America: Come for the Civil Disobedience, Stay for the Thunderdome

During the early days of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, when police departments were freaking out and the White House was clearing a churchyard with smoke grenades and batons, I was reading a book about American Indian law, and I was struck by some unfortunate similarities between what I read on the page and what I saw on the screen.

On Twitter I shared this image with the caption, "America: Come for the Civil Disobedience, Stay for the Thunderdome." In retrospect, though, the image is perhaps more like a scene from the Roman Coliseum than a Mad Max movie. Demonstrators were more like Christians being thrown to the lions than they were like Mel Gibson fighting Tina Turner's goons.

Mad Max: Police Academy?

At the same time, I was reading about a Supreme Court case, United States v Sandoval (1913), in Walter Echo-Hawk's book titled In the Courts of the Conqueror: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided. With that case, and several that Echo-Hawk relates to it, the U.S. government claimed broad guardianship authority over American Indians, authority it did not claim over other Americans. He wrote:

Big Brother can and did "do things" to Indians as their "guardian" that it could never do to regular citizens (202).

That guardian authority included the imposition of some religious beliefs and the denial of others (Native religious practices were explicitly outlawed well into the 20th century); control of property and financial transactions; and unilateral law enforcement and judicial processes.

This guardianship was based on the false assumption that American Indians were inherently inferior to white Americans and needed their guidance, as if they were children. It was also based on the assumption that the guardians were free of any repercussions for harming their wards. (Echo-Hawk demonstrates how this guardianship authority was repeatedly used to abuse rather than protect American Indians.)

I thought of this as I saw police officers swinging batons like baseball bats against unarmed, non-violent demonstrators in downtown Los Angeles. And when I saw a police officer using his shield as if he were Captain America and a photojournalist were Thanos. I thought of it when I saw an armored personnel carrier rolling through a Philadelphia neighborhood.

@ryanvizzions

The militarized police response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations were very familiar to Indian

Country. In 2016, we all saw the response to water protectors trying to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on unceded land belonging to the Great Sioux Nation. South Dakota brought armored cavalry to confront unarmed civilians. The water protectors were attacked by dogs, doused with pepper spray, and blasted with a water cannon on a freezing night. 

I do not know how much of the nation was outraged by the events at Standing Rock. President Obama delayed the construction of the pipeline, but he did not intervene in the violence, saying he would "let it play out for several more weeks," as if the opposing forces were equal in strength and legal justifications.

I think it was easy for many Americans to watch the events and remain unmoved. The events were happening on a fairly isolated reservation, so there were no traffic jams nor curfews to inconvenience people not directly involved. Many viewers may have been undisturbed also because this was a confrontation they were accustomed to: the Cavalry vs. the Indians. Even if their sympathies were with the Native people, they were accustomed, through national mythology, to understand Indians as potential enemies. That is the slippery slope in the guardian relationship between the federal government and Native communities: some times there was little difference between being a ward and being a prisoner of war.

But the violence at the Black Lives Matter demonstrations took place in the center of the nation's largest cities, not on the faraway Great Plains. I thought of this notion of abusive guardianship when I read about curfews that were declared 10 minutes before they were enforced, and when I read about groups of demonstrators who were not allowed to leave public spaces and who were then arrested for violating the curfew. Demonstrators were shot directly with rubber bullets (not how they were intended to be used) and hit with gas canisters. Limbs were broken. Eyes were damaged.

I asked at what point did the police gain such authority over U.S. citizens? When were they given the authority to injure people who were not violating a law and who were not threatening other people? Citizens are not given the authority to protect themselves against this violence. Would the police wield pepper spray with such nonchalance if they knew there was a good chance someone would spray them back? When were they given authority to swing their batons at people's legs simply for "crowd control"?

When did we surrender the right of self-protection?

How were people so easily transformed from citizens to enemies?

A legal scholar can probably tell me when this state of affairs evolved, and I assume it is involved with the concept of "qualified immunity," so perhaps my question is more "why?" or "how?" What is the legal reasoning behind the government declaring that demonstrators have surrendered their right to assemble, their freedom of speech, their freedom of movement, and their right to protect themselves?

And why should we let this continue?

To me, the assumption being made is similar to that articulated in Sandoval. People voicing their displeasure with the government are being considered (without legal or formal declaration) inferior to other citizens and surrender, like minors or children, many rights to their self-declared guardians.

Viewed in the light of an abusive guardian relationship -- the assumption of inferiority and the removal of Constitutional rights -- I think most Americans would agree that it is time to reconsider the authority that federal and state governments claim over their citizens.

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American Indian Studies has important lessons for all U.S. citizens because it considers some fundamental questions of interest to everyone. In this case, what does it mean to be a citizen? What is the right relationship between a person and their government? What responsibilities does the citizen have to their government and their government to them?

It is useful for them to study cases in which the government has for so long denied its obligations and disregarded the rights of individuals. It is useful for them to see how arbitrarily and self-servingly the federal government has conducted its relationship with Native nations, and for them to consider the possibility that their government could do the same with them.

