I See Dead People

Dead Metal Toy Sudanese Mahdists from John Jenkins Co.

When I was growing up in Chicago in the mid-1960s my best friend was named Nancy Lee. I don't remember what her father actually did for a living, but I knew he dreamed of returning to his native Kentucky and settling into an academic career and writing about his life's fascination, the American Civil War; which at some point he actually did, ending my friendship with little Nancy Lee. Anyway in Nancy Lee's basement her father Jim had a huge collection of plastic civil war toy soldiers. They were made in pale blue and pale gray colors, thus despite the similarity of uniform and pose casting no doubt about which side they were meant to represent. He had everything spread out on a jumble of tables. There were plastic Southern mansions and plastic trees and plastic bridges and tiny cannons scattered about the clashing plastic armies. It was quite the scene, and I was quite jealous, never being invited to play with what seemed irrationally to my mind an adult man's toy. Nancy Lee, being very young and a girl to boot, was not allowed to do more than look at this awesome display. Her older brother was initiated into the mysteries of these toys, but he was much older than Nancy Lee or I, so I was never invited to watch her father at play either: I don't know if he rearranged the lines of battle by whim of mood, whether he made whooshing, booming, spitting sounds as he moved the figures about, or whether he was aiming merely for the perfect just-so arrangement of some historic moment in time.

Did I mention I was jealous? I developed quite a fascination of my own with little toy historical figures, some of which I have written about here before. In the end I eventually boxed up my own collection of little toy soldiers, giving most of them away. As I entered adulthood I occasionally and wistfully bought myself a little model soldier, evoking some childhood romance with history and adventure and lost innocence no doubt, but I never seriously contemplated becoming one of that rare and undoubtedly dying breed of gentlemen hobbyists, the adult toy soldier collector.


Metal Toy Dead Zulus from Conte Collectibles.

Which is not to say that I am not still fascinated by the idea of toy soldiers: capturing and miniaturizing historical violence without worry over the lives of real men, without the stain of blood or the curse of collateral damage. Over the years with the onset of the internet I was happy to discover that I could pursue that fascination voyeuristically, nostalgically (and economically) by window-shopping hobbyist websites; which I have done now for years.

Although I have not met such a person in my adulthood, there are apparently lots of people, presumably men, who do still engage in this time-honored hobby. Fueled in part by cheap manufacturing in China, toy soldiers aimed at adults seem to be quite a stable niche market. And unlike my youth when toy soldiers were mostly devoted to Cowboys and Indians, Civil War soldiers like my friend Nancy Lee's father had, knights in shining armor, and WWII GIs, today's toy soldiers seem to have reached all level of exotic historical subjects covering thousands of years of human history.


Plastic Toy Dead Sioux from Toy Soldiers of San Diego.

But I have noticed a trend, something that really creeps me out: toy dead people. Your plastic cowboys and plastic Custer and metal Redcoats can now be matched up with dead and dying little toy Indians in a variety of agonizing poses. Your tiny British imperialist highlanders defending your model of South Africa's Rorke's Drift can now be surrounded by "clumps" (not exaggerating, see above) and "piles" of toy dead Zulus. And your Four-Feathers-style British heroes heading off to rescue a tin version of General Charles "Chinese" Gordon in the Sudan can now avenge themselves against crumpling, dying black African Mahdist tribesmen. While as near as I can tell there is the occasional toy white corpse to be had, the overwhelming number of these toy dead people are black and brown. Indeed you can get dying toy white people being scalped by fiendish looking toy Indians, so you will need those piles of dead Indians for your act of proper revenge.


Metal Toy Dead Woodland Indians from Sierra Toy Soldier Co.

Sure, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men and all that. Gore is a stable part of fantasy: violent movies, violent video games, plastic guns, murder mystery novels. Why shouldn't toys based in the actual violence of history add a little realism? As far as I can tell it's not like these items are aimed at children, as if in today's world one could keep images of violence from kids anyway. I played with these things and I'm a pacifist. But I remain unsettled.

Why in this virtual body count is black and brown "life" so cheap? I suppose it could be argued that an abstract hobby is coming to terms with the real, genocidal costs of the history being reenacted in miniature. For sure to reflect anything like real history you'd need to match up your pile of tin cowboys and redcoats with a mountain of dead tin Indians. But it feels so.... disrespectful.

I mean, can you imagine the outrage at little toy concentration camps with little toy skeletal Jews and miniature gas chambers? "Oh here's my little dead Great Grandmother Esther...look at the fine detail! Doesn't she look real? And see the tiny armband with its precious little star?" It's bad enough that there are indeed little tin Nazis: there is a questionable leap of taste if I've ever seen one. But isn't it damning that there aren't model "clumps" of Holocaust victims to match the molded puddle of imaginary exterminated Africans?

I'm not seeing that same nostalgia here that used to conjure up excitement in what remains of my little boy heart and imagination. It's impossible given the tenor of the times to not wonder if the nostalgia being conjured up by these "toys" isn't nostalgia for a time when white people were happily conquering the world in the name of manifest destiny, Britannia ruling the waves, and that historical favorite of white people, the noble pursuit of civilizing the "savages."

I can't look at these miniatures as toys anymore. I see dead people. Maybe time to put away childish things, eh?

A Lump for Your Gravy

I've referenced this piece before, but it's been reposted on Kasama by its author Mike Ely with an intro that puts it in context of today's #OWS Occupy movement. "Original Occupation: Native Blood & the Myth of Thanksgiving:"

"We are talking widely among ourselves about “occupying” Wall Street — taking the center of an empire back for the people of the world. We are talking about “Occupy Everything” — sharing our dreams of taking all society away from banks, police, and the heartless authority of money. We hope this moment marks a beginning of the end for them.

