An Indian's view of the West

Question for Discussion: According to Steiner,
Tenorio, and Wilkinson, what larger mythic story do
Indians tell about the white man in the West?

Reading: Tenorio, "The White Man's Suicide";
Steiner, "The Invention of America";
Wilkinson, "Where Are We Going?" ;
Echo-Hawk, "Healthy Environment, Healthy Economy "

Video: Images of Indians Series, Images of Indians ;
Scene from Red River: Wayne's Land

Response Paper: How does the Indian's mythic story
of the West contrast with the "Mythic American West"?
Do these Indians intentionally tell their story of the West in order to challenge every point of the Anglo-American story? Is the Indian's Mythic West a counter-myth to the Anglo-American Mythic West? (1-2 page paper due on Monday, Feb. 23.)
( See Anglo-American vs. Indian Stories on
the American West )

Red River (1948)

Geography of Western Settlement

Gast, American Progress Poster (in-class)
American Indians in White America (in-class)
Cognitive Dissonance and the American Indian
(in-class)
American Indian Tribes, 1600 (in-class)
Nativeweb: Indians on the Web (in-class)
Louisiana Purchase : 1800-1803
Territorial Growth 1830
Territorial Growth 1850
Territorial Growth 1870
Territorial Growth 1900
Territorial Growth 1920
United States: 1990
Map of Indian Reservations (in-class)

American Indians and Western
Settlement

U.S. Supreme Court, The Cherokee Nation
v The State of Georgia (1831)
Worcester v. Georgia (1832) (in-class)
Water Quality and the Winters Doctrine (in-class)
Navajo Urged to Fight Water Rights Settlement
Indian Reserved Water Rights: The Winters Doctrine

American Indian Policy and the Turner thesis

American Indian History Sites

Native American History

American Indians Today

Native American Populations by State
(1999) (in-class)

The Mythic West and the Turner thesis

Anderson, The Nation as Imagined Community
Red River: Internet Movie Database (in-class)
Gast, American Progress Poster (in-class)
Explanatory Text used to market
American Progress Lithograph (in-class)
Beck, The Myth of the Vanishing Race (in-class)
Deloria, "The Indians were Invisible"
American Indian Tribes, 1600 (in-class)
Map of Indian Reservations (in-class)
The White Man does not Understand America:
America is Indian (in-class)
Steiner, The Invention of an America
without Indians: America as Anglo-American
(in-class)
Lewis, What should be the place of Indians
in America? What is America?(in-class)
President Andrew Jackson on the place
of Indians in America (in-class)
Chief Joseph on how Anglo-Americans think
about Indians (1872) (in-class)
Loewen, Writing Indians out of American History: Cognitive Dissonance and the American Indian
(in-class)
Turner's Frontier Thesis as White Cognitive
Dissonance: America is Anglo-American(in-class)
Ehcohawk, America as Indian: Indians are
still part of American Society & History (in-class)
Wilkinson, The Future of American Society
and Indians (in-class)
Tenorio, The White Man's Suicide: The
Vanishing White Man and the American Future
(in-class)
Nativeweb: Indians on the Web (in-class)
Native American Nations (in-class)
Native American Populations by State
(1999) (in-class)
EPA: American Indian Tribal Portal

Lewis,American Indians in White America

Gast, American Progress Poster

The larger question facing both Indians and European setters from the very beginning of contact between these two peoples was this: Can Indians and Europeans live together in America despite their different cultures, religions, languages, customs and traditions? This larger question quickly posed two very different questions for American Indians:

1) Could Indians be a part of White American society and culture, and under whose terms--Indians or White?

2) Was there a future for Indians as part of White American society? That is, were White Americans willing to share American society and resources with Indians?

To begin to see how both Indians and White Americans answered these questions, we can look at Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce Indians. In the "Chief Joseph's Story" (1879) handout, Chief Joseph is speaking before Congress, pleading on behalf of his defeated and imprisoned Indian people. For Joseph, the so-called "Indian problem" was not caused by Indians, but by Whites refusal to accept Indians as a part of their larger American society.

