Starting with the Indians: A response to Scott Pratt's Native Pragmatism

Abstract

This is going to sound grandiose, but I really think it’s true: the work that Scott Pratt is trying to do in Native Pragmatism is at least as important and valuable as the work that was done in Philadelphia in 1776 and 1787. Not that the authors of either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution would approve of Pratt’s project. One of the ways by which the Founding Fathers and their descendants have maintained the power they seized in 1776 and secured in 1787 has been by marketing a series of conquest myths. One of these myths depicts Native Americans not only as savage but as insignificant. These myths have been used to justify the rotten treatment Indians have received since Columbus began making slaves of them in 1492. The truth, as numerous scholars have shown, is that Indians and other oppressed Americans could sometimes be the masters not only of their own destiny but of their masters’ destiny as well. To cite only the most remarkable of these arguments, Sally Wagner showed that in the middle of the nineteenth century, when white Americans’ racism against Indians was at its height, some whites—feminists—saw some Indians— Iroquois wives—as role models, since they had the right to own property, get divorced, and, if they did divorce, keep custody of their kids. They even played an important political role, which helped inspire Elizabeth Cady Stanton to make the most outrageous of the demands in the declaration she drew up in Seneca Falls: for the right to vote. And now Scott Pratt has set himself the even tougher task of tracing the impact of Indian ideas across several generations. Pratt’s mission reminded me in some ways of Lewis and Clark’s search for a route to Oregon, where Pratt makes his home today. As they left St. Louis in May 1804, Lewis and Clark knew the first thing they had to do was to find the source of the Missouri River, the arm of the river that would take them furthest west. As we all know, one reason they succeeded was that they acquired an Indian guide, Sacajawea. In Native Pragmatism, Scott Pratt seeks the source of American Pragmatism, and he proposes that we will never find it unless we, too, become willing to hire Indian guides. I have to preface my analysis of the book by confessing to you just how little I know