West refuses to live in the past: W. Richard West wants the National Museum of the American Indian to be rich in history while celebrating the continuance of contemporary native communities

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 26, 2002 | by Stephen Goode

As for the two terms, Native American and American Indian, each has its own difficulties as far as I'm concerned.

I don't think, for example, that most people indigenous to this hemisphere regard "American Indian" as pejorative in the way that other names referring to ethnic or racial groups are regarded as insulting or degrading. What "American Indian" shows is that Christopher Columbus was woefully lost. "Native American," on the other hand, is confusing because it can be applied to everyone who was born here. That makes a lot of people native Americans in-one way or another.

Other than identifying tribal membership, the terms I find most apt are "native peoples" and "indigenous peoples." They encompass us from one end of the hemisphere to the other.

Q: Growing up in Oklahoma in the 1950s and 1960s, what was your attitude toward your Southern Cheyenne heritage? You say it was a time of growing awareness of that heritage and the importance of its survival?

A: It was. The heritage had been a long time in a period of distress. My father, who was born in 1912 and died in 1996 at the age of 83, had grown up during a time of explicit and grinding deculturalization in Indian country. Indeed, it was perhaps the worst period. It spans the time from the late 1880s and 1890s into the mid-1930s until the Indian Reorganization Act came along and some of the reforms under President [Franklin] Roosevelt. That was a terrible time for us.

Dad grew up in Oklahoma. He was born in Darlington, which doesn't even exist anymore. But that was the agency for the Southern Cheyenne and the Southern Arapaho, right there on the banks of the Canadian River. And like many in his time, at the age of 5 or 6, and sometimes even at the age of 4, he was shipped off to boarding school. He spent most of his life, probably until his 20s, in those schools.

Rarely did he get to see his parents. His mother died of Spanish Flu during the epidemic of 1918; his father relocated and remarried. His four brothers also were put into the boarding schools in Oklahoma and eventually several of them went to Haskell Institute, an intertribal federal boarding school at Lawrence, Kan.

Q: So they were separated from their language and culture?

A: Absolutely. And they were separated from each other lots of the time. It was difficult, but while dad came out of that background he fought tenaciously to hang on to his culture.

He and his four brothers are case studies of what happened to the personal identity of Indians as individuals during that time. Dad remained thoroughly Cheyenne. Because he was an artist, he was constantly thinking about what it was to be Cheyenne and expressing it visually in his painting--something he did from a very early age, even before he became a studio-trained artist.

His oldest brother, an uncle I loved dearly, never came back to the Cheyennes. He considered it too difficult to do so, too full of pain. Two of his brothers went away but came back and eventually became chiefs of the Cheyenne.