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The Indian Voice
| Article
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12752 |
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Section : |
Book World
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| Issue
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3 / 1987 |
2,957 Words |
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Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner is professor emeritus of humanities at
Stanford University and is the author of Angle of
Repose |
FOOLS CROW
James Welch
New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1986
391 pp., $18.95
RED EARTH, WHITE EARTH
Will Weaver
New York: Simon and Schuster
383 pp., $17.95
The Indian has been no stranger in American literature. He began as Noble Savage, endowed with all the primitive virtues imagined and admired by Romantic philosophers, degenerated into a bloodthirsty tomahawker of women and children when he took the warpath against our invasions, and was sentimentalized into a tragic dignity and eloquence as the spokesman of a vanishing race, as soon as we could be certain that he was indeed vanishing.
Like savages ourselves, gaining virtue by eating the hearts of our enemies, we have come to take a possessive pride in his courage against great odds, and to regret that his destiny was to get in our road. Our pantheon is full of heroes we borrowed from him--Chief Logan, Billy Bowlegs, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Sequoia, Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph, Geronimo. It stirs us to read that General Howard, who finally ran down the Nez perces in the Bearpaw Mountains, called them "the bravest men and the best marksmen" he ever knew. Contemporary audiences viewing the movie Little Big Man cheer not the Seventh Cavalry but the Sioux and Cheyennes who annihilated it. We accept a comfortable guilt for our complicity in, or at least our benefiting from, the long record bad faith, broken promises, aggression, and outright genocide that Helen Jackson summarized in 1881, when Indian resistance was almost over, in A Century of Dishonor.
Along with the literary treatments of the Indian that cast him either as a retaliator for intolerable wrongs or as a demoralized, drunken, gut-eating vagabond living in faith at the fringes of white settlement, there was from early on--but not early enough--a persistent scholarly interest in Indian cultures. That produced the invaluable writings of Schoolcraft, Morgan, Powell, Bandelier and others, and preserved some dying or endangered tribal cultures at least as museum pieces. Later anthropologists, especially those associated with the Bureau of Ethnology, have continued that sympathetic investigation of native cultures and assured that at least their surviving remnants will not be lost.
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