Storming the Gates of Paradise (6 page)

I claimed, in the first half of this essay, that postmodernism—as a cluster of simulacral precessions, self-conscious mythologizings, rootless identity manipulations,
and erasures—was born in the Old West and that California is, rather than where the future has come to pass, a place where the regional past has borne strange international fruit. Those western emigrants turned actors, politicians, developers, and crooks created a mythology of the West so powerful it became a literary and cinematic genre that largely eclipses the factual history of the place, an inhabitable mythology with a large place for cowboys and a small one for Indians. When I think back to the Westerns of my childhood, it was the wagon train that functioned as the stable center of the movie, despite its invasive mobility; the Indians were, compositionally, invaders from outside the frame. Jane Tompkins writes in her marvelous treatise on the Western,
West of Everything
, that during her marathon of movie watching, “The Indians I expected did not appear. The ones I saw functioned as props, bits of local color, textural effects. As people they had no existence.”

Western history is, in some respects, the history of the accretion of these distortions or fictions, and contemporary Native American political activity is often an attempt to break out of that history. Imagine Western history as an action movie—part
Cape Fear
, part
Home Alone
—in which a home is invaded by loveable gunmen who insist that the residents play all the lousy bit parts in an interminable drama or just shove them in the closet and play house themselves: the Native American land wars are attempts to take back part of the house, but the cultural wars are attempts to recast the characters or rewrite the drama. The sardonic artist Jimmie Durham revises it thus: “Nothing could be more central to American reality than the relationships between Americans and American Indians, yet those relationships are of course the most invisible and the most lied about. The lies are not simply a denial; they constitute a new world, the world in which American culture is located.”

This new world of the United States was almost literally founded on appropriating indigenous identity: in 1773, the Sons of Liberty dressed up as Mohawks to stage the foundational gesture of revolt against England, the Boston Tea Party. Since then, playing Indian has been a popular occupation for children and, of late, for adults; and decorative motifs, from New Mexico license plates to Pendleton woolens to the ever popular chief’s-head tattoo, draw from indigenous iconographies. For Native American culture to be infinitely appropriable, it must belong
to everyone—and to no one in particular. This desire to possess has generated both the widespread belief that Native Americans have vanished and the concomitant problems of the visibility of contemporary Native people. The authenticity attributed to nativeness seems to be something everyone can impersonate; as cowboys are to American actors, so are Indians to—apparently everyone, including hordes of part-time wannabe Indians in Germany and Central Europe and New Age wannabes all over the United States. The Western’s self-invention finds its final frontier, or final solution, in immigrants reinventing themselves as indigenous people, self-conscious simulators of an aesthetic of unself-conscious authenticity, happy inhabitants of a historical fiction.

Perhaps the conceptual reservation onto which Native Americans have been forced is called Art: like works of art, they are expected to exist either outside of time or in the past tense of classics and masterpieces, to be on exhibit, to be public property, to be seen and not heard, to be about the spiritual rather than the political, and to embody qualities to which everyone can aspire, whether they are the Czech and Slovak “Indians” in John Paskievich’s 1996 documentary film
If Only I Were an Indian
or sports teams such as the Atlanta Braves, the Washington Redskins, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Chicago Blackhawks (to say nothing of Chevrolet Apaches, Jeep Cherokees, Pontiacs, and Winnebagos). As they have become more vocal—or audible—in recent decades, many native North Americans have worked to move out of or mock this conceptual museum. In the visual arts, Edgar Hachivi Heap of Birds, Jimmie Durham, James Luna, Zig Rising Buffalo Jackson, Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, and many others have taken on the politics of indigenous identity with humorous outrage.

One such battle against the museum was mounted by Pemina Yellow Bird, a Mandan woman appointed to the board of the North Dakota State Historical Society. After an incident in which two non-Indian men were apprehended with the shellac still drying on the skulls they had robbed from a local burial mound, she asked the state archaeologists where the recovered skulls were going:

And they said, Well, we’ll just put them in the vault with the others. The others? Yeah you want to see? So we went to the Heritage Center and down into
the basement where an armed guard was standing next to a vault. . . . They lead me into this warehouse-like room that was filled from the floor to the ceiling with boxes and boxes of remains of dead Indian people. And I said at that time—you know, I was just shocked, it knocked the wind out of me—Are these all Indian people? And they go, Yup, they’re all Indians. The non-Indians get reburied, but we bring the Indians here for study.