In order to understand Joseph's argument, we need to first understand the history of the Nez Perce Indian people. The Nez Perce had lived in what is now the border between Oregon and Washington state for hundreds of years. They hunted, farmed and traded with nearby Indian tribes. Upon reaching the Nez Perce Indian people on their journey to the Pacific, Lewis and Clark were welcomed by them and given supplies. They made friends with Lewis and Clark and the American expedition. However, this friendship didn't last very long.

White settlers and missionaries began swarming into Oregon and Washington in the 1840s and 1850s. Believing that they were settling a "new land," many of these settlers failed to recognize or accept the Indians rights to their land, culture, and way of life. The settlers acted and believed that the Indians were not a part of the larger American society. If the Indians didn't accept the settlers right to settle on their land and develop the wilderness, then the settlers would demand that the Federal government push them aside to make room for progress and development. The Indians were thus faced with a choice: They either allow white settlement and the economic development of their lands, or they be pushed aside onto reservations under the strict control of the Federal government and the military. Whites did not accept the rights of Indians to continue to own and control their land, to continue their way of life and separate culture and societies, and practice their religion and way of life. By the 1860s and 1870s White settlers' demands to settle on the Nez Perce Indian land created a real dilemma for both the Indians and the Federal Government.

In the early 1870s, the Federal government decided that in order to appease the growing demands of White settlers to settle on Indian land that it would remove the Nez Perce Indians from the majority of their land and place them on a reservation, separate and isolated from White society. It is here where Joseph's story really begins. In the mid-1870s, the Federal government sent General Howard to order the Nez Perce chiefs to prepare themselves to be moved onto reservations. General Howard told the Nez Perce that "the country belongs to the Government, and I intend to make you go upon the reservation." But Joseph and the Nez Perce were puzzled by this demand. How could the Federal government believe it had the right to take the majority of Nez Perce tribal land and put them on a small, isolated reservation? Where did the government get the authority to remove them from the land that they believed "the Great Spirit" gave them to live on. But General Howard wasn't willing to argue this point with the Indians. Believing he had the authority and right to remove the Indians, he warned them: "If you are not here in that time, I shall consider that you want to fight, and will send my soldiers to drive you on."

After trying to meet Howard's deadline to move, and finding it impossible to do so, Chief Joseph and the rest of the Nez Perce chiefs decided to attempt a daring escape to Canada, trying to flee the control and domination of the Federal government. But the government refused to allow the Indians to escape. It send thousands of troops to prevent the Nez Perce from escaping into Canada. Federal troops captured the Indians within 60 miles of the Canadian border. The Federal government had decided not to allow the Nez Perce to escape their control, fearing that other Indians would follow the example they set. Upon surrendering, General Miles promised Joseph that he and his people would be granted a small reservation in Washington. But after they surrendered the Secretary of War and other military leaders reneged on this promise and ordered the Nez Perce to be sent to prisons in Oklahoma. Representing his people, Chief Joseph asked to speak before Congress and be allowed to plead his defeated peoples' case.

Chief Joseph on the Indian Problem in America (1872)

Chief Joseph begins his speech before Congress by declaring his view of the larger conflict between Indians and Whites: "I want the white people to understand my people. Some of you think that an Indian is a wild animal. This is a great mistake. I will tell you about our people, and then you can judge whether an Indian is a man or not." For Joseph the central cause of this conflict is that Whites do not recognize and respect the rights of Indians as human beings and as Americans. Joseph gives a major example of this when he observes that whites "stole a great many horses from us, and we could not get them back because we were Indian." Chief Joseph must know that the penalty for White Americans stealing horses from other Whites is death. But Whites don't grant the same enforcement of this law to Indians.

Recognizing their defeat and the loss of their land, their horses and cattle, and the Nez Perce suffering and loss of life during this conflict, Joseph pleads with Congress to help his people: "I know that my race must change. We cannot hold our own with the white men as we are. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. We ask that the same law shall work alike on all men." Joseph is asking Congress to recognize Indians and men and as Americans with rights. He says: "Let me be a free man--free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself...." Joseph concludes his speech by promising that if White Americans "treat the Indian as they treat each other, then we shall have no more wars. We shall all be alike." But, tragically, White Americans refused to treat Indians like Whites, to recognize Indians as equal member of a larger American society.

