Regimes of Happiness PDF

Chapter Fourteen INDIGENOUS AND WESTERN VIEWS OF HAPPINESS: AN ESSAY ON THE POLITICS OF CONTENTMENT Colin Samson Social tensions over access to what is considered a good and happy life are particularly acute in unequal societies. In her...

Chapter Fourteen INDIGENOUS AND WESTERN VIEWS OF HAPPINESS: AN ESSAY ON THE POLITICS OF CONTENTMENT Colin Samson Social tensions over access to what is considered a good and happy life are particularly acute in unequal societies. In her essay ‘Fences: A Brexit Diary’, Zadie Smith (2016) observes that this tension came into the open during the Brexit referendum. It was symbolized in London by the proliferation of fences and barriers around schools, places of worship and other buildings. These mirrored the social boundaries built around people of different regions, classes and ethnicities. In her perambulations around the city, Smith notes the gaping economic inequalities incarnated in the vintage cocktail menu at the Savoy Hotel where drinkers can sip the £5,000 cocktail called the Saverac. ‘There has been a kind of money madness in London’, Smith tells us, ‘but it’s hard to find any sign of a beautiful, harmonious or even happy life (what kind of happy person needs to be ordering a £5,000 cocktail?)’. The obsession with money that Smith describes is deeply entwined with a notion that happiness is about greed, acquisition and consumption. If the twin ideological pillars of Western societies, liberal economics and universal egoism, have any purchase on what people are, what motivates them and what yields contentment then savouring the world’s most expensive mixed drink ought to be a joyous moment. Relaxing in luxurious surroundings and tasting a cocktail that costs almost double the average household grocery bill for a year (Work Gateways, 2016) ought to be the pinnacle of happiness. Yet as Smith intimates there is something absurd and empty about it. Liberal Happiness Emerges [...] and Lives on References to happiness as an ingredient in Western theories of society appeared in the nineteenth century. Happiness coincides with the first real attempt in European his­ tory to meaningfully elevate the individual and integrate human psychology into an eco­ nomic model of society. The ‘objective science’ of society formulated by the Utilitarians was founded on a psychological theory of human nature assuming universal egoism. According to Bentham, Smith, Mill and Malthus, people are governed by self-interest and make calculations about what to do based on maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. Jeremy Bentham’s famous ‘felicific calculus’ was the most mechanical articulation of this 220 REGIMES OF HAPPINESS dictum. Whether it be in personal life, economic behaviour or political preferences, self­ ishness was seen to be at the root of our being. In politics as in the economy, if unfettered individual preferences and choices were permitted free rein, there would be a ‘natural identity of interests’ (Halevy, 1955: 90). Not accidentally, the image of humans as fundamentally egoistic fit well with what was required if people were to be motivated for the acquisitiveness that emergent capit­ alism demanded. Each owner and employer must be out for their own enrichment, and each worker and consumer out to maximize their own economic gain through selling their labour and purchasing goods. Economic success became the cardinal measure of happiness in part because as Bentham held ‘love of self is universal’ (Halevy, 1955: 404). Even behaviour which apparently denies the self pleasure, such as saving money or post­ poning desire, can operate in the longer term benefit of the self. Adam Smith represented this as rooted in human biology when in the Wealth of Nations he asserts that, The principle which prompts to save is the desire of bettering our condition, a desire which, though generally calm and dispassionate, comes with us from the womb, and never leaves us till we go into the grave. In the whole interval which separates those two moments, there is scarce perhaps a single instant in which any man is so perfectly and completely satisfied with his situation as to be without any wish of alteration or improvement of any kind. (Smith, 1776:441) The inherent and constant human desire for betterment in this view is achieved through labouring to produce goods to exchange or, in the case of those who seek even greater betterment, to own the organizations by which products are made and to control their terms of exchange. Exchange itself is also rooted in the innate ‘propensity to truck, barter and exchange’ and underlying human qualities of self-regard. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love [...] Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevo­ lence of his fellow-citizens. (Smith, 1776: 119) Smith’s formulation, although criticized, modified and satirized by nineteenth-century thinkers and twentieth-century economists, remains in many ways an important source of legitimacy for capitalism. The representation of betterment as innate, the necessity of a division of labour (and hence inequality), the accumulation of capital and freedom from undue government intrusion all survive today and are evident in the campaign platforms of politicians. The writings of the many contemporary popularisers of capitalism amplify these principles. For example, Matt Ridley’s (2010) The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves argues that the selfishness underpinning capitalism leads to the innovation necessary to bring people and even whole countries out of poverty, facilitates