by Barry Lopez
The crawl space was two feet high and a little more than that wide. We could see to the south that the tunnel dead-ended twenty feet away, beneath the sidewalk on the near side of West 26th Street. To the north it extended another fifteen feet and then opened up into a larger space. We hunched and squirmed forward over gravel and a thick layer of fine dust until we could see a low-ceilinged cavern opening up to the west and north of us, to nearly the full width and depth of the building. The place was festooned with derelict spider webs and subdivided by piers of cross-laid bricks supporting the joists of the basement floor above us.
We searched every bit of this cramped place, pawing through dust that had sifted in over the decades and, here and there, digging down through the gravel with a garden trowel I’d brought.
My desire to pursue this quest for a part of Mr. Astor’s fortune, which we did not find, had been inflamed, I think, by my growing awareness of America’s voluminous folklore of fortune hunting, particularly in the West, and by my stepfather’s position on the conquistadores, which was to be tolerant. Like many other boys, I believed that the wherewithal to lead a successful life required, primarily and absolutely, a fistful of banknotes. The abject narrowness of this vision, the incompleteness of the thought, didn’t dawn on me. Nor did it occur to me that forty years later I would still be wondering what constituted real wealth—the “wherewithal”—in a campsite on the shores of the North Pacific, some miles down the Oregon coast from Astoria.
Whatever real wealth might be, it was not what Mr. Astor had accrued, selling the pelts of dead animals.
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I CAN REMEMBER today standing in places where strangers’ lives ended horribly and feeling my heart fall down at what I saw. At the age of seventeen, I saw the fields of white crosses and Stars of David blanketing the hills near Verdun. As an adult, I stood within the walls—by then they’d turned to rubble—of isolation cells in which criminals had been warehoused in the transport prison at Port Arthur, Tasmania. I had squeezed through the claustrophobic corridors of a windowless dungeon in the basement of Block 11 at Auschwitz, and stood in the gas chambers at Birkenau. I’d walked the blood ground at Bear River, Idaho, where more than three hundred Shoshone men, women, and children were raped, tortured, burned, and shot dead over two days by a bored and frustrated group of California volunteers, a militia whose commanding officer theorized that two Shoshone men, rumored to have beaten up a local white miner, might possibly be in that camp.
One July morning in 1999 I waded into Antietam Creek with one of my stepdaughters. We wanted to work out the details of a reconciliation ceremony we intended to stage that night on the Antietam Battlefield, a somber opening for a program of uplifting music and, we hoped, elevating words about environmental awareness and action. On September 17, 1862, 23,000 men were killed, wounded, or went missing here in about twelve hours. The date is the bloodiest in North American history, a day of staggering carnage during the American Civil War. My stepdaughter Stephanie and I waded up the creek from its confluence with the Potomac River to where it crosses the battlefield, a mile upstream. In water that was sometimes up to our waists, we tried to imagine it as a creek of blood, as historians of the war have said it had been that day.
That evening we laid out a path of luminaria (votive candles placed inside white paper sacks), a path the same width as the creek. It descended from a grassy slope where people would soon be sitting, and ran ahead, curving, to a point just beyond a small stage. We asked people as they arrived to take the souvenir boxes of matches we handed them and to walk this simulacrum of the creek, lighting a few of the five hundred or so luminaria as they went. As they did, a young man standing alone by the stage played “Amazing Grace” on his fiddle.
The physical harm humans are capable of inflicting on others—the ease with which people are baited into these lethal hostilities—has the look of something that will not quit. The years of my adulthood are filled to bursting with this kind of mayhem. Papa Doc Duvalier with his Tontons Macoutes; Ferdinand Marcos, during his murderous years in the Philippines; Joaquín Guzmán in Mexico with his sicarios; Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania; Hissène Habré in Chad; marauding militias like the Hutu Interahamwe and Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army; and haranguing fundamentalist clerics in the Middle East, with their suicide bombers. Slaughter is routinely the resort of dictators, of warlords and drug lords, of fanatics, sociopaths, and those with offended egos, operating from Paraguay to Congo to Chechnya. In July 1995, Bosnian Serbs under Ratko Mladić killed more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in and around the town of Srebrenica, in the Drina Valley in northeastern Bosnia, the largest mass murder in Europe since the end of World War II.
