BROKEN FEATHER'S LAST STAND

by
ROBERT J. LEWIS

___________________________________

Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
LIttle frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanese,
O! don't you wish that you were me?
Robert Louis Stevenson

The strength of the fire,
the taste of salmon,
the trail of the sun,
and the life that never goes away,
they speak to me.
And my heart soars.
Chief Dan George

"If me die, it not matter. If you die, it plenty bad."
Tonto to the Lone Ranger

 

There is no accounting for it unless it is the Canadian Indian’s not-so-secret death wish: the epidemic of gas and glue sniffing, spousal abuse, acute alcohol dependence and a suicide rate that bends the mind and chills the heart.

Broken Feather once had a home and native land. It was taken away from him, and he’s been on a non-stop downward spiral ever since. He now finds himself at the precipice contemplating an empty appease-pipe and a break-away trail of feathers riding the eddies above the abyss.

When the Mesoamerican Indian looks back (circa 700 A.D.) to the glories of the past, he swells with pride before the magnificent Aztec and Mayan temples in Coban, Tikal, Uxmal and Teotihuacan. When the North American Indian looks back he cowers in shame beneath the quavering shadow of his teepee -- bison hide on a stick against a hail of bullets. When the Indian was performing his morning ablutions in a hole in the ground, the Romans were constructing spectacular aqueducts which still stand today, two millennia later. When the white man was making his Industrial Revolution, the Indian was chipping flint for fire and turning the smoke into a medium of long-distance communication.

Where there is no avoiding the hulking mountain range of facts and arguments, it should be self-evident to both insiders and outsiders that to be born Indian is to be born without hope, without a future, into a life-long inferiority complex; and that no rewriting of history (or anesthetizing the brain) can remedy the hard facts of the past: the bow and arrow were no match against the white man’s superior firepower.

From their first exposure to the teepee – a dwarf structure next to any cityscape – to serialized portrayals of very dense and doomed Indian braves defiantly circling the white man’s wagon train, to the on-going fragmentation and collapse of one community after another into a heap of self-loathing against which all the money in the world is as effective as the Iroquois' war cry against the march of progress, the young are initiated into the downs of negative self-esteem before they have learned to walk and talk.

But the Indian, refusing and/or unwilling to make a clean break with his dead-end culture and traditions, instead fatuously romanticizes it, offering up a myth that tells of a golden age of hunting and fishing, and that the Indian (impositioned between the two competing cultures) merely has to commit himself to the past-perfect and he’ll find his way to the sources of his ancient pride. But it is not happening. The young only have to observe the depraved, despoiled adult world around them and they know it’s all a lie, that the myth is just another drug on the corner, that at the end of the day there is no cure for being born into humiliation and defeat. In the great clash of civilizations, the Indian was found consummately unfit.

So why does he stubbornly cling to his loser’s ways, why has he refused to renounce his culture -- the dead-weight that ensured his initial demise and subsequent abjection? If the underlying, evolutionary purpose of envy is to actuate a recognition of an advantage we should want for ourselves, has the Indian been short-changed of that vital emotion or has he refused to act on it?

After having given it his best, it is one thing to lose everything (all the wars and self-respect), but it’s altogether another matter when a self-loathing, complex-ridden people choose to refuse to let go of a defeatist mentality whose empty promises are tantamount to a death-wish. If, without any education or marketable skill, I lose my job and the respect of my wife and children, I regain what has been lost by returning to school and learning a skill. I do not cling to or defend my past ignorance, or the environment that nurtured it, nor do I wallow in self-pity; but answer to the best of my ability the challenges of survival. But this simple lesson has been lost on the Indian, and, it must be added, with more than a little help from a succession of irresponsible Indian Affairs administrations that have been pumping billions of dollars into a causa perdidit. Notwithstanding centuries of catastrophic decision making for which the Indian is solely responsible, Canada’s political class has been unable and unwilling to speak the truth to the Indian: that turning your back on your language, traditions and identity (your Indian-ness) is a sacrifice none too great when survival is at stake.

According to a Fraser Institute report, spending on First Nation’s people rose from 79 million in 1947 to 7.9 billion in 2012. And what has this incontinent spending produced? An on-going suicide contagion and 24/7 lineups at the local gas station.

