When my kids talked to their teacher about this omission, he asked them why they were so keen on the subject of Indians, leading them to mention the book I was planning to write on native peoples. This in turn led to an invitation for me to speak to the class.

The youngsters I met had never been offered one course, or even an extended segment of a course, about the Indian nations of this continent, about Indian-Anglo interactions (except for references to the Pilgrims and the Indian Wars), or about contemporary Indian problems in the United States or elsewhere. The American educational curriculum is almost bereft of information about Indians, making it difficult for young non-Indian Americans to understand or care about present-day Indian issues. European schools actually teach more about American Indians. In Germany, for example, all children read a set of books that sensitizes them to Indian values and causes. It is not surprising, therefore, that the European press carries many more stories about American Indians than does the American press.

In the 60 minutes I was allotted to speak to the Lowell class, I tried to communicate five points: 1) There were a lot of Indians living here before whites arrived; 2) They were not "savages" but lived in very well organized, stable societies spanning thousands of years; 3) The white European settlers killed most of the Indians on the continent, and massively stole from the rest; 4) Nonetheless, there are still many Indians within the United States facing problems similar to those faced by their ancestors; and 5) There are millions of Indians (and other native people) all over the world.

I posted one of the excellent maps prepared by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), showing Indian land areas prior to the arrival of white colonists. The students were shocked to learn that every acre of what is now the United States was once part of some Indian nation. Some of the Iroquois tribes have been living in the northern United States for at least 5,000 years. In the Southwest, the Hopi Indians are estimated to have been living in what is now called the Four Corners area (the junction of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah) for at least 10,000 years. (Some archeologists have lately put the Hopi arrival as long ago as 40,000 years. The Hopi themselves say, as do many Indian nations, that they did not "arrive" at all, that their genesis was in the Grand Canyon.)

By 1776, when the United States was established, about 100 Indian nations had survived the slaughter of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, and some two to five million Indian people (depending upon whose estimate you accept) were living in the "lower 48" states, speaking more than 750 distinct languages. (Some estimates hold that there were about 50 million native Americans, WFI Editor).

When I got to this point in my lecture, one of the students asked, "What do you mean by the word nation as applied to Indian tribes?" The definition of nation, by such international organizations as the United Nations and the World Court, includes the following components: Common culture and heritage, common language, stable geographic locale over time, internal laws of behavior that are accepted by members of the community, boundaries recognized by other nations, and formal agreements (treaties) with other nations. By those standards, Indian "nations" are just that. (Most of the attributes of a nation were defined by a common ethnicity gained through membership in a common tribe, which became the defining characteristics of what eventually became nation-states, WFI Editor).

From the late 18th to the late 19th centuries, the United States made 370 formal treaties with Indian nations, following the same procedure of congressional and presidential approval that was followed for treaties with France or Great Britain. The fact that we violated virtually all of these Indian treaties resulted from our feeling that we could get away with such violations.

Next on my agenda was a discussion of Indian governmental structures. Like most Americans, the young high school students assumed that Indian or aboriginal people had no forms of government other than despotic chiefs. This lack of information about Indian governments represents another tragic omission from American education, since many Indian governmental forms were highly evolved and democratic. Some of them, notably the Iroquois, apparently had considerable effect on concepts later incorporated into the U.S. Articles of Confederation and the Constitution (of 1787). The systems of checks and balances, popular participation in decision making, direct representation, states' rights, and bicameral legislatures were all part of the great Binding Law of the Iroquois Confederacy, dating back to the 1400s. But there may not be one American in 10,000 who knows this.

Another shocking fact was that very few of the students were aware of the degree to which, or how recently, Indian lands had been expropriated. Between 1776 and the late 1800s, Indian land holdings were reduced by about 95 percent, from about three million to 200,000 square miles. This was accomplished in a variety of ways, from massacres to duplicitous treaty-making. Some treaties exacted land cessions in exchange for guarantees of safety and permanent reserves, but these treaties were soon violated. Usually the Indians were driven off because the settlers wanted gold or farmland or mineral rights or railroad rights. Wherever there was resistance, the cavalry insured compliance. All of this was in the cause of Manifest Destiny: God willed it.

