1981 “It is a pity that so many Americans think of the Indian as a romantic or comic figure in American history without contemporary significance…

Thanksgiving: Indians Find an 

Empty Table in America

1981 Nov 26 The Los Angeles Times 

      Thanksgiving is our one truly national holiday, the day when all Americans reflect on this country's heritage 

And when most celebrate with a traditional meal that commemorates the Pilgrims’ celebration of their first bountiful harvest. As every schoolchild knows, the Pilgrims invited the Indians to share the feast – and to share in the civilizing of the savage “new world.” 

      This is the stuff of myths. Few schoolchildren learn about the succeeding Thanksgivings, which celebrated the Europeans’ success in taking over Indian lands – often through extermination, usually through broken treaties.

      Powerful is the effect of myth. It rationalizes. It canonizes. It serves as the basis for the teleology that justifies the actions of a people or a nation. Myth gives substance to nationally professed ideals such as democracy, human rights, a government of and for the people. Myth replaces knowledge, thus concealing from us what we have done and continue to do. We would rather accept the anesthetized version of history than risk the anxiety involved in learning the truth.

      Yet that is what we Americans must do if we are ever to achieve the ideal national that we profess to be. To do that, we must destroy the myths, and the myths about American’s first true “settlers” should be the first to go.

      A recent occurrence in the California Senate demonstrated the problem of operating from a belief system shaped by myth. At issue was a resolution urging Congress and the President not to cut funds for the federal Urban Indian Health Projects. There are 41 in the nation, involving about 500,000 Native Americans living outside reservations. Ten are in California – which, according to the 1980 census, has the largest Indian population in the nation. During the debate, Sen. H.L. Richardson (R-Arcadia) quipped, “I have no guilt feelings about what our great-great grandfathers may have done as they moved west . . . . I’m more of a John Wayne type myself.” The debate then degenerated into war whoops and racial slurs, with Richardson mimicking the stereotype of “Indian-style” talk: “Me urban Indian. Me wantum wampum.”

      Racism apart, this incident represents a popular misconception grounded in myth: that Native Americans’ problems today can be traced to whites’ settlement of the Far West in the late 19th Century. Thus, the power of myth obliterates the truth – in this case, it ignores the policies that adversely affected Indians for two centuries before the Gold Rush and a century after.

      In his book, “The Road to Wounded Knee,” Robert Burnette, the tribal chairman of the Rosebud Sioux, wrote of this simplistic focus on one time and place in American history: “For bad or worse, the image of the ‘Indian’ has been defined by dime novelists like Ned Buntline and distilled, bottled and mass-produced by Hollywood moguls more interested in creating a white success story than mirroring anything related to real history. An Indian was somebody with a gun in his hand, feathers in his hair and a grunt on his lips. When he was good, he was very good . . . but, when he was bad, he was a ravaging, raping, torturing, murdering brute who killed just for the heck of it. Good or bad, his extermination was justified….”

      Bad as this stereotype is in popular books and films, the most dangerous vehicle is the school textbook – most dangerous because it is the least suspect, ranking behind only the Bible as a source of scholarship and truth in Americans’ eyes.

      No Hollywood producer would try to market a movie title “How the Government Stole the West,” with an actor in the John Wayne mold leading a cavalry charge against unarmed, unsuspecting people who had accepted him as a brother and who had been converted to Christianity, and whose only sin was living on land found to contain gold. SO also no “producer” of textbooks would use this scenario, although it actually would use this scenario, although it actually happened to numerous tribes of California Indians. Both producers know that this version of history – the true version – would not sell, being incompatible with the national myth.

      Even in this supposedly environment-conscious age, a few Americans acknowledge that the Native American lived on this continent for 35,000 to 250,000 years in balance with nature, a balance that the European-rooted concept of “civilizing” and “progress” destroyed in less than 500 years. Before the “discovery of the new world,” the native people had use of 100% of the land base; today, all tribes together own less than 1% of the land base and are having to fight like hell to hold onto that.

      The policies that brought this about, and that created the urban Indian mocked by Richardson, stretch all the way from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the Reagan Administration. The push that began in the 1600’s is still on, and the myth still blocks the attempts of a few courageous legislators to rectify centuries of injustice. Part of the problem lies in the myth’s putting all Indians into two or three categories: Rousseau’s “noble savage,” Hollywood’s just plain savage and, perhaps, the down-and-out drunken street-corner Indian. But this country’s 1 million Native Americans are diverse in their interests, life styles and problems, and their agenda reflect that diversity. There are the Indians of the rural Northeast, their tribes scattered for generations, trying to reclaim 200-year-old broken treaties; Northern Plains Indians fighting the advance of energy-hungry conglomerates; Southwestern Indians seeking to adjust arbitrarily imposed tribal boundaries now in conflict with water and power development plans; Northwestern Indians struggling against commercial fishing interests; Indians living in rural poverty; Indians living in crisis-beset cities.

      What unites them all is the heritage of a people who lived on the land, in peace with the land, a people whose identity has been all but erased in their fellow Americans’ rush toward progress. This, fundamentally, is what Native Americans are striving for; the right to be Indian, not the B-movie stereotype, not the quaint walk-on in the school Thanksgiving play, but a living people who ask simply that their history be honestly portrayed. Then, perhaps, once non-Indians gain an understanding based on fact, they will act from that understanding for the good of all Americans.

      Shortly before his death in 1953, Felix Cohen, solicitor of Indian affairs in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Administration, compared the American Indian’s role to that of the Jews in Hitler’s Germany. Writing in the Yale Law Journal, Cohen warned: “It is a pity that so many Americans think of the Indian as a romantic or comic figure in American history without contemporary significance… Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere, and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith.”

      If the smokescreen set up by the myth of the Indian’s place in this nation’s history is not swept away, just as the pollution of “progress” fills the air, all Americans, like the miner’s canary, may suffocate on the poison it produces.

                         ~~ Kodo Lightfoot is an Apache writer and lecturer who lives in Kern County. 

1981 Nov 26 The Los Angeles Times 

1981 Nov 26 The Index Journal