Land bridge? We don't need no stinkin' land bridge!

Students in my American Indian literature class are required to make a brief presentation on a tribe that I assign them.  Among the questions I have them answer is this one:

Where does the tribe live today?  Where did they live at the time of contact with Europeans?  If there is a difference in locations, tell me why the people moved.

This gives the students an opportunity to discuss the  forced relocations that some tribes endured, or the loss of land for those tribes that remain in or near their homelands.

Yet each semester I get one or two presentations that include information about American Indians migrating across a land bridge from Asia.  This is despite my specific instructions to NOT tell us about some ancient road trip through Sarah Palin's front yard.

Also, there is no way discussing that migration answers the question.  I do not ask about entire migration histories of the tribes; I ask about their location at the time of contact, which means the farthest anyone has to go back in history is 1492, and that is only for the group that presents on the Taino, the first people Columbus encountered on this side of the Atlantic.

Some of the earliest European accounts of Indians claimed they were cannibals.  If only they had been.   If the Taino had been hungry for human flesh instead of such amiable hosts, perhaps history would have turned out differently.  If they had eaten Columbus and his men, this hemisphere would have enjoyed a few more years free from decimating diseases, commercialized slavery, and uncomfortable shoes.

Recently, a student presentation included information on the land bridge.  When it was finished, I reminded students to ignore the land bridge.  Yet the very next week, a student presentation brought us back to the land bridge.  Like a bad penny or America's Got Talent, it would not go away.

Why is that?  Why is discussing something that might have happened tens of thousands of years ago so tempting to talk about?  Why is it so tempting to the students when, for our purposes, it is irrelevant?

Knowing about that ancient migration does not help us understand any particular group of people better.    The land bridge will not help us better understand Hopi, Creek, or Mohawk societies.  If we visited the home of a Navajo family, we would not find a map of Mongolia on the wall with the caption of "Home Sweet Home."

Besides, I tell the students, that is not the story those cultures tell about themselves.  You can learn more about those cultures by listening to the stories they tell about their origins.  Pueblo groups, such as the Hopi, will tell you they came out of the ground on what is now called Mount Taylor in western New Mexico.  That is their creation story, and knowing it can teach you something about them.

Whether the creation story is true in a literal sense is not important.  The cultural truths they contain are useful.

Look at the creation story for the United States.  It is filled with mythologizing and untruths.  Most of the Mayflower were not pilgrims.  Most people were not coming here to "escape religious persecution." The ship was supposed to go to Virginia, and those on board had signed contracts to do so.  No one set foot on Plymouth Rock as they got out of the boat. And so on.  However, the story's lack of literal truths does not take away from its power. Knowing it can be useful for knowing things about American culture, about how American society has imagined itself and how it can be expected to behave.

I do not blame the students for being tempted to report on the land bridge.  (OK.  I do blame them for not reading the assignment instructions carefully.)  Many sources of information discuss the land bridge as if it were relevant.  Even the Associated Press Style Book still states that "American Indian" is preferred over "Native American" because "the ancestors of American Indians migrated from Asia."

Lucy, australopithecus afarensis

But why stop in Asia?  If the American Indians came from somewhere around Mongolia, why stop
there?  Where did the Mongolians come from?  And where did those ancestors come from?  Eventually, we all wind up together back in Africa's Olduvai Gorge with Grandma Lucy.

I found a National Geographic source that says the first Europeans migrated from Asia, too.  I doubt any student presentations on France or Germany start with that information.  Doing that would probably seem ridiculous to a student.  So why does it seem reasonable to do the same thing with a presentation on American Indian nations?

The answer that makes sense to me is this: The migration story appeals to the American conscience.  The land bridge theory supports a narrative that is important in American history and culture: America as virgin territory.

Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth is a foundational book for American Studies.  Published in 1950 by Henry Nash Smith, the book explores the myth that the continent was relatively empty of people, and those people who were here had left little mark upon it -- it was waiting for the Europeans to arrive and start changing things.  The notion of the land as virgin helps alleviate any guilty conscience the Europeans and then Americans might have had, since the degree to which the land was unoccupied was the result of the direct and indirect efforts of the newcomers to evict its residents.

Despite all of the evidence of successful and widespread agriculture by American Indians (the first pilgrims would have starved if the local tribes had not possessed surplus corn to feed them), Europeans and Americans insisted on thinking of all Indians as nomadic, as wandering hunters who made no permanent claim on the land.

