CHANGE OVER TIME

Twitter is not just for kids making jokes. It is a source and a place for discussion.  Recently individuals have been wrestling with the phenomenon of books written by Indians.  This quote below is not about that, but it sheds some light on why people are so emotional and angry about it.

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"Jan 29  TWITTER

Here's a fascinating reflection on the lessons from the 1960s left that can help today's left. Especially: when politics becomes like a religion, it builds fervor but interferes with building a winning coalition. From @JohnBJudis 

https://washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/01/21/i-was-60s-socialist-todays-progressives-are-danger-repeating-my-generations-mistakes/?

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I suggest a line of thought based on the quote above from Twitter.

This is about Native Americans, not in the Sixties when there was so much ferment and Indians began to participate, but about the 17th-century American social forces, specifically  "the American Protestant sects who imagined themselves as congregations of visible saints in a sinful world."  These are the people who imposed their world view on the quite different understanding of the tribes and who felt they had a license to use force, either as missionaries or as military.  People who wanted to survive came to agree with this point of view.

Writing and the "codex" form of books as sheets of paper between covers, are not pre-white phenomena in the indigenous world.  One of my students from the Sixties accepted the white position that this was a sign of inferiority and when I pushed back with Aztec or Inca writing and even other systems of memory, he would not accept them. He used it like the recurrent nonsense that it was a sign of inferiority like failure to invent the wheel, that oral story was not as valuable as a book, though stories saturate indigenous life.

The codex form of the Bible has become more real than the contents.  Codexes have become symbols of education.  The ability to read meant using English and closing out all indigenous people who could not read the documents that determined their fate.  Reading was power, thus it was forbidden to teach slaves to read.

So it was the mythic symbolizing of the specific form of writing that is a "book" in codex form that gives this fascination with "writing a book" a kind of power.  The power of the missionary is folded into the power of the government.  Creation of a world becomes possible.

"Books" were made accessible by the invention of the printing press, which was an early entry in the industrial revolution.  Benjamin Franklin ran a print shop that employed full blood tribal people who could read and assemble print on "sticks" for the machine to press on paper.  Interacting with "Indians" gave Ben ideas drawn from tribal organization and negotiation.

In the 19th century world when the reservations were formed, which gave the Protestants leverage over the Catholic missionaries, the Bible was prominent, books were valued, but none were produced on reservations except among the Cherokee, who assimilated early.  For the others, they remained something from the "outside" white world that belonged to whites. But for the early visitors, esp in the West, writing a book after visiting the "Indians" in the 19th century convention of exploration, was a way of recovering cost and increasing prestige.  Or, like Emerson and Thoreau, they could give speeches. Even when I was a child in the Forties and Fifties of the 20th century, the public lecture -- possibly accompanied by film -- was popular until TV ended all that.

The rise of the middle class meant that more women could read, they were inclined to read novels, and they were curious about "Indians."  This has continued.  Women like Louisa May Alcott and Lucy Maude Montgomery wrote repetitious books about a kind of mythology, that being exceptional could raise people out of poverty.  Women were interested in poverty and the burden of progressive improvement of the state of others fell on them.  Dickens and Mark Twain also profited from this.  They call it "misery lit."

So, the existence of books as a kind of magic instrument, as a sign of prosperity while feeling good about sympathy for lesser folks, and as a way of turning verbal story into a sales object that conveyed merit and virtue, belonged to the class that meant well.  

Today the existence of books is changing rapidly.  Pocket computers make a library invisibly present.  They might be oral.  Reading is taught to many people, but not the habit to sit down and concentrate on a body of print that records thoughts.  The wealth that used to come from major money advances for an author expected to sell well, is now gone, and in fact, though the money-up-front lingered a while supporting "big bucks" in Hollywood, now movies can be made by kids with video cams.  "Bonanza" was only a ranch.

I'm saying the power of books was once the power of the missionary who claimed virtue, the power of the explorer (disguised as an anthropologist) who told wonderful tales in a world before media, the power of the speculating producer of books, and the late dwindling power of the industrial revolution (printing press) yielding to technology  (the computer screen).  That's why this argument is not in books but on social platforms.

DRK used to worry that so few people on reservations actually read, even about themselves.  He used to say that when he went into homes there would be one shelf, maybe on the wall over the bed, holding the most sensational paperbacks of the time, written by the least literary of scandal-mongers.  You can hardly buy a book on the rez. The ones about "Indians" are still read by left-wing, progressive, do-gooder suburban white women.  

A newer category of readers is rez people who have gone to grad schools big enough and concerned enough about Indians to invite (even subsidize) them to study "English" as it is taught now, which is often dominated by French "hermeneutics of suspicion," thus the violent hatred of the colonial pattern of government, dependent on raiding and dominating "lesser" people.  This is a huge source of energy and identity, revision and revenge, but it doesn't exactly offer a path forward.  Neither is it admired by the people back on the rez who are still working out the end of the 20th century in terms of jobs and self-regulation that take up their days. 

I'm saying the days of making a lot of money and garnering a lot of prestige by writing a book are about gone.  That pattern has moved to sports, esp. basketball and bull-riding, but not for girls.  They can pick up a bit of action from romance but the zing has gone out of porn -- it's only kink now.  We need a path forward, on or off the rez, "Indian" or not, male or female, miserable poverty or not.  But one must learn to read in order to have directions.