The Good,the Better,and the Beautiful

Claudio ²

Where is my fucking horse?

This question is a good place to start:

In a world of cowboys and Indians

Framed(ing), represented(ing), and re-performed(ing)

a frontier plagued simultaneously both by

the specter of the unknown/unknowable

Other

and by the colonizing familiarity of the white Man’s ideology

Between Hell And Narrative (Diversi & Moreira, 2012)

I put my sociological imagination (Mills, 1959) to work

Bringing history and biography together through my messy, shitting body

Where memory is all I have!

And Yes, I remember playing cowboys and Indians.

And Yes, I remember my seven year old son being taught how to impersonate “Little Bear.”

And Yes, I remember my nine year old daughter telling me that the reason she is afraid of the Indians is because in school they only talk about pilgrims and never about the Indians (never about the Other)!

And Yes, I remember reading Vine Deloria Junior (1969) words:

Not even Indians can relate themselves to this type of creature who, to anthropologists, is the “real Indian.” (p. 86)

in his book sharply—like an arrow—named “Custer Died for your Sins.”

Memories from multiple pasts; the somehow impossible writing present; hope in a future of possibilities; being dangerous to power (Madison, 2009)

And in which category am I? The Good, the Bad, or the Ugly?

To demand to uncross the Mississippi river back to the fucking east, going through liberal New England, all the way across the Atlantic to the tribe called Europe.

Yes

Between Hell and Narrative

I ask again:

Where is my fucking horse?

hari

That IS a good question to start

That’s the question I should have asked

that time when that guy

that old white evangelical Christian guy here in puritan New England

laughed at me just before Columbus Day

several years ago

at my church after services

and told me a joke about how he always remembered on Columbus Day that

 “IF COLUMBUS HAD TAKEN A RIGHT INSTEAD OF A LEFT

 WE WOULD BE INDIANS AND YOU WOULD BE AMERICAN!”

and he laughed and laughed so much that he called his wife over to tell her the joke

and laughed again, as I stood there politely  smiling.

I wish I had asked him that question then.

You see, I had heard that joke from that guy for four years,

every year around Columbus Day

he would waddle over and find me in the church sanctuary

after services, when I would be going around cleaning up

the assorted debris of suburban white middle-class Christianity.

 “OH YEAH, BOB? THEN WHERE THE HELL IS MY FUCKING HORSE?!”

Except I don’t think Bob understood that

if Columbus had taken a right instead of a left

old Bobby here would still be a good ‘ole white European Sahib

and I would still be a nice polite brown man  (smiling)

picking up Sunday Service pamphlets and soda cans

after singing nice Christian hymns two rows behind good ‘ole Bob

giggling in his white privilege.

So even now, in my twisted and colonized imagination,

I wonder if Bob would respond to that question by saying

 “GO GET MY HORSE FOR ME.”

and then give me a dollar bill.

Claudio

And these are tranformative words:

“When we were young, my brother and I

wore cowboy outfits and rode a swayback horse

named Sunny, deaf in one ear and blind in one eye.

I have a picture of this moment.

When I was little, in the 1940s, living in

South-central Iowa, our grandmother told

Us stories about Indians.

When I was nine years old, I played Squanto

in my class’s Thanksgiving play.

When I was not yet ten,

One Sunday Mother and Dad

took my brother and me to see a powwow

Being performed in the Mesquaki Reservation

In Tama, Iowa.” (Denzin, 2011, p. 246)

Unlike Denzin, I never heard about Thanksgiving before arriving in the United States of America

“The land of the free and home

Of the brave,” ³ the national anthem as beautifully sung

In the voice of my daughter right

Before a women’s basketball game!

The daughter of an immigrant

Another betweener body

Being divided by the official narratives

Of nation-states which were

Formed by the extermination of

Natives.

And on a funny note

The translation for

The bird, turkey, in Portuguese is peru!

So you see—in the fake and in the real America

The bird (Turkey/Peru) has the name of the Other (Countries!)

Unlike Denzin, I never played Squanto in school—

In reality, I never saw a play until I

Moved to America

And Grandmother never told me stories about Indians because you see?

We don’t have Indians in Brazil or should I say

“We don’t have Native Americans in Brasil.”

I used to tell a really bad joke:

“Indigenous people in Brazil were exterminated before they had time to arrive in Hollywood!”

Or put another way

Before the age of ten, playing Cowboys and Indians, I

Killed many of those untamed

Others!

. . . the verge of witnessing a cultural and ecological genocide of epic proportions, where 20,000 indigenous people will be immediately displaced with the construction of Belo Monte Monster Dam in the Rio Xingu, in the heart of the Amazon. Marcelo’s cousin recently told him “there were no longer ‘indios’ left in Brazil.” His memory of ‘brazilian indians’ died with his history textbook. (Diversi & Moreira, 2012, p. 191)

Grandmother told me stories that the only toys I ever wanted as a little child were “hominhos” my childish way of say “homenzinhos” (little men in Portuguese).

Hominhos, miniature toys of soldiers and Indians in the west of the Mississippi in the land, faraway!

In playing with these figures, I could be my version of John Wayne

Even without knowing who he was, and I could really kill those savages

Over and over and over!

Some days, when things did not go right and I was mad, I would be the Indians . . .

I liked “Touro Sentado,” even without knowing who Tatanka-Iyotanka was but at the same time knowing enough about the fierce warrior, I would kill all the soldiers!

