The Metaphysics of Writing Indian-White History Author(s): Calvin Martin Source: Ethnohistory, Vol. 26, No.

2 (Spring, 1979), pp. 153-159 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/481090 Accessed: 27/02/2009 12:11
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THE METAPHYSICS OF WRITING INDIAN-WHITE HISTORY

by Calvin Martin Rutgers University
ABSTRACT The writingof Indian-White historyis impairedbecause Angloamericanhistorians in general have not familiarized themselves with the mythic world of North we AmericanIndians.In our historiography tendeitherto projectourthoughtworld Whitecommentators, that onto the past or to acceptandperpetuate of contemporary and in doing so we seriously misrepresentwhat Indians themselves may have thought about the issue at hand. Increasedattentionand sensitivity to the Amerindian thoughtworldmight result in our emphasizingdifferent,generally ignored themes in the Indian-White dialogue, such as Power/Powerlessness,or revitalization/declension.

is The writing of Indian-Whitehistory by European-Americans prowho our Native American foundly vitiated by our continuing ignoranceof subjects are. Those of us in the majoritysociety who scrutinizethe past still if have very little idea of the Indianmind, of the Indianthoughtworld, one may Native American be permittedto indulge in monolithic termsand straitjacket cultural diversity for the sake of convenience;' we have only the most rudiof mentaryunderstanding Native phenomenology,epistemology,andontology. the We presumeto documentand interpret historyof a peoplewhose perception of the world for the most part eludes us, whose behavior, as a result, is enigmatic. I am referringof course to "ethnocentricbias": the tendencyto interpret another culture using the norms and values of one's own cultureas a point of reference. Admittedly, there is nothing novel about decrying this tendency among historians, many of whom would doubtlessprotestthat they are faithfully reproducing the literary record of the Indian-Whiteexperience. Fair enough. But we should quit deluding ourselves about the significance and explanatory value of such history, for it is essentially White history:White reality, White thoughtworld.As such it has its place, certainly,but the point is that it has subtly transgressedits explanatoryboundariesto pose as the sole or only valid or only serious explanation of what transpiredwhen Indian and White met. White history (excuse the oversimplification) - i.e., retrospective White reality, retrospectiveWhite thoughtworld,or even the straightforwardrepetition of reality as perceived and rendered by White
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observers over the centuries - must be measuredagainst an Indian history (another forgivable generalization)- an Indian reality, an Indian thoughtworld, as these may be reconstructed using ethnographic analogy. Historians are now in a position to rewrite virtuallythe entire pageantof Indian-White relations from the perspectiveof another,equally valid, equally seriousreality - an American Indian reality - using the ethnohistoricalapproach. One begins by cultivating an appreciationfor the metaphysicsof the Native American lifeway. The first principleis that these people traditionally lived in a world dramatically differentfromtheone we perceive,products we as are of the Judeo-Christian,rationalistic, empirical, scientific tradition.The Indianwas a participant-observer Nature,whereaswe in theWesterncultural of traditiontend to be voyeurs. We keep ourdistancefromNature;we plungeinto it enveloped by an arsenal of protective paraphernalia admireit througha or picture frame or scrutinize it through a microscope lens - antiseptically, removed from the Power of it all. In the fourthquarter the 20th centurywe of seem still afraidof encounteringPan. Unlike young IkeMcCaslinin Faulkner's The Bear, we are unwilling or unable, it is debatablewhich, to rise at dawnand walk into the forest strippedof our civilized accountermentsto confront the great primeval Bear. The resultis thatthe Bearhas nothingto teachus - about who we are and what is meaningfulin life - because the wildernesshas been either suffocated ("conquered," "subdued," "tamed," etc.) by Christianity and its technological offspring, or if it has a residueof Powerremaining it we in find its speech incomprehensible unintelligible.We may listento Naturebut we cannot make out what it says. Our wilderness has become a proverbial Tower of Babel. The anthropologist-poet LorenEiseley, BenjaminFranklinProfessorof Anthropology and the History of Science at the Universityof Pennsylvaniaat the time of his death in the summerof 1977, eloquentlydescribedour peculiar cultural orientation vis-a-vis the rest of creation in an essay titled "The InnocentFox." He writes of an experienceon a desolatestretchof beachwith a fox cub whose den he hadjust spied beneaththe overturned hull of a wrecked vessel. He had been looking for a miracle - "I had a growing feeling that miracles were particularlyconcerned . . . with the animal aspect of things" (Eiseley 1978:57) - and found it cavortingwith a fox pup. "It was then I saw the miracle. I saw it because I was hunchedat groundlevel smellingrankof fox, and no longer gazing with uprighthuman arroganceupon the things of this world. " Contemplatingthe fearlesspup, Eiseley was reminded an aphorism: of "It has been said repeatedlythatone can never, tryas he will, get aroundto the frontof the universe. Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat." Such is the dilemmaof Westernman, in any case. Meanwhile, it had become clear the pup wished him to play, and his instincts compelled him to oblige. "On impulse, I picked up clumsily a whiter

