re Brechin on genocide and memorials #1

To: Retort

From: RS

Rebecca responds:

Hmmm--Avatar to indigenous genocide to crankiness about Jews: that's a curious trajectory. But the interesting question is: do Native Americans want museums of genocide? I don't think so--museums they've put together themselves, like the wonderful one in Pyramid Lake, are testaments of resistance and survival instead, generally. And here's what a California Native American, forester Jay Johnson then living in Yosemite Valley and working for tribal rights, told me nearly 20 years ago (as I recounted it in Savage Dreams in 1994), about being represented as wiped out: 

Johnson told me, "There's another example of people thinking that there are no more Indians here today in the Smithsonian in Washington. There's an Indian museum. I think it was 1980, Julia and four of us on business for our tribe went to the Smithsonian and found the California museum exhibits, then Yosemite. It's almost the same thing as the diorama down here in the corner. Down in the Smithsonian it was on the wall and it had a little statement on the side and it left off with 'It's very sad today. There's no more Yosemite Indians.' Period. I said, 'Let's go down, talk to the people at the desk about this statement.' So we went down there and this lady, she was at the desk, and I said, 'Ma'am about that diorama about Yosemite,' and she says 'Oh, isn't that nice.' And I said 'It's nice, but there's an error in the statement,' and she says, 'Oh no, there can't be. Every little word goes through channels and committees and whatnot,' and I says, 'It's ok, but,' I says, 'It tells me that there are no more Yosemite Indians today.' She says, 'Well that's true, it's very sad but whatever's out there is true.' So I say, 'Well I hate to disturb you, but I'm a Yosemite Indian, and we'ere here on business for our tribe.' And she caught her breath and said, 'Ohhh, uh, let me call somebody,' and so she called somebody who was in charge of exhibits, and I went and told her the same thing. If fthere's a statement saying that there are descendants of the Ahwahneechees living there today, all of us natives would be satisfied. But it hasn't been changed--I don't think so.

            "The written material states that there are no more Yosemite Indians. If they would ask us, they use a term like full-blood. We are descendants, that's not all we are, but we are.  I go back to my great-grandmother who was born here in the 1830s, before the army and militia came in." And Johnson sitting in the model Indian village in his green uniform, the huge black-oak acorns dropping around us as we spoke, told me, "I still tell people that this land is mine. One thing that they can't take away from me is my feelings."

Since I wrote that book, indigenous Yosemite-area people have made great strides in claiming rights and visibility in the park and the region. And  curiously, there are now about the same number of Native Americans in California as there were before invasion. Many of them are from elsewhere in the country--the occupation of Alcatraz was a pan-Indian act involving Lakota, Inuit, Sac and Fox and everything inbetween, for example--which doesn't mean that the decimation of the Native Californians has been mitigated, but there is a great deal of cultural vitality here now. One key catalyst has been the great (Jewish) publisher of News from Native California and aficianado Malcolm Margolin. 

Actually if anyone had asked, I suspect a lot of Jews would've said they didn't want holocaust museums (or to portray the genocide of the Nazis as unique). No one I know was polled.

Rebecca