The Roots of Racism and Prejudice

 

The sinister Christian women of the Deep South

In a recent poetry group, one participant composed a poem ending with a wish that “deep South evangelicals” would “pray for forgiveness for their myriad sins and continual hypocrisy.”

I felt obliged to send her a private note pointing out that this is hate speech. Something published, outside private conversation, that could promote hatred of an identifiable group. Would it sound all right if it read:

“I hope the Jews will pray for forgiveness for their myriad sins and continual hypocrisy.”?

“I hope the Muslims will pray for forgiveness for their myriad sins and continual hypocrisy.”

Or substitute Buddhists, or Hindus, or followers of “aboriginal spirituality.” 

It would be acceptable, true, if written by an evangelical from the Deep South about evangelicals from the Deep South; Christians are good at accusing themselves. But this poet was a Canadian secularist.

I warned her she could conceivably get herself in legal trouble here. And it is worth remembering that anything you put out on the Internet is forever. The political climate can change, and things that are socially acceptable now may not be in the future. What you say now can and may be used against you. 

It is unfortunately currently socially acceptable in Canada to express hatred towards Americans, people from the “Deep South,” and evangelical Christians. She managed to hit all three. That does not make it right. It was similarly socially acceptable to hate Jews in Hitler’s Germany.

Not that I believe there should be “hate laws”; but hate speech is nevertheless an ill thing.

This was her response:

“Yes, I'm aware, and I specifically said "deep south" and not all Evangelicals. And since the re-election of the felon, I am so angry that I don't even care what people think about that. The religious right in the deep south have been planning Project2025 for years, just waiting for the right guy to help them achieve it. Transactional Trump gave them what they wanted, including on SCOTUS, in exchange for votes - and now many millions are and will suffer because of it: the LGBTQ, women in general, pregnant women with complications and will die (and already have), legal immigrants to the US - yes, I've read from credible sources that even legalized citizens from South America have been getting their papers ripped up and they're carted out of the country like criminals ... by the biggest crooks are in the WH, who released the Capital Hill criminals who killed police officers and security personnel - here he is, carting out Venezuelens, many of whom are hard-working, tax-paying folks who lived in the US for many years. 

“I could go on, but I won't. … I appreciate your advice. I am just too mad right now to be sorry about my activist poetry. 

“So, yes, although I have always been against hate speech, I find myself hating the religious right of the US south. But my poem pales in comparison to much that comes out of the felon's mouth.”

Let’s take a closer look.

To begin with, this, surely, is a perfect example of just what she accused the evangelicals of: hypocrisy. She is opposed to “hate speech,” but she has a right to it, because she is angry. Assuming she also shares the view on the left that hurting someone’s feelings is a serious crime, here she nevertheless reserves the right to herself to say what she likes, and “not even care what people think about that.”

She thinks her criticisms are fair, because she said “Deep South,” not all evangelicals. Yet “Deep South evangelicals” is just as much an identifiable group as “evangelicals.” I wonder if she actually has no concept of individuality or individual responsibility. So she has no concept of why racism or prejudice is wrong. This seems possible on the modern left.

“The religious right in the deep south have been planning Project2025 for years.”

Project 2025 itself claims it is a “broad coalition of over 100 conservative organizations.” Not just the “religious right,” then. Its primary sponsor is the Heritage Foundation in Washington D.C. Not the Deep South. Of course, they might be lying. These could all be front organizations. We could get into conspiracy theories here.

“Transactional Trump gave them what they wanted.” 

It is not clear whether Trump is influenced by the proposals of Project 2025. He says he is not. On the one hand, why wouldn’t he be? He’s a conservative, and the Heritage Foundation is a leading conservative think tank. Think tanks exist to give policy advice. On the other hand, conservative policies are conservative policies; it also seems reasonable to assume that Trump’s policies would be about the same whether or not Project 2025 existed.

Our correspondent must next explain why there is something wrong with the concerns of the religious right, and why there is something wrong with the policies proposed by Project 2025.

She proceeds:

“Including on SCOTUS.” So she is referring to Trump’s appointment of “originalist” justices to the Supreme Court.

Originalism means you interpret the text of the constitution in light of what the framers must have intended, based on historical knowledge.

This applies to abortion, for example: since abortion was medically possible when the Constitution was written and adopted, and was illegal, and such matters were reserved to the states, it seems unreasonable to assume they intended to make abortion a human right. Therefore, no more Roe v. Wade.

She objects to originalism because it leads to a conclusion she does not like.

Here’s a logical problem: our correspondent laments that Trump appointed these judges “in exchange for votes.” First, doing things for votes is more or less what happens in a democracy; so what’s the objection? Other than that the vote went against her own desires. Which must supersede both the popular will and the constitution?

One begins to suspect that narcissism is the key to the modern left.

Second, “Deep South evangelicals” are a relatively small proportion of voters. Many other groups must have consented. Including large numbers of women, an absolute majority of the population. Why not blame women?

There must be some other special reason to hate “Deep South evangelicals.”

“The LGBTQ” will suffer from “it.” 

It is not clear what “it” is—the Supreme Court or Project 2025 or Trump. She does not specify how LGBTQs will suffer. And I would question whether there is any such group.  L’s have no particular interests in common with T’s, for example, and are commonly at loggerheads over washroom use. G’s worry that the current T push is castrating G’s. Many refuse to identify themselves with their sexual preferences or as “LGBTQ.”

Without elaboration, I cannot reasonably guess what she’s on about.

“Women in general” will suffer.

Again the impending oppression is unarticulated. But as noted, women form a majority of voters, and have the power to save themselves if this is so awful. 46% of them, according to exit polls, voted for Trump.

“pregnant women with complications … will die (and already have).”

She does not specify how this will happen. Presumably because states are now free to pass laws that make it illegal to treat women who have ectopic pregnancies and the like. 

This claim appears to be true. I used Grok to check, presumably not a left-wing source. Some women in Texas have been refused treatment by doctors afraid of possible legal liability; some have died. Maternal death rates have apparently risen in states with restrictive abortion laws.

This is alarming. But it is also obviously not the intent of such laws. Presumably it can be addressed by redrafting the laws, and educating doctors as to their legal responsibilities. 

You might be able to put some blame here on overzealous evangelicals in the “Deep South” who pressed for such laws, too hastily drafted. I’d be more inclined to blame the legislators and the doctors.

“…legal immigrants to the US - yes, I've read from credible sources that even legalized citizens from South America have been getting their papers ripped up and they're carted out of the country like criminals.”

Grok, which synthesizes all net sources, says this has never happened. Some US citizens have been mistakenly detained, until their citizenship was established. None have been deported.

Trump “released the Capital Hill criminals who killed police officers and security personnel.”

Grok confirms that no police or security personnel were killed at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. This is a commonly repeated falsehood on the left.

“Here he [Trump] is, carting out Venezuelens, many of whom are hard-working, tax-paying folks who lived in the US for many years.”

No doubt there are Venezuelans in the US who are illegal immigrants, have been here for many years, have paid taxes, and are being or will be deported. However, they are still criminals; they are in the US illegally. Paying taxes does not permit or waive punishment for crime.

“My poem pales in comparison to much that comes out of the felon's mouth.”

She gives no examples. To say that some Mexicans are rapists, or that some Haitians eat cats or dogs, or that Covid came from China, is not hate speech. These are simple statements of fact, even if erroneous, and provable. 

So can we understand from all this where the hate is from? Given its incoherence, I think the real key must be something left unspoken: I say it is a hatred of Christians. Everything else is constructed to justify it. This springs from the same font as the eternal hatred of Jews: because either represents the morality as divine mandate, and so is anathema to a guilty conscience.

Scapegoating always follows this pattern. 

The Real Victims of Prejudice.

 

I am a big fan of the Coen brothers. And MacBeth is my favourite Shakespeare play. But I have never bothered to see Joel Coen’s 2021 MacBeth. I dislike resettings and modernizations of Shakespeare plays. At best, it seems a gimmick. And messing with the Shakespeare original is like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Coen’s MacBeth made MacBeth a black man—an absurdity in 11th century Scotland.

Why, of all Shakespeare’s plays, must C0oen choose this one in particular to do in blackface? Shakespeare sets most of his plays either in England, or in the romantic Mediterranean. At least in the latter case,  there are more legitimate places to plausibly put a sub-Saharan African character. Othello comes to mind—although of course a Moor is not a sub-Saharan African, the miscasting would not be so jarring. There is, by contrast,  only one Shakespeare play set ijn Scotland, and its uncanny Scottishness is integral to it. It is often referred to simply as “the Scottish play.”

So it seems pretty in-your-face and up-yours to Scotland to culturally appropriate its main character. 

I suspect this is an example of a larger and longstanding effort in the English-speaking world to devalue and to efface the Scottish and Irish and their cultures. 

Others have noticed what seems to be a recent prejudice against characters who are “ginger”: Green Gables is now being partly converted into a display of aboriginal culture. Disney recently turned the Littlest Mermaid black. There is a common wisecrack in England: “do gingers have souls?”

Red hair is especially characteristic of the Irish and Scottish. It is far less common almost everywhere else.

And the Irish and Scottish are insulted regularly. Although “the n-word” cannot be spoken, nor even the innocuous Eskimo or “redskin.” Yet the terms “hillbilly” and “redneck” sare in common use, and are unambiguously pejorative.

I recently read that the term “hillbilly” was originally a term for the Scots-Irish: “billies” because they supported William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. So, reputedly, is “redneck”: Scots-Irish Presbyterians wore red scarves to show their resistance to the imposed Anglican faith. 

And, of course, the actual people usually referred to as “rednecks” and “hillbillies” in the US are the Scots-Irish. Whose ancestors usually came to these shores as indentured servants, as term-limited slaves, driven out of Ireland and Scotland by clearances.

While blackface is prohibited in polite society, nobody objects to whiteface: the traditional clown makeup, supposed to show an ignorant yokel. Clowns also usually also have red hair. They are a parody of an Irishman or Scot. And you laugh at them, not with them.

The English, and the Anglosphere, always had a benevolent attitude to darker-skinned people: subSaharan Africans, East or South Asians, or Native Americans. As an island people, they could afford to; they had no natural enemies there. Yes, they used Africans as slaves; but they had convinced themselves they were doing this in the best interests of these poor primitives. They were like children; do adults usually hate their children?

Even Jews were little known in the British Isles, and so little thought of. The ancient enemy, and the ancestral hatreds, are reserved for the Scots and the Irish. They represented rival cultures in the home islands. Worst of all, they were Catholic. Or Presbyterians, who were also an ideological threat.