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bone and shook it in teeth thathad not entirelyforgottentheiroriginalpurpose. Round and round we tumbledfor one ecstatic moment. We were the innocent thing in the midst of the bones, bornin the egg, bornin the den, bornin the dark cave with the stone ax close to hand,bornat last in humanguise to grow coldly remote in the room with the rifle rack upon the wall." The miracle had come and gone; the universehad momentarilyswung "in some fantasticfashionaroundto presentits face." But the lesson remained "The universeas it begins for all things . . . was, in reality,a and reverberated: child's universe.... Sitting on my haunchesbefore a fox den and tumbling about with a chicken bone" LorenEiseley sensed he, thatwe, were somehow kinsmen to fox - to Nature. 'For just a moment I had held the universeat bay." For just a moment Eiseley had experienced something of the mythic world familiarto NorthAmericanIndians(1978:63-65). The chief aim in life in virtuallyall NorthAmericanIndiansocieties was to be saturatedwith the primordialPower of Naturewhich seemed to pulsate throughout all creation. Hence the vision quest, the dreaming, the magical songs, the drumming,the use of hallucinogens,the use of ancienttobacco. All of Nature was alive, populatedby all sorts of beings - animalpersons, plant persons, etc. - beings upon whom the Indianrelied for physicaland spiritual sustenance. Perhapsmost important,he learnedwho he was by listeningto the wisdom of the bear, the beaver, the eagle, the elements, and so forth. Nature talked to him in a way we may neverfully comprehend in a way thatEiseley to only glimpsed. He trulylived in anotherrealm. It is essentialfor the historian grasp this, to understandthat the Indian of the fur trade, the Indianof the Spanish mission system, the Indianof the Tecumsehrevoltor WoundedKnee Creek - thatall were individualswho lived moreor less in whatwe wouldcall a mythic world. Robin Ridington, a BritishColumbiaethnologist, has captured quinthe tessence of this mythic world in an extraordinarily perceptivepassage on the Beaver Indianvision quest. Havingjust finisheddescribingthe youngperson's experience he asks: What doesit mean? canonlybeginto answer question asa Beaver I that child just from can the over newlyreturned theexperience onlybeginto learn answers the restof hislife. However is clear theexperience fardeeper learning it than that goes the habitsof animalsand attaining rapport in a usefulfor hunting laterlife. it it of the Although is allthesethings, is alsoandmore fundamentally beginning a in his pathof seekingto understand own humanity. Theydo notfindanimals but in of Each themselves, rather beginto findthemselves thenatures animals. and and nature, peoplecansee in themselves specieshas its unique distinctive that of animal qualities aremostlikethequalities a particular species.Animals, besidesbeingthemselves, symbols menof thevarieties human are for of nature and a mancan learnhis combination qualities of close to the through getting 2 of qualities animals.

