The Inconvenient Indian (4 page)

Perhaps I’m too harsh. Still, apart from Custer and Riel scholars, I don’t know of anyone, including me, who knows the names of
the Indians or the soldiers who died with Custer that June day in Montana, or the names of the Métis who fought with Dumont, or the names of the Whites who marched with Middleton at Batoche. No surprise, I suppose. I’ve visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., looked at the names on that cold piece of black granite, and can’t remember one of them. All I do know is that my brother’s name is not there.

Still, I object, in an ineffective and somewhat churlish way, to the manner in which Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and Dumont have been allocated minor roles in the “public history” of North America, while George Armstrong Custer is read into the books because he made a sophomoric military mistake and got himself killed. Though perhaps that’s not the reason. Perhaps it’s simply because he’s White, and the rest are not.

So, am I suggesting that race is a criterion in the creation of North American history? No, it wasn’t a suggestion at all.

But then what about Riel? He’s not White. If race were the issue, you might expect that General Middleton would get the glory, that his name would be the one that hangs over Batoche. After all, he defeated Riel and Dumont, and scattered the Métis. So I guess I’m wrong about the role of race in the construction of history and I will try not to mention it again.

I have to stop here for a moment, because I’m struck by an amusing thought, albeit not an original one. One of our problems in understanding Indian history is that we think we don’t have all the pieces. We believe our understanding of, say, the nineteenth century is like buying a thousand-piece puzzle from the Salvation Army, taking it home, and discovering that one-third of the cardboard squiggles are missing. Whereas, today, with our ability to
record any detail, hardly anything of note goes unmarked. If the twenty-first century were a puzzle, we could well have more pieces than we might reasonably manage.

Too little information or too much, what history encourages us to do is to remember the hindrances that Native people posed to the forward momentum of European westward migration, even though Native people were more often an assistance, showing Europeans river systems and trade routes, taking them around the neighbourhood and introducing them to family and friends. I don’t mention this because I think such encouragements were a particularly good idea. I bring it up because popular history for the period tends to ignore this aid and focuses instead on the trouble Indians caused. Worse, when the names of Native people who
did
help Europeans or who
did
try to bridge the gap between the two groups come up, we don’t applaud their efforts. In many cases, such as that of Sacajawea, we tend to look sideways at the alliance and wonder about their intent and morals.

I suspect that a great many of these intermediaries were women, and if this is true, it answers the implicit question of intent and morality. Helen, who is attuned to the ways in which women have been used throughout history, has reminded me that most, if not all, of the European explorers, soldiers, trappers, map makers, and traders were men, and that dealing with a Native woman they could sleep with held more appeal than dealing with a Native man whom they might have to shoot. Sure, there might have been gay explorers, but if there were, history has buried them right alongside equally forgotten Native figures such as Washakie, Standing Bear, Ely Parker, Carlos Montezuma, Osceola, and Jane Schoolcraft.

Just not in the same grave.

The sad truth is that, within the public sphere, within the collective consciousness of the general populace, most of the history of Indians in North America has been forgotten, and what we are left with is a series of historical artifacts and, more importantly, a series of entertainments. As a series of artifacts, Native history is somewhat akin to a fossil hunt in which we find a skull in Almo, Idaho, a thigh bone on the Montana plains, a tooth near the site of Powhatan’s village in Virginia, and then, assuming that all the parts are from the same animal, we guess at the size and shape of the beast. As a series of entertainments, Native history is an imaginative cobbling together of fears and loathings, romances and reverences, facts and fantasies into a cycle of creative performances, in Technicolor and 3-D, with accompanying soft drinks, candy, and popcorn.

In the end, who really needs the whole of Native history when we can watch the movie?

WHEN MY BROTHER
and I were kids, we would dress up and play cowboys and Indians with the rest of the kids. I have a photograph of Chris and me in our leather vests, leather chaps, and cowboy hats, looking laconic and tough as cowboys looked. For a nine-year-old, I cut a fine figure in my Western garb. I’m carrying a rifle, with two six-guns strapped to my waist, so there’s no mistaking who I’m supposed to be. Now that I think about it, I don’t remember anyone who wanted to be an Indian. Not my brother. Not my cousins. Not even the girls in the neighbourhood, who were generally good sports about such things.

