Not considering the materiality of native communities helps colonial settlers (most readers of this essay) ignore the realities of life for the original Americans. Like an American version of the movie, Sarah’s Key, we choose not to look at those histories which evidence our continued complicity in the displacement and subjugation of humans. Frankly, it is a downer. Then again, so is living in dire poverty. Unemployment and poverty rates are higher in reservation communities than for any other group in the United States, four times the rate for the average American. Even among gaming tribes, unemployment afflicts a quarter or more of reservation populations. The image of the “rich Indian” was used to combat pro-gaming ballot initiatives in the ’90s, particularly in California. How could real Indians also have large houses and cars, plural? The contrast between a “real” Indian as spiritual and a “fake” Indian as a rich Indian was portrayed to some comic relief by Seth McFarland’s Family Guy episode, “The Son Also Draws.” However, as with other popular representations, I believe the laughs provide relief mostly for the colonizer. The main non-Indian characters have a gambling problem but try to convince the tribal casino management that they are from that tribe. The tribal members in the cartoon are mocked as being pretend Indians since they cannot simultaneously be rich, dress in contemporary fashion, AND also be indigenous people. Indians cannot win. They are invisible out on the reservation, or no longer Indian if they attempt to work within the capitalist system. In fact, the Occupy Wall Street movement has enabled me many chances to point out how Indians were the first that were, and generally speaking still are, left out of the system. And when they “occupied” Alcatraz, Wounded Knee and the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, members of the American Indian Movement experienced the blunt repercussions of living in a police state.
The other side of the material/spiritual binary is that it elevates the Indian to a position of civilizational healer. Thinking of native people as having more access to all things spiritual, we fail to recognize that no one has the upper hand on deeply cosmological questions (not Buddhists, not Hindus, not Southern Baptists). However, settler colonizers do have the upper hand in legal and academic structures. And if we think of Indians as spiritual people, then their land claims and wisdom traditions are about sacred matters rather than rational science, and we have seen how those battles are lost. They are lost in courts of law and they are lost in what gets to count as History with a capital “H,” and Truth with a capital “T.” The real life implications of representing my research on native rituals and mythistory as “spiritual” are that I would be continuing to simplify the importance of indigenous lifeways as matters of the otherworldly. Because my first book dealt directly with the Yaqui people’s views of dreams, myths, and the afterlife, I committed myself to writing also about how such matters related to their struggle for land and the current debt-peonage in Mexico.
Page 3 of 5 | Previous page | Next page