Brando (44 page)

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.

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 devastated by the United States:

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.

After I became interested in American Indians, I discovered that many people, unconsciously at least, don’t even regard them as human beings on the same level as themselves. It has been that way since the beginning; preaching to the Puritans, Cotton Mather compared them to Satan and called it God’s work—and God’s will—to slaughter the heathen savages who stood in the way of Christianity and progress. In the Declaration of Independence proclaiming that all men are created
equal, the indigenous peoples of America were called “merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare is an undistinguished Destruction of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.” As he aimed his howitzers on an encampment of unarmed Indians at Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864, an army colonel named John M. Chivington, who had once said he believed that the lives of Indian children should not be spared because “nits make lice!” told his officers: “I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.” Hundreds of Indian women, children and old men were slaughtered in the Sand Creek Massacre. One officer who was present said later, “Women and children were killed and scalped, children shot at their mothers’ breasts, and all the bodies mutilated in the most horrible manner … the dead bodies of females [were] profaned in such a manner that the recital is sickening.…” The troopers cut off the vulvas of Indian women, stretched them over their saddle horns, then decorated their hatbands with them; some used the skin of braves’ scrotums and the breasts of Indian women as tobacco pouches, then showed off these trophies, together with the noses and ears of some of the Indians they had massacred, at the Denver Opera House.

The assault on American Indians continued into the twentieth century, but in different fashion. When I was going to school in the thirties, barely forty years after the army had butchered more than three hundred Oglala Sioux men, women and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, most textbooks dismissed the Indians in two or three paragraphs that depicted them as a race of faceless, ferocious, heathen savages. From dime novels to the movies, popular culture has reinforced our caricatures of American Indians, demonizing and dehumanizing them, and making folk heroes out of Indian killers like Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson and Kit Carson. From its birth, Hollywood defamed Indians in pictures like
The Squaw Man
.
John Wayne probably did more damage than General Custer ever did to the Indians, projecting an idiotic image of a brave white man battling the godless savages of the frontier. Hollywood needed villains, and it made Indians the embodiment of evil.

But our treatment of Native Americans is only a single thread in the tapestry of human depravity. Side by side with man’s extraordinary ability to think, there is an irrational aspect of his mind that makes him want to destroy on behalf of what he regards as his own breed. Darwin described an instinctive need of members of all species to protect and perpetuate their own group, but the human being is the only animal I know of that consciously inflicts pain on other members of its
own
species. When I was a young man helping to raise money for Israel, I was amazed by what was then a great mystery to me: how it was possible for seemingly ordinary Germans to machine-gun innocent children or herd people into gas chambers by the thousands. It seemed unfathomable that human beings could do such things to one another. But over a lifetime it has become apparent that we are capable of anything on behalf of our own group; the animus is an immutable product of billions of years of evolution.

People feel protected and secure in a tribe, as evidenced by the popularity of gangs in cities all over the world. Their members are responding to an atavistic impulse that has nothing to do with current social conditions; it is a part of every person and culture. The Holocaust wasn’t unique: what made it different was its scale, which to a large degree was simply a product of technology and organization. From time immemorial people have responded to similar impulses to exterminate other groups; the Nazis were more efficient at it. Nothing has eradicated our fundamental instinct to kill one another, usually under the guise of what is inevitably called a just and noble cause, religious or secular.

There is a line in John Patrick’s play
The Teahouse of the August Moon
in which the American officer assigned to bring democracy to Okinawa says, in effect, “We’re going to create a democracy here even if we have to kill everyone to do so.”
Julius Caesar
was a cynical play because it reflected how easily people can be manipulated for a supposedly honorable purpose. Brutus announces why he killed Caesar: