Speaking Of Indians

Ella Cara Deloria

• Publisher: Normanby Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786258052
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Beginning with a general discussion of American Indian origins, language families, and culture areas, Deloria then focuses on her own people, the Dakotas, and the intricate kinship system that governed all aspects of their life. She writes, "Exacting and unrelenting obedience to kinship demands made the Dakotas a most kind, unselfish people, always acutely aware of those about them and innately courteous."Deloria goes on to show the painful transition to reservations and how the holdover of the kinship system worked against Indians trying to follow white notions of progress and success. Her ideas about what both races must do to participate fully in American life are as cogent now as when they were first written.Originally published in 1944, "Speaking of Indians" is an important source of information about Dakota culture and a classic in its elegant clarity of insight.

PART I—THIS MAN CALLED INDIAN

1: THE INDIAN ENTERS AMERICA

SCIENCE TELLS US THAT THE NATIVE AMERICANS came from northern Asia and that they may have arrived here from ten to twelve thousand years ago. But they were not the first inhabitants of this continent. From archeological evidences we know that man-made implements of stone were left beside ancient campfires fifteen to eighteen thousand years ago, some even say twenty thousand. Man-made projectiles, too, have been found deep in the earth, together with the skeletons of a prehistoric species of bison. It is known from such remains that these earlier peoples lived by both hunting and seed-gathering. We cannot know what became of them—whether they had all vanished before the ancestors of the modern Indians arrived, or whether some were still wandering about and were absorbed by the newcomers. Of course, every bit of this is speculative; one guess is nearly as good as another, for we can never be sure of what actually took place.

And it doesn’t really matter, does it? All that which lies hidden in the remote past is interesting, to be sure, but not so important as the present and the future. The vital concern is not where a people came from, physically, but where they are going, spiritually. Even so, it does help to look briefly at these theories of origins.

We all know that the natives of America are not really Indians, that that name was mistakenly applied to them by Columbus when he reached these shores and supposed he had found India by sailing west. Then who are they? Scientists generally give as the best answer possible with the evidence now in hand that the ancestry of the Indians is Mongoloid. This does not mean that the Indians are Chinese nor that they came from China—for the excellent reason that at the assumed period of their arrival in America China and the Chinese were not yet in existence. Old as they are, the Chinese, by comparison, are recent. It is more nearly true to say that the Indians probably have a remote ancestry in common with other Asiatic peoples of today. But it was all so very long ago and the various races of mankind—which presumably had a common biological origin—have become so differentiated that no one knows what racial intermixtures may have occurred during the long ages.

It is supposed that the migrations from Asia that began ten to twelve thousand years ago took place in waves with varying intervals between. When they ended no one knows, or what finally put a stop to them. Perhaps it was some drastic change of climate or topography. Look on a map at the vast expanse of northern Asia stretching eastward all the way from old Russia and northeastward from the China of today to the point where it almost meets America, with only the narrow straits to hold the old and new worlds apart. It is not hard to imagine that small bands of hunters broke away occasionally from the tribes that roamed there and gradually found their way into-the new world, either by boat or perhaps by a land bridge that later disappeared.

The newcomers brought with them the knowledge and progress of their people back home in what we now call Siberia. It was not much, in that remote age—the early New Stone Age, sometimes called the Neolithic Age. They brought along the throwing stick; stone implements and tools, better made than those of the first Stone Age, but very simple still; a knowledge of basket-making; probably with the first migration, the bow and arrow; and only one domestic animal, the dog.

I can picture that dog, pulling a small travois on which are piled his master’s few belongings. I can picture a line of early men, women, and children, struggling along on foot, and, among them, these burdened dogs. Snow and winds harshly whip across their primitive faces. All are heading for America, to become unwittingly the First Americans. If one stops to muse on them coming thus, one must feel a little sorry for them, for they were walking deliberately into a trap. With each step they were cutting themselves off for thousands of years from the rest of mankind.

