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Exhibits: "I Am Not a Mascot!"

No set of "exhibits" such as this would be complete without a few Indian-mascot examples from the contemporary sports world. My take on why they are demeaning, aside from sheer pejoratives such as "Redskins": it's yet another conflation of the Native with the "wild," the primitive, the "animal." That is, the Cardinals and Diamondbacks and Indians are—literally—on the same playing field. (There are tribal worldviews that consider the Native and other species as analoguous in a far different fashion, as "close kin," in fact; but this is hardly the ideology behind the popular iconography.) . . . As for recent agreements by certain tribal officials surrendering the use of their names to local sports teams (read: FSU): just because some "chief"-of-a-bureaucrat sells the tribal name down the river, that doesn't make it right.  [Pictured: Cleveland Indians; Florida State Seminoles; Washington Redskins (2):]
 

Exhibit: "Oh, Paleface Maiden—"

A relatively recent pop-literature genre is—as I would call it—the "Native American Harlequin Romance." As the book cover on the right demonstrates, the "Harlequin" formula of a heroine in the thrall of a beguiling stranger is there, all right, but we have the additional treat of "Noble-Savage-meets-Buxom-Paleface." Our traditional "tall, dark stranger" now brings a delicious racial exoticism and tension into the equation, evidenced in the following web-blurb excerpt from the novel (published in 2000):

He had vowed to make her his wife when she was a mere girl. But now that Alys Clayton was a woman grown and ripe for the love of an honorable man, Moon Wolf knew that man could not be him. For she [sic] had since been named Wolf Shadow, a warrior pledged to protect his people. A well-born beauty like Alys deserved much more than a revel [sic] Indian could give her. And Moon Wolf loved her too much to deny her anything. . . .
Alys had long waited for the day when she would be reunited with the darkly handsome suitor who had filled her young heart with yearning. And once in Moon Wolf's tender embrace, she longed to fulfill their vow of love. But Moon Wolf struggled against his passion, stubbornly denying her the one thing that would make her truly his. Now Alys was determined to show the noble warrior that he need not walk alone and that theirs was a love meant to be. . . .

Exhibit: Of Birds—and People—of Color

Like the Firesign Theater selection, this is more of an anti-exhibit. Coeur d'Alene/Spokane author Sherman Alexie's poem, "Crow Testament" (from One Stick Song, 2000) not only plays on the association of Natives with animals of an often "reprehensible" reputation (i.e., the crow), but also presents the bird as the prototypical Native trickster, with a postmodern spin. After the hilarious section 6, the final section is a sad intimation that even many contemporary Indians no longer recognize the "deity" that such a figure connotes:
 

Exhibit: The Todd & Tyler Show

The stereotypes live on (570 AM/92.3 FM; Omaha, NE; 8 Sept. 2005):
 

Exhibit: "A Wake [Awake?] for a Warrior"

From the legendary Ira Hayes and my own great-uncle Percy in WWII, to the 2nd Iraqi "conflict," Native Americans have served their colonizers/conquerors well, as "warriors" after the "Indian Wars." Indeed, as an economically impoverished minority group, we have served disproportionately, most likely, in the last several U.S. military engagements. (Thus it is no surprise that the first U.S. female casualty in the current Iraqi engagement was a Hopi woman.) I have such mixed feelings, then, about Lakotas fighting in Iraq that I'll keep my mouth relatively shut in presenting these excerpts from an anonymous Powerpoint presentation I received in 2006, called "A Wake for an Indian Warrior," though one can't help but note the ongoing cultural contrasts evident in the photos:
 

