Settler Adoption Fantasies

Johnny Depp, Dancing with Wolves, and white people depicting themselves as "custodians" of "dying" Indigenous culture. Part 2 of Settler Moves to Innocence.

Today, we’re going to talk about some white folks claiming Native American culture, and/or claiming to be the custodians of Native American culture because, they maintain, it would die without their intervention, implying that Native Americans are too incompetent and too few to keep Indigenous culture alive.

Not only is this patronizing and appropriative, but it dismisses the resilience and autonomy of Indigenous people and serves as a tool for us white folks to sidestep our complicity in the ongoing realities of settler colonialism.

Here's the thing about settler colonialism: it is a system from which we - people who are not Indigenous - continue to derive unearned benefits.

Unearned benefits.

Colonialism vs Settler Colonialism

This is probably a good moment to step back and consider the difference between colonialism and settler colonialism. They are not the same.

In a broad sense, colonialism is the acquisition of full or partial control over another country combined with economic exploitation. In this form of colonialism, native people are used as labor, and settlers are generally few. Settler bosses plan to return to their home countries, and colonial rule is typically enforced through an administrative system that manages the colony on behalf of the colonizing nation. British colonialism in India is a classic example.

In Settler colonialism, on the other hand, settlers aim to make a new home on the land, a homeland, by permanently replacing the Indigenous populations. The settlers arrive with the intention of staying and creating societies that persist after the colonial administration has ended. Indigenous populations, cultures, and structures are eradicated. Examples of settler colonialism are the British colonization of North America, the European colonization of Australia, and the Zionist colonization of Palestine.

"Settler colonialism is a genocidal policy" writes historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

American mythology & settler moves to innocence

Many of us adhere to a number of US American myths, like meritocracy and Horatio Alger stories about bootstrapping our way to success. We don't like to believe the system is rigged in our favor and that we gain unfair advantage - that's like calling us cheaters - and we definitely don’t want to be associated with genocide.

So we come up with all sorts of stories that we use to distance ourselves from genocide and settler colonialism. We might say that we are Native Americans ourselves due to a real or imagined distant Native ancestor, or we might claim that we are immigrants, not settlers. Others might claim that we've moved beyond the days of colonialism by promoting multiculturalism and equality or highlight our efforts to recognize and honor Indigenous histories, cultures, and rights, or portray Indigenous people as a 'vanishing race', emphasizing narratives of inevitable decline to deflect attention from ongoing settler colonial processes... all of these known as "settler moves to innocence".

“You look so exotic!"

My wife is Mexican American.

"Where are you from?" she gets asked.

"I'm from Santa Maria," she replies. Santa Maria is a small town on the central coast of California.

"No, where are you really from?" says the asker, frustrated with her answer.

"I'm Mexican American"

"Ahhh. That's why you look so exotic!"

ex·ot·ic adjective: originating in or characteristic of a distant foreign country.

The question is being asked in California. Less than 200 years ago, California was part of Mexico. Before the colonization of Mexico by Spain, it was (and continues to be) Indigenous land. My wife is perceived as looking exotic because her appearance does not conform to the stereotype of what an “American,” aka an Anglo settler, looks like. Instead, she is perceived as alien and as other, despite her Indigenous ancestry. 

Othering

Exoticism plays a big role in the process of othering. Othering is the process wherein a dominant group - in our case white folks - defines itself in opposition to those we deem different, a difference that is frequently racialized or gendered. In doing so, we categorize, marginalize, and subordinate the "others.” We define ourselves as "normal" and them as "abnormal" or different.

Edward Said, in his seminal work "Orientalism," discussed how we historically constructed "the Other" – exotic, backward, uncivilized – in order to assert our own identity as progressive, rational, and superior. This reinforces a narrative in which settlers are “normal”, “civilized” and the “rightful” occupants of the land we are stealing, and Indigenous people as “different”, “primitive” and “intruders” on the very land that, for tens of thousands of years, has been their home.