In other words, the Indians were just passing through, so they were not being truly dispossessed of their land; therefore, there was nothing really wrong with taking it.

The land bridge story supports that larger, national narrative.  After all, the Indians were immigrants, too, just like the Europeans.  They were not native, as the Associated Press reminds us.  So the land was up for grabs.

Here we see a demonstration of the difference between fact and myth.

Is the land bridge migration true?  Perhaps.  Is it useful for understanding American Indian cultures?  No.

Is the virgin land story true?  No.  It is useful for understanding American culture?  Most definitely.

Marriage equality is a family value

In art, song, poetry, fiction, and film, Family is perhaps the most common way for imagining membership in a group, including the nation.

Think of the Civil War in the United States and how it was described as being a war between
brothers, which was literally true at times. Think of the HBO series about World War II, Band of Brothers.

Think of Walt Whitman in Song of Myself claiming that all men and women "ever born" are his brothers and sisters.  Although his statement is made in relation to all humanity, the poem is most clearly about his nation; the brothers and sisters he describes in his epic poem are his fellow Americans.

In his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson considers the ways humans create nations through their imaginations. Nations are rather large groups of people, and often times those people do not have that many things in common.  One way of overcoming potential divisions is by imagining connections.  He writes that a nation "is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion."

Thinking of themselves in terms of a family allows a group of citizens to imagine they have a shared history and a shared future -- as do members of a family who have common ancestors and descendants.  For instance, a group of school children might have been born in a dozen different countries, but, now that they live in the United States, they are encouraged to think of George Washington as a type of shared father figure. 

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio)

Families and nationhood came to mind recently when Sen. Rob Portman ended his opposition to same-sex marriage after learning that his son was gay.  (And it is especially pertinent now that the Supreme Court is hearing arguments concerning legal definitions of marriage.)

My initial reaction to Portman's announcement was, "How convenient."

He changed his mind only after learning that a member of his family would be negatively impacted by a legal principle he had supported.  While I appreciate his new outlook, I am troubled by what this says about his old outlook -- and the outlook of many others who have not changed.

Although Portman has changed his perspective on same-sex marriage, the reason for his change may mean an earlier principle remains in place: a mindset that extends justice and compassion only to members of one's family and those who closely resemble one's family.

It is a principle that suggests: If you are different from me, I am not concerned with justice for you.  

I would prefer a sense of justice and compassion that extends to everyone, regardless of whether they look or act or think as I do.  In other words, I would prefer we treated all people in the country as if they already were part of the family.  Just as Portman wants justice and equality for his son, we should want the same for all of our "relatives" -- which is to say, "everyone."

When it comes to the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship, we should ask not "What is right and wrong?" so much as we should ask "How would I want my brother or sister treated?  How would I want my son or daughter treated?"

In this sense, I wish Americans more thoroughly imagined themselves as members of the same family, people who can find ways to overcome their differences in order to preserve and honor their greater shared humanity.  I wish we had that kind of "family values," rather than the kind that are often used to justify the limitations of another person's rights or privileges.


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As an addendum, I would say that the notion of kinship is a powerful tool among Indian tribes in the United States and First Nations people in Canada.  To treat fellow citizens as family members is to seek resolutions to problems in a particular way.  In American democracy, we resolve problems with voting, and the majority rules; the system is built upon power and who possesses it.  The tribal conception of democracy is built more upon consensus; each party in a dispute should consider seriously what the other side wants or needs.  Both sides of a dispute should seek a resolution that keeps both parties healthy and fully engaged and invested in the community.  Like a family.

One articulation of this principle is frequently used by a university colleague of mine in American Indian Studies.  She signs off her correspondence with a phrase in Lakota: Mitakuye Oyasin.  It can be translated as "We are all related." 

I realize this is an ideal.  Many disputes within tribes can get very ugly, and people can behave according to their power or desires rather than their responsibilities to each other.  But that ideal relationship -- citizenship as kinship -- can be a powerful tool.  Perhaps it is a tool powerful enough to remedy our nation's political and cultural paralysis.

Dear Mr. Critic, Speak for Your Frakkin' Self

There is thing that critics of the arts do that has bugged me for a long time.  That is when they take some deeply subjective response to a work or experience and project it onto all of their members of the audience.

