More Native American Diversity

 

In my book, Forgotten Landscapes, I wrote that precontact Native Americans accepted more cultural diversity as normal than do most modern white Americans. The principal example I gave was the tolerance of different tribes and languages, which was unavoidable since there were so many tribes with mutually unintelligible languages.

Another example, which I did not include in my book, was an acceptance of sexual diversity. The conservatives would have thrown a fit if I had said this in the book. This is not the reason I left it out, but I just needed to keep the book from rambling. Native American tribes had individuals who did not fit into the model of two distinct genders, just like every other cultural group. In particular, there were some people who did not identify with the prevailing sexual roles. Formerly called berdache, they are today called two-spirit. The meanings of this and related terms, as well as a list of terms used in the Native languages, is given in the Wikipedia article.

The presence of this group of Natives, in each tribe, was recognized as long ago as in a nineteenth-century painting by George Catlin, and in the diary of Don Pedro Fages in the Portolà Expedition in eighteenth-century California. In both of these cases, the two-spirit men were held in esteem by the tribe.

Stages of Conquest

The Native American nations have suffered nearly complete conquest by the descendants of white Europeans, both from the outside and from the inside. From the outside, by physical conquest, and from the inside, by conversion to religious views that tend to justify white superiority. Not much is left except the glowing coals of cultural identity and even these can be, as in the case of my own Cherokee tribe, which is more white than red, very dim.

There have been at least three stages of this conquest. Starting over 500 years ago, Europeans came to North and South America and began killing and enslaving natives, taking their land, and introducing diseases that decimated their populations. This mostly occurred on the east coast. Many Native American tribes moved westward to get away from this conquest. This resulted in a westward push, in which eastern tribes pushed other tribes toward the west, compressing them and forcing them into conflict. Many of the intertribal conflicts were therefore caused indirectly by Europeans.

In some cases, smaller tribes took refuge with larger ones, merging with them even if they kept their own cultural identity. Therefore by the 1800s the larger tribes contained smaller ones. For example, the Coushattas, Yuchis, and Natchis were compressed into the Muskogee Creek tribe, and some of the Ottawas, Quapaws, and Delawares into the Cherokee tribe. This was the first stage of conquest: Europeans compressed smaller tribes into the larger ones.

The second stage was when the United States conquered the larger tribes. For the Cherokees and Muskogees, this was the Trail of Tears during the 1830s. When the Cherokees and Muskogees (as well as three other tribes) were forced into what is now Oklahoma, the remnants of the smaller tribes went with them. When what became Indian Territory was divided among the “Five Civilized Tribes,” individuals of the smaller tribes had allotments within the land of the larger tribes. To this day, you can find Quapaws living among Cherokees in northeastern Oklahoma, and Yuchis with the Creeks. For years, driving between Durant and Tulsa, Oklahoma, I passed through Wetumka, a little town which happens to be the headquarters of the Alabama Quassarte Tribal Town. I did not know it existed until they got a storefront building and painted a sign on it. I searched online to find out who they were. Quassarte is a variant form of Coushatta.

We often think of this second stage of conquest as the first: independent tribes got conquered by Europeans and later Americans. But in many cases, smaller tribes were conquered by Americans only after Americans had forced them to take refuge with larger tribes.

The third stage occurred when Americans swindled from the Natives the land allotments that the government had given them. In Oklahoma, this occurred immediately before and after statehood in 1907. For example, the conquered Creek people were given land allotments, with the Yuchi and Coushatta among them, but white swindlers, in collusion with white judges, quickly took these allotments away from them. In many cases they did so by forged deeds that claimed the Natives had sold the land to them; or, the white land speculators lied about the amount of money they were paying for the land by conveniently misplacing a decimal point so that the Native seller ended up getting only one-tenth as much money as he or she was promised. In many cases, Native children (and adults) were placed under “guardianship” and the “guardians” kept most of the money for themselves. In a few cases, the swindlers got the Natives to leave the land to them as heirs, and then they killed the Natives. In such ways, the large tribes were conquered a second time, and the small tribes a third time.

This is the reason that many Natives in Oklahoma live in desperate poverty even though their land allotments a hundred years ago often contained rich reserves of oil. And this poverty is evident if you drive through Native communities in the midst of rich oil land. Consider Wetumka, the city where the Alabama Quassarte Tribal Town is located. For the first few years I drove through, nearly every building I saw was dilapidated. Then new buildings began to arise, very fancy and rich amidst the rubble of the old buildings. The first was, of course, a bank. Next came two buildings associated with providing medical care to the Natives. You see, many of the Native Americans rely on health care at government expense because they are poor; and they are poor because white Americans stole their land.

The Americans who stole the land reaped immense private profits, but the conquered Natives must now be assisted at public expense. Private corporations got the profits, while the taxpayers ended up with the costs. This happens a lot. For example, tobacco corporations got rich while taxpayers paid medical expenses of people who got cancer and emphysema. It was not until the tobacco lawsuit that was settled in 1999 that the tobacco corporations ever paid any money for the damage that their products did, and then only a small portion of it. A similar thing will soon happen with global warming: the Koch Brothers get rich from oil and carbon pollution, but when it comes time to build sea walls to keep the rising ocean waters out of Miami, it will be at public expense. But when you see the poverty of Native American communities, you see the human face of private profits at public expense, and the lingering evidence of the white conquest of Native American nations.

