Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics

Seven: Resketching Anglo-Amerindian Identity Politics

SEVEN Resketching Anglo­Amerindian Identity Politics Scott Michaelsen But what has been fancied as life in the forest, has had no little resemblance to those Utopian schemes of government and happiness which rather denote the human mind run mad. HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCR AFT, The Myth of Hiawatha,1856 I Daniel K.Richter's magisterial history of early Iroquois politics and iden­ tity, The Ordeal of the Longhouse (1992), moves from the deep past (ap­ proximately 1000 A.D.) forward: "The story perhaps best begins in the beginning," reads the first line of the text (8).Richter is able to accom­ plish this feat through the process that historians call "'upstreaming,' that is, the interpretation of historical sources in light of ethnological and folkloric materials collected in later periods; one moves 'up' the historical stream from a better to a less well documented era" (Richter 1992, 5). There are good reasons to be suspicious of narratives about identity and, therefore, "identity politics" produced through upstreaming.1 Such narratives— produced through the rose­tinted memories and memo­ rizations of informants, living and dead, and filtered again through the similarly colored preconceptions of the historian­anthropologist—tend to produce the most astonishingly stereotypical and, recently, romantic­ utopic­inflected versions of Amerindia. In Richter's case, he produces Amerindians of "sublimely" "spiritual unity"— "busy," "calm," "warm," "peaceful" (7,18). This is an Amerindia of "nuclear families" linked by 221 222 Scott Michaelsen an "ethic of sharing and reciprocity," an "upside­down capitalism" in which leaders competed to "give the most away" (19, 22).To give this its proper name, Richter's Iroquois are liberal communitarian, a kind of cross between Andrew Carnegie and his "Gospel of Wealth" and Christo­ pher Lasch's sense of American lower­middle­class values in The True and Only Heaven (1991). This is, above all, an Amerindia of "consen­ sus" — a "noncompetitive" and "noncoercive society" that, in Richter's most remarkable claim, engaged in a series of terrible wars against neigh­ bors only because their neighbors failed to live up to Iroquois values of reciprocity or gift giving (22,45,40,49). Algonquian peoples, then, from an Iroquois perspective, simply were not giving enough to justify their continued existence. Strangely,all of this comes after Richter has signaled that he does not want to essentialize the Iroquois, that he hopes to pre­ sent the Iroquois "simply as peoples... caught up by forces... over which they had little control," and that "most of the mental world of the men and women who populate these pages is irrevocably lost" (2, 4). But it is upstreaming that has saved the day, permitting Richter to say that there is a "rock of traditional rituals," a "spiritual... unity," that tran­ scends history, even hundreds of years of encounter history. Iroquois identity is "flexible," he concedes, but "perdurable" (3). He says that "core traditional values" "survived" the whole of colonization—that year 1000 Iroquois are the same people who entered the middle i/oos (4). The problems with this approach are rather obvious. On the basis of literally nothing, it assumes one thousand years of identity without epis­ temological breaks or even bends in the road—folklore collected "to­ day" can tell the truth about Amerindian identity in the deep past. In Richter's case, what Amerindians "remember" about themselves need not be subjected to the obvious questions: Does the collected folklore reflect what Amerindians want to be remembered as (is it fantasy)? Does it reflect present consciousness rather than past (is folklore in general always about the here and now)? Is the informant simply telling the folklorist what she or he wants to hear ("Tell me about your wonderful past")? Are various informants ideologically positioned within Amer­ indian thought (for example, male or elite, or senior, or Indianist)?Fur­ thermore, Richter assumes one thousand years during which the "spiri­ tual" values and Amerindian identity are one and the same, and during Resketching Anglo­Amerindian Identity Politics 223 which period Iroquois identity manages to exclude everything else as secondary or even utterly marginal to itself, such as the colonial, the diplomatic, the economic, the political, the juridical, the sexual.2 Noth­ ing, it appears, can alter a monolithic Iroquois identity, save a dissolu­ tion of its conception of the spirit world.3 Rather than begin at this sort of "beginning," one alternatively might choose to start with the very end of Anglo­Amerindian...