We can see this same dilemma in President Andrew Jackson's "Second Annual Message" in 1830. In the 1820 and 1830s, Southern States were pressuring the Federal government to remove the remaining Indians tribe from their land in the South and put them on reservations in Oklahoma, which the government called "Indian Territory." The Southern states and white settlers and slaveholders wanted the Indians' land and resources to expand slavery and the Southern economy. They didn't recognize the right of Indians to remain on their land, to hold onto their culture and religion, and to live as Indians within the larger American society. Facing this pressure from White Americans, President Jackson came up with an policy supporting Indian removal that he thought was best for Indians and White Americans.

In his "Second Annual Message," President Jackson argues that removing the Indians in the Southern states to reservations in Oklahoma is good for the Indians, White settlers, and good for the Southern states. Jackson argues that removing the Indians will "place a dense and civilized population in large tracts of country now occupied by a few savage hunters"...."and enable those States to advance rapidly in population, wealth, and power." In addition to help the States and white settlers, removal will separate "the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites"...."which will retard the progress of decay which is lessening their numbers." Jackson now argues that Indians will survive only if they are removed out of the path of white settlement. If Indians aren't isolated from whites, and protected on reservations, Jackson warns, they will face the same fate as the Indians in the Eastern states--they "were annihilated or melted away." Isolated from whites, safe from annihilation or extermination, the Federal government can help the Indians "cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community." In addition to helping the Indians survive, removing the Indians will help America create an "extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or Industry can execute." If the white settlers can leave the homes of their ancestors to settle the wilderness, Jackson argues, then Indians should also be able to leave their homes and go to reservations. Jackson seems to think that sending Indians to reservations is comparable to white settlers settling in the West. For President Jackson, just like most Americans in the 1830s, the Indians as Indians could not live and be a part of American society. Either the Indians gave up their culture, religion, language, and way of life and disappeared into White society or they would be annihilated. Jackson's policy mirrors the larger Federal government's Indian policy from 1870 to 1920, which can be summarized in a phrase: "Kill the Indian to save the Man." If Indians did not give up their Indian ways and disappear into White culture and society, they would die out, because Indians as Indians could not survive in White American society in the 1800s.

In response to President Jackson's argument for Indian removal, John Ross and the leaders of the Cherokee Indian nation that was threatened with removal tried to argue their case before Congress and the American people for Indian's rights to their land, culture, and way of life. In "Memorial and Protest of the Cherokee Nation," Cherokee leader John Ross argues that Indians as a distinct people, deserving basic rights and freedoms, should be allowed to remain on their land and practice their culture and way of life, free from White American domination and control. Like Chief Joseph, John Ross believes that the conflicts between Indians and Whites is caused by the White's refusal to recognize Indians as peoples with inalienable rights and freedoms. Ross argues that the Indians are farmers, Christians, and are improving and developing their lands and resources. In fact, the White settlers and Southern state governments are stealing the Indian land that has been improved and developed. Given the Cherokee's efforts to become a part of the larger White American society, the United States should and must recognize the rights, dignity, and equality of Indians in American society. But the Federal government and most White Americans refused to accept Ross's arguments. And the Cherokee were removed from their ancestral land and march to a reservation in Oklahoma. On this march, known as the "Trail of Tears" over one-third of the Cherokee people die due to cold, disease, and starvation. This tragedy symbolizes the larger White American society's refusal to accept Indians as part of their larger society.

In order to understand the White American refusal to accept Indians as a part of their society, we must look back at the assumptions made by the first European explorers and settlers who came to America. For many Americans, Columbus has come to symbolize the progress and good will that Europeans brought to the Americas. But as, Loewen argues, Columbus was, in fact, one of the models for the behavior of future explorers and settlers in America. When Columbus first landed on the island of Hispanola, present-day Haiti, he claimed all the land and resources for the Spanish King and Queen. He even commented that the peoples would make "good slaves." On his return to Spain, Columbus brought a few of the Indians back to Spain as slaves. On his previous expeditions to the Hispanola and the Bahamas, Columbus brutalized the Indians, capturing them as slaves, forcing them to find gold for Spain, and using violence and terrorism to control the Indians. As a result of the massive violence Columbus and his men used against the Indians, tens of thousands of Indians died. Loewen argues that "the Spanish in Haiti is one of the primary instances of genocide in all human history. But the wealth and power created by Columbus and later Spanish expeditions convinced other European nations that they, too, had to get in on the scramble for wealth in America. If the Spanish could amass vast wealth by exploiting the Indians, then the French, the English, the Portuguese, and the Dutch could as well. Loewen argues that in the scramble for wealth in the Americas "these other European nations were at least as brutal as Spain. The British, for example, unlike the Spanish, did not colonize by making use of Indian labor but simply forced the Indians out of the way."(p. 66)