To become without becoming, and Dances with Wolves

"Dances with Wolves" is a film about Union soldier Lieutenant John Dunbar, who after being stationed at a remote outpost, befriends a group of Lakota Sioux Native Americans, immerses himself in their culture, and ultimately renounces his former identity to join them.

This renunciation implies that the white man can “become” an Indian at his convenience and also detach himself from this identity whenever it suits him. He has the privilege of moving in and out of this adopted culture at will, choosing the elements that appeal to him and discarding the rest, without truly experiencing the struggles or hardships of that culture.

The white man, played by Kevin Costner in the film, appropriates Sioux practices and knowledge, but the Sioux people themselves are merely a means to his personal growth. They are represented as the “noble, dying race,” which he, the white savior, comes to rescue. The Native people remain static, exotic objects for consumption while he is mobile and free to be anything. They are props in Costner’s right of passage; he must symbolically consume them in order to become them. This dynamic reinforces the white man's dominant position and allows us to romanticize our occupation of Indigenous lands by imagining ourselves as inheritors of Indigenous traditions as the natives “die out.”

It’s chilling stuff. In the words of Tuck and Yang, settler adoption fantasies “refer to those narratives in the settler colonial imagination in which the Native (understanding that he is becoming extinct) hands over his land, his claim to the land, his very Indian-ness to the settler for safe-keeping.”

It’s the fantasy in which we “benevolent” white folks imagine ourselves to be the stewards of Indigenous culture, a culture frozen in time and exoticized, a culture that hasn’t been erased by genocide but died because it was too pure and primitive to keep up with modern times. The remaining Native Americans become living museums.

Last of the Mohicans

James Fenimore Cooper's series Leatherstocking Tales are seminal works of American literature, contributing to the development of distinctively American literary themes, and the exploration of national identity. 

These books are instrumental in forging archetypes such as the vanishing Indian, the resourceful Frontiersman, and the degenerate Negro, thus laying the groundwork for an American national literature. Cooper, who grew up on Six Nations territory, penned narratives full of tragic Indians, resourceful settlers, and virginal white and Indigenous women in an equally virgin wilderness.

The fictional United States begins with these.

All five books star Natty Bumppo, a white man adopted by the fictional Mohican tribe, who epitomizes the settler adoption fantasy. In the last and most famous of these books, The Last of the Mohicans, our hero Bumppo becomes the adopted son of Chingachgook, chief of the fictional Mohican tribe who renames him Nathaniel Hawkeye, thus completing his Indigeneity. Before Chingachgook, who perhaps represents all Native Americans, suddenly dies (becomes extinct), he hands over his son Uncas (the last of the Mohicans) to Hawkeye, the Indigenized white man. When Uncas dies, Hawkeye becomes without becoming the Last of the Mohicans.

"The pale-faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the red-men has not yet come again."

Cooper's books take a romanticized fantasy of the founding and expansion of the US settler nation and distill it into the single narrative of one man: "Heroic settler Natty Bumppo transitions from British trapper to ‘native’ American, to prairie pioneer in the new Western frontier," write Tuck and Yang, pointing out that the books are written in reverse chronological order, and so "‘I am American’ becomes ‘I was frontiersman, was British, was Indian’".

Little Big Man and other examples

Actual ceremonial adoptions of white settlers into Indigenous families do in fact happen, but they are much less common in real life than in film, tv, literature, holidays, and history books, where the “fantasy that an individual settler can become innocent, indeed heroic and indigenized, against a backdrop of national guilt” (Tuck and Yang) is a super popular trope and motif.

“Little Big Man” is a revisionist western that follows the life of Jack Crabb, a white man played by Dustin Hoffman who is adopted by the Cheyenne tribe and navigates the conflicts between Native Americans and settlers, nominated for two Academy awards.

There’s also “A Man Called Horse” starring Richard Harris (nominated for one Academy Award), “The Descendants” starring George Clooney (nominated for five Academy Awards), “The Lone Ranger”, starring Johnny Depp as Tonto (two Academy Award nominations).

We’ll save Johnny Depp for another day… that guy is problematic enough to warrant his own entry.

Stay tuned for next week when we tackle Colonial equivocation (aka “everyone’s an immigrant”)!