Fear of a Red Planet | Ghost in the Machine

EXILE ON MAIN STREET:

Ghost in the Machine

They called my great-uncle Cavayo "Name Giver." He was the one who decided what to call the marvelous toys and dazzling inventions modern times brought to the Comanche in the last half of the nineteenth century.
He looks out at me from a framed picture taken at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in November of 1907. Cavayo and three dozen other well-known Kiowas, Apaches, and Comanches are arranged in the style of a high-school class picture. Some wear ties, some wear bandannas, and most have braids. Each is numbered and then identified on the photograph: Maximum Leader Quanah Parker ("Chief of the Comanches") is 1. Quanah's mother was Cynthia Ann Parker, a captive taken by The People as a child, who found life with us quite agreeable and eventually married a chief. Cavayo ("Headman of the Comanches") is number 5. In 1907 he was nearly seventy, and he sits a few spaces to the left of Quanah, hat in hand, with long silver hair and a trace of amusement on his face.
In order to give something an appropriate name you must first understand it. Cavayo, to be charged with his responsibility, must have had a particularly sharp eye for technology. Over the decades he had surely have seen the new and improved models of guns and beads and cameras, and had to decide when those improvements justified a new name. By all accounts, Comanches were, and are, among the most practical tribes, with just a few taboos and nearly all of those could be waived in an emergency. It seems doubtful that Cavayo and his contemporaries would have fallen for that line about cameras as soul-catchers. They were too busy trying to figure out new ways to obtain the latest firearms.
On good days, my ancestors were some of the finest people you would ever want to meet: generous and friendly and fun to be around, especially at parties. But we also were world-class barbarians, a people who for a hundred and fifty years really did all that murdering and kidnaping and raping and burning and looting, against Mexicans, Apaches, Utes, Pawnees, Pueblos, Americans, Poncas, Tonkawas, well, yes, pretty much anyone in our time zone. Compared to us, the Sioux were a bunch of Girl Scouts.
As a life-style it wasn't for everyone but as a group we liked it. Others objected. The first guns that showed up were a joke and even though we traded for them and appreciated their usefulness in certain situations, real men preferred repeating arrows-two straight black grooves on one side, two red spiral grooves on the other side-instead of nonrepeating, unreliable, noisy, and frankly rather unattractive guns.
This would soon change. An arms race began that we were destined to lose. In 1840, with the war against us going badly, a visionary Texas Ranger named Sam Walker made an extraordinary journey. Walker knew that only with a vastly improved firearm could his Rangers prove successful, so he traveled to the Colt factory in Paterson, New Jersey, and worked with the great Colt himself to perfect the world's first repeating pistol. It was called the "Walker Colt" caliber .44 revolver. The gun that revolutionized Indian-fighting, and weaponry in general, was a machine designed for one purpose: to kill Comanches. To make this very clear, each pistol carried an engraving of a battle between Comanches and Texas Rangers. We frantically tried to acquire the new guns but had limited success-imagine a member of the Crips trying to buy a dozen Stinger rocket launchers in the midst of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles: not impossible but really, really difficult.
There should have been a special camera invented to shoot Indians as well, given the tremendous influence photography has had on us. If one machine nearly wiped us out-we numbered just over a thousand when my grandparents were born at the turn of the century-another gave us immortality. From the first days of still photography, anthropologists and artists found us a subject of endless fascination. When the pictures began to move, and then talk, they liked us even more. We starred in scores of movies. John Wayne's best-loved westerns always seemed to take place in Texas or some other part of Comancheria. In The Searchers, often considered his masterpiece, Wayne spends years trying to find a girl we abducted. He succeeds, but by then she's turned into a "Comanch,'" and he must decide whether to kill her or not. The Duke identified so strongly with this movie that he named his son Ethan, after the fictional character Wayne played. (Robert DeNiro once called The Searchers his favorite film of all time.)
The movies gave us planetary fame. Without them, the Comanches would be an obscure chapter in Texas history books. With them, we live forever.
In the age of moving images, we remain a favorite target of still photographers. The pictures in recent Indian coffee table books, the ones that always seem to feature "Elder" and "Spiritual" in their titles, are a bit of deceptive flattery. The clear, unstated message of these books is this: the vast majority of Indians today-there is no nice way to say it-disappoint. We have, apparently, lost our language, misplaced our culture. We rarely make rain anymore or transform ourselves into cougars and magpies. We use glass beads and disposable cigarette lighters and sometimes, when no one is looking, even throw trash out of our pickups. We are not worthy enough to be members of the coffee-table book tribe.
