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2 THE END OF THE TRAIL
- University of Minnesota Press
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2 1 2 THE END OF THE TRAIL The indian is a daemon, a modernist simulation of the other in the wicked cause of savagism and civilization. —Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses When my brother and I were kids, we would dress up and play cowboys and Indians with the rest of the kids. I have a photograph of Chris and me in our leather vests, leather chaps, and cowboy hats, looking laconic and tough as cowboys looked. For a nine-year-old, I cut a fine figure in my Western garb. I’m carrying a rifle, with two six-guns strapped to my waist, so there’s no mistaking who I’m supposed to be. Now that I think about it, I don’t remember anyone who wanted to be an Indian. Not my brother. Not my cousins. Not even the girls in the neighborhood, who were generally good sports about such things. Having said that, I should acknowledge that a friend of mine, T h e I n c o n v e n i e n t I n d i a n 2 2 the Canadian historian Brian Dippie, did like to dress up like an Indian. He sent me pictures of himself as a bare-chested young lad in a headdress, complete with drum and tomahawk, emulating his hero, Straight Arrow, the popular character from the radio show of the same name that ran from about 1949 to 1952. Straight Arrow, as some of you might remember, was a Comanche who was orphaned and raised by a White family. As an adult, he posed as a White man named Steve Adams, but whenever “danger threatened innocent people . . . and when evil-doers plotted against justice,” Adams would rush off to his secret gold cave, get dressed up in “traditional” Comanche garb, grab his golden bow and golden arrows, leap onto the back of his golden Palomino stallion, Fury, and ride off to right wrongs. At the time, it was the only show that I knew that featured an Indian as the hero, a hero who pretended to be a White in order to mask his secret Indian identity. So maybe that was it. Maybe I wore my cowboy outfit to hide my secret identity. Although, if that was my intention, it wasn’t particularly effective. My six-guns have long since vanished, but I still have my vest and chaps. One Hallowe’en, when Benjamin was eighteen, he asked if he could wear my old outfit to a Halloween party. The chaps were much too tight, the vest much too small, but there was a certain nostalgia in watching my son walk down the street in the snow. An Indian disguised as a cowboy. Maybe when my grandkids are old enough, they’ll want to continue this family tradition. I should ask Dippie if he kept his Straight Arrow outfit. I don’t expect that kids in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America lined up to play Indians any more than we did, though their parents found Indians interesting enough. Almost as [3.81.79.135] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:20 GMT) The End of the Trail 2 3 soon as colonies were established at Plymouth, Jamestown, Acadia, and Quebec, and folks found time for more contemplative and artistic activities, Indians began appearing in literature, art, and popular culture. Native people in this early period were a critical part of everyday life. Even though diseases had greatly reduced populations along the eastern seaboard, Indians were still a potent military force, and they were also players in colonial economies. Native people had not been pushed west just yet, had not been reduced and relegated to reserves and reservations just yet. That would come later. In the beginning, Indians were more difficult to ignore. Explorers who treated with Indians in the early years tended to report on Indian–White relationships in generally positive terms. Colonists, who had to live with Indians, were more disposed to dwell on what they saw as the darker side of Native character. Armed with the divine imperative to subdue the earth, they were, no doubt, annoyed that the virgin lands they had imagined, the empty wildernesses they had been promised, were occupied, and, gazing through the lens that seventeenth-century Christianity provided, most were only able to see the basic dichotomy that framed their world, a world that was either light or dark, good or evil, civilized or savage. A world in...