Making a Landfall in Real America

A young relative by marriage arrived here from Italy a few weeks ago en route to the Oglala Sioux reservation in South Dakota. Like a young De Toqueville in search of a greater truth, he came to America to see what many Americans somehow fail to see--the continuous, oftentimes purposeful degradation of the American Indian, or more accurately Native American.

His experiences were brought to mind by Elaine Dutka’s report on the controversy over the new film, “Black Robe” (“Do Indians Lose Again in ‘Black Robe’? They Assail New Film While Writer and Director Defend It,” Calendar, Nov. 11).

The night before Alberto boarded the plane to Rapid City, we parked in front of the television to watch highlights of a game between the Atlanta Braves and the Pittsburgh Pirates. He remarked that he thought it strange to see Braves’ fans, including a famous liberal actress, waving tomahawks in the air, “whooping and hollering” as the term goes, like white extras playing Indians in a grade-B Western movie. I explained that the stereotyping and marginalization of native people in this country is as American as baseball, football and apple pie.

This, unfortunately, is not mere cliche. On “Monday Night Football” at the start of the NFL season, network cameras swooped in on two conspicuous Washington Redskin fans--African-American men dressed as an “Indian” and a “cowboy.” The commentators giggled as the “Indian” went through the mock motions of scalping the “cowboy,” in sight of millions of viewers at home.

One year after actors Graham Greene, Kevin Costner and Rodney Grant rode across the South Dakota plains in “Dances With Wolves,” Hollywood’s most realistic portrayal to date of the lives and virtual destruction of native people, many of us have resettled into childhood rituals--enforced by American historians--which mock Indian people. Cinematic verisimilitude of the Sioux people in the late 19th Century has swiftly given in to stark late 20th-Century reality, exemplified by Braves’ fans, Washington Redskins, Cleveland Indians, John Wayne and so-called Indian trading posts on the back roads and main streets of America.

Now, new on-screen portrayals of Indian people, the latest being “Black Robe,” promise accurate interpretations of reality, but all of us who have watched the persistent excoriation of indigenous people in American popular culture have our doubts.

It was “Dances With Wolves” on a big screen in Milan that inspired my Italian cousin to seek out a greater truth and meaning of American Indians. From his meetings with Indian delegations in Genoa, Alberto was presented with a picture of Christopher Columbus dramatically different from the idolized portrait hanging in a nearby museum in that beautiful city on the sea from where Columbus set off for Spain on his way to “discover” what was already known by the people who lived here.

America’s official history does not address the fact that Columbus was an enslaver of Indians or that the result of Spanish and U.S. government policies was genocide. And although “Dances With Wolves” may have achieved a great deal in illuminating the past, it has been less successful in casting a spotlight on the present conditions of native people.

Most adults I speak with continue to refer to “the way they treated Indian people.” It might do well for us as a nation, either individually or in a collective spirit, to travel to South Dakota as my Italian cousin did to understand that the past resembles the present.

On the Pine Ridge reservation, my cousin stayed with the family of a 19-year-old boy. Nearly 20 people lived in a house with no running water, indoor bathroom or electricity. The South Dakota winds billowed through sheets of plastic covering holes in the walls where windows should be. Alberto discovered that the poverty on the Pine Ridge reservation--exacerbated by extremely high unemployment and extensive substance abuse--is comparable to anything he has seen in his travels in parts of the Third World.

Every time we raise a tomahawk in a game or belt out a “war cry” and “scream like Indians,” we further marginalize and dehumanize a people whose suffering is already immense. As an African American, the brutal portrayal of American Indians is all the more painful in view of our own sad history in this country.

As a nation we should put away the tomahawks and the Indian headgear, and change the names of our sports teams to reflect the game, rather than the continued demonization and ridicule of native people. We should think carefully about the negative images of Indians in late-night reruns and be equally concerned that new movies accurately reflect the true nature of the Native American experience.

Indian people are right to protest the painful stereotypes perpetuated by non-Indians at baseball games and throughout society. To question these negative images is not, as some detractors might argue, a matter of “political correctness.” Rather, it is only by searching for the reality of current and past Indian history that we can truly discover America, as my Italian cousin has.