The Inconvenient Indian (10 page)

If you look the word up in the dictionary, you’ll find that “enfranchised” means “to be liberated.” A Blackfoot friend once told me that “enfranchised” was French for “screwed.” It’s only funny if you’re Indian. Even then, it’s not that funny.

In the United States, Legal Indians are enrolled members of tribes that are federally recognized. That’s the general rule. However, tribes control how their membership rolls are created and maintained, and eligibility for membership varies from nation to nation. Most base their membership on blood quantum. If you have enough Native blood in you, then you are eligible for enrollment, and, once enrolled, are a Legal Indian.

In Canada, loss of Status has been an individual matter, one Legal Indian at a time. A rather slow process. In the United States, where things reportedly move faster, the government, particularly in the 1950s, set about “enfranchising” entire tribes en masse. They started with the Menominee in Wisconsin and the Klamath in Oregon and, in the space of about ten years, they removed another 107 tribes from the federal registry. At that time, around 1.4 million acres of Legal Indian land were taken from tribes and sold to non-Natives. Over 13,000 Legal Indians lost their federal status and were reduced to being simply Live Indians.

Certainly the sentiment for the extinguishment of the Legal Indian has been around for a while. “I want to get rid of the Indian problem,” said Duncan Campbell Scott, head of Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932. “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department …”

In 1953, the Termination Act and the Relocation Act were concurrently passed by the United States Congress. Termination allowed Congress to terminate all federal relations with tribes unilaterally, while Relocation “encouraged” Native people to
leave their reservations and head for the cities. One might say that Termination provided for the death of the Legal Indian, while Relocation provided the mass grave.

In 1969, the Canadian government tried to pull a homegrown Termination Act—the 1969 White Paper—out of its Parliamentary canal. In that year, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau blithely intimated that there was no such thing as Indian entitlement to land or Native rights and suggested that it was in the best interests of First Nations people to give up their reserves and assimilate into Canadian society. The reaction was immediate and fierce. Almost every Indian organization came out against the plan. Whatever the problems were with the Indian Act and with the Department of Indian Affairs, Native people were sure that giving up their land and their treaty rights was not the answer.

Dead Indians, Live Indians, Legal Indians.

But all North America can see is the Dead Indian. All North America dreams about is the Dead Indian. There’s a good reason, of course. The Dead Indian is what North America wants to be. Which probably explains the creation and proliferation of Indian hobbyist clubs, social organizations that have sprung up in North America and around the world as well, where non-Indians can spend their leisure time and weekends pretending to be Dead Indians.

There are Indian clubs in Florida, Texas, California, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, New Mexico, and Arizona. There are Indian clubs in Russia, in Italy, in France, in Poland, in Hungary, and in most of the other eastern European and Scandinavian countries. In a 2003 article for
The Walrus
magazine, Adam Gilders estimates that each weekend over 60,000 Germans dress up like Indians and
head out for Indian camps to participate in powwows and sweats. Germany, it should be said, has a long history in the Indian business, a history exemplified by Karl May’s adventure novels and the founding of Club Manitou in Dresden in 1910.

But everyone likes to blame the Germans for everything.

I haven’t found any clubs in Canada yet, but would guess there must be a couple hidden away here and there. A friend of mine reminded me that, in this regard, Canada can claim Ernest Thompson Seton, who was responsible for the tradition of “summer camp” and the creation of the Boy Scouts. Seton was intrigued with Native people and used Aboriginal crafts and traditions as the centrepiece for his 1902 League of Woodcraft Indians, an organization that combined outdoor activities with Indian culture for the benefit of non-Native children. However, while Woodcraft Indians and the Scouts made use of what they saw as Indian content in their structures and performances, neither was an “Indian club.”