The old prejudices are stronger then ever now, and growing. Extravagant favours now granted to blacks, aboriginals, immigrants, can perhaps best be understood not as some newfound  tolerance, but a way to humiliate, efface, and keep down poor “whites”—that is, disproportionately, the Scots and the Irish.

Arguably, so, in its day, was slavery. 

Community

 

Avonlea Village, Cavendish,, P.E.I.

Dave Rubin, who is gay, recently and properly said on air, “There is no such thing as the LGBTQ community.”

Your community is the people you run into on a typical day, the people you spend time with. Most naturally, the folks on your block. 

Other than sex, gays do not have anything in common. No number of one-night stands adds up to a community. Nor does a solitary couple. And gays have nothing in particular in common with lesbians, or transsexuals; no more than the average straight male.

Similarly, except for those who go to the same mosque, Muslims in Canada are not a community. Except for those who live on the same reserve, indigenous people are not a community. Unless they attend the same women’s club, feminists are not a community. Mariposa is a community. Avonlea is a community. Cabbagetown is a community.

These false so-called “communities,” moreover, are used to cut us off from our communities: from seeing and celebrating all we have in common with our neighbours. They promote hostility towards anyone who is different from us. They alienate.

Racial Prejudice in Canada

Racism is a relatively modern problem, since the concept of race has only emerged in the last few centuries. But fear and suspicion of strangers, xenophobia, is instinctive; we are herd animals. It should therefore be no surprise to encounter it anywhere, including Canada.

I have certainly witnessed discrimination in Canada against East Asians; and against Jews. And I have experienced it myself—prejudice against “whites” is particularly common.

But I have also experienced prejudice on the basis of ethnicity in most other countries in which I have lived. Prejudice and discrimination against non-Chinese is quite overt, for example, in China. In the Middle East, there is a rigid racial hierarchy: Arabs at the top, Europeans (“whites”) below, but above Filipinos, who are above South Asians.

 On the whole, Canada has to be one of the least prejudiced countries in the world. The multi-ethnicity you encounter on a typical city street or in the subway suggests this. Most countries are ethnically based, and if you do not have the requisite physical characteristics and pedigree, you are forever an outsider. Not so Canada.

Friend Xerxes persists in asserting that “only the person experiencing prejudice knows it.” This is exactly wrong. Prejudice is an attitude in the mind. Unless motive is stated, only the prejudiced person can know for certain they are prejudiced. For anyone else it requires mind-reading. 

Granted that people can often not know, or not accept, that they are prejudiced. I had a discussion just yesterday with a man who insisted he was not anti-Semitic; it is just that Jews really are all like that. He had a good argument, too; he claimed that the principles of dishonest business dealing were Jewish values. I might have had to buy it, had I not read the Old Testament and much of the Talmud.

Given this uncertainty, the only sensible way to detect and root out prejudice is in laws, statutes, contracts and government policies. And, that, of course, is also the place it really matters. Rudeness you shall have always with you. 

And the statutes and laws in Canada, when they are not, as they should be, race neutral, actually always favour designated “non-white” ethnicities over “whites.”

As for social prejudice, the concept of “white privilege” is a fine example. It is impossible for anyone to know, by looking at the colour of someone’s skin, whether they have experienced a privileged or underprivileged life to that point. It is impossible to know either whether their ancestors have. The concept of “white privilege,” or any actions taken based on this assumption, is or are a classic example of prejudice. One must, as Martin Luther King said, judge not by the colour of someone’s skin, but the content of their character.

Anti-Catholic Hate Crimes

 

Breakfast Tacos

 

Jill Biden is facing criticism for lauding the diversity represented by the “breakfast tacos” of San Antonio.

In a way, the criticism seems unfair. She meant well. But I also understand the outrage. This is multiculturalism: it reduces ethnic minorities to a human zoo, dancing for us in colourful costumes and opening interesting restaurants. Sources of idle entertainment. Consider speaking to a group of black Americans about how much you love fried chicken and watermelon. 

I am similarly annoyed, as one of mostly Irish extraction, by St. Patrick’s Day pictures of dancing leprechauns. Ah, those Irish: stupid, but always happy. I’d rather be associated with James Joyce, Sinead O’Connor, Bishop Berkeley, Edmund Burke, Guy Carleton, W.B. Yeats, the Great Famine, and Easter 1916. And not be reduced to a cartoon.

The matter hits home just now—along with her mispronunciation, in the same speech, of “bodegas”—because it feels as though it reveals something about the Democrats. They don’t understand and don’t care about minorities. They don’t waste the time of giving them a serious thought.

Back when I was younger, it was similarly assumed that the Irish or the Italians would always vote Democrat. It was, after all, the party of Tammany Hall, of Richard Daley, of Al Smith and the Kennedys.  We used to think of the Republicans as alien and Protestant.

Now we have prominent Irishmen on the Republican right: Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity. We have prominent Italians: Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia. More prosperous then we once were, Irish and Italian Catholics no longer follow the instructions of city ward bosses. We cannot be bought as a unit.

The same is inevitably happening now with Hispanics: Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio.

The Democrats have been banking on Hispanics to ensure them a permanent majority in the near future. It is not going to happen.

Is Preferring White Meat Prejudiced?

 

“Friend Xerxes writes”—this has become the usual start to my Sunday sermons.

This week, friend Xerxes writes that “prejudice – racial or otherwise – can be defined only those on the receiving end.”

And he cites as example an incident that proves the opposite. He had three Jamaican guests to Christmas dinner, and asked if they wanted white or dark meat. They all chose dark meat, thinking he was referring to their skin colour.

In fact, prejudice can never be reliably defined by those on the “receiving” end; because prejudice speaks to motive, and none of us can read minds.

Only the person accused of prejudice knows for certain whether the charge is true. 

Xerxes goes on to say “I can never know if I’m expressing unrecognized prejudices unless someone points them out to me.”

Yet I do think we all must know when we are being prejudiced. Prejudice violates the essence of morality, which is the awareness of human equality (“do unto others”); we are all capable of understanding this simple principle, and we all have a conscience. 

It is close to a perfect contradiction to suggest we can be unaware of our own prejudices—that we can think a thought without knowing we are thinking it.

Of course, there is real prejudice in the world—lots of it. One good example is the claim that only “white” people can be prejudiced. Another is that certain groups are “indigenous.” Or that only “black lives matter.” Or that “men” cause violence. Or that this ethnic group owes reparations to that ethnic group. Or that fetuses are not human.

And so it goes, generation to generation.

Indian Horse

 

I hear from a fellow teacher that the kids in grade 8 are now reading a book titled “Indian Horse,” by Richard Wagamese. Not a part of the literary canon when I went through. Apparently it is a fictional account of a First Nations child’s life in one of the Indian Residential Schools.

It is fiction, of course, so Wagamese is free to make things up, and cannot be called on it. However, I’m not sure eighth graders are sophisticated enough to realize this. To be honest, I’m not sure the average high school teacher is sophisticated enough to realize this. They are all going to think it is an accurate description. 

It is chock full of accusations against the residential schools and the Catholic Church. In a sane society it would be recognized as “hate speech,” and would not be allowed in the school library, much less taught there.

A representative passage:

At St. Germ’s the kids called me “Zhaunagush” because I could speak and read English. Most of them had been pulled from the deep North and knew only Ojibway. Speaking a word in that language could get you beaten or banished to the box in the basement the older ones had come to call the Iron Sister. There was no tolerance for Indian talk. On the second day I was there, a boy named Curtis White Fox had his mouth washed out with lye soap for speaking Ojibway. He choked on it and died right there in the classroom. He was ten.

And then, of course, he was thrown into an unmarked grave.

This is almost at the level of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda. It is likely to end in violence.

It is perhaps worth noting, and perhaps significant, that Richard Wagamese, the author, never went to an Indian Residential School. Although ethnically Indian, he was also not raised as an Indian. Abandoned by his birth parents at age two, he was raised by “white” adoptive parents in St. Catherines. He has no more knowledge of the reality of residential schools than the next Canadian.

The New Apartheid

 

Shadd as she appears on Mackenzie House.

Shadd as she appeared in life.

A new mural has blossomed on the side of historical Mackenzie House in Toronto. It is a portrait of Mary Ann Shadd, the publisher of the Provincial Freeman newspaper (1853 – 1857 or so).

She is being honoured for being black and a woman—the Provincial Freeman was not an early newspaper, but the first in Canada to be published by a black woman. 

This in itself seems discriminatory. We should not honour people simply for being the first of their sex or ethnicity to do a thing. That is a textbook case of the soft bigotry of low expectations.

But the way she is portrayed is more troubling—dolled up like a cartoon African Queen. Shadd was a proper Victorian Quaker lady, who dressed accordingly. The three commitments in the banner of her paper were to “anti-slavery, temperance, and general literature.” Temperance at that time did not just mean abstinence from alcohol, but sobriety and moderation in all things—including in personal adornment. 

The agenda of the Provincial Freeman was to promote integration and to “develop in Canada a society to deny all assertions regarding the Negro's inability to live with others in civilized society.” This was a major issue of the day, even among strident abolitionists: should all the blacks, if freed, be shipped back to Africa, to Liberia and Sierra Leone, or could they adapt to live among civilized people? 

Shadd had previously run a school. She lost her funding because of her adamant insistence on integration, rather than running it, as other prominent blacks preferred, as black-only.

The portrait, in visual terms, takes the side in direct opposition to Shadd, saying she was inalienably alien, and could never fit in.

Next, I expect to see portraits appear of Martin Luther King wearing a leopard skin, carrying an assegai, and with a bone through his nose. Well done, regressives.

Scary

 

Is Morinville Burning?

 

The most beautiful church in Alberta, perhaps the most beautiful building, has burned down.

You may not have heard.

St. Jean-Baptiste rose like a miracle from the flat prairie landscape, its silver roof reflecting the strong prairie sun. It was the centrepiece of Morinville. I used to marvel at it each time, on the way into Edmonton: this perfect piece of old Quebec in northern Alberta. 

Alberta, sadly, has few old, historic, or traditional buildings of any kind. Now St. Jean-Baptiste is gone.

It is probably a case of arson. The local priest says he fears for his life. A number of Catholic churches, some others as historic, have been burned to the ground or vandalized across Canada in the past few weeks. You probably have not noticed. It is hard to find information in the Canadian media; there is nothing about any of this, for example, on Canadian news aggregator Bourque Newswatch. The best sources for the story I have found so far are from India and the Philippines. 

