The Persistence of Indians: In Search of Native America

Of all the great cultural shibboleths that have bedeviled the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere,” writes W. Richard West, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, “perhaps the most ultimately destructive is that the first citizens of the Americas were but no longer are.” West, the son of a Cheyenne father and a non-Indian mother (“the daughter of Southern Baptist missionaries to China,” he adds), is one of the contributors to the phototext Indian Country, published last fall by Grove Press, featuring superb photographs by Gwendolen Cates and brief accompanying texts by many of the Indians who are pictured.

Cates picks up West’s theme and adds another—the extraordinary diversity of Native American cultures and peoples—in her preface. “The current Native population of this country is 2.5 million,” she writes. “There are 561 federally recognized nations and tribes, 314 reservations and 226 Alaskan Native villages. Each is unique in its identity and its individual history.”

The subject is a minefield, and those who make their way through it often end up contorting themselves in the effort to avoid explosions. The Native American writer Sherman Alexie, drafted to introduce the book, is usually sharp-tongued and sharp-eyed, but here he turns uncharacteristically pious: “most important, these subjects cease to be objects when they are given the typographical and spiritual space to comment on their images.” The comments are various, and some are penetrating or deeply moving or witty, but many are way over the top into mutual self-indulgence, even when the speaker is the estimable N. Scott Momaday, whose books are a rich legacy. American Indians, he writes, “are innately spiritual. Their understanding of the world, in all its dimensions, is based upon a recognition of the sacred. Every step they take and every breath they draw are the making of a prayer.”

You can read those sentences and follow the progression from suggestive insight to overripe fantasy. So too, if you judged by the overview this volume provides, you would conclude that roughly one-third of Native Americans are by occupation “activists,” which probably isn’t true.

On the other hand, over the last few months as I’ve been telling people about the series that begins in this issue, I’ve been struck by the half-inadvertent grimaces that often appear, as if I were about to administer some bad-tasting medicine—as if the whole subject of Native America could be equated with the worst flights of politically correct rhetoric, as if that rhetoric were wholly gratuitous, as if we’ve been there and done that, game over.

We’re not foolish enough to suppose that in a few articles we can represent the range of unique identities and individual histories Cates rightly reminds us of, but we hope to suggest—without cynicism or sentimentality—something of the sweep of Native America, the contradictions and paradoxes, the tragedy and hope, the idiosyncratic character of Indian life.

Reports from “the Rez” are often numbingly depressing, with a crushing load of statistics that seem to point toward cultural collapse—while the ubiquitous casinos stay busy. Those are realities not to be swept under the authentic Indian blanket. And yet at the same time, there are signs of vibrant cultural life and renewal. Whether from the reservations or from the big city, Native American artists of every kind are producing significant work far out of proportion to their numbers.

If you went by the works of the canonical contemporary Indian writers—a brilliant bunch, including Sherman Alexie, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, and many more—and the large body of contemporary commentary on the Indian encounter with Christianity, you’d assume that by and large Native Americans are intensely hostile to the faith. On closer inspection, this turns out to be quite false. There are significant numbers of Native American Catholics and evangelicals, Pentecostals and Southern Baptists, and so on. As is so often the case, the full story—going back to the indiscriminate slaughter of Christian Indians by colonists who didn’t care whether the Indians they were killing, starving, and burning out were “friendly” or not—doesn’t fit with anyone’s Approved Version.

In this issue, Crystal Downing looks at Indians as they have been depicted in film, particularly the 1998 film Smoke Signals, “the first commercially successful movie” written, directed, and acted by Indians (screenplay by Alexie). “The word ‘Indian’ has been as fluid as smoke,” Downing observes, while in “the history of film, Indians themselves have had all the smoky shiftability of signs.”

The Native American writer Diane Glancy (profiled by Wendy Murray Zoba in the May/June 2001 issue of Books & Culture) contributes a story, “The Bird Who Married a Blue Light.” This is the first story we’ve published in the seven years since the magazine was launched (last year, a novel, The Womb Bomber, was serialized on our website). I hope it will send many readers to explore Glancy’s work.

Finally, Kenneth Moore Startup reviews two books on Andrew Jackson and Indian removal, noting that both books avoid glib moralizing without downplaying the fundamental moral questions raised by their subject. (Startup’s review should be read alongside Richard Lischer’s review of David Brion Davis’s study of slavery, also in this issue).

Coming attractions include James Schaap’s essay on Wounded Knee, Wendy Murray Zoba’s account of a visit to an Ojibwe Christian community, and much more. Diane Glancy and Wendy Murray Zoba are consulting editors for this series; many thanks to them and others (especially Father John Giuliani, whose Native American icons appear throughout this section) who have made the series possible.

—John Wilson