The Truth About Stories (7 page)

You may suspect me of hyperbole, but many of these were questions that I
was asked by a selection committee when I applied for a Ford Foundation Grant for
American Indians in order to complete my Ph.D. I've told this story a number of
times at various events, and each time I've told it, one or two non-Natives have
come up to me afterwards and apologized for the stereotypical attitudes of a few
misguided Whites. But the truth of the matter is that the selection committee was
composed entirely of Native people. And the joke, if there is one, is that most of the
committee couldn't pass this test, either, for these questions were not designed
to measure academic potential or to ensure diversity, they were designed to exclude. For
the real value of authenticity is in the rarity of a thing.

Of course, outside grant selection committees and possibly guards at the
new and improved U.S. border crossings, not many people ask these questions. They
don't have to. They're content simply looking at you. If you don't
look Indian, you aren't. If you don't look White, you're not.

As I pulled out of the McDonald's parking lot, I began thinking
about my dilemma in earnest. Edward Sheriff Curtis had been successful in raising money
and getting his photographs in print because he was fulfilling a national fantasy, and
because he documented the only antiquity that North America would ever have. Indians
might not have been Greeks or Romans or Egyptians, but Indians were all the continent
had to offer to a society that
relished the past. I could not
photograph that particular antiquity, not because it had vanished, but because it had
changed.

When I came up with my bright idea for a photographic expedition, I sat
down with a number of granting agencies to see if there was any chance of getting some
financial support for the project. Several of them thought the idea had merit, but they
weren't sure why I wanted to do it.

Which Indians did I have in mind, they wanted to know. How would I find
these Indians? How would taking photographs of Native artists benefit Native people?

Had J. P. Morgan asked that question of Edward Curtis, Curtis probably
would have told him that such photographs were necessary because the Indian was dying,
and if he hesitated, the Noble Red Man would be gone and that part of America's
antiquity would be lost forever. Curtis might have even thrown up John Audubon and
Audubon's great endeavour to paint the birds of North America, many of whom were
on the verge of extinction and might well have been helped on their way, since, in order
to paint the birds, Audubon first had to kill them.

So they wouldn't move and spoil the sitting.

How will taking photographs of Native artists benefit Native people?

It wasn't a question I would have ever asked. It was a question
— and I understood this part clearly — that came out of a Western
Judeo-Christian sense of responsibility and that contained the unexamined implication
that
the lives of Native people needed improvement. I knew, without
a doubt, that the pictures I was taking would not change the lives of the people I
photographed any more than the arrivals and departures of, say, anthropologists on
Native reserves had done anything to improve the lives of the people they came to
study.

I teach at a university, so I know all about the enthusiasm for creating
social change through intellectual and artistic activity, especially within what we
ironically call the “humanities.” And while we have had our fair share of
literary critics who have believed in the potentials of literature — Sir Philip
Sidney, Matthew Arnold, F. R. and Queenie Leavis — it goes without saying, I
think, that, apart from recent feminist and Marxist critics who seek to engage
literature in the enterprise of social and political transformation, the study of
literature, especially in the wake of New Criticism, has not had a sustained political
component.

So I was, in many ways, delighted to see postcolonial studies arrive on
campus, not only because it expanded the canon by insisting that we read, consider, and
teach the literatures of colonized peoples, but because it promised to give Native
people a place at the table. I know that postcolonial studies is not a panacea for much
of anything. I know that it never promised explicitly to make the colonized world a
better place for colonized peoples. It did, however, carry with it the implicit
expectation that, through exposure to new literatures and cultures and challenges to
hegemonic assumptions and power structures, lives would be made better.

At least the lives of the theorists.

But perhaps that was it. Perhaps I was travelling around the country
taking portraits of Native artists because the project promised to make my life better,
to make me feel valuable, to make me feel important.

How will photographing Native artists benefit Native people? You see this
basic kind of question in various guises on the “human study” portion of
grant applications, and you hear it debated on talk shows and in churches. Politicians
use it as a ploy because they know that political memory is not even short term.
Advertisers transform the question into a glimmering promise that if you buy their
products — deodorants, frozen pizzas, magic beans — your life will improve.
It is the great Western come-on. The North American Con. The Caucasoid Sting.

Actually, I'm no better. If you've been paying attention, you
will have noticed that I've defined identity politics in a rather narrow and
self-serving fashion.

Appearance.

I want to look Indian so that you will see me as Indian because I want to
be Indian, even though being Indian and looking Indian is more a disadvantage than it is
a luxury.

Just not for me.

Middle-class Indians, such as myself, can, after all, afford the burden of
looking Indian. There's little danger that
we'll
be stuffed into
the trunk of a police cruiser and dropped off on the outskirts of Saskatoon. Not much
chance that
we'll
come before the courts and be incarcerated for a longer
period of time than our non-Indian
brethren. Hardly any risk that
our
children will be taken from us because we are unable to cope with the
potentials of poverty.

That sort of thing happens to those other Indians.

My relatives. My friends.

Just not me.

To date, I've photographed about five hundred Native artists. In
that time some of the people, such as the Navajo artist Carl Gorman, have died. Before I
finish, more will pass away, and new ones will take their place. I may never finish the
project, may never see the book I had imagined when my brother and I headed off that
first time almost ten years ago. But it doesn't matter. The photographs themselves
are no longer the issue. Neither are the questions of identity. What's important
are the stories I've heard along the way. And the stories I've told. Stories
we make up to try to set the world straight.

