Exploring a U.S. Clash of Cultures : Times Book Prize Winners Discuss State of the Indians

Wherever else it may be, Indian country often lies between the covers of books. On the page--and in reality--it’s still a frontier.

These are among the impressions that emerged from a conversation among three writers--winners of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes--who have dealt with the American Indian in history or in the present, in fiction or in fact.

Whether they spoke of the present or the past, all three--Evan Connell, Louise Erdrich and Janet Lewis--made it clear that Indian country at all times has been a place seen dimly. Americans, the ones who came after Columbus, often see mirages or other false landmarks when they consider the first Americans, they said.

Wide-Ranging Discussion

The three authors, plus Erdrich’s husband and co-worker, sat down together last Saturday at the New Otani Hotel, the morning after they were presented their awards. While they talked--hesitantly at first--in the 18th-floor room, a police helicopter was visible through the windows, circling an unknown incident on the streets below.

In a wide-ranging discussion, the argument was made repeatedly that romantic notions, outright prejudice and misguided good intentions continue to blur the landscape that red men and white men have fought over or shared so uneasily.

Erdrich, a soft-spoken and sometimes self-effacing woman who is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and who won for her novel about reservation life today (“Love Medicine,” Holt, Rinehart & Winston), set the tone by declaring that vague preconceptions about Indians are treacherous.

“Each tribal situation is completely different, historically and at present,” she said. “You have to look tribe by tribe, I think, in order to be able to say anything and even then you are still generalizing.”

Wary of Sweeping Statements

Despite her wariness of sweeping statements and her doubts about being “competent to be a spokesperson,” Erdrich did venture a broad brush treatment of contemporary Indians.

“One of the amazing stories about American Indian people is the tenacity and survival of a people who have been systematically deprived in all sorts of ways that I think have been talked about and people know about and bear repeating,” she said. “This is the systematic policy of extermination that has gone on and has turned into a kind of bureaucratic attempt to eliminate cultural life and is now a struggle for a land base and mineral and water rights and a struggle for health and education.

“The amazing thing is there are Indian people who have come through all this and are still alive, struggling, kicking and celebrating their culture and the culture is still there.”

Lewis--who won the Robert Kirsch Award for her body of fiction and poetry that includes “The Invasion,” a 1934 novel about the collision of Indian, French and English cultures on the early frontier--said she was buoyed by the self-reliance that has infused some tribes in recent decades.

“More and more I think they have taken charge of their own affairs,” she said. “I’m thinking partly of the Navajo (who are) really an independent nation within a nation,” she said, referring to the largest tribe whose reservation sprawls across Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico.

Rights Ignored

Lewis’ comment about independent nations prompted remarks by Michael Dorris, Erdrich’s husband and collaborator, a member of the Modoc tribe who is an activist in Indian affairs.

“I think you hit the nail on the head when you talked about independent countries because that is the legal status of reservations, domestic dependent nations,” he said. “As such there are a lot of rights implicit in the law that have been ignored. One of the things that’s happened in recent times is that more and more native people have become attorneys and have reclaimed those rights, which is one of the things that makes the United States good . . . If there is a universal among tribal people, it is that the treaties should be kept rather than new ones made.”

Both Lewis and Dorris noted that the much-ignored treaties, now a truism of Indian lore, were regarded as fiction even as they were being drawn up, that even the pretense of compliance was often tossed aside.

“About the Ohio Territory,” Lewis said, “(George) Washington said in a letter to somebody that the treaty is not to be considered seriously and any man who would not go in and get himself some land now was a fool.”

Dorris noted that only recently have demographers begun piecing together one grim reason why the treaties were articles of expediency.

“A hundred years ago when people made the treaties, they were sure Indians were going to disappear,” he explained. “The real story of contact, the most dramatic story of contact, was the susceptibility of Western Hemisphere people to Eastern Hemisphere diseases. The current estimates are that shortly after contact with Europe, 19 out of every 20 Indian people died.”

Indian resistance might have been more effective and tenacious if the burden of disease could have been avoided, he said.

“When we look at the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, even into the first part of the 20th Century, we’re dealing with a population that is ill in large part or is suffering from the memory of the vast majority dying from mysterious diseases,” Dorris said. “ . . . The population that was once here, 20 million it’s estimated in North America, was reduced by 1910 to about 200,000.”

