Native American Heritage Month 2011

And now for a brief interruption of my musical exploration to catch up on my reading. Obviously I am running late, but not quite as late as I was running with Black History Month 2011, and with luck I will finish my 2012 Black History Month reading no later than June!

My material for this last round included Custer Died for Your Sins by Vine Deloria Jr; 1491 by Charles Mann, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie; For the Generations, which was a television special about working with Native American youth so they are in touch with their culture.

I also read some academic articles a friend found for me. One was by James Allen on the LDS Indian Placement Program and was quite good, one was by Vine Deloria Jr on Intellectual Self-Determination and Sovereignty, also good; and then there was one on the writings of Vine Deloria Jr, and I can tell you it was by Troy Richardson, but I would also need to say that it was so clearly a graduate work essay which used many words and never said much. Well, they can’t all be good.

I finished the last book on April 9th (Custer…), but I am currently reading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, and I thought that would make a nice supplement to 1491, but it was kind of a tough slog. I was talking to a friend Wednesday though, and while she and her husband both loved it, they spent a year reading it, because you can’t get through it quickly. The information is too dense. So I will keep reading that one, but it is outside the body of this work, and anyway it does cover Native American topics, but not exclusively.

It’s a fairly random sampling, which will make this more of a shaggy dog review with no clear theme, but I was having a hard time choosing, and I can live with this. One thing that makes selecting books difficult is that there is a strong emotional element to these issues, and so there were some books that I considered, but I felt like there was a bias, and that I don’t have enough of a background to know how what to trust.

For example, Custer Died for Your Sins at times veers into polemic, which is fine. Deloria is very intelligent, and an interesting thinker, and generally where it gets more emotional is not in parts where I am trying to learn history. However, there are books about different incidents where I can see that it would be really skewed towards one side or another, and that doesn’t have to rule it out automatically, but I would need to know more.

I think that’s one way where I’m lucky with the Black History Month readings. It’s been going on longer, with the issues more mainstream, so there is a lot of material out there, and there is material on the material. Plus that was kind of my major in college, though more geared towards African Americans in the American West. I feel more confident there.

Incidentally, a note on language: as much as I have this sense that I should use Native American and African America, all of the Native American writers use Indian, and there are cases where black is appropriate and African America is not, so I may switch back and forth on these terms, and there is no intended insult or ignorance.

Back to the actual books, 1491 was great. Again, it is not a quick read, but you learn a lot, and especially you see how many of our common conceptions are wrong. That may actually be a reasonable tie-in to the question of image, which was a factor in the other books, the essays, and even the television special. There is the image that others hold of Indians, but there is also how they view themselves.

For the Generations was about balancing the two. You can be both a skateboarder and a spirit dancer. You can sing contemporary music but have your costume be inspired by your heritage. In the one case she seemed to show her pride by dressing very scantily, but in buckskin and feathers. I’m not sure that is the best expression of cultural pride, but that was really just the one story, and they had many.

One quote that moved me a lot was by Chief Dan George:

“I was born when people loved all nature and spoke to it as though it had a soul. . . .
[But] then the people came. More and more people came. Like a crushing, rushing wave they came, hurling the years aside. And suddenly I found myself a young man in the midst of the twentieth century. I found myself and my people adrift in this new age, not part of it.
We were engulfed by its rushing tide, but only as a captive eddy, going round and round. On little reservations, on plots of land, we floated in a kind of gray unreality, ashamed of our culture that you ridiculed, unsure of who we were or where we were going, uncertain of our grip on the present, weak in our hope of the future. . . .
And now you hold out your hand and you beckon to me to come across the street. Come and integrate, you say. But how can I come? . . . How can I come in dignity? . . . I have no gifts. What is there in my culture you value? My poor treasures you only scorn.
. . . Somehow I must wait. I must delay. I must find myself. I must find my treasure. I must wait until you want something of me, until you need something that is me. Then I can raise my head and say to my wife and family, "Listen, they are calling. They need me. I must go."
Then I can walk across the street and hold my head high, for I will meet you as an equal. I will not scorn you for your seeming gifts, and you will not receive me in pity. Pity I can do without; my manhood I cannot.”

One thing that I got clearly out of my last year’s reading is that while shipping the tribes off to the reservations would have been bad enough, it never ended at that. There were always other moves, so no matter what they had built in terms of homes and schools and farms, it was constantly being lost again. This turns out to have still been an issue at least into the 60’s, not so much with more relocation but with funding issues and planning issues. So if they feel like they do not have gifts to offer, there was a lot of work put into getting them there.

Deloria’s answer is tribalism, that more separation is the answer, not less. My initial thought is to disagree, because he finds differences between the races that I don’t, and I don’t think the cultural differences are so insurmountable. However, I am a white liberal, and I’m expected to think that way. That actually may be the best part of reading “Custer Died for Your Sins”, is being on the receiving end of being judged on race. When I was writing about Jeremy Lin I had to admit that doesn’t come up very often, so I don’t relate to prejudice the same way as someone who has to deal with it all the time. Maybe it’s good for me to feel that sometimes. And he does judge.

(Also, he and Mann both leave you with not the highest impression of anthropologists and social scientists, but not in the same way. Academia is really cutthroat, no matter how boring it looks.)

Sherman Alexie’s book was the one that affected me the most personally. It is semi-autobiographical fiction, and I don’t know what specific details are real or changed, but it is emotionally very real, and it was devastating. And it was funny too, and somewhat optimistic, but I kept crying, and wishing things were different.

And this may be where more tribalism is the answer. In the book, Junior is advised by a teacher to get off the reservation, because there is no hope there, so he transfers to a school where most of the students end up attending college. He is still living on the reservation, but he is truly entering a different world, which is why he is a part-time Indian.

He initially encounters a lot of prejudice, but many of those people become friends, and you know that he will be able to go to college and graduate and have a future, just like the author did in real life. However, that leaves everyone else on the reservation with no hope.

One of the points made by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow is that people use black exceptionalism as proof that the system works. Obama became president, Denzel and Halle won their Oscars, there have been two Supreme Court justices, so obviously anyone can succeed, when really the deck is stacked against most.

Maybe there is a similar issue with Indian exceptionalism, except that they are so invisible most of the time that people don’t even worry about it. It may be more valuable to bring hope to the reservations than to wish for everyone to find it outside.

That sounds like I am advocating separation there, and no, I still don’t feel good about that. In addition, I think now we are moving into poor people exceptionalism, where if some poor people can finish school and find good jobs, than any can. Ultimately we need to build a society where anyone can do well, rather than one where the haves just assume the have-nots are lazy.

Really, I did not come away with any answers. I still just have this commitment to at least trying to find out what the questions are, and I believe that looking outside of my personal experience twice a year is not too much of a burden, even if I will always be running late. No, this November I will start on time, and the 2012 Native American reading will be completed in 2012.