Black Gold

For the last century, the most important source of energy for the human economy has been oil. We hear all the time, not the least from my blogs, about the environmental costs, including global climate change, of our oil dependence. And while it may seem like a distant memory even to those of us who lived through it, dependence on foreign oil has caused immense economic and geopolitical instability. It has taken decades for America to get to the point at which we import less oil than we produce, but we still use a lot of foreign oil. And we spew a lot of carbon into the air.

What I wish to address now is the immense toll of injustice that comes from our dependence on oil. Oil is a highly concentrated source of energy, both in terms of the number of calories of energy per volume and in the concentration of oil resources in specific geographical areas. In contrast, sunlight shines more or less evenly on the Earth’s surface. Although some places in the world are cloudier than others, and places far to the north or south get significantly less sunlight, solar energy is broadly distributed. The same is almost as true of wind energy. Low-level geothermal energy (which can be used to stabilize indoor temperatures) is also widespread, although only a few places have really hot rocks near the surface that can allow steam turbines to produce electricity. The fact that oil is concentrated in a few places means that whoever controls those places (whether governments or corporations) has an immense amount of geopolitical power.

And it is not necessarily the people who live in those places who have the power.

Native Americans from all over what is now the United States were forced into what is now Oklahoma, mostly in the nineteenth century, so that white people could have their land. The white-dominated government of the U.S. supposedly had a constitution, but whites broke every treaty with Native Americans, in complete disregard of the constitution as well as the most basic concepts of dignity and humanity. Then, much to the consternation of the government, oil was discovered on Indian land. While in some cases (as with the Osage tribe) this meant wealth for the Native Americans, what it usually meant was that whites decided to take Native land by any means necessary or imaginable, to treat Natives like vermin, as nothing more than impediments to oil production. By and large, having oil land has been a curse to Native Americans. I am speaking from the viewpoint of Oklahoma, where I was born and where I live, and the experiences of my Cherokee ancestors.

If you want to know about the many devious ways in which whites illegally took Native American land and oil rights, the most definitive source remains Angie Debo’s And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes. It is about how the land promised and then allotted to Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Muskogees, and Seminoles was stolen from them (us) during the twentieth century. Lies and forged documents were routinely used to defraud tribal members. The courts appointed “guardians” to take care of the supposedly simple-minded Indians; these guardians would then sell or rent the allotted land and keep all, or most, of the money. In one case, a guardian had 51 Indians under his control. Three of them were children who held title to very productive oil land, but the guardian did not tell them about it. They were living in a hollow tree and begging for food when a conscientious state government agent found them. In this one case, the “guardian” had his privileges taken away; but this rarely happened. And this “guardian” never went to jail. Jail was for drunk Indians, not for the whites who defrauded them. And even today, prison is mostly for poor drug offenders, not for financial crimes committed by the rich, with an occasional exception like Bernard Madoff.

But it wasn’t just fraud that whites committed to get oil land from Indians (and from freed slaves within the Indian nations). It was also murder. The whites would trick the Indians (some of them children) to making them the heirs, and then they would kill them. In Glenn Pool (now called Glenpool, right down the highway from my house in Tulsa) whites dynamited two black Muskogee boys while they slept to get their land. Glenn Pool was the massive oil deposit that made Tulsa famous. In Choctaw County, the next county over from the place where I work, whites killed Choctaws with carbolic acid or ground glass (put in their food to make them bleed to death from the inside) in order to get their land.

When I read this, on page 200 of Debo’s book, I could not do or think about anything else all evening, just devastated by learning about this. For those of you who think that the last time that whites massacred Indians was at Wounded Knee in 1890, think again! Everyone has heard about the four little black girls who got burned in the church fire set by white arsonists in the 1960s, but has anyone ever heard about those two little black boys in Glenn Pool? At least my ancestors were only defrauded, not murdered.

My point is that nobody has ever defrauded or murdered anyone else in order to get a choice spot for putting up a wind generator or a solar collector. There will never be a Koch Brothers of solar energy.

Is it any wonder that so many Native Americans (and Native American freedmen) are so demoralized? Especially the ones who still live in their own ethnic communities. The white governments of the United States and of Oklahoma have driven them into the ground. Toxic waste sites are often near communities of color; and in Oklahoma, that means Native American communities, such as the Cherokee-Quapaw town of Picher, which drips with toxic metal contamination.

I would expect to see Native American rage over these things, but the steamrolling of Native pride by white culture has been so complete that Natives are in some cases embarrassed to not be white. What should Native Americans do? There is no clear answer. In his 1970 novel The Ordeal of Running Standing, Thomas Fall wrote about a fullblood Oklahoma Indian who tried to be white and use the powers of the white economy against rich whites, failed, and then did a useless but heroic act of defiance against the overwhelming white powers. (If you want to know what it was, you have to read my review in the previous blog entry.) But nothing like this ever happened or ever will. The Indian nations are conquered now and forever. And oil was part of the reason.

As I said, I speak from Oklahoma experience. But anyone who listens to the news knows that rich people (some of them black) get even richer from the lucrative oil reserves in Nigeria, while the poor black Nigerians live in desperate poverty. And today the struggle continues in Ecuador, where oil companies take some land from the native tribes of the Amazon, and pour their wastes on the rest of it. El Oriente of Ecuador (east of the Andes) is the new Oklahoma.

Moving away from energy-dense fuel sources is essential for the ecological and economic future of the world, and also so that, at long last, justice can be done in the world. Oil is just too much of a temptation; it makes evil people destroy their fellow humans.

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.’”