Playing Indian

My last post talked about ways in which identity and culture were commodities and how they were exchanged through a global market that often put ethnic identities up for sale. In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith adds:

Whilst imperialism if often thought of as a system which drew everything back into the centre, it was also a system which distributed materials and ideas outwards. Said’s notion of ‘positional superiority’ is useful here for conceptualizing the ways in which knowledge and culture were as much a part of imperialism as raw materials and military strength. Knowledge was also there to be discovered, extracted, appropriated and distributed. (58)

This is part of the problem that Smith has with Western research: rather than acknowledging that knowledge and culture existed within indigenous communities before the dominant Western culture (namely, Europeans) “discovered” them, researchers have historically turned knowledge and culture into commodities to be interpreted and appropriated. According to Smith, “The production of knowledge, new knowledge transformed ‘old’ knowledge, ideas about the nature of knowledge and the validity of specific forms of knowledge, become as much commodities of colonial exploitation as other natural resources” (59).

Similarly, visual authenticity acts as a commodity as well. Smith tells a story about an international conference held in New Zealand “to discuss issues related to indigenous intellectual and cultural property rights” and how the reporters wanted to get a picture of the Natives together to publish with the story. They changed their minds, however, when they saw that the indigenous people they wanted to photograph looked pretty much like everyone else. Signs of visual authenticity are still something people look for in identifying Natives—romanticism and stereotype are still very much problems that face indigenous people throughout the world. In the following passage, Smith suggests a reason for this categorization:

Questions of who is a ‘real indigenous’ person, what counts as a ‘real indigenous leader’, which person displays ‘real cultural values’ and the criteria used to assess the characteristics of authenticity are frequently the topic of conversation and debate. These debates are designed to fragment and marginalize those who speak for, or in support of, indigenous issues. They frequently have the effect also of silencing and making invisible the presence of other groups within the indigenous society like women, the urban non-status tribal person and those whose ancestry or ‘blood quantum’ is ‘too white’. (72)

This sounds very much like the cases that Scott Richard Lyons referred to in X-Marks: these visual markers and authenticity tests because tools of exclusion, usually for the other’s profit. Think again of disenrollment and loss of federal benefits.

There’s a flip side, too, for those who do “look Indian”: they are judged as being only Indians, and are expected to conform to the stereotypes. In Chrystos’ poem “The Old Indian Granny,” the narrator shares some of the deplorable conditions of poor Indians, those who society has forgotten.

               

                Sometimes I don’t want to be an Indian either

                but I’ve never said so out loud before

                since I’m so proud & political

                I have to deny it now

                Far more than being hungry

                having no place to live or dance

                no decent job    no home to offer a Granny

                It’s knowing with each invisible breath

                that if you don’t make something pretty

                they can hang on their walls or wear around their necks

                you might as well be dead

This poem from Reinventing the Enemy’s Language serves as a perfect example of the expectations of Indians to perform Indianness. If Indians can’t emulate public expectations of them, they are invisible. Those Indians who are neglected and abused by society are the ones who are apt to live in poverty or succumb to addiction.  Too much social injustice is racialized, and for no good reason (as we’ve seen through many arguments about “touchstones” of ethnic or racial identity).

 The quality of life on many Indian reservations suffers as well; I’ve read of many accounts of Indians being unable to prosper in reservation communities, which often force members of the community to live in squalor and poverty. This is something I don’t really understand, though. I’ve never lived on a reservation, and my nation’s reservation in Shawnee, Oklahoma is a wonderful place to live, stay, and work. Sometimes I wish that I lived on the reservation just so I could be closer to great tribal resources and culture.  I remember reading somewhere once that reservations were poor because the Indians that lived there felt that they needed to represent public opinion of Indian living conditions and culture, so if that meant squandering money and neglecting to pay bills, that was just a part of being Indian. I don’t know if I really believe this, though. What can explain the impoverished conditions of certain Indian reservations?

