What’s with the Indians? Aside from paintings and drawings of Indians plastered all over the book, what’s it got to do with some wise guy New Yorker who wants to “go back to where I used to live when I was a kid in New Hope and see my best friend Smedley Fagan here, since it’s always been drummed into my head that I shouldn’t.. do useless things like that, roaming through the woods dressed as Indians living out of teepees… since the town attracted that type: artists, actors, musicians, writers, and other undesirables. You see when we moved to Fairchild, there were no artists, actors, musicians, writers, or other undesirables, just a rumor of the type. And if there were, they remained too well hidden. All I saw were people who bought all their clothes, houses, cars, kids, and pets at the same store, everybody divided and averaged by some unknown but common denominator so that no one dared vary or stray from the model of his neighbor, as though the majority had some secret knowledge of right and wrong.. until finally I adjusted and became a model boy who couldn’t wait to grow up and be like his model neighbors, until I’d backslide again with that loincloth and headdress and all, romping through the woods in search of white men, until one day I actually found one – a boy my own age who went running home, screaming like hell after he discovered who it was. I guess it would have been okay if I were an Indian, but the sight of a model boy dressed like that was too bizarre to reconcile for the little bastard, so that night, my mother got a call from his irate mother asking why a model boy would do such a thing and warned of repeat performances…but as the years went by the Indian died anyway and joined all those things we were supposed to ‘to help the world Gussie’ except by then it was too late, for all of us Mom, really.”
And that’s just for starters. Later on in life, he asked the question:
“Okay, let’s take the Indians first of all. This is how I remember it… the highlight of my youth… I went to live with the Sioux Indians for a summer on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. A scenario that I suppose went back to when I was seven or eight and decided I wanted to be a Si-ox Indian. Only later to discover that another tribe that looked like my Si-ox were called Sue. But since the Sue were real-life Indians in the movies, unlike the Si-ox, who were only in picture books, I now found it far more exciting to be a Sue. For a child growing up, the proper name Lakota (or Dakota, depending on which tribe you were from) would have cleared up the whole matter.
“Anyway, my goal became clear once I realized I was a Sioux and no longer had to choose between a Si-ox or a Sue, my goal was clear. Warbonnets, moccasins, teepees, whatever I made had to be Sioux. Or what I thought was Sioux, since Ben Hunt or Bernard Mason, the supposed leading authorities on how to make all that stuff that we’d spend weeks, months, years even making, didn’t really care that much either, as long as it looked generic enough and when you consider the fact that our eagle feathers could never be real eagle feathers, I suppose the breach was minor. And as long as New Hope and the surrounding area in Bucks County had their white turkey farms, we had an unending supply.”
Until FINALLY…
“… because now, in retrospect, in light of the fact that once again I’m living with Indians, I can’t help but wonder what the connection is because just as I probably wouldn’t have even considered missions without my interest in Indians and pursued painting as much as I did without my interest in Indians, I probably wouldn’t have seen a connection here either – in terms of our desires and consequent fulfillment as human beings! Because God knew all this before the foundations of the world, and like the tapestry, we don’t see from behind, who knows, but maybe all those loose pieces will be seen as inexplicably connected if only when we see Him face to face. The Indians, America, our history, our dreams as a people, Eden, The Promised Land, who can’t help but wonder that surely it’s more than coincidence that we even see this as a people in our songs, our movies, our paintings. ‘America the Beautiful’ is a song that captures it all, while Hollywood, by its very nature, is the result of it, and weren’t all our early paintings a belief in it: Bierstadt, Moran, Cole, Church, and so many who came before, the Hudson Valley School of Artists who all looked westward across the Hudson to the land beyond, the ‘Golden West?’ What country on the face of the earth has felt more destined to include everyone in their dreams? After all, what was the Statue of Liberty? In the very entrance gate? For all the huddled masses? Has any other nation made that invitation? And my Indians, the very symbol? – of the original recipient?? – of all it had to offer??? In our songs and poems?? ‘America, I sing of thee?’ – what could possibly account for the hope of such biblical proportions from the very first pilgrim to all of us today? Because maybe I, like everyone else, merely latched on to my symbol, which was certainly no less original than a few million others – right from our earliest thinkers and philosophers to our latest gurus of hope! Because maybe I, like everyone else! – was simply acting out a typically human phenomenon, and my desire to be ‘Indian,’ live with, be a missionary to was all to be expected and was really all in God’s plans to begin with and since He knew all along how the pieces would fit – maybe that was all part of the training course and MAYBE THAT’S WHERE IT ALL STARTED…”