Yellow Bird stood up at four board meetings to explain that the remains must be reburied, but, like Sitting Bull, she became inaudible when she became challenging: her remarks were ignored in the meetings themselves and were absent from the board minutes. It took five years of statewide Intertribal Reinterment Committee effort to achieve her goal.

The Smithsonian alone has the remains of more than eighteen thousand Native Americans in its collection, demonstrating yet again that Native Americans are considered artworks on the same order as their baskets. No matter how recent, indigenous burial sites were regarded as legitimate sites for archaeological digs until Congress passed the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. But the same year that legislation liberated Native American remains from museums, another law put live artists back in: that law mandates that no one may describe himself or herself as a Native American or Indian artist unless that individual is a registered member of a federally recognized tribe or is able to demonstrate a heritage of a quarter or more “Indian blood” (a definition that American Indian Movement activist Ward Churchill calls arithmetical genocide, since within a century no one will meet the genetic criterion, no matter what their cultural experience). No other ethnic group in the United States is thus certified—in somewhat the same way Old Masters paintings are authenticated or discredited. Punishment for unauthenticated artists or the exhibitors of their work can include up to fifteen years in prison or a million dollars in fines. Supposedly drafted to prevent imposters from cashing in on the Santa Fe art market, this law immediately caused several Oklahoma museums to close down and excluded uncooperative artists from many other arenas.

Jimmie Durham, for example, was scheduled to have a show at the nonprofit
gallery American Indian Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, but the gallery faced closure or loss of funding, because its legal mandate is to show Native American artists and the part-Cherokee Durham, a prominent AIM activist in the 1970s, has declined to be certified by the federal government. The show was moved to another venue, and soon after, the artist Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie made this law the subject of an installation at the San Francisco Art Institute, drawing an analogy between registration numbers and concentration camp numbers. Durham writes:

To protect myself and the gallery from Congressional wrath, I hereby swear to the truth of the following statement: I am a full-blood contemporary artist, of the subgroup (or clan) called sculptors. I am not an American Indian, nor have I ever seen or sworn loyalty to India. I am not a “Native American,” nor do I feel that “America” has a right to name me or un-name me. I have previously stated that I should be considered a mixed-blood: that is, I claim to be a male, but only one of my parents was male.

For a lot of tribes, the primary war nowadays is to prove that they exist; as extras from the Golden Age, they are assumed to have faded into the sunset along with the credits. Like Sandra Bullock in
The Net
(1995), a movie about a woman whose identity is electronically destroyed, or Vanessa Williams in
Eraser
(1996), the Schwarzenegger flop about the federal witness protection program, they do not officially exist; and without federal recognition of their existence, they cannot obtain the land rights and legal benefits owed to Native Americans. Proving they exist means coming up with a paper trail demonstrating cultural continuity, a peculiar demand to place upon people whose largely oral culture was violently disrupted and dislocated by the same government.

Proving that they exist to the general public can be equally challenging. Innumerable works of art mourn (or celebrate in a giddy whirl of melancholy) their vanishing: cultural monuments from
The Last of the Mohicans
(1826) to James Earle Fraser’s sculpture
The End of the Trail
(1915, but still widely reproduced on postcards, belt buckles, and so forth) to
Dances with Wolves
(1991) wave them a
fond but insistent farewell. Even the Northern California Karuk artist and storyteller Julian Lang embarked on a project about the nearby Mattole people under the impression that the Mattole were extinct—but learned better along the way. Thanks to the museum wall text accompanying an exhibition of Karl Bodmer’s frontier watercolors of the 1830s, I myself believed that Mandans had been utterly wiped out by smallpox, until I met the Mandan artist Zig Jackson.

