Indians: Red, White And Blue

...In order to feed the expectations of the tourist, hold his attention, and earn a few dollars, the tourist's Indian tends to caricature his own historical identity...

...The barbarians who have denied him repent and they set to work to write the story of his life...

...But only the closest empirical scrutiny can get near the truth of the particular case...

...For his is the most pressing, most persistent human puzzle that we face, namely, the achievement of identity by the acceptance and transcendence of ambivalence in self and society...

...Many find them willing, if not eager, to compromise in order to advance themselves in the white world...

...But I imagine that it represents, basically, the etherealization of Iroquois culture (as religious Zionism was the etherealization of ancient Hebrew culture), in which the Longhouse survives as a church, resignation, thankfulness and abstinence become the cardinal, if passive virtues, and thus a shield against adversity, while ancient rituals remain at the core of Christian forms...

...Those who believe, regard themselves as the real Seneca, whether or not they appear on the legal roster of the Nation...

...Thus the structure invites "promiscuity" from both sexes, for opposite reasons, from the men because of the narrowed choice of "legitimate" mates, from the women because any prospective white partner becomes a legally suitable husband...

...The lines of fracture run in many different directions...

...Within the culture of the reservation, life presents three faces...

...A Genet, a Beckett, an Ionesco, an Adamov, a Brecht would, having experienced contemporary civilization, appreciate at once the contradictions of the human drama that is reservation culture...

...Thus what may be the final paroxysm of this culture is seen as the end of the world by those who, by age and training, are able to remain loyal to it...

...Furthermore, knowledge of the language is declining rapidly...

...This is, of course, an excellent example of a quasi-traditional form of behavior in the service of a contemporary need, and I shall say a word about that later...

...What mutually reinforcing projections hold them all locked in dramatic tension...

...The wiser, older Seneca know this and they grow grimmer, more skeptical, more taciturn in their attitude to what they regard as civilized delusions of progress...

...whether the protagonists are Indian or white...

...Subscription to the Code is an ultimate test of Indian-ness...

...This does not justify the construction of the Dam but it does justify the Longhouse Seneca in condemning the Dam in the profoundest possible way...

...an alternative plan was available, and the Seneca nation has not been dealt with straightforwardly by the authorities involved...

...I am concerned at the moment only with the perceptions of the hard-core Longhouse group...

...A joke which I heard repeated several times concerned the white tourist who could not believe that he had entered the reservation because he had seen no encircling fence...

...tions of the Army Corps of Engineers...

...The written story of the life of Jesus is what the Devil wants people to believe...

...Just as there is an Iroquois Washington, there is an Iroquois Jesus and analogously, the more sophisticated Seneca echo Morgan in their conviction that the original Federation of the United States is patterned after the Longhouse league...

...there will be no escape as there was from the flood...

...Most significantly, the hostility is projective, i.e...

...Even in this elementary matter, questions that arise on the reservation are questions for us all...

...In one sweeping movement of his two hands, he converted the tobacco smoke ascending straight to Heaven, symbolic of peace and the Handsome Lake Code, symbolic of the Indian, into the obliterating smoke of the bomb, the white man's smoke, which in the mysterious ways of God becomes His redemption of His pledge to the Seneca faithful...

...Of course, there are increasing indications of strain—one or two elders, although connected with the tourist show, will not take their proper places in the Longhouse, because they believe the rituals are improperly performed...

...They resent Government for not giving more and, although I support their objective case, one can hardly help noting that the ambivalence has the character of a parent-child relationship...

...What infinitely ambivalent relationship exists among the actors and between them and the audience...

...What, finally, is Seneca physical identity, then, if not a legal fiction...

...If Genet were to write a play called "The Indians" in the style of his "The Blacks," the reservation would, depending on one's perspective, suddenly expand, or contract, to the size of the world...

...Even among the majority of the true-believers, faith and reality are held apart so that one plans for the future in substance while anticipating catastrophe in a purely formal sense...

...This is scripture but scripture is actually dictated by the devil...

...Is the perception of the normative "white" culture as philistine, false and alien, a response of the very poor, of the ethnic outsider, or both, fused in the person of the Indian...

...Historically and morally the Indians have been innocent victims in the situation...

...Thus the Seneca attempt to absorb, and even to claim, what they perceive as good in the encircling culture...

...And what of the anomaly of the religious chief, a participant in, and often the leader of important ceremonies, who is technically white and whose daughters "look" Indian...

...The Indians, they say, are a "special case" and the Indians themselves believe this and manifest their belief in a typically ambivalent way...

...They have spoiled the land, ruined the Indian and now, in their greed, want to take the little that is left under the pretext of improving a situation for which they themselves are responsible...