Until they left home, no doubt their chances of progress were about even with those of other peoples. All human progress was slow at the beginning, but at least it was cumulative as long as peoples could occasionally get in touch with each other. But now, upon reaching the New World, the Indians began to lag behind, although it must be said to their credit that they never stood still. But why did they have to lag at all? The answer is easy, and happily it casts no reflection on their potentialities. They lagged because they were isolated. All progress depends on contacts and the resulting exchange of new ideas. Dr. Franz Boas has said:

“We must bear in mind that none of these [ancient civilizations] was the product of the genius of a single people. Ideas and inventions were carried from one to the other; and so, although intercommunication was slow, each people which participated in that ancient development contributed its share to the general progress. Proofs without number are forthcoming to show that ideas have been disseminated for as long as people have come in contact with one another, and that neither race nor language nor distance limits their diffusion. As all races have worked together in the development of civilization, we must bow to the genius of all, whatever group of mankind they may represent.”{1}

How true! But, alas, for thousands of years it was the destiny of the Indian to be deprived of a share in that exchange which flourished elsewhere in the world. What, then, could his progress be but slow? He had no neighboring peoples to stimulate him to make endeavors matching theirs. When we realize that, it is remarkable that all by himself and through his own genius he managed to achieve anything to add to the world’s knowledge. And that suggests once more what we know already—that imagination and inventiveness are common human potentialities. All people invent.

This matter of independent development here in the Western world raises a logical question: Why the seeming disparity among the Indian peoples themselves? For it is true that some groups attained to high civilizations in what is now Mexico, Central America, and Peru, while others lived a barbaric existence, all simultaneously. According to the best scientific opinion, all the native Americans are one race. Even so, within any given race, progress is never uniform for all the people, because circumstances and life situations are never uniform. In the case of the prehistoric Indians, those tribes that lived entirely mobile lives in order to hunt and gather berries and seeds could never stay put long enough to start building together anything solid and lasting. Their culture necessarily remained static—and admirably suited to their simple needs.

And then there were other tribes that eventually worked their way to regions where the opportunities for obtaining food direct from nature were soon exhausted, making a more settled and systematic agricultural life an economic necessity. Such peoples were obliged to stay close together and to work out a new way of life. After a while they were building cities, accumulating wealth, and discovering and inventing things to better their material existence.

The civilizations of the Incas, Aztecs, Toltecs, and Mayas were really quite wonderful. We should all know more about them, if for no other reason than that they were so purely American in origin. A good account of them reads like a fairy tale. It sounds incredible that some of the same primitive peoples who had stumbled accidentally onto this continent only a few thousand years earlier should have wrought such civilizations—comparable to those of the ancient world, and all without foreign help. Yet that is what they did.

I cannot resist giving a few of the achievements and the inventions and discoveries independently made here. Weaving, pottery, metalwork and other art; architectural and engineering works, such as roads, mounds, and pyramids, capped by temples to the gods; cities with streets and street lights; waterworks and spouting fountains in the gardens of the rich; complicated religious and judicial systems and codified laws; schools for boys and girls; a knowledge of mathematics and of astronomy, about like that known in the Old World, before Copernicus; and, perhaps most important of all, a system of writing. Thanks to that, records were kept regularly; and if we had them all today, we might know even more about that indigenous culture so vital and fresh. But, unfortunately, the Spaniards destroyed most of them, as works of Satan.

But now, while remembering those great civilizations to the south and being properly impressed by them, we need to keep in mind the wild tribes of the same race that through the centuries were still roaming about up north, hunting, gathering the fruits of the earth, and fishing—all in the same old way. Those tribes were made up of vastly different men—men whose outlook and habits of life were a far cry from the more advanced peoples farther south. Do you recall the story of the Roman orator who cautioned his friend, “Do not obtain your slaves from Britain, because they are so stupid and so utterly incapable of being taught that they are not fit to form part of the household of Athens”?

We smile at that, remembering Britain today. Well, there might easily have been a comparable case, wherein some Aztec gentleman warned his friend, “Do not obtain your help from those awful, wild tribes in the far north [the Dakotas, for example!], because they are so stupid and so utterly incapable of being taught that they are not fit to form part of the household of Tenochtitlan.”

