The Making Of: A Human Kind of Hope
How a long trail of outrage, curiosity, and research led to the idea for a story
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Reading time: About 8 minutes
My friends, this story had a long trajectory. 💫 It started back in February, when I watched a lecture by a Native American couple from my tribe speaking at a local college. It left me completely befuddled and also incandescently furious. Let me see if I can explain.
The talk began with a screenshot of the area from Google Maps, in Street View. The audience was told that you look at the world and place importance on the human-built streets. But that we (Native people) place importance first upon the rivers and waterways, and navigate by natural landmarks.
My very uncharitable first reaction: Really? When you get in your car and ask Siri for directions, do you only allow her to direct you by natural landmarks?
The talk continued. You just see the ocean, but we see the mother that feeds us and watches over us. We pray to the Creator for seven generations from now. We see time differently than you do.
I’m sorry, what? Are you going to tell me while sitting there with gel nails and a plastic Starbucks cup that you don’t go to the grocery store? Are we going to pretend that a big chunk of tribal lands aren’t centered around the tribe’s Christian church? How exactly do you see time so differently that you still managed to show up on time to give this talk?
The “we are nothing like you” dynamic got right under my skin and made me absolutely livid. There is no single way the members of the tribe live in the world today, and to imply that the tribe has such uniformity of belief and purpose—this tribe that disenrolled my family—just felt like an insult.
But on top of that, I was entirely confused by this vision of tribal life that seemed completely divorced from time and space. And for some reason the audience seemed fully on board with the illusion that all Native Americans live in some sort of pocket dimension where time stopped in 1610. That also has Internet access?
No Indian nation in the US currently lives like it’s four centuries ago. Sure they each have their unique culture that sees the world through a different lens of beliefs than mainstream American culture. Sure their lives might look different from a “typical” white American life. (Or not.) But they have, you know, houses and cars and dental work. So what was that mess I had watched?
Have you ever wondered how the Native American tribes in the US got to be where they are today? No, really. From the 1600s to the early 1900s it’s snatching Indians as slaves, stealing their harvests, handing out the smallpox blankets. It’s wars, forced assimilation, and a trail of broken treaties thousands of miles wide. It’s stealing land, it’s forced migrations and the Trail of Tears, detribalization and the Wounded Knee Massacre and the boarding schools that aimed to “kill the Indian and save the man.”
Today tribes are federally recognized sovereign nations, with protected lands and budgets and self-governance and casinos. Now, there’s no lack of discrimination, no lack of government and corporate shenanigans, no lack of poverty and troubles that come from living through an apocalypse. But all that is still a far cry from the systematic genocidal extermination policy that had been happening for 300 years.
So what changed?
I was researching the origins of disenrollment, to try to come to terms with being disenrolled myself. My research led me to the scholar and activist Vine Deloria Jr. While I have yet to read any of his books, I stumbled across this fantastic interview with him on YouTube, one of his last (so the description says).
In it he talks a lot about the entire concept of Native American identity. I learned a ton. But he kept referencing the IRA, which I had never heard of.
It turns out the IRA is the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. And this was a very, very big deal in Indian Country. The IRA was called the Indian New Deal, and according to Wikipedia, “The major goal was to reverse the traditional goal of cultural assimilation of Native Americans into American society and to strengthen, encourage and perpetuate the tribes and their historic Native American cultures in the United States.” To say its aspirations were grander than its reality is a fair critique, but it was a huge step forward from the government policy of actively trying to force millions of people to just stop existing.
All right. So how did the IRA come to be? That is a long story, with a beginning point I hope you will recognize. I shall sum up the version of it I read in James Wilson’s The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America.
In the 1910s there was a young man named John Collier, just out of Columbia University, who was very disillusioned with American society. Wilson says of him: “Collier [had] a personal philosophy that directly challenged the prevailing assimilationist ideology of the time. Concerned that the melting pot and unbridled industrialization were creating an ‘unplanned and inhuman urban America,’ in which a mass of rootless individuals, connected to each other only by economic ties, were no more than slaves of the machine, he argued that immigrants to the United States should preserve and celebrate their own cultural traditions. Only by continuing to practise their languages, dances and social customs, he thought, could they avoid losing the ‘ancestral’ knowledge of how human beings can live together as true members of a society.”
