The Indian Givers

...If Edmund Wilson were simply the "journalist" he calls himself in this book, or the "New Yorker writer" the dust jacket blurb calls him, I would not have put down Apologies to the Iroquois with the same feeling of frustrated dissatisfaction...

...As great a critic and as fine a writer as Edmund Wilson is incapable of writing a bad book...

...They have even established colonies in some American cities, the largest of which is to be found in the unlikely North Gowanus section of Brooklyn...

...Limited in scope to the high-steel Mohawks at home in Caughnawaga and their home away from home—Brooklyn's Nevins Bar and Grill—Mitchell's section of the book is slick, perceptive and wholly satisfactory...

...Mad Bear, firebrand leader of the ultra-nationalist Iroquois movement, has not only "recognized" Fidel Castro's Government, but was the leader of an invited delegation to Havana, which now hopes that Castro's Cuba will sponsor admission of the Iroquois League to the councils of the United Nations...

...After much complicated legal maneuvering, the basis of which on the Indian side is that such Government action violates existing treaties between the Tuscaroras and the United States, the Indians succeeded in retaining their land, halting a $700 million construction project and rejecting an offer of $3 million for some 1,330 acres...

...It is curious that so few of us feel the same sense of guilt for having destroyed the Indians' life as for our having stolen their land...

...Regis Mohawk reservation and the Mohawks are suing the government for 834,000,000...

...To him the most significant aspect of the Iroquois resurgence is that "they remind us of our rights as citizens...

...The Senecas, part of whose land would be flooded, are actively opposing construction of a large dam on Pennsylvania's Allegheny River...

...While such facts of Iroquois history are scattered through Edmund Wilson's book like raisins in a cake, Apologies to the Iroquois deals with the politics, the religious ceremonies and the general outlook of the 20,000 Iroquois today...

...Part of the planning calls for a large storage reservoir which would flood about a fifth of the Tuscarora Indian reservation, thus evicting 175 Indians living in 37 houses, who were to be compensated for their land and buildings...

...Apologies to the Iroquois is written with all his accustomed facility and grace...

...It is manifest in a demand for Indian "rights," including compensation for land illegally taken in the past and a last-ditch resistance against encroachment on Indian land for recent engineering projects, and in a resurgence of Indian religion at the expense of the "white" Christianity to which most have been converted...

...While he does not support the new Iroquois nationalism, he seems opposed to their integration into today's American life, though he seems to realize that the virgin forests can never return...

...At its peak in the 18th century the Iroquois constituted an Indian Empire reaching from the St...

...A new Indian self-assertion, of which an Iroquois nationalist movement is a striking example, has lately appeared...

...Three of the Indian leaders of the demonstration were arrested, later to be released when their cases were dismissed...

...Lawrence Seaway also resulted in taking some Indian land from the St...

...They have no fear of heights, they have superb physical coordination, and even the natural Indian walk is perfectly adapted to walking narrow girders...

...Reviewed by Neal Buhler Part Cherokee Indian, Part American Critic IN HIS 1947 study of the Zuni Indians of New Mexico, Edmund Wilson wrote, "We white Americans glance wistfully at moments toward the Indians, whom only a short time ago we were fighting tooth and nail...

...The Mohawks in High Steel," the first short section of this book, is a reprint of Joseph Mitchell's admirable 1949 New Yorker piece on the footloose Caughnawaga Mohawks, who are among the finest structural steel workers in the world...

...For Wilson, to whom "our bureaucrats [are] getting more and more out of hand," the Indian nationalism recently manifest in obstructionism and a sometimes unrealistic demand for "rights" is not the understandable overcompensation of a people long denied simple justice...

...From their reservation just outside Montreal, these Caughnawaga Mohawks, since discovering the pleasures and high pay to be found riveting the girders of bridges and skyscrapers, now follow high-steel construction across the continent...

...He takes a positive glee in describing the discomfiture of Robert Moses and the Power Authority and implicit in his book on the Iroquois is the feeling that what we white Americans call progress is a sham...

...Certainly the Indians have suffered at our hands, and their treatment is perhaps the dirtiest blot on American history...

...What is peculiar about Edmund Wilson's attitude is his own brand of nihilism...

...The construction of the St...

...Wilson attended many and describes their observance in a wealth of detail more interesting to the anthropologist than to the layman...

...It is at least debatable that he is right in thinking that a planting of old elm trees in his home village is more valuable than a four-lane highway "for trucking...

...There seems to be a Indian affinity for high-steel work...

...Operations were begun without consulting the Indians, who refused to engage in any land transactions whatsoever, and the surveyors, under police protection, were met by 200 Tuscaroras, some of the women going so far as to lie down in front of the surveyors' trucks...

...In 1958 the Power Authority of the State of New York, of which Robert Moses is Chairman, began a gigantic hydroelectric project at Niagara Falls designed to cut the cost of electric power production almost in half...

...They are entitled to at least as much help as the Pakistanis or the Bolivians and we owe them a moral priority over all other peoples in attaining their legitimate rights and fulfilling their aspirations...

...they are also refusing to pay New York State income tax, again based on an ancient treaty with the United States...

...Lawrence to the Tennessee and from New England to the Mississippi...

...A great part of it deals with the rites and ceremonies of the Iroquois Handsome Lake religion...

...It contains a great deal that is interesting and much that is fascinating...

...There is a kernel of truth in both viewpoints, for the life of the pre-Columbian Indians had a "wholeness" and a harmony with nature which is totally lacking for us, and in the Indian character there was something truly noble, as well as savage...

...And this wistfulness is more natural for our badly run and annihilation-haunted industrial societies than was the equally unrealistic admiration of the eminently civilized Frenchmen of the Enlightenment for the Noble Savage...

...Much of the book deals with the latest Iroquois attempts to ward off continued white encroachment, of which the following is an example...

...Edmund Wilson's Apologies to the Iroquois is something else again...

...On the Six Nation Reserve in Canada, where almost half the Iroquois live, supporters of the Iroquois Confederacy are attempting to get rid of a "puppet government" of Indian councillors and to recover their original autonomy...

...In reading Apologies to the Iroquois it should be borne in mind that the Iroquois are not, and never were, an Indian tribe, but a confederacy or league—the Six Nations of the Mohawks, Senecas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Oneidas and Tuscaroras— all but the Tuscaroras speaking dialects of the same language...