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| Karl Bodmer: Indians hunting the bison. Maximilian Prince of Wied's Travels in the Interior of North America, during the years 1832–1834; published London 1843–1844. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill, 1885 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Novelist Thomas King’s remarkable book about his people,
the indigenous of North America, was published two years ago, but somehow or
other I never picked up on it until this last week, when, on vacation in
Europe, I finally found time to read it. It is called The Inconvenient Indian, a slightly throw-away title that gives a
clue to the humorous, ironical tone in which the book is written.
King has sub-titled his book A Curious Account of Native people in North America and again here
the use of the word “curious” is rather ambiguous. Curious, in what way?
His early chapters --- curiously enough, as I thought
while reading them --- contained long lists of Indians who had been actors in
Hollywood movies, of non-Indians who had portrayed Indians in Hollywood
movies, and various other things like that which to a serious-minded student of
the history of these people all seemed slightly facetious.
Maybe it was King’s way of suggesting that one shouldn’t be too solemn about these
things, but the serious purpose appeared to be the emphasize that non-Indian
people throughout North America had been schooled to see Indians as
stereotypes, not as real, live people, but as constructs of someone’s
entertainment sources (for example.)
This point was more than adequately made when he revealed that by 1883,
when Buffalo Bill Cody started his famous Wild West show, the self-perception
of North American indigenous people was already so degenerated, even among
those who had led the resistance, that
many of the latter-day “Indian” heroes were lining up to join Cody’s show. Before the 1880s were out, such leaders as
Red Cloud had joined the circus, followed in 1885 by Sitting Bull, later the
Metis leader Gabriel Dumont (1886), while heroes such as Chief Joseph and
Geronimo had joined Col Frederick T. Cummins’s Life on the Plains exposition when it opened in New York in 1903.
“Whatever else these shows were,” comments King, “they
were an intriguing alternative to being locked down on a reservation or sitting
alone in a prison cell. Keep in mind, many of these individuals were considered
dangerous by North America. After all the Battle of the Little Bighorn and
Wounded Knee were still in the rear-view mirror, and at the turn of the
century, no one was quite sure what might appear up ahead through the
windshield.”
Allow me to draw attention to King’s use of yet another ambiguous
adjective:”intriguing.” Like
“inconvenient” and “curious” in his book’s title, these three words are used in
an ambiguous sense, and since King is an expert novelist, we can assume his use
of them in this way was deliberate.
Now any reasonably objective person who has examined the
historical record of European colonialism, wherever it manifested itself,
would surely have to agree with the following proposition: wherever the colonialists landed, they
wanted the land, and everywhere they took it.
That is what happened in Africa, Australia, New Zealand and throughout
North and South America. And the differences between these places were merely
ones of degree, all within the ambiance of their wanting and taking the land,
and to hell with the consequences. Finding the lands in these places populated
by peoples whom they considered inferior, they used every stratagem at their disposal,
including the mind-blowing assumption that these lands were unoccupied, to
justify what was, in effect, their theft of someone else’s property. It was
fortunate for the colonialists that the indigenous people whom they found
already in occupation did not think of the land and their ownership of it in the
same, grasping, greedy way as did their invaders. In the words of a Cree hunter
whom I interviewed in the 1970s, their concept of “ownership” was entirely
different, all wrapped up with their subsistence on the land, along with that
of the animals on whom they depended for their food. “Do you own the land?” I
asked him, a question that was asked in the middle of a hurricane-like assault
on his land by invading
Euro-Canadians. “Well,” said Sam
Blacksmith, who had lived his entire life in the northern Quebec bush as a
hunter and trapper, “people tell us we own it. But in the end everybody dies,
so nothing can be predicted.” Talk about ambiguity: one understands where
Thomas King gets it from!
Around the 100-page mark, King gets serious, and I noted
these two vigorous paragraphs:
“…for the (English) or (French)…. Indians were simply
humans at an early point in the evolution of the species. They were savages
with no understanding of orthodox theology, devoid of complex language, and
lacking civilized manners. Barbarians, certainly, and quite possibly minions of the
devil. But human beings, none the less. And as such, many colonists believed
that Native people could be civilized and educated, believed that there was,
within the Indians, the possibility for enlightenment.
“Extermination dominated the early contact period,
assimilation the latter, until finally, in the nineteenth century, they came
together in an amalgam of militarism and social theory that allowed North America
to mount a series of benevolent assaults on Native people. Assaults facilitated by
force of arms, deception and coercion, assaults that sought to dismantle Native
culture with missionary zeal and humanitarian paternalism, and to replace it
with something that Whites could recognize.”
The rest of Thomas King’s book is an eloquent filling-in
of the details of these various assaults. In the following paragraphs he gives
primacy to the warrior work of the Christians --- Jesuit, Anglican, Methodist,
Presbyterian, Puritan, Baptist, Quakers, Franciscan and even Russian Orthodox
--- all of them played their part in the conquest of North America. Bruce
Trigger’s monumental historical masterpiece The
Children of Aataentsic (1975), establishes beyond a doubt the efficacy with
which these Christian groups --- in his case he was dealing with the Jesuits,
and their impact on the Hurons --- as soon as they came in contact with indigenous
Americans, completely undermined their belief systems, weakening them to such an
extent within 20 years that, attacked by the Iroquois, they collapsed like a
pack of cards, all their certainties about their lives having been demolished.
I have read a lot of the written record and I cannot say I
found a single fact or opinion in King’s book with which I do not agree. In
some places he seems to have been too soft in his denunciations. For example,
at one point unless my memory betrays me, he says various efforts were made to
turn Indians into farmers, and here I thought he could have been even tougher,
more condemnatory than he was, because of the the historical record (read Sarah
Carter’s studies of Western Canadian
history, particularly Lost Harvests written in 1993.) In that carefully researched book she shows
that, having responded to the call to them to become farmers, indigenous people
were then deliberately deprived of markets for their produce. In other words,
the colonizers were determined that the indigenous people could never win, no
matter what they did.
In this infamous tale King gives equal billing to the
United States and Canada, the major difference being that in the United States military
means were the major weapon of assault, in
Canada it was all done rather by legislation, generation after generation of legislation designed to deprive indigenous people
of everything that meant anything to them --- rituals, beliefs, languages, and
above all, their economies, especially those like that of the Ojibway of the
Lake of the Woods area which were diversified and soundly based. King’s indictment is severe, but it could have
been even more severe, if proving the infamy of the attackers had been his primary
object.
These are not serious criticisms of King’s book, which is
beautifully written, entirely convincing, and a major weapon for public education
on a subject that, somehow or other --- we cannot suppose this was accidental
--- has somehow fallen between the cracks of our educational system.
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