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.