I
recently re-read Thomas Fall’s 1971 novel The
Ordeal of Running Standing. As far as I can tell, it is the only novel Thomas
Fall ever wrote, and it is unavailable in its original form. University of
Oklahoma Press reissued it, with a new foreword, in 1993, and this edition is
still available for purchase. I consider it to be one of the best novels I have
read. As a Native American, I have a personal interest in this type of
literature.
It
begins on Indian reservation lands in western Oklahoma in the late nineteenth
century, where numerous tribes with mutually incomprehensible languages have
been thrown together. They have been demoralized by conquest, yearn for the
glory days before the white man, and end up accomplishing just about nothing.
The only way out seemed to be the Jesus Road: young Indians (such as the
incipient lovers Running Standing, a Kiowa renamed Joe Standing, and
Crosses-the-River, a Cheyenne renamed Sara Cross) go off to boarding school to
become white.
And
doesn’t Joe Standing become white! The oil tycoons are interested in hiring
him. He does not realize it, but what they want him to do is to go back to
Oklahoma and convince his tribe (and his wife Sara’s tribe) to sign the oil
rights to them. Now why would Joe Standing want to do this? Because he thought
he had figured out a way in which he could trick the whites at their own game,
and end up controlling the oil companies in order to benefit, not exploit, the
Oklahoma tribes. Of course, they have tricked him, something he learns only
after he has used his good graces to steal his people’s land.
He
wanted to be white in order to be Indian, and it didn’t work. This was his
ordeal. After becoming a white Indian, he tried to reclaim his heritage, and
discovered that he didn’t know the first thing about living in the woods, much less
about meditating in them.
It
is a beautifully-written book, with just enough romance to make us really care
about the characters. The Indians aren’t all good nor are the whites all bad.
The
climax begins when Joe accidentally kills one of the oil company
representatives. A marshal convinces Joe to turn himself in for manslaughter,
and when he does, the marshal decides instead to trap, torture, and kill him.
This is when Joe realizes that almost all white people—except a neighborly
white farmer’s family, and a white doctor—are vicious liars who have no concept
of honor. This is when Joe has the opportunity to attack the president of the
oil company, who happens to be in town, in a very dramatic and very Indian
manner, just before his own death dance.
About
the only way that Native peoples can have any sense of release in response to
the overwhelming injustice done to them (to us) is to read things like this novel
and fantasize about revenge. And part of the total conquest of Native peoples
has been the internal conquest by what Fall calls the Jesus Road. By and large,
Christianity over the years (in Oklahoma) has taught that God intended the
white men to bring civilization to the childlike Indians. Some grade school
teachers still take this approach. One of them, who became an Oklahoma state
representative, was proud of teaching history the old-fashioned way, without
this liberal hogwash of Native rights. She undoubtedly would not approve of the
murder of Indians. But that is what happened during the Manifest Destiny of
white conquest. This teacher’s creationism was inseparable from her belief in
benign white supremacy.
I
will close with some quotes. Joe was explaining the White Way to Sara. “The
white way of life was a simple but well-made pattern…wherein rich and powerful
people controlled the government by putting their own people into the
law-making bodies. ‘And they use the Jesus Road as a smoke screen to hide it
all from the common people. Haven’t you ever wondered why rich white men give
so much money to the churches? We don’t need an Indian state, Sara. We need an
Indian business. Business powerful enough to control politics. That’s what the
white way of life is all about. That’s civilization…There’s a way. If we take a
leaf from the white man’s book. His real book, and not the one with gold edges
that he reads in church.’”
