The Truth About Stories (8 page)

It's a killer story, isn't it. And I told it with vigour. I
probably waved my hands, raised my voice, may have even banged the podium. And when it
was all over, after the guys in their suits had packed up their charts and
transparencies and sat down, it was clear that the Indians had carried the day. You
could see it in the eyes of the audience. Some of the women were actually crying. And
what applause!

As we filed off the stage, one of the organizers, the
woman who had invited me to speak, appeared. She shook hands with each of the guys from
Washington, and at the same time handed them an envelope. I was delighted. I knew what
was in that envelope.

An honorarium.

I nudged the Mohawk guy, but he had already seen the envelopes. I must
admit I had my money spent before I even got to the woman. She shook my hand and thanked
me for coming and told me that she thought my remarks would stay with her for a long
time. But she didn't give me an envelope. For a moment I thought she had
forgotten.

So I held on to her hand. She could have it back when I got my
envelope.

But there was no envelope, and the woman seemed surprised I even
asked.

Were you promised money? she wanted to know.

Well, no, we hadn't been promised any money, I said, but you paid
the other guys.

That's true, she told me, her tone suggesting that she didn't
quite understand my complaint. But, after all, she said, they're the experts.

What were we, I wanted to know, entertainment?

It was a rhetorical question. The woman was supposed to be embarrassed and
apologize. She was supposed to promise to find the necessary funds to pay us for our
time.

But she didn't.

There were other invitations. So many, in fact, that
my loose collection of sound and fury quickly coalesced into a rather polished and
potent presentation, and, as I wandered from campus to campus, I became, God help me, a
Spokesperson.

Special, tonight only.

Return of the Complaining Native.

Hear It from a Real Indian.

White Depredations. Indian Deprivations.

You'll laugh, you'll cry.

Wine and cheese reception to follow.

Entertainment. Probably not as much fun as being tossed around, say, on a
mechanical bull or watching a good hockey fight on Friday night, but several steps up
from bowling.

At first I thought it was just me. That in my haste to make a difference,
in my desire to change the world, I had become a caricature of protest. So I toned down
my indignation, did some historical research so I could throw out the occasional date,
turned in my ribbon shirt, my fourstrand bone choker, and my beaded belt buckle for a
cheap but serviceable suit and a rather nice tie, and arrived at the next confrontation
virtually indistinguishable from the boys from Washington.

At the end of that presentation, which I thought went rather well, a young
Native man about my age, dressed in a ribbon shirt, bone choker, and beaded belt buckle,
the very markers of race that I had so casually abandoned, stood up and asked me what
the hell an “apple” was doing speaking for real Indians. For those of you
who do not know what an “apple” is, it's a
derogatory term for an Indian who is red on the outside and white on the inside. An
Uncle Tomahawk, if you will. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was the worst insult you could
hurl at another Indian.

Needless to say, I was hurt.

But worse, there was that rhetorical question again. As long as I dressed
like an Indian and complained like an Indian, I was entertainment. But if I dressed like
a non-Indian and reasoned like a non-Indian, then not only was I not entertainment, I
wasn't an Indian.

Stay with me.

Therefore, if I dressed like an Indian and acted like an Indian —
and here it would help if you've seen the witch skit in
Monty Python and the
Holy Grail
— I must be . . . entertainment.

Most of you are probably waiting for the sting, where I turn this conceit
back on itself and say something profound or at least clever. But, as it turns out, I
have nowhere to go.

What am I?

Entertainment.

Actually, as it turns out, it's not just me. It's Indians in
general. Somewhere along the way, we ceased being people and somehow became performers
in an Aboriginal minstrel show for White North America.

But we didn't begin that way. We haven't always been
entertainment. Once upon a time, we were . . . other things.

