White people were scared of us. And they loathed us. These things were not in question any more than the fact that our neighbors didn’t know or understand the first thing about us—about what Stacey lived through everyday, what strength it must have took, what shame had to be endured, for her mother to come in the night to knock at our door—was not in question. But if the things white people seemed to feel about us were true, where did they come from? We posed no real threat, personally or to the status quo. We disrupted nothing. We seemed mostly to be a problem to ourselves. So where did these feelings come from?
*
Underneath it all was a sense that there was some larger problem. Something race didn’t explain but that was actually the source of race itself. Racial thinking was the product of the problem. Race was not the cause of the problem but rather the effect. Some darker truth that was violence itself.
*
The shadow of violence was everywhere in my childhood. But what cast the shadow? Why was that so hard to see? And perhaps that is the most insidious aspect of all this: not the violence of the country but the ways in which its victims cast their own shade. The national myths have it that Indians live only in the past tense. That we were, but are no longer. This pastness, our pastness, is written into America’s holidays and its textbooks, its whole disposition towards us. So much so that many of us, when out in the world, have been told by well-meaning people that we simply can’t be Indians because we were all killed. The most common version of our early death has it that disease did most of us in. We simply had no immunity to smallpox and the measles and the flu. The modern version of the same story is that we are busy killing ourselves with alcohol and meth. In both versions you let yourself off the hook—there is no aggressor here. No culprit. No avarice. The only taking is a natural one. But between you and me: we survived the early diseases and we are surviving these later diseases. The theft of our land, our security, our well-being, and our peace of mind is the result of the colonizers’ willingness to kill us and take our land for their own use.
The threat wasn’t class either. Poverty, of course, is that other invention of the status quo. And race is often merely the clothes we drape over the body of the poor. There weren’t many rich people in in my town or on the reservation. There were some who were rich by our standards, but not many. As children we graded wealth in only what we could see—who had Nikes, who had Silver Tabs, did so-and-so have a car? These things, these thin objects, were merely the visible light of the broad spectrum of wealth so of course there was much we could not see. It wasn’t any group of white people resembling the “Socs” who gathered outside the middle school to fight any Indians coming outside. The few landed gentry of the region didn’t spend nights pondering the ways in which our existence bedeviled them. No. It was the sons of pig farmers (with few pigs) and welders (with no large orders of metal to join) and construction workers (with no houses to build) and clerks and baggers who laced up and threw side eye and who had theories and who marshaled arguments as to why we sucked. The reasoning was racial but the need for the reasoning was not: the fiction of our inferiority, our troubling but necessary “thereness” (which was both an affront and a fundamental and necessary constituent of their own self-regard), propped up their own sense of themselves as Americans and capable of anything.
Put another way: without us the fiction of hard work and getting ahead (and of meritocracy itself) was in deep trouble. Without us playing the part of the worst kind of Americans—without the fear and loathing—there was nothing standing between the poor, rural whites (and poor urban whites) and the basic fact that their country did not care about them and try as they might there was (and is) little hope they will “get ahead.” One need only look at the kind of anger Indian casinos generate, proportionate only to the amount of money they generate, to see this is true. The one thing despised more than Indian poverty and dereliction is Indian success, primarily monetary success. The resentment over Indian wealth wonderfully inverts the usual resentment: it is the well-off, the self-made, the successful who seem to resent it more than the most. They, in their thinking, haven’t received any help. They (and no one else) have made it to the high hill on a tide of sweat and smarts and hard work. And that’s how they perceive treaty rights: a leg up, as special treatment. They are neither of course. But then these Americans don’t really understand that they are also the beneficiaries of the treaty rights that have come down from the Treaty of Ghent, the Treaty of Paris, and the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo. Whereas the white working poor glance up out of their usual hatred of Indians and shrug, as if to say: of course, someone else is having a day in the sun, we never will. And the only way poor whites—weaned on the American Dream, told that if they work hard they can get theirs, trained to knuckle under and clock in and clock out—can pretend all of these lies are true is if they persist in fearing and loathing us. And so they always rose up in the school yard and the mall parking lot and it didn’t take much and there would be blood.
