When Parrots Learn to Talk, and Why They Can't: Domination, Deception, and Self-Deception in Indian-White Relations

Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History

When Parrots Learn to Talk, and Why They Can't: Domination, Deception, and Self-Deceptionin Indian-White RelationsAuthor(s): Gerald SiderSource: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Jan., 1987), pp. 3-23Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178778 .

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When Parrots Learn to Talk, and Why They Can't: Domination, Deception, and Self-Deception in Indian-White Relations GERALD SIDER

College of Staten Island, C. U.N.Y., and Graduate School and University Center, C. U.N. Y.

If the expansion and consolidation of state power simply undermined, homog- enized, and ultimately destroyed the distinctive societies and ethnic groups in its grasp, as various acculturation or melting-pot theories would have it, the world would long ago have run out of its supply of diverse ways of life, a supply presumably created in the dawn of human time. To the contrary, state power must not only destroy but also generate cultural differentiation-and do so not only between different nation states, and between states and their political and economic colonies, but in the center of its grasp as well. The historical career of ethnic peoples can thus best be understood in the context of forces that both give a people birth and simultaneously seek to take their lives.

No simple dialectic of domination and resistance shapes the processes by which ethnic groups form: Both may be brutal, but often neither is very clear. Domination even at its most violent can still be permeated with ambiguity, uncertainty, and peculiar mixtures of fantasy and reality; resistance can occur simultaneously with collusion. Moreover, processes of ethnic-group formation have both cultural and political-economic dimensions that sometimes develop in conjunction, and sometimes run cross-current to each other. Tak- ing a close look at some aspects of the earliest encounters between Europeans

The first draft of this article was written in 1981 for the Max-Planck-Institut fur Geschi- chte/Maison des Sciences de 1'Homme preparatory conference on "Herrschaft as Social Prac- tice." The second version was prepared during a residence at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in the fall of 1982. I would like to especially thank Prof. R. Vierhaus and M. Clemens Heller for the hospitality of their institutes, and for their support. The over-all perspective of the article owes a great deal to five years of continuing discussions on history and anthropology with Alf Ludtke, Hans Medick, and David Sabean of the Max-Planck-Institut fur Geschichte in Gottingen. Discussions with Karin Hausin, Rhys Isaac, Michael Merrill, Regina Schulte, and Elizabeth Traube were particularly helpful. 0010-4175/87/0110-3117 $5.00 ? 1987 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

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4 GERALD SIDER

and native American peoples, and then following a few initial themes as they develop on both the cultural and political-economic terrains, will show that the paradoxes, contradictions, and disjunctions that can be seen in the history of ethnic-group formation, rather than being obstacles to our understanding, are the keys to getting inside.

I

Concerning his first encounter with native people, on 12 October 1492, Co- lumbus writes:

I, . . . in order that they might feel great amity towards us, because I knew that they were a people to be delivered and converted to our holy faith rather by love than by force, gave to some among them some red caps and some glass beads, which they hung around their necks, and many other things of little value. At this they were greatly pleased and became so entirely our friends that it was a wonder to see. Afterwards they came swimming to the ships' boats, where we were, and brought us parrots and cotton threads in balls, and spears and many other things, and we ex- changed for them other things, such as small glass beads and hawks' bells, which we gave to them. In fact, they took all and gave all, such as they had, with good will, but it seemed to me that they were a people very deficient in everything. They all go naked as their mothers bore them, and the women also, although I saw only one very young girl. And all those whom I did see were youths, so I did not see one who was over thirty years of age; they were very well built, with handsome bodies and very good faces. Their hair is coarse, almost like the hairs of a horse's tail and short; they wear their hair down over the eyebrows, except for a few strands behind, which they wear long and never cut. Some of them are painted black, and they are the colour of the people of the Canaries, neither black nor white, and some of them are painted white and some red and some in any colour that they find. Some of them paint their faces, some their whole bodies, some only the eyes, and some only the nose. They do not bear arms or know them, for I showed to them swords and they took them by the blades and cut themselves through ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are certain reeds, without iron, and some of these have a fish tooth at the end, while others are pointed in various ways. They are all generally fairly tall, good looking, and well proportioned. I saw some who bore marks of wounds on their bodies, and I made signs to them to ask how this came about, and they indicated to me that people came from other islands, which are near, and wished to capture them, and they defended themselves. And I believed and still believe that they came here from the mainland to take them for slaves. They should be good servants, and of quick intelligence, since I see that they very soon say all that is said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, for it appeared to me that they had no creed. Our Lord willing, at the time of my departure I will bring back six of them to Your Highnesses, that they may learn to talk. I saw no beast of any kind in this island, except parrots.1

1 This translation appears in several places. It was originally done by Cecil Jane, revised by L. A. Vigneras, and published as The Journal of Christopher Columbus (New York, 1969), 23- 24. The standard transcription of the original, Bartolem6 de Las Casas's "abstract" of Colum- bus's journal, is in Raccolta di documenti e studi pubbl. dalla R. Commisione Columbiana (Rome, 1892-96). The transcription was made by editor-in-chief Cesare de Lollis and Julian Paz, from the las Casas manuscript in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid. The last two sentences of the quotation, in the original, are: "Yo, plaziando a Nuestro Senor, levare de aqui, al tiempo de mi partida, seys a Vuestras Altezas, para que deprendan fabular. Ninguna bestia de ninuna manera vide, salvo papagayos, en esta ysla."



DOMINATION AND DECEPTION IN INDIAN-WHITE RELATIONS

The opening sentence assigns a pair of roles, or more specifically, inten- tions. The natives are "to feel great amity towards us"; the Europeans are to "deliver" the natives "to our holy faith."2 And Columbus has a preferred method to achieve his goal- "rather by love than by force"--within which the conjoining of the two elements, love and force, indicates that they are not exactly alternatives. In fact, the conjunction of love and force, friendship and

contempt, admiration and insult, recurs throughout the text. Columbus begins by offering gifts, and then immediately describes his gifts

as "things of little value"-although bells for people who do not have metal are clearly special, and glass beads, for people who drill beads by hand, are

special also-as Columbus must have known, evidenced both from the very great importance, since the twelfth century, of Venetian glass beads in the trans-Mediterranean trade, and by the fact that he brought bells and beads with him.

