Subject:
RE: [ID‑L] The Invented Indian, Anyone have a copy?
Date:
Sun, 3 Jun 2001 19:41:37 ‑0700
From:
"Andy" <[email protected]>
Reply‑To:
identity‑[email protected]
To:
<identity‑[email protected]>
Noble Savagery
James A. Clifton, The Invented Indian, Transaction
Publishers, 1990, 388
pp., $29.95
Reviewed by Jared Taylor
>From December, 1991, issue
In America, virtually all non‑whites can trade on
their skin color and on
tales of past victimization in order to extract
benefits from guilt‑ridden
whites. Blacks are recognized experts at this game,
but American Indians
have been perhaps even more successful.
At the heart of their success has been the creation
of a mythical past
inhabited by Indians who never were. The Invented
Indian, edited by veteran
anthropologist James Clifton, is a brilliant
dissection of the myths that
have been so widely circulated by Indians and their
white apologists. Each
of the collection's 16 authors demolishes an aspect
of the myth or describes
the cynical purposes it has served.
This book so brazenly flouts America's unwritten
rules on how to talk about
minorities, that it is a wonder it was ever
published. It would be
impossible to bring out a similar book about blacks
or Hispanics, and it is
a joy to find serious scholars who are willing to
write the truth as they
see it, without regard to political consequences.
The Myth
The great myth is essentially borne out by whatever
one is likely to hear
about Indians from non‑specialist sources. Professor
Clifton devotes several
pages to fleshing it out, but it can be quickly
summarized: Indians were
spiritual, egalitarian, innocent people living in
perfect harmony with the
earth. They welcomed the white man, taught him the
secrets of the
wilderness, and shared with him the wisdom of their
social institutions. In
return, the white man enslaved and slaughtered the
Indian, afflicted him
with hideous diseases, and tried to destroy his
culture.
Nevertheless, runs the myth, the Native American has
survived. Though he has
been dispossessed and politically emasculated, his
spirit remains pure. As
the white man begins to acknowledge the horrors he
has wrought upon the
Indian, so has he begun to study and appreciate the
age‑old wisdom and
natural virtue to which all Indians, everywhere, are
heir.
Like all myths, this one leaves certain things out:
in this case,
cannibalism, infanticide, ritual torture,
geronticide, slaughter of
prisoners, slavery, and the like. Such practices,
though well substantiated,
are seldom written about by historians and
ethnographers for fear of
violating what Prof. Clifton calls the Eleventh
Commandment of the Indian
business: Never Say No To An Indian. One of the
Commandment's corollaries
prohibits writing or saying anything that Indians
might not wish to hear.
Most Indians know very little about their ancestors
of centuries ago, and
would vigorously deny accusations of slavery or
cannibalism.
In Canada, certain agreeable fictions have semi‑legal
status. Whenever work
crews find human bones at ancient camp sites, for
example, they must take
special measures not to violate the sacred dead.
Broken or burnt human
bones‑‑evidence of certain now‑embarrassing
practices‑‑can be treated like
animal bones.
Stressing the Positive
On the stress‑the‑positive side of the myth we find
the wisdom that the
white man is supposed to have learned from the
Indian. Every school child
has heard of Squanto, the Algonquin who taught the
Pilgrims to fertilize
their corn with fish. As Lynn Ceci points out in a
fascinating essay, there
is no evidence that any North American tribes used
fertilizer of any kind.
Squanto, who had a very interesting and
well‑documented career, probably
learned about it in Newfoundland, where he lived for
some time among English
settlers who routinely fertilized with fish.
School children do not learn that Squanto had lived
in both England and
Spain, spoke fluent English, and was hardly the
noble, simple savage the
history books make him out to be. As Dr. Ceci points
out, the image of
generous Squanto tends to obscure the more accurate
picture of Indians who
often attacked and killed settlers.
Another part of the great Indian myth that has
recently been picking up
steam, is that early Americans learned about
democracy and the advantages of
unity by studying the Iroquois Confederation. One of
the authors traces the
origins of this myth, and explodes the idea that the
Constitution could have
been influenced, in any way, by the matrilineal and
hereditary form of
representation practiced by the Iroquois.
