Saturday, November 30, 2013

CALLING OUT WRITING IS AN ACT OF LOVE

Obama's speech script

No one can really teach writing.  One “evokes” it.  One is a “writing-caller.”  One doesn’t say,  “do it this way” but rather considers possibilities.  The criterion that matters is NOT correctness but rather what it -- in turn -- calls out of the reader.  It could be dismay.  It might be admiration.  Maybe undying love.


I like to mix languages, which is a little risky, but most of my early vocabulary came from reading and puzzling out the meaning via context.  I pronounced words in peculiar ways. I wasn’t always old enough with enough knowledge to understand.  Anya Seton  (Ernest Thompson Seton’s daughter) wrote historical novels about mad passionate love affairs that were read in a social atmosphere that would never tolerate the kind of explicit stuff that’s in my ladylike cousins’ beloved historical time-traveler novel series, "Highlander".  (The author is a biologist and uses her knowledge!)  So Seton had to do a bit of metaphorical suggesting:  the hero carries off his red-headed prize to the bed-chamber.  The next morning she has strange red marks on her breasts.  I figured they were bed bug bites.  Castles are so unsanitary.

The real secret to writing is that it’s not about the words:  it’s about the thinking and envisioning and sort of mental diagramming that comes ahead of time, accumulating until it really NEEDS to come out.  It’s the “foreplay.”  It’s the teasing.  It’s the engaging with the subject matter.  And always keeping an eye out for the voyeur who is trying to understand -- you can make it tough for them or easy for them.  Depends on the audience.  The audience -- maybe an invented one -- shouldn’t have control, but on the other hand, a really good reader can pull things up through the writer that were always spooled in his or her guts, waiting for the right understander.

Grammar is only a tool.  Few kids old enough to attend any level of school have NOT internalized the basics or we couldn’t understand them.  Nouns are names, verbs are actions -- that’s the coupling that everything else revolves around.  Adjectives stick to the fronts of nouns in English, the backs of nouns in other languages.  Adverbs can go anyplace.  Move ‘em around -- see what happens.  Phrases and clauses obey the same rules.  Memorize the prepositions -- it’s sort of fun.   

Because of working on the computer instead of the typewriter, I bold all the names of people the first time I use them in a post, because I know that some people will be wanting to google the name or check it some other way and it will be easier for their eye to find again if it’s bold.  I italicize titles for something like the same reason.  But I also like to use it to separate fact from fiction, thoughts and quotes, like that.  All tools.  Underlining, colored fonts.  I would love to have a computer tool that would let me insert automatically triggered music -- I know it exists: I just don’t want to take the time and money to find it and learn it.  I’m a lazy writer in some ways.  I just link.  But then I could go cross-media.


Publishing is nothing but a capital investment in writing, backed up with an advertising and distributing mechanism.  It’s just money.  The idea that publishing is an indicator of worthiness is dead now.  Only in the “sticks” like around here do people knee-jerk say,  “Oh, you write?  Well, are you published?”  They mean,  “Is it safe for me to admire?”

But writing shouldn’t be safe, nor should any other kind of media.  Media is about the edge, the growth, the possibility, the potential.  What comes AFTER tablets?  Every kid in the Browning Public Schools on the Blackfeet rez is now issued a tablet.  I hope it doesn’t turn out like the “green” children’s networking computers in Africa given to the kids for free:  the adults stole them.  You don’t have to spell or even keyboard on a tablet.  You can dictate into it, listen to it, draw with it, take photos, compose music.  Speech is a way of capturing and conveying what is happening in the mind and then writing is another level away from that.  Other media are more sensory, more invested with emotion, more immediate.  No media can ever be as powerful as face-to-face hands-on with another person, the vocabulary of touch.
Nevertheless, writing can give precision, it can hold something still for long enough to study it, research it. analyze it.  Proper tools for proper goals, improper tools for improper goals.  Propriety is situational; the protocols for one time and place won’t work in another.  We admire the creator who can explore that -- joining the minuet or throwing a bomb into a mob, as wanted -- maybe as needed.

Censorship is a strange practice if you ask me.  Why prevent people from seeing things they won’t understand anyway?  Why narrow their understanding of what humans can do and be?  Why assume that children should not know about death and sex or the suffering of other children other places?  Surely these days they already know.  What does it do to the censors who sit there and watch, read, think about all the forbidden subjects?   If it has no evil and corrupting effect on them, what makes them so much more able to handle it?  On the other hand, maybe they have become evil and corrupt from watching all this -- can they prove otherwise?

