The Truth About Stories (6 page)

As it happened, I knew quite a bit about Australia. Just before I moved to
San Francisco, I had worked at South Shore Lake Tahoe, a gambling, fun-in-the-sun mecca
in the
Sierra Nevada Mountains, where I had dated a woman from
Australia. Her name was Sharon or Sherry and she told me all about the country, its
beaches, the outback, the sharks. To hear her tell it, the place was bristling with
adventure, and, three weeks into our relationship, I applied for an immigration visa. At
eight weeks our relationship was over. At the twelve-week mark, just as I was packing to
go to San Francisco, my visa arrived. I put it in the box with the books and forgot
about it.

Amazing the way things come around.

The next week I asked the woman from the steamship company what the
chances were of my getting a one-way job on one of the company's ships, and she
told me she thought they were good. I must admit I could hardly contain my
excitement.

Tom King, on a tramp steamer. Tom King, sailing off on a great adventure.
Tom King, explorer of known worlds.

So I was disappointed when she came back the next week to tell me that the
list of people who wanted to work their way to Australia was quite long and that nothing
would come open for at least a year. However, there was a ship sailing for New Zealand
in a week, and there was one spot left on the crew. If I wanted it, she said, it was
mine.

And so I went. Packed everything I owned into two cheap metal trunks and
hauled them to the docks. By the end of the week, I was at sea.

The ship was a German vessel out of Hamburg, the SS
Cap Colorado
.
The captain was German. The crew was German. The cook was German. I wasn't German.
As a
matter of fact, none of the crew was sure what I was. When I
told them I was Cherokee, or to keep matters simple, a North American Indian, they were
intrigued.

And suspicious.

The cook, who could speak passable English, told me that he had read all
of Karl May's novels and had a fair idea of what Indians were supposed to look
like and that I wasn't what he had imagined.

“You're not the Indian I had in mind,” he told me.

Here was a small dilemma. Of all the crew members on that ship, the one
person I didn't want to offend was the cook. I knew that Indians came in all
shapes and sizes and colours, but I hadn't read Karl May, had no idea who he was.
The cook had read May but had never actually seen an Indian. So we compromised. I
confessed that I was a mixed-blood, and he allowed that this was possible, since May had
described full-blood Apaches and not mixed-blood Cherokees.

I discovered some years later that May had never seen an Indian, either,
but on board that ship it was probably just as well that I did not know this.

I spent almost a year in New Zealand. I worked as a deer culler, a beer
bottle sorter, a freezer packer, and a photographer. I liked the country and might well
have stayed had it not been for a phone call I got early one morning. It was a
British-sounding man who introduced himself as an official with the immigration
department.

If I'm not mistaken, he said, clipping the edges off each consonant,
you entered the country eleven months
ago on a thirty-day tourist
visa and are therefore in violation of New Zealand immigration laws.

I agreed that he was probably correct.

When might we expect you to leave? he wanted to know.

As I said, I liked the place, had no plans to leave. So I asked him if
there was any chance of applying for an immigration visa.

It turned out my immigration man had only newly arrived from England the
month before to take up his duties and wasn't sure if this was possible. But he
would check into it, he told me. In the meantime, would I give him some of my
particulars.

It was the usual stuff. Name. Colour of hair. Colour of eyes. Height.
Weight. Race.

Black, brown, six feet six inches, 230 pounds.

Indian.

Dear me, he said. I don't believe we take applications from
Indians.

I have to admit I was stunned. Why not? I wanted to know.

Policy, said the immigration man.

Do you get many? I asked.

Oh, yes, he said. Thousands.

I hadn't heard of any mass exodus of Native peoples from Canada or
the States. These Indians, I asked him, where are they from? Alberta? Saskatchewan?
Arizona? South Dakota? Oklahoma?

Dear me, no, said my British voice. They're from, you know, New
Delhi, Bombay . . .

When Karen told me her father wouldn't let me
take her to the prom because he didn't want her dating Mexicans, I told her I
wasn't Mexican. I was Indian.

