Writing about Indians When You're Not One: The Environment

Troy D. Smith

You remember the commercial. Iron Eyes Cody was paddling a canoe along a polluted, sludged-up river. The narrator -I think it may have been William Conrad -says: "Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the beauty that was once this country. And some people don't."

At this point, a passing car throws the remnants of a happy meal at the Indian's feet, and we see a single tear rolling down his cheek.

CRYING INDIAN on Youtube

It is a familiar message. Native American Indians are often presented as, not only stewards of nature, but intrinsically a part of it. It is what Thoreau called "Indian wisdom" -being at home in nature, not a visitor to it.

On one hand, there is a lot of truth to that imagery. American Indians tended to be more in balance with their surroundings than were the European colonists who showed up one day in their world. Many Indian cultural groups believed in something scholars call "ordained killing," the idea that every element in the food chain is aware of their role and submissive to it, for the greater good of everything. Hence hunters would often have rituals to thank the spirits of the animals they killed, and some cultures practiced above-ground "burial" to make it easier for the animals to eat their flesh, thus ensuring that the great circle would continue.

Many of their practices fly in the face of the modern American images of them as people who did not transform their environment, but rather lived in tune with it. Indians around North America engaged in controlled burning, for example, transforming the forests and prairies. One effect of this practice was to remove underbrush that would otherwise provide kindling to lightning storms and lead to wildfires. Another was to aid in hunting; the sprouts that appeared in recently burned areas were especially enticing to many animals, making it easier to hunt them- the new growth brought your prey to you rather than you having to chase them down. The controlled burns were also conducive to transportation, for the great forests east of the Mississippi -cleared of underbrush -were much easier to travel through than they would be later. Early colonists marveled at the fact a man could gallop through a forest on horseback.

The Hohokam of the Southwest practiced extensive irrigation. Eastern Woodland Indians understood the concept of crop rotation, and of mixing several kinds of plants together in a field so that each could symbiotically aid the other -the tall corn provided stalks for bean vines to wrap around, and shade for gourds and pumpkins.

And of course, as western fans, we are all familiar with the bison culture of the Great Plains, in which Indians used "every part of the buffalo," never being wasteful.

But there is another side to the story.

Let's look at bison. Before the horse made hunting buffalo easier and more practical, Indians who lived and hunted on foot had to use other strategies. Many of you are probably familiar with the practice of frightening whole buffalo herds into stampeding over cliffs. Did the Indians use every piece of the buffalo, sometimes dozens or more, who crashed to their deaths? Of course not, there was far more meat there than the average band could use, or transport, so it was left to rot. This was due in part to the seemingly unending supply of bison on the plains, and partly due to the common belief that they were a gift to humans from the gods; so long as the right rituals were being practiced, they would always be provided for human beings. As Jay Leno might have put it, keep eating those Doritos. We'll make more. Therefore, there was no reason to conserve. Some historians, most notable Dan Flores, have suggested that over time the more efficient methods of hunting brought on by the horse, coupled with those cultural attitudes, might well have led to bison becoming endangered even without the help of white people.

Controlled burning was not always all that controlled, and sometimes resulted in disastrous forest fires. Large settlements like those of the Hohokam and Anasazi in the arid southwest, and at Cahokia in the Midwest, may have been abandoned due to the fact that their populations were unsustainable by the resources available, leading people to abandon them and reorganize into smaller bands.

Over time, many Indian groups abandoned their balance-oriented traditional hunting methods once they were introduced to the European trade system. Trade items previously viewed as luxuries came to be viewed as necessities -and the only way to get them was to give Europeans what they wanted. Which was furs (and sometimes captives to buy as slaves.) This led to an abandonment of the old ways and hunting practices that led to many species becoming endangered. Few people realize that white-tailed deer were hunted almost to extinction in the American South in the late eighteenth century, in large part by Indians who desired their skins as trade items to get European goods. I have often wondered if that is why deer in the South tend to be much smaller than those in the upper Midwest and Great Lakes region; because only the smallest and fleetest managed to survive that period of overhunting and reproduce.

I think the best explanation is this: American Indians, by and large, were a whole lot more responsible with their resources than the white colonists were. But they were not perfect, and do not really conform to our "Crying Indian" view of them; when push came to shove, they often behaved like -well, human beings. In fact, that last sentence could aptly sum up the overarching theme of this whole blog series. Indians were not (and are not) the "red devils" and savages they were often accused of being (side-point: the English word savage comes from the Latin word for forest.) Nor were they the romanticized, supra-human ideal "noble savages" that observers have wanted them to be since the earliest period of colonization. They were, and are, human beings. Which means that sometimes -many times -they did not do the right thing. That may be viewed as the deconstruction of a myth, but I believe it is, rather, the reconstruction of reality.