It looks like a gathering anti-Catholic pogrom; and this news, if not suppressed, is being mostly ignored by Canadian media and politicians. At the same time, all it seems they can talk about is the discoveries, one by one, of the graves of indigenous children near the sites of the old Indian residential schools. 

This “news” tends to foment hatred towards Catholics, since the Catholic Church ran most of those schools. It looks almost like a coordinated campaign, 

And the “discovery” of indigenous graves on indigenous reserves is not news. Every community in Canada has a cemetery; people die. In particular, in the 19th and earlier 20th century, children died. One estimate is that one third to one half of all Canadian children died before their fifth birthday. 

Everyone has always known of these particular gravesites. All that was not known was the number of interred; local bands apparently kept no records, and the official government records were lost to a recycling drive in Ottawa. 

Reporting on their “discovery” is fake news. It seems crafted to foment hatred against the Catholic Church, and to turn people away from faith. 

One almost suspects something cynical in the demand that everyone wear orange on Canada Day in supposed solidarity with the native people. Why orange? In the Canadian context, the colour orange meant and means opposition to the Catholic Church. 

Canada had the world’s largest membership in the Orange Order, an organization formed in explicit opposition to Catholicism. It used to control local politics in places like Toronto, “the Belfast of North America.” 

Take a short walk in any direction at this time of year in Ontario, and you will see beds of blossoming orange lilies. The reason they are there is probably forgotten by most modern owners, but those beds were originally planted to show allegiance to the order; by tradition, they bloomed by July 12, in celebration of the Battle of the Boyne.

 Doubt any cabal is consciously plotting all this. It is the devil’s work.

The Real World of Discrimination

 

The much-despised Tree of Life, in Kabbalistic symbolism: a representation of the attributes of God.

Caitlin Press in Tofino is calling for poems for an anthology about trees: ideally poems that “dispel the myth of hazardous and inconvenient trees.”

This is striking, because there are no such myths. In every known culture, trees are venerated. Which is why there is a market for an anthology of poems about trees. People love trees.

The much-despised Christian Tree of Life

This points to a common phenomenon. There is a persistent tendency to declare things or groups that are especially favoured to be or to have been discriminated against. Conversely, things or groups that have genuinely experienced discrimination get no love. In fact, this almost goes without saying: you are automatically not discriminating against any group you lament as being discriminated against.

For example, we are told endlessly that women have faced discrimination throughout history. Yet demonstrably, current laws discriminate in their favour in myriad ways. This is also true historically: women have always been put on pedestals. In many cultures, women were exempt from prosecution for any crimes; they were protected in times of war, rather than being sent to the front; and on and on. The exalted status of women has always been, in a phrase, a “motherhood issue.” And this is biologically hard-wired. Men are expendable, but women are not: they are needed to ensure the survival of the tribe.

We in Canada are told incessantly, and have always been told, that Indians have been discriminated against. Yet they are demonstrably given more rights than other Canadians: special treaty rights, a wide range of benefits not available to other Canadians. Any history of the Indian in literature reveals an unrealistic reverence for the “noble savage.” Everyone has always wanted to be an Indian, in Canada and in the US. And no, their land was never taken or stolen from them—a subject that might take us, for the moment, too far afield.

What about African Americans? Everybody agrees they have been discriminated against; and surely they have a legitimate grievance? After all, they were enslaved. But compare the Irish; the Irish too were enslaved in the New World, if not perhaps to a comparable extent. Indentured servitude. Moreover, the Irish, unlike the blacks, have been systematically oppressed wherever they lived for about five hundred years, including a mass starvation in the middle of the last century. About the same time slavery was abolished—after it was abolished throughout the British Empire. On balance, then, the Irish have arguably had a tougher time of it for longer. Yet there is little or no sympathy for the Irish. Current laws discriminate in favour of African Americans; and against Irish Americans.

It may be disturbing to accept it, but chattel slavery was thought throughout its existence to be of benefit to the African American slaves. They were understood to be unable to look after themselves properly, whether due to genetic incapacity or lack of civilization, and, like children, were to be taken care of. They were not hated or despised, any more than children are.

The Irish, by contrast, were hated and despised.

Who has authentically been persecuted and discriminated against, in recent times? The Jews. Within living memory, there has been a systematic and international attempt to exterminate the Jews. Compare African American slavery—never meant to harm, and abolished a hundred and fifty years ago. Anti-Semitic attacks are still the most common hate crime in Canada, and are on a rapid upswing across North America and Europe. Yet there is little public attention to it; if anything, it seems to be encouraged by some public figures.

The Poles. As many Poles as Jews were executed by Hitler in his camps; their country was carved up and enslaved in turn by Germany, Austria, Russia, and the Soviets. Yet Poles remain one ethnic group it is still acceptable to lampoon. Polish jokes are more or less okay in polite company.

There was something like an attempt to wipe out the Ukrainians within living memory. Yet Ukrainians remain another ethnic group it is still acceptable to lampoon. 

There was a concerted attempt to wipe out the Armenians barely a hundred years ago. It may not be fashionable to mock Armenians, but there is also no sympathy for them.

Who else has known great suffering in recent decades? The Koreans suffered a brutal occupation and something like a genocide under the Japanese, from 1911 to 1945, after which they lived through a devastating war. The Filipinos suffered more under Japanese occupation, reputedly, than any other occupied nation during the Second World War. It was not a matter of discrimination, but the Chinese and the Cambodians suffered holocausts of historic proportions within the lifetimes of many, and the Vietnamese lived through perhaps thirty years of scorched-earth war. Yet these groups are given no consideration in North America; instead, they are systematically discriminated against.

To be fair, African Americans, Indians, and perhaps women have a legitimate grievance, that they have not thriven despite the special help they have been given throughout recent history. Conversely, the Irish, the Jews, the Armenians, the Poles, the Ukrainians, have been successful, even notably successful, despite persecution.

But that is neither here nor there. Being coddled is not necessarily to one’s long-term benefit, because it strips you of self-reliance. It gives you unrealistic expectations, and, when they are not met, leaves you capable of doing little but complaining loudly.

These two unlucky fates, being genuinely discriminated against and being coddled, correspond to two common fates within a dysfunctional family. One child will be spoiled into arrested development, and will grow up to be a narcissist. The next child will be tormented, but, if they survive and survive without being permanently crippled, may even be stronger for the experience. They may grow up to be a hero.

The Bigotry of the Left

 

Michael Knowles has recently lost a sponsor for his podcast because, a few years ago, he expressed the opinion that being a man who believes you are a woman, or vice versa, is a mental illness.

On another occasion, he was berated on Fox News, and the network apologized, for saying Greta Thunberg is mentally ill.

Isn’t there an obvious problem here?

If you consider it an intolerable insult to say someone is mentally ill, what does that say of one’s attitude towards the mentally ill? 

That their existence is intolerable. That they are to be dismissed from the conversation.

It seems that, on the left at least, this is the standard view.

North of Princess

The crime-infested slums of Kingston.

Kingston, Ontario, the area around downtown, is roughly a square dissected diagonally by the main street, Princess Street, running from bottom right (or Southeast) to top left (or Northwest). And whether you live north and east of that line, or south and west, means everything to everyone. Everyone knows that “North of Princess” is an area of crime and slums, into which decent people must never venture. 

This is, objectively speaking, false; at least in that the crime rate in Kingston is actually quite low. If the place is poor, surely merely being poor is no reason to stay away. The area north of Princess is historic, and has a fascinating layout. Elsewhere, so close to downtown, it would probably be prime yuppie real estate.

I have not seen this kind of radical social divide in any other Canadian city or town in which I have lived—with one exception. In Montreal, it was always forbidden when I was a child to venture into Point St. Charles, a smallish neighbourhood near the waterfront.

The common denominator?

The first Irish settlers, dirt poor, found work building the Rideau Canal, finished in 1832. The final locks on the southward end are just north and east of Kingston proper, at Kingston Mills. So they would naturally have settled there, the nearest urban centre where they might find work. At the canal’s north end, in Ottawa, the original Irish settlement is similarly hard by the last locks, which in this case run through the city itself.

The typical accent of “North of Princess” still has a distinctly Irish sound.

The same thing seems true of Point St. Charles. This was where the Irish settled once they came off the fever ships, right near the docks. Here they found a livelihood in the transport trade, and digging the Lachine Canal.

Anti-Irish prejudice, the original racial prejudice in English Canada—for no one, contrary to popular myth, was ever prejudiced against the Indians—endures. It remains one prejudice that is perfectly acceptable, indeed required, in polite Canadian society.

And anti-Irish prejudice was the issue in Montreal, too, among the Anglos; and not anti-French prejudice. No problem as a child going into poor French neighbourhoods, or Craig Street, with its pawn shops, or Old Montreal, which used to be pretty gritty. But not Point St. Charles.

Even, or perhaps especially, in my own ethnically Irish family. Having learned to “pass,” perhaps, they were that much more afraid of any possible associations with the place. It is as if the area still had cholera, and you might catch it.

In fact, that is exactly what people used to say, decades after the cholera ships, about “North of Princess.”

The same seems true in the USA. It is intolerable to say the word “nigger,” for example, or “redskin”; but nobody objects to the term “hillbilly.” And everybody thinks it is right and proper to look down on such trash.

The people we call hillbillies are essentially the earliest Irish settlers (they call themselves, to partly obscure that shameful fact, “Scotch-Irish”). Once they had survived their initial indentured servitude, they were obliged to eke out a subsistence in the thin soil of the hills and mountains.

I doubt I will live to see the end of this anti-Irish prejudice. I doubt my grandchildren will.

The Madness in their Method

It’s getting nasty out there.

I am now reliably informed that if I oppose M-103, the motion currently before the Canadian Parliament condemning “Islamophobia,” I am an Islamophobe, a Fascist, and a white supremacist.

The empire is striking back. They seem to have taken down Milo Yiannopoulis and Pew-di-pie. They are working on Jeff Sessions. The elites smell blood. And ultimately, it is their own. Who could expect them to go down without a fight? Things are starting to get to the streets.

But it is more than just the elites. There are a lot of people who are with the old regime in this as well. People who are not themselves getting fat off the system. Why? Are they just naive?

Seems not possible. They include some pretty intelligent people, and the charges they are supporting are little short of delusional. How many Fascists, for example, do you really think are living in Metropolitan Toronto?

