The Enigma of Tribes

                                      

There’s a great moment in the 1932 Hollywood comedy The Heart of New York with George Sidney and the team of Smith and Dale. A man is making his way through the Lower East Side and asks “What’s become of all the Irish?” and one of the Jewish people who now lives there shrugs and says, “What’s become of all the Indians?”

Naturally, the joke refers to the never-ending cycle of displacement of peoples in America as newer peoples arrive. It feels American, of course, but it has also been experienced periodically everywhere on the globe throughout the entire history of the human race. For one obvious example, right in front of us: in a way, the Irish themselves had experienced something very much like the plight of the Native American in their own native land. In a way, you could say that the English had used Ireland as a sort of dry run for their subsequent colonialism. In the 1550s, after Henry VIII had been named King of Ireland, the English launched their plantation system project, sending hundreds of Englanders and Scots to colonize the island, extract its wealth, and subdue the local people. While Spain was expanding their empire in the Americas, the English were doing the same thing, only much closer to home, gaining much valuable experience for when they themselves crossed the Atlantic in the early 17th century. It is telling that just when English colonization of New England and Virginia began to take off in the 1620s, migration into Ireland slowed, though its domination and control of the Northern Counties continues to this day.

Not unusual among Americans, I have many ancestors among all Irish factions: the Irish natives, as well as Scots- and Anglo-Irish settlers. But I have always been grateful that among my ancestry’s thousands of lines, almost all of which arrived close to four centuries ago, is one that came during the “classic” era of American immigration. There was one straggler who came from Rosecrea at the time of the Great Famine. That is the most recent arrival in my family background. If you’ve seen Gangs of New York, you know what the Irish faced when they first arrived in the United States in large numbers in the mid 19th century: overt prejudice, discrimination, and even physical confrontation – at the hands of most of my other relatives, the ethnic English who had been here for two centuries. For a time, a bunch of them organized themselves into a political party named, tragicomically, the “Native Americans”, a.k.a. the “Know Nothings”, (because much like the later Ku Klux Klan, they were a secret society). That was the first use of the term “Native American” in American politics. The society was so Eurocentric that the people who were literally indigenous didn’t even count.

There was a rival political organization named after the real First Nations, however,  The Tammany Society was named in honor of Tamenand, a Lenape Chief named who had signed a major peace treaty with Quaker founder Willian Penn in 1683. In keeping with the theme, local chapters of the Tammany Society were known as wigwams. The administrators were known as sachems and sagamores. Which I think makes it especially ironic that Tammany’s democratic machine was instrumental in getting Andrew Jackson elected, Andrew Jackson, who of course made the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears a permanent stain on our history. And a Hall named for Tamenand, in a town that had no more Lenape.

One of my first wife’s ancestors was one of these Tammany Hall sachems. Her great-great grandfather was also a Tammany mucky-muck during the time of Irish Catholic ascendancy in New York in the late 19th century. Her dad was a U.S. Congressman; her grandfather, a Mayor. All Irish.

She and I went out west on two honeymoon trips, through the Teton country of Colorado, past the site of Custer’s Last Stand, through Utah, homeland of the Utes and their flute playing avatar Kokopelli, and into Yellowstone Park where we saw wild buffalo. We visited a real ghost town. We went to the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody Wyoming, one of the finest Buffalo Bill museums in the world!  I rode horses on a ranch and hiked in the desert and rode on terrifying mountain roads as snow fell. Oddly this was all at my wife’s bidding. She was working on a novel about cowboys and practically had to drag me kicking and screaming out there. Of course I loved it.

We also visited the magnificent Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City and the surrounding tourist traps. And there I visited an exhibit full of dioramas that attempted to lay out the case for the belief, shared by all Latter Day Saints, that the Native People of the American continent are actually the descendants of a Lost Tribe of Israel who came to America in ancient times. Almost everyone else disagrees that that was a thing that happened, but then Mormonism is a religion and there’s not much reward in arguing with what people take on faith.

Now….um, before I continue along this tightrope, I feel the need to assert the information that I don’t happen to share the bemused and often disrespectful hostility most non-Mormons hold toward the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In particular, that is. Not because I’m a goody two-shoes with a halo over my own head, but because I am connected to it. My brother and his wife converted to the religion as a young couple, and (as you can imagine) they’ve have had about a thousand offspring. His branch of our family now outnumbers the rest of us Gentiles by some uncountable proportion I won’t even attempt to calculate.

So there’s that. So I have been Mormon-adjacent most of my life, and for a good bit of my youth, say, from the ages of 8 to 18, I was much closer to the religion than I am now. I attended their functions, I read their core literature and even considered converting. In recent years, I’ve even learned that I’m distantly related to Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith, and am more related to a man named Hosea Stout, who was one of Smith’s bodyguards, the commander of police in the ill-fated town of Nauvoo, Illinois and one of the first of their bunch to enter the Salt Lake Valley.

Of course, all of that can be true without my caring a damn about them. It’s just that I happen to know a bunch of them way too well to dismiss them as kooks. They’re nice (maybe too nice), normal (maybe too normal), and a couple of them are scholars who are quite literally smarter than I am. One of them translates Chinese poetry into Italian, or something. Another is a master of geopolitics. Does their church have a racist, homophobic, and sexist history? Sure, but don’t, like, all the churches? Are they invested in a fantasy? Aren’t, like, all the churches? And furthermore, this particular church, like most of the other ones, has also been on the receiving end of persecution. If you don’t know that history, you ought to. It’s made the Mormons better attuned than most conservative denominations to the human rights of Jews, Muslims, and other smaller sects.

And as to some aspects of their creed? Surely you realize it’s by no means accidental that Mitt Romney has been one of a tiny handful of Republicans to swim against the Trumpian tide. He takes his principles (some of which you may not agree with) very seriously, and he knows that his people (his friends, his congregation) have his back. He had the courage to do something very hard, and his faith was the instrument that gave him the strength to do it. In that connection, I’ve observed something about my own family. Four of my mother’s children have had, ahem, issues with marital fidelity. The Mormon one, alone among the five, has not. The armchair psychoanalyst in me theorizes a possible motive for his conversion.