When the immigration officer told me I couldn't apply for a visa
because I was Indian, I told him I wasn't East Indian, I was North American
Indian.

As if that was going to settle anything.

Without missing a beat, and at the same time injecting a note of
enthusiasm into his otherwise precise voice, the immigration man said, What? Do you mean
like cowboys and Indians?

The next week, I was on a ship for Australia. As it turned out, that
immigration visa I had was still good. As for Karen, well, I went to the prom that year.
But I went alone.

The first three or four months I was in Australia, I travelled around,
working my way up the east coast and into the interior. At Rockhampton, I made pocket
money helping a man and his son dismantle a small house. At Tennent Creek, I worked at a
mine shovelling ore into sacks. In Adelaide, I cleaned trucks. But in all my travels, I
never met an indigenous Australian. In New Zealand, I had met a great many Maoris, and
while there had been friction between Maoris and Europeans, the two groups seemed to
have organized themselves around an uneasy peace between equals. In Australia, there was
no such peace. Just a damp, sweltering campaign of discrimination that you could feel on
your skin and smell in your hair.

The Aboriginal people, I was told, were failing. They
were dying off at such a rate that they wouldn't last another decade. It was sad
to see them passing away, but their problem, according to the men who gathered in the
bars after work, was that they did not have the same mental capacities as Whites. There
was no point in educating them because they had no interest in improving their lot and
were perfectly happy living in poverty and squalor.

The curious thing about these stories was I had heard them all before,
knew them, in fact, by heart.

Eventually I wound up in Sydney and lied my way into a job as a journalist
with a third-rate magazine called
Everybody's
— a disingenuous name
if ever there was one. I got the job, in part, because I was an American and an Indian
— the exotic combination being too much for folks to resist — and I was sent
out on jobs that required the firm hand of a reporter of exotic background. I filed
stories about teenagers having a good time drinking themselves into a stupor and jumping
off cliffs into the ocean, about escorting a chimpanzee around the city and showing her
the sights, about spending an exhilarating afternoon with the self-proclaimed king of
tic-tac-toe, discussing strategies and secret moves.

Almost certainly, the high point of my journalistic career was dragging
one of those plastic blow-up dollies around on a date that included dinner and a movie.
You'll probably think poorly of me, but I didn't really mind doing these
idiotic assignments. Actually, many of them were fun. Best of all, I had a professional
job. Race, which
had periodically been something of a burden, was
suddenly something of an advantage.

There was a photographer who worked for the magazine. Let's say
that, after all these years, I've forgotten his name. So, we'll call him
Lee. Lee was a decent enough guy, but on Friday afternoons when we got paid and
adjourned to the local pub to drink and review the week, he would turn into a boor. The
kind of boor who, after half a dozen beers and a few whisky chasers, liked to expound on
what was wrong with the country. Government was at the top of his list, followed closely
by Australia's “Abo” problem — “Abo” being
Australia's derogatory term for the Aboriginal people. And because there were no
Aboriginal people in the immediate vicinity, Lee spent many of these smoky evenings
sharpening his soggy wit on me.

Lee didn't know any more about Indians than had the cook on the
tramp steamer or Karl May or the immigration man, but he reckoned that North Americans
had taken care of the problem in a reasonably expedient fashion. I'm embarrassed
to repeat his exact words but the gist of it was that North Americans had shot Native
men and bred Native women until they were White.

In a perverse way, I've always liked people like Lee. They are, by
and large, easy to deal with. Their racism is honest and straightforward. You
don't have to go looking for it in a phrase or a gesture. And you don't have
to wonder if you're being too sensitive. Best of all, they remind me how the past
continues to inform the present.

One Monday, Lee stopped by my desk with a present
for
me. It was a cartoon that he had gotten one of the guys in the art department to work
up. It showed a stereotypical Indian in feathers and leathers with a bull's eye on
his crotch and flies buzzing around him. “Office of Chief Screaching
[
sic
] Eagle Goldstein,” the caption read. “Payola and bribes
acceptable in the form of checks or money orders. No silver please.” Just above
the Indian was “Happy Barmizvah Keemosaby” and just below was “only
living Cherokee Jew.”

