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.”

Discussion of "The Sacred Tree"

We started off class today by discussing all of our values—what we hold important, what we consider key to human understanding and survival. I haven’t really thought about this much at all before, to be honest. This came as a shock to me, given the amount of time I spend at protests and rallies against things. Given the amount of time I spend focusing on what I dislike, I spent so little time thinking about what I did like and respect, I was somewhat repulsed. The kicker? One of the traits I settled on was “introspection.”

I don’t think this is just an individual thing, though—western society in general seems to ignore deep, introspective thought. That’s one of the things I’ve enjoyed so much about my American Indian class—while nothing we’ve read comes close to the “wise Injun” stereotype, there does seem to be a greater emphasis on mindfulness throughout the literature we’ve read and experienced. I feel that through this class, I’ve been realizing more and more about who I am as a person, what I value, and even what some of my limits are.

So what are my values? I wrote down five on a sheet of paper:
•    Creativity
•    A sense of adventure, but one tempered by
•    Moderation
•    A degree of introspection or mindfulness
•    Kindness.

Most interestingly about this, though, is the bias present in the values I hold. I believe it was Dr Hobby in class who noticed and was repulsed by how traditionally “western” his list of values was. To a very large account, I’m repulsed by that, too. Very little of the values I hold have any basis in a society outside the traditional west. For example, community, perhaps one of the most important aspects of “The Sacred Tree,” the book that sparked this discussion in class, holds little to no place in my list of values. In fact, the similarity between the things I hold important and the things Eurocentric culture holds important is dismayingly similar.

Dr Hobby was repulsed by how western his value system was. Perhaps we all should be.

Coming of Age

The Brave Hearts Women's Society Coming of Age Ceremony

On Monday, I turned 18. Which is to say, I came of age.
 

Resources about American Indian coming of age ceremonies are scarce on the internet. Of course, there’s the ridiculously co-opted idea of a “vision quest,” but Googling that results in a smattering of pages for painfully white dojos and holistic medicine clinics—ironically, themselves things we have also stolen from foreign cultures. Regardless of how much they’ve grown to dominate the white imagination, however, vision quests did exist first in Native American cultures. Yellow-Wolf: His Own Story, a compassionate anthropological study of the Nez Pierce Indians published in the 1940s, touches on this coming of age ceremony piquantly. According to Yellow Wolf, the ceremony grants a certain type of invincibility. His words are beautiful and poignant, and the whole book is worth reading, available for free online. But I digress:

You know our schooling. Young people sent out into wild, night places without anything, their hands empty. I did that! Often stayed from home three, maybe five, suns and nights. Because my father died when I was young, no living man had sympathy for me. Your father's spirit outside somewhere might recognize you and come to you.

My father had a Power, but a soft body. Bullets entered his body but he did not die. Scars, many scars, on different parts of his body. All these showed his bravery in war.

The life in trees, in grass, might compose your Power. It is impossible to explain. It is against orders of your Wyakin to explain, if you could. This is all impossible to be understood by whites. I believe if I now went to war I would be killed by gas. My Power is not against that, only against arrows and bullets.  

In a less violent tradition, I recently read an NPR article about the growing trend of sending Indian girls, mainly Sioux, to the grassy banks of the rez to learn to erect tepees, harvest food, and live the way their ancestors did before being persecuted into standard American homogeny (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129611281). I just find this a wonderfully beautiful idea. Considering how American Indian culture has been near-exterminated, revisiting it seems not just a nice gesture but necessary. This isn’t to imply that the ceremony is entirely grounded in the past, however. The dark realities of the present tend to slink in, as well. From the article:

“At times, we have a nutritionist come in and talk to them about eating right and not just drinking Gatorade, about not being afraid of doctors and having to get a check-up,” Brook Spotted Eagle says. “Sexual abuse and incest can pose a huge problem within families. There's no easy way to talk about these issues, so you just have to get them out there.”

Combining modern advice and ingrained tradition is a necessary idea, and one that has its basis in many other cultures, as well. It is also a grim shadow of the American imperialism and dominance that lead to these traditions originally disappearing. Immigrant colonists introduced Gatorade as much as they did alcohol to the Indians, after all. 