But, I’m only human. One time, when I was trying to be a big shot, riffing at the expense of this relatively new religion at my wife’s folks’ Georgetown townhouse, I looked up and saw my old, wise, and thoroughly Irish Catholic father-in-law scowling at me.  It was like he was beaming me a message. It may have been the most profound thing he ever said to me and he didn’t speak a word. He was definitely imparting the sentiment “Don’t do that, schmuck”. We all believe something other people don’t believe (or vice versa), and, me, being descended from Puritans, Quakers, Huguenots, and other persecuted groups ought to know better. The way for ethnic, political and economic refugees to come to this country was paved by religious refugees. Nor were they welcomed with open arms by the indigneous people who lived here. Strife ensued, and the First Nations lost, though not for want of trying. 

If the Mormons want to believe that Native Americans are a long lost tribe of Hebrews somehow, which neither Native Americans nor Jews endorse, what’s the harm, as long as they don’t hurt anybody? Well, that is the crucial sticking point. And as it happens, one thing the Jews and the First Nations do have in common is that, of all the people’s of the earth, these two came the closest to being exterminated by a majority population that actively sought to wipe them from the earth.

Did you know that Adolph Hitler got some of his best ideas from western novels? A man named Karl May was Hitler’s favorite fiction author. May wrote books about cowboys and Indians. Hitler liked these books so much he passed them out as gifts. And when the Fuhrer gives you a book you don’t put it on a shelf and forget about it. The Germans of Hitler’s day were not ignorant of American culture. In fact, sometimes they knew an uncomfortable LOT about it. On April 28, 1939 Hitler gave a speech before the Reichstag in which he sarcastically answered an open letter from FDR pleading for more peace talks.  “The freedom of North America was not achieved at the conference table any more than the conflict between the North and the South was decided there,” Hitler scoffed, “I will not mention the innumerable struggles which finally led to the subjugation of the North American Continent as a whole”. …thus skewering Roosevelt’s sermon by reminding anyone listening of America’s history of slavery and genocide, at a time when Jim Crow was still in force and the First Nations had all been removed to reservations. Later he gets in another dig, claiming that the German delegates to the Versailles Peace Conference “… were subjected to even greater degradation than can ever have been inflicted on the chieftains of Sioux tribes.”  Hitler was being disingenuous and self-serving but nothing he said was a lie. Those things happened. Naturally it’s the wrong lesson to draw that that somehow makes it okay to commit such atrocities again, as Hitler was to do in his own country and throughout most of Europe. The lesson to draw is “never again” – by anybody.

Anyway, World War Two transpired and that was how and why my grandfather, a son of the former Confederacy, who lived one county over from the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, enlisted in a war against the Nazis and Imperial Japan. But soon, the international exposure and condemnation of Nazi policies in the wake of German defeat, meant that from now on America would have to look at its OWN history differently. Never again could it pretend to an innocence it didn’t possess. These things happened. And it’s very dangerous to deny that they did.

Detachment from reality allows emotional distance, which permits cruelty, which allows the displacement of some groups by other groups, who literally kill them for land. Before the English did it to the Irish, the Anglo-Saxons did it to the Britons, and those Celtic Britons did it to the previous Neolithic cultures and on and on deep into the mists of prehistory throughout the world. Thousands of years during which white men had killed each other and red men killed each other with identical savagery and identical xenophobia and identical greed. French killed English, Cree killed Choctaw, Protestant killed Catholic, Eagle People killed Sun People. As a Scotsman I can tell you that for centuries Scotsmen killed Scotsmen, clans killed clans, families killed families. This is true as well of the native people of the Americas. BEFORE the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, the Aztecs made mountains of skulls in the name of their religion. It’s not a white thing or a red thing or a black thing or a yellow thing, although it’s most definitely a man thing. Whether it’s also a woman thing remains academic, but I’m pretty skeptical. In the name of security, men pick leaders, worship them, do the madness of their bidding, and, historically, death has been the universal result.

The division of humanity into tribes, whatever they be, ethnic, religious, or political, is insidious, a mere excuse for a handful of monsters to accumulate power. The mission of almost all tribes is the elimination of the other tribes. The dilemma is that you can’t vanquish categories without harming the human beings who cling to them, and the vanquisher will always merely be the strongest tribe -- which is not a victory for humanity. The challenge is to acknowledge and celebrate the differences without allowing them to deteriorate into divisions.

"Plymouth Adventure" and Other Bad Mayflower Takes

 

All claims (by others) to the contrary, I am at best an amateur historian, though I have been at it since childhood, when I was a 13 year old  Junior Member of the Pettaquamscutt Historical Society of South County, Rhode Island, where my brother, for reasons no one could ever quite figure out, was made President. He set me to work transcribing dusty old diaries and ledgers, and identifying the content of old glass photographic plates. and I have been bored to distraction by such tasks ever since. I’m glad other people do it, but it’s not what gets me out of bed in the morning. I prefer to write and tell stories, and history is a gold field for stories.

My love of books and history was inspired by my favorite grandparent, my mother’s mother Ruth Cady Herindeen (the one who stirred up all that trouble with the Trouble Man). Through her I am descended from Governor William Bradford, as well as Henry Howland, who was the brother of the boy who fell off the Mayflower, John Howland whom we might call the Jerry Lewis of the Pilgrims.

I hold in my hands right now a book of grandmother’s that came into my possession after she passed away, a 1925 school textbook called The Land of the Pilgrims, by one Jay Earle Thomson, A.M., Principal of School Number Three, Jersey City. New Jersey. This was the sort of outdated, misguided tome I spent my childhood engrossed in, full of charm and jingoism, obsolete vocabulary and vague, spotty information. It gave me a reputation for book-learning among those who never graduated beyond TV Guide, but also turned me into a square peg in the round, spinning hole of the 1970s. Since today I write nostalgically about things like Starsky and Hutch and KC and the Sunshine Band, it appears I will always be exactly one half century out of date.