After deprecating the gifts, and the act of giving, to then say that the native people became "entirely our friends" is to mock and utterly deny the mutu- ality implicit in the concept of friendship. This deprecation of the native people-of the gifts to them, of their friendship-extends to blaming the victim (they "cut themselves through ignorance") and is summed up and made total in Columbus's response to the generosity of their giving: "they were a people very deficient in everything."

This is nasty, or much worse than nasty, but straightforward. At the point where Columbus first writes of women, and implicitly of sex and of inno- cence, he leaves the realm of the straightforward and enters the domain of fantasy: "They all go naked as their mothers bore them, and the women also, although I saw only one very young girl," (emphasis supplied). Within this domain of fantasy, which quickly encompasses visions of domination, the Europeans insist on a fundamental restructuring of what they directly see and hear: "I saw some who bore marks of wounds on their bodies, and I made signs to them to ask how this came about, and they indicated to me that people came from other islands, which are near, and wished to capture them, and they defended themselves. And I believed and still believe that they came here from the mainland to take them for slaves. They should be good servants. ..." (emphasis supplied).

Note this: Columbus himself comes from a mainland, not an island. He begins by insisting, directly contrary to what he has just been shown, that people from a mainland came to try and enslave (his transformation of "capture") the people before him. He then directly states that they should be good

2 The point here is not to try to understand whether or not this was Columbus's real intention, nor is it relevant here whether this text was in fact written by Columbus on the day he landed or was subsequently put together, or even invented, by las Casas. The point is that the unfolding contradictions of the text serve as an introduction, historically and structurally, to some seemingly fundamental and very long-lasting patterns of domination and coinvolvement in the relations between Europeans and native Americans.

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6 GERALD SIDER

servants, and he will so take them. Columbus will, that is, do nothing more than exactly what he fantasizes other people, like himself, have already done or tried to do. That is the importance of his insisting, contrary to the evidence ("and I believed and still believe") that the potential captors came from the mainland,3 and that they meant to enslave.

Columbus's identification with ongoing or prior domination creates a history which dehistoricises his intended actions: The false continuity that he shapes justifies his domination by making enslavement seem inevitable and natural, rather than specific and changeable. At the point of domination the humanity of the native people is denied in the context of an attempt to both create and incorporate the other.

It is in this context of dehistoricising, totalizing, and making domination seem natural that we can understand his last two statements as, simultaneously, statements both of domination and of the created-or about-to-be- created-otherness of the dominated: "I will bring back six of them to Your Highnesses, that they may learn to talk. I saw no beast of any kind in this island, except parrots." Columbus had experience in the Mediterranean and knew of very different languages. But he says "learn to talk"-not learn to talk our language, to talk with us. Then, immediately following, he says he saw "no beast of any kind in this island, except parrots."

Putting aside, for a moment, the point that parrots were the first gift that the native people brought to him, we must begin by seeing this statement as expressing a very simple, even trivial, lie, for if we count birds such as parrots as beasts, then Columbus had to have seen more than one kind of bird/beast on the island. His insistence that parrots were the only beasts points to, and for a moment conceals, a far more profound deception, which starts with the realization that parrots are birds that, after a fashion, can learn to talk. The natives will do the same; they are, or are soon to become for the Europeans, the parrots who "very soon learn to say all that is said to them." The denial of their humanity is total, or tends in that direction. But this denial is born in a lie, and remains riven with self-deceptions and contradictions, for if the first gift the native people brought were parrots, and if Columbus identifies the native people with parrots, than at some fundamental level he is deceiving himself into believing that the native people are giving (or should give) themselves over to him for delivery to his holy faith and to his king.

We will find in this, and developing from this, a contradiction that first appears standing between deception and self-deception. Deception-pretend- ing to friendship, for example-implies contempt for the native people, who are supposed to be unable to see through the deception, and it also implies

3 The fact that Columbus hoped he was not far from the mainland of Asia, or near Japan, does not explain his transformation of what he heard, although it may have been a contributing factor.



DOMINATION AND DECEPTION IN INDIAN-WHITE RELATIONS 7

self-aggrandizement. Self-deception, as we shall see most clearly in the case of the explorer Giovanni da Verrazano, eviscerates-hollows out-both the

contempt and the self-aggrandizement, leaving the Europeans parroting their own fantasies of native intentionality.

But the contradiction between deception and self-deception whereby the

Europeans wind up parroting their own fantasies of the other, is but the

doorway into a more fundamental contradiction between the impossibility and the necessity of creating the other as the other-the different, the alien-and incorporating the other within a single social and cultural system of domination. From below, from the point of view of the dominated, this same contradiction has a different surface appearance: It emerges as the contradiction between distancing oneself from domination and engaging with domination to struggle against it.

Before turning to Verrazano, and to the task of showing how the Europeans became the parrots of their own fantasies, a few words about the meth-

odological problem for this analysis are in order. The persistence, and the persistent unfolding, of several basic themes in

domination on the North American continent for the last five hundred years is rather startling, and extremely difficult to deal with analytically. When Co- lumbus says, after apparently handing the native people swords blade first, that they "cut themselves through ignorance," and when the United States government, in the War on Poverty of the 1960s says that Indians and blacks are poor because they are "culturally deprived," they are making identical utterances: Both blame the victims for their suffering; both invoke ignorance. And when Columbus says, after giving native people gifts of little value, that "they became so entirely our friends that it was a wonder to see," he is invoking a paradigm of friendship and inequality-with its unspoken contempt-that continues in the current frequent insistence of white women on the friendship they have for their black maids, as illustrated, for example, by the gift of and the gratitude for cast-off clothing.

How can we understand this continuity, if it is not just an artifact of our perspective, a superficial similarity'? The specific social contexts in which this continuity appears have changed fundamentally; context and social structure alone cannot provide an explanation. And it would be a failure of our craft to advance an abstract and universal psychology of domination as an answer to this problem. Moreover, our position would then be the same as that for which we have indicted Columbus, one of dehistoricising and naturalizing, as it were, domination.

The method chosen here is to specify the confrontations within which these themes recur, and to examine closely the historically developing and changing structure of these confrontations, using the unfolding of persistent themes to point to domains of confrontation over domination that remain unresolva- ble-the specific tensions, disjunctions, and contradictions that can not be



8 GERALD SIDER

reduced, resolved, or transcended in the char.ging and developing patterns of domination and resistance.

