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?