Loitering: New and Collected Essays by Charles D'Ambrosio Read Free Book Online Page B

created by Injuns who are actually alive and walking around and scratching their bellies and grumbling about what’s for dinner or listening to the radio or reading books or arguing over the rules of Monopoly and especially those who are rather clamorous (uppity) about their needs. It all gets so queer and drifty and hard to track these days. Eco-Elements on First Ave. downtown has been instrumental in gathering signatures for a petition against the Makah, and it’s one of those New Age emporiums with a syncretic, boutiquey approach to spirituality, a sort of travel agency specializing in tourism for the soul, emphasizing past lives, future lives, every kind of life but the really incompliant and unruly present, where tarot, runes, goddess-stuff, astrology, Native American spiritual resources, healing soaps and oils and aromas, candles that calm you down and bells that strike a special, particularly resonant and congenial note—where all this totally creeps out the stodgy Pauline Catholic in me, and yet—yet!—this reaching out to the arcane holy world, this Luddism of the soul, however fey and preposterous and apostatic and pagan it might seem in my eyes—you’d think this grab bag of atavistic practices would put the New Ageists in deep and direct sympathy with the Makah.
    But it doesn’t. And not so weirdly, a lot of the attacks on the Makah seem to gut and hollow out the “Indian” and take that rhetorical material and use it as stuffing, which in turn is packed into whales. The clichés about Indians transfer easily into clichés about whales, similar in substance and similarly hackneyed, yet housed in different vessels. The noble savage qua noble mammal. This can’t be flattering to the Makah, while I imagine metaphor in general is probably a matter of oceanic indifference to even the most poetic gray whale. And the rhetorical violence—the stealing of language, the silencing—shouldn’t surprise anyone even remotely versant with white/Indian history. Captain Watson likes to footnote his superior credentials as an Indian enthusiast from way back—Wounded Knee!—and yet somehow without tearing his brain in half he’s able to plunge ahead with low, vicious, even paranoid attacks on the Makah as people. A small measured dose of irony should prevent this kind of mental sloppiness, but doesn’t, probably because people in the environmental movement, like holy folks everywhere, don’t make real keen ironists. I can pretty well guess that these sort of merit-badge Indians aren’t entirely or enthusiastically embraced by your average enrolled tribal member, especially as they listen to Watson float pseudo-arguments that asperse the character of the Makah and accuse them of being liars,frauds, cheats, racketeers, colluders, and, of all things, fake Indians.
    Abstract love is the nosy neighbor of abstract hate; they see right into each other’s windows and they always agree on everything. And neither one of them really tests disinterestedness, the ability to make tragic choices between things of equal worthiness and legitimacy—which to my mind explains why so much writing and discussion about whales tends toward melodrama, where right and wrong are always clear, where only one of the terms is justified. “The opposition are not nice guys,” Captain Watson has written. Nice? That seems a simpy word for a big old jackpot of a problem, a lazy and sinister trope suggesting that to oppose (Paul Watson) is to lack niceness, by definition. “I have no time for the arguments of tradition,” Watson, the honorary Indian, has written. And further: “I have no wish to understand them. I have no wish to argue the pros and cons of whaling.” He says, “The tradition of whalekind is of far more value to me.” And this tradition comprises what? “They [the whales] grace the azure blue with a majestic intelligence wedded to an amazing tactile grace. A profound, elusive, ephemeral sentience, they deify the abysmal