On long winter nights beside
the Knife and Little Big Horn rivers, tribal elders still sit
around fires and tell their grandchildren stories to help them make
sense of the world. It’s a custom as old as silence.
Here’s a story: A black man, a white man and an
Indian arrive at the Pearly Gates, and after welcoming them to
heaven, St. Peter invites each man to pick the afterlife of his
dreams. The black man asks for great music and lots of friends. St.
Peter grants his wish and sends him on his way.
Up steps
the Indian, who asks for beautiful mountain streams, deep forests
and plenty of food to eat. “Say no more, chief” says St. Peter, and
sends him off. Lastly, he turns to the white man and asks: “What do
you want heaven to look like?” And the white man says, “Where did
that Indian go?”
Ever since Columbus waded ashore, say
the elders beside the Knife and the Little Big Horn, white men have
been asking, “Where’d that Indian go?” In this context,
there’s the recent scandal involving Jack Abramoff and
Michael Scanlon, lobbyists who fleeced six casino tribes out of
some $80 million by promising them, well, a little slice of
welcoming heaven in Washington, D.C.
Scanlon and Abramoff
stand accused of mocking tribal leaders as “morons” and “monkeys”
at the same time they were stealing tribes blind. Each man pocketed
about $10 million for his services, then distributed the rest to
Republican Party coffers. During a preliminary hearing before the
Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee last fall, Arizona Sen.
John McCain said this was the most “sordid affair” he had
encountered in his political career.
But in
Indian-dominated towns like Shiprock and Lame Deer, the
Scanlon-Abramoff scandal didn’t rate enough reaction to bump
the girls’ basketball team off page one.
Why?
Because out here in the Big Empty, where tribes have grown
accustomed to this sort of treatment from politicians, the
Republican Party’s quiet in the face of mounting outrage is
as clear an indictment as any angry editorial in a newspaper. When
tribal leaders shrug, it is their way of asking: Where was your
outrage when Mike Whalen, the assistant attorney general for the
state of South Dakota and a protégé of imprisoned Gov.
William Janklow, recently declared: “The Native American culture is
a culture of hopelessness, Godlessness, joblessness, and
lawlessness, a mongrelized people living on the outskirts of
western civilization?”
Where, they ask, was your outrage
in August 2000, when delegates to the Republican Party convention
in Washington state asked the federal government to expel native
people from their homelands and declare all Indian treaties null
and void?
Eighty million dollars? What about the billions
of dollars in mineral royalties owed to native people that went
missing over the past century? That’s the long-running
Elouise Cobell case against Interior Secretary Gale Norton, the one
where federal Judge Royce Lamberth called the agency “a blight on
the government of the United States.”
Naturally, after
the crime is exposed and mug shots have run in newspapers, we white
folks fall back on the hope that our outrage over these abuses will
miraculously sanitize our history with native people of this land.
But with folks like Scanlon and Abramoff representing our values,
redeeming our conscience from the pawnshop of history is a vain
hope. Because somewhere along the way, observed the great political
theorist Michel Foucault, our leaders invented a “language of
madness” in order to explain away the government’s conscious
refusal to enforce the egalitarian, democratic and secular values
it claimed as its birthright.
Native leaders have
understood this paradox for a long time. A century ago, Chief
Plenty-Coups of the Crow told General William Harney: “We saw that
the white man did not take his religion any more seriously than he
did his laws, that he keeps both of them just behind him, like
helpers, to use when they might do him good. These are not our
ways. We keep the laws we make, and we live our religion. We have
never understood the white man, who fools no one but himself.”
Around winter fires on the Powder and Little Big Horn,
the story-tellers know that Scanlon and Abramoff are only guilty of
imitating their masters. Their masters are the Great White Fathers
in a distant city who for centuries have yammered a kind of mad
language that asks, from one generation to the next, “Where did
that Indian go?”
Paul VanDevelder is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He lives in Corvallis, Oregon,
and his latest book is Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three
Tribes and the Trial that Forged a
Nation.
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