And yet, as a small child who normally had her questions answered, there were things I couldn’t figure out that took on a menacing shadow because adults were disturbed.  My father took me -- maybe three years old -- with him to the wool buying warehouse where he worked.  I had to pee but there were no women working there, no women’s bathroom.  My father took me into the communal bathroom while one of the other men guarded the door.  The row of urinals (the tall kind), so sculptural, so stinky, seized my imagination.  What were they?  Did they have something to do with the sheep?  Everyone pretended they didn’t know what I was talking about.  I dreamt about urinals.  Maybe they were an art form!


Rez kids have a thousand half-understood things shadowing them.  Unexpected reactions, glimpsed tableaus, misunderstood scenes in movies, song lyrics that make no sense.  I’ve been watching “Deadwood,” which I do not admire or even like, but it does have that hallucinatory quality of being half-understood, sometimes deadly and other times slapstick.  (Milch tells his actors to be “operatic,” but then admits he’s never attended an opera.) They didn’t dare take on Native Americans but the Chinese trope does just as well.  Also, whores, though they never even hint at MSM.  (No one says “gay” anymore.  Try to keep up.)  Shakespeare understood all this very well, even fancy language, MSM, cross-dressing, obsession, addiction and all that other fascinating plot material.  No censorship until the Victorian middle class suddenly decided Shakespeare was an icon of education.  The only reason the Bible escaped was that they rarely read it.

Writing that explains all that, writing that denies all that, writing that makes you feel a little strange, writing that confirms exactly what you’ve always believed -- everything has its place on a page, a screen, someone’s back fence, the side of an abandoned warehouse.  Maybe one’s own arm.  

Lately, in a world where men are garlanded with tattoos, the most eloquent writing I’ve seen was simply a straight black line drawn with a ruler down the inside of a young man’s arm, a geometry, a simple principle, written on living human truth.  Not exactly secret, but we don’t normally see the entire length of the underside of a young muscular arm.  I look at that strict plumb black line again and again, “reading” it.  I’ve fallen in love with it.



Friday, November 29, 2013

BIG PROBLEMS: fiction

After a tragic historical story, I thought it was time for a dynamic contemporary story, and since I usually write stories about boys, this one is about girls again.  The paintings I’m using as illustrations are the work of Rob Akey whose website is Robakey.com.  His phone contact is 406-862-7425.  He lives in Whitefish, MT, where he grew up, and generously allowed me to use his paintings.  He writes a blog about his work.
______________

This is not by Rob but by Ed Roberts.  I couldn't find the artist to contact him.

The past week had been almost too much.  Graduation from high school, a successful track season, good grades, but her grandma sick, maybe gonna die.  And this fall she would be going to college if she were accepted, but she hadn’t gotten word yet and she should have by now.  She knew there were many changes coming.

Her grandma was really her great-grandma.  There was a generation of women that was missing in there -- drinking, gambling, falling for bad men -- so that her great-grandma had raised her mother and her mother would only say about her mother and aunties,  “They thought they were squaws.”  Then she’d clamp her jaw shut and say no more, except that her eyes said, “You will NOT think you are anything but proud and successful!”


It was a lot to carry, but if there was anything she’d learned from track, it was that she could run her troubles off, especially early in the day like it was right now, just barely light enough to see the road on this clear June morning.  This was her favorite place to run because it was along the east front of the Rockies where for millennia people and animals had moved in the rain shadow that let grass predominate over trees.


It was even too early for traffic but not too early for a meadowlark caroling halfway up the bluff on her left.  Then there was a big dark shape ahead of her and for a minute she thought it was a pickup, but it was an animal.  In fact, it was a bull buffalo!


It it had been white, she’d have thought she was having a vision, but it was a plain brown bull buffalo, the kind that occasionally plagued the keepers of the tribal herd by wandering off, as likely to plow through the fence as not.  She tried to remember what one was supposed to do when encountering a buffalo.  If it were black bear, she should stand her ground but not stare; if it were a cougar, she should puff up, yell and act aggressive; if it were a grizz, she should drop, roll up in a ball and pray.  Although, she remembered a boy telling her that when he met a bear, he sang his bear song and the bear just went on its way.  She didn’t know any buffalo songs.

If she could have thought of an honor song, she’d have sung that, but her brain was only playing a silly kid song from the Black Lodge singers:  “Mighty Mouse.”  Her small cousins had picked it up and went around chanting,  “Is it a bird?  NO!  Is it a plane?  NO!  Omigosh, it’s Mighty Mouse.”  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBcu6Gc5sCU

Or in this case, mighty bull.  “Omigosh, it’s Mighty Bull!”  Mighty Meat?  Her crazy brain went off on a thought about how good the buffalo burgers were last Indian Days and the bull gave a great whooshing whuff, as though it could read her mind.

