I have a few thoughts left that I want to get out.
The first one is just a bitter little thing. As
George Bent got older and saw those older than him dying off, he realized that
their stories and ways were being lost. He started reaching out to different
writers and scholars, trying to get that history captured. One of the most
responsive was George Bird Grinnell, who did end up publishing two books using
a lot of information collected by Bent, much of it in conjunction with another
writer, George Hyde.
Grinnell believed the Indians were worthy of
respect, and saw them as a vanishing people so knew there was limited time. He
still felt free to put Bent off, and deceive him, and cheat Hyde. After all, he
could. Bent and Hyde were financially poor. Grinnell knew more about publishing
than they did and had better resources. Why not profit from it?
That happens a lot. Sometimes it happens with a very
righteous feeling that this is a favor; you don't have to help. It reminds me
both how important honest self-examination is if you want to accomplish any
good, and also that marginalize people have a lot of reasons for being
suspicious.
One thing that may have made it easier for Grinnell
to be that way is that after all, the Indians were doomed. It is still easy to
forget that they are around as anything more than mascots and stories, but we
lose things that way. We especially lose if we do not look to indigenous people
on the environment. I had heard that before, but I didn't understand it. It is
true for a few reasons.
Perhaps the most obvious one - in light of the North
Dakota Access Pipeline controversy - is that native lands are often used in the
worst ways. They are out of sight, which makes ignoring legal treaties easier,
and so things can be done that we don't see. This can include nuclear and other
kinds of waste, and fossil fuel issues. It has also included medical testing.
If we want to achieve environmental justice and medical justice, we need to
look at that.
That self-righteousness can come up in ways you
don't expect. An environmental organization can decide that the best way to
preserve lands is to keep people off of them, or only allow certain uses, but
the people who were on those lands first knew how to live on them without
destroying them. Maybe there's a better way.
I still remember animal rights protesters
interfering with the attempts of the Makah tribe to finally get back their
tradition of whale-hunting. If they were all vegetarian maybe that was not
hypocritical. Even so, when we have spent centuries trying to snuff out a
people, and their culture, and it is important to their well-being to reconnect
to it, that can be reason enough to shut up. If we listened to them more it might
improve circumstances for all whales.
Much of the environmental and medical information
came from Andrea Smith's book, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian
Genocide. That sounds like it would focus more on rape, but that was only a
small part of it. However, one point that was brought up multiple times in
multiple books is that there was no rape before, at least in the Haudenosaunee
(Iroquois) culture. This was true for both the native women and the white women
who visited them.
It was not that they didn't know that such a crime
was possible, but it was regarded as a terrible crime and it wasn't done. Later
on there are cases of captives being raped (that does come up in the Bent book)
and it is a common problem on the reservations now, but it looks like they
learned that from us.
There is room for a lot more knowledge here. The
Haudenosaunee had defined gender roles, but were still equal. Was the equality
why they didn't rape? What other cultures didn't rape, and which ones did? Our
culture says that rape is a terrible crime, but given how we treat it, it's
like we don't really mean it. What sets apart the societies that are not like
that?
Perhaps that is the most important lingering
thought: we do not have to be this way.
White supremacy was invented. It has deep roots, but
it is not innate. We can overcome that.
Even cultures that see different roles for men and
women can see them as equal. We can do that.
There is plenty of evidence of how horrible we can
be, but it is not the only story.
With that, I leave which books appear to be the most
important out of those that I read this time around.
Sisters in Sprirt: Haudenosaunee
(Iroquois) Influences on Early American Feminists, by Sally Wagner Roesch
Conquest: Sexual Violence and American
Indian Genocide, by Andrea Lee Smith
The Invention of the White Race, Volumes
1 and 2, by Theodore W. Allen
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