Storming the Gates of Paradise Read online

  Jimmie Durham, for example, was scheduled to have a show at the nonprofit gallery American Indian Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, but the gallery faced closure or loss of funding, because its legal mandate is to show Native American artists and the part-Cherokee Durham, a prominent AIM activist in the 1970s, has declined to be certified by the federal government. The show was moved to another venue, and soon after, the artist Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie made this law the subject of an installation at the San Francisco Art Institute, drawing an analogy between registration numbers and concentration camp numbers. Durham writes:

  To protect myself and the gallery from Congressional wrath, I hereby swear to the truth of the following statement: I am a full-blood contemporary artist, of the subgroup (or clan) called sculptors. I am not an American Indian, nor have I ever seen or sworn loyalty to India. I am not a “Native American,” nor do I feel that “America” has a right to name me or un-name me. I have previously stated that I should be considered a mixed-blood: that is, I claim to be a male, but only one of my parents was male.

  For a lot of tribes, the primary war nowadays is to prove that they exist; as extras from the Golden Age, they are assumed to have faded into the sunset along with the credits. Like Sandra Bullock in The Net (1995), a movie about a woman whose identity is electronically destroyed, or Vanessa Williams in Eraser (1996), the Schwarzenegger flop about the federal witness protection program, they do not officially exist; and without federal recognition of their existence, they cannot obtain the land rights and legal benefits owed to Native Americans. Proving they exist means coming up with a paper trail demonstrating cultural continuity, a peculiar demand to place upon people whose largely oral culture was violently disrupted and dislocated by the same government.

  Proving that they exist to the general public can be equally challenging. Innumerable works of art mourn (or celebrate in a giddy whirl of melancholy) their vanishing: cultural monuments from The Last of the Mohicans (1826) to James Earle Fraser’s sculpture The End of the Trail (1915, but still widely reproduced on postcards, belt buckles, and so forth) to Dances with Wolves (1991) wave them a fond but insistent farewell. Even the Northern California Karuk artist and storyteller Julian Lang embarked on a project about the nearby Mattole people under the impression that the Mattole were extinct—but learned better along the way. Thanks to the museum wall text accompanying an exhibition of Karl Bodmer’s frontier watercolors of the 1830s, I myself believed that Mandans had been utterly wiped out by smallpox, until I met the Mandan artist Zig Jackson.

  Ishi, much cherished as “the last Yahi” while more thriving California tribes were largely ignored, was exhibited at San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition, along with The End of the Trail, and spent the last years of his life as exhibit-in-residence at a University of California museum in San Francisco, among Egyptian and Peruvian mummies and Indian bones. Performance artist James Luna critiqued Ishi’s status when he put himself on display at the San Diego Museum of Man in 1986. Contemporary groups from the Ohlone of the San Francisco Bay Area to the Gabrielano of the Los Angeles Basin have been mourned as vanished tribes; and Edward Curtis’s costumed portraits, in which he dressed up Native people in a multitribe pastiche of authenticity, haven’t helped much either, insisting as they do that the only real Indian is a vanishing Indian. Tourists still sometimes get indignant about traditional dances performed by people in Reeboks.

  Southern Sierra Miwok activist and Yosemite Park employee Jay Johnson told me the following story a few years ago:

  I think it was 1980, Julia and four of us on business for our tribe [seeking federal recognition in Washington] went to the Smithsonian and found the California museum exhibits, then Yosemite. . . . It had a little statement on the side, and it left off with “It’s very sad today. There’s no more Yosemite Indians.” Period. I said, “Let’s go down, talk to the people at the desk about this statement.” So we went down there and this lady, she was at the desk, and I said, “Ma’am, about that diorama about Yosemite,” and she says, “Oh, isn’t that nice?” And I said, “It’s nice, but there’s an error in the statement,” and she says, “Oh, no, there can’t be. Every little word goes through channels and committees and whatnot.” And I says, “It’s OK, but,” I says, “it tells me that there are no more Yosemite Indians today.” She says, “Well, that’s true, it’s very sad. But whatever’s out there is true.” So I say, “Well, I hate to disturb you, but I’m a Yosemite Indian, and we’re here on business for our tribe.” And she caught her breath and said, “Ohhh . . .”