Noting that it is particularly within the self-deceptions of domination that thematic persistence is most marked, we return to Verrazano and the process of becoming a parrot.

II

In 1524 Giovanni da Verrazano was exploring the Atlantic coast of North America. His first attempt to go ashore was unsuccessful; sailing a short distance to the north, to the vicinity of what is now South Carolina, he tried

again. The following quotation from his journal describes his second and third

attempts. Look carefully at the mirror-like structuring of the two tales:

We left this place and continued to follow the coast, which we found veered to the east. All along it we saw great fires because of the numerous inhabitants; we anchored off the shore, since there was no harbour, and because we needed water we sent the small boat ashore with xxv men. The sea along the coast was churned up by enormous waves because of the open beach, and so it was impossible to put anyone ashore without endangering the boat. We saw many people on the beach making various friendly signs, and beckoning us ashore; and there I saw a magnificent deed, as Your Majesty will hear. We sent one of our young sailors swimming ashore to take the people some trinkets, such as little bells, mirrors, and other trifles, and when he came within four fathoms of them, he threw them the goods and tried to turn back, but he was so tossed about by the waves that he was carried up on the beach half dead. Seeing this, the native people immediately ran up; they took him by the head, the legs, and arms and carried him some distance away. Whereupon the youth, realizing that he was being carried away like this, was seized with terror, and began to utter loud cries. They answered him in their language to show him that he should not be afraid. Then they placed him on the ground in the sun, at the foot of a small hill, and made gestures of great admiration, looking at the whiteness of his flesh [guardando la biancheza de le sue carne] and examining him from head to foot. They took off his shirt and shoes and hose, leaving him naked, and then made a huge fire next to him, placing him near the heat. When the sailors on the boat saw this, they were filled with terror, as always when something new occurs, and thought the people wanted to roast him for food. After remaining with them for a while, he regained his strength, and showed them by signs that he wanted to return to the ship. With the greatest kindness, they accom- panied him to the sea, holding him close and embracing him; and then to reassure him, they withdrew to a high hill and stood watching him until he was in the boat. ....

We left this place, still following the coast which veered somewhat to the north, and after fifty leagues we reached another land which seemed much more beautiful and full of great forests. We anchored there, and with xx men we penetrated about two leagues inland, to find that the people had fled in terror into the forests [Surgendo a quella, andando xx huomini circa leghe dua infra terra, trovammo le gente per paura s'erano fuggite a le selve]. Searching everywhere, we met with a very old woman and a young girl of xviii to xx years, who had hidden in the grass in fear. The old woman had two little girls whom she carried on her shoulder, and clinging to her neck a boy-they were all about eight years old. The young woman also had three children, but all girls. When we met them, they began to shout. The old woman made signs to us that the men had fled into the woods. We gave her some of our food to eat, which she accepted with




great pleasure; the young women refused everything and threw it angrily to the ground. We took the boy from the old woman to carry back to France, and we wanted to take the young woman, who was very beautiful and tall, but it was impossible to take her to the sea because of the loud cries she uttered. And as we were a long way from the ship and had to pass through several woods, we decided to leave her behind and took only the boy.4

The turning point in the story occurs when Verrazano comments that the sailors on his ship were "filled with terror" at what (they thought) they saw or would soon see. Verrazano, while belittling his sailors, shared their feelings: note that earlier he fantasized that the native people were examining the "whiteness of [the] flesh" of the boy who swam ashore-"flesh," not skin-when they might, in fact, have been examining the European's body hair.5 Whatever they thought they saw, the Europeans were terrified.

What was the Europeans' response to the terror they felt'? First, after sailing to the north, they "penetrated" inland. Here the psychosexual reference indicates a shift, not simply into the domain of fantasy, but into fantasy-acted- upon. The native people, realizing danger, flee. As the next sentence makes clear ("searching everywhere"), it is the native people that are in fact being sought. The Europeans find eight: two adults and six children, among them all only one boy, the other children "but all girls." They consider abducting the young woman, in what was probably an act of potential rape, but even this is not as important to them as what they do; they single out and take the boy. The Europeans will do to the native people precisely what they feared the natives would do to them-seize (incorporate, devour) their boy.

The Europeans created a fantasy of what native people are like and then, acting toward the native people as they fantasized that native people would act toward them, they realized (and perhaps even became) their own fantasy. The groundless fears of the Europeans were both revenged and made true.

III

This form of domination creates a relationship that is, on the part of the dominators, simultaneously full of rage and destructiveness and also peculiarly intimate. Thomas Hariot, for example, who came to America in 1587 with John White to found a colony at Roanoke, records:

These their opinions I have set down the more . .. it may appear unto you that there is good hope that they may be brought through discrete dealing and government to the embracing of the truth [that is, to accept Christianity], and consequently to honour, obey, fear and love us.

4 The Cellere Codex of Giovanni da Verrazzano, Fred B. Adams, transcrib., Susan Tarrow, trans., Lawrence C. Wroth, ed. (New Haven, 1970).

5 Although Europeans are, on the average, far more hairy than native Americans, it is of course unlikely that they would make this a point of comparison, and our understanding why this should be so informs us about our knowledge of cultures of domination.



IO GERALD SIDER

And although some of our company, toward the end of the year, showed themselves too fierce, in slaying some of the people, in some towns, upon causes that on our part might easily enough have been borne, yet notwithstanding because it was on their part justly deserved, the alteration of their opinions [about us] generally and for the most part is the less to be doubted.6

Despite the fact that the Europeans are by now admitting their brutality, the Indians, after being brought to the church, are to love, honor, fear, and obey them. These familiar words are one side-the woman's side-of the Chris- tian marriage contract; the man promises to love, honor, and cherish; the woman to love, honor, and obey. What is new about the contract is the addition of fear, conjoining honoring and obedience with love.

Powhatten, the elderly leader of the Indian people from the Roanoke River to the vicinity of the Jamestown Colony, seemingly understood this imposed compact-the language of love and fear-and much of the motivation behind it. The following text is a speech he made at a peace parley in 1609 with

Captain John Smith (as transcribed by two of Smith's men). Smith was

attempting to support his maladapted and unproductive colony by stealing food from the native people, sometimes giving a few small objects "in

return," sometimes simply plundering. The drain he was making on native food supplies, and the humiliation of his methods, were both becoming in-

creasingly destructive.

