Storming the Gates of Paradise by Rebecca Solnit Read Free Book Online

an interminable drama or just shove them in the closet and play house themselves: the Native American land wars are attempts to take back part of the house, but the cultural wars are attempts to recast the characters or rewrite the drama. The sardonic artist Jimmie Durham revises it thus: “Nothing could be more central to American reality than the relationships between Americans and American Indians, yet those relationships are of course the most invisible and the most lied about. The lies are not simply a denial; they constitute a new world, the world in which American culture is located.”
    This new world of the United States was almost literally founded on appropriating indigenous identity: in 1773, the Sons of Liberty dressed up as Mohawks to stage the foundational gesture of revolt against England, the Boston Tea Party. Since then, playing Indian has been a popular occupation for children and, of late, for adults; and decorative motifs, from New Mexico license plates to Pendleton woolens to the ever popular chief’s-head tattoo, draw from indigenous iconographies. For Native American culture to be infinitely appropriable, it must belongto everyone—and to no one in particular. This desire to possess has generated both the widespread belief that Native Americans have vanished and the concomitant problems of the visibility of contemporary Native people. The authenticity attributed to nativeness seems to be something everyone can impersonate; as cowboys are to American actors, so are Indians to—apparently everyone, including hordes of part-time wannabe Indians in Germany and Central Europe and New Age wannabes all over the United States. The Western’s self-invention finds its final frontier, or final solution, in immigrants reinventing themselves as indigenous people, self-conscious simulators of an aesthetic of unself-conscious authenticity, happy inhabitants of a historical fiction.
    Perhaps the conceptual reservation onto which Native Americans have been forced is called Art: like works of art, they are expected to exist either outside of time or in the past tense of classics and masterpieces, to be on exhibit, to be public property, to be seen and not heard, to be about the spiritual rather than the political, and to embody qualities to which everyone can aspire, whether they are the Czech and Slovak “Indians” in John Paskievich’s 1996 documentary film
If Only I Were an Indian
or sports teams such as the Atlanta Braves, the Washington Redskins, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Chicago Blackhawks (to say nothing of Chevrolet Apaches, Jeep Cherokees, Pontiacs, and Winnebagos). As they have become more vocal—or audible—in recent decades, many native North Americans have worked to move out of or mock this conceptual museum. In the visual arts, Edgar Hachivi Heap of Birds, Jimmie Durham, James Luna, Zig Rising Buffalo Jackson, Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, and many others have taken on the politics of indigenous identity with humorous outrage.
    One such battle against the museum was mounted by Pemina Yellow Bird, a Mandan woman appointed to the board of the North Dakota State Historical Society. After an incident in which two non-Indian men were apprehended with the shellac still drying on the skulls they had robbed from a local burial mound, she asked the state archaeologists where the recovered skulls were going:
    And they said, Well, we’ll just put them in the vault with the others. The others? Yeah you want to see? So we went to the Heritage Center and down intothe basement where an armed guard was standing next to a vault. . . . They lead me into this warehouse-like room that was filled from the floor to the ceiling with boxes and boxes of remains of dead Indian people. And I said at that time—you know, I was just shocked, it knocked the wind out of me—Are these all Indian people? And they go, Yup, they’re all Indians. The non-Indians get reburied, but we bring the Indians here for study.
    Yellow