Drawing on his own experiences with native people and on their stories, Martin brings us to a new conceptual landscape—the mythworld that seems unfamiliar and strange to those accustomed to western ways of thinking. He shows how native people understand the world and how human beings can and should conduct themselves within it. Taking up the profound philosophical challenge of the Native American “way of the human being,”
Martin leads us to rethink our entire sense of what is real and how we know the real.
Drawing on his own experiences with native people and on their stories, Martin brings us to a new conceptual landscape—the mythworld that seems unfamiliar and strange to those accustomed to western ways of thinking. He shows how native people understand the world and how human beings can and should conduct themselves within it. Taking up the profound philosophical challenge of the Native American “way of the human being,”
Martin leads us to rethink our entire sense of what is real and how we know the real.
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Overview
Drawing on his own experiences with native people and on their stories, Martin brings us to a new conceptual landscape—the mythworld that seems unfamiliar and strange to those accustomed to western ways of thinking. He shows how native people understand the world and how human beings can and should conduct themselves within it. Taking up the profound philosophical challenge of the Native American “way of the human being,”
Martin leads us to rethink our entire sense of what is real and how we know the real.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300085525 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/11/2000 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Coming to America
He was Eskimo, he was Inupiaq, from the North Slope, and like some other Eskimos I have known he bore one name only: Katauq. And it was his own, original name. "Anyway, Katauq was sitting in his igloo one day when those with him noticed that he moved not a muscle, though he continued to breathe. They knew that he had gone traveling, his spirit had left his body to go see how things were at some other place." They knew if they left his body perfectly still, his spirit would find its body mask again when it returned from its journey, and he would be just fine.
Katauq's spirit traveled to a great meeting of bowhead whales. They gave him a parka to wear, and when he put it on, he was as one of them. Traveling with the whales as a whale, he learned their habits and their ways.
As spring came on, the whales informed him that they would be traveling along the coast. When they came to Point Hope, they would be met by whalers. He would notice that some of their umiaks [whaling boats] would be nice and light in appearance, and some dark, and dirty. If he wished to be caught by a whaler, then he should surface by one of the clean and light boats. These belonged to good people, respectful people. They shared their catch with the children who had no parents, with widows, and with the Elders. They were kind people, with good hearts. Their ice cellars were clean: good places for a whale to have its parka of meat and muktuk stored. The dark, dirty boats belonged to people who did not share their catch, and who were lazy. No whalewanted to give itself to these boats.
If Katauq were to go to the village as a whale, and give himself to the whalers, his spirit could not return to his human body. It could put on another whale parka, but it could never go to the human. He could, however, fly back to Point Hope as an eider duck. Then his spirit could return to his body.
That's what he did: flew right back as an eider duck. "He told the people of his time with the whales, and let them know how the whales felt, and how they respected respectful people."
Be careful what you say of this story. Pull it over you and wear it like a parka for a while, being sure you wear it the way you read it here: without critical analysis, as part of yourself. Hard to do, yes. But if you can manage this, you will hear it as an Inupiaq would hear it. You will hear it as did my Yup'ik friend Charlie Kilangak, whom I watched listen, spellbound, to that master storyteller of the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta, Maxie Altsik. Charlie told me that Maxie's story (which was much like Katauq's) had a spirit, yua: the story itself was a living thing. The yua ("its person") spoke to him. In some uncanny way, he said, the story was about him. Maxie, he added, was a "powerful man" to know that he needed this story.
Repeat Katauq's story to a few friends, but avoid saying anything about it—just tell the story. Soon you will begin to notice something strange: people will be a bit alarmed at your not commenting on it. Most people (except for young children, I'll wager) will promptly measure it with an opinion, and many will look for confirmation of their judgment by appealing to you for yours. Beware of this—beware of the question. Questions are usually a statement; they generally conceal a set of premises and an agenda. Questions are tricky forms of discourse, which is why older Eskimos take care not to ask them much.
Anyhow, deflect the questions. Merely tell the story.
