March 8, 2000, New York Times
GENERATIONS / IDENTITY

Going Home With a Postmodern Medicine Man

By BILL DONAHUE
PORTLAND, Ore. -- In the muted light of the museum, beside a diorama of a traditional Wasco Indian wedding, Spider Moccasin shared a piece of the creation myth of his grandmother's people, the Wasco of the Pacific Northwest: "Coyote was swallowed by Itc!i'xyan, this shapeless terror of a monster. And. . . ." Spider Moccasin is an antic storyteller. His hands carved the air and his eyes flashed. For a second I imagined we were outside, on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Oregon, beside a campfire, the sound of drums in the distance. (The monster's name, by the way, is pronounced IX-lit-i-can.) 


Shane Young for The New York Times
Spider Moccasin complains that Indians are expected "to be pure, like Sitting Bull." Defying that sterotype, he jammed with Native Mobb, a hip-hop group on the Warm Springs Reservation.

"And then Coyote was trapped in Itc!i' xyan's belly," he continued, "and he couldn't communicate, so he pulled out his laptop and. . . ." 

Well, maybe it is better to think of the campfire as virtual, a sort of holographic flame leaping in a dark void as MTV blares in the background. Spider Moccasin has not lived with his tribe for the last 20 years. He lives in Portland, where he graduated from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 1990 and now spends most of his time in his dingy, cubicle-size art studio. He calls himself a "postmodern medicine man." 

A 34-year-old cartoonist and singer-songwriter whose given name is Marcus Moseley, he has spent the last decade furiously reinventing himself. Through his political art, he has tried to reconcile his tastes for Spiderman comics and the rock band Rage Against the Machine with the ghosts of his ancestral past. 

He has written a book that has yet to be published, a 400-page novel about an urban Indian who finds himself by going home; produced an urban powwow that starred an American Indian poet; and played his Dylanesque protest folk music in Portland clubs. In January, he released his debut compact disc, "Spider Moccasin," which focuses on important issues confronting Northwest Indians, including the Army's plans to incinerate nerve gas on Umatilla Indian land. "Fifty years ago, I would have been beaten to shreds" for playing such songs, he said. 

Mainstream culture has long been exacting about the way Indians should express their ethnicity. Early-20th-century Indian youths were forced to go to boarding schools, where federal officials lopped off their braids and beat them for speaking their own languages. More recently, films like "Dances With Wolves" have saddled Indians with another expectation. "We're all supposed to be pure, like Sitting Bull," Spider Moccasin said. 

In reality, American Indian life has long been a blend of ancient traditions and pop culture flotsam. Now, young Indians are increasingly deciding that they can keep their culture alive by modernizing it. Off the coast of Washington State, for instance, a small group of young Makahs has revived a tribal tradition of whale hunting by giving it a new twist. As they ply the Pacific Ocean in their hand-carved canoe, they carry a .577-caliber elephant rifle. At powwows, where drumming has long been an almost exclusively male activity, the Mankillers, a California troupe consisting of Indian women, is beating its own rhythms. The group has released a compact disc, "The Mankillers." 

Kate Jackson, an elder at the Warm Springs reservation, is wary of such gestures, arguing that "our culture's music is for the reservations, not for wannabes looking for a payout." Her disdain is held only by ardent traditionalists, though, and even mainstream America is recognizing the complexity of Indian identity. 

More than ever, people want to hear the voices of contemporary Indians. In Boulder, Colo., the Four Winds Trading Company, a large distributor of American Indian music, reported that its sales increased roughly 40 percent in each of the last three years. Hollywood's first feature film written and directed by Indians, Sherman Alexie's and Chris Eyre's "Smoke Signals," was released in 1998 to favorable critical reaction. Mr. Alexie, a Spokane tribal member, has contracted with Miramax to shoot his second film, an adaptation of his novel, "Reservation Blues." The film focuses on a Catholic Indian rock band that subsists largely on "wish sandwiches" -- you wish something was between the bread. 

SPIDER MOCCASIN'S diet would be similar if his dishwashing job did not provide free food. He earns $600 a month, and he sleeps on friends' couches. When he is staying nearby, we chat. Once he told me about his great-grandmother, Pistol Packin' Annie, whose gun scared federal officials who were trying to drag her children to boarding school. 

Another time, he described how he had chosen his name. It was 1988 and he was "running away from being Indian," he said. He had few American Indian friends; all his comic-book sketches were of white superheroes. 

One night he tried suicide, ingesting sleeping pills. In his delirium, he recalled a "supernatural incident," a healing ceremony he witnessed on his great-aunt Zelma Smith's ranch when he was 12. A spider appeared. The person being treated, he said, "was struggling with the same thing I was, culture shock, and suddenly I came to think of that spider as representing the modern world." He realized that the spider was "just an issue that Indians have to contend with." 

