“Moving made me happy”

-Pretty Sheild, Absaarooke, 1932

So spoke the old woman about the hard work of her youth, work that modern women would equate with slavery, just as modern men bristle, chaff and whine woman-like when they are called upon to defend themselves and their family, thinking this is some other’s duty.

The question of interbreeding, of Crazy Horse’s brown hair and blue eyes—that he would not let his photo be taken—of the fact that Blue Jacket was entirely Dutch in genetics, and that these men fought fiercest against the whites—this question has haunted me.

We are told that the red man was not a redskin, that this notion is racist and must be stricken from our thoughts and speech.

We are told that we palefaces are inherently, genetically evil, and that all other races are superior in humanity.

We are told these things by very, very pale, Anglo-looking Indians of today. Perhaps they are so bitter because they are the end result of either surrender, betrayal or rape?

But others, in their ancient recorded words—like Metacomet—and some now, such as adopted Blackfeet Ronald Thomas West, insisted and insist, that culture is a state of mind, not genetic, that being an Indian is an ideal, a very old ideal.

In looking at the photos or Plains Indian war chiefs I am looking at a clearly different race than the Eastern Woodland Indians who adopted huge amounts of whites to maintain their population over 200 years of alternate compliance and resistance to civilization. When I look at Apache photos, I see another, red—race. At the Custer Battle Field Monument, most of the chiefs were very, very dark, with two looking half white. Ironically, Lame Whiteman was among the darkest.

So, at the entrance to the Plains Indian Museum, I stopped for a half hour to tarry over the photos of the Board of Native American Advisors.

I saw seven photos of eight people as my guide, who is 1 part out of 16 Lakota, walks past a large man who is apparently 1 part in 16 Caucasian. My impressions are, of course, crude. I’m not like my friend Ajay—who told me that in another life she was a mammy on a Virginia plantation in charge of sniffing out mixed race imposters “passing as white”—with a sixth sense for race mixing. However, I am not color blind and can tell beige from copper, rust from white, paleface from redskin. With black and white photos dark and light are strongly apparent. The features, the facial terrain, cannot hide from the eye.

Of the eight images I find:

A Lakota from 1991, appearing ¾ Caucasian

A Blackfeet from 2000, appearing ½ Caucasian

A Blackfeet from 2000, appearing ½ Caucasian

An Arapaho from 1993, appearing ¾ Caucasian

An Absaarooke from 2000, with no Caucasian traces

A Mandan from 1999, appearing ½ Caucasian

A Shoshone from 2000, appearing ¼ Caucasian

An Absaarooke from 1990, appearing ½ Caucasian

I then went into the interior of the museum, set up under the direction of Indians that looked more like my mongrelized, Northern European form than the copper-skinned, Siberian-featured people of another time, who fought so hard to avoid being penned in like my pallid slave-ancestors.

I thought then, wondering about the escaped white servant, William Garrison, who decked a rich navy officer off the California Coast, changed his name to John Johnston, moved to the High Plains of Montana, and did everything from growing cabbages, cutting firewood and fighting like the Fire Devil the Sioux named him, just to live a little like an Indian, away from the slave pens of the east that he was born to.

I suspect he had more in common with Pretty Shield than with his forefathers.