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