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Further on, Ridington explains that around age thirty the Beaver male begins for the first time to see the deeper meanings inherent in his youthful vision quest; he now begins to recognize that he is, in fact, the animals of the stories (myths, legends) and of his dreams. When a boy-man becomes one of the core adults of a band and has his own children . . . the experience of his pre-adolescentvision quest and post-adolescent maturitycome together in a powerful symbolic synthesis. He dreams. Of course he has always dreamed and known that dreams are crystalizationsof reality, but these first dreamsof maturityare special becausethey show him his medicines with the clarityof wisdomthataddsa new directionto the innocenceof of childhood and to the illumination the vision itself. This clarityandwisdomcan only come when he has enteredresponsiblyintothe lives of othersand learnedto see himself in them. He has always in a sense known his medicines, but now he knows what they mean. .... In the dreamshe sees himself as a child living in the bush and knows thatthe sories he has bothtakenfor granted,andtakenliterally, are abouthim. Whenhe enteredthe worldof animalsas a childhe also enteredinto the stories. The animals he knows and is, are the animals of the creation (Ridington 1971:122-123). The Sioux holy man Black Elk recalled a similar visionary experience with the Spirit of the Earth. "I stared at him," he remembered, "for it seemed I knew him somehow; and as I stared, he slowly changed, for he was growing backwards into youth, and when he had become a boy, I knew that he was myself" (Neihardt 1972:25). One might pause here and reflect on the implications of all this for the writing of Indian-White history. It seems to me that the entire text of that history - all 500 years of it - must be rendered so as to include this cosmological perspective, only briefly described here, if Indian behavior is to make any sense at all. Surely we have not been remiss in interpreting our joint history from our Western world view. And yet it cannot be emphasized enough that the Indian simply does not make sense when measured against our cognitive yardstick. Even today the traditional Indian and even the moderately acculturated Indian remain largely a caricature of White ways. So long as he subscribes to the promptings and messages of the mythic world of his ancestors he remains a misfit in ours. At the same time it should be recognized that under the White dispensation the Indian has had tremendous difficulty communicating with and sustaining his faith in the mythic world described above. When a group of irate Algonkins accosted the French Jesuit, Paul Le Jeune, and declared " 'that since prayer has come into our cabins, our former customs are no longer of any service; . . . our dreams and our prophecies are no longer true, - prayer has " they were expressing what they knew to be the spoiled everything for us,' most calamitous consequence of European contact. Le Jeune described his accusers as "obstinate" in this conviction and "furious" with him - on the

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verge of assaulting him (Thwaites 1896-1901:24:209-211,213). Christianity, no doubt in league with European-imported disease, had renderedthe mythic world in which they had formerly thrived more or less inarticulate.The anguished lament of Le Jeune's critics rolled down throughthe centuriesto be uttered by an illiterateNaskapi interviewedby the ethnologistFrankSpeck in " the early years of this century. Basil sensed that 'the times have changed. With the coming of the whites and Christianitythe demons of the bush have been pushed back to the northwhere thereis no Christianity.And the conjuror does not exist any more with us, for thereis no needof one. Nor is thereneedfor " the drum' (Speck 1935:172). Speck's informantand Le Jeune's detractorswere all talking about the same phenomenon: spiritualpowerlessness (Powerlessness). Indeed, the erosion, the dissipation of Indian spiritual power over the centuries and his sometimes desperateefforts to regainhis gripon the mythic world- witness a whole series of revitalizationmovementsfromthe Pueblorevolt underPop6to the message of the DelawarePropheton the eve of the Pontiacrebellionto the vision of Handsome Lake through the Tecumseh revolt through the Ghost Dance religion to peyotism today- this ebb and flow of Powercan in truthbe said to form the warpand woof of the Indian-White experience. have in truthfashionedand imposeda new reality, European-Americans a new thought pattern,a new perceptionon this continentwhich in many ways is the antithesis of the traditionalmythic realityperceivedby the Amerindian. Our Europeanancestorscalled into being a new intellectualorderon this land which has tendedto silence the mythicrealmof the Indian,who is thusrendered incapable or handicappedin expressing his preferredepistemology and ontology. One is reminded of the melancholy Columbia River Indian, Chief Broom, in Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo'sNest, a deaf-mute (self-imposed, admittedly)in the insane asylum ruledover and definedby Big Nurse. Historians might entertain the proposition that the world we have generated and defined for the Indianat large is also a kind of insaneasylum in his which he is more or less spirituallyimpotent,frustrating efforts to communicate with eitherthe mythic worldor ourWesternworld. He lives, perforce,in limbo, much as does the young Kiowa, Abel, in N. Scott Momaday'sHouse Made of Dawn. Quite possibly the greatestdilemmaconfrontingcontemporary Native Americans is "their inability to define themselves to whites," in the words of a spokesman for the North AmericanIndianEcumenicalMovement (an effort at pan-Indianspiritualrejuvenation)(Stanley 1977:242)- because the two, Indian and White, still cleave to what at least appearto be mutually irreconcilable, mutually antagonistic, mutuallyunintelligibleworlds. Professional historiansshould understand the Indianis and always has been very that much a creatureof this other, mythic world, even thoughit may tend to elude him, compromisedas he is by White influence.

