Blood Will Tell, Roots Will Show

I'm reading a fascinating book by the anthropologist Circe Sturm, Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-first Century (Santa Fe: School For Advanced Research Press, 2010).  It's about controversies over who is and isn't Cherokee, mainly involving the federally recognized tribes in Oklahoma and North Carolina on one hand, and other tribes elsewhere, some of which are state-recognized and some of which are self-recognized.  These latter, who often claim Indian ancestry but can't always document it, are generally considered "wannabes" by federally recognized (or "citizen") Cherokees, and Sturm spends some time explaining the complicated categories involved.  She doesn't pretend to resolve any issues; what she seeks to do, and does very well, is talk to people on all sides, trying (in words she quotes from Clifford Geertz) to "figure out what the devil they think they are up to" (14).  She's not afraid to point out the contradictions and inconsistencies in everybody's positions, and to recognize how inextricable they are - not just due to bad faith, though they are often that as well.  I was deeply gratified, for example, when she criticized one Cherokee informant's gleeful account (pages 113-114) of his viciously misogynist takedown of a white woman who'd claimed to be a descendant of "a Cherokee princess."  To do this takes some guts, and my respect for Sturm went way up when I read that passage.

Becoming Indian is relevant not just to Native American cultural conflicts, but to most confusions and squabbles over "identity," drawing boundaries and gatekeeping.  I was struck by one citizen Cherokee of the Eastern Band's take on the role of "blood" and upbringing in the debate:

Consider, for example, what [Robert] Thompson said about interracial adoption: “Let’s just say I found this little white baby, and I fell in love with this little white baby and raised him as my child, and I spoke to him in Indian, and I told him the stories, and he knew my whole family history.  He played with his so-called pseudo-cousins.  When he’s all grown up, don’t tell me he’s not a Cherokee” (October 22, 2003) [144].

In an endnote, Sturm remarks:

In this hypothetical example of interracial adoption, the baby who becomes Cherokee through a family’s love and devotion begins life as white, not black or some other explicitly marked identity, such as Hispanic or Asian.  Not surprisingly, white seems to operate as the default normative category, second only to Cherokee [228 note 14].

But something occurred to me.  "Interracial" adoption is a vexed issue in many contexts, and much of the controversy involves the notion that a baby has not just an explicitly marked identity but an explicitly marked essence.  A baby is already "Hispanic or Asian" or "white" or Indian by "blood," and if it's raised outside of its ancestral culture, it will feel alienated and displaced as it grows up.  This is a recurrent theme in Becoming Indian, after all: many of the wannabes, no matter how little Cherokee ancestry they had, felt lost in white culture; and felt that their "blood" called them "home." The citizen Cherokees, no matter how dismissive they were of wannabes and "Thindians," tended to agree that if these unfortunates did have Cherokee blood, they would certainly have felt that something was wrong.  In another context, Sturm tells how, when confronted by some very white-looking Cherokee claimants at a public event, many in the audience clucked, "Well, if you've got the blood, it'll call you home" (150).

From this standpoint, wouldn't it be wrong for Robert Thompson to raise a little white baby in a Cherokee environment?  Surely when he grew up, his blood would call him back to his real people, no matter how hard Thompson tried to assimilate him.  Wouldn't that be just as wrong as taking an Indian baby and raising it white?  I don't think so, because of my white, European, postmodernist, homosexual values, and Thompson seems to be less obsessed with blood than most of the Cherokee Sturm talked to, but the idea of blood as an almost sentient racial essence runs through most of the debate about Indianness in this book, among both the wannabes and the citizens.  But so does culture: it's not enough to have the blood, you have to walk the walk and talk the talk.  Part of Sturm's achievement is that she bears down very hard on the contradictions.  (Does this remind anyone else of the debates over whether Barack Obama, who had a black father but was mainly raised by his white grandparents, was "really" black or African-American, because he wasn't a descendant of slaves and hadn't grown up in a black community?)

Yet I do have a bone to pick with Sturm.  Early in Becoming Indian she writes:

Although the term “queer” is often [!] used simply to denote same-sex desire and sexuality whether lesbian, gay, or bisexual, in this instance I borrow Eve Sedgwick’s (1993:8) definition: “The open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.” If we apply this definition to the case of racial shifters and examine the way in which they narrate and construct their own Cherokee identities, then we can see how their very refusal of normative definitions of Cherokeeness might be considered queer.

I decided to look at the context of Sedgwick's "definition," which Sturm quotes from Tendencies (Duke, 1993).  First I noticed that what Sturm quotes is "one of the things 'queer' can refer to" (Tendencies, 8); there are a couple more.  Then I noticed that Sedgwick referred to "the constituent elements of anyone's gender," etc.  Which means, for everybody, pretty much all the time: Everybody's queer, including me and thee.  I believe Sedgwick was aware of this. I'm not sure any human category signifies monolithically: the differences within a category are almost always more numerous and more significant than the average differences between categories.  Having invoked queerness, Sturm never mentions it again, and I think that's just as well.  Some of the wannabes / race shifters refuse normative definitions of Cherokeeness; others want their definitions to be normative, even though they may be more inclusive than those of citizen Cherokees.  The final question might be where those normative definitions (of Cherokeeness, or of any human group) come from.  As Sturm shows, the citizen Cherokees know that their definitions don't really have a firm indigenous foundation, especially insofar as they include being recognized by the white Federal government.  The blood quantum was originally imposed by the whites, too.  As for walking the walk and talking the talk, the Ojebwe/Dakota scholar Scott Richard Lyons wrote in his brilliant X-Marks (Minnesota, 2010):

That is precisely the “problematic” part of the peoplehood paradigm.  If you do not conform to the model – land, religion, language,and sacred history , ceremonial cycle, and so on -- if you happen to live away from your homeland, speak English, practice Christianity, or know more songs by the Dave Matthews Band than by the ancestors, you effectively “cease to exist” as one of the People [139].

According to Sturm, some Indian scholars are now trying to resolve this conundrum by describing "Cherokee identity politics as 'a battle over sovereignty'" (181). The Cherokee anthropologist Michael Lambert, whose discussion of sovereignty she quotes, argues that "A sovereign people [does] not have to meet any cultural expectations" (ibid.).  I think that's a good point, but I wonder how many Cherokee will agree with him.