Something else, too, may happen: the story might seem to be thinking you rather than your thinking it. This is a potent thing and it is a legitimate thing, totally against common sense but nonetheless real. Don't reject it; this is how an Eskimo would perceive such a story: it has yua.
So may one begin to perceive "the way of the human being"—the way of the world of those people who beheld the first Europeans splash ashore five hundred years ago, and yet who did not regard time or reality or even words themselves in the way those newcomers did then or we do now, and who have struggled mightily with this strange new western philosophy ever since.
That is what this book is about—about the people who measure this story one way (yua) and those predisposed to measure it another way (fiction). Two opposite realities—two stories, really—playing themselves out on this continent.
What I myself have learned to say about both realities I shall say, carefully, in the book that follows.
The rich smoke from the brier bowl rose, windblown, up the clapboard wall of the house set back in the trees. An autumn night, leaves of ash, maple, beech, and oak beginning their turn to reds and yellows and oranges. Smells of leaf mold on the air. It was a night with a fairy, mischievous wind and broad moon. A listener would have detected faint peepings overhead, wave upon wave, as the birds of the north, great and small, rode a high northwind, answering a call only they could hear. From innumerable scattered lakes and rivers, ponds and marshes and brooding forests, they thronged the great celestial flyways, navigating by stars and river lines and deep magnetic fields. The night breathed and moved and beat its wings with power and magic. Altogether it was an event of ancient meanings, a time to be up and attentive to earth's doings and messages. Snow crickets sang of it, careening bats felt it with their clicks, and the night creatures of the wood with tiny sounds went about their errands mindful that something immense was happening. A shadowed figure beneath the window knew it well, too. Above all, he knew who he was—being all of this that was going on. He knew himself as essential to the event and closed his eyes in that exquisite knowledge, as the night coursed through and claimed him as one of its own.
Upstairs a boy traveled in dreams a child knows on such nights, till touched and awakened by the visitor's reverie and smoke. Curling around the room in the moon's pale light, it began to remind him of something familiar, something so natural that he took it for granted. Softly he crept out of bed and stood by the window. Below was a dark, still figure and a glowing ember.
So begins the night story that I used to tell my son and daughter, sitting with arm around each before a fire, before they went up to bed. It was their very favorite tale, and it always followed the same formulaic journey: the mysterious creature appearing late at night beneath the bedroom window, summoning the boy and his sister to a meeting with the wizard. Down the stairs and out the door they crept, into the tumultuous night. The messenger would lead by lantern along a woodland path till they came upon a huge, ancient oak in whose trunk was cut a cunningly wrought door. Through the door and up a long, spiraling staircase to the chamber excavated out of the core of this immense living creature. Here, haloed by firelight, stood a sage, a keeper of long-forgotten earthly knowledge.
The old man would speak of a world bristling and crackling with power, the power of origination and deepest formation, which cared for everything—took care of everything—even human beings. The earth, he said, is not a place to fear. The problem was that adults had lost their nerve, lost faith in the marrow of it all. Children, he believed, still hold the mighty secret of trust. It was the lesson of the child to the adult: absolute trust. Once trust began percolating back into the soul again, humans would behold the liberating of those colossal earthly powers that now lie silent under the spell of our bad faith. The earth would be alive again and human beings would stop living lives of waiting, stop living in the curse of time and history, to live instead in the still point of beauty.
I was a professor at the time and I knew this was the most important lecture of my life. It was, I thought, the real news: the news of our civilization's infidelity toward a powerful, sentient earth, tempered by the conviction that children, and whatever bits of childhood survived the battering of growing up, might help us in finding a lost trust in this planet. Human beings could unshackle the awesome powers of place if we could only find our body and spirit in the otherness of this planet, as our ice-age ancestors and their hunter-gatherer heirs did for tens of thousands of years. Distrust of the earth became the cultural norm only within the past eight thousand years or so, when the stories of man and woman began to careen away from the authentic ways of the earth and follow a trajectory of terror—what the philosopher Mircea Eliade called the "terror of history."
