Killing the White Man's Indian: Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century — Fergus M. Bordewich
Page 9: “The way they accomplished it was by sequestering the Senecas in a local hotel and lubricating them with alcohol until they agreed to sign.” —> Ugh, this is despicable.
Page 11: “unnoticed by a public that still sees Indians mainly through the mythic veil of mingled racism and romance” —> Yup. Fuck this.
Page 11: “talented tribal leaders were seeking innovative ways to define the place of the tribes in the modern world.” —> I feel like the word “talented” here is applied kind of liberally here, certainly in a hit-or-miss manner. I’m sure many are actually talented. But others probably not so much.
Page 14: Satraps. Good word.
Page 14: “participating in a nightlong peyote rite in a tepee on the Montana prairie” —> Of course he would start with this example.
Page 16: “and Thunderheart, a thriller, heroized the radicals of 1973 as third world-style revolutionaries struggling against a fascistic tribal leader and the tyranny of the United States government, in the form of the allegedly corrupt Federal Bureau of Investigation.” —> Well, this is all kinda true, though.
Page 16: “Seen from one angle, it suggests a massive failure of government to remedy generations of mistreatment. Seen from another, an equally massive failure of Indians to cope with life in present-day America.” —> Fair points, but one of these things seems way more egregious than the other.
Page 17: “It is almost as if a culture that is literally saturated with allusions to fictional Indians had no interest in living Indians at all.” —> Well, duh. That’s not much of an assertion.
Page 18: “Fritz Scholder’s sl portraits of flag-draped and feathered warriors” —> Look this up.
Page 18-19: “for ‘the Indian,’ as such, really exists only in the leveling lens of federal policy and in the eyes of those who continue to prefer natives of the imagination to real human beings.” —> This is going to be a recurring theme, isn’t it.
Page 21: “This book is not only about Indians but also about the nature of the United States itself as it enters the twenty-first century.” —> Of course, because we can’t talk about Indians outside the context of white people. We have to bring it back to how it all fits into mainstream white society. Of course.
Page 26: Ugh, this Custer reenactment makes me roll my eyes. So fucking dumb. All war reenactments are dumb.
Page 27: “'Custer was on a legal mission to return Indians to the reservation,’ protested Ron Nicholas, a reasonable man who is the president of the Custer Battlefield Historical and Museum Association, a nonprofit group dedicated to maintaining the character of the site. 'We can’t go back and rewrite history.’ Should we change the names of the Washington and Jefferson memorials because they were slaveowners? What our grandpas did was by the norms and values of their time. This place was a symbol of a hostile environment that needed to be conquered, and that conquest gave a lot of poor people an opportunity to move into a new area and earn a lot of wealth. To force out people they called savages was the norm of the time. You just can’t impose today’s norms on the 1870s.’” —> Wow, fuck all of this. Also, it’s such bullshit to bring up the vague idea of the American dream. Yeah, fuck all of this even more.
Page 28: “and that the Sioux, far from 'defending their homeland,’ as the plaque in the museum claims, were actually invaders in the ancestral lands of the Crows.” —> True, I’m not going to refute this. But ancestral homes can be hard to pin down anyway when so many tribes settled in different areas at different times or moved their tribes around a lot.
Page 29-30: “The past generation has seen the development of a national consensus on a number of aspects of the nation’s history that were once long obscured by racism or shame; for instance, there is today little dispute among Americans of any ethnic background over the meaning of slavery or the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. There is no such consensus, however, with respect to the shaded and deeply complex history of Indians and whites. In essential ways, both Indians and whites see their common past as apocalypse, as a story shaped crucially by violence, competing martyrdoms, and the collision of irreconcilable opposites. But there the similarity ends. Few other Americans, and perhaps none, have been so reshaped and so crippled by the events of the past, and at the same time so distorted in the national vision by myth and illusion. In a nation that is often impatient with history, Indians are still often dominated by it in a deep, visceral way that others find difficult to grasp. Indeed, it is impossible even to begin to understand modern Indians without taking into account the lingering power of events that the rest of the nation has never known or has pushed to the margins of memory.” —> True.