Who Are We, Really?

"I Just Bought Guilt & Paid Less Than You Are Going To"

 Robo-ad at Amazon.com

Time flies, doesn't it?  The release of part of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on torture in December set off a wave of right-wing tantrums not unlike what we just saw in response to President Obama's sermon at the National Prayer Breakfast.  (We never did anything like that, but we had no choice, and we enjoyed it, so there!)  I started writing a post in December inspired by an interesting article at Salon about the history of torture in the US, by one Charles Davis, which made some good points and still worth reading two whole months later.

In a nation-state founded by settler-colonial Protestants, the argument is familiar – it’s what’s deep down inside that gets one up into heaven, not the good or genocidal nature of what one does down here on Earth – and as with any half-decent lie, it’s relatable: as fallible human beings, we’d all rather like to believe that we’re not as bad as we are but as good as we say we would like to be.

As a rhetorical ploy, it’s understandable: Saying the United States has always been garbage is not going to be terribly popular in a nation that still fondly refers to a group of sadistic slave-owners as its “founding fathers” — so politicians savvy enough to know that openly embracing torture is not a good look for the world’s leading state-sponsor of holier-than-thou rhetoric, appeal to a history and set of values that never was and never were in practice, as a way to give political cover to their middling, public relations-minded critiques of the national-security state’s least defensible excesses. It’s entirely false, this narrative of extreme goodness marked by occasional self-correcting imperfection, but it satisfies our national ego to think the American phoenix rises from a store of ethically traded gold, not a pile of rotting trash.

Good stuff, but something bothered me about it.  I soon realized that Davis was engaged in what I might call inverted American exceptionalism.  That's not to deny the facts Davis marshals in his indictment, only to say that I had the feeling he was wallowing in them like a Puritan preacher detailing the rot in his congregation's souls and the eternal punishment that awaits them.  Since most Americans prefer to ignore the horrific aspects of our history, they do need to be pointed out, dwelt on, often.  But I kept remembering something I read in a history of the American Indians, a simple statement I haven't been able to find again.  It went something like this: The Indians were not less civilized than the European invaders -- but that's not saying much.

I also thought of this, from Walter Kaufmann's Without Guilt and Justice (Wyden, 1973, p. 49):

In Paul W. Tappan's massive standard text on Crime, Justice and Correction, for example, all ten references to Freud (in seven hundred fifty pages) concern the light he shed on criminals. But Freud ... also turned a searchlight on respectable society, illuminating the unedifying motives that come to the fore in punishment. Not only is the criminal a human being like you, but you, alas, are like the criminal.

Now, let me repeat: none of this excuses the crimes and atrocities committed by the European invaders of the Americas and their heirs.  Davis is quite correct to rub his readers' noses in the history, to show the yawning gap between the pretensions of Christian civilization and its grubby, shameful reality.  It's not at all unfair to say, as Davis does, that "the United States has always been garbage."  I just want to say, and stress no less firmly, that by Davis's standards so was every non-Christian civilization.  Invasion, massacre, torture, slavery have been business as usual through most of human history, and we must never forget it.

After pondering Davis's article I found my copy of Will Roscoe's The Zuni Man-Woman (New Mexico, 1991), which includes a sobering account of Zuni society at the end of the 19th century.  Roscoe worked closely with Zuni elders and other influential people in his research, and his work is not anti-Indian; indeed, he engages in some of the same sort of apologetics used by champions of white Christian culture.

In 1882, the Zuni delegation touring the East with Cushing made a side trip to Salem, Massachusetts.  Told about the seventeenth-century persecution of witches at Salem, the Zunis became excited.  At a public reception, the bow priest Kiasi “thanked the good people of Salem for the service they had done the world,” and he gave them some advice should witchcraft trouble them again.  “’Be the witches or wizards your dearest relations or friends, consider not your own hearts,’ said he, ‘but remember your duty and spare them not, put them to death!’”  Because the Americans had rid themselves of witches, the Zunis decided, they had become prosperous and strong.  Belief in witchcraft represents a darker side of Zuni life, one that contradicts the stereotype of Pueblo Indians as uniformly even tempered.  While the Zunis had solved various social problems creatively and humanely, theirs was not a perfect society.  Some Zunis, like Nick Dumaka, grew up at odds with themselves, their families, and the community, unable to conform to Zuni ideals and social rules.  As [Ruth] Benedict noted, “Zuñi’s only reaction to such personalities is to brand them as witches.”

Because the Zunis did not make the distinction, typical of European law, between behavior and intent, the wish to do harm was as bad as doing harm, psychic violence the same as physical violence.  [Well, we’re catching up with them these days; also with Jesus]  Murder, assault, theft, arson, and other crimes were all tried as forms of witchcraft.  However, because the Zunis considered anger, resentment, bitterness, and envy as precursors of witchcraft, sanctions were often applied before overt acts of aggression occurred.  Suspected witches were subject to avoidance and criticism [isn’t that also a sign of anger, resentment, bitterness and envy in the accusers?], and their actions were closely watched.  This is why Zuni appears to have had so little crime.  [Because criminal impulses could be acted out by accusing others of witchcraft!] ...

Prosecution of witches was the responsibility of the bow priests. who tried “to bring them to wisdom.” They seized the suspect at night and took him or her to their chambers.  Witnesses both for and against the suspect, and the suspect himself, could speak.  If the suspect did not confess, however, he was painfully suspended by his thumbs or with his arms tied behind his back.  Hanging, with occasional respite, continued for a day.  Suspects might also be hung in the large plaza, from a beam protruding from the old mission.  If the suspect still remained silent after this, he was taken to the bow priests’ chamber once again, “whence he never comes forth alive.” Witches were not always executed, however.  If the witch confessed, especially with an elaborate story of occult powers, he or she might be released, usually to live in exile [101-103].

Because we have very little reliable information about pre-contact American Indian culture, we can't say whether Zunis dealt with witchcraft in this way before the White Man came.  The method of torture used, for example, is familiar from European practice, and indeed was used to interrogate suspected witches in Salem, Massachusetts.  It's not rocket science, though, and was probably reinvented by various cultures bent on inflicting pain for its own sake.

