Once I told Harrington, “I think I’ve got a lot of rage because of my father.”
“What do you mean ‘rage’? Because you’re mad at your father?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’re not mad now, are you?”
“Well, not right this minute.”
He said, “Okay,” and that was it, but for some reason it helped disarm my anger.
Another day I walked into his studio, a small room with a desk, table and two chairs, and sat down, and as usual he gave me a cup of coffee. Every morning his wife put a fresh rose on his desk, and on this day I noticed that it was magnificent. Two petals had fallen off and were lying next to it on the desk. I was entranced by it and said, “That’s the most beautiful rose I’ve ever seen.” Then I leaned over to smell it and said, “But it doesn’t smell.”
“I’d be alarmed if it did,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s a fake.”
He had put the two petals beside the artificial rose to convey the illusion of reality and to illustrate that everything in life was perception—that just because you assume something is true, it ain’t necessarily so.
My sister Jocelyn also went to Harrington, and the two of us spent a lot of time on the phone comparing notes about our sessions with him. She loved him deeply because he was the father she never had. His wife was also very kind. She was a former concert pianist who sometimes played Rachmaninoff in an adjoining room during our sessions.
Once Dr. Harrington told me about a patient who came to see him; after ten or twelve minutes she stood up, said, “I’ve learned what I wanted to know, and I want to thank you very much,” and then walked out the door. I always remembered this story, and once I asked him, “Why do we always have to talk for an hour? Sometimes I don’t want to talk for more than twenty minutes.” He agreed, and unless it was an important session that might go on for two hours, I’d get up and leave regardless of the time. One day after about three years I got up and said, “I don’t know whether I have to come back here anymore. I’d like to come back and talk to you, but I don’t think I need to.”
And that was the end of my therapy. I never went back, but I was a different person for having known him. He was a wonderful friend who helped others in my family, too, and through humor he taught me a lot about myself. He simply had a talent for it. Most of all, G. L. Harrington taught me how to forgive—myself and others.
53
I SUSPECT SOME READERS who have reached this point in the book are asking themselves, “When’s Brando going to talk about the Indians? Isn’t he obsessed with the plight of the American Indian?” I bridle at this, more in exasperation than in anger, because I’m confronted with it over and over again from people who, perhaps to please me, mention “the plight of the American Indian” as if it were something that had happened on another planet in another era—like a drought in equatorial Africa or the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe, as if the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people were some sort of a historical curiosity, even an act of God, that humankind had nothing to do with and bore no responsibility for. This grates on my soul.
What astonishes me is how ignorant most Americans are about the Indians and how little sympathy and understanding there is for them. It puzzles me that most people don’t take seriously the fact that this country was stolen from the Native Americans, and that millions of them were killed in the process. It has been swept from the national consciousness as if it never occurred—or if it did, it was a noble act in the name of God, civilization and progress. The number of Indians who died because of what we called Manifest Destiny has always been a subject of debate among scholars, but I believe that the majority of informed historians and anthropologists now agree that between seven million and eighteen million indigenous people were living in what is today the continental United States when Columbus arrived in the New World. By 1924 there were fewer than 240,000 left; their ancestors had been victimized by centuries of disease, starvation and systematic slaughter.
If people acknowledged a similar ignorance about the Holocaust, they would be regarded with amazement. But that’s how it is for most of us when it comes to Native Americans. To my mind the killing of Indians was an even larger crime against humanity than the Holocaust: not only did it take more lives, but it was a crime committed over centuries that continues in some ways to this day.
Ever since I helped raise funds for Israel as a young man and learned about the Holocaust, I’ve been interested in how different societies treat one another; it is one of the enduring interests of my life. In the early sixties I read a book by John Collier, a former U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs who was responsible for giving the Indians a token measure of self-government on their reservations during the 1930s, and I was shocked at how badly we had treated them. Then I read The First Americans by a Flathead Indian, anthropologist D’Arcy McNickle, and was moved. The book describes two hundred years of savage warfare by European settlers against the Indians, the massacres of native peoples from New England to California and how U.S. military leaders like Lieutenant General Phil Sheridan called for the outright annihilation of the race. Indians who escaped being cut down by such predators were killed by disease imported by European settlers, which was followed by forced marches, deliberate starvation and attempts to destroy their culture.
The book was an eye-opener, and I went to Santa Fe to visit D’Arcy McNickle. After we had talked for several hours, I asked him where I could meet some Indians, and he suggested that I get in touch with the National Indian Youth Council. I went to a meeting of the organization and made many friends, a lot of whom I still know today, and thereafter I became absorbed with the world of the Native American.