I guess I had better weigh in on M-103. First, it makes no sense to single out Islam among the religions for special concern. In Canada, there are currently and historically more crimes of prejudice against Jews. And they seem to be growing. Worldwide, there are more hate crimes against Christians than anyone. Moreover, the largest proportion of both currently are actually done in the name of Islam. So it seems perverse to single out Islam here as under threat. It looks like deliberate misdirection. Or like giving Islam special status, and tacitly endorsing hate towards Christians and Jews.

Second, enshrining the term “Islamophobia” in the motion is a problem. First, a phobia is a mental illness (sic); it is something over which people have little control. It is not something willed, and it is something nobody would wish upon themselves. For the government to condemn something as a “phobia,” is to say that phobia is culpable. This is well calculated to promote prejudice against the mentally ill, who already have enough to suffer; and who are already a group that is discriminated against. No government should be giving any kind of sanction to such an expression.

On the flip side, the term seeks to prevent legitimate debate: a particular viewpoint is not to be questioned. If you do, you are simply mentally ill, and your concerns need not be addressed. This is an old Soviet tactic.

Then there is the term Islam. The word is “Islamophobia,” not “Muslim phobia.” It is a very different matter to condemn Islam than to condemn Muslims. One can certainly argue that condemning Muslims is illegitimate discrimination. But condemning Islam is anyone’s right. Obviously, if you are not yourself Muslim, it is because you disagree with one or more of the teachings of Islam. This concept of “Islamophobia” implies that simply disagreeing with Islam is not legitimate. Allow that, and you have ended freedom of religion, free speech, and freedom of thought.

It is vital that we preserve this distinction. Which is, indeed, currently in danger of being lost. For example, the idea that homosexual sex is a human right has recently extended to the idea that it is not permitted to say that homosexual sex is morally wrong.

Hard to see how you can parse that with the fact that Islam condemns homosexual sex as morally wrong; but logical inconsistency is the least of our problems here.

When the Liberal government were offered the opportunity to back a bill that took out these troublesome elements, while preserving the claimed intent, to protect religious liberty against discrimination, they refused. Why would they, unless this proves an ulterior motive?

The intent is not to protect Islam. But it is not really to end free speech and freedom of thought either, at least in the many people who are not part of the elite, but are going along enthusiastically with this agenda.

It is, I think, the opportunity to target a specific portion of the population as deplorable, morally intolerable. As “Fascists,” “white supremacists,” and “Islamophobes.”

It would be simpler, granted, to simply so target Muslims. And the left has done that in the past. But if you are so obvious about it that people realize what is happening, it does not work.

Because the whole point of scapegoating is to sublimate some guilt you yourself feel over something you have done. If you can blame the scapegoat for supposedly scapegoating, that gives you license to scapegoat them guilt-free.

A large body of people with guilty consciences, then, are eager to blame everything on some “basket of deplorables,” or “Nazis” or “white supremacists” or “the alt-right.” Just as they at other times would have blamed the Jews, or the bourgeois, or Catholics. And they do it, by unjustly accusing others of the same sin, of hating immigrants, or Mexicans, or Muslims, or blacks. Great bit of misdirection. It is not so much that these others are poisoning the wells; but that they are utterly bad, and so, by opposing them, I must be essentially good.

I do think, for the great mass of people who support this leftist pogrom, that it all comes down to abortion and free sex. So many people have bought into this, and their consciences have been after them about it. So, along with crazy, almost psychotic leftist politics, we have things like the self-esteem movement. A lot of people are going on these days about the need to “forgive yourself,” to love yourself, and so forth.

Forgive yourself for what? It all presupposes a troubled conscience.

Forgive yourself, sure, but the first step is to acknowledge the sin. That’s the hard part.

Rather than do that, those with said guilty consciences are demanding popular acceptance of crazier and crazier propositions: unisex bathrooms, free choice in gender, resolution M-103, and so forth. You have to sign on, or they no longer feel "safe." 

"Safe," ultimately, from the truth.

But the truth shall set you free.

The Literary Indian

Longfellow's Minnehana, dying poetically and clothed more or less as nature made her

In the 2016 American League playoff series, the Toronto Blue Jays faced the Cleveland Indians. Inevitably, a Canadian aboriginal activist appealed to the Canadian and Ontario Human Rights commissions to prohibit use of the visitor’s team name in Canada. Nor were they to to wear their uniforms, display their logo, or show their mascot. All were offensive to First Nations.

In support of the proposed ban, a “meme” hustled around the Internet holding that Indians as a team name was offensive just as it would be offensive to call a team "The New York Jews," or "The San Francisco Chinamen." So why should “The Cleveland Indians” be different?

Why, indeed? And why indeed is it different from the Minnesota Vikings, the Boston Celtics, the New York Knicks, the New York Yankees, the Montreal Canadiens, the Vancouver Canucks, or the Notre Dame Fighting Irish?

Teams everywhere want to name themselves after Indians. We have the Edmonton Eskimos, the Atlanta Braves, the Chicago Blackhawks, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Washington Redskins, the Florida State Seminoles, and so on. Even teams in Europe have used Indian names. The Exeter Chiefs play rugby. The Malmo Redhawks play hockey in Sweden. Yet nobody anywhere seems to have ever wanted to name a team after Jews or Chinese.

Pure business, folks. If you name a team the Indians, people like and want to support it. If you name a team the Jews or the Chinamen, people do not. You lose money.

In other words, there is a general popular prejudice against the Jews or Chinese, at least as athletes, but in favour of the Indians.

The surest proof that a group is not being discriminated against, is that it is used as the name of a sports team. People want to cheer it.

The Canadian aboriginal activist was not acting against discrimination. He was pulling rank.


This, of course, flies in the face of the common preconception. Every right thinker thinks Indians have been oppressed throughout history. Haven’t they always been discriminated against? Haven’t they been despised, spat upon, forced off their land, looked down upon as “bloodthirsty savages,” at least until recent, more enlightened times? Wasn’t the only good Indian once a dead Indian?

Nope. This is all a beautiful myth. As C.L. Sonnichsen puts it, not quite felicitously, “If the Apache is a gentleman of distinguished culture, the white man is a savage” (C.L. Sonnichsen, From Hopalong to Hud [College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1978], p. 65). He misuses the term “savage”--he means moral evil. If you believe in the myth of the “noble savage,” you must automatically believe that civilized man is evil. If the state of nature is a state of grace, it follows that all evil comes with civilization. The former assumption requires the latter. So it must be true that civilization is oppressive of the natural man. The Indian must have been hard done by.

Accordingly, without citing any actual evidence, the “TV Tropes” web site, for example, explains as given that “In the era of the ‘Revisionist Western,’ (the era in which we find ourselves) fiction often attempts to provide a more diverse and historically accurate view of violence by and against Native Americans.” The prior norm, then, was ahistorically anti-Indian.

“One of the main problems with the earlier Westerns,” explains a movie site, “is that they painted the Native Americans into the stereotypical savage who was only out to rape, pillage, and murder the white man “(Clay Upton, “Stereotyping Indians in Film,” http://clioseye.sfasu.edu/Archives/Main%20Archives/Stereotyping%20Indians%20in%20Film%209Upton).htm).

If t’were so, t’were a grievous fault.

“Before the movies added sound,” this account continues, “the Native Americans in films were stereotyped. They were always shown with scowls, while wearing war paint, showing that they were ready to kill at any time, or that they were less than the whites and that the Indians had need to be helped with everything having to do with the white way of life” (ibid).

Hmm. But does that sound like Tonto as you remember him?

At left: bloodthirsty savage.

Didn’t we all grow up with the righteous Tonto, hearing about how Pocahontas saved the life of what’s-his-name—the European is a lesser player in the legend? How the Pilgrims and the friendly local Indians celebrated the first Thanksgiving? How the Indians showed the incompetent Europeans how to survive in this strange new world? How Sacajawea skillfully guided Lewis and Clark across the Northwest? How Tiger Lily, the Indian princess, was a true and loyal friend (and love interest) to Peter Pan?

How bloodthirsty was all that?

Has somebody here been smoking Jimson Weed?

There certainly seems to be a stereotype, but not the one claimed. A rather more noble one.

More sophisticated analyses go so far as to admit that there are two standard portraits of the North American aborigine: not just the “bloodthirsty savage,” but also the “noble savage.” Both, however, the wise will understand, are equally wrong. Lacy Cotton writes of “the swinging pendulum of popular opinion concerning American Natives, and how that opinion always reached for one extreme or the other” (Lacy Noel Cotton, “American Indian Stereotypes in Early Western Literature and the Lasting Influence on American Culture,” MA thesis, Baylor, 2008, p. 37).

That sounds terribly balanced and enlightened, doesn’t it?

However, it ought to count for something, and seems not to, that the “noble savage” is commonly the Indian encountered in fiction, whereas the so-called “bloodthirsty savage” is the one most often found in eyewitness accounts.

In other words, only one of them is a literary stereotype.

And it isn’t the prejudicial one.

The idea is that Western civilization, being evil and greedy, has invented a slander against the Indians in order to steal their land. Think of the villain Ratcliffe in Disney’s Pocahontas, digging the beach for gold.

Hence indeed the whole idea that the “whites” stole the Indian land. It must be so. It is a necessary part of the Edenic noble savage myth that somebody took Eden away. Along with the idea that the Indians were particularly connected to the land.

Never mind that the white settlers never had any practical need to steal land from the Indians, whose numbers had already been dramatically reduced by disease. Never mind that there is still adequate uncultivated land around Attawapiskat and any point north to continue the traditional Indian way of life, if anyone were mad enough to want to.

Hence the strange untrue assertion that in the past, our ancestors despised the Indians, but now, we are more enlightened. A rejection of “civilization” is a rejection of tradition. That is what civilization is. A rejection of tradition is a rejection of the supposed wisdom of our ancestors, in favour of the spontaneous desires of the present time. If savages are better off, civilization is evil. If civilization is evil, our civilized ancestors are evil, or their counsel is. We, on the other hand, being at least potentially in and of the moment, if we learn the trick of being here now, can make some personal claim to natural spontaneity and following our own instincts. We enlightened are on the side of the Indians.

Keats put it plainly in his romantic ballad, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” The narrator’s fantasy of unrestricted romantic love is arrested by an interfering conscience personified as:

“pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;”

Hughes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci

The voices of social propriety—our ancestors—the dead.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!’
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

Some may object that the aboriginals themselves have and had a great respect for the wisdom of their ancestors. Indeed they did—they too, like most men everywhere, saw the critical value of civilization. They were themselves not romantics, and would have had no time for such mad ideas. But as a practical matter they were crippled in this by the lack of any form of writing. Their knowledge of their own traditions, and their ability to build on them, was limited to living memory.

