The Inconvenient Indian (5 page)

An interesting distinction. I’d always thought that war was war.

The regiments roamed up and down the canyon, engaging in minor skirmishes here and there, but there were no major battles. The worst casualties were inflicted on the Whatcom Company, which was wiped out in an overnight battle with itself. The story is that a rifle fell over and went off, and the soldiers, unable to see in the dark, began shooting at each other until there was almost no one left alive.

In the end, the Nlaka’pamux and the miners signed a series of six treaties known as the Snyder Treaties, none of which has survived. But all this fighting happened before British Columbia was a legal part of Canada, so I suppose we shouldn’t count it.

The author of the
Westminster Review
article goes on to explain why Canada hasn’t had any Indian uprisings or massacres. “She [Canada] is too poor to seek glory by slaughtering the natives born of her soil, and too proud to defame her character or stain her escutcheon.” “Contrast this,” the writer continues, “with the policy of the United States that is nearly always fighting its redmen. Indian wars are very expensive matters to deal with. The small episode of last year, beginning with the Messiah craze and ending with the tragedy at Pine Ridge Agency, covering but a few weeks, cost the United States Government $2 million,
besides the lives lost, and in addition unsettled the natives throughout the country.”

“Born of
her
soil?” “
Its
redmen?” A rather possessive attitude. As though both countries had stopped off at the mall and bought us on clearance.

This is probably as good a place as any to bring up the matter of race. The concept has been with us at least since the ancient Egyptians, whose
Book of Gates
set up categories for “Egyptians,” “Asiatics,” “Libyans,” and “Nubians,” and the Bible, in which Noah’s three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, are credited with fathering the Semites, the Hamites, and the Japhethites, the three races from which Asiatic, African, and Indo-European peoples are supposed to have descended. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the German physician and anthropologist, in his 1775
The Natural Varieties of Mankind
, offered up five classifications of race: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Ethiopian, American Indian, and Malayan. Charles Darwin, in
The Descent of Man
(1871), a book that everyone likes but few have read, makes the argument for the superiority of Europeans over other races, an idea that was central to the Atlantic-African slave trade. Eugenics, a natural byproduct of the discussion of race, was a very popular idea in the early part of the twentieth century, until Hitler and the Nazi regime went and wrecked it for everyone.

Certainly, race is what James Fenimore Cooper was invoking in his 1841 novel
The Deerslayer
, when he brought up the idea of “gifts.” “God,” Cooper argued, “gave each race its gifts. A white man’s gifts are Christianized, while a red-skin’s are more for the wilderness.”

But this wasn’t simply the old city/country, cultivated/wilderness dichotomy. What Cooper was talking about was the division
of
Homo sapiens
into categories that had clear and concise boundaries and attributes. Cooper allowed that both Whites and Indians had souls and that both would be judged by God according to how well each race had adhered to its “gifts.” And this “generosity” made Cooper sound almost modern and progressive, until you discovered that what Cooper was implying when he said “gifts” was that Whites had a pre-frontal cortex and Indians did not.

Sure, Cooper admitted that Indians were better in the wilderness than Whites, and that Whites were better with a rifle than Indians, since this technology was European, but what he made clear in description after description was that Whites were human, while Indians were still working their way up the evolutionary ladder.

“White is the highest color,” says one of the characters in the novel, “and therefore the best man; black comes next, and is put to live in the neighborhood of the white man, as tolerable, and fit to be made use of; and the red comes last, which shows that those that made ’em never expected an Indian to be accounted as more than half human.”

My quarrel is not with the Coopers of the period. He didn’t come up with these ideas on his own. They were part of the air he breathed, the water he drank. As with other writers before and after him, Cooper simply reminded his readers that race was a divine sanction, a scientific certainty, and an economic imperative.

Of course, the need for race precedes race. But let’s ignore that for the moment.

While much of the early literature tended to cast Indians as surly scoundrels and unrepentant pagans, nineteenth-century
literary offerings, such as John Augustus Stone’s play
Metamora
(1829), John Richardson’s poem
Tecumseh
(1886), and Lydia Marie Child’s novel
Hobomek
(1824), spun those representations on their axis and re-imagined Indians as romantic figures, heroes who were noble, honest, and trustworthy. But only one at a time. One Indian per play. One Indian per poem. One Indian per novel. Male, almost without exception. And all of them doomed, dying, or dead. In the end, though, neither the Indian as savage nor the Indian as hero changed the dynamics of racism.