Torture was used by other Indian societies, and it won't do to engage in apologetics like "The Christians in Europe tortured to belittle and to demean and to punish. The Huron and the Iroquois tortured each other to honour and possess the power of the enemy."  Let me reiterate that I don't bring this up to justify the European invasion of this hemisphere and its dispossession and slaughter of the Americas' original inhabitants.  If the Islamic State is a "death cult," as President Obama said at the National Prayer Breakfast, so is the United State of America.  But to return to Charles Davis, if the US is a "nation of torturers," so were the nations it replaced.  If the US has always been garbage, so were the First Nations.

Before Columbus, there was horrific violence in countries all over the world, too much to list here; I'd like to think that most of us have heard of it, even if we don't think of it much and tend to forget it when possible.  Off the top of my head, I think of the Roman practice of crucifixion, which they picked up from other sources.  Think of roads lined with crosses by the hundreds or thousands, each one with a human body on it, with carrion birds pecking at its tenant's eyes.  It's perfectly correct to denounce Christian violence against "pagans," but not if we forget the violence that "pagans" perpetrated against each other.  Much of human history is written in human blood, human cries of agony, in human bodies stretched out in torment. 

It's difficult to find a balance for denunciation of such horrors.  I follow Martin Luther King Jr. and Noam Chomsky, among others, in believing that people should first condemn the crimes of their own country before engaging in facile condemnation of the crimes of others.  I know I'm not alone in saying that I don't want to see America conquered:

-- not that America is in any danger of being conquered: the US has not fought a war of self-defense in my lifetime. But I don’t want to see any country conquered. People like [Joanne] Barkan get so furious at any mention of American malfeasance because they’ll gladly sic the dogs of war on any other country that behaved as the US has behaved, that killed a tenth as many people as the US has killed, that supported a tenth as many dictators as the US has supported, that harbors the kinds of terrorists the US harbors – so it is they who want to see the US attacked and humbled, if they had any consistency of principle. Those of us who can recognize the faults of our country, by contrast, simply want it to stop hurting people so wantonly.

But where do we go from that point?  What does Davis think is the proper way to deal with human "garbage"?  He concludes:

Torture and total war are not the work of a few bad people, but the product of a system that from its inception treated human beings as property and the right to property as more important than the rights of women and men – it’s who we are, and if we want the violence wrought by our system to end, we must honestly address the systemic cause. 

It is "who we are," but it's also who "they" are.  Davis's use of the singular ("a system") is misleading: there are multiple systems that have perpetrated violence and oppression, and the US is only one of those systems' heirs.  If we're all "garbage," as Davis's logic would require us to conclude, then what?  I think that recognition is a good starting point.  American exceptionalism, whether as the shining city on a hill or as an enormous, stinking mountain of garbage, is not going to get us anywhere.

The Ancient Way of the Feminist

While trying to read Twilight of the Elites is no fun, I'm enjoying Scott Richard Lyons's X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).  Lyons, who is Ojebwe/Dakota, is assistant professor of English at Syracuse University.  Though his thinking is informed by postmodernism among other approaches, he writes accessibly, and he actually uses postmodernism.  Ever since I began reading such writers -- including some prominent ones -- in the eighties, I've noticed that many of them announce their postmodern deconstructive allegiances in their theoretical introductions, but when they get down to business they fall right back into older, simpler modes. Lyons actually works on the assumption that identities are unstable, for example, and that concepts like sovereignty "have to be claimed in order to contest or revise them (136).  People who are afraid that rejecting foundations or absolutes means you can't contest or revise standards might want to read Lyons and see how it's done.

But even better, I enjoy Lyons because he generally agrees with me.  This is a pleasure I first encountered when I was researching the New Testament and early Christianity thirty years ago: after wading through hundreds of pages by scholars whose conclusions (as far as I could tell) didn't follow from their evidence or arguments, I'd come upon a scholar who criticized those conclusions for the same faults I saw, and who at least gestured toward possibilities I'd seen, but which were ruled invalid out of hand by most scholars.  Of course this didn't necessarily mean that I, or they, were right.  What it meant was that a person could be a trained professional and reach the same conclusions I did.  It could even indicate that some of the standard conclusions, which most scholars seemed to consider certain, were at least debatable.  The reason they weren't debated had more to do with the faith commitments of the scholars involved -- until recently most professional Bible scholars were believers, and often clergy -- than with the strengths or weaknesses of the arguments.  I'm willing to be the only person who holds a certain position if necessary, but I'm enough of a social animal to take comfort from knowing that there are other people who hold it too.

Analogously, then, I take heart from Lyons's differences with some of his fellow Indians, including academics.  He disagrees with Craig Womack, for example, in much the same terms I do, though I don't assume that Lyons would agree with all of my criticisms.  So my disagreements with Womack can't be explained away as the result of my not being Indian, since Lyons, who is Indian, has similar disagreements.  Again: I might still be wrong; so might Lyons.  But we can't be dismissed with ad hominems; our arguments must be dealt with on their merits.

Lyons also has some useful anecdotes:

I am reminded now of several arguments I had as an instructor at Leech Lake Tribal College with culture cops who wanted to shut down our science programs because they taught evolution. "Nothing in our oral traditions says that we came down from trees." Science was considered suspect because its origins lay outside an Ojibwe epistemology; because the latter was deemed suspect and pure, it had to be protected from contamination. My side eventually won the day, though not (as one might expect) through our claim that we needed to teach science to produce more local doctors and nurses. It was only after we successfully argued that our clan origin story could be read as a kind of proto-evolutionary theory that the culture cops backed off [96].

I'd been wondering what Indian traditionalists (or Indian Christians, for that matter) think about Darwin. "Culture cops" are cultural purists: "enthusiastic reclaimers of culture, often young, male, and educated, frequently with urban roots, who straddle a fine line between support and condemnation in the name of cultural revival" (76).  Note "educated": as Lyons says later, they "try to resist Western modernity and the 'white world' by employing discourses that are themselves rather Western, modern, and 'white' in character' (96).