Loewen, Cognitive Dissonance and the American Indian

But our textbooks do not describe the settling of the Americas as a scramble for wealth and the brutal exploitation of Indians and Africans. Instead we celebrate Columbus, as President Bush did in 1989, "as a role model for the nation." (p. 69) High school textbooks do not describe the refusal of Europeans to recognize and respect the rights of Indians who had already settled and lived in America, who were themselves the First Americans. There is thus a major contradiction between our history of European settlement and the reality of the brutal dispossession of Indian land and culture from 1492 to the present. Loewen argues that in order to avoid this contradiction, Americans forget the brutal reality of Indian-White conflict and accept the myth of the "empty continent" peopled by a few wandering savages, who were very quickly pushed aside by the progress of civilization across the American continent. Loewen refers to this process of denial as cognitive dissonance . Because humans can't hold two mutually incompatible beliefs at the same time, we tend to deny or forget one of those beliefs in order to make one of them reasonable and acceptable. Thus, in order to celebrate the victory of progress, the movement of white settlers across the continent, and the triumph of American democracy and civilization, Americans forget that in order to settle the continent that they had to brutally deny Indians their rights and culture. The basic contradiction is this: Can America celebrate itself as a democratic society based on the recognition of individual rights and freedoms while at the same recognizing that very democratic society denied the basic rights and freedoms of Indian peoples. This is the basic contradiction is Chief Joseph examines in his speech before Congress.

Turner's Frontier Thesis as White Cognitive Dissonance

The best example of what Loewen means by cognitive dissonance in Indian-White relations can be seen in Frederick Jackson Turner's famous 1893 history, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." This speech and Turner's larger argument is one of the most influential arguments in American history. Turner's point of view about Western settlement dominated the way American understood the history of American settlement up until the 1960s.

Turner argues that the best way to understand American history is to study the settlement of the continent: "Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West." He argues that American democratic institutions and values such as individualism, independence, self-reliance, and mistrust of government can be traced to the American settlement of the West. By facing and conquering the challenge of settling the frontier, Americans became who and what they are--they became Americans. For Turner, settlers contact with "free land" and the struggle to conquer the wilderness transformed them into Americans. But Turner does not mention anywhere the role of the Indians, who had lived and settled in the West. If settling the West made Americans who they are, why weren't Indians transformed and made into Americans already. The only time Turner mentions Indians is when he notes that the settler "fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails." But what happened to the Indians who made these trails and clearings? If Turner recognized the existence and prior settlement of America by Indians, his entire argument would fall apart. White settlers can't be celebrated as democratic heroes, settling and developing a continent, and in the process creating a democratic society, while at the same time denying Indians the very democratic rights America celebrates. As Loewen argues, Americans would rather have the myth than face the complex realities created by the massive contradictions between American democratic ideals and the reality of the brutal denial of Indians rights and place in American society.

Recognizing the larger contradictions in Indian-White relations and in American history, Luther Standing Bear argues that the Indian is America, that because Indians lived and settled in America for hundreds of years that they came to know and understand the land and America. Standing Bear argues that "the white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America." Whites' refusal to recognize and respect Indian rights, Standing Bear argues, only hurt the larger American society. When Whites come to "look upon the Indian world as a human world; then let him see to it that human rights be accorded to the Indians. And this for the purpose of retaining for his own order of society a measure of humanity." For Standing Bear, Chief Joseph, and John Ross, White America's refusal to accept Indians as human beings and as Americans has hurt both Indians and White Americans. Unlike Columbus and later White settlers, these American Indians believe that America can be and is a society that can include both Whites and Indians, that can allow both Whites and Indians to hold onto and celebrate their own culture, religion, and way of life. The refusal to accept such a larger multiracial and multicultural society has created racial divisions and tensions that have dominated American history and still threaten American society today.