  Kit Carson finds a book that tells of feats he never did. Jay Johnson finds a museum display that tells him he has vanished long ago. In the simulacral West, cowboys expand, Indians contract.

  Some tribes are fighting for federal recognition, others against appropriation in the representational wars. Many practitioners of New Age spirituality have been appropriating indigenous identities as though the world was their shopping mall and religious identity was no more than a costume to be tried on, mixed and matched, traded in and up. White people with bound braids and symbolic trinkets and animal names doing their own version of sweat lodge, drumming, vision quest, and sun dance ceremonies are rampant in the New Age and men’s movements. In 1992, the Lakota Nations, the heirs to the victors of the Battle of Little Bighorn and the victims of Wounded Knee, issued a “Declaration of War against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality.” It read, in part, “The absurd public posturing of this scandalous assortment of pseudo-Indian charlatans, wannabes, commercial profiteers and cultists comprise a momentous obstacle in the struggle of traditional Lakota people for adequate public appraisal of the legitimate political, legal and spiritual needs of the real Lakota people.” Like dressing up as Indians, religious appropriation threatens to homogenize, fictionalize, and commercialize an identity to the point where it can belong to everyone or no one, but not to anybody in particular. Confrontations with New Age people have attracted little outside attention, however. The Native newspaper The Circle reported that in 1993 indigenous activists caught up with Lynn Andrews, “a Beverly Hills housewife-turned-shaman,” at a Los Angeles Whole Life Expo “and tried to convince her to admit that what she was writing about [in best-selling books such as Jaguar Woman] was fantasy, not Indian spirituality. Andrews is reportedly considering the proposal, but has not officially responded as she is negotiating a movie deal.”

  Indian gaming may be where many tribes are making themselves visible now. In a recently opened Pueblo casino just north of Santa Fe, Pueblo Indians are having their long-delayed revenge on the kin of Coronado, who blundered through the vicinity in the 1540s looking for the fictional Seven Cities of Cibola. The casino is called Cities of Gold, after the jackpot Coronado never found, and poor Latinos get poorer there every night. It remains to be seen what the long-term results of the transformation of some of the poorest people in the country into some of the richest may be, but one of the early indications is counter-appropriation: back east, the Mashantucket Pequots, who operate the nation’s most profitable casino, have just given the Hartford Ballet half a million dollars to stage an American version of the Nutcracker to be set not in their own Connecticut, but in Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks—as dizzy a tour de force of hybridization as anyone could imagine.

  But the biggest wars are still over land, particularly over toxic and radioactive waste disposal on the land still held by Native Americans, wars to unload the excreta of technology upon the involuntary symbols of a pristine continent. (The same exemption from state regulation makes both dumping and gaming possible.) I participated in a Native American land war once. At stake was whether the U.S. government or the Western Shoshone Nation owns much of Nevada; the test case considered whether two Western Shoshone elders, the Dann sisters, had to pay federal grazing fees for running their livestock on the contested land.

  The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and, because all the evidence was on the Shoshone side, the g
overnment was forced to make up a fictitious date of taking for the land it had forgotten to steal in the last century. In 1979, the courts decided that the land had been “taken” in 1872, though nothing resembling taking had actually happened that year, or any other, to the still largely unfenced and sparsely inhabited land, and no paperwork documents a transfer of land by any means. Transplanted elsewhere, the outrageousness of this historical revisionism resonates more strangely: imagine, if you will, that France claims Napoleon did conquer Russia and thereby asserts sovereignty over it in the present; or recall the occasions when Ronald Reagan cited events from the movies as historical fact. It is as though the courts asserted that Fess Parker and John Wayne beat the Mexicans at the Alamo.

