Native cultures, imported myths

Writing of his travels in the Southwest in 1924, D.H. Lawrence counted 800 cars in a parking lot on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, where some 3,000 tourists had gathered to see a performance of the famous Snake Dance. Most of them managed to convince themselves that they were witnessing something authentic and sacred. For Lawrence, however, the spectacle was something wholly debased.

“And what had we come to see, all of us? Men with snakes in their mouths, like a circus?” wrote Lawrence in a queasy blend of irony and sarcasm. “Oh, the wild west is lots of fun: The Land of Enchantment. Like being right inside the circus-ring!”

Lawrence’s scornful words may be off-putting to the modern reader, but historian Martin Padget allows us to see why Lawrence came to the conclusion that “Euro-Americans really had turned ceremonial practices into cheap theater.” In “Indian Country,” Padget’s study of the “cultural geography” of the American Southwest, he shows exactly how Native American folkways were mythified and commercialized, starting with the first contact between latter-day and Native Americans and continuing through the early 20th century.

Padget seeks to deconstruct what he calls “a distinctive southwestern iconography,” the stuff of travel posters and tourist souvenirs, armchair-adventure books and romantic novels, movie and TV westerns, all of it produced by “Euro-Americans” to capture (or, more often, fabricate) the original Southwest wilderness experience. To illustrate the process, he offers a portfolio of photographs and artwork, including an early photograph of Paiute chief Tau-Gu and John Wesley Powell -- Powell is mounted on a horse and looking down at the chief -- and a painting of a rather wistful Zuni woman on one of the calendars that the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad passed out to promote tourism.

“Indian Country” is primarily a work of scholarship, disciplined and sometimes dense. Padget invites us to re-read -- or, at least, to reconsider -- a whole library of Euro-American texts, ranging from Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s “Two Years Before the Mast” (1840) through Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Ramona” (1884) to the writings of the prolific Charles Fletcher Lummis, who served as the self-appointed maker and purveyor of the California mission myth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“There is a part of America,” wrote Lummis about the Southwest, “of which Americans know as little as they do of inner Africa.”

The process of mythification, as Padget explains, began with the earliest contacts between Euro-Americans and the indigenous people of the Southwest. When Powell wrote about his pioneering excursion down the Colorado River, for example, his journals amounted to an alloy of science and sensation: “Adventure, storytelling, and romance each had their place here,” writes Padget, noting the “constant tension between awestruck wonder at the landscape passed through and the desire to rationalize and make sense of that landscape.”

For Powell, contact with the native dwellers inspired, at once, fascination with their origins and folkways, concern over their exploitation by white settlers and an unsentimental and highly utilitarian solution to the problem: “Nothing then remains but to remove them from the country,” Powell and a colleague concluded, “or let them stay in their present condition, to be finally extinguished by want, loathsome disease, and the dissent consequent upon incessant conflict with white men.”

Padget is both discerning and compassionate in his re-readings of 19th century works, and he comes to the defense of famous mythmakers like Jackson, whose “Ramona” has been savaged by critics as varied as Raymond Chandler (“sentimental slop”) and Mike Davis, who lumps Jackson with other boosters whom he blames for producing “a comprehensive fiction of Southern California as the promised land of a millenarian Anglo-Saxon racial odyssey.”

Thus, although Padget concedes that “Ramona” offered “misguiding stereotypes of both Indians and Mexican Americans,” he insists that it “can be read as a novel that campaigns not only for Indian reform but for more improved interracial relations generally,” while “calling into question, through its impassioned critique of frontier violence, the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny.”

As a scholar rather than an activist -- he is a lecturer in the English department at the University of Wales -- Padget confines himself to assessing what happened, rather than what might have happened, when American civilization rolled over the Native American communities of the Southwest. He acknowledges that “the formerly colonized populations of the region are affirming their right to contest the terms of incorporation imposed on them between the 1840s and 1930s,” but he prefers to look backward rather than forward.

Padget only rarely injects himself into his book, but when he does, he succeeds in making his points rather more sharply than in the more cerebral passages. He notes, for example, that some of his fellow tourists at the Taos Pueblo seem uncomfortable when a guide encourages them to look at the arts and crafts in the gift shop or sample the fry bread and Indian tacos from the food stalls. These high-minded contemporary tourists have come full circle -- they disdain what the Native American community has to offer and yearn to see the now-long-extinct sights that the first explorers saw: “Perhaps, I thought, some visitors would feel more at ease walking through a kind of open-air museum with period displays and actors impersonating ‘authentic’ Indians rather than observing the reality of present-day life.”

That’s the subtext -- and the ultimate irony -- of Padget’s work. The transformation of the “real” West into the stuff of popular culture began at the very moment when the earliest writers, painters and photographers first laid eyes on the people who lived here long before they arrived. And, once started, the process did not stop, and could not be stopped until the reality had been fully replaced by the myths they created. *