A World of Ideas; 145; Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris

BILL MOYERS' WORLD OF IDEAS November 14, 1988 #145 Louise Erdrich & Michael Dorris

BILL MOYERS: [on camera] Good evening, I'm Bill Moyers. Many years ago I took anthropology at the University of Texas from Gilbert McAllister. He had lived as a young man among the Aztec Indians, and in class he still talked excitedly about how the world for "grandfather" in the Aztec language is the same as the word for "grandson." He said it was an example of the respect among the Aztecs for the generations, for the reciprocity shared between young and old. I thought I of that when I met my two guests this evening. They remind us that the story of what happened to the Indians after Columbus arrived is a story of oppression and betrayal. But that the story is also one of survival, of reverence for the land, of kinships and communities so intimate that in some Indian languages there's no singular pronoun in the first person; no way to say, "I" or "Me, first" My guests tonight have learned to use "we" instead of "I." Because they think that way. Join me for a conversation with Louise Erdrich and

Michael Dorris.

[voice-over] Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich are collaborators in life, in love and in art. She says he is essential as air to the writing. He says she is his companion through every page. Hus-band and wife, they don't just dedicate their novels to each other, they also cheerfully confess that they write them together. Both are half Indian. Her tribe was Chippewa, his was Modoc. And their belief in family, community, and place they attribute to their Native American heritage. Their books are full of their family heirlooms. Love Medicine won Erdrich the National Book Critics Circle Award. Both The Beet Queen and Tracks are bestsellers. Dorris's first novel, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, is receiving wide acclaim.

They've just agreed to write their next novel under both their names. Its subject is Christopher Columbus, whose arrival in 1492 changed forever the lives of Native Americans. We talked at their home in New Hampshire.

[Interviewing] Take the book. You've just agreed to write-you may not want to talk about it, because it's out there, still to come-on Columbus. Why Columbus?

LOUISE ERDRICH: It was first that we were inspired by his diary. We found the diary that he wrote about his rust voyage a revelation. There was this truly openhearted man interacting with the natives, of what he thought of as the East Indies, in a generous way that, of course, history changed. Terrible things happened afterward, but the first meeting was genuinely moving, and intrigued us.

MICHAEL DORRIS: In addition to which It's anthropologically so interesting what happened. Because Europe, compared to the rest of the world, was a very homogeneous place. Almost everybody spoke Indo-European related languages. Almost everybody shared the same cosmological world view, and even the same political, in general, system. Indians in North American and South America, on the other hand, were used to this enormous plurality, 500 different cultures, seven different language families, four or five hundred languages spoken, many different religions, some emergent stories, some earth-diver stories. All of these different things. Within a day's walk of any place, you would encounter another group of people who looked different, spoke differently, had a different view of men and women, where they came from, and all this kind of stuff.

When Europeans came to Indians at first, it was no big deal. I mean, you read account after account of Indians saying, "Oh, yeah, and they came, too." You know, "And they don't bathe." That was the other big thing that all the Indian accounts talk about. Whereas for Europeans it changed everything. I mean, whose child were they in the Adam and Eve schema? And were they human beings or not? They argued in Spanish universities for 80 years until the Pope said Indians had souls. It changed the whole concept of world view.

BILL MOYERS: When Columbus arrived, there were an estimated how many Native Americans throughout the hemisphere?

MICHAEL DORRIS: Over a hundred million.

BILL MOYERS: Over a hundred million? And by the early part of this century?

MICHAEL DORRIS: Well, I don't know of South America, but in the United States, in the 1910 census, it was down to 200,000 people. Because of diseases. There were diseases that existed in Europe, Asia and Africa which had never come to the Americas before and the first time a European, Asian or African came over here and sneezed, basically, these diseases and bacteria were introduced into the trade networks of the Americas and most Indians were gone before any European had any conception they were here.

BILL MOYERS: Entire cultures wiped out.

MICHAEL DORRIS: Yes.

LOUISE ERDRICH: Blankets were traded that were infected with smallpox¨

BILL MOYERS: Deliberately?

MICHAEL DORRIS: Yes.

LOUISE ERDRICH: Because it was obvious that this was a way of clearing the path. And this was looked upon as a completely ordained.

BILL MOYERS: You mean, the white men, the white Americans would trade blankets with the Indians that the whites had deliberately infected with smallpox.

LOUISE ERDRICH: Oh, yes.

MICHAEL DORRIS: Yes, they were shipped.

LOUISE ERDRICH: And you know, part of the reason for writing the book is to desanitize a history-

MICHAEL DORRIS: Muddy it up.

