American Indian Culture and Research Journal

They Speak Like Singing: Native (American) Crossings focuses on early books of poetry and prose by select Native writers, showcasing the distinct voices and tribal diversities of living Indians. Through the pan-tribal medium of English, a second language for some, now a mother tongue for most, all of these Native writers begin as poets and go on to write novels. Long, long ago the Lakota matrix White Buffalo Calf Woman brought the medicine pipe. Nick Black Elk recalls in The Sixth Grandfather: “And she knew their thoughts and said in a voice that was like singing . . .,” With visible breath I am walking. A voice I am sending as I walk. In a sacred manner I am walking. With visible tracks I am walking. In a sacred manner I am walking. “He spoke like singing,” says Black Elk as he remembers the wanékia, or “make-live” prophet, of his Lakota Ghost Dance vision, whose “all-colors” voice goes everywhere. As with the grandfather stallion songs, everything hears and dances—the leaves, grasses, waters, leggeds, wingeds, and crawling beings. The savior’s chant is a Native blessing for all. “They were better able now to see the greenness of the world,” Black Elk says of heyoka curing songs, “the wideness of the sacred day, the colors of the earth, and to set these in their minds.” They Speak like Singing honors talk-song visions for all relatives and seeks to distinguish, if not to reconcile, Native with American poetics.

An award-winning film, The Mission presents an allegorical treatment of colonial drama in the Americas. Although the opening credits to the film state that “the historical events, represented in this story are true, and occurred around the borderlands of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil in the year 1750,” there is considerable evidence that the scope of this film is greater than the year 1750. Depicting the fabled “Jesuit Republic,” The Mission dramatizes historical events that span a period of more than 150 years, from 1610 to 1768. In scope and deed these events bear much that is relevant to the invasion and conquest of the Americas. Minding this premise, there is reason to suspect that The Mission dramatically conveys an allegory of the Conquest. In doing so, it frames the narrative in an allegorical sense of “brother care” or “neighbor love” that constitutes the agape doctrine of the synoptic Gospels. In approaching The Mission I propose to turn our attention to what I will call the archaeology of the film. By archaeology I am suggesting the foundations, both historical and imagined, in the filmmaker’s craft. As Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J., adviser on the film, has pointed out, a “two hour film attempts the impossible in summary of two hundred fifty years of achievement.” Film cannot be judged against the complexities that govern traditional historical analysis and presentation. Minding this consideration, I present, first, a historical sketch of the Jesuit Republic and, second, a critical analysis of the film. HISTORY OF THE CONQUEST In order to appreciate The Mission, it is helpful to review the historical themes that engendered the Conquest and, subsequently, the Jesuit Republic. Following landfall in the Americas and his initial observations of the Natives, Columbus wrote: “They should be good and intelligent servants, for I see that they say very quickly everything that is said to them; and I believe that they would become Christians very easily, for it seemed to me that they had no religion.”

The overall cancer mortality rate for American Indians is lower than the U.S. all-races rate. However, American Indians experience significantly higher mortality rates for some cancers, and incidence and mortality rates are increasing over time for many cancers. The Messengers for Health project, on the Apsáalooke Reservation, is located in southeastern Montana and is focused on cervical cancer. In the United States the mortality rate for Native women with cervical cancer is 1.35 times higher than the women-of-all-races rate. Cervical cancer mortality rates are the highest for Northern Plains Indian women, compared to rates for American Indians across all regions of the United States. Researchers conclude that the data regarding Native American cancer rates are incomplete; there are great regional variations in Native American cancer rates, so prevalence data from a single group cannot be generalized to the population as a whole; and cancer rates for Native Americans look lower than they really are. Messengers for Health is a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project with the objectives of decreasing cervical cancer screening barriers, increasing knowledge regarding screening and prevention of cervical cancer, and increasing the proportion of women receiving Pap tests among Apsáalooke (Crow Indian) women eighteen years old and older. These objectives will be assessed with preintervention and postintervention surveys and secondary data from the Indian Health Service (IHS).