At any rate The Land of the Pilgrims remains a useful gauge of the attitudes a certain portion of the American public has about the topic to this day, I think, insomuch as they reflect upon the subject at all. It is an attitude, one need hardly say, of unquestioning veneration. It’s the sort of book the teachers on the Little Rascals or Leave it to Beaver, ya know Miss Crabtree or Miss Canfield, might teach out of, full of “noble and edifying sentiments.” It dates from the one room school house time, when one teacher would teach you everything. It is a book so multiform and variegated that one would be hardpressed to say what it is. It is simultaneously a history of the Pilgrims, a travel guide to Plymouth Massachusetts, a biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and a critical appreciation of “The Courtship of Miles Standish”, which is presented in its entirety for the purposes of memorization.

Here is its description of Scrooby, the northern English village where the Pilgrim’s Separatist congregation first formed: (picture it read in a Margaret Dumont falsetto): “Like most English villages, Scrooby is quaint, charming and picturesque. Flowers, flagrant and colorful, and nicely kept lawns and terraces attract the traveler. It is not unusual to see tastily cultivated gardens in front of the dwellings. In the rear of the homes are well-kept fields separated by hedges that appear olive green in the sunlight. Everywhere one finds the people frugal, hospitable, and happy. In such an environment lived the Pilgrims over 300 years ago. Thus it is no wonder that they developed such excellent traits of dignity, character, and refinement.”

Wait, are they talking about Pilgrims or Munchkins? Sounds like the Scrooby Realtors Association slipped the author of this book a ten spot. “Each house possesses a lovely fireplace, equipped with its own chimney, allowing all the inhabitants of Scrooby an adequate supply of oxygen, which periodically aerates their healthy and well-nourished bodies”.

Apparently, things weren’t that good in Scrooby because the Pilgrims had to either flee or risk imprisonment and torture! The truth is that, no one is ONLY descended from nice people, so some of your ancestors were nice people and some of them were nasty people. You have not just hundreds but thousands of ancestors, and a sizeable fraction of them, whatever your color, whatever their origin, committed what you would consider unspeakable acts unless you yourself  are a psychopath. If you think no ancestor of yours ever did something so vile it would make you throw up to witness it, think again. That is the text of history. Now, you don’t have to put it quite that way to a group of elementary school children, but on the other hand, the pretty flowers in the front yards in Scrooby seems decidedly off topic, and something of a bait and switch. Unless you refer to Les Fleurs du Mal.

But there is an impulse which many among us have to speak no ill – at least to speak no ill of your own tribe. I am here to tell you that the world is too small for tribes, has been since long before I was born, so you’d better see the good in other folks families and acknowledge the ills of your own. White people, like people of all colors from every corner of the earth, have done unspeakable things. And never more so than at the very moment when they claim they never do unspeakable things. To claim otherwise is to LIE, which is L.I.E., the Long Island Expressway to perdition.

So The Land of the Pilgrims is a mighty white book. It came out in 1925, when membership in the Ku Klux Klan was exploding and the Nationalistic Society of Teutonia, precursor to the German American Bund was being established across several American cities. There’s ya patriotic education for ya.

At any rate, I find it significant that after all its promotion of pureness and goodness and commendableness, in the end The Land of the Pilgrims lands on the Longfellow poem The Courtship of Miles Standish which in the first, last and final analysis is a soap opera about a love triangle between Priscilla Mullin and her two suitors, John Alden, who was the ship’s carpenter, and Miles Standish, who was basically the Pilgrims' chief of police and commander of their militia. There was plenty in that poem to make a high school student’s heart go pit-a-pat, back when high school students knew how to read. Which guy is the girl gonna go with, huh, huh, huh? And don’t say Jesus.

My mother was born one year after The Land of the Pilgrims came out. Books, even books as cockamamie as The Land of the Pilgrims, were not her cup of vodka. Growing up in the ‘30s and ‘40s, her main cultural influences outside of school assignments would have been old time radio and Hollywood movies. She loved her jazz bands and movie stars.

Times have changed

And we’ve often rewound the clock

Since the Puritans got a shock

When they landed on Plymouth Rock

If today

Any shock they should try to stem

‘stead of landing on Plymouth Rock

Plymouth Rock would land on them!

Those are of course lyrics from Cole Porters’“Anything Goes”. The tune first became a hit when my mother was eight years old. For some perspective. Somewhat irreverent! Hollywood!

Compared with Christmas or Halloween there aren’t many classic Thanksgiving themed movies. Practically none, in fact. In desperation, a few years ago Turner Movie Classics began showing a 1952 turkey known as Plymouth Adventure every November.

Contrary to what the title promises, the film offers virtually no Plymouth and precious little "adventure". The entire movie takes place aboard the Mayflower during its VOYAGE to North America. Half way through the picture they are still tied to the dock. The movie literally has a 20 minute scene where they haggle over the lease! There are limits to realism. On the other hand, there are aspects when we are definitely reminded we are in a Hollywood movie. The Mayflower as depicted is a bit more spacious than the reality. I’ve been on a replica of that tub. The ceilings were very low. To practicably shoot a movie there you’d have to use the all-midget cast of The Terror of Tiny Town. Hey, maybe the Pilgrims WERE Munchkins!

And since it would be a drag to fill two hours with what the Mayflower passengers were really doing during those uncomfortable 7 months ( throwing up, eating rotten food, and holding their noses), Plymouth Adventure spices things up with no less than TWO love triangles. The first has one of Hollywood’s sexiest female stars Gene Tierney as Dorothy Bradford. (wolf noises). Hoo boy! That is one hot Pilgrim! That’s a real hornicopia! Unfortunately Dorothy finds herself neglected by her husband William Bradford, played by the cuckhold from central casting Leo Genn, who’d been nominated for an Oscar the previous year for his performance in Quo Vadis? and remains a forgotten star of yesteryear in spite of that accolade. So Gene Tierney is all too grateful for the attentions of Captain Christopher Jones, played by the much more dynamic Spencer Tracy. Spoiler alert, Dorothy Bradford never made it alive to Plymouth, which is why I wasn’t making wolf noises about my own 10th grandmother just now even if she was Gene Tierney, and also why the filmmakers could depict a lurid tale of implied adultery in the age of the Production Code. It never gets consummated. In fact the trailer advertises it! Probably why the movie wasn’t a hit! Bradford later married a woman named Alice Carpenter and it is her from whom I am descended.