And yet, just such a moment cannot be understood without remembering that other occupation — the one that marked the beginning of their beginning.

Arrogant invaders occupied a land using the most naked forms of genocide. They invented new forms of slavery, slave trade and profit making. They arrived with their high-tech arms and bibles. They declared all was theirs by divine right, while they took it all with raw force....

Here is the true story of that Thanksgiving — a story of murder and theft, of the first “corporations” invented on North American soil, of religious fundamentalism and relentless mania for money. It is a story of the birth of capitalism.

This piece is intended to be shared at this holiday time.

Pass it on. Serve a little truth with the usual stuffing."

Read the whole article or download it as a podcast. There's nothing wrong with being together with your loved ones enjoying a break from work. But it's important to remember. Context is everything. Peace to you and yours.

#OWS Occupies Times Square

Many thousands of people turned out Saturday night to bring the #Occupy Wall Street movement uptown to Times Square. While confused tourists milled about and police laid down a heavy hand with horses, motorcycles, and blocks and blocks of metal pens and barricades, thousands of people came out just before sunset to express their support to the rights of the 99% for economic (and social) justice.

The police response seemed to atomize the protest a bit, isolating a louder, angrier crowd around the military recruiting station from a more playful, music-playing "Occupation Party" crowd up near the TKTS booth. The police prevented feeder marches from joining the protests, and generally amped up an aura of explosive tension. After some abusive arrests earlier in the day at a protest inside a Citibank branch, the cops staged a confrontation with some protesters at the end of the Times Square event, arresting dozens. The protesters were engaged in nonviolent expression, and it's clear that the Mayor has ordered the police to limit that expression as much as they can get away with.

I love the sign above: "Decolonize Wall Street - Wall St. Is On Occupied Algonquin Land - Decolonize the 99%"


The Occupy Times Square Action was part of a global day of actions, with protests held in hundreds of cities in dozens of countries. Here's a sign expressing common sentiment at Occupy Wall Street Protests, and I gather, at protests world wide: "If Voting Could Change Anything, It Would Be Illegal - Join Us. We Are the 99%." If the fruit of all that excitement prior to Obama's election means anything, this is certainly a point up for debate.


And Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara made a welcome return visit to New York City courtesy of this red flag with the iconic Korda silhouette of the martyred hero. Of course my eye gravitates to red flags, but there was plenty of more middle-of-the-road sentiment present also. Considering this is a movement of the 99%, that road is pretty broad; and more power to it.

(Photographs by me; click on them to see them larger)

Repost: Also Born on the Fouth of July - A License to Kill

I'm away for the weekend so here's a repost of last year's Independence Day essay. 234, 235, who's counting?

Oh those immortal words of the American Declaration of Independence, every school child learns them by heart: "He [The King of Great Britain] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." Yes that's from that long part at the end. The part you never really read, the long list of grievances against King George.

While it's true that the Declaration of Independence contains some inspiring and fiery anti-authoritarian language and some really finely wrought righteous indignation, it's pretty clear that this document's appellation of "merciless Indian Savages" on the residents just across the potential new nation's frontier is the beginning rationalization to treat said "merciless savages" savagely without mercy.

It's been said that the three main colonizers of the Americas all had different attitudes toward the native population: The Spanish wanted to enslave them and convert them to Catholicism, the French wanted to trade with them, and the English wanted to pretend that they weren't there, or if need be push them out of the way. These are oversimplified of course. But one can see in the history of the 18th-century a hardening of colonial attitudes toward Native Americans, especially in the Northeast. The defeat of the French and their Indian allies in the American theater of the Seven Years War (the "French and Indian War") in the 1760s by the English seems to have pushed settler America to greater hostility toward the Indian nations; nations that were it should be said, unifying and modernizing living side by side with the English. Disastrously, the Indian nations wound up generally allied to the English in the American Revolution, and huge numbers emigrated to English-held Canada upon Washington's victory.

I'm not sure of the specific historical reference point that this portion of the Declaration of Independence is referring to, but it's clear that the nascent Americans saw English attempts to build alliances with Native nations as a threat to settler expansion.



Joseph Brant, whose Mohawk name was Thayandanagea, and who looked nothing like this "Indian chewing gum" trading card from the 1930s, was a prosperous landowner in New York State who as the military leader of the Iroquois League allied with the English against the new Americans. ('Brant dressed in "the English mode" wearing "a suit of blue broad cloth.' points out Wikipedia.) While obviously his military alliance against the Americans post-dates the declaration of independence, it's clear that everybody in 1776 knew there was a collision coming between the western frontier of the colonies and the Indian nations abutted against it. While some of the Indian nations remained technologically behind the settlers, in many places north and south, nations like the Cherokee and Iroquois were growing into, pardon the phrase, "civilized" nations that were in direct competition with white settlers for land and resources. While there were nomadic hunter-gatherer Indian societies, along the frontier of the time this was really not the case. Remember that the wild west of the time was western New York State and Ohio.

The English and the French and the Indian nations tried numerous different strategies of alliance and conflict to subvert the others and gain or defend territorial advantage. Clearly the Americans wanted none of that: they wanted one thing, sovereignty. And so in its first, most important document, the Declaration of Independence, signed so long ago on the 4th of July 1776, the United States of America built right in the dehumanization of native peoples, and the implied right to do something about the threat posed by these "merciless savages." Because everybody also knows that when the colonists labelled untold thousands of people "merciless savages" who don't respect human life, they were pretty much preparing themselves for the coming genocide.

