H. Kassia Fleisher

kass.fleisher@colorado.edu

 

Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian.New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.

 

The week I sit down to read Philip J. Deloria’s Playing Indian (which Yale UP plans to re-issue in paperback in September), President Clinton takes a “poverty tour.” He stops in rural areas of Kentucky’s Appalachia and Mississippi’s Delta, as well as urban areas like East St. Louis and the Arizona-Mexico border.

 

He also stops at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He is the first president to visit any Indian reservation since Calvin Coolidge.

 

The tour is designed to bring attention to the rural poverty that frequently goes unremarked in United States culture–sort of a “Boyz in the Wood” to counteract the more commonly mythologized, and demonized, “Boyz in the ‘Hood.” Clinton also wishes to introduce his new poverty-fighting program, known as “new markets.” At each stop, he recites the mantra of third-world-type entrepreneurial aid: tax credits for businesses investing in poor areas; debt guarantees for businesses investing equity in those areas; and enhanced funding for non-profit organizations that make small loans in poor areas. These investments will benefit both rich and poor, Clinton notes: “The only way you can keep the economic recovery going is to have new people working and new people buying” (23). The poor–considered “under-consumers”–are needed fuel for continuing the economic burn.

 

It’s the same logic applied by global villagers to the developing world. The aid program is analogous to the sort offered poor countries, even as the tour itself is analogous to Clinton’s trip to Africa. But, as The Economist warns from the distance of its London offices, the tour may serve primarily to divert public discussion of exactly how it is that eight years of economic growth have failed to affect certain regions. Indeed, it doesn’t help much to throw cash (as President Johnson did in the 60s) or private-sector guarantees (as Clinton proposes) at areas that lack infrastructure and educational institutions, especially in an age when Wall Street craves high-tech goodies with fat rates of return.

 

And especially at Pine Ridge, which The Economist titles “The Hardest Case” (24). The Economist, which frequently indulges an impulse to critique American society, provided in its July 10 issue a separate article to discuss the profound economic challenges that face Pine Ridge, the poorest county in the United States. Their coverage is remarkable because none of the major network broadcasts provided much footage or information about the visit to Pine Ridge–an appalling failure, since in the days prior to Clinton’s visit, American Indian Movement members had been staging demonstrations in the nearby town of Whiteclay, Nebraska. Two men had died; those deaths weren’t being investigated; and Russell Means was behind bars again.

 

Sounds like news. But the networks flashed the requisite photo-op of Clinton being feted by ceremonial drummers (The Economist couldn’t help but print it too), and covered instead the visit to East St. Louis, where celeb Magic Johnson was on hand to crow about potential profits in the inner city.

 

Clearly then, what’s been going on in recent weeks at the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota Reservation paints a picture of Indianness–and whiteness–unpalatable to the media and their primary consumers. In June, Ronald Hard Heart and Wilson Black Elk were killed in Whiteclay, a town with a population of only 22 people–all of whom must be brilliant entrepreneurs, since they somehow manage to post annual liquor sales of $3 million. The sale of alcohol is illegal on the reservation, where–in The Economist‘s white, econometric terms–3 in 4 people are unemployed, 2 in 3 live below the poverty line, 1 in 3 is homeless, and alcoholism and fetal alcohol syndrome are rampant. Lakota leaders have long wanted the Whiteclay booze supply shut down; when Nebraska officials claimed jurisdictional problems and failed to investigate the deaths, activist tempers flared. Two days of marches to Whiteclay were staged just prior to Clinton’s visit, probably in hopes that the national lens would focus on the Whiteclay problem. But, as The Economist points out, “The influence of the liquor stores seems a parody of the president’s desire to attract small businesses to deprived areas” (25). Doubtless the networks suspected their white, middle-class viewers would not appreciate the irony.