Writing about Indians When You're Not One: Property

Troy D. Smith

In this installment of our series about the cultural differences that non-indigenous writers should be aware of when writing about American Indians, we're going to discuss attitudes toward property.

Perhaps you have heard these things said about Indians: A) They had no sense of personal property. B) They had no concept of owning the land.

How true are those statements? Well, the answers are complex... but North American tribes definitely had outlooks about property and ownership that were far different from the European approach.

First off, you can't really say Indians did not have personal property. Let's say you were an Indian man (from any tribe, really)... and you had made your own tools and weapons. Well, those are yours, and you would definitely not appreciate someone just wandering into your domicile and taking them. On the other hand, you might not be as attached to them as most Europeans were to their own goods, and you might feel an obligation -and in some instances social pressure -to give them away pretty easily.

Owning the land? That's different. Traditional indigenous cultures did not recognize human ownership of land, or the lives of the animals on it. They did recognize the right to use that land, or those animals -although often more in a communal context than an individual one (the technical Western word for that, by the way, is usufruct rights.)

Certain regions might be claimed by some tribes as their hunting grounds. This didn't mean they owned the land or animals, but that their tribe claimed the right to use them- often more than one tribe made such claims. Sometimes that worked out okay, sometimes it didn't. So far as the animals were concerned, if you killed one you conducted a ritual in which you thanked either the animal itself or the spirit (or manitou, in Algonquian tribes) that represented that species for granting you the gift of its life, and it was expected you would use that gift respectfully. If you did not, or were ungrateful, you risked the spirit's wrath on you or, since there was a sense of communal responsibility, on your village or tribe. You did not assume you had an innate, divine right to take those lives because you somehow owned the creatures themselves.

Let us now assume you were a member of a tribe that practiced agriculture (which most did.) Your village would have the right to use a certain area, and usually each family had a portion of their own to work. Another portion was set aside as a common garden, which belonged to the whole village. Needy people would often be fed from that section.

Among some tribes, everything was common. The Cherokees would distribute the grain to all the families in a village each corn harvest, each according to what it was expected they would need to get through the winter -and the rest was burned as a sacrifice. No one accumulated anything, and there was no concept of profit. If the winter was worse than anyone expected, everyone would suffer together.

Sitting Bull (who was Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux), after the famous Indian victory at the Little Bighorn, worked for awhile in Buffalo Bill's traveling Wild West Show. As a member of the troupe he traveled widely, and one thing flabbergasted him in the large eastern cities, especially New York. He saw something there he had never encountered before.

There were children who were hungry and had no homes. At the same time, there were rich people.

This would not have been possible in his own culture. Anyone in need would be provided for out of the common stores. The whole village would prosper as one, or the whole village would suffer as one; some people having an abundance while others starved was unthinkable. Sitting Bull was known to take the money he received as wages for his performance in the show and pass it out indiscriminately to the street children.

As I mentioned in our last installment, about leadership, prestige was gained -not by how much you accumulated -but by how much you gave away. Warriors would take great risk to capture enemy horses or other goods -then often pass them out as gifts when they returned to the village, gaining social stature for doing so. Even as Cherokees had their Green Corn Ceremony, tribes in the Pacific Northwest had a ritual they called the potlatch. A potlatch was given -sometimes to commemorate a special occasion, sometimes not -in which a feast was thrown, and at the end the hosts gave away all or most of their belongings. There, too, there was social stature to be gained in doing so.

18th century Scotsman Alexander Hewatt said this of the Cusabo tribe of South Carolina:

"As for riches they have none, nor covet any; and while they have plenty of provisions, they allow none to suffer through want; if they are successful in hunting, all their unfortunate or distressed friends share with them the common blessings of life."

Early on, these differing approaches caused misunderstandings between Indians and settlers. The Puritans, for example, introduced domestic animals to New England, in the form of cattle and swine. It was not the custom at that time to build an enclosure for your stock, they were allowed to roam free -the wise Puritan built a fence around his garden, to keep the animals out. The wandering animals trampled down or ate the Indians' crops -which they did not appreciate, and caused much friction. On the other hand, Indians were prone to kill the roaming creatures and eat them.

Let's say you're a Wampanoag Indian, traveling through the forest, and you encounter a pig or a cow. A white settler in that context might ask "Gee, I wonder who this beast belongs to." A Wampanoag would think: "these woods are my people's hunting ground, and look, here is a four-legged creature. Let's eat it -clearly we have the right to do so." But to the settler, that Indian has become a poacher and a thief.