Like Custer, is this MY “last stand” of my fictional memories, of a white man with “Long Hair” trying to redeem himself for games played and the incapacity to see

Suffering

Destruction

Annihilation

Of Kayapo, Lakota, Juruna, Crow, Enawene, Apache, Nawe, Sioux, Arara, Oglala, Bororo, Cheyenne, Xavante, Patuxet, Cinta Larga, Wampanoag, Terena, Bakairi, Fulni-ô and many others. ⁴

Should we give thanks to blankets and smallpox ⁵ in a celebration of history textbooks?

In the celebration of Lewis and Clark!

Not 10 years old yet and in my very innocent play time I knew of savages

Because you see

This is outrageous.

These childhood games taught me

that anyone could be an indian for a day,

in a play.

These mini-mistrel shows,

Like the Custer paintings and Wild Bill

Cody’s Wild West shows

taught me that “Indianness” was something

You put on and took off. (Denzin, 2011, p. 227)

These narratives of Cowboys and Indians

In the movies and in playing with minatures

Never taught humanity, because they (the Indians) were not Humans!

Just something to play with, to kill, or to use for childish rebellion

But never “real”

But never human

Just something we see on Saturday afternoons in the movie theater

or a costume one wears to celebrate in the third week of November

or in late October in a diet full of sugar!

Don’t we all love chocolate?

Can we really separate the stories of Cowboys and Indians from the history of our lives, from the histories we are immersed in, from colonies and sugar, from chocolate and genocide, from colonization and the knowledge we produce with our typing fingers and knee bending to the big corporations inside the ivory towers?

No we cannot! Especially when I re-read Denzin’s words . . . I look at his words, and even from my privileged position as an assistant professor in a research one institution, in my everyday life inside academic walls, I see myself in Sunny the horse!

You may call me Sunny! Or you better dare not!

Because you see, differently from Sunny, I am not missing only an ear and an eye . . . I am missing my tongue!

Sometimes soulless!

In these moments I desperately cry:

“Where is my fucking horse?”

Or I just say to Bob

“GO GET MY HORSE FOR ME”

and give me a dollar bill.

hari

Speaking of giving thanks

in a town and University

named for the Englishman

who authorized the giving of

blankets covered with smallpox

to Native peoples in order to

“extirpate this execrable race” ⁶

I’m thinking of Bob again

as I’m about to go up on stage to get my Master’s degree

 and I’m thinking of how in this situation

 I’m supposed to walk up to this Bob

 and shake the outstretched hand

 of yet another white man in power

 and he will say meaningless nothings like “Congratulations”

 and I’m supposed to say meaningless nothings like “Thank you”

and I’m thinking of many Bobs as I am walking around on campus

past the big statue

in the middle of campus

of the Massachusetts Minuteman Colonial Soldier

 wearing his musket and his tricorner hat

 in a walking pose but looking alertly toward his left

 ready to defend the Colony

 the Commonwealth, the common WEALTH

 from any threat that emerges from that direction

and I’m thinking of

 the other statue

  that just HAPPENS to be in the same direction where

  that Colonial Minuteman is looking

  the other smaller statue that is half-hidden

   in a little dip in the ground

  the other statue that is officially called

   simply the Metawampe Indian

and now I am walking and I see

from the Minuteman’s perspective

that the other statue is behind a lot of construction fencing

 Bob has been busy you see

and there’s a note on the UMass Facility Planning website ⁷

that says:

 “The Metawampe Indian Statue will be removed and placed in storage

 until a later date when an appropriate location can be chosen.”

And I’m thinking of not just the obvious irony here

but of how I am also part of this structure, this system

that lets me walk on this land

 as a recently “naturalized” American

 an immigrant from India

and how the statue being removed

is making space for a new Academic Classroom Building

just like any office where I work on this land

is on land that has been “cleared” for my use

and “cleared” by the way, in a way that

the colonial history of the Minuteman Statue will

never have to worry about being “cleared”

and I’m thinking of all the deferred commitments made

by institutions and governments to their temporary workers:

 to the temporary graduate students

 to the temporary adjuncts and non-tenured lecturers

 to the temporary staff and ‘ancillary’ laborers

and how such institutions and governments and Bobs have restructured

our contracts and commitments

because of ‘budget cuts’

 until a later date when appropriate arrangements can be made

and I’m thinking about the

more violently ‘restructured’

commitments and treaties

made to those who were

living and working

on this land long before

they became ‘Indians’ in

 the arrogant ignorance

 the sick imagination

 the ill-literacy

 of ‘Western’/European epistemology.

And I’m thinking all this as I’m walking up 

on to the stage and I see this Bob’s

outstretched hand

and I fold my hands

 closed

 (in a pose not dissimilar to the

  Native American (Indian) stereotype

  of stoicism)

 but I smile

  a nice polite brown man

  always smiling

 and I say to him, looking him in the eyes:

  “I am so glad you are leaving.

  Thanks for nothing, . . .”

And I turn around, and walk off the stage

still smiling, still a nice polite brown man

 but refusing to perform thankfulness in

 yet another insincere gesture made by

 yet another insincere white man

  in a ceremony cloaked in colonial white privilege

  even as I am literally and figuratively cloaked

   and perhaps even blanketed

 in a particular privilege of now being

 a “Master.”

Let’s go Claudio,

I got Bob’s fucking horse here

and I gave him a dollar bill.

[hari links one arm with Claudio’s arm while miming leading a horse with his other hand. Together, the ‘three’ of them walk into and through the audience toward the exit.]