Tenorio, The White Man's Suicide

"Surely the Great Spirit did not intend for us to shrivel
up and die and our bones to be scattered, only to be remembered in anthropology textbooks.

If a Pueblo who died twenty thousand years ago should return to live with his relatives today, he would he perfectly at home. We have kept our relationship with nature and now we as a people see that we are one of the few custodians of this kind of knowledge left. Maybe this kind of knowledge is what the world will need to survive."

"Our old enemies, the Anglos and the Spanish, have now settled among us. They will not give back to us what they have stolen, but we have survived. We have survived the Spanish, the Anglos, and the technological revolution. But now we face our greatest enemies. They do not go by the name of Coronado, or Cortez, or Custer, but by the name of the Army Corps of Engineers, San Juan-Chama Diversion Project, Salt River Project, and
so forth. "

"It must be remembered that with the ever-expanding and wasteful urbanization of Indian country, we Indian people of the Southwest find ourselves with the last good land and the last good water left. As the white man wastes his resources, he casts a covetous eye on what we have preserved for our own needs. We have not wasted our resources.

There is something suicidal in the non-Indian's belief in ever-expanding development and his belief in his ability to be able to continually reform nature through technology. The Southwest, in terms of water supply, can only support a limited number of people; that is a fact of life. The fact is that the Great Spirit put only so much water on this earth, and that is a fact the white
man refuses to confront."

"People in power have always stolen from Indian People. But I must hand it to the present United States government; never has any government gone to so much expense and into so much detail in order to steal something from somebody. I guess that is the American Way .

The fact is that our water is being taken and our whole way of life is threatened.

We Indian people do not always understand the laws, largely because they are numerous, complex, and ever-changing. But we do understand fairness. Fairness is the right to exist as a people.... Fairness is living up to one's solemn agreements and contracts. . . . And fairness is having enough water to raise one's corn and feed one's family. . . . "

Wilkinson, Where Are We Going?

"We are not gods. That is what Western man likes to think about his words. That may be why the earth has rejected him.

The man who came from Europe is a stranger in this land. He thought that he had created America. He did not. He thought he was America. He was not. He is still searching for the meaning of America. He has not found it. He will not find it.

In this land he will be a stranger forever."

"When the Europeans came to this country, something happened. There was a splitting off, a cutting off, of the white people's roots to their cultures. A final de-tribalization that was going on in Europe was completed here. The roots of the white people were just snapped in two.

And that is a cruel thing, to cut yourself off from your culture."

"In America, the European people began to look for something else. That document, that piece of paper, that "Bill of Rights," became their concept of themselves. It is their life. It is a weird concept for people to have of themselves as a people. "

"Now, Indian people have a different view. They don't look at themselves as an idea. They see themselves as a People who live in a certain space, on land where their ancestors are buried. On that space there is something that takes place, a culture takes place, because the People live there. And that is America to them.

People who see themselves as an idea, well, it is very hard for them to know where America really is. Or for us to tell them what the Grand Canyon means."

"What sustains us is our culture. And what sustains our culture is part of the land, it comes from the land. It is America.

And the whites don't have that strength; it is a weakness of the whites. So we're dealing with people who are frightened, who are paranoid, because they have no country, no real country. In a way we're dealing with a nation of juveniles, who have never grown up, who have great power but no real strength, who pretend they are men but are really children. That's sad. It worries me. It 's very strange."

"Once you have destroyed your roots can you learn how to replant them from an ideology?

No.

No one can make a culture. You don't make a culture. You don't make a nation. You don't make a tribe. The Great Spirit makes them. It happens because people live together, because they have to survive. That's what makes a culture, a nation, a tribe. That's something that's given to you. And you just accept it; you don 't make it. What is a tribe? It's not rituals and customs. It's the relationships of human beings who share their lives, who are together in the way they express themselves. And if you are nothing, you can be anything."