I offer this book as an antidote: stories out of step with time and history, stories from a realm older than the one that bred our current "news" and "history."
Several years ago I began teaching a seminar entitled, simply, "Time." I typically start the class by describing one of my pet projects: accost any kid and ask how old he or she is. The answer, usually, from anyone under four or five is a number, and nothing more. A youngster will say he's "four," not "I'm four years old." Prod him, "You're four what?" and he draws a complete blank. Suggest that he might be four bananas, and you get a broad grin and an enthusiastic yes.
I like this little exercise because I get a kick out of showing this nebulous yet powerful thing, time, briefly unhinged and looking ludicrous in the utter innocence of a child. The number is there, but it refers to a void. There is no vast solar cycle or other heavenly wheel, no march of the calendar, in a young child's never-never land. It is mom or dad who keeps the record, who will say, "Next week is your birthday," or "Christmas is coming soon." Growing older, we soon enough find time attaching itself to us, until we feel seized by it, bringing forth from Aldous Huxley, one of the most vehement antitemporalists of this century, the cry, "Time must have a stop!" Thoreau, be-taking himself to a neighbor's tranquil pond to live there by a tempo different from the frantic one swirling about him, put it more lyrically: "As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him." Time is evil, snapped Huxley: "the medium in which evil ... lives and outside of which it dies."
Time is my element. I am a historian, a handler of this serpentine thing. I contemplate the stuff of Huxley's nemesis on a vast scale, as a philosopher of history, in my books and lectures, looking for meaning in the deep past. I brood upon it daily, and nightly, in my own life, searching for meaning in this, too. Time has fascinated and horrified me. Like Huxley, I have felt the rhythmic, fugitive, irretrievable message of the clock on the wall above my desk—"the clock that dismisses the moment into the turbine of time." Its pulse and the beat of my heart are eerily similar and, I sense, piteously joined. Time is the arrow that wounds me, as I watch myself age and decay and know that time's imperious message is never-ending loss.
Our ancestors first became enslaved to the clock when they began systematically enslaving plants and animals in what scholars politely call the agricultural (or Neolithic) revolution. There was no single point of origin, no one Garden, for the Neolithic; we now know that it happened in at least a half dozen separate nurseries scattered around the world over a span of several thousands of years. Archaeology shows these earliest agricultural societies emerging some seven to ten thousand years ago.
Standing back and surveying the big picture, we see the events that had engaged hunter-gatherers—the unharnessed schedules of the plants and wildlife sought for food and raiment—now usurped in certain quarters by the powers of computed time: the solar, lunar, planetary, and other heavenly engines that the earliest farmers realized could be put to work to order and rationalize the seemingly capricious ways of the earth. Put more bluntly, with the advent of the Neolithic, plants and animals were stripped of their will and permission and forced to submit to a schedule that suited one mathematical mammal's sense of thrift.
I had long studied and taught about hunter-gatherer societies, yet it was years before it dawned on me that here were people whose ancestors had avoided or rejected these philosophical terms. The remarkable courtesy rendered plants and animals by nonfarming, nonpastoral small-band societies revealed an approach to these beings that was profoundly different from the one my agricultural forefathers conjured up and that I, raised on the agrarian canon, grew up believing was inevitable and privileged. I began realizing that contemporary hunting and gathering economies furnish a window or, more appropriately, a membrane through which we can perceive that preagricultural, pre-pastoral realm—a pre-Neolithic glimpse of the earth and heavens.