Between the victory of the Americans in 1783 and period after the end of the war of 1812, the borders of white settlement were pushed from the East coast states clear to the Mississippi, with the Indian nations in between defeated. The Americans had made good on their founding words.

History is, well, history. It can't be changed (unless you're the Texas schoolboard), and I don't actually believe that we as modern people are responsible for the mistakes and betrayals of our ancestors. July 4, 1776 brought a lot of good into the world also: anti-colonialism and radical republicanism were historically progressive achievements. But I think confronting our national mythology is a good thing, because if we as American individuals living today are hopefully not committing genocide against Native Americans, the surviving institutions we hold dear--and sometimes abhor--are all built on questionable foundations that do color modern American policy and judgment. It should also be pointed out that the "we" of the Declaration didn't even include the hundreds of thousands of African-ancestored Americans who were, at the time, living out back in slave quarters and not even considered in polite discussions of citizens and their inalienable rights.

So I think it's good to ponder exactly who were the "merciless savages" back in 1776 and the years that followed. Enjoy the fireworks, and the grilled processed tubes of mystery meat, I know I will. But say a prayer that one day those inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness endowed by our Creator will apply equally to all the women and men clinging to this pretty boulder spinning through space.

"Geronimo EKIA"

“Geronimo is arguably the most recognized Native American name in the world,” the chiefs said, “and this comparison only serves to perpetuate negative stereotypes about our people.” — Leaders of the Onondaga Nation quoted in the Syracuse Post-Standard.

"Geronimo" was apparently the US Special Forces codeword for Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in the raid which ended with his assassination. Every American schoolchild knows that Geronimo of the Chiricahua Apache nation was the name of one of the last Native American leaders to engage in armed resistance to white American conquest at the end of the 19th-century. The raid in Pakistan ended with the transmission back to headquarters, "Geronimo EKIA," or Enemy Killed in Action.

Such a fascinating choice of words that says so much not only about what the military was thinking, but about the complicated legacy of America's genocidal past. Zunguzungu blog has amazing quotes about the myth-laden meaning of Geronimo, as well as a collection of links to analysis. (One of the passages quoted on Zunguzungu reminds us that George Bush's ancestors were among those who obscenely stole the real Geronimo's actual head for a fraternity trophy at Yale.) The choice of this word manages to equate the Special Forces with the "Good Guys," at least in the standard American History narrative, as well as tar Osama with an air of doom. The Onondaga leaders are quite right that it perpetuates the demonization of Native Americans in equating their history of resistance to Bin Laden's fundamentalist jihad. And it exposes the real barbarity behind the smug white American depiction of its enemies as barbarian savages.

I'm struck by the fact that the articles all over the web discussing this issue use one of the posed pictures of Geronimo that make him look armed and dangerous, showing him crouching with his rifle. These photos are pure mythology since they were taken after his surrender, when he had become a fairground attraction at a Wild West show. Of course the picture I've snagged for this post is also a posed one, showing him with his nieces some time in the early 1900s. Although these photos do show the human being inside the Geronimo myth, they're also a mirror reflecting back at American culture.

The bottom line is that America has issues.

Indian in a Box

Some time back in the 1960s I had a version of this toy. Mine didn't come with a horse; but I still remember how much I loved this plastic figure. I remember how the joints would creak when you moved them, the cool smoothness of his plastic skin, the slightly sticky touch and rubbery smell of his accessories, and of course the deep mystery of his lack of certain proper anatomical features. Part of me is embarrassed over this toy. How dare I, a little white boy, objectify an entire people and reduce them to a little plaything. Part of me is proud of choosing this toy over the matching cowboy: in my imaginary world the Indians almost always won as though the injustices I was reading about in the history books this toy helped me to love could be made to be unhappened and rewritten away. As much as I flinch, now, as a middle-aged adult, watching children play at killing each other with violent toys as I suppose this one was, I seem not to have indoctrinated myself into a strong urge to kill my fellow humans, join the army, or otherwise lead a life of crime or violence. In the end I think the imaginations of children are probably best left to do what they're supposed to do, stretch and expand little minds.

The thing is, playing with my toy Indian didn't really teach me anything about real Indians. It taught me to spin a narrative about Indians in my head, a narrative wrought from TV shows and old movies and daydreams which had elements of reality mixed altogether with my and other people's fantasies. My playtime did, ultimately, send me on a quest for information about Native Americans, and eventually I set aside the toys in favor of books. And to this day I'm an avid reader of books about Indian history. Which makes me well informed in a certain kind of way but in the end I'm still a (grown up) white boy trying to contextualize information about, well, others, albeit hopefully in a respectful way.

Because of course my Indian in its box had nothing much to do with any actual flesh and blood people. There are people I have come to know who have ancestors who lived here before white people and survived the rapacious thirst of European immigrants for land, just like others I know have ancestors who came here for all sorts of complex reasons, some of whom probably participating in various unspeakable acts of ethnic cleansing. It's ludicrous to even try and say it, but none of us is lifted up or cursed by this ancestry, we're all just regular people: some have values in common with me and some don't. And this brings me to the point I'd actually like to make, which is not about Indians at all.

Today France outlawed the wearing of Islamic face-coverings: either the Afghan-style Burqa bodysuit or the niqab, a veil draped across the face. A couple weeks ago that bigoted American pastor in Florida who had threatened to burn a Holy Q'uran fulfilled his promise; and while the American media took a pass on covering the event it was later used by fundamentalist demagogues across the planet in Afghanistan to whip up a crowd who last week wound up murdering a handful of innocent United Nations workers.