Indian clubs are magnets for non-Natives who want to transform themselves, just for a day or two, into Dead Indians. Folks who attend go to dance and sing and participate in pipe ceremonies and sweats. They take on cool Indian names such as Black Eagle and Howling Wolf and Screaming Hawk, and if you ask them what in the hell they’re doing, they will tell you with a straight face that they are trying to preserve the culture of North American Indians so it won’t be lost.

The one thing that you can say about Indian hobbyists is that they take their fantasies seriously. Still, all of this dress-up, role-playing silliness has as much to do with Indians as an Eskimo Pie has to do with the Inuit.

The irony is that these clubs and the sentiments they espouse would be better served if Live Indians and Legal Indians somehow disappeared, got out of the way. After all, there’s nothing worse than having the original available when you’re trying to sell the counterfeit.

Live Indians. Legal Indians.

If you listen carefully, you can almost hear North America cry out, in homage to Henry II and his feud with Thomas à Becket, “Who will rid me of these meddlesome Indians?”

And, as luck would have it, Canada and the United States are working on a solution.

IF NORTH AMERICA
doesn’t like Live Indians and it doesn’t like Legal Indians, why doesn’t the military-political-corporate complex just kill us off? I know this question sounds melodramatic and absurd, but I’ve been to rallies, marches, and protests where some clever wit has shouted out from the crowd, “We should have killed all you [expletives deleted] Indians, when we had the chance.” I’d like to believe that this kind of remark is just the huffing and puffing of bigoted buffoonery. But I’ve heard it too many times. Such sentiments may not be the rule, but neither are they the exception.

“Why didn’t we kill you off, when we had the chance?” It’s a fair question. Why didn’t the United States keep dropping atomic bombs on Japan? If two bombs were good, wouldn’t four have been better? Why didn’t Turkey keep on killing Armenians after World War I? What stopped the murderous purges of China’s Mao Zedong, Russia’s Josef Stalin, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, and North Korea’s Kim Il Sung? A friend of mine suggested that I include George W. Bush for his efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and much of the rest of the world, but if I did that, I’d have to throw in AT&T, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and once you start down that road, there’s no end to the list of killers and killings.

Even without the testimony of scholars and social scientists, we know that we don’t mind killing as much as we think we should. In particular, contemporary history has demonstrated that we don’t mind killing people we don’t like, and we don’t mind killing if it can be done at a distance and out of sight. And killing is especially acceptable if the slaughter can be attributed to a defect in the victims or to a flaw in their way of life or to an immutable law of nature. Or all of the above. How fortunate it is to have so many excellent ways of destroying a people without getting one’s hands damp.

“Why didn’t we kill you off, when we had the chance?” Maybe the answer isn’t all that complicated. Maybe killing is like most everything else. Do it enough times, and it loses its appeal. Maybe it gets boring.

A pervasive myth in North America supposes that Native people and Native culture are trapped in a state of stasis. Those who subscribe to it imagine that, like Vladimir and Estragon in
Samuel Beckett’s play
Waiting for Godot
, Natives were unable to move forward along the linear continuum of civilization, that we were waiting for someone to come along and lead us in the right direction. To free us from ourselves.

In Beckett’s play, as everyone knows, Godot never arrives. In the Native version, Europeans never leave. In some ways, I envy Vladimir and Estragon. Who knows what unfortunate turns their lives might have taken had Godot managed to land on their shores?

This idea, that Native people were waiting for Europeans to lead us to civilization, is just a variation on the old savagism versus civilization dichotomy, but it is a dichotomy that North America trusts without question. It is so powerful a toxin that it contaminates all of our major institutions. Under its influence, democracy becomes not simply a form of representative government, but an organizing principle that bundles individual freedoms, Christianity, and capitalism into a marketable product carrying with it the unexamined promise of wealth and prosperity. It suggests that anything else is, by default, savage and bankrupt.

