Thursday, February 20, 2014

The Ordeal of the Native Americans

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.’”

No comments:

Post a Comment