"WHEN THE WHOLE COUNTRY WAS 'ONE ROBE'" by Nicholas Vrooman

The categories of “public intellectual” or “independent scholar” are not really in the consciousness of most people.  There’s no money in it and not much prestige.  One needs an institutional connection to make it worthwhile to propose such “hunter/gatherers” for honors or whatnot.  Their office is their back bedroom or the space next to them on their pickup seat.  Nevertheless, they are a major part of some public dialogues that have important consequences. 

“The Whole Country Was 'One Robe'” comes from that context.  Nicholas Vrooman has moved among organizations focused on “folk ways” for a long time.  This has taught him the trails of the first All-Terrain-Vehicles, namely the two-wheeled Red River cart.  The ways of these drivers were as braided as their “breed sashes,” the kind Charlie Russell wore.  All the time in the centuries that the European countries, barely defined, were pretending to sell ownership of the new American continent back and forth among them, occasionally even engaging in battles over the boundaries, there was a virtual nation forming by blood relationship, Catholic faith layered onto prairie practice, friendships between families and men who grew up together and hunted together, long wintering and sharing, many a song and jig, and the commercial exploitation of bison, small furs, and the interface between arriving Euros and people already in place, maybe for millennia.

Many things cultural, biological and ecological have come into focus in recent decades, partly because of the internet, partly because of opening such archives as the Hudson’s Bay factors’ records, partly because the eyes that are looking now are in the heads of the people whose ancestors were there, and partly because of shifts in method -- we see things differently.  Justice issues once smothered by convenient political allegiances have bobbed up again.  Population demographics, that slippery subject, are demanding realignment.  There are more people, they are different, they have moved, and life itself is on new terms.  Was there a computer internet overlay for tribes before? There is now.  Were there essays comparing Euro ways of thought, teasing out the assumptions, to indigenous ways of thought?  Many now.

Technology jogs us in other ways.  Satellite images of the planet make us see things a whole new way without all those imposed lines and colors to indicate national ownership.  In a satellite picture, the land is self-evident.  The other technology that has made a huge difference is simple photography.  Can you ever think of Metis as just buckskin Indians after seeing the bride in her white dress in the last post?

After I read this book, I look around the community and see Little Shell Cree Chippewa everywhere.  Of course, I was always aware of the rez people, esp. in Browning, who were -- as the kids said in taunts -- “Creeeeeeeeee.”  In the white community it was said that if you wanted someone who would work, you looked for a Cree because they had to work to survive, they would work for low wages, and if one quit, there were plenty of others.  A cynical view.  

Three photos above all Cree Chippewa"Moccasin Flats Archipelago"

On page 340 in this book is a photo of a young mother and her boy.  It’s Mary Flammond and her son Albert.  Mary was the main counter clerk at Teeples, which in the Sixties was just one little store in Browning.  Albert was one of our best town police chiefs, when the town still had its own police force.  Calvin Augare was Bob’s best hunting partner, Ken Paul became his son-in-law, Cecile Horn was his “Indian mother”. A LaRance babysat his house if he traveled, and a Belcourt tried to destroy him politically.  I never did see the Bremner girls mentioned in this book but a Salois was my UPS man for years.  We think of the Blackfeet rez as being wall-to-wall Blackfeet with a nice solid line around it -- but that was never the reality.  It doesn’t even work that way with the 49^th parallel border which was negotiated between European nations in London long ago.  Not even Homeland Security can keep the rabbits on one side or the other.

Joseph Kinsey Howard

As Vrooman points out, the story has been a bit skewed by the dramatic tale of the Red River Rebellion, as told by the beloved  Joseph Kinsey Howard in “Strange Empire.”  Though the people hoped that removing “Rupert’s Land” from the clutches of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which was the loom that wove the fabric of the Metis “nation”, meant that there was enough of a jurisdictional interval to start a new country, tragically that’s not the way things turned out.  The people returned to their diaspora across the prairie in the rhizome-stolon pattern of sweetgrass and strawberries, a system of communities and the corridors across the land to connect them.  Vrooman calls it a Moccasin Flats Archipelago. The people moved along those patterns like blood in arteries, pulsing according to the seasons.  They continued to move in and out of Canada, not as refugees but as cousins and compatriots.