American Indians can be considered “bicultural” because they must adapt to two cultures: their Native (tribal) culture and the white, mainstream (nontribal) culture. Most research on the ethnic identity of American Indian adolescents has focused exclusively on tribal identity rather than on nontribal identity. Also, previous research has been based on samples of adolescents who live on tribal reservations, neglecting those who live off reservations or belong to tribes without residential reservation land. It is important, however, to study adolescents’ nontribal identity and to study those adolescents not living on reservations. Furthermore, studies of western and southern tribal adolescents significantly outweigh those of northeastern tribal adolescents. The history of northeastern tribes differs substantially from that of other tribes, as northeastern tribes have experienced a longer length of contact with settlers and more intermarriage with non-Indians, producing tribal members of various ethnic backgrounds. The purpose of this study is to achieve an understanding of the bicultural (tribal and nontribal) ethnic identity of northeastern tribal adolescents, highlighting their unique history and experience. Adolescents aged thirteen to seventeen of a northeastern tribe participated in the current study. This particular tribe does not have residential reservation land, so studying this population addresses the issue stated above—the lack of studies concerned with Indians not on reservations. Furthermore, the study examines not only tribal identity, as has been typically done in previous studies, but also nontribal identity.

Paiute writer Adrian C. Louis’s poetry complicates Native meanings of home and community in painful and sometimes problematic ways, yet it participates in the project, widely shared by Native writers, of maintaining these very essentials of Indian continuance and survival. The importance of home for American Indian writers and their peoples is implicit in the centrality of land and community for both traditional oral and written literatures. Community ideally embraces human and nonhuman life, the physical world, and the world of spiritual reality, all of which are reciprocally related. It is thus supportive, empowering, and dynamic. Community includes land, understood as the grounds of tribal and sacred history, culture, and language. In the framework of such traditional knowledge, home is one’s place within community and land; to some extent, these three terms—home, community, and land—can be used interchangeably, as I will often do here, using home to imply aspects of the other two. For Native peoples the web of home, land, and community has traditionally been the source of identity and of the sense of belonging, in and through family and culture; it is likewise often a source of knowledge and creativity. Native writers often confirm the significance of home to their visions and their work. Thus, for example, Luci Tapahonso writes: “The place of my birth is the source of [my] writing.” And Joy Harjo states: “Oklahoma never leaves us. The spirit is alive in the landscape that arranges itself in . . . poems and stories.” Many critics have also contributed to the project of defining the importance of home, land, and community in Native literature. William Bevis observes that “[i]n Native American novels, coming home, staying put . . . is not only the primary story, it is a primary mode of knowledge and a primary good.” Robert Nelson, who notes that the landscape values he identifies in fiction are also evident in Native poetry, finds that in the Indian novels he discusses “the common referent that serves to define, evaluate, and confirm or validate identity is a physical landscape” and that land offers “the antidote to alienation.” Cherokee scholar Jace Weaver states that the “necessity of community pervades every aspect of Native life,” since “Native peoples find their individual identities in the collectivity of community.” Thus he argues that “[b]y writing out of and into Native community, for and to Native peoples, [Native] writers engage in a continuing search for community.” As these critics’ observations suggest, and writers like Tapahonso and Harjo confirm, for Native peoples a grounding in home and community can be a powerful basis for survival.

In previous commentaries I discussed the generalized concept of personhood across Native North America. I included funeral rituals in that discussion because of the widespread belief among Native Americans that how a person comes apart can instruct us on how he or she first came together. Well-known methods for disposing of the deceased’s physical remains include burial in earthen graves, exposure on scaffolds, and cremation, but burial in the fourth element, water, is virtually ignored. Suggestions that this type of burial was practiced, however, do exist. Tulsa’s Gilcrease Museum holds a huge painting that shows bead-and-feather-dressed Natives in Woodland canoes on the verge of sinking a bundled body. Docents are carefully instructed, however, to explain to visitors that the entire scene is the artist’s imagining. Yet the deliberate placement of human remains into water deserves careful consideration. Unfortunately, any review of the past literature usually begins and ends with reports that Alaska Natives unceremoniously threw their deceased slaves into the sea. For our own times the immediate image called to mind is the end result of a Mafia contract that has “Guido wearing cement shoes and sleeping with the fishes.” Over and above all of these peculiarities, however, is the common knowledge that “water revives,” although, as we will see, this is not always a good thing. Water is both dangerous and powerful. Blessed as holy water it serves in many rituals and other acts of faith; raging as a tsunami, it destroys. Throughout the Americas, dangerous serpents live in water, perhaps most terrifyingly embodied by mythic anacondas in the rivers of the Amazon Basin. Among the Tsimshian of the Northwest Coast, spanaxnox, the abodes of wondrous beings (naxnox) were (and are) avoided by all those lacking the spiritual strength to deal with them. Other water beings with great power include Tie Snakes of the Southeast, the serpentine Missouri River itself, the “drawer-unders” of the Delaware, and the Underwater Panther (piasaw) of the Midwest.