A Problem of Images
GIARELLI, ANDREW L.
A Problem of Images The White Man's Indian By Robert F. Berkhofer Jr. Knopf. 261 pp. $15.00. Reviewed by Andrew L. Giarelli Very early in its conquest of the Americas, Spain required that its...
...A Problem of Images The White Man's Indian By Robert F. Berkhofer Jr...
...In making this point, the author occasionally simplifies and resorts to undocumented claims...
...The sole alternative was for Indians to move beyond the frontier...
...The Reguerimiento was read from the decks of ships approaching land...
...In the end, White Man's Indian refuses to answer its own important question, "To what extent can new meaning be infused into the old term to cancel old prejudices and invent a new evaluative image...
...The Reguerimiento, as it was called, was composed around 1512 by Palacios Rubios, an expert on just-war theory...
...Every new twist in white policy toward Native Americans has presented itself as being apocalyptic for their tribal condition...
...And it is equally true that such imagery was "mere cant to justify Puritan expropriation of native lands...
...It makes his pages of nice usage of terms like "Indian" and "native American" appear, by contrast, as posturing...
...often, it was delivered at safe, empty places far from the area of assault...
...Most distressing of all is Berkhof-er's reading of Native American political power between the Roosevelt and Nixon eras...
...Such a blunder is small, but its occurrence amid all of the author's attempts to avoid stereotype damages his credibility...
...White morality at the time argued that the allotment of land to individual Indians-a process that would supposedly wean them away from the notion that land was a tribal property over which they could wander freely-must go hand in hand with other forms of assimilation into white culture...
...Unfortunately, the Cherokees assimilated rather too well-and naively: By 1827, they had not only divided their lands but had also ratified a constitution espousing American principles of government...
...In fact, together these seemingly contradictory positions reflect white society's habit of demanding the freedom to be both moral and amoral in its dealings with Native Americans...
...Reviewed by Andrew L. Giarelli Very early in its conquest of the Americas, Spain required that its officers read a document to native populations they were about to attack...
...But I suspect he was afraid of the glaring simplicity of his destination: that five centuries of white legal, scientific and artistic explanations of the Indian have been a cover for two simple emotions-greed and conscience...
...When he tells us that English and Spanish colonization theory differed, since the English theorists added the right of commerce among the savages to the right to preach the gospel to them, he quips that this "may reflect not only the proverbial shopkeeper mentality said to be so prevalent in that nation...
...As for simplification, he blithely leaps from Renaissance Christian cosmogony to Enlightenment theories of the environment to 19th-century evolutionism and scientific racism, to modern cultural pluralism-as if each of these major currents in Western thought followed a timetable in making way for the next...
...Yet, Berkhofer observes, the interesting thing about the two sides of the controversy is that they were both indicative of white society's tortured drama of self-definition-a drama that hinged on the seemingly contradictory but actually complementary images of the good noble savage capable of being civilized, and the unspeakably vengeful savage...
...Noting that the legal relation between Native Americans and the United States "is perhaps unlike that of any other two people in existence," he speculated that the framers of the Constitution "had not the Indian tribes in view when they opened the courts of the union to controversies between a state and the citizens thereof, and foreign states...
...In his defense Berkhofer might argue that, for his purposes, Western thought merits simplification and not amplification...
...The writer himself also is not above using imagery to suit his particular ideology...
...There were, of course, people who held a more charitable position, arguing that white policy encouraged Indians to do what the Cherokees had done, and that whites must now honor the assertions made by those they had "civilized...
...Through examples like the above, Robert F. Berkhofer's book shows how strict was the morality and legality that Europe grafted onto its greed whenever it dealt with Native Americans...
...Luckily, the final section of White Man's Indian, entitled "Imagery and White Policy" is tough and clever...
...Chief Justice Marshall refused to hear the case...
...In the beginning all the world was America," wrote John Locke...
...Berkhofer concludes that white society has taken the realities of Native American cultures and turned them into ideology, and that Native Americans have turned that ideology into their own set of realities...
...President Andrew Jackson, long a "removal" advocate, advised the Cherokees that their best interests lay west of the Mississippi...
...Whites needed to be careful: They were-and are-In some way conquering themselves...
...Yet-true to his method of distancing himself from ideology-he offers no suggestions for changing the image of the Indian...
...To this, Georgians and their supporters replied that the Cherokees were being led by opportunistic half-breeds, and that most of the tribe was not civilized enough to assert its independence...
...The Spanish, after all, were not stupid...
...The hesitancy is soon dropped, and I am left wondering by what method, and with what proof, Berkhofer arrives at his claim that the idea of the Indian has remarkably persisted despite cultural change...
...The ensuing debate, as Berkhofer demonstrates, was not really much of a debate...
...They declared themselves an independent nation, and their leaders refused to cede any more territory to Georgia...
...The only time white imagery becomes complicated is when Indians themselves try to adopt it...
...Good intentions have seldom fit so nicely with greed...
...Then we can watch the white world scramble to preserve the appearance of good intentions and rationality...
...He is careful enough to undermine the possibility of white society ever abandoning its ideology for the sake of a "realistic" vision of Native Americans...
...Here Berkhofer traces the dependence of every Indian policy in the U.S.?from the Monroe era to the 1950s —upon the simultaneous image of the Indian as a deficient and a supereffi-cient employer of his resources...
...It was the only way well-meaning whites could envision preserving harmony between the races in areas where Indians remained after white settlement...
...It relied on such Christian legal notions as "terra nullius" (lands either totally vacant of people or uninhabited by Christians), and the idea of just war against the infidel...
...This gave the state the chance to react as if its sovereignty were being threatened, and in the bargain, to insist all Cherokees be removed from its borders...
...The author at first appears to exhibit typical scholarly restraint in drawing any conclusion from his survey...
...He shows how such power has expanded within the bounds set by assumptions of whites, and how a tribe's only escape from the ring of white power, from "the paternalism of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the supervision of Congress," lies in forsaking its tribal status...
...For instance, he writes at the start: "If the remarkable thing about the idea of the Indian is not its invention but its persistence and perpetuation, then the task of this book becomes one of delineating that continuity in spite of seeming changes in intellectual and political currents and alterations in social and economic institutions...
...The Jacksonian removal policies, the post-Civil War reservation policy, President Grant's "Peace" policy, the land allotment policy of the 1887 Dawes Act, even the New Deal's backfiring efforts to revive tribal cultures-none could escape the supposition that Indian tribes would be wholly assimilated within a generation...
...Take the case of the Cherokees versus the State of Georgia in the 1820s and 1830s...
...The study further reveals how oddly therapeutic-for white society?00 years of virtual genocide against the Indians has been...
...The "if" at the beginning of that sentence, however, is merely a concession to the statement's location in the tentative, early part of the book...
...Thus it is true that the Puritans' image of the Indian as a devilish creature was "the projection of the fears and repressed desires in themselves upon the outsiders they encountered in America...
Vol. 61 • August 1978 • No. 17
