Читать книгу The Quiet Crisis - Stewart L. Udall - Страница 10
ОглавлениеThe Land Wisdom of the Indians
In the dust where we have buried the silent races and their abominations we have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.
—D. H. LAWRENCE (at Taos)
There are, today, a few wilderness reaches on the North American continent—in Alaska, in Canada, and in the high places of the Rocky Mountains—where the early-morning mantle of primeval America can be seen in its pristine glory, where one can gaze with wonder on the land as it was when the Indians first came. Geologically and geographically this continent was, and is, a masterpiece. With its ideal latitude and rich resources, the two-billion-acre expanse that became the United States was the promised land for active men.
The American continent was in a state of climax at the time of the first Indian intrusions ten millennia or more ago. Superlatives alone could describe the bewildering abundance of flora and fauna that enlivened its landscapes: the towering redwoods, the giant saguaro cacti, the teeming herds of buffalo, the beaver, and the grass were, of their kind, unsurpassed.
The most common trait of all primitive peoples is a reverence for the life-giving earth, and the native American shared this elemental ethic: the land was alive to his loving touch, and he, its son, was brother to all creatures. His feelings were made visible in medicine bundles and dance rhythms for rain, and all of his religious rites and land attitudes savored the inseparable world of nature and God, the Master of Life. During the long Indian tenure the land remained undefiled save for scars no deeper than the scratches of cornfield clearings or the farming canals of the Hohokams on the Arizona desert.
There was skill in gardening along with this respect for the earth, and when Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonists came warily ashore on the Atlantic Coast, Indians brought them gifts of melons and grapes. In Massachusetts, too, Indians not only schooled the Pilgrims in the culture of maize and squashes, but taught them how to fertilize the hills with alewives from the tidal creeks. The Five Nations and the Algonquians of the Northeast; the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Seminoles of the South; the village-dwelling Mandans of the Missouri River country; the Pueblos of Hopi, Zuni, and the Rio Grande; and the Pima of the Southwest, all put the earth to use and made it bring forth fruit. Their implements were Stone Age, but most tribes were acquiring the rudiments of a higher civilization. They were learning how to secure a surplus from the earth, and were beginning to in-vest it in goods, tools, and buildings, and to devote their leisure hours to craft and artwork and to the creation of religious rites and political systems.
The idea has long been implanted in our thinking that all American Indians belonged to nomadic bands that developed neither title to, nor ties with, the land. This is misconceived history, for even the tribes that were not village dwellers, tending garden plots of com, beans, or cotton, had stretches of land they regarded as their own. But there was a subtle qualification. The land and the Indians were bound together by the ties of kinship and nature, rather than by an understanding of property ownership. “The land is our mother,” said Iroquois tradition, said the Midwest Sauk and Foxes, said the Northwest Nez Perces of Chief Joseph. The com, fruits, roots, fish, and game were to all tribes the gifts which the Earth Mother gave freely to her children. And with that conception, the Indian’s emotional attachment for his woods, valleys, and prairies was the very essence of life.
The depth of this feeling is reflected in the Navajos, who scorned the rich Oklahoma prairie country offered them by the government, and chose to live in their own arid and rugged deserts. It is reflected also in the Cherokees who, in the space of one generation, changed their whole way of fife, established schools and libraries, produced an alphabet, planned a constitution and a legislature, and went to work in their own mills and blacksmith shops—all with the purpose of becoming so civilized that the whites would allow them to stay on their own lands and not ship them west to the Territories.
To the Indian, the homeland was the center of the universe. No member of a civilized people ever spoke of his native land with more pride than is apparent in the speech of the Crow Chief, Arapooish: “The Crow country,” he said, “is exactly in the right place. It has snowy mountains and sunny plains; all kinds of climates and good things for every season. When the summer heat scorches the prairies, you can draw up under the mountains, where the air is sweet and cool, the grass fresh, and the bright streams come tumbling out of the snowbanks. There you can hunt the elk, the deer, and the antelope, when their skins are fit for dressing; there you will find plenty of white bears and mountain sheep.
“In the autumn, when your horses are fat and strong from the mountain pastures, you can go down into the plains and hunt the buffalo, or trap beaver in the streams. And when winter comes on, you can take shelter in the woody bottoms along the rivers; there you will find buffalo meat for yourselves, and cottonwood bark for your horses; or you may winter in the Wind River Valley where there is salt weed in abundance.
“The Crow country is exactly in the right place. Everything good is to be found there. There is no country like the Crow country.”
