White Man's Lies (1)

White Man's Lies
A Historical Overview of White-Indian Relations
Originally Posted to Amerind-US-SE-L@rootsweb.com
By Donald Panther-Yates

Native American decor is in. Eddie Bauer sells Indian sheets and towels. Nearly every American home has Indian kitsch in it somewhere. I ran into a woman at the airport completely decked out in Indian designs. Dreamcatcher earrings, plains choker, Navajo bracelet, fringed dress, moccasins, the whole bit. How strange, I thought. I know fullbloods who don’t even own a feather.
    What are Indians? No one is quite sure. Everybody has an opinion. It’s like the lady who said she didn’t know what art was but would recognize it when she saw it. There’s a mystique about Indians—and for good reasons.
    In 1995 they dedicated the Museum of American Indian Art in New York City. It was an event fraught with irony. They put the loot in the Alexander Hamilton Customs House on the tip of Manhattan and threw a cocktail party. All the literati and gliterati came to see what kind of bargains a collector named Heye had made off with over the years. I had to wonder what made those things Indian. They didn’t belong to us anymore. They weren’t being used. Few if any had been passed in the Indian way or properly compensated for. I later met a woman in Philadelphia who choked on her chablis when she saw her grandmother’s moccasins in a display case.
    Hollywood vilifies us one moment and idolizes us the next. Our history is written for us, and anthropologists have decided we are Mongoloids. Our spirituality is appropriated by well-meaning kooks. After defining us out of existence, the government counts coup on the ghost dancers. The freest people in the world are turned into a cartoon character in a cabinet. Who else but Indians could vanish by overrunning a place?

Stereotype Indian from turn of the century     The first thing Columbus did when he landed was enslave the greeting party. He died thinking he was in China. De Soto’s explorations read like very bad schoolboy essays. How I spent my summer vacation. We went to Florida and looked for gold. All we found were a bunch of Indians. Some had tatoos. When we got to the Gold Country we had to eat our burrows (sic).
    The explorers didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. American schoolchildren are still told fairy tales about Indians and pilgrims once a year, without fail. The media piously covers "our" Native Americans but it’s a case of "They’ll do it every time." We end up being a sideshow.
    A specialized vocabulary has been created to cloak people’s ignorance. It starts with the misnomer "American Indian" and goes on to list the different brands, all names given to us by the white man. Our sacred stories are called myths, our leaders chiefs, our villages and towns, camps. A red man is not allowed to have a wife. He has a squaw. He can’t own a horse. He rides a pony (which he probably stole).
    I’ve heard it said there are three ways to be Indian. This may appear to be generous, but wait!
    You can be Indian by blood. This is the least inconvenient and most definitive. If you want to know whether you’ve got it you can go get tested.
    You can also be Indian by adoption, as long as it involves bondage. This takes care of descendants of runaway slaves and white captives who for some reason do not wish to go back to the settlements.
    Finally, you can be Indian by thinking like an Indian. All you have to do is study them and fantasize real hard. Anyone can give themselves an Indian name. And if you want to, you can join one of the Indian tribes listed in the Reference Encyclopedia of the American Indian.
    Few authorities seem to suggest you may have to earn your Indian identity. The implication is you can’t lose it except by being cheated of it. None of these attempts at identification touches on the real issue. The Native identity trinity (NIT) test just substitutes three problems for one. It’s still the outside looking in.
    People constantly challenge me because I have Caucasian blood and an English surname. I don’t look Indian enough, I guess. They say I must be only part. Some tell me I can’t be Indian. Others ask, rhetorically, "Why do you want to be Indian?" A government worker pointed out I could check "Other" on his form. It was my choice. That was very white of him, wasn’t it?
    "Oh, they do that to me, too," says Grandfather. "What they don’t realize is I kicked the white guy out!"
    "There’s a Scotsman somewhere in my family tree," says a Tuscarora who looks as Indian as a Catlin portrait. "People find that out and say, ‘What part?’ I hold up my fist. I say, ‘This part.’"
    Mother Qualla is even blunter. "No one can tell me who I am," she says, with the firmness of bedrock.
    Every Indian has had the experience of being invisible in public. People either stare at us or appear unable to see us at all. Sometimes it seems as though the white man is still rubbing his eyes in disbelief from the first encounter. His deepest fantasy may be that Indians don’t exist and never have existed.
    Are we paranoid? Not really. We just know the world’s a dangerous place. The white man lives in the same world but his society is one of comfort and convenience. How dangerous these institutions are to him he has no inkling.