In the early 1960s, several members of the Indian Youth Council from the Pacific Northwest told me that they had decided to challenge government limits on salmon fishing by Indians in western Washington and along the Columbia River. Century-old treaties guaranteed their tribes the right to fish at their accustomed places in perpetuity—“as long as the mountains stand, the grass grows and the sun shines.” But sport and commercial salmon fishermen had persuaded state and federal agencies to limit their harvest, blaming the Indians for a drop in their own catch. This was after decades in which white people had built a string of dams on the rivers, often making it impossible for salmon to spawn, and after lumber companies had polluted streams and rivers with toxic chemicals and other garbage. The Indians wanted to challenge the restrictions because they clearly violated their legal rights to fish in the streams, and I offered to join them in doing so on the Puyallup Indian Reservation in Washington, with the expectation of being arrested and publicizing the “fish-in.” I got in a boat with a Native American and a Catholic priest; someone gave us a big salmon we were supposed to have taken out of the river illegally and, sure enough, a game warden soon arrived and arrested us. He took us to a jail near Olympia, but I was released after an hour and half because, I was told, the governor didn’t want a movie star’s arrest to create more publicity for the Indians’ campaign.
Even though I couldn’t get arrested for long, my experiences with the Native Americans had given me a sense of brotherhood with them that has lasted to this day. I was introduced to Indian food, Indian humor, Indian religion and the Sun Dance, an intense spiritual experience that the federal government had banned as part of its campaign to break the spirit and cohesiveness of Native Americans until they demanded and won the right to perform it again in the 1960s. One reason I liked being with the Indians was that they didn’t give anyone movie-star treatment. They didn’t give a damn about my movies. Everyone’s the same; everyone shares and shares alike. Indians are usually depicted as grumpy people with monochrome moods, but I learned that they have a sardonic sense of humor and that they love to tease. They laugh at anything, especially themselves. If somebody stutters, everybody in the group stutters or pretends to go to sleep while the poor man tries to fini
sh a sentence. But it’s an honest humor, not cruel.
There is no doubt that alcohol is the bane of the American Indians; many of them have drinking problems, and a bottle was usually on the table whenever we sat down. I also learned that there’s real time and Indian time: if a meeting is supposed to start at nine P.M. Indians start dribbling in about ten P.M.
After my first attempt at being arrested failed, we set out again, this time near a different reservation in Washington. We spent the night before in an unheated cabin with paper-thin walls, and I came down with a chest cold to end all chest colds. A damp wind blowing through cracks in the walls all night didn’t help.
At dawn, when it was time to leave, I was coughing and hacking and had a high temperature. But the Indians looked at me expectantly, and I knew I had to go. I wrapped myself in a blanket and got in the boat while icy waves whipped up by the wind sprayed everyone, and as we left shore I thought, I’m not going to leave this boat alive. I suspected that I had pneumonia, that I was going to die and that my body would be dumped into the river. Hunched over, I told one of my Indian friends, Hank Adams, how awful I felt, and he said, “You know, my grandmother used to say, ‘If you smile, you’ll feel better.’ ”
I just looked at him and thought, What in this poor, pissed-on world are you talking about? I’m dying, and you’re asking me to smile?
We traveled up and down the river for an hour waiting to be arrested, but no game wardens showed up. I don’t mind dying, I thought, but to die so senselessly on a freezing river without even being arrested seems absurd. Only later did we learn that we’d been on the wrong river. Patrol boats were looking for us somewhere else; I’d faced death—or so my melodrama let me convince myself—for nothing. One of the Indians’ lawyers got me to an airport, and I flew home and entered the hospital with pneumonia, where I swore that someday I would repay Hank Adams.
The fish-ins were important because in many ways they laid the foundation for subsequent Native American campaigns for civil rights. They were important for me as well because they acquainted me with what Indians were up against and how little support they had. I got to know extraordinary people, such as Clyde Warrior, a Ponca Indian with whom I often traveled around the country to Indian Youth Council meetings; he was a man with a sense of dignity I’ll never forget, a wonderful sense of humor and great sense of pride in being Indian, and he taught me as much as anyone how much my own view of life was similar to that of the American Indian. There was Vince Deloria, Jr., a brilliant political scientist, writer and Indian historian, who had devoted his life to their support; and Dennis Banks, Russell Means and other young Indians who would later start AIM, the American Indian Movement. I also got involved with such groups as the Congress for the American Indian, Survival of the American Indian and the National Congress for American Indians, and traveled around the country trying to explain to state officials, congressmen and Attorney General Robert Kennedy that American Indians were being unlawfully mistreated.
I also met with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Not many people have intimidated me, but he had such presence and I had such respect for him that when I walked into his office with my briefcase filled with a portfolio of complaints about the treatment of Indians I couldn’t say anything.
Douglas sat behind his desk looking kindly and attentive, and said, “Yes?”