Of course, the trade opportunities presented by Europeans caused a lot of change. Here come these new folks, and they have lots of things that you value: steel tomahawks, steel sewing needles, guns, coffee, sugar, colored beads that were worthless to the Europeans but for your purposes far superior than colored shells for use in decoration or spiritual ceremonies. There had always been trade among Indians, in fact there were extensive trade routes centuries before Europeans arrived. But never had there been such unique trade items, that an Indian could not make himself. They started off as luxuries, but -as luxuries are wont to do -soon became necessities. The Europeans want furs? we'll give them furs (deer were hunted almost to extinction in the American South, mostly by Indians, by 1800.) They want captives they can use for slaves on their plantations? Our limited warfare has always produced a handful of captives- let's make war on each other continually, to get ever more captives to trade (this led to great social disruption, and the bloody Westo and Yamassee wars of the late 1600s / early 1700s.)

From the George Washington administration onward, Americans tried to "civilize" the Indians. One way to do this was to break them from their tribal, communal, shared ownership ideas and teach them to be individuals, and to compete with each other. In fact, Thomas Jefferson proposed that Indians' land could be acquired without bloodshed if the U.S. government established trading posts among them, and introduced them to credit. They would soon find themselves overextended, the government could call the credit in, and the Indians would have no choice but to sell their lands as payment. His plan can be found HERE in a letter to then-military-governor of Indiana William Henry Harrison.

In the late 19th century the "Americanization" process was sought through implementation of the Dawes Act, or allotment. Tribes were discorporated, as was their communal ownership of land; instead, each individual family was given a plot of land to work on their own like good ol' American yeoman farmers. This had two immediate effects: 1) there would always be a whole lot of land left over, which would previously have belonged to the tribe in common, but which the government now took and redistributed to settlers, and 2) since Indians now had individual ownership, white people could buy those claims from them if the Indians were financially hard-pressed (which they were), which would not have been possible when the whole tribe controlled the land. This resulted in even more Indian land passing out of Indian hands. There were also unanticipated social effects, such as a breakdown in community (Indians were not loners, and had always tended to live in large groups; breaking the land up into individual, far-flung farms made each family a lonely island) and in gender roles (the government viewed each family's "head of house" to be the husband/father, even in tribes where traditionally it was women who controlled agriculture.)

We'll actually go into that in more detail next time, when our topic will be "Gender."

Writing about Indians When You're Not One, Part 4: Leadership

Troy D. Smith

This series started out to be a single blog entry back in the summer, but I quickly realized I was going to need more words... so I announced it had morphed into one of three parts. And there's still more to say, so I've given up and quantifying and decided this is a series.

If you've read the earlier entries, you know there are a lot of cultural pitfalls to writing about various American Indian cultures -specifically, there are many things that Anglo-Americans just understand differently than do the peoples who are native to the Americas. Many of those things differ from tribe to tribe and from region to region; at the same time, there are some things that apply generally to those indigenous people, just as there are certain cultural things that make some people European even though they are from different countries.

This time around, I'm going to talk about American Indians and leaderhip.

Europeans often assumed that Indians structured their societies the same way they did, and misunderstandings arose as a result. Some of those misunderstandings continue into the present.

Of course, there were some similarities between those very first explorers and colonists and the Indians they encountered. The Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru had empires, and their governments were composed of strict hierarchies, headed by leaders that were roughly equivalent to the kings the Europeans were used to.

In fact, when Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto led his expedition through the Southeast in the early 1540s, he found societies in North America that were (though smaller in scale)  similar to those in Central and South America. They were called the Mississippians -a catch-all term that included several different peoples -and their societies had been in place in the South and the Midwest for centuries. They had several things in common:

1. They built "platform mounds", miniature earthen versions of the Meso-American pyramids, which played an important role in their spiritual life.

2. Large-scale maize agriculture

3. Extensive trade networks, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes, and from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains

4. A strict social hierarchy, with a powerful chief at the top and a system of social classes, with religious and political power in the hands of a few. As with the Aztecs and Incas, there were large population centers that politically dominated smaller villages, who owed them fealty.


After De Soto passed through, it was the better part of a century before Europeans significantly penetrated the interior of the Southeast again. And when they did, they found a completely different world than De Soto had encountered.

You see, marching along with De Soto's men was another kind of army- disease. Due to various factors, Europeans had built up a hardy immunity to all sorts of things -a few centuries of plague, and of interacting with the people of Asia and Africa, made that possible. The Indians did not have that natural advantage. Death on an unimaginable scale -probably much worse than the Great Plague of Europe -devastated native peoples who had encountered the Europeans, or sometimes just other Indians who had met Europeans. The clearly defined, hierarchical societies encountered by De Soto collapsed into anarchy. In many cases, only a tiny remnant of a tribe remained -these remnants joined with other tribal remnants to form whole new groups, called coalescent societies (this is why some groups, like the Muscogees/Creeks, had several apparently unrelated dialects within their nations.) This new way of living in the South and the Midwest resulted in tribes whose lifestyles were much simpler, and much less clearly defined by class, than De Soto's Mississippians a century or more earlier. It was these, not their hierarchical forebears, that the English and French would meet.