LOUISE ERDRICH: Muddy it up a little bit. The ordained push West, which was supposed to clear the land of the native inhabitants, they were supposed to vanish before progress; it never happened. There's cultures of over 300 tribes surviving, and somehow managing to keep together language, culture, religion. And these are not visible people.

BILL MOYERS: But only marginally. I mean, the picture that you draw in your books is of a people serving a life sentence; chronic poverty, chronic alcoholism. Indians have the highest teenage suicide rate, enormous infant mortality rate. That is not a pretty picture.

MICHAEL DORRIS: It isn't a pretty picture, but there's a different status for Indians in this country than for any other indigenous group any place else in the world. Because there is a political status that comes from treaties. The reservations that exist in this country are the remainder of Indian North America. They were never given up, and consequently they're deemed by the Supreme Court as "Domestic Dependent Nations," within their boundaries.

BILL MOYERS: This gives them the political-

MICHAEL DORRIS: There's a nation-to-nation relationship with the United States. I mean, if all of the treaties were kept by Indians, none of them were kept by the government to the letter of the law. Because those treaties provided for a continuing political identity for Indian Nations that has not been supported by the kinds of prerogatives that should have come as the result of the treaties. And so unlike any other ethnic group in the country, when Indians look at the government, they don't say, "Change things." They say, "Keep the laws that were made in the 19th century," which were more advantageous to Indians than laws that you might make now. And consequently, Indians oftentimes make poor coalition members for other minority groups because they're not looking for social change, they're looking to uphold the laws that exist.

BILL MOYERS: Are you saying they still have faith, despite the last hundred years? Faith in the law, faith in the political process?

MICHAEL DORRIS: What's the alternative? We're talking about one-half of one percent of the American population, and good will and following the law are the only options.

BILL MOYERS: Now, there's something else that comes through, which I wanted to ask you about. because I've also seen it in my own experience. If you go to the reservations, you see people, Native American Indians, honoring the flag of the white society that has desecrated them. There's one of your characters who advises her brother, I think it is, to go and fight in Vietnam. He goes to light in Vietnam, and he's killed. This paradoxical relationship to the wrongdoer.

MICHAEL DORRIS: But you see, that's what I was saying before. You have to believe in the American ideals if you're an Indian. Because those ideals set up treaties that recognized Indian sovereignty. And if Americans ever lived up to those ideals, it would be a good day for Indians.

BILL MOYERS:When you see the flag above the reservation, you're seeing people paying tribute to the ideal, not to the history.

MICHAEL DORRIS: Yes, and to their personal history. A greater percentage of Indians fought in the world wars than almost any other group. And they're honoring their own valor and courage and determination to fight for the ideals that other people fought for.

BILL MOYERS: Well, I can see that on the level of patriotism. Psychologically it's a different kind of problem, it seems to me. You have a character, Maria, in Love Medicine

LOUISE ERDRICH: Right

BILL MOYERS: -who has this strange relationship with this Catholic nun, who has scalded her and scarred her with a poker. And yet Maria says, "There are times when I want her heart and love and affection, and there are times when I want her heart on a black stick." And then at the end, Maria comes back as this elderly nun is dying, and kneels like a child beside her bed and is drawn in affection toward the one who has been her tormentor. The old psychological bonding that takes place between the victim and the wrongdoer. Is there something of that in the Native American psyche today?

LOUISE ERDRICH: I think there is more of an ironic survival humor between the victim and the oppressor.

MICHAEL DORRIS: And an understanding.

LOUISE ERDRICH: Yes.

MICHAEL DORRIS: I mean, it's necessary for the victim to understand the oppressor much more than the oppressor to understand the victim. And I think there has been 400 or 500 years of study of J European systems by Indian people. And very little reciprocity in that respect

LOUISE ERDRICH: Very little. Vine Deloria Jr. said that when Western Europeans came over, they possessed knowledge. Well, the people of the Western Hemisphere possessed a wisdom. And we were talking about how Native Americans have been forced to learn everything about the dominant culture. Very little has taken place, very little reciprocity, where there was so much to be learned.

BILL MOYERS: Many of your characters have this wonderful, wry look at the world, this ability to see the world with a raised eyebrow in a sense that's quite charming. And is that in real life as well? That's not invented?

LOUISE ERDRICH: It may be the one universal thing about Native Americans from tribe to tribe, is the survival humor.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean? The humor that enables you to?

LOUISE ERDRICH: To live with what you have to live with. You have to have a world view, you can just laugh at some of the-there's a dark. side to humor. And you have to be able to poke fun at people who are dominating your life and your family, and-

MICHAEL DORRIS: And to poke fun at yourself in being dominated, I mean, it's both-

LOUISE ERDRICH: Yes, yes. We're a mixture of Chippewa and Modoc and German American and French and Irish. I mean, all of these different backgrounds have an aspect that is part of us. And if we took ourselves too seriously in any way, I feel that we would be overwhelmed.

