NOTES ON DEFINING TERM "INDIAN"

 SAM GILL:

Columbus = invented America according to Edmundo O’Gorman – 15th century beliefs there was no basis for speculating even the possible existence of a continent separate from Orbis Terrarum. One cannot discover what one cannot imagine as a possibility.

Los Indios/Indians/Native Americans =  A term used at the time to refer to all peoples east of the Indus River = translates in English as ‘the Indians’.  Indians = common terminology used in the early 16th century Christian world to designate peoples of the Far East.

Native Americans =  a term that will free us from the blinding tyranny of our old term “Indian”. Peoples native to America.

Sepulveda = Juan Gines de Sepulveda, Renaissace Scholar, portrayed negative image, believed in encomiendaro – permitted colonists to use natives for theirown profit – goal was to have them be Christianized.

Las Casas = Bartolome de Las Casas = Dominican, spent 45 years in New World. Believed they were nobel people developed in arts, language, government, gentle and eager to learn.

Dirty Dogs/Native Savage =  History of debate over the nature of the Indians that began in first half of 16th century.  Two camps;  Dirty Dogs (Sepulveda) and Noble Savage (Las Casas).

Unity of Mankind =

Homo Religiousus = generally accepted proposition tht underlies the study of religion = religion is a characteristic distinctive of human beings, that humans are by their nature religious.

Study of Religion =  begins with certain assumptions. Term lies in Western history.  Remains of interest only to Western institutions. Distinction: teaching the doctrines of religion and teaching about religion as an aspect of humanity.

Ojibwa Bear Ceremonialism =  Among the oldes forms of religious practice.

Person/Chief of the Bears

 

GRIM & ST. JOHN:

 

Winnebago/Siouan =   Winnebago is an Indian Tribe that speaks Siouan (one of three languages among the NA Indians – Algonquian and Iroquoian).

Ojibwa (Anishinaabeg/Chippewa//Algonquians =  Anish refer to the people of the woodland who spoke the same language.  Colonists named them Ojibway and Chippewa.

Cosmological Beliefs:  Involve the concept of power as manifested in the land, in the dialectic of the sacred and the profane, and in patterns of space and time.  Power is that transformative presence most clearly seen in the cycles of the day and the seasons, in the earth, in visions and deeds of spirits, ancestors and living people.

Power: expressed by the word MANITOU (a personal revelatory experience usually manifested in dreams or in visions of a spirit who is capable of transformation into a specific human or animal form. Efficacy of Power: symbolized as “medicine” either as (1) tangible object kept in a bundle, (2) intangible “charm” possessed internally.

The Land: cosmic power was intimately connected with the land.  Siouan speaking Winnebago developed cosmologies in which the heavens above and the earth regions below were seen as layered in hierarchies of beneficial and harmful spirits.   The highest power had different names (Great spirit, Master of Life, Finisher, Earthmaker by the Winnebago.

Spirit-forces: Power and guidance entered human existence from the cosmis spirit-forces, from the guardian spirits of individuals and medicine societies and from spirits of charms, bundles and masks.  Dreams, in particular were a vehicle for contacting power and gainig guidance.

Sacred/Recounted:  Among the Winnebago narrative stories were distinguished as worak (“what is recounted”) and waika (“what is sacred”).   Worak stories were profane – they told stories of heroes, human tragedy and memorable events.  Waika stories were sacred – they evoked the spirits.

The interweaving of sacred space and sacred time gave real dimensions to cosmic power.

Sacred Space: A place of orientation that provides individuals or groups with a sense of both an integrating center and a cosmic boundary.

Sacred Time:  The period of contact with sustaining power.  Contact was believed to occur in the movement of the seasons, the fecundity of nature and the personal life cycle.  Society member imagistically participated in the original assembly of the Manitou – this structured an experience of sacred time.

Ceremonial Practices: - they are concerned with subsistence, life cycles and personal, clan and society visions

Subsistence:  Through subsistence rituals, tribes contacted power to ensure the success of hunting, fishing or trapping; gathering of herbs fruits or root crops and agricultural endeavors.   They were private and public. The power object from the environment, the empowered hunters, and the ritually imaged Manitou-spirits, functioned together to bring sustenance to the people.