A big reason people in Indian Country were so happy with this week's decision in McGirt v Oklahoma was that the Supreme Court simply followed the rules. It offered simple, clear interpretations of the law and honored a treaty the U.S. government had signed. Indian Country expected the usual contortions of legal and moral reasoning from the Supreme Court to justify the continued dispossession and abuse of Native people. When that did not happen, Native people were elated. The court decision was good news, but its reception is sad, really. It is a commentary on how rare "doing the right thing" can be.

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 folks on 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.

Mything the Point

Some folks were upset when they learned that the U.S. Navy SEALs used "Geronimo" as the code word for Osama bin Laden during their successful raid against the Al Qaeda leader.  In "Geronimo?  Really?" I tried to describe some of the reasons that American Indians might have been disappointed in the SEALs vocabulary, even though they were glad the mission had been successful. 

Link to the original panel, May 14, 2011.

However, I also imagine some young people were puzzled about the controversy.  Names such as "Geronimo" do not resonate with them so deeply, neither as iconic hero nor as iconic enemy.  They have not been conditioned to the national mythology of "Cowboys and Indians."  This idea was depicted recently by Jeff Mallet's comic strip Frazz.

While it is never good to be ignorant of history, it can be good to abandon some of the old stories.  I think the "Cowboys and Indians" story is fading as one of the foundational myths for the United States.  Perhaps that is for the best.

What do I mean by "myth"?  Not stories about the soap opera on Mount Olympus.  I do not mean "a story that isn't true."  I mean "a story that is culturally powerful."  Whether it is true or false does not matter.  If enough people believe it is true, then it might as well be true.  If enough people identify with its characters or events, then it influences their behavior as individuals and as a group.

A myth gains its power through repetition and by evoking symbols that its audience values highly.  The power of these stories cannot be underestimated.  Nations depend upon them.  The stories shared by a population can be one of the primary connections holding the otherwise diverse people together.  A group of people who in actuality have very little in common can share a set of stories, and through this sharing they can think of themselves as similar to each other.  Two women from opposite ends of a nation can have different styles of clothing and dress, but if they grew up with the same story from childhood, they can share their identification with the story's protagonist.  This gives people who have never met an experience they have shared vicariously.

This is especially powerful if the story in question purports to be about a shared past, a history they have in common.  Richard Slotkin described it this way:  "Myth is the primary language of historical memory: a body of traditional stories that have, over time, been used to summarize the course of our collective history and to assign ideological meanings to that history."

Illegal immigrants landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620.

The story of "Cowboys and Indians" is set in the Old West (a product of American history that is largely constructed from our imaginations rather than fact), but it is truly an extension of older story: The Pilgrims arriving at Plymouth Rock.  It is the story of Europeans conquering the continent of North America.  It is the story of their defeating both the natural environment they found and the people who lived there. 

Like so many stories, this one had Good Guys and Bad Guys.  The Europeans/Cowboys were the Good Guys.  Nature/Indians were the Bad Guys.  The story did evolve, as the Indians often times were replaced with Bad Guys who were white -- bank robbers, cattle rustlers, etc.  American citizens were intended to identify with those Pilgrims and those Cowboys. 

On CBS from 1959 to 1965.

This Old West story was told obsessively, in novels, on the radio, in Hollywood films, and on television.  I grew up watching television series such as Rawhide, Bonanza, Gunsmoke -- and pre-Westerns such as Davy Crockett.  I grew up watching John Wayne in Western movies on television.  It was intended for the audience to identify with the bravery, honesty, loyalty and other good qualities of these heroes.  It was intended for the audience to not think about the people being displaced by them, the men, women, and children who had lived here for thousands of years.  Or if the audience did think of those people, American Indians were to be understood as deserving or welcoming this displacement.

Decades later, when I ask my students who has seen a Western, only a few hands are raised.  When I ask who has seen a John Wayne movie, even fewer hands go up.  Times have changed.  Those Westerns no longer form the backbone of the American mythological machinery.

I do not know what has replaced them.

One quality of national mythologies tends to be pastness.  These stories almost always involve some key moment in the nation's history.  But I do not know what moments in American history attract the collective imagination of the 18-24 population.  When I think of what stories these young people might hear and tell obsessively, the way I dreamed of being Davy Crockett -- I come up blank.

X-Men marks the spot?

The stories they seem the most attracted to involve not American history but American fantasy: superheroes and vampires.

One function of stories is to supply its audience with models and examples to be called upon later in life.  Stories provide us heroes and villains that we can use later for comparison to real-life situations.  When times get tough in the future, when today's 18-24 generation has been elected to Congress or is raising families or is otherwise calling the shots, will its members ask themselves: What would Spider-Man or Batman do?  Which one of the X-men is most like me and what would he/she have done in a situation like this?  In this dilemma, which would be the most useful: the qualities of a vampire or the qualities of a werewolf?

My hero!

