Storming the Gates of Paradise Read online

  In the 1880s in Montana, some young outlaws were apprehended with saddlebags full of dime novels—they must have been copycat criminals, egged on by their reading. In his book Spaghetti Westerns, Christopher Frayling recounts, “Emmett Dalton, the last surviving member of the Dalton Gang specializing in great train robberies, actually collaborated on a book in 1937 (subsequently filmed) entitled When the Daltons Rode. This book told the story of how Emmett Dalton had died a romantic death at Coffeyville, Kansas, forty-five years previously.” Wyatt Earp’s sister-in-law Allie, married to Virgil Earp, tells of an occasion when Kate Holliday, the common-law wife of Doc Holliday, accidentally stumbled upon Earp’s other identities, in the presence of Mattie, Wyatt Earp’s wife:

  Kate had been leanin’ against the closet door, her hand on the doorknob. As she flipped around, the door flew open. There was a bang and a clatter. Out of the closet tumbled a big suitcase, spewin’ out on the floor some things that made my eyes pop out. Wigs and beards made of unravelled rope and sewn on black cloth masks, some false mustaches, a church deacon’s frock coat, a checkered suit like drummers wear, a little bamboo cane—lots of things like that! Mattie gave a scairt little cry and fell on her knees in a hurry to gather all those things up.

  Earp was a gambler, a criminal, and sometimes a Wells Fargo stagecoach guard; he and Doc Holliday used this Cindy Sherman-like collection of disguises to cover up that they were working both sides of the law.

  After he and his brothers shot and were shot by a few rivals at the OK Corral, Wyatt Earp jumped town and dedicated himself to his own myth. He was always seeking someone to write his version of the facts about his two years in Tombstone; toward the end of his life, he served as a film consultant on Western movies. The love of his life was a San Francisco actress, and by the time he died in California in 1929, he had transformed himself from a petty criminal into the paradigmatic law-and-order marshal of American movies and, eventually, TV. Among his coffin bearers was Tom Mix, the most popular Western actor of his day; a few decades later, Henry Fonda would play Earp in a John Ford movie. Wyatt Earp had arrived in the pictures.

  This is what Jim Jarmusch was trying to get at in his 1996 Western Dead Man, in which Johnny Depp eventually becomes the notorious gunman he is initially mistaken for, as he wanders across a West where wanted posters bearing his likeness have preceded him—and the rock star Iggy Pop cross-dresses, in a calico-and-sunbonnet cameo role. For all the ethos of manliness, gender became as malleable as any other aspect of identity in the West, whose foundational document was Jessie Fremont’s ventriloquism. In the 1870s, Calamity Jane was following George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry dressed as a man. Elizabeth Custer was wearing a wig made from her husband’s golden ringlets. Custer himself was writing articles celebrating Wild Bill Hickok as the quintessential plainsman, and Calamity Jane made up a story that she had married Hickok; she claimed him as the father of a daughter eventually demonstrated to have been born four years after his death. Both Hickok and Buffalo Bill did stints with Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at various times, but Hickok was shot in a bar in 1876 shortly after playing the part of himself in a three-act entertainment entitled Scouts of the Prairie, the same year that Custer and his cavalry were wiped out by the Oglala Sioux at Little Bighorn. In Son of the Morning Star, Evan S. Connell tells the tale of a much-married laundress for the Seventh Cavalry who was posthumously discovered, by her fellow female camp followers preparing her for burial, to be a man. (During the California Gold Rush, dances were often held in which some members of the all-male society took the part of, or dressed as, women; and Western newspapers of the era tell of same-sex couples of both genders.) The berdaches—the gay men who took on female roles in Plains Indian society—are another story; Crazy Horse, one of the Oglala leaders who creamed Custer, was said to have had a berdache wife.

  Pictorially, the Old West existed in the interval between the development of wet-plate photography and the development of motion pictures and exists still in the timelessness of pictures and movies. Photography came of age with the settlement of the West, which became the first place to become widely known to the rest of the world through photographs. (Carleton Watkins’s large-plate photographs of Yosemite, for example, were winning medals in Paris before more than a few hundred white people had ever seen the place, and Yosemite would become the great national shrine of nature as a work of art.) The Western photographers already knew what Foucault would preach, that knowledge was power: surveying the landscape was a military exercise, and places were often invaded so that they could be documented and measured. An information age had begun.

  But the Western took place in the suspension of history. The Western is a conservative genre, intimating that cowboys and their environment of rough authenticity are how things have always been, or ought to have been, and that change is about to ruin both. Its sentiments echo still in conservative speeches claiming a Platonic steady state for the Heraclitan flux zones of family, culture, and nation. The nostalgia may be not for a past but for an impossible condition: the Western enshrines the self-conscious desire to be unself-consciously masculine, enshrines a condition in which masculinity has achieved the status of nature rather than culture. The only people who had been cowboys long enough to be traditional were the Mexicans and their indigenous ranch hands, and even gringo cowboys’ accoutrements and skills—lassoes, the high-cantled saddles with saddle horns, cowboy boots—were borrowed from Spanish-speaking vaqueros (and even the word vaquero was anglicized, as buckaroo). But when movie cowboys—like the gun-slingers of The Magnificent Seven (1960)—ride into Mexico, all they find are campesinos and a few inept bandits.

