The Truth About Stories (10 page)

Great stuff. And potent. So potent, in fact, that not only did these
wishful fictions convince Whites of the imminent demise of Native peoples, but they also
persuaded many Native people that they had no future as Indians.

Indians such as Charles Eastman.

Eastman was Lakota, one of the more famous Indians of his day. He had been
raised traditionally on the Canadian prairies and then at age fifteen was sent off to a
series of schools by his father, Many Lightnings, who was convinced that Christianity
and White culture were the wave of the future. Eastman's education took him to the
Santee Agency school in Santee, Nebraska, and from there to Beloit College in Wisconsin,
to Dartmouth, and on to Boston College, where he earned a medical degree. He served as
the physician at the Pine Ridge Agency in the winter of 1890 when the Seventh Cavalry
massacred Big Foot's band at Wounded Knee Creek, and went on to write — with
the strong assistance of his wife, Elaine Goodall Eastman — eleven books, several
of which —
Indian Boyhood
(1902),
The Soul of the Indian
(1911),
and
From the Deep Woods to Civilization
(1921) —
were
about traditional Indian life and Eastman's experiences with the non-Native world.
And while he saw the inherent faults in White civilization (“I have wondered
much,” Eastman wrote in
From the Deep Woods to Civilization
, “that
Christianity is not practiced by the very people who vouch for that wonderful conception
of exemplary living. It appears that they are anxious to pass on their religion to all
races of men, but keep very little of it themselves”),
¹⁶
he was, in the end,
convinced that there was no chance for Indians to maintain their former, simple lives,
that they would either have to assimilate or die. “I am an Indian,” Eastman
declared in the closing paragraph of the book, “and while I have learned much from
civilization, for which I am grateful, I have never lost my Indian sense of right and
justice. . . . Nevertheless, so long as I live, I am an American.”
¹⁷

But who exactly was this Indian Eastman believed himself to be, and who
exactly was this American he believed he had become?

While Charles Eastman was making his way from the deep woods to
civilization, E. Pauline Johnson was making her way from the Mohawk reserve at Six
Nations (near Brantford, Ontario) to the stage and the lectern. A mixed-blood like
Eastman, Johnson was best known for her poetry performances that played to sell-out
crowds in Canada and England. Dressed for the first half of the program in a
composite/makeshift, semi-traditional Native-inspired outfit complete with fur pelts,
wampum belts, her father's hunting knife, and a scalp she was given by a Blackfoot
chief, Johnson would then switch to
an elegant evening gown for the
second half, providing the audience with the Native exoticism they craved and the
English sophistication they trusted.

On occasion, Johnson would reverse the order of the costumes and do the
first half of her performance in a gown, only then switching to her Native outfit. But
this was not as popular because it inverted and challenged the idea of order and
progress that Western civilization had decreed and that her audiences expected.

And desired.

Both Eastman and Johnson were performers, though Johnson arguably realized
it more completely than did Eastman. Eastman, if we can trust the sentiment in his
books, was searching for a way to explain the dichotomy between Christian theory and
Christian practice, while Johnson was looking for a way to make a living. Delightfully,
her business card read, “Pauline Johnson, Mohawk Author —
Entertainer.”

The success that both Eastman and Johnson had at the turn of the century
depended, in large part, on their Native pedigree. Eastman's origins as a
“wild” Indian were a never-ending source of fascination for his White
audiences, while Johnson's connection to “Mohawk royalty” (her father
and grandfather were major figures at Six Nations) provided her with equally intriguing
credentials. Neither Eastman nor Johnson, though, could match a figure such as Sitting
Bull, who, nine years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, was touring with Buffalo
Bill's Wild West Show at a salary of $50 a week, plus a $150 signing bonus. Nor
were these examples the exceptions.
Gabriel Dumont toured with
Buffalo Bill. So did Black Elk. So did about thirty Indians who had been involved in the
1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. Seen as malcontents, they were given the choice of touring
with Buffalo Bill or going to jail.