harmonious social relations and is integral to human biology. The Rational Optimist is a book written with con­ fidence and certainty, invoking science and manifold historical examples to showcase the benevolence of high-technology capitalism and downplay any adverse side effects such  INDIGENOUS AND WESTERN VIEWS OF HAPPINESS 221 as climate change. Ridley (2010: 25—28), a Viscount, Conservative peer and Etonian, also believes that material prosperity is, with some exceptions, closely linked with happiness. The kind of natural harmony narrative presented in Ridley’s book and other blogs, columns and publications is a world away from the bitter divisiveness Zadie Smith sees in London. Although there are caveats, Ridley’s portrait maps the idea of progress from Adam Smith onto contemporary society. It converges neatly with the continual electoral appeals in Western politics to improvements in living standards, education and security as the basis of public policy. Perhaps the most important source of the ubiquitous political platforms for improvements in all aspects of life has been Bentham’s maxim ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, which Bronk (1998: 102) calls Utilitarianism’s ‘most indelible contributions to the modern psyche...’ and ‘the modern notion of progress’. These ideas about what happiness is and from where it springs are important not only because they inform notions of how people should be motivated. They also have important implications when extrapolated from the immediate context in which they were formulated. Immigration, colonial expansion and the attempted assimilation of indigenous peoples are all arenas that reveal conflicts between and within Western notions of happiness. Happiness Crosses the Atlantic The Utilitarians built on a history of British thought including ideas about the virtues of labour, thrift and accumulation and the prerequisites for obtaining private prop­ erty. Ideas about human well-being were incorporated into the colonial enterprises that Britain undertook in North America in the seventeenth century (Samson, 2013: 42— 65). They were consolidated in the nineteenth century by European settlers after the American Revolution. The colonizing actions of both the Euro-American settlers and European powers in Africa, Asia and Australia during the nineteenth century’s ‘Great Land Rush’ (Weaver, 2003) was justified by the assumption of the universality of self­ betterment, making wealth and happiness almost synonymous. Adam Smith attributed the rapid accumulation of wealth in the American colonies to agriculture in ‘virgin ter­ ritory’ (Caton, 1985), depicting economic well-being as a matter of individual enterprise transplanted to territories where lands could simply be appropriated from hapless indi­ genous inhabitants. In turn colonial powers presented themselves as uplifting the peoples they brought under their authority, a sentiment still alive today. A recent YouGov poll (2014) found 59 per cent of Britons were proud of the Empire, while 49 per cent thought it had made the colonies ‘better off. But, what occurs when happiness and the betterment from which it is thought to be derived is not understood by occupants of ‘virgin territory’ in the same terms and when indigenous peoples do not derive happiness from the same sources or easily deduce what happiness is from a preconceived notion of human nature? Here we find one of the cen­ tral and perhaps still unresolved conflicts of the colonial encounter. Seventeenth-century English Puritan colonization of North America, arguably the founding act in the establishing of the United States, was marked by contempt and bru­ tality towards people who diverged from the narrow interpretation of the Bible. Even 222 REGIMES OF HAPPINESS more hostility was hurled at indigenous peoples who the Puritans saw as heathens. Any sympathy that a colonist had for indigenous peoples marked them out and sometimes led to being ostracized. The dissenter and founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, observed that while Puritanism emphasized labour and commerce as the measures of Christian virtue, indigenous peoples’ energies were directed elsewhere, depicting natives as caring, considerate and virtuous (Gaustad, 2005: 32—33). Williams enjoyed friendships with many indigenous people, including the Narragansett Chief Canonicus. Some half century after the American Revolution Alexis de Tocqueville travelled to the frontier regions of Michigan and down the Mississippi where he observed and met many American Indians. Unlike most Puritans of the colonial period, Tocqueville was full of praise for the perceptiveness and wisdom of native peoples. He commented on their ‘natural intelligence’, quoted from Indian oratory, and said that they have ‘as much natural genius as the peoples of Europe’ (Tocqueville, 1945: 363). He continually referred to the ‘pride’ of the Indians and their resistance to ‘European civilization’, the superiority of which, Tocqueville maintains, was something they were never convinced of. The contentment he discerned in indigenous Americans, however, was undermined the more they encountered Euro-American setders. He argued that ‘European tyranny made them less orderly and civilized than they were before’ (Tocqueville, 1945: 346). Part of the problem was that setders were possessed of an inflexible sense of rectitude which influenced the American government to eliminate all in their path throughout Westward expansion. Hence, ‘there is no instance upon record of so prodigious a growth or so rapid a destruction’ (Tocqueville, 1945: 349). During this