Then there were the painters such as George Catlin, Charles Bird King, and Paul Kane. In 1830, Catlin began travelling the West and painting the Indians he encountered along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Charles Bird King was, for the most part, a studio painter and did not go West. Instead he spent his time painting the portraits of the members of Native delegations that came to Washington, D.C. Paul Kane, the Irish-born Canadian painter, worked out of Toronto and, like Catlin, went into the field, touring the Canadian Northwest and the Rocky Mountains, painting the Indians he saw on his travels.

And if you look at Catlin’s painting of Mah-to-toh-pe (1833), King’s portrait of the Pawnee Petalesharo (1822), and Kane’s dramatic
Assiniboine Hunting Buffalo
(circa 1851–56), you will see in the work of these early artists some of the ideas and images that would later serve as prototypes for the D.W. Griffiths, the Bruce Beresfords, the John Fords, the Kevin Costners, and the James Camerons of the world.

Equally visual and of far greater influence on North American culture were the Wild West shows. Buffalo Bill Cody started up his famous Wild West Show in 1883 with Whites playing Indians
in redface. But by the late 1880s, American Horse, Jack Red Cloud, and Red Shirt were performing with Cody’s Congress of Rough Riders. Sitting Bull joined Buffalo Bill in 1885. The Métis leader Gabriel Dumont, who had fled to the United States after the Battle of Batoche and the execution of his friend Louis Riel, signed on with Cody in 1886. Indian leaders such as Red Cloud appeared in Colonel Frederick T. Cummins’s 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, while Chief Joseph and Geronimo were in Cummins’s Indian Congress and Life on the Plains exposition when it opened at Madison Square Garden in 1903.

Did people such as Sitting Bull and Dumont and Geronimo enjoy these shows? Perhaps. Sitting Bull and Dumont stayed with Buffalo Bill for only a few months. Geronimo, on the other hand, was more active, working with Buffalo Bill, Colonel Cummins, and Pawnee Bill, as well as doing a stint with the Miller Brothers at their 101 Ranch in Oklahoma Territory. Whatever else the shows were, they were an intriguing alternative to being locked down on a reservation or sitting alone in a prison cell. Keep in mind, many of these individuals were considered dangerous by North America. After all, the Battle of the Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee were still in the rear-view mirror, and, at the turn of the century, no one was quite sure what might appear up ahead through the windshield.

On the one hand, using Indians in Wild West shows had a certain crass, commercial quality to it. Indians were the scary, unknown element that brought in the crowds, and the men who managed these extravaganzas knew it. On the other hand, Native performers were generally well treated. They were paid and fed. And they had the opportunity to travel with the show to Europe
to see the sights (if you’re an optimist) or (if you’re a satirist) to see whence came their oppression.

While Cody’s was the biggest, the best known, and the longest running of the Wild West shows, there were many others. Dr. W.F. Carver, Luella-Forepaugh Fish, the McLoughlin brothers, Tiger Bill, the Kemp sisters, Buckskin Joe, Montana Frank, Texas Jack, California Frank, the Irwin Brothers, and Tim McCoy all put together exhibitions that used Indians as a major part of their entertainment package. Indians were more than a staple in Wild West shows and expositions. They were an essential part of the Western spectacle, the Western myth. It would not be an exaggeration to say, “No Indians, no show.”

The pageantry of the Wild West shows, along with four centuries of visual and written renderings of Native people, came together in the twentieth century’s most famous Indian image, James Earle Fraser’s 1915 sculpture
The End of the Trail
. Fraser was also responsible for the Indian Head nickel that the United States minted from 1913 until 1938, but in terms of Indian iconography,
The End of the Trail
was his masterwork.

