American Indians: Still Strong after All These Years

Abstract

Indians write for the same reasons others write: to change the perception of the world around us. For sure, we Indians are trying to change the ways others view us. We want others to know that we did not receive fair treatment when the United States government failed to live up to solemn promises and treaties with us and altered a wonderful way of life in the process. Those are important parts of our history, and those stories are being told in movies, in courthouses, in songs, in books, and by word of mouth in Indian homes. At the bottom of all this is the way we think of ourselves, which may be our most important source of empowerment. During the past five hundred years many writers who are not Indian have expressed their views on Indians, and I tend to think most of them were hoping to empower Indians. Say that is true; whether or not we use it, when writing, we Indians have an advantage over those non-Indian people who write about us. Keep in mind, I only said an advantage—we still need as many points of view as we can get. Since childhood I have bumped into people who wish to be Indian or who think, somehow, they are Indian. They are an interesting group, and I personally appreciate the notion that they admire Indians and want to be one of us. They tend to attribute all of their admirable and noble characteristics to that part of themselves they believe to be Indian, and the not-so-admirable traits they attribute to the rest of the world. I believe somewhere in there lies more than a trace of empowerment. Then there are others who actually have thoughts of empowerment. They are the ones who have hopes of resurrecting their cultural selves and opening a casino. That is empowering Indians after they become Indian. Not a bad scheme, I suppose, but none of those things truly address American Indians