Page 31: Wow, I’ve never heard of the Wiyot massacre in Eureka on February 25, 1860. Utterly despicable.
Page 32: “In the space of a few hours, the world of the Wiyots had come to and end, cataclysmically and totally. Between sixty and seventy Indians were killed on the island. Another two hundred or more were massacred simultaneously on the south spit of Humboldt Bay and at the mouth of the Eel River, in what were presumably coordinated attacks designed to exterminate the Wiyots at a single stroke.” —> I hate this so much.
Page 33: “One would be grateful to write it off as a random, tragic event, a terrible accident at the margin of American history. But it is not that. It lies at the core of things.” —> Yup.
Page 34: “'In the beginning all the world was America,’ John Locke asserted with remarkable self-assurance” —> Lol. This commentary is funny.
Page 35: “In the 1650s, Dutch colonists brought back eighty decapitated Indian heads from a massacre and used them as kickballs in the streets of New Amsterdam.” —> What the fuck.
Page 37: No one is saying Indians weren’t violent. It just wasn’t a literal money-making, political motivation for them. Not a government policy to exterminate their enemies—yeah, they killed their enemies, but as a matter of war and safety. And even if exterminating their enemies wasn’t an official governmental policy—which it wasn’t in the sense of exact language in federal law—it wasn’t punished and white people rarely were imprisoned for it, so it was pretty implied and intended by the lack of justice for killing Indian people.
Page 38: “Most Indians were also realists; as encroaching white settlement disrupted their old way of life, they often sought aid from whites who were willing to provide them with education and help them adapt to new technology.” —> Maybe so; again, I’m not denying some Indians wanted to associate with white people. But they didn’t really have much choice to learn from and adapt to white ways. It was their only way forward. It was that or die, either by a white person’s literal hand or through diseases or just falling behind in development or life expectancy or whatever.
Page 39: “There are few places in the United States more poignant than New Echota.” —> This is a vague and weird sentence.
Page 40: What is the Cherokee alphabet?
Page 42: “'Yes, methinks I can view my native country, rising from the ashes of her degradation, wearing her purified and beautiful garments, and taking her seat with the nations of the earth.’” —> What a beautiful sentence. It’s from a Cherokee man talking about his changing culture and future.
Page 49: “Even as entire tribes succumbed to the epidemics that usually ran ahead of white settlement or to the occasional massacres that followed it, whites remote from the frontier pictured them perishing as gracefully as 'snow before the vernal influence’ or like 'the leaves of the forest that are swept away by the autumn winds.’ It was as if the Indians’ disappearance were the result of some force completely beyond the human power to stay, like a tidal wave or a change of seasons.” —> This honestly kind of makes me laugh, it’s that stupid. Who did white people think was responsible for the disappearance of the Indians? It absolves them completely of all responsibility to think this way.
Page 50: “In 1853, at Yontoket, several hundred Tolowas were murdered in the midst of their harvest dance. A survivor described it: 'The whitemen built a huge fire and threw in our sacred ceremonial dresses, the regalia, and our feathers, and the flames grew higher. Then they threw in the babies, many of them were still alive.’” —> This is so fucked up.
Page 52: “'I have always felt responsible for that man,’ Jack Norton says, with a gravity that belies his easy smile. 'I could deny responsibility and say that Alonzo lived in 1860 and I live now, so that whatever he did it’s no concern of mine. Or I can face the truth and the responsibility that comes with it.’” —> Yes. Very good. This is how you are supposed to approach problematic events or people in history, your own personal ones or in general. This is a Hoopa/Cherokee man talking about one of his ancestors being a white man who kept Hoopa concubines.
Page 53: “In fact, the populations of some regions, notably the Southwest, may have peaked centuries earlier and already have been in a period of long decline at the time of the European invasion.” —> I wonder if you could apply this to what happened to the Anasazi.
Page 59: “The questions that Boudinot raised are still the defining issues of Indian Country today: Are Indians to be part of American society, and if so on what terms? How are Indians to make use of Western culture? And what, indeed, does it mean to be 'Indian’ in the modern world?” —> All good questions, but I will always say that if it weren’t for white people invading and encroaching on Indian land in the first place, Indians today wouldn’t have to deal with these questions at all.