Part 2

Drawing of "Indian" by student at Eastern Cherokee Agency school, ca. 1950 Most of the misunderstanding can be laid at the doorstep of history and politics. White man’s lies are politically motivated. His propaganda is just history before the fact. Almost every racism I’ve delved into about Indians was the child of policy and scholarship. The biggest whopper is, Indians don’t own land. Sometimes this gets dressed up as, Native people are migratory. There’s free land out there, yours for the taking! We are lawless: vigilante justice in Indian country! We have no morals: get yourself an Indian wife!
    Missionaries were the advance guard of the Conquest. The history of the Indian people is the story of Indian-white relations. The cleverest apologists say we have become what we are through a process of assimilation.
    How Indians could live so close to the land without an affection for it is one of the abiding mysteries of American Studies. But the mother of lies was the theory that Indians were not human. This attractive notion was debated in the courts and coffeehouses of Europe for over a century before the Pope came out with his famous bull. Later on, the idea was embroidered. Indians were members of the human race but they didn’t have souls. Finally, it was rescinded altogether. Maybe by that time the red man had caught up.
    The Methodist minister Edward Bushyhead used to start sermons on the Georgia frontier with the words, "My father was a red man and my mother was a white woman. Do I therefore have half a soul?"
    The Ponca chief Standing Bear was the first Indian to be declared a human being. I heard the story from Grandfather:
    The railroads came out of St. Louis and took all the Indian lands west. They kicked the Ponca off their ageold homelands and forced them to march to Indian Territory. Along the way, the chief’s daughter sickened and died. He went back to bury her bones with those of the ancestors. He stayed, mourning her. By now, the white man had built fences, planted wheat and driven off the buffalo. Some of the other Ponca returned from Indian Territory half-starved, saying the white man gave them no place to stay. The band managed to hold out on a tiny scrap of land. Many died.
    Finally the white man found a way to remove them, too. The banks and railroads took the matter to court. But the Ponca had friends among the settlers. A newspaper man in Omaha got interested in their case. Standing Bear was ready to defend his people, but Indians were not allowed to appear in court. The first judge threw the case out. The newspaper man kept things stirred up. The case went to the Supreme Court.
The day of the trial the courtroom was packed with people on both sides. Standing Bear was going to speak for himself, for his people. At first the judge said No, but the white people in the courtroom made such a noise he changed his mind. Standing Bear rose to speak. He was a brilliant orator though he did not know English very well.
    He spoke of the times before the white man came. He spoke of his parents and grandparents, wife and daughter. He spoke in simple words, from the heart, but he spoke at length, as was proper. When he finished speaking people were all crying. Standing Bear ended his speech by saying: "I see my words bring sadness, bring joy. You see Indian feel beauty, shed tears." The judge had to yield to popular opinion. Standing Bear was declared a legal witness to the wrongs committed against his people. Indians were real persons in the eyes of the white man’s law. Standing Bear was his own lawyer.

