On One of America’s
Tragedies
When I was a kid in the 1950s cowboys and Indians was a
thing. We played cowboys and Indians. There were cowboy and Indians movies.
There were cowboy and Indians television programs. In every context of cowboys
and Indians the cowboys were always white, and they were always the good guys. The
Indians were the bad guys. Indians attacked white people for no apparent
reason. They were brutal. They scalped people. They kidnapped women and
children, and white men always came to the rescue, usually by killing Indians.
I was young in the 1950s, having been born in 1946. It never occurred to me to
question the stereotypes of the cowboys and Indians genre. No one ever told me
that in fact the Indians were the good guys and the cowboys and other white
people were the bad guys. It’s only recently, late in my life, that I have come
to understand the enormity of the calamity my white ancestors inflicted on
American Indians. Only recently have I come to understand that the Indians were
fighting to retain their land and their cultures from Euro-American attempts to
steal the land the destroy the cultures. I want here to reflect on that
calamity in hopes perhaps of clearing my soul or at least doing what I can to
clear the air.
My wife Jane and I recently got home from a long car trip to
the southwestern US. We drove from our home in Washington state through Oregon,
Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico. Colorado, then back home through Colorado, Wyoming,
Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. It was quite a trip. We went to see certain
natural wonders, Zion National Park and Grand Canyon National Park tops among
them. We saw a friend in New Mexico and family in Colorado. All of those things
were good, some of them very good. Yet something else occupies the first place
of prominence in my memories of the trip. It is what we experienced of Native
Americans, that is, the Indians of the cowboys and Indians genre of my
childhood. We heard about Native Americans at virtually every stop on that
trip. He heard about the Native people from whom we took the canyon of the
Virgin River in Zion National Park. We heard about how the Grand Canyon had
been home to many Native Americans and was sacred to them. We saw Indian
petroglyphs in New Mexico. We visited Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. We visited the
Museum of Indian Arts and Cultures in Santa Fe and the Tsamastslikt Cultural
Institute outside Pendleton, Oregon. Both of these institutions are beautiful
presentations of the cultures and histories of the Native peoples of their
areas. In all of those places we learned of the genocide of Native Americans
inflicted upon them by Spanish and other Euro-Americans.
The genocide started in Mexico in the sixteenth century. It continued
uninterrupted throughout the United States from then into the twentieth
century. Diseases Europeans introduced to which Indians had no natural immunity
killed as many as half of them or more. We took their land, then presumed to
give some of it back to them in the form of reservations. We desecrated sacred
Indian sites, Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota being but one
example. We looked down upon their culture and their spiritual traditions as
primitive, savage even, and full of superstition and evil. We tried to educate
their cultures and their languages out of their children. We forced some of
them to convert to Christianity, which we insisted was the one and only true
religion. We forced entire nations from their homes and resettled them in
distant foreign places, the Cherokee Trail of Tears being one of the most
egregious examples of this policy but hardly the only one.
We thought they were primitive savages. We treated them as
essentially less than human. We thought we were culturally superior. We thought
we had true civilization and they didn’t. We thought we had true religion and
they didn’t. We thought it was our God-given mandate to “civilize” the Natives
of this continent. We were quite content to kill them in the process, the Wounded
Knee Massacre of 1890 in which the US military killed hundreds of helpless
Indians, mostly women and children, being a prime example but again hardly the
only one. At Taos Pueblo we learned how in 1847 the US Army shelled a church in
which Indian women and children were seeking refuge until the roof collapsed
killing around 150 of them. We learned of treaty after treaty that the US
government signed with Indian nations and never complied with. We took back
land we had given to them. We refused to make payments promised to them. We saw
example after example of magnificent cultural creations by Native Americans,
and we knew that only recently have we white Americans recognized the beautiful
creativity of so many Native cultures. We learned of the sacred relationship so
many Native nations had, and have, with the land, something we Euro-Americans
mostly lack to the great detriment of ourselves and of the earth.
As I admired the beautiful artistic creations of Native
people my heart broke. I felt like crying because my white forebears in this
nation stole the land of Native people to build my country. Every square inch
of the United States of America is ours only because we stole it from the
Natives. Every bit of ground on which I walk belonged to other peoples until we
stole it from them. My house is located on land we stole from Native people.
Every house, every building in this country is located on land we stole from
Native people. And my heart breaks.
I know that the history of humanity includes many broad migrations
of peoples that involved some people occupying land that once was the home of
others. When teaching the early history of Christianity I have constantly to
remind people that in New Testament times the people of Anatolia were Greek not
Turkish, the Turks occupying that land only many centuries later. The Magyar
people of Hungary came from Asia and settled in and dominated land that was not
at all Magyar. I’m sure many other examples could easily be cited. I know that all of that is true, and when I
consider what Euro-Americans did to Native Americans my heart still breaks. I
know that I cannot undo what white Americans did to Native Americans. What we
did we did. What is past is past. Yet it is still very much with us.
I take a little bit of satisfaction in the way Indian
nations today are bilking millions of dollars out of gullible white (and other)
Americans in the casinos that have sprung up on so many Indian reservations
where the white man’s law against gambling does not apply, yet it isn’t
anywhere near enough. We could and should pay reparations to all Native
nations. That would be something, but it wouldn’t be enough either. Since we
can’t undo what we did there is nothing that would be enough. And so we live
with a history that we would rather ignore and of which most of us are woefully
ignorant. We can beg forgiveness, and some Indian people will be gracious
enough to give it. Beyond that I have no answers. I live with a broken heart
and a sense of guilt though I myself have never done anything to harm any
Indian person and never would. I don’t know what the answer is or even if there
is one.
I do know that we white Americans need to stop lying to
ourselves about what the establishment of the United States of America meant to
the people who were here when we arrived and whose ancestors had lived here for
millennia by that time. We need to start being honest. We need to admit that
every square inch of land in our country is ours only by right of conquest. Even
that won’t be enough, but it could at least be a start in righting the wrong
upon which our country is founded. May it be so.
