Post 2: Indians

Nora Mertz
Due: Wednesday, October 14th
Romano Per. 4

Book: The Monkey Wrench Gang
Author: Edward Abbey

The Monkey Wrench Gang is an exciting novel about three men (Doc Sarvis, “Seldom Seen” Smith, and George Washington Hayduke) and one woman (Bonnie Abzug) who sabotage construction sites and power plants in the Southwest desert in order to protest the destruction of the environment. Throughout the book their missions become increasingly more intense and they come close to capture many times. Throughout the book, the Indians living in the southwest play a small, yet significant role. For many parts, the Indians act as a sort of observing audience. In the scene where the bridge between Utah and Arizona breaks (the scene which I wrote my first blog post on) the Indians are the first ones to know what is happening. “Most of the crowd along the highway had only a poor view of what happened next. But the Indians up on the hillside saw it all clearly”. This already begins to show the reader, in the very beginning of the book, the role that the Indians play as an observing group of characters.
The four environmentalists have negative opinions of the Indians, Hayduke in particular, because they are “people who don’t do any harm” and they are “soft, weak, passive people”. One scene in particular shows Hayduke’s opinions when he is driving through Indian country, and noting his observations. “A blighted land, crisscrossed with new power lines, sky smudged with smoke from power plants, the mountains strip-mined, the range grazed to death, eroding away…The real trouble with the goddamned Indians, reflected Hayduke, is that they are no better than the rest of us. The real trouble is that the Indians are just as stupid and greedy and cowardly and dull as us white folks”.
At one point in the story, when Doc is trying to formalize a plan to blow up a bridge, train, and train tracks, he decides that he will “blame it on the Indians," He says, "Everybody loves Indians, now they're domesticated. So we offer a bit of a clue here and there”. This is not the only case during which the gang tries to blame the Indians. They leave graffiti to try to convince the authorities that the Indians were the ones responsible for the vandalism and damages, and Hayduke repeatedly signs these with the name, “Rudolph the Red”. The fact that the gang is trying to blame their destruction on the Indians shows that although the Indians are a minor group of people in the story, they do help to keep the authorities off their trail and they do play a significant role in the plot of the book.