To explain where the name “Urban Indian” came from — and
why, as a white, Jewish girl lacking a speck of Indian blood, I feel the right
to claim it — we'll have to start with a childhood rooted in the not-so-vast
wilderness of suburban Cleveland, Ohio. Growing up, my family’s primary
signs of affiliation with the Tribe were parsimony, unmanageable curly
hair, and a love of things fried in the name of religion. So though I was
given a Hebrew name —Shoshanna, which means lily — it was not to honor a dear
departed relative (as per Jewish tradition) or because anyone had visions of a
delicate retiring beauty, tinged with a pale blush. Which is good,
because I turned out to be more often brash, bruised, and unlikely to be tinged
with anything but dirt.
No, my mom named me Shoshanna because she thought it sounded
like the Shoshone people of the Western United States — the tribe from which
Sacajawea, the celebrated interpreter for Meriwether Lewis and William Clark,
was captured as a youth.
In my own youth, I was quite happy to live up to the
romantic image of what I thought my name connoted: I tramped through the woods,
caught tadpoles, built houses from sticks, and coerced my young
playground-mates to grind up rocks of different colors, mix them with water, and
paint their faces. I was astounded to meet my literary double in Sharon
Creech’s Newberry Award-winning book Walk Two Moons — the
main character Salamenca is so-named because her mother mistook it for the name of her great-grandmother’s
tribe — the Seneca.
I shared with Sal a well-meaning if misguided vision of what
emulating my namesakes might entail: treading lightly upon the earth, living
frugally off the fruits of the forest, and perhaps even casually passing the
time of day with wild beasts both fearsome and cuddly — in their own language,
of course.
All of this is surely to the consternation of plenty
of real American Indians, and the scholars, Indian and not, who
strive to understand and preserve their history. But then, it is also much in
keeping with a long tradition of pasty and bewildered Europeans on this
continent — one that we struggle, even today, to address and remediate.
Take the word “Indian” itself.
It was used, generally unchallenged, well into the 20th
century (the American Indian Movement was self-christened in 1968) despite the
fact that the term was long understood to be a misnomer. At the time when
Columbus bumped haplessly into the Antilles, he’d been looking for the "India"
he knew to be the provenance of valuable spices; the name was often applied to
the entirety of South and East Asia, and on some maps of the time, it referred
to basically anything that wasn’t Europe. Needless to say, the “Indians”
were so-called upon the mistaken belief that Columbus had hit his intended
mark, and the name stuck.
After the civil rights movements, “Native American” became
the preferred term because many felt that “Indian,” in addition to being the
result of serious geographical discombobulation, had accrued an unshakeable set
of pejorative undertones.
But then, “native” has a storied and troublesome past of its
own, raising plenty more objections, which have spawned a plethora of
additional phrases, each accepted by some and deplored by others to the point
where we’re tongue-tied with the task of distangling our language from the
social histories it preserves and, indeed, generates. In such a context, using
the term Indian to describe my own urban wanderings may seem frivolous at best.
But stay with me.
The battle over terminology is a valid one. Our
language patterns fossilize old power structures, but also create a template
for the construction of new ones — often with far-reaching, if not immediately
obvious, effects.
In this country, one of the most enduring examples of this
phenomenon has been described by geographer William Denevan as the Pristine
Myth. It is the idea that the pre-Columbian Americas were "natural" —
empty and untouched, save for a mere smattering of natives who stirred nary a
leaf, living in a prelapsarian paradise free from the ills of modern mankind —
wait, that sounds a little familiar.
So what exactly is the problem with the romantic, if naive, bent
of this fantasy that so stirred me as a child?
One problem with this idealized vision is that it is simply
wrong. Denevan and others have fully discredited the notion, showing how
the landscape European explorers first marveled at was, in fact, extensively
shaped by human populations — in numbers far exceeding what scholars would
generally acknowledge for the next several centuries.
But the Pristine Myth goes beyond a merely whimsical re-rendering,
supporting a number of crucial biases: the view that the land was unused and there
for the taking, and the suggestion that the decimation of Indian populations
following European settlement was less extreme than it actually was.
It fails to acknowledge the very real needs and desires of native
populations who, historical accounts have shown, traditionally warred with other
tribes, stole from each other, hunted some animal populations so unsustainably
that they at times risked starving themselves, and made eager use of
technologies from Europeans (like guns, metal, and horses) that made their
lives more convenient, even at the expense of the natural world.
The false dichotomy between greedy, disruptive white man and
the noble savage creates a difficult paradox for indigenous people today, whose
political will may run counter to our deep-seated romantic notions. Furthermore, this sort of schism
between reality and fantasy makes it difficult, despite even the best
intentions, to remediate troubled pasts, by falsely invoking some identifiable
point from which we can measure the damages, and some irreproachable ideal to
which we can return.
When John Muir famously effused on the beauty of the
Yosemite Valley, the “natural” churches that so moved him were grassy meadows
that had been maintained by very real, very extreme human intervention. Over
time, environmental advocates seeking to uphold Muir’s dedication to preserving
the immaculate landscape found themselves with quite a dilemma: their ardent
protection of the lands had, in fact, begun to destroy the very scenes which
drove Muir to such heights of religious ecstasy. Without the periodic burning
practiced by native tribes, the grasslands had succumbed to the natural cycle
of forestation, and trees were creeping in and squishing out those lovely
sun-filled meadows. Now the movement was in a pickle. Restore the land, yes,
but restore it to what? Muir’s vision? A truly wild state? What type
of intervention was preservation, and what was degradation?
