Indian Shadows
Josephy, Alvin M. Jr.
Indian Shadows NOW THAT THE BUFFALO'S GONE by Alvin M. Josephy Jr. Alfred A. Knopf. 330 pp. $15.95. Secretary of the Interior James Watt should read this book. Against all odds, American Indians...
...As Alvin M. Josephy Jr...
...Although Josephy touches on the problems Indian tribes have faced in creating economies that would sustain them, his book is not the place to go for deep analysis...
...Many, although how many is not clear, still follow traditional religions and lifestyles...
...Against all odds, American Indians have survived repeated efforts by white Americans to wipe them out...
...The small Nevada tribe of Pyramid Lake Paiutes stands in for tribes fighting for water rights...
...Still, he has done a service in compiling this detailed account of political fortitude over a long haul...
...Each group's experience illustrates a theme common to other tribes...
...They have even survived the protective custody of the Federal Government, which has used its power as trustee to take away still more of their land and resources, attack their religions and languages, and send their young people off to the cities...
...In the Oglala Sioux, who seized and held Wounded Knee in 1973, Josephy finds the "resurgent nationalism" that has shaken Indian reservations over the last two decades and has challenged the Bureau of Indian Affairs and its puppet tribal governments...
...Carol Polsgrove (Carol Polsgrove is a contributing editor of The Progressive...
...Josephy details the Indians' long struggle for identity and survival in Now That the Buffalo's Gone...
...The story of the Taos Pueblo represents widespread efforts to preserve traditional religions and sacred places...
...His voice can be monotonous, his narrative tedious...
...To illustrate the history, he recounts the experience of seven tribal groups fighting to hold onto or regain land, water, and fishing rights, religious freedom, and political self-determination...
...As one might expect of the former editor of American Heritage, Josephy is a chronicler, not an analyst...
...notes in Now That the Buffalo's Gone, the American Indian population has almost trebled since 1960, and roughly half of the more than 1.4 million American Indians live on reservations...
...And, ironically, in a book that so insists on their reality, his American Indians are too often shadows, walking a shadowy landscape...
...That uneasy reliance makes them vulnerable, in the short term, to political and economic winds, and, in the long term, to continued political and economic impotence...
...But American Indians cannot allow themselves such sentimentality over the past, Josephy argues...
...He writes as if from a great distance...
...Unfortunately, even as a chronicler Josephy has deficiencies...
...Nevertheless, the myth of the vanishing Indian retains a strong hold on white Americans, even some goodhearted ones, who are seduced by nostalgia for a lost American Eden...
...American Indians rely heavily on Federal money—a symbolic, inadequate, and perpetual payment for all that has been taken away from them...
...Even those who appear to be assimilated into white culture are often traditional at heart—a fact, Josephy says, that "may be either galling or wondrous to whites, depending on their point of view...
...They must stick to the political business of keeping themselves and their cultures alive...
...This drive toward self-government, led by young Indians educated in the ways of white power, may turn out to be one of the saddest casualties of the Reagan Administration's budget cuts...
Vol. 47 • April 1983 • No. 4
