Offensiveness

They’re making a new Lone Ranger movie. What’s worse, Johnny Depp, a decidedly non-native, has been cast as Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s trusted injun assistant. What’s worse, a photo of Johnny Depp in costume as Tonto has been released, and it looks like this: 

 

Of course, I myself was outraged over this, but the uproar among American Indians was far less than I thought it’d be. There were a scattered handful of blog entries and newspaper articles condemning the casting and costuming, but I could find almost as many defenses of it as well. (Among the articles condemning the film, though, I highly recommend this exquisite McSweeney’s letter, where I first found out about the film. Despite being very justifiably angry, it sparkles with wit and is a wonderful read: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-johnny-depps-tonto) But for the most part, there was a noncommittal sigh from the Indian community, and I was curious why.

This would be the part where I would talk to my American Indian best friend, to laugh and come to warm realizations about him and myself. However I’m white, and have lived in the isolated southern communities my parents chose for us for most of my life—my interactions, let alone friendships, with American Indians have been sporadic at best. I do know, however, that the Lone Ranger is a touchy subject for many Native Americans (see: virtually all of Sherman Alexie’s Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven). The show has been long criticized for its racist attitudes towards Indians, with Tonto being portrayed as a stoic fool and the Lone Ranger his white savior. Even the name “Tonto” is offensive—according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it means “foolish” (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Tonto&allowed_in_frame=0). The new Lone Ranger film is seeming like worse and worse an idea.

So why hasn’t there been much uproar over this so far? I suspect at this time that the American Indians (and I hate to use such a blanket term to describe many different peoples) are simply too worn out to say or do anything about this. After centuries of oppression, bigotry and hate,             perhaps a person becomes too exhausted to respond to another offense against their race and culture. After all, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, that old holdover from our Andrew Jackson days, still exists. Of course, the organization is almost all-white. Just based of the website alone, prominently featuring the bone-colored face of the Bureau President, things seem unlikely to change. 

After Visiting Cherokee, NC

The first thing I saw said, “Let Cherokee History depend on God, not alcohol!” with a big exclamation mark at the end. There was a cartoon bottle, and a pair of hands descending from a hastily painted heavens—the whole sign looked simultaneously furious, slapdash, and oddly quaint. I suppose all of those words could be used to describe the current state of Cherokee nation itself. As I was thinking about all of this, our ancient minivan pulled over the next hill and we entered Cherokee, NC, one of the oldest post-colonial settlements of Indians in the country.

Of course, both the Judeo-Christian God and alcohol were imposed upon the Cherokee nation by white settlers. The salvation the sign promised from white interventionism was just itself another form of white interventionism. I don’t doubt that the Cherokee themselves realized this, but it was still another sad reminder of the destructive effect we’ve had on other cultures, even those indigenous to what we would call home. Even the form of the sign—lettering in English, festooned with western-style illustrations—was derivative of American and European culture. The sign alone left me wondering how much harm we did to traditional Cherokee culture just by our presence.

This worry only intensified once we drove onto the main street. Combining the worst elements of both a state fair during the daytime and the gift shop of a Wild-West-themed amusement park, the street was almost painful to look at. At every corner, “native” dancers prepared to throw down for a couple of bucks. The stores were filled with cartoon redskins, “mystical” souvenirs, and, most perplexingly, beach towels. A store was actually called “DISCOUNT CIGARETTES.” Most depressingly, though, were the two largest buildings on the street: a closed amusement park with a tattered sign up proclaiming it “Santa-Land,” and a casket factory. Accurate or not, the juxtaposition sent the strange message that the Cherokee were killing themselves with the same things they were profiting off of. This point would only be strengthened by our visit to the casino. 

The casino was a disgustingly modern-looking building, and sadly the center of the reservation. Sparkling monitors recreated pat renditions of creation myths, with an animated eagle creating first the mountain range on the reservation, then the forest, and finally the casino itself. Although the reservation itself is dry, alcohol is allowed at the casino, and a horde of pasty tourists stumbled in and out of the elevators, mumbling drunkenly. Perhaps the grimmest symbol of American oppression and influence on the land was in the casino lobby: A Paula Deen restaurant. “It was modeled after Paula Deen’s own kitchen!” blurted our corpulent tour guide cheerfully.

Speaking of our tour guide: she was utterly white, oblivious to native culture, and filled with a level of enthusiasm about the casino that could charitably be called excessive. She rarely talked about Cherokee or reservation life, of course. Most of what she said was focused on the juggernaut of the casino, and how it kept itself afloat and expanding. The things she did say about Cherokee life ranged from being oblivious to actively offensive. I tried to keep a running tally of the latter, but I lost track between her assertion that the casino carpets were remodeled with earth tones and curves to make them “a representation of Cherokee culture” and her belief that legalizing alcohol for sale to residents of the reservation would be a boon to most of the tribe and would have no negative effects associated with it. While the guide undoubtedly didn’t mean any wrong, I could see centuries of white interventionism reflected upon her doughy face.

