The Imaginary Indian by Daniel Francis

Author:Daniel Francis [Francis, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC021000
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 1992-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Long Lance did not dispute the superiority of the White way, which perhaps accounts for his popularity. In another article in Maclean’s, entitled “I Wanted to Live Like the White Man,” he explains how as a young performer with the Wild West Show he was taken along to visit the home of a “ wealthy and cultured” White family. “This was the first time I had ever met people of real culture and seen how they lived in their homes—and I liked them,” he wrote. “These people so impressed me with their bearing and their environment that I decided on the spot, ’I am going to be like that!’” According to Long Lance, this encounter set him on the path to self-improvement, by which he means assimilation. He describes himself as he came out of the army as “an Indian trying to fight his way from college into civilization.” And he concludes with an expression of the duality which characterizes the exceptional Indian: “I’m proud to be as much like a white man as I am—but I’m proud, too, of every drop of Indian blood that runs through my veins. I’m proud of my Indian heritage—and I’m proud, too, of the land and people of my adoption.”26

For Long Lance, there was no shame in being Indian. But neither was there any future in it. He told his audiences that within one hundred and fifty years the “full-blooded Indian” would be gone, a victim of assimilation and miscegenation. As they became better educated, he believed, Indians would naturally gravitate towards White society. Generation after generation would intermarry until “Indian blood” became too thin to distinguish any longer.27

For Long Lance personally, the price of living as an Imaginary Indian was eventually too high. As the web of deceit he had wound around himself began to unravel, he became more and more unstable, drinking heavily and suffering through bouts of deep depression. In the spring of 1931, he went to California where he took the job of secretary and bodyguard to a wealthy divorcee and philanthropist, Anita Baldwin. It was in the library of Baldwin’s opulent mansion in the early morning hours of March 20, 1932, that Sylvester Long, alias Buffalo Child Long Lance, shot himself fatally through the head.

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