Indian princess

Related as well to the noble savage archetype—indeed, its epitome--is the cult of the beautiful Indian princess: Pocahontas, Sacajawea, Tiger Lily, Leonard Cohen’s Kateri Tekakwitha, Land O’Lakes butter, and so on. The Indian princess is the Belle Dame Sans Merci, image of, in the end, free love. She is found also in Kore, Persephone, the innocent daughter of Mother Nature. She is the possibility of unbridled raw romantic passion, emotion without pale reason, including and symbolized by carnal union, without the restraints imposed by polite society. Adam and Eve before the fig leaves.

The weird legend that the residential schools were harmful to the Indian children also functions as part of the same myth: the schools were, symbolically, the imposition of evil civilization on these pure children of the forest, these Indian innocents and virginal maidens. The white man is Pluto, god of the underworld, rich, selfish, and cruel; the residential school is his kingdom of Hades, to which the virginal maiden is abducted.

In 1911, just as today, just as every day, everyone “knew” that the discovery of the nobility of savages was some recent revelation. In a 1911 copy of The Dallas Morning News, the Associated Press gives a favorable review of a book contemporary to its time, titled The Indian Book by William John-Hopkins. AP praises the book for its “multi-layered view of the Mandan Indians,” stating that “the author makes the simple life of these primitive people vividly human, and the child forms a sympathetic and humane conception of this vanishing race, altogether different from his usual picture of the paint-daubed scalper” (Cotton, p. 41).

But this “usual picture” seems always to have been quite unusual. One could argue that the noble savage myth is even older than Persephone, is as old as the oldest sustained narrative known, The Epic of Gilgamesh: Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s BFF, is a wild man of the forests who comes to rescue mankind from, it seems, excessive governance.

To the Greeks, in turn, noble savagery evoked a lost “Golden Age.”

In the Golden Age, according to Hesiod, men

“lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all devils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace.”

In India, the Mahabharata nurses the same cosmic fantasy:

“Men neither bought nor sold; there were no poor and no rich; there was no need to labour, because all that men required was obtained by the power of will; the chief virtue was the abandonment of all worldly desires. The Krita Yuga was without disease; there was no lessening with the years; there was no hatred or vanity, or evil thought whatsoever; no sorrow, no fear. All mankind could attain to supreme blessedness.”

The myth of the noble savage is every man’s yearning for a simpler life in the midst of the restraining requirements of existence with others. We each indulge it, spontaneously, when we feel nostalgia for our youth, a supposedly happier time. That’s how many of us remember childhood. But it is unlikely to be true of real history

All of life was once a garden

Alexander Pope wrote in his "Essay on Man" (1734):

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv'n,
Behind the cloud-topp'd hill, a humbler heav'n;
Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd,
Some happier island in the wat'ry waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold!
To be, contents his natural desire;
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire:
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.

This was the most famous take on the American Indian in all of English literature in the 18th century.

And here we plainly see the noble savage as the dominant view, well before the Romantics. While Pope, a Catholic, does understand the Indian as lacking important knowledge, the latter lives where “No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold! [shades of Pluto, of Disney’s Ratcliffe]/To be, contents his natural desire.”

Crane: Persephone and Pluto

This, unfortunately, we know from missionary accounts to be untrue: Mr. Indian was very much tormented by fiends, and very much valued trinkets. But it fits with the Garden of Eden myth of a Golden Age of man.

It also reveals, properly enough, how very patronizing and condescending the “noble savage” idea really is towards Indians. Innocence is not itself a virtue, any more than ignorance is. It is simply a state of never having exercised free will.

On the French side, importantly for Canadian perceptions, there is Rousseau, also of the 18th century, the great proponent of the state of nature, and before him Montaigne. “He [Rousseau] explained that all men when in the state of nature were essentially good, with untainted intuitions and inclinations. But to be civilized was to be corrupted and made unhappy by experiences in society. Gaining knowledge through tuitions enforced unnatural behavior on the natural man and removed him from his more natural, and therefore good, inclinations.” “American Indians, then, became an ultimate example of man uncorrupted and unfettered by civilization, a concept that countered the beliefs surrounding original sin and reinforced that all men were, at their core, good” (Lacy Cotton, op cit., p. 30).

One might add Freudianism to the noble savage mix. Civilization, according to Dr, Freud, represses our natural instincts, and repression of our natural instincts ultimately causes us to go mad. Therefore – free sex is a moral right. Civilization is the nexus of evil.

One can see the attractions to the argument, quite independent from its possible truthfulness. Everybody, in the abstract, would prefer to follow their first instincts if they could. The only problem is everyone else doing likewise.

Feminism, too, drinks deep of this traditional joy juice of the Kickapoo: all tradition, all established social norms, are of the evil patriarchy, aka Pluto, established to oppress women, who themselves represent unblemished nature. All Indian princesses, all of them. Therefore – free sex is a moral right. Civilization is the nexus of evil.

One can see again why church-run residential schools get targeted as the chief villain in the piece. They teach original sin! They deny our primordial innocence! They oppose free sex!

Now let us pass to the specifically North American tradition.

The Transcendentalists, American Romantics, of course embraced the idea of original innocence. “This could be related to Emerson’s encouragement to seek the Aboriginal Self in his essay ‘Self Reliance.’ This self supposedly existed inside all men and listened not to the tuitions taught by society, but to the natural instincts of the soul” (Cotton, op cit., p, 30).

“The American Indian has since been idealized in this fashion throughout history,” notes Cotton, “and most notably in literature during the nineteenth century, including in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, with its noble descriptions of chief Chingachgook and his son Uncas, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, featuring Queequeg, and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, containing Crusoe‘s companion, Friday” (Cotton, op cit., p. 30). Not to mention Tonto, Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chief Dan George in Little Big Man, or Nobody in the recent Jarmusch film Dead Man.

Queequeg

In plain English, Indians have been traditionally venerated in the American, Canadian, and European mind, so long as that mind finds itself in a parlour. They are not now, and have never been, discriminated against; the discrimination has always been in their favour. While black Americans for many years wanted nothing so much as an end to segregation, and to fit in to the mainstream society, Indians saw the same proposal, offered to themselves, as an alarming loss of status.

So, no doubt, would the Queen of England.

If they have nevertheless been at times described as bloodthirsty savages, this can more easily explained not by prejudice, but by the fact that they were, at times, bloodthirsty savages.


Here are some European-invented “bloodthirsty savages” for you:

“Slowly the ship comes in, nearer and nearer the little wharf. Now, with a heavy swash of water and a boom, she touches; out jump her sailors to fasten her ropes.

But hark! what noise is that? It is the Indian war-whoop. And see! down rush the Indians themselves, yelling and brandishing their tomahawks. In an instant they have boarded the vessel. Down into the hold they go, yelling and whooping at every step.

The terrified sailors stand back aghast. Out they come again, lugging with them their heavy chests of tea.

Still they yell and whoop; and over go the chests into the dark water below.

And now, when every chest is gone, suddenly the Indians grow very quiet; they come off from the deck; and, orderly, take their stand upon the wharf; then do we see that they were not Indians at all. They were only men of Boston disguised.

This then was the Boston tea-party, which took place in Boston Harbor on the evening of December 16, 1773. (Pratt, Mara L., American History Stories, Volume II, 1908, pp. 30-31).

Many of us have heard the tale, of the first stirrings of the American War of Independence.

But did you ever wonder why the disaffected colonials dressed up as Indians?

For the same reason the Cleveland baseball club does.

Americans in general, and Canadians just as much, far from seeing the Indians as a despicable underclass of horrible others, have always wanted to identify themselves with them. The Europeans were the bad guys. As for we colonials, nobody here but us innocent, freedom-loving Indians.

Donald Grinde and Bruce Johansen, in their book, Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy, devote an entire chapter to analyzing why the Sons of Liberty used Mohawk disguise. “The Mohawk image,” they conclude, “was emerging as a revolutionary symbol of liberty in the new land, long before Uncle Sam came along. The resort to Indian guise was not seen only in Boston, but at similar protests up and down the Atlantic coast. One unit of the Sons of Liberty called themselves the ‘Mohawk River Indians.’” Mock Indians burned the British ship Gaspee in June of 1772. Some anti-British proclamations distributed by the patriotic groups were signed “The Mohawks.” (Grinde, Donald A.; Johansen, Bruce E [1991] Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy).

Bloodthirsty savages

Notice the eagle on the Great Seal of the United States—arguably an Indian symbol. And note the arrows he holds in his left talon. Is it Indian inspired? I don’t know: flip a coin. Wait—isn’t that an old Indian-head penny? No, my mistake. It’s an Indian-head nickel.

In October 1988, the U.S. Congress passed Concurrent Resolution 331, to formally recognize the influence of the Iroquois Constitution (the Great Law of Peace) upon the American Constitution and Bill of Rights. This seems highly dubious; if you actually read accounts of the (oral) Iroquois Constitution, it is hard to find anything in it that resembles the US Constitution. But it seems to be something everyone wants to believe. It makes Americans, symbolically, the descendants of the Indians.

Hence, symbolically, American “freedom,” freedom from the commands of Keats’ pale kings and princes, from the baggage of the “Old World.” The British are the oppressive Europeans, the Americans the free and brave Indians.

Canadians, of course, traditionally disagree. Americans north of 49 are the oppressive Europeans. Canadians are the true successors to the Indians. Were we not the allies of Tecumseh and Joseph Brant? Did we not give sanctuary to Sitting Bull? If we live in the West, do we not consider Louis Riel our spiritual father? If we live in the Quebec, did we not grow up with tales of the lovely Indian maiden Kateri Tekakwitha?

Devotional image of St. Kateri Tekakwitha

There are two great American founding myths. Both intimately involve native people. One is the story of the first Thanksgiving, of union and amity between the new settlers and the native people, the natives passing on their wisdom. The other is the story of Pocahontas.

Here it is from a nineteenth-century children’s history book:

“Two large stones were placed in front of Powhatan and Smith was pinioned, dragged to the stones, and his head placed upon them, while the warriors who were to carry out the sentence brandished their clubs for the fatal blow. One of the daughters of Powhatan, named Matoa, or Pocahontas, sixteen or eighteen years old, sprang from her father's side, clasped Smith in her arms, and laid her head upon his. Powhatan, savage as he was, and full of anger against the English, melted at the sight. He ordered that the prisoner should be released, and sent him with a message of friendship to Jamestown. (Mann, Henry, The Land We Live In: The Story of Our Country, 1896).