...But people laughed too heartily and one had the impression that there was a fence sealing off the Indian from a culture which he seemed to scorn and simultaneously to desire, perhaps, in part, because it fenced him out...

...And in the case of the Seneca, this is compounded by a sturdy ethnic pride...

...Or a man with a Seneca father and white mother, thus himself white, but who marries a Seneca woman and whose children become legally Seneca...

...Yet how can one determine the degree to which a mother-centered Seneca household is an inheritance from a matrilineal past or the result of the uncertainty of male status and of the peripatetic nature of male occupations— as among immigrant New York Jews, Harlem Negroes, or Boston Irish...

...And how shall we regard the dilemma which the young men face, under pressure, to marry in, while their prospective mates are free to marry out, without betraying their tradition...

...But the nominal or otherwise Christian Seneca retain an Indian identity, even if it consists only in the effort not to assimilate with one's whole soul and to pursue, as one man put it, with unwitting irony, a policy of self termination...

...for this consciousness makes them feel less dependent...

...He is a man, not a spirit...

...the idea of the Bible being dictated by the Devil may be either a Marcionite heresy, a form of gnosticism, or a reversal of the orthodox, especially Catholic dogma of divine inspiration...

...and for how many of us is choice ever more than illusion...

...But he is also perceived as a shiftless, two-faced alcoholic, who lives on a perpetual dole...

...But let me not close on so grim a note...

...Perhaps a Jean Genet could command the ironic ambiguities that compose the reservation, for the reservation today is a "theatre of the absurd...

...But what is Indian in this existence...

...There is a covenant between God and his chosen people, the people suffer for their sins and are saved, a drama which is usually acted out in the life of the Prophet, often reflecting the particular travail of the group, and as the world disintegrates, the faithful ascend to Heaven...

...Of course, the determination of Seneca genetic identity by a legalistic device has the convenience of any analogous principle of unilateral descent...

...As the Longhouse faithful are reduced in number, they reach deeply into their historical memories and describe the white culture which threatens now, finally, to obliterate them in words that the most traditional of Indians must have used generations ago...

...But since when has civil justice been meted out to innocent victims...

...Next we glimpse the social appearance of the Indian, his ordinary, day to day existence on the reservation, with its hardship and struggle...

...For the hard-core Longhouse people, the Dam is such a sign...

...Jesus is assumed to be the "last" of the four guardians of the Iroquois in Heaven, as originally envisioned by the prophet...

...it is doubtful whether anyone under the age of thirty can speak with real fluency...

...terization...

...Traditional continuities pass imperceptibly into the contemporary imperatives of a genuine culture of poverty...

...Let us move to a social-psychological level, and reflect on the image of the reservation...

...11 However, I do not propose to dwell on ambiguities alone...

...In this connection, how can I forget the five-year-old, physically very much an Indian, who insisted that when he grew up he wanted to be a cowboy, except that there weren't any cowboys left, or the old Indian retired from the railroad, who stared at T.V...

...Or observe the white girl, legally Seneca because her mother is Seneca, who applied tanning cream when selling souvenirs on Sunday...

...But the question of physical identity is entirely arbitrary and thus dissolves into the larger problem concerning the physical boundaries of any people functioning in the modern world...

...Townspeople refer to "our Indians" fondly and boast of their lack of prejudice, but they don't look you straight in the eye when they do so...

...And the questions would be "who are the Indians" and "who are the whites," "who is actor and who is spectator...

...There are other signs...

...Correlatively, the Pickering Treaty of 1794, which promised lands in perpetuity, is psychologically very vital to them since it is regarded as a pledge to treat the Indians with dignity and forebearance, to love them, and what is almost the same, to respect them in defeat, as did the proto-typically good parent, George Washington...

...Only two or three men are capable of preaching in the Longhouse, and when they die, who will maintain the ceremonies...

...I shall make no attempt to duplicate here the elusive but remarkable content of the Code, nor discuss its unique success as an established messianic movement, that is, a movement that found a structure...

...A fundamental ambiguity of structure divides the Seneca nation, as it does any nation or group rushing headling onto the contemporary world...

...The syncretic nature of the Code and associated teachings, and the ambiguities they contain, is evident in many ways but I found them most sharply reflected in a verbal interpretation of Jesus, or more prop erly the `one whom you call Jesus," related to me by a Keeper of the Faith...

...Only a small amount remains, say the Keepers of the Faith, and when it is gone, the Seneca will be gone...

...Jesus, they say in effect, is ours, not yours...

...Does the reservation keep the white world out, as one retired, high-steel warrior said with satisfaction, does it fence the Indian in, or may it do both...

...But is this not a universal use of history...