An easy choice, if you ask me.

At least they had a choice. Fifteen years earlier, in 1875, seventy-two
Kiowas, Comanches, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes were rounded up and sent to prison at Fort
Marion in Florida for no better reason than they were Indian. To alleviate the boredom,
the Indians were given ledger books and coloured pencils and encouraged to draw.
Considered curiosities rather than art, these drawings became a kind of currency in the
travel game, and many a tourist stopped by the fort to see the Indians dance and draw
and to purchase a memento of the visit.

And let's not forget Ishi.

If we were given to creating categories in order to organize the world, we
might be tempted to divide turnof-the-century Indians into two groups. The first might
be the “wild” Indian — Crazy Horse, for example — who refused
the gifts of civilization, never made peace, and remained an unrepentant warrior to his
death, while the second could be the educated Indian, an Indian — such as Charles
Eastman — who saw in White culture the only future that was available to Native
people.

Of course, nothing is quite so simple.

Though we would like it to be. Several years ago, John Stackhouse, a
reporter for the
Globe and Mail
, came to Winnipeg to do a story on the
Dead
Dog Café
, a Native
radio show that ran on cbc for
about five years. The
Dead Dog Café
gang — Edna Rain, Floyd Favell
Starr, and myself — were in town to do a
Dead Dog Café
special.
Stackhouse talked to each of us, watched the show, and went back to Toronto to write his
story, which turned out to be a curious piece that was as much about the different
categories of Indians — authentic and inauthentic — as it was about the show
itself.

Edna, according to the article, was the most authentic Indian in the cast,
“the show's . . . truest aboriginal person in terms of her life's
experience,” Stackhouse wrote. “On weekends, she returns to her reserve to
skin, smoke and tan animal hides, and chop wood. . . . She once showed up for rehearsal
with a dead moose in her trunk.”
¹⁸

Floyd, on the other hand, is a kind of transitional figure, splitting his
time between the Poundmaker reserve, where he was born and raised, and the urbanity of
Winnipeg's theatre world. “He participates in ceremonies such as sweats and
listens to hard-rock music stations,”
¹⁹

Stackhouse observed.

I'm the urban Indian. Not an Indian at all, really. “A bundle
of contradictions,” Stackhouse called me, “equal parts first class and first
nations.”
²⁰
My sins include insisting on flying
business class, playing golf with Graham Greene, owning a big house in Guelph, having
three cats, and vacationing in Costa Rica.

And then there's my “floral golf shirt.”

Remember that four-strand bone choker and beaded belt buckle that I so
foolishly gave up?

Actually, Stackhouse was wrong about me. I have two
cats, not three. Oh, and it wasn't a dead moose in Edna's trunk, it was
a tanned moose hide. Any self-indulgent urban Indian who golfs with Graham Greene knows
that not even the Mercedes S 500 could hold an animal that large.

Stackhouse's article appeared under the banner “Comic Heroes
or ‘Red Niggers'?” and appropriates once again the old question of who
is being entertainment and for whom. Comic heroes for Natives and “Red
Niggers” for Whites? Or is it comic heroes for Whites and “Red
Niggers” for Natives? And is it possible for us to move past this limiting
dichotomy?

Charles Eastman and Pauline Johnson entertained White audiences. Did they
entertain other Natives? Sure. Did they entertain themselves? One would hope so.

What about Ishi? He didn't have any Native people to entertain.
There were just the non-Natives who surrounded him. And himself.

Strange world. But maybe being entertainment isn't so bad. Maybe
it's what you're left with when the only defence you have is a good story.
Maybe entertainment is the story of survival.

Take Ishi's story, for example. It's yours. Do with it what
you will. Put Ishi's face on a T-shirt. Drive up to Oroville and visit the site of
the slaughterhouse. Forget it. But don't say in the years to come that you would
have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story.

You've heard it now.

