In the Hands of the Great Spirit (Review)
IN THE HANDS OF THE GREAT SPIRIT
The 20,000-Year History of Americans Indians
By Jake Page
Free Press 452 pp. $30
By Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist who teaches courses on nonviolence at six area schools and who directs the Center for Teaching Peace.
Until 1974 Jake Page, a novelist , essayist and who has been an editor at Natural History and Smithsonian magazines, had never met an American Indian. That year, he traveled to the Southwest. With his future wife, Susanne Anderson, he fraternized with citizens of the Hopi nation in northeastern Arizona. After 30 trips from Washington D.C., and producing the book “Hopi” with Anderson, Page left Washington in 1988 and settled in New Mexico. “Over the years,” he writes, “I came to feel comfortable among these particular Indian people, more so in fact than among many groups of my own people. It is also true that they, like all of us, are perfectly capable of creating a slightly idealized notion of themselves and passing it along to outsiders.”
The history of native people in this part of the planet shouldn’t be that difficult a project, except that getting a grasp on 20,000 years of it can’t be done in 452 pages. More than 800 pages were needed for “Katharine Graham’s Washington.” And those were only a collection of essays mostly published during her lifetime and representing a thin slice of the city’s life. The collected writings of Gandhi fill 95 volumes. A cultural, economic, political and religious history of only one of the 500 federally tribal nations, and not including another hundred seeking federal recognition, could start with 45,000 pages, not 452.
It’s unlikely that Page would argue with this. He acknowledges that he is offering “an overview, what I hope is a judicious rendering of some of the main events that have shaped [American Indian] history.”
The rendering—necessarily skimmed and spare--is judicious, as well as flowing, lucid and satisfying. Page, essentially a journalist, draws on the toils of large numbers of scholars, from archaeologists and ethnographers to paleobotanists and molecular geneticists. Aware of his debts to these authorities, Page is rightly generous in hailing their work. When discussing Christianity and the version of it brought to the continent by predatory Spanish and Italian explorers, Page writes: “After the ravages of European-borne diseases, the religion of the Europeans was the single most dangerous force the Indians across the entire hemisphere would ever face.” To back up that, historian Wilcomb E. Washburn is cited: “In the first centuries after the birth of Christ, the Christian message spoke for the weak and oppressed. Its message was one of peace and love. The New Testament message might have been understood and honored by the Indians of America had it been preached as it was on the shores of Galilee. But by the time the American Indian came face to face with the doctrine of Christ it had hardened into a mold of bigotry, intolerance, militancy and greed which made it the mortal enemy of the American Indian.”
Less than 300 years after the arrival of Columbus, Thomas Jefferson inserted into the Declaration of Independence his opinion of the natives: “merciless savages.”
While the dirty and violent deeds of white militarists are recounted—those of Generals Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Philip Sheridan, William T. Sherman, George Crook, among others—Page says nothing about William Penn and his humane dealings with the mid-Atlantic Indian nations.
Other omissions are present. The 18th century travails of the Winnebagos are detailed, but nothing is here on the heartening success story of the tribe in the past 20 years when its chairman, John Blackhawk, transformed the eastern Nebraska reservation into a community of economic self-reliance and social stability. In his17th and final chapter, titled “Current Events,” Page discusses several pending legal and political issues, but omits mention of the largest one of all: the mismanaging of several billion dollars of Indian money held in trust by the federal government. In 1999 Federal judge Royce Lamberth held two Clinton cabinet secretaries—Bruce Babbitt of Interior and Robert Rubin of Treasury--in civil contempt of court for their “shocking pattern of deception.” Of the two Great White Fathers and their forked tongues, Lamberth said: “I have never seen more egregious misconduct by the federal government.”
The successes of tribal educators to establish more than 30 colleges in 1l states is not described,, nor is anything here about golfer Notah Begay III, the four-time winner on the PGA tour and the best-known Indian athlete of the past decade.
So, exhaustiveness isn’t here. But a useful measure of breadth is, starting with Pages’ getting a firm fix on preliterate Siberians moving eastward into what is now Alaska and his speculation that the centuries-long killing spree against the native population following the Europeans’ invasion is comparable to what Jews suffered under the Nazis, Russians under Stalin and Cambodians under Pol Pot.
Great praise to Page for sharing what is clearly his strong and abiding passion for joining so many others, from M. Scott Momaday of the Kiowas to Elouise Cobell of the Blackfeet, in getting out the story of the Indian nations. A thanks is owed, also, for some humor. He tells of seeing a T-shirt designed by a Navajo friend which depicts several Indians staring at a caped European standing on a beach, with a sailing ship in the background. The caption says: “Columbus sought India and called us Indians. Glad he wasn’t seeking Turkey.”