And from the early twentieth century:

“A few days afterward, Captain Smith was brought before Powhatan and his braves. A big stone was brought and laid on the ground in the chief's wigwam. Powhatan again sat on his throne of furs, and his warriors stood round in a circle. They looked fierce in their war paint. They were eager for the white man's death. The prisoner's arms were tied behind him. His head was laid on the stone. An Indian brave stood ready with his war club. The club was raised to strike. A scream was heard, and in rushed Pocahontas and threw herself on the captive.

‘Kill me,’ she cried, ‘kill me, but you shall not kill him.’

The Indian did not dare to strike. He would have killed his chief's beloved daughter. The heart of the Indian chief was touched. Of all his children, he loved her best.” (Blaisdell, Albert E., and Francis K. Ball, The Child's Book of American History, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company 1923 , p. 32-3).

There is slim evidence that the scene actually happened. But it is cherished, because it says something important about the natural man, or natural woman: that she is innately good, that her most basic instinct is love. Trouble only comes with growing up.

We want that to be true. It reflects well on all of us. The archetype of the Indian princess, the Pocahontas myth, represents this hope.

Ever since, it has been a mark of nobility in Virginia to claim direct descent from Pocahontas. Charles Dudley Warner, writing in 1881, speaks of "the natural pride of the descendants of this dusky princess who have been ennobled by the smallest rivulet of her red blood" (The Story of Pocahantas). Two American first ladies have claimed such descent: Edith (Woodrow) Wilson and Nancy Reagan.

In North America, in short, to be Indian is to be nobility. Johnny Cash and Jessica Alba were publicly disappointed to discover they had no Indian blood, contrary to their family traditions. Elvis always insisted he did.


In Canada, this eternal desire to assume Indian identity is well-represented recently by John Ralston Saul’s essays arguing that Canada is ultimately a “Metis nation.” “Canada’s founding rationale and ongoing purpose in the world is to serve as a bulwark against the American steamroller of technology, capitalism and individualism” (Andrew Potter, “Are We a Metis Nation?” Literary Review of Canada, April, 2009). We hosers are the noble savages; the Americans represent the evils of plutocratic civilization. Saul argues that the “single greatest failure of the Canadian experiment, so far, has been our inability to normalize—that is, to internalize consciously— the First Nations as the senior founding pillar of our civilization.” To Saul, “single-payer health care, environmental protectionism, peacekeeping, soft power diplomacy, even the egalitarian elements of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms—these all supposedly bear the unmistakable stamp of aboriginal ideas and influences.” All the great virtues of the Canadian personality are owed to the country’s Métis character, and so our “desire for harmony and balance, our preference for diversity, inclusion and complexity, our renewed interest in egalitarianism—all are emanations of our aboriginal soul” (LRC).

Remarkable how like the Americans we are in our founding myth. Odd that we evolved to so many opposite conclusions about our Indian heritage. To Americans, being Indian means rugged individualism and personal freedom. To Saul, it means communitarianism, keeping everyone equal, and individualism is from the polluting civilization.

Put an Indian face on it, and any ideology at all sounds more plausible.

Sacagawea intrepidly guiding Lewis and Clark

Sacagawea is the second great American historical myth of the aboriginal princess. She gets to be on the dollar coin, after all – rather like the Queen in Canada. Although she is of course not the first Indian to feature on the coinage. She is commonly credited with guiding Lewis and Clark to the Pacific.

This is almost certainly not true. According to the expedition’s records, she gave directions in only a few instances. Her principal value to the expedition was probably her mere presence, because it suggested to the various native groups the peaceful intent of the expedition.

Nevertheless, her part has been lionized and widely commemorated because it fits with the desired American archetype of the good-hearted and wise Indian princess, especially as a founder figure.


The myth has continued to play out throughout American literature.

The first really popular American novel had an Indian in its title: James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, 1826. And the eponymous Indian was certainly of the noble savage tribe—literally a noble in Indian terms, the son of a chief and last of his noble line.

"Uncas ... clearly demonstrates a noble and chivalrous nature toward Cora Munro, his unrequited love” writes William Starna. “He dies stoically and with honor at the hands of Magua after Cora is killed by another Huron" (William A. Starna, “Cooper's Indians: A Critique,” [SUNY Oneonta] Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art, Papers from the 1979 Conference at State University College of New York, Oneonta and Cooperstown. George A. Test, editor, pp. 63-76).

Nor is Last of the Mohicans Cooper’s only tale of a noble savage. “James Fenimore Cooper was well known,” writes Lacy Cotton, “for his sympathetic opinion of Native Americans in his writing” (op cit., p. 65).

“Cooper's The Pioneers (1823), ... is set in the twilight of rural 18th century central New York where the frontier has now moved West beyond them; the beautiful wilderness replaced by orderly farms. Cooper's ‘civilization,’ however, is prone to irrational, sinful destruction of nature. The townsfolk's slaughter of the wild animals is well beyond any safety or economic justification. In one scene, the hero character of Natty Bumppo, whose legendary wilderness skills and attitudes were honed through his intimate contact with nature and Indians, is appalled at their employment of a cannon to bring down a massive flock of migrating pigeons. Bumppo criticizes the ‘wasty ways’ of so-called civilization and says it's a sin to kill more than one can eat. Meanwhile, the noble Indians struggle to understand and accept the ‘order’ imposed on them in the form of strict hunting laws.”

Unlike his hero Natty Bumppo, Cooper had little intimate contact with nature or Indians. This no doubt helped his characterization immeasurably.

“Chingachgook is first introduced (in the arrangement of the book order) in The Deerslayer (1841) as Natty Bumppo‘s traveling companion and adopted brother. His presence is representative of nature, and natural living, and he is often contrasted against the actions of other white characters like Harry March. One of the most poignant scenes in the novel takes place in chapter thirty-two, where Natty Bumppo stands between two trails, that to the garrison, and that to the village of the Delawares. Waiting in one direction are Chingachgook and Hist-Oh!-Hist, and in the other, Judith, Captain Warley, and the settlement troops. Natty Bumppo is faced with the choice of moving on into the wilderness with the Indians or devoting himself to Judith and leading a domestic, civilized life with her. Ultimately, he chooses to go with Chingachgook and Hist-Oh!Hist, metaphorically rejecting white civilization and choosing the life of the Noble Savage for himself as well” (Cotton, p. 43-44).

This is the ultimate American road less travelled. The “Last Mohican” of the book title may not, in the end, be Uncas. For Natty Bumppo too is a Mohican. He is Uncas’s adopted uncle, brother of Chingachgook, and he has symbolically chosen the Indian way of life. The “Last of the Mohicans, the inheritor of the Indian ways, may as well be understood to be the American frontiersman. The cowboy.

The cowboy was never the enemy of the Indian. He was his cultural descendant and adopted brother. Both literary stock characters stood for a primitive freedom against encroaching settlement. Both must be understood, following the Eden convention, as people of the lost golden age, always riding off into the sunset, always the last of their kind, or even already extinct, beings of a more wonderful past. The Old West is almost dead, and it always was. Innocence by its nature, like virginity, like childhood, must be under dire threat. We grow up. Damn.

The noble savage has remained at the noble and savage heart of American literature. In 1826, actor Edwin Forrest took out an advertisement in the New York Critic newspaper offering $500 “to the author of the best tragedy, in five acts, of which the hero … shall be an aboriginal of this country.” The winner was Metamora; or the Last of the Wampanoags. It became the first great American stage sensation.

Washington Irving was another loyal fan of the Noble Savage. In “The Trait of the Indian Character,” 1819-20, he wrote,

“The current opinion of the Indian character, …., is too apt to be formed from the miserable hordes which infest the frontiers and hang on the skirts of the settlements. These are too commonly composed of degenerate beings, corrupted and enfeebled by the vices of society without being benefited by its civilization…. Poverty, repining and hopeless poverty, a canker of the mind unknown in savage life, corrodes their spirits and blights every free and noble quality of their natures.”

Noble—nature. Note the inevitable juxtaposition.

“How different was their state,” he continues, “while yet the undisputed lords of the soil! Their wants were few, and the means of gratification within their reach. They saw everyone around them sharing the same lot, enduring the same hardships, feeding on the same aliments, arrayed in the same rude garments. No roof then rose but was open to the homeless stranger; no smoke curled among the trees but he was welcome to sit down by its fire and join the hunter in his repast. ‘For,’ says an old historian of New England, ‘their life is so void of care, and they are so loving also that they make use of those things they enjoy as common goods, and are therein so compassionate that rather than one should starve through want, they would starve all; thus they pass their time merrily, not regarding our pomp, but are better content with their own, which some men esteem so meanly of.’ Such were the Indians while in the pride and energy of their primitive natures they resembled those wild plants which thrive best in the shades of the forest but shrink from the hand of cultivation and perish beneath the influence of the sun.”

Cruel civilization crushes these innocent blossoms of the forest.

Note too that Irving presents this, in 1819, as the modern revisionist view of the Indians. Yet he is able to quote the same view already from an “old historian.” Being new is part of the myth, not the reality.

In a sense, however, Irving at least is right; the period before his own was dominated by the “captivity narrative,” which usually documented Indian cruelty to European captives. But there is a crucial difference: the authors of the original captivity narratives were writing from personal experience. Irving had little firsthand knowledge of actual Indians. His Indians were literary Indians, and literary Indians have always been noble savages.

Longfellow's Minnehaha: Another Indian Princess

To be fair, there was also a backlash to Irving’s and Cooper’s depiction of the native American. Some then still had experience of real Indians living outside the settled lands. This backlash was the far less well-remembered novel Nick of the Woods, published in 1837 by Robert Bird. Its Indians were indeed more savage than noble, at least in the eyes of Bird’s protagonist. However, this was hardly an established motif of the time: rather, according to his preface, Bird wrote the book in rebuttal of Cooper.

“At the period when Nick of the Woods was written,” Bird explains, “the genius of Chateaubriand and of Cooper had thrown a poetical illusion over the Indian character; and the red men were presented—almost stereotyped in the popular mind—as the embodiments of grand and tender sentiment—a new style of the beau-ideal—brave, gentle, loving, refined, honourable, romantic personages—nature's nobles, the chivalry of the forest.”