We speak now of the human toll from what are collectively called the “oil wars” in Nigeria and Ecuador, and of the “wars” to come over water and fish. At some point, say those who are adding up the sources of available protein, the storage basins of clean freshwater, and the numbers of hungry, thirsty people, we will need to accept the fact that thousands more will perish every day from lack of food and water than are dying now. Or we will look into the face of what they say looms and discover whether we have the wisdom, the imagination, and the intelligence to dismantle the apparatuses that are leading us to this end.
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THE SEVERED HEAD of the Chinook chief Concomly, Ranald MacDonald’s grandfather, left Oregon in 1835 in a satchel with one Meredith Gairdner, a British physician and Hudson’s Bay employee who dug up Concomly’s corpse the night before he sailed for Honolulu. Stealing the heads of Indian people and passing them on to phrenologists had become something of a sport for certain white people, and that night a few wary Chinooks almost caught Gairdner at it. A couple of hours after Gairdner took the head, Chinook tribal members discovered a fine spray of blood on the ground around Concomly’s disturbed grave site. They connected this immediately with Gairdner, who had pulmonary tuberculosis. (The blood came from his exhalations, from the exertion of his digging.) But they could not catch him before he boarded his departing ship.
When he died at about the age of sixty-five, Chief Concomly, a short, one-eyed man with dark skin and brown hair, was the spokesman for the confederacy of Lower Columbia tribes. He’d tried for twenty years, starting with Astor’s Americans and then with HBC employees, to develop a system of equitable and peaceful trade between the tribes and white merchants. He was confounded and finally defeated by the concept of ownership and by the necessity for profit that underlay the whites’ system of trade. And he could never fathom the reason for funneling profits to distant owners, people who were not part of the local economy.
Gairdner, intrigued by the pseudoscience of phrenology and curious about the reasons why Concomly had been chosen a chief, sent the head he stole to another physician, a friend in London named John Richardson, asking him for an opinion. Richardson soon moved on to other projects, however, and the head was apparently never closely examined. It languished on a shelf at the Medical Museum of the Royal Naval Hospital at Haslar for almost a hundred years before being shipped to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. In that time the skull’s skin and hair had disappeared, the maxillary teeth were lost, and the lower jaw was misplaced during a cleanup following a night of aerial bombardment in London during World War II. The Chinook were eventually successful in retrieving the skull from the Smithsonian and seeing to its proper burial at the mouth of the Columbia.
Gairdner died soon after arriving in Honolulu. He was twenty-eight. He’s buried in a modest, neatly maintained church cemetery in the city, and his prominent headstone bears a long inscription. He’s praised for his Christian faith, his “vigorous mind,” and his “pursuit” of a knowledge of “nature’s workings.” The paean ends by reminding us that he was “the fond object of a mother’s ceaseless prayer.”
It does not say that he was involved in the internatio
nal trade of the heads of American Indians.
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GAIRDNER’S INDIFFERENCE toward customs not in keeping with his own beliefs and ideals and the suspension of his own moral and ethical codes when dealing with nonwhites were, of course, emblematic of the times. His act is worth reconsidering today, however, for more than the barbarism it reveals. Cultural superiority, and the superiority that has historically been claimed by races, nations, and genders, has poisoned human relations for millennia. Gairdner’s presumption that there was nothing wrong with his actions because he understood his effort as a conscientious attempt to advance human knowledge derives from a kind of staggering blindness, or obtuseness, that today we are paying a more staggering price for. The unprecedented age of international cooperation (as opposed to international commerce) that some imagine lies ahead cannot bear the burden of exceptionalism if it is to be realized.