The other triangle in the film we already know from the Longfellow poem thoughtfully included in The Land of the Pilgrims. In this one Dawn Addams, who some of you may know from Charlie Chaplin’s A King in New York (1957) is Priscilla Mullin. [wolf noises galore]. She is lusted after by both John Alden, played by Van Johnson, and Miles Standish, portrayed by Noel Drayton, who’s even more forgotten than Leon Genn. The biggest of those three stars was of course Van Johnson, who was from my home state of Rhode Island and inexplicably a major heart throb with the ladies in the World War Two era. “Ah jeez, look at that. Say, if I knew you girls were havin’ a clambake, I’d have brought some of my famous quohaug stuffin’!”

WELL. I can see my Van Johnson imitation is wasted on you.

Plymouth Adventure also has a young Lloyd Bridges as a totally made up pirate guy walking around deck with his shirt off. With all this action you’d think a body’s pulse might quicken, but no dice. In fact in the end, Gene Tierney can’t take the tedium and jumps into the drink. The end. Oh and also, religious freedom.

Pilgrim dramatization had not appreciably improved by the time of my own childhood. When not reading 50 year old books, for my Plymouth fix in my own childhood I might tune in the 1979 CBS made-for-television movie Mayflower: The Pilgrim’s Adventure, with a young Anthony Hopkins as Captain Jones, and Richard Crenna, as Pilgrim leader William Brewster.

William Brewster was on the run from the authorities at the time so, I kid you not, Crenna spends the entire movie hiding in a small box like some kind of Pilgrim Senor Wences. And given that Hopkins had starred in Magic the previous year, I count that as a lost ventriloquial opportunity. “Are you alright down there, Brother Brewster?” (echoey Senor Wences): “S’alright!”

And did I mention the Pilgrim goils in this one? Whoa-sa! Trish Van De Vere as Rose Standish and Jenny Agutter as Priscilla Mullin. Clearly John Landis liked Agutter so much in this movie that he just had to have her for An American Werewolf in London and you know what that makes me say? (An absurd amount of wolf sounds and dogs barking).

But wait! Now we come to my sons' generation! And they have their own TV movie, Saints and Strangers, which premiered on the National Geographic channel in 2015.

This one has several male actors, but more importantly Anna Camp and Natsacha McElhone  as a couple of Pilgrim beauties [Crazy amount of wolf noises, climaxing with dogs barking "Jingle Bells"].

Hey now, these movies make it sound like Plymouth was a hotbed of…hot beds!

Songs of the American Indian Movement

 

If you know the song of which I’ll speak, you probably know it as "Cherokee People", although the full title was “Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian)”. It was a #1 hit for the Raiders in 1971. The Raiders had earlier been known under the flashier name of Paul Revere and the Raiders. They were a successful garage rock combo famous for their gimmick of dressing like Revolutionary War soldiers, complete with tri-corner hats… and lest you chortle at the hokum you’d better know that they had a string of 23 consecutive hits in the mid to late ‘60s. I was about six years old when “Indian Reservation” came out and just the kind of brooding, melancholy child to love it. Like many with roots in the American Southeast our family was reputed to possess Cherokee blood and I later found a couple of great-great-great-great-great grandmothers in my family tree to confirm it, though you should know that that’s 2 out of 128 ancestors in that generation, which amounts to, I dunno, one Cherokee eyebrow, or one Cherokee nostril, in my make-up, something like that. But I certainly learned about the Trail of Tears long before it was taught to me in school, and with the proper tone of shame, sorrow, and regret. and at the knee of a paleolithically conservative father, I might add. We seem to make a brand new kind of conservative nowadays, ones with a psychopathic ethic of never apologizing for anything.

Something was in the air at that time of which I speak. In the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, the birth of modern Feminism, Stonewall, and much else, The American Indian Movement, or AIM had been founded in 1968. That same year President Johnson signed the Indian Rights Act, which allowed Native Americans full access to the U.S. Bill of Rights for the first time. The movie Little Big Man, which cast Dustin Hoffman as a white man raised by Cheyenne, was released in 1970. Dee Brown’s seminal book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which our family owned, came out the same year as the Raiders’ tune, as did that much ridiculed “Keep American Beautiful” TV ad with the Crying Indian. 1970 was the first National day of Mourning, established to protest the very idea of Thanksgiving. The Crying Indian was Iron Eyes Cody, who was really an Italian American actor named Espera Oscar de Corti. And throughout these years believe it or not, President Richard Nixon championed tribal self-rule, signing 52 pieces of legislation granting Native American tribes greater self-determination, which is one of the several reasons that, in spite of his many character flaws and out-and-out crimes against humanity, Nixon has never been dead last in most historian’s rankings of U.S. Presidents. He took his job very seriously, one might call it a grim determination, which is undoubtedly why he seemed to have the defiant, self-righteous delusion that no one else could do it.

So Native Americans were having a cultural moment in the early ‘70s. It probably seemed like things would finally improve for them. But alas it was not so. The years that followed saw the Wounded Knee stand-off of 1973, the Pine Ridge shoot-out of 1975, all the way up to the Standing Rock protests, and the scandalous unsolved disappearances of hundreds of Native American women of recent years. The needs of the indigenous people of this nation go, as ever, continually unaddressed. The consciousness that leads to progress seems to come in fits and starts, usually in the wake of tragedies that bring things to a boil. More often than not, even that is not enough. We’re a nation of consumers, and while we’re delighted to consume things like movies and pop songs and fashions and fads, we are rarely exercised to take risks or ACT.  Yet songs and all art can help raise consciousness, something we should never dismiss out of hand.

And thus we come to Nashville songwriter John D. Loudermilk, or Johnny Dee, as he was billed on his own recordings. Loudermilk penned such once-popular tunes as “Ebony Eyes”, “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye”, and “Tobacco Road”. He was a native of Durham North Carolina, and possibly part Cherokee although he was so fond of yarns it’s hard to know for sure. Loudermilk once told American Top 40 DJ Casey Kasem that he wrote his song to pacify a bunch of Cherokee who'd pulled him out of the backseat of his car during a stopover on a long drive and threatened to kill him. It turns out that the unflattering story was just cooked up to make  a fool of Kasem in revenge for waking up Loudermilk with a phone call at 3 in the morning. Lowdermilk did claim that his ancestors Homer and Martha Loudermilk were among those marked westward on the so-called Trail of Tears but that one’s never been verified either. and let’s be honest – Homer and Martha? But I would be glad to be proved wrong.