Or perhaps I am thinking of the wrong type of story.  Perhaps the story they have experienced the most often is told on a PlayStation or an Xbox.  What will their narrative templates be?  With whom do they identify most?  Mario?  Luigi?  The Master Chief from Halo?

I am not trying to be flippant about the issue.  I mean, I'm not trying to be ONLY flippant.  But when I wonder what stories this generation hears the most, thinks about the most, identifies with the most, I genuinely do not have much of an answer

Eyes Wide Shut

I want to contradict myself.  Or at least appear to do so.

I recently wrote about the apparent futility of efforts to censor some texts.  I suggested that the act of censorship oftentimes calls attention to the censorship's target.  In writing this, I quoted Italian semiotician Umberto Eco on the futility of techniques to aid forgetting: "But this technique allows one not to forget something but to remember that one wanted to forget it."  But now I am writing about a dangerous and frequently effective means of forgetting.

We generally think of "ideology" as meaning a set of beliefs.  But it is more than that.  Ideology includes the stories a group tells about itself in order to explain the meaning and origin of its beliefs.  Also, ideology includes the principles that will guide that group's interpretation of its experiences.   In doing these two things -- explaining the past and guiding the present -- an ideology frequently requires some forgetting or ignoring of facts that challenge its interpretations or principles.

In academic circles, this process of forgetting, hiding, or ignoring is called "mystification."  Terry Eagleton, in his book Ideology: An Introduction, writes that this process "frequently takes the form of masking or suppressing social conflicts."  In this way, an ideology can be "an imaginary resolution to real contradictions."

So, one could argue that the revision of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in order to eliminate "nigger" is an example of this.  One could say that if we collectively forget the novels had this ugly word in them, we can more easily accept our national history; doing this could diminish the pain of prejudice, racism, and slavery.  Americans like to think of themselves as freedom-loving and inclusive of all races, but that ugly word reminds Americans that this wasn't always the case.  The solution?  Rather than revise their beliefs about themselves, some Americans find it easier to eliminate the word.  That does not undo the very real history of prejudice, racism, and slavery, but it allows Americans to pretend it does.  That is, it creates "an imaginary resolution to real contradictions."

However, I do not believe this example of ideology holds true with the recent revision of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.  The new edition from NewSouth calls attention to its revision; it may "mask ... social conflicts" but it calls attention to the mask.  Ideology rarely calls attention to itself as a self-conscious effort to shape a story or tell story; instead, it pretends to tell "the truth" about the past or present.

A recent example that DOES illustrate the process of ideological mystification is taking place in Tennessee.  There, members of the Tea Party want to revise the school curriculum to eliminate criticisms of the Founding Fathers based upon their treatment of American Indians or ownership of African slaves.  This effort is particularly interesting in its honesty.

One of their requests for the state government, as reported in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, is that "No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”

Impressive.   It openly says that even THE TRUTH should not obscure the reputation of the Founding Fathers.  Since those truths are inconvenient, they need to be eliminated or diminished.  The Tea Party wants "imaginary resolutions" to the "social contradiction" of the Sons of Liberty denying liberty to others and dealing dishonestly with nations that held North America before their arrival.

So, although I am not alarmed at the effort to sanitize Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, I do not like this proposed revision of history curriculum.  The Twain scholar who has revised the novels, Alan Gribben, has done so in order to get the books into more classrooms in Alabama, where they often have been excluded because of the word "nigger."  While to some degree the novels present an "imaginary solution," they will make possible a discussion of "social contradictions" by their new presence.  But this effort by the Tea Party in Tennessee functions to eliminate discussion in the classroom.

Although the Tea Party folks are honest about their motivations, I doubt the revised textbooks will be as forthright.  I doubt the book covers will include stickers announcing: "New and Improved!  Now with less truth!"

At a news conference announcing the requests, a Tea Party spokesman said, "The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at."

Perhaps the spokesman didn't realize that he was making an argument FOR the inclusion of the contradictions between the Founding Fathers' beliefs and their practices.  How can we measure the progress of liberty without understanding who had their liberty denied and how they gained it?  To measure that progress, we need a discussion of African Americans and American Indians -- and women and Asian Americans and Mexican Americans and homosexuals, etc.  This discussion does not detract from the real accomplishments of the framers of the Constitution, but it does set those accomplishments in clearer context.

Finally, depending upon what the Tea Party spokesman meant by "a world," his statement may also be plain wrong.

If "a world" means the European world that had extended itself to North America, then perhaps the Founding Fathers did introduce a new type of liberty.  But if "a world" means simply North America, then he does not realize there were many native nations here already enjoying all types of liberty not realized in Europe.

All groups have an ideology.  It is impossible to have a society without one, without many.  However, we must remain aware of the ideologies to which we adhere, and we must remain aware of what our ideologies may be making us blind to or encouraging us to forget.  Otherwise, our ideologies can control us rather than us controlling them.  Otherwise, we will be guilty -- as the Tennessee Tea Party seems to be -- of what Emile Durkheim called "the use of notions to govern the collation of facts rather than deriving notions from them."