In Deep

Deep: the word is a flatiron, an anchor. To be “in deep” (and often, “in deep fill-in-the-blank”) is to be trapped, with no known exit. There may be debt, actual or abstract, to scale. The word is a hole, a grave to haunt the living.

For those working in American Indian studies, even part-time, it can often feel just this way: like we are shackled to a mausoleum of decaying possibilities, dragged down by the hopes of others. Not incidentally, the word deep itself is often used to convey the awesome power and profundity of indigenous cultures, the impressive gravity and resilience of tradition. Yet this wonder too is a trap, a mistaken assumption of the Indian’s radical alterity and stasis: poised on a hilltop in buckskin and headdress, with a faraway gaze into a plane of existence no one else can access. Deep. This Indian is a product of someone else’s fantasy, a collective embodiment of the broader American appetite for mysticism, meaning, belonging.

From our nation’s earliest moment, that archetype has beckoned: members of the Tea Party (then and now) dressed up as Indians to express their indignation over taxation from external entities. For numerous American authors, indigenous characters and references offer handy opportunities to capture or refract myriad grievances and anxieties. Most common, perhaps, is the wise, romantic, ecological anticapitalist Indian who safeguards the spirit and memory of our deepest national values at the moments when we seem to be in acute danger of forgetting them. As exemplified in the popular 1970s ad campaign by Iron Eyes Cody, paddling and weeping his way down a garbage-strewn river, Indians don’t like littering, pollution, or multisyllabic expression. Of course, Cody was actually an Italian-American actor “playing Indian” on screen, and in his private life as well; he is simply one of a litany of white men in redface on the silver screen, a phenomenon so ubiquitous that it suggests there is an Indian spirit lurking somewhere deep in all of us. Some paradox. But what is an Indian to do except play along? As Comanche critic and Smithsonian curator Paul Chaat Smith says, “we dimly accept the role of spiritual masters and first environmentalists. . . . We take pride in Westerns which make us look gorgeous (which we are!). . . . We secretly wish we were more like the Indians in the movies” because “maybe it’s better to be vilified and romanticized than completely ignored” (27, 6). Most Indian critics are not as frank as Smith, though: rather than acknowledging the depth of our entrenchment, we assert sovereignty and self-determination instead. And why not? No one wants to admit that their identity is the product of a collective fantasy, an extended projection of fear and anxiety, a compromise elected over the alternative: utter disappearing.

Which is precisely what has happened in those areas of the country—most notably, the entire Eastern Seaboard—where Indians are presumed to be extinct. The tourism website Deep South U.S.A. proudly advertises the Native American heritages of Mississippi and Alabama (Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana seem to lack such attractions) in ways that confirm the exodus of indigenous peoples well before the infamous Trail of Tears. “After the coming of the white man, the Native American tribes were unfortunately destroyed or forcibly removed from their homelands,” the website claims. “The Natchez tribe was nearly exterminated by the French in retaliation for the Natchez rebellion at Fort Rosalie in 1729. The smaller Yazoo tribe was also nearly annihilated by the French and their Indian allies, the Choctaw, for their part in the 1729 rebellion.” The site’s history lesson leaves readers to infer that the South’s Indians were annihilated by Europeans—and by other Indians—long before Andrew Jackson and the federal government’s policies of removal, relocation, and termination could finish the job. Such omissions are typical of our national amnesia over the uncanny stains on our country’s beginnings, likely because the crimes committed against American Indians are a nightmare from which we have yet to awake. Easier instead to point to the nearest...