Page 62: “'I guess they figured I was supposed to look black.’” —> Why?
Page 64: “He put a pencil in each subject’s hair, meticulously noting down 'Indian’ blood if it slipped easily through and 'Negroid’ if it failed to.” —> What the fuck is this. Dumb anthropologists.
Page 72: “Although this was indeed a form of democracy, it was one that was rooted more in Collier’s sentimental view of Indians and their supposedly spiritualized sense of common interest than it was either in political reality or in the basics of true American democracy, for it glaringly lacked the separation of executive, legislative and judiciary powers that the founding fathers of the United States understood was essential for responsible government. This oversight continues to haunt tribes today.” —> Yes, indeed. Glaringly true.
Page 73: “Without proof of clear Indian lineage, the possibilities for abuse are self-evident. Since abolishing its blood quantum requirement in 1975, northern Michigan’s Sault Ste. Marie Band of Chippewas has ballooned from 1,300 to 21,000 members and has earned a reputation, perhaps undeserved, for allegedly selling tribal membership and the valuable fishing rights that accompany it to fishermen who have little or no Indian blood.” —> Huh, this is very interesting to me. I still have a hard time deciding how I feel about blood quantum. It’s just so damn complex.
Page 73-74: “Given the dazzling casino profits that have made the Pequots totally self-sufficient (each Pequot is guaranteed a job with an annual salary of $50,000 to $60,000 per year)” —> How does this work? Is it like per capita but you have to work to earn it? Interesting. I’m intrigued by the idea, even if it raises a bunch of questions about how that would practically work in a real setting.
Page 76: “'Indians started out white, you know. It was climate change over a number of years brought about a change in their pigmentation.’” —> Uhhh, what? I do believe in evolution, but this is just dumb.
Page 80: “and that the group has exercised tribal authority over its members without interruption since its first sustained contact with non-Indian settlers.” —> Why would this matter?
Page 89-90: “In 1986, the Department of Justice informed the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that in the seven years prior to the Martinez decision, the department had received some 280 complaints of violations of the Indian Civil Rights Acts by tribal governments. After Martinez, the number dropped precipitously, not because there were fewer abuses but because the department had made clear that it would do nothing to address them.” —> Boom. there it is. I don’t even understand this description of the Martinez case, but this is still true.
Page 90-91: “Ramon Roubideaux is a small, rotund, almost elfin man who enjoys describing himself, rather disingenuously, as 'just a little old barefoot boy from the Rosebud Indian reservation.’ While his view of tribal sovereignty is a minority one, it ears listening to, for, in contrast to that of most of the advocates of sovereignty, it has been gleaned from observing the behavior of tribal governments from the outside for nearly half a century. 'We have people with eighth-grade educations running what are, in effect, multimillion-dollar corporations,’ he says, leaning over his desk in his office in Rapid City. 'It’s so ridiculous, I can’t even cry! Indians can do anything harmful to their own people, and nothing happens. The federal government has given up its responsibility to guarantee their rights to Indian people—not only from the federal system, but also the tribal system, by hiding behind the idea that this is tribal sovereignty. What we’ve done is let the worst thing that was created by the white man in the last one hundred years—tribal governments—have a power that they simply do not deserve.’” —> Preach. I agree 100 percent with all of this.
Page 92: I find it so strange that this Lumbee man says the name of their tribe isn’t important. That seems like it would be an integral part of identity—and it is, to the feds! Hence this whole recognition issue based on name, present and historical.
Page 99: “When Gregg Bourland, a young businessman, was elected chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in 1990, he inherited the previous administration’s pledge to end alcoholism on the reservation by the year 2000.” —> Right, good luck with that.
Page 101: “Some of what they left drifted back into tribal ownership: 'Most of your heavy soil, your gumbo, your poorer land, what couldn’t be farmed, that was returned to the Sioux tribe,’ says Aberle.” —> Of course. Not that the Sioux ever really wanted to farm, but of course they would be allowed to keep only the worst, most useless land for farming.
Page 103: This Micki Hutchinson lady sounds like a real Republican brat. Ugh.