This book serves the Cree -- not just the Little Shell Cree Chippewa tribe -- in the same way as the Blackfeet are documented by Adolf Hungry Wolf’s four-book compendium combined with the Foley Report (a xeroxed near-underground lawyer’s research on the management of the reservation, particularly irrigation), plus Paul Rosier’s “Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912-1954,” and Bill Farr’s “The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882-1945.”  All basic history.  Over the years occasionally a “Cree” who has been quietly getting along in Blackfeet country has asked me whether there was something they could read about themselves.  I could recommend “Strange Empire” but this book is far more relevant and extensive.  Still, I would say, "Read BOTH."

Since the time when Howard was writing, thought about human society has changed quite a lot.  In fact, when I took on reviewing this book I told Vrooman he wouldn’t hear from me for a while because I would just read and read for a couple of weeks.  It’s over 400 pages long, after all.  But I found myself getting excited over spotting something -- “Look!  There’s Eula Churchill Sherburne!”  (She wasn't a Cree -- her daddy was the Indian agent.) and sending him emails.  He’s gotta be laughing at me.

Gary and Louella made this cradleboard for their newborn, also named Gary.

I remarked on the unusual absence of typos, grammar errors, and misspellings in this very big book.  He responded:  “Once had a conversation with a good ol' Metis friend married into the Crow, Gary Johnson. He and his wife Louella were for years the preeminent bead workers and regalia makers on the Northern Plains. We were remarking about the similarities to quality beadworking and writing, that they are much the same. You have to conceive of the whole picture, stitch every space as well as the word/design, every piece of punctuation, every fill. Each letter and space is like another colored bead, row after row, building pattern, making sense until something cogent arises, recognizable, and hopefully worth the effort.”   Beads equal pixels.  I’ve been saying that for a while.

The real subject of this book is serious, a matter of justice, not just in the allotment of land as reservations in the first place, but some serious questions for all of us about how we let the stigma of poverty kill people who are blameless except for being inconvenient (especially children), how “favelas” of people using the overflow of material goods from prosperous communities will spring up again and again -- not out of degeneracy but out of necessity -- and how intransigent and miserly our governments can be.

At the same time the kinds of hardship described here are offset by family solidarity, ingenuity in the use of whatever can be scrounged, true success in stable communities when hard work meets generous opportunities, and the graceful beauty of many of the people in these photos, both male and female.  Young women sometimes in blankets and sometimes in elegant white dresses; young men sometimes in braids and clouts and sometimes in ducktails and jeans.  Always the graybeards with hats.  Always the round women with their aprons and crucifixes.  And always the children with their bright upturned faces. 

If you live around here, this book is about us -- all of us.  The book will be in the Valier Library.  Here's a vid connection if you don't read.   http://www.c-span.org/video/?315917-1/book-discussion-whole-country-wasone-robe   

PATHS AND DOORS

When I think about my life, it becomes obvious that somehow I haven’t come to completion anywhere, or as my mother used to scold me,  “You never FINISH anything!”  She meant my 4-H sewing project.  I finished a lot of essays and stories, but they didn’t count to her.  People in Valier would say I never finish my yard -- quite true.  But I’m not talking about that.   Nor is that about committing to a life of search rather than one devoted to defending one position.  Only in the last half-dozen years have I found anyone who understood -- not out of sameness but out of parallel search.

In interaction with Tim Barrus, who is also a writer, there have been two shared metaphors: the labyrinth or catacomb and the door, the aperture of access, a threshold.  You may have noticed that I used these two in fiction recently:  “The Hall Boy” and the Neanderthal story.  The combined key is a long corridor with doors along the sides.  I dream these, partly because they are so common in mysteries, police procedurals -- the camera trundles along the carpet from one overhead light to the next and the armed gunman shoots from a doorway or around a corner.  Maybe a river with docks along it would work similarly, or even a road with trees along it.  An architectural hybrid between corridor and doorway is the enfilade, doors lined up so a person can walk through them in a straight line.