My hour was nearly gone. I had only enough time left to say that, while ignoring the past reality of the Indians is bad enough, ignoring the current situation is worse. In this country there are still one and a half million Indian people, more than half of whom live on the lands where their ancestors lived thousands of years ago. Some of these Indians maintain traditions that have survived for millenia. But, when the U.S. Government or a corporation seeks to get oil, coal or copper from Indian land, they behave exactly as they always have. Since the Custer period, the methods have switched from violent assaults to "legal" manipulations that separate Indians from their lands as surely as the guns once did. I gave the students three brief examples:

THE DAWES ACT (1887). Provided that individual Indians could now own their own plots of land. Hailed as a liberal reform when introduced, the real purpose and effect of the law was to break the communal-tribal ownership of land. Tribes were rarely, if ever, willing to sell land. But individuals could be persuaded to sell, for cash, guns or liquor. Millions of acres moved from Indian to white ownership.

THE INDIAN REORGANIZATION ACT (1934). Another liberal reform, it offered U.S. assistance in converting Indian governments to "modern democratic" systems. Like the Dawes Act half a century earlier, this law was designed to break the hold of traditional Indian governance -- based on slow-moving consensus processes -- because it invariably led to refusal to negotiate leases for oil, coal, gas, and other minerals that the U.S. was seeking. "Democracy" had nothing to do with it. In fact, as the new American-style (republican) governments were put in place, the great majority of Indians refused to participate in the voting. This enabled the Bureau of Indian Affairs to train and run its own compliant candidates -- ready to make deals -- who were elected by the tiny handful of Indians willing to participate in the alien process. As a result, corporations gained inexpensive access to Indian resources, and the new Indian tribal councils effectively became part of the U.S. bureaucracy, as most still are, though a sizeable resistance on many reservations now threatens this cozy arrangement.

THE INDIAN CLAIMS ACT (1946). Theoretically established to settle Indian grievances about stolen lands, in practice the Indian Claims Commission is a fraud. The Commission refuses all requests to grant land title to Indians, offering only compensation for lands that it determines were lost by Indians (at per acre rates [values] that are often a century old). So Indians entering claims to land find that accepting payment amounts to a permanent extinguishing of their aboriginal title, which is the opposite result of the one they sought.

I ended my talk by mentioning that there are hundreds of millions of indigenous people all over the world who continue to live on their ancestral lands, and who experience varying degrees of domination by invading colonial interests. Most of these people are suffering even more violent assaults than were visited upon American Indians a century ago. As in the past, these acts are justified by an assumption of cultural and spiritual superiority and by the fact that the Indians stand in the way of the orderly progress of technological and industrial development. The bell rang. The kids leapt up, and went out the door to lunch.

THE MEDIA: INDIANS ARE NON-NEWS

That the Lowell High students should know nothing about Indians is not their fault. It is one of many indicators that this country's institutions do not inform people about Indians of either present or past. Indians are non-history, which also makes them non-news. Not taught in schools, not part of American consciousness, their present-day activities and struggles are rarely reported in the newspapers or on television.

On the rare occasions when the media do relate to Indians, the reports tend to follow very narrow guidelines based on pre-existing stereotypes of Indians: They become what is known in the trade as "formula stories."

My friend Dagmar Thorpe, a Sac-and-Fox Indian who, until 1990, was Executive Director of the Seventh Generation Fund, once asked a network producer known to be friendly to the Indian cause about the reasons for the lack of in-depth, accurate reporting on Indian stories. According to Dagmar, the producer gave three reasons. The first reason was guilt: It is not considered good programming to make your audience feel bad. Americans don't want to see shows that remind them of historical events that American institutions have systematically avoided discussing.