  The decision was economic: the federal government could afford to buy eastern Nevada for $26 million at 1872 prices (without interest), but not at late twentieth-century prices. The fact that it wasn’t for sale didn’t enter the calculations. The Dann sisters didn’t respect the court’s rulings, or its jurisdiction. So in 1992, the government hired cowboys from Utah to steal the sisters’ cows from the contested land. I was one of the supporters at the Dann ranch the day of the first cattle raid, April 10, 1992, and though I missed the actual raid, a stalwart German supporter caught it all on videotape with Carrie Dann’s camcorder (along with camcorders, walkie-talkies, faxes, computers, and radio-telephones played a part in the defense; information was the most powerful weapon in our nonviolent defense project). The raid took place in the morning. Carrie Dann single-handedly prevented the government men and the rent-a-buckaroos from loading her rounded-up cows into their cattle trucks by occupying the loading chute.

  In the afternoon, we all watched it on TV with Carrie’s humorous live narration. A few days later, I took the videotape to San Francisco and convinced a member of Paper Tiger TV to cut the footage into a short documentary. Within a couple of weeks, it was being screened in theaters (it opened in San Francisco as the short before Craig Baldwin’s revisionist film O No Coronado!, which ends in the Coronado shopping plaza in Santa Fe), broadcast on public access TV, and distributed to activists. The Danns and their allies had become postmodern Westerners, living simultaneously in art and life, even if their version of history clashed with the cowboys’ master narrative.

  The Struggle of Dawning Intelligence

  Creating, Revising, and Recognizing

  Native American Monuments

  [1999]

  “The celebration of the past can easily be made to play politics, and monuments are linchpins of this process,” writes Lucy Lippard, and nowhere is this more true than with monuments involving Native Americans. European Americans have long been fascinated with Native Americans, but not with their history, which often implicates early emigrants and undermines the heroic versions of history preserved in songs, school lessons—and monuments. In recent years, that history has been told more accurately and more audibly, with often turbulent results. In earlier versions, Native Americans either were the adversaries in a Manifest Destiny version of history or were outside history altogether, as timeless and infinitely appropriable totemic figures. Almost all Native American monuments commemorate Indian-European interaction rather than autonomous indigenous history, and only a handful of helpful or nonadversarial Indians—Squanto, Sacajawea—are remembered by name in public monuments. Coming to terms with that history has generated a new era of Indian wars, with iconography and words as the weapons this time around.

  Earlier monuments are often merely evasive. On the coast of northernmost California, there is a National Historic Landmark plaque whose text names “Indian/Gunther Island” and asserts: “This site possesses national significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America.” What the plaque fails to mention is the nature of that significance: on this island, formerly known as Tolowot, settlers axed to death all the women, children, old, and infirm of the Indian village while the men were out hunting. Others celebrate the “us” in the old “us/them” model of Euro-American/Native American history. The central plaza of Santa Fe, New Mexico, features a monument to those who died fighting “savage Indians” (although guerrilla reformists chiseled off the word savage); in front of one of its civic buildings is an obelisk commemorating Kit Carson, although it doesn’t mention whether he’s being commemorated as an expansionist scout or the scourge of the Navajo. Such monuments are predicated on an obsolete idea of who the public is: more and more Americans come from neither side of the historic “us/them,” while if “us” now means the mainstream rather than an ethnicity, most Native Americans are participants in it to varying degrees.

  San Francisco generated a lot of conflict when it tried to adjust one monument. The Pioneer Monument in San Francisco’s Civic Center was dedicated on Thanksgiving Day 1894, less than half a century after California became part of the United States. The eight-hundred-ton piece, which serves as a statement about the Americanization of California, is a massive hunk of iconography, with thirty-seven bronze elements on five granite pedestals, including a forty-seven-foot-high central figure, four sculpture groupings on lower surrounding pedestals, commemorative names, bas-reliefs of representative events, medallions, and captions. Women, like Native Americans, have more often appeared as emblems than as individuals in public sculpture, and the Athena-like figure of Eureka standing atop the central structure along with a California grizzly is no exception. Two of the subsidiary sculpture groupings, allegories of commerce and agriculture represented as women, are standard-issue, too; although the artist, Frank Happersberger, was born in California, he learned his academic-classical clichés during years of study in Munich. The other two groupings are more specific and more interesting. One, captioned “In ’49,” shows a trio kneeling with picks and pans. The other grouping is where the trouble began.

