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 INDIGENOUS AMERICAS
R OBERT WARRIOR AND J ACE W EAVER , S ERIES E DITORS

The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial

Politics of U.S.–Indigenous Relations
Ke v i n Br u y n e e l

The Common Pot:

The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast
Li s a B r o o k s

Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History

Da n i e l He a t h J u s t i c e

The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

Th o m a s Ki n g

Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong

Pa u l Ch a a t Sm i t h

Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point

Ge r a l d Vi z e n o r

The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction

Ro b e r t Wa r r i o r

Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court,

Indian Rights, and the Legal History of Racism in America
Ro b e r t A. Wi l l i a m s , Jr.
Everything You Know about
Indians Is Wrong

Paul Chaat Smith

INDIGENOUS AMERICAS SERIES

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS

Mi n n e a p o l i s • Lo n d o n
For publication information on previously published works in this book, see pages 191–93.

Copyright 2009 by Paul Chaat Smith

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Paul Chaat.

Everything you know about Indians is wrong / Paul Chaat Smith.
p. cm. —(Indigenous Americas series)
isbn 978-0-8166-5601-1 (hc : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-8166-5602-8 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Indians of North America—Cultural assimilation. 2. Indians of North America—
Ethnic identity. 3. Indians of North America—Government relations—1934–
4. Smith, Paul Chaat. I. Title.
e98.c89s64 2009
323.1197—dc22
2008055791

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Lynora
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Every Picture Tells a Story / 1

Part I. States of Amnesia / 7

Lost in Translation / 9
On Romanticism / 13
After the Gold Rush / 28
Land of a Thousand Dances / 37
The Big Movie / 43
The Ground beneath Our Feet / 53
Homeland Insecurity / 64

Part II. Everything We Make Is Art / 67

Americans without Tears / 69
Delta 150 / 79
Luna Remembers / 88
Standoff in Lethbridge / 103
Struck by Lightning / 113
Meaning of Life / 123
States of Amnesia / 138

Part III. Jukebox Spiritualism / 143

A Place Called Irony / 145
Life during Peacetime / 151
Last Gang in Town / 158
From Lake Geneva to the Finland Station / 163
Ghost in the Machine / 172

Afterword: End of the Line / 181

Acknowledgments / 189
Publication History / 191
This page intentionally left blank
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 Every Picture Tells a Story

H
istory records that Ishi, a.k.a. the Last Yahi, the Stone Age
Ishi Between Two Worlds, was captured by northern Cali-
fornians in 1911 and dutifully turned over to anthropolo-
gists. He spent the rest of his life in a museum in San Francisco. (And
you think your life is boring.)
They said Ishi was the last North American Indian untouched by
civilization. I don’t know about that, but it’s clear he was really coun-
try and seriously out of touch with recent developments. We’re talk-
ing major hayseed.
His keepers turned down all vaudeville, circus, and theatrical offers
for the living caveman, but they weren’t above a little cheap amuse-
ment themselves. One day they took Ishi on a field trip to Golden
Gate Park. An early aviator named Harry Fowler was attempting a
cross-country flight. You can imagine the delicious anticipation of
the anthropologists. The Ishi Man versus the Flying Machine. What
would he make of this miracle, this impossible vision, this techno-
logical triumph? The aeroplane roared off into the heavens and
circled back over the park. The men of science turned to the Indian,
expectantly. Would he quake? Tremble? Would they hear his death
song? Ishi looked up at the plane overhead. He spoke in a tone

