Indian Voices: Listening to Native Americans

Preface

xi Let me start with my own ignorance. While driving in rural Arizona for the first time, a road sign shocked me so much I did not know whether to brake, turn around, or look for a toll booth. As I recall, the sign read, “You are Entering the Navajo Nation.” I am? I thought. Nobody is stopping me? I’m allowed? Ever since childhood I had felt American to my core, almost primevally American, but for the first time within these United States I felt intrusive. After stopping to look at my map and realizing that to turn back was unwise, I drove on into, then eventually out of, the Navajo Nation. Later, taking stock of my ignorance, I tried to equate it with innocence. As a non-Native New Jersey schoolchild far from known Native influences, my education on the subject was cursory: Pocahontas was heroic, a scout could walk down a trail silently, and Indians used every part of a buffalo. (Not always, I later learned.) From schoolgirlhood to the Navajo Reservation sign, I was all but Nativeless in consciousness, but for only a few things I can point to. One is an eighth-grade report I unearthed titled Whiteman (spelled out with rifles and bullets) vs. Indian (spelled out with bows and arrows). In one corner of the cover, a smiling Indian stands by an intact teepee (as we spelled it); beside him is a frowning Pilgrim, his home burned to the ground. “Before,” I labeled that. In the opposite corner I had drawn a coonskin-hatted Davy Crockett–type man smiling by his intact cabin, while a frowning Indian Preface Prelims.qxd 12/14/10 8:31 AM Page xi stands beside a smoldering teepee. “After.” The text (which my teacher critiqued as “factually accurate and written in an easy style that I trust is yours”) included this passage about Whiteman vs. Indian wars. “The Indians, seemingly inferior, really had the best excuses. For why shouldn’t they?” On the last page, my pictorial summary went from “This is the land the Great Spirit gave us before the palefaces came,” to “We take the trail of tears as the white man pushes west,” and concluded, “Working at the arts of our fathers, we keep alive our Indian memories.” Americans love happy endings. In my education effluvia I also found a long-forgotten report I wrote as a college sophomore for an economics class. “The Economic Situation of the Contemporary American Indian.” As embarrassing as my (then) contention that reservations should be terminated was realizing that I had entirely forgotten several basic historical facts I had so carefully typed upon Eaton’s Corrasable Bond. The work (“represents thought,” critiqued the professor) was written in prose properly labeled sophomoric. “What they [American Indians] have given us is immeasurable and what we have done in return has little ethical justification.” What good are such spurts of documentable and empathetic interest about Native Americana, however, if neither remained in my memory? Then came a pair of events that galvanized Native America and at the very least startled non-Native America enough to stay in our collective memory: the 1969 takeover by Native activists of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and the 1973 confrontation at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. When each ended, though, so did much non-Native attention , including, yet again, mine. Then came Arizona. It was the site of one of many research road trips I was making around the country for a book about American classism as revealed through waitressing. This trip resembled others (lots of driving, lots of voluble waitresses), except for the inadvertent detour through the Navajo Nation. Not only did I feel ignorant but abashed. It so happened that I was on my way to find a waitress of the Tohono O’odham Nation in southern Arizona to interview. Obviously, I knew nothing of Native America, but I did know that when most people picture “waitress,” they do not picture a Native American. At least I could skew that stereotype. preface xii Prelims.qxd 12/14/10 8:31 AM Page xii Then, during a stopover in Tucson, a staff member at a museum warned me that “those people” (the Tohono O’odham) will never talk to an outsider . Hmm, “those people.” Another stereotype beckoned. Within hours, during the post-lunch...