What will it availe you to take that perforce, you may quietly have with love, or to destroy them that provide you food? What can you get by war, when we can hide our provisions and flie to the woodes, whereby you must famish, by wronging us your friends? And whie are you thus jealous of our loves, seeing us unarmed, and both doe and are willing still to feed you with that [which] you cannot get but by our labours? Think you I am so simple not to knowe that it is better to eat good meate, lie well, and sleepe quietly with my women and children, laugh and be merrie with you, have copper, hatchets, or what I want, being your friend; than bee forced to flie from al, to lie cold in the woods, feed upon acorns roots and such trash, and be so hunted by you that I can neither rest eat nor sleepe, but my tired men must watch, and if a twig but breake, everie one crie, there comes Captain Smith: then I must flie I know not whither, and thus with miserable feare end my miserable life, leaving my pleasures to such youths as you, which, through your rash unadvisednesse, may quickly as misera- bly ende, for want of that [which] you never know how to find? Let this [peace-parley] therefore assure you of our loves, and everie yeare our friendly trade shall furnish you with come, and now also, if you would come in friendly manner to us, and not thus with your gunnes and swords, as to invade your foes.7

What is particularly surprising about this text, in addition to the vividness of the description, the openness about how the speaker felt (the inability to

6 Thomas Hariot, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (London, 1590), 30. Hariot stayed the summer of 1587 and then returned to England; all those who remained behind were lost.

7 (Capt.) John Smith, A Map of Virginia, with a Description of the Countrey, the Com- modities, People, Government and Religion (London, 1612), reprinted in The Indian and the White Man, Wilcomb Washburn, ed. (New York, 1960), 7-18.



DOMINATION AND DECEPTION IN INDIAN-WHITE RELATIONS II

express feelings-which, for the Europeans, are almost entirely absent from the early accounts-is one of the central preconditions for fantasizing), and the clarity about causes ("for want of that [which] you never know how to

find"), is the irreducible ambiguity of the offer of love. This offer of love was

simultaneously a response to the trap they were caught in, and in that sense

perhaps a pretense, and also a judgment: a native American judgment upon the other that no European offer of "friendship" ever rose to.

IV

The peculiar intimacy between dominators and dominated-from above, an

intimacy that comes packaged with brutality and contempt; from below, an

intimacy riven with ambiguity-seems particularly important to the histor-

ically unfolding process of domination and resistance, though perhaps more

directly important to understanding resistance (and also nonresistance).8 It is in trying to unravel the interwoven paradoxes and ambiguities of this intimacy that we can most clearly see what seems to be the fundamental cultural contradiction of the process of domination by Europeans over native Ameri- cans: between domination as a form of incorporation, of bonding together, and simultaneously domination as a form of creating distance, difference, and otherness. Both resistance and collusion took their variant shapes within this matrix of incorporation and distancing.

One of the special features of the documents of early European explorers and colonists is the frequent association of this package of intimacy, brutality, and contempt with the act of giving names and labels-to places, to people, and to events. In 1640, for example, Robert Hilton was exploring the Cape Fear River, looking for a place to found a colony:

... we saw many Deer and Turkies; also one deer with very large horns, and great in body, therefore called it Stag Park: it being a very pleasant and delightful place, we traveled in it several miles. . . . Some twenty five leagues from the Rivers mouth on the same side we found a place no lesse delightful. . . . This lower place we called Rocky-point, because we found many Rocks and Stones of several bignesse upon the Land, which is not common. We sent our Boat down the River before us; our selves traveling by Land many miles, were so much taken with the pleasantnesse of the Land. . . . We proceeded down to a place on the East-side of the River ... which we call'd Turkie-Quarters, because we killed several Turkies thereabouts. ...

Monday . . . we went with our Longboat well victualled and manned up Hilton's River; and when we came three leagues or thereabouts up the said River, we found this and Green's River to come into one, and so continued.9

8 While particular forms of domination cannot be understood without also understanding the shape of resistance, and vice versa, each has its own wellsprings. 9 This and the following two quotations from William Hilton are from his A Relation of Discovery Lately Made on the Coast of Florida (London, 1664), reprinted in Narratives of Early Carolina, A. S. Salley, Jr., ed. (New York, 1939), 48-52. The paragraph breaks have been added to make the texts easier to follow.



12 GERALD SIDER

Hilton is naming the landscape in terms of his activities, his sensibilities, and himself. It seems as if he is incorporating the landscape to what is known and familiar and important to him, and he is; but more subtly he is also distancing himself from a human landscape-the social/natural environment of the native people-by not learning to know it on its own terms. '0

One league below this place came four Indians in a Canoa to us, and sold us several baskets of Akorns, which we satisfied for, and so left them; but one of them followed us on the shoar some two or three miles, till he came on the top of a high bank, facing on the River, we rowing underneath it, the said Indian shot an Arrow at us, which missed one of our men very narrowly, and stuck in the upper edge of the Boat .... Hereupon we presently made for the shoar, and went all up the bank except four to guide the Boat; we searched for the Indian, but could not finde him: at last we heard some sing further in the Woods, which we thought had been as a Chalenge to us to come and fight them. We went towards them with all speed, but before we came in sight of them, we heard two Guns go off from our Boat, whereupon we retreated with all speed to secure our Boat and Men: when we came to them, we found all well ....

Presently after our return to the Boat . . . came two Indians to us with their Bows and Arrows, crying Bonny, Bonny: ' we took their bows and arrows from them, and gave them Beads, to their content. Then we led them by the hand to the Boat, and shewed them the Arrow-head sticking in her side, and related to them the businesse; which when thev understood, both of them manifested much sorrow, and made us understand by signes, that they knew nothing of it: so we let them go, and marked a Tree on the top of the bank, calling the place Mount Skerry.

