BOOKS
Serpents
BY DONAT O'DONNELL
When Deganawida was leaving the Indians in the Bay of Quinte in Ontario 'he told the Indian people that they would face a time of great suffering. They would distrust their leaders and the principles of peace of the League, and a great white serpent was to come upon the Iroquois, and that for a time it would inter- mingle with the Indian people and would be accepted by. the Indians, who would treat the Serpent as a friend. This serpent would in .time become so powerful that it would attempt to destroy the Indian, and the serpent is described as choking the life's blood out of the Indian People. . . . And he told them that when things looked their darkest a red serpent would come from the north and approach the white serpent Which would be terrified, and upon seeing the red serpent he would release the Indian, who Would fall to the ground almost like a helpless child, and the white serpent would turn all its attention to the red serpent. , . . And Degana- wida said they [the Indians] would remain neutral in this fight between the white serpent and the red serpent.
AD BEAR, the Tuscarora Indian who related
, to Edmund Wilson serpent long allegory which ceders the story of the , is one of the 74,,clers of a messianic and nationalist movement rich has developed in recent years among the Tucluois 'Six Nations' in New York State and r�anada', and apparently affects in some degree ether Indians in regions as far afield as Florida, Wisconsin and even Arizona. Socially, this move- 'nent draws strength from the resentment created HY1 the impact of industrial society—particularly e Physical and legal impacts of greaf engineer- ing projects, 'thruways' and seaways—on the dian reservations with their ancient treaty- ,'ghts, never fully observed and never completely rescinded by the white man. Politically, the move- ment is strongly affected by the activities of the Ati,ewlY emerging nations,' not only in Asia and iiIri
ca but also in Latin America. Apologies to froquois* contains a photograph of Fidel
Castro receiving Mad Bear in Cuba in 1959 and, al according to Mr. Wilson, Iroquois nationalists h °13e that Cuba will sponsor the admission of the Iroquois League to the United Nations. Cul- ,urallY, the movement is traditionalist and pagan L) tendency. The dances and ceremonies of the °Iighouse are revived and there are even those l'-as yet a minority, it seems—Who want to return n,() the Sacrifice of the White Dog. Other sacrifices e not altogether to be excluded. Brigadier 7oldridge, a paleface sympathiser with the Indian 'atinnalists, once campaigned in favour of hang- hang- 13°H 11-Iarry nd Truman, General Bradley, Cardinal Spell a John Foster Dulles. We have no deans of knowing whether this programme ,,realed to Indians more than to other sections ' the population, but the Brigadier recently ,. Unselled violence to the Indians specifically: resist, with all their power, even to gunfire, if 'Ieeessary, in defence of their territory.' 4/n4g/es to the Iroquois is an extremely wi", APOLOGIES TO THE IROQUOIS. By Edmund Lcnn. (W. H. Allen, 30s.) interesting, attractive and yet finally unsatisfac- tory discussion of these questions. The interest and attraction derive from Mr. Wilson's well- known and unflagging powers of observation and description, and especially his watchful respect for individual members of an alien culture: the unsatisfactory character is probably the result of the peculiar requirements of the New Yorker, in which most of the material originally appeared. The more obviously irritating, characteristics of New Yorker reporting—artfully-artless meander. ing, and an affection for detail above and beyond the call of duty—are certainly not dominant here, but the reader is conscious that something of the kind has been expected, and that something better has been lost by reason of this expectation. 'The nationalist movement of the Iroquois,' writes Mr. Wilson, 'is only one of many recent evidences of a new self-assertion on the part of the Indians. The subject is much too large and complicated even to be outlined here, but . . .' No doubt it is large and complicated, and no doubt there is much to be said for Mr. Wilson's method of confining himself to a few tribes and a few con- crete problems, rather than indulging in general- isations about Indian movements. Yet as a long description of a dance follows a long account of a lawsuit and, these are followed by another law- suit and another dance, it is possible to feel that room could, after all, have been found. if not for an outline of American Indian nationalism today, at least for something more than the shrewd, tantalising hints scattered through the 300 pages of this volume. Not that there is anything frivolous about either the lawsuits or the dances: it is the slow, restless oscillation from subject to subject, the New Yorker's ton de bonne com- pagnie, that is frivolous. But the white serpent has come to crave this cunning mixture of infor- mation and distraction, and even Mr. Wilson must sacrifice to him.