Stretch the membrane thin and hold it up to the dancing light of a fire and behold plants and animals before they are disfranchised into dumb brutes and inert vegetables. Look harder and you begin to make out the dim shapes of people: intelligent personalities whom men and women sang and spun stories about and listened to, to learn the full imaginative repertoire of true humanness. Thus hunters and gatherers acquired the powers of the bush, the desert, the plain, the tundra and sea, by sharing the qualities and powers of the creatures who, it was said, owned each distinctive sphere. These nonhuman people (spirit beings) were mentors and benefactors, giving counsel (through visions, dreams, trances, divination, songs, and manner of life) and offering their flesh out of affection, even pity, for the "wingless, finless, gill-less, naked creatures" with such ingenious hands and clever voices. Thus say countless stories collected over the past five centuries. Underpinning the relationship with the spirits of earth was a tenacious confidence that man and woman are taken care of by this commonwealth, through the principle of the gift: creatures gave themselves of their own free will.
The agricultural revolution marked the repudiation of all this and the installation of a new conceptual regime. With calendars came gods and their priestly servants, temples and other ceremonial centers (soon cities), sacred texts and liturgy. In sum, the whole apparatus of organized religion. There is now a growing consensus that religion as we know it was invented to legitimate the presumption of the cultivated field and barnyard and shepherd's flock—for did anyone think to ask the permission of these creatures to be so domesticated? To us, born and bred on the gospel (not to mention the cornucopia) of the Neolithic, the question seems ridiculous. Go find a functioning hunter-gatherer society and see what they think; I have. The point being that initially, at the boundary of one type of economy with another—the transition from hunting and gathering food on plant and animal terms to its production, now, on human-celestial terms—the question must not have been silly at all. When we consider the Pandora's box of environmental woe and existential alienation that was opened by this shift, as a growing chorus of scholars now tells us, the question may yet be worth taking seriously.
Accompanying this revolutionary shift from forager to producer mentality is a troubling new image of the earth as discordant, unforgiving, even dangerous, a place removed from human beings, who today refer to it as the environment. Order (cosmos, stability) versus disorder (chaos, instability) forms the conceptual cornerstone of this new mentality. Within this fantasy realm of imagination we see priest-kings ascending the throne to orchestrate the reordering of the earth (or their corner of it anyhow), to carry out a grand design whose signals originate now in the heavens rather than in conversation with authentic creatures of sea and land.
The secret to agriculture, its genius, is timing, and the sovereignty of the priest-kings lies in their wielding that temporal sword. Man, literally the male gender, allied with his fabulous gods, now imagined himself in league with the lunar, solar, and various planetary cycles. Once again, the heavens presented a giant clockworks that astronomer-astrologers discovered they could both chart and predict, and join forces with, through numerals—the numbers that were themselves divine beings.
"Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades," demands the whirlwind of that archetypal pastoralist, Job,
or loose the cords of Orion?
Can you lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season,
or can you guide the Bear with its
children?
Do you know the ordinances of the
heavens?
Can you establish their rule on the
earth?
To which the mind of the Neolithic replies, in effect, yes. And "do you know when the mountain goats give birth? further probes the cyclonic voice, amazed at man's hubris.
Do you observe the calving of the
deer?
Can you number the months that
they fulfill,
and do you know the time when
they give birth,
when they crouch to give birth to
their offspring,
and are delivered of their young?
Their young ones become strong,
they grow up in the open;
they go forth, and do not return to
them.
.......................................
Is the wild ox willing to serve you?
Will it spend the night at your
crib?
Can you tie it in the furrow with
ropes,
or will it harrow the valleys after
you?
Will you depend on it because its
strength is great,
and will you hand over your labor
to it?
Do you have faith in it that it will
return,
and bring your grain to your
threshing floor?
The questions cut to the heart of the agricultural agenda, and they are surely tragic. They seem oddly out of place in the generally Neolithic Old Testament. And in the end they seem not to matter, for we are told that Jehovah "restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends; and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. ... The Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning; and he had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys. He also had seven sons and three daughters.... After this Job lived one hundred and forty years, and saw his children, and his children's children, four generations. And Job died, old and full of days."
So plant and animal ways became trapped by detached calculation (measurement)—calculation, now, rather than the gift. Meanwhile, the increasingly agrarian, urbanized, and ballooning populations of the late Neolithic found themselves harnessed to the dynastic ambitions and cosmic duties of their kings. The two processes sprang from the same root.