Those later Indians had a more communal lifestyle. Power, prestige, and leadership were all handled much differently.

For one thing -and this was very confusing to the colonists -tribes often did not have a single leader. Even more confusing: a leader did not have absolute power over the rest of the tribe. Rather, he was more of an adviser. He could make suggestions, but everyone was free to decide for themselves whether to listen to him or not. Europeans did not operate this way; therefore, whichever leader they first encountered (or was most amenable to them), they summarily designated as the King or Chief of that tribe. They would then negotiate with him, and expect him to speak for his whole nation, not understanding (and sometimes not wanting to understand) that he could actually only speak for his small band or for himself. Indians, meanwhile, had a very hard time understanding colonial soldiers -what kind of idiot marches into certain death because someone orders them to?

Europeans had power and leadership because, ultimately, of the property they owned, or their money. Officers bought a commission, they did not earn it. Kings and nobles held their station because of actions their ancestors performed a millennium before.

Indians in North America did not usually operate that way. Leadership was not hereditary in most tribes (and since three-quarters of tribes were matrilineal, "hereditary" would have had a different meaning anyhow.) This does not mean there were not often leaders from within the same family: in New England, Wampanoag leader Massasoit was succeeded by his son Metacom; in Virginia, Powhatan was succeeded by his brother Ophecancanough; in 18th century Cherokee lands, Dragging Canoe was as influential as his father Attakullakulla (Little Carpenter) had been. But it does mean that such transitions were not mandated or guaranteed; new leaders could just as well have been someone else.

To become a leader, you had to... convince people to follow you. They would choose to do this if you had a track record of making good decisions, if you were a very good orator, or if you were deeply spiritual. To remain a leader, you had to keep those qualities up and running. Even if you were a leader, military planning could be a challenge; almost always, some of your men were going to ignore you and go about the fight however they wanted. This is a paradox: Indians could be extremely communal and extremely individualistic at the same time.

Besides these things, an Indian gained prestige -not by how much he accumulated, like Europeans -but by how much he gave away. This ties in to my next installment, Indians and property.

If, as an Indian leader, you could not really give orders, what could you do? A couple of 18th century visitors among the Cherokee give us some idea.

This is from Alexander Hewett, in 1779:

“When war is the result of their councils, and the great leader takes the field, any one may refuse to follow him, or may desert him, without incurring any punishment, but by such ignominious conduct he loses his reputation, and forfeits the hopes of distinction and preferment.” 

And this is from James Adair, in 1775:

“…They commend a warrior for having behaved valiantly against the enemy; when he acted cowardly, they introduce the minutest circumstances of the affair, with severe sarcasms which wound deeply. I have known them to strike their delinquents with those sweetened darts, so good naturedly and skillfully, that they would sooner die by torture, than renew their shame by repeating the actions.”

While these examples are from the Southeast, there were a lot of similarities with Plains tribes. In both areas, European travelers who -for one reason or another were present during tribal councils -often made the same observations. Indians talked and talked and talked before they did anything. This is because no one individual had the authority to coerce others to do what he wanted; he had to persuade them.

If someone had a reputation as a good leader, and you chose not to accompany him or take his advice, you would be embarrassed when he won glory and you couldn't share in it. And if your refusal to do as he says results in your side losing the fight.... your friends are going to make fun of you mercilessly.

It was all much, much more complicated than a Big Chief barking out orders.

I am going to close by giving you this LINK to a report in the American State Papers... on pages 289-291 a trader named Richard Finnelson, actually an American spy, witnessed and reported on a Cherokee council (with Shawnee and Creek representatives) in 1792 in which it was decided to attack Nashville. The print is small, but if you read it you'll see many of the things I've described.

Writing about Indians When You're Not One- PART TWO: BALANCE

 

Troy D. Smith

There is a Lakota expression that no doubt some of you are aware of: mitakuye oyasin. This phrase has traditionally been used in Lakota prayers, and since the Lakota language has, in the 20^th century, become in some ways an unofficial lingua franca of the Pan-Indian movement (and Powwow Circuit), the expression is known and used by Indians of many tribes, and their non-Indian allies.

Its literal meaning is something akin to “all my relations,” another way of saying “we are all related.” Even though every Indian tribe, and every region, differs from others, there are some basic principles that practically every indigenous nation of North America shares (the same way that there are certain European cultural traits, even though specific European nations and regions might differ in significant ways.) One of these principles is eloquently summed up by mitakuye oyasin: everything is connected. Not just all human beings, but each human being and all other forms of life, and the earth itself. It’s like we are all strands on one big web; vibrations on one strand will affect the whole thing, one way or another.