As for my birthday, what did I do? Sat on a couch and watched some movies with friends, honestly. Not the most culturally minded activity by a long shot, certainly. Still, I hope I can change.  With this much beauty in the world around me and the ceremonies performed by these people I've read about, I desperately hope I can change. 

/

The Business of Fancydancing

I’ve been reading my classmates’ blogs on The Business of Fancydancing in place of writing my own.

I know, I know, it’s a lazy way to get inspiration to write about the film. I realize my ideas will be tinged with the thoughts of my classmates, perhaps to an uncomfortable degree. Perhaps I’m even obfuscating my thinking process.

But I can’t help it. The film (or, more accurately, the 80% of the film I saw) resounded on such a giant level with me, I’m still not sure what to say about it. It was terribly sad, that’s for sure. There were interludes of humor, but they were nearly pitch-black, shocking as much as they amused. Mouse films himself huffing gas as an inspirational video of sorts, Aristotle brutally beats up a white attempted hitchhiker, and I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.

This emotional confusion seems to be a common response across the blogs, and even the mainstream media. I looked up the film on Rotten Tomatoes, and found critics were almost completely mixed on the movie. (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/business_of_fancydancing/) I suspect this was because, at least to an extent, the movie is so unusual and—dare I say—even confusing, almost.

Despite this emotional confusion, I still don’t regret seeing The Business of Fancydancing. The parts I did see resonated deeply with me, even standing as an outsider to both the American Indian and the LGBT cultures depicted in the film. I’m still going to have to think long and hard about what it meant to me, however.

Sherman Alexie's Website

David's blog a few days ago sent me to Sherman Alexie's website, and there I found some really interesting things. Alexie's web presence, www.shermanalexie.com, is even more self-deprecating, it would seem, than his produced works, but there are still fantastic bits of humor and pathos through the whole page.

The above is a comic Sherman Alexie made and posted on his website. What I love most about this is the sense of the ridiculousness present in it. While the strip starts off with a sad reminder of the violent past of Indians, with "White people are a fad" Leon Short Sight, by the end it has lurched firmly into the absurd. Who could dislike Henry Partially Invisible or even the beaming, starry-cheeked Dave? Not I, certainly.


Of course, most of his posts aren't quite this exuberantly silly. Instead, Alexie posts semi-frequently on real-world events, activist causes, and, of course, American Indian life. "If I had an awesome Indian name, like Sherman Charging Elk," Alexie writes, "I'd probably still live on the rez." Throughout all of his posts, there is a subversive wit running through. This links straight to my favorite Alexie moment I've discovered, via his twitter feed:

I'd like to leave with one more piece of content, this interview he did on his manner of performing at book and poetry readings. While more on the craft of writing and performing rather than Indian life, it still highlights the wonderful sense of humor, love of life, and intensity of thought that Alexie possesses.

When Literature Meets Stand Up

Drinking, Comedy, & Tragedy

Near the middle of "The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn't Flash Red Anymore," the narrator makes a bitterly funny observation.

It's hard to be optimistic on the reservation. When a glass sits on a table here, people don't wonder if it's half filled or half empty. They just hope it's good beer.

This sense of deep dread and emptiness is prevalent in the collection-- all of Alexie's work traffics in a sort of booze-soaked comic misery. It is perhaps the passage that immediately follows this one that drives home Alexie's point, however. Indians, Alexie writes, have a way of surviving, but not in the way you'd expect.

But it's almost like Indians can easily survive the big stuff. Mass murder, loss of language and land rights. It's the small things that hurt the most. The white waitress who won't take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins.

Life on the rez is not a massive, outrageous injustice. Instead, it is a barrage of smaller injustices, eventually suffocating the Indians. This pops up throughout Alexie's book. Indians drink and sleep and really don't do much else. The only way to deal with this cripplingly sad situation is through comedy. This juxtaposition between comedy and tragedy is Sherman Alexie's calling card. His characters encounter small injustices and tragedies every second and in response turn to their drinks, hoping at least, as Alexie writes, that it's good beer.

Will write and think about this more later. 

DJs and Indians

“Look at that f---er!” Gabe spits out the words like bullets, and turns to me with squinted eyes. “What’s even going through his mind?”

