James A. Clifton - The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies

The Invented Indian

Cultural Fictions and Government Policies

First published 1990 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 89-20676

The Invented Indian: Cultural fictions and government policies / James A.

Clifton, editor.

p. cm

ISBN-13: 978-1-56000-745-6

1. Indians of North AmericaPublic opinion. 2. Indians of North AmericaGovernment relations. 3. Public opinionUnited States. 4. Stereotype (Psychology)United States. I. Clifton, James A.

E98.P99I58 1990

305.897dc20 89-20676 CIP

ISBN 13: 978-1-56000-745-6 (pbk)

IN MEMORY OF

Lynn Ceci (19301989)

John A. Price (19331988)

Absent Friends, Lost Colleagues, Resolute Scholars

Next, then, I said, make an image of our nature in its education and want of education, likening it to a condition of the following kind. See human beings as though they were in an underground cave-like dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave. They are in it from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their heads all the way around. Their light is from a fire burning far above and behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a road above, along which we see a wall, built like the partitions puppet-handlers set in front of the human beings and over which they show the puppets.

I see, he said.

Then also see along this wall human beings carrying all sorts of artifacts, which project above the wall, and statues of men and other animals wrought from stone, wood, and every kind of material; as is to be expected, some of the carriers utter sounds while others are silent.

Its a strange image, he said, and stranger prisoners youre telling of.

Theyre like us, I said, for in the first place, do you suppose such men would have seen anything of themselves and one another other than the shadows cast by the fire on the side of the cave facing them?

Platos Republic, Book VII, Allan Bloom, trans.

My special, personal, and professional thanks go to Patricia Albers, Phillip Alexis, Benedict Anderson, Jo Allyn Archambault, James Ax-tell, John Baker, Donald Bahr, the late Robert and Mary Catherine Bell, Charles Bishop, John Boatman, Edward M. Bruner, James Canaan, Edison Chiloquin, Charles Cleland, the late Judge James Doyle, Jeanne Kay, Igor Kopytoff, Adam Kuper, James Janetta, Gail H. Landsman, Nancy O. Lurie, Buck Martin, James McClurken, J. Anthony Parades, Curtis Pequano, Paul Prucha, Tomatsu Shibutani, Bernard Sheehan, Donald Smith, William Sturtevant, Stanley J. Tambiah, Catherine Tierney, Flora Tobabadung, William Wabnosah, and Hiroto Zakoji. With a few exceptions, all of these have provided much positive grist for the mill of my thinking, directly and indirectly serving as sources of insight and enlightenment, as critics and intellectual buttresses, but they are in no manner responsible for the results. And I am also grateful to those few whose useful contributions to my practical education deserve anonymity for having actedin the awful language of contemporary pop-sociologyas negative role models; but I have learned from them, too. A great many years ago, Lt. Col. Hideyose Gomi of Imperial Japans Kempei Tai, gave me an unforgettable lesson in the fine distinction between education and propaganda, for which I will always remain appreciative.

To Theodore S. Stern I owe much too large a debt, for thirty-five years of higher education. For an advanced course in the intricacies of the Indian business, my thanks to the fourteen fine, independent minded, creative thinkers who contributed their essays to this book. However, on none of them should be loaded any culpability for the interpretations and conclusions I express in chapters One and Two.

To the Klamath, Southern Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, Potawatomi, Fox, Sauk, Menomini, Shawnee, Kickapoo, Chippewa, Ottawa, Brotherton, Wyandot, Huron, Miami, Oneida, Winnebago, Stockbridge-Munsee, and Delawareof Oregon, Colorado, Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, Ontario, and Quebec, individually and en masse, for the opportunities to learn about and from them since 1957, my lasting appreciation.

And to the Great Lakes Intertribal Council, the Federal District Court of Wisconsin and Michigan, and the now defunct Indian Claims Commission, my gratitude for providing me the opportunity to do what my friend and colleague John Messenger calls observant participation in their chambers.

Over the years my studies of North American Indians have been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the Canadian Ethnology Service, the State of Michigan, the Cleveland Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and, most recently, the National Endowment for the Humanities. I thank all of them.

And, above all others, to Faye, for wise counsel and everything else.

James A. Clifton

Though the biography of this book is still incomplete, a sketch of its genesis is proper, to help readers understand its lineage and anticipate the temperament of our offspring. This vita must remain unfinished for now, since only others can decide the later career of what the authors and editor have produced. While the contributors all write from the basis of their own experience and expectations, as editor, merely one of the parents, I can speak mainly of my own thoughts about the whole and the experiences which propelled them, from the first arousal of desire through conception up to the point of delivery.

Thirty-two years ago, as an apprentice anthropologist, I was invited to participate in an interdisciplinary team study of the effects of termination on the Klamath Indian tribe of Oregon. The termination policy (one of the American states cyclical attempts to resolve its Indian problem by scrapping subvention and management of the affairs of these client communities) was then in flower; and the Klamath were one of the two largest such corporate groups where this plan was fully implemented. My host, exemplar, and mentor in this research was Professor Theodore S. Stern, who modeled for his students the highest standards of professional integrity, rigor in scholarship, disciplined truth-telling, humane concern for others, and personal generosity.

I then had no experience with Indians, personal or semi-professional, and was largely untutored in conventional anthropological knowledge about them. I was not driven toward identification with Indians by inner compulsion and harbored not the slightest conviction that I might or should act as their liberator. I had not set off to live with Indians in order to discover myself. I was not even interested in Indians per se. I was, however, much committed to studying people, especially their social-cultural dynamics and resistance to change, hopefully among the societies of the islands of Micronesia, not the ethnic insularities of North America. However, because the Klamath were then facing major, externally imposed alterations in their status and situation, the invitation to live and learn among them seemed to be a marvelous opportunity to pursue knowledge and to master some of the rudiments of my craft (see Stern 1966; Kamber 1989).