Agrarian civilizations invariably seem to have a burning sense of righteousness and mission: the sense of being chosen. Mankind, at least this favored segment of it, becomes defined as a superior creation commissioned by the sky gods to work for the stabilization of not just this world but the entire universe. Again, it is important to appreciate that the matrix for this enterprise is time. The new agrarian religions typically had hardwired into them a beginning point and also an end point: that final cataclysm that marked for some civilizations the start of a new eon and for others the final cleansing of sin and end of all counted time in infinity. Launched on their blood-soaked march of history, on a time line cratered and blasted by wars (all, ironically, in the name of order and good and some kind of god), civilized societies would implore the heavens for a savior. For someone who could redeem them and their children—and I am their child—from the unfolding of their own narrative.
One need only to refer to the papal arguments for the Crusades or the authority that Europeans summoned for swallowing up the New World to get the flavor of this temporal chauvinism, which was not unique to the West, I might add.
One sees a number of variations on these basic themes in early agrarian civilizations, though the element they all share is an expansive, human-celestial vision of order wherein mankind assumes an aggressive role. The point is that this seminal Neolithic vision of time was nothing less than a bold revisioning of human beingness vis-à-vis the rest of the earth and cosmos, with the story of that new vision and its aspirations and illusions coming down to us as the narrative of history. Again, the agency chiefly responsible for managing all of this was the priest-king and his lineage, and it was the record of their efforts that constituted the first real histories. We ought to think of it, not as the story of history, but as the organism of history, for, contrary to the common view of history as something gathering dust in the remote past, history in fact has a life of its own, and it has a future. History has a trajectory. The life it has is our own: mankind's commandeered collective imagination. The illusion of history thrives and perpetuates itself because we simply cannot imagine any other way of comprehending the human enterprise. Besides, by this point history has built up such an archive of cherished grief and beckoning opportunity that we are thoroughly caught in its logic.
History, in sum, was originally a highly purposeful activity: the cross our forefathers shouldered when they tore time from the soul of the earth and refocused it above, harnessed to a higher purpose. And, marching in time, we now seem incapable of laying the burden down.
The modern environmental ethic warns us that the earth cannot sustain our sense of mission and destiny and that we will increasingly pay a price for enjoying such a self-indulgent narrative. Let me suggest that we will truly begin solving our environmental and other collective miseries only when our appreciation of timing becomes disentangled from these fateful celestial fantasies and is restored to the earth and its authentic economies. Not until, in other words, we reconceive ourselves as actors not of history but of the earth. That is the deepest challenge of Native America.
The sorcerer's late-night conversations became a part of my children's mythology: they touched a chord resonating down to the bedrock of childhood and beyond, to wherever childhood comes from and wherever it remains alive. The message, I knew, was borne along largely by its medium: the fabulous story lifting us out of the white clapboard house into the sensuous, voluptuous, numinous realm of an autumnal night where we are prepared to find a message. The imagination is flowing, released by the incantation "Once upon a time ..." Ironically, we call it a suspension of disbelief when in fact it is the most ancient, most important belief of all beliefs: the power to let go of what our intellects cling to when our souls say, "No, there is something better. The earth is kin, and its ways are grace." When we really, genuinely let go, we discover that the night and its affairs and citizens are not evil, nor is the earth bathed in sunlight malevolent. We discover the earth to be one vast, orchestrated anthem to beauty, and find ourselves participants within that. Even creators of it. For let it be said, as jarring as it may seem, that humans create deep reality. So suggests the new physics. Humans actually reach out in word and artifice, and finger the dance of elementary reality, which in turn shape-shifts its dance according to how we touch it. Thus the universe runs by a strange metaphysical collaboration, an immense ramifying synthesis that humans, it seems, actually assist in bringing to pass. What Loren Eiseley called that "ancient, inexhaustible, and patient intelligence gathering itself into a universe": we are essential to it.
