Storming the Gates of Paradise (8 page)

The San Francisco monument pitted two relatively disenfranchised groups against each other, but the conflict is more often between indigenous and dominant-culture values and interpretations, as with the new memorial to the Indians killed at the Battle of Little Bighorn in the summer of 1876. The history of this Montana site reflects changing federal attitudes: established in 1879 as a national cemetery for the soldiers of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry who died and were buried there, it became Custer Battlefield National Monument in 1940, and in 1991 was renamed Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in a law signed by President George H. W. Bush that also called for an additional monument at the site (a granite obelisk bearing the name of General Custer and his fallen troops having been erected long ago). As the official Little Bighorn Battlefield statement put it, “The law also stated that the memorial should provide visitors with a better understanding of the events leading up to the battle and encourage peace among people of all races.” An advisory committee was formed, a public competition was held, and a ruckus ensued.

In 1997, the
Times
of London reported that “enraged critics say that erecting an Indian monument at Little Bighorn is akin to ‘handing the Vietnam War memorial over to the Vietnamese.’ ” Another unnamed traditionalist told the western states’ progressive newspaper
High Country News
, “It’s like erecting a monument to the Mexicans killed at the Alamo.” Philadelphia designers John R. Collins and Alison J. Towers’s winning design for the monument is an earthwork, a circular berm with a northern aperture through which can be seen a grouping of three larger-than-life mounted Indians. It’s an odd mix of contemporary siteworks, à la Maya Lin and Nancy Holt, and old-fashioned heroic representation. It provides both a place to gather and to think and something to look at—something for
everyone but those still fighting the Indians. As in the San Francisco case, governments have become more progressive than some of the governed.

In his 1995 book of photographs,
Sweet Medicine: Sites of Indian Massacres, Battlefields, and Treatie
s, Drex Brooks portrays places important to indigenous history and culture across the continental United States. What is most startling is how many are unmarked. The site where King Philip and his Wampanoag warriors were massacred in Bristol County, Rhode Island, in 1675, for example, is only a stream in a thicket of young branches; and many others are likewise unaltered, unmarked landscapes. A massacre site in Mystic, Connecticut, is built up, but uncommemorated: the bland buildings and signs constitute an erasure of the past.

Monuments are reminders that something important happened somewhere and interpretations of its significance. The premise of monuments—that without such markers the history of a place would be lost—may be true for cultures whose memory is preserved in material forms and whose members do not remain long in one place—that is, for cultures such as that of the settlers and contemporary Euro-Americans. Leslie Marmon Silko writes of the web of stories woven around everyday life in her Laguna Pueblo community, stories that “carefully described key landmarks and locations of fresh water. Thus a deer-hunt story might also serve as a map. Lost travelers and lost piñon-nut gatherers have been saved by sighting a rock formation they recognize only because they once heard a hunting story describing this rock formation.” She continues, “Indeed, stories are most frequently recalled as people are passing by a specific geographical feature or the exact location where a story took place. It is impossible to determine which came first, the incident or the geographical feature that begs to be brought alive in a story.”

Anthropologist Keith Basso describes a similar relationship in the culture of the Western Apache, for whom natural places call forth stories, so that the landscape provides a practical and moral guide to the culture. Even allowing for the profound differences between tribes, the many accounts like this suggest a worldview in which oral tradition continually generates a network of stories that map and make intimately familiar a landscape in which, as Silko puts it, “the precise
date of the incident is often less important than the place.” All of which suggests that bronze sculptures and granite obelisks with their inscriptions and emphasis on dates might be alien or redundant to such a tradition. In her essay in
Sweet Medicine
, however, historian Patricia Nelson Limerick argues that “Americans ought to know what acts of violence bought them their right to own land, build homes, use resources, and travel freely in North America. Americans ought to know what happened on the ground they stand on; they surely have some obligation to know where they are.” Knowledge of such past violence, she says later, might save Americans from nostalgia for “a prettier time in the past.” For Limerick, such monuments would speak most powerfully to the nonindigenous population. By these terms, putting up monuments is as significant a project as revising those that exist.