  The great Kansas-bound cattle drives that form the basis for Texas Westerns like John Ford’s Oedipal Red River (1948) took place in the brief years between 1866 and 1886, before the fences and trains reached Texas. The Western depended on the delicate balance between a wild space and a tame audience, between Texas plains and Chicago slaughterhouses, between the authenticity of cowboys and the insincerity of actors. The first narrative feature film is 1903’s The Great Train Robbery, which was almost simultaneous with the events it fictionalized, but afterward technology appears largely as a threat in an ever more sophisticated Western cinema. In Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), trains, cars, and automatic weapons are making it hard for traditionalist horse-riding thieves. In Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), the same sense that the spirit has gone out of the times prevails. Clint, as the protagonist, has hung up his guns, and everyone else except tired fellow retired gunman Morgan Freeman is despicable: the easterner who has come out to write about the bungling Duke of Death, the sadistic sheriff, the nearsighted would-be young gunman who idolizes the bloodshed of the past, the fat guy whose attack on a prostitute who giggled at his tiny dick sets the rest of the events into motion. It is an austere Western because it lacks the lush homoeroticism of almost all the movies in this genre, in which men represent Nature and women are the intrusive force of Culture come, like Huck’s Aunt Sally, to civilize them (“We won’t play culture to your nature” could be the rallying cry of Western feminism).

  Late twentieth-century entertainers have reversed the trajectory of the frontier heroes, from acts to representations, from nature to culture. Ted Turner in Montana and Robert Redford in Colorado, Ronald Reagan in Santa Barbara, and costume maker Ralph Lauren in New Mexico celebrate their entertainment successes with the purchase of the ultimate reality, real estate. They become ranchers, and the lifestyle they impersonated becomes the one they take up in life (though rather than exiting the picture, they seem to be moving into an enlarged arena in which to carry out their cultural enactment of the nature and value of manliness and westernness). Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull went from the landscape of the West into the theater of the Western. This reversal always reminds me of children’s tales of toys like the Velveteen Rabbit and the puppet Pinocchio becoming flesh and blood: if they love you enough at the box office, you can become a
real cowboy. After Fremont, what could be a more perfect precession of simulacra than the career of Clint Eastwood, who clambered up from playing in TV’s Rawhide to the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone to American Westerns to becoming a rancher, a landowner on a vast scale, and, for a while, the mayor of Carmel?

  II. INDIANS, OR BREAKING OUT OF THE PICTURE

  One of the most spectacular moves from the solid ground of the West into the nebulous genre of the Western was made by Sitting Bull, the great Hunkpapa chief who had been instrumental in wiping out Custer and his Seventh Cavalry. He became an actor who played himself. In 1884, Sitting Bull and his entourage exhibited themselves as “representations of wild life on the plains” in a New York City wax museum, already relics of the authentic only eight years after the Battle of Little Bighorn. He toured the West and then joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show with his entourage (and contractually retained the right to sell photographs of himself).

  As a spectacle, Sitting Bull fit into this new West; as a speaker, he did not. In 1883, he had given a public address at an event commemorating the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad, another commercial artery slicing up the West’s open spaces and bleeding off its resources. Abandoning his text, he stood up and told the white audience that he hated all white people, that they were thieves and liars—but his army interpreter decided not to depart from the script and translated Sitting Bull’s speech as a flowery welcome full of faux-Indian clichés. The audience applauded enthusiastically. A speech he gave in Philadelphia, this time about the end of fighting and the importance of education for his people, was “translated” as a lurid account of Little Bighorn. The inherent inadequacies of language so beloved of deconstruction had, in the case of Sitting Bull, become a political gap between signifier and signified that effectively silenced him. In his public speeches, Sitting Bull described a territory neither east nor west, but central: home, a complex, real place. His translators relocated it to the fictional zone of the Western, assimilating him into that authenticity they had to simulate.

  Back on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota during the heyday of the Ghost Dance cult and its bloody repression, Sitting Bull was shot down by the reservation police sent by the U.S. Army to capture him, a side note to the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. In the midst of the gunfight, the white horse Buffalo Bill had given him began to go through his circus tricks. In Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown writes, “It seemed to those who watched that he was performing the Dance of the Ghosts. But as soon as the horse ceased his dancing and wandered away, the wild fighting resumed.” Sitting Bull had exited the picture, but his horse was still performing on cue.

  I claimed, in the first half of this essay, that postmodernism—as a cluster of simulacral precessions, self-conscious mythologizings, rootless identity manipulations, and erasures—was born in the Old West and that California is, rather than where the future has come to pass, a place where the regional past has borne strange international fruit. Those western emigrants turned actors, politicians, developers, and crooks created a mythology of the West so powerful it became a literary and cinematic genre that largely eclipses the factual history of the place, an inhabitable mythology with a large place for cowboys and a small one for Indians. When I think back to the Westerns of my childhood, it was the wagon train that functioned as the stable center of the movie, despite its invasive mobility; the Indians were, compositionally, invaders from outside the frame. Jane Tompkins writes in her marvelous treatise on the Western, West of Everything, that during her marathon of movie watching, “The Indians I expected did not appear. The ones I saw functioned as props, bits of local color, textural effects. As people they had no existence.”

