POSTINDIAN WARRIORS fee Thomas Jefferson envisioned a water course to the west- ern coast of the nation a decade before he proposed the expedition that would become the most notable literature of tribal survivance. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were instructed that the ob- jective of their mission was to explore the land west of the Missouri River that “may offer the most direct & practicable water communi- cation across this continent, for the purposes of commerce.” Lewis and Clark reported in their journal that they wanted to be seen by tribal people on their expedition. They were diplomatic at a distance, to be sure, and they were certain that their mission would have been threatened not by the presence of the other, but by the absence of the tribes. Luther Standing Bear, three generations later, was on an expedition in another direction and dimension; he was one of the first tribal stu- dents to graduate from an eastern government school. He was curious and courageous in the presence of the other, and he was threatened by the absence of reverence, honor, and natural reason. Standing Bear, Lewis, Clark, and others, created the simulations that would honor their survivance in literature. Simulations have never been uncommon in literature, as the simulations of the other are instances of the absence of the real, but these expeditions in at least2 MANIFEST MANNERS two dimensions were more than the mere simulations of savagism and civilization. The Lewis and Clark expedition was one of the first transconti- nental encounters with diverse tribal cultures; the encounters were inevitable in the new nation, but the successive encroachments on the natural presence of the tribes were vicious and barbarous. The cruelties of national and colonial authorities were widespread; the grievous outcome of avarice, perverse determinism, and the destinies that would become manifest manners in the literature of dominance. Lewis wrote in his journal on 18 July 1805, “as we were anxious now to meet with the Sosonees or snake Indians as soon as possible in order to obtain information relative to the geography to the coun- try....” Four days later he wrote that Sacajawea, the “Indian woman recognizes the country and assures us that this is the river on which her relations live, and that the three forks are at no great distance.” Lewis wrote on 27 July 1805, “we begin to feel considerable anxiety with rispect to the Snake Indians. if we do not find them or some other nation who have horses I fear the successfull issue of our voy- age will be very doubtfull or at all events much more difficult in it’s accomplishment.” Then, about two weeks later, he wrote, “I was overjoyed at the sight of this stranger and had no doubts of obtaining a friendly intro- duction to his nation provided I could get near enough to him to convince him of our being whitemen.” The selections are from The Journals of Lewis and Clark, edited by Bernard DeVoto. “Indeed, the greatest danger the Indians could pose for Lewis and Clark arose from their absence rather than their presence,” wrote Larzer Ziff in Writing in the New Nation. “What was later to be a cliché in Western adventure fiction, the white man’s seeing Indians and taking care to remain unseen by them, was reversed as they strained to see the Indians who they knew were seeing them in order to enter into dealings with them.” Postindian Warriors 3 Lieutenant William Reynolds, in contrast to the earlier expedition of Lewis and Clark, remained unseen on the deck of the Flying Fish, a schooner in the first discovery expedition of the United States Navy. “We never saw any one for weeks, save a few Indians now and then who brought us Salmon and Deer and who were welcome enough, but as to Society, after a hard day’s labour, we might as well have been in the great desert. We did long with all our hearts to see the face of some human creature,” he wrote to his sister on 7 November 1841, after a survey of the Columbia River. “Once in a great while we did manage to run up to Astoria and have a chat with the folks there, and sometimes we saw the young wives of the missionaries, pretty, rosy checked women, the very sight of whom gave us the heart ache. | am disgusted with all naked Indians and primitive people whatever, and shall be too happy ... when I can associate again with the more intelligent and attractive portion of the human family, who carry ideas in their heads, wear clothes on their bodies and are fair to look upon.” His aversion to the tribes would represent the racialism of the nation; in turn, that aversion to the presence of the tribes would become the cause of manifest manners and the literature of dominance. Lewis and Clark traversed the same river thirty-six years carlier and were content to be seen by the tribes. Clark wrote in his journal on 24 October 1805 that the “nativs of ths village re{ceJived me verry kindly, one of whome envited me into his house, which I found to be large and comodious, and the first wooden houses in which Indians have lived Since we left those in the vicinity of the Illinois. . . . Peter Crusat played on the violin and the men danced which delighted the nativs, who Shew every civility towards us. we Smoked with those people untill late at night, when every one retired to rest.” Standing Bear seemed to envision the onset of the postindian war- riors of simulations; that sensation of a new tribal presence in the very ruins of the representations of invented Indians. “I always wanted to4 MANIFEST MANNERS please my father in every way possible,” wrote Standing Bear in My People the Sioux. “All his instructions to me had been along this line: “Son, be brave and get killed.’ This expression had been moulded into my brain to such an extent that I knew nothing else. “My father had made a mistake. He should have told me, upon leaving home, to go and learn all I could of the white man’s ways, and be like them.” Luther had “come away from home with the intention of never returning alive unless he had done something brave. “Now, after having had my hair cut, a new thought came into my head. I felt that I was no more Indian, but would be an imitation of a white man. And we are still imitations of white men, and the white men are imitations of the Americans.” Standing Bear was in the first class to attend the federal school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Later, he taught school on the reservation, witnessed the horror of the massacre at Wounded Knee, and toured with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in Europe. This postindian war- rior was active in tribal rights movements, an actor in several motion pictures, and he wrote several books about his experiences. The postindian warriors encounter their enemies with the same courage in literature as their ancestors once evinced on horses, and they create their stories with a new sense of survivance. The warriors bear the simulations of their time and counter the manifest manners of domination. Manifest Destiny would cause the death of millions of tribal people from massacres, diseases, and the loneliness of reservations. Entire cultures have been terminated in the course of nationalism. These histories are now the simulations of dominance, and the causes of the conditions that have become manifest manners in literature. The postindian simulations are the core of survivance, the new stories of tribal courage. The simulations of manifest manners are the continu- ance of the surveillance and domination of the tribes in literature. Simulations are the absence of the tribal real; the postindian con- versions are in the new stories of survivance over dominance. The Postindian Warriors 5 natural reason of the tribes anteceded by thousands of generations the invention of the Indian. The postindian ousts the inventions with humor, new stories, and the simulations of survivance. Standing Bear, for instance, had graduated from the government school and he was working at John Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia when he read in the newspaper that Sitting Bull, the Lakota healer, was scheduled to lecture in the city. “The paper stated that he was the Indian who killed General Custer! The chief and his people had been held prisoners of war, and now here they were to appear” ina theater. “On the stage sat four Indian men, one of whom was Sitting Bull. There were two women and two children with them. A white man came on the stage and introduced Sitting Bull as the man who had killed General Custer,” which was not true. Sitting Bull “addressed the audience in the Sioux tongue” and then the white man, the interpreter, misconstrued his speech in translation. “My friends, white people, we Indians are on our way to Washington to see the Grandfather, or President of the United States,” and more was translated as the story of the massacre of General Custer at the Little Big Horn, “He told so many lies I had to smile.” Standing Bear visited Sitting Bull at the hotel. “He wanted his chil- dren educated in the white man’s way, because there was nothing left for the Indian.” The interpreter was in the room, so “I did not get a chance to tell Sitting Bull how the white man had lied about him on the stage. And that was the last time I ever saw Sitting Bull alive.” The postindian warriors hover at last over the ruins of tribal rep- resentations and surmount the scriptures of manifest manners with new stories; these warriors counter the surveillance and literature of dominance with their own simulations of survivance. The postindian arises from the earlier inventions of the tribes only to contravene the absence of the real with theatrical performances; the theater of tribal consciousness is the recreation of the real, not the absence of the real in the simulations of dominance. ; Manifest manners are the simulations of dominance; the notions