To me, those books and the photographers behind them are like big game hunters on safari, and their big game is the real Indian. They set out from Berkeley or New York or Phoenix in their Range Rovers or Grand Cherokees, armed with Leicas and Nikons and Zeiss lenses-trained observers who see nothing. They barely glance at the fourteen year old boy in baggy pants and the Chicago Bulls sweatshirt as he screams down the road on his Kawasaki dirt bike, too fast and no helmet either. They ignore the fat guy with the Marine haircut and bad skin who pumps their gas at the Sinclair station. Busy checking directions provided by a German anthropologist, they miss the pack of excited young women in designer jeans and damaged hair, trading gossip on their way to a friend's house where the satellite dish actually works, for an evening of Melrose Place and microwaved popcorn. If our visitors cared to stop for dinner, the basketball coach who lives alone in the trailer just past the power station would, I am sure, invite them in and share his chili and fry bread from the night before; his only plans for the evening are the Maple Leafs and catching up on the latest controversies in deconstructionist theory with the new issue of Third Text that just arrived from London.
I am afraid that we present a rather pathetic tableau to the big game photographers. I imagine they feel sorry for the Indians they encounter on their way to an audience with their quarry, the Perfect Master. Drunks stumbling in the road-reason is those broken treaties, cycle of poverty, stupid Bureau of Indian Affairs, whole gambling thing, I don't know about that . . . and when they find his house in the middle of nowhere (the directions might as well have been in German) all their hard work pays off. The Perfect Master delivers, with astonishing tales and authentic wrinkles, and the equipment, thank God, works without a hitch and the PM, what a guy, even takes our picture with his little automatic 35 mm and seems fine with the money (five crisp new 20s in a discreet white envelope), doesn't even count it, and wait until they see these prints in New York. They dream of book deals and cable television infomercials.
They blow right past us, without a clue.
Perhaps the niece who likes bad television spends Tuesday nights teaching the Cheyenne she learned from her grandparents to her friends. Maybe the post-modern basketball coach finally sees his critique of Foucault published in Belgium (unfortunately for him, there is not one person on the entire Crow reservation who reads Flemish). I am pretty sure the truculent grandson finally agrees to wear his new helmet. And the overweight employee of the Sinclair station -I'm just guessing here-leads a campaign that sends the crooked tribal chairwoman and all of her cronies packing.
I do not know how their stories end, but I know the possibilities are there for the unexpected, the surprising, the improbable and even the impossible. And these possibilities are precisely what escape the big game hunters. They search for ghosts, for elders trapped in amber. Sometimes, they even find them. But no matter how their poltergeist expeditions turn out, no matter what they find, they miss far more.
The photographers in these pages, on the other hand, don't miss much. Their images show us our families, at our Sunday afternoon best and our predawn, post-bar-closing worst. We see our grandparents, foolish in parade cars and ridiculous in war bonnets, laughing in a way you never see them laugh in most pictures taken by non-Indians. Like my bloodthirsty progenitors, these photographers evidence a fine appreciation for technology and all it can accomplish. They are fearless in other ways, and not just in technical proficiency. They dare to experiment, to theorize, to argue and harangue, to tease and joke. They are not following anyone's instructions. To use the parlance of the late 19th century, these Indians have strayed "off the reservation."
For a genre still relatively new, there is a remarkable amount of conceptual work being done. But that should not surprise us either. Exploration of the cutting-edge theoretical issues that photography presents is one of our traditions. Each of us has a complex relationship with photography, and we each know it. That relationship is one of culture, of history, of politics. It is immediate and concrete, and at the same time wrapped up in the kind of intricate theoretical issues that can give you a headache in five minutes flat. It is Sitting Bull pushing his signed photographs in Europe in the last century, and Leonard Crow Dog inviting film crews to shoot the Sun Dance in this one. It's looking for-and finding-old pictures of your relatives at the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives. It is our radical leaders from the 1970s finding steady movie work in the 1990s, and the haunting thought that comes at you like a freight train from hell that no pictures exist of Crazy Horse, but the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative postage stamp of him anyway. It is our own frequent willingness to lead the searchers in their quest for the real Indian. It is the terrible truth that most of us, in dark, painful moments, have felt inadequate for not living up to the romantic images. We know they aren't really true, of course. We are somehow supposed to be immune from their powerful beauty, yet the reality is that we are particularly vulnerable.
