- 8 - The Imaginary Indian

Walt Whitman well expressed in his poem, Leaving from Paumanok, what is the very essence of Indian Otherness for a man of European culture: being natural. The native is either as cruel and brutal or romantic and panic as Nature, he is both a brute and a custodian of the Earth. Indian Otherness flees the White Man who tries to seize it. Yet the desire to possess is reciprocal, because it belongs to man and the natives, yesterday and today complain not having possessed in their turn. Both the protagonists of the tragic encounter feel the weight of an existential incommunicability, observing each other from the opposite banks of the Neolithic revolution. But these points of view, in the mythic tradition and history, are almost exclusively male. What was the meaning of knowing the Other through the female way, which does not possess, but opens the door? Even today we cannot know: mythic feminine traditions and histories of white women do not create the archetypal image of the Indian either in European mind or the present Indian one. The practice of the sacred, as the way to deal with the unknown, is above all masculine on both the shores of the Atlantic Ocean and it determined the shape of the encounter, the phantoms of the European unconscious mind, the cold sweat of whom is afraid not to possess and lose possession, in one word, the Imaginary Indian.

Wolfgang Mieder

http://info.utas.edu.au/docs/flonta/DP,1,1,95/INDIAN.html

Sandra Busatta

The application to the study of Man of those methods of scientific research, which had demonstrated their value in the physical science, and the books written after the discovery and settlement of America, originated the idea that the American Indian cultures might be identified as the first stage of Mankind, from which the Europeans had reached their actual stage. For example, John Locke declared: "In the beginning the entire world was America". The literature about the "American savages" influenced the ideas of the 18th century thinkers on "primitivity", which originated the myth of Rousseau's Good Savage and favored the birth of a new theory about the development of society. The "discovery" of the Indians enabled the theoreticians of the time to sink them into a more remote and primordial antiquity than that of such ancient peoples as Tacitus's Germans and portrait "realistically" the time when "man was a wolf to man", as Hobbes stated.

This wild state was typical of the first stage of mankind, which was characterized by the absence of agriculture and trade. In his analysis Hobbes did not take into consideration the historical fact that a great number of American peoples were agricultural. Some authors admitted the existence of Indian agriculture but, since it was in contrast with the thesis maintaining that mankind proceeded from the stage of the hunters to that of the shepherds, to the agriculturists and then that of the traders, they solved their theoretical troubles by undervaluing Indian agriculture because it was a female activity. Adam Smith said that Indian women planted their maize in the backyard of their cabins and that could not be defined agriculture. By depreciating native agriculture ( but a superior stage, male agriculture was recognized only to the Mexicans and the Peruvians), and by promoting a male activity, secondary hunting economy, to economic activity par excellence, the Indians became hunters by definition, that is the lowest cultural stage of mankind.

Even in the most favorable theories, such as that of the Good Savage, the "primitive" American was a paradigm of pure instinct, unity with nature, a pristine, authentic living rebuke to the affectedness of civilized life. So Rousseau and his New Age followers, together with all the other versions of the white man's Indian, simplified the multifold reality of the actual Indian communities, erasing their individuality and trapping them in the European fantastic mental building. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, influenced by the writings of the English, Scottish and French philosophers and especially by the so called father of American anthropology, Lewis H. Morgan, elaborated their stage theory. In a famous book, Engels divided human progress into three stages subdivided into sub-stages: savagery, barbarism and civilization. He put the Native Americans between savagery and barbarism. A reaction to the Positivist and Marxist evolution theory came from the anthropologists of the Boas school and from structuralists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss , but also from religious fundamentalists. The non evolutionists try to demonstrate that there exists, and has always existed, a great variety of cultures, all of equal dignity and on an equal level. Yet, these theories have been accused of being reactionary by some feminists , interested in researching the historical roots of patriarchal revolution. It is understandable that the Native American favor the non- evolutionary theories, though their sacred histories are not completely devoid of an indigenous stage theory.

Franco Melandri

(The West, westerner and western are used in the text for Euro-americans)

Why does western imagery continue to be haunted by the Indian character after more than five hundred years from the "discovery" of America? Probably the answer to this question cannot be found among the Indians themselves, but in what this question shows, that is those knotted problems concerning the meaning the meaning of the image of the Indian hold by the western world, the reason why the Indian has always been the phantom of the West. Reviewing Teodorov, we can say that there has never been an actual encounter between the West and the Native Americans: after five hundred years nothing is do faraway.