Lyons distinguishes between culture cops and elders, who he says tend to be much less rigid.  He also compares culture cops to "fundamentalists," which is ironic because what is fundamentalist in this story is reinterpreting the clan origin story to reconcile it with evolutionary theory. Fundamentalists don't take sacred texts literally, as is often said: they consider them inerrant, free from error. To keep error out, you need a lot of very non-literal interpretation.

In a discussion of Native American nationalism, Lyons discusses the First Nations Canadian scholar Taiaiake Alfred, whose three books on reviving Native culture have been very influential.  Here's part of what Lyons (who largely approves of Alfred's work) has to say. 

First those negative legacies [of colonialism] must be transcended: "People must be made whole and strong and real again before they can embark on a larger struggle" ... This is not really an individual pursuit so much as a community project of "warriors" empowering each other.  Alfred wants to witness "one-to-one mentoring, face-to-face interaction, and small-group dialogue to effect the regeneration of our minds, bodies, and spirits.  This is the ancient way of the warrior" ... Of course, this was also the ancient way of second-wave feminists, who called it "consciousness raising," but there are traditional Indian equivalents to what he describes: talking circles, sweat lodges, vision quests, and other such occasions for dialogue and introspection ... [137]

"Warriors."  Sigh.  Warriors aren't an ideal for any culture: they're parasites who run a protection racket.  Pay me, give me your daughters and the best food, and I'll protect you from the guys like me in the next town. (Just between you and me, I feel much more kinship with them than I do with you civilians.)  I wonder what place Alfred has in his regenerated Native societies, not just for women, but for non-warrior men.  No, we can't all be warriors, any more than we can all be Superbowl champs: the guy at the top of the pyramid is held up by everybody under him. Will women be allowed into the talking circles, the sweat lodges, the vision quests, or will they be expected to chew the hides, cook the meals, and nurse the wounded?  I don't think many of today's Native women will go along with that, any more than their distant foremothers would have.

Lyons also points out the "chicken-or-egg dilemma" in Alfred's prescription: "we could just as well argue that strong sovereign nations would produce cultural revitalization" 138), an argument with which I'm in sympathy.  So, as you can see, I'm enjoying myself greatly as I read X-Marks.  But it's not just an echo chamber in which I get my own pet ideas bouncing back endowed with academic authority: Lyons also traces out difficulties in political concepts like "culture," "nation," and "race," among others, going places I haven't gone.  I'm learning as well as having my prejudices stroked.  If I weren't, I wouldn't enjoy the book as much.

The Great American Indian Berdache

From queer, Stewart Van Cleve went on to take on the berdache.  I was mildly surprised to see him give the word even as much coverage as he does, since I thought it was generally agreed to be obsolete, having been replaced by "Two Spirit" or by the actual indigenous terms.  "Two Spirit" was invented in 1990 as a blanket term for what, for now, I'll call gay Indians.  It invites the same objections as "gay," since the people who invented it were already affected by, and reacting to, American gay culture and activism, so it's historically specific (late twentieth-century North America) and culturally overreaching (subsuming the vast variety of pre-Columbian peoples under one rubric).  Following Will Roscoe, Van Cleve reports that two spirit is an English translation of "the Anishinaabe/Objibwe term niish mantoag."  That's one linguistic and cultural strand out of many.  If it's inappropriate to use homosexual to refer even to pre-1870 Europeans, as fundamentalist Foucauldians insist, then it's inappropriate to apply two spirit to Native Americans before 1990.  (I've even encountered some non-indigenous gay Foucauldians who claimed that two-spirit was equivalent to gay, which it certainly is not.  Some white New Agey gays have tried to appropriate two-spirit for their own use as well.)  The problem could be avoided by loosening the strictures of scholarly terminological determinism, but the field is too attached to that limitation in principle, though not in practice, to do so.

Bardache was the word applied by early French explorers to some "native" individuals they encountered, mostly male, who adopted (or were assigned) feminine dress, mannerisms, and work assignments.  They also took male sexual partners.  I'm not absolutely certain about this yet, but it appears that "berdaches" did not copulate with other "berdaches": the trade/queer divide applied, as in later American and other cultures.

It's not clear why the French thought that berdache was the right word for these men.  Its history has been traced to the Arabic (or Persian?) bardaj, "slave."  Supposedly it eventually came to refer to a "catamite," from a Latinized form of Ganymede, the beautiful boy who was raptured by Zeus to serve as his, erm, cupbearer: in practice it meant the "passive" partner in a male homosexual relation, and that is why the (evidently classically-educated) French trappers applied it to the effeminate Indians they encountered, because that was what they were.  But here's something odd, and an indicator for future research on my part: it just occurred to me to look up berdache and bardache in an online French-language dictionary and encyclopedia.  The bucket came up dry, with no references, historical or contemporary, for either word.  Van Cleve, however, claims that berdaj was "a Persian word for 'intimate male friend'" (17), which I have never heard before and can't find attested elsewhere.

The first thing to remember is that an etymology doesn't tell you the meaning of a word, it only tells you its history.  Words do funny things over time; they may reverse meanings or take on other seemingly unrelated ones.  Eventually "Western" anthropologists adopted and adapted berdache to mean specifically Native North American males who took on feminine dress and work assignments.  (By "specifically" I mean that if a similar role occurred in other societies -- South or Southeast Asia, say -- anthropologists would not call them berdaches but something else, hijra or katoey or bakla perhaps.  So, while the term's origin is less than felicitous, it no longer means or connotes "catamite," especially when the anthropologist is gay or lesbian, and it was the best word available to the profession before two-spirit was invented.  I should think that the fiercest defenders of indigenous intellectual property wouldn't want non-indigenous anthropologists to use two-spirit anyway.

The role of the berdache in Land of 10,000 Loves relates to a famous painting by George Catlin, "Dance to the Berdache":

Like many Euro-Americans who encountered sexual practices they disapproved of, Catlin was repulsed by the ceremony and its focus.  According to Van Cleve, a late 18th-century fur trader named Alexander Henry said that "this creature, called Ozaw-wen-dib, was now near fifty years old and had lived with many husbands" (16).   Participants in the dance depicted in the painting were Ozaw-wen-dib's present and former "husbands" who "voluntarily got up to dance."  There are over a dozen of them in the painting; it would seem that by modern Homo-American standards, the indigenous term A-go-kwa should be translated "slut," a Homo-American term which means "someone who's getting more than you are."

