Absurdities abound

Neither Columbine nor Red Lake resulted from "ethnic enclaves"

Posted March 30, 2005 5:00AM PST

According to columnist Eric Wang, the school shooting at Red Lake is about ethnic isolation:

(T)he Minnesota murders were a case study of the dangers of what The Washington Post, in a news article, called "a long tradition of self‑enforced isolation" on Native American reservations. — Eric Wang, Shutting down the Trail of Tears, The Cavalier Daily, March 30, 2005

A litany of ills that plague Indian country followed, to support his assertion: violent crime, suicide, poverty and alcoholism. Wang's solution? An end to tribal sovereignty:

Under "tribal sovereignty" self-government agreements, the reservations have no stake in the national political system, and vice versa. … Rather than continue to imprison individuals in the ethnic enclaves of our de facto apartheid, we should embrace assimilation as the way to shut down the trail of tears for individuals of all physical races. — Eric Wang, Shutting down the Trail of Tears, The Cavalier Daily, March 30, 2005

How absurd! There are two glaring flaws with his premise. First, the problems are not isolated to Indian reservations, but affect American Indians throughout the nation. Second, it ignores Columbine, unless Wang is suggesting that Columbine suffered from being too white.

To attribute Jeff Weise's rampage to reservation life is the easy, obvious conclusion. It's the knee‑jerk explanation, and it's wrong. Not that the reservation system is perfect. But, as leading American Indian conservative commentator David Yeagley noted, Red Lake could benefit from more, not less ethnic isolation:

American Indians have fully assimilated: Indian youth can commit the same catastrophic crimes that blacks, whites, and Mexican do. … How can we expect better behavior when we assimilate the lower‑end of pop culture? — David Yeagley, Death and Assimilation, Reasons for Red Lake, Bad Eagle Forums, March 27, 2005

Easy explanations imply easy solutions. The problems, as Dr. Yeagley notes in his column, and as I explore below, are not complicated. But the solutions preclude dismissing it as an "Indian problem," for which the only solution is a subtle attack on Indian tribal sovereignty: Instead, it requires getting back to the conservative principles that made Indian tribes strong. This doesn't require isolation, but it does require rejecting the corrupting influences of mainstream progressive‑liberal society.

A culture of despair

To have better dreams, our children need better stories

Commentators on the left are over‑analyzing the Weise case and, among other things, using it to blame everything on Bush. Many commentators on the right, meanwhile, oversimplify the issues. Both extremes misunderstand. Indian Reservations have problems, but many of those same problems plague Indians who do not live on reservations. Beyond that, however, the tragedy at Red Lake is about America's youth. Like the Columbine kids, Weise was a Goth. Lacking strong relationships with elder role models, he filled his head with bad stories, bad dreams and vicious aspirations. They need us to give them better stories and relationships, from which they will draw better dreams and higher aspirations.

Posted March 28, 2005 5:30AM PST

"The gods walk on every road of man, and every road of man in sacred." — John Collier, U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1933‑1945, Indians of the Americas, 1947

When self‑loathing explodes, it takes many victims.

Listening to Air America's Mark Riley and Laura Flanders, on Morning Sedition, prattle with their callers about the tragedy on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, I could only shake my head. The closest anybody came to saying anything relevant was one incensed caller who said Jeff Weise and Native Americans are "disenfranchised." There's some truth in that. Unfortunately, he placed the blame for this on George W. Bush, and then flew off on a tangent about the Cobell Trust Case, which he blamed on Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton.

Secretary Norton is one of my heroines, and I rank her in stature with John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1945. To blame her for Cobell is ridiculous. The original complaint was filed in 1996, during the Clinton Administration, when it languished and got little attention until after Bush was sworn in.

The degree of relevancy of everything that Riley, Flanders and their callers had to say declined from there: Bush is to blame because he has institutionalized bullying in America; Bush is to blame because the No Child Left Behind Act took away money needed to properly counsel Weise; the NRA is to blame because they're responsible for assault rifles being on the streets. It's the typical nonsense of the left, chasing hither and yon like a litter of kittens, finding nothing of value.

As Vine Deloria Jr. noted in God is Red, "The left wing thrives on social movements and fads of all kinds." Typically, Progressive‑Liberals are utterly clueless about Indian country. They don't see the part they have played in creating the culture of despair.

Culture of Despair: The wet blanket

The tendency of pundits is to overanalyze what happened in Red Lake, but I understand Jeff Weise. Many Indians do. It has more than anything else to do with the self‑loathing perpetuated primarily by the progressive‑liberal agenda that stifles the human spirit nowhere in America more effectively than it does in Indian country. In broad terms, Indians want what every American wants—to live well, to love and be loved, to experience the fullness of life—but we are also born into ancient communities that are historically rather than consciously communalist. (For an informative discussion of the difference between historic and conscious communalism, see What is Communalism? The Democratic Dimension of Anarchism, by Murray Bookchin.)

