Kennedy Krossen

Envs 328

Natives Americans and the Frontier Narrative

Native Americans are a proud, strong and spiritual people. They

managed to keep their powerful narrative alive long after the western

“settlers” invaded their lives. Somehow through discrimination,

assimilation, war, disease, starvation, and forced relocation they managed

to hold on to their beliefs, passed down from generation to generation.

Their holistic approach to life and the planet itself has helped them to

survive the atrocities of the frontier mentality.

While historians continue to debate the official beginning of the

American West, as well as the reasons for the expansion itself, there is no

argument that the American Indian paid the price of the westward

movement. This constant movement west through the land, and the

subjugation of the people there in is what many would see as first the

settlement narrative, then later as the frontier narrative. This is a story

characterized by its euro and anthro-pocentrism. These narratives were put

at odds with the more egalitarian, environmental, posterity and spiritually

centered less linear native narrative

 In her book,” The Legacy of Conquest, The Unbroken Past of the

American West,” Patricia Nelson Limerick, describes the popular image of

the Western Frontier as our own "creation myth.” She links this creation

myth with slavery. "The subject of slavery was the domain of serious

scholars and the occasion for sober national reflection: the subject of

conquest was the domain of mass entertainment and the occasion for

lighthearted national escapism. The dominant feature of Western conquest

remained "adventure.” (19) " In Western paintings, novels, movies, and

television shows, those stereotypes were valued precisely because they

offered an escape from modern troubles. "Children happily played cowboys

and Indians, but stopped short of “masters and slaves." This kind of

thought experiment, is illuminating. We think nothing of children playing as

these cultural icons; but just imagine how horrified we world be to see

children acting out the murder and enslavement of Africans. This is the

recreation of our founding myth, we came we saw, and we conquered.

The tale of the American West has been formed by gross

misconceptions, and misinformation, spread by Eurocentrism, much of this

directed toward the Indians. While there are many reasons for the fallacies,

and plenty of blame to go around, one thing is for sure, the huge difference

in the colliding cultures contributed to the mayhem. The invaders never

took the time to try to understand the Indian way of life, so from the

beginning, the Indians were viewed and feared as savages. From their

nakedness, Columbus believed the native people to be an inferior

race. Columbus wrote of the natives he met, "They all go around as naked

as their mothers bore them; and also the women. "They could easily be

commanded and made to work, to sow and to do whatever might be

needed, to build towns and be taught to wear clothes and adopt our ways."

Columbus however, also wrote paradoxically that, "they are the best people

in the world and above all the gentlest," despite this deceleration of virtue,

his earliest records were filled with atrocious acts towards the Indians,

including rape, enslavement and murder.

How could the actions of these people be reconciled with their

account of these peaceful natives? As we know from history, most people

fear what they cannot, or will not try to understand. So it was with the

American West, it began with a horrific trail of misunderstandings that led

to the oppression and the near genocide of American's indigenous people.

The first colonists coming to Northern America were confronted with

the Iroquois tribe. The culture of the two groups were in sharp contrast

from each other from the start. The treatment of women for example was

vastly different in each. Iroquois hunted as a group, and shared the catch,

they respected and valued their women, who tended crops, and took care

of affairs while the men were away, hunting or fishing. Shared power

between the sexes was natural for the Iroquois, but this was not so for the

Colonists. They were controlled solely by males, the clergy, governors, and
family heads were all men. Other Indian tribes in the “new world” behaved

in similar ways to the Iroquois. They also seemed to have a great

partnership and respect for nature. John Collier, an American scholar who

lived among the Indians in the 1920's and 1930's in the American

Southwest, said of their Spirit: "Could we make it our own, there would be

an eternally inexhaustible earth and a forever lasting peace.

It was not just the Indians physical actions and appearance that

disturbed the white man, but his holistic worldview. The native Americans

had a more egalitarian conception of the earth and her people. Many tribes

treated women as valued members of society. They also knew that this

generation was not the only generation our actions effected. “We do not

inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.” -

Tribe Unknown. This is certainly not the shared view, or the western

worldview of the colonizers and the frontiersmen.

The religious beliefs of the European invaders was another important

difference that would support the new oppression of the natives. Most of the

so called settlers from Europe had became Christians centuries earlier, while

Native Americans worshipped the sun, and other powers of nature believing

that the land, water, and skies were home to supernatural sprits. This of

course, was completely unacceptable by the newcomers, driving a huge

moral division between those “saved” and the “heathen masses.” Power and
medicine were synonymous for the Native Americans. They believed that

anyone who processes unnatural skills like healing, or items like guns, must

have supernatural powers. Since the Europeans had some of these

"unnatural skills" the early misconception of them as healers, or "gods" was

born. This helped perpetuate the idea of euro-superiority, and it even to take

root in parts of native populations. In later years this illusion was unveiled,

causing more dissension.

Complicating all of this was the fact that the Indians had no written

language, further proof in the Europeans eyes, that they were an inferior

race. However this also meant that all early accounts of the two clashing

cultures were documented by only one, the “settlers.” This lack of a written

language also kept the natives from having a cohesive narrative, that was

easy to express and adopt. The Europeans account of the land the people as

we all know, was not always truthful, for a number of selfish reasons.

