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| 2009 |
I saw this image last week after a couple of items
circulated in blogosphere about the woman pictured in the feathered war
bonnet. She is identified as Queen Chief
Warhorse and as Ms. Elwin Gillum.
When I saw the image of her in that Plains-style bonnet, I thought
about Tea Party demonstrators who wear tricornered hats. I thought about how group identities, such as
ethnic and political identities, are products of fantasy and imagination – even
when the group or a person’s claim to membership is legitimate.
Gillum spoke at the recent Healing for Democracy conference
in New Orleans, and the discussions that followed tended to involve whether she
was or was not an American Indian. They concerned the question of who gets to speak for American Indians. They
concerned whether the group she represented had a legitimate claim to tribal
status. They concerned whether
questioning another person’s identity was legitimate. And they concerned the implications that
fraudulent claims to tribal status presented to federally recognized tribes and
those groups seeking that status.
Indian Country is a complicated place.
I don’t have room here to address all of the issues raised
by the blogosphere’s reaction to Gillum.
If you are interested, read about some of those reactions at the blog of
my friend
Debbie
Reese.
What I did want to consider
for a moment was Gillum’s “Indian name,” her feathered headdress, and the man
standing next to her in neon colors. What do those things mean?
N. Scott Momaday is a Kiowa writer who won the Pulitzer
Prize for fiction in 1969, and he wrote an essay famous in American Indian
Studies titled “The Man Made of Words.” In
that essay he poses the question, “What is an Indian?” He answers it by saying “an Indian is an idea
which a given man has of himself.” Later
he asks about a human’s “the relationship between what he is, and what he
thinks he is.” Momaday suggests they are
inseparable, that a human’s identity is produced by his or her imagination.
For some people, this seems like a recipe for chaos. Anyone can be anything he wants to be,
anything he imagines himself to be.
Regardless of a person’s lived experiences, she can claim any identity.
I don’t think that is what Momaday intended. In the essay he describes the importance of
imagining experiences one may not have first-hand access to. For instance, he discusses the importance of
a person’s relationship to the land, but not just the land here-and-now; it is
important to imagine the land before you arrived and the land after you have
gone. It is important to imagine the
land you cannot see from your current place.
Similarly, he writes that it is important to imagine those ancestors who
came before you. It is important to
imagine their sacrifices and successes that made your existence possible. It is important to imagine them fully, in
their complexity and humanity.
More than personal identity relies upon imagination. In his book titled Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson writes that nations are
built upon imagination. Nations are
built of many local communities, and the greater the distance between these
communities the less their members will have in common. But having a belief, trait, or experience in
common is so important for creating a nation that humans will create it if they
need to. And if even if they do not make
it up, they still must imagine it.
Anderson describes the importance of the newspaper in creating a nation:
people in distant parts of the nation can easily imagine their countrymen
reading about the same events and sharing something of a common perspective on
them. “Remember the Maine!” American
Idol results. Etc.
This act of imagination is so fundamental to nations that
Anderson writes: “Communities are to be distinguished not by their
falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.”
That brings me back to Gillum’s feathered bonnet. It is initially puzzling because it seems out
of place. She represents a group calling
itself the Tchefuncta Nation of the Chahta Tribe. Chahta is a variation of Choctaw, a tribe of
the Southeast United States, and the Tchefuncta River runs into Lake
Ponchatrain just north of New Orleans. Historically,
the Choctaw did not wear bonnets like that.
Those were a Plains thing. So why
is she wearing it?
Is she wearing it because she does not know much about
Choctaw history and culture? Is she
participating in a kind of “redface minstrelry”? Or
perhaps she is truly the descendant of Choctaws, but the United States
government’s effort to erase Choctaw culture and communities was so successful
that she is left to recreate her Choctaw identity out of the bits and pieces
she can glean from … wherever. Including
Hollywood.
If you have read my blog before, you know that I like to
entertain the notion of signs – the ways in which humans communicate to
themselves and to each other. I think her feathers could signify “the partial erasure of Indianness” as much
as they signify “Indianness.”
However, that bonnet could signal a cultural heritage
connected to New Orleans and Mardi Gras traditions rather than to centuries-old
Choctaw traditions.
That man standing
next to her is dressed as a
Mardi Gras Indian.
He possibly is a member of a “krewe” or “tribe”
that dances and parades at Mardi Gras celebrations.
These groups elect a “chief” and a “queen.”
When I searched online, I found images of
such chiefs and queens, and some of them wore headdresses like Gillum’s.
The Mardi Gras Indians have their origin in African slave communities
in and around New Orleans before it became part of the United States. Those groups had important links to the
region’s Indian communities – through personal and romantic relationships and
through a kindred feeling of oppression and resistance. Their signature flamboyant costumes seem to
be an influence of carnival traditions brought by people from the
Caribbean.
Some of the bloggers commented on her name of “Queen” and
how this is not a rank bestowed by American Indian tribes. It was bestowed by Europeans who did not
understand how Indian politics and diplomacy worked, who assumed that North
America worked as Europe did (or mostly didn’t – Europe was really a mess). However, Mardi Gras Indians have “queens.”
So, is Gillum imagining herself as an Indian when she wears
that feathered bonnet? Is she imagining
herself as “only” an Indian, or is she imagining herself as an amalgamation of
African and Indian ancestries and cultures?
The latter makes sense, but when she addressed the group in New Orleans,
she emphasized only her Indian identity and ancestry, and she spoke of
representing those who were, one could say, Americans before there was an America
– but the Africans did not arrive as slaves until after there was an America.
What do her feathers mean?
The answer to that question could be very complicated.
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| Ding! Ding! |
As I said earlier, her bonnet makes me think of the Tea Party
demonstrators who wear tricornered hats.
This is their way of signaling their own imagined nationhood. They see themselves as connected to those
Americans who fought against Great Britain in the Revolution – regardless of
whether they are truly descended from those people. Who knows when their ancestors came to the
United States? Whether he is or isn’t
descended from some brave Minuteman is not as important as his act of imagining
himself to be.
This connection of the imagination and the past is
especially evident with someone like Thomas Jefferson. Those who argue that the United States is
somehow a Christian nation insist upon Jefferson’s implicit Christian leanings,
while those who argue for a separation of church and state cite his written sentiments
supporting their position. Each side
fights over his ghost, in a sense, trying to imagine themselves as his
legitimate ancestor. It seems hard for
humans to imagine themselves in entirely new communities. They seem to insist on looking for
connections to the past, whether real or imagined.
This is not to say that all national identities are merely
the stuff of imagination and have no claims of legitimacy. But all national identities are imagined, and
that process of imagining a national identity is intriguing.
