Vitality, Bi-Culturalism,
Survival & Enhancement
Native Americans Now
[and a note or two on the Russell Means speech]
by Hunter Gray
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My father, a full-blooded Indian, who never had a day of high school, did have, as time went on, three ascending university degrees - and was an excellent artist and a wonderful professor. Among his students were a great many young Native people from the Southwestern tribes [and from others as well ]. And many of these went on to play major trail-blazing roles in education and related approaches within their respective tribal nations.
My father occasionally remarked that there was frequently one question that his Indian students asked - and it was always the toughest single question of all.
"How can I," the student would ask, "learn and take on Anglo ways - and still be a Navajo [or any one of a number of other specific tribal nations]? How can I work that out?"
And my father would say: "They can never really blend and merge. Not that way. They are far too different. But we still have to mix them together - and use each. The challenge is to remain true to our Native tribes and Native cultures. We can only do the best we can."
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In our high Southeastern Idaho country earlier today, the winds were very strong. The continual light rain that blew over the 'way up ranges and ridges was cold, even a bit of snow. Grass was extremely green, the flowers of all colors glistened and glittered, the sage and cedars generated their extraordinarily pungent sweet aromas. It was far too cold for rattlers - but a huge mule deer looked at us wonderingly.
If I left our home displeased with the world, I returned feeling a great deal better about the Cosmos and Humanity and the Great Meaning and all the rest of the manzanita Jungle-of-Life into which I and billions of others have been dumped. A good Anglo friend and neighbor of ours, a young mining engineer who works with Bureau of Land Management, sometimes skips his LDS church services and junkets up with his dog, occasionally meeting us - and draws the same healing qualities from the Earth and the Mountains.
And then, after I'd eaten, coffeed-up and oiled my water-soaked Size 15 Vasque boots, I made a signal mistake and looked at my computer. And there I saw on the Net, the 1980 speech by Russell Means: "For American To Live, Europe Must Die." It has been given at the Black Hills that summer and some extremely traditional students of mine - Dine' from Navajo Community College - who'd gone there for a conference had heard it but had not been impressed at all. I could only tell them then that I was not a great admirer of Russell Means - fellow Indian that he certainly is - and had not been since the late '70s, a few years after the prime point of his AIM leadership.
Exactly why this speech is traveling around at this present moment, I really do not know. Many Anglos, let me say clearly, have a rational and healthy view of Native Americans.
But this speech of Means is the sort of thing some other Anglos love - for some odd masochistic reason - and there are still other Anglos that relish this stuff because it gives them the opportunity to trash Natives. Russell Means has traveled widely in the political waters - many directions indeed - and may now be presently associated with the Libertarians.
Here are a couple of salient paragraphs from the Means polemic:
"American Indians are still in touch with these realities-the prophecies, the traditions of our ancestors. We learn from the elders, from nature, from the powers. And when the catastrophe is over, we American Indian peoples will still be here to inhabit the hemisphere. I don't care if it's only a handful living high in the Andes. American Indian people will survive; harmony will be reestablished. That's revolution."
and
"It is possible for an American Indian to share European values, a European worldview. We have a term for these people; we call them "apples"-red on the outside (genetics) and white on the inside (their values). Other groups have similar terms: Blacks have their "oreos"; Hispanos have "Coconuts" and so on. And, as I said before, there are exceptions to the white norm: people who are white on the outside, but not white inside. I'm not sure what term should be applied to them other than "human beings." - Russell Means
The matter of Indians who are, say, Establishment Pets quite aside, the fallacies in this parochial attack on bi-culturalism - given the complexities of the World of Today - are far too obvious to enumerate. This is, to state it politely, the sort of thing that builds up in a corral used continually for cattle.
I do agree with him on the one point: We are not talking about biology. Almost all Native people in the Western Hemisphere today are of some mixed ancestry - Russell Means and virtually all of the rest of us. That's as far as he and I can go together.
About thirty years ago, an interesting - and essentially accurate - concept was coined by several anthropologists [a couple of them Native] for we Indians: "culturally 150% people." It's an accurate characterization of the fact that we're necessarily bi-cultural: our base is in our tribal cultures - but with much mixed in from the non-Indian setting.
It's not an easy thing to do at all. My father, a full-blooded Indian, who never had a day of high school, did have, as time went on, three ascending university degrees - and was an excellent artist and a wonderful professor. Among his students were a great many young Native people from the Southwestern tribes [and from others as well ]. And many of these went on to play major trail-blazing roles in education and related approaches within their respective tribal nations.
My father occasionally remarked that there was frequently one question that his Indian students asked - and it was always the toughest single question of all.
"How can I," the student would ask, "learn and take on Anglo ways - and still be a Navajo [or any one of a number of other specific tribal nations]? How can I work that out?"
And my father would say: "They can never really blend and merge. Not that way. They are far too different. But we still have to mix them together - and use each. The challenge is to remain true to our Native tribes and Native cultures. We can only do the best we can."
There are several kinds of Anglo reactions to Indians that we Indians would rather not encounter. One is the Anglo who swims in a dreamy Romanticize-Our-Red-Brother fantasy - and that, to us, is simply unsettling in its significant distance from reality.
Another is the Anglo who either can't or won't recognize the extraordinary stability and national distinctiveness of our tribal nations and the continuing vitality of our aboriginal cultures. This species of Anglo wants to see only - for everyone - European or Euro-American identity of some sort and/or thinks that the only Real Indians were mostly of long ago. And if there are any Real Natives left, they have to be in Buckskin, Beads and Feathers. And, since most of us aren't in those [for most of the time at least], we really don't have a Native identity. [Nothing against traditional tribal garb - quite the contrary! - but I am fond of my Levis.]
