A Dark Side of James: Native North Americans and a Way Out of the Darkness

You got to look at thingswith the eye in your heart,not with the eye in your head.—Lame Deer1it is surprising to find in the writings of William James (1842–1910) a condescending and stereotypical view of the Native North Americans, which he shared with most of his fellow white Americans at the time. However, James and the Native North Americans did share a holistic view of nature. For example, they abhorred the systematic deforestation of forests. But his view and the white settlers’ view of nature excluded the Native North Americans’ ways of life and living. Most of James's statements are about the Northern Great Plains Indians, so most of my discussion centers around the Sioux or the D/Lakota accounts of the land and their idea of self. These conflicting perceptions of the white settlers (and James) and those of the Lakota are reflected in the evolving recent cases of the US Supreme Court regarding Indian legal jurisdiction, which I examine later in this essay. Colonialism raises its ugly head in these discussions. I conclude with a promising note of possible synthesis of some of James's cornerstone ideas and those involving the land and self in Lakota thought, especially those of Robin Wall Kimmerer (in note 27).A dark side of James is his attitude toward Native North Americans. These attitudinal remarks range in time and occasion. I start with the last statement of 1910: “The earlier men were hunting men; and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial tribes selected, and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder.”2 This passage is that of a spectator, superficially seeing the subjects externally and not from within, and James is primarily describing the warlike behavior of Plains Indians. However, some tribes came together in times of war. In a passage from “The Kit Fox Society among the Oglala Sioux” (Anonymous): Brave young men of good repute were chosen as members. It was gotten up when the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and Sioux were associated together and all other Indians were considered enemies. This society was originated for the purpose of holding these Indians together and keeping them friendly to each other.3A related remark by James comes from “Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” where he says: “Others again, like survival, are quite indeterminate in their consequences, and leave us in the lurch where we most need their help: a philosopher of the Sioux Nation, for example, will be certain to use the survival-criterion in a very different way from ourselves.”4 We generally begin with negotiation, and if it fails, then we may make a last resort move to a combatant mode. Is it conflict vs. conflict (the alleged Sioux way) or negotiate vs. conflict? The question is how conflict is to be handled. In keeping with this way of thinking, James states: “The thought of very primitive men has hardly any tincture of philosophy. Nature can have little unity for savages. . . . ‘Close to nature’ tho’ they live, they are anything but Wordsworthian.”5 James is referring to the poet's reverence for nature. In this passage, James is mistaken because reverence for nature is one of the core beliefs of the Native North Americans, as we shall see below.Also, James speaks of “primitive men” and “savages,” but it must be remembered that “[m]any of the aspects of the so-called savage war,” for instance, torture, “were taught to Indians by European example” (Conley 65).Things become darker when we turn to James's psychological studies, especially Psychology: A Briefer Course: With us he [the subject] gives himself out at the worst for an Indian or other grotesquely speaking but harmless personage. The “control” here in America is either a grotesquely, slangy, and flippant personage (“Indian” controls, calling the ladies “squaws,” the men “braves,” the house a “wigwam,” etc. are excessively common; or, if he ventures on higher intellectual flights, he abounds in a curiously vague optimistic philosophy-and-water, in which phrases about spirit, harmony, beauty, law, progression, development, etc., keep recurring).6It is difficult to make sense out of this passage; control at worst would be linguistic in that these are native terms with no derogatory connotations, as James suggests. But these so-called native terms, like “squaw,” have become highly controversial. The former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (a member of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico) declared “squaw” to be a racist, derogatory term and removed it from use at the federal level, including by beginning the process to remove the word from place names under federal jurisdiction (Chappell).We need to pay closer attention to the “higher intellectual flights” of Native North Americans. They may be closer to philosophy proper than philosophy-and-water or diluted philosophy than he claims. James didn't have available the native literature we have today, so we are in a better position to assess these claims. Why James made some of these claims is puzzling given what he did have on hand. Some claims are even dogmatic without examples.Now, for the briefer passages. In a letter to his parents (dated 21 April 1865) from Rio, Brazil, James compared the Brazilians to Indians using skin color, “without a particle of red.”7 However, this remark does not make James a racist; while at Harvard, he had several graduate students who were black, whom he helped with admission and to graduate with advanced degrees. And in a letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (dated 17 September 1867) from Berlin, James compared himself to “the base Indian, threw evening after evening away which I might have spent in your bosom, sitting in your whitely-lit-up room, drinking in your profound wisdom” (Hardwick 34–35). Are we speaking of laziness or relaxation of the Native North Americans here?For the question of the reverence of nature, let me begin with the treatment of the land and the Earth. This is taken from James's “personal example.”8 He recalled that while he was journeying in the North Carolina mountains, he passed by numerous “coves,” or heads of small valleys between the hills, which had been newly cleared and planted. In such a situation, he