As Hilton is about to insist on "skerry" as a new definition of his relation to the indians, we should take a minute and look at the prior meanings of this word. "Skerry" had four different, but fundamentally related, meanings, each of which and all together seeming relevant to Hilton's developing situation. First, it meant what Newfoundland fishermen now call a sunker: a

rugged rock, visible only at low tide, a treacherous danger to sailors unless

they impose, at high tide, their knowledge of the hidden landscape upon what seems an apparently safe sea. Second, it is a name given to those portions of Scotland formerly under Scandanavian control. Third, it refers to rock "of

shaly or slatey nature"-what mountaineers now call scree: slippery, dan-

gerous rock and the crumbled, shifting stones that come from it. Fourth, it is a variant form of "scary."'2

What Hilton does next looks like simple domination- "teaching the Indi- ans a lesson" in the modem phraseology. But not until we come back to his insistence on "skerry" can we see that the lesson is about more than the

power of the Europeans to commit uncheckable acts of destructiveness; it is

10 The full passage from which this quotation is excerpted is particularly evocative of the second version of the story of creation in Genesis 2:8-20.

1 [Bueno, bueno(?)] These native people had been in contact with the Spanish at Guale (Georgia) and had learned some Spanish words.

12 The definitions of 'skerry' are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 1971).




also an attempt to impose a set of meanings that simultaneously separate, differentiate, and conjoin Indians and Europeans.

So we proceeded down the River, til we found the Canoa the Indian was in who shot at us. In the morning we went on shoar, and cut the same in pieces: the Indians perceiving us coming towards them, run away. We went into his Hut, and pulled it down, brake his pots, platters and spoons, and took away a basket of Akorns: So we proceeded down the River ....

... at last we espied an Indian peeping over a high bank: we held up a Gun at him; and calling to him, said "Skerry": presently several Indians appeared to us, making great signs of friendship, saying "Bonny, Bonny" and running before us, endeavoring to perswade us to come on shoar, but we answered them with stern countenances, and said "Skerry," taking up our guns, and threatening to shoot at them; but they cried still "Bonny, Bonny" . .. and at last perswaded us to go ashoar with them ....

. . . we shewed them the Arrow-head in the Boats-side, and a piece of the Canoa which we had cut in pieces: the chief man of them made a large Speech, and threw Beads into our Boat, which is a sign of great love and friendship . . . and for a further testimony of their love and good will towards us, they presented to us two very hansom proper young Indian women, the tallest that we have seen in this Countrey; which we supposed to be the Kings Daughters. . . . These young women were ready to come into our Boat; one of them crouding in, was hardly perswaded to go out again. We presented to the King a Hatchet and several Beads, also Beads to the young Women and to the chief men. . . . When we left this place . . . we called it Mount-Bonny, because we had there concluded a firm Peace. Proceeding down the River two or three leagues further, we came to a place where were nine or ten Canoas all together; we went ashoar there, and found several Indians, but most of them were the same which had made Peace with us before: we made little stay there. ....

Hilton's armed insistence on the peculiar word "skerry," his refusal of the gift of women-the most integrating of all gifts (if indeed it can be considered a gift)-and his lack of interest in native people with whom he had already made "peace," taken together form an insistence upon the distance and the strangeness-and the wrong and evil ways-of the other. This insistence, for which Hilton provides only a typical example, drastically constrained the extent to which native people could use their intimacy with European ways and their knowledge of European political-economic principles to resist, to pressure for change, to oppose, or even just to chide and tease the dominant Europeans. The following two excerpts from the record of John Lawson are illustrative:

At these Cabins came to visit us the King of the Santee Nation. He brought with him their chief Doctor or Physician, who was warmly and neatly clad with a Match-Coat, made of Turkies Feathers, which makes a pretty Shew, seeming as if it was a Garment of the deepest silk Shag. This Doctor had the Misfortune to lose his Nose by the Pox [syphilis] which disease the Indians often get by the English Traders that use amongst them. . . .

. . . our Doctor . . . in the Time of his Affliction withdrew himself (with one that labour'd under the same Distemper) into the Woods. These two perfected their Cures by proper Vegitables. . . . After these two had perform'd their Cures at no easier Rate than the Expence of both their Noses, coming again amongst their old Acquaintancels]



14 GERALD SIDER

so disfigur'd, the Indians admir'd to see them metamorphos'd after that manner; enquir'd of them where they had been all that Time, and what were become of their Noses. They made Answer, That they had been conversing with the white Man above, (meaning God Almighty) how they were very kindly entertain'd by that Great Being; he being much pleased with their Ways, and had promis'd to make their Capacities equal with the white People in making Guns, Ammunition &c, in Retalliation of which, they had given him their Noses. The Verity of which, they yet hold, the Indians being an easy, credulous People, and most notoriously cheated by their Priests and Conjurers. 13

It is, of course, exceedingly doubtful that these particular native Ameri- cans-the Santee-uniquely conceptualized their "god" as the "white Man above"; it is even more doubtful that Lawson saw far enough through the

story he was being told or fully grasped, in his own usage of the word, the double meaning that "retalliation" then had (return of a good, a kindness; vengeance) to understand even dimly that it was his credulity that was shaping the situation. It did so by denying the Indians' capacity for reciprocating-or their capacity simply to respond to-an imposed intimacy by knowing both the other and their own situation.

Parrots mimic, without understanding, small fragments of speech-which is precisely what Lawson, in the following text, insists that the Indians are

doing. The Indians, however, are here so startlingly clear about the whole structure of the discourse between themselves and the English colonists that it makes the central point of the text not the fact that the Europeans use, as license for their brutality, an insistence that the Indians are ignorant mimics.

Rather, the point becomes the form of the humiliation imposed upon the Indians at the end of the incident: the Europeans, themselves now parrot-like, retell to the Indians what the Indians did, and do so in a way that insists that

they (the Europeans) are ignorant of what has been said to them:

They seeing several Ships coming in, to bring the English Supplies from Old England, one chief Part of their Cargo being for Trade with the Indians, some of the craftiest of them had observ'd, that the Ships came always in at one Place, which made them very confident that Way was the exact road to England, and seeing so many Ships come thence, they believed it could not be far thither, esteeming the English that were among them, no better than Cheats, and thought, if they could carry the Skins and Furs they got, themselves to England, which were inhabited with a better Sort of People than those sent amongst them, that then they should purchase twenty times the Value for every Pelt they sold Abroad, in Consideration of [in comparison to] what Rates they sold for at Home. ...

. . . after a general Consultation of the ablest heads amongst them [they began] building more Canoes, and those to be of the best Sort and biggest Size, as fit for their intended Discovery. . . . The Affair was carr'd on with a great deal of Secrecy and Expedition, so as in a small Time they had gotten a Navy, Loading, Provisions, and

13 John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina (London, 1709), 19-20. Lawson notes that the pox here is syphilis.




