Starting out in a bubble of assumptions that some neurologists call an hallucination, which is not meant to be pejorative so much as realistic since reality cannot be proven, I believed in the reality of my family being blameless and unified, and all others being at least mysterious and maybe dangerous. By now my struggle to swim through the swirling possibilities of time and place is more funny than tragic, not least because I accept the possibility of unbearable loss (having already borne it repeatedly) and my own death which I won’t be around to mourn anyway.
My world axis was Portland, Oregon, which by now has gone through so many transmutations that it’s impossible to explain how the gray rain, orderly cement, and pure drinking water used to feel so real. In any case I moved my axis mundi to Blackfeet country, which they hardly noticed I had done. I swapped my family history of Oregon trail and Dakota/Manitoba homesteading for the less embarrassing geology of the upthrust Rockies and the grassy prairies — less embarrassing because it was no longer about humans.
Today’s scientifically perceived “Deep Time” going back through the creation of the planet to the Big Bang (which is a metonymy of old white men who fought in WWII and who can’t give up the idea of explosions) is a source of wonder and humility, as well as detaching from the idea that what happens to humans is very important at all. I so love reading about it, but in short bursts, since like Calvin and Hobbs, sometimes I feel there are just too many stars and I have to go indoors where it’s presumed safe.
What I share with other humans is what I might call “Middle History,” which has been dominated by those iconic old white men who haunt us, rule us, and tip us into degradation in their struggle to keep everything the same. They fail, and that brings me to what you probably didn’t expect: “Montana, the Magazine of Western History,” Spring and Summer issues, 2017. I don’t subscribe because the library carries it.
And also because I got tired of reading articles about old white men congratulating each other for winning battles and wearing top hats. (That’s a metonymy, which is a figure of speech in which a part is meant to stand for the whole: “top hats” for those 19th century men signalling their wealth and importance in photos.) Those men’s work has resulted in a world where they themselves can no longer operate, which is an irony — which is a rhetorical device very much out of fashion these days, partly because no one can get a strong enough grip on the thing that is being mocked or revealed as ridiculous, and partly because few have the energy. But it’s a strategy I can’t resist. People say I’m “sardonic.”
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IRONY
1: a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning —called also Socratic irony
2a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning
b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony
c : an ironic expression or utterance
b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony
c : an ironic expression or utterance
3a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity
b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play —called also dramatic irony, tragic irony
b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play —called also dramatic irony, tragic irony
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So the welcome irony of these two issues of “Montana” is that they each include stories about Native American women. Molly Holz, the present editor of the magazine. Martha Kohl, a previous editor, is the editor of a book published by the Montana Historical Society Press. “Beyond Schoolmarms and Madams: Montana Women’s Stories”. The economics and wars are still there, but don’t dominate.
A friend here on the rez asked me about Maslow, the great psychologist who shifted the psych paradigm from studying what was bad, damaging, or painful to studying what was good, healing and enlightening. At one point he visited the Alberta Blackfoot tribes. Narcisse Blood and Ryan Heavy Head claimed that’s where he got the idea of his paradigm shift.
Alas, I had to report that Maslow only lasted on the high prairie for a few weeks. It was too tough for him, so he withdrew back to Manhattan — which is too tough for me. The friend wanted to know what Maslow thought of Blackfoot youth, but I doubt that he thought of them at all. Trying to understand the lives of children is a work in progress, particularly on a rez since old white men have controlled so much and resorted to violence so easily.
I recommended to the friend that he read “Amskapi Pikuni, The Blackfeet People” which is about the South Piegan, the people of the tribe on the US side of the border with Canada. It was a manuscript begun by Clark Wissler (1870-1947) who was writing with the help of David Duvall, a Blackfeet from Heart Butte. The manuscript was found by Alice Beck Kehoe who has studied the Piegan band for more than fifty years, and completed with the help of Stewart E. Miller (1950-2008), a very productive enrolled Blackfeet who died young. The book includes pieces by Earl Old Person and Walter Lamar, Miller’s cousin. Such an assortment of authors, with only Wissler as the educated white male authority, would not have been possible only decades ago.
This verges on what I call “Middle History” which extends back as far as living memory, constantly diminishing as it always does. But I’m also enjoying the different dimensions of that history that are being explored — shifts of focus through time, across gender, and by theme. At present, “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” by Yuval Noah Harari and “The Silk Roads: a New History of the World” by Peter Frankopan. There are a LOT of these narratives, all asking, “But what about . . . ?”
I used to have a minister friend who owned a t-shirt that said on the front, “Question authority” and on the back “Listen to the answers.” The problem arises when there are TOO MANY answers. That's when you need an axis mundi.
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