Captured in the Middle: Tradition and Experience in Contemporary Native American Writing

House Made of Cards: The Construction of American Indians

House Made ofCards The Construction ofAmerican Indians ~ THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICAN INDIANS BY European diseases and military technology is obvious. What is less visible is how various language appellations have harmed Indian cultures. For example, words such as savage, enemy, them, and other create the objectification necessary for one group to treat another as if the members were not fellow human beings. Once intellectual separation is achieved, the ways and means ofdestruction become of primary concern; rationalization follows. Justification of the destruction ofAmerican Indians has been so successful that contemporary majority culture has effectively suppressed acknowledgment of wrongs and ignores continuing genocide. Such denial can be observed in many ways. For example, when I first began to introduce into the classroom materials illuminating American Indian genocide, the reaction was always the same. Asmall but passionate number ofstudents would insist on acknowledging the horror of what had happened, but the majority regularly asserted they were not responsible because the atrocities had happened before they were born. Pointing out the continuing genocide among Indian people, as evidenced by the forty-seven-year average life expectancy for Indian males, 21 CAPTURED IN THE MIDDLE was a way to counterargue the claim, but such point-by-point argument was never truly effective. What I find more productive is to ask students to prepare an individual oral performance in which they relate their own lives to the classroom discussions and readings. The shift to individuality successfuHy redefines certain group dynamics. For example, when students were treated as part ofa large group they relied on information they had already acquired from family, friends, and the media. Conversely, when they are invited to examine their own experiences and relate them to those of American Indians, the students look more closely at the ways tribal people lived in the past, their present circumstances, and what their ways oflife have to offer for the future. I also ask students to write a paper relating what they know about American Indians and explaining where they obtained the information. It is amazing not only to realize how much nearly all students know about Indians, but also to note their wide variety of sources. Unfortunately , most of the cultural information students have absorbed at random is not very useful, ranging from urban myths, to stereotypes, to the Hollywood paradigm ofthe eighteenth-century Sioux warrior. Although these images are notparticularly useful, theyare not nearly as pernicious as the other kinds of troublesome information that form the basis ofthe formal and informal codes by which Indian people are dealt with by the forces of government, law, education, publishing, and art. These more formal sources of information first gave authority to the idea that Indians were uncivilized, and now depict them as inherently maladjusted. In "The Man Made ofWords," his masterful discussion ofthe relation between language and experience, Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday says, "The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined." I As with many things related to American Indian cultures, the more important meanings of this statement are found in its deeper, postrnodern allegorical subtleties. "The Man Made of Words," written around 1970, intensified the issues among language, landscape, and identity to show them as much more complex than simply a reflection of those places where we live or upon which we make money. In fact, Momaday's insights are much clearer to us now, when we are coming to realize that all relationships, animate and inanimate, are complexly intertwined. 22 House Made ofCards Similarly, Momaday's observation ofthe tragic nature of"going unimagined " not only relates to events and characters, but also is connected to the very structure of ideas that events and characters are intended to conyey. Momaday's statement has an unusual complexity because Indians have never suffered from being unimagined. In fact, D. H. Lawrence noted a sincere yearning on the part of many Americans to be Indian. On a less romantic level, Louis Owens observes, "In fact, the Indian in today's world consciousness is a product of literature, history, and art, and a product that, as an invention, often bears little resemblance to actual , living Native American people."2 These inventions, or imaginings, including the stereotypes ofnoble savage, stoic warrior, libidinous princess , cigar-store totem, rainmaking shaman, and tearful ecologist, had many social uses. Some have framed elaborate rationalizations for widespread abuses of people, animals, and the environment, while others have served...