We’re all sitting in the dusty corner of a downtown sandwich shop. We originally went down to check out a spray-paint gallery a local artist had set up, but the gallery was more a cupboard than anything else. It’s now the DJ who holds our attention. Specifically, the painfully white DJ wearing an enormous Plains Indian war bonnet.

It may very well have been the most offensive thing any of us have seen since coming to Asheville.

Of course, I’m sure that the DJ didn’t realize the offensiveness of his attire. He was staring fixedly at his Macbook, stirring up an abomination of club music and ambient noise. Every now and then he’d bump up the levels on his mixing console with a bone-colored hand and push the sound further into the treble. He was bobbing up and down like a culturally inconsiderate worm. The headdress, I swear, glistened in the neon lights.

Appropriation of a native culture by the people that tried to exterminate that culture is nothing new. Blackface and redface acts have been around for virtually as long as we’ve known about the races we were mocking. In the 60s, the hippies wore American Indian clothes in an attempt to capture the Indians’ “free spirit,” a hideously incorrect though well-intentioned belief.

But the war bonnet seemed different. Maybe it was the oblivious smirk the DJ wore. Maybe it was the fact that the bonnet was perched on top of his head so innocuously. But Gabe and I were in agreement: there was something seriously annoying about this person wearing another culture’s heritage so blatantly. 

I'm realizing now, though, that this attitude has permeated our culture. We as children still grow up playing Cowboys & Indians. The Atlanta Braves and the Cleveland Indians still compete every year. American Spirit, despite being founded in the post-redface 80s, prominently features an war bonnet-wearing warrior smoking on the cover of the pack. Surrounded by so much blatant appropriation, could I even fault the DJ that much?

Thinking back on it, I might have figured out what we found so offensive about the DJ's outfit: the banality of it. With both the redface troupes and the hippies, the intent in donning Indian clothing was to become something other than themselves. The redface performer would become a parody of an Indian. The hippy would become the same thing, without realizing it. Despite this, though, they still fundamentally realized that they were transforming themselves into something other than themselves. The DJ only realized he was transforming himself into a DJ with a headdress. Perhaps that is what our culture has become: an assimilation of elements from other cultures, destroying them by making them our own. The idea of the American mixing pot suddenly doesn't sound so good after all.

More Rabbit

While this is not directly related to "Little Rabbit Fights the Sun," I came across this song by folk punk band Andrew Jackson Jihad right after finishing the story. I can't imagine there are too many creative works out there about setting out to kill the sun, so I thought this worth sharing. Perhaps a hymn for Rabbit on his quest?

Little Rabbit and Mr Punch

Yet on second thought, the sheer brutality of the Little Rabbit’s exploits separate it well from the other tales contained within the American Indian tradition. I’m curious what the influence of white settlers was on these tales, because the character Little Rabbit reminds me most of is an undoubtedly anglicized one: Mr. Punch.

Mr Punch was an anarchic, sadistic clown, popular in turn of the century British puppet shows. Through the course of each puppet show, which followed a rough formula, Punch would kill his way across the power system of England, eventually slaughtering the Devil and freeing all men to "do whatever they like." This stands in contrast to Rabbit's conclusion at the end of his story that "it seems like killing is not the answer," but until that point, both stories take a similar near-glee towards death.


Mr Punch opens his story in charge of the family baby. Warned not to let it cry, he decides to preemptively bash its head against the floor. Of course, the baby lets loose a ferocious howl, so Punch continues bashing it until it is silent, finally throwing the infant onto the ground. Of course, his wife Judy appears and is horrified, so Punch bashes her to death, too. From here, a cycle of grim slapstick continues, with Punch killing a village constable, a judge, a hangman, and, in the form of a ghost, his own conscience. Finally, he kills the Devil and sets all men free.

 

The first part of a traditional Punch and Judy show.

Perhaps the only real difference between "Little Rabbit Fights the Sun" and a Mr Punch show is the target at the end. Rabbit is attempting to kill the sun, a beneficent presence in the world. However, Punch kills the Devil, a force of oppression and darkness for men. Both Punch's and Rabbit's actions result in chaotic anarchy, but the cackling Mr Punch removes oppression and social restraint rather than the light and goodness represented by the sun. On a base level, the two characters are not so dissimilar at all.

Tricksters! or, Murdering Rabbits.