These three events all have in common, I think, a basic failure to recognize ourselves in the faces of others. These are all actions based in fear. Certainly the murder of innocent people is the worst of them. But the other actions are repellent also: societies where religious freedom is allegedly cherished acting in these ways? We should be ashamed. Because just as the fundamentalist demagogues in Afghanistan have put non-Muslims in a box, so fundamentalist demagogues like Pastor Jones or the racist politicians behind France's new law are putting Muslims in a box: the dehumanizing box of otherness and objectification.

Only now, it's not children's playtime. These reactions are not based in reality, they're based in narratives going on in the heads of the perpetrators.

Dear Indians, Sorry 'bout That!

Every American child knows the story of the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving. Having fled Europe in a quest for religious freedom, thanks to the friendly Indian Squanto and his tribe, the Pilgrims survived their first winter in their new home back in 1620. Squanto already spoke English! It's kind of like in the Bible how Adam and Eve are supposed to be the first people created by God and then all of a sudden other unexplained people start popping up. A wise person might question the general narrative. Well you soon learn that Squanto learned English from...being captured and enslaved by previous English "visitors." So yes, the earliest interactions of the English and the native population of what they called New England was not the sharing of food and farming techniques, but the random enslavement of the locals. What kind of people come to a new land, rip people away from their families, and turn them into forced-labor slaves?

Here's the thing. The land of New England was not empty wilderness. It already had residents; it didn't need new ones. Tribes like the Wampanoag and Pequot lived across the region, farming and hunting. Not gathering berries in the forest, growing crops. Growing crops, agriculture, implies something quite different about native American society and civilization than the simple-minded Thanksgiving myth suggests.

I recommend an article on a leftist blog "Frontlines of Revolutionary Struggle" that details the relationship of the Pilgrims and other English colonialists in early New England. It's called Native Blood: The Myth of Thanksgiving. It recounts the Pequot War in the mid/late 1630s in which the English settlers exterminated the Pequot tribe from Connecticut. It quotes William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth, on the destruction of the Pequot town Misistuck (Mystic): “Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire…horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.” Wikipedia quotes participant in that massacre John Mason, "Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling [Mystic] with dead Bodies." The Pequots captured by the English were, yes, sold into slavery and shipped to Bermuda.

So in fifteen years the English settlers went from accepting the food aid and survival help of the Indians to repaying this debt by committing genocide against them. The Indians were in the way of the English; the new world was empty wilderness only because the Indians were not considered real people; they were ungodly heathens, little better than wild animals.

It's nice to gather with friends and family and give thanks for the blessings and bounties of life. A traditional or not-so-traditional Thanksgiving meal is a great way to connect with the memory of one's ancestors and mark the rhythms of the turning of the seasons. And hey it's a day off work! But along with the thanks offered up to God, to each other, to life, maybe we should be offering up apologies as well.

Celebrate the Insatiable Hunger of White People for Gold!

Here are some excerpts from the journal of Christopher Columbus, 1492:

"At daybreak great multitudes of men came to the shore, all young and of fine shapes, very handsome; their hair not curled but straight and coarse like horse-hair, and all with foreheads and heads much broader than any people I had hitherto seen...They came loaded with balls of cotton, parrots, javelins, and other things too numerous to mention; these they exchanged for whatever we chose to give them. I was very attentive to them, and strove to learn if they had any gold....I gathered from them by signs that by going southward or steering round the island in that direction, there would be found a king who possessed large vessels of gold, and in great quantities.

"About sunset we anchored near the cape which terminates the island towards the west to enquire for gold, for the natives we had taken from San Salvador told me that the people here wore golden bracelets upon their arms and legs. I believed pretty confidently that they had invented this story in order to find means to escape from us...

"We set sail about ten o'clock, with the wind southeast and stood southerly for the island I mentioned above, which is a very large one, and where according to the account of the natives on board, there is much gold...

"[These islands] are all extremely verdant and fertile, with the air agreeable, and probably contain many things of which I am ignorant, not inclining to stay here, but visit other islands in search of gold.

"Now, writing this, I set sail with a southerly wind to circumnavigate the island, and search till we can find Samoet, which is the island or city where the gold is, according to the account of those who come on board the ship.

"The wind being favorable, I came to the Cape, which I named Hermoso, where I anchored today. This is so beautiful a place, as well as the neighboring regions...Tomorrow morning before we depart, I intend to land and see what can be found in the neighborhood. Here is no village, but farther within the island is one, where our Indians inform us we shall find the king, and that he has much gold. I shall penetrate so far as to reach the village and see or speak with the king, who, as they tell us, governs all these islands, and goes dressed, with a great deal of gold about him.

"Presently we saw several of the natives advancing towards our party, and one of them came up to us, to whom we gave some hawk's bells and glass beads, with which he was delighted....I shall depart immediately, if the weather serve, and sail round the island, till I succeed in meeting with the king, in order to see if I can acquire any of the gold."

Finding little gold among the Arawak-Taino population, by 1496 Columbus was writing back to Spain: "In the name of the Holy Trinity, we can send from here all the slaves and brazil-wood which could be sold." Which is what he did!

And continuing in Columbus' tradition, here's FoxNews' Glenn Beck on gold: "I've been spending a lot of time with the founding fathers lately...they talked about what the future of America was going to be like... There would be troubled times, and then it would reset self....I'd like a little bit of insurance. That's why I want to talk to you about Goldline."