Night upon night I was a navigator of the universe, pronouncing verities for two small creatures nestled briefly within my arms. It was no accident that I conjured a story using images that had likewise attached themselves to me as a child raised on the land, images that would not release me even as I grew into manhood—the man approaching middle age and father in his own right. Now, years later and far away, I sometimes muse whether those imaginations ever catch the faint scent of pipe tobacco outside a white clapboard house on a wind-blown night.
Thanksgiving of my freshman year at college, and I was far from home. A friend had invited me to spend the holiday with him and his family in Los Angeles. I was still getting used to southern Californians. I remember sitting in the family's living room with his grandfather, an old-fashioned, retired doctor. The man said little, and I felt uncomfortable in his brooding silence. At six o'clock his daughter brought him a dinner tray, turned on the television set, and left us alone watching the evening news in the front room.
It was five or ten minutes into the newscast before I realized that the old man was weeping, silently. Tears streamed down his face as he ate and beheld the spectacle of the day's accounting of ourselves. His grandson later told me that he did this every night. A kind of ritual. "He's senile," he added.
That old black, bag healer, watcher over fevered children, the birth-ripped mother, the body that no longer knows how to live, had the courage, the grace, the compassion, to weep at the ill-conceived news we casually tell and accept as our legitimate story. It has taken me this many years to understand the lesson of those tears, to grasp that this monstrous thing is not our proper story at all. The words to be pronounced on Homo sapiens lie elsewhere, in a realm whose originating premise is not fear but trust, where the revelation runs not according to time's calculating powers but by the power of aesthetics. Not as swimmers struggling to stay afloat in the dark river of time but as vessels of beauty: let us so imagine ourselves. Beauty has an older claim on us than does time; beauty was there in the beginning before time was conceived; it was inherent in the originating Word, the idea and its pronouncement.
Time is but beauty's scaffolding.
My lungs are burning by the first mile. I'm not used to this altitude. The thin air. Still, I am running in intense beauty and determined to keep going. It's early. The sun has just broken free of the far mountains. Night chill is dissipating. I labor past the big rock with the graffiti and I am on the stretch where the road goes into a series of dips and rises, when off in the distance I spot a plume of dust approaching—a lone vehicle coming my way. At the top of the next rise I see it, a beat-up pickup truck. Closer yet and I see its occupants: three burly Navajos squeezed into the front seat.
Damn! I'm a blond, blue-eyed Caucasian out jogging alone and here come three big Indians in a truck.
As they draw nearer, I worry that I look like General George Armstrong Custer—sort of. I figure I probably look as much like Custer to them as they look like the Navajo freedom-fighter Manuelito to me. Or maybe Kit Carson, the scout who betrayed the Navajos' trust by taking command of the U.S. army that rounded them up and packed them off to prison in eastern New Mexico. The Navajo still loathe him for that—loathe another guy whom I kind of look like, my fevered imagination tells me, jogging out here on this dirt road.
Panicked minds work fast in situations like this. Fears begin to avalanche. Getting closer, like a slow-motion movie—that infernal little voice we all have in our heads reminds me that Navajos aren't joggers. Shorts, T-shirt, expensive running shoes, pounding the reservation roads: the helpful little voice, safely out of harm's way within my skull, says that they're not likely to be charmed. It then further cautions that I not forget all those times I've been honked at, yelled at, thrown at, even swerved at by motorists as they roar by on highway and city streets. Folks with no particular grudge except that I'm a white guy or, if they are, too, that I am a jogger.
Fifty yards ahead of me now, closing fast, expressionless, three of them. Large. Sunglasses. Headbands. Custer—the Little Bighorn—he had it coming ... They wave and keep going.
They just wave and keep driving. No horn, no jeering. No massacre.
I emerge from a cloud of dust. The sun is a little higher over a high plateau in Arizona on the Navajo reservation. My chest still hurts, legs feel like lead—and I feel like an idiot.