Humans and landscapes have complex, intertwined pasts, just
like humans and other humans. Though understanding these pasts can be key to
healing them, there may be times when finding footing amid forever-shifting
historical accounts is less important than taking stock of where we are now and
figuring out how to go from there — even if it means approaching bigger
questions of truth and justice by addressing more granular, even prosaic,
matters first: are we enabling a diversity of species to thrive? Preserving
cultural autonomy and promoting economic prosperity for those who need it most?
Are we holding extinction at bay? Advocating for clean air and water?
Leaving something breathtaking for our children to see?
One way forward may be to borrow from the emerging
study of political ecology, which seeks to understand the complex interplay
between socio-economic structures and the natural and cultural landscapes in
which they are set. One of the field's leading voices, Paul Robbins, has
introduced the concept of the Hatchet and the Seed: a methodology that
emphasizes not only exposing and pruning away — deconstructing — the myths the
prop up many of today’s undesirable social and environmental realities, but
also using our knowledge to plant new and better realities.
Political ecology can be a practical means to explore the
legacies of, and make amends for, the complex histories between postcolonial
cultures and the populations they have marginalized in the quest for land and
resources. But it is a field that aims for a moving target — a productive,
sustainable relationship with nature, and with each other, is best described as
a dynamic equilibrium, a balancing act that requires constant reevaluation,
innovation, and compromise.
This is not to negate the very real
need for serious inquiry and reparation in this country — many have called for
a Truth and Reconciliation Commission modeled after the one that followed the
dismantling of Apartheid South Africa, and I don’t think it would be a bad
idea. But we must also recognize that talking about the past —
reconstructing our notions of what happened or refining the terminology we use
today — will not alone move us forward.
In Twelve Step programs, there is the concept of living amends.
Some things you just can’t apologize for, and you can’t truly take back.
Instead, you must simply change how you live, do better as you go along.
And — this is where I’m sure to get myself into trouble — I say, if holding
onto our romantic notions, just bit, helps us do that, then why not?
Increasingly, experts in fields ranging from architecture to
zoology are making the case that cities hold the key to a more just and
sustainable future. While they have always created efficiencies in housing,
transportation, and energy consumption, it is the relative novelties of electricity
and, oh, say, sewage treatment that have made them infinitely more livable than
they were even a short hundred years ago.
Meanwhile, those aspects of life affecting population and
environment on a global scale that have always fallen under rural purview —
agriculture, for instance — are increasingly manipulatable by city-dwellers,
either indirectly through choice in the marketplace, or directly through
bourgeoning interest in urban foraging, home cooking, preserving, community-supported
agriculture, and the thriving
urban homesteading movement.
We needn’t each of us own a hundred acres in the woods —
indeed, this would be the biggest ecological and political disaster of all — to
honor the values we ascribe, accurately or inaccurately, to the first people of
this land. “Real” or not, those values, applied today, can help overcome
the obstacles of land and resources that have germinated over time into stories
of oppression and destruction.
Frederick Jackson Turner famously expounded on the
importance of the frontier in defining the American spirit of gumption and
pluck. He delivered his thesis at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (officially,
the World’s Columbian Exposition, held to honor the 400th anniversary of
Columbus’s “discovery” of America), at what he saw as the end of an era. In the
1890 Census, just three years earlier, the US government had declared that
there was no longer a discernable line between civilization and the savage,
untamed wilderness — the frontier was dead.
Since then, many things have been dubbed “the new
frontier,” not the least significant among them urban America itself. The
retreat from this country’s urban centers in the second half of the twentieth
century did, undeniably, leave untamed jungles of despair in many places. In
this context, the term “urban frontier” has been used for many purposes. Some
have been brash and mercenary, resulting in the wholesale re-development of
city districts where another solution may have sufficed. But many have been
less dubious, and even valiant:
sensitive, fine-grained approaches to urban renewal, incentives drawing energy
back to the urban core, and the many not-insignificant grassroots efforts to
create urban culture and prosperity at street level.
Amid this new wave of exploration, we might do well to think
of ourselves not just as Urban Settlers, but also as Urban Indians. Cities
are ecosystems, webs as tenuous as any forest or meadow, and change — plucking
any string — can have dramatic results, both good and bad. It is crucial
that we understand issues like gentrification, attendant to this new wave of
Manifest Destiny, and recognize the impacts upon all city dwellers — after
all, urban landscapes, even those ravaged by disinvestment and
disenfranchisement, are no more “empty” than were the forests and plains of the
frontier. “Urban Indian” is my nod to the past, a reminder to stay humble, move
slowly, tiptoe where necessary, through landscapes that each have a unique
ecology, a matchless balance of triumphs and challenges.
And, problematic as the term may be for some, I think there
is something deeply evocative about it. “Urban Indian” calls upon us all
to live — among skyscrapers or suburban lawns — more like we imagine Indians of
the past living among the trees: with creativity and parsimony, attention to
our surroundings, a sense of pride and self-reliance, abundance wrought by using
what is available and wasting little, and above all, joy in simple things and
in each other.
As for why this blog isn’t called “Urban Native American”?
I’ll let Sharon Creech answer that one through Sal’s mother, the character who
shares so much in common with my own mom: “My great-grandmother was a Seneca
Indian, and I’m proud of it. She wasn’t a Seneca Native American. Indian sounds
much more brave and elegant.”