Happy Columbus Day!

Read more about the Taino people of Boriken (Puerto Rico) here. An excellent essay by Howard Zinn on Columbus and the Indians is excerpted here. Art snagged from "Columbus Day: American Holocaust."

Us vs. Them, Them vs. Us

How did it happen that working-class Americans lost their class solidarity? How did it come to be that working people have come to identify with their bosses? The people in government--overwhelmingly entitled, wealthy people--and the bosses of the business world know what their self interests are. How come working people don't? Who's responsible for this lie that what's good for the business world, for capitalism, is good for everybody?

Marxism, not exactly the most popular of ideologies in our post-modern world, got this one exactly right. One of the simplest but seemingly most difficult concepts of Marxism is that different social classes have different self interests. And the self-interest of the ruling class--them--really is to do everthing possible to stay in power and to game the system so it preserves and enforces itself. To "them," we below them exist to make them rich; to give them power. The self-interest of the working class--us--should be mutual solidarity, banding together to protect each other and to organize together to take what is rightfully ours.

It's true that Marxism hasn't aged well. Class-based methodologies like Marxism, heck even like industrial trade unionism, have been particularly prone to a host of corruptions. The truth is that "they" are very strong and "we" are very weak as long as "we" believe that "they" have the right to make the rules. But it doesn't have to be that way. "We" can make different choices, and these choices start at the smallest level of who we identify with, whose side we instinctively jump to.

One of my favorite jokes probably dates me horribly. (And, careful reader, it's even an example of Indianism.) It has the Lone Ranger and his trusty Indian companion Tonto chased into a canyon by hostile Indians. The Indian war cries echo off the walls of the Canyon, loud and fierce. There's guns shooting and arrows flying. Out from every boulder steps another Indian, and finally the Lone Ranger and Tonto are backed against the canyon wall. The Lone Ranger says to Tonto, "Well, Tonto, I think this is it. I don't think we're going to get out of this one. We are surrounded." Tonto turns to the Lone Ranger and says, "What do you mean we, white man?"

So yeah, us versus them: Which side are you on?

Also Born on the Fourth of July: License to Kill?

Oh those immortal words of the American Declaration of Independence, every school child learns them by heart: "He [The King of Great Britain] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." Yes that's from that long part at the end. The part you never really read, the long list of grievances against King George.

While it's true that the Declaration of Independence contains some inspiring and fiery anti-authoritarian language and some really finely wrought righteous indignation, it's pretty clear that this document's appellation of "merciless Indian Savages" on the residents just across the potential new nation's frontier is the beginning rationalization to treat said "merciless savages" savagely without mercy.

It's been said that the three main colonizers of the Americas all had different attitudes toward the native population: The Spanish wanted to enslave them and convert them to Catholicism, the French wanted to trade with them, and the English wanted to pretend that they weren't there, or if need be push them out of the way. These are oversimplified of course. But one can see in the history of the 18th-century a hardening of colonial attitudes toward Native Americans, especially in the Northeast. The defeat of the French and their Indian allies in the American theater of the Seven Years War (the "French and Indian War") in the 1760s by the English seems to have pushed settler America to greater hostility toward the Indian nations; nations that were it should be said, unifying and modernizing living side by side with the English. Disastrously, the Indian nations wound up generally allied to the English in the American Revolution, and huge numbers emigrated to English-held Canada upon Washington's victory.

I'm not sure of the specific historical reference point that this portion of the Declaration of Independence is referring to, but it's clear that the nascent Americans saw English attempts to build alliances with Native nations as a threat to settler expansion.



Joseph Brant, whose Mohawk name was Thayandanagea, and who looked nothing like this "Indian chewing gum" trading card from the 1930s, was a prosperous landowner in New York State who as the military leader of the Iroquois League allied with the English against the new Americans. ('Brant dressed in "the English mode" wearing "a suit of blue broad cloth.' points out Wikipedia.) While obviously his military alliance against the Americans post-dates the declaration of independence, it's clear that everybody in 1776 knew there was a collision coming between the western frontier of the colonies and the Indian nations abutted against it. While some of the Indian nations remained technologically behind the settlers, in many places north and south, nations like the Cherokee and Iroquois were growing into, pardon the phrase, "civilized" nations that were in direct competition with white settlers for land and resources. While there were nomadic hunter-gatherer Indian societies, along the frontier of the time this was really not the case. Remember that the wild west of the time was western New York State and Ohio.

The English and the French and the Indian nations tried numerous different strategies of alliance and conflict to subvert the others and gain or defend territorial advantage. Clearly the Americans wanted none of that: they wanted one thing, sovereignty. And so in its first, most important document, the Declaration of Independence, signed so long ago on the 4th of July 1776, the United States of America built right in the dehumanization of native peoples, and the implied right to do something about the threat posed by these "merciless savages." Because everybody also knows that when the colonists labelled untold thousands of people "merciless savages" who don't respect human life, they were pretty much preparing themselves for the coming genocide.

Between the victory of the Americans in 1783 and period after the end of the war of 1812, the borders of white settlement were pushed from the East coast states clear to the Mississippi, with the Indian nations in between defeated. The Americans had made good on their founding words.

History is, well, history. It can't be changed (unless you're the Texas schoolboard), and I don't actually believe that we as modern people are responsible for the mistakes and betrayals of our ancestors. July 4, 1776 brought a lot of good into the world also: anti-colonialism and radical republicanism were historically progressive achievements. But I think confronting our national mythology is a good thing, because if we as American individuals living today are hopefully not committing genocide against Native Americans, the surviving institutions we hold dear--and sometimes abhor--are all built on questionable foundations that do color modern American policy and judgment. It should also be pointed out that the "we" of the Declaration didn't even include the hundreds of thousands of African-ancestored Americans who were, at the time, living out back in slave quarters and not even considered in polite discussions of citizens and their inalienable rights.

