I’m thankful that we never worry about the amazing genocide perpetrated within the borders of our homeland!
November 26th, 2009We were teaching our Thanksgiving lesson today, which included a short video on the history of Thanksgiving. The narration:
“The pilgrims had no food. It was very cold. The Indians had lived there a long time. They were very smart and nice. They helped the pilgrims. They were friends. The pilgrims gave them food. The Thanksgiving tradition began.”
And my co-teacher, I think half-jokingly, turned to me and said, “Tradition? Do you give food to Indians every year?” And I, half-jokingly, said, “No, there are no more Indians. We killed them all.” And we all had a good laugh.
I’m reading Okla Hannali by R.A. Lafferty. I first heard of this author when reading Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things (named on the AV Club’s list of top short story collections of this decade, you know); the best story in the collection, “Sunbird,” (not the overwrought “The Problem with Susan” as the AV Club says) was a light, hilarious, mysterious, beautiful gem. In the author’s notes, he said:
“There was a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma (he died in 2002), who was, for a little while in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the best short story writer in the world. His name was R. A. Lafferty, and his stories were unclassifiable and odd and inimitable — you knew you were reading a Lafferty story within a sentence. When I was young I wrote to him, and he wrote back.
“Sunbird” was my attempt to write a Lafferty story, and it taught me a number of things, mostly how much harder they are than they look…”
If that was the case, I wanted to read some more of this Lafferty as soon as possible! He wrote mostly science fiction and folkloric fantasy, but also a good deal of (as wikipedia says) “can roughly be described as historical fiction.” The only book of his in all of Arlington’s book stores was an old 1970s paperback of Okla Hannali, complete with a glossy yet faded full-color cigarette ad in the middle of the book. Classy.
The title character is a big Choctaw Indian, wise, clever, bold, full of life. From the back cover copy, I had the impression that it would be a 19th century picaresque, but it is something very different. Lafferty, first of all, writes like a funnier John Steinbeck. He puts bits of tall tales and legend into his prose, creating a beautiful, surreal yet superreal world. Gaiman’s description is apt; no one writes like him.
(On a side note, I despair that someone with Lafferty’s obvious mastery could have written so many novels, and now, a scant seven years after his death, be almost forgotten. His books were absent from almost every shelf in Arlington; I’d never heard of him until I read that Gaiman book. Have you heard of him? Probably not. But he made a living and was happy - I can tell from the book.)
The Choctaws were one of the tribes uprooted by Andrew Jackson (”The Devil of the Indians) in the 1830s and forced along the Trail of Tears into Oklahoma. Lafferty lays it out plainly - the Indians (and I use that appellation because he does) had cultivated the south, the areas now Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia. At that time, they were better and more successful farmers than the white men. There was plenty of uncultivated land that the white settlers might have taken, but they didn’t want the uncultivated land. So Jackson gave it to the settlers, and he did not give it to the poor yet honest and hardworking men that we like to think built America. He gave it to the rich plantation owners, who worked it with slaves, displacing the poor yet honest and hardworking men, thereby creating the castes of poor whites and poor blacks that continue to fuck up the South to this day.
The Choctaws and Cherokees and Creeks arrived in Oklahoma and discovered that their new land was no damn good. It wouldn’t grow corn. Not only that, but it was actually only one-third the size of the original land that they had “traded” for the Oklahoma land. But they made it prosperous, until the Civil War.
When the Union split, both sides were after the Territory Indians to choose sides; most wanted to remain neutral. As happened, though, the Confederacy absorbed the Territory, and Albert Pike, now the only Confederate soldier to be honored with an outdoor statue in Washington, D.C., began a careful, ingenious campaign to sew little civil wars between the Indian tribes. He signed humiliating treaties with junior chiefs that bound the senior chiefs and infuriated the one against the other. He made peace with one faction of a tribe and then claimed that it bound the rest of the tribe. It did not matter that the treaties were unenforceable. He only wanted to get them killing each other. It worked. The prosperity of the Territory Indians was shattered, and the numbers of the tribes reduced by half during the Civil War. Pike was punished for this mass murder by moving to Washington, D.C., rising through the ranks of the Freemasons, and embarking on a successful poetry career. He died thirty years later, at home, at the age of 81.
Pike was a monster and the history of the American West is filled with such monsters, yes, on both sides of the conflict. Many of the Apache and Comanche were brutal, bloodthirsty savages; Texas’s Karankawa, extinct by 1860, were cannibals. But the American campaign of the 19th century is filled with forced relocations, open warfare, germ warfare, engineered famines, rapes, murders, broken treaties; it is, in short, an appalling genocide. History is catastrophe.
The outrage, and Lafferty felt this outrage, is the utter lack of apology or reparation for these crimes. Today, Native Americans number just over 2.7 million, down from as many as 18 million before Columbus. They struggle with disproportionate alcoholism, heart disease, diabetes, mental illness, and suicide rates. The poverty of reservations is startling; they have been called third world nations within our borders. The consolation for all this is a college scholarship, though usually only those from a culture that values formal education pursue further education; many don’t understand that education is the key to - escape? To be successful, they must leave the reservation, join the working world, surrender their culture and heritage, in effect, become white.
These problems are very real and very relevant. It may not seem so, depending on where you live. Take a drive through northwestern New Mexico, anywhere in Oklahoma, anywhere in rural Arizona, soak up the poverty. It’s still there, and it’s still breeding misery.
The response from the government is underwhelming. Native Americans, after all, are a tiny slice of our population, and acknowledging their plight would mean acknowledging, not our complicity in the crimes perpetrated against their ancestors, because “sins of the father” is bullshit, but our failure to rectify the situation to the best of our ability; not from guilt, but from basic humanity. No one talks about this problem, and one gets the impression that if we wait long enough, alcoholism, tuberculosis, diabetes, heart disease, and suicide will make it go away.
History is catastrophic, filled with war, bloodshed, and incredible bigotry, ignorance, and needless suffering. We can’t change history, but we can hope to alter its course. First step is consciousness-raising; go read Okla Hannali. Get impassioned, then forget it and do something else. There are too many video games and American Idols and So You Think You Can Dances and Jon and Kate Plus Eights to worry about this kind of thing. Plus, with the economy…
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