Kiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State

Chapter 1. The American Problem

While working on this project I read Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz.1 Levi was an Italian Jew caught in the Nazi net near the end of World War II. He spent ten months at Auschwitz, surviving to see the allied forces liberate the death camp and later writing a stunningly detailed account of life within its walls. Auschwitz was a place of unimaginable horrors, but even there, prisoners developed social organization, an economy, habit, and practice, crafting a version of day-to-day life. The prisoners’ daily routines, carried out against a backdrop of genocide, required them to experience simultaneously death and creation, exploitation and human connections, self-interestedness and shared values . Levi’s attention to the painful details of the Jews’ practices and routines within Auschwitz illustrates the significance of small measures. The practices of Levi and his fellow prisoners constituted a means of self-preservation. Separated from Levi and others ’ experiences, we possess the luxury of using small measures as a lens into the lives they constructed, preserving their humanity under a regime that saw them as inhuman. Consider Levi’s description of the strategic nighttime rituals of men who shared the tight physical spaces of the prison dormitories. Nights in Auschwitz were dominated by dreams that released desolating grief, interrupted every few hours by the need to relieve oneself of the watery soup served from the camp’s kitchens. The nightly procession to the common bucket became a performance of “obscene torment and indelible shame.” The bucket bound the men in their mutual misery, but also called for calculation and foresight cultivated by experience. Chapter 1.The American Problem 2 The American Problem Each man wanted to avoid carrying an overflowing bucket to the latrine for emptying since the waste of many men inevitably would slop onto one’s feet and legs. Given that men slept two to a narrow mattress, their feet at opposite ends, each became invested in teaching the rules for elimination to his bunkmate. Misery, calculation, and social relationships of unknowable duration between men threatened with the possibility of death at a moment’s notice converged into a gray space of victimization, agency, choices, and unequal power. I visited the still new Holocaust Museum soon after finishing Levi’s book and rushed to the research center to find what I could about the author. I received a slim file, which opened to an account of his death some five years before. I naively had assumed that a person who could write Survival in Auschwitz was impervious to the kind of torment that leads to suicide. Scholars and admirers were left to ponder the reasons for his death without benefit of explanations from Levi himself, without certainty that his death was self-inflicted. The stories he left behind ask us to reflect on irreconcilable experiences: destruction and creativity , dehumanization and dignity, peace of mind in the midst of constant calculation. The probability that Levi killed himself also reminds us that the mark of victimization can never be totally erased. Levi’s account of the death camp led me to look at the American Indian reservation with fresh eyes. Levi, though much closer to his material than I am to the Kiowas’ experience, set me on a search for the commonplace in uncommon circumstances where uncertainty, deprivation , and unknowable outcomes dominated life. Survival in Auschwitz challenges limited and limiting frames of victimization, agency, and resistance, each on its own an inadequate model for examining matters of genocide and self-preservation. Levi’s account of creative humanenergytransformedintoself -replicationinfusedwithsocialvalues inspired my search for the Kiowas’ humanity as they faced a genocidal invasion by the state. In 1856 the Indian agent for tribes south of the Arkansas River confronted Dohausen, one of the most respected Kiowa leaders of the nineteenth century. The agent threatened to withhold goods from 3 The American Problem the Kiowas if raids against American settlers continued. Dohausen rebuked the agent for threats he saw as indicative of the Americans’ impetuosity2 : The white chief is a fool; he is a coward; his heart is small—not larger than a pebble stone; his men are not strong—too few to contend against my warriors; they are women. There are three chiefs—the white chief, the Spanish chief; and myself. The Spanish and myself are men; we do bad towards each other sometimes stealing horses and taking scalps, but...