But Van Cleve overlooks something important.  By his criteria, and according to the standard Anglo-American scholarly consensus, two-spirit people were not queer in their own societies.  Far from violating indigenous gender or sexual norms, they occupied a more or less comfortable niche; there was a place for them -- an honored place, according to the current consensus.  If they represented "an alternative to the male-female gender dichotomy," it was an alternative that their societies had provided for them as part of their gender systems.  They did not call the assumptions of their social orders into question, they accepted them.  (Some of us feel the same way about well-known analogues of the two-spirit in our own culture; I wish I could remember who it was who called drag queens the loyal opposition to our gender norms.)

Needless to say, I'm skeptical about the scholarly consensus on the two-spirit; to me it comes suspiciously close to romanticizing the Noble Savage who rejected simplistic binaries and intolerance of those who were different.  But I still have a lot to learn before I can confirm or reject my suspicions.  As I say, it's a subject for ongoing and future research.

(The title of the post is culturally appropriated from Sherman Alexie's poem "How to Write the Great American Indian Novel."  Thanks, Mr. Alexie.)

The Intelligent White Person's Guide to First Nations Sexuality

I've begun reading Me Sexy: An Exploration of Native Sex and Sexuality (Douglas & McIntyre, 2008), edited by Drew Hayden Taylor, and I have a question about the opening paragraph of the Introduction:

When I told people I was thinking about putting together a book about the world of Native sexuality, the two comments I got back most often were: (1) "That will be a short book" and (2) "Isn't that a contradiction in terms?"  Usually these comments were said with a knowing smile, but I knew there was a grain of social belief buried deep within.  And I thought, "If only they knew..." [1]

Okay, two questions, actually.  One: who are the "people" who made these comments?  Were they "Natives", or were they "whites"?  I think it makes a difference in how to take their comments, since they could be taken as self-mocking humor in the former case.  Two: I'm going to assume that they were white (or "Last Nations," as they're known in Canada), since the book as a whole is directed at a non-Indian audience, a sort of guided tour whose point is that we whites are the ones who are hung up about sex because of our Western binaries and our Christian culture, while Natives are closer to nature and in touch with their bodies and not uptight about sex, but also their sexuality is infused with the spiritual and the Sacred.  This stance puts the book into a double bind, since such stereotypes are also a standard part of white propaganda about non-whites... But I digress.  My second question is: Are people really that clueless, to think that any group of people doesn't have a lot to say about sexuality?  Oh hell, I know they are.

So Me Sexy, which I'm about two-thirds of the way through as I write this, is probably marginally more self-aware than a live sex show for tourists in 1950s Trujillo-era Havana, since the discussion of sexuality in arty and academic sectors of North American Anglophone society has come some little distance in the past sixty years.  The writers included come mostly from those arty and academic sectors, after all, so their discourse is mostly ironic and knowing, and it's also self-conscious and didactic, to let the reader know that the sexy talk is just a come-on for the chalk talk that is to follow, which is for our own good.  But then it's also reminiscent of the medical/social framework that pornography used to use as a defense against prosecution: this is not just a dirty book but a serious educational exploration of problems of sexual adjustment in our society today.  (As I recall, even as late as the early 70s, Deep Throat began with a disclaimer to advise the audience that it was really about an ordinary woman's quest to achieve a healthy sexual adjustment.)  The subtitle of the book underscores the ambiguity, which I'd like to think is intentionally ironic: An Exploration of Native Sex and Sexuality -- so our handsome, hawk-eyed (or proud, beautiful, raven-haired) Native guide and interpreter will lead us into an uncharted wilderness of the human heart and naughty bits.

I checked out Me Sexy after seeing it cited and recommended in several recent books I've read lately by Native American scholars, and I have to say that what bothers me most about it is how Western it is.  I'm not really surprised, since as I say it's clearly written and compiled with a white readership in mind.  The editor remarks that after "a vice-chief from the Assembly of First Nations" asked him, "Have you ever thought about writing about something important, like self-government?" (1) instead of "the dominant culture's perception of Native sexuality", he asked ten people at a powwow "which they would be more interested in reading or thought was more relevant to their lives: an essay on self-government or an essay on Native sexuality.  I don't think I have to tell you which answer I got" (2).  I think that if I were Indian, I'd be interested but disappointed in the writings gathered here, since they were written for the education and titillation of whites, rather than mine.  I dare to say so, though I'm not Indian, because I've seen analogous works "about" gay life but made for a straight audience, such as Philadelphia.  The trouble with such works is that even the intended audience shouldn't trust them, because they're produced with an eye on public relations and Our Image, which is bound to distort the content and the message, so that the target audience believes it has learned more, and come closer to the subject people, than in fact it has.  Does that correct the dominant culture's perception, or reinforce it?

Now, I don't mean that Indians are required to educate, let alone titillate me with the inside dish on their sex lives.  But I do think that any PR exercise such as this has a corrupting effect on the producers as well as on the intended audience, and I speak as one who has been observing and debating this question for decades in my own community.  PR productions by gay people for straight audiences certainly corrupt: the producers and spokespeople may even begin to believe that real Homo-Americans are monogamous, clean and sober, responsible adults -- just like heterosexuals are!  Then they begin to lie, even to themselves, about the less-PR-compliant aspects of their lives -- just as heterosexuals do!  Such PR material lacks a subconscious: it shows selfless, truth-seeking scientists who care only about decoding the secrets of nature and not about Nobel Prizes or fudging data; it shows honest leaders of the Free World intervening humanitarianly to protect human rights in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya (or honest leaders of the Soviet bloc protecting Czechoslovakia and Hungary against the depredations of American imperialism); it shows decent Homo-Americans living in ranch homes with white picket fences, saying the Pledge of Allegiance and clamoring at the recruiting offices to serve and defend their country; it shows spiritual but refreshingly raunchy Natives celebrating their sexuality as an embodiment of the Sacred.  Ambivalence and ambiguity, let alone an underside, are neither depicted nor admitted.