Fear: the little voice that's only trying to be helpful. I will live on the reservation the rest of the summer and I will learn not to fear them. I will learn to mistrust preconceptions, and I will begin to learn who these people really are, the people who call themselves real.
Real people: so where does that leave me?
History repeats itself. My European ancestors who sailed over here in the sixteenth century were just as idiotic as I am. You can see it in the small stories of history, the ones the textbooks leave out.
Giovanni da Verrazano says that while coasting the shore of this voluptuous new land which he had just "discovered" (his word) for Francis I, he and his crew spotted some natives making signs for them to land. The Frenchmen were delighted and judged that this might be the right moment to bestow some of the "trifles" (again, his word) brought along for the very purpose of winning their friendship. The natives did seem friendly enough there on the shore, waving. The captain intended to dazzle them with his "sheetes of paper," eyeglasses, and bells. Toward that end he loaded twenty-five marines into the ship's boat and pulled for the beach. Getting closer they realized that the surf was more than they could manage. So one intrepid young fellow was persuaded to dive overboard and swim the trinkets ashore. Which he did. It seems he made it through the breakers to within several yards of the beach when, alas, courage failed him. Standing knee-deep in the surge, he flung the package on the sand at the feet of a crowd of Indians, turned, and hurled himself back into the waves.
But luck was not with him that blustery March day. No sooner had he turned around than he was seized by one of the rollers and violently deposited up on the continent, next to his package of toys. Such is the inglorious arrival of the man made in God's image, bearing the fruits of higher civilization: the tourist, half-drowned and puking, and his luggage. Indians, I discovered on the reservation (and they do call themselves "Indians" on the reservations I have been on), have a quick and bawdy sense of humor: they must have thought it was hilarious.
We have called them Indians, though there are now better names; Verrazano never learned what they called themselves. The real people, very likely. In any event, the young fellow retching on the beach soon felt himself seized and hoisted aloft by a couple of strapping natives (Verrazano's journal reports they were "somewhat bigger then [sic] we") and carried up to the dry sand. Fear—the helpful little voice—now began sounding the alarm. He began screaming. As he screamed they shouted, "to cheere him and to give him courage." Soon they had him on the ground, stripped of his clothes, "marveiling at the whitenesse of his flesh." Preconceptions—that foreknowledge that fear sometimes appeals to—had warned him that all savages are at bottom murderers. These particular murderers were standing about howling, gesturing at his delicious-looking soft white flesh.
They now have him naked. They begin making a bonfire. At this his comrades in the longboat set up a howl. My God, they are actually going to roast him alive and eat him! Five hundred years later I will have to deal with three burly Navajos in the front seat of a pickup about to offer me, too, insult or violence.
Except no one makes a move to cook him; everyone seems to be just sitting around chatting, having a jolly time drying him out. Emboldened by his unexpected good fortune, the Frenchman signals that he would appreciate going back to the boat now, if they have enjoyed his company long enough. "They with great love clapping him fast about with many imbracings, accompanying him unto the sea, and to put him in more assurance, leaving him alone, went unto a high ground and stood there, beholding him untill he was entred into the boate."
Certainly the French were not alone in their preconceptions of savages. Englishmen, too, were steeped in the legend of "the Cannibals, ... a cruell kinde of people, whose foode is mans flesh, and have teeth like dogges, and doe pursue them [their victims] with ravenous mindes to eate their flesh, and devoure them." Aye, "and it is not to be doubted," stoutly declared one gentleman,
but that the Christians may ... justly and lawfully ayde the Savages against the Cannibals. So that it is very likely, that by this meanes we shall not only mightily stirre and inflame their rude mindes gladly to embrace the loving company of the Christians, proffering unto them both commodities, succour, and kindnesse: But also by their franke consents shall easily enjoy such competent quantity of Land, as every way shall be correspondent to the Christians expectation and contentation, considering the great abundance that they have of Land, and how small account they make thereof, taking no other fruites thereby then such as the ground of it selfe doeth naturally yeelde.