 

Even The Economist blames the Lakota for their own persistent poverty. The article recites the history of the theft of the Black Hills, and explains, “The Lakota Sioux [sic] go to great lengths to teach each generation this history and their culture, so that even the few who graduate rarely tolerate life beyond the reservation, choosing to return to a place where the average age of death is 45. It is a source of pride” (25). Plus, it seems that the Lakota pridefully refused to accept financial compensation for the Black Hills, preferring foolishly to continue to press for ownership.

 

“The ability to adapt and reinvent yourself,” the article begins, “is a hallmark of American success, the admired requisite for triumphing over the odds. The Pine Ridge Reservation exemplifies the extreme opposite: the tragic consequence of defending a way of life in impossible circumstances” (24).

 

The ability to adapt and reinvent yourself. Philip Deloria might ask, “But how is this sense of self constructed?”

 

The day I sit down to write this review, I take my coffee with National Public Radio, which informs me that the Nez Perce tribe has settled their suit against Avista. The utility company built the Lewiston Dam some decades ago in northern Idaho, beyond the Nez Perce reservation, and had subsequently removed it, but too late. Fisheries that belonged by nineteenth-century treaty to the Nez Perce had been ruined; the Nez Perce claimed that millions of fish had been lost. A mediator proposed a $39 million compromise, and both sides signed.

 

This is important news in itself, news European Americans need to understand: Native Americans have been successfully using the judicial system to enforce old treaties that give them control of vast resources, allowing them to act at times as a sovereignty within a sovereignty. Consequently, the country is headed for a constitutional crisis far more complicated than that old, nagging states-rights problem ever was.

 

But the local-affiliate reporter is more distracted by another angle of his story. The negotiation, he reports, was very “unusual.” Officials from Avista came to the reservation to meet, talk, and attend ceremonies in a sweat lodge; Nez Perce leaders went to Avista’s plant to understand better the unique concerns of a utility company. This “cultural” and “spiritual” contact permitted the opposing sides to understand the “human” elements of the negotiation and act as “neighbors.”

 

Now, that’s groovy and all, but again, a particular portrait–of Indian cooperation, and spiritual and cultural “nobility”–is privileged over the story of Indian sovereignty. The reporter decides to ignore the real story here, which is that Indians are legally–“savagely”?–kicking butt in court.

 

In the United States, then, in 1999, Native Americans are still “seen” by mainstream culture as variously invisible, noble, and savage. Deloria explores the history of the noble/savage opposition, but argues that another factor–that of relative “distance” from the national mainstream of power–must also be understood as dramatically affecting the cultural construction of Native Americans.

 

Deloria begins with the Boston Tea Party, “the first drumbeat in the long cadence of rebellion through which Americans redefined themselves as something other than British colonists” (2). He reminds us that the night before the tea was to be seized legally by British officials–the Sons of Liberty had refused to permit its unloading, by way of protesting the import tax–the tea was dumped into the harbor by a mob of rebel colonists.

 

Who were dressed as Indians.

 

The question for historians has been, why the Indian dress? Deloria notes that it can’t be that they hoped to intimidate officials, shift blame, or disguise their identities. The work of the “mob” was witnessed by large crowds of supportive townspeople and guards who must have known who the masqueraders were–since a mob of “real” Indians hiking hundreds of miles to attack the harbor would surely have caused mass terror. Instead, Deloria says, the tea party costume was deliberate, and the tea party itself was “street theater and civil disobedience of the most organized kind… plotted and controlled by elites” (2, 28).

 

And, he reports, there were many other instances of colonial Indian play. In Philadelphia, the Tammany society was formed by John Dickinson, Benjamin Rush, Thomas Mifflin, and David Rittenhouse; like Boston’s leaders, these were elite men “well positioned not only to define the general nature of the Indian, but also to construct… national subjectivity” (27). Tammany was a fictitious Indian saint for whom a biblically proportioned–and utterly false–legend was created: Tammany had fought the devil for possession of his land; then become a great hunter, later graciously relinquishing his hard-won hunting and fishing rights to William Penn; and then–ever thoughtful–had burned himself to death to spare his family the burden of his aged self. Philadelphians dressed as Indians and annually celebrated and re-sacrificed King Tammany on an annual feast day, May Day, the start of the Schuykill fishing season. All this, Deloria says, by way of encouraging fertility (new life after death); by way of democratizing British restrictions on hunting and fishing (which in England was limited to the sport of gentlemen); and, most importantly, by way of developing a national identity. The vast abundance of game on the American continent was celebrated as egalitarian, and, Deloria notes, “through Indianness, Tammany members tied the act of hunting to political and social control over the landscape”(19).