Reading historians of the European exploration of the Pacific, especially of the explorers’ contact with indigenous Pacific peoples, reveals a generally coarse and cavalier disregard for the mores of other cultures. In the light of this, part of what I find admirable about Cook, again, is that whatever his failings might have been, he made strenuous efforts to understand, even to honor, societies that initially seemed inferior to him. He conceived of them as foreign but did not write them off as worthless.
Cook is often held out as someone who embodied all that was right about the Enlightenment—informed thinking, curiosity about the world, a commitment to the ideals of humanism. But he also, of course, represented the dark side of the Enlightenment, a belief that there was only one right way to govern, to organize one’s economy, to worship God, and to think. All other ways were primitive (i.e., unenlightened), and those practicing them were assumed to be far behind on Progress’s inexorable path. Non-European (and later on, non-American) people the world over were to be pitied (the compassion of the humanist); to be helped (i.e., converted to the Christian faith and educated in Western-style schools); pressured to reconfigure themselves into nuclear rather than extended families; and exhorted to become gainfully and permanently employed.
The idea that other theologies, economies, diets, arrangements of empirical knowledge, and forms of social organization might be better suited, or at least as well suited, to a people and a place was regarded as benighted. Many people, into the tens of millions, died as a direct result of their resistance to a European way of knowing the world. European nations, and later the United States, became so committed to notions of Progress and Improvement, became focused to such a degree on Development, so insistent on the legitimacy of theft from “lesser” peoples, so tolerant of legal concepts like terra nullius (indigenous people live on land to which they have no legal claim, lands that therefore legally belong to no one, so they can be claimed by Europeans without compensation), so dedicated to the imperative to profit, to reorganize, to purge, to quash, that the British, in their endless bickering with other imperial nations over the spoils of colonization, were able to create and then to perpetuate the idea of a Black Legend, their characterization of the Spanish invasion of the New World. (The English vilified Spain for its barbarism and Catholic proselytizing at the same time that Britain itself was becoming the greatest slave-trading nation the world has ever known. With the diminishing importance of slave-based economies at the turn of the eighteenth century, a reformed Britain was even able to represent itself as an avatar of abolition, if not emancipation.) When Britain set up concentration camps in Kenya in the 1950s, primarily to corral Kikuyu people and end their resistance to British rule, the world took Britain at its word and supported their effort to stifle native resistance, believing the British were engaged in a laudable and necessary fight against Mau Mau terrorism. Jomo Kenyatta, a political leader of the Kenyan resistance, was hauled off to Lokitaung on Kenya’s desolate Northern Frontier, where he was imprisoned for years. And dissolute white settlers, primarily in the Kenya highlands outside Nairobi, were rallied to arm themselves and to hunt down rebellious blacks.
Britain condemned Spain, sought to exonerate itself as a slave-trading nation, and as meticulously set out in Caroline Elkins’s Imperial Reckoning, sought to conceal the degree of its opposition to Kenyan independence.
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IN CONVERSATIONS WITH different indigenous peoples over several decades, I’ve found few topics more sensitive than grave robbery, the outlander’s seizure of someone’s body and/or the things buried with it. There is more to rectifying a theft of this nature than the humiliating legal due process required of traditional people, the degrading bureaucratic tedium one must endure to recover a few bones, then to be placed in the hands of the deceased’s descendants. The primary effort of most indigenous people is to prevent complete disintegration of the body of a relative in a profane place. The long fight of colonized people against desecration of their graves is pursued to ensure, by bringing the bones of their ancestors back into the circle of their traditions and thus protecting their elders, that their culture will not be eclipsed.
What traditional cultures must face when they defy their colonizers requires almost inconceivable strength and moral authority. In most cases, these activists remain undaunted. They understand what is really at stake. Oblivion.