Bird was not trying to malign Indians, but simply to present a more realistic portrait. “It may be submitted that such are not the lineaments of the race—that they never were the lineaments of any race existing in an uncivilised state—indeed, could not be—and that such conceptions as Atala and Uncas are beautiful unrealities and fictions merely, as imaginary and contrary to nature as the shepherd swains of the old pastoral school of rhyme and romance; at all events, that one does not find beings of this class, or any thing in the slightest degree resembling them, among the tribes now known to travellers and legislators.”

“The Indian is doubtless a gentleman,” Bird allows; “but he is a gentleman who wears a very dirty shirt, and lives a very miserable life, having nothing to employ him or keep him alive except the pleasures of the chase and of the scalp-hunt—which we dignify with the name of war. The writer differed from his critical friends, and from many philanthropists, in believing the Indian to be capable—perfectly capable, where restraint assists the work of friendly instruction—of civilisation: the Choctaws and Cherokees, and the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians, prove it; but, in his natural barbaric state, he is a barbarian—and it is not possible he could be anything else. The purposes of the author, in his book, confined him to real Indians. He drew them as, in his judgment, they existed—and as, according to all observation, they still exist wherever not softened by cultivation,—ignorant, violent, debased, brutal; he drew them, too, as they appeared, and still appear, in war—or the scalp-hunt—when all the worst deformities of the savage temperament receive their strongest and fiercest development.”

Bird was quickly condemned for this assertion and this depiction at the time, and has been condemned for it ever since. This may be why he is far less well-remembered than Irving or Cooper. His preface goes on to say: “Having, therefore, no other, and certainly no worse, desire than to make his delineations in this regard as correct and true to nature as he could, it was with no little surprise he found himself taken to account by some of the critical gentry, on the charge of entertaining the inhumane design of influencing the passions of his countrymen against the remnant of an unfortunate race, with a view of excusing the wrongs done to it by the whites, if not of actually hastening the period of that ‘final destruction’ which it pleases so many men, against all probability, if not against all possibility, to predict as a certain future event.”

This idea of the Indian’s inevitable final disappearance, of course, has not happened: Bird, and not Cooper or Irving, has proven more prescient here. The idea of the inevitable passing of the Indian is, in the end, an aspect of the noble savage myth. Eden and the Golden Age, like childhood, must by their nature be lost forever in order to be truly romantic and real to the imagination; just as Swift’s Lilliput or Brobdingnag must not be found on any conventional charts. The noble savagists cannot, in the end, as Bird rightly saw, allow the Indian into the modern world. They must forever be picturesquely dying, or already dead.

Bird does not say that Indians are evil, but rather draws a fictional portrait of a man who does. A not-uncommon sentiment, Bird says, among those who had dealt with real wild Indians before the cruel influence of civilization blasted these innocent forest flowers. “No one conversant with the history of border affairs,” Bird writes, “can fail to recollect some one or more instances of solitary men, bereaved fathers or orphaned sons, the sole survivors, sometimes, of exterminated households, who remained only to devote themselves to lives of vengeance; and ‘Indian-hating’ (which implied the fullest indulgence of a rancorous animosity no blood could appease) was so far from being an uncommon passion in some particular districts, that it was thought to have infected, occasionally, persons, otherwise of good repute, who ranged the woods, intent on private adventures, which they were careful to conceal from the public eye.”

“The author remembers,” the author continues, “in the published journal of an old traveller … who visited the region of the upper Ohio towards the close of the last century, an observation on this subject, which made too deep an impression to be easily forgotten. It was stated, as the consequence of the Indian atrocities, that such were the extent and depth of the vindictive feeling throughout the community, that it was suspected in some cases to have reached men whose faith was opposed to warfare and bloodshed.”

Bird himself did not believe that Indians were in any way inferior or depraved. They simply behaved as their unfortunate condition, a war of all against all, required of them. It was the Romantics, he insisted, who saw Indians as inferior, as bestial.

Nevertheless, this seems to have been a rare and futile kick against the pricks already by the early nineteenth century.


Like the first widely popular play, the first musical score published in America was about Indians, and presented from the Indian perspective: “The Death Song of an Indian Chief,” released in March 1791 in the Massachusetts Magazine (Cotton, op cit., p. 5).

It was always, after all, the proper business of Indians to be romantically dying.

“Romanticizing the Indian dominated western fiction and poetry between 1800 and 1830,” writes Cotton. “Titles such as Frontier Maid; or, the Fall of Wyoming (1819); Logan, an Indian Tale (1821); The Land of Powhatten (1821); and Ontwa, Son of the Forest (1822), all portrayed dramatically idealized Indians that fit into the Noble Savage definition. …. By 1830 the theater was dominated by ‘Indian’ plays, that heavily featured the Noble Savage motif. … [O]n stage in 1893 was Belasco and Fyles‘s play, ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me,’ which victimized innocent Indians at the hands of corrupt white culture” (Cotton, p. 6). Or rather, portrayed Indians as victimized at the hands of corrupt white culture.

So too among Canadian writers. Adam Kidd, in 1830 Montreal, wrote the long poem, “The Huron Chief,” featuring the lines

Undisturbed as the wild deer that strays o’er the mountain,
Or lily that sleeps in its calm liquid bed,
In that arbour of green, by the gush of the fountain,
Oft, oft has my Huron there pillowed his head.
But the hand of the white man has brought desolation —

Duncan Campbell Scott, Confederation poet, is often criticized for showing traditional Indian life as difficult; he was with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and knew something of real Indians. Nevertheless, his poetry shows the marks of the Noble Savage myth. In “On the Way to the Mission,” he tells the story of a lone Indian shot dead by Europeans, the “whitemen servants of greed,” in order to steal his sled-load of furs.

Pauline Johnson recites

And then there are Grey Owl, Pauline Johnson, and Emily Carr, aka “Klee Wyck.” Johnson claimed to be a native princess, and recited in Indian dress. Farley Mowat made his literary reputation with People of the Deer (1952), about the Inuit. It was sympathetic to the native people, highly critical of the government, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and Western civilization generally. “It’s the story,” explains Craig MacBride in the Toronto Review of Books, “of white people disrupting and ruining Indigenous culture” (March 15, 2013). Marketable. Unfortunately, there are charges that Mowat made most of his stuff up.

In Canada, claiming to be Indian or an adopted Indian has plainly always been a good career move in the arts.


Throughout the nineteenth, and into the twentieth, centuries, one of the most popular forms of entertainment throughout North America was the Indian medicine show. Indians, again, were shown to the rubes in a completely favourable light. The success of the enterprise depended, after all, on the general prejudice that Indians could not tell a lie. Accordingly, if they said a patent nostrum worked, it must work. “The Noble Savage‘s determining features,” notes Cotton in another context, “included a harmony with nature coupled with a moral innocence and inability to lie” (Cotton, p. 30).

We see the same prejudice in the naive acceptance by the Canadian courts of Indian “oral tradition” as of equal weight with written and signed treaties. We see it in the acceptance of “victim” statements without any further corroborating evidence by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. If an Indian says it, it must be true.

Were little white children once taught to see the Indians as bloodthirsty savages? Here is how an Ontario school history book of 1879 introduces them: "They were bold and cunning, generous to their friends, but bitterly revengeful to their foes. There were, however, some great chiefs among them, who were noted for their love of the people, their honesty, and their kindness to enemies (Jeffers, J. Frith, History of Canada, 1879, p, 4). Said chiefs are not identified; we are left to speculate.


Of course, Canadian kids did once play that notoriously racist old game of cowboys and Indians. But consider: in order for it to work, roughly half of the kids must always have wanted to be Indians.

Nor were literary cowboys and Indians enemies by nature: they were brothers, like Uncas and Natty Bumppo, like Tonto and the Lone Ranger. If cowboys sometimes fought with Indians, this was the Indian way. Just as cowboys fought with cowboys, in their shoot-outs, and Indians fought with Indians, the Iroquois with the Huron, the Cree with the Blackfoot, the Huron with the Mohicans. It was the inevitable logic of life beyond police patrol and government control, and it was, in fictional form, as fun as any Tom and Jerry cartoon. The cowboy was the European Indian—the free man, the wanderer, living by his own code of honour outside the law.


The traditional image of the cowboy, and the original Western, began with dime novels in the second half of the 19th century. And the dime novels themselves began with tales of Indians. Only later did the cowboy emerge as a subject of similar interest to the same readership.

The first dime novel ever was Malaeska, the Indian Wife of a White Hunter (1860). Its vision of Indian life, as first presented to the reader, is plainly romantic:

“wigwams might be seen through a vista in the wood. One or two were built even on the edge of the clearing; the grass was much trampled around them, and three or four half-naked Indian children lay rolling upon it, laughing, shouting, and flinging up their limbs in the pleasant morning air. One young Indian woman was also frolicking among them, tossing an infant in her arms, caroling and playing with it. Her laugh was musical as a bird song, and as she darted to and fro, now into the forest and then out into the sunshine, her long hair glowed like the wing of a raven, and her motion was graceful as an untamed gazelle. They could see that the child, too, was very beautiful, even from the distance” (p. 10).

Like an untamed gazelle: Malaeska is the familiar archetype of the innocent and good-hearted Indian princess, representing an imagined purity of nature. “[H]er untutored heart, rich in its natural affections, had no aim, no object, but what centered in the love she bore her white husband. The feelings which in civilized life are scattered over a thousand objects, were, in her bosom, centered in one single being; he supplied the place of all the high aspirations – of all the passions and sentiments which are fostered into strength by society” (p. 31-32). Pure of heart, in other words; here as the story progresses ruined by contact with the evil Europeans and their civilized prejudices.

The same motif is soon reprised in The Frontier Angel (1861), its topic an Indian maiden’s “suffering and devotion.” This was followed in turn by King Barnaby or The Maidens of the Forest: A Romance of the Micmacs (1861). Oonomoo the Huron came in 1862, plus a romance, Ahmo’s Plot, or The Governor’s Indian Child, based on the premise that Count Frontenac took an Indian wife, the daughter, of course, of a chief. Laughing Eyes, in 1863, reverses the stock situation; it has a European maiden falling in love with an Indian prince. Mahaska, the Indian Princess tells the continuing story of Frontenac’s supposed half-Indian daughter, her mother having died “of a broken heart, as we see forest birds perish in their cages.”

Obviously, the fallout from the residential schools was not the first time we conceived the idea that exposure to European civilization was harmful to native people.

The Indian Princess was soon succeeded, logically enough, by The Indian Queen, purportedly the story of Mahaska become the Queen of the Senecas. In 1869, Border Avengers, or The White Prophetess of the Delawares, announced an upcoming series on Wenona, the Giant Chief of St. Regis, including Silent Slayer, or The Maid of Montreal, and Despard the Spy, or the Fall of Montreal. Despard, a European, was the villain. Wenona, of course, a Mohawk, was the hero.