early phase of colonization beyond the 13 colonies, many native peoples were often forced to leave their lands and move out of the path of European settiement. A personal witness to the Trail of Tears, Tocqueville observed, ‘the Indian races melt away in the presence of European civilization as the snow before the rays of sun’. Happiness and Labour If there was a Puritan idea of happiness it was one intertwined religious devotion, earthly toil and self-denial. According to Max Weber (1976), the New England Puritans encouraged and reinforced personal qualities required for the development of capit­ alism. Puritans invoked the Calvinist doctrine of pre-destination which held that some of the Christian flock were bound to be among the elect with passage guaranteed to heaven. Only God knew who these were, but certain ‘outward signs’ such as self-assurance or stoic refusal of sinful temptation and frivolity might indicate a heavenward path. When taken unproblematically, and interestingly eliding the warning in Matthew that false messiahs may also be among the elect, this type of rationalism is precisely how people need to behave in an economic system in which labour produces capital. Numerous spokesmen for the colonists includingjohn Cotton, John Winthrop and Cotton Mather postulated a connection between Godliness and prosperity (Schaar, 1970). Key to this was the devel­ opment of a psychological orientation that made people feel happy or at least content by taking actions that would result in an ordered and materially comfortable life on earth with Paradise awaiting at death.  INDIGENOUS AND WESTERN VIEWS OF HAPPINESS 223 It did not take long for this doctrine to shed its Christian justification, and replaced with a secular template making happiness a function of economic gain. Euro-American settlers saw land as a source of material wealth from the labours they invested in farming and animal husbandry. Not only did many settlers see their own industrious farming as entitling them to native lands, but land itself had become a commodity, making it enticing to remove it from collective Indian ownership. Prominent American revolutionists such as Washington and Jefferson were land speculators, and the American Revolution and its Republican ideals were heavily influenced by the desire for indigenous lands (Weaver, 2003: 94). These ideals pitted ideas that the good life arose from labour, acquisition and material wealth against the native inhabitants who made no such presumptions and, as we shall see, regarded human activities differently. Indeed, the perceived laziness of Indians made them lesser occupants of the land in Puritan eyes. As Cronon (1983: 55) put it, ‘a people who moved so much and worked so little did not deserve to lay claim to the land they inhabited’. After the American Revolution and at the outset of westward expansion, Scottish Enlightenment figures heavily influenced thinking about the nature of the Euro- American social experiment. As Roy Harvey Pearce’s (1988, : 86) classic intellectual history, Savagism and Civilization, argues, ‘Scottish theory seemed to bear out American practice’. The progressive concept of civilization was put forward by the likes of William Robertson and Adam Ferguson by contrasts drawn from characteristics of indigenous societies in North America in travellers’ and explorers’ accounts. Although the Scots considered American Indians to have many virtues, indigenous transition to a more advanced state could only come from the civilizing influences of private property and the division of labour (Pearce, 1988 : 85). Robertson viewed Indians as living under ‘preposterous folly’, but at the same time admitted and even envied their apparent enjoyment of ‘real happiness’ (quoted by Pearce, 1988 : 88). Similar conflicting and hypocritical views appear at other times of early contacts between indigenous peoples and Europeans in North America. Despite their almost total reliance on indigenous peoples, many fur traders in what is now the Canadian North were often scathing about the qualities of indigenous peoples, particularly their lack of appreciation for the semi-feudal labour imposed upon them (Samson, 2003: 128, 144—4-8). Traders and others who praised native peoples for their generosity and general well-being were often ridiculed as purveying a ‘noble savage’ view. This is evident in Lewis Saum’s (1965: 91—113) The Fur Trader and the Indian, in which one such fur trader is accused of presenting ‘superstitious wilderness sages’ (Saum, 1965: 109). Government village settlements in much of Northern Canada often agglomerated migratory peoples at fur trading posts. In the Ungava region of Quebec, Graburn (1969: 69—71) records that at the time of settlement, Inuit had nothing resembling money or gradated measures of value. The ideal was to ensure that no one was left out rather than to extract gain from exchange, and envy or greed was a highly stigmatized characteristic in anyone who displayed them. Inuit reciprocity at the time in which they were inducted into the market economy largely existed without accountancy of the quantities and values of items, which had formerly been shared. Indeed, as Bodenhorn 224 REGIMES OF HAPPINESS (2000) argued in her study of Alaskan Iiiupiat households, material objects, labour and other qualities that are quantified in capitalist economics are incommensurable to the Inuit. In the Pacific Northwest coast and some Great Plains societies, ceremonies were regularly enacted to redistribute the products of labour in the form of crafts, tools, clothing and food. This was all part of the circulation