So, what to do?  One dilemma any outsider faces is that his or her good intentions will also be suspect: am I really interested in Native sexuality out of human fellow-feeling and acceptable curiosity, or am I a voyeur in search of exotica and an Other on whom I can project the parts of myself I don't wish to own?  I think such questions can only be dealt with face-to-face, not in print.  The editor tells the reader, "Think of [Me Sexy] as a 'How to make love to a First Nations person without sexually appropriating them' type of book" (3), which I think overreaches just a tad.  One of the contributors promises, "Being an Ally Is Sexy!" and offers "five things you can do" (48).  If only it were so easy, so simple.  But I suppose it's nice to be reassured, even if the promises are still for the tourist, sexual or otherwise, who will soon finish the book and be back at home.

Which returns me to my opening question.  Should I assume that American Indian sexuality is Other?  Me Sexy seems to take for granted that I do, and even that I should.  But I don't think I do, except that every other human being is Other to me (as I am to them), and when I read or listen to their words, or come together with them sexually, I'm being invited into their world to learn about them, not just as an individual but as a member of some larger group.  I don't blame Drew Hayden Taylor and his contributors for wanting to keep me at a distance -- there are very good reasons for them to do so, and no one owes anybody else their soul -- but Me Sexy feels less like an exploration than a theme park, a good-natured and professional 21st-century sideshow performance that promises knowledge but delivers something less.  I've been around the block enough to know that there's a lot more to be learned, not just by me but by these writers.

Part of My Culture

A good place to begin might be with the story of eighteen-year-old Laxmi Sargara from the great state of Rajasthan in India, who was betrothed to the slightly older Rakesh when she was one year old.  She knew nothing of this agreement until very recently ("a few days ago," according to the BBC story), when her in-laws tried to claim her.  (It's reminiscent of a motif in some European fairy tales, isn't it?)  Her parents wanted her to go through with it, so she consulted an NGO and with their help, was able to annul the marriage.  Child marriages are now illegal under Indian law anyway, but they are still common in "rural and poorer [read: "traditional"] communities."  (I suspect that the parents were trying to get around the law by delaying the actual wedding [as opposed to the betrothal] until the kids were of age, but they didn't reckon with the growing disrespect and rebelliousness of Kids These Days.)

According to the BBC, this is "thought to be the first case of its kind in India."  Needless to say, I hope, I consider find it immensely cheering and I admire Laxmi Sargara for her courage and determination; I hope her parents don't feel obliged to punish her for her defiance of their wishes and their authority, to say nothing of their shame before their neighbors.

I found Sargara's story in my Tabloid Friend's news feed on Facebook, along with this comment from one of his friends: "This is sick, this is wrong. What kind of 'parents' did this poor girl get stuck with? And how many instances are there that we don't know about." I replied:

"‎Sick" and "wrong" are two different things. But arranged marriages are examples of the "traditional" marriages that so many gay people have told me they want. They're biblical, in fact. Betrothal at the age of 1 is a bit extreme, but only in kind, not in degree. At least they didn't turn the girl over to her in-laws at 8 or 10, as often happens. This was a fairly liberal arrangement, and not abnormal for good families in India -- to answer your question of "what kind of 'parents' did this poor girl get stuck with?" Normal Indian parents, that's what kind. 

Understand: I'm not saying this was a good arrangement, and I'm cheering that girl for her courage and determination. It takes physical courage to go against your culture as she did. I'm just saying is case like this are why I cringe when people assume that marriage is a beautiful thing, and talk about "marriage equality." Marriage is a lot of things, many (or even most of them) bad -- especially for women.

The earlier commenter replied that just because it's biblical doesn't make it "right or proper," and I naturally agree.  Nor does the fact that something is normal in a culture.  That's why I drew the analogy to marriage in the US today.  Almost everyone seems to pay lip service to the goodness of monogamous marriage -- it's the benchmark that same-sex marriage "equality" aspires to -- even though that institution is problematic for women in many ways.  Even someone like the anti-religious, sexually radical Homo Superior can claim that "there is no progressive case against gay marriage as an issue of social justice," and that "all social justice movements of the past have sought to change access to existing institutions".  By his logic, there's no real problem of social justice in Laxmi Sargara's case, since both children were betrothed by their parents: no inequality between the sexes was involved.  If parents betrothed two male or two female infants, you'd have arranged-marriage equality.

This is just one instance in a larger problem that I've written about before: the "respect" that supposedly is due to different cultures than our own.  It's not easy to resolve; in fact I believe it is impossible, and can only be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.  But a lot of bad arguments are deployed whenever it comes up.

I came upon the story of Laxmi Sargara soon after I started reading Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (Minnesota, 1999) by Craig S. Womack, a Creek/Cherokee writer who's now Associate Professor of English at Emory University, specializing in Native American literature.  I'm only about 60 pages (of 300) into Red on Red, and so far I'm conflicted about the book.  Womack has plenty of sense, but he also swerves into bad sense periodically.

I'm sympathetic to the project of Native American academic separatism, as I am to separatism by other groups -- women, queers, people of color -- but I'm also aware of the contradictions it inescapably involves.  For example, American lesbian separatists of the 1970s did their best to withdraw not only from men, but from men's institutions; academic feminists of the same period were not separatists: Women's Studies (or Afro-American Studies or GLB Studies) Departments don't constitute separatism any more than Chemistry Departments or Business Schools do.  Native American Studies will have plenty of non-Indian students, just as Afro-American Studies draw whites, Women's Studies draws men, and GLB Studies draw straights, the more so since whites have been involved in Native American Studies all along.  Serious separatists know that they need to build their own institutions, not join those of the oppressor.  Which doesn't mean that it's invalid to do Native American (or other) studies within the white man's university, only that it's dubious as separatism.

I certainly don't object to Native American Studies programs being defined and directed by Indians; that's exactly what I want, as I want from everybody else: to hear from them how the world looks to them.  Separatism would demand that I not read, not listen, but as I've said before, I've never let that stop me before.

