My Life on the Road

by Gloria Steinem

  By now I feel like I’m in an alternate reality. He says the mounds were such feats of construction that Europeans didn’t believe people they regarded as savages could have ancestors who created them. One popular theory was that the Egyptians lived here—and then mysteriously left. Another was that the Chinese, the first sailors, had come and gone.

  I ask if the mound builders were his ancestors. He says they might have been, but with all the mixed heritage in this country, they could be my ancestors, too. Nobody knows what they called themselves—the mounds are named after the places they were found: Adena, Hopewell, and so on. Most of the big mounds were along the Mississippi River. People on this continent then known as Turtle Island had cultures as advanced as any on earth.

  Suddenly, it seems ridiculous that we just came from a city airport named for Columbus, a terrible navigator who insisted to his dying day that he was in India—which is why people here are called Indians. As the Native women in Houston said, “It could have been worse—he could have thought he was in Turkey.” If you’ve been genocided and left out of history, as they explained, you need a sense of humor to survive. When I tell my host this, he looks at me as if I’m just beginning to get it.

  Though I’ve been assuming this kind and patient man was sent to pick me up, I realize I don’t know his role. He says mildly that he’s one of the conference organizers. If I hadn’t asked, he would have been content to remain a driver. So much for hierarchy.

  As we pull into our destination, I ask how he keeps on working, despite ignorance like mine on one hand and all the commercial imitations on the other.

  “In Indian Country,” he says, “we have a different sense of time. I’m learning and you’re learning—and more will.”

  —

  WHEN I TELL THIS story to my friend Alice Walker, I discover that she too has always wanted to see the mounds. Like so many African Americans, Alice has Native Americans in her family tree. As William Loren Katz, a favorite historian of Alice’s, once wrote, “Europeans forcefully entered the African blood stream, but Native Americans and Africans merged by choice, invitation and love.”2 Her friend Deborah Matthews, who grew up near these Ohio mounds and had a Cherokee great-grandmother, offers to show us what she learned in her childhood.

  In the summer of 1997, I leave my home in New York, Alice and Deborah leave their respective homes in California, and we meet at the motel where Alice and I will be staying—though with the added comfort of meals in the nearby homey kitchen of Deborah’s mother, a generous woman Alice calls by her middle name, Magnolia.

  On the first day, Deborah shows us the mounds in her small hometown of Newark. One is a round, slightly raised grassy area about the size of a city block, with ancient curved edges still visible under bushes and refuse. Surrounded by working-class houses with families sitting on front porches in the August heat, it is an open space with kids playing near public restrooms. A second is Moundbuilders Golf Course at the Moundbuilders Country Club, just outside town. A third is the Great Circle Earthworks, which is protected as a state park. Its thirty acres are surrounded by a wall that even after two thousand years of erosion is still fifteen feet high. At the center are four mounds in the shape of a bird, its beak pointing toward the entrance. Deborah says excavations have revealed an altar inside the bird’s body, and dowsing has identified energy lines along the top of the wall. She came here as a little girl on family outings. “If we ventured outside the wall,” she remembers, “our elders would say, ‘Just follow the circle and it will bring you back to us.’ ”

  In Magnolia’s kitchen, we eat homemade peach cobbler and talk about differences in the way countries treat their past. At Stonehenge in England, there are guards and tape-recorded tours. Modern Greeks picnic among the ruins and are intimate with their ancient history. Both can count themselves as descendants of past glories. Here, people arrived from another continent and, by war, disease, and persecution, they eliminated 90 percent of the residents. From 1492 to the end of the Indian Wars, an estimated fifteen million people were killed. A papal bull had instructed Christians to conquer non-Christian countries and either kill all occupants or “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”3 From Africa to the Americas, slavery and genocide were blessed by the church, and riches from the so-called New World shored up the papacy and European monarchs. Whether out of guilt or a justifying belief that the original occupants were not fully human, history was replaced by the myth of almost uninhabited lands.

  Thinking about our schooling in different decades and parts of the country, all three of us in that kitchen discover that we were taught more about ancient Greece and Rome than about the history of the land we live on. We learned about the pyramid builders of Egypt but not the pyramid builders of the Mississippi River.

  The next day Deborah drives us to Flint Ridge, an ancient quarry that once yielded flint for Native tools used in hunting, farming, and building. By local legend, Indians hurled themselves to their deaths from this ridge rather than be slaughtered by the enemy.

  We need some healing, and find it at the Serpent Mound.

  There it is, a grass-covered, undulating serpent stretching out for a quarter of a mile on a plateau above a valley. It seems to emerge from the earth, rather than to be built on it. From a globe or comet in its mouth to a tightly coiled tail, its direction was thought to be random until astronomers realized that the head points to the sunset at the summer solstice, and the tail to the sunrise at winter solstice. Radiocarbon dating traces its age back to at least two thousand years ago, not the few centuries originally thought. This is the largest of the effigy mounds surviving here, and also in the world. Like so many other mounds, it would have been destroyed to make room for construction if money hadn’t been raised to save it, in this case with the help of a group of women at the Peabody Museum of Massachusetts.