  Western history is, in some respects, the history of the accretion of these distortions or fictions, and contemporary Native American political activity is often an attempt to break out of that history. Imagine Western history as an action movie—part Cape Fear, part Home Alone—in which a home is invaded by loveable gunmen who insist that the residents play all the lousy bit parts in an interminable drama or just shove them in the closet and play house themselves: the Native American land wars are attempts to take back part of the house, but the cultural wars are attempts to recast the characters or rewrite the drama. The sardonic artist Jimmie Durham revises it thus: “Nothing could be more central to American reality than the relationships between Americans and American Indians, yet those relationships are of course the most invisible and the most lied about. The lies are not simply a denial; they constitute a new world, the world in which American culture is located.”

  This new world of the United States was almost literally founded on appropriating indigenous identity: in 1773, the Sons of Liberty dressed up as Mohawks to stage the foundational gesture of revolt against England, the Boston Tea Party. Since then, playing Indian has been a popular occupation for children and, of late, for adults; and decorative motifs, from New Mexico license plates to Pendleton woolens to the ever popular chief’s-head tattoo, draw from indigenous iconographies. For Native American culture to be infinitely appropriable, it must belong to everyone—and to no one in particular. This desire to possess has generated both the widespread belief that Native Americans have vanished and the concomitant problems of the visibility of contemporary Native people. The authenticity attributed to nativeness seems to be something everyone can impersonate; as cowboys are to American actors, so are Indians to—apparently everyone, including hordes of part-time wannabe Indians in Germany and Central Europe and New Age wannabes all over the United States. The Western’s self-invention finds its final frontier, or final solution, in immigrants reinventing themselves as indigenous people, self-conscious simulators of an aesthetic of unself-conscious authenticity, happy inhabitants of a historical fiction.

  Perhaps the conceptual reservation onto which Native Americans have been forced is called Art: like works of art, they are expected to exist either outside of time or in the past tense of classics and masterpieces, to be on exhibit, to be public property, to be seen and not heard, to be about the spiritual rather than the political, and to embody qualities to which everyone can aspire, whether they are the Czech and Slovak “Indians” in John Paskievich’s 1996 documentary film If Only I Were an Indian or sports teams such as the Atlanta Braves, the Washington Redskins, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Chicago Blackhawks (to say nothing of Chevrolet Apaches, Jeep Cherokees, Pontiacs, and Winnebagos). As they have become more vocal—or audible—in recent decades, many native North Americans have worked to move out of or mock this conceptual museum. In the visual arts, Edgar Hachivi Heap of Birds, Jimmie Durham, James Luna, Zig Rising Buffalo Jackson, Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, and many others have taken on the politics of indigenous identity with humorous outrage.

  One such battle against the museum was mounted by Pemina Yellow Bird, a Mandan woman appointed to the board of the North Dakota State Historical Society. After an incident in which two non-Indian men were apprehended with the shellac still drying on the skulls they had robbed from a local burial mound, she asked the state archaeologists where the recovered skulls were going:

  And they said, Well, we’ll just put them in the vault with the others. The others? Yeah you want to see? So we went to the Heritage Center and down into the basement where an armed guard was standing next to a vault. . . . They lead me into this warehouse-like room that was filled from the floor to the ceiling with boxes and boxes of remains of dead Indian people. And I said at that time—you know, I was just shocked, it knocked the wind out of me—Are these all Indian people? And they go, Yup, they’re all Indians. The non-Indians get reburied, but we bring the Indians here for study.

  Yellow Bird stood up at four board meetings to explain that the remains must be reburied, but, like Sitting Bull, she became inaudible when she became challenging: her remarks were ignored in the meetings themselves and were absent from the board minutes. It took five years of statewide Intertribal Reinterment Committee effort to a
chieve her goal.

  The Smithsonian alone has the remains of more than eighteen thousand Native Americans in its collection, demonstrating yet again that Native Americans are considered artworks on the same order as their baskets. No matter how recent, indigenous burial sites were regarded as legitimate sites for archaeological digs until Congress passed the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. But the same year that legislation liberated Native American remains from museums, another law put live artists back in: that law mandates that no one may describe himself or herself as a Native American or Indian artist unless that individual is a registered member of a federally recognized tribe or is able to demonstrate a heritage of a quarter or more “Indian blood” (a definition that American Indian Movement activist Ward Churchill calls arithmetical genocide, since within a century no one will meet the genetic criterion, no matter what their cultural experience). No other ethnic group in the United States is thus certified—in somewhat the same way Old Masters paintings are authenticated or discredited. Punishment for unauthenticated artists or the exhibitors of their work can include up to fifteen years in prison or a million dollars in fines. Supposedly drafted to prevent imposters from cashing in on the Santa Fe art market, this law immediately caused several Oklahoma museums to close down and excluded uncooperative artists from many other arenas.