Contrary to liberal myth, there is nothing intrinsically mystical or socialist about American Indian communalism. Historically, it embodies principles which today are defined as Conservative. Offended by the conservative nature of traditional Indian communalism, Progressive‑Liberals fell like a wet blanket on Indian country, insisting that we conform to their mythical notions of the "noble savage," or that we live like eco‑nurturing, gay‑loving, socialist feminists, in pristine poverty.

The consequences of the oppressive policies spawned by their views—which I describe as "smiling racism"—are pervasive, destructive and intensely personal:

Many (Indian people) are trapped between tribal values constituting their unconscious behavior responses and the values that they have been taught in schools and churches, which primarily demand conforming to seemingly foreign ideals. Alcoholism and suicide mark this tragic fact of reservation life. People are not allowed to be Indians and cannot become whites. — Vine Deloria Jr., God is Red

For many of us, the result is a despondent self‑loathing that starts with rebellion and ends either with a downward spiral into a truncated life of half‑measures, or personal abrogation of the Indian within.

One of the best dramatizations of this that I have ever seen was in the movie Thunderheart, in which Val Kilmer plays Ray Levoi, an FBI agent who is "half Sioux" Indian. Agent Levoi hates his Indian ancestry, and has turned his back on anything to do with it. But when he is ordered to an assignment on a reservation, he experiences a racking epiphany that forces him to accept his Indian identity and confront the pervasive culture of despair.

Levoi witnesses the strength of his people, their humanity, the moral fiber of those who fight against the moneyed interests and smiling racism to lift the people out of their poverty and restore their pride. He sees them killed, and as he and the sheriff, played with characteristic wit by Graham Greene, are chased to a literal dead end by an array of characters, led by a villainous "BIA Indian," played to perfection by Fred Ward, Levoi comes to a figurative end as his worldview disintegrates.

Wracked by the struggle, he turns and reaches out to his supervisor, played by Sam Shepard, who pleads with him to come back before it's too late. But it's already too late, Levoi has seen the truth: that the culture of despair is not characteristic of Indian country, but is imposed by the smiling racism that lies draped over Indian country like a wet blanket.

The paradoxical relationship of self‑loathing and self‑respect

The smiling racism characteristic of the left is not the only drag on Indian country. Many on the right do not understand the legal relationship between contemporary Indian tribes and modern America.

Most Americans are taught to think of Indians in terms of heritage, that we are a conquered people, and victims whom they must compensate. This, it is commonly taught, is why Indians get "special rights." What nonsense! Many tribes were never conquered, and Indian rights are property rights, just as is the inheritance of Bill Gates' heirs. Yet because we are taught to view Indian rights in the context of heritage rather than inheritance, we are cast as recipients of unconstitutional privileges rather than owners of inherited property rights. A misunderstanding which provokes understandable hostility from many on the right.

Together, the smiling racism on the left and the hostility on the right create a culture of despair in Indian country that fills many Indians with a self‑loathing that, paradoxically, arises out of self‑respect. Believing we are competent to live, which is the essence of self‑respect, we instinctively reject the incompetence imposed on us by the left, recoil from the hostility on the right, and loath that which society says makes us incompetent and unjustly privileged.

I know this from personal experience.

During the hearings preceding the famous Boldt Decision, I was attending Highline Community College, where the prevailing sentiment was against the tribes. At that time, my own tribe was not yet federally acknowledged, and so I was Indian in blood only, even though my father was active in the Quinault Allottees Association. While discussing the Boldt Decision with my parents, I angrily spat out that I disagreed with Judge Boldt. "I'm not one of those people," I snarled, referring to reservation Indians.

Indian reservations bear the brunt of the wet blanket. They are the focal point, where the hostility and smiling racism converge to douse and smother the stoutest spirit. Apathy, particularly in the 1970s, was pervasive on the reservations. What self‑respecting person would embrace that? And so, like Kilmer's character in Thunderheart, I loathed my Indian self and disagreed with the Boldt Decision.

Legally, of course, Judge Boldt was absolutely right: it's not about the interests of Indian individuals versus other American citizens, but agreements between governments. The Boldt Decision found that the governments of the "Medicine Creek Treaty Tribes" and the government of the United States shared the fish (salmon) "in common": half for citizens of the United States, and half for citizens of the treaty tribes. The logic of this did not escape me as a youth, but because of the smiling racism that is particularly prevalent among progressive liberals in western Washington state, I rejected it.

Surrounded by savagery

Why would I care about anti‑Indian racism, smiling or otherwise? Especially since I didn't grow up on a reservation, but in the solidly middleclass and progressively liberal community of Normandy Park.

Although we grew up in pre‑feminist America, a time when most mothers remained home and maintained the neighborhood networks that made the streets safe for children to socialize without fear of abductions or predators, our childhood was filled with violence. Our paternal grandparents provided our only sanctuary; nowhere else were we safe and accepted as being like anybody else. Not that this had everything to do with being Indian—being a very high functioning autist, or having what is now called Asperger's Disorder, poses challenges all its own—but because we are Indian, most of our teachers and other adults treated us differently, and looked the other way when our peers turned savage.