What we do know is that in 1959 Lowdermilk wrote this song which was originally recorded by singer Marvin Rainwater who was one quarter Cherokee and known for performing onstage in Native American themed outfits. The song as originally recorded went under the title “The Pale Faced Indian.”

Fans of the song will note several differences between Rainwater’s version and the Raiders’ better known hit, although you will admit it has as much hokum. Some of the lines in the verses were later cut, and this original version contains faux native chanting rather than the familiar melodramatic chorus with the lines “Cherokee People, Cherokee Tribe, So Proud to Live, So Proud to Die”. These changes were mainly made in 1968 by English singer Don Fardon who had the first hit single with the song, which was then eclipsed by the Raiders much bigger hit three years later.

And as I say, I loved the song. I had the single, which I’d picked up at a yard sale, and played it endlessly. It stirred my imagination. I connected to that family lore about Cherokee connections in my own family. When I was in the third grade, circa 1973, I made friends with a kid in my class who was the grandson of the Chief of the local Narragansetts. One time, with great solemnity, we and another friend held a blood brother ceremony, and I, in all earnestness, took on the name of “Running Buffalo”, a Plains Indian image that had little to do with either the Narragansett or the Cherokee, but sounded real cool. But there is another memory I have about that boy. He was spirited, and very funny, and he couldn’t sit still. The teacher was an old school disciplinarian who insisted on total silence, upright posture, and all manner of outmoded behavioral protocols (not unlike the ones imposed by my father, come to think of it). Anyway, she had her hands full with this shaggy haired rapscallion who wasn’t having any of it. He spoke and moved when he pleased, and was surly with her to boot. It was joyous to watch, especially among the majority of us who regarded the woman with terror. One day, she’d had enough of the kid's lip, blew her stack – and taped his mouth shut. Oh, she had cause to regret the day she did that, I can assure you. 

Hollywood and the Western

In the late 19th century, Native Americans were exhibited in Indian Medicine Shows, and Wild West shows like Buffalo Bill’s, and in anthropological exhibitions in amusement parks like Coney Island, and in the great World’s Fairs, where they were presented in paddocks behind fences, as primitive missing links like zoo animals.

Around the same time Theodore Roosevelt wrote his four volume history The Winning of the West, a bloody bloody account that pulls no punches. Teddy’s great uncle James Henry Roosevelt donated the land on Lower Broadway that is now the site of the Roosevelt Building. That building was the original home of Biograph Studios, employer of D.W. Griffith who directed such early western motion pictures as The Battle of Elderbush Gulch, which was made made one year before his now notorious The Birth of a Nation. At the climax of The Battle of Elderbush Gulch, the main characters are in a cabin surrounded by hostile natives. The hero of the story comes a hair's breadth from shooting his beloved in the head, lest she be molested by one of the leering, terrifying red men creeping towards them like the sideshow characters in the climactic scene of Freaks.

By the time Hollywood came on the scene, there was already a fleshed out and stereotyped iconography not dissimilar from blackfaceminstrelsy, the Original Sin of American show business. In western films, radio shows, and television programs for decades, Native Americans were presented as soulless, marauding enemies, like zombies, or jackdaws, or giant locusts on horseback. They were usually shown attacking in swarms like angry bees.

When presented as individuals they were usually made to speak a sort of pidgin tongue full of monosyllables and grunts as though they were proto-lingual, like cavemen, rather than in possession of complex languages of their own. This sort of depiction hasn’t died out. I still see it done from time to time. It was a staple of comedy for a long time. Theoretically it was done ironically, a lot of the time as an ostensibly parody of western screen characters. Bob Hope's The Paleface (1948) and Son of Paleface (1952) have that sort of thing in it. Buster Keaton, who also made a comedy called The Paleface (1922), had a sort of side career in later years playing comedy Indians, in movies like Li’l Abner (1940) and Pajama Party (1964). Nicknamed the Great Stoneface, it must have seemed appropriate for him to mimic the stoic visage of the cigar store Indian. One of his last projects, and the very last project for comedian Ernie Kovacs was a 1962 pilot for a sitcom called Medicine Man, in which Kovacs played a fast talking frontier snake oil salesman and Keaton his elderly Native American sidekick "Junior", whose dialogue was replete with “How” and “Ugh” humor. Whether the show would have gone on to become a classic 60s sitcom will always be an unanswered question because on the last day of filming Kovacs lost his life in a car accident. But later in the decade F Troop (1965-67) did become a sitcom classic. On that show, the fictitious native tribe are played against stereotype as sophisticated merchants, whose haggling over prices is redolent of the 7th Avenue garment district, though their Chief, Wild Eagle is played by Italian American Frank De Kova. The tribe are known as the Hekawi, a joke that arose from confusion when the tribe was lost on one occasion and someone asked “Where the heck are we?”

Despite their small numbers, Native Americans played a huge part in America’s pop cultural imagination until the 1970s, mostly through the influence of westerns. After years of misrepresentation, it seems like there was a brief period of apology from the late 60s through the mid 1970s and then the influence almost completely disappeared except for occasional blips like Dances with Wolves (1990). Instead of trying to address Native American concerns and make some kind of real concerted industry wide effort to reform, producers took their lacrosse ball and went home.  It’s like Hollywood went: “Sorry, all we got is bullshit. It’s bullshit or nothing. I don’t know what to tell ya! All we got is bullshit” 

 

Tobacco Road, Crack Alley, and the Path to the Celestial City

 

My father worked for decades in a shipyard, just a short drive away from a fabulous, world-famous casino started by the Pequot tribe. I like to call that King Philip’s revenge. He was to have two grandchildren who were part Pequot, whom he didn’t get to know, because he was killed by Madison Avenue driven consumption of a Native American product called tobacco. I call that one Chief Powhatan’s Revenge...