It was not just historians that were guilty of painting a negative, and

fictional portrait of the indigenous American people. These narratives

expansion west and violence perpetrated by natives lived on with the Wild

West shows of the 1890s-1920s. They continued to carry on the stereotypical

ideas of the “savage Indian,” as well as portray the winning of the West with

the exploiters as the winners and the Indians the losers. These shows
themselves furthered violence towards native peoples; there is even

documented abuse of natives due to these shows.

Many of these forms of entertainment, implied that the "evil" Indians

were a vanishing race, conquered by the "good white man." This pushed the

idea of manifest destiny and the frontier spirit, and worked as a kind of

propaganda of the nation’s expansion narrative. While these shows were

entertaining audiences around America, the real wars against the Indians

were still raging. In fact, Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show featured Sitting

Bill, who was killed on December 15,1890, by reservation police during the

Ghost Dance uprisings at Standing Rock Reservation. Later that year

hundreds of men, women and children were slaughtered at Wounded knee.

These atrocities were real but the fictionalization and demeaning nature of

these shows trivialized these peoples sufferings, making it all part of the wild

west show.

The popularity of these shows helped encourage the early cinema to

provide Americans with hundreds of documentaries and silent films of similar

motifs. Because most of these films were shot as melodramas the way

Indians were portrayed in them, left most people feeling disconnected to the

real political agenda of the present government; the native people were

trapped in fiction. In other words, many people may have felt sympathy for

the individual Indian victim in a film, but did not question the prevailing
dominant narrative of manifest destiny and the frontier sprit. Another

problem was, and is, that fictional movies or fictional television often will be

accepted as fact. For example, popular shows, movies, and television

portrayed Indians as savages, lazy, and drunk, where this was and is not the

case. Also the women are sometimes elevated to a royal status like

Pocahontas, as a princess and queen, where this too is untrue, and contrary

to many tribal beliefs.

According to Patricia Nelson Limerick, in the book, The Legacy of

Conquest, The Unbroken Past Of the American West, many misconceptions

and problems with Western American history "stemmed from the excess of

respect given to the ideas of the field's founder, Frederick Jackson Turner”

whose thesis was written in 1893, The Significance of the Frontier in

American History(20). “Although Turner was a very respected scholar, respect

for the individual flowed over into excessive deference to the individual's

ideas. To many American historians Turner thesis was Western history(20)."

Limerick also takes issue with key ideas of Turners’ thesis; first, that

the center of American history was to be found on the edges. "as the

American people proceeded westward, the frontier was the outer edge of the

wave, the meeting point between savagery and civilization" and "and the

line of most effective and rapid Americanization." According to Limerick, "The

struggle with the wilderness turned Europeans into Americans, a process

Turner made the central story of American history: The existence of an area

of free land , its continuos recession, and the advance of American

settlement westward, explain American development."

In 1898 the American census revealed that no large lands were left for

American conquest. Of this, Turner noted at the conclusion of his essay, "And

now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred

years of life under the constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going

has closed the first period of American history." Limerick asserts that Turner

was interpreting the past in light of recent events, and believes Turner's

frontier was a process, and not a place. This is the problem with the frontier

narrative is that it is dealing with real places that unlike the stories that are

told about them still are valid and real. Limerick contends the frontier should

be considered a place, "as many complicated environments occupied by

natives who considered their homelands to be the center, not the edge.”

This is exactly were the frontier narrative put the Native Americans.

They were put on the edge of society, and then they were pushed off. They

were made to go and live in strange new places and on lands that were less

then prime real-estate. After the mid 1800’s the US Congress passed the

Indian Appropriations Act, this authorized the creation of Indian reservations.

This seemed to spell the end for the Native Americans as a real part of the

new nation inhabiting their ancestral land.

 In his book, A People’s History of the United States Howard Zinn said,

“The Indian tribes [were], attacked, subdued, starved out, had been divided

up by putting them on reservations where they lived in poverty.... For a time

the disappearance or amalgamation of the indians seemed inevitable (385).”

This was due to the dominant narrative of the white frontiersmen, they were

on the land that they wonted and were less powerful thus they needed to go,

and go they did. From a population high speculated to be around a million or

more, the Native American population feel to below 300,000 in 1900 (385).

As before mentioned, Native Americans are a proud, strong and

spiritual people. This their own narrative began again to take shape. Zinn

said, “But then the population began to grow again, as if a plant left to die

refused to do so, began to flourish(385).” The Native American population

more then dubbed by 1960 there were 600,000. Half of this population lived

on and the other half off the reservations. The Native Americans were again

becoming what they always were, true inhabitants of this land.

With this new found growth came a rediscovered strength, and

defiance. In the 1960’s Native Americans began to approach a past subject

of controversy: treaties. The United States Government signed over 400 with

the natives and there was not one that they did not subsequently

break(386). From demanding fishing rites to the taking of Alcatraz in 1969,

there was and is a powerful and proud native movement in America. Even

after the great pain and strife caused by other peoples narratives imposed

upon them, the Native Americans are still able to forge their own. One of

pride, justice and hope.