So I think it's good to ponder exactly who were the "merciless savages" back in 1776 and the years that followed. Enjoy the fireworks, and the grilled processed tubes of mystery meat, I know I will. But say a prayer that one day those inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness endowed by our Creator will apply equally to all the women and men clinging to this pretty boulder spinning through space.

Beneath Your Feet

It's obvious that the main square in Mexico City is old. The cathedral and buildings ringing the square date from Spanish colonial days; and the stones from which these buildings are constructed from speak of earlier days, because of course many of these stones were from the glorious Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, ripped down after the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century. You come to realize what it means that Mexico City is the oldest continually occupied city in the Americas.

I went to Mexico city in 1985, a few years after the amazing discovery--obvious in retrospect--that a few inches under the plaza, vast ruins of Tenochtitlan had remained undisturbed and unnoticed for four hundred years. Some careful excavation produced portions of the Templo Mayor itself (details shown above and below; photos by me), the main pyramid of the Aztec city. Other excavation revealed treasure troves of statues and artifacts.

Mexico is not the only place where the monumental past is literally beneath your feet. Elsewhere I've read that in the flat portions of both Iraq and large swathes of the American midwest, any rise or hill is not likely to be a natural formation, but the remnant of a Mespotamian ziggurat in the Iraqi case, or an Indian temple mound or burial mound in the American one. I guess there's a lesson there about what we think of as permanently important.

The Massacre Monument

When I was a boy in the 1960s, I used to linger at this statue in front of the Chicago Historical Society. It's huge--certainly in my memory--these figures are larger than life. It shows the Potawatomi Chief Black Partridge rescuing the white settler woman Margaret Helm from being killed during what is remembered as the Fort Dearborn Massacre, when Indian tribes allied with the British during the war of 1812 successfully destroyed the Chicago-area settlement of Fort Dearborn. It's an evocative statue in a sort of heroic realist style. The "hostile" warrior raises his tomahawk to strike, the "friendly" chief's hand raised to stop him; the lithe Ms. Helm writhes dramatically, indeed erotically, between them. A white baby raises his teeny hand out for aid at their feet. I don't remember the other side clearly, though I remember further mayhem: I think another Indian crouches over his fallen victim. There's a visceral quality to it all: the rippling muscles, the violent instant eternalized in bronze.

Sometime after my departure from Chicago in the 1970s this statue was removed to a warehouse, a victim of changing sensibilities, and protests from Native Americans have prevented its planned re-installation in a memorial park for Fort Dearborn. Indeed the term "Fort Dearborn Massacre" seems to be falling out of favor, replaced by the Battle of Fort Dearborn.

I'm sure the railroad robber baron who commissioned this statue in 1893--interestingly enough a few short years after the final defeat of the Sioux nation at Wounded Knee--intended it to strike fear into the hearts of little white boys and virginal white maidens. It's surely some kind of triumphant monument to the final defeat of the fearsome savages, and proof that the industrious white race deserved its victory, so recently having proved its mastery of the continent. It's a justification for everything that happened between 1812 and 1893 as the United States moved west, pushing the indigenous residents onto smaller and smaller patches of land at bayonet point.

Oh it's clear that in the battle/massacre of Fort Dearborn, the Indians killed about half of those hapless settlers, soldiers and civilian alike, about 45 of them, and the half who survived were sold to the British allies. But in the ocean of blood spilt by the new republic as it pushed into Indian lands, this massacre was but a drop.

I don't remember feeling fear when I looked at this statue as a little boy. What I remember feeling was a kind of admiration. I wanted to meet those fearsome Indians, and it didn't matter whether it was the "bad" one about to deprive Ms. Helm of her scalp, or the "good" one nobly intervening. Those weren't savages, those were people; mysterious and compelling people, but people nevertheless. When me and my little friends played settlers and Indians I knew from this statue I always wanted to be the Indian. In my own play fantasies with my little toy figures I remember that the Indians always won the battle of the bedroom floor. My poor little cowboy and pioneer figures; half the time I was content to leave them in the toybox and just play with plastic Indians. Is this the way the world works among children? Do we choose sides so early?

Today America's bugaboo is no longer wild Indians, it's Muslims and terrorists, though in the popular imagination those two words mean the same thing anyway. A community board in New York City has just given permission for the construction of an Islamic mosque and community center, Cordoba House, near the "ground zero" site of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, and predictably there's no end to the outrage. The imam of this center, Feisal Abdul Rauf, has plainly condemned terrorism; numerous victims of the 911 attacks were Muslims, and yet somehow, in typically bigoted American fashion, because the 911 hijackers were Muslim extremists this mosque is being called an insensitive insult to the memory of the fallen. Well, to the memory of the fallen non-Muslims apparently, since they're the only ones who count. Somehow the presence of an Islamic center near the eventual 911 memorial is just too much for these people to bear.

Even on the gay blog I read frequently, Joe.My.God., this mosque has engendered a fierce debate, with numerous gay men repeating ridiculous canards against Islam, basically suggesting that all Muslims want nothing more than to behead gay men on sight.

