The Good Red Road

I swerved into this (below) on the morning Internet read -

Backstory: My grandfather Emil Lindley came from Nez Perce/Yakama stock, his parents orphaned by Europeans and raised "white" in mission schools, with little or no awareness of their people's history (in part due to a sense of shame at his Native blood from the prevalent racism of the late 1800's early 1900's Pacific Northwest) we have had little or no knowledge of their life. But I know from what glimmers I have (an ancient photograph of a Native family, tipis and a cooking fire marked "Lindley Relatives", an executor of an ancestor's estate named Leon Cloud Rainwater, an aged photo of an ancestor of dusky hue named Mary Turtle; an anecdotal story or two) that my German/Scotch/Irish/Welsh ancestors loved and wed some Native peoples. The inter-generational trauma of erasing the "Indian" from the Indigenous peoples, and also from the "half-breeds" such as my Grandfather, Mom and Aunties and Uncles. Mom was made to be ashamed of her dark skin and her Native heritage, a fact which has brought me sorrow since I first understood it as a young girl.

How to heal this sick culture? How to undo the devastation of the tribal ways? In them may lie our healing.

QUOTE Observing a prisoner exchange between the Iroquois and the French in upper New York in 1699, Cadwallader Colden is blunt: “ notwithstanding the French Commissioners took all the Pains possible to carry Home the French, that were Prisoners with the Five Nations, and they had full Liberty from the Indians, few of them could be persuaded to return. “Nor, he has to admit, is this merely a reflection on the quality of French colonial life, “for the English had as much Difficulty” in persuading their redeemed to come home, despite what Colden would claim were the obvious superiority of English ways:

No Arguments, no Intreaties, nor Tears of their Friends and Relations, could persuade many of them to leave their new Indian Friends and Acquaintance; several of them that were by the Caressings of their Relations persuaded to come Home, in a little Time grew tired of our Manner of living, and run away again to the Indians, and ended their Days with them. On the other Hand, Indian Children have been carefully educated among the English, cloathed and taught, yet, I think, there is not one Instance, that any of these, after they had Liberty to go among their own People, and were come to Age, would remain with the English, but returned to their own Nations, and became as fond of the Indian Manner of Life as those that knew nothing of a civilized Manner of Living. And, he concludes, what he says of this particular prisoner exchange “has been found true on many other Occasions.”

Benjamin Franklin was even more pointed: When an Indian child is raised in white civilization, he remarks, the civilizing somehow does not stick, and at the first opportunity he will go back to his red relations, from whence there is no hope whatever of redeeming him. But when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and have lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.

There was always the great woods, and the life to be lived within it was, Crevecoeur admits, “singularly captivating,” perhaps even superior to that so boasted of by the transplanted Europeans. For, as many knew to their rueful amazement, “thousands of Europeans are 'Indians', and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become 'Europeans!' ” UNQUOTE



Frederick Turner: Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness (1980)
John Zerzan: Against Civilization - Readings and Reflections (1999)