*
There was a boy in my school. Memory has rearranged a lot of the past but I think his name was Dan or Daniel. He was good-looking. Quiet. His girlfriend was pretty. He had his own car. Before the shit hit the fan he was something of an enigma to us. He was strong and athletic but not an athlete. He was handsome and had a certain dark charm but he didn’t use it. Those of us in the acne-and-Fiend-Folio-crowd would have given a lot to have even a fraction of his chi. And then one weekend he climbed up on the roof of the Chief Motel across from the high school with a deer rifle and began shooting. The police showed up. What may have begun as a bad day got worse. He wounded two police officers before he either gave up or was captured. He wasn’t harmed. All of us puzzled over this at school. Some said he was on drugs. Others said his parents were getting divorced. He was depressed. He was sad. He went to jail. And then, a few years later, as though nothing had changed and no years had actually passed, he was out. We’d see him around town on a motorcycle. His girlfriend on the back. The same good looks and the same dark charm keeping him company. Here’s the thing: he had a bad day, or a bad series of days. He failed individually. He got to fail individually. But as for us? Indians fail collectively. We fail because we function (as an embodiment of failure) because being Indian is a social condition. That, in the American world, is our function. We are the outer limit, the dark margin. We are the alternative to the American Dream.
*
Speaking of Dreams. My father had a few. They were the core around which he orbited (and as his children we were pulled into their gravity). He was a refugee, a holocaust survivor. He managed to flee Austria in 1938 while most of the family was murdered at Dachau and Mauthausen and, later, Buchenwald and Auschwitz. My grandparents survived, too. One uncle and one aunt. Two cousins. Seven, in total, out of a family of hundreds. They landed in Yellow Springs, Ohio and as such they landed in the seam between Jim Crow and equality, between north and south. They wound up in the black part of town, kitty corner from the AME church. Years later I would meet the son of the pastor (himself an old man when we met) who remembered my grandparents, their chickens, their beehives, and even their dog. For reasons I admire and don’t even now fully understand, my father, even then as a teenager with a tenuous grasp on English, threw himself into the Cause, the only cause, the primary struggle of racial justice. He sat in at lunch counters. A black person would sit down and order only to be told there was nothing to be had. Whatever he wanted (even when he changed his order) had just been sold and sold out. Then my father would enter and order the same thing and be served. Once a café owner, after being exposed, chased him out onto the street with a kitchen knife. I asked him why he got involved, why, in effect, he cared. His answer was frustratingly simple: they were nice to me. They were the only people who were. Later, after three children and the demise of his marriage, he met my mother and the two of them moved to Washington, DC in the fall of 1967. The struggle was there. It was all around. My mother, in her own words “just a rez girl,” went shopping in Georgetown. She found an empty shopping cart on the sidewalk and began strolling, confused as to why all the stores were closed and some fronted broken windows. There was trash and smoke. She asked someone what was going on. “Honey, there’s a riot going on.” It says something about her and about the reservation that she needed to be told this. My brother Anton was born in 1969 and I was born in 1970. Washington, DC in the 1970s was where the action was. Marches, protests, the raw workings of power, the ghosts of inequality, and the seat of power (this was before power learned to hide and outsource itself. Now power, like the Internet, doesn’t seem to have a place like it once did. Now it makes no statement. It hovers over no particular building. It can’t be protested in the same way. Or at least, not with the same results.). My father worked for the government. My mother gave birth to Anton and then to me and raised us and took care of us while going to law school and then raised us and took care of us while pregnant with my younger brother and sister