Ninety percent of everything is mediocre: people, puddings, plays, politicians, tv, books. I’ve said that before…often.
Without men like Simon to say there is something more golden if only we’d reach for it, we would sink into the quagmire of banality, sentimentality, mediocrity that the 90 percent live in eternally. For some of us, the hatred of the monkeymass is tolerable, if only we can touch that gold occasionally.
93: 15 JANUARY 71
THE RED MAN’S BURDEN: Part One
Years of close observation of people have led me to the conclusion that bigotry, racial prejudice, and hatred stem from a lack of personal acquaintance. I wish I had a dime for every time I’ve heard a white man bumrap blacks, only to amend the derogatory remarks with, “The only one I’ve ever met who was any good is that George Washington Carver Rastus White who repairs my car. He’s really a good mechanic and honest as the day is long.” I’d even take a nickel for every time I’ve heard an anti-Semite say, “Kikes are cheap and money-grubbing, except for my friend Israel Solomon Fishbein who is a sweet guy. Why aren’t there more like him?”
Every time one of us (considered a “minority”) leads, through no nobler activity than being our own decent selves, some locked-in soul to a realization that individuals are shitty but entire races or religions are not, we’ve helped straighten the world’s head just a smidgen. Which, of course, behooves us to be as good and nice as we can, all the time. If it goes on long enough, upcoming generations will hear bigoted remarks so seldom they’ll simply be phased out. Lack of acquaintance was at the bottom of my ignorance about Indians.
Thus, for a kid brought up on Western movies in which the Injun was always a slavering, brutal barbarian, the only good one of which was a dead one, biting the dust, it was a joy and a blessing for me to meet Russell Bates.
Russ is a thirty-year-old Kiowa. He was one of my students at the Clarion (Pa.) College Workshop in science fiction and fantasy. He’s a fine—and improving daily—writer who also happens to be massively proud of, and enormously well-informed about, his Amerind heritage. Because we are friends, Russ has written me on several occasions (from Anadarko, Oklahoma) about the treatment of Amerinds on television. Many of the points he raised, and the observations he made, were fresh and startling. I’d like to share them with you, not merely because examination of every facet of tv’s inability to portray history or reality in a truthful way is necessary to our understanding of the video modus operandi, but because the more acquaintanceship we have, the quicker decreases our prejudice.
While I’ll be taking credit for these columns about tv and the Red Man, please be advised all I’m doing is paraphrasing Russ Bates, without whose comments and research these articles would never have come to be.
Thank you, Thay-nay-Tone. (Which is what Russ’s maternal grandmother named him in the Bureau of Indian Affairs Kiowa Hospital. It means “Bluejay Tailfeathers.”)
Conceptually, Russ points out: “When Man was civilized, he watched his fire flickering at the mouth of his cave and used his emerging imagination to conjure up horrors out of the darkness just beyond the light. It brought him a long way. But now his fire that he watches is programmed on the backside of a glass screen and makes little demand of his imagination at all. How much further can he go now?”
Probably not much further, but it’s fascinating to note where tv is now, in terms of portrayal of the Amerind…and how it got there.
One core conclusion is obvious: tv merely inherited its sometimes blatantly horrendous misrepresentations of Amerinds from the movies. Thousands of Saturday-afternoon quickies (on which Russ and you and I grew up) drummed wrong ideas and cliché stock images into the heads of the average filmgoer but, more important, into the heads of destined-to-be writers, directors, actors, and producers.
And this, not merely in terms of the Indian always being the bad guy and butchering psychotics like Custer always being the good guy, but at a deeper level in portraying the Amerind as always stoic and devoid of any human feelings; printing them as complete primitives (the highest accolade Hollywood could offer was that they were “noble savages”); categorizing them as ludicrous, oddly funny people who worshiped impossible spirits. Thus dismissible because they had utterly alien senses of value. In short, the God Is On Our Side syndrome, carried out with Judeo-Christian missionary zeal that vindicates even genocide.
On this point, as a cultural aside, Russ notes, “Their eventual defeat was the product of tribal orientation: by the time there were any alliances at all, it was too late. Couple that with new diseases, an aversion to getting involved (some Indians fled ahead of the encroaching Whites like game flees before a party of hunters), misplaced trust, outright lying and chicanery on the part of the Authorities, and the clever stroke of wiping out the bison (destroy the food supply, destroy the Indian), and the genocide almost worked.”
Ironically enough, speaking to the above, the whites brought their children’s diseases and Indians dropped like mayflies, but the Indian gave the whites tobacco and syphilis, so maybe there is some justice in the world. Or maybe those Red Man gods weren’t as silly as we thought.
We’ll talk more a little later on about the present state of life of the Amerind, but getting back to the hub of the discussion—tv’s responsibility in the matter and its awesome burden of guilt, both by commission and omission—movies, and therefore, subsequently, tv have presented little of the more involved aspects of the Amerindian history or struggles for survival.
Most flagrant, and the part of the crime that infuriates Amerinds most, is that Indians rarely play Indians. Even taking into account that Anthony Quinn or Katharine Ross or Howard Keel or Dewey Martin might draw more white filmgoers than a nameless Indian in the roles these actors have created, except for an occasional Chief Dan George, Eddie Little Sky, Jay Silverheels, or Iron Eyes Cody,* the casts are invariably made up of Mexicans or whites.
