Native America

Recently, it has dawned on the Phantom that his favorite movies and many of his favorite books are about American Indians.

The Phantom dislikes the name "Native Americans" because it suggests somehow the American Indian has a claim to this continent whites do not. As far as paleontology can tell us, homo sapiens did not arise in North American but walked across the Bering Straight and simply arrived on these lands centuries, if not eons, before white men sailed here from Europe in wooden ships with smallpox infested blankets.

This predilection for Indians came as surprise to the Phantom, who, if, had you asked him, would have said his favorite literature was urban, American and very much not Indian. The Phantom has long been addicted to film noir, with its black and white images, its long, stealthy shadows playing across insidious staircases down which you know someone will eventually go hurtling. "The Killers," and "The Big Heat" and even the technicolor "Chinatown" never grow old for the Phantom.

Woman Walks Ahead

On a recent trip to the Hampton town library to restock film noir DVD titles, however, the Phantom strayed into the one section of books he frequents and plucked off the shelves a book he'd never heard of but with a title which demanded attention: "Custer Died for Your Sins." Within the first 10 pages Vine Deloria's voice of amused irony had the Phantom hooked and the Phantom was shocked at Deloria's recommendation of Thomas Berger's "Little Big Man" as an authentic representation of what Indians were and are really like, right up there with "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee."

Downloading Berger's book to his Kindle, the Phantom found himself plastered to his chair, unable to stop reading.

"This cannot be happening," the Phantom thought. "Why am I reading about Indians?"

But, in a sense, this obsession has been a river running through the Phantom's developing soul (such as the Phantom may have developed a soul) from childhood, when, as a 9 year old,  he spent most of his time running through the woods with his good friend, Terry Rodgers, who knew all sorts of useful Indian stuff, like how to make a stout stick bend by placing it in a stream, shaping it under tension between rocks so it would be bowed and useful for launching arrows, once you have weaved a bowstring out of rawhide and made some stone tipped arrows.  (Terry later grew up to become an artist whose orgy scenes apparently sell well in Europe and grace the stark white walls of German aristocracy, who are rail thin, dress in black turtlenecks and black jeans and play Wagner on their home sound systems while looking out through glass walls over their bleak, leafless forests in the dead of Black Forest winters.)

Terry Rodgers and White Culture

In college, the Phantom chose an interdepartmental major including biology and anthropology and delighted to the "anthro flicks" the department showed weekly, like "Dead Birds" about warring New Guinea aboriginal tribes.

Since then, he hadn't thought much about Indians, even when he visited his New Mexico in-laws and found himself lost on various Indian reservation, where the natives silently regarded him with unconcealed hostility. 

But now and then he'd find titles like "Empire of the Summer Moon" about the Comanches, who had no word in their language for "surrender" since all fights were to the death.  Berger mentions the Cheyenne would not waste time and effort fighting  strangers, because fighting was a serious business and not to be engaged in lightly. 

Looking at his collection of DVDs, the movies which the Phantom decided are worth owning because they are simply the best ever and can be replayed over and over without growing stale, he discerned a motiff:  "Last of the Mohicans" with Daniel Day Lewis, the most intensely romantic film ever made as far as the Phantom is concerned.  "Dances with Wolves" in which the Indians are pursued by relentless American soldiers determined to extinguish them. And, of course, "Little Big Man" in which a white boy goes back and forth between white and Indian culture. 

Sheridan

Even the Phantom's heroes of the Civil War, Philip Sheridan and George Armstrong Custer, when seen from the perspective of their later lives trying to extinguish the American Indians, look not like the noble patriots fighting to preserve the union and end slavery, but simply as men who enjoyed killing, loved the exhilaration of battle. Sheridan learned from his brother in arms, William Tecumseh Sherman (a man with an Indian middle name) the lesson that simply killing enemy warriors in battle would not defeat an entire nation--you had to burn and destroy their means of existence--thus Sheridan burned the Confederacy's breadbasket in the Shenandoah Valley and later, as an Indian fighter, devised the plan to extinguish the buffalo herds on which the plains Indians depended. Kill off the buffalo and you starve the Indians. It was Sheridan who said, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

I Will Make Georgia Howl--Obadiah Youngblood

It has got to the point where if the Phantom surfs across the Netflix selection and sees an Indian in the title, he stops and investigates. Doing this is usually disappointing, but occasionally he finds a gem, as in the film, "Woman Walks Ahead" which mixes feminism and anti racism in the same story, in this case the woman is a New York lady who travels West to find and paint Sitting Bull.

White Man's Culture

The real joy in books like "Little Big Man" is seeing the world in a fresh and new way, through the eyes of another culture and understanding that our basic assumptions are no more true or worthy than the perceptions of others.