 

Deloria traces the Tea Party and the Tammany Society back to European history. These community events were clearly intended to create a specific meaning, the power of which was drawn from traditions of carnival and misrule. Carnival was a celebration of abundance, fertility, and bodily function, a wintry season of overconsumption that involved social disruption, disguise, transvestism, reversals of gender and hierarchical social roles (vestiges remain in Mardi Gras and Mummers Parades); while misrule was a tradition of blackface, masking, and ritual burning that involved charivari parades, which ridiculed persons who posed a threat to moral economies or social custom. Carnival and misrule (and here Deloria cites Bakhtin) served as potentially transformative opportunities to subvert and, at times, to sustain political order–useful tools for the work of separating from British rule. Not surprisingly, Puritan Bostonians took more to the shaming practices of disobedience, while Quaker Pennsylvania and other middle states indulged mummer madness.

 

By way of differentiating from the crown, then, proto-American leaders utilized familiar rituals. But they needed a new “historical tradition” that could provide uniqueness to the emerging nation’s sense of self. “We construct our identity,” Deloria writes, “by finding ourselves in relation to an array of people and objects who are not ourselves” (21). Conveniently, the colonists discovered themselves to be in relation to the aboriginal peoples they had encountered in “The New World.” Deloria argues that the United States began almost immediately to use Indianness in an attempt to create this unique national self, appropriating a false Indian “heritage,” and Indian “history,” that had the secondary benefit of justifying the very real appropriation of Indian land. While Philadelphians portrayed themselves as the heirs apparent to both Tammany’s lands and his nobility, Bostonians appropriated a bit of intimidating savagery.

 

All of which fueled the now-familiar division between real and ideal Indians. King Tammany and the white Indians had little to do with contemporary, actual Natives, who by 1776 tended to care little for the colonists’ efforts to create a separate national self, and at times fought alongside the British.

 

Thus does Playing Indian provide a fascinating examination of American identity formation. Deloria would agree that, as The Economist suggests, the United States has from the beginning had to reinvent itself to triumph over the “odds” encountered in nation-formation–odds which were doubly challenging for America, confronted as it was not by one enemy, but by two: the crown, and the aborigines. Deloria cites D. H. Lawrence’s assertion (in Studies in Classic American Literature, 1924) that, for America, the “long and half-secret process” (1) of identity-formation is “unfinished” (3). For Deloria, Lawrence exposed “a string of contradictions at the heart of familiar American self-images… locating native people at the very heart of American ambivalence” (3). Playing Indian reveals the secret (Indian) part of the nation-building process, and suggests that America will remain unfinished until it has reconciled the dilemma of “wanting to savor both civilized order and savage freedom at the same time” (3). Indianness was “the bedrock” (186) of the national subjectivity built by white males “on contrasts between their own citizenship and that denied to women, African Americans, Indians and others” (8). Indianness was “one of the foundations (slavery and gender relations being the other two) for imagining and performing domination and power in America” (186). America’s resulting identity was “both aboriginal and European and yet was neither,” which ambivalence “prevented its creators from ever effectively developing a positive, stand-alone identity that did not rely heavily on either a British or an Indian foil” (36).

