CLUTCHING GRIEF

Yesterday I got an indignant comment about an old blog in which I talked about a local woman, someone I knew, whose obituary had been in the paper. I had used it as a springboard for a discussion of Virginia Wolff’s novel about Mrs. Dalloway. The commenter was a great-granddaughter who was sure that I had copied a private letter she had written about her grandmother and who said I should not have written anything about “that other woman” in the same piece. I think it was a young woman writing and that she didn’t know who either Virginia Wolff or Mrs. Dalloway was. The reaction is not unusual on the rez, though I’m also likely to get a comment (and did earlier on this same post) that thanks me for remembering the person.

Emotions about beloved dead relatives, esp. the ones that are old-timey (though this woman was not), are so intense that they are like black holes in space, trying to pull everything into them until the density somehow makes the whole planet stop. They want to suck every detail of the person into themselves and forbid anyone else -- even family -- from knowing anything or ever bringing up the name. They are a total knot of pain and denial. They make themselves a hoard of information, objects, relationships, in a belatedly protective way.

The more usual and, one presumes, healthier reaction is to talk about the person, share photos, be pleased to discover a new person who knew them, share stories, laugh and cry. When grief gets too heavy, too thick, too indescribable, it sits on the heart like a big black ball-bearing, crushing the muscle and stopping the blood.

Grief groups are often organized on this rez. When I was at the Junior High in 1988-89, the counselor, Grant Barnard, organized one. He invited me to participate, I think because he knew I’d been a minister. Neither of us really understood how much I needed a grief group myself. (Bob had not died yet -- it was more a matter of the death of aspirations.) What struck me then was how mixed with other emotions the grief was. Mostly it was thick with rage, sometimes unresolved anger at the dead person. But because these were young people, much of the emotion was despair, that paralyzer. They had no sense that it would end. They felt that healing was a betrayal.

At that first attempt at talking in a group, superstition in the community tried to make it stop, for fear that it would CAUSE death, that it would call back ghosts. Blackfeet have always had that feeling. Avoidance has sometimes served them well, as in the case of smallpox epidemics. Or in grizzly country. When Mr. Barnard went on to try to discuss drug use and sex, the parents drove him out. Sometimes I think the hills of the reservations must be piled with the sprawled bodies of dead messengers no one wanted to hear from.

I try to avoid the conventional moral dimensions of things, or if I MUST look at it, I try to define the specific context and principles of the morality involved, not just that of the participants in the situation but also in a sort of meta-moral way, usually with a utilitarian bias. What are the consequences? But the po-mo crowd likes rule-morality, esp. in their post-colonial version which is what NA students are likely to run into in university classes or just sitting around in a coffee bar with a lot of hip people who get off on Indians. It’s easier to make rules and then enforce them with a lot of confidence, since you don’t have to think about mitigating circumstances.

So -- all white male educated people are wealthy oppressors. Thus, the slacker in the cafe booth is NOT an oppressor because he’s not wealthy, but his anthropology professor (who is only wealthy by rez standards) is ripping off the poor people by making his living exploiting their heritage. This quickly translates into the idea that if anyone portrays anyone or anything on the rez, they are transgressors. For a while the cultural heritage guy in the tribe was forbidding anyone to take photos of Chief Mountain because it is a sacred mountain and therefore owned by the Blackfeet. An old lady was spreading her opinion that Bob Scriver, by making recognizable portraits of Blackfeet, was “stealing their faces.” These ideas are not just protective grief, but also a determination to wring profit out of their identity. There is a long tradition of paying Native Americans when taking their photo or watching them dance. In fact, some artists and anthropologists also pay.

But that’s not the ONLY way to look at it. Another, older, tribal element is very proud to show off what they value by appearing at ceremonies to signtalk the Lord’s Prayer while wearing white buckskin or, more recently, to pray in Blackfeet and bless those present. The message here is that these ways, specific to a place and time, are still part of the American story, just as much as imported European traditions. They accept pay only to compensate for expenses.

Perhaps it is a subterranean alliance between these two approaches that tries (and succeeds) in suppressing everything negative about Indians. No one is allowed to criticize because it is the same as betrayal! This attitude that criticism is betrayal is alive in the general American population, which uses it to suppress Indian uprisers who wear the American flag on their seat of their pants and pour red paint down Mount Rushmore. The relationship of Native Americans to the great Amalgamated Masses of the United States is ambivalent.

But the scales are easily tipped with money. If at some giveaway ceremony honoring this complaining girl’s great-grandmother, I were to show up and contribute blankets, tobacco, or cash, she would be far less inclined to criticize my blog. Why is grief alleviated by money? I don’t think it’s greed. I think that money is a way of awarding value and that valuing someone is a way of healing shame and anger. But writing about someone is also a way of valuing them. This girl doesn’t know that. She doesn’t value writing. The question at this point is who does?

I wouldn’t dare ask that if I didn’t have an answer. The small Catholic charter school in Browning has been encouraging students to write their family stories. Then they are sent away to be bound into “proper books.” Maybe I should go interview them before someone accuses them of stealing the Blackfeet heritage.