We approach the millennium as a people leading often fantastic and surreal lives. The Pequot, a tribe that's all but extinct, run the most profitable casino in the country, and tribal members become millionaires. But guess who's still the poorest group in North America? Vision quest retreats and sweat lodge vacations are offered in the pages of Mother Jones, and one of our best so-called friends in the entertainment industry bankrolls fawning documentaries on us but refuses to rename the Atlanta Braves, and that Dances with Wolves-I'm warning you don't get me started-NOT JUST THE NOVEL BUT EVEN THE SHOOTING SCRIPT SAID IT WAS ABOUT COMANCHES AND THEY ONLY CHANGED IT BECAUSE THE PRODUCTION MANAGER COULDN'T FIND ENOUGH BUFFALOES IN OKLAHOMA AND THEY MADE THE COMANCHES SIOUX JUST LIKE THAT-POOF-AND EVERYONE IN MY FAMILY LIKED IT ANYWAY!!!!
The brilliant Palestinian intellectual and troublemaker Edward Said wrote that "in the end, the past possesses us." Okay, Eddie, I get it. But is it supposed to possess us this much? The country can't make up its mind. One decade we're invisible, another we're dangerous. Obsolete and quaint, a rather boring people suitable for schoolkids and family vacations, then suddenly we're cool and mysterious. Once considered so primitive that our status as fully human was a subject of scientific debate, some now regard us as keepers of planetary secrets and the only salvation for a world bent on destroying itself.
Heck, we're just plain folks, but no one wants to hear that.
But how could it be any different? The confusion and ambivalence, the amnesia and wistful romanticism make perfect sense. We are shape-shifters in the national consciousness. We are accidental survivors, unwanted reminders of disagreeable events. Indians have to be explained and accounted for, and to fit somehow into the creation myth of the most powerful, benevolent nation ever, the last, best hope of man on earth.
We're trapped in history. No escape. Great-uncle Cavayo must have faced many situations this desperate, probably in god-forsaken desert canyons against murderous Apaches and Texans. Somehow, I know what he would say: Get the best piece you can find and shoot your way out.
I think the photographers in this book are doing exactly that.

© Paul Chaat Smith, 1995

EXILE ON MAIN STREET:
Ghost in the Machine
They called my great-uncle Cavayo "Name Giver." He was the one who decided what to call the marvelous toys and dazzling inventions modern times brought to the Comanche in the last half of the nineteenth century. He looks out at me from a framed picture taken at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in November of 1907. Cavayo and three dozen other well-known Kiowas, Apaches, and Comanches are arranged in the style of a high-school class picture. Some wear ties, some wear bandannas, and most have braids. Each is numbered and then identified on the photograph: Maximum Leader Quanah Parker ("Chief of the Comanches") is 1. Quanah's mother was Cynthia Ann Parker, a captive taken by The People as a child, who found life with us quite agreeable and eventually married a chief. Cavayo ("Headman of the Comanches") is number 5. In 1907 he was nearly seventy, and he sits a few spaces to the left of Quanah, hat in hand, with long silver hair and a trace of amusement on his face. In order to give something an appropriate name you must first understand it. Cavayo, to be charged with his responsibility, must have had a particularly sharp eye for technology. Over the decades he had surely have seen the new and improved models of guns and beads and cameras, and had to decide when those improvements justified a new name. By all accounts, Comanches were, and are, among the most practical tribes, with just a few taboos and nearly all of those could be waived in an emergency. It seems doubtful that Cavayo and his contemporaries would have fallen for that line about cameras as soul-catchers. They were too busy trying to figure out new ways to obtain the latest firearms. On good days, my ancestors were some of the finest people you would ever want to meet: generous and friendly and fun to be around, especially at parties. But we also were world-class barbarians, a people who for a hundred and fifty years really did all that murdering and kidnaping and raping and burning and looting, against Mexicans, Apaches, Utes, Pawnees, Pueblos, Americans, Poncas, Tonkawas, well, yes, pretty much anyone in our time zone. Compared to us, the Sioux were a bunch of Girl Scouts. As a life-style it wasn't for everyone but as a group we liked it. Others objected. The first guns that showed up were a joke and even though we traded for them and appreciated their usefulness in certain situations, real men preferred repeating arrows-two straight black grooves on one side, two red spiral grooves on the other side-instead of nonrepeating, unreliable, noisy, and frankly rather unattractive guns. This would soon change. An arms race began that we were destined to lose. In 1840, with the war against us going badly, a visionary Texas Ranger named Sam Walker made an extraordinary journey. Walker knew that only with a vastly improved firearm