File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9801, message 199


From: cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Subject: M-I: The Lakota
Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 14:22:25 -0600 (CST)



Lou P quotes Crazy Horse:
> 
> "We did not ask you white men to come here. The Great Spirit gave us this
> country as a home. You had yours. We did not interfere with you. the Great
> Spirit gave us plenty of land to live on, and buffalo, deer, antelope and
> other game. But you have come here; you are taking my land from me; you are
> killing off our game, so it is hard for us to live. Now, you tell us to
> work for a living, but the Great Spirit did not make us to work, but to
> live by hunting. You white men can work if you want to. We do not interfere
> with you, and again you say, why do you not become civilized? We do not
> want your civilization! We would live as our fathers did, and their fathers
> before them."

I trust in future reports you will be more detailed on the background of
this, since you plan to read more primary documents than I have at my
disposal. But The Lakota are a very particular instance of an Amerindian
culture formed by European impact. I quote from Stephanie Coontz, *The
Social Origins of Private Life*, Chapter 2, "The Native American
Tradition," the section on "The Case of the Plains Indians":

   We are now in a better position to evaluate the reports of women's
degraded status among the Plains Indians. Ironically, the Plains Indian
life portrayed in the popular media since the 19th c was entirely the
result of European influence. It was the rise of the fur trade, the new
demand for pemmican, and the decline of farming villages due to disease --
all the consequences of European contact -- that increased the reliance of
Indians on the buffalo hunt, while it was the horse and gun -- also
introduced by Europeans -- that made hunting an individualized, male
activity. Alan Klein has pointed out that buffalo were originally hunted
through "impounding," in which all the men and women of the tribe
surrounded the animals and drove them into a trap, where they were
dispatched with clubs. In this period, he argues, the entire family
participated equitably in the distribution of meat and hides. The
introduction of the horse, however, led to the exclusion of women,
children, and old people from the process of acquiring buffalos. As
farming declined, these members of society "became *subjects* of
distribution rather than active participants in it."

  When the fur trade stimulated men to kill more buffalo than they needed
for subsistence, the wife's traditional role of hide-processing became
greatly magnified and the most successful hunters needed to pull in more
labor. Both Klein and Oscar Lewis have shown that this was achieved
through a fall in the age of marriage for women to preadolescence, a sharp
increase in the number of wives per hunter, and a tightening of
restrictions upon wives. . . .(The reported frequency of mutilations of
adulterous women in the 19th century should be related to this increase in
male authority and also, perhaps, to the fact that an unfaithful wife
challenged the husband's control over her work as well as her sexuality.)

  At the same time, the individual nature of the fur trade exacerbated
wealth differentials and social fragmentation. The rise of male sodalities
"worked to take up the slack left by the erosion of the collective mode of
production and distribution" but also further "raised the already rising
position of men *vis-a-vis* women." With the beginning of the reservation
system, from the 1870s, Plains Indian women lost all remnants of their
traditional role in "supervising the distribution of meat from their
collective hunts."

  The image of Indians chasing buffalo, making war on each other, and
dominating women, children and elders was obviously an attractive one to
19th-c Americans. If traditional Indians lived thus, it was possible to
argue that first the colonists and then the expansion of the Republic had
brought "civilization" to the New World, where before there had been
hunger, disease, violence, and male dominance. . . .
	Coontz, pp. 66-67

My main point, I guess, is that even the culture that Indians in the 19th
century defended against the invading Europeans (and to which most
accounts of Native American culture seem to look back) was *already* a
"European-Native American" culture, not a Native American culture.

My second point is that defending the rights of contemporary "natives"
need not and should not depend on the virtues and vices of their "native
culture," but on their rights as humans. The present policies of the U.S.
government and U.S. corporations towards Indians is criminal and
outrageous, and would be *even if* the "Native American" Culture had been
utterly abominable.

I can agree in advance with most of what Louis P will be writing us in the
next week, with one qualification: decent rights for Native Americans must
*not* depend on the accuracy of those arguments. The political conclusions
that Lou has been arguing for the last couple of weeks hold regardles of
what we might think of Native American culture.

Carrol


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