The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present
Berkhofer, Robert F. Jr.
BOOK REVIEW The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present Robert F.Berkhofer, Jr. / Alfred A. Knopf / $15.00 Bernard W. Sheehan The real Indian, according to...
...In support of a traditional social order, he adopted the misty perfectionism that had long been the dream of those who sought the release of the human spirit from the inhibiting boundaries of habitual social arrangements...
...The Dawes Severalty Act prescribed the distribution of tribal lands to individual Indians, who would then assume their places among the white farmers of the country, though for a time they would remain under government tutelage...
...Haters of Indians saw the disintegrated native as irrefutable evidence of the original deficiency of his society and as the inevitable consequence of progress...
...For him, the qualities of savagism negated the familiar attributes of human society...
...The idea of the noble savage drew sustenance from the same mythic root that supported ignoble savagism...
...Indians who were not cannibals exhibited a certain pristine innocence...
...In either sense, the native Americans became entangled in a moral dilemma not of their own making and over which they exercised no control...
...As Berkhofer makes plain, in the white man's view the Indians' traditional social order was the major obstacle to progress...
...Despite failure, the English never stopped trying, but the appearance of the pathetic Indian in the eighteenth century threatened to obliterate the last hope of civilizing him...
...They would now be encouraged to remain Indians, and henceforth government policy would support the tribal organizations...
...A deeply alienated man, Collier despised the materialism and fragmentation of his own society, and he saw in the tribal order a system worthy of imitation...
...The tribal organizations retained their grip upon native life...
...The Spaniards made much progress, the French a good deal less, and the English virtually none...
...The problem began with Columbus, who returned from the New World carrying a description of people he called Indios...
...With the coming of the New Deal it seemed that all would change...
...In the 1830s, under pressure from the southern states, and from humanitarians who believed that the effort to convert the Indians in the East had failed, the government forced the southern tribes to cross the Mississippi, where efforts to civilize them would be continued...
...He affects a certain scholarly distance between his argument and some of its obvious implications...
...After a stint in the twenties at the Taos artists' colony, he had become a missionary for the defense of the Indian way of life...
...In the sixties, the Indian was adopted by the counterculture...
...The natural processes of acculturation and the positive efforts at proselytization had subjected it to considerable strain and effected numerous changes...
...Though they remained Indians, they had moved in the direction of the white man's world...
...Savages were people who had yet to create a society or endure the vicissitudes of history...
...The name was wrong because he thought he had reached Asia...
...Bernard W. Sheehan is associate professor of history at Indiana University...
...His approach to the Indian problem contained a number of ironies...
...From the beginning, conversion lay at the heart of the European approach to the natives: The Indians were expected to become good Christians and civilized farmers...
...The Indian thus became a symbolic form, disembodied but useful in the ideological fratricide that has plagued Western civilization since the dawn of modern times...
...Berkhofer stops short of this last point...
...He has written a useful primer on the problem of the Indian in the Western mind, and in his conclusions he is invariably intelligent and moderate...
...Mostly the act failed...
...Once the tribes no longer presented a threat, white men began to acknowledge their plight...
...They joined the counterculture, came to believe in noble savagism, and acted out the roles dictated for them by the white man's radical critique of his own society...
...He thought one of the best ways to accomplish this was to separate the tribes from their vast land holdings...
...He is author of Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian and Savagism and Civility: The Idea of the Indian in the Making of Virginia {forthcoming from Cambridge University Press...
...John Collier became Commissioner of Indian Affairs and announced the abandonment of government efforts to turn Indians into replicas of white men...
...For them, the Indian stood for all that Europeans abominated...
...in the eighteenth century, the abstract image of the Indian acquired a certain substance...
...In particular, on Berkhofer's evidence, the supposed simplicity of tribal life has proved an especially slippery basis on which to secure a respect for the separate integrity of native societies...
...In a sense, the sixties marked a significant success for the white man's effort to transform the Indian...
