Normally he wouldn’t have attached much importance to this, but now, with the peyote opening up his mind and with his attention having nowhere else to go, he bored in on it with intensity.
This directness and simplicity was in the way they spoke, too. They spoke the way they moved, without any ceremony. It seemed to always come from deep within them. They just said what they wanted to say. Then they stopped. It wasn’t just the way they pronounced the words. It was their attitude — plain-spoken, he thought…
Plains spoken. They were speaking in the language of the Plains. This was the pure Plains American dialect he was listening to. It wasn’t just Indian. It was white too. It was a kind of Midwestern and Western accent you hear in Woody Guthrie songs and cowboy movies. When Henry Fonda appears in The Grapes of Wrath or Gary Cooper or John Wayne or Gene Autry or Roy Rogers or William S. Boyd appear in any of a hundred different Westerns this is how they talk, not like some fancy college professor, but Plains spoken; laconic, understated, very little tonal change, no change of expression. Yet there was a warmth beneath the surface that you couldn’t point to the source of.
Films have made the whole world know the dialect so well it’s almost a cliché, but the way these Indians were speaking it wasn’t any cliché. They were speaking the American Western dialect just as authentically as any cowboy he had ever heard. More authentically. It wasn’t something they were putting on. It was them.
The web expanded when Phædrus began to consider the fact that English wasn’t even the native language of these people. They didn’t speak English in their homes. How was it that these linguistic foreigners spoke the Plains dialect of American English not only as well as their white neighbors but actually better? How could they possibly imitate it so perfectly when it was obvious from their lack of ceremony that they weren’t trying to imitate anything at all?
The web grew wider and wider. They were not imitating. If there’s one thing these people didn’t do it was imitate. Everything was coming straight from the heart. That seemed to be the whole idea — to get things down to a point where everything’s coming straight on, direct, no imitation. But if they weren’t imitating, why did they talk this way? Why were they imitating?
Then the huge peyote illumination came:
They’re the originators!
It expanded until he felt as though he had walked through the screen of a movie and for the first time watched the people who were projecting it from the other side.
Most of the rest of the whole tray of slips, many more than a thousand of them before him here, was a direct growth from this one original insight.
Tucked in among them was a copy of a speech made at the Medicine Lodge council of 1867 by Ten Bears, a Comanche chief. Phædrus had copied it from a book on Indian oratory to use as an example of Plains speech by someone who could not possibly have learned it from the whites. Now he read it again.
Ten Bears spoke to the assembled tribes and specifically to the representatives of Washington, saying:
There are things which you have said to me which I do not like. They were not sweet like sugar, but bitter like gourds. You said that you wanted to put us upon a reservation, to build us houses and to make us Medicine lodges. I do not want them.
I was born on the prairie, where the wind blew free, and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures, and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there, and not within walls. I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have hunted and lived over in that country. I lived like my fathers before me, and like them I lived happily.
When I was at Washington, the Great Father told me that all the Comanche land was ours, and that no one should hinder us in living upon it. So why do you ask us to leave the rivers, and the sun, and the wind, and live in houses? Do not ask us to give up the buffalo for the sheep. The young men have heard talk of this and it has made them sad and angry. Do not speak of it any more. I love to carry out the talk I get from the Great Father. When I get goods and presents, I and my people feel glad since it shows that he holds us in his eye. If the Texans had kept out of my country, there might have been peace.
But that which you now say we must live on is too small.
The Texans have taken away the places where the grass grew the thickest and the timber was the best. Had we kept that, we might have done this thing you ask. But it is too late. The white man has the country which we loved and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die. Any good thing you say to me shall not be forgotten. I shall carry it as near to my heart as my children and it shall be as often on my tongue as the name of the Great Spirit. I want no blood upon my land to stain the grass. I want it all clear and pure, and I wish it so, that all who go through among my people may find peace when they come in, and leave it when they go out.
As Phædrus read it again this time he saw that it wasn’t quite as close to cowboy speech as he’d remembered — it was a damn sight better than cowboy speech — but it was still closer to the white Plains dialect than is the language of the European. Here were the straight, head-on, declarative sentences without stylistic ornamentation of any kind, but with a poetic force that must have put the sophisticated bureaucratic speech of Ten Bears' antagonists to shame. This was no imitation of the involuted Victorian elocution of 1867!
From that original perception of the Indians as the originators of the American style of speech had come an expansion: the Indians were the originators of the American style of life. The American personality is a mixture of European and Indian values. When you see this you begin to see a lot of things that have never been explained before.
Phædrus' problem now was to organize all this into a persuasive book. It was so radically different from the usual explanations of America, people would never believe it. They’d think he was just babbling. If he just talked in generalities he knew he would lose it. People would just say, Oh yes, well, that’s just another one of those interesting ideas people are always coming up with, or You can’t generalize about Indians because they’re all different, or some other cliché like that and walk away from it.
He’d thought for a while he might come at it obliquely, starting with something very concrete and specific such as a cowboy film that people already know about, for example, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
There is an opening scene in that film where everything is shown in brown monochrome probably to give a historic, legendary feeling to it. The Sundance Kid is playing poker, and the scene is slowed a little to give it a dramatic tension. The Kid’s face is all you see. Only a fragment of one of the other players is sometimes seen, and an occasional wisp of smoke passing before the Sundance Kid’s countenance. The Kid is without expression but is alert and self-controlled.
The voice of an unseen gambler says, Well, it looks like you cleaned everybody out, fella. You haven’t lost a hand since you got the deal.
There is no change in the Kid’s expression.
What’s the secret of your success? the gambler’s voice continues. It is threatening. Ominous.
Sundance looks down for a while as if thinking about it, then looks up unemotionally. Prayer, he says.
He doesn’t mean it but he doesn’t say it sarcastically either. It’s a statement poised on a knife edge of ambiguity.