THE TRAIL NARROWS

The urge to leave a record.

This morning I woke with a new plan for spring.  To discard many boxed things I’ve loaded into one You Haul after another, carrying them across the continent because I believed they were important, even valuable.  I come from two lines of hoarders, maternal and paternal, who believed in paper and saved the documentation of the family back far enough that letters from Andersonville have come down to my generation.  (For those who don’t know, Andersonville was the notorious Civil War prison in Georgia where Union soldiers were held under Auschwitz-like conditions.)  

So here’s a list of what I’m going to discard now.

My boxes of old Glacier Reporters, because bound books of them have been given to Blackfeet Community College.  When I started in 1961, there WAS no BCC with a library and the Museum of the Plains Indian had a limited archive that has been raided several times: once to weed out anything that wasn’t relevant to the material culture of the 19th century and once to weed out anything about white people.  In short, politics break through scholarship on the rez.  It's print stuff in an oral culture.  But the people themselves are capable of wrestling with that now.  The Millennials will decide.

I hope they value it as much as the people who constantly come in from outside, determined to squeeze more out of the 19th century.  It’s time for the rez folks to get into the BIA and FBI files.  The descendants of the demonized early whites have already destroyed much of their trader records which were mostly about buying and selling anyway.

I’m just now beginning to reorganize my library of books about Blackfeet and what we used to call “vertical files” of articles and tear-outs.  The death of Darrell Kipp has shaken some of my ideas.  At one point Piegan Institute was supposed to be an archive of scholarship as well as an immersion school.  

I’m putting a list of all my Blackfeet books on prairiemary.blogspot.com, which is taking a while as I add a dozen books at a time.  If you’re looking now, come back in a month.   I don’t think most Blackfeet scholars even know about all of them.  Like university classes, media pieces and published books go over and over the same old worn out stuff and ignore the cutting edges.  Of course, the post-colonial stuff is almost unintelligible and rarely digested.  There’s a great need for translation, esp. the things written in European languages.

I have one four-drawer cabinet and a few scrapbooks of materials about Bob Scriver, but I’ve already discharged my obligation to testify to his life.  The book is “Bronze Inside and Out, A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver.”  The Montana Historical Society has tricked and ignored me, so I do not feel good about giving them anything.  We don’t live on the same planet.

Alvina Krause

A few materials remain in my possession about Alvina Krause (my B43 Acting Class journal, for instance) and have already been offered a home in the Northwestern University archives.  I managed to get an article about her published in the Stanislavsky Studies international journal, for whatever that’s worth.

The materials from my ministry (newsletters, correspondence, pamphlets) seem curiously irrelevant now.  The individual congregations turn over their membership and their focus much more than they realize, but esp. the Montana people — the most ephemeral — have no time, energy or central location interested in these materials.  I’m divided between stuffing them into mailing cartons and sending them to the individual groups or just taking them to the dump.  The denomination and districts are so absorbed by the need to “market” — meaning increase membership and income — that they see nothing of value in the little low-population edges far away from Boston.  They have become an urban phenomenon, or maybe the Unitarians always were.

Aside from that, I think that the UUA and the whole concept of denominations is on its way out — again.  They are luxuries and when low status populations like women and people of color manage to get into the leadership, they are no longer valuable to the old white men who have the money, since their idealism clings to Edwardian British values. 

For a while I saved a lot of material about Cut Bank High School which I intended to digest into a novel about how we destroy our children: the boys by encouraging violent sports, extreme street fighting for betting, and substance abuse; the girls by discarding any who don’t look like movie stars and put out like whores — except for a few destined to be moms sustaining the grudgingly necessary families.  By now none of these forces are undocumented by the media or even unstudied by sociologists.  The destructiveness of American schools is no secret, nor is it unconscious any longer.  Now what I have is redundant.  I liked the kids, so I’ll keep the yearbook.

