The Indian Who Married His Mother
By Donald Panther-Yates

There was one Indian who married his mother. His name was Athore. He was a chief. He was tall and handsome and walked and talked like a king. Yes, he married his mother and even had a number of children by her. He pointed these out to visitors, slapping his thigh. After he married his mother, his father (whose name was Saturioura) did not live with the mother any longer.
    Only an Indian….
    Where does the story come from? When the French first came to Florida they made a report to the folks back home about the strange plants, people and animals they encountered.  The scientific illustrations accompanying this narrative were widely reproduced. They are studied today as influential sources of the philosophical idea of the "noble savage." In the book Southeastern Indians. Life Portraits 1564-1860, by Emma Lila Fundaburk, these depictions of Timucua Indians by the Frenchman Le Moyne enjoy pride of place as the oldest and most faithful pictures of Indian life before the white man. Among the many marvels of the new world, readers learned about turkeys, alligators, hermaphrodites, human sacrifices…and the Indian who married his mother. We might, somewhat crudely, call this the first documented use of "mother-f*****" as a racial slur applied to North American indigenous people.
    I refuse to believe that any human beings in the history of the world have married their mothers--much less Indians, who practiced an older and more highly developed system of ethics than their Christian discoverers. It is different from, say, Oedipus. The effect of the Greek tale depends on Oedipus’ being unaware Iocasta is his mother. Oedipus also killed his father, unknowingly. That was myth and fiction; this purports to be an eyewitness account of a real person. The Indian breaks one of mankind’s firmest taboos and jokes about it.
    Only an Indian….
    One can imagine Athore explaining to his wide-eyed French guests that he was the "father" of the tribe and his wife was the tribal "mother." He had replaced the former chief. Was this too difficult a political concept for the Europeans to grasp? Did they not speak of "our father in heaven," "the fatherland or mother country" and the "family of Frenchmen?"
    To make a comparison, there were once five blind men who came up on an elephant. The first found the elephant’s trunk. He declared the beast to be a giant serpent. The second took hold of his tail and claimed it was more like a snake than a serpent. The third and fourth felt along the sides and rump. They described a different animal entirely. The fifth stumbled on the elephant’s feet and said the other men were all wrong. Each insisted that his view was right. They never did agree what an elephant was.
    To continue the parable, elephants were largely unknown during the European Middle Ages. Monks illustrating manuscripts such as Livy’s History of Rome with Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps had to draw the strange beasts anyway, without benefit of having seen a real-life elephant. The results are equally ludicrous. Later on, however, kings and emperors started zoos and obtained real elephants from Africa and India. How did people draw elephants now? The results, again, are pretty comical. No one could really see an elephant because of all the preconceptions. Rather than representing the animal, they drew a picture instead of what people thought elephants looked like.
    The Indians described by the European discoverers of America never existed, either as individuals or societies. They are convenient fictions, projections of what the French, Spanish and English wanted to see. Even today, the Hollywood Indian persists as an enduring image. An Indian has long, thick, black, lank hair; big nose; high cheekbones; piercing dark brown eyes; copper-colored skin; is naked and muscular; knows how to ride horses (and whisper to them); doesn’t talk much; is probably dark, vengeful and oversexed; on and on. As the activist John Trudell says in one of his rock songs, "We didn’t match our descriptions."
    All the sturdy stereotypes of Indians can be found in these early, few reports, and they are all of a piece. No cartographer or portraitist, no Spanish friar, no ethnologist, no Catlin has ever come close to capturing the spirituality of Indians, their primary differentiating characteristic. The entire period covered by Fundaburk includes less than five hundred records, whatever their value may be. Most of the Spanish relaciones  read like schoolboy essays, a howler every line. Whole tribes were exterminated without even recording what they were called. For many others, we have only an epitaph--sometimes commemorated in the name of a state, such as "Alabama" or "Tennessee."
    Perhaps the most famous American Indian is Sequoya, inventor of the Cherokee writing system. Arguably, the one known portrait of him, which hangs in the U.S. National Hall of Fame, is the most familiar picture of any Indian (never mind that Sequoya was half-white, half-Indian), unless it be that of Geronimo, the Apache warrior patronized by Theodore Roosevelt, or Sitting Bull, the Lakota Sioux chief-turned-circus-star.
    The word "NOT!" should be hung under Sequoya’s portrait in Washington. In a rare book entitled The Lies of History, a descendant tells the rest of the story. A northeastern reporter was sent on assignment to scoop the breaking news that a learned savage had managed to invent an alphabet. When he arrived in Georgia he found to his chagrin that the noble hero, already deformed by a childhood accident that rendered him partially lame (hence the name, which means "pig-foot" in Cherokee), had been hideously disfigured as a traitor by his own people. The Cherokee, in fact, never liked Sequoya very much, particularly the traditionals. The benign visage that graces our history books is pure fabrication, made up out of whole cloth.
    Art historians everywhere are familiar with a decorative motif known as the acanthus leaf. Old as Western Civilization, it appears curling around the capitals of civic buildings and snorkeling around letters in medieval illuminated manuscripts. It is found in the curlicues on coins, stamps and official documents. Where does it come from, and where does it grow? Perhaps Egypt, or India, or the Spice Isles? The answer is nowhere. This leaf is never represented as a plant growing in the ground or as part of a branch because it was a product of men’s imagination, the result of art and fancy.
    Students and admirers of Indians are like botanists searching the world over for the acanthus plant. They exult in its nonexistence. They crow over its look-alikes. They lament its disappearance. Dissertations and treatises are published. But they keep on looking.