"I made myself throw up," he said. "I wanted to live." 

The ranch is in Warm Springs, about 110 miles from Portland, and on a recent weekend we went to the reservation to visit the place he calls home. 

With his friend Jamie Stewart, a Karuk Indian, we drove east in Mr. Stewart's battered pickup truck, through the suburbs and over snowy Mount Hood. Spider Moccasin was wearing a T-shirt depicting the 1928 Wasco Royal Court, and one princess on the shirt was his grandmother, Mildred Smith. Ms. Smith was a full-blooded Wasco, a tribe that once lived on the banks of the Columbia River and fished for salmon. In 1855, the government moved the Wascos 50 miles south to Warm Springs, where they were forced to live beside two rival tribes, the Paiute and the Warm Springs. 

The three tribes rarely mingled. But in the mid-1930's, Spider Moccasin's grandmother married a Warm Springs man. Their seven children, Spider Moccasin boasted, "united the tribes for business in the 20th century." One went to Harvard Law School; another became a champion at fancy dancing, a powwow tradition. The most successful was Ken Smith, who spent nearly 20 years as the chief executive of Warm Springs' confederated tribes. 

As we rolled down Mount Hood and onto the reservation's red, sage-speckled plains, his legacy was clear. We passed many buildings he had helped build: the museum, a health center, a tribal administration center. Then we stopped at his lavish home and went in. 

Spider Moccasin had not seen Mr. Smith in six years and had not been to Warm Springs in more than a year. We made polite conversation, sipped tea and then left for Spider Moccasin's childhood home, a modest yellow clapboard ranch house. His parents divorced in 1976, and he lived at Warm Springs with his mother, Rosella Moseley, until 1980, when they moved to Beaverton, a Portland suburb, for its good public schools. 

Ms. Moseley is an advocate for poor people; she became outspoken on Indian issues at age 20. "She was in a car accident going over Mount Shasta in California, and her eye was torn from her head," Spider Moccasin said. "They rushed her to the hospital, but they said, 'We don't take Indians,' so then they took her to the vet's. They got her some whiskey and tied her down and they took some sandpaper to her skin. They got the glass out of her face and pushed her eye back into the socket by hand." 

The next day, at Indian Trails restaurant, we ran into a cousin of Spider Moccasin's, Darreck Palmer. Mr. Palmer, 18, is a singer for a hip-hop act called Native Mobb, and his tales of the reservation's other rap bands enthralled Spider Moccasin. We followed Mr. Palmer to a remote house that was essentially hip-hop central in Warm Springs. 

Inside, were seven young men from the reservation in sagging slacks. A keyboard track thumped on the stereo, and each young man rose in turn to blast his own rhymes into a microphone. "You may think I'm in a gang," cried Brian Renfro, 20, "but I'm all about dat Native Mobb thang." Gerald Tufti, 21, sang of "words that left me open, living the life my grandma'd been hopin'." 

Last spring, there was a rift among the rappers that began with the bands Straight Savage and Native Mobb mocking each other's music and culminated with both spouting threatening lyrics. 

More recently, death has brought unity. Just after dawn on a Saturday last summer, Lance Thomas, a member of Native Mobb, was killed with three friends when he crashed his Thunderbird into a truck on the highway south of Warm Springs. 

FOR Mr. Thomas, the crash ended a tumultuous adolescence. Warm Springs has neither a middle school nor a high school, so he rode a bus to school in Madras, a rough cowboy town 15 miles away. Like many Warm Springs youths, he dropped out. Robert Medina, a onetime substitute parent for Mr. Thomas, said that the young man had spent his last months "unemployed, partying and mouthing off to police." 

His friends gave voice to his anguish. "Every breath that I take," Mr. Tufti half-whispered, half-sang, "I'm getting nearer to my end." 

Spider Moccasin felt the power of the words. "Who said Indian kids couldn't write?" he said. He flashed his hand at the rappers, pinkie up, gangster style, and then stepped to the mike to sing his own song. "Manifest Destiny forgotten!" he shouted. "Who writes the history books? Manifest Destiny forgotten! A lost century or two slipstream, lost culture, no one else to turn into!" 

Everyone cheered and shouted. 

Spider Moccasin gave the rappers a copy of his compact disc. "Bro'," Derek Greene, 18, said, "we're going to sample it!" 

As we pulled onto the highway, it struck me that his music, too, was a kind of sampling. I said it borrowed from the hard experience as well as the daring of his forebears to make something new. 

Spider Moccasin disagreed: "No. I can't say I sample them. I'm not, like, patching their ancient voices into my recordings, not at all. 

"But I'm definitely influenced by them," he continued. "They didn't wrap themselves up in the past and weep. They took public service jobs. They acted. They realized that American history isn't something that happened. It is still happening now."

 Bill Donahue, a correspondent for Outside magazine, has also written for The New York Times Magazine.