of debts and responsibilities that contributed to social solidarity. Prestige and honour was accorded to those who gave valuable and prized possessions away because they were strong enough not to be diminished by attachments to material objects. If the assumption of egoism as human nature was what cemented Anglo-Saxon society together in what Utilitarians called the ‘natural identity of interests’, the podatch was the parallel for many Native Americans. Even though no assertions about human nature were made, the podatch was more than just a ceremony but a ‘holistic system of governance and justice’ including law (Fiske and Patrick, 2000: 15). Happiness was achieved through giving as well as accumulating, and this is one of the reasons that contrary to their own laws upholding freedom of expression, culture and religion, both the Canadian and American governments suppressed the potlatch. Among other ceremonial practices such as the Sun Dance and Pueblo religious rites and dances, potlatch giveaways were banned and those who participated were liable to prosecution under the US Courts of Indian Offences (Martinez, 2011: 101). Similarly, the podatch, perceived as a flagrant and irresponsible disregard for private property, was banned in Canada under the Indian Act of 1884 and this remained in place until the 1950s (Niezen, 2000: 6). The institutionalized redistribution of goods was so offen­ sive to the colonizing agents that there were moral crusades against it by Indian agents, settlers and missionaries. In British Columbia, ‘the government saw potlatch exchanges as blocking “progress”, which it defined as the development of a capitalist economy and personal habits grounded in thrift and the accumulation of commodities’ (Fiske and Patrick, 2000: 221). John A. MacDonald, the first prime minister of Canada, referred to potiatches as a ‘pernicious custom’ and a ‘mania’ that blocked all industriousness and private property acquisition as well as showing a contempt for British authority (Fiske and Patrick, 2000: 223). Pernicious customs were an illustration of what settlers saw as an odd attitude towards exchange that some thought was against the grain of what it was to be human. This sometimes came to a head when industry, resource extraction and wage labour were introduced as means of appropriating wealth from indigenous territories. In Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, a study of the long-term colonial reshaping of the Amazonian Putumayo region started by the British-owned Peruvian Amazon Company, Michael Taussig (1987) describes the use of terror to effect that reshaping. The British consul Roger Casement had drawn attention to the murderous quest for rubber extraction by the company overseers who hunted down Indians and forced them to work, killed them if they did not find enough rubber and subjected Huitotos, Bora and other 'groups to murder, slavery, rape and torture. Although the system operated by the company amounted to a form of debt peonage, it crucially entailed manufacturing desires for material gain among the indigenous labourers. These were  INDIGENOUS AND WESTERN VIEWS OF HAPPINESS 225 fed by the introduction of money, the standard medium of exchange in the colon­ izing society. Taussig (1987: 72) recounts an incident that illustrated this clash of worldviews: [When] the rubber was handed over and the goods advanced, Father Gridilla commenting that, ‘the savages don’t know money, their needs are very limited, and they ask only for shotguns, ammunition, axes, machetes, mirrors, and occasionally hammocks.’ An Indian he described as a corpulent and ugly savage declined to accept anything. On being pressed, he replied, ‘I don’t want anything, I’ve got everything’ The whites insisted again that he must ask for something. Finally he retorted, ‘I want a black dog’ ‘And where am I going to find a black dog or even a white one if there aren’t any in all of Putumayo?’ Asked the rubber station manager. ‘You ask me for rubber,’ replied the savage, ‘and I bring you rubber. If I ask for a black dog you have to give me one.’ The rubber station chiefs of the Putumayo were making Indians labourers in a global market, and to do this it was impossible to say, ‘I don’t want anything, I’ve got everything.’ Satisfaction had to arise not from what one has, but from imagining that one needed more and could get more through more labour. Happiness from Having Less Fastforwarding to the last quarter of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first cen­ tury, Amazonia remains a colonial resource frontier in which the lands and autonomy of indigenous peoples have been continually usurped. The lacklustre enforcement of demarcated indigenous territories in Brazil has encouraged the invasions of non- indigenous loggers, miners and farmers. This has precipitated responses by indigenous groups in Amazonia, often in concert with indigenous NGOs such as London-based Survival International. Out of this has come Yanomami shaman and spokesperson Davi Kopenewa’s The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, a remarkable work in which Kopenewa’s words were taken down and relayed by anthropologist Bruce Albert in a ‘polylogue’. The work articulates a Yanomami view of identity, the natural world, dreams and relationships with other peoples, but it also is a kind of reverse anthro­ pology in which insights into white or Western society are provided from a Yanomami perspective. Kopenawa observes the addictions Westerners have to material objects in what he calls ‘merchandise love’, and this extends to materialistic relationships between