Tricksters abound throughout literature and cultural tradition. Almost every group of people has had at least one central trickster figure, most being relatively nonviolent (or at least nonlethal). Brer Rabbit, for example, would frequently dupe people, but as he escaped at the end, the people he duped would still fundamentally be living. For the most part, this seems to hold true across cultures, applying fairly well to American Indian folklore as well. The stories follow a formula: a creature like Coyote decides to get something, realizes he has to trick someone to do it, successfully fools them, goes back and repeats the trick several times, and is ultimately duped himself. Occasionally, to mix things up, he recovers from the dupe and re-tricks the person who caught him, reasserting his dominance.

This is not to knock the stories present; all of them are engaging, often hilarious encounters that benefit from the episodic structure. But there’s an expectation on the reader’s part that the story will be relatively weightless—someone might burn a part of their back off, or lose a tail, but that’s the extent of the damage their mischief-making causes. That’s what makes the character of Rabbit, specifically in the story “Little Rabbit Fights the Sun,” so shocking. In the beginning of the story, Rabbit falls asleep in the sun, which burns a brown spot onto his back. Waking up, incensed by this, Rabbit decides to kill the sun. He moves throughout the world, slaughtering everything in his path in gleeful displays of trickery, leading to his final goal. The shocker in all of this? He succeeds.

Little Rabbit said: “Why did these foolish people get in my way? I am in a killing mood; I am going to fight the sun. I’ll make an end of anyone trying to stop me!”

Then he saw two men making arrowheads out of hot rocks. He watched them for a while from behind a tree. Then he went up to them, saying, “Let me help you.” …He seized them and held them down onto the red-hot stones, and they were consumed by heat and fire until only their ashes remained. “Lie there,” said Little Rabbit, “until you can get up again!” He laughed, saying: “This is good practice for fighting Sun!”

Rabbit spouts out one-liners with the regularity of a machine, all of them unnerving in their callousness towards death. And Little Rabbit keeps trucking on. As the story progresses, he comes close to death multiple times and reveals himself as an indestructible force. He’s essentially an ancient Rambo with a sense of humor and a more barbaric endgame.

After killing reams of people, Rabbit arrives at the end of the world, and waits for the sun. He bounces his magic ball into the sun, exploding it and scattering its parts throughout the whole world.

They were scattered all over the world, setting the earth on fire. The flames burned Little Rabbit’s toes, then his legs, body, and arms, until only his head was left. It rolled on all by itself until the terrible heat burst his swollen eyes, which exploded in a flood of tears that covered the whole earth and put out the fire. It took a long time until Sun and Little Rabbit had re-created themselves.

That image alone is terrifying and nightmarish. The very idea of a giant rabbit head, weeping tears out of an exploded set of eyes, sounds more at home on the cover of a metal album than in an indigenous trickster tale. Yet it fits in with the bleak almost-nihilism of the story. Even after destroying the entire world, the indefatigable Rabbit is reborn and goes on with his life.  One can picture him laughing at his exploits for years to come. Despite the death that fills it, the tale doesn't seem so different from the rest of the trickster tales, after all.

The American Way

Thinking about our discussion today about how both the American Indian and Jewish immigrants essentially had their pasts forced away from them, I came across this article, starting on page 133 (link opens in new window). While it is about the treatment of Chinese immigrants, not native American Indians, there were some surprising similarities between the two. What compels America to seemingly attempt to remove the past histories and cultural identities of all of its minorities?

The Occupy Movement and the American Indian (Pt 2)

The ties between my trip to Washington and American Indians didn’t stop there, however. As soon as we pulled into the camp where the protesters were spending the night, a homeless man came up to greet us. His name was Zed, and he was half American Indian. He didn’t specify which tribe.

Zed walked us around the camp, telling us about life in D.C. and his day-to-day struggles. One of his eyes was always pointed to the left and, combined with his hunched-over gait, lent the illusion of a constant bug-eyed vigilance over the area. Zed suffered from mental issues, he said. Zed had been homeless almost his whole life, and was regularly antagonized by the police. Zed was born a while after the Little Big Horn incident, and while he condemned the movement’s violence, wished he could have been a part of it nonetheless. I’ve always found “incident” to be such a brutally clinical name for the Little Big Horn struggle, incidentally. “Incident” carries the implications of operating rooms and gauze and bureaucracy—perhaps the aftermath of the occupation, but certainly not the heart of it.

