Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong by Paul Chaat Smith

Considering that recent decades have seen the most significant Indian political movement in a century, including much new sensitivity and education, we might have thought things had improved.  But the familiarity of the situation around these recent publications leaves me feeling that things haven't gotten any better, only more subtle.  The discourse on Indian art or politics or culture, even among people of goodwill, is consistently frustrated by the distinctive type of racism that confronts Indians today: romanticism.  Simply put, romanticism is a highly developed, deeply ideological system of racism toward Indians that encompasses language, culture, and history.  From the beginning of this history the specialized vocabulary created by Europeans for "Indians" ensured our status as strange and primitive.  Our political leaders might have been called kings or lords; instead, they were called chiefs.  Indian religious leaders could have just as accurately been called bishop or minister; instead, they were medicine men.  Instead of soldier or fighter, warrior.  And, perhaps, most significantly, tribe instead of nation.

Paul Chaat Smith occupies an interesting vantage point in the history and discourse over Native American life in the 20th century: once a committed member of the American Indian Movement and later a chronicler of it, producing one of the definitive accounts of the movement during the critical years between the occupation of Alcatraz and the occupation of Wounded Knee, he later became a curator at the National Museum of the American Indian.  He straddles, then, both the institutional "genteel" wing of Native activism and the grassroots.  His book Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong brings this perspective, along with a casual and irreverent voice, to bear on contemporary Native American issues.

Chaat Smith's book is one of those books of essays compiled from different times and places; here are remarks given at galleries and symposia along with newer works that seem to have been written for this collection specifically.  As with all books like that, it has a habit of repeating itself: by the end of the book, for example, you will not be able to ignore the oft-iterated idea that European exploration of the Americas is the most important event in world history, because it brought together two hemispheres that had operated independently of each other for millennia upon millennia for the first time.  (As repeated ideas go, this one at least is fascinating and persuasive.)  You'll also get to hear a lot about the movie Dances with Wolves.

I had expected this book to be more academic and historical, something like a more sophisticated version of the book Do All Indians Live in Tipis?  It's too disparate to be that book, too unfocused, and besides, Chaat Smith's interest is really in cultural criticism.  Several of these essays are reflections on the work of Native artists I've never heard of, and were clearly written explicitly for galleries and museums in which those artist's work were present.  Chaat Smith's essay is meant to contextualize the artwork, but without the artwork, it was hard for me to contextualize the essays.  I got less out of those essays than I wanted, but I'm content to let them be a gentle push to seek out the work of these artists, like James Luna and Faye HeavyShield, who Chaat Smith praises.

I especially liked the essay "On Romanticism," which describes romanticism as one of the most singular forms of racism facing Native Americans in the 20th and 21st centuries.  As an example, Chaat Smith discusses the children's book Brother Earth, Sister Sky, which is presented as a transcription of remarks made by Suquamish chief Seattle, but which in reality is a bunch of environmentalist pablum doctored up by white writers.  Chaat Smith suggests that white Americans who are "interested in" Natives are more harmful than those who merely ignore them (I admit that's a remark that might be made directly to me), but it's clear that Chaat Smith is correct about the dangerous effects of romanticizing indigenous Americans, of placing them in amber and denying their right to be living, flawed, complex.

The antidote, Chaat Smith describes, is to remember the Comanche hero Geronimo riding around the desert in his Cadillac.  Although in my last review I talked about how I didn't think that There There really works as a novel, you can see how Orange--by giving us uncertain Indians, listening to Madlib, flying drones, using 3D printers--is plying the same ground.  I'm going to keep "On Romanticism" in mind as I start teaching the novel in a few weeks; it might provide useful context.