Knowledge of this connectedness leads to an overarching need to maintain balance at all times, in every way, and this need is reflected in many aspects of American Indian religion, culture, and daily life. Failure to understand the concept of balance among native nations led many European settlers –and many non-Indian writers –to misunderstand the thoughts and actions of Indians. In Part One of this series, I talked about KINSHIP; this time around I’m going to expound on that sense of balance and how it has been (and continues to be) manifest in American Indian culture.

The most obvious manifestation is in regard to consumption and interaction with the physical environment. Most modern audiences are aware that, traditionally, Indians have been known for “not taking more than they need, and using everything they take.” This is the ideal (although, like all ideals, it has not always been lived up to.) This is why Indians of most tribes had rituals in which they thanked the spirit of the animals they hunted for providing them with food; failure to do so would upset the balance, and the spirit would punish the hunter –or his village, since Indians had a sense of community responsibility.

As I said, that was the ideal. Some scholars speculate that the “mega-fauna” that once proliferated in North America (mammoths, for example) may have disappeared due to overhunting –though others argue that climate change at the end of the last glacial period played a larger role. Some historians have suggested that the American bison may have already been on the road to extinction due to Indian hunting practices –whether that’s true or not, one can’t deny that the tactic of goading entire buffalo herds to plunge off cliffsides (when your tribe can only use a fraction of that meat) does not not fit the general idea of Indians as ecologists. Nor can it be denied that, once Southeastern tribes became heavily invested in the deerskin trade in the 18^th century, deer were overhunted nearly to extinction.

Such practices, though, can probably best be described as aberrations from the cultural ideal of balance. Another, and related, application of balance pertained to agriculture and property. In most tribes, a person gained prestige –not by how much they accumulated –but by how much they gave away. A successful raid on an enemy horse herd might provide you with several new mounts that you could give as gifts when you got back home, gaining status in the tribe. Of course, if you were a young man, you could parlay those horses into a new wife –in which case your new father-in-law would have horses to redistribute and prestige to gain. Excess agricultural goods were often considered the property of the village in general, and were redistributed according to everyone’s relative needs. Among the Cherokees, for example, at the annual Green Corn Ceremony after the harvest, each family was given the amount of grain it was estimated they would need for the year, and everything that was left over was burned as a sacrifice to the spirits. Tribes in the Pacific Northwest redistributed wealth via a ceremony known as the potlatch.

The point is, balance requires that everyone be provided for equally. Early European colonists could not wrap their minds around this attitude, which they considered wasteful and unnatural. Conversely, when Sitting Bull traveled with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, he was flabbergasted when he saw starving and homeless children in Eastern cities. How could this be possible? In his culture, either the whole tribe prospered or the whole tribe suffered. Either way, they did it together, as one community.

Thomas Jefferson understood that the secret to defeating the Indians was disrupting these traditional approaches. As early as the late 1700s, when Jefferson became the first U.S. Secretary of State, he was recommending that all tribes be removed west of the Mississippi; however, he believed it would be morally wrong to physically force them to do so, therefore he had an alternate plan. Establish government funded trading posts in Indian country, and introduce the natives to certain goods –sugar, coffee, manufactured goods –which would start off as luxuries but quickly come to seem like necessities. Then introduce the Indians to the concept of credit, which they’re not going to understand at first… once they are deeply in debt, call in that debt, and their only choice will be to sell off their lands to pay it (so much more civilized an approach!)

In other words… manipulate the Indians into abandoning their tradition of maintaining balance. The same approach was used when getting Southeastern tribes entrenched in the slave trade (raiding other tribes for captives they could sell as slaves to the English) and the deerskin trade.

Throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Indian spiritual leaders preached that their people’s only hope was to abandon the white man’s way of doing things and go back to the traditional ways –including an appreciation for balance. Prophets from Neolin to Tenskwatawa to Handsome Lake to Whitepath to Wovoka made this call.

Balance also comes into play when discussing justice. If you kill another member of your tribe, you must forfeit your life; a kinsman of the victim can assume the role of Blood-Avenger and execute you. If you cannot be found, a close relative will do in your place. The blood price does not absolutely have to be paid by you personally, but by your family or clan –again, community rather than individual responsibility.

In most cases, the guilty party did not attempt to escape justice –knowing that to do so would doom a family member instead. Among the Choctaws, executions were very ritualized… the killer would appear at the appointed place of execution (he was given an extension if an important ball game was coming up- this was the South, after all), along with a second- usually a brother or close friend. The killer was dispatched with a single blow to the head –a bullet in later eras –and his second would catch him and gently lower him to his burial shroud, spread on the ground. Although technically illegal in the late 1800s, many Choctaws continued to do things the traditional way- one recorded account tells of a promising Choctaw baseball player, bound for the majors, who came home to Indian Territory to answer with his life for a drunken killing. Another tells of a Choctaw enlisted in the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War who took leave in order to go home for his execution.