I have it on good authority that Indians do have their favorite movie and tv actors, and they aren’t Elvis Presley, Victor Jory, Ricardo Montalban, H. M. Wynant, or Gilbert Roland. Having very little druthers, Amerinds will settle for a Robert Loggia or a Charles Bronson, either one a pretty good choice.
Excuses for this condition are summed up in the complaint that there is a shortage of authentic Indian actors, though Jay Silverheels was supposed to have started a school for same.
Nonetheless, Amerind militants (who, because of the very real psychological block passed on and on by succeeding generations of Amerinds forced to live with the reality of having been defeated and subjugated by whites, are really out after economic or political blood, no shuck, no jive) find themselves—when they can amass the power—in positions like Buffy Sainte-Marie when Universal signed her to work in a segment of The Virginian last season. Miss Sainte-Marie insisted she be allowed to rewrite the script to make it conform to reality…and that Indians play Indians. Whether or not her demands were met, the show was rather innocuous, another of those Indians’-conflict-with-the-white-man’s-world stories, with little new to add or say, and, thus, all for almost nothing. Squished down in the mulch of standard tv expediency and a universal (also Universal) policy of offending as few people as possible, even when dealing with “hot” topics.
…Then Came Bronson, last season, did a fairly accurate and in some ways very interesting episode about a Kiowa (played by Robert Loggia) who is unsure about his place in the white man’s world, who takes his pregnant wife out in the desert to wait for a spirit message telling him what to do. Later in the season, they did another Indian story. It was considerably less successful than the episode noted above, despite the presence of Eddie Little Sky and Miss Sainte-Marie again. However, there was a dramatization of a holy peyote ceremony (Navajo? Hopi? Zuñi?) at which a real peyote song was sung. On the other hand, there were many technical errors—such as holding the ceremony in an open tent, which would never happen—and the plot was virtually pointless. However, these shows rated praise from Amerinds
for at least the attempt to deal realistically and contemporaneously with the Amerinds’ condition today.
On the other hand, there was a Bracken’s World that reduced to low slapstick comedy an encounter between Century Studios and its staff with some ersatz Apaches hired as “local color” in a Western epic. Reaction to this show by our Mr. Bates, himself a Kiowa, remember, is best set forth in his own words:
“Oh, gawd! (Who is not an Indian spirit: one never takes the name of an Indian god in vain, on pain of losing one’s place in the Over-The-Clouds place.) I have never sat through an hour when I more wanted to get my bow and put an arrow through the eye of the NBC peacock! As if it weren’t bad enough on simply dramatic grounds, or ethnic grounds, I found personal affront when an actress, found objectionable to the Indians because she’s ‘Anglo,’ is defended by her stage mother, who protests her daughter is part Indian, some tribe that starts with a ‘K.’ I cringed because I knew the next line. ‘Kiowa?’ someone asks. (I don’t know who, ’cause I was trying to crawl under my couch, shouting, ‘No! No! No!’) A flaming arrow for the scriptwriter. I came as close to cursing as I’m capable. (I follow one of the old ways in this respect: there were no swear words in any Indian language; there are a few now, but they are all transliterations of English usages.)”
And on that note of impending warpath, I’ll end for this week. But Bluejay Tailfeathers and I will return next week for part 2.
94: 29 JANUARY 71
THE RED MAN’S BURDEN: Part Two
For a long moment let’s consider not the dream condition of the American Indian as television sees it, but the reality of life for the Red Man in this cataclysmic latter half of the twentieth century.
The Amerind today finds his lot painful and bewildering. It is on the one hand compounded by a patronizing and paternalistic bureaucracy, and on the other by himself. The Bureau of Indian Affairs administers Amerinds closely and loosely at one and the same time. The majority of the children are sent to government schools far away from their homes. There they are told that they are Indians and that’s why they’re there. But they are denied anything Indian: they may not speak the languages of their tribes, yet they are allowed to entertain with the songs, the art, and the dances of their tribes.
Yet they may not do these things for themselves.
Proficiency with English is very poor among Amerinds. Perhaps this is why they are not allowed to speak their native languages in school. However, that they did learn their native tongues first enforces the limitation on whether they can or even want to learn English with any degree of fluency.
English thus becomes second and secondary to most Indians, consequently hindering their education and their abilities to compete in most fields.
In the cities they fail miserably and consistently. They become clannish and withdrawn, falling into alcoholism and cringing poverty. Most of them are taken there by the bureau without much regard for their experience or employment history. If they failmost do—then they are abandoned and more brought in.
And when an Amerind manages to break through, to get on the upward path to fulfillment, the bureau appropriations always run short, because the major programs of the BIA are designed to help the mass of Indians—hospitals, schools, land administration, loans, food programs, jobs—and so help for individuals more often than not runs thin.
All of the above would seem to be noble enterprises, and in concept they are. Yet every one of them makes Indians more dependent than independent.