1
 2 / Every Picture Tells a Story

his biographers would describe as one of “mild interest.” “White man

up there?”
Twenty years later my grandfather would become the first Comanche
frequent flyer. Robert Chaat was born at the turn of the century in
Oklahoma, when it was still Indian Territory. It was our darkest
hour. The Comanche Nation was in ruins, wrecked and defeated. The
U.S. Army did a census at this time and found that 1,171 of us were
still alive.
Grandpa Chaat was one of those holocaust survivors. He was a tire-
less fighter for the Jesus Road, who battled the influence of peyote and
forbade his children to attend powwows. Yet he also taught pride
in being Indian and conducted services in Comanche into the late
1960s. His generation was pretty much raised by the army, who beat
them for speaking Indian and had them march like soldiers to school.
Geronimo was the local celebrity, and my grandfather remembers
meeting him before the old guy died in 1909. Fort Sill was a small
place; I guess everyone knew Geronimo.
My mother remembers her dad’s trips to Chicago and New York
when air travel was often a two-day adventure. He sent his five chil-
dren trinkets from the 1939 World’s Fair, newspaper clippings about
his speeches around the country, pictures of himself with Norman
Vincent Peale.
She discovered the lantern slides on a trip back to Oklahoma in
1991. They were in a battered and ancient black case buried deep in a
closet. These closets have given up more and more secrets as time has
passed. A few years earlier, when Grandpa still lived in the tiny house
in Medicine Park (soon he would move to a nursing home in town),
he produced an eagle feather from one of those closets. The feather, he
told my mother, belonged to an ancestor who was a medicine man.
The forty-eight square glass slides are about three by four inches,
at least an eighth of an inch thick. Each has its own slot in the felt-
lined case. They’re heavy: a single one weighs more than an entire box
of their modern equivalents. Generously engineered with metal and
glass instead of cardboard and film, they are about as similar to today’s
slides as a 1937 Packard is to this year’s Honda.
 Every Picture Tells a Story / 3

They show Indian lodges, tipis, Comanches of all ages in brilliant

clothing, buffalo, horses, wagons, Quanah Parker’s Star House, all in
vivid, lifelike color.
Their meaning and purpose? Fund-raising, of course. There were
even a few pledge cards in the case: “Indian Mission Fund. I pledge
to pay the sum of __________ before May 1, 19_____.” I could see
Grandpa lugging his twenty pounds of glass slides through airports
(still called “flying fields”) because they would have been too precious
to check through, the key to next year’s budget or the church’s build-
ing fund.
But what were these pictures? Mom could identify some of the
locations and people, but most of them she could not. Maybe they
weren’t even Comanche. Perhaps the Dutch Reformed Church had a
media consultant who put it together. The label points in this direc-
tion: “Chas. Beseler Co., New York,” not some outfit in Lawton or
Oklahoma City. Grandpa might have sent along a few of his own pic-
tures, and the rest, for all we know, might have been from a photo
agency in Manhattan.
To me the Indians in the pictures seem dignified, friendly, open
to religious instruction and new cultural ideas. I imagine listening to
Grandpa in a church meeting room in New York or Boston in 1937,
hearing about the struggle for redemption and a better way of life. A
people at a crossroads, he might say. The images underline his script:
Indians in blankets with papooses on their backs next to Indians in
starched western shirts and bandannas, posing for the camera on their
way to a Jimmie Rodgers show. We see, ridiculously, an umbrella next
to a wagon.

Which Will It Be, the Blanket or the Bible?

On second thought, it’s obvious the Indians are resistance fighters pre-
tending to cooperate. See that look in their eyes? They are American
hostages denouncing imperialism in a flat, dull voice for the Hez-
bollah. They steal the photographer’s gun when he’s not looking. At
the Gourd Dance tonight in the foothills of Mount Scott, they make
plans for the future, plans the city fathers won’t like.
 4 / Every Picture Tells a Story

We have been using photography for our own ends as long as we’ve
been flying, which is to say as long as there have been cameras and air-
planes. The question isn’t whether we love photography, but instead
why we love it so much. From the Curtis stills to our own Koda-
chrome slides and Polaroid prints and Camcorder tapes, it’s obvious
we are a people who adore taking pictures and having pictures taken
of us. So it should hardly be a surprise that everything about being
Indian has been shaped by the camera.
In this relationship we’re portrayed as victims, dupes, losers, and
dummies. Lo, the poor fool posing for Edward Curtis wearing the
Cheyenne headdress even though he’s Navajo. Lo, those pathetic
Indian extras in a thousand bad westerns. Don’t they have any pride?
I don’t know, maybe they dug it. Maybe it was fun. Contrary to
what most people (Indians and non-Indians alike) now believe, our
true history is one of constant change, technological innovation, and
intense curiosity about the world. How else do you explain our instan-
taneous adaptation to horses, rifles, flour, and knives?
The camera, however, was more than another tool we could adapt
to our own ends. It helped make us what we are today.
See, we only became Indians once the armed struggle was over in
1890. Before then we were Shoshone or Mohawk or Crow. For cen-
turies North America was a complicated, dangerous place full of shift-
ing alliances between the United States and Indian nations, among
the Indian nations themselves, and between the Indians and Canada,
Mexico, and half of Europe.
This happy and confusing time ended forever that December morn-
ing a century ago at Wounded Knee. Once we no longer posed a
military threat, we became Indians, all of us more or less identical in
practical terms, even though until that moment, and for thousands of
years before, we were as different from one another as Greeks are from
Swedes. The Comanches, for example, were herded onto a reservation
with the Kiowa and the Apache, who not only spoke different lan-
guages but were usually enemies. (We hated Apaches even more than
we hated Mexicans.)
 Every Picture Tells a Story / 5

