Native American Anarchists (1965)

Native American Anarchists (1965)
Book Reviews by D’Arcy McNickle

THE LOST UNIVERSE. By Gene Weltfish. Basic Books. 506 pp.
THE LONG DEATH: The Last Days of the Plains Indians. By Ralph K.
Andrist, The Macmillian Co. 371 pp.

As to the question of posting sentinels to guard against surprise attacks, Dr. Weltfish suggestively writes that they were a well-disciplined people under many trying circumstances. And yet they had none of the power mechanisms that we consider essential to a well-ordered life. No orders were ever issued, No assignments for work were ever made. . . . The only instigator of action was the consenting person. Even in so critical an area of public safety as the posting of camp guards, the will of the individual governed. According to Dr. Weltfish, a young man would say, I think I’ll go up to the sentry post early tomorrow morning. A friend would respond, I think I’ll do that too. In due course as many men as were needed would have volunteered. It is conceivable, under such a system of individual consent, that there would be temporary lapses, moments when the guard was down. Any democratic society based on the consent of the governed is vulnerable to sneak attack from a militant neighbor.

The Pawnee system of individual consent brings us to one of the central themes of the book, for Dr. Weltfish is manifestly interested in the meaning of democracy, as practiced by this tribe, which lived in the Missouri River basin for more than 600 years-a longer time perspective than archaeologists of the area formerly reckoned with. She asked repeatedly how the people managed to live together without centralized authority and could find no instance in which a political leader, a priest, or even a senior member of a household presumed, to give orders at large or to another individual. Even formal discussion for the purpose of arriving at a consensus was not a general procedure. When asked how plans were worked out, who discussed them, the informant would answer, They didn’t discuss it at all. They don’t talk about it. It goes along just as it happens to work out.

Social forms, she decided, were carried within the consciousness of the people, not by others who were in a position to make demands. For such a system to operate, as this one did for a longer period than most modern democracies have existed: participation had to be universal, the autonomy of the individual had to ,be inviolable, and the individual had to be internally disciplined and responsible, not for himself alone, but for the entire group within which he functioned.

What brought down the Pawnees was not a failure in the society but diseases against which they had no immunity; competition with the Sioux, intensified by a shrinking economic base; and finally by the total destruction of that base, the buffalo herds.
And behind all of this was the incoming white man, who practiced a democracy in which every man wants to be king.

The development of the individual within his society is yet another part of the question raised by Pawnee democracy, which Dr. Weltfish explores. One thing is clear, she writes, no one is caught within the social order . . . each person stands as his own person. The child was born into a community, but was never swallowed up by it. From the beginning he was made to feel that his identity was with the infinite cosmos, as the roundhouse within which he lived served as a central observation post from which the movements of the planets and the stars were calculated for ceremonial purposes.

Affection came from many sources, in varying degrees of kinship intimacy, but affection never became a smothering overprotection. The special concern of his mother did not mean that he was so closely embedded with her emotionally that he was not able to move about. Move about he did, to the homes of his uncles, his halfbrothers, his grandparents, always certain of food and warmth, and there was no reason why he should hesitate to set out alone and explore the wide world, even though years should pass before he returned. The world, indeed, was his home. Dr. Weltfish contends that it is not easy for us to perceive the wide gap in kind between Pawnee society and our own, and yet in the face of all the terrible events of the past and the pressure to destroy his personality, surely it must mean something that the American Indian has maintained his identity among us.

If the meaning of Pawnee identity eludes us at this moment in time, the occasion may yet arise when we find ourselves retracing the social development of these once despised denizens of the Plains for the threads of continuity which successfully carried them beyond disaster.

One such thread certainly was the individual-not the social form or the institution, which may stifle individual growth and in any case is a temporal creation of fallible men. The Pawnees were fortunate in that they were born into a fluid society. The individual personality was not trimmed down to fit the kin structure, but the structure was used to realize the individual personality. The Pawnee social structure was written into no statute books, nor did it have the status of doctrine, and there was no chain of command to enforce it.

With freedom to move and to grow, the individual carried out his commitment to the group, not because of coercive sanctions or internalized guilt, but because in his own searching for goals he was realizing the goals ‘of the group. His aspiration [was] not to surpass some one else, but to go beyond his own past achievements. And therefore, his aspirations, even his personal name, ,were secrets which he shared discreetly, if ever. To speak publicly of such matters was to invite competition and conflict.

In such a society, the individual was the keystone. This, the Pawnee, as well as other Indians, understood. Which perhaps is the ultimate explanation of why the Indian people have kept their identity through all adversity. After all forms had crumbled, the man stood revealed.

On that final point, having reminded us that the problems of our bomb-ridden, automated age call for drastic revisions in our age-old motivations, Dr. Weltfish concludes that it is within the individual that the universe will be regained. This, also, the Pawnees knew.

Ed. Note: D’Arcy McNickle, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of Montana, is director of American Indian Development

From The Goals of the Group a review in The Nation by D’Arcy McNickle 9/25/65

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