Stranger in a Strange Land

The ACLU handbook, The Rights of Indians and Tribes, by Steven L. Pevar, is laid out like a catechism, with the questions in bold print—for instance, Who is an “Indian”? The answer doesn’t mince words. “There is no universally accepted definition of the term ‘Indian,’ ” Pevar writes. “Therefore, determining who is an Indian is difficult.” Indeed. Quite apart from legal contexts, Larry McMurtry makes the same point in “Chopping Down the Sacred Tree,” included in Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West, a first-rate collection of a dozen pieces originally published in The New York Review of Books. After 500 years “in which both blood and cultures have been mixing,” McMurtry writes, “it is now less easy, in speaking of Native Americans, to know to what extent they are we and we they.” (And Sacagawea’s nickname was Janey, but you have to read the essay—a jewel—to know why that matters.)

Of course, this sort of question is not peculiar to Native Americans. (In a future issue of Books & Culture, Timothy Sato of USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture will be taking on the subject of mixed race more generally.) But that’s where our concern lies in this issue, which introduces a series on “The Persistence of Indians: In Search of Native America” (pp. 16-21). The seemingly straightforward question—Who is an “Indian”?—turns out to be fiendishly tricky, and the way we answer it—including the always popular “Who cares?”—is tangled up with other questions, not least our understanding of what it means to be an American.

No one has thought longer, harder, and more trickily about this trick question than the prodigiously inventive Anishinaabe (Chippewa) mixedblood writer, Gerald Vizenor, author of Griever: An American Monkey King in China and a whole shelf of other books. For one series of passes at the question, see his Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence, published by University of Nebraska Press in 1998, wherein among other matters Vizenor considers the curiously recurring figures of “the varionative,” whose “native antecedence” is uncertain, and “the autoposer, the autobiographical poseur, or the almost native by associations and institutive connections.” (Vizenor, as you may have already guessed, is an incorrigible and unrepentant coiner of neologisms.)

These are writers whose claim to identity as Indians entails some degree of deception built on a shaky foundation—Jamake Highwater is a prominent example of the varionative whose deceptions were unmasked—but who are to be distinguished from the producers of brazen “simulations” like the sentimental fake-Indian bestseller, The Education of Little Tree, by Forrest Carter, whose real name turned out to be Asa Earl Carter, a violent segregationist and anti-Semite who later renounced segregation. (Vizenor observes that The Education of Little Tree “has sold close to a million,” exceeding the sales of N. Scott Momaday’s classic, The Way to Rainy Mountain.)

If your head is spinning, Vizenor wants to give it an extra whirl. Singer of all things tricky and multiple, he hates monotheism and Christianity in particular. It would be a good exercise to go through his books, most of them published by university presses, with a highlighter, marking the passages in which he explicitly denounces either monotheism or Christianity, then imagine the values reversed (bitter diatribes against “paganism” or “polytheism,” say—the university presses would have no problem with that, would they?). But he rages too against the politically correct censors. He has drunk deeply—too deeply—from the perverse Frenchmen, Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille, Derrida and Foucault and Baudrillard et al.; he flirts with evil and doesn’t recognize the reality of sin.

At the same time, as is abundantly clear in the memoir Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1990), one of my favorites among his books, he is a decent and humane man, devoted to many traditional liberal causes and an unembarrassed champion of constitutional democracy. The contradictions remind me of Richard Rorty, though I find Vizenor far more appealing. He would be a good friend, I think, trustworthy and wickedly funny.

All of this and more emerges in answer to the question, Who is an “Indian”? The answer is not a package deal. You don’t have to choose between accepting it whole or rejecting it whole. Part of the answer in Fugitive Poses that we should pay attention to concerns the nature of animals and their relation to humans, a theme that also appears in Diane Glancy’s story in this issue, “The Bird Who Married a Blue Light” (pp. 18-20).

And this: “The earth is a trickster creation.” There is indeed something of the trickster in the God of the Old Testament, more than we are wont to acknowledge in our sanitized, prettified versions, but a divine trickster, clearly distinguished from his creation—a distinction that gives Vizenor fits.

Question: Who is an “Indian”?

Answer: God is red, too.