BILL MOYERS: It'd probably be like sitting in the General Assembly of the U.N. all day. I mean, that can get very, very frightening.

LOUISE ERDRICH: I don't think we take ourselves seriously, probably, enough even as writers. So that when we talk very seriously about our collaboration, and about serious literature; of course, it's the deepest thing in our lives. But it's hard to talk about it terribly seriously. And almost the most serious things have to be jokes, I think. It's the way we deal with the most difficult events in our lives. I mean, we're both members of our tribes and have tribal backgrounds. Once you're a citizen of both nations, it gives you a look at the world that is-it's different And there is that edge of irony. And if you have a Native American background, it's also a non-Western background, in terms of religion, culture, all of those things that are important in your childhood.

BILL MOYERS: What happens to a people whose gods have been banished? Because it wasn't until 1934 that the Federal Government allowed-

MICHAEL DORRIS: Nineteen seventy-eight

LOUISE ERDRICH: Yes. Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978.

BILL MOYERS: Oh, was that-I thought it was '34 that they lifted the ban on religious observance.

MICHAEL DORRIS: Seventy-eight

BILL MOYERS: What happens to people waiting for over a hundred years'? Their gods have literally been outlawed.

MICHAEL DORRIS: It's devastating. And it's something that the United States Government realized, and it was used. In the 19th century, there was something called the Ghost Dance that was practiced on the plains and in the Northwest And the Ghost Dance was a desperate belief when land had been taken away, the natural subsistence base had been denied them, people were confined to reservations, etc., it was saying. "This is all a test This has not really happened. and if we believe strongly enough, if we join hands, if we wear a Ghost Dance shin, and we dance in a circle and we deny this reality, that it'll all go away. And all the animals that have died, and the buffalo, and all the people who have died, everything will be restored the way it is because we have been tested."

This was a response of people who had no other power but faith. And what happened is the first Wounded Knee. A group of people traveling in dead of winter, old men and women and children, from one reservation in South Dakota to another reservation in South Dakota to do a Ghost Dance, were surrounded and obliterated by Gatling guns. The Ghost Dance shirts didn't work, they didn't turn away bullets. It was the low moment

LOUISE ERDRICH: It did convince the government that religious beliefs among Native Americans were dangerous. You know, some Indian people joke and say, "When missionaries came here, all they had was the book and we had the land. And now all we've got is the book, the Good Book, and they've got the land." I mean, the missionaries were the first contact in so many cases with the European society. And when the missionaries' religious zeal was also followed up with government withholding of food-there's a lot of violence to a conversion in which one is told. And who shouldn't believe it when people are dying of disease and you don't have a cure, that the God of someone else's, some healthy people, isn't a better god? I mean, this is the first contact a lot of people had. Now on reservations, people are religious according to what denomination was issued; what reservation, basically.

MICHAEL DORRIS: Under the Grant Administration.

BILL MOYERS: The government would say, "Well, this is a Methodist-the Methodists have the franchise here--"

MICHAEL DORRIS: No competition.

BILL MOYERS: Yes, and the Presbyterians have the franchise here.

LOUISE ERDRICH: But those religions are very strong, because in some places the greatest advocates for American Indians in their own reservation-

MICHAEL DORRIS: And social justice-

LOUISE ERDRICH: -is within the church.

BILL MOYERS: What are you telling your children about their identity?

LOUISE ERDRICH: We're just, as I did when I was a child, going back and forth. I didn't grow up on a reservation. I went back and forth. You get a view of what life is like in very different cultures, and, of course, you tell your child you are proud of your tribal background. We are proud of our tribal background. We are proud of our relatives. These are our relatives, these are our people.

BILL MOYERS: There is a character, I think in the Yellow Raft, the young 15-year-old half-breed who dreams of having a dog named Rascal, and of two parents.

MICHAEL DORRIS: Actually, she started out as a he. In the first draft of the novel she was a he, so you may have caught something there. Rayona is a contemporary character. Her father is a black mail-carrier from Oakland, her mother is an Indian from Eastern Montana. They met in what her mother describes as the wrong bar on the right night in Seattle. They love each other, but they can't live together. Rayona grows up very much an urban black Indian kid in a Northwest city. And then suddenly, Through a set of circumstances, she finds herself on a reservation where she's inappropriate in every respect. I mean, she's the wrong color, she's the wrong background, she doesn't speak the language as well; all these complications.

