Native American List Servs

In 1993 I’d been thrown out of Heart Butte School. The superintendent said, “If you don’t resign, I’ll smear you so bad you’ll never teach anywhere again.” (He himself had been accused of stealing money and had to “cool off” as an insurance salesman before he got this job.) Since I couldn’t defend myself against smear without involving innocent students and their parents, students I had taught long ago, I left. The next eight months were spent on my mother’s sofa in Portland while I looked for a non-teaching job.

I had former students in Portland as well and sometimes we lunched. (You’re supposed to network while you look for work.) One’s job included monitoring Native American listservs, but he was overwhelmed with the simple quantity of posts. Why didn’t I subscribe and let him know if there was something relevant to his job? One list required that members be Indians. My student said, “When they ask you if you’re Indian, just say you’re from Browning. They’ll think you are.” When I dealt with the unemployment people and told them I was from Browning, they thought I was Indian, too, and their attitude went mean. “Are you even LOOKING for work?”

It was a hard time but being on the list servs was like being back in Browning again, which is where I wanted to be. That’s when I became “Prairie Mary.” Many posts were personal, even intimate, and many raged with paranoia and ghosts. Over and over again people said the equivalent of the Giant in Jack and the Beanstalk: “Fee fie fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishmun.” Finally I felt so guilty about being white that I resigned. It turned out that about four people had already figured out who I was, but didn’t rat me out. They must have liked my commodity cheese jokes.

On another list which was not closed to whites, I continued to post. That might have been Michael Wilson’s list. These were the years of the Native American Literature Renaissance and when I went downtown to Powell’s bookstore, I would find wonderful NA books for $5. When I had a job again, I began buying them in threes: one for the Browning public library, one for the Heart Butte School Library, and one for myself. On my first vacation, I hustled to Browning to see what they thought about the books. The Browning librarian, an Indian, had made a special shelf where she put them -- there were a few dozen by then -- but the Heart Butte librarian, a white person, had locked them all up in a storage closet so they wouldn’t be stolen.

At Powell’s and other bookstores in Portland the authors of these books would show up for readings. I shook hands with Sherman Alexie, watched Louise Erdrich read (brave but exhausted) in the middle of what had to be the worst trial of her life, laughed with Greg Sarris, and talked for a half-hour with the elegant Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. Then Sidner Larson, who was teaching in Eugene, organized a conference of NA writers where I heard Joy Harjo play her sax, met in person folks from the list, and -- best of all -- was remembered by Jim Welch (Sidner’s cousin) whose father was Bob Scriver’s best childhood friend. I’d drive back to Portland, stuffed with ideas, and type them into a report for the listserv before I went to sleep. It was a fabulous experience, one of those key seedbeds -- to mix metaphors.

In 1994 my mother was diagnosed with a blood cancer that would kill her in five years at most. It was painless but exhausting. She just gradually faded until the last two weeks when she was clearly dying. The listserv -- oh, bless them! -- was by then a community and I even got cards from some of them, but often kind words online.

Maggie Dwyer was always there, and then her father died and her mother died. She stopped in Portland to meet me and we tried to support each other. It appeared that my mother would leave enough money for me to move back to Browning, but before it could get done, Bob Scriver died. Bob was a controversial figure because of selling his artifact collection to Edmonton. (Much of it has been repatriated now.)

Somewhere on the Carolina banks, an Indian woman lost her former husband. Privatedly we emailed about our dreams of these powerful and unresolved men from our pasts. She cut her hair to mourn -- mine was already short. She and her daughter sent me a braid of sweetgrass with a shorebird feather attached. I put it on the bronze crucifix that Bob had made and it’s still there. We would never have known each other if it hadn’t been for the list serv.

But sometimes the flames raged high and in the emotions stirred up by the retrial of the murder of Annie May Pictou, I had enough for a while. (I was back on the edge of the rez anyway.) I think that particular list collapsed. A few lists have been operating for a very long time with the same “owner” who is responsible for keeping them cleaned up and operational, though they are usually backed by university tech people. A few have gone on churning posts through even though the owners have disappeared and the techs have sort of forgotten them, partly because the present maintainers are four generations down the line. It’s an eerie sci-fi sort of phenomenon.

There are secret listservs, listservs that are strictly monitored against flaming, formal academic focussed listservs with high standards who want solid research. For a short time I was accidentally on one that was hunting “plastic shaman” types in order to bring them down. I withdrew but was a little afraid of being labeled a plastic shaman myself and attacked. Luckily, I’m not an academic -- don’t even teach high school now.

One of my favorite list encounters was with Rolland Nadjiwan. He was trying to make a point and told about his father coming in from running his trapline in the snow, then sitting down at the grand piano in his cabin to run through his favorite concertos. I took him seriously, and someday I’ll write a short story that comes from that. He thought I didn’t know about trapping, but Bob Scriver was a fur buyer, so I knew a lot of Indian trappers. We bantered back and forth until Carter Revard intervened, worrying that we were getting out of hand. But in fact, Rolland and I kinda bonded. Recently he contacted me again and I was glad to hear from him.

Also, Heather Devine popped up in Calgary. (Her new book on the Metis has been published by the U of Calgary Press!) Kris Groberg has been in contact pretty much all along. Now and then I think of Linden, who has “traveled the wolf trail.” Or Michael Two Horses.

As a genre NA literature is quiet right now. All American publishing and book sales are a real mess and even people who have made their living by writing for a long time are thrown for a loop. But at the same time, blogs, epubishing, self-publishing, on-demand publishing -- all of these have been blooming. The problem is discovery and sorting -- where are they? Which are the ones we can trust? Who’s reviewing all this stuff? It’s scary. But I think, like list servs, in the end this major morphing of NA lit will be another renaissance. Like being fired, it can be an unrecognized blessing.