What you mean “we?”

… white man?

Like “African-American” and “person of color,” “Native American” was not a phrase of my childhood, simply because they weren’t invented yet. I’m using “Indian” here for the earlier parts, not on principle but as a matter of memory in tune with the times I’m talking about. The term was a constant set of images for me, mostly positive which I think was relatively new in the culture.

A lot of Indian-ness was appropriated as a symbol for other groups. The narrator of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the breakout in 1961 (the novel was a hit long before the play/movie), officially transforming the embarrassment, loser, and perennial victim into the powerhouse hero of dissenters everywhere. Black and Indian civil rights were often combined although never really allied as movements, and the former used a lot of Indian imagery to make its point. Everyone knew Bill Cosby’s Lone Ranger and Tonto sketch from his 1964 album, and Cassius’ Clay’s famous draft resistance quote was immortalized in Hair (1967).

I remember this song by Oscar J. Brown, Jr. from Top 40 AM radio in 1974.

There I was, reading Captain America and the Falcon at the same time, and you can bet I turned my head a bit to the side, squinted a little, and went “h’mmm …” This connection wasn’t always abstract, either, as a lot of people with shared Native American and African ancestry were now becoming vocal about it for the first time.

Sherry L. Smith’s Hippies, Indians, & the Fight for Red Power captures the moments in a way only an honestly reflective participant could, and I highly recommend it. She shows in detail how the influences went both ways: Indian activism reached into antiwar and leftist techniques, and counter-cultural and other activism reached into Indian symbolism. Genuine contact was limited, some of it terribly naive and some pretty solid, and most of was in-between. Probably most familiar now is the confounding of psychedelic drugs with shamanism – my personal jury is still out on how many people became shamans in part to get high, and how many people got high thinking they’d become shamans (cough). I remember very well the counter-cultural emphasis on Indians, whether dressing up like them or learning romantic accounts about “harmony with nature,” and also being perhaps the only generation in U.S. history who learned a non-heroic account of Columbus’ journey and related events … I was stunned as a teen to find that only I and a handful of other kids even knew why Native Americans are called “Indians.” Even today I discover college students proudly lecturing others about it because they just learned it for the first time at age 20.

Remember this?

I loved Schoolhouse Rock, being the on-target age group, and I still do; my kids watch it. But I don’t let them see this episode, and even then, still a pre-teen, I was shocked to see the American/Nazi terminology right in the middle of the other material which was all much more street-friendly, hip, people-centered, diverse, and even politically a bit edgy. This was the same year my class was visited by the Holocaust survivor with the numbers on her arm. I mean, we have “Tyrannosaurus Debt,” still one of the finest animated segments in the medium’s history, and then … “Elbow Room?” I know now that this segment had everything to do with the feature’s funding and with the Bicentennial, but you want to talk about selling your soul, shit.

Sneer if you like (this is getting a lot of play currently), but back then, at least this counter-cultural contact meant some little white kids took their own time to read Black Elk Speaks, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and I Will Fight No More Forever, got heavy into Coyote mythology, and eventually checked out the real political and cultural history behind these popular accounts. Some of us even understood that Indians were much more acceptable targets than black people in the 70s, that this was wrong, and that even attempts to be inclusive were usually ham-handed, in their saintly or otherwise equally-still-wooden portrayals.

There were also the civic protests which are generally not well-remembered, like the occupation of Alcatraz in 1968 and the events at Wounded Knee in the mid-70s. In isolation, they may seem classically quixotic and full of genuinely head-thumping screw-ups … until you look at it in the long haul and consider that maybe the Native American effort has walked a really hard line between gaining political clout and resisting full assimilation, and its arc isn’t easily understood without a lot of personal legwork. In retrospect, the American Indian Movement laid the foundation for quite a lot.

Uh … you do realize that Mount Rushmore is not on U.S. land, right? Not even a little. Not even sort of. If the Lakota wanted to dynamite the largest piece of tasteless graffiti on earth off their mountain tomorrow, then by our very own laws, they absolutely could.

OK, I’m supposed to be blogging about comics, in this case from the late 60s through the early 80s, and the usual odd, variably effective, hard-to-parse presentation in the Marvel comics that I knew so well. The first being of course Wyatt Wingfoot, who in inimitable Lee-Kirby style refused to conform to “honest Injun sidekick” tropes even when he was an honest, Indian, sidekick guy. Even given any number of gratuitous mentions of his ethnicity (including racist ones from Ben Grimm), or his “uncanny” tracking abilities, we are talking about one of the simply coolest, most decent guys ever written in Marvel Comics, who had the guts to hang with the Fantastic Four at the height of Kirby’s trippy action extravaganza phase, and if sometimes pummeled, was never punked. All those whiners with issues, lightin’ up the sky with their powers, and Wyatt never got any, go figure. He was also fortunate later to be liked by John Byrne which means he was never mutilated, brain-fried, or retconned into, I dunno, a child molester or something when Byrne went through his axe-murder-all-heroes phase at Marvel in the late 80s-early 90s.

Talking about Byrne is distracting and it just bumped me out of my sequence. Plus, I don’t want to run down every last character, as Wikipedia has done that, and I want to stay focused on the 70s.

Coolest mask in comics.