They just stood there eyeing each other.   Her senses sharpened by adrenaline, she noted that the bull’s cleft hooves overlapped just slightly, the inside over the outside.  She saw that his shoulder height was a good two feet taller than she was though she was a very tall girl.  When he licked his nose to get it wet so he could smell better, she saw that his tongue was purple.  She could smell him and guessed that he smelled the way a buffalo should smell. How else?  He smelled BIG.  But looking at him head-on, once a person looked down the long sides behind his massive furry head, his sides were lean -- not square like a cow bred for meat and shaped like a dining room table.  WHUFFF!  Oh, sorry.

Maybe she should just talk to this animal, in case he were a medicine bull, stumiksahtosee.  “Mister Bull, I respect you and I don’t know how much power you have, but I wonder if you could help my grandmother ?  She is a Blackfeet speaker and would be able to speak to you much better than I can.”  Maybe she was being superstitious, but what could it hurt?  She had a lot of little superstitions about winning at track.

The bull was not wetting the earth with urine or drooling or pawing in the dust of the road.  Those were all good signs, or lack of signs, so maybe the rutting season wasn’t underway yet.  July, wasn't it?  In July?   The bull seemed to nod -- crazy!  She knew that animals could tell female humans from male humans, but what were the implications?  Would it be better if the bull thought of her as female?  Probably.  Less likely to want to fight -- after all, testosterone is about the same in every mammal.  But, well -- being a bull buffalo's girl friend . . .  uh, no.

“I respect you and I honor you for being our source of life and shelter for so many millennia.”  The bull was watching her closely but he swung his massive head back and forth a little, as though favoring one eye and then the other.  His wet nose wrinkled and he made a noise like a pig, grunting.  She couldn’t help giggling.

Then, slowly, the bull turned aside into the barrow pit, walked up to the five foot fence, leapt over it as gracefully as an English thoroughbred horse in a fox hunt, and marched straight up the steep bluff as though it were level ground.  She saw that a coyote had been watching from halfway up.  “Too bad, you dog!  No stomped carrion this morning!”  

Newly energized, she resumed running along the road, and saw that the coyote was running along parallel to her over in the field.  When it sat down, panting, she looked back at the top of the bluff and there was the bull, watching her moving along.  She slung her arms into the air, a victory sign.

There really had been more of a communication than a competition, but her head had cleared.  Whatever happened now, grandmother or college or boyfriends or a summer job -- she could deal with it.  How could any problem be bigger than a bull buffalo?



Thursday, November 28, 2013

WHAT HAPPENED


Now that I’m dead it’s much easier to understand what happened.  Time is changed after you die.  It’s like water and you can swim in it, so that it goes forward and backwards and has waves in it but no temperature.  It was night time, the coldest part of a January night before there was any light yet and the trees groan and pop.  I was glad to be under the buffalo robes between my mother and father.  I dreamt the horses were running so the ground shook and then it was true, but they were not our horses because there was jingling and the creaking of leather.  Then the shooting began.

My father grabbed me up in his arms, and my mother scrabbled quickly to find the Peace Paper that would tell soldiers to leave us alone.   She had made a little case for it that hung with the Pipe Bundle on a tripod. She pushed it into my father’s hand, between his hand and me where he held me against his chest.  As he stepped out of the lodge, there was a whispering sound as the bullet pierced through the paper.  Then I felt it go through me -- between ribs, through my lungs and then I couldn’t breathe.  My father made a sound I can’t describe and fell.  Then I heard my mother give a sound, the sound of her life leaving her.   Not quite a cry. It was too fast to understand.

I only lived a little while with the big dark horses rushing back and forth and the men’s voices shouting at each other.  Not our men, who were away hunting, but those white men all muffled up in heavy coats and hats pulled down but I could see that there were stripes down the sides of their legs.  Their guns exploded and their sabers flashed.  Panting of horses and men showed as pale vapor in light from fires set by the soldiers.

Our people, women and children and old people, were quiet.  They didn’t cry out or shout because that would attract the attention of the nearest soldiers.  They saved all their breath for running, dodging into shadows and through brush, pulling and carrying children.  It was all over in minutes.


