I gleaned the following, with a few minor changes for style only, from Robert Pirsig’s book Lila. It seems important to me at numerous levels.

What follows is a portion of a speech made by Ten Bears, a Comanche Chief, at the Medicine Lodge Council of 1867, to the assembled tribes and especially to the representatives of Washington, D.C.:

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 in 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 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.

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.

What is seen in the true American style of life is a cultural adaptation of the American Indian: “the famous old traits of the American Indian: silence, a modesty of manner, and a dangerous willingness to sudden, enormous violence.”

If you take a list of all the things European observers have stated to be the characteristics of white Americans, you’ll find that there is a correlation with the characteristics white American observers have customarily assigned to the Indians. And if, furthermore, you take another list of all the characteristics that Americans use to describe Europeans you’ll get a pretty good correlation with Indian opinions of white Americans.

Many Europeans think of white Americans as a sloppy, untidy people, but they’re not nearly as untidy as the Indians on the reservations. Europeans often think of white Americans as being too direct and plain-spoken, bad-mannered and sort of insolent the way they do things, but Indians are even more that way. In World War II Europeans noted that American troops drank too much, and when they got drunk they made a lot of trouble. The comparison with Indians is obvious. But on the other hand, European military commanders rated the stability of American troops under fire as high, and that is also an Indian characteristic.

Indians don’t talk to fill time. When they don’t have anything to say, they don’t say it. When they don’t say it, they leave the impression of being a little ominous. The well-mannered circumlocutions of aristocratic European speech are “forked-tongue” talk to the Indian and are infuriating. They violate his morality. He wants you to either speak from the heart of keep quiet.

To this day Americans are mistakenly characterized by Europeans as “like children,” naïve, immature, and tending toward violence because they don’t know how to control themselves. That mistake is also made about Indians. To this day [1991] white Americans are also mistakenly characterized by Indians as a bunch of snobs who think you are so stupid you can never see how phony they are. That mistake is also made about Europeans.

This anti-snobbery of all Americans, particularly Western Americans, is derived from this Indian attitude. The Cheyenne name for white man is wihio, meaning “spider.” Arapaho use niatha to mean the same thing. To the Indian, whites seemed like spiders when they talked. They sat there and smiled and said things they didn’t mean, and all the time their mind was spinning a web around the Indian. They got so lost in their own web-spinning thoughts they didn’t even see that the Indian was watching them too and could see what they were doing.

One often hears “frontier values” spoken of as though they came from the rocks, the rivers, or the trees of the frontier, but trees, rocks, and rivers do not by themselves confer social values. They’ve got trees, rocks, and rivers in Europe.

It was the people living among those trees, rocks, and rivers who are the source of the values of the frontier. The early frontiersmen such as the “Mountain Men” deliberately and enthusiastically imitated Indians. They were delighted to be told that they were indistinguishable from Indians. Settlers who came later copied the Mountain Men’s frontier style but didn’t see its source.

Freedom was the topic that drove home this whole understanding of Indians. Of all the topics his study of Indians covered, freedom was the most important. Of all the contributions America has made to the history of the world, the idea of freedom from a social hierarchy has been the greatest. It was fought for in the American Revolution and confirmed in the Civil War. To this day it’s still the most powerful, compelling ideal holding the whole nation together.

The idea that “all men are created equal” is a gift to the world from the American Indian. Europeans who settled here only transmitted it as a doctrine that they sometimes followed and sometimes did not. The real source was someone for whom social equality was no mere doctrine, who had equality built into his bones. To him it was inconceivable that the world could be any other way. For him there was no other way of life. That’s what Ten Bears was trying to tell us.

The struggle between European and Indian values is still the central internal conflict in America today. It’s a fault line, a discontinuity that runs through the center of the American cultural personality.


2 Cor 1:13