Connell, who won for his often humorous account in “Son of the Morning Star” (North Point Press) about the events and times that led to the massacre of George Armstrong Custer and his command at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, noted that some have yet to reconcile themselves to the 7th Cavalry’s defeat.

Anonymous Letter

“I get exasperated letters every once in a while,” he said. “I got an anonymous one the other day. He signed himself ‘Old 4th Cavalry Trooper.’ He said he wasn’t going to waste 22 cents on a letter so he sent a postcard. He said, ‘Your credibility vanished on Page 14 when you wrote Middlebury instead of Middleburg, Virginia . . .’ What prompted this card and several other angry letters I’ve gotten from military buffs, I think, is a vein of humor that runs through the book. These people are so humorless, particularly the Custer freaks. I think they regard him as an idol and are absolutely outraged if you look at Custer or the 7th Cavalry or the American military with any less than the utmost respect. So they will seize on a detail as small as a ‘y’ instead of a ‘g’ as a means of venting their anger.”

Another letter writer chided him for saying that the trees in a certain location were pines when they are actually spruce, he added.

Connell also noted that the persistence of Custer’s popularity is baffling. “It’s one of the mysteries,” he said. “He touched something in the American psyche. I can’t think of anybody who’s been dead a hundred years who excites such passion . . . Throughout this country I think that man could still start an argument.”

The lack of humor in literature about American Indians struck a responsive cord in Dorris.

“One of the important things is that we tried to make the language as true to life as we could (in ‘Love Medicine’),” he said. “It’s great that it’s been a critical success, but the thing that has relieved our minds is the reaction of Indian people around the country, people who don’t normally read books . . . Indians seemed to have read this book and realized that is catches something about them. So many books about Indians have an absence of humor, they’re somber and benighted, although this is not the fabric of everyday life.” Her novel, Erdrich added, is not meant to pigeonhole Indians as some sort of alien race. Her comments also strengthened the impression that she and her husband have a close working relationship, illustrated by their frequent use of “we” instead of “I,” although she is listed as the sole author of “Love Medicine.”

“When we first began working on this book, both of us were certainly aware that we were writing about American Indian people but, before that fact, we were really interested in making a story that people would read first and read it with an avid interest in these people’s lives because they spoke to them as people,” she said.

Although the situation of Indians is now vastly different from a century ago, Dorris maintained that the potential for conflict still exists.

A Tense Time

“It’s going to be very tense in the next few years in the Southwest because of water rights,” he said. “Indians are very popular as long as they’re not competitive and as long as they’re not powerful. When you have control of natural resources and water especially in the Southwest--the Papago reservation versus Tucson, say--then I think a lot of the old paranoia and the old racism is right there under the surface.”

In fact, he added, a friend of his “has a theory that interest in Indians follows a parabola and it’s at the top when Indians are most unapparent and it’s at the bottom when there’s a resurgence of demanding rights, etc.”

And, Dorris said, overly romantic impressions of the Indians harbored by many whites could ultimately prove dangerous to the Indians.

“For one thing, if people have an impression of native people as the first ecologists,” he said, “then, if they go to a reservation and they don’t see people being ecological in a (white) sense, they say, ‘Ah ha, you’ve lost your culture, therefore you don’t have the right to land anymore, you’re not really Indians . . . I don’t think there’s anything inherent in Indian people that makes them have a predilection toward conservation more than any other agricultural people . . . and most Indians were agriculturalists, precontact (with Western civilization).”

Toward the end of the session, both Dorris and Erdrich offered anecdotes that perhaps illustrate how great the gulf between red and white still is.

Erdrich recalled visiting her grandfather after college one year. “He got up really early one morning and went out into the woods,” she recalled. “He was standing there and he was making a prayer and I went up to him and asked, ‘What are you talking about?’ He was praying for the astronauts and, ever since, the fact that they got back down was his personal success. He had made a pact and it worked.”

Said Dorris: “Our mailman came by one day and said he was a Boy Scout leader and he was going to take his troop out and they were all going to be Iroquois. They were going to go out and live in the woods for a week and be real Iroquois. They would be absolutely legitimate. He said to me, ‘What should we do to be absolutely legitimate?’ and I said, ‘Take their mothers.’ ”