I am struck by how the tomahawking Indian savage of past American imagination has been replaced by the bomb-throwing, sword-bearing Muslim savage of present American imagination: both are charging fearlessly toward our heads, their goal expanded from just our scalps to our entire heads. This is rich with metaphor. Americans are nothing if not consistent. I suppose we are lucky that artistic sensibilities have changed: I'm trying to picture the bronze statue showing fiendish Muslims ravaging a modern Ms. Margaret Helm.

There's just something so arrogant about American intolerance. 911 was a terrible tragedy. I witnessed it. I lived with it. I walked home across the bridge with thousands of other frightened, saddened people. Every morning for weeks after the attack I saw the pillar of fire and smoke from my bathroom window. The nearly three thousand innocent people who died that day deserve to be honored and remembered. But we have no monopoly on tragedy. Our suffering as Americans doesn't make us superior beings. How many 911s has the United States inflicted on the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan in its almost ten-year quest for vengeance? If you're a family in the rugged borderlands of Pakistan murdered by a predator drone that's mistaken you for a band of terrorists, is your death less tragic than an investment trader doomed at his or her desk? In the ocean of blood spilt during this misbegotten war between the US and "terror," what drops reflect the innocents of 911? Are those redder drops than all the people killed by "shock and awe" and its aftermath?

Whatever monument is built at the site of 911, I hope there are directions from there to Cordoba House. The monument to those lost that day needs to humanize people not demonize them. Oh I'm not saying it needs to rehabilitate the criminals who carried out the 911 attacks, nor am I offering sympathy for the perverse fundamentalists of Al-Qaeda. But as long as Americans fail to see themselves reflected in the faces of others, it will just be a matter of time before we have to build yet another monument to another massacre.

By way of humanizing the Potowatomi nation who won the Battle of Fort Dearborn--or committed the massacre of Fort Dearborn, your choice--check out The Pokagon Times for a video of the Pokagon band of Potawatomi performing at the rededication of a park at the site of Fort Dearbon in Chicago in 2009. A detailed history of the Potawatomi nations can be found at Tolatsga.org. Also recommended is the First Nations site index.

Top postcard photo from Chuckman's Chicago Nostalgia. Bottom image of the statue at its original location on the south side of Chicago from Wikipedia.

Rethinking America Before Columbus

Of all that could be said of the erased cultures of the indigenous first Americans, perhaps the greatest lamentation is that most of them did not, or could not, leave behind a written record of the days before the European explorers and immigrants, leaving their stories to be endlessly mangled and distorted, the subject of both endless fantasy and speculation. Of course there are modern Native writers like the late Vine Deloria attempting to add a sense of perspective, and the historical record of nations captured in their moment of confrontation with the new, second Americans, but outside Central America and Mexico the voices of the pre-Columbian Americans can only be interpolated from relics and ruins not from written testaments.

Much writing on Native history suffers from twin distortions: on the one hand those anxious to ultimately excuse the genocide of the Indians as an act of historical progress, or those looking to objectify Indians as dreamily lost environmentalist naifs, too spiritual and too innocent to survive the confrontation with Europeans. That image of the weeping Indian from that 1970s TV pollution ad twins so perfectly with the whooping, scalping savages of a thousand Westerns.

One of the best books I have read recently on American Indians avoids these pitfalls. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann discusses the state of North and South America before the arrival of the Europeans. Based on archeological, geological, anthropological and historical evidence, Mann radically reinterprets the clues left behind to come up with a fairly revolutionary, and apparently controversial, comprehensive view of Native American civilization at odds with most of the myths of popular imagination.

One of the most exciting of Mann's arguments is his debunking of the notion that the America the early European explorers arrived at was some kind of pristine, near-empty natural paradise. Mann sees the massive herds of buffalo, the incredible overabundance of animal life as evidence not of ecological balance, but of a sudden ecological imbalance brought on by the collapse of local human population. He shows how Indians shaped their environment through well-developed agricultural practices including forestry management using controlled burnoffs. He suggests that North America was filled with vibrant permanent settlements--cities like Cahokia!--home to millions of people at a much higher level of development than that of nomadic hunter gatherers. He suggests that a sudden die-off of native populations happened out of sight of Europeans due to the spread of disease from the early limited 15th- and 16th-century incursions long before the 17th-century wave of European immigration and settlement. Thus the "pristine" forests and huge animal populations were the boomerang of human catastrophe as the human population suddenly plummeted.

Mann also similarly argues that the vast Amazon forests are the legacy of previous civilization. He looks at the ground itself and sees evidence not of mere human subsistence agriculture but of radical terracing and irrigation practices that reshaped the landscape and harnessed its fertility.

Again and again he reinterprets the evidence in North, Central and South America and challenges convential history. The resulting view of Indian cultures, of American Indian civilization, is far more nuanced, far more complex, and far more respectful of its achievements. Ultimately it humanizes the original Native Americans by de-mythologizing them, turning them into people of historical achievement rather than people of myth.

Pyramid of the Sun

Teotihuacan is probably the most amazing place I've ever been. It's the stone ruin of a city's central plaza dating from before Aztec/Nahuatl civilization just outside the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan that is today Mexico City. That makes it at least a thousand years old. While dominated by two huge pyramids, so-called the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, the plaza is surrounded by dozens of smaller pyramids, temples, and galleries.

Having been born in Mexico I was curious as an adult to return: I did so in 1985, when I visited Teotihuacan and took this photo. I don't remember what time of year it was, but it was dry and hot. There were these dried plants all over the place that had tiny seed pods hanging from them: walking through them sounded like walking through a field of tiny bells as the brittle seed pods shook and rattled. It was almost like hearing the echo of the place's ancient sounds while walking on the broad avenues below the pyramids. The pyramids themselves are steep, but accessible. There were plenty of tourists there but the place was not overwhelmed; in any case it would be hard to imagine that the scale of the place wouldn't dwarf even the largest tourist invasion.