And there the machinery breaks down, for the dependency either can’t or won’t be served. The schools have a low quality of teachers, since the salaries are usually less than the state average…the hospitals are woefully understaffed and dangerously low on drugs and supplies, frequently decrepit…and the loans, apparently, are there for those who can prove they didn’t need to borrow in the first place.
As Russell Bates (my Amerind connection for these columns) puts it, “The Amerind’s state is partly his own fault. There is the language barrier, of course, but other cultural barriers stand in his way. He finds it close to impossible to unite to help himself because everything comes back to tribal differences, some ages old. There is an unwillingness or inability to learn simple things, such as adapting to the concept of time.”
True. Indians had no clocks in their culture, so they refuse to honor appointments or even job reporting times in quite a few instances.
The workings of the law and courts totally escape them. In this respect—instant identification—they are not unlike many of us born with skins of other colors.
They are far from thrifty, having been raised to share completely all that is theirs. Obviously, this puts them at a decided conceptual disadvantage in a thoroughly materialistic society like ours.
Temperance seems to escape most of them. They are given to hopelessness and inarticulate frustration at the slightest setback or affront, so the retreat is into alcohol for most, drugs for a very few. The brightest and ablest Indians are in the very same bars with the dull and inept, drinking themselves into escape.
And the racial hatred for the white man that is passed on from generation to generation makes many Amerinds incapable of dealing with white society with any degree of trust. They seem unable to forget—down on a cellular level where it goes beyond mere slogans—where Indians were interred, food was withheld or they were forced to adapt to ways of life completely alien to them (hunters into farmers, for example). The highlight of it all—discounting the loveliness of the Sand Creek Massacre as shown in Soldier Blue—was the delivery of government issue blankets infected with smallpox to people weakened by hunger, despair, and lack of natural resistance.
Hold it. I’m dredging up the past. It is, of course, almost impossible not to fall into that trap when dealing with our treatment of the people who, bottom line, lived here first (one wonders how Good Amurricans who are outraged at destruction of “property” but seem unmoved by destruction of “lives” would justify patriotically, my country right or wrong, this flagrant usurpation of rightful ownership). Nonetheless, it is a trap I must resist here.
The sign NO INDIANS OR DOGS ALLOWED may be down, but prejudice against Amerinds is still very much with us. Or as Lenny Bruce used to say, people in Minnesota are quick to point out there is no Negro prejudice in the state (because there are so few Negroes in Minnesota…but they kick the shit out of their Indians).
So we return to tv and the Amerind, having learned—I sincerely hope—a few things about the reality as opposed to the fantasy promulgated by the tube.
Generally, Indians on tv are played as fools or bad types, without human consideration. The High Chaparral is a consistent exception to that cavil, however. Its portrayal of Indians tries to be authentic, and while it is far from great, it is at least eminently fair, even when dealing in comedic terms, which is saying a great deal.
(And in North Carolina, Indian children are refused entrance to schools at gunpoint.)
(Anywhere in the nation where there are Indians in large numbers, a quick review of police arrest records will reveal countless Indian names and almost no white or black names.)
There are, remember them, the WWII series in which Indians as soldiers were always played as feelingless killers, always the ones who crept into the Nazi camps and slit the sentries’ throats.
Yet against these and the almost fifty years of erroneous images purveyed by motion pictures can be held up such sometimes productions of beauty and accuracy as NET’s Trail of Tears, starring Johnny Cash (one-eighth Cherokee) as John Ross (also one-eighth Cherokee), leader of the Indian death march to Oklahoma in the dead of winter.
A dramatized documentary, the show was hailed by Amerinds as biting, straightforward, and dead on with historical accuracy. I don’t know what kind of audience numbers that show drew, but those of us who saw it could not possibly have ignored the onus our race must bear for that singularly inhumane, bestial, and bloody episode in American history.
&n
bsp; As a choice for the part of Ross, Cash was ideal. He has, at times, been very active in some of the Indian movements, most notably the Tribal Indian Land Rights Association, which is among the most vocal and well-known.
Historically, the show had more straight truth than ten years of tv and films. Andrew Jackson, for instance, was portrayed exactly as he was: a bitter, half-paralyzed, dying old man who still regarded Indians as he had when he invaded Florida. The forked tongues of politicians and other bureaucrats, as they mouthed over the “Indian problem” in Alabama, was laid painfully on the line.
And the show ended not as tv drama ends, with a happy upbeat about the enduring nobility of Man and a little laugh at human foibles, but on a note of unrelieved despair, pointing out that even when the Indians did settle Oklahoma, that, too, finally, was no longer theirs.
Is it any wonder, then, that a regular Indian holiday in this country is June 25, the date of Custer’s Last Stand? It sounds funny, but the Indians are deadly serious about it. In 1966, one Indian I know threw a big blowout for the ninetieth anniversary. He was not alone. In countless locations across the U.S.A. the same thing was done. As Bluejay Tailfeathers says, “Watch out! 1976 will mark the hundreth anniversary!”
(Tv-wise, the ninetieth celebrations were covered by network news and all reports were played for the laugh. Again, the Indians were played for clowns by Gya-dah bonh: the vision seen from afar.)