One reason such preposterous notions make any headway
at all is that it has
become nearly obligatory to describe Indian societies
as idyllically
egalitarian, even "non‑sexist." Of course, there were
hundreds of different
tribal societies with different customs, but all of
them had well defined
sex roles that would horrify Gloria Steinem. Often,
women were treated
scarcely better than beasts of burden.
As for egalitarianism, it is difficult for bare
subsistence‑level hunters
and gatherers to practice anything else, but as soon
as material surplus
appeared, some people got more of it than others.
Leland Donald writes about
the Tutchone of the southern Yukon, who lived on land
so harsh as to be
nearly uninhabitable. Nevertheless, their society was
divided into
hereditary classes of rich, poor, and slaves. As Dr.
Donald puts it, "even
in conditions that seem ideal for the presence of the
classic egalitarian
Indian society, it is possible for marked
inequalities to emerge."
The potlatches and ruinous gift‑giving that were
required for status among
the more prosperous Northwest Indians are well known,
but somehow coexist
with the myth that Indians all lived in innocent
classlessness. Even well
known expressions like "low man on the totem pole"
fail to puncture the
myth.
Another important part of the image is the perfect
harmony with nature in
which Indians are said to have lived. Once again,
sparsely scattered,
stone‑age people have very little choice about the
matter, but "Mother
Earth" is central to the myth. All Indians, it is
said, saw the earth as
their beloved mother. Hills were he r breasts,
streams were mother's milk,
and vegetation was her lovely hair.
Astounding as it may seem, one of the authors
explains that the entire
Mother Earth story can be traced to a single
statement made by a single
Indian in 1885. There is virtually no other evidence
that Indians thought of
the earth as mother. Nevertheless, the Mother Earth
belief is now so widely
attributed not only to American Indians but to all
primitive peoples that it
is frightful heresy to point out how unsubstantiated
it is.
Not surprisingly, there are plenty of
entrepreneurs‑‑Indian and
non‑Indian‑‑who have parlayed the notion of the
noble, nature‑wise Indian
into a means of parting gullible whites from their
money. People with names
like Rolling Thunder and Spotted Fawn do a brisk
business promoting sweat
lodges, sun dances, purification ceremonies, or
whatever else aging hippies
can be made to pay for. These ceremonies bear only a
vague resemblance to
anything the Indians of the past ever did, but there
is a steady market for
them.
According to another author, the same can be said for
the pottery sold on
the Pamunkey Indian reservation in Virginia. The
Pamunkey stopped making
pottery in the 1890s and started up again in the
1930s only because the
state of Virginia paid to establish a pottery school
on the reservation. Now
tourists happily buy "Indian" pots, decorated with
stick figure "writing"
that is likewise a 20th century invention.
The High Counters
Minor frauds like these are relatively harmless.
Deliberate attempts to
manipulate thinking about Indians are more serious.
David Henige of the
University of Wisconsin reports that there is a small
academic industry
devoted to inflating the population estimates of
Pre‑Columbian America. If
evidence can be found that tens of millions of
healthy, happy Indians were
living on the continent before the white man arrived,
then the reduction of
their numbers through warfare and disease can be made
to seem all the more
heinous.
The High Counters, as Mr. Henige calls them, pore
over ancient accounts,
pick the most exaggerated population estimates they
can find, and solemnly
pass them along as wholly credible. One scholar, for
example, believes that
a single energetic priest actually baptized, and
counted, 14,000 Indians in
a single day‑‑one every six seconds, 'round the
clock. Others think that
when Cortes said he faced an army of "more than
149,000" men, he can be
relied on to have counted them accurately.
As Mr. Henige points out, numbers like these are just
another way of saying
"a lot," but it is the scholars who are prepared to
believe the worst of the
colonizing white man who have the deepest faith in
his ability to count
people in crowds. Other High Counters would have it
that European diseases
swept through native tribes before the white man
found them, killing up to
half the population before Europeans could even start
counting them.