***

I was lucky on two counts when the call came: 1) my bags were already packed and under my desk; and 2) the call came before I left work. I was separated from my wife then, and every Friday night, I’d bolt to the Port Authority bus station and hop on a coach which would take me upstate to visit my kids. By upstate I don’t mean Sing-Sing. Plenty of time for that later. At the moment, their mom was in grad school at Cornell so I would get on this bus that would take me through the beautiful Catskill mountains, Rip Van Winkle territory, Thomas Cole territory, James Fenimore Cooper territory (which really means Mahican territory), and then Northwest to the college town of Ithaca, at the base of the Finger Lakes where I would spend the weekend. Every weekend.

And you know, in those days, we were supposed to always be packed, anyway. It was two years after September 11, and those were the days of Go Bags. You were supposed to be ready to flee at a moment’s notice with all the underwear and road maps and duct tape you might require as you fled New York City. Nowadays I think the authorities would take one look at all that stuff in a bag and think you had a Murder Kit there, but back then they were telling you to pack this stuff. But like I say, my valise, my grip, my portmanteau was not for outrunning Armageddon, or kidnapping women at truckstops, it was just for visitation. Visiting children upstate thankfully not in prison.

And so when the call came that my father was shortly to be drawing his last breath, I was prepared. Not for that, but I was prepared in a more general way, for any type of emergency. All I needed to do this time was grab my bags -- and go in a different direction.

My father had been drawing his last breaths for about six months by that time, so I didn’t know how seriously to take this news. He was a bit of a drama queen. Minor things were always exaggerated to a heroic scale. I got in the habit of taking everything he said cum granis salis. But this time he was right. His lung cancer was advanced. The end was imminent. I remained skeptical right up until I got to his deathbed, which was surrounded by relatives, and saw him.

It wasn’t pretty. Every breath took Herculean effort. He couldn’t talk or even open his eyes. He had to summon every ounce of strength every few seconds to accomplish a shuddering, whistly whiny wheeze. It was agony to witness his agony. The cause was lung cancer: as advertised. He wasn’t the first in my family to die of the demon weed. My dad’s mother, an old hillbilly woman from the Smokey Mountain country had actually CHEWED tobacco, or chaw, as it was called, and spit it into coffee cans. She died of mouth cancer, an equally horrible way to go because the towards the end you can’t even eat. Can’t breathe, can’t eat. What a product of perfect selfishness tobacco is.

In a way, the English and the Native Americans had collaborated to kill my father. The natives had discovered the mildly intoxicating effects of tobacco and first cultivated the plant, but it had been the English of Virginia and North Carolina who had mass produced it and created a market for it and invented insidiously efficient new delivery systems. The names of the brands tell the story: Raleigh, Viceroy, Kent, Marlborough, Winston, Pall Mall. These name are the most prominently British products in all of American culture, then cancer-like, the products they're associated with eclipsed their origins. When you hear those names now, do you picture the London skyline, Big Ben? 

To the Native Americans tobacco had been a sacrament; the Europeans managed to convert it into an obscenity. The indigenous people would pass a pipe around during a tribal meeting. Each person would take ONE hit and pass it around, and that one hit was considered and had significance. The smoke was believed to contain their prayers or aspirations or thoughts or decisions, which would drift off to be heard by the spirits. Not dissimilar from the ancient Latin conception, where breath and spirit were the same word, so that inspiration and respiration come from the same root. Tobacco was also used as medicine, believed to cure everything from stomach woes to toothache. When John Rolfe and others were trying to create a European market, they too made medicinal claims for tobacco, and such claims on behalf of tobacco were made well into the 20th century. Calm, relaxation, a sense of well-being. For a while in the 1920s there were even Listerine cigarettes for curing bad breath. Gee, I wonder why that’s no longer on the market?

But ultimately, I think it’s less the principle of falsehood, than the industrialized scale of it that has done the widespread damage. If consumed in the quantities and with the frequency that the Native Americans brought to it, smoking tobacco was on balance pretty harmless and even benign. Then the Europeans got a hold of it and turned it into a menace to the human race. Why share a pipe? Here: take the whole thing! Look, we’ll roll it in paper. Why refill a pipe? That could take four seconds of valuable smoking time! The way you people are doing it is very inefficient! Soon each individual is smoking enough for 100 regional tribal meetings a day. It’s not just profane and irreligious but obscene in its selfishness. The industrial revolution didn’t stop at lengthening our lives. It has turned us all into Neros and Henry VIIIs. And what should be medicine becomes poison.  We do that with everything in this country. Anyone who’s ever witnessed SantaCon can tell you that. One Santa Claus: magical. 10,000 Santa Clauses running amok through the streets of New York: cancerous. Or consider all of the foodstuffs we subsidize. Like Corn. Corn comes from the Americas. Everyone knows that story about the Natives teaching the Pilgrims to grow corn so they wouldn’t starve. That’s kind of at the core of the Thanksgiving myth. Now, there’s corn syrup in EVERYTHING and America is the most obese nation on the earth. If corn syrup had come to the surface of the earth as glops from outer space like the goo in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and then suddenly everyone doubled in weight, you’d consider it a real life horror movie. The alien menace must be thwarted. When the menace is US, we’re like “Okay, whatevs!”

 

Tobacco may well be the most widespread, most pernicious swindle in history (next to the various forms of totalitarianism; let’s be real). Let’s say it’s the biggest CAPITALIST swindle. The Virginia company founded Jamestown, discovered no gold, struggled for a while, and then simply created a market for a product that had NO value (other than “satisfaction”, which is a euphemism for “the absence of withdrawal symptoms”.)  At their founding, Virginia and North Carolina were actually LITERALLY narco states. We’re filled with revulsion at drug cartels in Central America. I’m at a loss to know how the earliest Southern States of the U.S. were any different, other than the fact that their drug was legal. Tobacco growers created millions of addicts, and to grow their insidious product, they relied on slavery and indentured labor. People were actually forced upon pain of death to labor their entire lives so that rich men could get richer by killing other people. That is literally what happened. Later, cotton became the main cash crop, and slavery grew worse and worse (a topic for another project and another day). But you must admit that there is a stark difference here. Massachusetts was founded as a City on a Hill. Virginia was founded as a Swamp of Despond. Those two strains have been doing battle for the soul of this nation ever since. By the 20th century the North was fully complicit as Madison Avenue hawked this pernicious product to the world.