Though Jeff Weise grew up on a reservation and was not, to my knowledge, autistic in any form, I can see many similarities between his life and mine, and between him and me. So while many will pick through the pieces of young Jeff Weise's life, looking for and finding evidence to support their theories, because of the similarities between his life and mine, what I see is his search, and where it took him. What he needed, he thought he found in Hitler:

Weise was also found by the St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper to have posted several comments last year on an online forum frequented by neo-Nazis. He used the pen names Todesengel, German for "angel of death," and "NativeNazi." … "I guess I've always carried a natural admiration for Hitler and his ideals, and his courage to take on larger nations," Weise wrote in one session. … He also wrote that he planned to recruit high school students to join a neo-Nazi movement he hoped to start on his reservation. — Teen who killed 9 claimed Nazi leanings, NBC, MSNBC and news services, March 23, 2005

Evidently, he wrote and talked about racial purity and other aspects of the Nazi paradigm. But according to Weise, "when you speak your mind on the subject you get 'silenced' real quick by the teachers and likeminded school officials." This is typical, and it's stupid. Today we can blame political correctness, but the revulsion for discussing "taboo" subjects is older than my rickety old car. Contrary to what feminists believe, the way to make "inappropriate thoughts" go away isn't by shushing them up.

Helping youthful minds to understand the wherefore and the why of life requires engaging in dialogue, something that's hard to do when so much of our speech, today, is forbidden and subject to sanction. Ironically, it's easy to dismiss the myth of racial purity, which disintegrates before the vigor demonstrated throughout nature by what's known as "hybrid hardiness." But tearing down the ideas that formed the cracked foundation of his emerging identity would not have helped Weise form a more appropriate expression of himself.

In search of identity

In his search for identity, Weise wanted more than the little pond of platitudes upon which most people drift, casting the line of their lives into mysteries and accepting what minnows fate hooks for them with vague dissatisfaction. Weise wanted his life to mean something, to be part of something bigger than himself, and as Eric Hoffer noted in his seminal work, The True Believer, this is a powerful force. It has built and destroyed empires, killed and nurtured millions, and instilled both fanatics and defenders of the status quo with a sense of purpose.

To some degree, we all want for identity, some sense of who we are; but for Indians, trapped between cultures, this can be a particularly compelling need. So just as Weise did, when I was his age, I went in search of identity, too. But where young Jeff found Hitler, I found Doc Smith. Okay, Smith wrote science fiction, the first space operas, but just as the fictions of Hitler and the Nazis made a huge and tragic difference in the life of Weise, so Smith's stories gave me better dreams which, combined with my parents' South Park conservatism and my grandparents' love, led me to choose a path very different from the one that led Weise to his tragic end at Red Lake High.

We must not ignore that Weise is responsible for his decisions and the harm he caused, nor should we judge the people of Red Lake Indian Reservation, but what could his community have done differently that would have changed his choices? As with the shootings in the City of Columbine, there are lessons to be learned of the things that these and other communities can do, for although we are responsible for the choices we make, we are also a product of our environment:

Societies exist. They create a people's temperament, the world‑view and the color and structure of personality among their members. They deep‑dye the peoples; and myriad are the dyes and juxtapositions of colors with myriad patterns. Present‑day men are not everywhere the same; men on the average through recorded time have never been everywhere the same. This is because societies differ one from the other; they make the man. To individuals they are nurture, shaper and fate. — John Collier, U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1933‑1945, Indians of the Americas, 1947

Part of the answer, I believe, lies in telling our children better stories. There is a passage I read, years ago, in a book about Indians which, though I have been unable to find it, speaks with particular force to both the political dialogue in America today, and to the insane acts of violence committed by Weise. The question goes something like this:

What stories do you tell your children at night, to fill their sleep with dreams that make them eager to wake up in the morning?

For Jeff Weise, as for so many of America's children, the stories we tell fill their sleep with nightmares. Stories that promote what Michael Medved describes as a "culture of death."

For more than 40 years, feminists have droned, screamed, whined and murmured in "reasoned whispers" about the evil nature of males. During that same time, environmentalists have wailed about the horrors that modern civilization inflicts on the planet, that we must revert to a more primitive state and "walk lightly" upon the planet. And most on the left have persistently complained that America is an evil nation which is guilty of a multitude of crimes for which all Americans must be ashamed. African American groups, meanwhile, claim to be victims of everybody, including, according to some organizations, American Indians. And Progressive Liberals sneer that they are superior to all the "stupid peasants."

With these and so many other dark stories, who can blame our children if they see the world as a dark place and go in search of dark identities to match? What do they have to gain from living virtuous lives? By what communities can they hope to be embraced and celebrated when the TV shows are full of unsavory people screeching at one another, and the talking head shows are dominated by cynics pointing fingers and shouting "liar!"

If we want our children to have better dreams, if we want them to live better lives and have higher aspirations, then we need to tell them better stories. Stories that fill their nights with good dreams and their days with optimism and hope.