A major role model of mine as a kid - beyond the critically important one of my father - was the internationally acclaimed Iroquois ethnologist and Native activist, Arthur Caswell Parker [1881-1955], Seneca, and great nephew of Brigadier General Ely Parker [Donehogawa], first Indian/Indian Commissioner, long-time colleague of Lewis Henry Morgan. Arthur Parker's contributions to ethnology were massive over his entire life, he served as the chief archaeologist for the State of New York, was a prolific and excellent writer, a person of many broad interests [including parapsychology.] Arthur Parker was also an extremely effective activist with the traditional Iroquois bent toward organizing and organization: a key founder and leader [and its editor] of the first contemporary pan-Indian Native rights organization: Society of American Indians [1911 into the mid-20s], other activist organizations, and was one of the several founders of the National Congress of American Indians [1944 to the present.]
Arthur Parker tended to wear very conservative suits - black suits, in fact. And ties. Asked once by a well-meaning Anglo about the "feathers and buckskin," he was not wearing, the august [and very traditional] Iroquois, who certainly respected feathers and buckskin, responded icily. "I don't have to play Indian to be Indian."
For myself, I certainly have a variety of strains in my makeup. I've had no problem blending Native tribalism and radical Rocky Mountain industrial unionism with socialist concepts - to arrive at my own visionary approach to Humanity's problems. I've worked congenially and all my life with people from many different tribal backgrounds - and all sorts of ethnicities. I've labored at many different jobs - and I read all kinds of books. I get along pretty well with most folks.
And, although I never forgive treachery, I have had no problems at all in arriving, say, at a principled reconciliation with old mortal foes of mine: e.g., former - now greatly changed for the better - White Deep South racists who would have once cheerfully jailed me for life or given me a "ticket into the Eternal" [and who certainly tried valiantly and almost successfully to accomplish those goals.]
But, scratch down: My soul is certainly Iroquois and Wabanaki - and also something extremely shaped by the Navajo among who I grew up and with whom our family relations are extremely close, and the Lagunas, too, with whom our family has always had close ties. Add it all up, and I'm a guy who is at least 150%.
Many years ago, I [then a prof at University of Iowa's Graduate Program in Urban and Regional Planning] was part of an all-Indian panel discussion at Rock Island, Illinois - with the focus being contemporary challenges. It was a Sunday afternoon and about three hundred people came - almost all of them Anglo. Our chair was Cecil Kickapoo, a pleasant and very capable Indian leader. Others in our group were equally well suited for the affair - save one: a strange man of Northern Rockies background who, via a completely tangled and mangling adoption-by-whites, had emerged as a circus and carnival Indian in midwestern settings. He used the name, Chief Lone Eagle. He had pushed to join the panel and the friendly Cecil obliged - but on the firm condition that Lone Eagle only talk about the problems encountered by Natives in an urban setting.
We panelists began to speak. In my case, I discussed at length the Navajo struggle against the uranium companies, against radioactivity, and against death. As I talked, I became conscious of a man sitting in the far back row: an Indian, dressed very formally in a dark suit. He was paying the most acute attention to my words. I looked again - and then I placed him. Across the many rows of Anglo heads, we gave each other a nod.
It was Chief Lone Eagle's turn. He did not adhere to his agreement with Cecil - but, instead, launched into his favorite fantasy which we all dreaded: that he was "Chief of the Navajo." This, of course, was utterly ridiculous. The far-flung Navajo have never had "a chief" - but, traditionally and to the very moment, have an extensive network of local headmen and other local leaders. Since the 1920s and 1930s onward, the fast growing and very large Navajo Nation [250,000 people today] has also had an increasingly complex tribal council system - legislative, executive, judicial. Recently, the title of "Chairman" became "President."
With we other panelists super-cold and stony-faced, Lone Eagle continued, on and on - frequently uttering the words "ugh" and "me-um" and other stereotypical gibberish. And many of the Anglos obviously loved this.
The dark-suited man in the back and I exchanged looks at a number of points. Somehow, I was sure I could detect his sympathy for me.
Cecil Kickapoo, at an opportune point, cut off Lone Eagle's soliloquy. Questions and answers from the audience now came into play - with the local "Chief" getting at least half of them.
And, when the whole event had mercifully ended, Lone Eagle drew most of the Anglos who came up front to visit. The man in the back - he of the very formal suit - made his way politely through the throng to me.
I knew. I greeted him in Navajo. He responded by also greeting - and then by introducing himself by name and by clan. And while the awed Anglos swirled around Chief Lone Eagle, this Navajo man and I visited at great length - about many things but not about the nearby and obviously tragic figure responding to questions with "ugh" and "me-um."
My new friend was an electronics engineer with two university degrees - in Rock Island for a scientific conference. He had read about our meeting in the local paper and decided to sit in. I was very glad he had - and he was equally glad to see me. As always, we knew some of the same people in Navajo Nation.
We talked about the Southwest - Flagstaff, Gallup, Farmington - and Navajoland. And the hideously mounting, lethal uranium tragedies: The bones under the turquoise sky.
"I'm going home very soon," he said. "We have the regular clan ceremonies and some other family things. Going to be very good to get back."
And I certainly agreed. It's always good to get back.
We Natives try to, as my father put it, "do the best that we can." And, while I really don't know about Russell Means, I think almost all of us do pretty damn well under the circumstances.
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– Hunter Gray [Hunterbear]
Protected by NaŽshdoŽiŽbaŽiŽ and Ohkwari' with [Toltec] Tezcatlipoca
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In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the high windy ridges - and they dance from within the very essence of our own inner being. They do this especially when the bright night moon shines down on the clean white snow that covers the valley and its surroundings. Then it is as bright as day - but in an always soft and mysterious and remembering way. [Hunterbear]
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