According to every available index as it concerns life expectancy, education, single parent families, depression, percentage of young girls entering prostitution and the incarceration rate, the living conditions of life on the reserves are worsening. Meanwhile, both sides refuse to acknowledge that largesse and best intentions have had and can have no positive, salutary affect on a people epigenetically ensnared in a hermetically sealed, self-perpetuating circle of shame and inferiority.

The residential school system that sought to “kill the Indian in the child” failed because it was mandated and not voluntary. First Nations’ community leaders and councils refused to acknowledge what should have been self-evident to the least astute observer: that being born Indian is a syndrome that has rendered him wholly unfit for life in the modern era. In an either/or crunch, the Indian parent failed to grasp what was required of him to save his children: that he beg, borrow and persuade them to become non-Indian. As to the widespread, unforgivable (criminal) abuses suffered throughout the residential schools, it could be argued that it was tantamount to trading one hell on earth for another: being born First Nations is already a life sentence.

For the long list of historical injustices done to the Indian, all government apologies and restitutions are lies because there can never be an apology adequate to winning a war and decimating a people. What hasn’t occurred to policy makers on both sides of the divide is that apology is beside the point next to survival.

How bad does it have to get before First Nations’ people (a de facto nation of the walking dead) begin asking of themselves what difficult choices must be made in order to gain admission to the winner’s circle?

“What would I save if my house was burning down?” asks the poet Andre Breton? “I would save the fire.” Short shrifted in the Indian’s anxiety over the loss of his sacred culture and traditions is his apparent indifference to the survival and transmission of his genes. An Indian who fully integrates himself into modern society will surely lose his culture, his Indian-ness, but his genes will survive and mix with genes that are well-fitted for the challenges of life in the modern era. Should not this be the matter that matters most?

The Osoyoos Indian Band in British Columbia escaped the deprivations and degradations that consumed other tribes because they sagaciously adopted modern and proven entrepreneurial and agricultural business models. And when meeting and dealing with them in person it occurs to you that they don’t seem Indian, that is exactly the point. They have made a choice, they have disbanded, abandoned their ways, and are now fully integrated into the 21st century. Apart from his physiognomy, nothing is left of the Osoyoo Indian; he has made himself of his own free will into an interchangeable unit with the new world he has embraced. That he is irrevocably estranged from his language and culture is a small price to pay since his genes (his children) will enjoy a robust future. In consideration of the pluses and minuses that come to bear on every decision, there is no better indicator of a child’s future than being born into a community that is thriving and self-esteeming.

What responsible parents, sub species aeternitatis, owe their children are the means and tools to ensure their survival, which makes the Indian’s centuries-deep betrayal of his children an indictable offense. His crimes against the young stem from an ignorance born out of a twisted sense of romanticism that has been enabled by the white man whose lack of vision and gutless policies have conspired to keep the Indian in a permanent chokehold. In the on-going blame game, it’s anyone’s call: the Indian refuses to speak the truth to himself and the white man refuses to speak it to him.

With the hourglass running on empty, and the second edition of the Indian Book of the Dead overwhelmed with new applicants, we wonder out loud when First Nation’s people will finally find the wherewithal to look into the mirror, make peace with what is there, and then turn their backs on what they see for all time. Anything less is a dead-on-arrival promissory.

Every people, every individual is on a unique journey that has already begun because it is never too late to become what you want.

Regardless of one's personal views on the role of irony in history, the white man decimated the Indian who must now decimate himself if he is to survive.

 

REQUIEM FOR THE REDMAN

Bent over truce and treaties
and fallen teepees
the land surveyor pens another community.

Paper maps create mishap.
We will settle the west with our best.

Unremembered deeds and a charge of weeds
appoint the sacred grounds.
Hopes of a young braves
race crazy raging rivers
in birch canoes tried and true.
     At the broken neck of dawn
     bloated bodies on the dew.

Solace sperms
in a ceremony of tear-brine and chyme.
Smoke and ash are the remains of the clash.

A god-fearing man
drops a coin in the box
then aims at his feathered friend’s wife.
     "Now I’m ready.”
He loads up his shotgun
pulls up his pants
and says “dance.”

Triggered in her tracks
the squaw falls dead.