Hands ready to set Sail, leaving only the Old, Impotent, and Minors at Home, 'till their successful Return.

The wind presenting, they set up their Mat-Sails, and were scarce out of Sight, when there rose a Tempest, which it's suppos'd carry'd [off] one Part of these Indian Merchants, by way of the other World, whilst the others were taken up at Sea by an English Ship, and sold for Slaves to the Islands. The Remainder are better satisfy'd with [have come to understand] their Imbecilities in such an Undertaking, nothing affronting them more than to rehearse [retell to them] their Voyage to England.14

To capture a prisoner of war and sell that person as a slave is to engage in an affair that begins with at least a minimal egalitarianism; one could get killed in the endeavor. To sell as a slave someone whom one has rescued from distress is perhaps even more brutal. In both cases the Europeans are the host-either in the sense of host as the invading army, or the hosts of their unwelcomed guests who were brought in from the storm. While the moral imperatives for both kinds of hosts are ambiguous in every society, the host of guests, welcome or not, was traditionally at least as strongly bound to duty and constrained from opportunism as the patriot. Closing his eyes and ears to such constraints, it took no further effort for Lawson to ignore the clarity of the Indians' assessment of the kind of English that ordinarily came among them, and to refrain from comment on how close was their guess about the mark-up on their furs. The denial of his own humanity and the denial of the Indians' have merged. But they have merged in a context where, in parroting to the Indians the "story" of their voyage to England, the Europeans were also insisting on the utter and absolute difference between Indians and Europeans.

v

Europeans incorporated native American societies into their expanding colonial frontier in ways that both allowed and encouraged the development of diverse forms of postcontact native social systems. New forms of native social organization emerged and flourished, for a while at least, in a semiautono- mous field of strategy and maneuver, resistance and collusion. Tied to, and expressive of these emergent native social forms, were increasingly distinctive postcontact native cultures-increasingly distinctive from a European pattern and from each other. Several separate processes in the system of incorporation, domination, and resistance in the colonial frontier both gener- ated and sustained native American cultural distinctiveness, and brought this

14 Lawson, A New Voyage, 11-12. Charles Hudson, Catawba Nation (Athens, Georgia, 1970), 40-41, suggests a parallel between this incident and modem Melanesian cargo cults, which evokes the possibility that the increasing technological gulf between native and industrial societies has both blinded us to, and partly transformed, the profound rationality and insight of present-day native movements that we regard, in the same way that Lawson did, as irrational "religious" responses.



I6 GERALD SIDER

distinctiveness into increasing prominence in the confrontations over domination:

1. Native people ordinarily produced goods and services for the colonists collectively. Hunting for deerskins and beaver pelts, fighting wars, capturing slaves, all were tasks that bound people together in decisions, in the allocation of resources, and especially in the organization of the task itself. The collective and self-organized basis of the tasks that native societies were pressured or encouraged to do served to consolidate and unify these societies as culture- generating groups and as groups that needed new kinds of cultures, rooted in and expressive of the newly emerging social relations within and between native societies.15

2. Europeans not only forced native peoples to produce goods and services for them, but they seemed to be very careful about the kinds of goods and services they would permit or encourage native people to produce. Native Americans, for example, taught the Europeans to grow both tobacco and corn (maize), but they were never allowed either to participate in the rapidly expanding production of tobacco for export, or to become, in any substantial way, commercial maize-growers for a domestic food market. Indians were primarily allowed to become commercial producers from diminishing resources-resources that declined, usually rapidly, from the onset of commercial production in any specific area. They could sell deerskins and beaver pelts, they could sell their bodies as soldiers, and they could sell their land. Once the Indians became dealers in diminishing resources, it was relatively safe for the colonists to allow autonomous native American cultures to develop and flourish, for as these resources diminished locally and their quest or use shifted westward, so, too, it was thought, would the people and their ways of life.

By not allowing Indians into market agriculture, by taking their land (the cleared "old fields") by military tactics that emphasized burning crops, by enslavement, by using native societies as mercenaries, by treaties and trade relations that encouraged formation of ever more sharply bounded social groupings (first called "nations," then "tribes"), the European colonists increasingly transformed many village farmers into hunters and warriors, increasingly emphasized and elaborated the differences between native and colonial Americans, and made the increasingly sharply bounded native societies increasingly useful within the colonial political economy.16

15 Several key theoretical issues concerning the connections between culture and social organization, just suggested here, are developed in my Culture and Class in Anthropology and History: A Newfoundland Illustration (New York, 1986), chs. 1, 3, 5, 6.

16 Particularly useful in unravelling the multiple and competing uses of native Americans in the southeast are Werner Crane, Southern Colonial Frontier (Madison, Wisconsin, 1928); Michael P. Rogin Fathers and Children (New York, 1975); and William Willis, "Divide and Rule: Red White and Black in the Colonial South," Journal of Negro History, 48:3 (July 1963), 157-76.




3. It is ordinarily thought that the expansion and consolidation of a colonial political economy (or indeed of modern state power itself) destroys or under- mines prior cultural distinctiveness, or generates distinctions in the context of seeking to divide and conquer. But ethnic group formation in the colonial context-the creation of cultures and peoples-is not so much a product of divide-and-conquer policies as of a much more complex, less specifically planned, and far more resistance-permeated process that we might call "create and incorporate." In this process the developing social and cultural distinctiveness is often crucial to the expansion and consolidation of the colonial frontier. Native people's ability to do certain tasks well (for example, warfare, fur procurement) was not likely to be based on any peculiarly Indian ability to see, hear, smell, or know the forest, as the Europeans often claimed (savage attributes all, in their precise reference to the special skills of wild animals, not people). Rather, their ability to do certain tasks well came both from their capacity for collective action, which was a capacity developed and reinforced in the cauldrons of colonial domination, and from the fact that they could be pressured into collective action, usually very inexpensively.

The capacity for collective action, conjoined with the notion that native people were particularly and uniquely "savage," was simultaneously useful and threatening to an emerging colonial elite. Indians were used to create an inland wall that kept black slaves and white indentured servants from escaping westward, the slaves being forced to escape either north or south, the indentured servants having to purchase or be granted, under controlled conditions, land that was taken en bloc from native peoples by treaty-purchase or con- quest. Far from being simply an obstacle to the westward expansion of Euro- American societies, the assertive and partially autonomous native peoples on the frontier were crucial to the expansion and consolidation of colonial inequalities, including the creation of a white rural lower class. Being crucial, their autonomy and distinctiveness were, to a certain extent, protected and encouraged-particularly in the southeast-while at the same time being claimed and expressed by the native peoples themselves.