Having said that, I should acknowledge that a friend of mine,
the Canadian historian Brian Dippie, did like to dress up like an Indian. He sent me pictures of himself as a bare-chested young lad in a headdress, complete with drum and tomahawk, emulating his hero, Straight Arrow, the popular character from the radio show of the same name that ran from about 1949 to 1952.

Straight Arrow, as some of you might remember, was a Comanche who was orphaned and raised by a White family. As an adult, he posed as a White man named Steve Adams, but whenever “danger threatened innocent people … and when evil-doers plotted against justice,” Adams would rush off to his secret gold cave, get dressed up in “traditional” Comanche garb, grab his golden bow and golden arrows, leap onto the back of his golden Palomino stallion, Fury, and ride off to right wrongs.

At the time, it was the only show that I knew that featured an Indian as the hero, a hero who pretended to be a White in order to mask his secret Indian identity. So maybe that was it. Maybe I wore my cowboy outfit to hide my secret identity. Although, if that was my intention, it wasn’t particularly effective.

My six-guns have long since vanished, but I still have my vest and chaps. One Hallowe’en, when Benjamin was eighteen, he asked if he could wear my old outfit to a Halloween party. The chaps were much too tight, the vest much too small, but there was a certain nostalgia in watching my son walk down the street in the snow. An Indian disguised as a cowboy. Maybe when my grandkids are old enough, they’ll want to continue this family tradition.

I should ask Dippie if he kept his Straight Arrow outfit.

I don’t expect that kids in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America lined up to play Indians any more than we did, though their parents found Indians interesting enough. Almost as
soon as colonies were established at Plymouth, Jamestown, Acadia, and Quebec, and folks found time for more contemplative and artistic activities, Indians began appearing in literature, art, and popular culture.

Native people in this early period were a critical part of everyday life. Even though diseases had greatly reduced populations along the eastern seaboard, Indians were still a potent military force, and they were also players in colonial economies. Native people had not been pushed west just yet, had not been reduced and relegated to reserves and reservations just yet. That would come later. In the beginning, Indians were more difficult to ignore.

Explorers who treated with Indians in the early years tended to report on Indian-White relationships in generally positive terms. Colonists, who had to live with Indians, were more disposed to dwell on what they saw as the darker side of Native character. Armed with the divine imperative to subdue the earth, they were, no doubt, annoyed that the virgin lands they had imagined, the empty wildernesses they had been promised, were occupied, and, gazing through the lens that seventeenth-century Christianity provided, most were only able to see the basic dichotomy that framed their world, a world that was either light or dark, good or evil, civilized or savage.

A world in which you were either a cowboy or an Indian.

Strangers in a strange land, European squatters quickly crafted an easy narrative that ignored Native humanity and reduced Indians to instruments of divine punishment. In an elegant amalgam of desire and doctrine, colonizers framed Indian attacks not as a consequence of colonial arrogance or mutual misunderstandings, but as God’s way of making sure that his chosen people were paying
attention. Indian depredations were a test to measure the force and depth of faith. Pass/fail. No extra credit available. Don’t even ask.

English Puritans were the designated apologists for God’s bad behaviour, but the concept of therapeutic suffering was not the exclusive domain of Puritanism. All the different flavours of seventeenth-century Christianity featured a deity who might hurt you as a way of demonstrating his love. While the hardware of civilization—iron pots, blankets, guns—was welcomed by Native people, the software of Protestantism and Catholicism—original sin, universal damnation, atonement, and subligation—was not, and Europeans were perplexed, offended, and incensed that Native peoples had the temerity to take their goods and return their gods. As though there was a money-back guarantee on God’s love.

Still, colonists, whose feelings had been hurt, could always console themselves with the knowledge that Whites, who had found their way to North America, were part of God’s master plan. And Indians, who had been here all along, were not.

