The Truth About Stories (5 page)

So when I set out in the fall of 1995 on what I had pompously decided
to call the Medicine River Photographic Expedition, I was stuffed full of high
expectations. My brother Christopher, who is a fine woodworker and three years younger
than I, wanted to come along. He told me that the expedition sounded like fun and the
prospect of meeting other Native artists was appealing.

My mother, fearful that her only children might get
lost in the heart of the heart of the country, cooked and packed us six roast chickens,
twenty dozen chocolate chip cookies, an entire tree of bananas, a vineyard of grapes, an
orchard of apples and oranges, four loaves of bread, a case of drinking water, candy (in
case we ran out of cookies, I guess), and four pounds of butter. Along with a complete
set of maps of the provinces and states, three flashlights of varying sizes, a highway
hazard warning light, a car-battery charging system with an electrical tire inflater,
several pamphlets on how to survive in the wilderness, and a compass.

After we had packed and said our goodbyes, she walked alongside the car
all the way to the street and had us roll down the window so she could tell us to drive
carefully.

As we slipped onto the interstate, the Volvo stuffed with camera gear and
the better part of a grocery store, and began following my bright idea down to the
American Southwest, I can remember thinking that Curtis couldn't have been any
better outfitted.

In Roseville, California, where I grew up, race was little more than a
series of cultural tributaries that flowed through the town, coming together in
confluences, swinging away into eddies. There were at least three main streams,
Mexicans, the Mediterranean folk — Italians and Greeks — and the general mix
of Anglo-Saxons that a Japanese friend of mine, years later, would refer to as the Crazy
Caucasoids. But in Roseville in the late 1950s and
early 1960s,
there were no Asian families that I can remember, and the picture I have of my 1961
graduating class does not contain a single black face.

If there was a racial divide in the town, it was the line between the
Mexicans and everyone else. Some of the Mexican families had been in the area long
before California fell to the Americans in 1848 as a spoil of war. The rest had come
north later to work the fields and had settled in Roseville and the other small towns
— Elk Grove, Lodi, Stockton, Turlock, Merced, Fresno — that ran through the
heart of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys.

I went to school with Hernandezes and Gomezes. But I didn't
socialize with them, didn't even know where they lived. My brother and I kept
pretty much to our own neighbourhood, a five- or six-block area on the northwestern edge
of town bounded by auction yards and an ocean of open fields.

Racism is a funny thing, you know. Dead quiet on occasion. Often
dangerous. But sometimes it has a peculiar sense of humour. The guys I ran with looked
at Mexicans with a certain disdain. I'd like to say that I didn't, but that
wasn't true. No humour here. Except that while I was looking at Mexicans, other
people, as it turned out, were looking at me.

In my last year of high school, I mustered enough courage to ask Karen
Butler to go to the prom with me. That's not her real name, of course. I've
changed it so I don't run the risk of embarrassing her for something that
wasn't her fault.

I should probably begin by saying that at eighteen, I
was not the prettiest of creatures. Tall and skinny, with no more co-ordination than a
three-legged stepladder, I also had drawn the pimple card to brighten my
adolescence.

Pimples. The word has an almost dainty sound to it. Like
“dimples.” But my pimples were not annoying little flares that appeared here
and there but rather large, erupting pustules that hurled magma and spewed lava. They
crowded against the sides of my nose, burrowed around my lips, and spread out across my
chin and forehead like a cluster of volcanic islands.

Roseville was a railroad town. Until the hospital and the shopping centre
were built on the southeast side, most everyone lived north of the tracks. Karen was
from the south side, one of the new subdivisions, what cultural theorists in the late
twentieth century would call “havens of homogeneity.”

Karen's mother was a schoolteacher. Her father was a doctor. My
mother ran a small beauty shop out of a converted garage. Karen's family was upper
middle class. We weren't. Still, there was a levelling of sorts, for Karen had a
heart defect. It didn't affect her so far as I could tell, but I figured that
being well off with a heart defect was pretty much the same as being poor with pimples.
So I asked her if she wanted to go to the prom with me, and she said yes.

