[Pen-l] John Gregory Bourke and the Apaches

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Last November, when I trashed "No Country For Old Men", a Coen 
brothers movie based on a Cormac McCarthy novel, I wrote the 
following about another McCarthy novel:

--->
If I had more time on my hands, I might take a look at McCarthy's 
novels to try to extract out the rotten core and examine it under a 
strong light, especially the 1985 "Blood Meridian" that is described 
on the official website of the Cormac McCarthy Society as a 
dismantling of "the politically correct myth of aboriginal 
victimization, so that victims and their antagonists become 
indistinguishable." The write-up continues:

	In one celebrated scene, a column of mercenaries the kid has joined 
encounters a Comanche war party herding stolen horses and cattle 
across the desert. The kid barely escapes as the Indians, still 
vividly dressed like eldritch clowns in the garments they have 
stripped from their last white victims, annihilate his companions.

Just what the world was waiting for, a Faulkneresque novel that 
depicts American Indians as wanton killers.
<---

I finally got around to reading "Blood Meridian" about a month ago, 
but before trashing it I am doing some background reading on the 
Apache, Comanche and Yuma Indians who all play a significant role in 
McCarthy's horrible novel. As I have mentioned previously on my blog, 
McCarthy has essentially a Hobbesian worldview. Everybody is rotten, 
both the white death squads that the McCarthy website refers to 
charitably as "mercenaries" and the Indians that they slaughter.

Reading "Blood Meridian" is an experience that is analogous to 
reading a novel focused on a band of Nazi stormtroopers assigned to 
quell the Warsaw uprising. The author does not hide his animosity 
toward the Nazis but also finds the Jewish rebels just as repugnant. 
One imagines that it is possible to write a novel about white 
Indian-killers and their victims being equally vicious in this 
country because?as Ward Churchill once pointed out?our Nazis (Kit 
Carson and company) won their war.

While I am sure that one can write a compelling novel with Nazi 
stormtroopers as the major characters, I certainly am not interested 
in reading it. Cormac McCarthy's characters are pretty 
one-dimensional, who function pretty much as killing machines without 
any inner doubts. His novel has bamboozled some left-leaning 
Literature professors into thinking that McCarthy has mounted some 
kind of Marxist critique of the Old West solely on the basis of the 
unflattering portrait of the white killers. I will have much more to 
say about this when I post my review of "Blood Meridian" but will say 
at this point that I would have written a much different novel that 
would be not only more Marxist but more interesting from a literary standpoint.

My major characters would have not been members of John Glanton's 
gang, but men like John Gregory Burke, whose relationship to the 
Apache Indians was far more complex. His psychological and political 
conflicts are the very stuff of great literature, as this passage 
from Richard J. Perry's "Apache Reservation: Indigenous Peoples and 
the American State" reveal:

One Man's View of the Apache: John Gregory Bourke

In the 1870s and 1880s, as the Apache found themselves increasingly 
enmeshed in the expanding American state, John Gregory Bourke 
participated in the process. His papers offer a vivid sense of the 
era. When he participated in Crook's winter campaign of 1871, 
apparently he fully accepted the rightness of the forces he 
represented. Bourke clearly was a man of his times. He had graduated 
from West Point and was conversant with the thrust of 
nineteenth-century American social thought. An aspect of this thought 
was the idea that progress was an inevitable law of nature, and that 
some human societies had progressed more than others. In the late 
1880s he wrote a scholarly treatise discussing Apache practices in 
terms of cultural evolutionary stages (1892). There was little 
question in Bourke's mind that the United States and western Europe 
represented the epitome of human progress up to that time.

From this perspective, populations like the Apache were 
different?not because they represented alternative, equivalent 
varieties of human experience, but because they had not progressed 
beyond the stages of "savagery" or "barbarism." In many ways, 
according to this view, the Apache were something like what Europeans 
had been in the past. Human progress for the good of all, even for 
the good of the Apache, required that higher levels of social and 
cultural development replace savagery. To young John Bourke and other 
Anglo-Americans of his time, there was no apparent reason to question 
the idea that the Apache were an anachronistic obstacle to progress 
whose time had almost ended. Their fierce resistance to a civilized 
population's invasion of their territory did little to dispel these 
assumptions.

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/john-gregory-burke-and-the-apaches/

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