As previously announced, this is the third in a series of diaries acknowledging American Indian Heritage Month; this diary was originally posted on DailyKos.com under a slightly different title. Previous diaries in the series can be found here and here. Related entries by others may be found here, here, here, here, and here; also of interest: tributes to Vine DeLoria, Jr. here, here and here
“Ah what can I do?” say a powerless few
With a lump in your throat and a tear in your eye —
Can’t you see that their poverty’s profiting you?–Buffy St. Marie
Some songs stay with you all your life–resting dormant in the recesses of memory and called to the fore in times of despair, they bring comfort and act as reminders of truths long-denied. As with any great work of art, they cry out to you in their lapidary urgency: You must change your life! (Rilke).
Buffy St. Marie’s “My Country tis of thy People You’re Dying” has been like that for me ever since it was first released in the sixties (and if you’re not familiar with the song I encourage you to read the full text of the lyrics because without them, this piece makes little sense).
A lot of us hoped this song in particular would lose its relevance within twenty years of its release: obsolescence by design. Alas, never has it been more pertinent, and in the course of the past five years, the song has resurfaced in my mind more often than any other in a vast repertoire of protest songs, songs of war and peace, foreign lyrics alongside domestic paeans to diamond deserts, gulf stream waters, and hard rain’s a fallin’.
And the frequency with which these strains have returned has increased thousand-fold since I made my first forays into the so-called liberal blogosphere a little over a year ago. Where others see hope for a revival of the noble principles and tenets of founding fathers and suffragette mothers, I see only a rote reiteration of the same logic, the same hypocrisies, the same deceptions and denials that form the duplicitous narrative Buffy invited us to unravel in her plaintive plea that we
Hear how the bargain was made for the West:
With her shivering children in zero degrees,
Blankets for your land, so the treaties attest,
Oh well, blankets for land is a bargain indeed,
And the blankets were those Uncle Sam had collected
From smallpox-diseased dying soldiers that day.
And the tribes were wiped out and the history books censored,
A hundred years of your statesmen have felt it’s better this way.
And yet a few of the conquered have somehow survived,
Their blood runs the redder though genes have paled.
From the Grand Canyon’s caverns to craven sad hills
The wounded, the losers, the robbed sing their tale.
From Los Angeles County to upstate New York
The white nation fattens while others grow lean;
Oh the tricked and evicted they know what I mean.
Like many Americans (most of my current readership included), disillusioned with the obvious failures of government, of the press and of the mainstream populace, I turned to the blogosphere for signs of hope. And indeed, a glimmer appeared. But written between the lines of this newly-scripted hope, there is the despairing realization that it’s just another case of re-writing history in the intellectually dishonest idiom of denial.
Denial and history. In the aftermath of WW II and the Holocaust, the Shoah, the Catastrophe, or “that which happened” (Paul Celan)–whatever you want to call it–the destruction of European Jewry at the hands of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi thugs, the international community refused to allow Germans and Germany to escape judgment, and this condemnation went beyond the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal, beyond Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, beyond the Nazi Physicians’ Trials in Frankfurt–“mastery of the past” and the “burden of guilt” was inscribed on the narrative of German national identity–from the late 50s and early 60s onward, the Question of German Guilt (Karl Jaspers) has been at the forefront of Germany’s single-minded national obsession with confronting the consequences of that fleeting 12-year period in its own history.
Guilt. What good is it? No one wants to go through life bearing the burden of a guilty conscience. And yet, in cases where the crimes committed in a nation’s name are taken to such extremes that the whole world calls out for retribution–as was the case with Germany in the aftermath of WWII–guilt, it seems, becomes a “necessary evil,” and it is the lesser of the two (taking a close second to false pride).
For me, as a person of German-Jewish (paternal) and Native American (Ojibwe) maternal descent, I cannot help but make these comparisons. And when I make them, understand that the basis for so doing is not an abstract study of historical archives and the annals of long-distance learning: I lived in Germany for ten years–Germany, where I am clearly marked as a Jew by virtue of a quintessentially “Jewish name.” And yet, my primary identification is that of a Native American (Ojibwe). In summary: as a German-Jewish-Native-American female, I have genocide written all over my genealogy. I cannot afford the luxury of denial. As much as I appreciate the efforts of “liberals” and “progressives” in this country, as much as this newly discovered pride in America is perhaps laudable, the dynamics of denial indelibly imprinted between the lines of nearly every word of political discourse, of these passionate outbursts of “pride” in America, this seemingly endless stream of eulogies to America’s great past, are excruciatingly painful reminders of denial.