Then about a week before the big evening, Karen called me to say that she
couldn't go to the dance after all. I'm sorry, she told me. It's my
father. He doesn't want me dating Mexicans.

It took my brother and me four days to drive to New
Mexico. We could have made the trip in three days, but we kept getting sidetracked by
interesting stops. My favourite was a McDonald's on the Will Rogers Turnpike near
Claremore, Oklahoma. I generally avoid places like McDonald's but this one had a
tiny Will Rogers museum on the first floor of the restaurant, as well a statue of Rogers
himself in the parking lot standing next to a flagpole, twirling a rope.

Tourists pulling off the turnpike and seeing the statue for the first time
would probably think Rogers was some kind of famous cowboy. In fact, he was a famous
Indian, a sort of Indian/cowboy, a Cherokee to be exact.

But most importantly, he was what the political and literary theorist
Antonio Gramsci called an “organic” intellectual, an individual who
articulates the understandings of a community or a nation. During the 1930s Rogers was
probably the most famous man in North America. He performed in circuses and Wild West
shows. He starred in the Ziegfeld Follies, and from 1933 to 1935 he was the top male
motion-picture box-office attraction. Over forty million people read his newspaper
columns on everything from gun control to Congress, and even more listened to his weekly
radio show. He did just about everything with the exception of running for office.
“I ain't going to try that,” he said. “I've got some pride
left.”

Rogers was born near Claremore, Oklahoma, and his family was prominent in
the Cherokee Nation. But he didn't look Indian. Not in that constructed way.
Certainly not in the way Curtis wanted Indians to look.
And tourists
pulling into the parking lot and seeing the statue for the first time would never know
that this was an Indian as famous as Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse or Geronimo.

Christopher must have read my mind. The Indians we're going to
photograph, he said, walking over to the statue. What if they all look like Rogers? I
know he's Indian, said my brother, and you know he's Indian, but how is
anyone else going to be able to tell?

Curtis wasn't the only photographer in the early twentieth
century who was taking pictures of Indians. So was Richard Throssel. Unless you're
a photography buff, you won't know the name and will therefore have no way of
knowing that Throssel was not only a contemporary of Curtis's, but that he was
also Native. Cree to be exact. Adopted by the Crow. Throssel even met Curtis, when
Curtis came to the Crow reservation.

Throssel took many of the same sort of romantic photographs as Curtis,
photographs such as “The Sentinel,” which shows an Indian in a feathered
headdress, holding a lance, and sitting on a horse, all in silhouette, set against a
dramatic sky, or “The Feathered Horsemen,” which records a party of Indians
on horses coming through a stand of tipis, the men wearing feathered headdresses and
carrying bows and arrows and lances.

But he also took other photographs, photographs that moved away from
romance toward environmental and social comment, photographs that did not imagine the
Indian as dying or particularly noble, photographs that
suggested
that Indians were contemporary as well as historical figures. His photograph of Bull
Over the Hill's home titled “The Old and the New,” which shows a log
house with a tipi in the background, and his 1910 photograph “Interior of the Best
Indian Kitchen on the Crow Reservation,” which shows an Indian family dressed in
“traditional” clothing sitting at an elegantly set table in their very
contemporary house having tea, suggest that Native people could negotiate the past and
the present with relative ease. His untitled camp scene that juxtaposes traditional
tipis with contemporary buggies and a family of pigs, rather than with unshod ponies and
the prerequisite herd of buffalo, suggests, at least to my contemporary sensibilities,
that Throssel had a penchant for satiric play.

But I'm probably imagining the humour. Throssel was, after all, a
serious photographer trying to capture a moment, perhaps not realizing that tripping the
shutter captures nothing, that everything on the ground glass changes before the light
hits the film plane. What the camera allows you to do is to invent, to create.
That's really what photographs are. Not records of moments, but rather imaginative
acts.

Still, neither Curtis nor Throssel had to deal with the Rogers conundrum.
Or perhaps neither chose to. Throssel's Indians, even the ones set against
contemporary backdrops, were, like Curtis's Indians, all visually Indian. And when
we look at his photographs, we see what we expect to see.

The Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish writer Louis Owens, in
his
memoir
I Hear the Train: Reflections, Inventions, Refractions
, deals with the
issue of photographs and expectations. Looking through a collection of old photographs
of his mixed-blood family, Owens can find no “Indians.” “This family
from whom I am descended,” he says, “wears no recognizably Indian cultural
artifacts; nor are they surrounded by any such signifiers. (Though there is possibility
in the blanket nailed across the cabin door: what if my great-grandfather had perversely
wrapped the blanket around himself for this picture?) . . . To find the Indian in the
photographic cupboard, I must narratively construct him out of his missing presence, for
my great-grandfather was Indian but not
an Indian
.”
²

Of course, all this — my expedition, Throssel's images,
Owens's family portraits — are reminders of how hard it is to break free
from the parochial and paradoxical considerations of identity and authenticity. Owens,
in a particularly wry moment, notes that “few looking at [these] photos of
mixedbloods would be likely to say, ‘But they don't look like
Irishmen,' but everyone seems obligated to offer an opinion regarding the degree
of Indianness represented.”
³

In Curtis's magnum opus,
Portraits from North American Indian
Life
, we don't see a collection of photographs of Indian people. We see
race. Never mind that race is a construction and an illusion. Never mind that it does
not exist in either biology or theology, though both have, from time to time, been
enlisted in the cause of racism. Never mind that we can't hear it or smell it or
taste it or feel it. The important thing is that we believe we can see it.

In fact, we hope we can see it. For one of the
conundrums of the late twentieth century that we've hauled into the twenty-first
is that many of our mothers and fathers, who were pursued by missionaries, educators,
and government officials (armed with residential schools, European history, legislation
such as the Indian Act, the Termination Act, and the Relocation Program of the 1950s),
who were forcibly encouraged to give up their identities, now have children who are
determined
to be
seen
as Indians. Louis Owens isn't the only
Native person who has sorted through old photographs and looked in cold mirrors for that
visual confirmation.

When I was going to university, there was an almost irresistible pull to
become what Gerald Vizenor calls a “cultural ritualist,” a kind of
“pretend” Indian, an Indian who has to dress up like an Indian and act like
an Indian in order to be recognized as an Indian. And in the 1970s, being recognized as
an Indian was critical. And here tribal affiliation was not a major consideration. We
didn't dress up as nineteenth-century Cherokees or as the Apache, Choctaw, Lakota,
Tlingit, Ojibway, Blackfoot, or Haida had dressed. We dressed up as the
“Indian” dressed. We dressed up in a manner to substantiate the cultural lie
that had trapped us, and we did so with a passion. I have my own box of photographs.
Pictures of me in my “Indian” outfits, pictures of me being
“Indian,” pictures of me in groups of other “Indians.”

Not wanting to be mistaken for a Mexican or a White, I grew my hair long,
bought a fringed leather pouch to hang off my belt, threw a four-strand bone choker
around
my neck, made a headband out of an old neckerchief, and
strapped on a beaded belt buckle that I had bought at a trading post on a reservation in
Wyoming. Trinkets of the trade.

I did resist feathers but that was my only concession to cultural
sanity.

Not that university was my first experience with the narrow parameters
of race. In 1964, I fell into a job as a junior executive at the Bank of America in San
Francisco. Junior executive sounds grand, but as I discovered after the first few days,
this was what the bank called men who worked as tellers, as opposed to the women who
worked as tellers and who were just called tellers. These terms, though I didn't
understand it at the time, were innate promises that men had possibilities of
advancement, while women did not.

In any case, it was a boring job, and by the end of the first month I was
looking for another career. I didn't find it, but I did meet a woman who worked
for a steamship company. Each week, on Friday, she would come in and deposit the
company's earnings. I was bored. She was bored. So we talked. The steamship
company she worked for was called Columbus Lines, an irony that was not lost on me, and,
occasionally, she told me, they would take on “passengers” who could earn
their one-way passage to Australia by working aboard the ship.