Shoshoneans by Dorn Edward; Lucas Leroy; Hofer Matthew

Author:Dorn, Edward; Lucas, Leroy; Hofer, Matthew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2013-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

“What a people does in relation to its gods must always be one clue, and perhaps the safest, to what it thinks.”20 The tale the little boy told is interesting and instructive: it is one way a people have come to think of a social environment which has put the finger on its gods. The glue itself is not important, it is simply the current substance, the “88¢ Store” the current place, the salesgirl the current “hag in the dark wood.” The Indian boys who seek to acquire the glue are undergoing, in some sense, the altered terms of their initiation rite. The rite will not be abandoned because one of the ritual objects proves difficult to obtain. The working out of the new theology, or mythology if you prefer, one will expect to be in the hands of those for whom it is most crucial to possess a lattice for their lives. The surrounding, non-Indian community will continue to see the merits of an Indian simply in the progress he has made away from the dishevelment of ambiguous gods, away from cheap wine and disreputable automobiles. The non-Indian community will never relax its hatred toward some practices of native Indian life—peyotism, the inhalation of airplane glue, the various burial methods, questions of sanitation, legitimacy and marriage, the lingering resistance Indian men have to domestication and routine work. All religious and civil facts are one great indiscriminate label—The Indian Problem. Meanwhile, those Indians who are apparently the most unable or “incompetent” and still “hostile,” who go about marked by their sojourn through the bitter space of the past century, those are precisely the creatures whom with some pride we can call human, and who need no one to tell them what that means.

I have no need or intention to deny the speciality of my own view of Indian people and affairs. I am therefore pleased to give an American Indian the last word in this essay. The following is an article, “Poverty, Community, and Power,” written by Clyde Warrior (a leader of the Indian youth movement in the Southwest), which includes the speech he was prevented from giving to a conference of the “War on Poverty” program.21

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