    As late as 1982 in the state where I resided I was told Indians fell under the wildlife commission. This state had an Indian name. Every fourth inhabitant claimed to be descended from a Cherokee grandmother (normally a princess). The only Native American with a statue in the National Hall of Fame was born in what became this state. Activists pointed out all these things to legislators and more. Finally, Tennessee got a Commission on Indian Affairs. An African American woman was placed in charge of it, on a part-time basis. Only with Indians!
    As is well known, Indians did not become U.S. citizens until 1924. Ever since Delaware, the government had talked of creating an Indian state. The Cherokee were promised a seat in Congress. Indians became citizens in the same way they became human beings—gradually. The history books say they won citizenship in recognition of their helping fight in World War I. That’s the spin they put on it.
    From the Indian viewpoint, the government couldn’t hold off any longer. They’d already taken away tribal governments. They weren’t signing any more treaties. By the 1920s, the government was in the midst of the biggest scam since Removal. It was called Allotment. According to Allotment, there was no longer any such thing as tribal land. Indians were supposed to hold land like everybody else, in fee simple. We couldn’t be Indians anymore. We had to be something. So we became citizens.
    When the dust settled in Oklahoma, the courts had legally stolen most of the reservation land. Of the 120,000 Cherokees entitled to an allotment, half were declared incompetent. Their land was taken into trust. Indians began to pay rent to live on their own property. This is the historical background that explains why the term "crazy Indian" today is not necessarily received as a compliment. No Indian wants to be a ward.
    Following Allotment came a few reforms under John Collier and the Great White Chief’s Indian Reorganization Act, but the next phase of Washington policy signaled a return to business as usual. It was known as Termination. It is unclear whether an end was ever put to Termination. While it was in full swing, families were busted up, children bussed off to jobs in the big city, the last speakers of many native languages died, and tribal traditions were declared dead. The state of Alabama still deported Indians in the year of Our Lord 1949, more than a hundred years after the Trail of Tears. The removal law was not taken off its books until 1974. Within living memory, Georgia had a "no Indian after sunset" law. On the Federal front, Indians became the last minority to be covered by the Bill of Rights in 1972. They had to wait until the 1980s for freedom of worship.
    Growing up in the 50s and 60s, I was more ashamed than proud of my Indian blood. My family considered it a skeleton in the closet, a nonissue at best. As a relative on Sand Mountain told me, "Most folks around here has Indian blood. . . I just haven’t found anyone who knows what to do with it."
    "To the government we’re an embarrassment," says Grandfather. "They don’t know what to do with us. We ought to have died out a long time ago. They still count Indian warriors in Washington. They get the tallies from the chiefs. They monitor even those that are not recognized. Even nonrecognition is a form of recognition, isn’t it?
    "It used to be against the law to practice our religion," he continues. "Most Indians don’t know the story behind Jimmy Carter’s passage of AIFRA in 1979 (American Indian Freedom of Religion Act). In the old days, there didn’t use to be as many powwows as there are today. Things were different. When I started my medicine training I told people I was studying to be a conjuror, learning how to do magic tricks. Even my wife and children didn’t know what I was doing at first. One teacher would sit me on the end of a dock in Florida. We weren’t supposed to look at each other. He spoke in a real low voice and I had to memorize everything in a code. It’s all still in there but sometimes it takes me a while to dredge it out.
    "Another of my teachers would meet me at truck stops across America—in the Mojave desert, Oregon, Utah, out in the middle of nowhere. He used to come to me in dreams. One day, this stopped and I never saw him again. I knew him only as Grandfather.
"Things changed overnight. Few people know how the freedom of religion law came about. It was because of the Russians. We was over there breathing down their necks about Afghanistan. They turned around and said, ‘How can you talk to us about human rights—look what you’re doing to your Native Americans.’ They were really indignant.
    "They had their facts together. Every time we’d bring something up they’d return to the subject of Indians. Finally, it was decided if the Americans would give the Indians their freedom back, the Russians would withdraw from Afghanistan. Jimmy Carter came back and put through AIFRA."

    When I speak to school groups I am invariably asked (more often than not, told) about worshiping the sun. One little girl interrupted an interviewer outside the town hall to demand if I lived in a house of fallen logs. When I told her I lived in a house just like hers, she exclaimed, "You’re not a real Indian!" Every Indian has his fund of such stories. It is hard to respond to the mockery without perpetuating it.
    We were about to go into the sweat lodge. Some neighbors dropped by. Was it true we got naked, smoked sage and sat around on hot rocks? The water pourer just looked at them and said, "Have y’all ever tried to sit on a hot rock with no clothes on?"
    Some of the disinformation started out as misinformation. The classic case is probably the dumb Indian stereotype. I always wondered where it came from. All the Indians I knew were smart. One day I questioned Grandfather about it. He said it had a historical basis. It went back to the first encounters between the red man and the white man.
    "A true Indian speaks slowly to a stranger," he said. "It is considered rude to talk too fast. You are to show your respect by taking your time. You are to show you are thinking about what you are saying. Well, the white man thought we were dumb. He suspected we were making things up. But Indians tell the truth. And they’re smart. It’s funny how a trait of intelligence got turned into a sign of stupidity."
    Many blunders that later became enshrined can be blamed on language barriers. The white man’s culture is driven by paper. It is based on books. Our people were more oriented toward the spiritual. The talking leaves were considered part of the white man’s magic. The idea was reinforced by the Spanish and Dutch in particular. They staged demonstrations of their power. They would fire a cannon and have a soldier read something from a piece of paper. The English perfected the treaty as a means of cultural subjugation. They would have a picture made of the chiefs signing a treaty. If the Indians were not willing to wear the requisite uniforms and costumes for their portraits, these were painted on them. That was how the white man literally made history.
    Indian sign talk was, and is, understood the length and breadth of the American land-mass. Columbus learned it in ten days. It is often said there is no such thing as Indian unity, no pan-Indian culture or intertribal recognition. This is confounded by the existence of Indian sign talk. There are about 2,000 signs, and there is a root language spoken by medicine people and used in ceremony. This may be in the oldest spoken language in continuous use on earth.
    "A lie will never stand unless it’s written down," says Grandfather. "You’ll test it against what you know. If it’s not true you won’t repeat it. It will not be spread. But if you put it in a book it is believed by millions."