...He proposed also that Indians who did not wish to adopt the white man's way should be encouraged to move west...
...The decline in population and the crack-up of the tribal order yielded the image of the pathetic Indian, despoiled of his land, enslaved to alcohol, and dependent on an alien society for support...
...Nothing had changed since Montaigne, unless it be that now the native people had themselves come to believe the white man's portrayal of tribal life...
...The middle-class whites who revived the American addiction to metaphysical revolt found in the Indian a sure cure for the anxieties that tormented their psyches...
...Alfred A. Knopf / $15.00 Bernard W. Sheehan The real Indian, according to Robert Berkhofer, Jr., has long eluded the white man's grasp...
...By divesting themselves of the accouterments of bourgeois existence, they hoped to live the simple, uncluttered, and in fact culture-less life that had long been attributed to the noble savage...
...Yet in the nineteenth century, it was clear that much of the native social order remained intact...
...In the middle of the sixteenth century, Montaigne encapsulated the qualities of the savage in a brilliant passage that became the classic definition...
...Whereas before Indians had managed to preserve the core of tribal existence, despite the many changes that occurred under the influence of European culture, now in effect great numbers of natives had gone over to the other side...
...Either the native people embodied those ideals and stood as a living condemnation of European man's decline from virtue, or the Indians themselves deserved censure for their failure to reflect those ideals...
...As a consequence, in the four hundred or so years since discovery white men have tended to define Indians according to Western ideals...
...More importantly, he rendered the first account of native life as a negative reflection of European manners- though the picture was not uncomplimentary...
...Considering the kind of passion the subject frequently generates, one can sympathize with his effort to remain detached...
...They grieved for the loss of innocence and feared the blame for the destruction of the world's last exemplar of unspoiled nature...
...Even in the twentieth century, when the rise of moral and cultural relativism has made it possible for intellectuals to perceive the true character of native American societies, relativity has not always served the ends of cultural pluralism...
...He believed in the doctrine of environmental-ism, as did most other thinking men of his generation, and hence he had anticipated a relatively easy transformation of the Indians from savage hunters to settled farmers...
...When the French learned of these new peoples, they did much the same thing by calling them savages and thus relating them to the wild men who were reported to inhabit remote forests in Europe...
...But the most precious irony of all lay . in Collier's vision of the good society...
...Not all Indians persisted in loyalty to the old ways...
...The term savage incorporated the native Americans into the primal myth of Western civilization...
...Jefferson, for example, feared that the Indians would disappear before his efforts to turn them into yeomen farmers should bear fruit...
...For him, the native style of life constituted nothing less than a secular Utopia...
...In wishing to preserve the traditional native society, he ignored the important changes that had occurred...
...Indians were virtuous because they lacked European vices and possessed no vices of their own (nor, for that matter, any of the elements that would form a culture) . Montaigne saw them as instruments that could be used to level criticism at European society...
...Since the establishment of European colonies in the New World, politicians and keepers of the popular imagination have remained faithful to ethnocentric conceptions of native life...
...For humanitarians, the pathetic Indian awakened the sense of guilt that had long been latent in the conception of the noble savage...
...Although he was a talented bureaucrat who transformed government policy toward the American natives, Collier failed to transcend the time-honored categories for conceiving of Indians...
...But his conception of native culture served as well for those who wished to defend the European way...
...Since Collier's time the situation has gotten worse...
...Thus, Europeans and white Americans saw the Indian through a universal idea that suited their own needs but failed utterly to recognize the distinctive cultures that formed the societies of aboriginal America...
...Indians continued to live a savage and deficient existence...
...They had become, finally, the white man's Indians...
...In 1887, reformers and land-hungry whites conspired once again to save the native from his savage self...
...Furthermore, in the name of tribal autonomy it proved necessary for the government once again to impose its will on the native people...
Vol. 12 • March 1979 • No. 3