X Marks Identity

This book is so rich I don’t even know where to start! So let me just dive in…

Scott Richard Lyons suggests in X-marks: Native Signatures of Assent that Indians are continuously undergoing removals. The first remove he describes actually connects to my tribes Legend of the Seven Fires. Lyons, too, refers to seven prophets that visited the anishinaabeg (that’s “O-gibberish” for the Potawatomi word nishnabe), but times their visits around the time that the three individual tribes—Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa—emerged. Lyons’ telling of the Ojibwe story names the three tribes as the three fires, whereas the Potawatomi story refers to the seven prophecies as the seven fires. So while the stories differ, we can certainly trace certain homologies. I think that’s pretty cool.

According to Lyons, we are in the fourth remove, which began somewhere around the time the American frontier closed. Shortly after that, Americans gained citizenship in 1924, and continued to progress through the process of modernity. Like the metonymical signatures Indians first used as they were coerced into signing treaties, Lyons identifies x-marks as indicators of Indian presence or Indian identity. Because of changing definitions of what constitutes Indian space in our contemporary world, Lyons explains that “[a]ny consideration of an x-mark should contend with this intractable multiplicity of Indian space. Further, we must always admit that space can be modernized. Indian space is never defined by tradition or culture alone because Native people migrate in modern times as well” (21).

X-marks beg the question of who determines the definition of Indian identity and Indian space. Lyons claims that “X-marks are always made in the political context of discursive formations that never emanate from organic indigenous communities. I am saying this even in the so-called age of ‘self-determination’: even now our discourses of Indianness are generated by institutions, the state, and the market” (24). These discourses exist within many loaded contexts, including such areas as tribal government, the art world, workplaces, federal government, communities, and more. Definitions of Indianness are made to change in any situation that increases someone’s profit. What definition of ourselves will best allow us to be successful and profitable? Lyons cites Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s text Empire (2000) in order to illustrate the concept of cultural multiplicity as a world market:

Many of the concepts dear to postmodernists and postcolonialism find a perfect correspondence in the current ideology of corporate capital and the world market. The ideology of the world market has always been the anti-foundational and anti-essentialist discourse par excellence. Circulation, mobility, diversity, and mixture are its very conditions of possibility. Trade brings differences together and the more the merrier! Differences (of commodities, populations, cultures, and so forth) seem to multiply infinitely in the world market, which attacks nothing more violently than fixed boundaries: it overwhelms any binary division with its infinite multiplicities. (19-20)

The coming-together of multi-faceted identities, articulated for some gain, is illustrated as early as the writings of Samson Occom in the late eighteenth century, to Charles Alexander Eastman in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century, and continues through Native writers today. Lyons explains that “early Native writers were always acutely aware of their rhetorical contexts and addressed them accordingly, sometimes through challenging or appropriating the dominant discourses of their day” (25). In this way, discourse is symbolic of a capitalist market, and an individual’s appropriation of the dominant discourse offers one a chance to profit. I have written in other work about the rhetorical strategies of William Apess in the late 1800s, and how wielding Euro-American rhetoric commanded the attention of a formerly dismissive audience, thus ensuring change for the better in the lives of Indian people.

 However, there is a negative side to the cultural market:

given the logistics of our peculiar technological age…and considering  what the postmodernists have identified as a general lack of faith in the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment, what we would seem to be left with is a call to perform our roles as ethnic spectacles, and the greatest of these is always ethnic discontent. (26)

The expectation of Indians to perform as “ethnic spectacles” is nothing new. Consider the photography of Edward Curtis in the 1800s, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show near the same time, and Indianist art and music in the early twentieth century. The following is an excerpt from a paper I just wrote on the American desire for Indianist compositions:

by the 1920s the broader American public began to call into question United States assimilation policies and sympathize with the Indian “plight.” Now there existed a non-Indian concern with and demand for the experience of “authentic Indianness, just as the anthropological theory of cultural relativism began to significantly infiltrate universities and the press.”[1] Unfortunately, the product of that desire and demand for authentic Indian culture constituted inauthentic, Indianist creative works of music, literature, and art. Theses Indianists aimed to “[infuse] their music with the spirit of Indian life, as others had tried to do in various genres—Edward Curtis with photography and Mary Austin with poetry.”[2] In doing so, Indianist composers hoped to elevate “Indian” music as a legitimate art form in the dominant culture.[3] The “sound of the Indian” during this time included musical interpretations of Indianness which created elaborate narratives on Indian life and imposed symbolism in ways that did not relate at all to actual Indian life at the time.[4] Troutman explains that one of the signature components of the “sound of Indian” was “the ‘war drum’ (DUM dum dum dum DUM dum dum dum), [which] came in the first half of the twentieth century to cue pioneers on the silver screen to shriek with horror or muster their manliness.”[5] (Funk, “(Mis)Representations of American Indians in Early Twentieth Century Popular Culture” 9) 

