Two racial groups did not follow the pattern of arrival, prejudice, acceptance, and absorption: the American Indian, who was already here, and the Negro, who did not come under his own volition. To begin with, the Indians were not a minority but a majority. In some cases they seem to have tried to get along with their guests, and when it became apparent that this was impossible—it is difficult to be friendly with someone who wants to take everything you have—the Indians not only defended themselves but inflicted telling losses on the settlers. Over the years the ratio changed as well as the weapons, but the Indians continued to defend themselves for a long, long time—a practice which not only cut them off from their white brothers but welded the Indians themselves much more tightly together. When the white settlers finally achieved supremacy, they found to their indignation that some of the best and most profitable places were inhabited by Indians. The process then was, by force of arms, to move the Indians little by little to areas so poor that nobody else wanted them. This process took an unconscionably long and bloody time, and mistakes were made, such as the prime one of moving the Cherokee tribes from the Appalachian Mountains to the West and settling them on unpromising-looking Oklahoma. When oil was discovered there, the mistake was apparent; but for some of the Indians it was too late—they kept the oil.
One of the American Indian tendencies which led to our distress was their abiding passion for survival. During the latter part of the last century, when some of the Southwestern tribes such as the Apaches were not only surviving but actually fighting back, a bounty was offered for scalps, and a good number were brought in and the bounty collected. It was after that that the Mexican government complained bitterly that the scalps were not Apache but Mexican. The hunters were crossing the border for the ugly little bits of skin and hair; it was much safer to kill a Mexican than an Apache, and they couldn’t be told apart. Then, so it is said, a company of forward-looking businessmen began importing Chinese and Filipino scalps, smoked and dried, which could be got with no personal danger at all; but they overdid it and broke the bounty market.
For a time it looked as though the Indians might completely disappear, but then about fifty years ago something—or perhaps a series of things—happened. The Indians developed an immunity to extinction. Their birth rate began to pick up and their death rate dropped. Some of the young men emerged from their reservations to take dangerous jobs, such as top-falling in the forests and high steel work on the new skyscrapers of the growing cities, and at the same time it ceased to be a hidden disgrace to have Indian blood, and people began boasting of grandparents who were Cheyenne or Cherokee, even if it wasn’t true. In recent years, no candidate would think of running for the Presidency without being made an honorary member of some tribe or other and being photographed wearing the feathered war bonnet that had once caused a chill of fear in the borderlands.
The Indians survived our open intention of wiping them out, and since the tide turned they have even weathered our good intentions toward them, which can be much more deadly. The myth of the Indian as a savage, untrustworthy, dangerous animal, wily, clever, and self-sufficient as an opponent, gave way to the myth of the Indian as a child, incapable of learning and of taking care of himself. Hence he was made a minor under the law, no matter what his age might be. The problem, of course, was, in the beginning, that he was the only person who could take care of himself. His crops served our first settlers, his skills in hunting were absorbed so that our people could live; and his method of warfare, being learned, was not only turned against him but was turned against our other enemies. Oh, yes, he could take care of himself—against everybody but us.
Many white people, after association with the tribesmen, have been struck with the dual life—the reality and super-reality—that the Indians seem to be able to penetrate at will. The stories of travelers in the early days are filled with these incidents of another life separated from this one by a penetrable veil; and such is the power of the Indians’ belief in this other life that the traveler usually comes out believing in it too and only fearing that he won’t be believed. An experience I once had illustrates, I think, the way the tribesmen can slip back and forth between their two realities and between one culture and another.
For several years I worked for the California Fish and Game Commission in a trout hatchery in the Lake Tahoe area. Our job was to trap big lake trout when they ran into a stream to spawn, to strip the eggs from the females and milt the males to fertilize the eggs, raise the little fish, and bring them up in tanks until they were ready to be transplanted into California streams. A young man named Lloyd Shebley and I were assigned to the Tallac hatchery and spent considerable time there. The hatchery had to be prepared in the winter for the run of the fish in the early spring before the snow melted. When the fish began to run, we were very busy; but later in the year our job was simply to feed and care for the fish, and so it was pleasant and highly interesting work, and also we got to know all the people in the area; and among those people were members of a tribe which I believe is a branch of the Piutes. In the summer they came up from Nevada, where their reservation is, to live in the mountains, to hunt, and to pick the piñons from which they made their bread. Among the friends we made was Jimmy, the chief of the tribe, and far from being a savage—noble or otherwise—Jimmy was like any American with a high-school education. He had been to high school in Reno, and looked and spoke like any other American, except that he was an Indian—rather a quiet, good-looking, well-mannered man of about forty. We liked him very much.