That's where the contradictions come in.  In the introduction, Womack quotes "Anna Lee Walter's cogent remarks" (9):

Scholars or authorities from academia, from outside tribal societies, do not necessarily know tribal people best.  There is an inherent right of tribal people to interpret events and time in their worlds according to their own aesthetics and values, as a component of American history, even when this interpretation is different from that of mainstream history.

"I might add," Womack adds, "especially when the interpretation is different from that of the mainstream."  To which I might add, oh, indubitably, but big whoop.  Walter's remarks can be transposed to any other other group: try substituting women, or gays, or African-Americans, or Jews, or Rajasthani parents for "tribal people."  There is indeed an inherent right of any group to interpret events and time in their worlds according to their own aesthetics and values, but that doesn't mean that academics don't have an inherent right to use their intellectual tools wherever they wish; academics are a tribal group with their own traditions and values, which often puts them at odds with the mainstream. (But what is the mainstream? -- a question to which I'll return.)  Academics just shouldn't be given power over others; I'm not sure if anybody should.

Think of conflicts between middle-American gays who know they were born gay and who denounce academic Queer Theorists who, they allege, think it's just a choice.  Think of conflicts between the Talented Tenth of middle-class African-Americans who made careers for themselves in historically black colleges (a prime example of separatism), and the other ninety percent of African-Americans.  Then think of white progressives who denounce hoity-toity academics of any color who make "race" an object of study, even though it's a social construct.  And then think of academics from non-Western societies who study in American universities and feel free to interpret and judge American gay communities by their (supposedly non-Western but actually Western-academic) aesthetics and values.  Think of Christians who are upset by academic Christian scholars for questioning and undermining the beloved traditional grounds of ordinary believers' faith.  And so on.

Womack declares, "I do not bother much in this book with the skepticism of postmodernism in relation to history.  It is way too premature for Native scholars to deconstruct history when we haven't yet constructed it" (3).  He then quotes "Abenaki poet Cheryl Savageau":

I never even encountered the word "essentialist" before coming to grad school, and then it was thrown at me like a dirty word, mostly because I wrote something about Native writers and the land in a paper.

.... The same professor who labeled me "essentialist," said there was no truth, no history, just lots of people's viewpoints.  I argued that some things actually did happen.  That some versions of history are not just a point of view, but actual distortions and lies.

It is just now, when we are starting to tell our stories that suddenly there is no truth.  It's a big cop out as far as I'm concerned, a real political move by the mainstream to protect itself that Native people, African Americans, gay and lesbian folks ... are telling.  If everybody's story is all of a sudden equally true, then there is no guilt, no accountability, no need to change anything, no need for reparations, no arguments for sovereign nation status,  and their positions of power are maintained [3-4].

For better or worse, most people probably encounter words and ideas in graduate school that they'd never encountered before; that's not in itself an argument against those words and ideas.  In fact, it's one of the reasons one goes to graduate school.  Which doesn't mean that Savageau's professor wasn't full of shit.

But notice the irony here.  There's nothing about "postmodernism," as Womack presents it, that forestalls anybody from "get[ting] our stories told" (4); rather the opposite: that stance would discredit any attempt by Savageau's professor to privilege his stories, his labels, his viewpoint over anyone else's.  If nobody's story is more valid than anybody's else's, there's no reason not to tell all of them.  But an essentialist stance would justify the professor's dismissal of Savageau's ideas, since he was the authority and she was just a lowly graduate student, and an Injun at that.  When I read stuff like this, I wonder what would have happened to me if I'd gone to graduate school.  Since I disagreed with my professors on such issues on more than one occasion as an undergraduate, I imagine I'd have gone on doing so, and it might have made my career or it might have ended it.  I can't help wondering if part of Savageau's problem was that her tribal truth required deference to elders "and their positions of power", no matter how wrong they were.

Later, Womack quotes "Phillip Deere, a full-blood traditionalist from Nuyaka Grounds" (54):

I think a lot about these things.  Sometimes it makes me wonder how many of our people will be destroyed?  How many of them will be lost forever?  I keep looking around.  I keep a thinking and I hope that I'm not the only Indian left because of knowing this.  We may look like Indians, we have the color of an Indian, but what are we thinking?  What are we doing to our own children who are losing their language, their own ways?

I sometimes think that even within the government, there's an all-out effort to lose Mr. Indian.  Even Reagan, his new Federalism or whatever it is, it means cutting off all the funding from the Indian people ... But on the other hand, what's our people acting like?  Are they still trying to be Indians or are they just benefit Indians, a three-day Indian, a clinic Indian, or BIA-school Indian, what kind of Indian are they? [55].

I take Mr. Deere's words very seriously; he says important things.  But he also sounds exactly like a white right-wing Republican conservative elder.  Let me just rewrite the first paragraph with a few minor substitutions:

I keep a thinking and I hope that I'm not the only American left because of knowing this.  We may look like Americans, we have the color of an American, but what are we thinking?  What are we doing to our own children who are losing their own language, their own ways?

When I read Womack, I find myself remembering the struggle over American history and how it's to be taught.  "Full-blood traditionalists" don't want a bunch of postmodernist college perfessors trampling on the inherent right of American people to interpret events and time in their worlds according to their own aesthetics and values.  The David Brooks column I just linked to is full of the same complaints that Womack vents, but from the Anglo-American tribal viewpoint.

I agree that different opinions and arguments should be listened to, especially when they go against the mainstream of history and culture.  But I'd apply that to Native Americans' mainstream interpretations, no less than I do to mainstream American interpretations.  Outside of academia and other select hotbeds of dissent and "deconstruction", I might be less inclined to question mainstream views, but in the university everything is fair game.  But why limit it to the university?  If I, and other people, don't question mainstream views that are objectionable, who will?  Consider again Noam Chomsky's and Martin Luther King Jr.'s dictum that one must first criticize one's own country and culture; is that a "mainstream" view?  Certainly not; it's why people like Chomsky and King are attacked by the mainstream. (Nietzsche said something similar: "A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions: rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions.")

