Minnesota: If They're Lost, Who Are We?

[Harold Schiffman]

If They're Lost, Who Are We?

By David Treuer
Sunday, April 6, 2008; B01



LEECH LAKE, Minn. I am not supposed to be alive. Native Americans were
supposed to die off, as endangered species do, a century ago. And so
it is with great discomfort that I am forced, in many ways, to live
and write as a ghost in this haunted American house.
But perhaps I am not dead after all, despite the coldest wishes of a
republic that has wished it so for centuries before I was born. We
stubbornly continue to exist. There were just over 200,000 Native
Americans alive at the turn of the 20th century; as of the last
census, we number more than 2 million. If you discount immigration, we
are probably the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. But
even as our populations are growing, something else, I fear, is dying:
our cultures.

Among my fellow Indians, this is not a popular thing to say. Most of
us immediately sneer at warnings of cultural death, calling the very
idea further proof that "The Man" is still trying to kill us -- this
time with attitudes and arguments rather than discrimination and guns.
Any Indian caught worrying that we might indeed vanish can expect to
be grouped with the self-haters. While many things go into making a
culture -- kinship, history, religion, place -- the disappearance of
our languages suggests that our cultures, in total, may not be here
for much longer.

For now, many Native American languages still exist, but most of them
just barely, with only a handful of surviving speakers, all of them
old. (On Jan. 21, Marie Smith Jones, the last living fluent speaker of
Eyak, one of about 20 remaining Native Alaskan languages, died at the
age of 89.) Linguists estimate that when Europeans first came to this
continent, more than 300 Native American languages were spoken in
North America. Today, there are only about 100. Within a century, if
nothing is done, only a handful will remain, including my language,
Ojibwe.

Another heartening exception is the Blackfoot language. The tribe
dropped to a population of just over 1,000 in 1900, but they have
grown again, and their language is on the upswing -- largely because
of the efforts of the Piegan Institute, based on the Blackfoot
reservation in northwest Montana, with a mission of promoting the
tribe's language. Once moribund ceremonies are on the verge of
flourishing again. But for many tribes -- who struggle to retain the
remnants of their land, life ways, sovereignty and physical and mental
health -- what is left can't really be called culture, at least not in
the word's true sense.

Cultures change, of course. Sometimes they change slowly, in response
to warming temperatures or new migration patterns. At other times,
cultural changes are swift -- the result of colonialism or famine or
migration or war. But at some point (and no one is too anxious to
identify it exactly), a culture ceases to be a culture and becomes an
ethnicity -- that is, it changes from a life system that develops its
own terms into one that borrows, almost completely, someone else's.

My favorite example of this difference was the question posed to an
Ojibwe man by the Indian agent whose job it was to put him down on the
treaty rolls. "Who are you?" the Ojibwe was asked, through an
interpreter. "Oshkinawe nindaw eta," he replied, puzzled ("Only a
young man"). The Indian agent noted this, and the Ojibwe man's family
still bears his Anglicized response, Skinaway. The man had no
thoughts, really, about himself as an Indian or as an individual. The
question -- who are you? -- didn't even make much sense to him because
the terms of identity didn't make any sense to him; they were not his
terms. Nowadays, unlike Skinaway, many of us have come to rely on ways
of describing ourselves that aren't ours to begin with.

In the United States, we Natives now have sets of beliefs that we
articulate to ourselves, mostly in English, about what being Indian
means. We are from such and such a place; this and that happened to
our ancestors; we eat such and such. Unlike the young man who was
asked who he was, we think nowadays in English, and we forge our
identities with those thoughts. (I am Indian because my parents are,
because I live in a certain place, because I eat fry bread, because I
go to powwows.)

Without our own languages, however, the markers we use to define
ourselves can become arbitrary. One need only change the nouns to see
the difference. Instead of "fry bread," insert "corned beef," and
instead of harking back to smallpox-infested blankets, say "potato
famine" -- and you arrive at a completely different ethnicity.
American Indians are fast becoming ethnic Americans like the Irish and
the Italians and the Scandinavians, to name a few.