Exhibit: Crazy Horse: The Monument

Assuming that most of you have seen facsimiles (all in pure "white marble"!) of the intended final product-—with Crazy Horse on horseback, his arm outstretched towards some grand enterprise or dream—here is a relatively recent photo (2002) of the Ziolkowski family's progress on this huge monolith in the southern Black Hills (SoDak). (Having seen it through the years since the 1970's, I'm actually impressed by how far they've gotten.) The elder Ziolkowski defended his effort as providing a Native American counterpoint to the four Euro-American figures on Mount Rushmore (just a short drive north)—and admittedly this rationale hasn't been unaccompanied by a good deal of understandable local tribal support. However, the site has also become a consummate capitalist tourist-trap enterprise; and the Lakota warrior who is supposedly being honored is being petrified, mortified into stone, a man who, when alive, seemed forever in motion on horseback. . . . My daughter Emma and I checked the place out together in 2001, even paying for a rattle-trap bus ride to the base of the construction site. Now that the arm had become pretty well defined, I asked Emma, "Do you know why Crazy Horse is extending his arm? . . . He's tellin' the white people, 'This is our land. Get the hell off it!'" (I doubt, however, that this characterizes the sculptor's original intentions very well at all.)

Update: These are (now) a few of the picts my daughter Emma & I took just this summer (June 2006). We had the bad luck of showing up on the sculptor's wife's birthday—ergo the rather untoward white signs on the sculpture's arm, regarding her 80th year. . . . My political views thereof have not changed.

Exhibit: "We've Discovered the Indians, and They Are—US!"

Outside the Center for Great Plains Studies in downtown Lincoln, NE, is a set of statues called "On the Trail of Discovery" (by George W. Lundeen, 2004). My reading thereof should be obvious by now: what has been really "discovered," at last, is the helpful "savage" saying, "Take this land—it is yours!" (Cf. the Crazy Horse sculpture's outstretched arm.)

Worse yet, the Native youth displaying the U.S. flag is another blatant iconographic act of colonialist wishful thinking, of coercive co-optation. (Cf. the Firesign Theater script:)

EDDIE: Aw, come on! Call me Eddie! I'm an American now!
INDIAN [father]: What have they been teaching you?
EDDIE: Just what we need for a better life: French horn, Italian, water polo . . .

 

Exhibit: THE JOURNEY: From Eco-Indian to Eco-Anglo?

In The Journey, a museum in Rapid City, SD, humankind's concern for the environment is emblematized in a two-part exhibit, with a definite value-judgment timeline implied. On the left side of the presentation [1st photo] is an archetypal Indian, as it were, living as one with the land–although, frankly, he looks rather stunned just to be alive.

In the 2nd photo (the Native guy can still be seen, now on the far left), the Euro-American–or, the "new & improved man"!?–has a similarly healthy concern for the environment; moreover, with the aid of charts and graphs and Darwinian science, this dapper fellow must be considered even more eco-conscious: indeed, he is a fine tribute to human evolution, to the advance of civilization itself.  [photos by TCG, 6/07 . . . Oh, my daughter tells me that the person on the right is a woman! Still hard to tell from the larger version of this photo, but now I think she's right.]

Exhibit: "Have a Holl-lah-ko-tah Christmas . . ."    

A student of mine's relative just received the following in the mail (September, 2007). Now, I've been driven around St. Joseph's by a Chamberlain (SD) friend, and I know another fellow who works there, and I have nothing against this school specifically, other than its role as a belated remnant of the Catholic-Indian-boarding-school tradition. But: this "gift box" mailing cover is pretty sickening. Wow, these cards are "from the Lakota children!" (all Catholics now, of course); and I guess the bourgeois houses-in-the-country scenes are truly representative of contemporary Native housing. Oh. Wait. They're all white kids in these pictures. Except for the card about the (Middle-Eastern) Three Wisemen. Hey, you couldn't do a "Three Little Indians" card, at least?!

Exhibit: HOLIDAY DRESS-UP: The Thanks(giving) Never Ends

Costume SuperCenter(.com) offers the following among their holiday merchandise (Nov. 2007): 1) the "Indian Boy Child," for that "dirty white boy" who wants to get even dirtier & bloodier with some bow-hunting action—and circus-clown face paint; and 2) the "Indian Babe Adult," for the discerning hottie who wants to practice her flirtatiousness as another ethnicity:

Exhibit: "MY INDIAN NAME IS A RACIAL SLUR"

I recently received a wonderful mail-order catalogue called What on Earth: A Collection of Fun Wear & Delightful Diversions (Holiday Preview 2007 edition). The fun includes wearing a t-shirt or sweatshirt that sports a "delightful" racial slur/stereotype: