How Not to Approach Another Culture...

Native Americans may be our most-loved minority--if loving native Americans means harboring a warm, fuzzy feeling for their spirituality that does not permit them to be encountered as modern, complex people. Not surprisingly, some native Americans feel they are being loved to death. Looking askance at eclectic non-native American wanna-bes who partake of such spiritual practices as sweat lodges and peyote ceremonies, they fear yet one more treasure is being stolen from them: their culture. With native Americans all the rage in certain circles, publishers are issuing a stream of books with native American themes that range from honest efforts to explore modern native American life in all its richness to blatant exploitation.

Into the latter category falls “Indian Time: A Year of Discovery With the Native Americans of the Southwest,” an example of a writer succumbing to the urge to make a quick buck from her encounter. Author Judith Fein seems full of good intentions. She constantly marvels at the generosity of the Pueblo Indian families who invite her to dine with them whenever she shows up for village ceremonies as part of her research for a proposed television series.

A screenwriter and self-described phobic living a hectic and miserable existence in Los Angeles, Fein finds her life transformed during the seven months she spends getting to know New Mexico’snative Americans. She is struck by their warmth, as well as their sense of community and connectedness to nature, so much so that she starts to view herself differently and overcome her fears. She hopes her book will serve as a “bridge” between the dominant culture and the indigenous people of the Southwest. But there is a telling omission. While Fein and her husband fret about taking so much from people of often meager means, they never bother to prepare a dish to contribute to the family meals they so often intrude upon. (She seems blissfully unaware that Pueblo people often feel obligated to extend hospitality to strangers, even when they show up unannounced.) “Indian Time” is, in fact, a chronicle of greediness.

Starry eyed overnative American culture, Fein has an insatiable desire to witness as many Pueblo dances as possible, accumulating encounters with Indians like so many trophies. She asks pointed questions about Pueblo religious customs, ignoring her hosts’ well-founded reluctance to discuss the subject with outsiders and perkily chalking up her rudeness to her irrepressible curiosity. Absorbed in her own drama, Fein happily discloses personal facts about the people she meets, including drinking problems and marital woes. Although she claims her subjects encouraged her to use their names and stories, one wonders whether they really understood that she was writing down everything they said. Would they have agreed knowing that the book is “soon to be a major motion picture,” as the dust jacket advertises? Compiled from a collection of letters Fein wrote to friends and relatives, the book is written in a chatty Dear Diary style that is meant to be engaging, but choppy editing and small factual errors reveal the publisher’s unseemly haste to jump on thenative American book bandwagon. Although advertised as one woman’s “fabulous journey” of discovery among the native cultures of the Southwest, “Indian Time” is really about Fein’s own neediness, a record of how she usednative American culture for her personal course of self-help therapy. It’s poor repayment for the generosity she was shown.

Thankfully, not all books aboutnative Americans are quickie rip-offs. For example, Stephen Trimble’s new work, “The People: Indians of the American Southwest,” reflects nearly a decade of painstaking research that has paid off handsomely. Surveying the nearly 50 tribes and pueblos of Arizona and New Mexico, southern Utah and southwestern Colorado, the book dares to let native Americans speak in their own voices about the challenges they confront.

Whether the subject is economic development or the struggle to define a native American identity in the midst of a dominant culture, Trimble is a respectful and compassionate listener.

In Trimble’s Southwest, nati e Americans aren’t spiritual icons. They are poets, potters, ranchers and politicians, leading ordinary lives in the modern world that happen to be distinguished by a unique sense of identity. Trimble’s graceful photographs of people and places likewise resist the urge to sentimentalize. He writes with a rich consciousness of each tribe’s traditions and culture. Looking deeply into the ongoing interplay between people and their environment, he comprehends how native Americans have adapted and continue to adapt in the name of survival.

Where Fein’s book is primarily about herself, Trimble’s is panoramic in scope, taking in millennia of history and peoples as diverse as the Apaches, the Zunis and the Southern Paiute. Trimble himself is largely transparent in the book, resisting the compulsion to advertise a special relationship with the native Americans he encounters. He chooses instead to let their words say what needs to be said. “The People,” in short, is not about taking. In his introduction, Trimble recalls a Southern Ute educator who told him, “We’ve given you a piece of your lives. You then have the responsibility to give something in return.” He acknowledges this, and writes that his book is intended as a gift (not insignificantly, a portion of its royalties are to be donated to the Native American Rights Fund and other organizations). In the end, Trimble demonstrates that it is perfectly possible to write aboutnative American life in a way that contributes to real understanding without further exploiting people who fear their cultural identity is endangered. The key lies in cultivating an awareness of one’s motives.