Cynics Unlimited

See Also: Part 1

Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were Sioux (Lakota) Indians and Geronimo was an Apache Indian. Three is not many, but these individuals are known and the larger tribe or nation they were born into. This is different from Pocahontas, Pilgrims, Puritans, Squanto or the Mohawk where we know the group or the individual, but not both. This is a change.

Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Geronimo were 19th century American Indians that attached themselves to a rising power at the time, the United States. The wars with Plains Indians permitted no chance of victory for these Stone Age peoples against an advancing industrial civilization. Fighting however meant glory, a struggle with wins and losses. It gets your name in the media and creates history and stories. Simply fighting, even when you can’t achieve victory, prolongs the inevitable, but gets your voice heard and ringing through the ages. This was bad news, but sometimes that is the only way to get news out of your people. To let them know you are still out there, surviving against long odds against an implacable foe. You’ve got spirit on your side while they have superior arms, technology, and numbers, but still you battle them for decades and instil terror in them because they can never be sure where you will strike next.

We can easily conjure up mental images how Apache and Sioux Indians lived. Writers and Hollywood took this image and ran with it. Some of the portrayals were inaccurate and romantic on the silver screen and in print, but they discuss real real Indians and the world came to know them. They are American Indians that came from the Midwest, not the east coast. From the Midwest are the “real” American Indians. They seem like the first but they are not.

Not only do we know their names and nations of Crazy Horse, Geronimo and Sitting Bull, but also how they lived. Their famous hand signals, headdress of eagle feathers, their very manly and exciting methods of hunting buffalo, their famous tepees-cone shaped animal skin tents where smoke comes out and pipes are smoked for various reasons. These Plains Indians are icons of masculinity. Hunting buffalo on horses and chasing those vast thundering herds under the big sky is far more heroic than fishing or farming. One reason why William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody took his Wild West show, with Sitting Bull, to Europe.

In Canada a non-white, part European person in Louis Riel became famous when he led the Red River Rebellion against Canada in 1869-70. Again, west of the Great Lakes, on the wide open prairie of Manitoba he had room to manoeuvre. Riel is an important figure in Western Canadian history, a Métis, who was of French and aboriginal background. Riel is not well known among the general public, but he has no equivalent east of the Great Lakes in Canada. The Red River Métis were fur traders who worked with the Hudson Bay Company and were buffalo hunters that ranged across the western frontier until it closed late in the 19th century. The Métis hunted buffalo in wagons with their families, which is not as exciting as riding a horse, but their resistance to the government of Canada has put them firmly in the history books.

Another example that when you rebel against the government, they record it, the media reports this as news, and you get a measure of recognition you otherwise probably would not get had you not protested.

There is a legacy east of the Great Lakes that that remains from the colonial period. When looking at portraits of George Washington, one sees images of a cultivated man who looks like he could have been born in Europe. In fact, growing up in the mid 18th century, until his twenties, he considered himself English. It seems to have taken a successful war to create Washington‘s fame and an assertion he was no longer English. A new man in the New World made a new American country and the world wishes to find out more about him. England and other European powers do not give up their political grip easily, it has to be wrested away.

A portrait shows George Washington as a boy who has just chopped down the mythical cherry tree. The picture is an idealistic portrayal of a plantation in a well maintained landscape of gently rolling hills, green grass, and well built brick houses. This is could easily be an estate in Europe, safe, relaxed and comfortable. It is a far cry from the wilderness of the dusty Wild West with its sod huts, tepees, rain storms, tornadoes, floods, saloons, poker, six shooters, Winchester rifles, cowboys, Indians, buffalo, Rocky Mountains, tumble weeds, cactus, deserts, cowboy hats, cowboy boots, ranches, longhorn cattle, and cattle drives that shout, “not Europe.” A geographic space distinct from Europe, was not colonized by a European power, and thus permits a non-European people to emerge from it.

It was lands from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic that were directly governed by England and France. Through the charter of the Hudson Bay Company, so was most of Canada. Here were the colonies of England and France that had New France, New England, and Nova Scotia. How can you have Indians living in a region called England or France? Even if they are prefaced with the word “new”? The great powers of the day dominate the lands they control, and people who do not appear to be from England, France, Scotland, or Europe are dimly seen, faint in the distance. This cultural legacy lingers on through the centuries even as formal political control has ceased.

What is to be done? History cannot be changed, but interpretations can be, and new knowledge acquired that was not popular before. Trivia perhaps is one answer, it can be so trivial, yet it is fast and easy, built upon what we already know in small increments. Some trivia is unimportant, and should be forgotten, but not all of it is. Pocahontas is already in the media, in our consciousness, so modestly increasing what we already know about her is entirely feasible. One or two small questions that prod our thinking can be a start.

And the answers are Pocahontas spoke an Algonquin language and was in the Powhatan tribe.