In my blog post on Vine Deloria, Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins, I briefly referred to the popular American obsession with representing Indianness through advocating environmentalism. Of course, many Indians are guilty of this as well. Lyons explains that “[g]lobal capitalism is the culprit here, as it has spent the last several decades dismantling boundaries, shattering essences, and obliterating binary oppositions in order to open markets and put ethnic identities up for sale” (26). By putting ethnic identities up for sale, by emphasizing multiculturality, anyone who can appropriate Indianness, for whatever reason, can profit by this market mode of cultural trade. He continues, “What is called ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ also happens to function as a ‘niche market’ from another point of view, and this new ethnic market is the machine that now produces most of our dominant discourse” (26). He discusses ethnic protest as being a driving force in capitalism, saying that because protest and resistance in regard to ethnic definitions does not necessarily occur for the benefit of freedom or recognition of Indians as people anymore, they rather attract notice, instigate debate, and provide people with “economically logical and socially viable vocation[s]” (qtd. in Lyons 27). Identities are essentially “things,” according to Lyons, “things used to describe people, and always the invented fabrications of human beings” (36).

This doesn’t necessarily mean to stir up trouble for trouble’s sake, however. Appropriation isn’t always a bad thing. Lyons contends, like Paul Chaat Smith in one of my previous posts, that cultures change with modernity, and Indians, too, are “adopting new ways of living, thinking, and being that do not necessarily emanate from a traditional source (or, for that matter, ‘time immemorial’), and sometimes it means appropriating the new and changing it to feel more like the old. Sometimes change can make the old feel new again” (33). In fact, change can be a good thing. Trying to go back to traditional roots is rather counterproductive, and Lyons specifically refers to the disenrollment of Cherokee Freedmen in the early 2000s (an attempt to “ethnically cleanse” themselves) along with the insistence that many Native Americans’ practice of Christianity for the past 500 years isn’t traditional enough.

Ultimately, identity is a social process, so how do we determine what constitutes Indian identity? Lyons opines that [i]dentities always serve particular interests…all identities can be challenged and redefined; a successful assertion of identity depends mainly on its recognition by someone else” (37). And sometimes assignments of identity seem highly suspect, such as what Lyons calls the “eyeball test” of federal officials who defined Indian identity based on skin color: do you look Indian, black, or white? The chairman of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation legally fought with the federal government over this classification of Citizen Potawatomi according to color, mainly because many Potawatomi certainly don’t “look” Indian, and by claiming that if one Potawatomi worked outside that summer and therefore had darker skin, then he was more Indian than his neighbor who worked inside that summer and didn’t get much of a tan. Indian dentity was never based on “blood” because those identities “do not come from biology, soil, or the whims of the Great Spirit, but from discourse, action, and history” (40).

Discourses are stories. And like Thomas King states in The Truth about Stories, “the truth about stories is that that’s all that we are.” Our identities are constructed through discourse, stories. Most importantly, “Identity orients you in space and time, connects you to the past, helps you identify a vision for the future, and provides you with a story” (Lyons 39).

So whose story defines our identities?

Authenticity Test

Since my current research focuses on interpretations and appropriations of American Indian identity, image, history, and so on, I’d like to highlight Paul Chaat Smith’s words in Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong, in which he claims that “the continued trivialization and appropriation of Indian culture, the absolute refusal to deal with us as just plain folks living in the present and not the past—is the same as ever” (18). He claims that unlike the American Indian Movement in the 1970s, which brought about vast social change and political change for Indians, we are not likely to be able to conjure up such a movement now in terms of altering perceptions of the popular image of the Indian, most commonly seen through the image of “the Plains Indian of the mid-nineteenth century” (20). Now, instead of identifying Indians by tribal affiliation, “Indian” has come to define a much broader scope of individuals of many cultures. Smith explains that “[w]hat has made us one people is the common legacy of colonialism….Five hundred years ago we were Seneca and Cree and Hopi and Kiowa, as different from each other as Norwegians are from Italians, Egyptians, or Zulus….When we think of the old days, like it or not we conjure up images that have little to do with real history” (19). The problem facing Native Americans today is that colonialism has made all Indians “one people,” and romanticism springs almost organically from that metamorphosis. Now, our dilemma lies in distinguishing romanticism from reality, which given the complexity of Indian histories, is easier said than done. What we can do instead is begin to reconceptualize our notions of Indian identity through understanding bits and pieces of what constitutes Indianness today.