IV

T
HERE IS A STORY
I
KNOW
. It's about
the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle. I've heard this
story many times, and each time someone tells the story, it changes. Sometimes the
change is simply in the voice of the storyteller. Sometimes the change is in the
details. Sometimes in the order of events. Other times it's the dialogue or the
response of the audience. But in all the tellings of all the tellers, the world never
leaves the turtle's back. And the turtle never swims away.

One time, it was in Trois-Rivières I think, a man in the audience who
was taking notes asked about the turtle and the earth. If the earth was on the back of a
turtle, what was below the turtle? Another turtle, the storyteller told him. And below
that turtle? Another turtle. And below that? Another turtle.

The man quickly scribbled down notes, enjoying the game, I imagine. So how
many turtles are there? he
wanted to know. The storyteller shrugged.
No one knows for sure, she told him, but it's turtles all the way down.

The truth about stories is that that's all we are. “I will
tell you something about stories,” the Laguna storyteller Leslie Silko reminds us,
“They aren't just entertain-ment/Don't be fooled/They are all we have,
you see/All we have to fight off/Illness and death. You don't have anything/If you
don't have the stories.”
¹

Over the years, I've lost more than my fair share of friends to
suicide. The majority of them have been mixed-bloods. Native men and women who occupied
those racial shadow zones that have been created for us and that we create for
ourselves. The latest and greatest loss was the Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish writer Louis
Owens, who killed himself in an airport parking garage on his way to an academic
conference in Bellingham, Washington.

Louis was a fine novelist and an even better literary/cultural critic and
theorist. But most especially, he was a good friend, more a brother, really. We were of
a like age, shared much the same background, were haunted by the same fears. We loved
fly-fishing and the solitude of quiet places. We understood in each other the same
desperate desire for acceptance. And we were both hopeful pessimists. That is, we wrote
knowing that none of the stories we told would change the world. But we wrote in the
hope that they would.

We both knew that stories were medicine, that a story told one way could
cure, that the same story told another way could injure. In his memoir
I Hear the
Train
, Louis tells
the story of a summer that he spent
picking tomatoes. It was 1965. The year before, the U.S. government had decided to end
the Bracero program that had brought half a million migrant workers up from Mexico each
year to work in the fields of California. Faced with the continuing need for cheap
labour and the prospect of a long, hot, politically dangerous summer — urban
riots, Vietnam protests, and disillusioned youth had been the order of business the
summer before — politicians at the state capitol came up with the bright idea of
making field jobs — normally the domain of Mexican workers — available to
Blacks from the inner cities and to the generic poor.

“The government men decided to call it an economic opportunity work
program,” Louis writes. “Any lucky person with a sufficiently low income,
they announced, could qualify to work in the fields for minimum wage. They advertised
the program heavily and recruited in Los Angeles, Stockton, Compton, East Palo Alto,
Oakland — those places where summer jobs for Black teens had never existed and
where young Black males with time on their hands posed potential complications for the
coming summer. Somehow we heard about it in Atascadero. It sounded like
fun.”
²

The labour camp where the workers were required to stay was an old
military barracks left over from World War II that, over the years, had housed thousands
of Mexican workers. Now it housed close to three hundred young Black men and a handful
of others. The barracks where the workers stayed were spartan at best. Old metal cots
lined both sides of a long, narrow room, with
mattresses flattened
thin and hard as plywood by seasons of exhausted farm workers.

Best of all, a new ten-foot chain-link fence had been thrown up around the
camp, topped with barbed wire to make sure no one wandered away. Each night the camp was
locked and a guard stationed at the gate. Each morning Louis and the other workers were
let out and taken to the fields. Each evening they were brought back and locked up
again.

It was hard work. The food that was provided was inedible. Worse, the
workers were charged for it. As well they were charged for their cots, for
transportation to and from the fields, for insurance, and for anything else the growers
could think up. And when the first payday rolled around, after all the expenses had been
deducted, Louis discovered that he had spent more money than he had made. Twelve dollars
to be exact.