Balance must be kept.

Of course, some accused killers kept an eye to their own self-preservation; Cherokee James Vann was a creative example. Vann, the son of a Cherokee woman and a Scottish trader, was a prominent warrior during the Chickamauga Wars. While in his late teens, he killed the member of another clan during a drunken brawl, and was therefore liable for blood revenge. His mother’s brothers hid him out. Finally, when he ventured out one day with one of those uncles, a dozen or so members of the opposing clan closed in on them, prepared to take their revenge. Vann quickly drew his pistol –and blew his own uncle’s brains out. The other clan members were surprised and frustrated (though not as much as the uncle)… they immediately realized there was now nothing they could do, and no way they could touch the impudent young warrior. They had lost a member of their clan, and now a member of the killer’s clan was dead. Balance was restored. I imagine, however, that Vann had trouble finding traveling companions after that.

The same principle applied in war. If another tribe attacked you and killed five of your people, you were obligated to raid them back, and kill five of theirs. Of course, sometimes the young warriors in the retaliating party would go overboard and kill more than five of the enemy, so there would be a vengeance raid coming their way later. This is why many tribes were in a perpetual state of war –but suffered relatively few deaths each year. The goal was not to find your enemy then annihilate them –it was to restore balance (again, this was the ideal, and sometimes there were large-scale casualties. Especially after the arrival of Europeans, when tribes started jockeying for favored trading status and sometimes decided to get rid of their rivals –but these cases indicated the abandonment of traditional principles.)

Once tribes started interacting with European (and later American) settlers, cultural differences would lead to further friction. Let’s say some miners kill half-a-dozen Indians. Those Indians’ tribesmen were not necessarily going to go to the trouble of finding the specific miners who committed the deed; they were going to kill the first half-dozen or so white people they found. Conversely, if some Indians attacked a farm and killed a family, and the local white authorities demanded that the specific killers be handed over, they were usually not going to be met with cooperation. The idea of having no choice but to find the specific killers was foreign to the Indians. Guilt and responsibility belonged, not to the individual, but to the community –and so did the responsibility of maintaining balance.    

Next time - August 10 -my subject will be "Indians Are People."

[Troy D. Smith is Assistant Professor of History at Tennessee Tech, where he teaches American Indian history.]



Writing About Indians When You're Not One

Writing western fiction often means writing about cowboys and Indians. Now, some of us have direct ranching experience and others do not. For those of us whose ranch experience is limited, there is clearly a need to do a lot of research so we at least have some idea what we're talking about. And that does require a good bit of effort. But at least, for most of us, it is only a specific profession and lifestyle, and subculture, we have to learn, not an entire culture that is foreign to us.

Not so with Indians, unless we happen to be one. It is possible to do a large amount of reading and research, and get many technical details right, and still misinterpret or incorrectly characterize some very basic cultural elements of how Indians think and act. Some western/historical fiction authors, nonetheless, have done an excellent job of writing "from the outside" about indigenous peoples. It's a very long list, and includes people like Don Coldsmith, Win Blevins (who, if I recall, does have some Cherokee heritage), Lucia St. Clair Robson, Terry Johnston, Michael Blake, Douglas Jones, and many others -including several of our WF members.

I am not an American Indian, but I have done a lot of research on the subject, including writing a dissertation and earning a Ph.D in it. I teach American Indian history at Tennessee Tech University. I also know a lot of Indians, some of 'em pretty well -some of them also academics, but many of them not. Which is all just a way of getting at the subject of this blog: my goal today is to share with you some basic facts about Indianness that a lot of us wasicu writers miss when we write about them.

I'm going to start with the term "Indian." Sometimes people hear me talking about Indians, and feel the need to correct me- "You mean Native Americans! They are not from India!"

Well, no, they are not from India, and they are native Americans. Since about 1970, Americans have been taught -initially by anthropologists -that calling indigenous peoples "Indians" was both insulting and inaccurate, and we should call them "Native Americans" instead. So, for the most part, we have learned to do just that.

Thing is, around 1995, a poll was taken of people who had self-identified as indigenous on the census, asking which term they preferred. 37% said Native American, but 50% said American Indian (the remainder had no preference.) From what I've seen, I'd say the tilt toward "Indian" has become even more pronounced since then. Since that is the case, scholars who study indigenous peoples have begun using Indian much more than Native American, as a reflection of the actual desires of the people in question. Most Indians, of course, prefer to be called by the name of their tribe or nation; but sometimes, especially for legal purposes, there is a need for a term describing them as a larger group. Why on earth, one might wonder, would they object to "Native American"? The most common reason I've heard is that none of the well-meaning white folks who decided their name should be changed ever bothered to ask them what they thought about it, so Native American is every bit as much an externally imposed generalization as Indian -at least, some say, they were used to the first one. So now academics have the well-deserved task of convincing people it's okay to switch back to a terminology they only dropped in the first place because academics told them to.