...actors and observers enjoy the show, Indians applaud Indians, and together take pride in the attention they receive...

...But a semblance of the traditional organization persists...

...Let me make it clear that I am against the Dam...

...it is, of course, characteristically human to blame an external agency for an internal crisis...

...It requires these, yes, but also an authentic literary insight...

...Thus his problems bring him closer to us rather than set him apart...

...They bitterly oppose Government, and yet anticipate continued dependence on it...

...The Code, and much of res ervation culture, is a syncretism in the service of the desire to insure survival and maintain dignity under the shadow of superior force...

...I have never encountered gayer, more enduring, more intelligent Americans than the Seneca...

...only the forms differ...

...while it is often a line of conflict, it is also a source of comfort, giving the illusion of choice be tween ways of life...

...Among the Seneca we encounter people who appear white yet consider themselves Indians and talk of the "white man and white man's culture" in alienated and bitter tones...

...They love the Government for the minimal protection and security it extends them, but resent it for frustrating their need for independence, both originally, when the Government first conquered them, and in the intervening generations, during which it helped them somehow to survive...

...Indian" and "white" problems share the same substance...

...Thus they are continuously, and properly, aware of what they, the Indians, have contributed to the culture of the United States...

...The clans, the moieties, the clan mothers, and the religious chiefs maintain a function that not only involves the orthodox Allegheny, but ties them religiously to Iroquois throughout New York...

...Perhaps the best we can do is to assume that the total social identity of the Indian is composed of two complementary halves held together by an invisible seam...

...The jural nation, with its council, officers, electoral machinery, and constitution is recognized as the sole, competent representative authority of the Seneca...

...Any given genealogy can, and does, weave in and out of the Seneca roster, creating, in either instance, socially odd circumstances...

...In a remarkable metaphor of speech and gesture, one of the Longhouse faithful referred to the "rising smoke" by which he meant both the boiling mushroom cloud that is the bomb's aftermath, and the smoke rising from the tobacco burnt as an offering to God to stay the inten...

...All of these circumstances herald doomsday...

...Similarly, is the maintenance of a human community with instrumental kin and quasi-kin ties ramifying beyond the immediate family, a broken shard of the past, or is it a function of that culture of poverty which still struggles on in those parts of the world where being poor is a way of life, and not merely degrading as in our country...

...This structural cleavage is regarded as a "separation between church and state," but it really represents the shadowy line between the past and the present, between the remnants of tradition and the modern consciousness...

...The orthodox Seneca feel that they are irrevocably losing their faith, and this is merely historically coincident with the intentions of the Army Corps of Engineers, the Pittsburgh industrialists and the State of Pennsylvania...

...Here the ambivalence of the white view of the reservation is pertinent...

...There are several elements here that deserve comment...

...The Iroquois had, after all, absorbed Indian elements from the length and breadth of the Eastern seaboard and the mixture has been and is continuously compounded by marriage with whites...

...It limits the size of the group while maintaining and perpetuating social integrity and ecological viability...

...Look at any slum clearance in Boston or Legos, and you get the same answer...

...The reservation is split by the looming presence of the Dam, not on whether it should be built, all are against that, but on how to cope with the problem...

...They live on all three levels—tourist, social and ceremonial—and by some miracle of persistence and skill are able to segregate one from the other while maintaining themselves as integrated human beings...

...The remarkable thing is that, caught in this storm of paradoxes, the Seneca has learned the practical and religious art of transcendence...

...The true account is in the Handsome Lake Code, and derivative beliefs...

...The existence of the politically powerless, but active, religious organization keeps the past present to every Indian on the reservation...

...no people tolerates being told to move from its old neighborhood, to break out of old associations, in the abstract name of progress...

...What I really wish to attempt is an analysis of the social psychology of the apocalyptic response to the building of the Kinzua Dam and the con sequent flooding of nine-tenths of the habitable area of the reservation...

...They say: "The whites are cold, acquisitive, competitive, strangers to nature, impolite and exploitative...

...how do we distinguish between drama and dramaturgy in th world as it is today...

...Where does the "convention" of the theatre end and the "reality" of life begin...

...When the Indian says, whether he looks like an "Indian" or not, that the "white man" stripped the land and dirtied the river and now wants to clean the river and control the flood, and the devil with Indian Rights then as now, he is correct...

...Here again, problems on the reservation are problems for us all...

...The atomic bomb may well be the flaming instrument of God's final judgment...

...But whatever the source, historical or logical, it is clear that the linking of the Bible to the devil represents a defense against the missionary assault on Iroquois culture...

...To do justice to the subtleties of life on the Seneca Reservation requires more than ethnographic reportage, or abstract analyses of social structures that we find transfixed in the professional journals...