The family archive on my father’s side rests with my cousins except for the little book I made from photos of all the places the Strachans lived, mostly pretty minimal rural prairie houses.  Everyone is much more comfortable now.  Even my house would count as pretty nice.  Beulah Strachan raised her children in a tarpaper shack.  But that much of the story is told and the other relatives are intent on silence.  I might do an end-run around them to the five emigrant Scots sisters who originally came to America, but it would have to be fiction.  Still, they had very suggestive divergent fates.  There is another writer among their descendants, Kathy Rouzie.

Beulah Swan Finney Strachan, my grandmother

What I will save, burdening my niece Adrienne Lulay who is my inheritor and executor, the family photo albums, partly because I still want to use them for my own memoir.  I need to learn more about layout and the kind of programs used to do tricky things like montages.  There is no video, but I’ll go to CD technology maybe.  None of the current cyber-technology can keep itself from transforming and updating.

On my mother's side I'm alienated enough to tell the double story of the Hatfields/Pinkertons with no restraint, maybe as fiction.  The Hatfields and McCoys are nothing compared to Hatfields against Hatfields with Pinkertons trapped in the middle.  (My mother was the only sib of the Pinkerton girls who didn't marry a Hatfield.)

Pinkertons - my grandfather on the right, seated

I may not have time to finish one small part of this project, but again a death hustles me along, this time the recent death of Mike Burgwin who did so much to professionalize animal control.  I did get a book self-published ("Dog Catching in America"  but I see that www.lulu.com/prairiemary is marketing it as a PDF instead of the Print On Demand that I expected.  Animal Control has developed much farther since our time, so maybe it’s just a collection of war stories by now.  In the background the study of the relationships among animals — including humans — has expanded and become more startling and absorbing than anything we expected.

My life has been a series of lives:  theatre, the Blackfeet reservation in all its aspects, animal control, Unitarian-Universalism both as scholarship and as practicum, a return to the reservation with special attention to geology which has persisted even after the forced return to Portland, OR, where the interest in geology — this time in regard to cities — grew deeper: the basic engine of ecology and therefore of mutation that drives evolution.

Now that I have the great privilege of living in a quiet, safe place where I can write, I’ve tried to do as much as I can towards developing skill.  Since 2005 blogging has replaced publishing (it IS today's publishing) and I’ve had a writing friend of great force and daring (Tim Barrus) who has pushed me along.  Now I’m looking for master concepts that can project a future I won’t share and don’t much want to.  We knew it was coming, this present quandary produced by too many people, the exhaustion of resources, technical shifts that get out ahead of our ability to assimilate them, global warming and so on.  But we had thought maybe 2025 was a good predicted onset.  We’d be gone.  Now we know a lot of people are likely to be underwater.

When I’ve fallen in love with a writer, I’ve expressed it by buying and reading all their works, so Peter Matthiessen is probably the next death that has prodded me.  Wendell Berry is still a bit in the future.  A.B. Guthrie, Jr. died quite a while ago, also Norman McLean and Richard Stern.  The whole category of “Montana writers”— which was kind of invented anyway — is dented by the death of Jim Harrison.  Wallace Stegner and Jim Welch are gone.  I don't want to write like a lady.

The big secret about publishing is that it is the publishers who control the fates of writers and these days do it only in terms of sales.  No one cares about the quality of the writing. Publishers have concluded that Indians and women don’t sell except in romantic genre eBooks.  Of the major publishers of literature of the West based in universities, one is captured by self-aggrandizers and the other fell under the ax of the post-structuralists.  The real action is in Canada but even there it’s a bit of a struggle.  No one in the US knows their work, not even the tribes that are on both sides of the border.

My shelves of psych and communication insights have somehow become outdated.  Eric Fromm, though he was a death camp survivor, is not adequate to the AIDS pandemic, a country like North Korea where the whole nation is a death camp, or the total questioning of everything, even male/female or the nature of reality as managed in the brain.  Now I have shelves on neuron research, hominin evidence, revisionist long history (pre-human).  They are the only way I participate in the frenzy of acquisition around me.

There’s plenty to do and some of it will be muscle work like sorting and carrying books.  I’d better do it while I’m still only 76.