My father proudly and sometimes obnoxiously declared he was an atheist. His grandfather, the hot-tempered Archibald Strachan, taught him to avoid any angry gods, but did not cause him to give up patriarchy -- just the fantasy justification. In fact, his claim of being religion-free was just a failure to recognize that nations, national monuments, battle sites, the industrial revolution, and progressivism were his true religion. Empire. Dominance. Virtue. He had no real understanding of Christianity except for obvious institutions, which his parents respected but did not join in the sense of being members of a congregation.
Also, he did not understand that his nationalism had no tolerance for the weak, the faulty, the nonconforming. Scots pride brushed off the indigenous, the black, and even women by considering them children. He stigmatized by diminishing. Yet he himself was not powerful except when he was spanking his children. Every August the family took a car trip to the Co-op convention he was paid to attend and which he managed to leverage into a kind of pilgrimage through American engineering feats and patriotic admirations like Mount Rushmore. But he never tried to explain, say, Fort Ticonderoga, or Hoover Dam. They never came to life for us kids.
My most impressionable adult years were in Browning, Montana, and now I've lived for twice as long in a little mostly white village just a few miles away. The population of this town is roughly the same as my elementary school in Portland where I lived until college: about 3 or 4 hundred kids. The population of the Blackfeet rez is about the same as my college when I attended, maybe 8 thousand.
Another 8 thousand tribally enrolled people live somewhere else, maybe on another rez or, going back generations, in some coastal city or a foreign country. So far, the boundary has been set by provenance; that is, inheritance from ancestors which is inaccurately described as having blood quantum, which cannot be determined from blood. (Provenance is proven by DNA, but the main thing is birth certificates/baptismal records and oral claims by old ladies.) It's expressed in fractions, though it has nothing to do with genetic inheritance, which is always totally re-assorted at conception.
The problem is that by neither appearance nor culture do the actual persons add up to a category in any other way than fantasy. This is sort of the dilemma of being an American. No longer is patriotism or citizenship definable by appearance or culture, though since the original whites -- whom we pretend are British but are actually by majority German -- maintain the power of determining the terms of the Rule of Law and the ordering of government. Losing that makes them crazy, as we observe.
But what do we do when different ways of categorizing people and the measurement of the boundaries among them simply aren't there? I remember the joke -- which might have been true -- about the full-blood man in the army determined to maintain segregation. The sergeant issued his order to the lines of men: "All blacks to the left, all whites to the right!" Left standing was the indigenous man. The sergeant didn't even know that's what he was.
The indigenous man asked, "Which way should I go, Sarge?"
Sarge bellowed, "I don't give a fuck! You choose!" There's no punchline about which way the "Indian" went. No man's land?
He didn't have the choice of those dealing with paper, who simply leave out the people who don't fit the binaries. Like the full-bloods who are the products of different tribes being gathered into schools at the romantic age, so that no parent or grandparent provides a big enough fraction of a tribe to be enrolled in any of them. A reality that doesn't fit the paper plan.
Why is our census still including race when we're all mongrel? We are no longer "breeds" like cows or dogs. What how else can we be grouped? I was always fascinated by the sizeable group of indigenous/Asian/Latino people in Portland. Skin not so dark, glossy straight hair, a little different lilt in their voices but not from any one place except where they are now. I called them "Tomorrow's People" because they looked like those computer tricks where all races are combined into one face. If there was a little black in the mix, they might have fluffy hair.
In the end nations have nothing to do with the way people look or eat or talk or descend from. They want to be safe, to have families, to have health care, and to work. Many of us in rural Montana have doctors from India and do well with them. People are human in both places.
"If the social contract is broken, and people turned to authoritarians for better lives, then it is exactly this deficit that must be repaired. Democracy isn’t giving people what they are desperate for — that is what every authoritarian moment tells us.” -- Umairh
Here are some interesting tweets to read or hear.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/15/the-us-hidden-empire-overseas-territories-united-states-guam-puerto-rico-american-samoa
This long-read blog post is about the legal empire we never really understand because it is so vast and scattered.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/07/is-the-gop-finished-history-weighs-in.html
A columnist and a college professor talk about the history and nature of this scary time we live in. They don't focus on individuals so much as process. Process is what I'm after, too.
The Theological Triplets (Christian, Muslim, and Judaism) come out of the same place/time, the land they call "Holy," and all three support this deforming idea of kowtowing to the emperor to get what we want. We must move to an ecological "fittingness" model of ecoplace. We can abandon or diminish our imposed legal boundaries in favor of natural living, conditions that come from participation by all who are there in that place, which is a New Religious and Scientifically Supported way to organize, then maybe we can dump this idea that survival is a matter of power and wealth.
We don't form an enduring future from "owning" the water supply, but rather by sharing what there is, as best supports us all. And working together to find the new aquifers, the new ags, the new desalinization plants and methods. This realization is coming to life through our children. The planet doesn't wait on us. Many will die of thirst in the future until we understand. It's a hard way to learn.
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