“I have noticed that as soon as you have soldiers the story is called history. Before their arrival it is called myth, folktale, legend, fairy tale, oral poetry, ethnography. After the soldiers arrive, it is called history.”
– Paula Gunn Allen
The subtitle of this blog is “A Journal from Indian Country”. There’s a straightforward explanation for that: because I’m writing in a country that was first settled and developed by Indians. That goes for the whole country and for Santa Cruz, specifically, which was occupied by the Awaswas tribelet at the time of first contact with Europeans. But the subtitle is intended to resonate on a few other levels too.
The phrase “Indian Country” correlates with images of cowboys and the Wild West in the psychogeographical representation of the US in the eyes of the world, and of the West and Southwest in the eyes of the rest of the United States. My personality and ideas have been shaped by growing up in Arizona and by living in California, so it makes sense for me to associate myself with that regional imaginary.
But the most important reason for using that phrase is something very different: it’s exactly because “Indian Country” is not an archaic notion from the nineteenth century. It’s because Indian Country is a place that exists today, growing larger all the time, on a global scale. Eventually its growth will makes everyone choose whether we they are in the camp of the natives or the settlers. Here I’ve made my choice.
The most striking evidence that Indian Country has an uninterrupted history stretching from early (white settler) America to the present day is the way it has been, and still is, used by the U.S. military as a generic term for hostile territory. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes, “‘Indian Country’ is a military term of trade, a technical term, such as ‘collateral damage’ and ‘ordnance,’ which appears in military training manuals and is used on a regular basis. ‘Indian Country’ is the military term for ‘behind enemy lines.’”
U.S. Army Captain Robert Johnson, in testimony before Congress about war crimes in Vietnam, described what it meant when he said that soldiers referred to free-fire zones as “Indian Country”: “I guess it means different things to different people. It is like there are savages out there, there are gooks out there. In the same way we slaughtered the Indian’s buffalo, we would slaughter the water buffalo in Vietnam.”
In an op-ed titled “Indian Country,” written during the second year of the Iraq War, conservative journalist Robert Kaplan called for the U.S. to learn lessons from the Indian wars, namely that the American military needs to do a better job disguising its violent actions. This follows from a historical analogy: “[w]hen the Cavalry invested Indian encampments, they periodically encountered warrior braves beside women and children, much like Fallujah. Though most Cavalry officers tried to spare the lives of noncombatants, inevitable civilian casualties raised howls of protest among humanitarians back East.” That’s why “[i]n Indian Country, as one general officer told me, ‘you want to whack bad guys quietly and cover your tracks with humanitarian-aid projects.’”
I think most people believe that there’s a great distance between our own time and the age of Indian wars and cavalry raids. But we are not so far separated from that history; in fact we’re still living in the same age of contact and chaos that began in 1492. And none of us today knows what the contours of that age really are, or where it will end.
Living in Santa Cruz reminds me of this almost every day. My ride up to campus takes me right by the Catholic church on Mission street, on the site of the original Franciscan mission which gave Santa Cruz its name. The church has a commanding location in town, at the top of a hill and visible from the coast, from the far side of the river, and up in the mountains. For me the most interesting view is from the back side, near the parking lot of the hardware store set by the bottom of the hill. Go there early in the morning and you’ll see several dozen Mexicano men gathering around, looking for work for the day. Economic and social developments in Mexico and in the United States have brought them here from Michoacán and from Oaxaca. They’re the latest subjects in a centuries-long history of endless changes and revolutions in Santa Cruz, standing in the shadow of that church — the ultimate symbol of the colonial project — which has pivoted the whole fabric of life, economy, demography, society around it for hundreds of years.
Indian Country never disappeared; in fact it’s growing all the time. It is the United States military, pursuing enemies in Indian Country, which creates and defines that hostile territory, from Vietnam to Iraq to the next scene of imperial adventure. Imperialism means war, as Lenin said, and war means the discovery of a new stretch of Indian Country and a new population of hostile Indians. American military power also supports the other enterprise that defines Indian Country by its opposition: the white settlement. In the present day these settlements proceed literally (for example with missionary work across the world, and colonial land grabs happening right now from Canada to Palestine) and figuratively (especially through culture and mass media). These settlements are an act of power and at the same time an act of definition (both of which are the same thing, according to Huey Newton), separating the settler and the native; the cowboy and the Indian.
For all these reasons, in these different ways, I am or I have chosen to be inside Indian Country; — behind enemy lines; — against the colonizer, the missionary, and the cavalry. And if sometimes that is more a statement of commitment than a consequential fact — at least I’ve made my choice.
Written August 13, 2007 — 486th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlán
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