 

Playing Indian also provides a fascinating examination of cultural constructs of Native America, particularly in Deloria’s application of (among others’) Todorov’s work on “distance,” and Said’s work on Orientalism. We know colonists made good use of the Enlightenment’s old noble-savage dichotomy, but, Deloria says, American colonists also developed a useful us-and-them division:

 

[T]hey imagined a second axis focused not on Indian good or evil, but upon the relative distance that Indian Others were situated from this Self-in-the-making.... Along with the positives and negatives of the noble savage, then, we need to consider the distinction between Indian Others imagined to be interior--inside the nation or society--and those who are to be excluded as exterior.... The matter can get extremely complicated, for both interior and exterior Others can take on positive or negative qualities, depending on the nature of the identity construction in which they appear. (21)

 

In a footnote he adds, “Indians could, for example, signify civilized colonial philosophe (interior/noble), fearsome colonial soldier (interior/savage), noble, natural man (exterior/noble), or barbarous savage (exterior/savage)” (203).

 

While the noble/savage dichotomy has remained fairly consistent, the distance between the “inside of the nation” and the Indian Other has shifted with the sands of political necessity. “The practice of playing Indian,” Deloria writes, “has clustered around two paradigmatic moments–the Revolution, which rested on the creation of a national identity, and modernity, which has used Indian play to encounter the authentic amidst the anxiety of urban industrial and postindustrial life” (7). The modern period is flush with forest-romping, drum-whacking men’s groups; a strangely profit-driven New Age “spirituality”; Order-of-the-Arrow Boy Scouts; and “hobby Indians,” whites who in the 60’s traveled to pow-wows to dress, dance, and trade as–and with–Indians. The modern period, then, has birthed an interior/noble Indian–perhaps a good thing in its encouragement of potentially positive cross-cultural economies and understanding.

 

But still. What effect does the noble/savage/interior/exterior conundrum–even today’s kinder, gentler version–have on Native Americans themselves? Deloria examines several cultural “bridge figures” from the past:

 

Throughout a long history of Indian play, native people have been present at the margins, insinuating their way into Euro-American discourse, often attempting to nudge notions of Indianness in directions they found useful. As the nineteenth and twentieth centuries unfolded, increasing numbers of Indians participated in white people's Indian play, assisting, confirming, co-opting, challenging, and legitimating the performative tradition of aboriginal American identity. (8)

 

Deloria discusses these bridge figures sympathetically, as people who saw little choice but to re-appropriate the appropriation, and use this potentially damaging rhetoric to help their people as they could.

 

Questions remain. Deloria touches on gender issues, but his explication is incomplete, and his most important interrogation is relegated to a footnote. As Deloria reports, Indianness was often gendered (see the much-deconstructed Vespucci Discovering America, in which Jan vander Straet painted America as an Indian woman) and Indian play was used to enforce white female domestication (see the history of the Camp Fire Girls). But given intersections of race/class/gender/sexuality, exactly how interior are white women? It would be equally useful to examine the exterior-ness of women of color. Here, and elsewhere, our quadrant may have to become three-dimensional. Historically, Indian play was the purview of white men, often elite; so what do we make of elite white women like Helen Hunt Jackson, a nineteenth-century activist on behalf of natives, without appropriating mythologies and without “going native”? Is it possible that, given the complexity of women’s own situations, women worked as particularly successful bridge figures? In 1880, Jackson wrote to Henry Dawes, “I quite agree with you that even the shadow of a suspicion of what is technically known as ‘lobbying’ should not rest on a woman: and… nothing would induce me to do so. But would it not be possible for me, in a quiet and unnoticeable way–(now at the Capital)–to make opportunities of reading a few statistics–a few facts, to men whom it is worthwhile to convert?” (Mathes 150). This is the plaint of an interior white-elite but exterior woman who, despite (because of?) her exterior-ness, attempted to operate as a bridge figure.