Of course, we know that this is untrue. The ancient Romans, Chinese, Egyptians, the Maya and the Incas, didn’t practise democracy, or Christianity for that matter, and they managed to create civilizations that were vigorous, civilizations that we admire. North America defends democracy as the cornerstone of social, religious, and political enlightenment because it is obliged to think well of itself and its institutions.

So, in North America—according to western orthodoxy—you had Europeans who were enlightened and Indians who were not. For the first century or so, the two groups killed each other. Not all the time, of course. In between depredations and deprivations,
Europeans and Indians found time for commerce. The French traded with Iroquoian tribes such as the Huron, while the English traded with tribes such as the Mohawk, and for the next two hundred years or so, the two groups traded and fought, fought and traded. When the dust cleared from the so-called Seven Years’ War, the American Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812, what had been, according to William Bradford, “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men” was now two nation states, Canada and the United States, all clean and spanking new.

That’s not quite true. While the United States became its own nation in 1776, Canada had to wait another ninety-one years for nationhood to become official. Of course, that didn’t stop Great Britain, the United States, and the geographical lump that would later become Canada from drawing an imaginary political line from the Atlantic, along the St. Lawrence, ziggy-zag through the Great Lakes, across the prairies, over the Rockies, all the way to the Pacific Ocean and agreeing that all of the land north of the 49
^th
parallel (more or less) would be the property of England cum Canada, and all of the land south of the 49
^th
parallel (more or less) would belong to the United States. Trees, lakes, rivers, mountains, swamps, deserts, bays, islands, animals, plants, birds, minerals.

Indians.

Indian-White relations were originally constructed around the concerns of commerce—the fur trade being a prime example—and military alliances. In these matters, Native peoples understood themselves to be sovereign, independent nations, and in early land and treaty negotiations, they were treated as such. But by the late 1700s, as European military forces gained the upper hand, Whites began to re-imagine the place of Indian nations in
North America. In the U.S. Articles of Confederation, the federal government gave itself the exclusive right to regulate “the trade and managing all affairs with the Indians.” This power was repeated in the 1790 Trade and Intercourse Act, which further refined “trade” and “affairs” to include the purchase and sale of Indian land. The intent of these two pieces of legislation was clear. Whatever powers states were to have, those powers did not extend to Native peoples.

Beginning in 1823, there would be three U.S. Supreme Court decisions—
Johnson v. McIntosh, Cherokee v. Georgia, Worcester v. Georgia
—that would confirm the powers that the U.S. government had unilaterally taken upon itself and spell out the legal arrangement that tribes were to be allowed.

I’m always looking for the funny bit in the historical record, the ironic slant, the chuckle, something to make a dull subject interesting, something to make a boring discussion lively. But there really isn’t much of anything that could be described as delightful in these three decisions, so we might as well get to it.

1823.
Johnson v. McIntosh
. The court decided that private citizens could not purchase land directly from Indians. Since all land in the boundaries of America belonged to the federal government by right of discovery, Native people could sell their land only to the U.S. government. Indians had the right of occupancy, but they did not hold legal title to their lands.

1831.
Cherokee v. Georgia
. The State of Georgia attempted to extend state laws to the Cherokee nation. The Cherokee argued that they were a foreign nation and therefore not subject to the laws of Georgia. The court held that Indian tribes were not sovereign, independent nations but domestic, dependent nations.

1832.
Worcester v. Georgia
. This case was a follow-up to
Cherokee v. Georgia
. Having determined that the Cherokee were a domestic, dependent nation, the court settled the matter of jurisdiction, ruling that the responsibility to regulate relations with Native nations was the exclusive prerogative of Congress and the federal government.

These three cases unilaterally redefined relationships between Whites and Indians in America. Native nations were no longer sovereign nations. Indians were reduced to the status of children and declared wards of the state. And with these decisions, all Indian land within America now belonged to the federal government. While these rulings had legal standing only in the United States, Canada would formalize an identical relationship with Native people a little later in 1876 with the passage of the Indian Act. Now it was official. Indians in all of North America were property.