I’m admittedly unfairly representing the reservation a bit. We also went to the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, one of the best museums I’ve been to in my life. It was vibrant, full of pathos, and well designed. Still, even the museum gave off a sense of regret and loss for the traditional life. “The white race is a wicked race [and needs to be] forever crushed” Tecumseh says in a speech quoted by the Museum. One can’t help but wonder what would have happened had the Cherokee fulfilled his words.

Thoughts on the Patricia Grant Speech

I’ve been thinking about the talk we went to on Thursday, the Cherokee Journey to Forgiveness and Healing. There’s this enormous tendency to intellectualize the talk that I’ve been trying to resist—I’m not sure if posting on my blog about this negates that effort, but I hope not.

Despite the mental acrobatics I’ve pushed myself through, though, the reason I’ve been so hesitant to write about it is fairly simple. Objectively as a presentation, is was amateurish and heavily flawed; yet on an emotional level, I connected more deeply with it than almost anything else this year. Patricia Grant, as a speaker, was often accusatory. She opened her speech, delivered to an all-white audience, with a polemic against the white race. The slides for her presentation were awkwardly designed and repeated information with an almost disturbing regularity. She rambled, and, for a speech titled “Forgiveness and Healing,” spent most of the time speaking about trauma and hurt. She had a stammer that reappeared every minute or so. By any standard of public speaking, she failed tremendously.

Yet still her words and her presentation were cutting, effective, and heartrending. She talked about how her mother would make medicine for them when they were sick because they couldn’t afford a trip to the pharmacy. At one point she began to weep. I found myself near tears myself, though I could say why. Perhaps that is the great achievement of the presentation. Someone with an awkward and alienating style of delivery, with origins that could not be further from my own, made me feel the pain she felt, and helped me realize my own capacity for destruction and hate.

When I learned about how Grant’s mother couldn’t spank her children when she was angry because she was afraid she would hit them to death, and then found out how that this uncontrolled emotion can be traced back to emotional trauma, often inflicted by the whites on the Indians, I felt a profound sense of injustice. That’s an understatement. I felt that I myself was guilty and finally, ultimately, realized how many things were still wrong in our country for American Indians. While the speech might have been a failure as a speech, in terms of emotional impact, it was a resounding success.

What I've Learned From This Class (Notes from 3/15, Updated 3/27 & 4/5)

While this class has been a constant learning and growing experience for me as a student, it’s difficult to pin down how precisely I’ve changed since taking it. I’ve become more aware of the pervasiveness in this country of racism, discrimination, and hate, certainly. But I’ve also become more cognizant of the beauty of the human spirit, and to a degree the interconnectedness of us all as humans. It’s a strange dichotomy, and I’m still struggling with how to bring together the two views. Really, though, one could view that as the human condition—extreme acts of violence and hate corresponded with brief moments of beauty, light, and art. To a certain extent, we have to remember that the White oppressors were oppressed themselves a long time ago—the culture we have now is more the sort of thing the Romans forced on the visigoths than anything approaching our shared past.

(I use the phrase we to refer to White people. This is a mistake, in all honesty—we, as a uniting word, should signify the whole human race rather than any individual subgroup in that. But there’s etymology for you.)

But I’m digressing. What did I learn from the class? Rather, what am I learning from this class? Like before, lots of things. I’ve had a cascade of realizations about myself, for one. This course has been one of self-discovery to an almost alarming degree—through investigating a form of literature and, sadly, culture that’s foreign to my previous experience, I’ve come to terms with my worldview and belief system like I’ve never before. Sherman Alexie said once in an interview with The Atlantic that “literature is all about the search for identity, regardless of the ethnicity,” and as we’ve delved further and further into the literature of the American Indians, I find myself understanding more and more of what he’s saying.

Despite being a white, second-generation immigrant from a staunchly middle-class background, I’ve discovered my similarities with the authors we’ve discussed. I’ve found out secret biases I didn’t know I held, spiderwebbing out from a center of white privilege and complacency. And through these things I’ve realized about myself, I’ve also found out who I am. Alexie was right. I’ve been searching for my identity all along.

(As a further aside, the Alexie interview I referenced earlier is phenomenal, and well worth a read. Here's a link to it: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/interviews/ba2000-06-01.htm )

A Letter to Freeman Owle

Dear Freeman Owle,

I think what I find most appealing in your stories is the throwaway details. Like the “many of you can remember, maybe not” prelude to the description of old cars coming up the mountains with Roosevelt looming in your introduction. Or the way you tell your version of the Nikwasi Mound with historical grounding that somehow adds to its sense of magic, not detracts.

You said that your parents were afraid to teach you Cherokee, under the fear you would be persecuted. My father underwent a similar thing—not Cherokee, and nowhere near as bad, but he too was prevented from learning his native tongue by his parents, who were worried he wouldn’t fit in, or would be persecuted in the 1940s and 50s America he grew up in.

