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Reach out to American Indians the other 364 days of the year

By Andrew L. Yarrow
November 22, 2007

Inevitably and sadly, Thanksgiving is the one day of the year when American
Indians cross the minds of most other Americans. Other than at our yearly
commemoration of Pilgrims and Indians giving thanks, in early elementary
school, in occasional movies or as tourists in the Southwest, most
Americans give about as much thought to - and have as much knowledge of -
their country's first inhabitants as they do the people of Outer Mongolia.
This needs to change.

While America's 298 million non-Indians generally express good will and
considerable sympathy about past injustices and present poverty afflicting
Indians, they largely view the nation's Indians as relics of a past that
ended with Custer and Wounded Knee. Or, because of lack of knowledge, they
frequently see them through a caricatured and stereotyped lens forged on
old Hollywood back lots. For the most part, they are oblivious to the
vibrancy and difficulties of present-day Indians' lives and culture, or to
their social and legal status, a recent study of non-Indians' thinking
about American Indians by Public Agenda has found.

Despite some recent, politically correct romanticizing of Indians as
spiritual, and model environmentalists, to most Americans, knowledge and
thinking about Indians begin and end with Pocahontas and Sacajawea (good)
and half-formed notions about primitive savages and alcohol-riddled
reservations (bad).

The good news, according to the report, "Walking a Mile: A First Step
Toward Mutual Understanding" - one of the most exhaustive attitudinal
studies ever done on this subject - is that non-Indians want to be better
informed about Indian life today and in the past. (Indians, also surveyed,
strongly second that sentiment.) The bad news is that there is very little
public education about America's native people out there.

After centuries of post-1492 microbial and military decimation, and further
generations of discrimination, Indians largely have vanished as historical
actors on the U.S. stage, at least in the minds of most non-Indians. When
asked what comes to mind when they think of Indians, many non-Indians
ticked off such images as teepees, wampum, warriors, casinos and alcohol.
They picture Indians as "stoic," "brave," "fierce" or "spiritual," sporting
ponytails and wearing exotic dress and jewelry.

Although two-thirds of America's Indians live in urban areas, and only a
half-million inhabit reservations, in non-Indians' minds, Indians exist
only on "the res." This perception flows into one of poverty, unemployment
and social pathology. Nevertheless, many non-Indians - particularly those
who live close to Indian populations - resent the perceived "preferential
treatment" and "loopholes" to establish profitable casinos that Indians
receive, and are opposed to large-scale public funding.

Indians are painfully aware of their invisibility and bitterly resent the
stereotypes and ongoing sub rosa prejudice against them. Contrary to
non-Indians' beliefs that Indians are coddled by the U.S. government, the
Public Agenda study found that many Indians feel that they are still
victims of government policy, and that supposed governmental largesse is
actual public stinginess. They also sense an ongoing devastation of their
culture, symbolized by such diverse phenomena as using Indian land in
Washington state for the Hanford nuclear-waste reservation to portrayals of
Thanksgiving and Columbus Day as holidays implicitly celebrating the
subjugation of Indians.

Although Indians believe that much needs to be done to redress widespread
poverty, unemployment, poor health and low educational attainment, they are
also proud of their cultures and justifiably prickly about unawareness of
their successes in professional, urban, middle-class America. Yet, even
there is a rub: Many Indians feel they straddle two worlds, torn between
their historic cultures and modernity, and between identities as Indians
and as Americans.

Clearly, more sophisticated education about Indian life is needed. It
should not be relegated to third-graders. And memory should not be left to
the fourth Thursday in November. It should be integrated into curricula
throughout high school and college. Media and popular culture need to do
more thoughtful portrayals, and not simply report on Indian crime and
substance abuse, or continue to craft dramas with either old, disparaging
or new, flattering stereotypes.

The lives of urban and other non-reservation Indians, many successful, need
to be showcased. Museums, too, need to go beyond
natural-history-cum-anthropological displays that reinforce the notion that
American Indians are a dead culture, denizens of pre-1890 America - and
improve upon potentially outstanding institutions such as the National
Museum of the American Indian.

As a starting point, as one Indian said, "Maybe you should just tell them
that we still exist."

Andrew L. Yarrow is vice president and Washington director of Public
Agenda, a nonpartisan think tank, and a professor of U.S. history at
American University. His e-mail is ayarrow@....