ARCHIVING

Another characteristic of the two demographics I think about is that both are shattered by divisions of many kinds.  This may be what keeps them from becoming a unified power with more impact, but it may also keep them from committing to one path that turns out to be wrong.  The two big categories are what has been called "gay" but which has devolved into such a plethora of kinds and names that a whole website is devoted to a list.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gay,_lesbian_or_bisexual_people

We're far beyond thinking that any male that has female characteristics is "gay."  The divisions are every which way and are constantly changing. Age, location, economics, and more.  It turns out that there are a thousand variations on what people's private inner psyches desire, and that they develop over time.  Even keeping in mind a separation between sexual physical arousal and what a specific time and place stipulates as a proper gender role is barely possible.

If we go to a more neutral word than sex or love, maybe the idea of "attachment," wanting to be with and relate to a specific other, then we are confronted with cross-species relationships like kittens being mothered by Golden Retrievers or goats who are imprinted with a horse.  The sex part gets confused with feeding and sheltering -- in humans an economic issue.

Then the other group.  This might seem as though it ought to be the most emotionally unified people but in fact, indigenous identity is just as hot a topic.  "Indians" can be a politically demonized word, indigenous and autochthonous are Euro Latinate big fat words, redskins is disrespectful.  We are advised to use the specific names of tribes instead, but they tend to be in English or French or supplied as hostile nicknames by rivals.  

People obsess over "blood quantums" and claim to be "Indians" if they have small amounts of provenance over a number of generations and have always lived in the city -- and yet the overwhelming cultural nature of the identity is completely ignored.  The divisions run through "blended" families, sometimes separating half-sibs.  Small fractions of non-white inheritance overwhelm a person's majority white identity.

At first contact when the indigenous people were easily distinguished from Euros by simply looking at them, this might have made more sense.  But even then there was little awareness of how different a Zuni might be from a Lumbee.  The indigenous people had varied their nature to fit their ecosystems, so corn people were quite different from salmon people.  The hundreds of identifiable tribes each have their own systems.

Now that the world has been so homogenized and globalized, the very aspects that were once considered negative, meant to be stamped out, leading to the demonizing of "blanket ass" old-timers, is entirely reversed and those same people are praised and valued.  Blankets are given as prestigious gifts.

The whole issue of multiple identities in either context, gay or Indian, is stigmatized and politicized until tempers run high and injustice overwhelms common sense.  Funnily enough, there is overlap among gay indigenous people, esp those who engage in tribal pursuits disapproved by missionaries.  This often attracts gay people into tribal contexts where controversy immediately develops over whether these people are "two-spirits," or spiritual at all, whether being labeled a "berdache" means you are a prostitute, or whether not welcome on grounds of being white.

The unfortunate development of anthropology of the indigenous in the context of white academics and sensational novels plus later interpolations from urban peoples like political Blacks, have confused the most major historical divisions which were among the indigenous who were the objects of pity and sentiment, indigenous who were fiends and enemies, and indigenous who were innocent children of God.  This goes into a scramble that includes media sexpots who post selfies in defiance of lethal stalkers, and guys who just want to play basketball.  Everybody finds something to be indignant about.

All of this presses on the issue of archives.  Over the years I've accumulated a lot of clips, personal writing, books, and so on.  On my demise the books certainly are meant to go to the Blackfeet Community College.  In the meantime I'm still using some of them.  I think the materials about "teaching Indians" are so outdated that I'll just pitch them.  

I contacted the D'Arcy McNickle library of the Newberry Library in Chicago, about binders of letters from Darrell Robes Kipp, only to be patronized by a young white man who objected to me putting three-hole punches in the letters and rejected any notes.  Over the years I've seen much of this kind of material -- personal, joking, but often insightful -- censored and even destroyed to preserve reputations or certain political points of view.  I'd just as soon not let that happen.

I'm told that the Montana Historical Society has started a "box" of materials of mine from the years of circuit-riding as a UU minister, but when I tried to return records to the fellowships, the district, or the denomination, only one person would accept them.  Everywhere the mood is confusion and resistance.  We are in a kind of Dark Ages.  Trump is not so much a cause as a product of people who don't want to get involved.  It's expressed in money.

People who worry about my safety and reputation give me advice, but they rarely have a very good picture of what I do, where I've been, who I treasure, and who I'd like to rap on the head.  I'm trying to think about two levels:  what should be done if I die tomorrow and my niece in Oregon has to deal with this stuff; and what should be done if I can hang on another decade until the sea-change that is bound to come has transformed the whole layout.

Though Darrell Kipp has been gone for many years, I keep wanting to call him up  see what he thinks.  (I WAS disconcerted to call the Piegan Institute and have him answer the phone, though I knew it was just his voice on the answering machine.)

https://www2.archivists.org/groups/native-american-archives-section/protocols-for-native-american-archival-materials-information-and-resources-page

PS:  Articles are beginning to appear that explore how archives can be a viable idea in the face of the coming climate apocalypse. This may be the true "end of history."