David Bianculli, the TV critic for NPR (whose commentaries I enjoy), did that this week while reviewing the new FX series, The Americans.  The show is about Russian spies planted in the United States during the 1980s,  under cover as a happily married couple.  Bianculli liked the show, but he took exception to one of the songs selected for the pilot. (You can read all of his comments here.)

"As they set off -- without saying a word to one another as they go through their various spy motions -- we hear on the soundtrack one of the most iconic cues in all of TV history.  It's an homage, certainly, and a song that is true to the '80s era.  But when I heard it, instead of pulling me more deeply into the drama, it made me laugh.  If you were around during the decade when The Americans takes place, it's impossible to hear Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" without thinking of Miami Vice.  Other period music is used more effectively, but that's one that should have been avoided."

Um... it IS possible to hear that song without thinking about Miami Vice.  In fact, I think about that show only when I see grown men wearing pastel colors and loafers without socks.  And that is pretty much never.

I lived in the '80s, and I owned that Phil Collins album, Face Value.  But I never watched that show.  In fact, millions of people did not watch that show.  Sure, millions did, but more millions didn't.

If I associate any music with Crockett and Tubbs that would be Jan Hammer's somewhat cheesy tune that plays over the opening credits.  Can you say keytar?

"In the Air Tonight" was apparently used in the pilot episode (1984) and again in the Miami Vice film  (2006) -- but the film version was a cover by Nonpoint.

I believe this is the scene in question:

More recently, the song has also been used in Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters (2007) and in The Hangover (2009).

That means Bianculli thinks one episode of a television series has burned itself into the collective memory of the United States so deeply that the song has been ruined for all other uses.  That is asking a lot, isn't it?

In other words, the song rattled Bianculli's memory banks in a way I doubt it did for other viewers of The Americans.  But he assumes his experience is shared by all viewers and takes the time to crab about the song selection.

This is a common problem with arts criticism.  So much of it is subjective, but it gets presented as objective fact.  The critic has seen, read, and heard much more than the typical audience member, which means the critic can serve as a useful guide or commentator to compare the work in question with other works; but too many times the critic assumes everyone has seen, read, or heard everything he has and, worse, assumes everyone agrees with his observations.

Now... if someone wants to talk about a really bad soundtrack choice (in my humble opinion) it is "All Along the Watchtower" in the final episodes of Battlestar Galactica.  It was not only used in the soundtrack, several of the characters sang it in key scenes.  When I thought the show was set in the future, I might have believed Bob Dylan's song had survived for centuries.  Somehow.  But when I realized the show was set in the past, and that the survivors of the Galactica became the ancient ancestors of the human race on Earth?  That means Dylan's song remained intact for a hundred thousand years.

No frakkin' way.

That one song choice nearly ruined the whole series for me (because it was a central plot device toward the end), just as Bianculli says the Phil Collins pulled him out of the viewing experience rather than drew him in.  But I am not willing to say anyone shares my opinion, because I have heard no other complaints about the Dylan song.

In Canada, the Natives are Restless

"Idle No More" in Ottawa (The Toronto Sun)

There is something going on in Canada that most Americans are not aware of.

Of course, that is true about most of the things going on in Canada.  But this one involves my First Nations friends up there -- First Nations in Canada are what is known as American Indian tribes in the United States.  And these events involve two ideas that I think are important to keep in mind here, South of the Great White North.

1. The legal and Constitutional obligations that exist between those groups in the United States and Canada and their federal governments.

2. The importance of environmental restraints on industrial and commercial development.

My Canadian friends have been waging a campaign called "Idle No More," a grassroots protest against C-45, a bill recently passed by the Canadian government that makes some sweeping changes in environmental protections of the many, many waterways in Canada.  Many of those rivers, streams, and lakes are on First Nations land.  (You can watch a CBC report on "Idle No More" here.  There have been demonstrations in the United States, too.)

In The Mall of America (lastrealindians)

By "sweeping changes," I mean the Canadian government is removing hundreds of waterways from the previous oversight that limited industrial and commercial development.  These changes were made without consultation of the First Nations effected, and many First Nations people feel those changes are a violation of the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982.  That act states, "The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed."

If a treaty between the Canadian government and First Nations group recognizes its right to a river and, for example, the salmon resources in that river, then that First Nations group needs to be included in any regulations that will impact that river.  If rights to that river are unilaterally reduced or removed, then the government has failed to recognize and affirm those legally binding treaty rights.