"The communities of tribal people are not organized to progress. They are organized to be. And that is something that is absent in Western man--the ability to be. Perhaps the Indian People who have survived spiritually have created a way of saving the earth in this way, by simply being."

"It seems to me that the Indian People have been the victims of versions of Western man for hundreds of years. First, the conquistadors came. And stole everything. Then the missionaries came behind them. And they said they would save the Indian People if they gave up their religion. Then the U.S. Army and the Bureau of Indian Affairs came and said they would save us by setting up a colonial system. And today white people come to the reservation and tell us they will save us by this program or that program, if we will become socialist, or capitalist."

"They have tried in every way to destroy us. They tried to use hatred. And genocide. And slavery. But we survived that. So the only thing they've got left to try is love. The ecology movement may do us in by loving us to death. And love is very difficult to fight against.

But it has occurred to me that the ecology movement has no spiritual base. Well, how can anyone save the earth who has no spiritual relationship with the earth? They can't really love the earth. Even though they talk about saving this or that, like saving the Grand Canyon , they don't really know why the Grand Canyon should be saved. And this is very disconcerting. It is
rhetoric. There is a kind of intellectual abstraction about the earth, but no visceral participation in the earth.

To me, saving the earth is like putting out a fire in your house. The earth isn't an abstraction: the earth is simply your house.

One of the strange things about this country is that it still doesn't see itself as a place, a space on the earth. It doesn't see itself as a people who are living on some place, on some land."

"One thing Indian People now see is that the white man has no perspective on his own world. He doesn't see that it is coming to an end. To see the end coming, you have to be able to step back, to not be part of it, to see the whole cycle.

Most people have chosen to be part of the white man's world. Even the nationalists want to be part of it, to have a piece of it. They just want to have a separate piece of it. Whereas the Indian People have never accepted the basic premises of the white man's world. Even when they take part in it, they are not part of it. That gives them the kind of perspective to see the white man's world as it is ."

"Now, when you talk about the destruction of the earth, you are talking about political states and social systems and psychological attitudes. You are not talking about the end of life. There will be some people left, who will learn to live again .

Who will survive? People who are close to the earth, who are the custodians of the soil, who have learned from the earth, who have the earth's wisdom, who have learned how to survive. They will survive.

It is meaningless to talk of the destruction of the earth as an abstraction. The peasant in the fields won't buy that; he can't buy that. He will go on planting his corn."

"When societies become too sick or tired to live, they die. The way a plant does.

Now, no one can know what is going to happen after this whole thing falls apart. Even in the prophecies. It is not as if anyone can just stand here and watch it. All we can know is that at that time the People will return, as People.

And maybe, through that, we will he able to create a new world, a world of human beings. There is another world. Another world is coming."

Steiner, The Invention of America

"So it was, said Senator William Benton, that "the road to empire " in the West at last would realize the unfulfilled dream of Columbus; the "riches of India" awaited, and the American "Indians" had better not stand in the path of the modern conquistadors.

The men of the Renaissance had conquered America with such seeming ease because the People did not exist for them, and they "invented" them in the images of their own "creation myths." So, too, the men on the frontier conquered the West by proclaiming the People did not exist; but on the frontier of the West the feudal fears and medieval creation myths would be too mystical and metaphysical. So they were Americanized. The fantastic creatures of the bestiaries were simply "beasts."

"The white settlers not only tamed "the wild land," the departmental historians wrote. "They brought civilization." In executing that feat they "forced the nomadic Indians onto reservations, drove the game into the hills"; the "hostile" Indians and "wild" game had to be subjected to "pacification," one way or another.

If the People were beasts, then they had neither a culture nor a history worth considering. Nor was it conceivable that the pioneers would learn anything of value from them. They literally did not exist."

"That was the paradox. In fighting the Americans, the Europeans became Americans. And it was the "beasts" who Americanized them--by "Indianizing" them.

"None of the white settlers knew the lay of the land. None of them knew its meanings. These were things they had to learn from the People, who had lived there for thousands of years. "

All the land was the land of the People. The nature of the land gave to them their nature, as they gave their nature to the land. That was the history of the American West, retold as myths that were truth. It may be that the Europeans' intense feelings of guilt, which came with the taking of the land in the way it was taken, and the intense angers of the People at losing their lands, combined to distort this knowledge of what the land meant and corrupted the history of America. "

"By the beginning of the twentieth century, the People had all but vanished, historically and numerically, from the eyes of the whites. "We became invisible when we were no longer a threat," Vine Deloria, Jr., has said.