And I think what she's looking for there is some stable form of identity, and like all of us, she finds that from the movies, from television, from-you know, that is the media barrage that she's been exposed to. And if there's movement in her character in the book, it's finding her identity in herself eventually. But where do we go for our references? Where do people go when they try to imagine Indians? It's Jeff Chandler, Sal Mineo, you know.

BILL MOYERS: You tell the story somewhere about the Boy Scouts, going out to be Iroquois?

MICHAEL DORRIS: Yes. Our mailman of several years ago actually stopped by and said that he was a scout leader. And his troop wanted to be absolutely authentic Iroquois, and they were going to go and live in the woods for a week and so forth. What would I recommend that they take along'? And I said, "Their mothers," Because Iroquois were matrilineal, and these little 14-year-old kids wouldn't know what to do without their mothers telling them what to do. Well, that didn't work. They wanted hatchets or something.

BILL MOYERS: This seems to me to be such a critical point with your children, our children, everyone's children. Rayona, in A Yellow Raft, is on a search for identity, her identity. And she has to pick here and pluck there, and put it together in her own life. There is no way that almost any child today can have a clear and unrestricted profile, because all of us are from so many different backgrounds.

MICHAEL DORRIS: I think that's a plus, though.

BILL MOYERS: Oh, I do, too.

MICHAEL DORRIS: You know, I worry about people who find themselves in life too uncomplicated and don't have to struggle for that

BILL MOYERS: Or the people who are trapped on that reservation, mentally, psychologically, or geographically, who have no alternative to put together another perspective.

LOUISE ERDRICH: I don't think people who are living on reservations -half of American Indians are also u.rb3n Indians -think of reservations as traps. They are homelands. They are places where the culture is strongest, where the family is, where the roots are.

MICHAEL DORRIS: Where the language is spoken.

LOUISE ERDRICH: Where the language is spoken, where the people around you understand you, and you understand them. I mean, there's very subtle things about them being of mixed background that suddenly one's comfortable on a reservation. Reservations are places of great poverty and great comfort for people. And they're very important You see, the most important thing, I would say, if we're going to celebrate in some way Columbus's quincentennial, would be to, as Michael said, begin keeping the treaties, the over 400 treaties that were made and never kept. That would mean returning some of the land base to Native American people. Over the years award monies have been given to people since about half of the United States was bought for less than a dollar an acre and the rest of it simply taken. In very few cases have Native Americans been able to gain even a tiny parcel of land and return it to what remains of their holdings. If some of the treaties were kept-maybe some of the land from the public domain was returned to Native American communities-the land itself would mean that standards of living would rise, that so many of the problems would-people would be able to take care of themselves. It really comes down to the land, and the Federal Government has refused to return land in almost every case that has come up before the Indian Claims Commission.

BILL MOYERS: You have quoted Chief Standing Bear saying that America can be revived, rejuvenated, by recognizing a Native school of thought What do you mean by that?

MICHAEL DORRIS: I think there is one in common experience that Indian people across the hemisphere have that Europeans by and large lacked. And that is the experience of pluralism, of cultures that developed in an atmosphere in which they were surrounded by other cultures. That's the world. That is the world.

BILL MOYERS: We all are tribes?

MICHAEL DORRIS: We are really like that, you know. There are people who speak languages that have a whole different set of assumptions. One of the languages that learned to speak doing field work does not have a Single pronoun. No "I," "my," "me," "my." Everything is collectively "we" or "you." And SO it's expressed in the sense of the people, the people do this and the people do that. That gives you a whole different world view about ownership and about your responsibility to somebody else.

BILL MOYERS: And what do you think we would hear if we listened to these voices?

LOUISE ERDRICH: The first thing is people want to be who they are. People don't want to assume a kind of identity that, a sort of rippling identity that America thinks of; this persona that makes us the envy of the rest of the world. Even within our own borders there are 300 different cultures who do not envy Americans so much that they want to give up their tribal status.

BILL MOYERS: But be realistic, Louise. Can people survive this way in a highly individualistic, competitive-¨

LOUISE ERDRICH: Technological-

BILL MOYERS: -technological era?

LOUISE ERDRICH: I think that it becomes more and more imperative that people do survive that way. The very survival of people is a kind of a moral question. Native American people are surviving tribally within the borders of the dominant country. It has to cause people to think twice about ¨how they're living, what their assumptions are, what their view of the world is. When we talk about wisdom that was here, we're talking about cultures that managed to survive very well on the land without pushing it toward the brink of a very serious ecological crisis. We have to look at how people managed to do that.

BILL MOYERS: From their home in New Hampshire, this has been a conversation with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. I'm Bill Moyers.