Cue the Indians

As a kid I watched a lot of Westerns. I liked the horses, the guns, even the dust, but most of all, I liked the Indians. They were exotic. Brave. Scary.

For most of my childhood I believed every wagon train was attacked by Indians - murder on horseback; painted and feathered, bristling with lances, arrows and tomahawks. It was a scenario I didn't question. At school my teachers didn't talk much about white/Indian interaction; we heard about covered wagons and pioneers, but nothing was ever presented to contradict what we saw on TV or in the movies. I never asked about it... I mean, I already knew what happened, didn't I?

Then, when I was about 14 years old, I was in study hall in the school library and I came across the biography of Crazy Horse written by Nebraska-born author Mari Sandoz. Unwilling to apply myself to assigned schoolwork, I began to read, and I learned about a nation of people who call themselves Lakota, not Sioux. I was exposed to their religious beliefs, language, ceremonies, music, art, legends and customs. I learned something about how they married, raised children, selected their leaders, hunted and gathered food, buried their dead. Yes, and I learned about their warrior culture, and how it influenced the ways in which they practiced warfare and treated their enemies.

Most important, I began to see that the "hostiles" had many interests beyond ambushing wagon trains. Securing food and shelter was not the least of those. Hunting buffalo from horseback with a lance or bow and arrow wasn't just difficult, it was dangerous. Winters were cold, summers hot, and on the Plains, there isn't a lot of time in between. I found out old age was not only unpleasant for the Lakota, it was unlikely.

Reading about Crazy Horse taught me that the reality of the Old West extended well beyond the reach of Hollywood's popular images. I realized the richness and complexity of Native American cultures had been short-changed in deference to the function served by Westerns as morality tales. Good versus evil. If you ain't one, you're the other.

Most of the Westerns I saw as a kid served up caricatures, not history. With all due respect, the Old West portrayed by John Wayne and John Ford never existed. But the real problem is our tendency to view those images as iconic representations of American values, "the good old days" as it were. In so doing we enshrine them as rationalizations for the consequences of Manifest Destiny - which was itself a giant rationalization.

We can't change what happened. But it seems to me that the more we know about how we got to where we are, the more we can appreciate the achievements of our ancestors, and the better we can identify, try to correct, and avoid repetition of their mistakes.

I still watch those old Westerns. They take me back to a time when the horses, the guns and the dust were enough. Then some Italian actor in feathers, fringe and beardstick rides into frame, and I remember that the real story never made it to the screen.