One European-style monument to insurgent indigenous history has long been in the works: the giant equestrian figure of Crazy Horse being carved into a mountain near Mount Rushmore. The brainchild of Boston-raised Korczak Ziolkowski, who assisted Gutzon Borglum in the carving of Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse memorial was begun half a century ago and, according to its web site, will be the biggest sculpture in the world when completed. It could be argued, however, that the European sculptural tradition within which this work fits and the massive blasting of the mountainside it requires celebrate the artist and the technology more than the dead leader, who refused to be photographed.

The continent is already densely populated with monuments—that is, sites of significance—recognized because of oral traditions, which means that those outside the traditions are often unable and or unwilling to see them. A case in point is Devils Tower National Monument, in northeastern Wyoming, where conflicting interpretations, or at least interests, led to a lawsuit. A steep and startling granite butte standing alone in the landscape, with ridges sweeping up to its flat crown, it was designated in 1906 as the first National Monument in the country (a National Monument is a national park named by presidential order rather than by an act of Congress). Devils Tower has been mainly a recreation destination during most of its subsequent history, but long before its absorption into the terrain of scenic tourism, it was a sacred site for several tribes in the region, including the
Lakota and the Kiowa (who call it Bear’s Lodge, because of the story in which seven sisters fled their brother, who had become a bear; they were saved by a giant tree stump that rose from the ground with them on it: the butte we see today is scored by the bear’s claw marks, and the sisters became seven bright stars in the night sky). Lakota leader Charlotte Black Elk recalls, “I grew up going to Devils Tower. As a kid with my family, we would pass ourselves off as tourists, initially. Back then, the park wasn’t a high traffic place.” The butte appeared in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
as the site where the aliens landed, which, says Black Elk, caused tourism to increase significantly. So too did the growing popularity of rock climbing. In 1973, 312 climbers visited Devils Tower; now about 6,000 do so every year. Because of the popularity of rock climbing and the growing respect for Native American religious beliefs and rights, monument superintendent Deborah Ligget called for a voluntary moratorium on climbing every June, when Native Americans conduct ceremonies at Devils Tower.

The number of June climbers dropped dramatically when the moratorium was instituted in 1995; but Andy Petefish, who owned a climbing service, sued to have the ban declared illegal. Petefish and the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which represented him, argued that the voluntary ban was a violation of the First Amendment—that protecting Native American religious practices amounted to establishing a religion. Petefish, whose real motives seemed to be economic, asserted, “Climbing on Devils Tower is a religious experience for me. But when the rock gets crowded, I don’t ask for my peace and quiet to be regulated. I just want equal treatment on public land.” Since he wasn’t prevented from climbing or guiding clients on the butte, he seemed to be suing to protest being made to feel that climbing there was inappropriate.

The same attitude has prevailed at many other sacred sites across the West, where protecting indigenous rights or respecting non-Western religious beliefs by limiting access to the land has been attacked as reverse discrimination, by non-Natives who assert that the pleasure of outdoor recreation and scenic views is equally a form of spiritual observance. Some of the friction arises because many contested sites are federal land; another problem is that natural sites are not visibly tied to specific cultural practices, as is the case with, say, churches. An interpretation
dependent upon oral tradition is less distinct than one embodied in architecture and sculpture—it changes how people look rather than what people see.

Similar cultural clashes have arisen at Rainbow Bridge in Utah (sacred to Dine [Navajo] people and already damaged by the flooding of nearby springs and petroglyphs caused by the Glen Canyon Dam); at Cave Rock in South Lake Tahoe (sacred to the Washoe and popular with climbers); and at the Western Shoshone sacred site at Rock Creek in northern Nevada’s Landers County, whose officials wanted to create a recreational reservoir that would put the site underwater (with a lot of activist work, the county measure was recently defeated). As Malcolm Margolin, a historian of Native California, said when discussing a sacred spring in the San Joaquin Valley that was threatened, “I began to realize that for them the religion, the religious experience was rooted in that particular place, in the power and the beauty of that particular place, and if you destroy the place, you destroy the religion.”