people and between people and the natural world. Of relevance is Kopenawa’s observations taken from trips to cities that merchandise love governs the behaviour of non-indigenous people. While acquisition is linked in Western thought and culture to happiness, he finds that it brings only shallowness, addiction, discontent and inequality. The white people Kopenawa sees in North America seem to be constantly labouring and toiling in offices. In their quest for ever more money, they are hurried, distracted and disconnected from each other. In a reversal of what is often reported about the Third World, he tells us 226 REGIMES OF HAPPINESS that whites seem to look old and tired faster than indigenous people and that they are terminally separated from the natural world. As Kopenawa describes it, possessions in the Yanomami world are mostly functional, circulate widely and are not to be stored up. As he says, ‘I only think about merchandise to hand it out’ (Kopenawa and Albert, 2013: 337). The hoarding of old objects leads only to sadness since they remind us of past times and people who have died. The perceived lack of toil among indigenous peoples was even more galling for colo­ nial settlers in many places because indigenous groups seemed to live happily although not extravagandy with less and without anything resembling a Protestant work ethic. This was a complaint of the Northern fur traders, one of whom noted around Hudson’s Bay in 1814 a time of early contact, ‘nothing but necessity of extreme want will produce a spirit of exertion in such Indians as these; their dependence on us is very trifling, the Deer furnishes them with both food and raiment, and so long as they can procure a supply of Powder, shot, tobacco and a hearty swill of grog at times, their wants are wholly supplied’ (Davies, 1963: xxxvii). This sense of contentment from self-reliance extended to Australia, where after the initial British landing at Botany Bay in 1770 by Lieutenant (later Captain) James Cook, the British found Aborigines resistant to exchange. Using Cook’s journals, Banner (2005: 103) observes, Despite the crew’s best efforts, the Aborigines ‘set no Value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them.’ Banks [the naturalist who travelled on Cook’s first voyage] concluded that there would be no way to purchase land from them, because ‘there was nothing we could offer that they would take’ in return. Cook went on to assert that Aborigines were ‘far more happier than we Europeans’. This unpalatable statement was quickly dismissed by J. C. Beaglehole, one of the early editors of his journals as ‘nonsense’ (Williams, 1981-: 499). Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River offers a disturbing glimpse of how unpalatable Aborigine self-reliance continued to be as Australia was opened for British settlement in the early nineteenth century- The luckless ex-convict Will Thornhill has been transported to Australia and after some years of indentured servitude in Sydney is given his freedom. With his wife, several children and his own servants, he sets up a homestead by the side of a river about an hour inland by boat. Thornhill and his indentured labourers painstakingly build a crude living structure, rip out mangroves, chop down trees and clear the land for the cultivation of corn. All around him, however, are ‘the blacks’, and these ‘buggers’ cause disquiet in his camp. They seem to be close, then dissolve into the forest. However, his youngest son Dick enjoys wandering off to the Aborigine camp and playing with the children there. When his father reprimands him for consorting with the Aborigines, Dick responds by pointing out their virtues. Regarding the skill with which Aborigines make fire, for example: They don’t need no flint or nothing like you do, he sulked. And no damned weeding the corn all day. Thornhill felt the rage burst in him. He grabbed the boy by the arm and pulled him outside, and in the last of the sunset, in a din of laughing jackass birds, he pulled offhis heavy leather  INDIGENOUS AND WESTERN VIEWS OF HAPPINESS 227 belt and beat Dick with it. Felt his arm heavy, reluctant, but would not stop. Heard the boy cry out as if surprised by each blow. (Grenville, 2005: 223) It was all too much for Thornhill. His son’s praise for Aboriginal indolence and trickery and the mysterious contentment it brought could not be countenanced. If Thornhill had somehow acknowledged Aboriginal virtue and happiness in avoiding dedicated toil, he would undermine his own colonial undertaking. It would prod him to reconsider whether his prodigious efforts to reproduce European agriculture and live a sedentary life in a nuclear family on other peoples’ lands had any merit or indeed whether it would lead to a happy and prosperous life. Furthermore, the early representations by European setders in Australia sometimes depicted this contrast between the arduous toil of the European in contrast to the more natural and leisurely demeanour of the Aborigine. But, as Affeldt (2016:4—5) observes, while there was some acknowledgement that labour in this context may appear futile and undesirable, it is the condition for self-development that the colo­ nial society held in high esteem. Happiness and the Natural World Indian ‘savagery’, as the Puritans often referred to it, was in part signified by their lack of attachment to material things. As semi-mobile peoples moving in flexible social units, they did not remain in permanent setdements or derive happiness from a fixed abode as did the Englishman, whose proverbial ‘casde’ provided affirmation and security. Villages rarely