Page 104: “Anthropologists believe that the Lakotas originally inhabited the forests and grasslands of central Minnesota.” —> I’m willing to entertain the idea that the Lakota moved all over the place and weren’t only from the Black Hills area. But I have a huge skepticism toward anthropologists at the same time too.
Page 106: But claiming reservations are separate nations implies a belief that borders or jurisdiction lines actually mean something, which just isn’t true.
Page 109: Ugh, why is Donald Trump mentioned in all these books I’ve been reading lately. Fuck him.
Page 111: “By the end of the century, the tribe had shrunk to a single extended family with fewer than two dozen members; by the 1930s, only two elderly women still lived on tribal land.” —> How do you even recover from this Just a massive breeding campaign with whoever is left?
Page 113: Would it ever be possible for an Indian tribe to secede from the U.S., as it were? Not that Congress would ever recognize its independence, but it seems like it could be symbolic at the very least, and then maybe more substantial down the road.
Page 114: Fuck Senator Dawes. Good intentions or not, he fucked a lot of shit up. And they all thought they had good intentions anyway. Good is relative.
Page 115: “As liberal Christians, they were certain that the Indian had, like themselves, been made in the image of God and that the Indians’ ultimate transformation into a white man was part of a grand cosmic plan.” —> How presumptuous, arrogant and ethnocentric do you have to be to actually believe this? Goddamn.
Page 118: “Like many of his contemporaries in the golden age of capitalism, Dawes perceived private property as an almost magical force, a severe but benevolent taskmaster with transformative power.” —> But why? I know capitalism and private property are inexorably linked, but I don’t really understand why people believe in these things so fervently and religiously without any sort of critical thinking.
Page 118: “There was none of the selfishness that the Senator, like most of he educated men of his time, was convinced lay at the root of advanced civilization.” —> This is so fucked up, to venerate selfishness. It explains a lot, though.
Page 120: “Allotment would effectively remove individuals from the oppressive authority of the tribe.” —> What a fuckin’ euphemism this is.
Page 124: “There is no question that allotment was a disaster whose effects still shape the physical, legal, and human landscape of Indian country today.” —> Too bad Dawes died in 1902. I would have loved to see him reap the consequences of such a stupid policy.
Page 130: “Environmentalists have accused the tribe of irresponsibility toward th earth” —> Let me guess, though: these environmentalists are all white. They’re always white. It’s basically synonymous at this point.
Page 131: “But there is something more, something that i at the same time both subtle and overarching, a sort of moral perplexity that Indians have failed to behave according to expectation.” —> There it is. They just want Indians to be docile and nonthreatening. And to fit into that spiritual, nature-loving mold that white people created for them, so of course they’re surprised when they don’t fit into that cookie cutter.
Page 133: “The speech as it is known to most Americans is, quite simply, an invention, a fact that seems to make little difference to well-meaning whites who are determined to portray Indians as icons of ecological correctness.” —> Ohhh shit. So Chief Seattle never even said the words he’s most famous for. White people made it up and shoved it into his dead mouth. That’s a good metaphor for white-Indian relations in U.S. history, I think.
Page 140: “and jagged, reddish-gray jagged ridges” —> Uh oh. Redundant editing error.
Page 141: “the blunt-snouted cui-ui (pronounced 'kwee-wee’) was utterly unique” —> What a fun word!
Page 141: This Paiute myth about the white children returning home is particularly brutal with historical context and hindsight; that is, knowing that it was never going to be a happy reunion and only a bloody one.
Page 158: “'Now, instead of having a relationship with the resource, with the forest, we’re having a relationship with a piece of paper, an allocation, a budget.’” —> Good point. More proof that such legal proceedings are so arbitrary. You can write anything on a piece of paper and have it be supposedly legal if you write it the way you want with plenty of loopholes. Man, I’m such a cynic.
Page 164: “The anthropologists realize that they no longer matter now, that this is the real burial, the sacred event, and that, for the Omahas, the public gathering tomorrow will be almost beside the point.” —> You’re goddamn right.
Page 168: “A friendly scholar from the University of Indiana recovered a trove of forgotten Omaha songs recorded in the 1920s on wax cylinders.” —> I’ve listened to these!