  Captioned “Early Days,” it is meant to represent the peoples who lived in California before the Yankees. In the rear is a dashing vaquero; in the middle, a figure wearing a monk’s habit and leaning over the figure of a prone Indian, who is in front. While the other two figures have upraised hands—the vaquero is energetically twirling a now-vanished lariat, the priest is chastising with upraised finger—the Indian’s arms are draped resignedly across his body, as if to suggest that his space is contracting as that of the others is expanding. From left of center, it looks as if the vaquero and the priest are raising up invisible whips to lash the Indian. With his two feathers, braids, lanky body, and Roman nose, this representative Indian looks more like the Last of the Mohicans than like most Native Californians, and he is clearly an older cousin of James Earle Fraser’s The End of the Trail, the famous sculpture of the downcast warrior slumped on his drooping horse that was first exhibited at San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 and now sits in Visalia, in central California. Happersberger’s grouping represents the Spanish and Mexican eras, during which the Franciscan missions were built to convert—into Christians and laborers—the indigenous inhabitants of the coast. According to the San Francisco Municipal Report of 1893–1894, “The group of figures fronting the City Hall consists of a native over whom bends a Catholic priest, endeavoring to convey to the Indian some religious knowledge. On his face you may see the struggle of dawning intelligence.”

  The 1906 earthquake destroyed the City Hall that this first version faced, but the monument survived unmoved until a few years ago. It was slated to be relocated to accommodate the new public library when the San Francisco Arts Commission received a letter from Martina O’Dea, “on behalf of the American Indian Movement Confederation and the Native American and Indigenous people of the San Francisco Bay Area,” early in 1995. “We request,” she wrote, “the removal of a monument which symbolizes the humiliation, degradation, genocide and sorrow inflicted upon this country’s indigenous people by a foreign invader, through religious persecution and ethnic prejudice.” The Arts Commission, which administers such civic sculptures, decided instead to attach a plaque provi
ding a contemporary interpretation of the grouping. An early draft stated, “In 1769, the missionaries first came to California with the intent of converting the state’s 300,000 Native Americans to Christianity. With their efforts over in 1834, the missionaries left behind about 56,000 converts—and 150,000 dead. Half of the original Native American population had perished during this time from the whites’ diseases, armed attacks, and mistreatment.”

  Although the draft text was intended to counter the image of oppression conveyed by the statue, it actually reinforced its message by linking indigenous and Spanish/Mexican history with the “Early Days,” as if the Spanish and the Mexicans had superseded the Indians before fading away themselves. Clearly neither group was imagined as part of the audience Happersberger addressed, the audience that identified with westward migration and a romanticized version of the Gold Rush. In representing the domination of Indians by the Spanish, the sculpture pitted against each other, then and now, two peoples who had both suffered in the Americanization of California—and presumed that neither would be its audience, though in the 1990s both are.

  The proposed revision of the text prompted both the local Spanish consul and the Catholic archbishop to write indignant letters to the mayor. Their point was that the most brutal treatment and precipitous population decline of Native Californians came with the Gold Rush, not the mission era (although being less brutal than the Forty-Niners is a dubious distinction). Should the text appear, said Consul General Camilo Alonso-Vega, “many of us, including myself, would feel discriminated against and indelibly unwelcome at the very core of this city founded by Spaniards.” Alonso-Vega missed the point that the statue had for a century made indigenous Americans feel those very things. Archbishop William J. Levada even suggested another interpretation of the grouping: “a Franciscan missionary directs the attention of a native American and a vaquero heavenward.” Most of us who are not archbishops distrust authority more than did the citizens of 1894; an image of one man asserting such intensely bodily authority over another would appear ominous to many viewers even without historical contextualization.