Edgar Hachivi Heap of Birds has worked as a public artist for more than a dozen years. All his public works have been temporary or permanent monuments to the erased or invisible indigenous history of the chosen site. The pieces most often consist of short texts placed on objects from the existing vocabulary of public space—billboards, bus signs, enameled metal signs like those used for traffic—which gives them a neutral, official aesthetic. In the late 1980s, he completed
Native Hosts
for a public art project at City Hall Park in New York. This work consisted of twelve signs made by the city’s Traffic Department, each of which said, “New York, today your host is ____” and named one of the tribes that had lived or still lives in the region. A few years later, in Seattle, he paid tribute to the city’s original inhabitants and the homeless Indians on the streets today with an enameled metal sign in Pioneer Square, next to and addressing the existing statue of Chief Seattle. One side of
Day Night
, decorated with crosses and dollar signs, said, “Chief Seattle the streets are our home”; the other, decorated with leafy splotches, said, “Far away brothers and sisters we still remember you.” Both these projects spoke to the presence, then and now, of displaced Native people in urban spaces. So did a third project
in San Jose, California, which used bus posters to critique the effects of the mission system—and, inevitably, offended the Catholic Church. “Who owns history?” another project asked point-blank, at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, monument already commemorating “Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the United States.”

Among Heap of Birds’s more controversial projects were billboards commenting on the centennial of the 1889 Oklahoma land rush from which the “Sooner State” took its name; one had the text “Sooners run over Indian Nations, Apartheid?” with the word “Sooners” written backwards. In 1992, Heap of Birds recalled,

All of the state of Oklahoma is Indian Territory. They changed the treaties and took the land away and gave it to the settlers and that’s why they had the land run. So every April they have an incredible reenactment which goes throughout all the school system. All the grade school kids come to school and they have a little red wagon and they dress up like pioneers and they bring their sack lunch and they run across the school yard and put a stake in the ground and take away Indian land. . . . So I made a series of billboards that just try and turn the Sooners away and run them [in] the other direction . . . and just try to remark about this kind of practice of racism really. So we had the billboards up and then I made some t-shirts and then people started wearing them and then the day was coming when the city was going to have its big celebration, and then everyone said well let’s have a protest march, so we made more t-shirts and then people marched from the Native American Center in Oklahoma City to the State Capitol and had a forum on the steps of the Capitol and followed the path of the billboards, so it was a very, very positive kind of way to bring people together and focus people on this other part of the history.

You could call Heap of Birds’s works counter-monuments: they speak to excluded people of erased history; they revise, but they don’t reconcile or conciliate.

The gestures of conciliation and recognition are due elsewhere. Those fighting to deny recognition of the presence of Native Americans then and now and the atrocities suffered are cultural Custers, caught up in a doomed assault on truth, justice, and even awakening government bureaucrats. But the conflicts they stirred up are not yet over.

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

Screen text from the early computer game Adventure

Place your right (or left) hand on the right (or left)
wall of green, and doggedly keep it there, in and out of
dead ends, and you will finally get to the middle.

Julian Barnes, on hedge mazes

In 1989, I went to a demonstration at United Technologies in San Jose, a company making fuel components for Trident II missiles, which carried nuclear warheads. The corporate headquarters was nothing special, just another glass-walled box with a Pizza Hut–style mansard roof, a parking lot full of late-model cars, and nobody in sight but security guards. It was in a business subdivision so new that much of the earth was still exposed, with raw compacted clay and gravel up to the curving suburban sidewalks; and there was a fruit orchard just behind the offices, where one of the protestors escaped when chased by a guard. This, the visible landscape of military technology, was bland, closed-off, a mask. There were other United Technologies landscapes. Some were even more invisible, or only potential: the military bases where the Trident missiles were stationed; the targets they were intended for in this, the late rococo phase of the cold war; and the workplaces where they were manufactured—we were at design and corporate headquarters. (Nuclear weapons are traditionally pork-barreled all over the country, so that almost every state has an economic interest in their perpetuation and no one is responsible for
making
weapons.)