Lisa Jones: Laugh at the crying Indian…

As a tribal citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes, also known as the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, this story made me thankful a writer helped share the story of the Garrison Dam and the devastation it had on our people. Mistakes from the past still haunt us. The MHA Nation is still working to strengthen communities at Fort Berthold after the flooding of our traditional homelands, including scores of our sacred sites. A movement is underway in Twin Buttes, N.D. to save and revitalize the Mandan, or Nueta, language. You can help. Stay tuned to Buffalo’s Fire as details develop. —  Jodi Rave

The following story is from Lisa Jones and the Grist:
Maybe you’re too young to remember the 1971 TV commercial featuring the Native American guy in the fringe suit canoeing into the industrial heart of, let’s say, Cleveland. He disembarks, stands at the side of the road, has litter thrown onto his moccasins from a passing car, and turns to the camera with one tear rolling down his cheek.

So maybe that wasn’t what you were reminded of when you saw the new crying-Indian photo that’s been popping up around the Interwebs lately—the one who is ostensibly lamenting a rainforest’s ruin. But surely you’ve seen the parodies that followed the original Keep America Beautiful ad. It was repeated move-for-move on The Simpsons. On Friends, while Chandler and his pals are stranded at a rest stop, he gets caught throwing an empty cigarette pack on the ground, and protests, “I thought maybe if I littered, that crying Indian might come along and save us.” In Wayne’s World 2, Jim Morrison’s Naked Indian Friend sheds tears upon seeing the scattered trash left over from Waynestock. He cheers up, though, when he sees Wayne and Garth picking up the mess.

Sure, the commercial was hokey—40 years later, littering no longer rates as a notable environmental transgression, plus it starred an Italian-American actor, not a native one. But something struck a nerve, and when Americans’ nerves get struck, we start making jokes. As comedian Lenny Bruce pointed out, the equation for comedy is “laughter = pain + time.” The website TV Tropes collected no less than 30 parodies of the Crying Indian commercial, putting them under the headline, “Somewhere, an Indian is crying.”

Sure, somewhere, an Indian is crying, and somewhere else, like in the non-Indian, first-world mind, we are applying humor to further anesthetize the little sleepy zone in our brain where serious and sustained thought about native people might dwell—the part of our collective post-colonial consciousness that, if it awoke, might convince us to give it all back and move back to Krakow or Athens or Liverpool—and who wants to live there?

OK, so let’s look at a photo of an actual Indian crying, and over something a lot worse than littering. Here’s George Gillette, who in 1948 was the chairman of the Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa tribes of North Dakota, crying because the tribes’ homeland on the fertile floodplain of the Missouri River was to be inundated by construction of the Garrison Dam.

Gillette’s tribal ancestors saved Lewis and Clark’s lives in the frigid winter of 1804-5, and later that century, served as scouts for the U.S. Cavalry. The Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa assimilated into remarkably patriotic attendees of both schools and churches, and were industrious farmers who had weathered the Great Depression better than their white neighbors. They also learned a thing or two about the American legal system, and fought the Garrison Dam with extraordinary tenacity and skill. They lost that battle, however, and after the dam was constructed, the three tribes were scattered, their communities and extended families flung to different shores of the 200-mile-long Lake Sakakawea, their centuries-long agricultural practices destroyed.

Go to the Grist for the rest of the story…