Despite his American Indian heritage, Zed was very much immersed in modern white American culture. He grew up in D.C. during the heyday of hardcore punk, and was a professed fan of Slayer. He threatened to go ballistic if anyone removed the battered Iggy Pop button from its perch on his jacket. As he balanced his way between tents, I could see myself, projected fifteen years into the future. 

The next morning, our group trekked to the Smithsonian, and visited, in short succession, the Museum of American History and the American Indian museum. I don’t think Samuel Beckett could have come up with a more ironic juxtaposition.

While at the American History museum, we learned that only several hundred thousand natives existed in America before settlement (modern estimates put the number closer to several million) and that the Spanish were the first colonizers of the region (Asians arrived via land bridge several thousand years earlier, and the Scandinavians had been ferrying back and forth for several hundred years). At the Museum for the American Indian, we saw videos of groups of flabby white people trying to learn indigenous dances and an exhibit on the American Indian presence in the “Twilight” book and film franchise. Despite the efforts of the curators of the American Indian museum, it was clear that both buildings were attempting to appeal to a mainly (if not exclusively) white audience.

Still, the most representative moment for our trip occurred at the Museum of American History. In the exhibit on post-Revolutionary War issues, there was a display for the debate on voting rights. Three different segments of the population were illustrated, and a giant wheel was below each one, listing popular opinions why or why not the group should be allowed to vote. The segments for “women” and “African-Americans” displayed beaming sketch portraits above an ebullient multicolored wheel. The segment for “Native Americans” featured a sad-looking sketch of a native. Where his wheel should have been, there was only a gaping hole, the wheel itself having been stolen several months prior.

The Occupy Movement and the American Indian

Over the previous weekend and part of the week, I was in Washington, D.C., participating in the Occupy Congress protest. While at the protest, which incidentally became the first to successfully take the steps of the Supreme Court, I couldn't help but think about the earlier protests American Indians conducted, especially the occupation of Wounded Knee.

In the 1970s, a group of American Indians, frustrated with impotent reservation management and callous government treatment, stormed into Wounded Knee. Site of the infamously brutish 1890 Lakota massacre, Wounded Knee still stands as a towering pillar of shame for our nation. The American Indian Movement saw this only conflagrated by the current treatment of the American Indian, and in 1973, began occupying the location. Sound familiar?

Yet despite the basic similarities, the occupation of Wounded Knee and modern, capital-O Occupying are different in several key ways. Most substantially is the level of violence between the two. The AIM had come prepared for confrontation, and was loaded up with what I can only imagine as an all-you-can-eat restaurant of weaponry. Of course, with the arrival of the FBI, the opposition was well-armed as well. Gradually, the two groups drifted together, circling around one other like ants slowly spiraling down a drain. Things came to a head, and bullets were soon in the air. After 70 days of trading bullets with each other, the two forces declared a stand-off.

Occupy has shown no violent proclivities at all, of course. One of the main goals of the protest is nonviolent action. Yet the philosophical goal of the movement-- taking areas that epitomize the corruption and immortality of the government and occupying them-- is the very same as that of the AIM. I can't help but think that, if not for the AIM, Occupy Congress would have never happened.

On the Navajo Night Chant

In class several days ago, we performed a reading of the Night Chant, a traditional Navajo song. It was a beautiful experience, frankly. The lines of the song reverberated through the class, and the actual structure of the song seemed to have little in common with either traditional western poetry or song.

Except that doesn't seem to be entirely true. Rather, "Night Chant" seems almost a precursor to modernist literature. The repeated lines, the propelling rhythm, and the mixture of optimism and deep-set melancholy present in the song are all heavily reminiscent of the works of poets and authors like James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Even the invocation of the gods and presence of the supernatural is in alignment with modernist authors.

T.S. Eliot famously said, defending modernism, "Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art." Yet American Indians had been using the "mystical method," and making art through it, far before the Western world. I'd like to close with a line from Night Chant that reminds me heavily of another famous literary chant, T.S. Eliot's "This is how the world ends" koan from The Hollow Men. The Night Chant line is similarly preoccupied with endings, but in a more hopeful and upbeat fashion:

"In beauty it is finished.

In beauty it is finished."