It has usually been a convention in Indian country that the game laws do not apply to Indians. They are permitted to hunt when their white brothers are forbidden to, and also to fish. This is just generally known and generally respected. One day in the spring when we were trapping, and the snow was still very high on the edge of the turbulent little stream, Jimmy appeared on foot—indeed, that was the only way he could get anywhere; he was walking on a pair of bear paws—and came to the trap and asked us for a fish. We were used to giving fish to the Indians when they asked for them. One of us reached into the trap with a net and pulled out a fine, big buck trout, drew the milt, and gave the fish to Jimmy. He put the flopping trout down in a snowbank, and in the freezing cold took off his clothes, got into the stream and washed himself carefully, got out, put his clothing back on, picked up his fish, and started right up the sides of Mount Tallac, a very steep mountain that rises in that back country; and that was the last we saw of him until the following summer.
It was in August, I think, that Jimmy came by the hatchery to pass the time of day and stay to dinner. We cooked him a good meal and when we were sitting afterward having coffee and whisky I said to him, “Jimmy, what was that thing about the fish last winter?”
He looked rather taken aback and answered naturally, “What fish?”
I said, “You remember, Jimmy—that trout we gave you when you jumped in the stream and then climbed up the mountain. What was that all about?”
He said, “Oh, yes—that fish,” and he was silent again.
I said, “Of course, if you don’t want to talk about it, it’s all right with us. I was just interested.”
He took quite a long time before he spoke again. “Yes, I guess I could tell you, maybe,” he said. “You see, I was sick all last summer—bad stomach trouble—and I went to all the doctors in Reno and they looked me over and gave me medicine and it didn’t do me a bit of good. They couldn’t find out what was causing it and they couldn’t cure it, and I was just miserable, and finally I just got sicker and sicker; and so I went to one of our own men.”
I said, “You mean one of your medicine men?”
And Jimmy said, “Yes, I guess you could call them that—that’s not what we call them. He told me what was wrong with me.”
I asked, “Well, what was wrong with you?”
He said, “Well, you know, the last season my boys and I killed four deer and we didn’t get to jerking the meat and some
of it spoiled, and that was what was wrong with my stomach.”
“You mean you ate spoiled meat?”
“No, we wasted meat.”
“What did the man suggest?” I asked.
Jimmy said, “He told me to come and get one of the earliest trout I could, and to bathe in the stream it came from, and to take it up to Half Moon Lake, over in back of the peak of Tallac, and give it to a mermaid.” He said, “Oh, no, now don’t get this idea that this is a half-woman, half-fish sort of thing that you see in pictures. That’s not what it was.” And he was quiet.
I said, “But you did climb up the mountain to Half Moon Lake, and you did give the fish to something or somebody.”
“Yes,” he said, “I did.”
“Could you describe what it was or who it was you gave the fish to?”
“No, it would be hard. I don’t know how to describe it.”
I said, “Was it a person?”
He said, “In a way; but it was an un-person too.”
I said, “Male or female?”
He said, “It seemed to be a woman.”
I said, “And she took the fish?”
And he said, “Yes.”
“And she went into the lake?”
He said, “I don’t know. I turned and walked away.”
“Well,” I said, “how is your stomach?”
He said, “I’ve had no more trouble with the stomach. It went away right then.”
Well, that’s what happened, and you can make anything you want of it; but of one thing I am certain: Jimmy was not a liar. But it is more than probable that if I had been alone at that time and did not have the corroboration of Lloyd Shebley I never would have repeated that story.
Paradox and Dream
ONE OF THE generalities most often noted about Americans is that we are a restless, a dissatisfied, a searching people. We bridle and buck under failure, and we go mad with dissatisfaction in the face of success. We spend our time searching for security, and hate it when we get it. For the most part we are an intemperate people: we eat too much when we can, drink too much, indulge our senses too much. Even in our so-called virtues we are intemperate: a teetotaler is not content not to drink—he must stop all the drinking in the world; a vegetarian among us would outlaw the eating of meat. We work too hard, and many die under the strain; and then to make up for that we play with a violence as suicidal.
The result is that we seem to be in a state of turmoil all the time, both physically and mentally. We are able to believe that our government is weak, stupid, overbearing, dishonest, and inefficient, and at the same time we are deeply convinced that it is the best government in the world, and we would like to impose it upon everyone else. We speak of the American Way of Life as though it involved the ground rules for the governance of heaven. A man hungry and unemployed through his own stupidity and that of others, a man beaten by a brutal policeman, a woman forced into prostitution by her own laziness, high prices, availability, and despair—all bow with reverence toward the American Way of Life, although each one would look puzzled and angry if he were asked to define it. We scramble and scrabble up the stony path toward the pot of gold we have taken to mean security. We trample friends, relatives, and strangers who get in the way of our achieving it; and once we get it we shower it on psychoanalysts to try to find out why we are unhappy, and finally—if we have enough of the gold—we contribute it back to the nation in the form of foundations and charities.