In Mad Bear's allegory there is also a black serpent, who eventually defeats the red and white serpents, and whose victory is the prelude to the return of the Indian messiah, Deganawida, and the restoration of the Indian nation. The culminating moment is already at hand. The big war between the red and white serpents is due to begin in 1960, and as a result of it the United States is to come to an end and a great light will come to the Indian people.
No doubt such fantasies are common to all oppressed peoples—and a people can still feel itself oppressed, even if no one is any longer conscious of oppressing it. Nor is there anything new in what is represented by the red serpent— a sporting flutter on the enemy of one's enemy. .`England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity' was for long the watchword of the most irreconcilable `minority people' in Western Europe. What is probably new, however, is the role of the black serpent—the feeling that a general victory of oppressed non-white peoples is at hand. Mr. Wilson writes They know that they came from the Orient,
and they know what has, been happening, in China. They also know that India has freed her- self, that Ghana is now a free state, and that the Algerians are struggling to become one. They have sensed that the white man has been losing his hold and, like the rest of the non-white races, they are sick of his complacency and arrogance. They find this a favourable moment for declar- ing their national identity because, in view of our righteous professions in relation to the Ger- mans and Russians, they know that, for the first time in history,. they are in a position to black- mail us into keeping our agreements and honor-
ing their claims. '
Cold war, unlike hot war, has probably more beneficiaries than victims, but it resembles hot war in that those who are most apt to benefit are those who manage to avoid taking part in it. The American Indians, like so many African and Asian peoples—but unlike the people of Tibet:— may greatly gain, mateiially and politically, from the cold war. Agreeable as this is, it is not with- out its dangers, even for the beneficiaries. All weak peoples are apt to cherish a sense of superior virtue, corresponding to the magnitude of the crimes they have been powerless to com- mit. This sense, in times of oppression, is a relatively harmless consolation. On the emer- gence of freedom it becomes a costly delusion. Atavistic practices, being felt to guarantee the tribal distinctness—and therefore superiority— become more cherished than intelligence or even common sense. The reverses brought about by this scale of preferences will in the long run, if there is, one, overthrow it; in the short run they are more likely to intensify atavism : 'The Sacri- fice of the White Dog was not, it seems, enough. . .
Logically, the discredit of racism should have done nothing to make primitive animism respect- able. In practice the white man's shame does tend to have that effect-The eighteenth century pro- nounced the Savage noble, in cheerful ignorance of how the Savage behaved; the twentieth, cen- tury, having had the opportunity to .study all varieties of savagery, refuses to pronounce a value-judgment at all. The resources of civilisation have, apparently, become exhausted quicker than Mr. Gladstone would have thought possible. It is only 'apparently,' of course; the anthropologist who writes as if he thought that the practices of head-hunters were no less valuable and no less commendable than the proceedings of the Royal Society is playing a scientific game, which most of his readers understand. But members of the communities studied might be forgiven for taking the game seriously; for reaching the conclusion that Western civilisation, having studied what it wrongly took to be a primitive form of society, had been forced to see that this society was in fact an alternative civilisation, of no less value than that of the declining West. The relativist anthropologists of the twentieth century may be seen in retrospect to have been no less disastrous than the absolutist ethnologists of the last century. For something like the dream which haunts Mad Bear—and no doubt many other Mad Bears in other parts of the world—may very easily come true. The red and white serpents may indeed destroy each other, and the black serpent may inherit the earth. In the perspective of human history this need not be an unmitigated disaster —except for amateurs of a particular pigmenta- tion--provided that the transit of civilisation has already been successfully accomplished. But it will be a pity if the survivors of the human race are in such a mental state—as a result, among other things, of anthropological 'respect'- that they fancy their survival to be a result of their
persistence in aii k illeing ro-gs.. ,
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