“Americanize the first Americans. Give them freedom to do their own thinking; to exercise their judgment; to hold open forums for the expression of their thought, and finally permit them to manage their own personal business. Let no one deprive the American Indians of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
The contents of this book are split into sections with subtitles like “Old Indian Legends,” “American Indian Stories,” and “Poetry, Pamphlets, Essays, and Speeches.” This quote concludes a selection from the latter section. It is a heartfelt and quite fervent call to Washington, D.C. to make the first residents of America legal Americans. In addition to being profoundly ironic, it is a testament to what was—at least at one time—a fully committed movement within the indigenous tribes to assimilate as fully as the slaves brought here against their will and the immigrants from other countries who eagerly sought to make the “New World” their home. When reading that last sentence, it should by all rights be almost impossible not to recall some words penned by Thomas Jefferson. Those words about everybody being equally deserving of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This particular selection undergoes significant changes in tonality, but ultimately it leaves one with the taste of bitter irony lingering on the palate as they may wonder just exactly who Jefferson was actually writing about.
“Among the legends the old warriors used to tell me were many stories of evil spirits. But I was taught to fear them no more than those who stalked about in material guise. I never knew there was an insolent chieftain among the bad spirits, who dared to array his forces against the Great Spirit, until I heard this white man’s legend from a paleface woman.”
This quote exemplifies a theme that runs throughout the narrative even though the selections within were not composed with the purpose of being thematically related. The theme that comes through loud and clear in this quote and other sections is that the white Christian immigrants who came to the land unwanted and unasked share a fundamentally different view of mankind than the indigenous tribes. What this quote is saying in simpler terms is that until Christian missionaries came along with the intent to convert everyone in sight, the narrator had never even imagined such a character as the Devil. Notice that she does not say she was not familiar with evil. This is so significant that it hardly seems possible it would pass by without notice, yet it continues to do so. Evil can exist in the world, the Sioux concept goes, without it necessarily having to be embodied in one fiendish-yet-convenient scapegoat. Within that simple divergence from Christian theology lies the foundation for a completely antagonistic existential philosophy. If this is doubted, just try imagining the entire history of western civilization without the presumed reality of the existence of Satan.
“Peyote has been represented as a sacrament in an Indian religion. ‘I baptize thee in the name of the Father and Son and Peyote,’ is the baptismal formula borrowed from the ritual of the Christian church. Twelve feathers dangling from a long staff represent the twelve apostles. This twelve apostles idea is borrowed from the white man’s Bible. It is not Indian.”
This quote is a fascinating peek into the long history of Christianity’s relentless effort to eliminate every other religious belief but its own. It is an unfortunate aspect of the history of all indigenous tribes in America that much of their ancient history has been lost forever and their recent history is so inextricably threaded into that of Christianity that it is impossible to extricate. That the so-called “peyote sacrament” is entirely a European fiction forced upon the tribes is not, of course, singular. Christianity is notable for taking parts of the pagan rituals it embraced and making them it's own. It is only natural that the reverse would follow suit in which it forced its own rituals onto the pagans. The phrase “It is not Indian” is another simple assertion packed with meaning beyond its simplicity. It speaks not just to this ritual, but to so many other elements of so-called Indian history. Beginning, of course, with the very names of the tribes by which they are mostly known. Their very identity is thus an idea borrowed from the menace of white European settlers.