 

Likewise missing among Deloria’s “string of contradictions at the heart of familiar American self-images” is the profound contradiction of democracy versus capitalism. As President Clinton has all but said, contemporary federal Indian policy seems now to consist primarily of forced entrepreneurialism–which is to say, a forcing of one dominant economic structure onto another, possibly very different structure. This current movement has the potential to produce social alteration as total as that of the Indian Reorganization Act, which aided assimilation by forcing an unfamiliar governing structure on tribes. Yet entrepreneurialism is happening quietly, without public debate, without an “Act.” Mythology is necessary to support even a silent policy. Does entrepreneurialism arise from an interior or exterior, noble or savage construct? And if, indeed, we do construct identity in relation to others, where is the white Appalachian located on the interior/exterior axis? Racially, he’s interior, but by class he’s exterior. To convince American taxpayers that the badlands of Pine Ridge and the hills of Kentucky are both part of the same (exterior/them) third world– this will take some doing. How will that construct operate successfully? Or will it?

 

And while Deloria’s audience often seems to be academics (most of whom are white/male/elite), he does not address questions of white activism. He notes that the primary Indian policy dilemma has been the question of whether to destroy Indians or to assimilate them; and that this is “a decision that the American polity has been unable to make or, on the few occasions when either policy has been relatively clear, to implement” (4-5). As he suggests, the United States could have settled on a purely genocidal policy; this decision might even have resulted in the formation of a stronger national identity. But the U.S. remained ambivalent about the peoples it displaced. Native resistance does deserve the lion’s share of the credit for providing the persistent thorn in the paw of Indian policy. But is not the American left also partly to–blame?–for this unresolved policy? Deloria might criticize–justifiably–the left’s tendency to exploit native issues by way of performing a cultural critique that presents no real threat to its own economic status. But how should we advise those among the radical left (assuming this is not an oxymoron) who wish to support indigenism? What should white activists be doing to revise this Indian-based U.S. identity? How can–or should–white anti-racists support the work of native identity-formation?

 

Regardless of how these interrogations proceed, it’s clear from such disparate sources as National Public Radio and The Economist that Deloria is correct: Indianness is a rhetorical bank account–well-funded, profitable, and available for borrowing whenever the interior-nation needs it. Until the rhetoric is altered, perhaps, attempts to bridge the cross-cultural whitewater will do little to help Ronald Hard Heart and Wilson Black Elk; little to help the “hardest case” of Pine Ridge. Indeed, President Clinton has now expressly codified this reservation and its people as a third world (i.e., exterior from our national first world) country (without noting that country’s sovereign right to the Black Hills). Clinton was willing to make-exterior these “under-consumers” (them) in order to justify the appropriation of funds necessary to finance “new markets”–new sources of income for the CEOs (us) who support his leadership. And an Idaho utility company’s CEOs (us) have an equally urgent financial incentive to make-interior the Nez Perce, to “go native,” sit in a sweat lodge, and graciously embrace the wonderful interior/noble natives (us, for now) whose fish the CEOs have killed–which natives have graciously accepted $39 million for their trouble. National Public Radio is happy to play (Indians-R-us) along, clucking their tongues and asking why all of our CEOs don’t do business in this charming way. Which gets them out of having to critique the historical power grid that caused the fishkill in the first place.

 

What all of us, including the editors of The Economist and NPR, could learn from Deloria’s book is that even as the United States grapples with the difficulty of a continually “unfinished” national identity, Native Americans face the struggle of cementing a national identity of their own, one free from outsider construction, and perhaps one updated from the “traditional,” addressing contemporary issues (economic and technological, for instance) in freely chosen terms. Deloria’s Playing Indian may be the first drumbeat in what promises to be a long, and long needed, rhetorical rebellion.

 

Works Cited

 

• “America’s Emerging Markets.”The Economist 10 July 1999: 17.
• Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.
• “The Hardest Case.” The Economist 10 July 1999: 24-25.
• Mathes, Valerie Sherer, Ed. The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879-1885. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998.
• Nadvornick, Doug. “Nez Perce Indian Tribe.” Morning Edition. Natl. Public Radio. 20 July 1999.
• “The Pockets of Poverty World Tour.” The Economist 10 July 1999: 23-4.