and going to law school. Before those busy times she would buy a record a week, whatever was new, with my father’s paychecks. Nancy Sinatra, the Everly Brothers, The Beatles. When we moved back to the rez in 1979 all those records, along with all the impressions of a larger America, came back with us. But you see: the only sounds my father could seem to tolerate in the house were his voice, classical music, and anything to do with Martin Luther King, Jr. In that order. Among the records in my parents’ collection were voice recordings of King’s speeches. And on winter nights when we weren’t listening to Beethoven piano sonatas or being subjected to Weill’s Three Penny Opera or Schubert we listened to King. My father would get excited and stop the record and draw attention to King’s rhythms, how he repeated phrases, adding a little here and a little there, building meaning, building power. Then he would demonstrate how to do this with his voice. He never managed to sound like King. Who could? My father did not come to speech from Praise. He did not come to English the way King did. My father’s English was the result of listening to Ralph Edwards, Myron Wallace, and Edward R. Murrow. King was lifting his voice—trying to change prayer to policy. My father, by contrast, spent his life trying to simply get his point across, the point being nothing less than his life. This was bound to be frustrating. Of the many hundreds of records in the collection (and my mind goes back over those under-heard originals: Jethro Tull, Sgt. Pepper’s, Nat King Cole, Buddy Holly) only two non-classical, non-King records ever got any play: Neil Diamond and the soundtrack to Zorba the Greek. Anton and my mother loved to sing and dance to Diamond. I never joined in on “Sweet Caroline.” Something always held me back. But the whole family would dance around the coffee table with linked hands in some weird Jewish/Indian approximation of Greek salt-of-the-earth-ness with only the pines and the snow drifts looking on. But even then a certain sadness took me over when listening to “I Have a Dream” and “We Shall Overcome” and “We Must Love Each Other” and “The American Dream.”
What was in that sadness as I lay on the living room floor toying with the designs in the rug? I am not sure. I am not sure even now. But perhaps this: the struggles if not the dreams articulated by King and embraced by my father, on display in Washington, DC, and everywhere I turned, seemed so clear. They had dimensions and dates. 1863. 1954. 1968. Slavery had a beginning and an end. There was a clear wrong that at least could be understood and addressed. Whether those wrongs had been addressed or ever would be was a different question. It seemed to me that the struggles of black America were huge, obvious, and clear. And in music and film and in our cities and across the land black Americans were undeniably here. They were unavoidable. They had a critical mass. I, of course, didn’t fully appreciate the ways in which the country could play with and manipulate that presence, the way the country could both harness it and eradicate it. But I was young. The sadness, anyway, was there because we Indians lacked the necessary clarity, the necessary presence, the necessary “thereness.” Instead of emancipation and Jim Crow and Civil Rights all we had was our sorrow, as large as the land itself. All we had was the violence, for which there was no beginning and no end. What we had were girls hiding their faces with their hair in class and appearing at our doorstep in the middle of the night and the arrows we shot through the windows of cop cars and the bullets the cops shot into us. All we had were the summer cabins on our land and the happy white people waterskiing over our lakes, their children learning “Indian Lore” and campfire songs on our shores. We didn’t have a King or an X. We didn’t have a Thurgood or a Rustin. We had the American Indian Movement, which, even then, both confused me and filled me with disgust. Not the citizens of the movement, but the leaders: big men with big bellies drooping over big belt buckles, getting even fatter off their protest. They seemed like professional protesters whose rhetoric didn’t match up with their actions. They seemed to love the power they collected from critiquing power and made light-skinned Indians march at the back of the line.
