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Fantasies of the Aster Race FANTASIES OF THE ASTER RACE literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians BY WARD CHURCHILL CITY LIGHTS BOOKS SAN FRANCISCO © l 998 by Ward Churchill All Rights Reserved Cover design by Rex Ray Book design by Elaine Katzenberger Typ ography by Harvest Graphics Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Churchill, Ward. Fantasies of the master race : literature, cinema, and the colonization of American Indians I Ward Churchill. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Rev. and expanded from the 1992 ed. ISBN 0-87286-348-4 1. Indians in literature. 2. Indians of North America- Public opinion. 3. Public opinion-United States. 4. Racism -United States. 5 Indians in motion pictures. I. Title. PN56.3.I6C49 1998 810.9'35 20397--dc21 98-3624 7 CIP City Lights Books are available to bookstores through our primary distributor: Subterranean Company, P. 0. Box 160, 265 S. 5th St., Monroe, OR 97456. Tel: 541-847-5274. To ll-free orders 800-274-7826. Fax: 541-847-6018. Our books are also available through library jobbers and regional distributors. For personal orders and catalogs, please write to City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133. Visit our Web site: www. citylights.com CITY LIGHTS BOOKS are edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters and published at the City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Those familiar with the original version of Fantasies efthe Master Race will undoubtedly note not only that the line-up of material in the second edition is stronger, but that there has been a marked improvement in quality control. Both matters are largely the result of the exemplary work performed by my editor at City Lights, Elaine Katzenberger. I would also like to thank Rex Ray for his superb execution of the cover and the Saxifrage Group for its assistance in preparing the index. Leah Kelly provided the photo of me used in the back of the book. Appreciation is due to the original publishers of several of the essays for their generous permission to reprint. "Literature and the Colonization of American Indians" was first published in Journal of Ethnic Studies. "Lawrence of South Dakota" and "Hi Ho, Hillerman" both appeared initially in Z Magazine. "Interpreting the Indian" and "The New Racism" first came out in Wicazo Sa Review. "Fantasies of the Master Race" first appeared in Book Forum, while "A Little Matter of Genocide" saw the light of day in Bloomsbury Review. "Beyond Ethnicity" made its debut in New Scholar and "In the Service of Empire" first came out in Great Plains Quarterly. for my maternal grandparents, Minnie Idalee and Philip H. Allen, Sr. CONTENTS Introduction lX Unraveling the Codes of Oppression American Indians in Literature and Film Literature and the Colonization of American Indians 1 It Did Happen Here 19 Sand Creek, Scholarship and the American Character Carlos Castaneda 27 The Greatest Hoax Since Piltdown Man Hi-Ho Hillerman ... (Away) 67 The Role of Detective Fiction in Indian Country A Little Matter of Genocide 99 Colonialism and the Expropriation of Indigenous Spiritual Tr adition in Contemporary Academia The New Racism 121 A Critique of James A. Clifton's The Invented Indian Beyond Ethnicity? 137 Werner Sollors' Deepest Avatar of Racism In the Service of Empire 149 A Critical Assessment of Arnold Krupat's The Turn to the Native "Interpreting" the American Indian? 161 A Critique of Michael Castro's Apologia for Poetic Racism Fantasies of the Master Race 167 The Stereotyping of American Indians in Film And They Did it Like Dogs in the Dirt 225 An Indigenist Analysis of Black Robe Lawrence of South Dakota 239 Index 243 INTRODUCTION Unraveling the Codes of Oppression American Indians in Literature and Film It has been said that I dare to speak truth to power. Maybe so, but that's never been my objective. My job, as I see it, is to speak the truth to the great mass of people without political or economic power. .. I take this as my task out of a firm conviction that knowledge of the truth is itself empowering. It follows that my goal is really to change current power relations in a constructive manner. -Noam Chomsky 1998 t is with considerable gratification that I write this introduction to the I revised and expanded City Lights edition of my Fantasies efthe Master Race. First released in early 1992, the book in its initial form captured a national award forwriting on the topic of human rights in the United States, sold out through four consecutive printings, stimulated considerable discussion in activist/ academic circles, has been widely referenced by other analysts and saw broad adoption as a course text before a dispute with the original publisher led to its withdrawal from circulation in mid-1996. All told, the record accrued by Fantasies has thus been quite remarkable, given the limited distribution channels available to it and the factthat its content is so frankly hostile to certain of the mythologies contrived to sustain the comfortability of North America's dominant settler society. 