Here is affection for the land, but no notion of private ownership. The idea that land could be bought and sold was an alien concept to the Indians of America. They clung possessively to certain chattels, but lands were nearly always held in common. An individual might have the use of a farm plot, but at his death it reverted back to the community.
The confrontation of Indians and whites had in it the seeds of hopeless misunderstanding from the start. The two cultures had produced irreconcilable concepts of landownership, and once the first white man set foot on American soil, the drama unfolded with all the certain sweep of a Greek tragedy.
Englishmen, especially, coveted land. It was something to be owned outright. Had not the English King given the charter deeds? The sixteenth-century Spaniard, by contrast, was not primarily interested in seizing land: the soldier wanted personal plunder; the priest came with his seeds and livestock to save Indian souls.
To the joint-stock companies of Virginia, intent on commercial profits, and to the colonizing Pilgrims, exclusive possession was the be-all and end-all of landownership. But the Indian’s “title,” based on the idea that he belonged to the land and was its son, was a charter to use—to use in common with his clan or fellow tribesmen, and not to use up. Neither white nor Indian fully grasped the concept of the other. The Indian wanted to live not just in the world, but with it; the white man, who thought in terms of estates and baronies, wanted land he alone could cultivate and use.
In the beginning, friendship and co-operation with the Indians were essential if the colonists were to gain a foothold in America, for the white man was badly outnumbered. To be unneighborly was to risk violence, and respect for Indian rights was the better part of wisdom. The upright conduct of the first colonists in Massachusetts and Virginia drew generous response from powerful chiefs who helped the settlements survive.
Live and let live was the inevitable opening keynote, for muskets could neither cut trees nor keep the peace. In the meeting of alien worlds both Indians and whites had something to learn from each other, and if the newcomers borrowed the idea of a feast of thanksgiving from a harvest celebration of neighboring Indians, so much the better.
But the first phase ended quickly, and as stockades were completed and new colonists swelled the ranks of the invaders, conciliation became superfluous. As one historian put it, “The Indians were pressed remorselessly when their friendship became of less value than their land.” In Virginia, the Indians watched with consternation and alarm as the white men planted tobacco, used up the soil, and every few years moved on to clear new fields. The planters took the Indians’ land, first by cajolery and trade, then by force. So swiftly did events move that, within forty years of the founding of Jamestown, the mighty Powhatans were landless and in beggary at the edge of their former homes. Elsewhere the details were different, but white expansion followed the same general pattern.
The barrier of misunderstanding that arose when advancing whites encountered Indians was too high for either people to scale. Some weak and venal chiefs bargained away the rights of their people, but for most tribes the sale of large tracts to the settlers was not a solution to their problems, for they had no land to sell. The warrior chief, Tecumseh, stated the Indian philosophy of nearly all tribes with his reply to the demands of white buyers: “Sell the country? . . . Why not sell the air, the clouds, the great sea?”
To the Indian mind, even after two centuries of acquaintance with the whites, land belonged collectively to the people who used it. The notion of private ownership of land, of land as a commodity to be bought and sold, was still alien to their thinking, and tribe after tribe resisted the idea to the death. Land belonged, they said again and again—in the hills of New York, in the Pennsylvania Alleghenies, and in the Ohio Valley—to their ancestors whose bones were buried in it, to the present generation which used it, and to their children who would inherit it. “The land we live on, our fathers received from God,” said the Iroquois Cornplanter to George Washington in 1790, “and they transmitted it to us, for our children, and we cannot part with it. . . . Where is the land on which our children and their children after them are to lie down?”
Had the Indians lacked leaders of integrity, or been less emotionally tied to their hills and valleys, a compromise might have been arranged, but life and land were so intertwined in the Indian scheme of existence that retreat meant surrender of self—and that was unthinkable.
Before the moments of climax came, weaker tribes in all parts of the country made peace, and some of the stronger ones delayed the inevitable by selling parts of their domain. There were fierce chiefs, too, who would not bargain; men repeating the defiance of Canasatego who, representing the Six Nations in Philadelphia in 1742, spoke with contempt of the money and goods acquired in exchange for land. They were gone in a day or an hour, he said, but land was “everlasting.”
Yet to many another red man, the new goods had an irresistible allure. Contact with the higher technology of Europeans began to make most of what the Indians had known obsolete, and created needs which they could satisfy only by making increased demands upon the bank of the earth. Once seen, a musket became essential to an Indian warrior; and once an Indian woman had used a steel needle or a woven blanket, she could never again be satisfied with a bone awl or a skin robe. The white man was the only source of the new essentials, and the only way to get them was by trade for things the white man wanted—meat, beaver—and later and farther west, pemmican and buffalo robes. So the Indian, too, became a raider of the American earth, and at the same time was himself raided for his lands by the superior technology and increasingly superior numbers of the white man.
