REALITY ON THE GROUND

Richard Stern, much-praised novelist and blogger (and for a while a professor of mine) says:

Those elements of the past which form parts of what we call our identity--family, religion, ethnic background, class, biological being including gender, strength, and health, our place in the communities of which we're a part--almost surely lead to internal as well as external conflicts in the course of our life. Perhaps only those who never feel such conflicts can be called inauthentic and unreal. One talent of the dramatist and prose fiction writer is to stage the conflicts, that is, to so isolate or exaggerate one or more of the conflicting elements that it upsets the status quo of the drama's beginning and begins its drive toward another status, tragic, comic, or some rich combination of them. The bliss of the audience or readers is to get swept up in this two- or thirty-hour transfiguration in such a way that our own reality is enriched with what we've seen, heard, or read. The work of very powerful dramatists and novelists will in time alter, indeed, become the culture, that is, the very "reality on the ground."
-- Richard Stern
May 14, 2007

Every time I sift through my American Indian materials, as I’m doing while I compose “A Guide to the Blackfeet Reservation,” I’m struck by the issues Stern is addressing above. The truth is that our lives are controlled by an illusion composed of brute strength, economics, political happenstance, impersonal global events like earthquakes or hurricanes, and inertia. That is, the Blackfeet Reservation or even the concept of “tribes” exists only at the “pleasure” of these forces. Those tribes petitioning to be defined as nationally recognized entities will know what I mean. Always underneath Indian negotiations are the not-so-hidden threat to “terminate” reservations and all privileges and payments connected to them. A national emergency like terrorists or, better yet, global warming and the water shortages it creates, might be exactly the excuse needed.

Even the larger nation or the “united” part of what we know as the United States if America is only a convention that could be ended by internal collapse or external threat. That this is coming to consciousness now is demonstrated by the wave of books comparing the state of this country to the decline and fall of the Holy Roman Empire.

Under the concern for the continuing existence of this country is the even larger question of what it means to challenge religion, including the taken-for-granted assumptions of the Christians who put that “Holy” in the Roman Empire (after defeating the assumptions of the pagan world). The nations who used the Pope (remnant of the Holy Roman Empire) or God Himself as the authority for establishing their constitutions and kings must ask what it means today. We fear the whole globe may have to be re-negotiated. Indeed, it does -- it is happening. Books challenging religions are right there alongside those challenging the continued existence of our nation.

Not just our religion and our nation are frail, but also the actual ground on which all human nations and religions are built. Quite aside from church and government, science is saying that human life is endangered by our constant erosion of the environment. Bird flu, the disappearances of frogs and bees, chemical contamination of Inuit breast milk, the drowning of polar bears -- there seems to be no safe haven. BB’s are being put on the scale daily and we have no way to know which one will be the tipping point that dumps us off, but we suspect it won’t take many more. If Darwinian fittingness for life is based on intelligence and self-discipline, then we’re in big trouble.

We need depictions of the new reality that are so convincing that we will feel that we’re “seeing” the truth in a compelling vision that will change our behavior. The problem that Blackfeet, a microcosm of this dilemma, struggle with in their subset of this challenge is (as in the larger world) two-fold: one is the conflict among themselves and the other is dissonance and opposition outside of themselves. Inside, there is the same old push/pull between “full-blood identified” -- that is, people who claim entitlement because of their privileged provenance as descendants of the original tribal groups -- and “progress identified” who accept at least some degree of assimilation in the interest of economics and politics. Both are desperate for control in the interest of self-preservation, even willing to sacrifice the reservation if it will mean the survival of their own sub-group.

Outside, several ideas of who Indians are govern this nation’s tolerance and support for reservations. One is the romantic, usually educated (not always), liberal (not always) persons who believe that Indians are “natural” and therefore in some way more innocent and better than other people. (This plays into the “full-blood” ideas and reinforces them.)

At the other extreme is the remnant who still believe that Indians are degenerates, dragged down by primitiveness, alcoholism, and lack of education. (The extreme of the extreme was the early idea that Indians were a kind of animal. Now we are forced to admit that we are all animals.) This racist remnant is a component of those who date their own prosperity from ancestors who grabbed Indian land, grass, timber, gold or whatever. (If you want to hear examples, bring up the topic of irrigation in Valier. I think the locals themselves are sometimes a little shocked by what they say without thinking.)

In the middle are a lot of people (including a lot of Indians) who are confused about just how to think of tribes, reservations, entitlements, privilege, sovereignty and so on. How can we think about Indian rights when we aren’t even sure about our own? Certainly there is a growing governmental tendency to flatten everyone out into a giant database: prevented from crossing the border without identification, defined by income level, discarded if nonproductive, separated from family.

One of the genius safeguards of our nation is that the states themselves as entities, are capable of rising up and opposing such tendencies. Montana just rejected the idea of a fancy high-tech universal ID card. The federal revenge is to impose the need for a passport to cross the border, a requirement that will hurt the entire High-Line economy. At the very same moment, the Montana tribes were pleased that their tribal ID cards will be accepted by the state, as valid as the driver’s licenses that have become state passports.

In the next few days a television show will propose an enduringly transcendent work of history that shaped many minds about Indians: “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” by Dee Brown. It’s an account of the Clearance of the Prairies for Euro-homesteaders, revealing how many “battles” were simply massacres of Indians. Not every small fact in it is true (at least not for the Blackfeet), but the shift of attitude swept the hearts of many people. The irony of bringing this to the TV (and then the DVD) is that the producers believed they couldn’t make it acceptable to a contemporary American audience without introducing white and white-assimilated characters who are not in the nonfiction book. Clearly they are reaching for the conciliatory tone of the earlier “Into the West.”

But we need something more, something so intense that it will speak to everyone everywhere. One talent of the dramatist and prose fiction writer is to stage the conflicts, that is, to so isolate or exaggerate one or more of the conflicting elements that it upsets the status quo of the drama's beginning and begins its drive toward another status, tragic, comic, or some rich combination of them. The bliss of the audience or readers is to get swept up in this two- or thirty-hour transfiguration in such a way that our own reality is enriched.

This depiction is not enough, but it might prepare the way.