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

sculpture
The End of the Trail
(1915, but still widely reproduced on postcards, belt buckles, and so forth) to
Dances with Wolves
(1991) wave them afond but insistent farewell. Even the Northern California Karuk artist and storyteller Julian Lang embarked on a project about the nearby Mattole people under the impression that the Mattole were extinct—but learned better along the way. Thanks to the museum wall text accompanying an exhibition of Karl Bodmer’s frontier watercolors of the 1830s, I myself believed that Mandans had been utterly wiped out by smallpox, until I met the Mandan artist Zig Jackson.
    Ishi, much cherished as “the last Yahi” while more thriving California tribes were largely ignored, was exhibited at San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition, along with
The End of the Trail
, and spent the last years of his life as exhibit-in-residence at a University of California museum in San Francisco, among Egyptian and Peruvian mummies and Indian bones. Performance artist James Luna critiqued Ishi’s status when he put himself on display at the San Diego Museum of Man in 1986. Contemporary groups from the Ohlone of the San Francisco Bay Area to the Gabrielano of the Los Angeles Basin have been mourned as vanished tribes; and Edward Curtis’s costumed portraits, in which he dressed up Native people in a multitribe pastiche of authenticity, haven’t helped much either, insisting as they do that the only real Indian is a vanishing Indian. Tourists still sometimes get indignant about traditional dances performed by people in Reeboks.
    Southern Sierra Miwok activist and Yosemite Park employee Jay Johnson told me the following story a few years ago:
    I think it was 1980, Julia and four of us on business for our tribe [seeking federal recognition in Washington] went to the Smithsonian and found the California museum exhibits, then Yosemite. . . . It had a little statement on the side, and it left off with “It’s very sad today. There’s no more Yosemite Indians.” Period. I said, “Let’s go down, talk to the people at the desk about this statement.” So we went down there and this lady, she was at the desk, and I said, “Ma’am, about that diorama about Yosemite,” and she says, “Oh, isn’t that nice?” And I said, “It’s nice, but there’s an error in the statement,” and she says, “Oh, no, there can’t be. Every little word goes through channels and committees and whatnot.” And I says, “It’s OK, but,” I says, “it tells me that there are no more Yosemite Indians today.” She says, “Well, that’s true, it’s very sad. But whatever’sout there is true.” So I say, “Well, I hate to disturb you, but I’m a Yosemite Indian, and we’re here on business for our tribe.” And she caught her breath and said, “Ohhh . . .”
    Kit Carson finds a book that tells of feats he never did. Jay Johnson finds a museum display that tells him he has vanished long ago. In the simulacral West, cowboys expand, Indians contract.
    Some tribes are fighting for federal recognition, others against appropriation in the representational wars. Many practitioners of New Age spirituality have been appropriating indigenous identities as though the world was their shopping mall and religious identity was no more than a costume to be tried on, mixed and matched, traded in and up. White people with bound braids and symbolic trinkets and animal names doing their own version of sweat lodge, drumming, vision quest, and sun dance ceremonies are rampant in the New Age and men’s movements. In 1992, the Lakota Nations, the heirs to the victors of the Battle of Little Bighorn and the victims of Wounded Knee, issued a “Declaration of War against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality.” It read, in part, “The absurd public posturing of this scandalous assortment of pseudo-Indian charlatans, wannabes, commercial profiteers and cultists comprise a momentous obstacle in the struggle of