The timing is strange: We find our cultures most imperiled just as
some (though certainly not most) Indian communities are experiencing a
kind of economic rebirth from casino money. Not only do we have some
wealth -- the Seminoles of Florida own the Hard Rock Cafe franchise,
and the Mashantucket Pequots own and operate probably the largest
casino in the world -- we also have the basis of some political clout.
In Great Plains states with dwindling populations such as North and
South Dakota, Indians (who are not fleeing to the cities like rural
non-Indians) have become a huge voting bloc that can sometimes
determine the outcomes of state Senate and House races. Because
Indians vote Democratic at a rate of about 90 percent, the power of
Indian tribes is unsettling to many Republicans. In 2006, Republican
Doug Lindgren ran for a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives
on what can only be called an "anti-treaty" platform that called into
question the validity of northern Minnesota's Red Lake Indian
Reservation and its treaty rights. Lindgren hoped to use deep-seated
anti-Indian sentiment to consolidate his base. He lost. But our
growing wealth and power has in no way guaranteed our survival.

Curiously, it is in the field of "story" that the most ringing claims
are made for the continued health and vibrancy of American Indian
cultures and lives. But it's not clear why so many Indian critics and
novelists suggest that stories, even great ones, in English by writers
whose only language is English are somehow "Indian stories" that store
the kernels of culture -- not unlike those fabulous caves in the
Southwest where explorers found seeds thousands of years old that grew
when planted. One Indian critic recently rather self-servingly
suggested that "English is an Indian language." He's wrong. English is
not a Native American language; for most of us, it is our only
language -- through no fault of our own, owing to a federal policy
aimed at wiping out Native American languages. Cultural eradication is
a process, and it was precisely through the attempt to stamp out
Native American languages that the U.S. government tried to stamp out
Native American cultures. To claim that English is a Native language
is to continue that process.

More often than not, English was forced on us, not chosen by us.
Naturally, one can (and millions do) construct a cultural identity out
of whatever is at hand, and no Indian should feel bad (though many of
us do) about speaking English. But I don't kid myself that my writing
reflects my culture -- or can save it. My novels are exercises in art,
not cultural revitalization or anthropology. And if novels published
by large publishing conglomerates, marketed to a general readership
that doesn't know the first thing about our lives, written in English
by university-educated writers who by and large live far away from
their tribal communities, don't speak their tribal languages and
probably earn two or three times as much as the rest of their people
are our best defense against the threat of cultural death, we are in
worse shape than I thought.

Perhaps we protect and even beatify stories because we have no real
presence in film or popular music, because we have no stand-up comics
with their own TV shows, because not one of us is a host on "The
View," because there is no Indian Oprah and no Indian Denzel and no
Indian on "Lost." Stories are all we've got. So when an Indian holds a
copy of N. Scott Momaday's groundbreaking novel "House Made of Dawn,"
which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, or Louise Erdrich's widely
popular "Love Medicine," they hold it gingerly, as though carrying the
ashes of a recently deceased grandparent.

Our cultures and our languages -- as unique, identifiable and
particular entities -- are linked to our sovereignty. If we allow our
own wishful thinking and complacency to finish what George Armstrong
Custer began, we will lose what we've managed to retain: our
languages, land, laws, institutions, ceremonies and, finally,
ourselves. And to claim that Indian cultures can continue without
Indian languages only hastens our end, even if it makes us feel better
about ourselves.

Cultural death matters because if the culture dies, we will have lost
the chance not only to live on our own terms (something for which our
ancestors fought long and hard) but also to live in our own terms.
That Native American cultures are imperiled is not just important to
Indians. It is important to everyone, or should be. Because when we
lose cultures, we lose American plurality -- the productive and lovely
discomfort that true difference brings.

david at davidtreuer.com


David Treuer is Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation in northern
Minnesota and a translator of Ojibwe texts. His most recent novel is
"The Translation of Dr. Apelles: A Love Story."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/04/AR2008040403216.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
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