Free The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King Page B

cents a bottle. Today’s Indian snake oil is considerably more expensive. In her article “Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances: New Age Commercialization of Native American Spirituality,” Lisa Aldred makes note of someone called SingingPipe Woman, in Springdale, Washington, who advertises a two-week retreat with a Husichol woman priced at $2,450. A quick trip to the Internet will turn up an outfit offering a one-week “Canyon Quest and Spiritual Warrior Training” course for $850 and an eight-night program called “Vision Quest,” in the tradition of someone called Stalking Wolf, “a Lipan Apache elder” who has “removed all the differences” of the vision quest, “leaving only the simple, pure format that works for everyone.” There is no fee for this workshop, though a $300-$350 donation is recommended. Stalking Wolf, by the way, was supposedly born in 1873, wandered the Americas in search of spiritual truths, and finally passed all his knowledge on to Tom Brown, Jr., a seven-year-old White boy whom he met in New Jersey. Evidently, Tom Brown, Jr., or his protégés, run the workshops, having turned Stalking Wolf’s teachings into a Dead Indian franchise.
    From the frequency with which Dead Indians appear in advertising, in the names of businesses, as icons for sports teams, as marketing devices for everything from cleaning products to underwear, and as stalking goats for New Age spiritual flimflam, you might think that Native people were a significant target for sales. We’re not, of course. We don’t buy this crap. At least not enough to support such a bustling market. But there’s really no need to ask whom Dead Indians are aimed at, is there?
    All of which brings us to Live Indians.
    Among the many new things that Europeans had to deal with upon their arrival in the North American wilderness were Live Indians. Live Indians, from an Old World point of view, were an intriguing, perplexing, and annoying part of life in the New World.
    My son’s girlfriend, Nadine Zabder, a meat science major, once told me: “You can’t herd them. They won’t follow. And they’re too heavy to lift.” Nadine was talking about sheep, but she could have been talking about Indians, for the same general sentiment appears in early journals and reports. The good news, the writers agreed, was that they were dying off in large numbers.
    Indians. Not sheep.
    There is no general agreement on how many Indians were in North America when Europeans first arrived, but most scholars are willing to speculate that the new diseases that fishermen and colonists brought with them killed upwards of 80 percent of all Native people along the eastern seaboard. Conflicts and wars did their part as well, and, by the time the nineteenth century rolled around, the death of the Indian was a working part of North American mythology. This dying was not the fault of non-Natives. The demise of Indians was seen as a tenet of natural law, which favoured the strong and eliminated the weak.
    George Catlin, who travelled around North America in the 1830s painting Live Indians, said of the tribes he visited that, “in a few years, perhaps, they will have entirely disappeared from the face of the earth, and all that will be remembered of them will be that they existed and were numbered among the barbarous tribes that once inhabited this vast Continent.” General John Benjamin Sanborn, who was part of an Indian Peace Commission formed in 1867, echoed the common sentiments of a nation on the move. “Little can be hoped for them as a distinct people,” said Sanborn. “The sun of their day is fast sinking in the western sky. It will soon go down in a night of oblivion that shall know no morning … No spring-time shall renew their fading glory, and no future knowtheir fame.” The American newspaperman Horace Greeley, on a trip west in 1859, was not quite as kind as Catlin nor as eloquent as Sanborn. “The Indians are children,” said Greeley.