4. The primary guarantee of Indian autonomy was not colonial policy, nor even simply the armed assertiveness of native peoples, but the expression of this assertiveness in a context where different sectors of the white political and economic elite sought to use Indians in different and largely incompatible ways. White deerskin traders advanced rifles, powder and shot, and a variety of other goods to Indians, usually on credit against future production of deerskins, and they did not want to see these Indians marching off to war with other native Americans. Colonial political officials armed Indians for just such purposes, much to the dismay of other sectors of the white elite who wanted to capture them for sale as slaves in the Caribbean, or to seize their land, etcetera. Such divergent uses, often but not always incompatible, gave native peoples substantial room for ne-gotiation, maneuver, and also spe-



i8 GERALD SIDER

cialization, that is, the opportunity for a partial autonomy, based upon a capacity to maneuver between interests they were forced to serve.

VI

It seems to have been precisely in the context of partial autonomy-the negotiations and specializations, and the mounting impossibility of success in either collusion or resistance-that native American cultures came to incorporate profound tensions and ambivalences about their confrontations with domination. The advancing collapse of the field for autonomous action, and the ever more desperate need for some form of resistance as military resistance became increasingly impossible, brought to the foreground both the paradoxes and the potential of native American cultures.

By the 1870s the whole political-economic basis for distinctive native cultures had eroded, and native peoples were increasingly forced into reserva- tions as wards of the state. While the material and social-relational basis of native cultures was rapidly being undermined, these cultures were mo- mentarily elaborated and embellished in a flurry of culturally-based movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-movements simultaneously of creation and re-creation of distinctive native cultures and social organizations, and of resistance to domination: the Ghost Dance, the Sun Dance, etcetera.

Enough autonomy remained, at least in the symbolic domain, to make these cultural forms of resistance-or even the cultural autonomy itself-extremely threatening to the dominant society. The Sun Dance, a rite of purification and dedication to the tribe, was outlawed, as was the potlatch on the Canadian northwest coast. And at Wounded Knee, in 1890, several hundred Sioux women, children, and men (who had only a few guns among them) were massacred-in large part in response to the extraordinary intensity of their wide-spreading dream, expressed in the dances, songs, and rituals of the Ghost Dance, that their white oppressors would be swallowed up in the chasms of the earth, and that the buffalo, the dead Indians, and the old ways would return to life. They were shot while closely surrounded by troops, and they were chased-women and young children also-to be shot in the back as they ran and shot again as they lay wounded in the snow.

American Horse, with several Sioux who had been loyal to the United States government, testified to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, in Wash- ington, D.C., on 11 February 1891:

? . . the women and the children of course were strewn all along the circular village until they were dispatched. . . . The women as they were fleeing with their babes were killed together, shot right through, and the women who were very heavy with child were also killed. All the Indians fled in these three directions, and after most of them had been killed a cry was made that aii those who were not killed or wounded should come forth and they would be safe. Little boys who were not wounded came out of



DOMINATION AND DECEPTION IN INDIAN-WHITE RELATIONS I9

their places of refuge, and as soon as they came in sight a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there.

Of course we all feel very sad about this affair. I stood very loyal to the government all through those troublesome days, and believing so much in the government, and being so loyal to it, my disappointment was very strong, and I have come to Wash- ington with a very great blame on my heart. Of course it would have been all right if only the men were killed; we would feel almost grateful for it. But the fact of the killing of the women, and more especially the killing of the young boys and girls who are to go to make up the future strength of the Indian people is the saddest part of the whole affair and we feel it very sorely.17

The issue, for the forward-looking Ghost Dance, and in part for those who massacred the people of the dance and even for those Indians who collabo- rated with the government, was the future. And it was, perhaps, the Indians' notion that they had a future within, and from, their culture that enraged and terrified the whites.

How do cultures so permeated with borrowed symbols of domination and of being dominated retain such power and such threat? And what is now the

potential of these cultures as foci for further resistance, especially now that native American societies are becoming split from within by the rapidly emerging class inequalities among each of them? Two short texts and a brief

concluding comment may contribute to understanding these strategically sig- nificant issues.

The Indian prophet and leader Smohalla, on the northwest coast at the end of the nineteenth century, in resisting attempts to incorporate his people into the American political economy, declared:

Those who cut up the lands or sign papers for the lands will be defrauded of their rights and will be punished by God's anger. Moses was bad. God did not love him. He sold his people's houses and the graves of their dead. ... It is not a good law that would take my people away from me to make them sin against the laws of God.

You ask me to plow the ground! Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest.

You ask me to dig for stone. Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? Then when I die I can not enter her body to be born again.

You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men. But how dare I cut off my mother's hair?

It is a bad law, and my people cannot obey it. I want my people to stay with me here. All the dead men will come to life again. . . . We must wait here in the homes of our fathers and be ready to meet them in the bosom of our mother. 18

This text could be understood as an appropriate, if not very effective, critique of the rapaciousness and insensitivity of the white society's transfor-

17 James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, Anthony F. C. Wallace, ed. (Chicago, 1965), 139-40. See also Joseph Jorgensen, The Sun Dance Religion (Chicago, 1972).

'1 "The Doctrine of Smohalla," in Edward Spicer, A Short History of the Indians of the United States (New York, 1969), 275-76.



20 GERALD SIDER

mation of the environment and assault on native society. But it is also in some respects a fiction, a form of deception and self-deception. Native people had been cutting growing things from the earth, and digging flint, pipestone, and copper long before Europeans arrived. To reuse, against domination, the idea that Indians are especially natural both reinforces a shallow stereotype origi- nated by the dominators and also conceals from native Americans the basis of their resistance-which is not a mystical communion with nature, but resides rather in their social relations to each other and in the culture that grows out of, and expresses, these social relations.

