Volume 10 Number 1
October 1970

Rennard Strickland

IN THE YEAR 1744, a group of Iroquois met with commissioners from Virginia for the purpose of negotiating a treaty. The Virginians offered to educate half-a-dozen of the Indians’ sons in the college at Williamsburg. The Iroquois response, reported by Benjamin Franklin, has become a classic statement of the problems of cross-cultural education. The Indians refused the Virginia offer, saying:

You, who are wise, must know that different nations have different conceptions of things . . . . Several of our young people were formerly brought up at the colleges of the Northern provinces; they were instructed in all your sciences; but when they came back to us they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger, knew neither how to build a cabin, take a deer, nor kill an enemy; spoke our language imperfectly; were therefore neither fit for hunters, warriors, nor counselors—they were, therefore, totally good for nothing (see Reference 1).

There is a final portion of the statement of the Iroquois chief, rarely quoted, but which has much relevance for our discussion. The chief followed his refusal of the Virginia offer with a counter-offer of his own:

To show our grateful sense of it, if the gentlemen of Virginia will send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care of their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them (see Reference 2).

We might have been wise to listen to the counsel of the American Indian and to have accepted his offer of education. The offer is, in a sense, still open for us today. We should, I believe, accept it. There is much we can learn from the American Indian as a part of our renewed study of man and his environment. Truly, ecology has become the issue of the decade. The magnitude of the crisis is well known. Mankind is, no doubt, faced with questions which will decide the issue of survival of the species.

We have all heard the bromide "you cannot stop an idea whose time has come." May I suggest the idea whose time has come—the idea is that man must save his environment in order to save himself. May I even be bolder and suggest that in this quest our guiding vision must come, not from the sophisticated scientist, but from the materially impoverished, from the so-called primitive, from the American Indian. My contention is that the ideal of the Indian may make science worth saving. It is not an accident that the idea of ecology and the ideal of the Indian should emerge simultaneously as national issues.

What then can we learn from the Indian? There are, no doubt, many messages he might have for us, but I would like to stress only two of these. First, we can learn that we must have a vision for our life, a well-ordered and reasoned understanding of our goals. Second, we can learn that we must live in partnership with nature.

Quest for a vision. Among the ancient customs of many tribes was a solitary visit, a contemplative journey into the wilderness. An Indian, before he became a man, before he was admitted to the warrior class, went alone into the mountains, into the desert, or into the forest where he sought a vision—a mystical experience.

While the quest differed from tribe to tribe (and some tribes did not even have this custom), the object was the same. The outcome of the experience might be a chant for protection, a design for a shield, or a sacred and personal song. Yet the fasting and praying always gave the Indian a vision of life - an ordering of his being.

Theodore B. Hetzel, professor of engineering at Haverford College, suggests that the modern American lacks the vision of the young warrior. He further argues that "seeking to atune our lives to harmony with the universe could have value" for us (see Reference 5). I think it is important that this suggestion came from a scientist such as Dr. Hetzel. The true scientist knows that science must be directed by the vision of the society it seeks to serve.

My suggestion is that the Indian can teach us to quest for a vision—a vision by which we can order our expectations of our relationship to science. We do not have to go to the mountains to search for this vision. All we need do is ask ourselves the bard, the difficult, the impossible ethical questions which must be answered to establish a rational order for our direction of the achievements of science.

We are not unlike our old friend the sorcerer’s apprentic—maybe like Mickey Mouse playing the sorcerer’s apprentice in a feature-length Walt Disney cartoon! We have failed to search for a vision, an order, a goal. We have looked for a scapegoat. We have tried to make the achievements of modem science the scapegoat. Science, however, is not the enemy. Science is but an apprentice, a handmaiden, the methodological tool. The real enemy is progress as the uncontested god-bead of the age.

The late Richard M. Weaver argued in Ideas Have Consequences that progress was the "metaphysical handmaiden of science’ and that in our worship at the font of technology we have become "ethical eunuchs." Why? Because progress is without relation to ideals—to a vision of order. Unregulated, unquestioned, progress becomes a self-fulfilling goal. In the final analysis "progress [Weaver contended] becomes the salvation man is placed on earth to work out."