Even if there was a time when Britain was trailing so far behind the civilized world that Roman and Greek nobles could with impunity talk slightingly of her people, she did not stay there. Is it not thinkable that those wild Indian tribes of the north could likewise have caught up, if only they had had another long period of normal growth in which to emerge from a hunting to a settled, farming economy, and then to build a material civilization like that of the Aztecs and the rest?

Why not? Scientists say that the native Americans differ in no essential particular from the rest of mankind. And it is now well established that all human beings in the world are biologically one family.

“This means, in concrete terms, that however different the customs of the people you may come in contact with, they could have been very much like yourself in habits and outlook, except for the accident of location and upbringing.” So writes Dr. Gene Weltfish, Columbia University anthropologist, in an article preparing our soldiers to meet new peoples the world over with intelligence and understanding.

According to that, the Indian had it in him to progress in his own way quite as much as the Briton in his. And I believe he could have done so if his normal life had not been suddenly disrupted, and if he had not been forced to make so drastic a change in his methods and his direction.

At a leisurely pace, the Indians would have gone on learning from one another. Discoveries and inventions at the centers of progress would have worked outward until they had reached every tribe. Students of Indian history have established that, by the fifteenth century of our era, certain cultural elements had already been spreading. The most obvious were those related to agriculture. Knowledge of the cultivation of corn, beans, squashes, and other crops had reached most of the tribes. Even the most mobile of them had learned to grow corn.

Do we realize that these agricultural products were developed by the Indians? From a wild plant with a tiny ear came maize; from a species of the wild cucumber vine came squashes and pumpkins, and so on. These were all indigenous plants, for we are told that no seed was carried here from Asia.

Within that same era ideas and arts were also passing from tribe to tribe—a knowledge of building, for example, apparent today in the ruins left behind by the prehistoric cliff builders, as well as various forms of art expression. All human beings learn from each other, we have been saying. The Indians, belonging to the great human family, have the same innate powers, inborn intelligence, and potentialities as the rest of mankind. They have imagination and inventiveness. They can copy what they see and adapt it to their own special needs. These are all common human traits. The Indians in the long centuries through which they spread out over two continents were only running true to their nature. They had their own aims and their own methods for achieving them; and those aims and methods were the direct outgrowth of their peculiar situation and life circumstances. They differed in their habits and outlook simply because they were not exposed to the influences of outside cultures.

Otherwise, they were just some more of earth’s peoples climbing.

2: TRIBAL LANGUAGES AND CULTURE AREAS

WITH THE COMING OF THE WHITE MAN, THE INDIAN’S existence became suddenly known to the rest of the world, and his situation and life circumstances came under close observation. In this chapter we shall look at two important aspects of his life that have been widely studied: his language or, more accurately, his languages; and his material culture.

From such evidences as are available scientists have been able to conjecture, with what they regard as reasonable accuracy, much as to the Indian’s prehistoric life in its prehistoric setting. These are complex and involved matters, too much so for a detailed examination of them in this brief introduction to Indian life. But, if we can fix in mind a few points that are basic for a working knowledge, the rest can wait.

Let’s consider language. In the first place, don’t you think it rather amazing that so few people, relatively, should have developed so many different languages in the New World? Where did they all come from, these only real American languages? Well, we can offer a reasonable answer to that one.

Briefly, this is what must have happened. Each migrating group of those first peoples came speaking whatever language was spoken back home in Siberia, of course. Very probably they soon separated into small groups, the better to find their food. As the years and the centuries passed they lost track of one another forever; but they were all still using a common tongue.

As each division of any one large original group met new experiences, however, and had new ideas to express, new words were coined and new forms and speech devices introduced. Perhaps, too, they occasionally met up with another people stemming from another migration and of course using an entirely different language; and they borrowed a word from them now and then. By so...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENT
• PART I-THIS MAN CALLED INDIAN
• PART II-“A SCHEME OF LIFE THAT WORKED”
• PART III-THE RESERVATION PICTURE
• PART IV-THE PRESENT CRISIS
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER