Imposing Irony

Growing up, I had virtually no exposure to authentic North American indigenous culture. Instead, what I internalized as a child were stereotypes fed to me through television shows and movies. The American history texts in my schooling years did little to provide a counternarrative to what I saw on the small and big screens. Other than vague memories of attending a Powwow on a New York vacation, I never even had a conversation with an Indigenous person until my early 30s (when I shared a tent with a Navaho teenager on an Adventure program in Colorado, but that’s another story). I had no Indian friends or knew anyone with Indian ancestry. And growing up in Puerto Rico, where the Taino Indians didn’t survive Spanish steel and germs, my only interaction with Indigenous culture was seeing pictographs in a pre-Columbian “Indian Ceremonial Ball Court” near the town of Utuado in the western part of the island.

This lack of understanding and appreciation of the Indigenous experience in North America continued over the years I’ve lived in Columbus, Ohio. While there are probably people living in Central Ohio who claim Indian ancestry, I haven’t met or interacted with Indigenous culture. Sure, I once visited the raised earth archaeological sites of the prehistoric Hopewell and Adena, known as the “mound” Indians, located south of Columbus, but not having lived or spent much time in the American West, until my cross-country trek, I hadn’t seen how Indians lived or could say I truly understood their history.

This changed in an instant on our drive through the west when Joanie and I drove from Columbus to the Olympic Peninsula. Our chosen route took us through the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, which struck me immediately as poor and neglected. Unlike the disrepair we saw in the private RV park where we had stayed the previous night, the reservation’s neglect was structural, the result of decisions made by the politicians living thousands of miles away and executed by the federal government.

The reservation was created after the Black Hills War of 1876, in which the Cheyenne and Lakota tribes were defeated. The tribes had allied in the fight against the U.S. government which was seeking to give white settlers access to mine gold in the Black Hills. The name “Northern Cheyenne” refers to a group of Cheyenne who had been forcibly moved to “Indian Territory” (now Oklahoma) where their relatives, the Southern Cheyenne, had been living. Unaccustomed to the heat of western Oklahoma, the brutal conditions of living in barracks, and forced to grow their food instead of hunting and gathering, the mortality rate of the tribe increased quickly. In what is known as the Northern Cheyenne Exodus, several hundred Cheyenne escaped the reservation, pursued, of course, by cavalrymen. After months of pursuit, evasion, capture, escape, recapture, and negotiation, these Cheyenne were given lands in southeastern Montana.

We drove through towns with names such as Lame Deer -- capital of the Northern Cheyenne Nation -- and Muddy, human settlements made up of derelict houses, barbed-wire fences, trailers, and pickup trucks randomly scattered across the rugged landscape. We could see no town marker which provided historical context, that the ancestors of the people living in this place suffered hardship at the tail end of a grisly chapter in their history.

Driving through the reservation, I felt a vague sense of discomfort tugging at my insides. The day before I had been contemplating how the land and people weren’t fixed in the present but fluid, a continuing, ongoing story. Traveling through the reservation, those webs from the past were on display, right outside our windows. As Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

We continued westwards through the Crow Indian Reservation, larger and more developed that the Cheyenne’s. Both the Crow and Northern Cheyenne tribe’s fate and their poverty were the direct result of policies made by the government of my country. Even though my family were relative latecomers to the American story, I had the raw, ripe-dead realization that the country I could claim as my own was made possible through the loss and grief of people like the Northern Cheyenne.

Seeing the reservations first-hand, my first impression was that these tribes got a raw deal, having been forcibly settled on what was less than stellar real estate. My suspicions were confirmed when we drove deeper into the lush Yellowstone River Valley. It wasn’t by chance that the tribes were shut out of lands rich with water. If water rights are the currency of the west, the Cheyenne and Crow are destitute. 

We humans create meaning through symbols, representations that often convey deeper meaning or cultural significance (such as the image of the Dharma wheel above). As I crossed the country, the two most predominant symbols I saw in front yards were the stars and stripes of the American flag and proud, fierce-looking bald eagles. But there are other symbols that we as a nation have adopted. For instance, we transformed the nineteenth century stereotype of the proud Indian warrior into tame and commercially acceptable symbols for our sports teams. Perhaps one of the most cynical appropriations of this Indian was used by Keep America Beautiful (a front for the plastics industry) and the Advertising Council for their “Crying Indian” ad. (Not-so-fun fact: the actor portraying the Indian was actually second-generation Italian-American.)

Native author and storyteller Thomas King writes that White America created the symbol of the mythic Indian – wild, free, solitary (and male) – as a means to condense the exotic and terrifying Indian of the imagination into “a single Indian who could stand for the whole.”

Which is perhaps why I was surprised when, on our drive west from Columbus, we encountered the Dignity Statue -- a 50-foot-tall stainless-steel sculpture depicting an indigenous woman in Plains-style dress holding a star quilt -- at a scenic view rest stop, set on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River.  The sculpture was created by Claude Lamphere, South Dakota’s artist laureate, to mark the state’s 125th anniversary of statehood in 2014. Lamphere’s intent was for the sculpture to “stand as an enduring symbol of our shared belief that all here are sacred and in a sacred place.”

I never imagined that irony could be so imposing.

For here was a super-sized art installation dedicated to tribes that were, with great effort and much violence, cleared from their land and corralled onto reservations. Tribes whose children were forcibly assimilated in boarding schools sometimes thousands of miles from their homes, leading to the eradication of tribal history and culture. I was surprised because rather than forgetting the Lakota, an enormous sculpture calls attention to them.

Dignity Statue near Chamberlain, South Dakota

I can appreciate that Lamphere’s art doesn’t seek to bury the past and that it throws the stereotype of the mythic Indian on its head by depicting a Lakota woman. But what is it attempting to remind passing I-90 drivers of? For there is no escaping the fact that despite all the recent changes in the narrative of Indigenous people, they are still marginalized. The changing of sports teams names aside, based on health and welfare data, most Native Americans face tremendous obstacles to live healthily and prosperously.

As I walked around the impressive piece of art, I considered the statue’s name. Dignity, for a conquered people? Dignity, for the erasure of a way of life to accommodate the thirst for resources and wealth? Dignity, in the form of a statue? For all its good intentions and spectacular visage, it was way too little and much too late. A 50-foot, stainless steel afterthought.