American Indian Stereotypes:
500 Years of Hate Crimes©
by Steven W. Baggs (who would welcome your comments...)
Janice would bring me a Tootsie Roll Pop about twice a week. I liked that, I liked Tootsie Roll Pops, and I especially liked the friendliness in her chubby cheeks. I considered her a friend. How my other friends felt about her giving me these treats - I didn't give much consideration to at all. Janice wasn't the most popular girl in our fifth-grade class. She was quiet and overweight, but generally speaking, a normal fifth-grader. A year or so later, in the sixth or seventh grade, I learned that I was supposed to view all the Janices of the world differently. Janice was my first American Indian friend. I must have been a slow-learner, not learning until I was about twelve years of age that I was supposed to dislike and distrust American Indians. Most of my friends already knew that Indians held a lesser social status than whites. It was not uncommon to hear: "You hardly ever see an Indian until the middle of the month when their government check comes in, and then the downtown bars are full of 'em. Lazy drunken Indians!"
My hometown of Yankton, South Dakota, was and is probably not much different from many small American towns. Yankton takes its name from the language of the Nakota nation - Ihanktunwan, meaning "end village." This fact is still not well known. I remember as a youngster thinking that Yankton must be some shortened form of Yankee-town, probably a name from New England. Apparently we honored some type of association with American Indians, though, because our high school athletic teams were called the Bucks, our yearbook and homecoming celebration were called Arickara [sic], and our school paper was The Woksape. I have yet to discover why Arikara has remained misspelled.
I have often wondered how my old high school buddy of Norwegian descent felt in the homecoming ceremonies, resplendent in full buckskin regalia, an elaborate headdress, and facial "war-paint." More importantly, how did the local American Indians feel about these young non-Indians parading around in costumes resembling those of their early Lakota leaders?
In the 1950s and 60s in a small midwestern community, there wasn't much thought given to political correctness, ethnic sensitivities, or racism. News reports of these problems came from the big cities back east or in the South. I recall such statements as, "Put the Indians back on the reservations." Most who heard this sort of statement probably laughed it off as harmless and thought it as impossible as "Sending the niggers back to Africa." Were these harmless jokes? Or was it that years and generations of delegitimization and negative attitudes toward minority groups had become so commonplace that individuals no longer heard the harsh reality and prejudice in the tone of their remarks?
Despite the "so-what" attitude of much of the community, the school board recently succumbed to the pressures of political correctness, ethnic respect, and long-overdue common sense and did away with the "Indian chief's" head as the school's mascot logo. The high school athletes are still called the Bucks - only now they sport the image of an antlered deer. It should be interesting to watch and see what becomes of the yearbook, homecoming coronation, and school newspaper.
People are taught to stereotype other people. Stereotyping is a learned form of classifying and labeling others based on inaccurate information or assumption rather than on factual knowledge. It is not a new phenomenon. Individuals and societies, to assert their dominance over others, have been cruelly and crudely labeling others for thousands of years. It is a systematic imputation whereby the "self" or some particular group attests to its superiority over the "other." Stereotyping is a form of delegitimization, "...beliefs that downgrade another group with extreme negative social categories for the purpose of excluding it from human groups that are considered as acting within the limits of acceptable norms and/or values" (Bar-Tal 1990).
"Indian" is a word commonly used by many white Americans and, whether intentional or not, may convey a negative image of indigenous Native American peoples. Although the word "Indian" is a misnomer, it is still used by many scholars and native peoples in collectively referring to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Raymond W. Stedman explains in Shadows of the Indian how difficult the terminology can be when writing about the First Americans. Native Americans is too inclusive. "Cowboys and Native Americans" doesn't address the image appropriately. Additionally, Native Americans in this century's context can also include Polynesian descendants in Hawaii, Native Guatemalans, Native Canadians, and Native Mexicans. "Being possessed of knowledge of their pre-Columbian heritage, Indians are less concerned about their collective designation than they are about their tribal or national identities. They can be called Indians or Native Americans or First Americans, but they are Oneidas and Kiowas and Cherokees" (Stedman 1982:xvii).
Labeling the German, the Scot, the Pole, the Welshman, the Frenchman, and the Englishman as European and white is as vague and misleading as calling the Apache, the Aztec, the Mandan, the Ojibwa, and the Yanomano, Indian and red-skinned. Let it suffice, for the sake of this writing, that the indigenous peoples, nations, and tribes discussed will be called American Indians and the European immigrants who arrived post-1492, Euro-Americans and whites. Tim Giago, publisher of Indian Country Today, stated that it is preferable to use an individual's tribal affiliation whenever possible. The term Native American has become less popular, since anyone born in the United States can call themselves Native American. Giago continued with:
We realize the word 'Indian' is a misnomer, but for generic purposes, we are forced to use it when speaking of many different tribes. ... Any politically correct thinker who believes Native American is the preferred identification tag for the Lakota or any other tribe is wrong. Most of us do not object to the use of Indian or American Indian. And as I said, Native American can be used by any American native to this land (Utter 1993:66).
The culture, language, physical features, and history of American Indians are as diverse as that of Europeans. If you ask a young Lakota boy if he speaks Indian, don't be surprised (after he shrugs off the absurdity of your question) if he asks you whether or not you speak European. The incessant image remains that somehow all American Indians are the same and are to be clumped together as a single ethnic entity. This is perhaps one reason that negative stereotyping continues to be so tempting. It is much simpler to dominate and express superiority over the "others" when they all belong to the same generic category - Indians.
Through millennia, most of mankind has had an obsession with labels - a need to classify things in some orderly system to better understand them. When Scandinavian explorers first arrived in North America in A.D. 1001, they called their new world Vinland. The short-lived colony that Lief Ericsson established in Newfoundland was on the northern part of the island at what is now called L'Anse aux Meadows. The sea-faring Scandinavians encountered a peculiar group of people inhabiting Newfoundland when they arrived. They called the residents of this new world skraelings, a word roughly translated as "barbarians, weaklings, or even pygmies." Although it is still not certain, these early inhabitants of Newfoundland were probably Eskimos (Thornton 1987:12). Scandinavian peoples did not persist in attempts at colonization; consequently, white Euro-American children of the twentieth century did not grow up playing "cowboys and skraelings," and there have never been wooden cigar store skraelings greeting patrons at the local general store.
Few written records exist concerning European explorations to the New World after the Scandinavian visits of the eleventh century until after 1492 when Christopher Columbus accidentally sailed into the Caribbean region of the Western Hemisphere. Failing to convince the Portuguese to finance his quest for a westward route to Asia, the Italian mariner sought the aid of the Spanish royalty. The Catholic monarchy of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella ultimately financed Columbus's visionary voyage by providing him with three ships. On October 12, 1492, Columbus and his crew visited the Arawak people of the island of Guanahani, in the Caribbean Greater Antilles. He thought he was off the coast of Asia. Columbus named the people he encountered los indios, which at the time meant people of a darker race. He renamed their island San Salvador. Columbus made four expeditions to the Caribbean and founded the settlement of Isabella on the island of Hispaniola. He never made it to the continent of North America although his men did land on the South American coast of what is now Venezuela (Thornton 1987:12).
Columbus wrote about how generous and loving the Arawak people were and how easy their conversion to Christianity would be. The quest for more converts to Christianity was of great interest to the Spanish monarchy, for there is great strength in numbers. The conversion process began immediately, and it was only a short time before enslavement practices followed. Columbus captured great numbers of native people and transported them to Spain and other islands desirous of slave labor. Cruel treatment and foreign diseases all but annihilated the Arawak people. Columbus was arrested for his abusive treatment of the Arawaks, taken back to Spain in chains, and stripped of his colonial office. He was later released and once more allowed to sail, provided he never set foot on Hispaniola again (Chalk 1990:179).
Christopher Columbus died in political obscurity, to the end convinced that he had reached the coast of Asia. The several thousand native Arawaks of the Caribbean island "discovered" by Columbus were reduced to nearly zero by 1535 because of the abusive exploitation and diseases brought by the European explorers and overzealous entrepreneurs. Characterized as something "halfway between humanity and animality", New World inhabitants were doomed from the moment of first contact with Europeans (Berkhofer 1979:13).
Strict Christian definitions of what humans should be, generated the white European image of the Native American Indian. The Indios lacked everything that resembled Christian norms. The sauvaiges were uncivilized, uncultured, uncultivated, and unpredictable in their "foreign-ness." European explorers looked at, valued, and reported on indigenous peoples according to what the explorers knew of their own civilization and the powerful Christian worldview of the time. The early Spanish expansionists and clergy were therefore convinced that the native savage souls needed saving, and in so doing, they easily justified their conquests and enslavement policies. This fifteenth-century clumping together of all the diverse first peoples of the Americas as a single group, Indians, by ethnocentric European societies marked the beginning of racist stereotyping in the New World.
The image of New World heathens and infidels was well established in the minds of Europeans prior to colonization. This image, projected through Judeo-Christian values and ideologies, was such that it placed all Indians on a social plane much lower than whites - although not as low as blacks. Native peoples' resistance to the invading Europeans and their reluctance to submit to a "superior" race changed their image from one of an exotic, yet inferior, people, to one of a hostile, contemptible nuisance. The "Indian problem" would not and will not go away.
The tendency began with Christopher Columbus and continues today that European and Euro-American lifeways define the standards for American Indian cultures. Euro-Americans have rarely considered evaluating and accepting tribal American lifeways as distinct and viable cultural entities. The Christian-influenced European expansionists could not comprehend the uncomplicated elegance of American Indian spirituality and the naturalness of indigenous religions. Indeed, the monomaniacal Christian attitude allows little deviance from its staid beliefs and values. Pope Clement VI, in a papal bull Intra arcana written in 1529 to Charles V, wrote:
We trust that, as long as you are on earth, you will compel and with all zeal cause the barbarian nations to come to the knowledge of God, the maker and founder of all things, not only by edicts and admonitions, but also by force and arms, if needful, in order that their souls may partake of the heavenly kingdom (Washburn 1971:11).
The power of the organized religions extant in the Old World was indeed formidable. The papal authorization to use "force and arms" to help the New World's indigenous population "partake of the heavenly kingdom" was the license granted to Europeans to take full possession of the Americas. Genocide was not the expressed intention of the European invaders although it was nearly the result of Euro-American conquests in the New World. The seeming genocide had already begun via the diseases introduced by white explorers. Genocide, ethnocide, and holocaust sound harsh in their usage when applied to the early Euro-American treatment of American Indians; yet, they are the only words one can use to explain the millions of deaths and the complete obliteration of entire tribes of American Indians.
The peopling of North America began about 14,000 years ago. Some anthropologists claim, albeit with little evidence, that the earliest settlers arrived as early as 40,000 years ago. There may have been three major migrations into North America by way of Beringia, the land bridge that once connected present-day Alaska with Siberia. The three possible waves of migration and the wide range of diffusion of specific bands of people throughout the North American continent over the several thousand years prior to European contact further the notion that many distinct groups of people inhabited the continent. Again, the idea of lumping all Indians together is as inappropriate as lumping all Europeans together or all Africans together.