observed: The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The settler had in every case cut down the more manageable trees and left their charred stumps standing. The larger trees he had girdled and killed, in order that their foliage should not cast a shade. He had then built a log cabin, plastering it chinks with clay, and had set up a tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs and cattle out. Finally, he had irregularly planted the intervals between the stumps and trees with Indian corn, which grew among the chips; and there he dwelt with his wife and babes—an axe, a gun, a few utensils, and some pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being the sum total of his possessions. (WWJ 630–31)With this description, James added the following judgment: “The forest had been destroyed; and what had ‘improved’ it out of existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature's beauty” (WWJ 631). In their manifesto, Tuck and Yang characterized this process as setter's colonialism.9 They added: “The settler is making a new ‘home’ and that home is rooted in a homesteading worldview where the wild land [and] wild people were made for his benefit.” We shall return to these unsettling issues below.In a less dark moment, James's answer to nature's beauty, and loss of beauty under the hands of settlers, is like that of the Native North Americans. For example, Charles Alexander Eastman (1858–1939), or Ohiyesa, his Sioux name, remembers the past: As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I became civilized. I lived the natural life, whereas I now live the artificial. Any pretty pebble was valuable to me then; every growing tree an object of reverence. Now I worship with the white man before a painted landscape whose value is estimated in dollars! Thus, the Indian is reconstructed, as the natural rocks are ground to powder and made into artificial blocks which may be built into the walls of modern society. (Eastman 128)Eastman was a prolific writer and spokesperson for the Native North Americans.James continued his personal example of human blindness with the following argument that weaves newly cleared nature and culture together: Talk about going back to Nature! I said to myself, oppressed by the dreariness, as I drove by. Talk of a country life for one's old age and for one's children! Never thus, with nothing but the bare ground and one's bare hands to fight the battle! The beauties and commodities gained by the centuries are sacred. They are our heritage and birth-right. No modern person ought to be willing to live a day in such a state of rudimentariness and denudation. (WWJ 631)Moral obligation to future generations is alluded to here. The sacredness of the land is voiced by many Native North Americans; for instance, Chief Seattle, as the Dwamish leader, spoke to Isaac Stevens, Governor of Washington Territory, in 1854, and declared: Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. The very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than to yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch.10This is Chief Seattle's noble reason for nature's sacredness. Of this literature, it is one of the best, most elegant statements of the sacred soil conception.A particular conception of the land is given by Red Cloud in his Abdication Speech, 4 July 1903, “I Was Born a Lakota:” The Great Spirit made us, the Indians, and gave us this land we live in. . . . We moved on our hunting grounds from the Minnesota to the Platte [River] and from the Mississippi to the . . . the there we and no house No one this is my to that is . . . The from to The he to us to and us if we would let the white people have our . . . Now where the the and the there are on that the . . . and where the Lakota as he from the to the of the for days and days on his James continued his with his sort of people are they who have to make these new of he we happy here we are one of these under I that I had been the of the to me the spoke of but . . . when they on the what they thought of was personal The the girdled trees and the spoke of and The was a of for self and wife and In the which to me was a ugly on the was to them a with and a very of and (WWJ in the is or by The of this James is “I had been as to the of their as they would have been to the of had they a at my way of life at that (WWJ 631). As we have James had a blindness when it came to the Native North that James from his personal example is that a process of life an to who there the life the is more up with with the with the with But it is there is the the the of and there is in the and sense in which can (WWJ what are we to make of the conflict between these Native North and the has got to so how we The answer James came to in this was that all but one particular of would be the we have to pay for being in some some or or when the man a does the externally and a of into . . . the of life us, so different from that of our the of our then our self is and its to then a new and a new must be (WWJ is it to be it was there all in North and it had been there for The were so with European philosophy and that they see what was The Native North Americans had all But it was so James had to was this He did not answer this question but he did it which we shall see the to the Native North Americans which we James's personal example an attitude to and a reverence toward nature that he shared with he did not and he didn't it in its of Native North Americans’ for James is was not an for (in of because its toward life is the so as to leave upon it as a sort of or (WWJ Nature is of or and no with it is no here. However, was an because “the and human must and the in other it the way of (WWJ He is in then of and we and the are of the (WWJ very like what we find in Native North and if it is to be are the for or philosophy. James's is then the because his is more than the “The under such James to to a more profound and primitive in In a letter to (dated James I and not a savage as I would and to be the that I ought to be with But I that you to the are some and in that where one can on one's and long as one up for a while to one's of and from every and out on such a might what (Hardwick in the is a or an between James and the Native North Americans. It like he would have thought of them in and these but he