Although this issue is immediately impacting First Nations, it should be important to all Canadians.  If a government cannot be trusted to keep its word, to obey its own rules, then no group of citizens is safe from abuse or injustice.  

Sometimes my students and friends in the United States express surprise or puzzlement at this idea of "treaty rights."  At times they object to the idea that a group of Americans will get "special treatment" from the federal government.

This is because they are misunderstanding the situation.  They are understanding the situation in terms of ethnicity rather than the rule of law.  They think a group of people are being "granted" special privileges because of their ethnic status.  (This is an easy mistake to make, and I am not criticizing them for this.)

But the rights accorded to federally recognized American Indian tribes are based upon legally binding agreements between the federal government and the governments of those tribes. Those legally binding agreements arise from the Constitution, which states that "Congress shall have the power to regulate Commerce with foreign nations and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes."  This grants tribes a status rivaling foreign nations -- or at least the states.  

Those rights recognized in treaties extend to the citizens of those tribes, as defined in part by the tribes and by federal government.  This definition is based largely upon descent; one must be descended from a member of that tribe to be a citizen of that tribe -- in much the same way that American citizenship is extended to the descendants of American citizens.  (A major difference is the lack of naturalization for tribal membership.  Someone might be "adopted into" a tribe -- such as Johnny Depp was recently adopted by the Comanche Nation -- but the rights of citizenship are not extended to that person.)  

I say that citizenship is defined by the tribal government AND the federal government because before those treaties membership in a tribe was often not contingent upon descent.  A person could have been accepted as a participating member of that tribe regardless of descent.  The notion that the rights of tribal citizenship depended upon descent was enforced by the federal government -- as a way of limiting its obligations to the tribes with which it signed treaties.  However, today those tribes have exercised the right to determine the degree of descent required for citizenship.

Actor Adam Beach joins Red Hand Singers in Los Angeles

That is how I am a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Most of my ancestry is white, but I am descended from someone (my mother's father) recorded on the federal census for the Cherokee in 1907. Therefore, certain rights and privileges are extended to me that are not extended to other American citizens.  (Since I live in California, I generally cannot take advantage of those rights and privileges.)  The key is not whether I am ethnically white or Cherokee (or Choctaw on my father's side), the key is my legal status as a Cherokee citizen.  

Some people believe it unfair for me to have certain rights and privileges not available to others.  But this is not that much different from the varying rights and privileges available to citizens of different states.  For example, a same-sex couple in Massachusetts can be legally married, whereas a same-sex couple in Oklahoma cannot.  They are all American citizens, but they have differing rights according to their states.  

In Alberta (photo by Blaire Russell)

My friends in Canada are fighting for what they believe to be their Constitutionally guaranteed rights as Canadian citizens AND as First Nations citizens.  These rights are not "special treatment" nor some kind of "welfare" or "charity" extended to First Nations by the federal government.  The treaty rights are real, and they are legal, and they are important so long as Canada wants to be a nation governed by the rule of law.

As for the importance of restraints on "development," which can be another word for "rapid exploitation and degradation of an ecosystem"....

I like to believe that each of the many cultures that compose the United States has an important contribution to make.  I believe the most valuable contribution from American Indian cultures is the respect for the world that surrounds us and from which we are made.  This world includes the land, the sky, the water, the plants, and the animals.  This world is not just something that surrounds us, it is something that feeds us, and therefore it is something that quite literally makes us.  Our  bodies are made up of those things.  The water you drink, the air you breathe, the plants and animals you eat -- they become you.

And when correctly appreciated, this relationship leads to a reciprocation.  Those things contribute to making our lives, and so we should contribute to making theirs.  In this way, we can mutually support each other and contribute to our mutual health.  

Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005)

American Indian philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. stated it this way in an interview: "If you see the world around you as a collection of objects for you to manipulate and exploit, you will inevitably destroy the world while attempting to control it.  Not only that, but by perceiving the world as lifeless, you rob yourself of the richness, beauty, and wisdom to be found by participating in its larger design."   

"Idle No More" is fighting for that vital relationship between humans and the world.  "Idle No More" sees that C-45 opens the way for the industrial and commercial exploitation of the land and the water. 

During the recent presidential election in the United States, there was much debate about the kinds of economic policies and  philosophies we should have in government.  There was much simple-minded discussion about socialism vs. capitalism, and there was a lot of chest-thumping from the talking heads on CNBC and Fox News about the virtues of free-market capitalism.