Life Cycles:  Birth and Early childhood, Puberty and Death: Life cycle rites of passage recognize  the passage through life’s stages required a structured encounter with power

Individual, Clan, Group: Power objects given by the Manitou, (i.e. medicine bundles, charms, face-paintings) became the focus of personal rituals, songs and dances.

Religious Personalities:. Primarily a healer and diviner. – contact power by means of a trance  and channels that power to specific needs.

Four Shamanic vocations: (1) Shaking tent diviner and healer; technique – shaman enter a special lodge that swayed when the Manitou arrived.  (2) Tube-sucking curer – used the bones of raptorial birds to suck the affected area and to remove objects believed to have been shot into a person by malicious witches.  (3) Manipulation of fire – healed by using the heat of burning embers to massage and fascinate his patients.  (4) Member of one of the medicine societies;  composed of shamans, candidates initiated into the society and healed patients.

Medicine People: War Chiefs: religious personalities who led war bundle ceremonies and ware parties. Peace Chiefs: acted as mediators, working for peace within the tribe as well as between separate tribes. Prophets: Ecstatic visionaries received revelations concerning the need to transform specific historical situations. Represented a shift in religious thought among native peoples from individual concern and responsibility for harmony with cosmic powers in nature to a more structured ethics based on an interior religious imperative.

 

PAUL RADIN:

Religious Man- ie Shamans, Intermittently Religious, Non-religious Man

Religion is connected with the preservation of life values; success, happiness and long life.   They interpret religion in terms of life. It is not distinct from mundane life but a means of maintaining social ideals.  The Indian does not interpret life in terms of religion, but religion in terms of life. Spirits/Deities:   They mean little to The Winnebago except at some crisis or wanting something. Purely mechanical relation of cause and effect between the offerings of men (tobacco) and their acceptance by the spirits (a blessing).  Condition set by Earthmaker:  in return for tobacco the spirits were to bestow blessings on man.  The spirits are dazzled, hypnotized by the offerings and

Localized Spirits: spirits possess the power of bestowing anything – from rain, success on the warpath to insignificant trifles.   Any spirit can bestow generalized blessings.   Spirits are looked upon from 2 points of view (1)  bestowers of certain blessings, ( guardian spirits)  (2) protectors of their own precincts ( vague indistinct spirits to whom offerings are made for temporary protection.

Earthmaker = the great spirit, for shamans – he is a true monotheistic deity, benevolent but unapproachable.  Comes into relation with man only through his intermediaries, the spirits.  Created everything for the purpose of benefiting mankind – contrast to the Trickster and his creative acts of mischief.

Sun:   his worship diminished when that of Earthmaker began to assert itself. Many of his functions and powers were taken over by Thunderbirds.   Spoken in myths but is not a culture hero.  He is not a true guardian spirit. Only blesses men (not women) gives success in war.

Disease-Giver:  deals out death from one side of his body and life from the other.  He is a guardian spirit who only appears to the bravest and holiest fasters.   Specific blessings are with war and curing of disease.

Thunderbird:  also part of the older group – has been remodeled and reinterpreted by the shamans.   He is found everywhere.   He is a clan ancestor, popular guardian spirit and a popular deity.    Theromorphic in form – causing lightning by the flashes of his eyes and thunder by the flapping of his wings.  Blesses men with everything but particularly victory on the warpath.

Mechanical Relationship =  If the Winnebago make the offering, the spirits must accept and bestow the blessings. 

Contract Theory =  Introduced by the Shamans. Spirits possessed various powers which man needed for success.  Man possessed tobacco, corn, eagle feathers, buckskin, etc.  The contract: Man was to give the spirits tobacco; and the spirits were to give man the powers they controlled.  

Difference:   In attitude,  principal characteristic of which was a heightened religious feeling.

Fasting experiences that show what powers are supposed to be possessed by various spirits.  Dealing with boys and girls of adolescent stage.  Attitude varies from play to extreme religious intensity. Methods of Bringing the Spirits into Relation with Man: (1) Fasting,  a) method of superinducing a religious feeling, b) this religious feeling in turn is bound up with the desire for preserving and perpetuating socio-economic life values,  (2) Mental Conentration –  effectiveness of a blessing, a ceremony depended upon “concentrating one’s mind” upon the spirits, the details of the ritual or the precise purpose to be accomplished.   The blessing would be in direct proportion to the power of concentration. (3) Offerings and Sacrifices,   offerings consisted of tobacco, buckskins and whatever the particular spirit liked.  Animal spirits were given favorite foods.   (4) Prayers,   Objects of the prayer are always connected to happiness,  success and long life.  Prayers are accompanied by religious feelings when made by the religious man – but become more formulas in the hands of the lay Indian.

