Читать книгу Fleeting Snow - Pavel Villikovsky - Страница 22

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The Menominee are becoming extinct both as native Americans and as human beings. In their capacity as native Americans they become extinct when they leave their reservations and join the ranks of other American or Canadian citizens. They get an education, learn a trade, start a business or get a job, becoming car mechanics, lawyers, doctors, actors or social workers. The legendary jazz musician Jack Teagarden, for example, was a native American, but if you didn’t know you would never have guessed. Sometimes he would perform with Louis Armstrong, a black man playing with a native American, but of course everyone could tell that Armstrong was black.

Štefan told me about this successful property developer in the US who was also a native American. Štefan couldn’t remember his full name and referred to him as Jeff. He read in the paper that the man had been charged with the murder of his second wife, with whom he had been embroiled in a lawsuit over their million-dollar fortune and custody of their two sons, although that is irrelevant in our context. Jeff was only half native American because his father was of Scottish extraction; this kind of mixing of blood also contributes to the extinction of native Americans in their capacity as native Americans. His parents had divorced because his mother had allegedly taken to drink and was said to have been predisposed to other native American vices, so Jeff, who had not got on well with his mother, went to live with his father, while his sisters stayed with their mother. For many years he had not acknowledged his native American heritage but he suddenly remembered it when the court was about to seize his assets, and he hid some expensive building equipment on his tribe’s reservation. The native Americans from his mother’s tribe welcomed him in their midst like a prodigal son and bestowed an Indian name on him – Withered Branch, say, or Stray Caribou – as well as some property he was entitled to as a member of the tribe. (Incidentally, Stray Caribou was not a Menominee, his mother had been a Shawnee.) But once the immediate danger passed, Jeff left the reservation and turned his back on his heritage, dying for the second time in his capacity as a native American. As a human being he might still be alive, but one day he will also die as a human being, like everyone else.

Native Americans who live on reservations could be said to be professional native Americans. This is not a demanding job, as they have received generous government subsidies in compensation for their lost territories and hunting grounds. Still, it is hard to be a native American if you can’t behave like one. The life of present-day native Americans bears no resemblance to that of their ancestors. They no longer hunt animals for food or fur to keep out the cold; in fact there are no wild animals left on the reservations and even if there were, they would be scared off by the roar of the motorbikes as the natives race through the woods. When they feel hungry they buy their meat – deboned and pre-carved – in a supermarket or, what’s even simpler, grab a hamburger in the nearest fast food joint. And as for fur coats or thick quilted jackets, they can choose anything they fancy from a department store. The women no longer harvest crops for nourishment, nor do they sew clothes from leather, except as souvenirs for tourists if they feel like it. It is a comfortable way of life but as time goes by many realise that something is missing. They might use a different term for this void. We call it meaning or purpose.

The purpose of life is to be lived. From a personal point of view this is quite a good purpose especially since, if you want to survive, you have little time left to ponder the purpose of life. But human beings seem to be designed in such a way that as soon as they have a free moment they start wondering about silly things, for example why they came into this world in the first place and what their mission in life is. Native Americans are no exception and as they have plenty of time on their hands and the questions keep haunting them, they keep them at bay with alcohol and drugs; as they are unable to find any answers, they prefer to forget the questions. They could seek advice from their council of elders, provided such a thing still exists on their reservation, but their elders grew up in very different circumstances and their advice would be of little use to the young. And so the native Americans living on reservations remain native Americans for the rest of their lives but they become extinct as human beings, with their health ruined and tormented to death by the void.

Admittedly, all I know about native Americans is what I picked up from trashy Westerns, set in an era when they had not yet been driven onto reservations, or from Štefan, who has never set foot in an Indian reservation. He hasn’t even learned the Menominee language. There would be no point since there is no one he could chat with. He just learned individual words, primarily those containing bilabial consonants, but without understanding their meaning. He didn’t need to learn the language. Based on his study of the phonetics of their language he concluded that the Menominee had once been a particularly fearless and ferocious tribe. But that was a long time ago, before the avalanche.