So, when Womack writes that "an important characteristic of the Creek nation [is] its tendency to 'swallow up” smaller groups that moved into Creek country (these groups would often become assimilated Creek, most eventually adopting the Creek language) … This 'swallowing up' effect is important because it demonstrates that Creeks were able to view nationalism as a dynamic, rather than a static, process" (30-31), I have to giggle and smirk, just as I do when a mainstream American glosses over little problems in our shared history.  Perhaps the Creek aren't as different from the Whites as Womack wants to think, I suspect. Then I want to know more, which is why I'm going to continue reading.

A Great Day to Be Indigenous

There was outrage in Native American circles (and others) recently when it was learned that the mission to take out Osama Bin Laden was codenamed "Operation Geronimo."

BoingBoing reported:

Even the NYT's account would appear to have inaccuracies now: They report that "Geronimo" was code name for bin Laden, but CNN cites an administration official later clarifying that this was the code name for the operation, not the man himself.

Oh, well! That's all right then. But it didn't appease the administration's critics. An LA Times op-ed agreed:

Present-day Native American leaders have rightly objected to the implied comparison between Geronimo and Bin Laden. As Jeff Houser, chairman of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe noted in a letter to President Obama, "to equate Geronimo … with Osama bin Laden, a mass murderer and cowardly terrorist, is painful and offensive to our tribe and to all native Americans." No religious fundamentalist, Geronimo never sought to create an all-encompassing caliphate. Rather, he simply wanted to be left alone.

(Geronimo as Greta Garbo -- I like it.) I'm not defending the mission's title, I only want to suggest that Native American critics should treat it as a salutary reminder of the history that they seem to be trying to forget as fiercely as any other Americans. The op-ed drew on an article by Karl Jacoby, a history professor at Brown University, who wrote:

The appropriation of Indian labels is particularly unseemly given the reality of today's military. Native Americans have one of the highest per capita enlistment rates in the military of any ethnic group. Powwows often begin with the entering of an honor guard, composed of military veterans who carry the U.S. and tribal flags. At the San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona, where Geronimo was confined in the 1870s and '80s, the tribal government maintains a billboard proudly listing all the San Carlos Apaches serving in the military.

It's no wonder that Indian peoples feel their sacrifices have been dishonored by the labeling of our worst enemy as Geronimo and that they themselves have been treated as other than real Americans. As Guyaalé's great-grandson, Joseph Geronimo, noted recently, using the name in the operation to kill Bin Laden was a "slap in the face." His ancestor, after all, "was more American than anybody else."

Kaplan acknowledges "the 1939 movie 'Geronimo,' (a film advertised at the time as featuring images of 'war-maddened savages terrorizing the West')". Whatever the reality of Geronimo's career, that's how he was long seen in white American culture. The US military still uses the term "Indian country" to refer to "enemy territory"; the usage is apparently of Vietnam-war vintage, but survives in Iraq. (A Marine general's use of the term in 2003 also aroused controversy and hand-wringing.) In the American military imaginary, they're still fighting the Indian wars.

The Indian wars are reckoned to have ended with the capture of Geronimo in 1886, though, so I guess it's not too surprising that many Native Americans now want to see and present themselves as patriotic Americans. But I can only go along with that wish so far. If Native Americans want to overlook their past sufferings at the hands of the US Government they are now so proud to serve, so be it; it's their choice. There's another inseparable side of that story, though: it means supporting, endorsing, and participating in the present crimes of the US. Which is not okay.

This morning I was listening to the Native American music program on my local community radio station. Today's installment was dedicated to Memorial Day, and between songs I vaguely heard references to "defending our country." Then they played a song called "She's My Hero", by Radmilla Cody, a tribute to Lori Piestewa, described on Cody's label's website as "the first Native woman to die in the Iraq war". (Well, no. "Native" in Iraq would mean "Iraqi," and I'm sure that many native Iraqi women were victims of our invasion before Piestewa was killed. This is another indication why "Native" is not a suitable label for the pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas. But that's another issue.) I listened more closely to the words as the song played:

Her name was Lori
synonymous with Glory
she answered her country's call
she did it for us all
Oh the woman warrior
she's my hero

The price that she paid
the sacrifice she made
There's peace all around us
embraces all Americans
Oh the woman warrior
she's my hero

The CD's liner notes describe Piestewa as "the first Native American woman warrior to die in battle protecting the freedom of her people and the United States of America." So few words, so many lies. Piestewa wasn't a warrior, she was (according to Wikipedia) "a member of the army's 507th Army Maintenance Company, a support unit of clerks, cooks, and repair personnel." An Iraqi in an analogous position could have ended up in Abu Ghraib or Bagram.

Far from "protecting the freedom of her people and the United States of America", Piestewa was a participant in an illegal and horrific war of aggression against people who had not attacked the US. Even if she was, according to Jessica Lynch (who was injured in the same ambush -- remember her?), "the true hero" of the debacle, and even if Lynch named her daughter "Dakota Ann" (?) in Piestewa's honor, and even if "Her death led to a rare joint prayer gathering between members of the Hopi and Navajo tribes, which have had a centuries-old rivalry," what she was doing in Iraq should not be whitewashed. It had better be possible to sympathize with her and her family's loss without obscuring this reality. I am sorry Piestewa died, but she didn't do it "for us all." Not for me, and not for you either.

"There's peace all around us"? The song and the program's content were especially outrageous coming on the heels of this (via) defense of America and our freedoms:

For the second time in three days, a night raid in eastern Afghanistan by NATO forces resulted in the death of a child, setting off protests on Saturday that turned violent and ended in the death of a second boy. . . .

"American forces did an operation and mistakenly killed a fourth-grade student; he had gone to sleep in his field and had a shotgun next to him," [the district's governor, Abdul Khalid]. said. "People keep shotguns with them for hunting, not for any other purposes," Mr. Khalid said.

As Glenn Greenwald commented,

Just imagine the accumulated hatred from having things like this happen day after day, week after week, year after year, for a full decade now, with no end in sight -- broadcast all over the region. It's literally impossible to convey in words the level of bloodthirsty fury and demands for vengeance that would arise if a foreign army were inside the U.S. killing innocent American children even a handful of times, let alone continuously for a full decade.

When I hear about women warriors (or any others) proudly hearing their country's call and defending us all, I can only think of "heroic" exploits like that one. There've been so many.