So what’s the big problem then?

The true story is simply too messy and complicated. And too threatening. The myth of noble savages, completely unable to cope with modern times, goes down much more easily. No matter that Indian societies consistently valued technology and when useful made it their own. (20)

 I pointed out in a previous blog that Vine Deloria, Jr. thought that one of the benefits of people idealizing Indians is that it inspires some to be more conscious of their impact on and connection to the environment. Here, Smith cites it as a problem: “Today the equation is Indian equals spiritualism and environmentalism (20). An “antidote,” he proposes, lies in reconciling manufactured history with “the secret history of Indians in the twentieth century,” and on the same page shows a picture of Geronimo in his 1905 Locomobile Model C (21).

More than simply having a penchant for keeping up with modernity, Indians also have a not-so-bright history, which includes “a riot of vastly different cultures, which occasionally fought each other, no doubt sometimes viciously and for stupid reasons. If some Indian societies were ecological utopias with that perfect, elusive blend of democracy and individual freedom, some also practiced slavery, both before and after contact” (19-20). Refusing to acknowledge otherwise is to refuse to recognize real history, even if it isn’t pretty. By valuing false, manufactured versions of people and their histories over real accounts, including glorifying stories of the greats—like Black Elk and Geronimo—we emphasize the importance of “the myth more than the genuine struggles of real people” (22). Smith explains that as contemporary American Indian people, if we “pretend we are real Indians, instead of real human beings, to please an antique notion of European romanticism, we may think we’re acting tough but instead we’re selling out” (23).

Since, as Smith claims, “[t]here will always be a market for nostalgia and fantasy,” he suggests that Indians as artists (and as I suggest, Indian writers, too) infuse their art with elements of real Indianness—which is often so much like the expressions of other artists, that it’s hard to label this kind of art as Indian in nature. Often, and sadly, others perceive that Indian art doesn’t meet the demands of the market for “Indian art” as it’s commonly preconceived. Smith states, “To be an Indian artist means always arguing about the rules, the process, the judges, the reviews, where the shows are and where they aren’t….In 1958 Oscar Howe famously protested his exclusion from the Phillbrook Art Center’s annual art fair. The judges said his entry was ‘a fine painting, but not Indian’” (35).

The problem lies not only in representations of Indianness through art, but also through film (which, I guess is also art when you think about it). Personally, the only movie with Indians in it that I can recall is Dances with Wolves, but since that presupposes much about Indians, I’ve read much debate on its legitimacy. Smith questions the appropriation of Indianness in film, especially film produced by non-Indians. He explains:

We are the Indians. On the screen, up there? That’s a movie about Indians. The films we write about and debate and criticize are usually about the idea of us, about what people think about that idea, about Vietnam, the West, or buildings and food. Often, we’re simply a plot device or there to provide visual excitement. That many of us would place real hopes and dreams of advancement in the hands of a business renowned for its single-minded focus on the bottom line speaks volumes about the intellectual state of Indian Country these days. (39)

His statement, of course, assumes that the market drives the role of Indians in film, and Indianness is appropriated through whatever means will ensure the attraction of consumers. Indians, again, are the objects of romanticism and stereotype.