 

At any rate, many of my father’s earliest American ancestors were complicit in this evil cultivation across the generations. Growers, plantation owners, overseers, merchants. But Chief Powhatan got his licks in. My father started smoking when he was eight years old; he stopped breathing when he was 68. I was there at the end, when his entire form froze, and his soul left his body, leaving him in a nightmarish pose, with his eyes rolled back into his head and his mouth agape in a yawn of terror, like the victim of a vengeful spirit. I’ll never unsee it. 

***

One night, not long before his death, we were sitting at the kitchen table and my father said, “do you think your sister could be on this cocaine? And I thought that was just hysterical. You know how parents are. They see on the news that something bad happened in Brooklyn and then they phone you in an entiurely different Brooklyn neighborhood and say “Are you alright? I see where a pizza parlor blew up in a place called East Flat-Haven!” Because endless Law and Order marathons gave them this erroneous idea that New York was a combat zone, a place where you go to the bodega, the laundromat, or the takeout joint and you find a body behind the dumpster. So I laughed and I said “No way!“ My sister was the conservative one. Of late she was the one who organized the family gatherings. In fact, my last family Thanksgiving, spent with my own family, was cooked and organized by her. My parents' vague reports that she was acting strange, keyed up, and hanging around with sketchy people sounded like alarmism. They knew little of the world. But so did I. and it turned out that I was naïve. 

She left her husband and kids, was seeing this other guy, and they were into all kinds of shit. One day they met me in the city, a journey she rarely made. So I met them or the front stairs of the American Museum of Natural History, which is across the street from the New York Historical Society, where I worked. And my sister said “You look good” which is the same thing my mother said at my fathers deathbed and for the same reason. I’d just come from work and was standing there in a suit and a topcoat, instead of dressed like a bum which was what they were accustomed to. We met near the statue of Teddy Roosevelt and his trusty red and black assistants (since removed) which in retrospect seems significant, for my sister's paramour was part Pequot and part black or so he claimed. I'm not the one who was skeptical about his identity. The Pequots were, it turns out, because he was energetically trying to be recognized as a member of the tribe at the time. There was a legacy and a fortune there and ownership of a casino and some of his cousins belonged and so he was just positive that he was going to get this money. And when he got that money he was gonna do this and he was gonna do that and he’s saying this (I guess) to impress me and I wanted to say "No! Stop that, its not necessary, its embarrassing and I'm just some cracker, I'm an imposter who doesn't belong here myself, and I hate materialism, if you want to impress me stop talking about this payday, this bonanza". But I held my tongue and was icily polite and distant but friendly in the way of my people. As we looked at the dinosaur bones and the Hall of Evolution until they had to make their train and then off they went.

The pair proved to be like bleach and ammonia -- together they were like poison. They both developed rap sheets as long as my arm, and did time in jail. Years went by when I never spoke to my sister, never knew where she was, if she was alive, dead, in jail or how to get a hold of her and wouldn’t have anyway because she was beyond help and I had no help to give . I was barely hanging by a thread myself sometimes, the proverbial spider web, to use Jonathan Edwards' metaphor. But I missed knowing the two beautiful babies she and her boyfriend had made and lost during those years of tumult. They are among the closest blood relatives to me on the earth, born, like me, out of wedlock. They've grown up, and I haven't seen them, I don't know them and they don't know me. But I want to.And I sense a bond with them, though it's only a theory. I imagine that like me, they have big chips on their shoulders and much to prove. There might be ways I could relate to them like no one else can. Maybe, maybe not, But I dedicate this work to them, just in case. 

The Genocidal Writings of L. Frank Baum

 

Critics, admirers and the man himself all referred to P.T. Barnum as a Humbug. Like many, I first encountered that charming, old-fashioned word in my favorite childhood book and movie, which featured a character based on Barnum, The Wizard of Oz. Author L. Frank Baum was from Chittenango, New York, near Syracuse. Like Barnum, he was a master of escapism. If he’s not the father of American fantasy fiction he’s damned close. Baum’s work is steeped in America’s peculiar magic, the stuff of state fairs, wild west shows, circuses, medicine men. He is associated with Kansas because that’s where Dorothy comes from, but his actual long term base was Chicago, and for a number of years he edited a newspaper in Aberdeen in the Dakota territory. During the 1890s he penned a couple of now notorious editorials wherein he advocated the extermination of the remaining Native Americans. He couched it almost as an act of mercy, but it rings chilling to us in the 21st century. No one hates to hear it more than I do. I am here at all because of my obsession with L. Frank Baum and The Wizard of Oz. Yet on two occasions, the death of Sitting Bull and the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre, Baum advocated, in print, the worst thing anyone could wish on other human beings. To bring up his positive legacy in this context would seem like a rationalization for the indefensible, even in the context of his times, so I won’t do it. I’m telling you he said these bad things because you should know. Frankly, I don’t know any historical figure who didn’t do or say some bad, even intolerable things. If you prefer to boycott Baum’s books I fully understand, but I warn you, young people – J.K. Rowling will be a lateral move. Maybe, and I’m just spitballing here, maybe people with a lots and lots of imagination but not a lot of grounding in reality should refrain from opining on life and death political matters. That rules me out!

Anyhow, largely inspired by the site of the so-called White City at the Chicago World’s Fair, a.k.a. the 1893 WorldsColumbian Exposition, Baum gave us the Emerald City of Oz. And that is unavoidably what I thought of when I first visited New York City. 

