January 24, 2019
Few things better reflect the extreme views of Native Americans than
those of Mark Twain and James Fenimore Cooper – two of Americans foremost
writers.
Twain had little good to say about Indians, even though he considered
himself “a disciple of Cooper, and a worshiper of the Red Man,” as well as a scholar
in regards to the “savages” in the “Last of the Mohicans.”
Twain, who had believed Cooper’s version of Indian life, was shocked at
what he later witnessed.
“I saw that the nausea which the Goshoots gave me, an Indian worshipper,
set me to examining authorities to see if perchance I had been over-estimating
the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of Romance,” Twain
wrote. “The revelations that came were disenchanting. It was curious to see how
quickly the pain and tinsel fell away from him and left him treacherous, filth
and repulsive.”
Twain found Cooper and his school out of touch with reality, trying to
create language of hungers and mountaineers the way a Broadway clerk might have
eating a book on frontier life at the Broadway Theater over a couple of weeks.
Twain’s description of some Indian tribes would give the politically
correct reader of today a stroke who could call him a racist. Unfortunately,
these readers would prefer Cooper who was something of an Indian groupie the
way Elizabeth Warren and the generation of post 1960s kids are today, a
collection of people who have returned to Cooper’s deluded conception of the “Noble
Savage,” although these kids come at it with a racist anti-white twist.
Twain’s descriptions of particular tribes were extremely harsh especially
when it came to certain tribes such as the Goshoot Indians who he said were “very
considerable inferior to even the despised Digger Indians of California,” and even
less than the Tgerra Del Fuegans, the Hottentots, and “actually inferior in
some respects to the Kytches of Africa.”
Twain said he had to go through the bulky volumes of Rev. J. G. Wood’s books
on uncivilized men “in order to find a savage tribe degraded enough to take
rank with the Goshoots” and came up with only the Bushmen of South Africa.”
But in his journey west, Twain said he saw Goshoots along the road,
hanging around stations, and described them as small and scrawny, with dirty
hands, “a silent, sneaking, treacherous looking race, taking note of
everything, covertly, like all other ‘Nobel Red Men’ that we do not read about,
and betraying no sign in their countenances; indolent, ever-lasting patient and
tireless like all other Indians, pride less beggars…always hungry, and yet
never refusing anything that a hog would eat, though often eating what a hog
would decline…who when asked if they have the common Indian belief in a Great
Spirit show something which almost amounts to emotion, thinking whiskey is
referred to.”
While this was his description of a particular tribe, Twain went on to
day “Wherever one finds an Indian tribe, he has only found Goshoots more or
less modified by circumstances and surroundings,” and fundamentally, all the
tribes he encounters were only variations on Goshoots.
Twain write what he saw firsthand, a clearly degraded people before and
after the American Civil War, at a time when a once noble and powerful people
had long fallen into decline, aided partly by alcohol and loss of traditional
territories in the East. Twain described some tribes as a race of beggars and
worse, who seemed to have no purpose and largely existed on the charity of society
-- not at all fitting the Cooperesque documentaries of the Burn brothers who
painted them with the same tinted and nostalgic hue as Cooper and his followers
did.
Cooper wrote his novels many decades after the events he attempts to
portray. He did not describe what he saw, but what he imagined took place, and
because there was so little actual history written about Indians at that time
and its culture, many have come to accept his version as fact when it was in
reality fiction.
In some ways we are in worse shape today than Cooper’s time, separated
from actual facts by centuries, and so are forced to rely on Indian-self portraits
or worse liberal reinvention of history – like that of the Burns’ brothers to
tell us what Native Americans were really like and what actually happened to
explain how Cooper’s “beautiful people” declined into the beggars Twain saw huddled
along the road sides of the west, looking for handouts, and worse, drink.
Unfortunately, most people today lean towards what Cooper imagined rather
than what Twain actually saw.
But Twain was hardly as judgmental as the liberals might make him out
to be. He understood that he was not seeing Native American at their best.
“They deserve pity, poor creatures, and they can have mine – at this
distance. Nearer by, they never get anybody’s,” Twain wrote, going on to say, “if
we cannot find it in our hearts to give those poor naked creatures our
Christian sympathy and compassion, in God’s name, let us at lease not throw mud
at them.”
History since Twain’s time has shifted back towards the concept of the
noble savage. But there have been true moments of nobility and struggle, such
as at Wounded Knee,” and true political heroes who have stepped up and taken
the side of a once degraded people to help them once again regain historic dignity
– heroes liberals would not acknowledge such as Richard Nixon – who gave back
massive tracks of lands, and true villains such as Ronald Reagan, who completely
ignored the plight of Native Americans with his “hands off” policies.
But today, Native American have become a political tool for a
race-baiting conflict between liberals and conservatives, with liberals seeking
make the conflict about people of color against a white establishment.
It’s very sad, and pathetic, as if we are living in the middle of one
of Cooper’s novels, where all Red Men are good, and all White men bad (somewhat
of an exaggeration of Cooper, but not of today’s politics.”
No comments:
Post a Comment