But someone is being truly naive about capitalism (and the industrialization that supports it) if he speaks about its power only in the positive.  Capitalism IS powerful, but capitalism is neither good nor bad; that is determined by how and to what ends its power is used.  The industrialization we have seen unleashed by capitalism in North America has destroyed ecosystems, poisoned rivers, drained aquifers, demolished mountains, wiped out species, and blackened the skies.  Capitalism is too powerful to run loose in the land.  Restraining it is a sign of respect for that power.  I believe capitalism can work with a conscience; but that takes some restraint and humility.

The type of capitalism practiced in North America has too often emphasized immediate, maximum exploitation of a resource -- which ultimately destroys that resource and deprives future generations of its benefits.  It violates that sense of mutual support and respect that I mentioned.

"Idle No More" fears that C-45 will clear the way for the destruction of waterways, especially as corporations work feverishly to exploit the Tar Sands oil reserves. Canada is blessed with many, many rivers, and that means many rivers will need to be crossed by the pipelines needed to get that Tar Sands oil to markets.  "Idle No More" fears that the people behind the Tar Sands see only dollars and not the people and the land that are threatened.

America still has the urge to purge

If you are tempted to say "This changes everything!" then odds are good that it doesn't.

This came to mind when I saw Esquire magazine's The Culture Blog entry titled "Texas Chainsaw in the New Age of Violence."  Stephen Marche notices that "massacre" is missing from the usual title for this franchise, the latest installment being Texas Chainsaw 3D.  He suggests the deletion was strategic, a post-Sandy Hook omission.  He writes, "It is a horror movie that seems totally unaware of the current nature of horror."

He continues: "Horror movies exist to allay our fears through purgation.  But this is a film that scratches an itch that no longer exists..."

All fine and good, except for this: Texas Chainsaw 3D was the highest-grossing film last weekend.  Granted, its ticket sales of $23 million are not astonishing, but this does suggest American moviegoers have an itch such horror films can scratch.

Marche complains that Texas Chainsaw 3D is a "palimpsest of cliches," and I imagine he is right (I'm certainly not going to find out by seeing it).  But I think that is what horror-movie audiences want.  Such bloodfests are somehow reassuring in their predictability, like baseball but without George Will's bow ties.

Marche notes that Gangster Squad (either the dumbest or the most precise film title in a few years -- or perhaps it is both) was delayed after the Aurora shootings because the film features a shootout in a movie theater.  He writes: "The producers felt it was too close to reality for comfort.  Texas Chainsaw 3D has the opposite problem.  It is completely out of touch."

The problem, Marche says, is that Hollywood's monsters, such as Leatherface, are not as scary as the real monsters we face -- psychotic young white males with access to semiautomatic weapons and lots and lots of ammunition.  He feels films such as this no longer offer Americans that purgation they desire because their monsters are so unbelievable and unrelatable: "The vision of evil in this movie is too ridiculous even to be amusing.  Right now, in the middle of a time glutted on real-life horror, the ridiculousness borders on the offensive."

Implicit in his blog entry is the idea that "everything is different" after the events in Sandy Hook and Aurora.  I doubt they are.

The purgation he attributes to horror films is not designed to realistically deal with those things we find frightening in our real lives.  The purgation may excite audiences, but it has always left their world unaltered.  That is, it purges the audiences of anxieties and so re-establishes the social order they live in.

If monsters were realistic, the films might be imagining solutions to real-world problems.  Then they would not offer the cathartic experience Aristotle supposedly prescribed for the theater; they would offer catalyzing experiences, inspiring or inciting action from the audience.

Films such as Texas Chainsaw 3D may scare audiences, but they are designed also to reassure audiences that everything is OK.  While you might be jealous of the perfect bodies of the movie's victims, you certainly would not want to be chopped up with power tools -- and you probably don't have to worry about either.  It is unlikely you will keep your New Year's resolution to visit the gym more often, and it is even less likely you will be attacked by crazed killers in the woods.

There is another side to this argument.  While Hollywood reassures audiences that monsters do not present real threats to their safety, in other movies Hollywood reassures audiences that there are easy solutions to big problems, and these solutions usually involve high-caliber guns.  And that brings us back to Aurora and Sandy Hook.  (But that is the subject of a different blog entry.)

I do not think audiences will hunger anytime soon for realistic villains and monsters. Nor do I think Hollywood will offer us solutions to the actual threats we face every day.