Why were Indians called "redskins"? Seer tradition remembers. The Frenchmen who landed in the St. Lawrence asked the Micmacs who they were. It was done in sign language. The Indians replied, "We are who we are—people." The sign for this is similar to the one meaning "paint" (especially red paint). It is made by rubbing your fingers across the top of your left hand. The one sign shows "This is me." The other sign imitates the mixing of paint. The Frenchmen didn’t understand. The question was repeated. The Indians repeated their answer, more insistently each time. The Frenchmen thought the Indians were saying they were "Redskins." They reported that back to the King and those who had sent them. It got put in books. Later, they did not want to correct their mistake. And they never have corrected it.
I have talked with GIs who saw the skins of flayed Indians on display in French castles in Europe. The owner of these curiosities informed his visitors they were the skins of Indians taken in battle during the conquest of North America. Perhaps they thought this was an animal or white man’s hide? "Ah, you must only hold it up to the light of the sun to see that it is a true redskin."

Part 3     Many of the lies come from hasty generalizations. The white man bumped into one tribe and thought it must be the outpost of an empire. He had crossed the Alps so everybody here must be Italian! Our people lived in pockets and layers. They sometimes roamed huge corridors. Many tribes had summer and winter residences. Indians went all over Turtle Island with a freedom the white man could never comprehend. His early information was all coastal.
    "The government would send someone out to make contact with the Indians," Grandfather says. "They usually tried to find the Indian emperor. Their instructions were to locate the biggest chief they could, so they could sign a treaty. They’d find someone and then they’d go back to the colonies. They’d get caught up in politics back where they came from, and it might be years before any Indian laid eyes on them again. They wouldn’t be able to find their way back, or they’d send someone else instead. They always expected the same people to be in that place. Well, we may have moved! The government always wanted us to stay put. They’d make a map and write ‘Cherokee’ across a whole mountain range. The government made up the name of that tribe. It’s really a Shawnee word. It means ‘those people over there.’ Part of the deal with treaties was: ‘Sign this treaty and we’ll make your name live forever.’"
    Two of the most cherished absurdities about Native Americans are that they have a certain look and are really Asians. Both beliefs are examples of extrapolation. There was far more racial diversity in the New World than the Old World. The piercing eyes, swarthy complexions, big noses and lank, black hair an Indian is supposed to possess for easy identification are travelers tales. Central casting looks for Cherokee cheekbones, an Apache tan and Sioux hairdo when it makes a Western. When they can’t get any real Indian to play the part, they round up Italians in Brooklyn. In point of fact, most Indians are as fair skinned as the white man. The Yuchi were called Children of the Sun because their hair turned light in the summer. Medicine people are often selected for their blond hair and blue eyes. Not all the flaxen locks and freckles are the genetic souvenirs of furloughed Vikings and itinerant Irish peddlers.
    The white man’s population estimates fall into the same category. All his guesswork is based on military information. He has now decided there might have been Five Hundred Nations. But he never saw the interior of the continent until after the Holocaust. As the governor of Hispaniola, the first Spanish colony in the New World, Columbus orchestrated the genocide of its Native population. A generation later, in 1528, over half a million people were dead.
    That was one island in the Caribbean. Tradition says there were once 660,000 Cherokee. Seers say the souls of our people are as the stars of the Milky Way. How many is that?