stayed in the same location for more than a year (Bowden, 1981: 99), and this dictated travelling tight. The ‘endless accumulation of capital [...] made tittie sense to them’ (Cronon, 1983: 79). The lack of desire for material possessions and limited senses of want, commented upon by many colonists, meant that there were virtually no ‘out­ ward signs’ to think that natives were among the elect. Furthermore, both indigenous agriculture and hunting stressed group survival through sharing so that all products of labour got passed around. By contrast, an important measure of happiness for settlers was permanent settlement through house building. The source of much of the English entitlement to do this was the naturaliza­ tion of Puritan-style sedentary living through the Lockean concept of private property. In his Two Treatises on Government of 1689, John Locke held that agriculturalists alone may possess land as property because they labour on it as farmers. This meant that the English (and later, American) colonists had a right to dispossess indigenous peoples of their lands because these were merely occupied in transit (Pearce, 1988 : 68). The Lockean view also held that private property was not only part of a civilizing process, but an extension of the personhood and well-being of those who held it. Competence at obtaining property over time came to be, ‘regarded by the middle classes as the very substance of goodness and happiness’ (Schaar, 1970: 10). Over the years in which indigenous peoples were displaced for European settlement, farms or industry, they continue to express their love for their lands. As orated in a letter from Aitooweyah to John Ross, principal chief of the Cherokees at New Echota in 1830 at the beginning of the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, 228 REGIMES OF HAPPINESS Creeks, Choctaw and Seminoles, ‘We, the great mass of the people think only of the love we have to our land for [...] we do love the land where we were brought up. We will never let our hold to this land go it will be like throwing away [...] [our] mother that gave [...] [us] birth’ (Woodward 1982: 202—3). Almost a century later, when Indians were finding it difficult to farm their reservation lands, the government’s leasing of them to white ranchers caused protests. Among the Oglala Lakota at Pine Ridge reservation, for example, ‘the people [...] viewed their lands differently than did government officials and western ranchers. The reservation was something more than an economic com­ modity to be “developed” and the community there was concerned with more [...] than maximizing its income’ (Hoxie, 2001:150). The poverty of the people at Pine Ridge was not an incentive to commodify their lands, but rather an opportunity to enjoy lands for non-material reasons. Similarly, in the 1990s the Innu Nation, representing Innu peoples of Labrador, Canada, pointedly argued that land was more important than money in reaction to the government’s proposal to extinguish their land rights in exchange for cash compensation. Containing numerous narratives of community members extolling the meaning, purpose and happiness obtained from hunting, fishing and gathering, they entitled their proceedings, Money Doesn’t Last, The Land Is Forever (Innu Nation, 1998). While money, sedentary residences and absolute ownership of possessions have become measures of happiness in Western society, the relative indifference to these forms of wealth was characteristic of indigenous societies. In fact, this lack of possessiveness was one of the rationales for the reservation policy.in the United States under the Dawes Act of 1887. Reservations containing one or a small number of different tribes or tribal factions were designed to transform American Indians into individual private property holders. The main architect of this social engineering was Senator Henry Dawes, who had already advised Congress to disregard treaties because they provided too much land for Indians. He complained about the tribes subject to allotments that, ‘there is no self­ ishness, which is at the bottom of civilization’ (quoted in Debo, 1940: 22). After speaking with the Cherokees who proudly recounted that no one in their whole nation owned property or owed money, Dawes concluded that they were stagnating and needed to be injected with greed to make the land economically productive and therefore advance socially and economically. As recorded in their writings and oratory, it was the insistent possessiveness in the whites that many Native Americans found distressing and distasteful. Luther Standing Bear, a Lakota survivor of the Carlisle boarding school, used his knowledge of English and prolonged exposure to Euro-Americans to refine the comparisons he frequently made in his various books in the early twentieth century. He tells us of the happiness that came from living a life deeply interconnected with the living landscape and its creatures, all' of which had personalities, differing only in form from humans. ‘The world was a library’, Standing Bear remarks in Land of the Spotted Eagle (1978, : 194), ‘and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks, and the birds and animals that shared, alike with us, the storms and blessings of the earth. We learned to do what only a student of nature ever learns, and that was to feel beauty’. The attitude towards nature was for Standing Bear perhaps the most profound diffe­ rence between the white and' the Indian mind. He finds frontier settiers’ senses of the  INDIGENOUS AND WESTERN VIEWS OF HAPPINESS 229 natural world to be dulled and their general attitudes