Kiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State

Chapter 7. Conclusion

Chapter 7. Conclusion No less a figure than Walt Whitman created the most seductively eloquent language of inevitability and regret with which to surround the price of American progress: There is something about these aboriginal Americans, in their highest characteristic representations, essential traits, and the ensemble of their physique and physiognomy—something very remote, very lofty, arousing comparisons with our own civilized ideals—somethingthatourliterature,portraitpainting,etc.,have never caught, and that will almost certainly never be transmitted to the future, even as a reminiscence. No biographer, no historian , no artist, has grasp’d it—perhaps could not grasp it. It is so different, so far outside our standards of eminent humanity.1 With that, Indians could be hustled out of history books and national memory with a clear conscience. Once the slavery issue had been dealt with, the United States enjoyed an uncluttered narrative of its nation building. On December 2, 1952, Ella Deloria, a member of the prominent Deloria family from the Yankton Sioux Reservation in southeastern SouthDakota,wrotetoH.E.Beebe,whofundedthetypingforDeloria’s Waterlily manuscript:2 “This may sound a little naïve, Mr. Beebe, but I actually feel that I have a mission: To make the Dakota people understandable , as human beings, to the white people who have to deal with them. I feel that one of the reasons for the lagging advancement of the Dakotas has been that those who came out among them to teach and preach, went on the assumption that the Dakotas had nothing, no 152 Conclusion rules of life, no social organization, no ideals. And so they tried to pour white culture into, as it were, a vacuum.” Deloria, who enjoyed great respect for her abilities as an expert translator of Lakota and Dakota dialects of Sioux from an array of texts, did not intend to leave representations of Indians to the likes of Whitman and others who shared his views. She was a close associate of Franz Boaz and Ruth Benedict. At their urging, Deloria wrote Waterlily, a fictionalized account of a nineteenth-century Siouan women’s life. Deloria’s primary objective was to use a more personal approach than did the anthropological approaches of the time, which flattened Indian people into one-dimensional representations of ethnographic data. Written in the 1940s, Waterlily symbolized a Native woman’s effort to humanize the Sioux to non-Native people. For Native people, tribalism is the expression of their humanity. The social values that intertwine work habits, ceremonial life, gender relations , and kin relations are rooted in ideals. Deloria’s heroine Waterlily, responding to the behavior of ill-kempt pioneer children, wrote: Here were unbelievably wild, untutored children. No one had ever said to them, “No, don’t do that . . . see, nobody does so” and thereby shamed them into good behavior toward those about them. There were no others about them from whom they might learn by imitation. And so they were growing up without civility —and the results were terrifying to see. Camp-circle people were civilized; they knew how to treat one another. They had rules. These children were wild because they lacked any standards of social behavior. It came over Waterlily as she observed the unfortunate children , so unkempt and so hostile [in response to her friendly gesture], how very much people needed human companions. It was the only way to learn how to be human. People were at once a check and a spur to one another. Everyone needed others for comparison, for a standard for himself. This measuring and evaluating of self was only possible in camp-circle life, where everyone was obliged to be constantly aware of those about him[.] 153 Conclusion At mid-century Deloria wrote to the American unwillingness to recognize Native humanity, present in all aspects of tribal life. Americans, like other colonizers before them, have resisted the simple truth that Indians were not empty vessels waiting to be filled with Christianity, Western ideas about work and productivity, an admiration for capitalism , and desire for acquisition—that is, unwilling to abandon tribalism—they pronounced them inhuman. The Western ideology that linked progress and perfection lacked an authentic acceptance of Indian civilization. Individualism was critical to the kind of progress reformers prescribed for Indians. Ella Deloria observed the vision became a program: “Those who sought to ‘individualize’ Indians . . . developed strategies of subjectivity and emotion production that aimed to prescribe how an ‘individual’ should properly pursue...