could his Rangers prove successful, so he traveled to the Colt factory in Paterson, New Jersey, and worked with the great Colt himself to perfect the world's first repeating pistol. It was called the "Walker Colt" caliber .44 revolver. The gun that revolutionized Indian-fighting, and weaponry in general, was a machine designed for one purpose: to kill Comanches. To make this very clear, each pistol carried an engraving of a battle between Comanches and Texas Rangers. We frantically tried to acquire the new guns but had limited success-imagine a member of the Crips trying to buy a dozen Stinger rocket launchers in the midst of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles: not impossible but really, really difficult. There should have been a special camera invented to shoot Indians as well, given the tremendous influence photography has had on us. If one machine nearly wiped us out-we numbered just over a thousand when my grandparents were born at the turn of the century-another gave us immortality. From the first days of still photography, anthropologists and artists found us a subject of endless fascination. When the pictures began to move, and then talk, they liked us even more. We starred in scores of movies. John Wayne's best-loved westerns always seemed to take place in Texas or some other part of Comancheria. In The Searchers, often considered his masterpiece, Wayne spends years trying to find a girl we abducted. He succeeds, but by then she's turned into a "Comanch,'" and he must decide whether to kill her or not. The Duke identified so strongly with this movie that he named his son Ethan, after the fictional character Wayne played. (Robert DeNiro once called The Searchers his favorite film of all time.) The movies gave us planetary fame. Without them, the Comanches would be an obscure chapter in Texas history books. With them, we live forever. In the age of moving images, we remain a favorite target of still photographers. The pictures in recent Indian coffee table books, the ones that always seem to feature "Elder" and "Spiritual" in their titles, are a bit of deceptive flattery. The clear, unstated message of these books is this: the vast majority of Indians today-there is no nice way to say it-disappoint. We have, apparently, lost our language, misplaced our culture. We rarely make rain anymore or transform ourselves into cougars and magpies. We use glass beads and disposable cigarette lighters and sometimes, when no one is looking, even throw trash out of our pickups. We are not worthy enough to be members of the coffee-table book tribe. To me, those books and the photographers behind them are like big game hunters on safari, and their big game is the real Indian. They set out from Berkeley or New York or Phoenix in their Range Rovers or Grand Cherokees, armed with Leicas and Nikons and Zeiss lenses-trained observers who see nothing. They barely glance at the fourteen year old boy in baggy pants and the Chicago Bulls sweatshirt as he screams down the road on his Kawasaki dirt bike, too fast and no helmet either. They ignore the fat guy with the Marine haircut and bad skin who pumps their gas at the Sinclair station. Busy checking directions provided by a German anthropologist, they miss the pack of excited young women in designer jeans and damaged hair, trading gossip on their way to a friend's house where the satellite dish actually works, for an evening of Melrose Place and microwaved popcorn. If our visitors cared to stop for dinner, the basketball coach who lives alone in the trailer just past the power station would, I am sure, invite them in and share his chili and fry bread from the night before; his only plans for the evening are the Maple Leafs and catching up on the latest controversies in deconstructionist theory with the new issue of Third Text that just arrived from London. I am afraid that we present a rather pathetic tableau to the big game photographers. I imagine they feel sorry for the Indians they encounter on their way to an audience with their quarry, the Perfect Master. Drunks stumbling in the road-reason is those broken treaties, cycle of poverty, stupid Bureau of Indian Affairs, whole gambling thing, I don't know about that . . . and when they find his house in the middle of nowhere (the directions might as well have been in German) all their hard work pays off. The Perfect Master delivers, with astonishing tales and authentic wrinkles, and the equipment, thank God, works without a hitch and the PM, what a guy, even takes our picture with his little automatic 35 mm and seems fine with the money (five crisp new 20s in a discreet white envelope), doesn't even count it, and wait until they see these prints in New York. They dream of book deals and cable television infomercials. They blow right past us, without a clue. Perhaps the niece who likes bad television spends Tuesday nights teaching the Cheyenne she learned from her grandparents to her friends. Maybe the post-modern basketball coach finally sees his critique of Foucault published in Belgium (unfortunately for him, there is not one person on the entire Crow reservation who reads Flemish). I am pretty