Secondly, there is the "What's-in-it-for-me?" factor. Americans in general do not see how anything to do with Indians has anything to do with them. As a culture, we are now so trained to "look out for number one" that there has been a near total loss of altruism. (Of course, American life itself -- so speedy and so removed from nature -- makes identifying with the Indians terribly difficult; and we don't see that we might have something to learn from them).

The third factor is that Indian demands seem preposterous to Americans. What most Indians want is simply that their land should be returned, and that treaties should be honored. Americans tend to view the treaties as "ancient," though many were made less than a century ago -- more recently, for example, than many well-established laws and land deals among whites. Americans (under the influence of) the government of the republic, and the media, view treaties with Indian nations differently than treaties with anyone else.

In fairness to the media, there are some mitigating factors. Just like the rest of us, reporters and producers have been raised without knowledge of Indian history or Indian struggles. Perhaps most important, media people have had little personal contact with Indians, since Indians live mostly in parts of the country, and the world, where the media isn't. Indians live in non-urban regions, in the deserts and mountains and tundras that have been impacted least by Western society, at least until recently. They live in the places that we didn't want. They are not part of the mainstream and have not tried to become part.

When our society does extend its tentacles to make contact -- usually when corporations are seeking land or minerals, or military forces are seeking control -- there is little media present to observe and report what transpires. Even in the United States, virtually all Indian struggles take place far away from media: In the central Arizona desert, in the rugged (and sacred) Black Hills, the mountains of the Northwest, or else on tiny Pacific Islands, or in the icy vastness of the far north of Alaska. The New York Times has no bureau in those places; neither does CBS. Nor do they have bureaus in the Australian desert, or the jungles of Brazil, Guatemala, or Borneo.

As a result, some of the most terrible assaults upon native peoples today never get reported. If reports do emerge, the sources are the corporate or military public relations arms of the Western intruders, which present biased perspectives. When reporters are flown in to someplace where Indians are making news, they are usually ill prepared and unknowledgeable about the local situation. They do not speak the language and are hard pressed to grasp the Indian perception, even if they can find Indians to speak with. In addition, these reporters often grew up in that same bubble of no contact/no education/no news about Indians.

To make matters even more difficult, as I explained at length in my book, it is also in the nature of modern media to distort the Indian message, which is far too subtle, sensory, complex, spiritual, and ephemeral to fit the gross guidelines of mass-media reporting, which emphasizes conflict and easily grasped imagery. A reporter would have to spend a great deal of time with the Indians to understand why digging up the earth for minerals is a sacrilege, or why diverting a stream can destroy a culture, or why cutting a forest deprives people of their religious and human rights, or why moving Indians off desert land to a wonderful new community of private homes will effectively kill them. Even if the reporter does understand, to successfully translate that understanding through the medium, and through the editors and the commercial sponsors -- all of whom are looking for action -- is nearly impossible.

So most reporters have little alternative but to accept official handouts, or else to patch together, from scanty reports, stories that are designed for a world predisposed to view Indian struggles as anomalies in today's technological world: Formula stories, using stereotyped imagery.

PREVALENT STEREOTYPES AND FORMULAS

The dominant image of Indians in the media used to be of savages, of John Wayne leading the U.S. Cavalry against the Indians. Today the stereotype has shifted to nobel savage, which portrays Indians as part of a once-great but now-dying culture; a culture that could talk to the trees and the animals and that protected nature. But sadly, a losing culture, which has not kept up with our dynamic times.

We see this stereotype now in many commercials. The Indian is on a horse, gazing nobly over the land he protects. Then there is a quick cut to today: To oil company workers walking alongside the hot-oil pipeline in Alaska. The company workers are there to protect against leaks and to preserve the environment for the animals. We see quick cuts of caribou and wolves, which imply that the oil company accepts the responsibility that the Indians once had.

The problem here is that the corporate sponsor is lying. It does not feel much responsibility toward nature; if it did, it would not need expensive commercials to say so, because the truth would be apparent from its behavior. More important, however, is that treating Indians this way in commercials does terrible harm to their cause. It makes Indians into conceptual relics; artifacts. Worse, they are confirmed as existing only in the past, which hurts their present efforts.