Romanticism: From the "Noble Savage" to Buffalo Bill

 

As a commercial and cultural center, New York was the nerve center for shaping American ideas about its indigenous inhabitants, though not through some top down directive. It was market-driven. It was what people wanted to hear. For the defeated Northeastern tribes there was sentimentalization. So it is that we arrive at the concept of the Noble Savage.  The phrase “noble savage” was coined by restoration playwright John Dryden, England’s first poet laureate and as it happens my 2nd cousin, 13 times removed. Dryden was a Puritan, so not a huge stretch that he’s a relation. Dryden’s phrase became attached to a concept that crept into political science, philosophy, and literature, an idea of aboriginal man as something like an angel, uncorrupted by the moral corkscrew of modern civilization. According to this idea, the Noble Savage is like an innocent child, or a very loyal dog. Robinson Crusoe’s Friday, for example. This is an outgrowth of romanticism.

The great actor Edwin Forrest, today most famous for his unintentional part in the anti-English Astor Place Theatre Riot of 1849, starred as King Philip in a melodrama for the stage called Metacom.James Fenimore Cooper wrote his Leatherstocking Tales and Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha. Herman Melville’s allegory Moby Dick describes a ship called The Pequod driven to destruction by a bloodthirsty, hate-filled, monomaniacal captain, and casts as its harpooners the "primitives" Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo. There is sadness and regret in that stuff, but also a convenient lack of acknowledgment that folks from all of those tribes were still alive, still had needs and wishes and thoughts and dreams. It consigned the heart of the issue to the past as though it were a dead letter, rather than one that was ongoing.

This is a testament to the fact that native Americans had become novelties in the Northeast by this stage.  In fact, James Fenimore Cooper’s landmark novel The Last of the Mohicans is set during the French and Indian War, nearly a century earlier, and it’s all about what’s advertised, a member of a New York tribe so endangered he’s the last man standing. There’s your sentimentalizing right? After it’s too late. Uncas and Chingatchgook are types of the Noble Savage: loyal, brave, dutiful. 

As for the still troublesome western tribes, those were painted as a threat, one that was generally much exaggerated by newspapers and dime novels and theatrical spectacles of one kind of another. Around 1860, there occurred a revolution of sorts in the realm of popular literature with the release of a paper-bound publication called Maleaska, The Indian Wife of a White Hunter. Sold for a dime, it was a runaway success selling 65,000 copies in a few months. It established a winning recipe that sold books for four decades: lurid, cheaply and hastily made. Pot-boilers, bodice rippers. There were all sorts of romances and melodramas with all sorts of settings, pirate ships and the castles of cavaliers, but the ones that were most popular were set in the west. I was about to call it the Old West, but back then it was just the west.

 

The best remembered of these tales of the great plains concerned the adventures of a character whose name you may be familiar with , a gentleman by the name of Buffalo Bill Cody. Cody was one of the greatest showmen of all time, second perhaps only to Barnum. Yet it might surprise you to know that in many ways as a frontiersman he was the genuine article. He had been an Indian scout, buffalo skinner, Pony express rider, Union soldier, a gold prospector, and more. It wasn’t until a gentleman named Ned Buntline starred him in a series of dime novels that Cody’s legend began to grow…into a legend. Amusingly, Buntline’s real life story is nearly as picaresque as Cody’s was. His real name was Edward Judson. He took Buntline as his nom de plume because he had been a sailor, much as Samuel Clemens had taken“Mark Twain” from the riverboat lexicon. Buntline was a rough character; he was always starting newspapers and magazines, they would fail and then he would skip town to avoid his debts. He spent plenty of time in jail and yet he funded one of his magazines by single-handedly catching a pair of wanted men for the bounty. But then he would do things like the diddle some guy’s teenage daughter and then kill him in a duel when he got mad about it. Buntline was hung by a lynch mob on that occasion and was only saved when the awning he was hanging from fell down. He liked to stir up trouble. Politically, he was to the right of the cavemen. He was a leader in the Nativist “Know Nothing Party and was convicted for inciting TWO riots. One of them was the famous 1849 Astor Place Theatre Riot in New York. and there was another one in St Louis 3 years later.

 

Now you’d think a guy like that wouldn’t need to make up stories. But he did. he wrote ripping yarns to pay his bills, tales with titles like The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main: or, The Fiend of Blood,  or The Red Revenger; Or, The Pirate King of the Floridas.  Now, it might not surprise you to know that Ned Buntline was a heavy drinker. And if you know anything about the world at all, it won’t surprise you to know that Ned Buntline was also an outspoken temperance crusader. So while he was on this lecture tour  in Fort McPherson, Nebraska in 1869, preaching about the evils of drinking, he heard that Wild Bill Hickok was over at the saloon. he went in there to interview to get material for a book or an article or something but Bill wasn’t having it, and shooed him away at gunpoint. So he went and saw the other long haied Bill, Bill Cody, who had fought alongside Hickok in a recent actions against the Sioux and Cheyenne. And that’s how Buffalo Bill: King of the Bordermen was born. This dime novel penned by Ned Buntline was a publishing sensation and made a household word out of Cody, who had never been called Buffalo Bill in his life.

 

And then, a transformation: from the actual to the legendary. In those days, there were no firm lines between a) fiction, b) journalism, c) biography, d) advertising, and e) public relations. And so Ned Buntline went from interviewing Cody about his real adventures, to making up fake adventures as though he were a mythical figure, to being his manager, i.e. managing his real life as well as his fictional one. In 1872 Buffalo Bill, King of the Bordermen  was adapted into a stage play that was presented at the Bowery Theatre in New York City. Cody liked it so much that Buntline wrote him a new play, Scouts of the Prairie, in which Buffalo Bill played himself, accompanied by Texas Jack Omohundro, who did rope tricks, Italian ballerina Giuseppina Morlacchi, and 6 year old Carlos Montezuma, who played “Atseka, the Apache Child of Cochise.”  On at least one occasion Wild Bill Hickok relented and appeared in these shows. But Cody was bit by the bug. They toured the whole country with this show which was still essentially a melodrama stage play. A decade later (1883) Cody debuted Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a large scale spectacle that possessed elements of circus, rodeo, sideshow, a parade, a carnival, and a stage spectacular, and paved the way for Hollywood westerns.

The show reenacted real events like Custer’s Last Stand, and one of the most famous acts they booked was the genuine Sioux Chieftain Sitting Bill. Buffalo Bill toured his Wild West all over the US and Europe and kept it going until 1908. He had many imitators in the wild west show line yet was the only one that lived on in popular memory