I couldn’t put three words together. After five minutes of my stuttering and stammering, he said, “Well, I have to go on the bench now. It’s been a pleasure to meet you.”
I rose and left, hardly able even to say good-bye to the great man.
54
AS THE NATIVE AMERICANS’ civil rights movement spread and gathered momentum in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I supported it in every way I could—emotionally, spiritually and financially. I was outraged by the injustices they had endured; there is simply no other way I can put it. Our government signed almost four hundred treaties with the Indians and broke every one of them. These agreements almost always include this language: “As long as the river shall run, the sun shall shine and the grass shall grow, this land will be forever yours, and it will never be taken away from you or sold without your express permission.” Yet all of them were broken with the blessing and sanction of our courts. Even when the federal government gave lip service to honoring the treaties, settlers, ranchers and miners ignored them and grabbed the richest valleys, lushest forests and lands with the most minerals. They squatted where they wanted, then persuaded Congress to legitimize the status quo and abandon the treaties that they were unlawfully ignoring. What would happen if Cuba abrogated its treaty granting America the use of Guantánamo Bay, one that can be lawfully annulled only with the consent of both nations? It would be considered an act of war, and smart bombs would rain on Havana. But if Indians even complain about a broken treaty, they are scorned, vilified or put into jail. I don’t think anything equals the hypocrisy the United States has exhibited toward the Native American. Our leaders have called for their annihilation in the name of democracy; in the name of Christianity; in the name of the advancement of civilization; in the name of all the principles we have fought wars to uphold.
From Congress, the White House and human-rights groups, we constantly hear complaints about ill-treatment and genocide against this group or that. But no people has ever been treated worse than Native Americans. Our government intentionally starved the Plains Indians to death by slaughtering the buffalo because it was quicker and easier to kill buffalo than to kill Indians. It denied them food and forced them to sign treaties giving up their land and future. The Indians were rarely defeated militarily; they were starved into submission. In the Orient I once heard a phrase describing nineteenth-century Chinese peasants as “rice Christians.” It was an allusion to the way in which Catholic missionaries converted them; if they attended Mass and religious instruction, they were given rice; if not, they starved. The same was done to subdue the Native Americans. Kit Carson applied a scorched-earth policy that burned the Navajo fruit trees and crops, then chased the Navajos until they were dead or starving. Those who went to reservations and showed any independence were denied food, blankets and medicine, or were given moldy flour and rancid meat that accelerated their annihilation. The government blamed the spoiled food on frontier traders, but while the Indians were being given tainted food and starved to death, the soldiers guarding them were well fed. Starvation was used as a national policy; it was an act of intentional genocide. It is no coincidence, I suspect, that when Hitler was plotting his Final Solution, he ordered a study of America’s Indian-reservation system. He admired it and wanted to use it in Europe.
Starved, degraded and emotionally depleted, in the end the Indians had no choice but to submit. As Chief Seattle said when he surrendered his tribal lands to the governor of Washington Territory in 1855, “My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain. There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea covered its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.…”
Twenty years later, a great leader of the Nez Percé, Chief Joseph, made many accommodations to settlers while trying to preserve his people’s culture. But as in so many cases, the government reneged on the treaties it signed with the Nez Percé: first it forced the tribe onto a wasteland that white men didn’t want, and then, when gold and other minerals were found there, it ordered the Indians off it. The great warrior took his entire tribe—women, children, teepees and all—and, with another chief, Looking Glass, led it on a desperate flight of over 1,500 miles toward Canada, pursued by thousands of cavalrymen. En route, there were fourteen major engagements with the cavalry, and Chief Looking Glass proved himself a brilliant tactician. When they were finally stopped by the army, less than fifty miles from the Canadian border and freedom, Chief Joseph surrendered in a speech that summarized poignantly how a great and proud people had been dev
astated by the United States:
I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohoolhoolzote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men [Joseph’s brother] is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.
After their lands were stolen from them, and the ragged survivors of what the writer Helen Jackson called A Century of Dishonor were herded onto reservations, the government sent out missionaries from seven or eight religious denominations who tried to force the Indians to become Christians. It was a clear assault on their religious beliefs and a culture that had thrived for millennia, as well as a blatant denial of the constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion. Missionaries divided up reservations as if they were a pie. They stole Indian children and sent them to religious academies or to the government school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where the children were beaten if they spoke their own languages. If they ran away, they were subject to severe punishment applied in military fashion. Yet these crimes are almost invisible in our national consciousness. If they give any thought to the Indians, most Americans project a montage of images from the movies; few conjure up anguish, suffering or murder when they think of Native Americans. Indians are simply a vague, colorful chapter in our country’s past, deserving no more interest than might be devoted to the building of the Erie Canal or the transcontinental railroad.
Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Page 31