John Crowe Ransom (a most incisive thinker of the fugitive poets—Vanderbilt Agrarians) believed that progress, defined as conquest of nature, has no end. The result: a substitution of means for ends, a cycle in which one discovery, one new process, one new product, automatically, unquestioningly "progresses" to another." When we do not exert an ethical judgment among the alternatives offered by scientific knowledge, we are abdicating to the machine our human decision-making power, our value-ordering function.

What does this all mean? We have failed in our duty to seek a vision—to weigh the costs and the benefits of technological progress. For example, the pill has been bailed as that most wonderful of all discoveries of mankind—a technological advance creating a sexual revolution by separating the sex act from reproduction. Doctors are now telling us that the price for this temporary distortion of the sexual function may be paid in blood clots, brain damage, and other unforeseen maladies.

We have a responsibility to assert a rational order in man’s relationship with nature. We must have the humility to admit that we cannot win an unlimited war on nature. The concept of progress as salvation can no longer go unchallenged. We must have a vision of order. Our ultimate goals must be ultimate in a rational sense. We can no longer afford to be Weaver’s "ethical eunuchs" enchanted by Circe’s music found in the sounds of our own machines.

We need to take time to make value-based decisions, to discriminate, to tell the scientist, to tell the businessman, to tell the politician the things that we value. Are we willing to continue to pay the price in air pollution for unregulated automobiles? Do we know the costs for increased agricultural production through the use of chemical pesticides? We will have to engage in the difficult task of evaluating alternatives.

Relationship with nature. Only through a rational understanding of mankind’s dependency upon all of nature, can we make truly sound evaluations of the environmental alternatives. As seen by the Indian, there is a peculiarly strong unity between man and his world. In the introduction to our Cherokee Spirit Tales we explained the relationship this way:

The life of the ancient Cherokee was guided by a deep faith in supernatural forces that linked human beings to all other living things. To these Cherokees every animal, every tree, every place, every manifestation of nature had its own spirit (see Reference 9).

The Cherokees have a myth, which the Kilpatricks took as the title for a wonderful book, Friends of Thunder, and which says much about the relationship of the Indian and nature. The relationship is, at best, a precarious one, but the friendship, the oneness, the partnership is there.

Loren Eiseley has written a beautiful explanation of man’s relationship to nature which he calls "The Hidden Teacher." In that essay he describes a "long war of life against its inhospitable environment"—a war in which "nature does not simply represent reality . . . but [in which] nature teaches about reality" (see Reference 10). In this book Eiseley relates the Blackfoot legend of an early people who were poor, naked, and did not know how to live. "Old Man, their maker, said: Go to sleep and get power [and] whatever animals appear in your dream, pray and listen" (see Reference 11). That was how, in the Indian thinking, the first people got through the world—by the power of their dreams and the animal helpers.

Truly the Indian has a different way of looking at nature than those of us who worship the gospel of material progress. As the Spanish philosopher Ortega noted, "Two men may look from different viewpoints at the same landscape. Yet they do not see the same thing. Their different situations make the landscape assume two distinct types of organic structure in their eyes" (see Reference 12).

Consider the landscape which our eastern Indians in Virginia confronted. The land was the landscape of the thick forest. William Faulkner was always disturbed, he told a Japanese audience, that "the forests are going, being replaced by machines." This was important to Faulkner who believed that the South was "the only authentic region in the United States, because (in the South) a deep indestructable bond still exists between man and his environment" (see Reference 13).

In Paris, soon after he received his Nobel Prize, Faulkner had hinted at this. "I like silence," he said. "Silence and horses. And trees. You see what that big freeze last winter did to trees in Miss’ippi? Seems like it happens ever’ year. I got these cedar trees growing along the front walk to my house. Tha freeze broke a heap of branches off them cedars" (see Reference 14).

Faulkner’s comment started me thinking about trees and Ortega’s view that we look at the landscape and see different things. Differences in culture, I think, can be seen at this point. Let’s take Faulkner’s cedar trees and my tribe, the Cherokee, and have a look.