Collier was searching for his calling, trying to help immigrants resist assimilation. According to Wilson: “The results were almost always unsuccessful and sometimes farcical: in 1915, for example, his plan to hire the New York city armoury to teach ‘1000 working-class girls’ how to dance misfired when a drunken Isadora Duncan made sexual advances to the mayor.” {That was too good not to share! }
Collier was on his way to Mexico in 1920 after “yet another professional setback (this time with immigrants in California)” when a close friend of his, Mabel Dodge, invited Collier to the artist colony in Taos. She lived there with her husband, Tony Lujan, a Tiwa Indian from Taos Pueblo. They took Collier to see the Taos Pueblo performing their Deer Dance, and the experience had a profound effect on the man, something like a mystic revelation. “Here, at last, it seemed, was what Collier had been looking for: a ‘Red Atlantis’ that still retained the primordial secret of communal life,” Wilson said in his book.
This moment changed Collier’s life. He became a champion of Native American rights, and brought together a broad coalition of Native Americans and others in and out of Washington. Together they made the IRA happen.
I am hoping Collier’s epiphany sounds familiar to you! Why did I choose this one point in history as inspiration? To answer that, let’s re-look at my research. Collier was determined to preserve the Indian way of life. Wilson said it this way: “Collier did not believe that the ‘Indian spirit’ was, for all its attractions, inevitably doomed to extinction: on the contrary, he thought that it could and must be preserved, not only as a belated act of justice to Native Americans themselves, but because it was what ‘our sick world most needs.’ Convinced that ‘Could we make it our own, there would be an eternally inexhaustible earth and a forever lasting peace,’ he solemnly dedicated himself, with the evangelical determination of the convert, to keeping it alive for the benefit of all humanity.”
Fast forward to Vine Deloria and his ruminations on Indian identity. When asked if there will be Indian tribes in the future, here was part of Deloria’s answer:
Now the question is, if you get too much assimilation, then your local anti-whites are going to raise a big fuss over the fact that these people are indistinguishable from us, and why should they have these rights? And you’re going to get a conservative Congress who’s going to say “yes, you’re right.” You look through the 20th century and about every 20 years there was an effort to get rid of Indians. So it’s going to be pretty hazardous.
Last stop: the lecture I watched that began this very long thought train. The very purpose of the IRA was (in part) to “perpetuate the tribes and their historic Native American cultures.” This was Collier’s vision. And while he had good intentions, I’m gathering that his legacy has left Native Americans pretending they live in a diorama. It seems to me that when tribal officials interact with US institutions, they often act like their culture was frozen in time. And this weird, carefully preserved, inauthentically “authentic” Indian show is dusted off and put on display like a prehistoric stone tool in a museum anytime someone cares to look at it. If the tribes don’t do this ridiculous dance, trying to give the impression on a Zoom call that they see the world exactly like their twenty-generations-back ancestors did, then the fear is that sooner or later the country at large is going to start to wonder why they bother to give the tribes the benefits that they currently have. Which is a horrible thing to have to do just to get food and medicine for your people.
I wanted to write a story inspired by Collier’s epiphany for lots of reasons. Because it speaks to what one person can do to rally others to a cause and make change happen. Because it speaks to how the vision of one outsider who thinks he knows best can turn into misery a generation later. And because I’d bet everyone involved in the passing of the IRA would make the same decisions all over again, even if they had foreknowledge of what was to come. Sometimes the proposition on the table is just slightly better than the worst outcome, but it’s still worth fighting for. And I think, times being what they are, that’s a really important lesson. Perfect solutions are few and far between, but as long as we’re still here, there’s always the chance to make things better.
💖
Elnora
I was familiar with the IRA, but not how it came about. This is fascinating! I have so many thoughts and reflections reading this. Thank you!