In his misanthropic love of the American West, Frederick Jackson Turner, the "father of frontier history," was to say that the People had little or no influence on that history. The frontier, by itself, had "Americanized " the Europeans, and the native democracy that developed had arisen from the "free land." "It came stark and strong and full of life from the American forest," like a frog from under a mushroom. The People were reduced to mere scenery that got in the way. "American history has been to a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West, " wrote Turner, by the white "settlers. "

"Nowhere was the creation story more innocently transcribed than in the Manual for Citizenship published by the Daughters of the American Revolution for many years. It began like this: American history was dated "from the discovery made by Columbus ." Before that time, "No one lived in the country but savage Indians and wild beasts." They had "no cities or villages or houses." And so the "real settlers" had to come from Europe, for neither "savage Indians" nor the "wild beasts" could qualify as "real settlers. " It was these Europeans, "mostly " from England, who "brought their laws and free institutions with them." And they "made" America."

"After all, it was to be expected that men to whom the conquest of "savages" was the manifest destiny of civilization would feel morally justified in fighting them anywhere. They perceived the darker-skinned tribes of the world as they perceived the red-skinned tribes of America ."

"One Navajo Marine in Vietnam voiced this feeling when he wrote home: "Sometimes I feel I am fighting myself."

And yet there are people who seem to learn nothing from their myths. In a curious interview with the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once offered an explanation of his success in negotiating the peace treaty that "ended" the war in Vietnam; his charismatic self-image was that of the lone gunslinger who rides into town to bring peace and justice single-handedly.

It was "a Wild West tale," said Kissinger."

EchoHawk, "Healthy Environment, Healthy Economy"

"I have a basic premise that there can be no healthy economy in the American West without a healthy environment. It is a premise based on the experience of the West's oldest residents -- the American Indians. When one contemplates the American West, whether it be of the past, the present, or the future, it is impossible to round out the picture without taking into account the Indian tribes."

"Contrary to popular belief, the "vanishing red man" theory of the last century was erroneous. We never did vanish. The tribes are still here and have no intention of leaving the American West. In fact, most traditional Indian beliefs are that we will be here long after the white man has gone. Nevertheless, the red man continues to remain a virtual mystery to his non-Indian neighbors. Our religion, our culture, our hopes and expectations all remain a mystery. And what will be the place and the role of the American Indian in our ever-maturing society as we go side by side into the next century?"

"The American Indian contribution to this relationship, as we know, has included the giving of Indian lands and natural resources. Even our religions and cultures have been deemed expendable. Even our dead have been taken from us and treated as America ' s archaeological resources. This pattern of exploitation must cease as we approach our five-hundred-year anniversary, and a new racial relationship, a pattern of coexistence, must be founded."

"But what do these things have to do with economic development in the American West? Perhaps nothing at all, for, as I mentioned earlier, we are the poorest of the poor, living in the richest country on the planet. We are strangers to economic development. But perhaps there is some relationship, at least insofar as a healthy environment and a healthy economy are connected with one another. It is here that American Indians, if they are allowed to exist, can offer at least some small spiritual guidance. Whether we like it or not, Westerners must acknowledge the long-standing spiritual relationship of the American Indian to the land. And maybe in that regard we have something to offer to the dominant element of American society, which, maybe, has not quite yet adapted to the land as well as it must if we are to survive and flourish."

The White Man does not Understand America

"Sioux Chief Luther Standing Bear, noting the recent arrival of the white man and the need for adaptation, once said:

The white man . . . does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative processes. . . . The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien. And he still hates the man who questioned his path across the continent.

But in the Indian the spirit of the land is still vested; it will be until ether men are able to divine and meet its rhythm. Men must he born and reborn to belong. Their bodies must be formed of the dust of their forefathers' bones. 10 "

Chief Seattle: "And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children 's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone."

American Indian Tribal Portal