His statement about movies being “about Indians” echoes Gerald Vizenor’s conjecture that appropriation does not equal authenticity. In Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, Vizenor states, “The various translations, interpretations, and representations of the absence of tribal realities have been posed as the verities of certain cultural traditions. Moreover, the closure of heard stories in favor of scriptural simulations as authentic representations denied a common brush with the shimmer of humor, the sources of tribal visions, and tragic wisdom; tribal imagination and creation stories were obscured without remorse in national histories and the literature of dominance.” (17) He cites as an example artist Rene Magritte’s inscription on his painting of a pipe, which reads “Ceci n’est pas une pipe, This is not a pipe” (18). A painting of a pipe is not the same as a pipe in reality. So, too, are the Indians in the films Smith discusses. Smith might say in the words of Vizenor, “The portrait is not an Indian” (Vizenor 18): the films do not represent Indians, but merely appropriate their image and performance. However, the dilemma in representing truly authentic Indians and cultural practices disrupts popular notions of Indian identity according to the American public: they are reluctant to believe anything about Indians that doesn’t fit their definition of Indians. As an example, Smith refers to the director’s exclusion of Mohican farming settlements in the film Last of the Mohicans because “[p]ictures of Indian towns challenge the idea of settlers clearing a wilderness and instead raise the possibility that Europeans invaded and conquered and pillaged heavily populated, developed real estate.” He claims that the reason is “because the audience knows about Indians, and knows Indians didn't live in farming towns. To be outside the narrative, then, is not to exist. A film that attempted to show something more historically accurate would appear to audiences to be like science fiction, a tale from a parallel universe” (51). Smith, like Vizenor, points out that a close look at the dominant art/literature reveals the complete absence of Indians, and instead puts on a show of Indianness according to dominant ideology.

I’m including the following passage because I think it really illuminates some core issues that Smith explores in his text and poses some very real and important questions about notions of Indianness:

The particular kind of racism that faces North American Indians offers rewards for functioning within the romantic constructions, and severe penalties for operating outside them. Indians are okay, as long as they are “traditional” in a nonthreatening (peaceful) way, as long as they meet non-Indian expectations about Indian religious and political beliefs. And what it really comes down to is that Indians are okay as long as we don’t change too much. Yes, we can fly planes and listen to hip-hop, but we must do these things in moderation and always in a true Indian way.
It presents the unavoidable question: Are Indian people allowed to change? Are we allowed to invent completely new ways of being Indian that have no connection to previous ways we have lived? Authenticity for Indians is a brutal measuring device that says we are only Indian as long as we are authentic. Part of the measurement is about percentage of Indian blood. The more, the better. Fluency in one’s Indian language is always a high card. Spiritual practices, living in one’s ancestral homeland, attending powwows, all are necessary to ace the authenticity test. Yet many of us believe that taking the authenticity tests is like drinking the colonizer’s Kool-Aid—a practice designed to strengthen our commitment to our own internally warped minds. In this way, we become our own prison guards. (91)

Smith raises an important point: Indians in addition to non-Indians are responsible for perpetuating antiquated ideas of Indian identity and authenticity. If one needs to meet the above criteria in order to be Indian, well then, even as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, I’m not a real Indian at all. Time to dump that Kool-Aid!

A Visit to the NMAI Archives

I want to dedicate one of these posts to my visit to the NMAI Archives in Suitland, Maryland. At the end of this post will be a PDF of the article in the Citizen Potawatomi Nation's HowNikan newspaper (I'm in the picture, bottom row, third one from the right). This visit made quite an impression on me, and it was the first time I can remember a stranger recognizing a group a very white-looking people as "the Potawatomi" as we came up the front steps. Granted, we did have an appointment, but it was nice to be recognized as Potawatomi on first sight alone.

The entrance to this circular building faces East, and all architectural features hold significance to many Native Americans. Once inside the atrium, we could see that much of the structure is made of wood--the entire building incorporated many natural features--and a skylight is situated in the center of the ceiling. Our guide pointed out that the Archives is meant to let in as much natural light as possible and encourage a welcoming space for Indians to visit. The Archives also includes a ceremonial room, which the Smithsonian keeps supplied with tobacco, sweet grass, sage, cedar, abalone shells, and matches. There is a fire-pit in the center of the room, too, (many of us fell in the fire pit, since we weren't accustomed to having one in the middle of an indoor environment) and our guide said that it was very important for the architects to have such a space in the building, and so the room was built with a complex ventilation system that allows for fire to be lit indoors.

Our tour began with a private viewing of Potawatomi artifacts that our legislator selected. Here are some pictures of those.

