Ten Little Indians

One little, two little, three little Indians

Four little, five little, six little Indians

Seven little, eight little, nine little Indians

Ten little Indian boys.

Ten little, nine little, eight little Indians

Seven little, six little, five little Indians

Four little, three little, two little Indians

One little Indian boy.

 

What do children’s songs, cartoons or other, more mundane objects of everyday life tell us about terror, genocide and human rights? Why even write about such a topic, or take such an approach, when acts of genocide continue to occur, regimes of terror still reign and human rights are violated  everyday despite the proclamations of 1989/90 that finally, everyone everywhere could have freedom and security? Are there not after all more pressing matters?  And is this not then just another academic exercise?

    I grew up singing. Some of my earliest memories consist of my sister and me huddled around the piano in our living room with our mother who played folk songs from an old green, illustrated song book. In one of my fondest memories, we ran around the piano, pretending to blare our golden trumpets singing the words along with our mother to an ancient story, “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho. Joshua fit the battle of Jericho and the walls came tumbling down.”

    Those memories invoke strong feelings of joy inside me when I recall my childhood. I know those songs also hold older layers of meaning and use, but they do not immediately present themselves at face value as songs of terror, genocide or human rights. They were never meant to do those things, right?   
   Yet the songs do directly speak to the problems of genocide, terror and human rights.  "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho" refers to stories found in the Old Testament books of Exodus, Numbers and Joshua, about Joshua, the first leader of the ancient Israelites after Moses had led the Jews out of Egypt, out of slavery, and toward freedom from tyranny. It was Joshua who led the conquest of the land of Canaan and oversaw the reallocation of land among the Israelite tribes. What does that story and its singing tell us about ourselves and our ability to reflect on our history, present and future possibilities?  Genocide deeply ingrains our history.  So how can we break the vicious cycles of history that appear to condemn us to repeating the histories of persecution, genocide, struggle, and freedom, only to become yet another group of  proud conquerors, tyrants, oppressors and planners of mass murder in the process?
    It is not so easy to draw such straight lines to the present and future, but looking more closely at the contours of our everyday lives and peeling back the layers of history within our everyday life can help us see more clearly what we have done, what we are doing and what we can do.  I still can recall many melodic phrases and words to songs I grew up singing.  Most remain in the background of my mind devoid of any meaning, but capable of recall.  I did not know the Irish melody to which Septimus Winner, supposedly set the original music of “Ten Little Indians,” for instance, but I can quickly recall that tune when I see the stanzas written out, and I even take a little pleasure in my ability to recall some audible memory otherwise lost.  The performances from which "Ten Little Indians" originated  were meant to entertain ordinary people, to make them laugh, buy another drink, or just forget about things for a while - not pronounce the doom of Indians, or convey what people should think about the red man, let alone invoke international law and justice, make moral judgments in hindsight about things which occurred so long ago, or reveal ourselves - they are just children’s songs, right? 

    But there is also a history here within the contours of everyday life that we can peel back further. in  order to reveal more context and meaning.  There are first of all, different perspectives, different contexts and meanings for us to consider.  There is learning to count to the tune of ten little Indians, which some may  yet remember from childhood, but there are also other contemporary associations, as one member of our writer's group can recall, learning to count to the same song, but to the tune of ten little monkeys.  Delve further and one may find the Agatha Christie novels that generations of English-speaking readers consumed, popularizing the old Indian tune as a plot device in a murder mystery.  Delve further back, and one finds its original setting in blackface minstrel shows that traveled the United States of America, ironically it now seems, re-setting the lyrics to "ten little niggers" at the same time that many of the“first peoples” of western north America were engaged in war with the US Federal government, white society putting African Americans  back in their place and nearly eliminating different peoples in our march to our manifest destiny.  One then has to ask, what were the meanings of these songs?  How were they used, what kind of impact did they have, how did people react to them and continue to react to them? 

    This song is but a remnant of that history that fewer and fewer people perhaps can recall. Much has occurred since then that also needs more careful consideration, in terms of the depiction of these peoples, their physical and cultural destruction, forced removals, reservations, assimilations, political suppressions and neglect, as well as their struggles, resistance, survival, perseverance, sacrifice and renewal. Images of Native Americans still abound; they permeate our popular culture, museums, stories, films, games, teams, food, language and place names.  Many may also know or have heard of their troubling issues, poverty rates, health problems, lack of education and job opportunities, or some may simply just associate them with casinos.  Yet their realities also remain obscured.  There is often no conscious connection between the present and the past, between today's problems and the history of genocide whose sites sometimes literally lie beneath our feet, or just off in the distance from a Native American massacre of European colonial settlers commemorated on a plaque retelling that story.  At my archival research presentations, I have even met people who can claim descent from people who are some of my most interesting native sources, which tells us that not all of  Native Americans left these places as wars pushed their ancestors to the west, and indicates that we also need to develop oral history research in the areas in which we live in order to tell more stories of survival and peaceful coexistence.  In this way, peering into the familiar and everyday aspects of our lives via the products of our popular culture, is itself a political act, at least I think so, that forces us to rethink the assumptions underlying our history and remind us of our  responsibility to testify to this history of genocide, terror and human rights in the world in which we live and learn from it.