I don’t know how many people know the sculpture itself or its story, but most everyone recognizes the image of a dejected Indian holding a spear while he slumps over his equally dejected horse. The idea seems to be that both rider and horse have run out of time and space and are poised on the edge of oblivion. Now, it’s probably my vivid imagination, but the horse looks as though it’s being pushed from behind, that something or someone is trying to shove horse and rider over a precipice.

Most likely the gentle hands of civilization.

But if you look at the sculpture a second time, you can easily
reason that the horse is resisting. Its front legs are braced and its back legs are dug in. American expansion be damned. This pony is not about to go gentle into that good night. Such a reading might be expanded to re-imagine our doleful Indian as a tired Indian, who, at any moment, will wake up refreshed, lift up his spear, and ride off into the twenty-first century and beyond.

The original sculpture was done in plaster and scheduled to be cast in bronze for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, but the war had first call on bronze, and the plaster sculpture remained plaster. If you’re keen on seeing the original, it has been restored and is currently housed at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.

The point I want to make is that
The End of the Trail
was the single most powerful icon of Indians in North America. Versions of
The End of the Trail
still appear everywhere. The image and its variations have been slapped on motels, riding stables, restaurants, used-car lots, and rest homes. When I took two of my three children west to see where the Lakota and the Cheyenne had defeated Custer, I stopped at a Wyoming rest stop and there on the back of the shelter was a stencil of
The End of the Trail
.

Hollywood has had a long-standing love affair with Indians, and I’ve always felt that
The End of the Trail
, both in subject and in rendering, could have been a fine logo for the film industry. In 1890, when Thomas Edison began making images to showcase his Kinetoscope—the first motion-picture viewer—the images he chose to make were of Pueblo villages. Between 1894 and 1930, Hollywood made well over 100 films that featured Hollywood’s notion of “real” Indian people and “authentic” Native culture. This was the period of the silent film and the short featurette. After
1930, when you could
hear
the crack of the rifles, the thundering hoofs of the ponies, and the blood-curdling screams of the painted warriors, Hollywood knocked out another 300 films, which means that in the 116 years between 1894 and 2010, Tinseltown conjured up an average of 3.5 films a year. Films with Indian people somewhere in the frames. Which more or less confirms Native filmmaker Chris Eyre’s suspicion that “Indian people have been the longest running subject of films out of anyone.”

Indians were made for film. Indians were exotic and erotic. All those feathers, all that face paint, the breast plates, the bone chokers, the skimpy loincloths, not to mention the bows and arrows and spears, the war cries, the galloping horses, the stern stares, and the threatening grunts. We hunted buffalo, fought the cavalry, circled wagon trains, fought the cavalry, captured White women, fought the cavalry, scalped homesteaders, fought the cavalry. And don’t forget the drums and the wild dances where we got all sweaty and lathered up, before we rode off to fight the cavalry.

The only thing film had to do was to collect such materials and cobble them into a series of functioning clichés. Film dispensed with any errant subtleties and colourings, and crafted three basic Indian types. There was the bloodthirsty savage, the noble savage, and the dying savage. The bloodthirsty savage was the most common. This was the familiar character who rode around wagon trains, burned settlers’ cabins to the ground, bashed babies against trees, and trapped cowboys and soldiers in box canyons. The second type was the noble savage, an Indian who assisted Whites in their struggles with bloodthirsty Indians, spoke fluent English, and understood the basic precepts of
supply-side capitalism. The dying Indian, on the other hand, was just that. Dying. Not from a wound. Not from any disease. This was the Indian who was simply worn out, who was well past his “best before” date, who had been pulled under by the rip tide of western expansion, drowned, and thrown up on the beach to rot.

You could mix and match these Indians. The bloodthirsty Indian might also be a dying Indian. The dying Indian generally had an element of nobility in him. You normally didn’t find all three elements in the same Indian, but you would have no trouble finding all three Indians in the same film.

The good news is that none of these Indians was a threat. To the White heroes in particular and to North America in general. None of them ever prevailed. What we watched on the screen over and over was the implicit and inevitable acquiescence of Native people to Christianity and Commerce. No matter what happened, the question that was asked and answered again and again on the silver screen was: Can Indians survive in a modern world? And the answer, even in sympathetic films such as
Broken Arrow, Little Big Man
, and
Dances With Wolves
, was always: No.