The truth is that we didn’t know a damn thing about being Indian.
This information was missing from our Original Instructions. We had
to figure it out as we went along. The new century beckoned. Tele-
graphs, telephones, movies—the building blocks of mass culture were
in place, or being invented. These devices would fundamentally change
life on the planet. They were new to us, but they were almost as new
to everyone else.
At this very moment, even as bullets and arrows were still flying,
Sitting Bull joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (the word “Show” was
never part of the name) and became our first pop star. Like an early
Warhol he sold his autograph for pocket change, and like Mick Jagger
he noticed that fame made getting dates easier. He toured the world
as if he owned it, made some money, became even more famous
than he already was. Afraid of cameras? Talk to my agent first is more
like it.
It was an interesting career move, even if it couldn’t prevent the
hysterical U.S. overreaction to the Ghost Dance that resulted in his
assassination the same month as the Wounded Knee massacre.
Some think of Sitting Bull as foolish and vain. No doubt Crazy
Horse felt this way. The legendary warrior hated cameras and never
allowed himself to be photographed, although this didn’t stop the
U.S. Postal Service from issuing a Crazy Horse stamp in the 1980s.
Maybe Sitting Bull was ego-tripping, but I see him as anxious to figure
out the shape of this new world.
For John Ford, King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, and the other early kings
of Hollywood, the Indian wars were more or less current events. Cecil
B. DeMille, who made more than thirty Indian dramas, was fifteen
at the time of Wounded Knee. They grew up in a world in which
relatives and friends had been, or could have been, direct participants
in the Indian wars.
The promise of film was to deliver what the stage could not, and
the taming of the frontier, the winning of the West, the building of
the nation was the obvious, perfect choice. Indians and Hollywood.
We grew up together.
 6 / Every Picture Tells a Story

This has really screwed us sometimes, for example, the stupid macho
posturing by some of our movement leaders in the 1970s. (If only their
parents had said, Kids! Turn that TV off and do your homework! we
might have actually won our treaty rights.)
But maybe it’s better to be vilified and romanticized than com-
pletely ignored. And battles over historical revisionism seem doomed
from the start, because the last thing these images are about is what
really happened in the past. They’re fables being told to shape the
future.
All of the lame bullshit, the mascots, the pickup truck commercials,
the New Age know-nothings, I used to find it embarrassing. Now I
think it’s part of the myth to think all that is bogus and the good old
days were the real thing. The tacky, dumb stuff about this country is
the real thing now. The appropriation of Indian symbols that began
with the earliest days of European contact is over, complete. Today,
nothing is quite as American as the American Indian. We’ve become
a patriotic symbol.
For our part, we dimly accept the role of spiritual masters and first
environmentalists as we switch cable channels and videotape our wed-
dings and ceremonies. We take pride in westerns that make us look
gorgeous (which we are!) and have good production values. We secretly
wish we were more like the Indians in the movies.
And for the Americans, who drive Pontiacs and Cherokees and live
in places with Indian names, like Manhattan and Chicago and Idaho,
we remain a half-remembered presence, both comforting and danger-
ous, lurking just below the surface.
We are hopelessly fascinated with each other, locked in an endless
embrace of love and hate and narcissism. Together we are condemned,
forever to disappoint, never to forget even as we can’t remember. Our
snapshots and home movies create an American epic. It’s fate, destiny.
And why not? We are the country, and the country is us.
(What? No flash again?!)
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