Another stereotype we see in commercials these days is the Indian-as-guru. A recent TV spot depicted a shaman making rain for his people. He is then hired by some corporate farmers to make rain for them. He is shown with his power objects, saying prayers, holding his hands toward the heavens. The rains come. Handshakes from the businessmen. Finally the wise old Indian is shown with a satisfied smile on his flight home via United Airlines.

Among the more insidious formula stories is the one about how Indians are always fighting each other over disputed lands. This formula fits the Western paradigm about non-industrial peoples' inability to govern themselves; that they live in some kind of despotism or anarchy. For example, in the Hopi-Navaho "dispute," the truth of the matter is that U.S. intervention in the activities and governments of both tribes eventually led to American-style puppet governments battling each other for development rights that the traditional leadership of each tribe does not want. But the historical reality of that case, and most Indian cases, is unknown to the mass media and therefore left unreported.

Another very popular formula story is the one with the headline INDIANS STAND IN THE WAY OF DEVELOPMENT, as, for example, in New Guinea or Borneo, or in the Amazon Basin. These stories concern Indian resistance to roads, or dams, or the cutting of forests, and their desire for their lands to left inviolate.

The problem with these formula stories is not that they are inaccurate -- Indian peoples around the world most certainly are resisting on hundreds of fronts and do indeed stand in the way of development -- but that the style of reporting carries a sense of foregone conclusion. The reporters tend to emphasize the poignancy of the situation: "Stone-Age" peoples fighting in vain to forestall the inevitable march of progress. In their view, it is only a matter of time before the Indians lose, and the forests are cut down, and the land is settled by outsiders. However tragic the invasion, however righteous the cause of the Indians, however illegal the acts being perpetrated against them, however admirable the Indian ways, reporters will invariably adopt the stance that the cause is lost, and that no reversal is possible. This attitude surely harms the Indians more than if the story had not been reported at all.

Finally, and perhaps most outrageous, is the rich Indian formula story. Despite the fact that the average per-capita income of Indians is lower than any other racial or ethnic group in the United States, and that they suffer the highest disease rates in many categories, and have the least access to health care, the press loves to focus on the rare instance where some Indian hits it big. Sometimes the story is about an oil well found on some Indian's land, or someone getting rich on bingo, but often the stories emphasize someone's corruption, e.g., Peter MacDonald, the former chairman of the Navajo Nation. (Ironically, the surname MacDonald suggests Scottish descent, rather than Indian, WFI Editor). This formula story has a twofold purpose: It manages to confirm the greatness of (republican) America -- where anyone can get rich, even an Indian -- and at the same time manages to confirm Indian leaders as corrupt and despotic.

A corrollary to this story is how certain Indian tribes have gotten wealthy through land claims cases, as, for example, the Alaska natives via the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. As we will see, a little digging into the story -- if reporters only would -- exposes that settlement as a fraud that actually deprived the Alaska natives of land and money.

The press's failure to pursue and report the full picture of American Indian poverty, while splashing occasional stories about how some are hitting it big, creates a public impression that is the opposite of the truth. The situation is exacerbated when national leaders repeat the misconceptions. Ronald Reagan told the Moscow press in 1987 that there was no discrimination against Indians in this country and the proof of that was that so many Indians, like those outside of Palm Springs, California, have become wealthy. (Wealth from oil discovered on the desert reservation.)

INDIANS AND THE "NEW AGE"

While most of our society manages to avoid Indians, there is one group that does not, though its interest is very measured. I was reminded of this recently during my first visit to a dentist in Marin County, an affluent area north of San Francisco. The dentist, a friendly, trendy young man wearing a moustache, looked as if he'd stepped out of a Michelob ad. While poking my gums, he made pleasant conversation, inquiring about my work. When he pulled his tools from my mouth, I told him I was writing about Indians, which got him very excited. "Indians! Great! I love Indians. Indians are my hobby. I have Indian posters all over the house, and Indian rugs. And hey, I've lately been taking lessons in 'tracking' from this really neat Indian guide. I've learned how to read the tiniest changes in the terrain, details I'd never even noticed before."