I've always been a reader. Sometimes out of
interest. Sometimes out of necessity. Sometimes to get out of the heat. I was raised in
the Sacramento Valley of California, and during the summers the temperature would climb
to forty degrees Celsius and above. The house we lived in did not have air conditioning,
and the only cool place in the entire town that did not charge an admission fee was the
library. The library wasn't air conditioned, either, but it had a basement that
was cool and walls that were stacked with books.

I was fond of adventure fiction, but my favourite stories were about the
discovery, exploration, and settlement of the Americas: William Prescott's
History of the Conquest of Mexico
and
History of the Conquest of
Peru
, for example. The epic adventures of empire. Men with swords. Men with
flags. Men with Bibles.

And Indians.

Well, not Indians exactly. And not entertainment either. At least not
yet.

Most historians mark the beginning of Indian-European contact with
Columbus wading ashore somewhere in the Caribbean, striding up the beach, flag in hand,
and taking possession of the land and all that was there for the king and queen of Spain
on October 12, 1492. We know now that Vikings had landed in North America some four or
five hundred years earlier, but the tenth-century settlements at L'Anse aux
Meadows in Newfoundland had a short tenure, whereas Columbus's arrival marked the
beginning of a permanent European presence in the
Americas. And the
beginning of the stories that Europeans would tell about Native peoples.

“These people are very poor in everything,” Columbus is
supposed to have written in his journal. “They all go quite naked as their mothers
bore them. . . . They bear no arms, no know thereof; for I showed them swords and they
grasped them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance. . . . They are generally
fairly tall and good-looking, well built. . . . They ought to be good servants and of
good skill, for I see that they repeat very quickly whatever was said to them. I believe
that they would easily be made Christians, because it seemed to me that they belonged to
no religion.”
²

Nothing wrong with this. Columbus didn't know where he was. He
didn't know who the people were. So he guessed. Since he was looking for India,
these must be Indians. Not his fault he was lost. And for all the erroneous assumptions
that this first description contains, it's a reasonably honest report of what the
good admiral saw. Tall, good-looking, naked people who were unfamiliar with steel
weapons.

We can forgive and forget the nonsense about being “good
servants” and the “easily be made into Christians” part, can't
we? That was just wishful thinking.

Explorers who came after Columbus would describe Native people in much the
same way. Pedro Vaz de Caminha, who sailed with Pedro Álvares Cabral for Brazil in
1500, wrote a letter to King Manuel of Portugal in which he described the Tupinambá
Indians as having good faces and noses. “They go naked,” Caminha told the
king, “neither do they pay more attention to concealing or
exposing their shame than they do to showing their faces, and in this respect they are
very innocent.”
³

In 1505, Gaspar Corte Real kidnapped approximately fifty Indians, men and
women, from the coast of Newfoundland and sent them back to Spain to be examined by
Alberto Cantino. They were much like Europeans, Cantino conceded, “their speech is
unintelligible, but nevertheless is not harsh but rather human. Their manners and
gestures are most gentle; they laugh considerably and manifest the greatest
pleasure.”
⁴

Through most of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, explorers
such as Giovanni da Verrazzano, Jacques Cartier, Francis Drake, Martin Frobisher, Arthur
Barlowe, John Brereton, and James Rosier visited the Americas and sent back reports of
Indians who were civil, good looking, gentle, quick witted, and, of course, naked.

But along with these good reports, many of which played off some of the
ideas that Europeans had of Western mythologies such as Eden and Atlantis, were less
savoury descriptions of Indians. Amerigo Vespucci, who may never have made it to the
Americas at all, described Indians as indecent, immoral, and cannibalistic. Sir Francis
Drake, who found the Indians of California loving and without guile or treachery, was
concerned about the influence that the Devil had over these simple people. Jacques
Cartier, who had been well treated by the Indians of the St. Lawrence River region,
complained that they were great thieves, an ironic complaint, to be sure, for the
historian who knows that Cartier capped off his second
voyage by
kidnapping ten Indians and taking them back to France with him.