Smohalla's statement, however, is not completely fictional. People who do not brutalize one another in the context of work and daily life-or who do not do so necessarily, and in many ways unintentionally, as people must do in societies with massive inequalities in access to the resources for life-do not usually brutalize their symbolic relations with nature; they depict such relations in the same metaphors of gift and counter-gift, kinship, and ancestry that connects people to one another. This is not mystical19 but matter-of-fact. Smohalla here hovers on the border between a derivative politics of mystical imagery, in responsive confrontation with domination, and the practicalities of daily life and work for himself and his people.

Beneath the prophet Smohalla's words there is another claim, hidden in the text, more important than the superficial communion with nature, and far more threatening. This is the claim to a different sense of time, a sense of time not marked by progress and linear progression, but rooted in a kin-based society that stretches conceptually back into an earth from which appropria- tion is made along lines of kin and clan. Such societies, and such senses of time, are rooted in an environment that is simultaneously "past" and presently living. On this sociotemporal basis intentionalities-orientations toward the future-are, or can readily be, formed along the same kin-connected and kin-rooted lines, intermingling the future as well as the past in the paradoxes, tensions, and integrations of present social relations.

Nothing in this alternative kin/temporal framework requires that the alternative world vision of native societies-or the "unilineal" (matrilineal, patri- lineal, or bilineal) kinship ordering of their social relations to one another, through which their vision of time and nature is shaped-be archaic, or represent a holdover, a relic of a dim and distant past. To the contrary, and more significantly so.

Anthropological literature in the past two decades, which spoke to the point that "tribes" and tribal boundaries are the creation of states and state (coloni-

19 As it also becomes when a glorification and romanticization of nature is conjoined with a brutal enterprise. See Perry Miller, "Nature and the National Ego," in his Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1956). 204-16.




al) expansion,20 could be pushed further as a framework for a new perspective on "tribal" kinship systems. It is quite likely that the more time-binding forms of kinship (loosely called unilineal) are particularly the product of an encounter with, and resistance to, state power. Without pursuing this more complex matter here, suffice it to suggest that at the margins and hinterlands of power, in the context of a simultaneous adaptation to, and resistance against, economic, political, and cultural domination, and in the context of a simultaneous engendering of social and cultural differentiation and the use of these differences to advance partially autonomous claims, "native" social systems emerge and develop that simultaneously adapt to, and profoundly challenge (or distance themselves from), the political, economic, and cultural forms of those who dominate. Unilineal kinship systems, I suspect, often- perhaps ordinarily-form in the crucible of externally imposed domination as dominated peoples seek to organize their own production and reproduction, and their attachment to their resources, natural, spiritual, and social, in ways that provide and secure some temporal depth to this "hold": a history and a future.

The profoundly different sense of time that emerges from this is, I think, particularly threatening to those who dominate not simply because it suggests that those who were here before will be here afterward (that is too mystical, in an abstract way, to be very frightening), but because domination contains within it-within each of its acts, each of its gestures, each of its symbols- claims to a temporal ordering of the world that are central to the process of domination.

Columbus dehistoricised domination by making it seem natural and inevitable, and gave to his domination a false historical continuity that was, perhaps, a central justification. (Religious justifications also, in their own fashion, both dehistoricise and provide a false continuity to domination.) Native peoples, evading or resisting domination, create their own structures of temporality. As time and meaning become intertwined in ancestry and kin-continuity, their own autonomous sense of history emerges, and it emerges, as Smohalla shows us, in part as a denial of the meanings domination seeks to impose.

One of the most remarkable facts about domination is that it is never simply political and economic, but always entails attempts to humiliate the dominated. So crucial are the insults and the slander that they must themselves be seen as an attempt to situate domination in time-to present reasons and justifications for its current existence, and to make claims against the future. All this is threatened by an alternative or even an autonomous sense of time.

20 Central to this literature are Essays on the Problem of Tribe, American Ethnological Society Proceedings, June Helm, ed. (Seattle, 1968); and Morton H. Fried, The Notion of Tribe (Menlo Park, Calif., 1975).



22 GERALD SIDER

But an autonomous sense of time is not abstract, not a conceptual creation. It is rooted, rather, in the partly autonomous social structure of a dominated people, and is part and parcel both of the distancing and of the critical engagement between dominated and dominators. The process of domination imposes a dialogue between dominators and dominated. Each must speak to the other2l for the political and economic transactions to occur. In speaking to each other, they seem often to seek to incorporate one another: western Indians wearing cowboy hats and boots, and army-style sunglasses; whites forming "Red Men's" lodges, dressing like Indians on certain occasions, and often invoking a fraudulent Indian ancestry.

This attempted incorporation both defines and denies the dialogue, return- ing to the basic contradiction of this form of domination-that it cannot both create and incorporate the other as an other-thus opening a space for continuing resistance and distancing.

So the fundamental language of this confrontational and incorporative dialogue is not found in words, or even in symbols. It is rooted, rather, in the domain of social organization, in which words and symbols are con- textualized in a struggle to harness emergent differentiation or, from below, to develop and redevelop autonomy. When Iroquois native nationalists, in the late 1970s, seized and occupied for several years an area of land in central New York State, and held this land against armed assaults of local whites and the state police, one of the young Mohawk men there said of his role in the occupying community, "I cut wood for the old people, and I carry water for them. I am a warrior, and a warrior takes care of his people." He made no

21 This point is powerfully presented and analyzed in the Timorese poem recorded, translated, and interpreted by Elizabeth Traube, in Transgressions within an Order: The Critique of the Rightful Rulers on Colonial Timor (Chicago, forthcoming). A fragment, by way of encouraging reading of the full poem and the book:

When there is hunger, it overcomes you When there is thirst, it possesses you Maybe it is the rifle that you carry on your shoulder Maybe it is the gunbelt that you gird around your waist Because it is you who is stupid It is you who is ignorant We two might simply converse We two might simply talk together But you come with the sharp thing

To come chase me like a deer To come pursue me like a pig

As if I had no speech

If we two do not speak together, we do not speak together because of this.

If we two are not kin, we are not kin because of this.




reference whatever to what we might regard as one of his central roles as a warrior: his armed defense of the border. The central symbolic issue remains social organization itself. At stake throughout the colonial and colonizing confrontation, and in the midst of whatever collusions may emerge, is not

simply the creation of ethnic identities within domination, but the creation and self-creation of peoples who genuinely stand apart, outside-as well as within.



Documents

When Parrots Learn to Talk, and Why They Can't: Domination, Deception, and Self-Deception in Indian-White Relations