THE IMPERMANENCE OF IMAGES

Blog subjects just come to meet me. I got up early to drive to Cut Bank to get blood glucose strips because I was out of them and discovered they were, too. But I ran into Mary Lynn Lukin in the salad dressing aisle and we had a good conversation about rounding up the photographic records of the past. She was saying how often she would go to visit some of the older folks on the rez and they’d hear about her putting photos on line or in archives. (She says use TIFF, not JPEG, because JPEG’s deteriorate more quickly and here I’ve been using JPEG exclusively!) They sit over their coffee thinking for a few minutes, then go into the back room and bring out a box of old photos -- like a hundred years old -- and dump them out onto the kitchen table regardless of what else is scattered on it. Mary Lynn yelps and rescues them.

Native Americans get emotional whiplash from the twists and turns remembering can take. First around were the artists without cameras, people like Paul Kane, Bodmer and Catlin, who portrayed Indians as accurately as they could -- paraphernalia in great detail -- but never quite got bison right. For a long time then Indians were supposed to forget Indian stuff and just try to be like the whites around them. (Which was only one way for whites to be: after all, cavalry, priests, cattlemen and sheepherders are not exactly typical.) Then, if they put on buckskin parade suits and rode horses around, everyone thought the past was a great thing. The anthros came and wrote down a lot of stuff, took a lot of photos, put them in books, advanced their careers, got a lot of stuff wrong.

There are a lot of photos you never see unless you’re pretty close to Indian families. Indians in bobby sox and sweater sets, riding around in the big cars of the Fifties, the girls all with perms and head scarves. Mom and Dad playing love bird at the kitchen table. These are the people who grew up speaking Blackfeet but gave it up and didn’t teach their children. They thought life would be like in the Small Town Fifties forever more. They swilled Coca Cola, smoked cigarettes, and danced to the juke box. They felt American and played basketball with all their hearts, even the girls. Won, too.

Then the people began to split up: some went city and some went ghetto and some went beatnik and some just stayed home in the little cabin where their grandparents raised them in the foothills. They all took photos, but what people want now are the posed photos of white photographers who were selling re-enactments what was being stamped out just decades earlier.

Last night’s movie was “In the Light of Radiance,” 2001, shown on PBS, available at Netflix, narrated by Peter Coyote and Tantoo Cardinal. It’s about the tension between Native American sacred places and commercial interests like mountain climbing, ski resorts, and gravel pits. This is a genre I mostly see for sale on DVD around here. The photography is gorgeous and there are many references to Mother Earth. Tense but earnest forest rangers talking to naked New Age people.

The resident wise man of the film is Vine Deloria, Jr. (b. 1933 - 2005). A local cinematographer, Darren Kipp, has just finished a video about him. Some people, local and Indian, have already forgotten or never knew who he was. http://blogs.nwic.edu/deloria/ If you’re in doubt this website will help you. You might want to attend the symposium, but if you do or if you want to be a presenter: “Individual presentations may be formal or informal, but in keeping with the spirit of Vine, there will be no PowerPoint or other electronic presentations.” (Big story about the military’s overuse of this in the New York Times today!)

Deloria was actually quite assimilated -- his father and grandfather were Episcopal priests and he himself had both a theology and a law degree, as well as being a Marine. His hat trick was turning everything around and examining the reversal. His most famous book is probably “God Is Red” if not “Custer Died for your Sins.” His formal position was that white civilization was decadent and corrupt, dead on its feet and raiding red civilization in hopes of recovering its vitality. He makes a good case.

Since Bob Scriver’s life (1914-1999) was so entwined with NA lives, I looked through piles of rez photos from the Twenties. Recently I’ve been posting Twenties photos from my own family, the Strachans, at www.swanrivermanitoba.blogspot.com. They aren’t so different. My friend Jim Stebbings was here yesterday. He’s been retrieving historic photos of the St. Louis stockyards where he worked as a kid, cleaning them up and placing them with societies who will presumably protect them and use them for study. There are always two schools of thought about such things: those who want to preserve it all and those who say it’s OVER, dump it. Forget it. Don’t obsess so much.



Both are reacting to the power of photos to SEEM as though they’re telling us something about reality, when in fact they are not, except that time passes quickly and even the photos that seem to have frozen an image are vulnerable. I sit and look at a photo of Louis Plenty Treaty taken as a young man to prove that Blackfeet can successfully grow kitchen gardens. There he is, handsome and strong with his shovel in his hand. And then I look at a photo taken of him in old age to prove that Blackfeet are religious people who attend Christian churches, and there he is, still handsome but now his braids are gray. In fact, he was one of the most serious of the Bundle Keepers and an important leader, but how would you know that? Photos of the ceremony are forbidden and he didn’t write anything that I know of. What did he really think? I never thought of asking him and I doubt he would have told me anything. Photos are but a faint shadow of reality.

And just now the pharmacist called to say that my glucose monitor is obsolete. He can’t get me more strips.