It's sort of remarkable that these man-made mountains are just there. They're simultaneously symbols of both permanence and impermanence. The nation that made them is long gone, but the world that inherited them is left to confront their meaning. Visiting Teotihuacan is a little bit like visiting a cemetery in that the place itself is sort of other-worldly and hallowed. Nobody's likely to build a skyscraper next door, and McDonald's isn't likely to build a concession stand on the top of one of the pyramids.

Collect Dead Indians!

This is from a series of trading cards included with packs of chewing gum back in the 1930s. This series featured notable native Americans: featured here is a "portrait" of King Phillip, the Alonquian chief named Metacom whose claim to memory is King Phillip's War, the bloody late 17th-century conflict that marked the general destruction of independent Indian nations side-by-side with the Puritan/European settlements in southern New England. The reverse of this card reads "Metacomet was the Indian name of this fearless chief of the Wampanoags who inhabited the southeastern part of Rhode Island and Massachusetts. He was the son of Massasoit and was at first a friend of the white colonists. Later, fearing the whites would destroy his people, started the terrible King Phillip war and massacred many colonists."

It's a completely fanciful illustration; and the brief history is the perfect distillation of the conqueror's point of view: the noble savage was first our friend but then betrayed us. What the card omits is that the defeated Algonquins were largely rounded up, enslaved, and shipped to the Caribbean to be sold as so much chattel. Metacom's severed head was put on display in Plymouth. Pilgrim's progress indeed.

For an extraordinary read on King Phillip's War, including a remarkable exposition on "how brutality is justified and how war is remembered," I strongly recommend Jill Lepore's 1998 work "The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Orgins of American Identity."

New Tenants and the Folks Who Used to Live Here

Nicaragua doesn't have any pyramids. Further south than the historic homelands of the monument-building meso-American civilizations of pre-Hispanic times, it does however have many stone figures carved out of ubiquitous volcanic rock. I photographed this one on the island of Ometepe in the largest lake in the center of Nicaragua in 1986. To my dilettante's eye it looks far more Aztec in style than Mayan. It looks a bit like the "eagle knights" of Aztec military aristocracy.

I was walking around my neighborhood in Brooklyn today, which was pretty much entirely constructed in the first decade of the twentieth century on what had been farmland for the previous several hundred years of American and European settlement. My block of brownstones was thrown up in 1907, a bedroom community for the industrial zone along the shore. Its first residents were a wave of Scandinavian immigrants, though its many classically-styled Lutheran churches are pretty much the only remaining trace of northern European ethnicity here; today it's a melting pot of Latin and East Asian immigrants, with smaller numbers of South Asians and "white" people (recognizing that color is a particularly imprecise measure here). Anyway it feels like an old, established, somewhat decaying neighborhood...and it's barely a hundred years old. No matter how many holes you dig, try as you might, you're not going to find anything man-made here older. The next neighborhood over has a stone farmhouse and few wooden frame ones going back a hundred or a hundred-and-fifty years more, but that's it.

I often wonder how that lack of a visible past affects our consciousness. In Mexico, in Europe, the past is all around you, layer on top of layer. But in Sunset Park, even the Mexican immigrants whose ancestors' civilization's remnants are clear to see back home are as rootless here as the rest of us.

The presence of Native Americans here before the Dutch and their bags full of clocks has an imaginary quality about it: we know they were here before but you can't easily prove it. Sure in upstate New York, even out on Long Island, there are Indian Reservations with real-live people in them descended from those original inhabitants, doing what they can to survive and preserve tradition and identity in a melting-pot world that has treated them particularly badly. But there's not even any stone statues here reminding us that this place used to be different. And whether, or maybe how, that state of difference was better or worse than today becomes a minefield of conflict between nostalgia and progress, racism and consciousness, evidence and imagination. What are our obligations of respect, of gratefulness, of acknowledgement?

There's no pyramids here either.

38, El Apache

Colorfully decked out in dyed-in-Taiwan turkey feathers, El Apache stands at the crossroads of Indianism. Simultaneously having nothing and everything to do with real native American people, he's both a travestic joke, a kind of clown, and an idolized fantasy of the eternal noble savage. No actual Apache ever looked like this, while millions of little white (and brown?) boys certainly donned similar exotically preposterous outfits in childhood play. And yet, he is tinged with the regret of the centuries that this continent of immigrants is what it is today only by the subjugation, destruction, and marginalization of its original inhabitants.

It's interesting that this card comes from Mexico, whose capital city was founded by the Aztecs with broad clean plazas, fertile gardens, and running water while the citizens of the capitals of Europe were rolling about in "nightsoil" and sharing their muddy hovels with rats, whilst hawking up bloody mucus into the dark corners. Today's Mexico is inescapably the fruit of its mostly poor native masses and its European-ancestered elite.

El Apache lives on in the erring imaginations of today's North Americans. Objectified as the wise spiritual being at one with nature or as the terrifying savage archer stoically dressed inappropriately for any season, our native American caricature reflects our aspirations and fears for a human nature much more complex; an inner conflict for generations of immigrants' heirs with exposure to few actual descendants of the survivors of the Europeans' American genocide.

(In addition to continuing The Cahokian's series of meditations on Loteria cards, this post marks the first of a series of posts on the phenomenon of Indianism, with all respect due to the late Edward Said, author of Orientalism).