Page 172: “These collections were not representations of reality, they were 'hostages,’ constant reminders of the nation’s new imperial power.’” —> One hundred percent agree.
Page 177-178: “Reinhard also observed that the women’s vertebrae were weakened and cracked from the pressure of heavy labor in numbers far out of proportion for a normal population. Few of them, moreover, lived to reach thirty. 'By the age of twenty, women were showing arthritic stresses that they shouldn’t have shown until after forty. They were working so hard, probably carrying loads like beasts of burden, that their spines were literally compressing, that their bones were quite literally breaking with the stress.’” —> This makes me cringe because it hurts me, but it also makes me really mad. Of course women do everything to keep a tribe together.
Page 180: “Epidemics meant not only the sudden loss of parents, of children, of beloved friends, but the destruction of entire cultures and economies. When warriors died, the entire nation became more vulnerable to predatory neighbors. When hunters died, the food supply shrank. When medicine men died, the spiritual world disintegrated. When young women died in large numbers, the community lost the capacity to reproduce. When the elderly died, collective memory went with them.” —> This is so sad. I never thought of it like this before.
Page 186: This author seems to really like the word “wryly,” huh. It’s a great word, don’t get me wrong; I’ve just seen it a ton in this book.
Page 194: “Members of the Zuni football team regularly make offerings of cornmeal to the war gods before their games.” —> This seems like a good use of a deity, sure, praying to win at sports. Ugh.
Page 200: “In the shadows of dorms, young lovers stand with their loins pressed together.” —> What a weird sentence.
Page 206: “From somewhere behind the altar, ethereal voices rise in breathless song: 'I’ve been given eyes to see by the eagle…My spirit makes me free.’” —> This sounds like some real bullshit to me.
Page 207: “the Fund for the Four Directions, a private organization interested in Indian spiritual issues” —> Jesus Christ. And of course this organization paid for a rich white woman to come speak at this forum for indigenous issues. I hate white people.
Page 209: “Brock Evans, the executive director of the National Audubon Society, declared, 'It’s like the massacre at Wounded Knee.’” —> Are you fucking kidding me? I don’t even know where to begin with my myriad issues with this assertion. He’s claiming that a telescope construction project on a remote mountain is the same as the literal massacre of hundreds of people.
Page 212: “Romanticizers fail to see that the apparently flattering image of the Indian as selfless caretaker of the earth is, in essence, little different from the ugly exploitation of caricatured Indians as school mascots, for both are equally rooted in the assumption that Indians and their beliefs (real or imagined) are icons free for the taking, to be appropriated for any white man’s cause.” —> Fuck yes. Preach.
Page 214: I hope there is more about this topic, the co-opting of Native beliefs by white people, and how white people then completely bastardized and manipulated those beliefs to suit their own beliefs and world views. That’s exactly how I felt about Standing Rock. I need to read more about this. This is such a good inclusion in this book. I would read whole books about this topic alone.
Page 216: So what’s really in this for Ola Davis? Money? Fame? There’s gotta be something substantial for her to fight this hard.
Page 217: “Scientists such as Baars were stunned. 'Part of the beauty of astronomy is that you only observe, that you are not interfering with the process of things,’ he says, sounding bewildered, even hurt, at the protestors’ failure to appreciate the passive quietude of astronomers’ work. 'We can’t do any harm—it’s just impossible.’” —> Agree, mostly.