disrespectful with their fear of ‘the wilderness’ and their depiction of nature as savage. Standing Bear (1978, : 168, 169) attributed the reason for Europeans’ uncultured understanding of the natural world to avarice. Whites were so consumed with acquisition that they were not able to pay sufficient attention or respect for their surroundings. Hence, ‘an element that created distrust in the Indian was the white man’s greed’. Whereas in Lakota society ‘all goods were to be used by band members at the call of need’, and ‘there was no possible excuse for hoarding’, whites coveted Indian lands and property and ‘greed fathered the cruelty which the Indian suffered’. The gauge of a pathological disconnection from nature was the lack of a sense of beauty or pleasure that Standing Bear believed characterized European attitudes towards the landscapes into which they had so recentiy intruded. There could be litde rapport with nature if it was seen as ‘free land’ of ‘inanimate nature’ as the great frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1961: 41) suggested in his homage to the American individu­ alism. The desire to ‘enlarge their dominion’ over nature was for Turner inherent in them. Given how firmly Europeans believed in a preordained human nature dictating this kind of domination, it is understandable that American Indians saw them as fiercely aggressive. To many native people on the frontier, whites were seemingly incapable of recognizing ways to live happily in the natural world without destroying it. Destruction, as Hannah Arendt (1968: 145) once noted, is the most radical form of possession. Many years later, the Laguna Pueblo novelist Leslie Marmon Silko (1991: 224) described elders’ perceptions of Europeans in Almanac of the Dead:. The elders used to argue that this was one of the most dangerous qualities of Europeans: Europeans suffered a sort of blindness to the world. To them, a ‘rock’ was just a ‘rock’ wher­ ever they found it, despite obvious differences in shape, density, color or the position of the rock relative to all things around it. The Europeans [...] could often be heard complaining in frightened tones that the hills and canyons looked the same to them, and they could not remember if the dark volcanic hills in the distance were the same dark hills they’d marched past hours earlier. The settlers were, of course, people out to better themselves but also to accumulate cap­ ital. All accumulation had to be based on producing goods found in nature. Therefore plains, rivers, forests and mountains simply became sources of raw materials. The contours of this can be discerned in the accounts of the sometimes-violent collisions between colonizers and indigenous peoples at the point at which capitalism is introduced via wage labour and commercial agriculture or resource extraction. These were developments that Standing Bear was observing to have been levers in the pro­ cess of undermining the stability of Lakota society, especially in the context of the gold rush that caused the violation of the 1868 Treaty between the United States and the Sioux. Not unsurprisingly, other indigenous writers could not fail to see the problems in setder society that, while touted as leading to well-being and happiness, simply created divisions, rancour and disrespect for people and the environment. The Santee Sioux author Charles Eastman, who graduated from Dartmouth College and earned a medical 230 REGIMES OF HAPPINESS degree from Boston University in 1890, wrote From Deep Woods to Civilization (1977 ) in part as a commentary on the inconsistencies between the more humanitarian principles in Christianity and the flagrant self-interest that governed settler society. While visiting eastern seaboard cities he came across multitudes of poor people living in slums and tenements. This he found not only varying with Christian charity but a contrast to his own culture, of which he tells us that ‘we could not conceive of the extremes of luxury and misery living side by side’ (Eastman, 1977, : 148), continuing ‘Indians have poor people too [...] but our poor lost nothing of their self-respect and dignity’. In his early recollections Eastman observed how whites measured everything, and particularly made everything translate into money. In fact, he thought that Euro-American morality was predicated upon money, pointing out that the whites even compelled people to pay for the land they live on through taxes. Happiness and Transculturation The story of Roger Casement’s persistent yet largely ignored efforts to make the British government take actions to stop the brutal murder, rape and exploitation of indigenous peoples in Amazonia has recendy been retold in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel The Dream of the Celt. Following the contours of Casement’s life, Vargas Llosa describes the report on the Putumayo during the research for which Casement takes pity on Omarino and Aredomi. These two young indigenous boys had been forced to work under the gra­ tuitously violent Peruvian Amazonian Rubber Company. Despite Casement’s philan­ thropy in bringing the children to be schooled in Britain, the boys ‘ [...] were as far from happiness or, at least, a tolerable existence, as they had been in the Putumayo. Though they weren’t beaten and instead were treated with affection, they felt alienated, alone and aware they would never form part of this world’ (Vargas Llosa, (2012: 318—19). Casement is baffled by the boys’ disaffection and their wish to return to Iquitos in Peru, but consents to taking them back, where they resume their lives. We do not know