Now, on to some things that are more likely to come up in our western fiction.

It is difficult for us non-Indians to understand just how important tribe is to tribal members, in the past and in the present as well.

What is a tribe? It is, essentially, a group of related people. More specifically, a group of clans. In fact, most Indian tribes traditionally placed a great taboo on marrying within your own clan, as a way of keeping the gene pool sufficiently broad. It is KINSHIP, then, that defined (and continues to define) Indians. That kinship was usually literal -even if very extended -but it could also be fictive. That is, a person could enter into your kinship circle without being literally related to you -usually by an adoption ceremony.

In many tribes, only the people within your kinship circle were actually people, or at the very least, it was possible to have peaceful dealings with someone only if they were within your kinship circle (this is why many tribes gave themselves names that translated as The People, The Real People, or The Human Beings.)

Sometimes captives could be adopted into the tribe. At any rate, in order to have diplomatic or trade dealings with outsiders, they had to become insiders somehow.

Let us consider Pocahontas and Captain John Smith.

We all know John Smith's side of the story. He was captured by Powhatan Indians, and their chief was all set to have him executed... but then the chief's daughter, clearly smitten with the dashing English captain, begged for his life and her wish was granted (remember, we know this story because Smith recorded it. Modesty was not his strong suit.)

But let's try to look at it from the Indian perspective.

Chief Powhatan had been working at establishing hegemony in the tidewater region. Along come these new folks, the English... they might be a serious threat. On the other hand, they might be potential allies or at the very least trade partners. But they are outsiders and thus enemies. How to rectify that?

Captives are often adopted as members of the tribe. It is the women of the tribe, not the men, who decide which captives would live and which would die. Sometimes elaborate rituals were acted out, in which potential trade or diplomatic partners were symbolically adopted and brought INTO the kinship circle.

That interpretation actually makes more sense than the one John Smith believed, and which has been passed down to all of us... because of some very basic cultural misunderstandings.

Another important factor to consider is that about three-quarters of North American tribes were matrilineal, not patrilineal like Europeans. That is to say, their lineage was traced through the mother, not the father. When a couple got married, the husband left his clan or tribe and joined that of his wife. Of course, the other one-quarter of tribes WERE patrilineal. For example: Creek Indians were matrilineal, and Shawnees were patrilineal. If your mother were Creek and your father were Shawnee, you would actually have a valid claim of membership in both tribes. But if your mother were Creek and your father were Cherokee (another matrilineal tribe), then you were Creek. Not half-Creek... there was no such thing. Because it's all about the kinship circle. Either you are IN it, or you are NOT, you cannot be halfway.

I like to explain it this way. Let's say you are a Creek man in the 1700s, and you have two sisters. A runaway slave comes to your village, and your people decide to welcome him in... and he marries your sister. He is now a member of your tribe. Then later a white trapper comes into the village, perhaps a man who is unhappy with life in the settlements and prefers to live on the frontier- and he marries your other sister, thus also becoming a member of your tribe.

Now, to a European/American colonist, there would be three men: a red man, a black man, and a white man. But to the Creek Indians, there would simply be three Creek Indians. They look different from one another, but they are all inside the kinship circle, so they are all Creeks and so are their children.

This would change by the mid-19th century, as Southern tribes became "civilized", and terms like mixed-bloods and full-bloods would come into play. But that was not those tribes' traditional way of looking at things. Nor was it the way Plains tribes looked at things, until well after they were forced onto reservations.

Here's another historical example: the first French colonists who dealt with the Choctaws (like all those nations later called the Five Civilized Tribes, they were matrilineal.)

"We come to you from your Great White Father across the waters," the French said, because to them a father was the ultimate authority figure. "We give you these gifts." The gifts were to prove how wealthy and powerful the Great Father was, and instill both a sense of fear and a sense of obligation in the Choctaws. "We gave you this stuff and you accepted it, so we expect you to do what we tell you."

The Choctaws happily took their gifts, and didn't do a single thing the French told them to.

Because in the Choctaw worldview, the greatest male authority figure in your life was either your mother's eldest brother or your maternal grandfather. You're in THEIR clan/tribe, not your father's. (Ever notice how many stories have Indians being taught by their maternal grandfather? This is why.) Your father, on the other hand, was this guy who came around now and then and gave you presents and was your buddy, not the guy who laid down rules and punished you if you disobeyed them. The French are from the Great Father? Then of course they are giving us presents, that is a father's job. It's not his job to tell us what to do -so take the gifts, smile politely, then ignore him. But if the French had said they were from the Great Uncle across the water, there might have been a clearer understanding on the Choctaws' part of what the French were trying to do.