Over time, the frontier of romance, to remain plausible, had to move west. The Lone Chief or the Trappers of the Saskatchewan (1873) tells of Chief Blackbird. It is a tale that “awakens our warmest admiration”; its heroine is a “strangely beautiful” Cree girl. This was quickly followed by Old Bear Paw the Trapper King, or The Love of a Blackfoot Queen.

Indian princesses everywhere populated the West. Virginally.

Buck Taylor

In 1887, Henry Nash Smith, Beadle Dime Novels editor, hit upon the idea of the cowboy hero to add to the now-traditional Indian. He published a fictionalized biography of the real star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Buck Taylor (William Levi Taylor). The literary Taylor, the original cowboy, reveals his true lineage in his origin story: he is first captured by the Comanches, then eventually freed by an Indian friend. It is like a second birth, as an adopted Indian, in the mold of Natty Bumppo.

And the cowboy, in turn, is the essential image, at home and abroad, of the American character. He is the American hero.

The Wild West Show as popular entertainment followed more or less the same evolution: the first Wild West shows, organized by artist George Catlin to tour the US and Europe, featured only Indians. Buffalo Bill Cody hit upon the idea of adding “cowboys,” Europeans who lived on the frontier and adopted many of the Indian ways, to the shows. While the Indians were spectacle enough in themselves, by doing this, he could add displays of trick shooting, horsemanship, roping, and other talents more easily found among the pool of European-Americans. Visiting Europe, the “cowboys” made a point of sleeping outdoors, like the Indian performers. They were, after all, children of nature.

In novels, the Western genre truly came into its own with the full-length yarns of Zane Grey. And, like his predecessors, Grey was a faithful acolyte of the noble savage. "His respectful treatment of Indians,” boasts the Zane Grey West Society web page, “was ahead of its time."

Yep. Always was, always is.

Among other treatments, Grey wrote The Vanishing American, obviously sympathetic to the eternally dying Indians.

“In his 1910 novel, Heritage of the Desert,” similarly, “Grey idealizes the Navajo people, particularly the Chief Eschtah” (Cotton, p. 47).

“This pattern of victimizing [sic] the Noble Savage continues in Grey’s novel, The Rainbow Trail (1915). In this story, yet another female Indian named Glen Naspa is seduced and assaulted by a white missionary” (Cotton, p. 48). The Vanishing American, similarly, features “lecherous and greedy ministers” who “oppose noble and good Indians that honor the nation by participating in World War I” (Cotton, p. 51).

Sound familiar? The missionary is the inevitable fall guy in the noble savage myth, because he introduces the idea of original sin.

In the same novel, “Shefford... discovers [an] Indian woman in her home, having died in childbirth, and his guilt over the tragedy leads him to feel something of the white man’s burden of crime toward the Indian weighing upon his soul.” “Grey,” Cotton adds, “was not the only author to use this method of victimizing [sic] an Indian woman and orchestrating her death as a metaphor for the ruthless cruelty of white culture” (Cotton, p. 49).

“The roots of this imagery,” Cotton goes on, “can be traced back as far as the 1890s, when David Belasco and Franklin Fyles wrote the play “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” This story of an Indian uprising involves a maiden named Fawn Afraid, whose involvement with white culture ultimately leads to her death” (Cotton, p. 49).

“Fawn Afraid”? You have to love it.

But Cotton is significantly wrong here. The imagery of the innocent Indian maiden being destroyed by contact with white culture is not from some play in the nineteenth century. It is an essential element of the Indian princess myth, going back to Greek mythology and Kore/Persephone. We have already seen it many times.

The popularity of the cowboy novel has, of course, spread beyond North America. When the Americans occupied Germany at the end of World War II, they were amused to find the Germans entirely wrapped up in the romance of the old frontier—as they largely remain today.

This is mostly due to Karl May, probably the most popular novelist in the German language, who specialized in “Western” stories.

But note that on May’s frontier, as in the early dime novels, the central hero is an Indian, not a cowboy: Minnetou, the “wise chief of the Apaches.” “Old Shatterhand,” the cowboy figure, is like Bumppo or the Lone Ranger his “blood brother.”

According to Anthony Grafton, writing in the New Republic, May always depicted Native Americans as “innocent victims of white law-breakers.” He had much that was unflattering to say about Jews, the Irish, the Chinese, blacks, and Armenians; but never about Native Americans.

Why were Indians special? “His readers longed to escape from an industrialized capitalist society,” writes Grafton, “an escape which May offered” (Grafton, “Mein Buch,” The New Republic, December, 2008). The noble savage, exactly.

Grafton points out that Karl May and his Western adventures were special favourites of Adolf Hitler. “Hitler later recommended the books to his generals and had special editions distributed to soldiers at the front, praising Winnetou as an example of ‘tactical finesse and circumspection’" (Grafton, op cit.). “The fate of Native Americans in the United States was used during the world wars for anti-American propaganda,” writes Frederic Morton in the New York Times. “The National Socialists in particular tried to use May's popularity and his work for their purposes” (Morton, Tales Of The Grand Teutons: Karl May Among The Indians. The New York Times, 4 January 1987).

This should not surprise us. The cult of the noble savage always had Nazi-esque overtones. Like Nazism, it was a cult of nature and the natural man. Like Nazism, it believed in a mystic oneness of the “volk” with the ancestral land and the landscape. Foreigners were not welcome. Like the Nazis, it believed in the value of racial and cultural “purity.” The evil forces of “cosmopolitanism” were simply transferred by the Nazis from May’s encroaching European plutocrats to the capitalist, cosmopolitan Jews.


But what about the movies? What about Hollywood? Surely here, at least, the racist stereotype of the bloodthirsty Indian descending on the helpless wagon train ruled supreme? As we have read, “One of the main problems with the earlier Westerns is that they painted the Native Americans into the stereotypical savage who was only out to rape, pillage, and murder the white man” (Clay Upton, Stereotyping Indians in Film, http://clioseye.sfasu.edu/Archives/Main%20Archives/Stereotyping%20Indians%20in%20Film%20(Upton).htm). Up until “Little Big Man,” or “Dances With Wolves,” wasn’t the story always at the very least told from the point of view of the white man?

Anyone is free to believe that. So long as they have never seen a Western.

The very first Western movie with a narrative that featured Indians is told from the supposed Indian perspective: "The Red Man's View," 1909, by D.W. Griffith. According to a review of the day, the film is about "the helpless Indian race as it has been forced to recede before the advancing white, ... full of poetic sentiment" (NY Mirror, Thomas Cripps, Hollywood's High Noon: Moviemaking and Society Before Television, JHU Press, 1997, p. 27).

If the reader doubts the accuracy of this characterization, he is advised that the full film is available for view at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/TheRedMansView_201401

Make no mistake: white people are the villains, and D.W. Griffith is rarely ambiguous about such things. They repeatedly drive the Indians off their land and, of course, abduct a poor defenseless Indian princess.

Pocahontas, 1910

A classic treatment of the prototypical Pocahontas appeared in 1910, and a second version in 1911. In 1912 came “The Heart of an Indian Maiden” (YouTube: https://youtu.be/-kVKKEEiJR0) and “The Invaders”-- said invaders, of course, being the Europeans. In the latter movie, according to IMDB, "the U.S. Army and the Indians sign a peace treaty. However, a group of surveyors trespass on the Indians' land and violate the treaty. The army refuses to listen to the Indians' complaints, and the surveyors are killed by the Indians."

Also in 1912 came “A Temporary Truce”: “three malicious drunks have just killed an Indian, solely to amuse themselves. When Jim abducts the prospector's wife, and takes her to a remote place, he soon afterwards encounters a party of angry braves seeking revenge" (IMDB).

Yes, you see fights between cowboys and Indians—but the cowboys are always to blame.

D.W. Griffith’s “The Battle of Elderbush Gulch” (1913) (Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/TheBattleOfElderbushGulch) is sometimes cited as an example of the contrary, bloodthirsty savage image of Indians. But their offense in the film is not that great. They try to eat a couple of dogs, hungry and not knowing this is taboo among whites, and are shot dead for it. A battle ensues.

Who here is being portrayed as bloodthirsty?

One might expect that a film called “The Indian Wars Refought,” filmed with the cooperation of the US government, might offer a more balanced account, if not an outright tribute to the US Army.

We will never know. The film was suppressed, claims Wikipedia, by the US government, and all copies disappeared. Reputedly, this was because it turned out to be too awkwardly pro-Indian and anti-US government, during a period of wartime censorship (IMDB; Larry Langman, Larry, American Film Cycles: The Silent Era. Greenwood Publishing Group [1998]).

In 1922, Canada produced what is commonly cited as the first ever feature-length documentary film. That would be “Nanook of the North,” a sympathetic portrayal of the life of an Inuit hunter. Roger Ebert calls it “alone in its stark regard for the courage and ingenuity of its heroes" (Ebert, Roger [2005-09-25] "Nanook of the North [1922]," Chicago Sun Times). Another “revisionist” view of aboriginal Canada; as they all are.

“They Died With Their Boots On,” 1941, again tells the story of the Indian Wars, culminating in the Battle of Little Big Horn. But, again, white men are clearly blamed: “The battle against Chief Crazy Horse is portrayed as a crooked deal between politicians and a corporation that wants the land Custer promised to the Indians.” “A letter left behind by Custer, now considered his dying declaration, names the culprits and absolves the Native Americans of all responsibility; Custer has won his final campaign.” (Wikipedia) It has to be so; if the Indians were guilty of anything, it would not be a satisfactory ending in the eyes of an American audience.

Of course, many may argue that this is simply telling it like it was—that the whites are fully responsible for the Indian wars, fought to take the Indian land. But was this true? Indians, after all, were always fighting one another. Why would they always make an exception of the white men?

“Sitting Bull,” 1954, was the first Western in CinemaScope. Again it was filmed from the Indian point of view. “When the white man wins,” the cinematic Sitting Bull complains, “you call it a victory; when the Indian wins, you call it a massacre.” This seems the eternal lament of the Hollywood Indian; but there never seems to have been a prior time during which everyone called the one a victory, or the other a massacre. It is simply part of the Noble Savage myth.

And then we had “Little Big Man”…

It is always possible, I suppose, that some day, someone actually will make an anti-Indian movie. Or write an anti-Indian novel.

But nobody will buy it.