LIGHTWEIGHT

A criticism of mine has boomeranged.  I was reacting to a category of people who purport to "know" Native Americans and maybe teach them or study them but are themselves not NA's, at least not much.  Most of what they know comes from books written decades ago, based on other books.  It's stuff that's never challenged or tested.  If NA's are asked questions about "their" people, they give answers from this context because they fit the stereotypes so the whites go away feeling confirmed.

The term I used pejoratively was "lightweight."  So comfortable, unchallenged, unrisky.  I didn't accuse my respondent himself, but someone who was his "friend." The response I got was highly emotional.  X said he himself was "lightweight," that all his friends were lightweight, and that I myself was lightweight.  Both of us were hit hard in a soft spot.

This man has made his living in "Indian Education," was paid a lot of money, worked in a big city for white people, traveled to little burgs struggling to figure out what to do, and never challenged the cynical German-army-based step-and-hierarchy system of education invented to fit the industrial revolution.  He wouldn't recognize those terms.  His has been a life of compliance.  Mine has been a life of defiance, tribal Celtic if you like and if that's not too fantastic.

He is not alone in his own definition of "lightweight," which includes staying out of trouble, telling funny stories with absurd chracters, and a good bit of race stereotyping.  (Napi stories.)  He's enough Indian to be enrolled, but is anyone contemporary -- who lives off-rez and is less than half "Indian" -- really an Indian?  The claim of belonging turns into admitting the dark self-destructive side of oppression and joking about it.  

A big part of what he means by saying I'm lightweight is that by "white" standards I have not seemed very important or influential.  I have no big markers -- for instance, I'm poor, which in the white mainstream means "failure."  He had not known about my degrees, esp. the one from the U of Chicago Div School which is my pride and joy.  He has no theory of religion and doesn't attend church, but recognizes my big-time grad school university.  His assumption was that any white person who taught on the rez was a person of failure.  When a third person was impressed by my degrees, which encouraged me to hit a few other high points, my respondent found me arrogant and showing off, a major rez sin.  "You think you're better."

Well, I am better.  Get used to it.  I'm poor because I'm idealistic, invested in analysis, productive, self-sustaining, uncompromising and using a quality education which came as much from the rez as from any university.  I'm developing a serious understanding of human existence in the world that might never get published, except in this blog at intervals.  I'm not wasting time at conferences.  It's very scary.  I had thought this respondent could at least understand what I do or be curious about it.  NOT.  He just wants to joke and maybe get drunk with the other lightweights to show that nothing really matters.

I'm not "better" because I'm more abstinent, write more than a thousand words a day, stay apart to think instead of hanging out over coffee with neighbors, indulge these rather ratty cats.  I'm certainly not better in terms of housekeeping or cooking or dressing up or maintaining my house or pickup.  But "better" is a one-dimensional concept, confined to one continuum. 

On what continuum am I "better?"  One woman demanded to know why she never saw me "around," but when I said that if she drove down the alley behind my house and looked in the back bedroom window, she would see that I was always there, writing.  "Oh," she exclaimed.  "You're a writer!"  Clearly, to her a writer was a higher category than an old recluse.  This is a middle class assumption: that people who write are more worthy.  She had no knowledge of what I wrote or how well.  Her only marker might have been publishing and publisher's advertising, both of which are pretty poor indicators of the value of writing.  Being featured on PBS is not an indicator of value -- alas!  

We are in a time between world-views where some, like Putin recreating the USSR by seizing Crimea, are trying to rebuild the old days.  Others are convinced that "race" is a real Platonic essence of being human that is unchanged by environment or the turnover of generations.  And so on.  I feel the continuum I'm on is the search for a new understanding of what we call the humanities that will guide the future.  I find it very "heavyweight."  

I complained about the criminal element in my village and on my street.  My respondent's solution was the same as his -- move away.  Elusiveness is part of being lightweight.  My approach is to take a stand and defend it.  Anyway, I own this house but I have very little income.  This village has houses for sale on every block but few jobs.  I'm eighty.  I once figured out that the weight of my books equals the weight of two bull buffaloes.  Moving is not lightweight.

My respondent has always complained about not having been taught study skills.  Now he reveals something I never suspected: he doesn't read.  He doesn't write because he doesn't read.  The kind of work I do is heavily dependent on print, not always in books, but my brain is much shaped by a lifetime of reading.  The difference between people who are "oral" versus people who are "literate" is just beginning to be explored and is now joined by people who are "visual", no longer writing pictographs on cliffs but creating fabulous envisionments of abstract concepts no one has words for, either written or spoken.  It's not oral, but it's often musical.  It's not pop but includes pop elements.  I feel about those who can create it the same way conventional people think about writing, that it's unaccountable and privileged.  

Not for lightweights.  The relationship with this person is over. He floated away.