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

4 ONE NAME TO RULE THEM ALL

7 7 4 ONE NAME TO RULE THEM ALL growing up in rural Alberta in a town with fewer Indians than ideas about Indians —Marilyn Dumont, A Really Good Brown Girl If North America doesn’t like Live Indians and it doesn’t like Legal Indians, why doesn’t the military-political-corporate complex just kill us off? I know this question sounds melodramatic and absurd, but I’ve been to rallies, marches, and protests where some clever wit has shouted out from the crowd, “We should have killed all you [expletives deleted] Indians when we had the chance.” I’d like to believe that this kind of remark is just the huffing and puffing of bigoted buffoonery. But I’ve heard it too many times. Such sentiments may not be the rule, but neither are they the exception. T h e I n c o n v e n i e n t I n d i a n 7 8 “Why didn’t we kill you off when we had the chance?” It’s a fair question. Why didn’t the United States keep dropping atomic bombs on Japan? If two bombs were good, wouldn’t four have been better? Why didn’t Turkey keep on killing Armenians after World War I? What stopped the murderous purges of China’s Mao Zedong, Russia’s Josef Stalin, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, and North Korea’s Kim Il Sung? A friend of mine suggested that I include George W. Bush for his efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and much of the rest of the world, but if I did that, I’d have to throw in AT&T, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and once you start down that road, there’s no end to the list of killers and killings. Even without the testimony of scholars and social scientists, we know that we don’t mind killing as much as we think we should. In particular, contemporary history has demonstrated that we don’t mind killing people we don’t like, and we don’t mind killing if it can be done at a distance and out of sight. And killing is especially acceptable if the slaughter can be attributed to a defect in the victims or to a flaw in their way of life or to an immutable law of nature. Or all of the above. How fortunate it is to have so many excellent ways of destroying a people without getting one’s hands damp. “Why didn’t we kill you off when we had the chance?” Maybe the answer isn’t all that complicated. Maybe killing is like most everything else. Do it enough times, and it loses its appeal. Maybe it gets boring. A pervasive myth in North America supposes that Native people and Native culture are trapped in a state of stasis. Those who subscribe to it imagine that, like Vladimir and Estragon in One Name to Rule Them All 7 9 Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, Natives were unable to move forward along the linear continuum of civilization, that we were waiting for someone to come along and lead us in the right direction. To free us from ourselves. In Beckett’s play, as everyone knows, Godot never arrives. In the Native version, Europeans never leave. In some ways, I envy Vladimir and Estragon. Who knows what unfortunate turns their lives might have taken had Godot managed to land on their shores? This idea, that Native people were waiting for Europeans to lead us to civilization, is just a variation on the old savagism versus civilization dichotomy, but it is a dichotomy that North America trusts without question. It is so powerful a toxin that it contaminates all of our major institutions. Under its influence, democracy becomes not simply a form of representative government, but an organizing principle that bundles individual freedoms, Christianity, and capitalism into a marketable product carrying with it the unexamined promise of wealth and prosperity. It suggests that anything else is, by default, savage and bankrupt. Of course, we know that this is untrue. The ancient Romans, Chinese, Egyptians, the Maya and the Incas, didn’t practice democracy, or Christianity for that matter, and they managed to create civilizations that were vigorous, civilizations that we admire. North America defends democracy as the cornerstone of social, religious, and political enlightenment because it is obliged to think...