But even if we did have better leadership or more of a presence, if we were in your face in the way black people were (and of which I was secretly jealous), it didn’t seem like any of this would matter for the simple reason that for it to matter would mean that the great wrong could be undone. And this had to do with land. Our degradation could be explained and even fixed, perhaps. The ways in which our religions were banned and suppressed only to find new expression in the hands of white hippies and counter-culturalists (which might explain why, as much as Indians hate the hate piled on us, we might hate the love even more) could be addressed. The spread of disease and subsequent Indian mortality could be seen and explained. But the taking of land cannot. You’d hear it then and you hear it now: get over it. It happened a long time ago. But this isn’t true. This is the greatest lie behind the other lies of race and power. Dispossession occurred by degree and in specific places and at specific times. These were acts committed by people, individuals and groups, by privateers, and by the government. As such the shape of the past can be contained and can be known. It would be a mistake to think otherwise. The more damning mistake is to think the taking is something that happened. No. It is not a crime of the remote past or even one best understood in the past tense. It is a present and a present tense. The taking happened and is happening, it has been happening with no stop in sight. The land is a continual state of being taken by the simple virtue that it continues to be covered ever more so by white people and non-white people who can only do so because of ongoing theft. To say it happened is one thing. To see that it is happening is another. This is the root of American violence. This is the bedrock on which we all stand. The taking—from the first to the last, most recent—is something that must be hidden for it to work. Virgin country. Unbroken wilderness. This country was neither but you described it as such in order to claim you were simply moving in rather than evicting us. Nomads. Savages. Hunters and gathers. These are the ways we were described because to describe us this way was to suggest we weren’t tenants here. And the colonizers were moving into an empty house. But the house isn’t empty. It wasn’t in those early days and it isn’t now. We’re still here. And so the shadow of violence is cast by the sun hitting the body of the thief. The taking didn’t happen in some far off time. It happened then and it is happening now. Which explains why we are still being erased.
*
But in order for that taking to work, to be able (in the words of Camus) to love justice and still love one’s country, the violence that makes up this country must necessarily be covered up. The root of race is violence. A violence that need not be seen, that can’t be seen, because to see it, to live in it, is to destroy the very idea of an American self: a self vested in the idea of fairness and democracy and the ability to get ahead because of one’s own hard work. So, too, is the original violence of theft. It can’t be seen because to see it is to know there is no innocence to be found in this land. And to see this original and on-going violence is to see all the others. That cannot be allowed. The state won’t allow it. Our own delicate consciousness won’t allow it either. Because what happens to us if we see it. After all one can stand in Wounded Knee or Sand Creek or Haymarket or Pickawillany and point at the ground and say: violence happened here. That’s not so hard. The harder thing is to point the finger at ourselves and recognize that it is happening here, too. To do that would mean to recognize that nothing works, that nothing will work, that our violence is what defines us much more so than our founding documents. Lost in that inner clash is our sense of innocence, of American goodness.
*
It is the fiction of goodness that creates all the others: race, crushing class divisions, numbing inequality, a sense of an ending of what this country tried to but couldn’t quite mean, a nervous condition that causes the police to pop off far more often and with more force than the people they are supposed to help. The reason? The fiction of goodness, the story of our collective story, is built on a historical and contemporary and constant taking (the degree of which is so massive it is now felt by most everyone) that is forever treated as invisible; as past, done, and dealt with. That it has not been dealt with is a matter of fact. There is a reckoning that needs to take place. And the perpetual postponement of that reckoning is the source of our collective madness. The matter, however, is not simply one of lifting the veil to peer in on our true selves. The matter is more complicated than that. Because that original and old violence has become wrapped up in new violences, like the one in San Bernadino and the violence of the police and the violence of earning less than a living wage no matter how hard you try. These new violences arise from the old and from continuing to act out our surprise at the presence of violence itself. To deny violence is to do it. Our surprise at Sandy Hook and Cold Springs and Columbine is a form of violence in its own right.
*
In 1836 Emerson wrote of a way of being and seeing: “I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” To have the “good fortune” to stand on any ground in the American east was hardly fortune at all, it was the result of conquest. Concord was so named because of the ease with which Peter Bulkley and Simon Willard were able to extract that land from under control of the Algonquians who lived there, who gave the only thing they had left after 150 years of disease and warfare (the land) in exchange for trade goods that would only get them through the winter. The ground was available to Emerson because of transactional violence and the wealth of the country at the time was extracted from the bodies of black people. As such, Emerson’s egoless “transparent eyeball” was and is connected to the savage mind. This mind is the author of this country. It controls what the eye can see. It is your maker and the maker of my children and of me.
***
Read “The Savage Mind, Pt. 1” and “The Savage Mind, Pt. 2”.
***
Image provided courtesy of Sterling HolyWhiteMountain.