1 The City Lights edition, born of the success enjoyed by its predecessor, promises to be a far stronger and more useful book. Shorn of items which now seem dated or otherwise extraneous, it nonetheless retains the best of what ix appeared in the 1992 compilation, much of it further developed and/ or sub­ stantially reworked. It also incorporates material previously published else­ where and an essay which was written specifically forincl usion in this edition. Thematically, Fantasies remains very much the same, concentrating as it does upon exploring the ways in which literature and its celluloid stepchild, the cinema, have been employed in combination with supposedly nonfic­ tional venues to falsify the realities of Euroamerica's interaction with the continent's indigenous peoples, both historically and in the contemporary setting. Its purpose is, as it has always been, to strip away at least some of the elaborate veil of rnisimpression and disinformation behind which the ugly countenance of Euroamerican conquest, colonization and genocide have been so carefully hidden. 2 The Open Ve ins of Native North America It is perhaps helpful to provide a backdrop to the analysis of films and written works which follow by providing a factual overview of the modern colonial context in North America. Although ideologues ranging in outlook fromreactio nary Republicanism to revolutionary marxism are wont to decry as "misleading and rhetorical" any application of such terms to the structure of relations prevailing on this continent, the fact is that the very core of U. S. imperialism lies not abroad in the Third Wo rld, but right here "at home." As these words are written, more than 400 native peoples continue to exist within the boundaries of the 48 contiguous states of the United States alone, another 200 or so in Canada. 3 About half these peoples retain nomi­ nal possession of some reserved portion of their aboriginal territory (or "replacement lands"), a pastiche of areas comprising about 3 percent of the continental U. S. and a lesser portion of Canada. Moreover, these peoples, having never ceded it by treaty or other instrument of consent, still retain unassailable legal title to something more than ten times the territory now left to us. Put another way, the United States lacks even a pretense oflegiti­ mate ownership of about one-third of its claimed land mass, while in Canada the situation is rather worse. 4 While pushing Indians off 90 percent of the land we'd retained by treaty-instruments through which both the U. S. and Canadian govern­ ments formally and repeatedly recognized indigenous peoples as comprising fully sovereign nations in our own right-the U. S. in particular consigned native populations to what were thought to be the least useful and produc- x tive portions of the continent, mostly arid and semi-arid tracts deemed unfit forranching or agriculture, and typically lacking in timber and other renew­ able resources. 5 In effect, the reservations represent nothing so much as dumping grounds, out of sight and mind of polite society, where it was assumed that Native North Americans would die offaltogether. 6 It is one of history's supreme ironies that this same "worthless" acreage turned out to be extraordinarily rich in minerals, endowed with an estimated two-thirds of what the U.S. now claims as its own uranium assets, as much as a quarter of the readily accessible low-sulfur coal, 15-20 percent of the oil and natural gas, and appreciable deposits of copper, bauxite, zeolite and other strategically I commerically crucial ores. 7 These minerals, plainly belonging to the indigenous nations within whose reservation boundaries they lie, con­ stitute what federal economic planners now like to call "U.S. domestic reserves." Without these resources, America's contemporary business as usual could never have been created, and would presently come to a halt in a hot minute.8 Using the term "colonization" to describe such circumstances stands to instill a certain unsettling, and perhaps "destabilizing," sense of cognitive dis­ sonence among the Euroamerican citizenry. After all, they themselves, or rather their ancestors, once engaged in a decolonization struggle against England, a process inaccurately referred to at this juncture as having been a "revolution." Their success in that endeavor has with equal inaccuracy anchored their collective boast of having emerged as "the land of the free." To be confronted with the proposition that their ostensible heritage of staunch anticolonialism embodies instead as virulent a strain of colonialism as has ever been perfected is more than the average Joe can be expected to reconcile with any degree of psychological grace.
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