If, by whatever means, the High Counters can gin up
enough pre‑Columbian
Indians, they can then trot out the great, anti‑white
totem word,
"genocide," when they talk about the legacy of
Columbus. The University of
Oklahoma has even published a book called American
Indian Holocaust and
Survival.
Indian Givers
Present descendants of invented Indians have woven
the strands of myth into
a mighty whip with which to beat the white man. They
have, for example,
mobilized reservoirs of public sympathy for huge land
claims. Allan van
Gestel, who has defended current owners against such
claims, estimates that
since 1970, Indian law suits have clouded the title
to 35 million acres in
the Eastern United States alone. This is an area the
size of Austria or
Ireland.
Indians can always call on teams of eager whites who
will work for them pro
bono. Clever lawyers have based most land cases on an
obscure Congressional
proclamation of 1783 that forbade the states to buy
land from Indian tribes
without federal permission. This was six years before
the Constitution even
went into effect, and several state governments had
bought land from Indians
even before the proclamation. This has not stopped
tribes from trying to get
back land that was duly purchased‑‑and that has been
enormously improved in
the last two hundred years.
Public sentiment, stoked by tales about the invented
Indian, is such that
Indians can virtually monopolize the services of
scholars and historians; to
testify "against" Indians can ruin a career. Some
Indian claims have cost
current land‑owners hundreds of millions of dollars.
Today, the federal government has primary
responsibility for dealing with
Indians, but states and Canadian provinces also
manage publicly funded
Indian programs. According to Steven Feraca, a
long‑time worker at the
Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), all of these
bureaucracies have long been
given over to race‑based hiring and promotion.
Preferences at the Bureau are
so blatant, and career prospects for non‑Indians so
bleak, that although
Indians are only 1/2 percent of the US population,
they hold 75 percent of
the jobs at BI A.
In the last few decades, the "Indian desks" of
virtually all branches of
government have been turned over to Indians, so that
decisions that are
supposed to be made in the names of larger
jurisdictions are in the hands of
unabashed partisans. Tribal "leaders" are now often
indistinguishable from
Indian‑affairs bureaucrats, with no way to sort out
the resulting conflicts
of interest. What is more, as another author points
out, chronic lateness
and absenteeism in these offices are routinely
excused by the notion that
Indians work according to mysterious earth rhythms
rather than by the white
man's clock.
In sum, both in Canada and in the United States,
Indians have succeeded in
becoming a kind of Uber‑citizen. Off the reservation,
they have all the
usual legal rights, in addition to the strenuous
affirmative‑action
preferences that are now obligatory. On the
reservation, they enjoy a kind
of extraterritoriality, which exempts them from many
taxes and laws, and
entitles them to a complete array of Indians‑only
health and welfare
benefits. They have suckled at the public teat for
longer than any other
group in North America, and bear the stigmata of
listlessness and squalor to
prove it.
Next year will mark the 500th anniversary of
Columbus' discovery of America.
What, by all rights, should be a proud celebration of
the spread of
civilization to the New World, has already been
hijacked by cultural
relativists who see in the white man nothing but
wickedness. The October
issue of National Geographic begins a series of
"quincentenary" articles, in
which the editors flatter themselves on letting
Indians write from "the most
intimate ‑‑and perhaps truest‑‑perspective of all."
Such a series is likely to be filled with the
exploits of invented
Indians‑‑more of what Prof. Clifton calls "perfectly
enchanting fiction . .
. that is both believed by its impresarios and
presented as believable to
others." His book, impressively researched and
stuffed with fascinating
details, is the perfect antidote.
‑‑‑‑‑Original Message‑‑‑‑‑
From: owner‑identity‑[email protected] [
mailto:owner‑identity‑[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Bill Kalivas
Sent: Sunday, June 03, 2001 19:28
To: identity‑[email protected]
Subject: [ID‑L] The Invented Indian, Anyone
have a copy?
A while back a review was posted on a book called
"The Invented Indian."
Where can I get a copy? Living here in the land of
the "Native America",
Oklahoma, I might need to have a balanced perspective
at my fingertips.
Thanks
Bill Kalivas
www.historicist.com
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