Rushdoony's Book, The American Indian

Gary North - November 29, 2013

My father-in-law, R. J. Rushdoony, wrote a great deal when he was alive. But it turns out that there was a lot that he had written which was not published during his lifetime. He died in 2001.

His son now runs the Chalcedon foundation. The primary work of the foundation today is to reprint the materials that were published during Rushdoony's lifetime, and to put out as books the materials which had sat in manuscript form for decades.

The latest publication is a remarkable book: The American Indian: A Standing Indictment Against Christianity and Statism in America. It is about 130 pages long. It's like nothing I have ever read before, and nothing like you have ever read before.

From 1944 until 1953, he was a missionary in Nevada. He was on the Western Shoshone Reservation. He ministered to two tribes, the Shoshones and the Piutes. He learned more about the Indians than most white men ever suspect. While his observations were based primarily on the practices of two tribes, much of what he said was applicable to the Indians of North America. The book has this thesis: the reservation system is suspiciously close to the American welfare state.

The book offers a series of stories. He draws conclusions from the stories.

This experience on the reservation made him a conservative. He had been something of a leftist in his years at the University of California at Berkeley, or so his younger brother told me. They used to argue a lot over politics.

Here is a fact that has been noted in the past. It was impossible to enslave most North American Indians. The Spaniards tried it, and they failed. Virginians tried it, and they failed. The Indian either tried to escape or he died. He would not serve another man. You could kill him. You could wear him out to the point of death. Or you could find, one morning, that he was gone. But you could not keep him as a slave.

Rushdoony found that the older Indians he dealt with were highly unsentimental. They were not interested in restoring the old Indian ways. If there is some aspect of Indian life they liked, they tried to keep it, but they were not committed to it in some emotional way. They were highly practical. You might even say they were pragmatic. He gave this example. One of his church officers was a Piute. As a boy, he enjoyed hunting. He used a bow and arrow. After World War II, he became a commissioner to the Presbyterian General Assembly, held in the East Coast. He chose to fly rather than ride a train. He regarded airplanes as one of the triumphs of the white man. He was still an Indian, but he did not want to take the train. Surely, he didn't ride bareback to the meeting.

Another example I really enjoyed. Some older Indians were standing in front of the store on the reservation. Some Indian approached him who had been indoctrinated into what was called the new Indianism, which later morphed into the Indian rights movement. The man began to talk of the injustices of the white man and the land stolen from the Indians. The older men started laughing at him.

I asked one of them what he had said in his Shoshone language, and he answered, "I told him that I grew up with his grandfather. I remember that man shivering in his moccasins and breechcloth on a cold day because he was a poor hunter. 'You have two pairs of pants on to keep warm,' I said, 'and the white man's shoes and the white man's automobile to drive. If you are fool enough to want what your grandfather had, don't count me in. I'm an Indian, not a jackass.'

The older Indians were hard-headed and unsentimental. That was when one old man, laughing, told me the meaning of the conflict between the whites in the Indians: "We wanted everything the white man had, but we didn't want him. The white man wanted what we had, but he didn't want us. We lost."

The white man, by now, had become a sentimentalist, and so too had the younger Indians, but the older Indians I knew were all realists; and they had also a sense of humor. (p. 31)

He said that the turning point was 1869. Why 1869? That was the year the transcontinental railroad was completed in Utah. From that point on, the iron horse was unstoppable. The Indians knew that they could stop some of the wagon trains. They could inflict a lot of damage. They had at least a fighting chance of survival. But when the railroad came, they knew it was over. There was the one attempt at Custer's last stand to inflict defeat, but after that, not much. The Nez Pierce Indians under chief Joseph did give the Army a run for its money, but he was trying to get out of the country. He was a great military commander, but he couldn't quite make it to Canada.

Here's one of the most insightful things I found in the book. In Christmas of 1945, he was talking with one of the younger Indians. He liked this man. This Indian was noted for his fighting ability, including knife fights. He was not to be taken lightly. He enjoyed telling Rushdoony the stories of the fights he had gotten into.

As the evening progressed, he grew somewhat serious. As we looked out of the window and saw the kerosene lamps being let in one cabin after another across the valley, he pointed to them and said, "Look at those people of mine. They're no good. They're like me, just no account. All they're fit for is a reservation or someone puts a fence around them and takes care of them. That's it. They're not fit for anything else."

But, he went on, "I've been around the country two or three times now in the last few years, and I've learned something: the white man isn't much better. He has reservation fever now. He wants someone to put a fence around the whole North American continent and take care of him. He wants the government to give him a handout and to look after him just like Uncle Sam looks after us. And he's going to get it." (P. 23)

Reservation fever. That pretty much says it. America still suffers from it.

This insight was also something I had never read before. When he first came to the reservation, he got together with a number of the Indians on the reservation. He began to ask them about life on the reservation.

I asked about the religious character of the Indians on the reservation, about 900 people. A few, they said, adhere to the old belief in the wolf spirit, and most have some of the old superstitions and practices; but the essential faith of all, save themselves and the other Christians, was in the whiskey religion. I laughed when they said that. They laughed, too; but then they told me earnestly that it was also very true and why it was true. A man's religion is what he relies on in trouble, and also in a time of happiness, for healing and relief. Religion is what a man cannot live without. That is what whiskey is to most Indians -- and, they added, to some white men also. (p. 46)

He reports that the peyote cult is of quite recent origin. The drug is actually worshipped. It is not simply a technique to gain mental escape. It is considered comparable to a god. The cult had considerable opposition from members of the tribe. They understood how destructive it was. It was destructive morally, but was also destructive physically. It affected the intestinal tract, and a lot of Indians died from it.

He also told about John Collier. Collier was an important bureaucrat during Roosevelt's New Deal. In the 1920s, he had visited the Hopi and Zuni tribes, which were communistic. It is not the usual pattern among Indian tribes. But he was convinced this was the wave of the future for American Indians. So, he and the Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, attempted to impose it on all the Indians under their jurisdiction.

The Indians protested but to no avail. It usually resulted in the favoring of incompetents throughout the United States. The result of this policy was to increase the debauchery of the Indian character. It led to the rise of such movements as the Pan-American Indian Group, a communist front. It furthered the peyote movement because John Collier strongly favored it. It led to nothing but tragedy. (p. 29)

It is interesting how much Indian tribal cultures differed from one another. On the reservation, there were two completely different systems of civil government. The Piutes had a system that was centralized. When Piute leaders made a decision, the rest of the tribe followed suit. In contrast, the Shoshones required a complete majority. One person could stop any program simply by refusing to go along.

My wife was born off the reservation. The physician on the reservation was an alcoholic, and Rushdoony did not want his daughter to be delivered by this man. Rushdoony did not have a lot of use for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

He made another point, rarely mentioned. A lot of Americans can trace part of their biological heritage back to one or another American Indian tribe. A lot of American Indians moved off the reservations and into cities. They were assimilated into the cities. They became citizens, and no longer were connected to tribal life on the reservations. They assimilated very well. It is hard to prove this, precisely because they did assimilate well.

Here is one of his major complaints. "The romantics want the Indians to retire from history and return to a mythical past. The American Indians are people with great potential, but the romantics are trying to turn them into a museum piece." (p. 82)

The book reprints an article that he wrote around 1953. No one knows what journal it was published in. Because the Presbyterian Church's mission organization did not hold to the position he held, he wrote it under a pseudonym. The title of the article is "The Welfare State on the Reservation." It's worth buying the book just to get this one chapter.

You can buy it here. It is also available as a Kindle ebook.