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Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 10:05:01 EDT
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Subject: Re: Essence Magazine
Ish...one of my co-workers just brought this article to me. It is from the
April 1999 issue of Essence and is written by Paula Gunn Allen. It is an
excellent and thought-provoking essay.
All the Good Indians
Yesterday a student said something that forced me to contemplate a world
without Indians. He said that the elder people knew we were disappearing, and
when something is ending, it gets smaller. He said it's like a shutter on a
camera - the opening grows smaller as it closes. That is why, he said, so
many
of us have begun to write. We write everything down so there will be a
record.
The student is the second chief of his tribe, the Narraganset; he is at UCLA
Berkeley pursuing Native American Studies and anthropology, readying
himself to
research and record everything he can about his tribe and others. The class
let out after five o'clock. I left the campus and walked down Telegraph
Avenue
toward the parking lot. I saw people going past me as I walked. I saw the
shops, the goods on display in the windows. I went by restaurants and
coffeehouses. Nowhere did I see an Indian, an item produced by or even
reminiscent of Indians, a food or beverage that was identified in my mind, or
in the minds of those around me, as Indian. Coffee is Inidian, but not
really.
Corn, turkey, tomatoes. Pumpkin, chili, tortillas. So many things. We
don't
think of them as Indian. There was no Indian visible anywhere...not even me.
Twenty-four hours later I still hand't begun to deal with my student's
remark. How do you touch extinction? How do you comprehend that your entire
world is about to vanish? I believe Sitting bull did that. He comprehended
the totality of death. He went with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, like the
last exotic striped quagga would have gone with the zoo. He told the
people to
see to it that the children got educated in the White man's schools, and he
worked to get schools opened so they could. They left the wonderous way of
the
Sioux, became ranchers and farmers, christians and bureaucrats, soldiers in
the
conquerinor's armies, welfare recipients. By the 1960's their life expectancy
was a little as 44 years. It has barely increased.
Walking along Telegraph, I remembered a t ime when I lived in an Indianless
world. I was in Oregon in the sixties, attending the university in eugene.
For the first year or so I never saw or heard of an Indian. I was the only
one
I knew. In Oregon I saw a shrink. I didn't know the name of the disease I
was
suffering from, didn't know I was only grieving and lost. I thought I was
mentally ill.
I was involved back then - in the Civil Rights Movement, in the Peace
Movement. I taught and spoke out and wrote. One night at the local campus
bar
I was in conversasstion with two radical Black men, a White man (my husband)
and a couple of students. We were discussing why the movement was
immportant.
One Black man said I couldn't know how significant it was, that I had no
reason
to care. He said I was a groupie, a voyeur. The other one disagreed; I at
least had the same difficulties as Black people, he said. I faced the same
oppression, respression, depression. "She's a woman," he said. "For her it's
even worse." Nobody said, "She's an Indian." Not my husband. Not even me.
By 1982 I had moved to California to teach Native American Studies at
Berkeley. The only Indians I saw were in my class (two among 40) or in the
department's offices. Today of some 21,000 undergraduate students enrolled at
Cal, something like 260 are American Indian. Out of more than 270 million
people in the United States, slightly more than 2 million are American
Indian.
When I think of the girues, I wonder how I could have lived so many years
thinking my world was not bereft of Indians.
Some say that on the eve of contact with Europeans, upward of 45 million
Indians lived in what is now the United States. Health workers say that more
than 25% of Indian women and 10% of Indian men here have, while undergoing
medical treatment, been sterilized without their knowledge or consent.
Scratch
several hundred thousand future Indians. Many "marry out." Go to the cities
and get lost. More than a quarter of all American Indians now live in
cities.
Maybe more. They walk down Telegraph or Central or Market or fifth Avenue.
They see themselves nowhere.
Do you remember the child's song "One Little, Two Little, Three Little
Indians?" The first part counts one, two, three, up to ten. The second part
counts backward: ten, nine, eight little Indians, seven, six, five little
Indians, four, three, two little Indians, one little Indian. Lens closing.
so
light doesn't get through.
"The only good Indians is a dead Indian," it used to be said. I didn't
understand until now that what Sitting Bull advocated was not wrung from
him by
defeat in a years-long war. It was a statement about who and what Indians are
in America - more than forgotten, more than oppressed, more than terminated,
relocated, removed. The word for it is extinguished. Too many of us dead.
I can imagine a world without Indians. It is a world that has
surrounded me
most of my life; I only just recognized it. So it's critical that we begin to
presesrve not just our living culture but also our records - pictures, foods,
artifacts, heritages of Indians. As my student understood, we must write down
our stories, so they will not all be transformed into something unrecognizable
to an Indian. Even as the lens closes, we must, like the camera, record an
image for posterity.
Paula Gunn Allen, author of Grandmothers of the Light, is a professor of
English and Native American Studies at UCLA. This excerpt is taken from Off
the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-busting, Border-Crossing Loose
Cannons
by Paula Gunn Allen. Published by Beacon Press.
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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