The Greens and the Indians

Some of my students, here in Benson Polytechnic High School in Portland, are American Indians (it's okay if you want to call them Native Americans, or indigenous Americans). The attitude of the majority culture toward that minority of remaining aboriginal inhabitants of this part of the continent strikes me as worth considering.

The United States of America was for a long time genocidal in its attitude towards Indians: not, of course, explicitly and by statute, like Nazi Germany or the Hutu government of Rwanda in 1994, but in fact, as a result of its course of behavior. We could probably characterize the behavior by the common nineteenth-century saying, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." The long record of treaties solemnly arrived at, and subsequently broken, by the government of the United States is probably sufficient factual basis for believing in the strength of the saying.

On the other hand, the official inclusiveness of the United States's founding documents, most fundamentally the idea that the legitimacy of any government flows from the votes of its citizens, and the practical inclusion of a wider and wider variety of immigrant groups in the period following the Civil War, softened the harsh exclusion of Indian participation in the political life of the rest of the U.S. Most especially, the participation by many Native Americans in the foreign wars in which the U.S. engaged during the course of the twentieth century went some distance to validate Indians, absurd as it sounds, as "real Americans." If they were willing to sacrifice their own lives in pursuit of the belligerent aims of the country, that counted with common men.

There also existed the counter-current, originating in the Romantic conception of the Noble Savage, of lament for the loss of the Native American population and culture. It had strong elements of condescension in it as well as covert guilt feelings for the actual genocidal practice, but it did produce some more charitable reception of Indian ways and mores than the simple demand by the majority for complete assimilation.

It seems to me that we are seeing the origin in the last couple of decades of a quite different attitude toward American indian culture, one which I would characterize as Green, not without ulterior motive. I am myself a political activist in the Pacific Green party of Oregon, and hope to proselytize for its good ideas. The attitude, that is, of conserving the resources of the Earth, so basic to Green Party solutions for a sustainable future, owes at least as much to the American Indian culture as any other inspiration.

Green Party political gatherings proceed by consensus-building, rather than by parliamentary procedure and majority vote. At least here in Oregon the Greens are pretty firmly convinced of the value of the use of common psychotropic plants for medicinal purposes. And we constantly stress the importance of locality: here and now, in this place, at this time.

We are all quite aware of the fact that the American Indians were promoting these ways of thinking and acting, so much at variance with the norms of modern industrial culture, well before we were. Our adoption of these ideas stems from a rational appraisal that they are beneficent and constructive; not that they are valuable because aboriginal. Rather than the Other who must be repressed, or the Wild Child whose welfare we must protect, the Indians are at the present time the Peers whose wisdom will benefit us if we will but listen to it.