Page 228-229: “Modern Lakota nationalism holds, as a matter of faith, that true Lakotas could not even consider selling the Black Hills. 'Only someone with no Lakota heart beating within them would consider taking money in lieu of the land,’ Gregg J. Bourland, the chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, declared in a public television report devoted to the question of the Black Hills in 1992. The historical record tells a somewhat different story. Although mid-nineteenth-century Lakotas recognized that the Hills held a wealth of food and constructional material that was crucial to the tribe’s well-being, not a single tribal leader of the period referred to the Hills as sacred or holy. On the contrary, although some Lakotas, including Crazy Horse, refused to relinquish the Hills on any terms, when American negotiators pressed the Indians to either lease mining rights or sell the Hills outright, the leading chiefs offered to give them up for $70 million. Indeed, their words give the lie to modern notions that traditional Indians understood neither money nor the concept of real estate; the Lakotas knew perfectly well what it meant to sell land, and they south to drive the best bargain they could. 'The Black Hills are the house of Gold for our Indians,’ Little Bear declared. 'If a man owns anything, of course he wants to make something out of it to get rich on.’ Red Cloud, who had led the Lakotas in their successful war against the U.S. Army in the 1860s, said: 'You can see it plain enough that God Almighty placed those hills there for my wealth, but now you want to take them from me and make me poor, so I ask so much that I won’t be poor.’ Added Spotted Tail, 'I want to live on the interest of my money. The amount must be so large as to support us.’ The whites offered $6 million. The Indians balked at what they considered a paltry sum. Soon miners and settlers began pouring into the Black Hills. Clashes with the Indians steadily increased and finally flared into full-scale war.” —> Now this is incredibly interesting. I had no idea the chiefs said this stuff about the Black Hills—not that the hills weren’t for sale at all, but rather that they weren’t for sale at the low prices the whites would offer them. Wow.
Page 233: “'To give up the Hills, that would be like an American saying to hell with the flag and the Constitution.’” —> Is this really comparable, though? Because I definitely feel that way about both of those things, but I’m still definitely an American.
Page 238: “'When I hear non-Indians going on about how this is going to destroy our culture,’ says Belvado, 'I think, what are they talking about? If they really want to help, let them bring $10 million onto the reservation to build youth centers and schools and to fence in our real sacred sites and make them worthy. There are plenty of holy places on our own land that have been looted because no one bothered to protect them. And if these environmentalists are so concerned about us, why not help us with our water supply, our garbage dumps, and sewerage? Why don’t they provide funding for these things, instead of spending money to send people to Europe who don’t represent us?’” —> Hell yes.
Page 241: “New Mexicans who don’t like Gallup call it 'Drunk City.’” —> I remember this coming up in Leslie Marmon Silko’s book Ceremony, except then both whites and Indians didn’t like that city.
Page 242: “In McKinley County, which includes Gallup, the rate of death from alcoholism is six times the national average. For years, the county has led the nation in alcohol-related motor-vehicle deaths. In 1990, according to Gallup police chief Frank Gonzalez, Gallup also endured 1 murder, 15 rapes, 26 robberies, 365 burglaries, 115 car thefts, and 1,350 assaults due to alcohol. In another recent year, Gonzalez’s department made 33,000 arrests for drunkenness, more than the entire state of Illinois. It is no secret that levels of consumption that spell disaster for Indians provide Gallup with a thriving economy. 'If it wasn’t for them coming in, this city wouldn’t be as well off as it is,’ says Gonzalez. 'You’ve got to take the bad with the good. That’s the way it is.’” —> Are you fucking kidding me?
Page 248: “One treatment program that works with Indian children has estimated that as many as 95 percent of girls and 33 percent of boys raised in alcoholic homes may have been sexually molested by the age of nine.” —> This makes me so fucking sick.
Page 255: “A 1989 report by researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo, for instance, blamed Indian alcoholism largely on such things as 'a history of discriminatory government policies,’ the 'unclear legal and social status of Indians,’ and Native Americans’ lack of awareness of their rights.” —> You can put the blame on whomever you want, even hereditary alcoholism. But the fact remains that it’s still a choice to pick up a bottle. It’s that simple. Your dead Indian ancestor isn’t forcing you to drink—you’re making the choice; you’re doing it to yourself.
Page 255: “Such theories, intentionally or not, shift responsibility for Indian drinking problems into the past and onto whites; they also suggest that otherwise intelligent and adaptive Indians were simply unwilling to change their behavior even when it became obvious that excessive drinking was wreaking havoc in their lives and communities.” —> Yes. This right here. I’m willing to give Natives some slack when it comes to things like this given their histories, but alcohol is still a personal choice. You still have control. You’re not completely helpless.
Page 256: “Tellingly, the Lakotas named alcohol mni wakan, which may be rendered two ways: as 'magic water’ or as 'the water that makes men foolish.’” —> Uh, how does this translation work?
