Spontaneous combustion is something that happens because of an interaction of conditions. Like the individuals that the media labels “jihad” which is more accurately a few individuals who use political terms to explode into lethal objections. These incidents get splashed all over: “terror porn.” A new economic alliance of nations along the Pacific coast of the American continents, but only from Mexico south, which will have far more impact on politics, goes quietly unremarked except in certain contexts, like “The Economist” magazine which is part of the reason the latter is considered far more important than “The New York Times.” The Economist recognizes processes, the hydraulics of life, instead of the sensational or the institutional.
I try to follow that same practice when considering even ordinary and taken for granted assumptions that seem real and solid. If you’re a “long reader” rather than a quick hit reader, you’ll know that what I think about includes art, Native Americans, writing (which might or might not include publishing), religion (which might or might not mean institutions), education (which might or might not mean institutions), small prairie towns, natural history, sex and HIV-AIDS. That’s not an exhaustive list, but what pulls them together is that I try to understand them in terms of process, pattern, relationship, echo and metaphor. It’s not a board game -- it’s a dance.
Every gesture, seemingly self-contained, has consequences. So the idea that a vaccine is harmful (which recurs all the time because it seems like an intervention in nature) means that worried parents don’t get their children inoculated and now we have an epidemic of measles that will cost far more in many ways. And the idea that HIV is connected to atypical sex practices (not much attention to the same syringes used for IV drugs that scare parents away from vaccines) means that people assume that only naughty people are at risk -- that being mainstream is a protection, though HIV and Hep C sweep through ordinary populations, swelling and billowing until one can buy at the drugstore a kit for detecting it, as though it were an unwanted pregnancy. Which it is, in a way.
Many admire the claim by the linguist Whorf that the Hopi speak in terms of process instead of object and find it rewarding to speak of “godding” instead of “God.” But then they fail to apply the idea even to Indians. Consider that perhaps there is no such thing as “Indian,” but only “indianing,” a moving process that is as much or more economic as political, very hard to render into institutions like tribes, esp. when the institutional tribe, which was invented by the institutional national government so as to have an entity with which to negotiate, has already evolved far away from the shifting cultural context that defined it as it adapted to prairie or mountain or forest.
Consider Wendy Rose AKA Chiron Khanshendel AKA Bronwen Elizabeth Edwards. She is one of the finest poets working under the rubric “NA writers” but part of her genius is her marginality as an urban Indian Hopi/Miwok. (The Miwok are the origin of Lucas’ Star Wars “Ewoks.” They used to occupy the territory where his studio is built. Their chief is or was Greg Sarris, the writer.) Her father was full-blood Hopi but the Hopi recognize only descent through the mother, as Orthodox Jews do. Since the US government charges each tribe with defining its own membership, Wendy cannot be enrolled. Her best credential is occupying Alcatraz with AIM, but she also has a Ph.D. in anthropology -- but defining her in terms of what she “does” would require a list of a dozen “disciplines.” Hang onto the idea of poetry, the notion that such an art is a relating to the universe that subsumes everything else.
One of her more powerful poems is about “Truganinny,” an indigenous woman who was assumed to be the last of the Tasmanians. Tasmania is a continental shard of Australia in the Pacific, separated long enough ago to evolve unique creatures. Like the maybe-planet Pluto, its classification as continent/not-continent is right on the boundary. Like Wendy. Truganinny, since she was the last -- like Ishi -- was “stuffed.” That is, mounted to look lifelike the same as her husband had been. We don’t protect the first populations -- just the disappearing edge of the past.
I know a lot about taxidermists (taxi or “toxi”=poison + derm= skin) because I was married to one. I’ve spent long winter afternoons turning the ears of trophy animals inside out, because the cartilage is replaced with a piece of plastic. I thought about what those animals heard in life, what I could say to them in death. Why will we kill something, then try to preserve it? In my time with Bob Scriver we came to understand, in a kind of conversion, that we could keep the animals more alive in bronze art than in the actual skins of the animal.
Here’s the end of Wendy Rose’s poem, which expresses the “last” of a kind’s wish to simply disappear:
| Please take my body to the source of night, to the great black desert where Dreaming was born. Put me under the bulk of a mountain or in the distant sea; they will not find me. |
The last defiance of the destruction imposed by the outsider is to resist the saving of one’s own literal skin, which is -- of course -- preserved by the poet, far more effectively than by taxidermy.
I’ve been thinking about Wendy because she left a comment on one of my earlier posts about Native American literature, a slippery category (more even than planets and continents). What is it? Who is it? Who reads it? All the questions she had were about who is entitled to write about or “as” native Americans, but none were about who is entitled to read it. How will it make any money for the author if no one reads it except Native Americans, who are notoriously impoverished non-readers? (Why is that, huh?)
I suggest that native writing -- ALL writing, all ART -- is a spontaneous combustion that flames up under specific circumstances. Bronwen’s transparently comes from claiming to be “Native American” against the rules of her own genetic tribe, a dark place hard as irony. It cannot be forbidden or suppressed. It can become violent as terrorism, though not in terms of flesh. She is what she is, regardless of the label, and I admire her. Not because she is half-Hopi, even if her own tribe won’t admit it, but because she has made her life an action: Indianing, not just enrolled.
I do not admire deadly attacks on the street. But bloody terrorism cannot be forbidden or suppressed. It is not a “thing” but a spontaneous combustion. The social forces of exclusion and deprivation that cause the flaring up must be addressed. Labeling, stigmatizing, jailing, are crude instruments for keeping order because they always fall behind the processes of the bleeding, festering edge.
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