Then I lay on my father’s body, which was still warm, though I was cooling myself, while the soldiers went on burning the lodges even if there were people inside, the people who had smallpox and were too weak to escape.  Lying there dead with my eyes open, it wasn’t until the sun came up that I could see the blood on the snow, just dark smears until there was enough light to show red.  At first the light was silver except for the blood and the charred things, but then it warmed to golden and the sky cleared to blue, such a blue.  By then the cavalry was gone.  Everything was silent.  Charred lodgepoles still fumed and flickered soundlessly, rigid triangles over the black remains heaped inside and out.

From far away came singing.  The People came walking in a long procession, all the People who had died so many ways but were still somehow moving through time because there was no time now, just the place, and we were all together as a tribe.  We newly dead rose.  I was happy to be walking between my mother and father.  The snow was sand under our feet and drifts were sarvisberry bushes in bloom.
________


Maybe you’ve figured out that this is an experiment to see if I could summon up a word picture of the Baker Massacre that was new.  Usually battles are a man-thing with a lot of emphasis on who dominated, who had to submit.  So I thought of the most unlikely point of view:  a girl, a girl who is already dead, like the narrating heroine of “The Lovely Bones”.  It’s known that Heavy Runner was shot while holding up his letter of protection and that the same bullet killed the daughter in his arms, so that’s where I started.

One of my premises is that death, once you cross over, is not painful but rather a kind of bemusement, transparent but not agitated -- “swimming.”  It’s a strange phenomenon that understating something horrific can be more powerful than the gory details.

The librarian at BCC said that they were still having to address the problem of students with weak writing skills.  They’re not stupid -- all of them can speak eloquently -- but somehow there’s something about writing that makes their brains go flat.  Partly it’s because they don’t read any more than is strictly necessary, but there’s something more.  I think it’s because they haven’t had the experience of falling through the words into another world, what some people call “immersive.”  It’s like an addiction.  What they read doesn’t “hook” them.  How can it when it’s not about them?  There are exceptions. 

In this story I tried the trick Jim Welch used at the end of “Fool’s Crow” which was also about the Baker Massacre.  Instead of letting it end on horror and injustice, he summons up a vision of the People traveling on with their travois and dogs into some protected place where the past can continue to unspool.  

This is not just an invention of his own.  When someone on the rez has a close brush with death, like being in a car accident that leaves them suffering in a snowbank all night before they are found, they will often report that this procession of All the People, the Nitzitahpi, passed by them and that they tried to join it.  They will say that their grandmother, the most recent family member to die, was at the end and when they tried to go with her, she turned and made them go back to Life, even using a quirt to beat them into turning back -- because the suffering want to go with their Tribe but they shouldn't unless it's time.  It’s an illustration of the essential truth that to tribal people it is the survival of the tribe that counts more than any individual, which is why speaking the language -- the main marker of the tribe -- is so crucial.  But an individual has a story, too.

Some people, immersion readers, will not want to know the things I’ve just told about how and why I wrote this little piece.  They’re the same people who never want to know how movies and sausages are made -- they cling to their illusion.  But it’s like that thing about being inside the circle and outside the circle:  inside, the illusion is strong and convincing; outside, it’s clear that it was conjured and can be summoned.  There's skill to it.  The true writer and the stronger power is to be able to call up the circle, but then also to cross its boundary and inhabit a dream.  Dreams are also real.

Where it really happened




Wednesday, November 27, 2013

SQUANTO DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE




Squanto, whose real name was Tisquantum, was the inventor of “tisquantum physics,” which premises that everything is relative, especially all one’s relatives, who are always around if there’s a feast but not so much in times of need.  (I’m kidding.)  He crossed the Atlantic four times without dying of a European disease which is better than usual.  He kept getting abducted by various Euros and at the end of his life was for sale for twenty pounds, which is about forty dollars today (unadjusted), which (also today) is about the price of a little boy on the world market.  I am not kidding.  Even the Great Falls Tribune admits it.  You could read all about it on that eminent source of information Wikipedia, although I have to admit that the Wikipedia is very weak on accurate Native American information since it’s mostly written by know-it-all youngish white men from the East Coast of America.

The clergy who sometimes owned Squanto assured him that Jesus loved him so long as he was obedient and they taught him English though few of them learned Patuxet.  (They still talk funny over there on the East Coast and in Europe.)  He lived to be thirty, acting as a peacemaker among tribes, and died rather mysteriously, possibly poisoned by Waupanoags but not with polonium.  (No one had an umbrella to poke him.)  At least he’s famous.

But I’m grateful not to be Squanto, not to be famous, and not to own an umbrella.  I’m grateful to be me, to be here, to have a lot of books and too many cats, but none of it was my doing, really.  It just happened.