...Their hostility toward the Dam is only in part the result of a broken treaty, a high-handed attitude on the part of the Army Corps of Engineers and other more or less formal irritations...

...There will be no white men and few Seneca among them...

...I believe that the culture of poverty and primitive cultures share certain similar institutions originating in overlapping but not identical causes, and these institutions can arise quite independently, in the absence of any historical continuity between them...

...First of all, the idea of secret knowledge of the man from Heaven is convergent to a gnostic heresy...

...Moreover, certain Longhouse faithful believe the younger Seneca politicos are almost as bad as the whites...

...What the Jesuits considered divine, the Iroquois were likely to consider diabolic...

...It seems an accurate enough portrayal...

...Finally, we confront the ceremonial identity of those who remain faithful to the Longhouse and the Handsome Lake Code...

...And who can say that their perceptions are mistaken...

...And yet one feels that in attracting and attempting to fulfill the anticipations of the tourist, the Indian seems also to authenticate some vision of himself...

...Like all Messianic religions, the Handsome Lake Code is prophetic and apocalyptic...

...But all this is a matter of record and need not be recapitulated here...

...Thus we find that the Seneca revolution of the 1830s has come full cycle —the orthodox today tend to suspect the Council for disloyalty and defalcation— whereas, originally, of course, it was the traditional chiefs who were overthrown for selling the reservations prior to the setting up of the present quasi-national structure...

...The world, it is said, will end in fire and on this occasion destruction must be complete...

...Only the truest of believers are destined for salvation...

...First, one confronts the tourist Indian who makes souvenirs and dances in the shows at the "Indian Village," which is, so to speak, a theater within a theater...

...The little water medicine, the most powerful of protective medicines, is diminishing and cannot be renewed...

...Let me begin with the most obvious paradoxes...

...Concepts such as "proletarian" and "small bourgeois" explicate many of the forms of social life on the reservation but they do not begin to exhaust their contents...

...The world had a beginning...

...and these same grandmothers refer contemptuously to the ways of the "whites...

...Yet the Seneca took what seemed to them potent in Christianity, that is, the concrete image of Christ himself, and incorporated it into their hierarchy of divine beings...

...Only two or three people expect that the world may end either before the Dam is completed or at some indefinite time in the future...

...The Indian is considered a symbol of all that is freest, noblest, and most virile in the American tradition...

...thus they hasten the dissolution of the very tradition they seek to uphold...

...within its restricted compass are reflected many of the generic absurdities of our time...

...The troupe performs on stage, other Indians sit with the audience...

...The very poor, in particular, have a healthy suspicion of what Claude Levi Strauss has called the triumph of "mono-culture...

...There are, also, people who are fully identified with reservation society, generally Indian in appearance but, having white mothers, are not considered to be "Seneca" at all...

...But first let me ask whether a man with an Indian father and a white mother is less a Seneca than a man with a Seneca mother and a white father...

...He is the only one of the guardians who descends to earth but he finds it unnecessary to preach among his own people, the Seneca, because they are virtuous...

...all day in his tiny shack, and thought the Westerns were bad for the children for reasons that you might suppose...

...it also suggests an initial association of the purposes of writing with the evil ways of the whites, by a pre-literate people...

...Actually, no more than a dozen people really believe in the relevance of the prophecies of Handsome Lake to the present impass...

...His body is placed in a tomb under a rock but he easily escapes and returns to his place in the Iroquois Heaven...

...For the Dam signifies the loss of most of their land, and the land is still their Mother...

...Does not part of the world die, when a culture, a language, or even a generation that considers itself traditional, dies...

...It seems inadequate to its stated purpose...

...We encounter Seneca grandmothers, dusky-skinned and faithful to the Longhouse, fondly caring for small white grandsons with crewcuts and an addiction to television...

...Ultimate disaster and ultimate salvation are preceded by signs...

...The Dam, then, is a target for the frustrations of the Longhouse group and a sign of the Handsome Lake prophecy that the end of the world is approaching...

...How do these people of asymmetrical parentage regard themselves and each other...

...the anger caused by the internal decline of the Longhouse faith is vented on the Dam...

...divine" man is probably an accurate enough charac...

...George Washington is not only "the Father of our country," but he is the author of their new beginning, and he is the only white man who has ascended, if only to the middle reaches, of Handsome Lake's Heaven...

...Yet many Longhouse people are quite capable of changing masks to meet the occasion...

...But the term "hard-core" is misleading...

...This group numbers perhaps forty, and includes representatives from approximately one-third of the families on the reservation...

...Therefore he goes overseas and, coming upon evil men, is crucified and killed...