The continuous attempts, made by the western culture to comprehend within itself the Indians, remain deficient and what they left in shade is more than what they enlightened. Maybe the reason why is the extreme difficulty western philosophy has always shown when it had to think about Otherness. Since its birth in Greece, western philosophy has been established as the "work of concept", that is as the will and belief to be able to grasp an intelligible essence among the variety of events, an intelligence that could be nothing but logical, i.e. non contradictory, and therefore universal, valid always and everywhere , that is true. This way western philosophy has always wanted to lead into itself, into its own pre-comprehension that world that it could do nothing but conquer, that is include it in itself and make it alike to itself.

The Europeans lived the encounter with the American peoples with a feeling of radical Otherness, but also believing that Indian Otherness was nothing but a difference that their minds could grasp from the beginning. Western culture, in fact, has always tried to reduce the incomprehensible variety of the American peoples to stereotypes, which are nothing but images of itself the West projected onto Others. This way the West hid the obvious Otherness of the Native Americans, first of all to itself. When such an Otherness was grasped, in the case the Europeans recognized the common humanity they shared with the Indians, they enforced assimilation policies, while, in the case the Other persisted in his in-human refusal, extermination policies were enforced.

If the Indians were others to the Europeans, then also the Europeans were others to the Indians. The difference was that the Native peoples did not have to include everything into a philosophic, preconceive scheme, which claimed to be true, i. e. comprehensive. The possible answer for a real encounter must be found in the spiritual, more than in the intellectual, disposition to "lose oneself", that is to abandon ideas and certainties which, though acquired unconsciously, determine what today the westerners and the natives think to be.

Flavia Busatta

Emilio Salgari is the creator of the Italian imaginary Indian, a mythical character who haunts the audience at the lectures about Native Americans in Italy. It is him who teaches us the fairy tale about the mustangs as thoroughbred horses, creates the image of an excessive, panic American nature, paints the icon on the "nice buffalo family", depicts the Indians as ferine and extreme and the cowboys as brave and tough. Nature seen as hostile to human progress and something to tame, however, demonstrates the urban, Catholic mold of Salgari, who does not believe in the lost Eden any longer. Salgari's racism and eurocentrism is shared by writers of Indians from Cooper to Verne, from Chateaubriand to Karl May. Indeed in his works the capital sin is miscegenation, the medley of races, a sin that causes only mourning and fierce revenges. Racism, also emphasized by a notable splatter effect, affects equally both the Whites and the Indians, but above all the English. That is understandable in view of the period (1883-1911); in those years Britain opposed the colonial aims of the new-born Kingdom of Italy. Another element of the atmosphere of that time can be noted in the author's adhesion to superhuman characters, extreme feelings such as revenge, hatred, furious passion and "beautiful" death (he looked for the last one, in a way, with his suicide). In his works the image of the Indian appears a disgraceful collage of tribes and cultures. In this collage, indigenous or foreign words are used to give an appearance of truth to the story, trogh their exotic sounds, to stress the savagery of the Natives, because "savage peoples" have uneducated tongues.

Francesco Spagna

"La sovrana del Campo d'Oro" (The Queen of the Golden Field) by E. Salgari is a well-built story that, for piling up all the western stereotypes. Becomes a bit boring after a while. The message given by the author is clearly racist, not only against the Indians, but in general against miscegenation in America. Even if the Indians seem to be incurable savages, Salgari, for some aspects, gives a correct reading of the Indian issues, and this is an evidence that his sources, though of second or third hands, were of quality. He was a passionate library-goer and it seems that he made friends ith the seamen of the port of Genoa, looking for exotic information. In this context it is interesting the description of the reservation Indians, who are, to the main character's eyes, only soothed, ragged people. This passage, moreover, reveals that no future is granted to the losers, whose wild nature gives only inauspicious outcomes. In order to find the fascinating ambivalence of the "savage" again, we have to wait for the appearance of the still free, irreducible Indian characters in this and other novels by Salgari. Even if the sources might be honest, Salgari's descriptions act according to the principle for which the complexity of other cultures is mixed up in a cultural meat ball, if not annihilated. As far as the historical data are concerned, it must be said that the episode of Sand Creek is correctly represented, doing some justice to the Indians. Moreover, there is a precious piece of information such as "La fenice dei Ceroki"(sic!, The Cherokee Phoenix), which makes us appreciate once again Salgari's passion for documentary research.

Wilma Ricci

Sherman Alexie, young poet and writer, already known to the Italian public for his collection of short stories published by Frassinelli (1995), The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in Heaven, with this novel, Reservation Blues (Frassinelli, 1996), offers us a crude as well as lyric representation of the dramatic life in an Indian reservation. An intense narration, where the sadness for past, present and future life fully justifies the blues reference of the title. Le story tells the adventures of a rickety Indian band, which makes up and breaks up around a magical guitar, among collective and individual dramas, in the bare frame of the reservation.

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