I ran my limited knowledge of Squanto past the clerk at the gas station, who is actually an Amskapi Pikuni scholar.  He said he knew all about Squanto, so nevermind telling him anything, and anyway, there have only been two polonium deaths.  (I’m betting he doesn’t own an umbrella.)  We talked about a few other issues, too, like whether there is no word for goodbye in Blackfeet.  He says there is but it’s a bit of a circumlocution, like “not-hello.”  I really like this guy but I don’t buy much gas so I never get to talk to him as much as I want to.  He’s a type not much known or appreciated, but not unlike Squanto, except that he belongs to himself.





Yesterday a scholar referred to me another scholar’s question about a Sixties writer who won big prizes by writing a faux journal patronizing a local Amskapi Pikuni famous for being very old.  In those days it was very “cutting edge” to call the book about this old man “Piegan.”  (Some kids have been troubled because they thought it was the same as “pagan.”  Not.)  The writer, who is dead now, went mad, was confined for a while in Texas, then stumbled drunk through the streets of a minor city until he died.  Never wrote another book. He was a bad man in many ways.  When he came around, Bob Scriver locked himself in the shop and pretended he wasn’t there.  Yet people still think the book is reliable.  

Since this guy used our shop phone to call his editor, always claiming to reverse the charges though I don’t think he ever did (this was before calling cards), I stuck my ears out to see what I could learn.  Mostly what I learned was that his editor (in those days people had editors instead of agents and the publisher paid them instead of the writer paying them) was demanding that he write things more like what people expected to know about Indians.  He had a tendency to write about himself in self-flattering ways, though the book opens with him forcing open a window and climbing into the old man's the empty house, on grounds that they were expecting him and would want him to do that.  I think they were trying to do the same thing Bob did, but forgot to lock that particular window.  Anyway, this semi-scholar wanted to know where this author’s papers were.  As if he HAD papers and as if a drunken madman would put them in a safe place.

Anyway, the point is that a white man forcing himself into the lives of tribal people -- whether or not they are expected -- is no longer a viable concept.  Even book editors sort of realize that.  But then what about my book, “Heartbreak Butte,” about the two years I spent teaching there?   (It’s online.  www.heartbreakbutte.blogspot.com )  What about my Blackfeet name and what about my teasing of the gas station cashier?

The other day I got an email asking for contact with a renegade anthropologist who was also around here in the Sixties.  This inquiry came from Cornwall, England, where the anthro (uncredentialed) grew up with the inquirer, who had some connections with Sioux country, entirely honorable, and assumed that his renegade friend was the same.  Not.  The renegade had become an artifact dealer/stealer and spent time incarcerated for it.  He even stole from white people.  Bob should have locked the door.



On the way to Darrell Kipp’s funeral mass, I stopped in at the Blackfeet Community College library which has come a looooong way, baby.  Most recently, they just finished cataloguing the acquisition of an outstanding collection of books about Indians that was given them by Bob Doerk, a deceased Air Force lieutenant colonel, who then became a banker, and, in addition, a Lewis and Clark and fur trapper aficionado, which led him into an admiration of the Amskapi Pikuni (Blackfeet).  He was tall, intelligent, patient, and capable of managing a dignified interface with the tribe itself.  It’s a huge collection of books, all of them significant and timely.  Not enough of them by Blackfeet themselves.  It takes more time to build authors than it does to build structures.   http://library.bfcc.edu/resources.php  

Bob Doerk

Doerk was one of the most faithful attenders at Darrell Kipp’s and Rosalyn LaPier’s August Piegan Institute seminars.  He was always interested, comprehending, and diplomatic.  That was better than myself, who holds grudges, pays off old offenses, and pins people to the wall -- which defeated the purpose of the seminars.  The seminars were supposed to dissolve some of the local animosity and urge appreciation.  Doerk was in line with that goal.  His library was a valuable gift since a book these days (including the one I wrote about Bob Scriver) often sells for about forty dollars, or as much as a small trafficked boy, who would be a lot more trouble but a worthy recipient of care and affection.

Some people on Thanksgiving will express gratitude for living in a civilized country, for being good religious folk, for having a nice income and owning in a pleasant house, for living in an advanced technological world where one can visit with a man who is in Cornwall and have a scholarly discussion with a gas station attendant.  I don’t think about turkeys much.  I think about that little boy quite a lot.  And also the seven-year-old grandfather of Darrell Kipp who escaped a winter massacre with only his life but made Darrell possible as well as all the boys and girls inspired by Piegan Institute.  It’s not some romantic fantasy -- it’s reality.  Well, at least as real as I can manage today.