The glaring absence of consciousness for American Indian issues is perhaps most apparent in the gloating and gleeful celebration of the Abramoff scandal–which, as we know, involves yet another egregious bilking of American Indians by the US government and its allies, but is of interest and value to the liberal blogosphere and to Democrats only because of its volatile potential to “bring down the Republicans.” There is great irony in the fact that this most recent assault on Native American economic interests could be the one thing that spells d.o.w.n.f.a.l.l. for the criminal agents the American people have allowed to seize control of their government. There is great tragedy in the fact that this seems to be the only reason that the Senate Indian Affairs Committee is of even minimal interest to Democrats, liberals and progressives. The bilking of the tribes that is at issue here is incidental. And the fact that this represents not even the most horrendous assault on tribal assets in the country’s history is of course wholly irrelevant.
So what is it about my impertinent refusal to let these things slide? Can’t we all just get along? Is this just a psychotic expression of some innately Jewish penchant for suffering within me? Perhaps a pathologically Native American strain of savagery? A belligerent expression of bitter resentment, or a curmudgeonly refusal to let sleeping dogs lie? (Indeed, based on many of the responses I have gotten to previous postings here and elsewhere in the liberal blogosphere, I have been tempted to change my screenname to “grumpyoldindian” just to give my readers fair warning; it would seem that “starkravinglunaticradical” might have had the same effect–without the advantage of subconsciously invoking the dynamics of “liberal white guilt” that would necessarily go hand in hand with any overt reference to Indianness in a screenname.)
William Greider, in his 1996 One World Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism addresses the question of American guilt:
German social consciousness was anchored in the country’s tragic knowledge of guilt and defeat, a humbling encounter with self doubt that Americans have so far evaded in their national history. …American history did provide ample basis for humility and social introspection: slavery and the enduring wounds of race, “winning” the West by armed conquest, Hiroshima and the nuclear potential for mass destruction, the bloody failure of the neocolonialist war in Vietnam….The social meaning of these experiences was usually deflected, however, and repackaged by the optimistic American culture as stories of triumph…Thus, Americans generally managed to evade any national sense of guilt or defeat. Critical reflection on the national character was discouraged, ridiculed as “un-American.
To the best of my knowledge, Greider is neither Native American nor Jew–perhaps he is Jewish, I know not. It wouldn’t surprise me, nor would it matter. The point is, I am not alone in pointing out the precipitous absence of reflection on the whole genocidal history of America and the way this dynamic of denial prevents us from arriving at a more intellectually honest appraisal of our own history, especially as it relates to our present situation and the attendant re-configuration of the national psyche that is the single most urgent prerequisite to any hope for a brighter future for this country.
A recent article on the Question of American Guilt by Manuela Garcìa, Jr. offers similar insights in this regard.
It is this madness that is our greatest weakness, and the vulnerability most accessible to real enemies. Four jumbo jets were flown through this opening on 11 September 2001. The “inability” to understand “why?,” and the loud howling of indignation about Ward Churchill’s stridency in his use of the phrase “little Eichmanns” since, are only reflex denials mounding over the underlying truth that must remain submerged: Americans’ collective guilt for the continuing impact of American power on non-American lives. We engineer this denial into our manner of speaking and the objects of our daily lives. Our SUVs are psychological sculpture, karmic Rorschach blots, anechoic cocoons free of the Palestinian screams emitted as we squeeze the earth for black blood to burn. (3) If ignorance is bliss, then America is paradise.
As an American, accept the collective guilt. Denial, whether rhapsodic evangelical or an enlightened progressive’s disavowal (“It’s not my fault, I know better”), only delays responding to its causes — and changing this nation’s course. We are all guilty to some degree for the footprints of America in this world. Why? Because we are — and want to be — all part of this nation. This attitude is the psychological antidote to the psychosis.
And so, as I watch this diary scroll down the screen into the depths of denial, I will at least have the assurance that the psychosis is not mine.
For those who are ready to consider these questions from a position of intellectual honesty and are perhaps furthermore prepared to take reconciliatory action on their own behalf–in an attempt to begin the process of “mastering the past,” I will be posting in the near future suggestions in answer to Buffy’s question: “Aw what can I do, say a powerless few?”
Till then, I encourage you to ponder these issues. A good start might be to take a look at the Abramoff issue from the perspective of its implications for the “wealthy Indian tribes”.
(What’s wrong with that you ask? I mean, they are wealthy aren’t they? It’s the truth, ain’t it?)
Yeah, sorta. But if you have to ask what is so bothersome about anyone talking in terms of “wealthy Indian tribes”….well, that’s part of the problem, and my providing the answer isn’t going to do much good.