This last picture is of our guide holding up a Potawatomi breast plate (an ornament), and the tag on the box indicates that the breast plate is non-Indian in origin. I asked why it was included in the Potawatomi artifacts, then, if it wasn't made by  them, and she assured me that many Potawatomi artifacts were not made by Potawatomi, but were traded for. Similarly, many of the artifacts are ornamented with elaborate beading--the beads were introduced to the Potawatomi by the French, and consequently many beads were acquisitions by way of trade.

After we viewed the selections, we were invited to explore the entirety of the collection of artifacts in the Archives. The artifacts collection is located on the second floor of the building, the first containing archaeological finds (mainly sacred things from grave sites, which many Indians do not wish to see) and the third containing the archives of text (I can't wait to go back to explore this one on my own!). The layout of this collection is pretty neat: all artifacts are stored according to the location of the individual tribes. Since the Potawatomi are from the Northeastern Woodlands, the Potawatomi artifacts are located in the northeastern part of the room. I love this system! Since there are so many artifacts, the stacks that hold them can move to collapse and expand aisles. I filmed a bit of this happening so you can understand the full effect. Items on the top shelves can be accessed by lifts, which guests are welcome to use. While only the staff can touch the individual artifacts, visitors can pull out shelves and hold the boxes containing the artifacts to view what they please. In the following video, the guide also explains why the NMAI continues to collect artifacts from our contemporary environments....they, too, become a part of our history (and yes, my dad is wearing my grandmother's purse...and yes, I did forget that I was filming for a time).

Hope you enjoy this information as much as I did!

Coming to terms with Vine Deloria, Jr.

I’m pretty sure that each of my posts will focus on identity, because that’s the subject I’m most interested in that surrounds Native American rhetoric and literature. So now I’ll just jump into Deloria, who I at times agree with and at other times…well, not so much.

First, I’m going to introduce the abstract of my conference paper so you can see where I’m going with this:

“The truth about stories is that that’s all that we are”: Interpreting Indianness across the Years

Since first contact, American Indians have undergone transformations in identity through interpretations of Indianness. Popular American conceptions of Indians have traditionally been interpretations that create elaborate narratives on Indian life and impose symbolism on a manufactured Indian culture. Thomas King claims in The Truth about Stories that “the truth about stories is that that’s all that we are”— told either by us or about us. The foundation of perceived notions of Indian identity are largely the stories of Euro-Americans. Implementation of federal Indian policies, followed by the instruction of “acceptable Indianness” in Indian boarding schools, perpetuated false conceptions of Indian identity that persist in popular culture even today.

In this presentation I will tell a new story that weaves together a narrative that differentiates between interpretations, appropriations, and authenticity of Indian identity in order to reconceptualize the real experiences and identities of Indians. I will investigate Paul Chaat Smith’s ideas about romanticism—“the distinctive type of racism that confronts Indians today”—through discourses on Indian art, politics, and culture, and Scott Richard Lyons’ claim that these discourses are driven by institutions, the state, and the market.

By understanding the ways in which Indianness has been interpreted and appropriated throughout American history, Indians and non-Indians alike can begin to deconstruct and reform our interpretations of Indianness.

So, like I said, I’m going to begin with Deloria before I move into Smith and Lyons (they’ll be in a later post).

This first quote is from the preface to Custer Died for Your Sins and relates to appropriation and the market:

Today Indian shamans, medicine men, and snake-oil salesmen follow the lecture-workshop circuit, holding ceremonies and otherwise performing feats of power for their disciples and fellow practitioners. Many Indians object to this commercialization of the Indian tradition, and there is something to be said for their complaints. Nevertheless, it seems beyond dispute that within the tribal religions is a powerful spiritual energy that cannot be confined to a small group in the modern world. It would be hazardous to predict where this movement is headed, but if it influences people to deal more kindly with the earth and the various life forms on it, then there should be few complaints about its impact on people’s lives and practices. (xi)

Of course, I already have several complaints about this passage. There is a long history of commercialization of Indian traditions, but I think that Deloria is stretching the idea of Indian religion to cover many small parts of the whole—many tribes, or individual Indians, have been practitioners of Christianity and other religions for quite a while. He also passes a strong judgment on the energy of tribal religion, enhancing its worth over other spiritual forms. As to the other stuff about people’s idolatry of supposed Indian identity and implicit connections to the Earth, I think this is another problem that Deloria doesn’t address, and instead seems to also assume about Indians—that they all are all quintessential environmentalists, and a great example for the rest of society to follow.

