The experience of indigenous America, one of the most protracted genocidal policies in the Western world, might be of little significance to us now if it could be written off as an ‘unfortunate’ episode in the annals of a less enlightened past. However, this is not the case. As a body of heterogeneous peoples, Native America continues to be subjected to the depredations of imperialist policies and, as, such, is a living recrimination against the duplicitous rhetoric of liberal democracy. As a body of beliefs, it testifies to the spiritual failure of the Judeo-Christian tradition as it became compromised by the capitalist enterprise. And as a narrated body, it has much to tell us about the elaboration of fictions by which dominant culture satisfies its demand for otherness.

Modern history, as a narrative constructed from the perspective of a dominant culture – indeed, as the language that justifies its dominance – effectively begins with the first contact between Europe and indigenous America. Understanding the nature of this history is crucial to understanding the untenable position in which Native America is situated, and the extent to which we are implicated in the power relations that inscribe it. But at the same time, it has to be acknowledged that even a ‘revision’ of Anglo-American Indian history does not restore native subjectivities. To off simply an alternative interpretation of reported data is to do no more than substitute one representation by another without questioning the organising principles of historiography itself. A history from the viewpoint of native peoples is at best a romantic digression in a white master narrative in which they can have no identity as speaking subjects. Native commentators themselves are sceptical of history as a white invention which alienates the present from the past – a void filled by an act of writing , a reminiscence which is, in effect, a means of forgetting. And as Santayana once said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

This is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the mythologisation of Native American peoples. The sleight of tongue by which the reality of Native American civilisation was disavowed, by which judgements became institutionalised as statements of ‘fact’, circulates around the forces of mercantilism under the alibi of Christian nationalism. If this self-righteous rhetoric provided moral justification for the dispossession of native lands and the slaughter of its people, it also laid the ground for a modern all-too-familiar mindset, deeply alien to indigenous traditions, in which an individual could deny responsibility for the consequences of his own actions. By the 1890s, removed to reservations, and reduced from a pre-contact population of many millions to a few hundred thousand, the ‘Indian’ could be safely presumed to have ‘vanished’, and thereafter resurrected as an exotic sign stripped of the more threatening aspects of cultural difference. In this popular historiography the ‘Indian’ body, dismembered and displace, is not a historical subject but a mythic and fetishized object.

The ambivalent fear of loss of identity combined with a fear of difference endemic to the American political psyche takes shape in its confrontation with native otherness as a subversive influence. There is a unique paradox in Anglo-American Indian relations for which the reservation is its literal expression. Native America is the Outside – that which is, as yet, unthought but nevertheless wholly internalised: an inside formed by the infolding of the outside.

The crisis of late capitalism includes more than our alienation from any meaningful relation to the past outside the empty sign of consumerism. Capitalism, in the name of scientific progress, has lead us through a potentially catastrophic detour from which we are only now beginning to comprehend what Native American ‘primitives’ already knew about the spatiotemporal dynamics of the natural world. Such dynamics, predicated on the interconnectedness of all things, do not recognise the kinds of boundaries that place hierarchical values on human existence, or the political and historical cartography that Western culture constructed to secure its dominance of the world. Even so, recognising the failure of capitalism or, belatedly, the validity of Native American belief structures does not reinstate the legitimacy of indigenous peoples. Current white liberal enthusiasm for what it calls ‘Indian spirituality’ further obfuscates the nature of native cultures; to speak of ‘mysticism’ is to conceal a political reality, which, in effect, is yet another form of disempowerment. Language continues to map a landscape of fictive identities from the fragments of history in the service of a patriarchy which must produce otherness as a denial of what it does not confront in itself.

The question remains what strategies for self-empowerment are available to a heterogeneity of peoples implicated in a language that denies their experience of reality, and that precludes them from any effective political discourse. If civil rights activism seemed, during the early ‘70s, to be a viable strategy, its violent suppression made clear that the U.S. remained firmly entrenched in its paternalistic myths, intolerant of the idea of an autonomous Native American speaking subject. If cultural intervention now seems to be a potential course of action, it is nevertheless faced with the dilemma of what positions can be taken up in relation to the West’s colonisation of the marginal. Despite its post-modern rhetoric of cultural pluralism, the art establishment remains in practice one of the last bastions of racial and sexual imperialism, slow to relinquish its belief in a pure aesthetics divorces from sociopolitical realities. The criteria of judgement, the pursuit of the novel and of the sovereign subject, and other abstractions by which conservative thought defines art, are largely irrelevant to a traditional native viewpoint in which culture means shared lived experience. The enduring strength of Native American cultures lies in their capacity to remember both the past and the future as the conditions of the present.

‘For the Indian there is something like an extended present. Time as motion is an illusion; indeed, time itself is an illusion. In the deepest sense, according to the native perception, there is only the dimension of timelessness, and in that dimension all things happen.’ 2