  There is a small wooden viewing tower, and pamphlets from the State of Ohio, but they focus on facts—for instance, the Serpent Mound is as long as four football fields—not on meaning. In The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen, a Native poet, mythologist, and scholar, explains that Serpent Woman was one of the names of the quintessential original spirit “that pervades everything, that is capable of powerful song and radiant movement, and that moves in and out of the mind…she is both Mother and Father to all people and all creatures. She is the only creator of thought, and thought precedes creation.”4

  In Western mythology, she might be compared to Medusa, the serpent-haired Greek goddess whose name means Knowing Woman or Protectress. She once was all-powerful—until patriarchy came along in the form of a mythic young man who chopped off her head. He was told to do this by Athena, who sprang full-blown from the mind of her father, Zeus—a goddess thought up by patriarchy and therefore motherless. There is history in what is dismissed as prehistory.

  In books we brought along, we read about earlier grave excavations here that revealed a young couple laid out side by side, wearing jewelry and breastplates, their noses shaped in copper to keep them after the fragile cartilage was gone. Their bodies were surrounded by buttons made of copper-covered wood and stone as well as more than a hundred thousand pearls.5

  That night we join Deborah’s mother, her eighty-six-year-old grandmother, and teachers and neighbors at a community potluck supper in the school gym. It’s a welcome for us. With the slow-paced humor and warmth I’ve come to cherish, they talk about the history of small-town Ohio, and are delighted that we are interested. Deborah’s grandmother has lived her entire life near Adena mounds that may be even older than the one we just saw. They reminisce about everything from romantic outings in the Great Circle Earthworks to the connection they feel to people they just call “the ancients.” We tell them about the young couple in copper and pearls. All of us light a candle for them.

  What I don’t tell them is a feeling I don’t understand myself. As a child, I went to Theosophical meetings with my mother, and to a Congregational church where I was christened. I’
ve enjoyed many years of Passover seders, rewritten with scholarship and poetry to include women. But not one of them felt as timeless and true as Serpent Woman.

  II.

  Coming home from a road trip in the late 1970s, I notice graffiti painted in big white letters over the Queens Midtown Tunnel: WHEELS OVER INDIAN TRAILS.

  Soon I find myself looking for this graffiti whenever I come home. I wonder, Who climbed so high above the traffic? One of New York’s brash young street artists? Some Marlon Brando–esque guy in love with a culture not his own? A descendant of a tribe that once lived here?

  I assume this is not a message from a living culture. I don’t yet realize that it is part of a journey that will change how I see the world and the possible.

  Later when I’m sitting in my favorite place amid the tall outcroppings of igneous rock in Central Park, just a short walk from my apartment, I wonder, Who rested in this same place long ago, before the Dutch and then the English arrived? Whose hand touched this stone, and who looked at the same horizon? This vertical history feels more intimate and sensory than written history. It’s been reaching out all along, I just wasn’t paying attention.

  —

  WHEN I WAS YOUNGER and trying to become a writer by interviewing other writers, I got an assignment to profile Saul Bellow, the much-awarded novelist who chronicled Chicago in all its diversity. Since he didn’t want to sit still for an interview, he took me on a day’s tour of this city that was a character in all his writing. We started out in the claustrophobic rooms of a tenement preserved to show how generations of European immigrants lived, and a neighborhood shop that sold can openers and other cheap items in the front, and diamond rings in the back. Then we went to a bar where Native American steelworkers were sitting silently, drinking as the morning light filtered through venetian blinds. They were Mohawk, Bellow explained with a novelist’s eye for a good story, and they had so little fear of heights that they could walk on steel beams seventy stories up while catching hot rivets in a metal sieve—sort of a death-defying jai alai. He admired their natural gift and looked at them as different. To me, they seemed as isolated as Mexican migrants working in California fields, or South African men working in diamond mines.

  Years later, as if I’d sent out a call to the universe, I met women on a Mohawk reservation in Canada. They lived near a railway bridge that had given birth to this myth of fearlessness. They assured me that Mohawk men were just as afraid of heights as anybody else, but they needed the jobs. Maybe they were helped by a trail-walking habit of placing one foot directly in front of the other, and by a tradition of bravery in the face of danger, but so many had perished that Mohawk women asked their men never to go out on the same job together, to lessen the risk of group widowhood and fatherless children. If I hadn’t been in that sad bar watching men numb themselves with alcohol—and met those women—I too would have believed in the myth of a fearless choice.

  No wonder oral history turns out to be more accurate than written history. The first is handed down from the many who were present. The second is written by the few who probably weren’t.