Now, here's something that bothers me sometimes. When discussing Cherokee leader John Ross, textbooks always say things like "Even though John Ross was only 1/8 Cherokee, he was accepted as their leader." That simple statement displays a basic lack of understanding about how Indian tribes worked at the time being discussed. Especially that "even though" part... and the "only"...because adding those words makes it seem very extraordinary indeed that such a man would become the leader of the Cherokee Nation. In fact, some people in the 19th century (and since) have believed that Ross's "white" blood gave him an intrinsic superiority that allowed him to rise to the top- the same thing was said of other Southern Indians, including the Creek leader Alexander McGillivray.

So let me tell you a little bit about John Ross's ancestry.

In 1740, a 20-year-old Scottish fur trader named William Shorey married a 15-year-old Cherokee girl named Ghigooie, from the Red-Tail Hawk Clan. It was common for Cherokees to marry their daughters to fur traders, because that brought the trader into the kinship circle and made it permissible to have dealings with him. Well, that couple had a daughter, and later she was married to another Scottish fur trader. THAT couple had a daughter, and SHE was married to yet another Scottish trader. And that couple had a son that the mother called Guwisguwi, which was the name of a mythical bird, but that the father called John Ross.

Now, the average American at the time looked at John Ross and said "how is this guy chief of the Cherokees? He's actually 7/8 Scottish!" And, in fact, Americans STILL say that, whether in history books or in the classroom.

But here's how the Cherokees saw it.

Ghigooie of the Red-Tail Hawk Clan of Cherokees had a daughter, Anna. Since the Cherokees are matrilineal, Anna was... Cherokee. Anna had a daughter named Mollie. Since Anna was a member of the Red-Tail Hawk Clan, so was her daughter. Not a 1/4 member; you were either a member, or you were not. Mollie had a son named John Ross; his mother was a Cherokee of the Red-Tail Hawk Clan, and therefore so was he. In fact, it was some of the most traditionalist members of the Cherokee leadership that endorsed Ross for Principal Chief... because he, like they, was Cherokee.

This was not just a Southeastern Indian phenomenon. Quanah Parker was the son of a Comanche man and a white woman who had been captured and adopted as Comanche when she was a child. Quanah's followers did not consider him "half-Comanche," but Comanche,  like them. The list could go on.

My point is this. RACE WAS NOT AN INDIAN CONCEPT. It was a white concept. Race only became an Indian concept after any given tribe/nation started adopting the white man's way of thinking about things.

Consider the Lakota word for white people: wasicu. It literally meant "grabs the fat", as in someone who comes into your camp and with whom you are therefore obligated to share your food, but who rudely immediately grabs the very best for themselves. The word had nothing to do with skin color, and everything to do with perceived cultural attributes.

There has been a long tradition in western fiction and drama of portraying the "half-breed" as someone who was part-white and part-Indian, but accepted by neither, because he was not fully one or the other. This IS how white people would have considered him, because they had such an investment in the idea (especially in the 19th century) of "purity" of race. But it is unlikely that his own tribe would have considered him that way, especially if it were a matrilineal tribe and his mother was Indian, or if his white parent of either sex had been adopted into the tribe. It would be very non-Indian for a writer to assume that Indians would feel the same way about racial purity that white people of the time did. That's just the sort of cultural misunderstanding I was thinking of when I mentioned how easy it is for us non-Indians to make mistakes; heck, western writers have been making that mistake for generations.

As an example of how we can try to be more aware, I offer my Wolf Creek character Charley Blackfeather (Plug!! Book 5 is due out very soon!) Charley's father was a runaway slave who married a Seminole woman in Florida. This makes Charley, to his own people, a Seminole, since his mother was one. But to the average American he encounters in and around Wolf Creek, he is a "half-breed." In fact, he confuses some of them, because they're not sure whether he's a black man or an Indian. He is both -but culturally, he is Seminole.

Note: Of all the "civilized tribes", the Seminoles were the most reluctant to develop a racialized hierarchy that debased blacks. Why? Because they were the least "civilized" (mostly because their swampy homeland enabled them to resist domination by whites for the longest of any Southern tribe.) Nineteenth century reality: being "civilized" meant learning to treat blacks as inferiors, thus the more "traditional" a tribe was, the less likely they were to pay much attention to wasicu ideas about race.

I had intended to cover several subtopics in this post.... but so far I've only covered my first bullet point. I guess I'll have to make this a series... that being the case, I'll wrap this one up and await your comments.