WHITE MAN MEETS INDIAN: This detail is taken from one of the few authentic, contemporary paintings of Indian-white relations during early contact, Dutch master William Verelst's depiction of the visit of a party of Georgia Indian chiefs to the seat of British government in London in 1734. Pity the artist mixed Cherokees from a 1730 delegation with Creek Indians from the 1734 event. For propaganda purposes all Indians were one. Used with permission.
The Indian returned the white man’s stare and reciprocated his stereotypes. We came up with some speculations of our own. Tecumseh said the white race was born of the scum of the Eastern Ocean. All Englishmen were called George by the Creeks and Cherokees (after their monarch). All Dutchmen were Corlaers—after a pirate family that settled in the lower Hudson. All Germans were Tied Asses—after their suspenders.
    The European was called the Paleface, or White Man, because when he introduced himself (they all did this) and removed his hat (they all had hats) the natives were amused to see a naked tan line across his forehead. The word for "white" became a sign you made by passing your hand across your brow. Before this, there were no words for colors in sign talk. The precontact Indians always had splendid painted things about them, so you just pointed to the color you wanted to reference.
    The Siberian theory of Indian origins arises from another accident of history. The English and French had their main contact and exposure with the Algonquian tribes. The Walum Olam does speak of an Algonquian migration to Turtle Island from a land in the far west. It says nothing of chasing woolly mammoths across a land-bridge. The people crossed in hide boats 2,000 strong in a single night. "There was a land-bridge," says Grandfather, "but most of the traffic went the other way."
    If the Pilgrim Fathers had landed in Virginia, people today would probably think of Indians as the lost tribes of Israel. That was the dominant theory in the southern colonies. The white man was always clutching at straws. We had to be from somewhere. Anywhere but here!
    The land-bridge is a particular sore spot with Indians because our sacred traditions teach us that the Four Corners Area of the American Southwest was the original birthplace of Man. But the land-bridge story is an article of faith in the religion of science. Most books about Indians begin with it. By Page 4, it is a fact. All subsequent assumptions flow from it and feed back into it. The tenacity with which twentieth-century man clings to it may be compared to the domination of another belief in his thinking--evolutionary theory. If evolution is not true, what then?
    Misunderstanding begat misunderstanding. Over the years, relations became settled and sealed in a further and final type of injustice. I call it suffered misunderstanding, or avoidance. Indians have not always wanted to be understood. Most even today just want to be left alone.
    When the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe mounted an expedition into the Virginia piedmont and "discovered" the Shenandoah Valley, they found it strangely empty of inhabitants. You can visit the Museum of the American Frontier near Winchester and read how the land was not held by any tribe. The reason for the abandonment of this choice spot has eluded historians.
    The Indians of that place—mostly Siouan-speaking—called the honeybee "the white man’s bird." Its arrival meant the tide of settlers was a day’s journey behind. The Shawnee (after whom the Valley was named) withdrew into the Ohio. Despite their size, power and strategic location, not too many things were named after this Algonquian people. The silence can perhaps be explained by the documented fact that Shawnee warriors killed more white soldiers than all the other tribes put together. Enumerable Indian groups disappeared west ahead of the white man or fled into the swamps or hills.
    A Creek chief persuaded his people to follow him to Indian Territory saying he wanted never again to look on a white man’s face. He died on the trail.
    Indians suffer a lot of the misunderstanding because of secret knowledge. Any tradition that is kept cannot be passed without permission. Otherwise, it could fall into the wrong hands. Thus, all medicine knowledge is privileged information and carries a responsibility. You can kill with it as well as heal. No sacred teaching is to be sold. Such knowledge is to be held pure, used only under strictly defined circumstances, passed only in one-on-one situations, on a case-by-case basis.
    A friend of mine, a gifted singer, now gone on his long walk, used to perform sacred Lakota songs in public. Some Indians were horrified by this. He’d look over at these bystanders before beginning a performance and say, "If you can catch it, it’s yours." No one ever got it.
    I feel it’s time for the buckskin curtain to be drawn back. A Chippewa educator uses this analogy. He speaks of how much has been lost because it was not passed. He says we must go back and pick up things our ancestors dropped along the trail. I’ve been fortunate to walk that trail. I have been blessed to hear the ancestors’ voices and share the elders’ stories. My purpose is not to divulge anything that should not be divulged but rather to celebrate things that used to be common knowledge. It used to be there was no one to listen. More and more there is no one to speak.