We fight our way in, and try to buy our way out. We are alert, curious, hopeful, and we take more drugs designed to make us unaware than any other people. We are self-reliant and at the same time completely dependent. We are aggressive, and defenseless. Americans overindulge their children and do not like them; the children in turn are overly dependent and full of hate for their parents. We are complacent in our possessions, in our houses, in our education; but it is hard to find a man or woman who does not want something better for the next generation. Americans are remarkably kind and hospitable and open with both guests and strangers; and yet they will make a wide circle around the man dying on the pavement. Fortunes are spent getting cats out of trees and dogs out of sewer pipes; but a girl screaming for help in the street draws only slammed doors, closed windows, and silence.
Now there is a set of generalities for you, each one of them canceled out by another generality. Americans seem to live and breathe and function by paradox; but in nothing are we so paradoxical as in our passionate belief in our own myths. We truly believe ourselves to be natural-born mechanics and do-it-yourself-ers. We spend our lives in motor cars, yet most of us—a great many of us at least—do not know enough about a car to look in the gas tank when the motor fails. Our lives as we live them would not function without electricity, but it is a rare man or woman who, when the power goes off, knows how to look for a burned-out fuse and replace it. We believe implicitly that we are the heirs of the pioneers; that we have inherited self-sufficiency and the ability to take care of ourselves, particularly in relation to nature. There isn’t a man among us in ten thousand who knows how to butcher a cow or a pig and cut it up for eating, let alone a wild animal. By natural endowment, we are great rifle shots and great hunters—but when hunting season opens there is a slaughter of farm animals and humans by men and women who couldn’t hit a real target if they could see it. Americans treasure the knowledge that they live close to nature, but fewer and fewer farmers feed more and more people; and as soon as we can afford to we eat out of cans, buy frozen TV dinners, and haunt the delicatessens. Affluence means moving to the suburbs, but the American suburbanite sees, if anything, less of the country than the city apartment dweller with his window boxes and his African violets carefully tended under lights. In no country are more seeds and plants and equipment purchased, and less vegetables and flowers raised.
The paradoxes are everywhere: We shout that we are a nation of laws, not men—and then proceed to break every law we can if we can get away with it. We proudly insist that we base our political positions on the issues—and we will vote against a man because of his religion, his name, or the shape of his nose.
Sometimes we seem to be a nation of public puritans and private profligates. There surely can be no excesses like those committed by good family men away from home at a convention. We believe in the manliness of our men and the womanliness of our women, but we go to extremes of expense and discomfort to cover any natural evidence that we are either. From puberty we are preoccupied with sex; but our courts, our counselors, and our psychiatrists are dealing constantly with cases of sexual failure or charges of frigidity or impotence. A small failure in business can quite normally make a man sexually impotent.
We fancy ourselves as hardheaded realists, but we will buy anything we see advertised, particularly on television; and we buy it not with reference to the quality or the value of the product, but directly as a result of the number of times we have heard it mentioned. The most arrant nonsense about a product is never questioned. We are afraid to be awake, afraid to be alone, afraid to be a moment without the noise and confusion we call entertainment. We boast of our dislike of highbrow art and music, and we have more and better-attended symphonies, art galleries, and theaters than any country in the world. We detest abstract art and produce more of it than all the rest of the world put together.
One of the characteristics most puzzling to a foreign observer is the strong and imperishable dream the American carries. On inspection, it is found that the dream has little to do with reality in American life. Consider the dream of and the hunger for home. The very word can reduce nearly all of my compatriots to tears. Builders and developers never build houses—they build homes. The dream home is either in a small town or in a suburban area where grass and trees simulate the country. This dream home is a permanent seat, not rented but owned. It is a center where a man and his wife grow graciously old, warmed by the radiance of well-washed children and grandchildren. Many thousands of these homes are built ever
y year; built, planted, advertised, and sold—and yet, the American family rarely stays in one place for more than five years. The home and its equipment are purchased on time and are heavily mortgaged. The earning power of the father is almost always overextended, so that after a few years he is not able to keep up the payments on his loans. That is on the losing side. But suppose the earner is successful and his income increases. Right away the house is not big enough, or in the proper neighborhood. Or perhaps suburban life palls, and the family moves to the city, where excitement and convenience beckon.
Some of these movements back and forth seem to me a result of just pure restlessness, pure nervousness. We do hear, of course, of people who keep the same job for twenty years, or thirty years, or forty years, and get a gold watch for it; but the numbers of these old and faithful employees are decreasing all the time. Part of the movement has to do with the nature of business itself. Work in factories, in supermarkets, for contractors on the construction of houses, bridges, public buildings, or more factories is often temporary; the job gets done, or local taxes or wage increases or falling sales may cause a place of business to move to a new area. In addition, many of the great corporations have a policy of moving employees from one of their many branches to another. The employee with the home dream finds that with every removal he loses money. The sellers of homes make their profit on the down payment and on the interest on the loan; but the private owner who wants to turn over his dream home and move on to another finds that he always takes a loss. However, the dream does not die—it just takes another form.
America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction Page 37