James was to use his terms and he would make the white settlers out to be and the the Arapahoes, and the himself to be James the this a of view the between a of and one of the between a of and one of might it a for after the of us all is the whose we we must be of the on we may and keep no (WWJ for the Native North the of the is in people of that time the in the Indian we examine James's conception of nature, we find of and especially However, James that the Native North Americans had such a as from the with which we this his James's reverence for the land is to some of the we find advanced in the Native North literature, but the Native North the idea of of land very For instance, in by Chief of the Nation, an member had these people [the to our village and our which the Great Spirit had given us to live reason me that land be The Great Spirit gave it to his to live upon and as as for their and so long as they and it they have the to the but if they leave then any other people have a to on can be but such can be (Eastman in a more a Chief (in the land of The the way to this is for the men to in a and in the land as it was at and should be it was but to No has the to even to each less to . . . a Why not the the as well as the not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his in the is puzzling The land of were and the and one would James would have to the Native North of but nothing was from of what to the Native North Americans James's This James's which is “the of people and centuries later a the way we to nature, we to the land and the land to to be and for or had a to it it was a man or a a an Indian or a white The land was here and it for the James have with this on the the it is difficult to he would have given his intellectual and than Tuck and Yang for a of and and and they for on the part of no one is from is in what to people and their thought was to the but the Sioux of a of are of the soil and the soil is of We are not of and its we are about here is This is what Tuck and Yang to as be a an conception is in the Sioux us that it was and of since the man from the soil in the of the personal an to not one's but the the The of the word is In of the it in this The Indian is of the it be the of or He into the for the that the the man for his He grew as as the wild he as the a conception of is most and we such an In most of personal it is to or or or However, these are to the Native North of personal James's conception of personal is to us in making sense of the that the self is the is left is the sense of being associated with the with the European of land in terms of James like that of the settler and the of their James and the were but in different a from Tuck and Yang the (the of nature and and (the of people and which was by He had a to make when it came to at nature in the wild or made by the “the beauties and commodities gained by the centuries are and modern person ought to be willing to live a without he not have thought this way given how he grew up in a white of which he was an and the Native North Americans about a self. is how or when is is when we a sense of self. is part of by like would be a of would be a from these we can that is about by a loss of is it or For a it would be the which make it up they may For instance, the loss of land and are on the Native North self. The land became a or a the from Eastman and Chief may be in the because of the recent vs. case in which the US Supreme Court that and the are native and under this can be as a move toward legal because it will the of the people. However, this has been by the The Court on Native Americans in certain can be on the in federal which can in note this the out of the a was with a that the state to in In vs. the Supreme Court its for tribes in the of the Nation, said the was a he said in a Supreme Court legal and the of and Indian The Court to its regarding Indian a the of the Indian under the of in the and culture has its and to native and This is especially in the of and The is a in for example, human and and their shared side is the which has some For instance, the of a by of New which on on and the view that the land does not to us, but we to the all have our and that of James was the Native North Americans. It is surprising with his and that he didn't see this and about He when it came to other people. This is especially in his how are to be made the that Tuck and Yang have are we to the we in to make these the and issues in this we should to what James had to in his The of other all our of and we a in our life which would us to it let us at be of like claims made by other they may to us to us at any not on our whose grounds we because we on the whose grounds we at would be blindness down the to “Moral there to be some will us out of and some of the we all as James let us move our blindness so may James's which and the conception of had the to Native North life and thought, it to its and with European philosophy and these cast on recent claims of to For instance, to James that are all as these we can see James's philosophy by Native North thought, especially that of to the land as a of his idea of eye in the for James's But we find more than for in Lakota In terms of we of and the in to several where to those who which are in the of the Lakota in with this of “the eye in the is a for and which may be as a of the other “the eye in the to seeing the in and says: white man so he must see with one the eye in the In he We Indians live in a of and where the and the are you are or in a us they are part of nature, part of the the and the even little like and We to them not with the head but with the and we need no more than a to us the speaking of it to a ways of are attention among and is this philosophy or diluted a more philosophy has for us to find better in recent I by the of New “The Are me of and other natural mountains, and are we should for because we are all has are we to become or of Some are given by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Kimmerer a way out of the some and Why were and of to the Native North They us how to what we have it is in their It is because they are more of the than the here is the Native North Americans’ answer to We where the head has gotten us, so let us the idea of and has been to in of and for see This idea the of and its like in to