NATIVE AMERICANS : When the Blood Speaks

The record of interaction between Native Americans and the rest of America over the past century and a half mostly reflects a pattern of one-way communication.

The dominant culture saw Native Americans as inferior from the outset: the only charitable thing was to Christianize them, educate them and assimilate them. They were not often listened to.

That mind-set began to change in the late 19th Century, when some realized much of value in Native American culture was disappearing. Men like Frank Hamilton Cushing and Edward Curtis set about interviewing and cataloguing, but these preservationists now saw Native Americans as representative “types”--the last, grieving members of a dying way of life.

Both attitudes still linger, but a new line of communication has opened as native writers, artists and photographers have begun to articulate what it means to be Native American in 20th-Century America. It is no longer up to the dominant culture to define for Native Americans who they are or what they must believe.

SACRED ENCOUNTERS: Father De Smet and the Indians of the Rocky Mountain West, tells the story of a Belgian Jesuit who led a well-meaning but ultimately futile missionary effort among the Native Americans of western Montana and northern Idaho.

Setting out across the Great Plains from St. Louis in 1841, Pierre-Jean De Smet tried to teach the Salish (Flathead), Coeur d’Alene, Pend Oreille, Colville, Kootenai and Blackfeet tribes how to farm, pray and play European band music.

Ironically, De Smet and his band of Jesuits had been invited to live among the Salish because of a prophecy that white men in black robes would bring the tribe good fortune. But what the visitors brought instead was European concepts of sin and hell and an authoritarian religious hierarchy that were at odds with native spirituality.

The missions were closed by 1850, and within a few decades the region was overrun by miners, settlers and soldiers. The Native Americans were moved off their traditional ranges onto reservations, where they fought to retain their cultural identity.

A catalogue for a museum exhibit of the same name, “Sacred Encounters” is illustrated with drawings by Father Nicholas Point, one of De Smet’s colleagues, as well as archival photographs and pictures of Native American clothing and other articles collected by De Smet himself. Point’s drawings, in particular, depict happy people still relatively untouched by European culture. Curator Jacqueline Peterson’s historical narrative could easily have been more extensive, but the overall package is informative and absorbing.

Interestingly, among the beautifully reproduced sepia tone prints in NATIVE NATIONS: First Americans as Seen by Edward S. Curtis, is a photograph of a smiling Salish boy in a feathered headdress titled, “Flathead Childhood, 1910.” He could be the grandchild or great-grandchild of one of De Smet’s converts. Many of the plates in “Native Nations” have been reproduced elsewhere: Navajos passing through the towering rock formations of Canyon de Chelly; women drawing water from the old well at Acoma Pueblo; Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. Taken in the early years of this century soon after the closing of the frontier, they represent Curtis’s conscious desire to preserve vestiges of what he thought to be a “vanishing race.” Curtis devoted more than 30 years of his life to “The North American Indian,” a 20-volume record of photographs and ethnographic information. With little formal training, he devised his own information-gathering methods and used the most advanced technology of his time to make 10,000 Edison wax cylinder recordings of Native American language and music.

After completing the series in 1930, Curtis and his work lapsed into obscurity. But since being “rediscovered” in the 1970s, Curtis’s bittersweet images have been so widely reproduced that today they “define” Native Americas for many people. But Curtis’s legacy is mixed, at best. Scholars have taken him to task for romanticizing his subjects, as well as for staging them and sometimes supplying them with inauthentic props. In this view, whatever the artistic merit of Curtis’s photographs, they are flawed as a documentary record.

Unfortunately, “Native Nations” scarcely addresses this controversy. Christopher Cardozo makes no mention of it in his editor’s note, while writer George P. Horse Capture, a member of the Gros Ventre tribe, refers to it only obliquely in his foreword. Horse Capture, who writes movingly of the moment he encountered his great-grandfather in a Curtis photograph, declares, “Real Indian people are extremely grateful to see what their ancestors looked like or what they did and we know they are not stereotypes. No one staged the people. And we see them at their classic finest.”

Elsewhere, Horse Capture makes an additional point. For all of Curtis’s skill as a photographer, what makes his portraits haunting is the beauty and integrity of his subjects.

Curtis, talented as he was, did not contribute to the exhaustion of Red Cloud, the strength of Chief Joseph, the courage of Bear’s Belly, nor the quiet dignity of Horse Capture, he writes. All he could do was highlight and document them on film. But we are grateful for his record.

Native American writers and artists meanwhile have begun to reach a mass audience, for the first time creating the possibility for a real dialogue with the dominant culture.

In A CIRCLE OF NATIONS: Voice and Visions of American Indians, a diverse group of writers and photographers explore the heart of contemporary Indian life. Their observations are sometimes bitter, sometimes despairing, but never far removed from the idea that to realize one’s Indian identity is to be grounded.

Here is poet Joy Harjo describing her student days at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe during the 1960s: “I marked myself once with a knife. I was disappearing into the adolescent sea of rage and destruction, but the mark of pain assured me of my own reality. The cut could speak. It had a voice that cried out when I could not make a sound in my defense. I knew that blood could talk. It was full of the memories that call us human, that link us with stars as well as the Earth.”

And journalist Debra Calling Thunder celebrates the sheer, lyrical beauty of language when she writes: “The air is crowded with words--words that bind us to eternity, that carry the stories and dreams which are gifts from generations unseen, the songs of victory and mourning which compel us to seek tomorrow.”

The photography, too, is a revelation, as in Owen Seumptewa’s black-and-white portrait of an elderly Hopi woman sitting by her wood stove, her entire life present in that single moment.

This book presents a challenge: now that the dominant culture has largely quit telling Native Americans who they should be, is it ready to hear Native Americans themselves tell who they are?

*

SACRED ENCOUNTERS: Father DeSmet and the Indians of the Rocky Mountain West, by Jacqueline Peterson with Laura Peers (The University of Oklahoma Press: $49.95, cloth; $24.95, paper; 194 pp.; 200 color illustrations, 20 black-and-white photographs)

NATIVE NATIONS: First Americans as Seen by Edward S. Curtis, edited by Christopher Cardozo, foreword by George P. Horse Capture (Bullfinch Press/Little, Brown & Co.: $60; 160 pp.; 110 quadra-tone plates

A CIRCLE OF NATIONS: Voices and Visions of American Indians North American Native Writers and Photographers, foreword by Leslie Marmon Silko, introduction by Michael Dorris, edited by John Gattuso (Beyond Words Publishing Inc., Hillsboro, Ore: $39.95; 128 pp.; color and black-and-white photographs)