Lee stood at my desk, waiting for me to smile. I told him it was funny as
hell, and he said, yeah, everyone he had showed it to thought it was a scream. I had the
cartoon mounted on a board and stuck it on my desk.

I still have it. Just in case I forget.

So it was unanimous. Everyone knew who Indians were. Everyone knew what
we looked like. Even Indians. But standing in that parking lot in Oklahoma with my
brother, looking at the statue of Will Rogers, I realized, for perhaps the first time,
that I didn't know. Or more accurately, I didn't know how I wanted to
represent Indians. My brother was right. Will Rogers did not look like an Indian. Worse,
as I cast my mind across the list of Native artists I had come west to photograph, many
of them friends, I realized that a good number of them didn't look Indian,
either.

Yet how can something that has never existed — the Indian —
have form and power while something that is alive and kicking — Indians —
are invisible?

Edward Sheriff Curtis.

James Fenimore Cooper, George Catlin, Paul Kane,
Charles Bird King, Karl May, the Atlanta Braves, the Washington Redskins, the Chicago
Blackhawks, Pontiac (the car, not the Indian), Land O'Lakes butter, Calumet baking
soda, Crazy Horse Malt Liquor,
A Man Called Horse
, Iron Eyes Cody,
Dances
with Wolve
s,
The Searchers
, the Indian Motorcycle Company, American
Spirit tobacco, Native American Barbie, Chippewa Springs Golf Course, John Augustus
Stone, the Cleveland Indians, Disney's Pocahontas, Geronimo shoes, the Calgary
Stampede, Cherokee brand underwear, the Improved Order of Red Men, Ralph Hubbard and his
Boy Scout troop, Mutual of Omaha, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, the Boston Tea
Party, Frank Hamilton Cushing, William Wadsworth Longfellow, the Bank of Montreal,
Chief's Trucking, Grey Owl,
The Sioux Spaceman
, Red Man chewing tobacco,
Grateful Dead concerts, Dreamcatcher perfume.

In the end, there is no reason for the Indian to be real. The Indian
simply has to exist in our imaginations.

But for those of us who are Indians, this disjunction between reality and
imagination is akin to life and death. For to be seen as “real,” for people
to “imagine” us as Indians, we must be “authentic.”

In the past, authenticity was simply in the eye of the beholder. Indians
who looked Indian were authentic. Authenticity only became a problem for Native people
in the twentieth century. While it is true that mixed-blood and full-blood rivalries
predate this period, the question of who was an Indian and who was not was easier to
settle. What made it easy was that most Indians lived on
reserves of
one sort or another (out of sight of Europeans) and had strong ties to a particular
community, and the majority of those people who “looked Indian” and those
who did not at least had a culture and a language in common.

This is no longer as true as it once was, for many Native people now live
in cities, with only tenuous ties to a reserve or a nation. Many no longer speak their
Native language, a gift of colonialism, and the question of identity has become as much
a personal matter as it is a matter of blood. N. Scott Momaday has suggested that being
Native is an idea that an individual has of themselves. Momaday, who is Kiowa, is not
suggesting that anyone who wants to can imagine themselves to be Indian. He is simply
acknowledging that language and narrow definitions of culture are not the only ways
identity can be constructed. Yet, in the absence of visual confirmation, these
“touchstones” — race, culture, language, blood — still form a
kind of authenticity test, a racial-reality game that contemporary Native people are
forced to play. And here are some of the questions.

Were you born on a reserve? Small, rural towns with high Native
populations will do. Cities will not.

Do you speak your Native language? Not a few phrases here and there.
Fluency is the key. No fluency, no Indian.

Do you participate in your tribe's ceremonies? Being a singer or a
dancer is a plus, but not absolutely required.

Are you a full-blood?

Are you a status Indian?

Are you enrolled?