The concept of evil: 3 Causes of Evil:   (1)  Did not perform a rite in the prescribed way  (2) Was not able to invoke the spirits for protection, (3) The evil machinations of other men.

The concept of disease:   Disease is rarely ascribed to the spirits.  It is regarded as a fact of existence.    (1) Due to carelessness of man of trying to pass through life without the aid of spirits  (2) evil machinations of other men.

 

 

 

AN INTERVIEW WITH GERALD VIZENOR

        "A Chance of Survivance":

An Interview with Gerald Vizenor, Conclusion

Broadcast on Cover to Cover, KPFA-FM, 8/26/96

Jack Foley

 

JACK FOLEY: You have marvelous stuff about Edward Curtis in this book, as well as some great stuff about the words "discover" and "Indian." Here is one impressive paragraph:

The use of the word "Indian" is a postmodern navigational conception; it is a colonial invention, a simulation in sound and transcription; tribal cultures became nominal, diversities were twisted to the core, and oral stories were set in written languages, the translations of discovery.

"Discover" is another word that you redefine. What does it mean to "discover" an Indian?

GERALD VIZENOR: To possess! The interesting key here is the idea of simulation. Of course, so much of post-anything life is one of simulation: photographs, images, motion pictures, the things we take pleasure in are simulations. The distinction here, though, comes from Jean Baudrillard in the work he did on simulations, where it refers to the idea that the simulation has no reference. It's just a pure invention, and then that invention becomes the real, so that you have to be suspicious of your own memory, your own experience; you have to suspend them because the power of the simulation has taken control of everything real.

JACK FOLEY: Yes. You're thinking there, of course, of the famous ways in which Edward Curtis and others would pose people.

GERALD VIZENOR: They certainly knew their audience.

JACK FOLEY: Absolutely. They knew exactly how to appeal to people, and they did. I'm half Irish, and the Irish created their stereotype, whereas that was not true for African Americans and it was certainly not true for Indians. Indians didn't create the stereotype; they had to play along with what somebody else told them they were and that's what Curtis famously did. This is something that's touched on deeply in this book the problem of naming, which is an enormous problem. Now your tribe... You have a book called The People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories (University of Minnesota Press). It's not "the people who called themselves Chippewa." They never called themselves "Chippewa." What do they call themselves?

GERALD VIZENOR: "Anishinaabe," plural "Anishinaabeg." Not only that the word is different but the context of using such a word wouldn't refer per se to any national identity, or any political reference; it would be a general reference to the people who speak this language.

JACK FOLEY: It's only recently that "Chippewa" came into existence at all, and many people never used it, so you're perfectly within your rights to say "the people who call themselves Anishinaabe."

GERALD VIZENOR: True. So many of the words that are in dictionaries and lexicons about the native tribes are in English or derived from French or Spanish Navajo, Iroquois, Sioux, and others. Very few of the native tribal names come from the language in some way Winnebago, Oneida would be exceptions but there are not many.

JACK FOLEY: And there is also the issue of the different modes of naming. Nicknames are very important to you and to many people. As you point out, names are stories. You point that out in the essay, "Ishi Obscura" [about the survivor of the Yahi Yana people who came in from the California forests in 1911]. That's a wonderful title because, you know, the photograph, the whole business of photography cames from the camera obscura, and this is "Ishi Obscura," the one that hasn't gotten into the photograph, the Ishi who is still "obscure," still in the dark. You point out that he never told anybody his name.

GERALD VIZENOR: His nickname, or sacred name. We presume he did [have one], but it was not revealed.

JACK FOLEY: It was certainly not Albert Kroeber [the anthropologist who set Ishi up at the University of California]!

GERALD VIZENOR: Jack, I just made a mistake. I used the word "Winnebago," and I meant to use the word "Menominee." "Winnebago" was of course one of the simulated words. Ishi was given a name from his own language, a name that meant man or person, but he didn't tell anyone his sacred name, and I think this may have been true for many natives in their first encounter with Europeans, say missionaries. They didn't just step forward and say, "My sacred name is ," so I think many of the descriptive names, many of them so beautiful and intriguing, suggest something of the native tradition. Many of the traditional names were probably translations from nicknames, and then a nickname ends up a surname in the English language.