Ishi, much cherished as “the last Yahi” while more thriving California tribes were largely ignored, was exhibited at San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition, along with
The End of the Trail
, and spent the last years of his life as exhibit-in-residence at a University of California museum in San Francisco, among Egyptian and Peruvian mummies and Indian bones. Performance artist James Luna critiqued Ishi’s status when he put himself on display at the San Diego Museum of Man in 1986. Contemporary groups from the Ohlone of the San Francisco Bay Area to the Gabrielano of the Los Angeles Basin have been mourned as vanished tribes; and Edward Curtis’s costumed portraits, in which he dressed up Native people in a multitribe pastiche of authenticity, haven’t helped much either, insisting as they do that the only real Indian is a vanishing Indian. Tourists still sometimes get indignant about traditional dances performed by people in Reeboks.

Southern Sierra Miwok activist and Yosemite Park employee Jay Johnson told me the following story a few years ago:

I think it was 1980, Julia and four of us on business for our tribe [seeking federal recognition in Washington] went to the Smithsonian and found the California museum exhibits, then Yosemite. . . . It had a little statement on the side, and it left off with “It’s very sad today. There’s no more Yosemite Indians.” Period. I said, “Let’s go down, talk to the people at the desk about this statement.” So we went down there and this lady, she was at the desk, and I said, “Ma’am, about that diorama about Yosemite,” and she says, “Oh, isn’t that nice?” And I said, “It’s nice, but there’s an error in the statement,” and she says, “Oh, no, there can’t be. Every little word goes through channels and committees and whatnot.” And I says, “It’s OK, but,” I says, “it tells me that there are no more Yosemite Indians today.” She says, “Well, that’s true, it’s very sad. But whatever’s
out there is true.” So I say, “Well, I hate to disturb you, but I’m a Yosemite Indian, and we’re here on business for our tribe.” And she caught her breath and said, “Ohhh . . .”

Kit Carson finds a book that tells of feats he never did. Jay Johnson finds a museum display that tells him he has vanished long ago. In the simulacral West, cowboys expand, Indians contract.

Some tribes are fighting for federal recognition, others against appropriation in the representational wars. Many practitioners of New Age spirituality have been appropriating indigenous identities as though the world was their shopping mall and religious identity was no more than a costume to be tried on, mixed and matched, traded in and up. White people with bound braids and symbolic trinkets and animal names doing their own version of sweat lodge, drumming, vision quest, and sun dance ceremonies are rampant in the New Age and men’s movements. In 1992, the Lakota Nations, the heirs to the victors of the Battle of Little Bighorn and the victims of Wounded Knee, issued a “Declaration of War against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality.” It read, in part, “The absurd public posturing of this scandalous assortment of pseudo-Indian charlatans, wannabes, commercial profiteers and cultists comprise a momentous obstacle in the struggle of traditional Lakota people for adequate public appraisal of the legitimate political, legal and spiritual needs of the real Lakota people.” Like dressing up as Indians, religious appropriation threatens to homogenize, fictionalize, and commercialize an identity to the point where it can belong to everyone or no one, but not to anybody in particular. Confrontations with New Age people have attracted little outside attention, however. The Native newspaper
The Circle
reported that in 1993 indigenous activists caught up with Lynn Andrews, “a Beverly Hills housewife-turned-shaman,” at a Los Angeles Whole Life Expo “and tried to convince her to admit that what she was writing about [in best-selling books such as
Jaguar Woman
] was fantasy, not Indian spirituality. Andrews is reportedly considering the proposal, but has not officially responded as she is negotiating a movie deal.”

Indian gaming may be where many tribes are making themselves visible now. In a recently opened Pueblo casino just north of Santa Fe, Pueblo Indians are having
their long-delayed revenge on the kin of Coronado, who blundered through the vicinity in the 1540s looking for the fictional Seven Cities of Cibola. The casino is called Cities of Gold, after the jackpot Coronado never found, and poor Latinos get poorer there every night. It remains to be seen what the long-term results of the transformation of some of the poorest people in the country into some of the richest may be, but one of the early indications is counter-appropriation: back east, the Mashantucket Pequots, who operate the nation’s most profitable casino, have just given the Hartford Ballet half a million dollars to stage an American version of the
Nutcracker
to be set not in their own Connecticut, but in Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks—as dizzy a tour de force of hybridization as anyone could imagine.