  


Tuesday, November 26, 2013

THE POVERTY LINE


What IS official poverty in the United States?  After considerable digging, which mostly revealed how many people administering Social Security and other “help” programs know nothing at all about what they are administering, it appears that defining “poverty” comes from a set of guidelines that are themselves determined by poverty “thresholds” which were originally defined by the Department of Agriculture by determining the cost of four “market baskets” for diets of people on farms and off farms, ranging from poor to superior.  

At the time these four levels of diet were arbitrarily defined, there was no allowance for contemporary nutrition standards, nothing about ethnic differences, nor about diets for chronic diseases, nor about processed foods. Far more people at the time lived on farms because the post-WWII migration to the cities was still in early stages.  Farm crops were not so involved with chemicals or genetic tinkering, nor were they so industrialized.  There was as much concern about farm income as about the hunger of people.  There was no allowance for how food shopping is affected by long driving distances to market sources or ghettoes where food prices are artificially high for captive consumers.  The shift of the labor market from basic work to specialized and computer jobs had not happened yet.

Thresholds and guidelines are renegotiated constantly, so that a person can be moved in and out of categories because of politically desirable standards based on non-personal characteristics like the current national resentment of any kind of social safety net.  The same income might be on either side of the cut-off line: sometimes at 120%, sometimes at 90% of the poverty threshold.   http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/progdesc/sspus/appenv.pdf

Federal Poverty Guidelines  (abridged):    “Some programs use the poverty guidelines as only one of several eligibility criteria, or apply a modification of the guidelines. For example, the eligibility level may be set at 130% or 185% of the guidelines rather than 100%. Other programs, although not using the guidelines as a criterion of individual eligibility, use them for the purpose of targeting assistance or services. The guidelines become effective on the date they are published in the Federal Register (unless an office administering a program using the guidelines specifies a different effective date for that particular program) and remain in effect until the next update is issued.”

No wonder that none of the multitude of people trying to answer questions on government hotlines or trying to sell me insurance had any idea what it meant that in 2011 I was moved from Level 4 to Level 1, or what the “levels” themselves meant.  Which "market basket" was a plunked into?  Is 4 the top or is 1 the top?


Poverty guidelines, or percentage multiples of them, are used as an eligibility criterion by a number of Federal programs, including the following:

1. Department of Health and Human Services
2. Community Services Block Grant
3. Head Start
4.  Low-Income Home Energy Assistance 
5.  Hill-Burton Uncompensated Services Program  (in connection with previous medical facilities construction and modernization assistance to hospitals or other health care facilities)
6. AIDS Drug Reimbursements (under Title II of the Ryan White Act)
7. Medicaid (The guidelines are used only for certain parts of Medicaid; however, the rest of the program — which probably still accounts for a majority of Medicaid eligibility determinations — does not use the poverty guidelines.)
8.  Department of Agriculture
9.  Food Stamps
10.  Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)
11.  National School Lunch Program School Breakfast Program
12.  Child and Adult Care Food Program Special Milk Program for Children
13.  Department of Energy Weatherization Assistance for Low-Income Persons
14.  Department of Labor
15.  Job Corps
16.  Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers
17.  Native American Employment and Training Programs 
18.  Senior Community Service Employment Program Corporation for National Service
19.  Foster Grandparent Program Senior Companion Program
20.  Legal Services Corporation. Legal services for the poor

The following Federal programs do NOT use the poverty guide-lines in determining eligibility:

Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
Supplemental Security Income
Social Services Block Grant
Department of Housing and Urban Development’s means-tested housing assistance programs

The article at the following url is very enlightening.  It shows that the original thinking came out of the Great Depression and was then somewhat revised for the purpose of the Johnson War on Poverty.  http://www.ssa.gov/history/fisheronpoverty.html

The "generally accepted" standards of adequacy for food that Mollie Orshansky used in developing the original “thresholds” were the food plans prepared by the Department of Agriculture.   With family roots in the Ukraine, Oshansky (b. 1915 in the US) was one of six children who were raised in the Bronx.  This family information was sometimes used in an attempt to discredit her standards so the poverty level could be raised.  In fact, a West Wing television series plot aired November 21, 2001, was called “The Indians in the Lobby” and was based on a story by Allison Abner that addressed the issue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt0tvWSbirY  is a short clip of Abner in person.  She is now involved in the issue of child sex trafficking.  All these issues are inter-related.