  In my own schoolbooks, I remembered reading headings like “Indians Were Backward.” Those sources ignored, or were ignorant of, a culture with agricultural techniques that gave the world three-fifths of the food crops still in cultivation in modern times,6 developed long-strand cotton that made the mills of England possible, and attracted so many white settlers to Indian instead of European ways of life that Benjamin Franklin complained bitterly about it. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, “Indians enjoyed equality and plenty; Europeans were in chains.”7

  Often the myths about Indians depicted them as more violent than the white society around them, though “scalping” was initiated by the U.S. Army, in order to pay soldiers and settlers a reward for each Indian killed. In my childhood, Hollywood westerns presented a few noble savages as well as fearsome warriors (or rather non-Indian actors playing them), but pioneer women were portrayed as suffering a fate worse than death if captured. “Half-breeds” born of such liaisons were seen as wanting only to be accepted into white society, and, especially if they were females, they were doomed by an out-of-control sexuality.

  In fact, much more typical were white women who experienced the communal work and higher status of a Native culture, and chose it over their own. For instance, Cynthia Ann Parker was an adopted Comanche who gave birth to the last free Comanche chief, was captured by Texas Rangers, and spent the last ten years of her life trying to return to the culture she loved.

  As Benedict Anderson wrote in Imagined Communities, a witty and lethal exposé of fictions that justify nationalism, “All profound changes in consciousness…bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions…spring narratives.”

  Even graffiti above a tunnel can begin a journey that never ends.

  —

  LOOKING BACK AT THAT National Women’s Conference in Houston. I realize how much I learned, not only there, but in the two years of travel and state conferences leading up to it. LaDonna Harris, a much-loved Comanche activist, was the only woman from what she called Tribal America among our commissioners, and she was also a rare link to Washington.8 She had married Fred Harris, her high school sweetheart, who, with her help, became a U.S. senator from Oklahoma. Some people joked that she was the state’s third senator because she was so active in organizing and educating on Native issues.

  To create pride in Native young people and bring knowledge to the rest of the country, LaDonna also had founded Americans for Indian Opportunity, with an Ambassadors Program that trained young women and men to talk about their history and culture. This created more understanding in the mainstream plus confidence in new generations of emerging leaders, and this idea would be adapted by First Peoples in other countries. Still, as she told me, their first task was often to start from ground zero by explaining, “We’re still here.”

  LaDonna herself reminded me of people I’d met in India who also came from cultures older than anything in my history books. Like them, she had double-consciousness, a term invented by W. E. B. Du Bois to describe the African American experience of being one’s unique self on the inside, yet generalized by the racist gaze of outsiders. Somehow, LaDonna had turned this on its head. She lived fully in the modern world, yet included her Native consciousness within it and became a bridge for both. Being around LaDonna meant sensing a much longer span of history; also linking rather than dividing humans and nature; also valuing such timeless qualities as spirituality and humor. That last seemed so common to LaDonna and others in Indian Country that I wondered where the stoic and expressionless cigar store Indian had come from. In our many endless meetings with other commissioners, she, like so many of the Native people I’d met over the years, had a rare ability to find irony and humor in the midst of seriousness—and vice versa.

  I understood that LaDonna’s presence among the thirty-five International Women’s Year commissioners would send a signal to Native American women around the country who otherwise might not feel invited to state conferences. What I didn’t understand was how rare this was. At less than 1 percent of the population—at least, by the notorious undercount of the U.S. Census9—the more than five hundred tribes and nations made up the smallest, poorest, and least formally educated group in the United States. Nations were very diverse, varying in size from the vast Navajo Nation that extended into several states to reservations of less than twenty acres. But across that diversity, they shared such common struggles as dealing with a federal government that had yet to honor one treaty in its entirety, gaining control of the schooling and treatment of their own children, protecting their land from exploitation for oil, uranium, and other resources on it—and much more. For instance, women on reservations suffered the highest rate of sexual assault in the country, yet the non-Native men who were the majority of their assaulters were not subject to tribal police or jurisdiction, and were mostly ignored by the larger legal system.
r />   From quiet, understated, and sometimes hesitant Native women who came to meetings and stayed to talk, I learned about the generations of Indian families who had been forced by law to send their children to Christian boarding schools often funded by tax dollars; never mind the separation of church and state. The nineteenth-century founder of those schools coined the motto “Kill the Indian, save the man.” They deprived children of their families, names, language, culture, and even their long hair. Then they were taught a history that measured progress by their defeat. Often, these children were subjected to forced labor, malnutrition, and physical and sexual abuse. Later, after several schools were closed down, the land around them yielded graves of starved and abused children. Saddest of all, two centuries of child abuse in Indian boarding schools had sometimes normalized punitive child rearing and sexualized violence within Indian families. Childhood patterns are repeated because they are what we know. Even when the schools were humane, teaching Native languages and practicing Native religion was illegal, something that continued until the 1970s.

  Listening to these stories reminded me of the words of the great Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah: “For seasons and seasons and seasons, all our movement has been going against our self, a journey into our killer’s desire.”10

  In Indian Country, there is a belief that one act of violence takes four generations to heal. Because many centuries of such acts have yet to be known or taken seriously by most Americans, much less healed, this nation may keep repeating its violent childhood—until we find the wound and heal it.