The settlers’ demand for new territory was insatiable, and what money could not buy, muskets, deceit, and official ruthlessness could win. Worse, as the bloody thrust and counterthrust went on, hatreds deepened and demagogues argued for a “final” solution of the Indian problem. They coined a slogan that became the byword of the American frontier: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
In the westward push, new land became the key to progress, and Indian policy was guided solely by economic expediency. A spokesman for the Ottawa, Sioux, Iowa, Winnebago, and other tribes made this sad and unsuccessful appeal at the Council of Drummond Island in 1816: “The Master of Life has given us lands for the support of our men, women, and children. He has given us fish, deer, buffalo, and every kind of birds and animals for our use. . . . When the Master of Life, or Great Spirit, put us on this land, it was for the purpose of enjoying the use of the animals and fishes, but certain it was never intended that we should sell it or any part thereof which gives us wood, grass and everything.”
He got his answer the following year when President James Monroe wrote: “The hunter or savage state requires a greater extent of territory to sustain it than is compatible with the progress and just claims of civilized life . . . and must yield to it.”
There was a continent to be redeemed from the wilderness, and the Indians’ way of life had to be sacrificed. Thus the policy of forced removal was established, and the Five Civilized Tribes were sent, with scant civility and, in the end, scant humanity, on a thousand-mile “trail of tears” to Oklahoma.
In its latter stages the land war moved into its cruelest phase in California, the Southwest, and the Upper Great Plains. Most of the California Indians were neither as warlike nor as land-conscious as the Eastern tribes. But even this did not spare them, and the most pitiless chapters of the struggle were written by frustrated gold-seekers who organized vigilante raids, killed helpless natives, and subsequently collected from the government for their deeds of slaughter.
After the Civil War the “clear the redskins out” policy approached its dramatic climax. The mounted Indians of the Upper Great Plains and the Apaches of the Southwest were fierce warriors who would not be cornered. It took regiments of trained cavalrymen over twenty years to drive them from their sacred hills and hunting grounds. Outarmed and outmanned, these warriors made fierce counterattacks, and our American pride was dealt a grim blow when the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was interrupted by the news of the Custer massacre. The undeclared racial war did not end until the final tragic chapters were written in the Pyrrhic victory of Sitting Bull at the Little Bighorn, and in the last stands of Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph, and Geronimo.
With the final triumphs of the cavalry, and the uneasy settlement of tribes on reservations, the old slogans gradually disappeared, and the new conscience expressed itself in the saying, “It’s cheaper to feed ’em than to fight ’em.”
The 1887 Allotment Act, which broke up parts of some reservations and gave individual title to some Indians, Luther stripped away Indian rights by forcing unprepared tribesmen to deal with unscrupulous land swindlers.
With the passage of time and the steady attrition of old ideas and beliefs, we are at last, hopefully, entering a final phase of the Indian saga. The present generation of Indians accepts the system their fathers could not comprehend. The national government strives to provide the Indian people with adequate health and education programs and to aid them in developing the potential of their human and natural resources. As a singular gesture of atonement, which no civilized country has ever matched, the Congress has established a tribunal, the Indians Claims Commission, through which tribes may be compensated for losses suffered when their lands were forcibly taken from them.
After long years of peace, we now have an opportunity to measure the influence of the Indians and their culture on the American way of life. They have left with us much more than the magic of place names that identify our rivers and forests and cities and mountains. They have made a contribution to our agriculture and to a better understanding of how to live in harmony with the land.
It is ironical that today the conservation movement finds its eh turning back to ancient Indian land ideas, to the Indian understanding that we are not outside of nature, but of it. From this wisdom we can learn how to conserve the best parts of our continent.
In recent decades we have slowly come back to some of the truths that the Indians knew from the beginning: that unborn generations have a claim on the land equal to our own; that men need to learn from nature, to keep an ear to the earth, and to replenish their spirits in frequent contacts with animals and wild land. And most important of all, we are recovering a sense of reverence for the land.
But the settlers found the Indians’ continent too natural and too wild. Though within a generation that wildness would begin to convert some of their sons, and though reverence for the natural world and its forces would eventually sound in much of our literature, finding its prophets in Thoreau and Muir, those first Europeans, even while looking upon the New World with wonder and hope, were determined to subjugate it.