In this expression of enthusiasm, this young man was like thousands of other people, particularly in places like Marin or Beverly Hills, or wherever there is sufficient leisure to engage in inner explorations. Among this group, which tends to identify with the "New Age," or the "human potential movement," there has been a renaissance of awareness about Indian practices that aid inner spiritual awakening.

A typical expression of this interest may be that a well-off young professional couple will invite friends to a lawn party to meet the couple's personal Indian medicine person. The shaman will lead the guests through a series of rituals designed to awaken aspects of themselves. These events may culminate in a sweat ceremony, or even a "fire walk." There was a period in the seventies when you could scarcely show up at a friend's house without having to decide whether or not to walk on hot coals, guided by a medicine man from the South Pacific.

Those who graduate from sweat ceremonies or fire walks might proceed to "tracking," as my dentist had, or else to the now popular "vision quests." You may feel as you read this that I am ridiculing these "human potential" explorers. Actually, I find something admirable in them. Breaking out of the strictures of our contemporary lifestyles is clearly beneficial, in my opinion, but there is also a serious problem. For although the New Age gleans the ancient wisdoms and practices, it has assiduously avoided directly engaging in the actual lives and political struggles of the millions of descendants who carry on those ancient traditions, who are still alive on the planet today, and who want to continue living in a traditional manner.

The roots of the current New Age Indian revival lie in the hippie period of the 1960s and in early drug explorations. In that era, young people sought to define new modes of being that were non-acquisitive, spiritually oriented, non-hierarchical, tribal, communal. The hippie community did have some awareness of the political dimensions of Indian societies. In fact, many of the hippie activists, now 20 years older, continue to show up when a meeting is called by Indians spreading the word of a problem. It is still Wavy Gravy's Hog Farm that goes down to help the elders at Big Mountain on the Navajo reservation. It is still the Grateful Dead who play at the benefits.

It was also during the sixties that Carlos Castaneda offered, through his books, a window into a different reality construct. I was among the people in those days who found Castaneda's work fascinating and important. Castaneda did not avoid political realities. In each of his books, Don Juan, and sometimes others among the shamans, spoke passionately about the prejudices they experienced as children. But few reviewers commented on those passages; they were not the reason the books were devoured.

Castaneda was able to immerse millions of Americans in a system of logic truly different from our own. He created Indian heroes who were irresistable to middle class whites seeking a pathway out of rigid Western modes of thinking. He led millions of readers through experiences designed to reveal unknown dimensions of our nature. And he did all this by imitating Indian storytelling style. Like the stories, myths, and histories Castaneda emulated, it scarcely mattered to what extent the characters were real or not real. They were teaching systems. They brought us a new way of mind, and they delivered experiences, images, and perspectives that ran counter to the prevailing imagery and paradigms of our society. In these ways, the books approximated Indian thought, and were subversive and political, even dangerous.

Americans went for them like dry roots seeking water. We still do. For like Castaneda himself, born of Indian heritage in an increasingly Westernized Peru, we are all caught between chairs. Drawn to the subjective, longing for the naturalistic, the moody, the sensory, the mythic, the magical, and desiring to integrate these elements in our lives, we are stuck in a world of concrete, time-bound, homocentric (i.e., anthropocentric, or human-centered), mechanical logic. Castaneda's images, like fire walking and sweat lodges, offered pathways back to nature within ourselves.

But however enlightening this may be, confining our knowledge of Indians to their "spiritual" pathways continues to deny what is most important to the Indian people. While we experience and explore Indian-ness in ourselves, Indian people experience our culture in terms of its drives to expand and to dominate nature and natural people. We have managed to isolate one or two aspects of Indian life -- the spiritual aspect and sometimes the art -- and to separate these from the rest of the Indian experience, which is something Indian people themselves would never do. It is a fundamental tenet of Indian perception that the spiritual aspect of life is inseparable from the economic and the political. No Indian person could ever make the kind of split we wish to make for them. So why do we?