And Freeman, you also talk about when the reservation was not “beyond the times of beauty.” I sometimes wonder the same thing about my curd of suburbia I grew up in, thinking and dreaming about when it was covered with trees and flora and fauna and things that weren’t sixty-year-old WASPs. I’m worried we’re living beyond the times of beauty now, and I desperately want that to change. Do you agree with that? You talked about the rise of VCRs and televisions, and in the past fourteen years, that’s only skyrocketed. Is storytelling still alive at all? I hope so.

And finally, I love the wickedly sharp epitaph you left on your story, “The Magic Lake.” After telling all about the lake that heals animals, and the beautiful befuddlement of the Cherokee boy who’s witnessing all of it; after telling about how the Great Spirit sends a message of love, and peace, and union with all of the world; after telling about the hope of resurrection and freedom from sickness we all have, you end with this sentence: “This was a belief that was ‘savage.’”

Thank you.

Jozef Lisowski

Scattered Thoughts on Prison Chants and Exploitation

I’m listening to prison chants and I’m shocked at how much they resemble American Indian rain songs and dance songs.

Below is an beautiful and heartbreaking chain gang chant, "It Makes A Long-Time Man Feel Bad," recorded by Alan Lomax in 1947 at the Mississippi Parchman Penitentiary. And then, a little bit further, is a video of an American Indian drum circle chant (tribe unknown) filmed at the San Diego Earth Day Festival in 2008.

Listen to the two performances for a bit.

Play Song

I love how there are shared musical elements between the two-- the rhythmic thumping, the almost anguished yelling and moaning. And I know they were performed for two entirely different purposes, and I know that the authenticity of both could be questioned. (Namely because the act of recording something imposes the own reality of that something upon it, a debate we see a lot in discussions of reality television. By imposing a reality, it alters the original state of performance perhaps irreparably. To rephrase, as the prisoners and the Indians knew that they were being watched, they subconsciously altered their performance, maybe even changing the original intent. This is especially a concern for the American Indian video, as it was filmed at a San Diego festival, far removed from the original tribal settings of the chant. But I digress. ) I have all of these potential objections to both of these pieces of music, but in the end, I can toss them out the window. Mainly this reminds me of the gloriously transmittable power of music. Both of these are strong, powerful songs, full of emotion and fury and sadness and possibly even guilt. Did one influence the other? Does that question even matter? 

The necessity that caused both of these things' existence, which is to say the corrupt legal system that led to the chain gang chant and the brutal exploitation of native culture that led to the drum circle chant being performed at a widely-attended festival, is horrible thing. But the fact that so much beauty and similarity was able to arise from this suffering speaks miles about the redemptive power of art and music, and the terrible beauty that such things can contain.

Truth, Life, and American Indian Lit

In class a while ago, Hobby was talking about verisimilitude-- the appearance of something containing the utmost truth. Realism is something we generally take for granted, yet to a very large degree, the American Indian literature we've read has questioned the boundaries between the real and the illusory. Even dating back to the trickster tales, characters were fooling each other nonstop, making them believe things opposite to the truth. 

I’m most immediately reminded of the beautiful story contained within our American Indian Trickster Tales anthology, “Tricking the Trickster.” The story, Sioux in origin, recounts how Iktomi the Spider-Man tricks several rabbits into letting him eat them, but then has his food stolen away from him by an equally wily group of coyotes. Of course, Iktomi ends up having the last laugh at another group of easily fooled chumps, but the flow of the story is not what I find the most rapturous about the piece. Instead, it’s the asides. There’s a gorgeous moment early in the story dealing with both truth and perception of storytelling; I’m just going to quote it below.

At one time there lived two little boys and their grandmother in the west. She is always telling them stories about Ikto, Iktomi, the smart-ass Spider-Man. They want to know whether Iktomi is a man or a spider. He is both; he is a spirit of the mind. The boys are listening to their grandmother’s voice. They say: “Things that we don’t know, we want to know.”

The first thing that grabs me about this is Iktomi’s existence as both a man and a spider, “a spirit of the mind.” The duality that the authors bring up and nearly as quickly dismiss is nothing short of gorgeous, and just as easily can apply to the stories and life we’ve experienced: is it truth? Is it lies? Perhaps it’s both, after all—Iktomi could exist not to trick us, but to cause us to realize the things we’ve been deluding ourselves with. Maybe all of life is a joke, as the Spider-Man says. To quote the other famous Spider-Man, after all: “I mock; I’m a mocker.” Laughing at things can be the only way of truly dealing with them. 

I’d just like to end with the other great thing I love about this passage—the quote at the end. As I progress further and further through this class, I’ve begun to think of it as a path towards more knowledge and a greater understanding of the world and myself. That is why the boy’s chant at the end is so invigorating and even inspiring. As I progress further through this class and even through life, delving into the great paradox of truth and our perception of it in our lives, I’ll keep repeating this phrase as a rudder to steady my progress and keep open my mind. As the boys said, after all: “things we don’t know, we want to know.”