Page 262: “To Ducheneaux, Bourland’s belief that alcoholism can be brought under control by regulation and taxation is too little and too late. 'Closing a few bars is not going to have any affect on tribal alcoholism,’ he drawls with the irritable weariness of a man who feels he has had to make an all-t00-obvious argument too many times. 'It’s not just in the bars. It’s i the kids. It’s in the elderly. It’s in the homes.’” —> Agree.
Page 273: “Like most junior colleges, Little Big Horn offers two-year degrees in conventional subjects such as business administration, data processing, mathematics, psychology, science, nursing, industrial arts, home economics, and 'office systems.’ Uniquely, however, it also requires that students, nearly all of whom are members of the Crow Tribe, take courses in Crow language, oral literature, tribal history, 'Indian identity,’ Indian philosophy and law, and 'American Indian political science,’ among others.” —> Good!
Page 282: “He once suggested, apparently seriously, that the country’s quarter million Indians be spread, nine to a county, among the nation’s 2,700 counties.” —> Why. I mean, assimilation, yes. But still, why. Richard Pratt, you’re dumb too.
Page 300: “'Any notion that we can, or should, live in isolation from contact with whites is absurd. The most important education can do is give kids a choice about how to live their lives. Think of it as providing the weapons of survival for the modern warrior.’” —> Agree. This is a good way to look at it. Yes, it sucks that Indians have to live this modern life with white people now, but since that is the case, everyone should adapt to it. It’s not going to change back, so there’s no use pretending it can ever go back.
Page 301: “Real Bird, in the common way of Indians, speaks of the transcendental matter-of-factly, as whites will of money and sex.” —> Huh?
Page 307: “In key respects, Martin’s plan resembled the approach of East Asian states that recognized, at a time when most of the third world was embracing socialism as the wave of the future, that corporate investment could serve as the driving force of economic development. Martin understood that corporations wanted cheap and reliable labor, low taxes, and honest and cooperative government.” —> I have such a big problem with this. Corporations might be good for large-scale economic development, making a tribe more wealthy, for that tribal bureaucratic advantage or whatever, but at what expense for average workers? I suppose maybe it’s possible for some employees to earn more money too, but there will still be a hierarchy of income and power, which probably will only make things worse.
Page 312: “'Whether the Indians should have been satisfied and what the land would be worth now if it has never been sold are questions that lead us to etheral realms of speculation.’” —> Good point. I’m not saying you should all move on, but you certainly can’t go back to the past.
Page 322: “In a letter to Powell confirming her dismissal, Chairman LaFramboise stated, 'It is very disturbing to find people who are thinking they are professional and only have hidden agendas including manifestations of political grandeur.” —> Lol what. This sounds bizarrely Trumpian. (Context: a reporter employed by a tribe-run newspaper was snooping around too much, so they fired her.)
Page 330: “How much blending can occur before Indians cease to be Indians? Unfortunately, the implications of this democratic trend remain virtually unexamined.” —> This is why the whole issue of blood quantum is so confounding to me.
Page 330: “How much blending can occur before Indians cease to be Indians? Unfortunately, the implications of this democratic trend remain virtually unexamined. The question is sure to loom ever larger in the coming generations, as the United States increasingly finds itself in 'government-to-government’ relationships with 'Indian tribes’ that re, in fact, becoming less ethnically Indian by the decade. Within two or three generations, the nation will possess hundreds of semi-independent 'tribes’ whose native heritage consists mainly of autonomous governments and special privileges that are denied to other Americans. In the meantime, relations between Indian tribes and both the federal and state governments are likely to become more complicated. Increasing control over their sources of revenue will enable more and more tribes—primarily those with marketable natural resources, well-run tribal industries, and proximity to big cities—to achieve some degree of political autonomy. However, without enlightened leadership and an educated and self-confident electorate, not to mention the collaboration of the federal government, political sovereignty is only a pipe dream. 'There’s no such thing as being half sovereign any more than there is being half pregnant,’ says Ramon Roubideaux. 'We are only sovereign insofar a the U.S. allows us to be. Sovereignty can only be preserved as long as you have the force to protect it, not just brute force, but political force, too. So unless you have an army, you’d better get used to that. Indians who think differently are just kidding themselves.’” —> All of this is sad but probably true.