For one thing, it is a way that we can skim the "cream" -- arts, culture, spiritual wisdom -- off the Indian experience. We can collect it for our museums, while discarding whatever we find in it that challenges the way we live our lives. We can make ourselves feel good about "saving" something Indian, as if it were meaningful support for living Indians.

It is little wonder, of course, that we choose such a course. The average person does not seek information that will make him or her feel badly. In fact, if we ever became more personally engaged than at present, and let into our hearts and minds the full spectrum of horrors that Indian people have faced, and still face; if we ever accepted that American corporate and military interests and surely American commodity and technological visions drive the juggernaut, the pain of these realizations would be overwhelming. So instead, we avoid the subject, which allows us to avoid re-examining the premises upon which our current lives and this society are based, premises that sanction the destructive behavior against nature and native peoples that is now rampant.

CULTURAL DARWINISM

There is yet a deeper widespread rationalization for our avoidance of Indians and the news they bring us. On some level we think that however beautiful Indian culture once was, however inspiring their religious ideas, however artistic their creations and costumes, however wise their choices of life within nature, our own society has advanced beyond that stage of evolution. They are the "primitive" stage and we have grown beyond them. They have not adapted as we have. This makes us superior. We are the survivors. We are the "cutting edge."

A good friend of mine (who now works in television) put it this way: "There is no getting around the fact that the Indian way is a losing way. They are no longer appropriate for the times. They are anomalies." In saying this, my friend was essentially blaming the Indians themselves for the situation that befell them. They failed to adapt their lifestyle and belief systems to keep up with the changing times. Most importantly, they failed to keep up with technological change. They were not competitive.

This statement reflects a Darwinist, capitalist outlook of survival of the fittest, with fitness now defined in terms of technological capability. If you can use the machine better than the next fellow or the next culture, you survive and they die. This may be sad, the reasoning goes, but that's the way it is in today's world. This view sees Western technological society as the ultimate expression of the evolutionary pathway, the culmination of all that has come before, the final flowering. We represent the breakthrough in the evolution of living creatures; we are the conscious expression of the planet. Indians helped the process for a while, but they gave way to more evolved, higher life forms.

Our assumption of superiority does not come to us by accident. We have been trained in it. It is soaked into the fabric of every Western religion, economic system, and technology. They reek of their greater virtues and capabilities. Judeo-Christian religions are a model of hierarchical structure: One God above all, certain humans above other humans, and humans over nature. Political and economic systems are similarly arranged: Organized along rigid hierarchical lines, all of nature's resources are regarded only in terms of how they serve the one god -- the god of growth and expansion. In this way, all of these systems are missionary; they are into dominance. And through their mutual collusion, they form a seamless web around our lives. They are the creators and enforcers of our beliefs. We live inside these forms, are imbued with them, and they justify our behaviors. In turn, we believe in their viability and superiority largely because they prove effective: They gain power.

But is power the ultimate evolutionary value? We shall see. The results are not yet in. "Survival of the fittest" as a standard of measure may require a much longer time scale than the scant 200 years' existence of the United States, or the century since the Industrial Revolution, or the two decades since the advent of "high tech." Even in Darwinian terms, most species become "unfit" over tens of thousands of years. Our culture is using its machinery to drive species into extinction in one generation, not because the species are maladaptive, but by pure force. However, there is reason to doubt the ultimate success of our behavior. In the end, a model closer to that of the Indians, living lightly on the planet, observing its natural rules and modes of organization, may prove more "fit," and may survive us after all. Until that day, however, we will continue to use Darwinian theories to support the assertion that our mechanistic victory over the "primitives" is not only God's plan, but nature's.

SOURCE: This article is excerpted from "In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations," by Jerry Mander. Published by the Sierra Club Books, 1991 (San Francisco). Reprinted from the Daybreak Magazine, Spring 1993 Edition. This article is reprinted here because it is in the national interest of the American people.