Those "tyrannicall and blood sucking ... Canibals" yielded a marvelous image and handy argument for stealing native land—but in fact such creatures were pure fantasy.
What was genuine was the experience of a Master Hore of London, "a man of goodly stature and of great courage, and given to the studie of Cosmographie," who, "in the 28. yeere of king Henry the 8. and in the yeere of our Lord 1536, encouraged divers gentlemen and others ... to accompany him in a voyage of discoverie upon the Northwest partes of America."
Soon after reaching Newfoundland, the little band of adventurers "grewe into great want of victuals." Which they endeavored to solve by pilfering from an osprey, who "brought hourely to her yong great plentie of divers sorts of fishes." Raiding a bird's nest brought scant relief, and it wasn't long before they secretly resorted to, frankly, eating one another. Master Hore, empiricist that he was, had not failed to notice that the men were slowly and mysteriously disappearing, though he had assumed, naturally, that they were being either "devoured with [by] wilde beastes" or "destroyed with [by] the Savages." The awful truth was revealed when one of the gentlemen "burst out into these wordes: If thou wouldest needes knowe, the broyled meate that I had was a piece of such a mans buttocke." Whereupon the horrified captain "stood up and made a notable Oration" on cannibalism—real, not fanciful.
Meanwhile, the only savages these men had seen was a canoeful gliding toward the English vessels as they lay at anchor, "to gase upon the shippe and our people." To look, merely. The Christians, on the other hand, immediately set up a shout to their mates belowdecks that here, at last, were "the naturall people of the Countrey, that they had so long and so much desired to see," speedily lowering a "shipboote to meete them and to take them." The sight of a boatload of hungry Anglo-Saxons closing fast was enough to "mightily stirre and inflame their rude mindes" to flee "the loving company of the Christians": they "returned with maine force and fled into an Island ..., and our men pursued them into the Island, and the Savages fledde and escaped."
Cannibalism, meanwhile harangued Master Hore, was an abomination before God and man. Let us repent, he thundered, and he beseeched "all the company to pray, that it might please God to looke upon their miserable present state, and for his owne mercie to relieve the same."
Repentance was brief, for the crew, we're told, was soon drawing lots to determine which of their company would furnish the next meal—this time with the skipper's approval. At which instant the deity did send relief. "That same night there arrived a French shippe in that port, well furnished with vittaile," which the Englishmen "surprised" and stole. "Changing ships, and vitayling them, they set saile to come into England"—victualing them, one hopes, with something other than scraps off an Englishman's backside.
Cannibals, kidnappers, pirates, and two-bit bird-food crooks—altogether, "six score persons, whereof 30. were gentlemen," on a "voyage of discoverie." Wherein was discovered their own heart of darkness.
Preconceptions had a way of backfiring over here, in this strange new land.
Scholars debate the tribal identity of the "people of the Countrey" whom these sixteenth-century explorers were encountering up and down the Atlantic coast. I think they were real people. The three large Navajos in the front of the pickup truck call themselves the Diné: "the real people." They were all over the continent: the people who waved.
I remember sitting at a stoplight in Window Rock, Arizona, the small town that serves as the Navajo Nation capital, and being the first car in line. I had lived for eight years in New Jersey and hence was educated about being speedy out of the blocks when lights change. But something must have gotten into me that day; as I gazed off dreamily at the landscape, the light changed to green and then back to red.
Nobody behind me honked.
Table of Contents
| Preface | ix | |
| From the east beauty has been restored | ||
| ONE Coming to America | 1 | |
| TWO | to the Skin of the World | 32 |
| From the south beauty has been restored | ||
| THREE Cartier's Bear | 52 | |
| FOUR Einstein's Beaver | 77 | |
| From the west beauty has been restored | ||
| FIVE Raven's Children | 104 | |
| SIX Oscar | 132 | |
| From the north beauty has been restored | ||
| SEVEN A Witch's Story | 160 | |
| EIGHT Frogs | 193 |