"The Secret Victory"
Richard Bernstein, Dictatorship of Virtue, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1994, pp. 223-227
If the space invader has become the hero and the earthling the
villain, similar inversions have taken place in at least one other
cinematic prototype--the cowboy-and-Indian adventure, the classic in
this case being Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves of 1990. Never mind
that Costner uses a historical event that never happened (the defection
of a Civil War cavalry officer to the Indians) and transforms the
warlike, scalp-taking, torturing, predatory, patriarchal,
male-chauvinistic Sioux Indians into a group that might have founded the
Ethical Culture Society. Dances With Wolves replaces one myth, that of
the brave settler and the savage Indian, with another--the morally
advanced friend-of-the-earth Indian ("Never have I seen a people more
devoted to family," the cavalry defector says with reverence) and the
malodorous, foulmouthed, bellicose white man.
The desire to put the Indian on a pedestal of superior moral
awareness defeats even simple truth. In 1991 two American Indians were
the subjects of best-selling books. They became icons of the New
Consciousness, and they continued to be so even after it was discovered
in both cases that their most admirable qualities had been invented for
them by white men. One of them, Chief Seattle, became identified with a
statement reproduced on posters in practically every multicultural
school in America, the statement about "The earth is our mother" and "I
have seen a thousand rotting buffalos on the prairie, left by the white
man who shot them from a passing train." These quotes reappear every
year on Earth Day and form the centerpiece of Brother Eagle, Sister Sky:
A Message from Chief Seattle, which sold 280,000 copies in its first six
months in print. The problem is that Chief Seattle's ecological views
were invented by a screenwriter named Ted Perry for a 1972 film about
environmentalism. Very little is actually known about Chief Seattle
himself because he left scant written record of himself, but it is known
that he spent his entire life in the Pacific Northwest and never saw
buffalo or the prairie.
The Education of Little Tree and the cult that grew up around
him brings into even sharper relief our collective search for new heroes
of virtue. Little Tree, which was on top of the New York Times paperback
best-seller list for thirty weeks in 1991, won the Abby Award from the
American Booksellers Association, and drew twenty-seven film offers, is
supposedly about Native American Forrest Carter's heartwarming Cherokee
upbringing, in which white people are depicted as fools and ignoramuses.
The evidence is that, in fact, the book was written in the late 1970s as
a kind of gag by a certain Asa Carter, a former speechwriter for
Alabama's governor George Wallace, a member of the anti-integrationist
White Citizens' Council and a founder in 1957 of the Ku Klux Klan of the
Confederacy. Even after it was revealed that Carter was no Cherokee but
actually a white supremacist, the book remained a Times bestseller. A
new printing of one hundred thousand copies was ordered by the publisher.
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