JACK FOLEY: A name is fossilized history, and that's part of it too. One of the interesting things you say here, about photography: "Photographs are the discoveries of the absence of the tribes." We've just had you read your poem, "The Last Photograph," which is about the presence of your father. That's not exactly a contradiction, because there is this longing toward your father, and here is evidence of, in fact, what he looked like. These photographs of Curtis's are precisely what the Indians didn't look like. It's what he wanted them to look like. In a sense he's using photography against its realistic and historical aspects.

GERALD VIZENOR: We have a real interesting problem now with the photograph. Before virtual images, before computer-generated images or electronic images, where one can alter photographs even motion pictures, so that we have Forrest Gump talking to John F. Kennedy earlier we could allow a photograph pretty much its imaginative reality, that is, we could imagine and give it reality. We could create its reference by either reading about it or just seeing it from our own imaginations. Now it could be a virtual, electronic, or digital manipulation, and we can never be sure, so we truly are at a point of something of a post-photograph simulation where we must take all images now as floating without references.

JACK FOLEY: And there's a tendency in photography to achieve that kind of simulation anyway. They're all square or rectangular, of a similar size. We can blow them up, but basically they're the same. And it's so strange because, in fact, especially with portrait photos, we're looking at the photos but we imagine the people in the photos are looking at us.

Now, like Ishi, you're an Indian (I should say a postindian, excuse me) at the University of California. Like Ishi, you've been to the museum.

GERALD VIZENOR: I should say that it took about eight years to work through the committees and find support to name something on campus in honor of Ishi's presence, even though he was one of the first natives to work for the university. There's irony in the way he did his work, but he was there. Here is some of what I wrote in the essay:

Ishi was never his real name. Ishi is a simulation, the absence of his tribal names. He posed at the borders of the camera, the circles of photographers and spectators, in the best backlighted pictures of the time.

JACK FOLEY: Yes, he did. There's more there. I was thinking, too, of Ishi is not the last man of stone. He is not the obscure other, the mortal silence of savagism and the vanishing race. He's none of those. It's interesting, too: A problem similar to the term "Indian" is the problem that African Americans have had in trying to find a neutral term. In a racist society, the minute you find a neutral term, about five minutes later the neutral term has taken on negative attributes and so you have to find another neutral term. African Americans are notorious for having gone through a whole bunch of neutral terms in this racist society. The same is true of Indians, but what is interesting is that now, for the very first time, this is true for whites. To call someone a "white male" is not neutral. It's negative!

GERALD VIZENOR: There are no whites, either.

JACK FOLEY: That's true. There are no whites. That's an invention, just as much as "the Indian" is.

I want to ask you about a few of the terms that show up often in your work. What is a trickster? There are tricksters that abound in your work, but they're not quite the kind of trickster that Paul Radin in his famous book, The Trickster talks about. How are your tricksters different?

GERALD VIZENOR: Well, Radin talks about tricksters being something of a semi-godlike character. The point obviously is that tricksters arise in imaginative literature of the stories that native people told, and it's a literary art. But Trickster is a figurative character, not a real person. It's not a representation of human behavior; it's in fact a transformational figure. It's metaphorical, it's figurative, it's a playful figure .

JACK FOLEY: I'm going to jump on you for that word "literary," though.

GERALD VIZENOR: "Literary artist" oh, I see, after the fact.

JACK FOLEY: "Preliterary artist."

GERALD VIZENOR: Well, I like to think of literature not just in its written form because a work in translation of course becomes literature after its sound but that suggests that the sound part of it is somehow less literary.

JACK FOLEY: I take "literature" to be "letters."

GERALD VIZENOR: Yes.

JACK FOLEY: And so it's writing, whereas with the trickster figures, part of what is interesting about them is that they are freed of that.

GERALD VIZENOR: The trickster is a postliterary artistic creation!

JACK FOLEY: Very nice.

GERALD VIZENOR: Postliterary survivance!

JACK FOLEY: And he's a compassionate figure, he does good things for people. Paul Radin's trickster is tremendously powerful yet totally amoral. Your tricksters are not like that. I think you are essentially an optimistic writer, though you bring us through extraordinary kinds of experiences in order to have that optimism... What is "holosexual"? Not homosexual or heterosexual but holosexual, which shows up in the Reader.