sure the truculent grandson finally agrees to wear his new helmet. And the overweight employee of the Sinclair station -I'm just guessing here-leads a campaign that sends the crooked tribal chairwoman and all of her cronies packing. I do not know how their stories end, but I know the possibilities are there for the unexpected, the surprising, the improbable and even the impossible. And these possibilities are precisely what escape the big game hunters. They search for ghosts, for elders trapped in amber. Sometimes, they even find them. But no matter how their poltergeist expeditions turn out, no matter what they find, they miss far more. The photographers in these pages, on the other hand, don't miss much. Their images show us our families, at our Sunday afternoon best and our predawn, post-bar-closing worst. We see our grandparents, foolish in parade cars and ridiculous in war bonnets, laughing in a way you never see them laugh in most pictures taken by non-Indians. Like my bloodthirsty progenitors, these photographers evidence a fine appreciation for technology and all it can accomplish. They are fearless in other ways, and not just in technical proficiency. They dare to experiment, to theorize, to argue and harangue, to tease and joke. They are not following anyone's instructions. To use the parlance of the late 19th century, these Indians have strayed "off the reservation." For a genre still relatively new, there is a remarkable amount of conceptual work being done. But that should not surprise us either. Exploration of the cutting-edge theoretical issues that photography presents is one of our traditions. Each of us has a complex relationship with photography, and we each know it. That relationship is one of culture, of history, of politics. It is immediate and concrete, and at the same time wrapped up in the kind of intricate theoretical issues that can give you a headache in five minutes flat. It is Sitting Bull pushing his signed photographs in Europe in the last century, and Leonard Crow Dog inviting film crews to shoot the Sun Dance in this one. It's looking for-and finding-old pictures of your relatives at the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives. It is our radical leaders from the 1970s finding steady movie work in the 1990s, and the haunting thought that comes at you like a freight train from hell that no pictures exist of Crazy Horse, but the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative postage stamp of him anyway. It is our own frequent willingness to lead the searchers in their quest for the real Indian. It is the terrible truth that most of us, in dark, painful moments, have felt inadequate for not living up to the romantic images. We know they aren't really true, of course. We are somehow supposed to be immune from their powerful beauty, yet the reality is that we are particularly vulnerable. We approach the millennium as a people leading often fantastic and surreal lives. The Pequot, a tribe that's all but extinct, run the most profitable casino in the country, and tribal members become millionaires. But guess who's still the poorest group in North America? Vision quest retreats and sweat lodge vacations are offered in the pages of Mother Jones, and one of our best so-called friends in the entertainment industry bankrolls fawning documentaries on us but refuses to rename the Atlanta Braves, and that Dances with Wolves-I'm warning you don't get me started-NOT JUST THE NOVEL BUT EVEN THE SHOOTING SCRIPT SAID IT WAS ABOUT COMANCHES AND THEY ONLY CHANGED IT BECAUSE THE PRODUCTION MANAGER COULDN'T FIND ENOUGH BUFFALOES IN OKLAHOMA AND THEY MADE THE COMANCHES SIOUX JUST LIKE THAT-POOF-AND EVERYONE IN MY FAMILY LIKED IT ANYWAY!!!! The brilliant Palestinian intellectual and troublemaker Edward Said wrote that "in the end, the past possesses us." Okay, Eddie, I get it. But is it supposed to possess us this much? The country can't make up its mind. One decade we're invisible, another we're dangerous. Obsolete and quaint, a rather boring people suitable for schoolkids and family vacations, then suddenly we're cool and mysterious. Once considered so primitive that our status as fully human was a subject of scientific debate, some now regard us as keepers of planetary secrets and the only salvation for a world bent on destroying itself. Heck, we're just plain folks, but no one wants to hear that. But how could it be any different? The confusion and ambivalence, the amnesia and wistful romanticism make perfect sense. We are shape-shifters in the national consciousness. We are accidental survivors, unwanted reminders of disagreeable events. Indians have to be explained and accounted for, and to fit somehow into the creation myth of the most powerful, benevolent nation ever, the last, best hope of man on earth. We're trapped in history. No escape. Great-uncle Cavayo must have faced many situations this desperate, probably in god-forsaken desert canyons against murderous Apaches and Texans. Somehow, I know what he would say: Get the best piece you can find and shoot your way out. I think the photographers in this book are doing exactly that.
© Paul Chaat Smith, 1995