I’m aware that Deloria is writing this in the context of the late 60s, and I know a lot of other Indian voices have contributed since then to the idea of Indian identity and place in the world. The following excerpt comes from Karen A. Redfield’s article “Native American Storytelling” (in Ernest Stromberg’s American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance: Word Medicine, Word Magic), in which she quotes Randall A. Lake:

militant Indian rhetoric is more appropriately viewed from a perspective which examines its significance for Indians themselves…[T]he judgments of failure so often leveled against Native American protest rhetoric are problematic because they misanalyze this rhetoric’s primary audience. Most Red Power rhetoric is directed at movement members and other Indians for the purpose of gathering the like-minded, and is addressed only secondarily to the white establishment…In brief, AIM may have been judged a failure because its rhetoric is expected to do something which it is not intended to do. (qtd. in Redfield 158-9)

I’m most certainly criticizing Deloria from outside of the Red Power movement. But I wonder why Indians would only want to speak to other Indians. Redfield further comments, “Contemporary resistance, I would argue, is taking a familiar form, internal rhetoric. The activism is reflected by American Indian storytellers, intellectuals, artists, students, and elders, telling their stories in their own languages for their own people” (159). I think this practice employs a sort of separatist methodology that suggests that Indian identity, culture, and concerns are only relevant within Indian communities, excluding the external rhetoric necessary to communicate with Others. If Indians withdraw from the greater world, including the dominant culture and ideology, they remove themselves from contemporary dialogue about important issues, issues that may affect them and their representation to the majority. Employing external in addition to internal rhetoric is important to assuring the prosperity of Native nations in the contemporary world.

Deloria emphasizes “things [which] represent areas of growth and change that life in the modern world requires and extracts from tribal peoples” (xii) and only mentions as a possibility the continuous move toward cultural hybridity, and certainly seems to value traditional tribal identity over hybrid identity. What’s more, he concludes his preface with the following:

But the Indian task of keeping an informed public available to assist the tribes in their efforts to survive is never ending, and so the central message of this book, that Indians are alive, have certain dreams of their own, and are being overrun by the ignorance and the mistaken, misdirected efforts of those who would help them, can never be repeated too often. (xiii)

I find this troubling, simply because the rhetoric he employs is mainly internal, and wouldn’t resonate much with non-Indians (or many other Indians for that matter).

I like to draw on Sherman Alexie’s young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian as an example of the need to embrace hybridity. Junior, the protagonist, struggles with identity and where he belongs. He leaves the school on the Spokane reservation to pursue a better education at a “white” school, but upon this change rests his notion of identity; he doesn’t know whether he belongs to the world of the “white” school, where no one accepts him into their society, or to the reservation, where his people thought of him as a deserter, someone who preferred to identify as white than Indian. At the conclusion of the novel, Junior makes some profound observations about those of his tribe that resist change:

I cried because so many of my fellow tribal members were slowly killing themselves and I wanted them to live…Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear. But somehow or another, Indians have forgotten that reservations were meant to be death camps. I wept because I was the only one who was brave enough and crazy enough to leave the rez. I was the only one with enough arrogance….I was going to have a better life out in the white world. I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in my loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream. I realized that, sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants…. (216-217)

Junior recognizes that we do not live in a world of purity, but at an intersection of worlds, and to refuse to thrive as a cultural hybrid is even more culturally devastating than anything imposed on us by the colonizers. The key to hybridity is to recognize that identities are ever-shifting, and that doesn’t mean that a part of us dies with the coming of change.

I wonder if it’s beyond Deloria’s capabilities to consider Indians capable of adopting hybrid identities while still remaining Indian. He relates the following about “white” people who come to him claiming Indian blood: “I would confirm their wildest stories about their Indian ancestry and would add a few tales of my own hoping that they would be able to accept themselves someday and leave us alone. Whites claiming Indian blood generally tend to reinforce mythical beliefs about Indians” (Custer 3). His conceptions of “white” and “Indian” are quite polarizing: as someone who is both white and Indian, I can’t help but feel that he’s constructing very limited parameters for Indian identity that force individuals to fit in one box or the other.