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The fact is there is a powerful, dual metaphysics- one Indian, one White - inherentin the writingof Indian-White history.To ignorethe Indian thoughtworldis to continue writing about ourselves to ourselves. IndianWhite history thus becomes White history because it expresses our or our colonialism is no forbears'perceptionof reality. This sort of historiographic longer tenable. Let us have the courage and humility to recognize another reality to what happenedbetween IndiansandWhites. The place to begin is by appreciatingthe mythic world outlinedabove - but that is only a start.What view of the dynamicsof the fur we will emerge with, yearshence, is a bicultural trade, of King Philip's War,of IndianRemoval,of the PlainsIndianWars-of the whole sweep of it all. There is more involved here than antiquarian titillation. Historianscan lead the way in dismantlingthe White paternalistic mind-set,thatin its expression has always crippledthe Indian,by admittingthatthereis another legitimate our that historyis way of interpreting mutualpast- by admitting Indian-White the process of two thoughtworldsthat at the time were more often than not mutually unintelligible. Surely this is the most poignant message of IndianWhite relations:500 years of talkingpast each other, of mutualincomprehension. Although the situation still prevails it may not still be inevitable, as it perhaps was the majority of the time. It comes down to this: If we are to understand the contemporaryIndian we must first understandthe historic Indian. That means giving him an historic voice - his own this time, not the ventriloquist's. And thatwill take us back to 1492 again, to the beachesof San Salvador, where the Westernworldallegedlydiscoveredlos Indios. It is a piece of fiction, of course:the West did not "discover" the Indianthen;it discovered the Europeanin caricature.That is where the discontinuitybegan, when our forefathers rejected the Indian claim to a legitimate vision of existence as a burlesque, a parodyof the "true" and "divinely sanctioned"reality. (Indians felt similarly about the Europeanthoughtworld, incidentally.) The time is auspicious to equip ourselves with the linguist's and ethnologist'stools and to returnto the sources and find the Indianas he defined himself and his world. Perhaps in the process of finding him we will discernanothermeaningfor this land, as well. In a very realsense the meaningof the New Worldstill awaitsour discovery. Acknowledgments An earlier version of the articlewas readas a paperbeforethe Canadian Studies in Vancouver, British Columbia, in Society for Eighteenth-Century 1979, and benefitedat thattime fromthe commentary L. F. S. Upton. by May, The author furtherwishes to thank Robin Ridingtonfor permissionto quote extensively from one of his publishedarticles.

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I. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. (1978) is highly recommendedas a stimulatingand eruditestudy of Native Americans- the Indian- in 500 years of White imagination.See, in particular, his epilogue (pp. 195-197). By referringto Native Americans as an Indian collectivity I am in a sense, I suppose, perpetuatinga pernicious image and stereotypeof these people, who were and are in many respects culturallyand socially diverse. I agree with Berkhofer'ssentimentson this - thatthe of Indianis an artifact Whiteimagination. Berkhofer I aretalkingabouttwo fundamentally But and different issues: he is primarilyinterestedin documenting often fanciful, Whiteethnocentric the image of Native Americans, whereas I am trying to installa more ethnographically-informed one in the minds of historians. I doubt that Berkhoferor any otherresponsiblescholarwould deny that it is possible and undercertaindidacticconditionsdesirableto referto and discuss an overarchingcosmology, or world view, seemingly distinctiveto Native Americansocieties all of them - just as one may describe Western thinkingin similarlygross terms. Let it be understood, then, thatthe collective Indianworld view describedin these pages is a convenient and candidly artificialabstraction,or distillation,of certainpivotal sentimentsanda distinctive outlook on life sharedby the membersof these legion societies. 2. Ridingtontells me it is now clear to him thatBeaverchildrenof both sexes engage in the vision quest. REFERENCES Berkhofer, Jr., RobertF. 1978 The WhiteMan's Indian:Imagesof the AmericanIndian to from Columbus thePresent. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Eiseley. Loren 1978 The Innocent Fox. In The Star Thrower. pp. 53-65. New York: Times Books. Neihardt, John G. 1972 Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Storyof a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. New York: Simon and Schuster, Pocket Books. Ridington. Robin 1971 Beaver Dreaming and Singing. In Pilot Not Commander:Essays in Memoryof DiamondJenness. Ed. Pat andJim Lotz, pp. 15-128. Anthropologica,Special Issue, n.s. 13 (1 and 2). Speck, FrankG. 1935 Naskapi: The Savage Hunters of the Labrador Peninsula. Norman: University of OklahomaPress. Stanley. Sam 1977 AmericanIndianPowerandPowerlessness.In TheAnthropology Power:Ethnographic of Studies from Asia, Oceania, and the New World. Ed. Raymond D. Fogelson and RichardN. Adams, pp. 237-242. New York: Academic Press. Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. 1896-1901 TheJesuit Relations and Allied Documents:Travelsand Explorationsof theJesuit Missionariesin New France, 1610-1791. 73 volumes.Cleveland: The BurrowsBrothers Co.

Submitted:July 16, 1979 Accepted: October 12, 1979