A more practical answer as to why explorers tended to be more generous with Indians than colonists can be found in the frictions of propinquity and competition. Explorers, their curiosity salted with excitement, came and went, never staying long enough to rub relations raw, whereas the colonists, who stepped off the ships and found themselves up to their pious prejudices in a “howling wilderness” inhabited by “murderous wretches” and “hell-hounds,” were not nearly as enthusiastic. In the early days, there were certainly concerted attempts to put differences aside, and there is no doubt that colonists knew how to share. They simply did not want to share with Indians.

From the early part of the seventeenth-century until the close of the nineteenth, Indians and Europeans were continuously “not sharing” somewhere in North America. From 1622 to 1644, the Powhatan Confederacy fought with Virginia colonists. Connecticut and Rhode Island were the sites of the 1637 Pequot War, while Massachusetts and Rhode Island found themselves embroiled in the 1675–78 King Philip War. The French and Indian War, which officially began in 1754 and ended in 1763, involved most of the landscape between Virginia and Nova Scotia, with the Algonquian nations fighting as allies of the French and the Iroquois nations fighting as allies of the British. The Tuscarora War broke out in North Carolina in 1711, while the Yamassee War erupted in South Carolina in 1715 and ran for three years. Pontiac led an alliance to drive the British out of the Ohio River Valley in 1763, a conflict that continued in one form or another until 1774. This is generally referred to as Lord Dunmore’s War. Conflict broke out again in Ohio and Indiana in 1790 and continued until 1794.

From there we have the Battle of Tippecanoe at the Wabash and Tippecanoe rivers (1811), the Creek War in Georgia and Alabama (1814), the First Seminole War in Florida (1817–18), the Black Hawk War in northern Illinois and southwestern Wisconsin (1832), the Second Seminole War in the Florida Everglades (1835–42), the running conflicts with the Navajo in Arizona and New Mexico (1849–63), the Sioux Wars in Wyoming, Minnesota, and South Dakota (1854–56).

And then there’s the Rogue River War in Oregon (1855–56), the Third Seminole War in the Everglades once again (1855–58), the skirmishes with the Apache in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Mexico (1861–1900), the Ute Wars in Utah (1865–68 and
later in 1879), the Modoc War in northern California and southern Oregon (1872–73), the Red River War in northwestern Texas (1874–75), the Battle of Rosebud in southern Montana (1876), the Nez Perce War in Oregon, Idaho, and Montana (1877), and the Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota (1890).

Nor should one assume that the intervening periods of time were islands of peace. From the beginning of the European colonization of North America, Indian-White relations were an itch that both parties scratched until someone broke the skin. Agreements for peace were made. Treaties were signed. But the constant temptation to pick at the scabs was, in the end, just too much to resist.

In December of 1895, almost five years after the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, an article appeared in the
New York Times
(reprinted from the
Westminster Review
in England) that tried to draw a line between the treatment afforded Indians by Canadian, in contrast to American, authorities. “The great fact stands boldly forth that Canada has never fought the Indians,” said the article, “and she will not begin to do so now. Never has Canada had an Indian war.”

This is correct if you don’t count Red River, Duck Lake, Frog Lake, Batoche, Frenchman’s Bluff, Cut Knife, and Loon Lake as proper “Indian” conflicts, since they had more to do with the Métis. And while drawing a line in this fashion is technically accurate, it also serves as a way to disguise aggression and make it appear that conciliation and forbearance were cornerstones of Canadian Aboriginal policy.

Of course I could mention the 1858 Fraser Canyon War in British Columbia. During the Fraser Canyon gold rush a group of miners raped a Nlaka’pamux woman, and the Nlaka’pamux retaliated,
killing the miners and dumping them into the river, where their headless bodies floated around in an eddy near the town of Yale. Panic set in and six ragtag regiments formed up. They were of two minds. One group, the New York Pike Guards under the command of a Captain Snyder, called for a war of pacification, while a second group, the Whatcom Company, commanded by a Captain Graham, argued for a war of extermination.