Familiarity.

It occurs to me that what I have studied about Native Americans throughout my lifetime has aggregated into an anecdotal mass, an unorthodox accumulation that wouldn’t enable me to pass an elementary college course but nonetheless exceeds that of 99.999 percent of my fellow citizens, who resolutely hide their faces from the sins of their ancestors against these people. We must accept the fact that most of us wish to know only what is convenient. I recently asked a Native American friend to what degree it distressed him that we apparently have never learned a simple fucking thing about his people. He said he wasn’t distressed, because accepting responsibility for wrongs is a religious idea, and he hadn’t noticed much religion “in motion” in modern culture. He added that without the element of goodwill, all problems had to be approached legalistically because that was the only effective language for social change. How sad. No justice is possible without lawyers.

Way back when, I envisioned that one could spend a thin cotton sheet over our country and its living history and then stand back and watch the locations where the blood soaked through. We must consciously remind ourselves what happened at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, to name two. Such events have never fully entered the history of the conquerors, for the same reason that My Lai hasn’t. You’re scarcely going to see a Wounded Knee or a My Lai float in the Fourth of July parade. Come to think of it, our so-called Indian Wars were, strictly speaking, mere real estate operations and conquests. This property is condemned for better use. Much later, Bertolt Brecht said that whom we would destroy we first call savage.

What we lock in the closet forcibly away from public view invariably becomes ghostly and destructive. Nearly everyone is somewhat aware that it is the media, rather than religion or a sense of national purpose, that gives structure and credibility to their lives. If you look at how we spend our time, it is clear that diversion frames our reality. Who can forget Ronald Reagan speaking of oil-rich Indians on their “preservations”, a notion he got from several identifiable movies. When you go looking for accurate movie portrayals of native culture, you come up with only the recent Smoke Signals and, to a lesser extent, Little Big Man. Movies and television are largely to reality what fast food is to our bounteous crops.

In my own case, which proves not at all uncommon, I learned much about the habitat before I learned of the people who belonged in the habitat. The nature of our predecessors was taught only slightly in school, if at all. The information was out there, but you had to dig, so I dug. It’s unlikely I would have done so without my father’s direction and the knowledge of how a relatively wild and natural habitat could be made livable without destroying it, and how native religions could emerge directly from the earth that gave people life.

Just the other day I was reading how the kestrel (commonly known as the sparrow hawk) has a curious ability to perceive ultraviolet light with a four-dimensional color vision system, which enables it to see the iridescent urine trails that voles leave in the grass, and thus the bird is able to better pursue them. This isn’t a wonderful idea, but a fact, and it led me again to remember William Blake’s line, “How do we know but that ev’ry bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight closed to your senses five?” Whether you are reading E.O. Wilson or Jean-Henri Fabre, you are drawn into ponderous delight at the smallest creatures. At this point it occurred to me that Native Americans paid a lifetime of attention to the natural world in order to survive. The fact that they no longer have to do so poses a series of enormous questions. If Native Americans historically spent all of their existence in intimacy with the natural world, what are the consequences of our imposed rupture of this relationship, other than the obvious effects of disease, drug addiction, and alcoholism? In our own existence, particularly in our urban areas, we have seen clearly what happens to humans when they are reduced to being consumers and spectators.

The poet Wallace Stevens made the uncomfortable statement. “We were all Indians once.” This seems technically true, and it led me to the uncomfortable conclusion that, because of my familiarity with the natural world, I identified strongly with those who until recently had depended on such familiarity for their existence. I had also long understood that my intensest pleasure came from activities such as hunting, fishing, and studying wild country that would have been the same for any Pleistocene biped. The essential difference between me and Native Americans is that my people never got the rawest of deals. My people didn’t get reduced from a possible ten million down to approximately three hundred thousand between the years around 1500 to 1900.

Jim Harrison

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