So many aspects of contemporary society demand a global re-thinking.  There is a movement away from statistics and politically-controlled issues towards practicalities.  Recently I saw a list -- which would not be universal, but an excellent beginning -- of questions for someone trying to determine poverty levels:  

1.  Do you have a warm winter coat?
2.  Do you ever have to miss a meal or go to bed hungry?
3.  Must you choose between medicines and food?
4.  Can you easily get to a store for your necessities?
5.  Do you always have clean underwear?
6.  Is your sleeping arrangement comfortable and safe enough for eight hours of sleep?
7.  Are your shoes comfortable?
8.  Do you eat the school-provided foods?
9.  Are you ever too cold/too hot?
10.   Can you afford public transportation?

I would add things like:

Do you have a library card?
Do you own any books of your own?
Can you afford a pet?
Can you afford to go out for sports?  Or attend games?

This list is mostly for school children.  A list for older people might include things like whether there is enough money to join the local morning circle of coffee-drinkers or enough money for proper hair care.  

What people really need in order to have an endurable life is not always definable from one group to another.  For some, being gregarious is basic; for others, solitude is far more important.  Some wish to be around children, others want to be away from noise and mess.  The costs will differ.  Now, of course, we’re looking at a technological divide, which is a HUGE leap in the necessary assets, though libraries with computers and personal smart phones are taking up some slack, even in the Third World which is partly internal to the USA. 

I figure that if all else fails, I’ll get to Mexico somehow, look for a village with clean water, and never wear shoes again.  But what about the cats?

If you have Netflix, here's the code for the West Wing episode in question.
http://movies.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70157152&trkid=13462769&tctx=6%2C5%2C7edbede4-6803-453b-a60e-79fbbe8d14d4-38806961#MovieId=70157152&EpisodeMovieId=70262134

Monday, November 25, 2013

DARRELL KIPP'S FUNERAL MASS


The day dawned clear and golden with dry highways.  On the way to Browning a coyote crossed the road, searching the willow brush along Two Med creek.  A golden eagle -- I am not making this up -- flew along with me for a few miles at Antenna Hill and, just before I got to Browning, a raven was lingering along the way.  In Browning the dog people -- all of them variations on huskies and shepherds if not wolves -- rushed out to challenge my little pickiup and then finally a Newfoundland the same size as the vehicle.  The rest of the animal life was the same old groups of cows and horses.


Near Cuts Wood School, where Darrell’s body had been through Sunday, cars were everywhere, some of them probably parked overnight after the Nanamska (Bundle Keepers) ceremonies on Sunday that GG Kipp guided.  The Catholic mass was scheduled for eleven AM but people were taking seats by ten AM.  The basement held a megascreen relay for the overflow.  

I sat in my usual place: the back pew.  On one side was Sandra Watts, tribal attorney who got her law education in Oregon with my cousins' husbands, and on the other was an extremely ancient woman who explained that her name was “Bubbles” by pantomiming the juggling of balloon-sized bubbles.  In front of me was Dorothy Still Smoking, who teamed with Darrell to create the Piegan Institute, even kept Darrell moving through some tough times.  (He was not the only one with ideas.)  And on the other hand, Donna Douglas (I don’t know her married name), the cheerful and competent granddaughter of Vina Chattin for whom one of the elementary schools is named.  Donna’s hair is white now, but she does not dye it fire-engine red as her grandmother did.

King Kuka’s Roualt-style chunked-stained-glass Stations of the Cross glowed dramatically in the bright sun, tinting the people primary colors.  We were startled to realize that one young woman with green hair that we assumed was stained by colored light, really DID have green hair!  Most of the people were adults.  Maybe the babies were downstairs.  

Many boys, some pre-teens, all dignified, scrubbed, braided and attentive, were standing to spare more seats for older folks.  A few of them were drummers for an honor song.  I suspect they all had close ties to Cuts Wood School, all devoted to Darrell Kipp if not related.  (Darrell always joked Kipps were numerous as tin cans on the landscape.)  They acted as orderlies in the ceremony, bringing forward the wine and  communion wafers.

Father Ed had an emotionally tough job because over the past years Darrell and his wife, Roberta, had become more and more closely dedicated to church matters, a support to this priest who once lamented,  “I came here hoping to lead the people to renewal and instead all I do is bury teenagers.”  Today he commemorated a 69-year-old man who had cut trail for decades, renewal after renewal.  At many points in Darrell’s life he barely squeaked through, but very few people had much awareness of that.  He used a quiet network of people he thought of as educated and aware, as well as several circles of people who were great jokers, sometimes in rough ways. 