Page 332: “To see change as failure, as some kind of cultural corruption, is to condemn Indians to solitary confinement in a prison of myth that whites invented for them in the first place.” —> Yes.
Page 334: “Her twin sons are strikingly Indian in appearance—'You’d never know I had anything to do with it’” —> Lol.
Page 336: “On the cultural plane, it represents the struggle of peoples who have been flattened out into cliche and myth to regain dimension and to shape an identity that is simultaneously more traditional and more modern, more conscious of history and less dominated by it, and, ultimately, both more Indian and more American.” —> This sentence is filled with contradictions, yet somehow it makes perfect sense and sums it all up. Which was the point, obviously: contradictions for effect.
Page 338: I wonder what John Marshall was thinking when he called Indian tribes “domestic dependent nations” that should be treated like “wards” of the government. There was no way for him to have known what would come later because of his words, but did he realize how powerful anything he wrote might become? He surely would have had to understand the concept of precedent and that everything he did in those early days set a precedent. So I wonder if today’s tribes and reservations would be even remotely close to what he thought they should be.
Page 338: Ah! I had never thought about a potential amendment to the constitution concerning Indian tribes! That would be a good way of doing it, except that the language would have to be perfectly clear, which is an impossibility. So actually, nevermind, that’s not a good idea.
Page 338: “As the landscape of Indian Country becomes steadily more complex and ever more reflective of the vast diversity of tribes that always existed beneath the conforming grid of federal policy, it is increasingly essential to disentangle the contradictions with which the principle of 'sovereignty’ has become freighted. To do so with enough finality to accommodate the rights of tribes as well as those of individual Indians and of other Americans deserves, and may well require, an amendment to the United States Constitution. Such a measure might, for instance, clearly define Indian tribes as self-governing entities subject in every respect to the laws of the United States but not to those of the states in which their reservations lie. If it is to guarantee democratic freedoms to all, it should prohibit discrimination by tribes based on race, religion, or tribal origin; guarantee the civil rights of tribe members and other residents of reservations, perhaps by the establishment of a board of appeal along the lines of the British Privy Council within the Justice Department; assure both Indian traditional religions and other faiths equal protection under the law, including the protection of authentic sacred sites; require tribal constitutions to enforce the separation of governmental powers; explicitly make tribal officials accountable to federal laws; ensure freedom of the press; require free, fair, and open elections subject to federal scrutiny; and guarantee permanent residents of reservations who are not enrolled members of tribes some form of representation in tribal forums.” —> What a loaded sentence full of ideas. I love it.
Page 340: “It can scarcely be surprising that communities far from airports, interstate highways, and cities, populated by ill-trained workers, and governed, in some cases, by politicians who do not abide by the most basic democratic rules are not prime locations for large-scale investment.” —> Hm, I wonder where this makes me think of…
Page 340-341: “But if public policy is somehow to be made from the tangle of inventions and aspirations that have endowed the Black Hill and Mount Graham and similar places with sacred power for Indians, other Americans must undertake a painful separation of history from wishful myth and of true political obligation with romantic attachment to idealized notions of the Indian. Not only whites but Indians as well will somehow have to overcome the false polarity that calls upon us to see the relationship between whites and Indians as one of irreconcilable conflict between conquerer and victim, corruption and innocence, Euro-American 'materialism’ and native 'spirituality.’” —> Agree with alllll of this.
Page 343: “The Indian story does not, of course, end with an intellectual accommodation of the past or even a moral coming to terms. Indeed, the story does not end at all. Until now, each age has imagined its own Indian: untamable savage, child of nature, steward of the earth, the white man’s ultimate victim. Imagining that we see the Indian, we have often seen little more than a warped reflection of ourselves; when Indians have stepped from the roles to which we have assigned them, we have often seen nothing at all. There will be no end to history, but an end may be put to the invention of distorting myth.” —> Very good. This could be a great summary to the whole book, which makes sense why it’s at the end, then.
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