Though we shouldn't think that poorly of Jacques. Everyone did it.
Taking Indians as souvenirs, it seems, was an explorer's prerogative. Columbus
took ten Indians back with him on his first voyage and, on his second, rounded up
Indians en masse, five hundred at a time, and shipped them back to Seville to be sold in
the slave markets.

A number of years back, I wrote a children's book called
A
Coyote Columbus Story
in which I suggested that it was that ubiquitous Native
trickster Coyote who created Columbus and his crew, so Coyote would have someone with
whom he could play baseball. Things didn't work out exactly as Coyote had planned
them, which is typical, and, in the end, Columbus tells Coyote to stuff his baseball
game, has his men round up as many Indians as the ships will hold, and sends them back
to Spain to be sold as slaves.

One annoyed reviewer complained that, while imagination was a good thing
in children's literature, I should not be inventing history in order to make a
political point. She was, it turned out, angry about my suggesting that Columbus had
enslaved Indians. And when I told her that this was the only part of my story that was
accurate, she refused to believe me.

I wasn't trying to ruin Columbus's good name, but somebody had
to pay for these voyages. Sailing the ocean blue was expensive, and slavery was a brisk
and profitable business. If Africans made good slaves — and here
we have to ignore the pernicious assumptions on which that statement is based
— why not give Indians a try? You can see the logic. Unfortunately Indians who
were sent to the slave markets had the annoying habit of dying before they could be
auctioned off, and the enterprise was soon abandoned.

Besides, Indians were a much more valuable resource to explorers.
Particularly when it came to the question of what was where, and as long as Europeans
were strangers in a strange land, Indians, innocent, deceitful, and naked though they
may have been, were the only guides to this new world that explorers had.

Can't find the Seven Cities of Gold? Ask an Indian.

Looking for the Fountain of Youth? Ask an Indian.

Need to find a water route to the Orient? Ask an Indian.

Living together would be another matter, and, as exploration gave way
to settlement, the European reaction to Indians hardened, and the language used to
describe Indians intensified. Particularly among the English. While the Spanish depended
on Indians as a slave labour force to work the mines and plantations in New Spain, the
British and the French depended on the Indians as partners in the fur trade, and then as
an adjunct mercenary force so they could fight each other, and later, of course, the
Americans. But apart from these specific roles, none of these nations had much use for
Indians.

This was particularly true of the Puritans in New England, who had brought
with them a religion that was
militaristic in nature and a theory of
land acquisition and usage that was individualistic and private. Thanksgiving and
corn-planting techniques aside, Indians were, most often, seen as impediments to
progress and affronts to faith.

You might be wondering why I'm about to use an American example to
discuss early Native–non-Native relations instead of a good Canadian example. I
could say that it's because I'd prefer to put the Americans on the spot and
pretend that Canadians treated Indians better. But that's not true. It's
because I know the American example better, and because Americans started the process of
eliminating Indians sooner and were more diligent about the project than were
Canadians.

Don't worry, my partner, who is a staunch Canadian, has already had
words with me about this rather lame bit of reasoning.

So the Puritans saw the world at war, a holy war, a war that was both
philosophical and physical. Philosophically, God and the Devil were engaged in a
spiritual battle for the souls of humans. Humans, in turn, fought a physical battle that
pitted God's troops, in this case the Puritans, against the Devil's
mercenaries. While they were in England, the Puritans had seen the manifestations of the
Devil in the pomp of the Catholic church and in the impurity of the Anglican order.
Transplanting themselves to America did not take them out of the battle. It simply
pitted them against an old enemy in a new guise.

Land, on the other hand, was a godsend, satisfying two needs for the
Puritans. First, it provided them the
space in which to establish a
community, something they had not had in land-poor England. Second, it provided settlers
with enough room to isolate their community, so that the worldly influences that had
plagued them in England could be walled out, and the forces of darkness and the
wilderness could be kept at bay.