GERALD VIZENOR: I've used that term in several stories, mostly in Griever: An American Monkey King in China. He's the holosexual clown.

JACK FOLEY: But your character Mother Earth is also a holosexual.

GERALD VIZENOR: I am referring to the entire sexual and erotic energy of every cell in our bodies, in order not to reduce this rich and complex energy of eroticism and sexuality to the mere restrictive binaries of gender.

JACK FOLEY: Yes, yes. "Holo" meaning whole, the whole thing, everything, like the Greek prefix "pan."

GERALD VIZENOR: Always, always sexual.

JACK FOLEY: Your phrase "manifest manners" one can get from "manifest destiny." What about "survivance"? which is a word one can find in the Oxford English Dictionary.

GERALD VIZENOR: It's of French origin.

JACK FOLEY: Why do you use that rather than "survival," which is the word more commonly used?

GERALD VIZENOR: Survival suggests more of a reaction, and that's that. It's tied to something and describes the circumstances of a response, a survival. My idea is that we understand what dominance is, a condition; we know it in many, many forms in time and place and circumstance. We need a word like dominance that speaks and is understood in the context of our will to live.

JACK FOLEY: And "survivance" sounds like "dominance."

GERALD VIZENOR: It's as powerful as "dominance."

JACK FOLEY: Yes, it's an English word, actually. Though it's somewhat ancient and not so much used, one can still find it in the O.E.D. Very interesting word. Another term, "half-breed," has practically been annihilated. I was talking earlier about terms that have taken on negative connotations! This also has the sense that one hasn't quite made it: not a "holo-breed," a "half- breed." You use "mixed-blood" and "cross-blood." Part of what's interesting to me in all of this and there are many more words that one finds in your work that one has to use in order to understand it at all part of what's interesting to me is the fact that you have to rename almost everything, you've got to say, uh-uh, that word is no good, that word is a story which is a false story, I've got to rename it in order to state my vision at all. It's not dissimilar, really, from James Joyce, who also had to rename everything.

GERALD VIZENOR: Yes, it's part of mythic re-creation; it is part of the power of a story that you must not just describe the circumstances of the story that give meaning to the story, but you create the presence of the experience in the story itself, and, to do that, many times you need new words or new language.

JACK FOLEY: Particularly I think in the situation of a colonized people, a people who have been oppressed by another people. All right, I'll use that language, I'll take English; I'll use it but I'm going to use it in a way that's different.

GERALD VIZENOR: You come to the vocabulary that I provide for you.

JACK FOLEY: Exactly. Part of the excitement and the deep pleasure of reading Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader is the pleasure of language. There's rage in the book, but there's also a lot of comedy. There's also a screenplay, Harold of Orange, which was made into a delightful film in 1983. The screenplay reads beautifully. You've delved into a lot of very deep issues throughout the book. There are essays, there are stories, there are excerpts from novels. The screenplay touches on a great many of these issues but in a very light way. You read it as the last thing in the book and you think, Oh, I know about that because I read this other piece, but in the screenplay it's just a joke, just a little joke that goes on by. But because of what you've read earlier you see the depths both of understanding and of pain and joy that these "jokes" come out of.

GERALD VIZENOR: Harold of Orange was the compassionate trickster: that is, he did better than people would have expected of him! [Laughter]

JACK FOLEY: Why don't you read a few of your haiku. This is something we haven't even talked about and we're almost out of time. But you're quite a haiku writer. In fact haiku brought you to literature. Haiku connected you to your own tribal "literature" I can't get away from the word!

GERALD VIZENOR: Yes, it did, by way of imagery.

those stubborn flies

square dance across the grapefruit

honor your partner

JACK FOLEY: What did somebody say about that one?

GERALD VIZENOR: They said, "That's not the way we treat flies around here!"

redwing blackbirds

ride the reeds in a slough

curtain calls

calm in the storm

master basho soaks his feet

water striders

JACK FOLEY: That's a beautiful one. I think that's about all we have time for, yet there's lots more to talk about. Gerald Vizenor's Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader is a marvelous book. It's educational on all levels and it's also an awful lot of fun. Gerry, thank you so much for being on the show.

GERALD VIZENOR: Thank you, Jack, very much.

Jack Foley

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