Take Will Rogers's story, for instance. It's yours. Do with it
what you will. Make it the topic of a discussion group at a scholarly conference. Put it
on the Web. 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.

III

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 Peterborough I think, an older woman in the audience
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 her. And below that turtle?
Another turtle. And below that? Another turtle.

The woman began to smile, enjoying the game, I imagine. So how many
turtles are there? she wanted
to know. The storyteller shrugged. No
one knows for sure, he told her, but it's turtles all the way down.

The truth about stories is that that's all we are. The Metis
singer Andrea Menard reminds us of this in the first verse of her song “The
Halfbreed Blues.”

I was born the privileged skin.
And my eyes are bright, bright
brown
You'd never know there is Metis blood
Raging underground
Let
me tell you a story about a revelation.
It's not the colour of a nation that
holds a nation's pride
It's imagination.
It's imagination
inside.
¹

When I was much younger and more prone to be incensed by injustice than I
am now, I was invited by a small college in Northern California to be on a panel as part
of their “Indian Awareness Week.” There was a “Black Awareness
Week” and a “Chicano Awareness Week,” which left, if I've done
the math correctly, fortynine “White Awareness Weeks.” Still, it was a
chance to say something meaningful, and being politically naive and eager, I
accepted.

There were four of us: a Mohawk artist, two guys from the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, and me. The Mohawk guy talked eloquently about traditional art, spirituality,
and pride. The two guys from Washington made pragmatic speeches complete with charts and
overheads to show the
kinds of programs that were available to
Native people who wished to better themselves, along with the kinds of economic
opportunities that various government agencies were providing for the benefit of tribes,
such as oil exploration, coal mining, dam construction, clear-cut logging ventures, and
nuclear waste storage.

For my part, I told stories. Stories about broken treaties, residential
schools, culturally offensive movies, the appropriation of Native names, symbols, and
motifs.

And Ishi.

It's a famous story and I imagine some of you know it. Or know a few
of the details. And then again, maybe you don't.

In the summer of 1911, near the town of Oroville in Northern California,
butchers found an Indian behind a slaughterhouse. He was, not to put too fine a point on
it, a surprise. Indians in this part of the world had been persecuted for years. Gold
miners, landowners, and your average God-fearing gun-loving enthusiasts such as the
group of White men who massacred the Wiyots off the coast of Northern California in
1860, had forced Native peoples out of their homes, and in many instances, simply hunted
them down and shot them on sight. More than likely, the people in Oroville didn't
know there were any Indians left in the area.

This one was not in particularly good shape. He was sick, hungry, and near
death. The butchers called the sheriff, and the sheriff, not knowing what to do with
him, put him in a cell reserved for the insane at the local jail.

The papers called him the “Wild Man of Oroville.”

He was a Yahi. Maybe part Maidu. Maybe part Wintu. No
one really knows. But like James Fenimore Cooper's Chingachgook, and Peter
Such's Shawnadithit, he appeared to be the last of his people. Had he died in
jail, there wouldn't have been much of a story.

But he didn't.

He was rescued — and I use the word “rescued” guardedly
— by Alfred L. Kroeber and Thomas Talbot Waterman, two anthropologists from the
newly opened Anthropological Museum at the University of California in San Francisco.
With the co-operation and permission of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who believed that
they owned all Native people in U.S. America, Kroeber and Waterman took the Wild Man of
Oroville to San Francisco and gave him a place to stay at the museum.

His name wasn't Ishi. He never told anyone his name. Kroeber, under
pressure from reporters who got tired of calling the Indian the Wild Man of Oroville,
named him Ishi, a Yahi word that means simply “man.” For the next five
years, until his death in 1916 from tuberculosis, Ishi lived and worked at the
museum.

He was even given a job. Junior janitor. Twenty-five dollars a month plus,
of course, room and board. It wasn't a bad life, and Ishi, from all accounts,
enjoyed it. He had the freedom to come and go as he pleased. He rode the trolley cars in
San Francisco, went to the opera and the ocean. He followed doctors as they made their
rounds at the university hospital. He was fascinated, according to Theodora Kroeber, not
so much by what Whites did as by their numbers. And each Sunday afternoon, for about two
and a half
hours, he demonstrated Indian arts and crafts —
arrow making, hide preparation — for the curious of the city. He was not, so far
as we know, abused. Kroeber kept the vultures away, refusing the requests to put Ishi on
the vaudeville circuit or in the circus. There were no “I Saw Ishi”
T-shirts, no boxes of Ishi breakfast cereal, no Upper Deck Ishi rookie cards, and no
bobble head Ishi dolls.

The people at the museum were inordinately fond of pointing out that Ishi
was, in fact, free to return to the mountains and lava fields of Northern California if
he chose to do so.

You can go home any time you wish, they told him.

Which must have made him laugh and cry at the same time.

For there was no home. No family. Not anymore. Ishi hadn't come out
of the mountains because he had seen an advertisement in the employment section of a
newspaper.

“Help wanted. Museum curiosity. Apply in person.”

He had to come to that slaughterhouse to escape the killings and the
loneliness, and he would stay at the museum until his own death because he had nowhere
else to go.