Cowboys and Indians in a Reversal of Roles

Bill Miller, a Native American country/western singer was reaching out to shake the hand of Dee Brown, author of “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” when gunshots rang out. Without warning, a U.S. Cavalry troop in full regalia marched into the crowded Western Writers of America autograph party, banging drums, blowing bugles and firing Winchester rifles into the air.

“This means war,” the long-haired Indian shouted over the ruckus.

In fact, though, many Native Americans are at last ready to make peace with some of the white men and women who chronicle or create the legends of the West.

Dee Brown, whose fictional and non-fictional portrayals of Indians were pivotal in bringing about a change in attitudes, remembers going to the movies in the late ‘20s with a Creek Indian friend.

“There were always Indians getting shot, but he’d yell along with everyone else,” Brown recalled. “I asked him why, and he said, ‘Those aren’t real Indians, they’re actors.’ ”

Eventually, though, Brown’s feelings began to change. “After awhile I wouldn’t applaud the cavalry anymore,” he said. Now the author believes that the most important thing his work has done is to open the literary frontier to American Indian writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Vine Deloria Jr.

Robert Conley, a Cherokee, is one of the authors now writing about the West from the other side of the battlefield. He recently taught a class at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, on the treatment of the Indian in literature, beginning with James Fennimore Cooper’s “The Deerslayer.” From the old dime westerns to TV’s Tonto, Indians were portrayed as savages, he said. Sometimes they were blood-thirsty savages, sometimes noble savages, but always somehow sub-human.

“Savage means without civilization. They had civilization,” he said. But, he added, that fact wasn’t always convenient for writers in a genre defined by a clear-cut battle between good and evil.

With the civil rights movement and the subsequent growth of Indian studies programs in colleges, all that began to change. Now most writers avoid the easy stereotypes, Conley said.

“We’ve turned the myth upside down,” said C. L.(Doc) Sonnichsen, an author of 23 books and a former English professor at the University of Texas, who, at 85, is considered a bit of a legend himself among western writers.

“The pioneers, once considered heroic for opening the frontiers to civilization, are now considered exploiters, villains, the ones who destroyed the civilization the Indians had.” One hundred years ago, Geronimo was treated as the worst Indian who ever lived, now he’s the George Washington of his people, Sonnichsen said.

“He’s become the symbol of heroic resistance to injustice and oppression. If you jump out of an airplane, you know what you holler.”

“The Indians needed to have their side told,” he added. But Sonnichsen isn’t quite comfortable with the new portrayals. “It’s like two buckets in a well. When the Indians went up, the pioneers went down . . . What we had in the West were two separate ways of life that had to meet. It wasn’t a case of one being absolutely right or wrong.”

“I try not to see people as symbols. I see Geronimo as a remarkable man who did what he could in difficult times,” Conley added.

And while he understands that the pioneers, like the Indians, were just people with human emotions and motivations, Conley has a hard time putting himself in an objective frame of mind.

“Take the popular title ‘The Winning of the West,’ ” he said. “From the Indian point of view, it was the losing of the West.’ ”