They do not hold with any belief in cultural exceptionalism.
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TODAY THE PRESERVATION of traditional cultures and their wisdom keepers is one of the most tenuous of human projects. Many traditional people see the attempt to prevent cultural disintegration, to resist incorporation into one or another dominant culture, as useless. Others believe it is better to pass away for who you are than to try to become someone you are not, recalling the words of the Oglala Sioux wisdom keeper Black Elk: “Sometimes I think it might have been better if we had stayed together and made them kill us all.”
I wonder whether in my own travels I, too, of course, haven’t unconsciously behaved in some way like a grave robber, given offense where I haven’t meant to, assumed rights or privileges not mine to assume—at an Afghan dinner table one night in a restaurant in Bamyan, in a Warlpiri village in the Northern Territory, in an Inuit village on Baffin Island. By my simple presence in these situations I’ve brought with me the possibility of (further) disintegration. The fact that I haven’t taken anyone’s life, haven’t set up a business that took advantage of people’s naïveté, haven’t seduced them with intoxicants or attempted to enlighten anyone about the strengths of my religion, all seem somewhat beside the point. The nature of the transgression in these situations isn’t always clear. Often it’s no more than this: the white guest does not see himself as a guest. He sees himself as an emissary. Even if he sees himself as only a well-intentioned visitor, he’s prone to believe that, in the long run, he knows what’s best, whether it’s how to sharpen a knife, how to run a bodega, or how to worship the Divine.
For centuries American and Europeans have arrived in foreign lands as though sent by a superior god. Even avowed atheists bent on making business deals now arrive regularly in foreign lands with this attitude. It’s an outward sign of their success as a “superior” culture.
It kills people.
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ON MARCH 25, 1960, a 136-foot refrigerated freighter with sixty-six people aboard, the Western Trader, sailed under the Aurora Bridge between Seattle’s Lake Union and the open water in Puget Sound and set a course for Wreck Bay, in the Galápagos Islands. The passengers were all members of the Island Development Company, a cooperative intent on establishing an American colony in Ecuador’s Galapagean archipelago. As a group, the colonists were idealistic and enthusiastic individuals, a mix of nuclear families and single men, many of them unaware that Ecuador already had its own plans for the archipelago, thank you. They’d left Seattle believing that Ecuadorian authorities would be delighted to hav
e them there—developing a fishing cooperative, applying their (largely nonexistent) farming skills, and generally improving the lot of a small population of Ecuadorians at Wreck Bay, who were living, the colonists assumed, an impoverished life in a dilapidated village. They were prepared to show the villagers how to develop more productive lives.
Initially wary of each other, the ship’s complement were galvanized in friendship during a terrific storm that battered the Western Trader off the Oregon and California coasts between March 30 and April 2. When the vessel put in at San Pedro, the Port of Los Angeles, to pick up visas, the Coast Guard ordered the Western Trader refitted to make it more seaworthy and also required that the ship undergo extensive repairs. The Coast Guard restricted as well the number of colonists who could reboard the vessel for the continuation of the voyage. The long delay in obtaining their visas, and the Coast Guard’s lack of confidence in the Western Trader, unsettled some of the passengers. Shouldn’t a project of this size be going more smoothly? they asked.
When the Western Trader finally cleared the port at San Pedro, the colonists aboard were in restored high spirits. Many were skilled laborers with backgrounds in a variety of trades, and all of them were willing workers. They agreed that there were some philosophical differences they would have to deal with in Galápagos, but exactly how the workload was to be shared and how the profits from farming and fishing were to be divided, and who had the authority to make certain decisions with regard to the ship or a now-derelict refrigeration unit that had previously been built at Wreck Bay, or what was to be done about housing—all this they’d already taken care of with a set of written guidelines. Other decisions, such as how much of their profit would go toward the improvement of the lives of local Ecuadorians, the group would address after they’d made an assessment.