I was skimming through indianz.com this morning and came across something surprising: “cop killer” Bucky Phillips is Seneca. What I found surprising was that Bucky’s indigenous status was never mentioned in the mainstream coverage of the manhunt. Perhaps the media was being sensitive, fearing that the image of an “Indian” alluding the government in a remarkable 5-month run (a la Geronimo) through upstate New York would prompt anti-Indian sentiment. Or, more likely, they just didn’t know or care: with his thick mustache he didn’t look Indian enough for American visual culture. In the bizarre and contradictory collective American mind, he would signify a “fake Indian” the way Central American illegals signify “foreign Indians.”
According to postings on indianz.com discussion boards, the self-identified Seneca posters say Bucky was likely finding refuge with sympthetic Seneca people, on and off the three Seneca reservations. It was not so much that they like Bucky, but that they dislike (for a variety of long-standing reasons) the state police (who have no jurisdiction on federal reservations, but have been used in the past any way). Some believed the reward offered for Bucky was only offered to motivate impoverished tribal members to turn him in. Didn’t work.
Now, I am not defending Bucky and neither were the posters at indianz.com. From all accounts he is a miserable human being. But regardless, the issue at stake is the lost opportunity to discuss what leads someone like Bucky down his road of life-long crime. The lost opportunity to discuss the vexed relationship between the six Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) nations and New York (and Canada), which was the background to this case. Instead, the implication from the coverage was that “Bucky” was just some deer-hunting, camo-hat and thick-mustache wearin’ “hillbilly.” This is American code for a person of inferior moral status, prone to violence and irrationality on a grand scale.
Some might argue that most Americans are wholly ignorant of Native issues because the issues are unrelated to what counts as the “most important” news. But here was a perfect opportunity to incorporate some of those issues into the coverage of the sensationalized 5-month manhunt. The fact that it was totally overlooked is just more evidence that a variety of other forces keep these issues from being broached. And, even if there was a desire to protect Seneca people from bounty-hunting vigilantes during the course of the hunt, the opportunity still stands. But I will bet that Bucky will remain, like most lower-class criminals, a fully dehumanized caricature rather than a complex human whose behavior is largely an adaptation to social conditions.
What was Bucky thinking when he fired at the gun-toting representatives of the colonial state? What is the relationship between being an indigenous person within a settler colony and the experiences that clearly turned Bucky into a bitterly anti-social person, a lifelong criminal with an acknowledged vendetta against the police?
We all knew Bucky was invisible for 5-months, evading the police. But he remains invisible–because we refuse to look him in the eye, and prefer to have him hustled away in the back of a squaking police car rather than have to deal with his sheer physical presence or the sound of his voice.
The unwritten story for the past five months is this: Bucky Phillips was invisible because America refused to look at him, not because he could hide in the woods.