One might say Red Wolf was a bit too Indian at his first appearance in 1970, almost to the point of assless chaps, but hold up, think about how easy it would have been to make the guy white “raised by Injuns,” and give some credit for not doing that. Besides, I really envied this guy’s mask. I made up all sorts of rip-off variants to be my superhero costume, you know, when the day came. (Silver Wolf. Black Wolf. oh the choices!) Nor did I miss my chance at relevance; as a devotee of Ranger Rick, I threw my heart into a report on the (actual) red wolf in sixth-grade, with at least one thumb on the comic at the same time. Looking at the stories now, I realize the primary Native American conundrum in them is the token issue, using a single concept-character as nearly the total of Marvel Indian-ness. It’s not like they could have a whole cast of various such characters; no, they had to keep using the same name and hero-lineage for it, as with nine issues of the same-named series featuring his predecessors, one in a late 19th century character and some other 70s guy. The original (William Talltrees, meaning in real-life publication, not fictional chronology) didn’t do much more, showing up with Tigra a few times during her extremely weird run in the black-and-white Marvel Chillers. That’s different from what I see with black characters of the mid-70s and the following decade, in which the various details jumped all over the cultural-political map, but usually through making new characters.

The only good one, I guess.

Wyatt and William Talltrees were pretty much it then, until look! Another unambiguous Native American guy in the mid-1970s, great! Thunderbird: (pause for horror-stricken horror) oh man, what a pure and embarrassing travesty. Feathers in his hair, fringes on his arms, well, OK, but worse by far: completely inarticulate, chip on his shoulder, inferiority complex beyond all reason. Pouty, pissy, simply and thoroughly useless – even explicitly so when compared to white Canadian Wolverine (pause for loud groan). He existed solely to provide the most cynical and yes, I’ll say it, exploitative kill-off in Marvel history, dying unheroically in what appears to be some kind of fuck-you suicide, unnecessarily as the Banshee could have solved the immediate problem without his butthurt butt in the way. Then we get a couple of obligatory “oh we loved him so” moments, despite that fact that no one else in the team ever once liked or talked nicely to him, and after that, nothin’. Not even a mention. The memory hole goes zoop, closed.

Seriously, in the 70s, when the black guy dies, it’s extra-special tragic because y’know slavery and all, and now this … but when the Indian gets it, everyone breathes a sigh of relief that that shit is out of the way, the incompetent load is finally gone, we get to sniffle once and feel “concerned” or something, and we don’t have to listen to his constant guilt-trip any more. Do I even have to go into the whole Thunderbird’s lookalike brother thing? At least that guy didn’t have an absurdly stereotyped name … oh wait. Or include absurdly stereotyped details like being a knife-wielding revenge-obsessed manaic … oh for God’s sake, Marvel, please, just stop.

Good enough to be your totem.

The coin might show its other face with I Am Coyote: a confirmatory and exciting book for me in the early-mid 80s, speaking of the collection with the depicted cover, by Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers. It’s best described as more sex and tripping and gore against the establishment than a Native American hippie blend could hope to bear in one spot, as written by two white guys with lysergic acid diethylamide possibly deserving a co-creator credit. It’ll get a whole post of its own with some relevant autobiography, including why the incredible self-indulgence of the whole thing was a plus … uh, for me anyway. I could see why someone else might recoil from it as strongly as I do from Thunderbird and Warpath. It’s the whole Hippies & Indians yes/no good/bad respect/appropriation issue in triplicate. It spoke hard to me on a number of levels in part because of its confusion, and in that it comes down barely on the right side of that line.

I’ll tell you a little more, I guess. One of my mentors in my teen years was a counselor at the camp I posted about before, named Jim – an outspoken black and Native American guy, whom I still recall as the first genuinely kind, anti-bullying authority figure I met, and certainly the first who treated me as a younger man instead of as a kid. A lot of my regard for I Am Coyote is rooted in my friendship with him, not with abstractions, and so when I talk about the comic’s extremist social activism, Indian rights, wilderness, and peyote, my enjoyment of its excess is grounded in real people who were not “stupid hippies,” and in their concrete actions which I respect.

The issue remains all kinds of dicey, with the only virtue to its presence being that it demands attention. There’s a hell of a lot politics and policy to review before I can do that. The larger sweep of Cheyenne characters written by Chris Claremont in the 80s deserves a look, especially Cable, who was introduced right at the time I quit reading Marvel superhero comics again, approximately 1990. For the 90s comics, there’s Garth Ennis’ presentation in Preacher, and in the last few years, Jason Aaron’s and R. M. Guera’s Scalped. So much to blog!

kinda trippy!

Here’s one last thing for this post: I learned from Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story that in 1984, J. M. DeMatteis was writing a story in which the Red Skull is (really) killed, that Steve Rogers (really) quits being Captain America, that he’d then be killed by Bucky Barnes, and wait for it … that the Native American superhero Black Crow would become the new Captain America. For real, no reversals, no dial-it-back gimmicks, that’d be the character now. Holy shit!

This didn’t happen, needless to say, and Black Crow instead became an intermittent character to say the least, but still, holy shit! If I had the money, I’d pay DeMatteis my own self to write that this minute, with thinly-disguised expy characters as a unique publication. What might that character go on to do! (Mount Rushmore …)

Links: The X-Men are a little racist

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