Charlie Farmer, for instance, visited Darrell in hospital during the last days, pretending to ask to inherit his pickup.  When Darrell improved a few days later, Charlie pretended to be disappointed that he would have to give the pickup back.  Darrell used Charlie as a kind of lieutenant and co-conspirator, giving him various titles and responsibilities.  There was a swimming pool they could see from the original Moccasin Flats school but it was full of blown-in dirt and a couple of dead dogs.  Charlie nagged to re-activate it until finally they hired a backhoe, gave the dogs proper burial (since all Browning dogs are enrolled in the tribe), and brought in a squad of boys with borrowed shovels to shift the dirt out from corners.  In their practical nepotistic way, they hired a couple of Kipps who could swim to be lifeguards and called a plumber to see about water.  (Alas, no Kipp is a plumber.) 

The water treatment shed turned out to have been used to store 200 pounds of “Cap’n Crunch” breakfast food that had been donated by the company because the boxes were mislabeled.  (One of Darrell’s peeves was the practice of giving aged-out, broken, useless things in “charity.”  Another of the stories about him was that once when he went to Blackfeet Community College to teach, he found most of the desks damaged -- they had been that way for months -- and simply pitched them all out the door.)  Charlie finally gave the Cap’n Crunch to Vic Connelly and the rumor was that he used it to wean his calves.  They act as though they’re on a sugar high anyway.  Charlie talked a long time, telling one story after another. 


The second speaker was a man from the Flathead whom I didn’t know.  He was a fine speaker and part of the global academic context.  Hawaiian indigenous language speakers were deeply involved with Piegan Institute.  Over and over they reassured Cuts Wood teachers faced with crisis that they had confronted the same thing and told them what would work.  One of the recurrent problems was people who tried to exploit the school for their own uses and even poisoned relationships.  The Hawaiians said,  “Be tough.  Throw ‘em out!”  So they did.   Jim Thorpe’s daughter was an advisor.  The Canadian Blackfoot people were vital, esp. Shirley Crow Shoe.


Darrell’s father was a hard worker on the railroad who in advanced age sat by the window all day looking at the Rockies.   Darrell wrote a poem about it.  When he was a soldier in Korea, he used his free time to learn Korean and startled a South Korean trade group that came to visit the rez by greeting them in their language.  Words were his weapons.  Make that “tools.”


Mothers, esp. ones mindful of massacre and world war, tend to spoil their sons in order to keep them close and safe. Darrell broke away early, but then in late adulthood came back to help his parents.  He promised he would never put his mother in a nursing home and he didn’t.  Roberta and he talked for a long time to understand what they were doing, which was one of the secrets of their success as a relationship.  Both took care of their parents right up to death.  Darrell never made a secret of his three brothers who died of alcoholism and violence.  Donald remains, the lone brother.  Geraldine, his quiet conscientious sister, was the office manager at Cuts Wood.  There was never a pretense that Piegan Institute was federal or tribal, neither in terms of funding or of control.

Darren is following that pattern.  He has all the legal control and training experience he needs to keep the school operating.  The restraint and equanimity may be a little harder to come by for a young man who succeeded in keeping himself separate from a powerful father by becoming a videographer in his own right.  Roberta is relatively young, still beautiful, and has a strong support group she earned as her own when she formed a study circle focused on earning distance-learning master’s degrees.  They'll be okay.

At one time Darrell had a commune-style fantasy about all his beloved friends and family living in an old-time village where they could visit each other in the classic sit-by-the-fire way to smoke and drink a little.  This picture didn’t include movie stars or Montana big shots and I didn’t spot any at the Mass.  We don’t need them.

The thing of it is, Darrell just doesn’t feel dead.  I found myself talking to him as I drove back across the dun fields.  The railroad was pausing for some reason -- first a string of coal cars, then a string of oil tankers, and finally a line of Christmas presents from China.   The frozen sloughs along the road show extra-tall muskrat midden-houses.  The waterfowl have gone on ahead. It will be years, if ever, for those who knew Darrell to stop turning, expecting to see him right alongside.

Tom Saubert is the artist.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

A BRIEF DESKTOP CONCERT FOR APENAKIO PETA (Morning Eagle)






“A Native American Prayer”  Nolan Schmit


“Bird Songs”  Louis Ballard


“Ojibwe Prayer”


Magic of Rebirth/Wisdom of the Eagles 



Summer Sun, Winter Moon



This is what Darrell has meant to his students.