To many people, the tree is only so many board feet of lumber. They look at the tree and see graded timber, stacked, ready for sale. Willard Hurst, the great legal historian, has written a thousand page text on the timber industry in Wisconsin (see Reference 15). The tree has a clearly defined shape to the commercial mentality. Is this not the American way? The true folk-hero of our culture is not Johnny Appleseed but Daniel Boone; not Audubon but John Henry, the legendary steel drivin’ man.

By way of contrast, look at the Cherokees. When a Cherokee sees a cedar tree, he sees a mythical relationship of man and nature. Only recently did I find the rarely-told story of the origin of the cedar tree. There were, in Cherokee mythology, eight evil brothers. They "creeped into the sacred circle of the great spirit who created the Cherokee people. Unable to know the wisdom of the spirit world, they stole from the circle magical powers contained in the holy relics." The priests followed the brothers, who ran into the sky and formed one of the constellations. One of the brothers could not run fast enough and lost his balance. When he fell to the earth, the brother became the cedar tree. Today, the cedar oozes his sap, bleeding in this manner for his evil efforts to learn the secrets of the universe" (see Reference 16).

Another Cherokee tree myth concerns the fir tree.

Even to this day, the spirit of the fir tree of death rules the land of the Cherokees and no Cherokee will plant a fir because he knows that when the fir’s shadow is long enough to cover his grave, the man who planted the tree will die" (see Reference 17).

To extend this illustration just a little more, I believe that the greatest art in America today is the contemporary American Indian art. It is a tragedy that more Americans do not know the works of Fred Beaver (Eka La Nee), Joan Hill (Che Sequah), David Williams (Tos Que), Terry Saul, Donald Vann, Blackbear Bosin. At the apex of this art is the wood sculpture of men like the Apache Allen Houser, the Cheyenne Dick West, and the Cherokee Willard Stone.

When Willard Stone, for example, looks at a piece of wood, he has both the eye of the Indian and the eye of the artist. To him, it is not timber, the first step on a new porch, but a story coming from the grain of an uncut piece of wood. One of Willard’s great pieces is "Young Rabbithawk." In that wood sculpture, the mystical relationship between Willard Stone, the Cherokee Indian, and the creatures of nature show through. The wood is smooth, the natural formations in the tree make the bird’s feathers, his face, and the heart on his chest. In turn, the ‘Young Rabbithawk" symbolizes the Cherokee Indian as he looks out on the modern world. Surely Ortega was correct!

When I was an undergraduate it was quite fashionable, among those of us who fancied ourselves intellectuals, to laugh at Margaret Mead. I don’t know if it still is. I do know that I have learned an immense amount from a little book that Dr. Mead has just published. In Culture and Commitment, she draws the picture of older societies in which the life of the youngest generation will be almost exactly like the life of the oldest generation—a society in which there is little change. In such a society the grandfather figure is most important (see Reference 18).

We, on the other hand, live in a society in which change is so rapid that none of the oldest generation has lived a life closely resembling the one that the youngest generation is living. In such a society the value of the grandfather adviser is minimized. I suggest we look to the American Indian as a grandfather figure for us all.

The grandfather in Indian society was the teacher. Pablito Velarde, Pueblo artist, and Oscar Howe, Sioux, have created magnificent paintings of the Indian grandfather, the storyteller, the teacher. Such a teacher would not be outdated in Dr. Mead’s changing society. Using the Indian as the teacher would help us through the uncertainty of change.

Now I am not suggesting that we become mesmerized into a new age of the noble savage but that in two important areas we cannot afford to turn our back on the Indian’s teaching. WE need a quest for a new vision of life, a proper ordering of our expectations of science, a partnership with nature. The survival of mankind may well depend upon these decisions.

How can we learn these things which the Indian has to offer? How can we teach them? The answer is not simple. We can begin by teaching the art, literature, music, and dance of the native American. Why are the tales of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and the politically-minded Mother Goose a better fare for American children than the friendship of thunder and the origin of corn?