if Omarino and Aredomi find happiness in their native lands. Often transculturated native peoples who returned did not fare so well as several stories of indigenous peoples who had spent time in white society and then returned demon­ strate. These include the Assiniboine Pigeons Egg’s Head or Wi-jun-jon, the subject of a well-known portrait by George Cadin. Cadin himself wrote about American Indians in affectionate terms, and part of this was connected to his respect for the way in which they found contentment without seeking material gain or ‘felt the contaminating touch of money, or the withering embrace of pockets’ (quoted by Dippie, 1990: 61). After returning from Washington in 1831 dressed as a dandy, Pigeons Egg’s Head was treated with disdain by his people. According to Cadin (1989: 59, ) he was ‘spurned by the leading men of his tribe, and rather to be pitied than envied, for the advantages which one might have supposed would have flown from his fashionable tour’. These sentiments were echoed in many Native American novels of the 1960s and 1970s. These were times when American Indians were experiencing a cultural effer­ vescence and at the same time being exposed in large numbers to living off reservation. Protagonists in these works often return from American military service or life in white  INDIGENOUS AND WESTERN VIEWS OF HAPPINESS 231 towns to find themselves unable to fully readapt to their own communities. In works such as Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko and N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize winning House Made of Dawn, they sometimes become confused, itinerant, self-destructive problem drinkers. Set in Montana over three generations, James Welch’s (1974: 21) Winter in the Blood has the narrator son of First Raise ruminating on the transitory life of his father leaving and returning to the reservation. He ‘stayed in town and made white men laugh. Despite their mocking way they respected his ability to fix things; they gave more than his wife’. Yet, both he and his son descend into aimless drinking, random sex arid grasp any opportunity for escape from the conflicted worlds they inhabit. While First Raise ‘never really stayed and he never really left’, his son, like the protagonists of Silko and Momaday. finally find redemption through native wisdorh and connections to land and community. Ironically, many non-native accounts of life among Native Americans, even those who were captured and subjected to violence and hardship, record a similar redemption in the indigenous world. The positive values of indigenous societies suffuse the memoirs of European settlers who were captured by Native Americans. By 1880 at the height of the Great Land Rush nearly 2,000 captivity narratives had been published (Mifflin, 2009: 147). In 1851 the year that the Mormon Olive Oatman was captured along the Gila River in Arizona there were between 30,000 and 40,000 miners and pioneers trav­ elling across native lands between Arizona and California (Mifflin, 2009: 45). One of the main themes in women’s captivity narratives was transculturation (Drounian-Stodola, 1998: xiii—xv). Many women found indigenous society more favourable in part because women had more-important and defined roles and generally exercised greater autonomy than women in settler society. Finding meaning, purpose, pleasure and happiness in land- based indigenous societies, a large number of women refused to return to white society when they could have done so. A compelling account of transculturation that speaks to connections between land, nature and happiness in indigenous societies is John Tanner’s (2000) The Falcon. Tanner was captured from his family farm in Kentucky in 1789 when he was eight and lived into his 30s with the Ojibwa, being adopted into a family, marrying, hunting and travelling with them in Canada. By the time he was able to return to find his family, he was hardly able to speak English or accommodate himself to non- Indian life, not even being able to sleep indoors because ‘it made me sick to sleep in a house’ (Tanner, 2000: 244). He pitched a tent outside his relative’s house and then quickly returned to his life as an Ojibwa. He remembers life as a child in Kentucky as confined literally and figuratively in comparison to his life with the' Indians (Tanner, 2000: 26). It was not only the captives who found some degree of happiness in Indian life, but numerous others were admirers of native North Americans because of their lack of attachments to possessions and money and their more sympathetic engagements with nature. A shortlist of such admirers might include essayist and naturalist Henry David Thoreau; painters such as George Catiin and Winslow Homer in the nineteenth century and Georgia O’Keefe and Maynard Dixon in the twentieth century; the photographers Edward Curtis and Eadweard Muybridge; reformer and novelist Helen Hunt Jackson; 232 REGIMES OF HAPPINESS the Chicago School sociologist Nels Anderson; linguist Jaime de Angulo; and John Collier, a poet, essayist and Commissioner of Indian Affairs in the mid-twentieth century. Concluding Thought Today the native casino capitalism in the United States (Light and Rand, 2005) and large payouts for land claims and resource extraction on indigenous lands in Canada (Samson, 2016) could be evidence of the extent to which money and materialism have seemingly been embraced by Native North Americans. However, exposure to the idea of happiness as uniquely deriving from these sources is not the same as the experience of it from them. 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