The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

5 WE ARE SORRY

9 9 5 WE ARE SORRY Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one? —Lee Maracle, Ravensong Wheneversomeonesays“PlanB,”I’minstantlyreminded of that wondrously horrid movie that Ed Wood wrote and directed back in 1956. Plan 9 from Outer Space. The film was shot in just five days and cost less than $20,000 to make, much of the capital coming from a group of Baptist churches. How Wood got these folks to invest in a horror/science fiction movie is a mystery, although the best story has him convincing the clergy that if Plan 9 was successful, the profits could be used to make twelve movies, about the lives of each of the apostles. In any case, the churches took their role as investors seriously, insisting that the original title, Grave Robbers from Space, T h e I n c o n v e n i e n t I n d i a n 1 0 0 be changed, that any dialogue they considered profane be removed, and that all the members of the cast be baptized. The part about baptism is probably apocryphal, but had it been a deal-breaker, Wood would, no doubt, have obliged. In the film, aliens try to stop human beings from creating a doomsday weapon that will destroy the universe. In 1980, Michael Medved hailed Plan 9 as the worst film ever made, but when I look at the movie with its cheap sets, its dreadful script, its pedestrian acting, its incompetent direction, and its rumors of mandatory conversion, it reminds me a great deal of North American Indian policy. Indeed, North American Indian policy in the last half of the nineteenth century had many of the qualities of a bad movie. It was a low-budget affair with a simplistic plot: politicians, soldiers, clerics, social scientists, and people of unexamined goodwill dash about North America, saving themselves from Indians by saving Indians from themselves. But, unlike Plan 9 from Outer Space, Plan B didn’t include the option to get up and leave the theater. For 250 years, Whites and Indians had fought as enemies, had fought as allies, had made peace, had broken the peace, and had fought each other again. But when Great Britain, France, and the newly formed United States sat down in 1783 to hammer out the details of the Treaty of Paris that would officially end the American Revolution, Native people, who had fought alongside both England and the colonies, were neither invited to the negotiations nor mentioned in the treaty itself. So long and thanks for all the fish. Indians were mentioned in the Treaty of Ghent, which tidied up the War of 1812. Article Nine specified that the United States cease We Are Sorry 1 0 1 all hostilities toward the “Nations of Indians” and restore to the tribes all the “possessions, rights, and privileges which they may have enjoyed or been entitled to in one thousand eight hundred and eleven previous to such hostilities.” The Americans more or less forgot about this particular article as soon as they signed the treaty, but anyone watching the film shouldn’t have been surprised. Throughout the history of Indian–White relations in North America, there have always been two impulses afoot. Extermination and assimilation. Extermination of Native peoples, especially in the early years, was not considered “genocide”—a term coined in 1944 by the legal scholar Raphael Lemkin—so much as it was deemed a by-product of “manifest destiny”—a term struck in the 1840s when U.S.DemocratsusedittojustifythewarwithMexico.Extermination was also seen as an expression of “natural law,” a concept conceived by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C. and used by the Spanish humanist Juan de Sepúlveda in the sixteenth as a legal justification for the enslavement of Native people in the Caribbean and Mexico. The means of extermination didn’t much matter. Bullets were okay. Disease was fine. Starvation was acceptable. In the minds of many, these were not so much cruelties as they were variations on the principles underlying the concept “survival of the fittest,” a phrase that Herbert Spencer had fashioned in 1864 and that would become synonymous with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The second impulse, assimilation, argued for salvation and improvement. One of the questions that the Spanish worried over waswhetherornotIndianswerehumanbeings.Thiswasthesubject of the great debate organized by...