It’s just a metaphor for living through time with periodic contexts that might be jobs or classrooms or marriages or towns.  When I was reviewing the Western art mags, I used to keep track of two kinds of paintings:  those of doors or gates and those of cafes.  There would be a half-dozen of each in most issues and they were often very beautiful.  

There’s a Russian movie from the Fifties called “The Cranes Are Flying.”  It’s about world war and in it a girl goes back from work to her family’s apartment, rushes up flights of stairs, throws open the door and there is . . . nothing.  Bombed-out space, many floors up, distant from all other buildings.  She witnessed no violence, heard no explosion, and now had no family.  All she did was open a door, as usual, and stand there trying to understand.

George MacDonald, English Universalist minister who wrote fairy tales to feed his children, had a basic construct in his stories: the castle on a hill full of coal mines.  The castle itself is a labyrinth of rooms and a winding staircase (a rising labyrinth); the many complex tunnels are like an ant-hill underneath it.  They echo, one is the reflection of the other.  The stories are “The Princess and the Goblin,” “The Princess and Curdie,” and they never end because to end the story is to end the labyrinth which is actually an income stream.

“Peer Gynt” is another version featuring sea voyages, Morocco, lunacy, thieves and trolls.

What is necessary is not the goal but the comparing of burrowing dark against constructed lighted places.  This is very deep in us, so it is hard to think about.  It must go back to the first small mammals learning that safety is always achieved by digging into and under the earth and whatever is piled onto it, while the first small birds were learning to leap and glide, then flap and dive.  Some seabirds can live for years without ever touching the land.  Tennessee Williams often spoke of birds who had only wings, no feet at all and no need for them, never “grounded.”  Mammal-me loves the rara-avis-other.  Bats, of course, inhabit both worlds.

My understanding of life was changed, once again, when I saw a YouTube vid of the axon of a neuron worming its way through the brain tissue in search of the place it needs to connect -- they say that tip is using something like smell: molecular cues.  This is not at all like the stacked-up boxes of cells that we used to believe in.  Knowledge as the contents of drawers and books is one thing: knowledge as seeking, smelling, moving -- that’s different.  Verb-based.  A trip.  The connectome: a road map to a story.

But one mustn’t become so focused on the goal that the side compartments are passed up or entered, then forgotten.  Alvina Krause, the legendary acting teacher I’ve been remembering on blogs, only slipped up once.  She said she had gotten word that one of her students had a good role in a Broadway play.  “He MADE it!” she exulted.  Maybe because she never was an actor herself, she forgets that being in the first play is a threshold -- oh, yes! -- but then life will present a whole sequence of new thresholds.  The play can’t run forever.  Being cast in this one won’t mean being cast in the next one.  A remarkable performance will mean that next time the performance must be equal or better.  And yet there is no better lighted space than the stage.

When one graduates, some people will tell you that this is not the end but merely the beginning.  They’re right.  The end will be only when the trip is over and the alma mater stops asking for donations.  The Middle-Eastern religions: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, all think in terms of beginnings and ends.  Some apply these mainly to individuals (birth and death) and some think in terms of nations or “cultures” (founding and final fall).  Our scientists get preoccupied with how the universe began and how it will end.  The Asian religions are more concerned with just being, participating in the great rolling wave of existence.  Yet once they took it into their heads to conquer others in order to guarantee their longevity, they were the most merciless, relentless, destructive of all.

My movie last night was about Jane Goodall:  “Jane’s Journey.”  (Streams on Netflix.)  It’s about her life, how simply it started and then expanded until now it’s about the whole world.  Many of the shots were of Jane walking a well-worn path and sitting down with the chimps, just being with them.  Their reactions range from mock-rage to pretending not to notice.  She speaks calmly about her first husband, a photographer who made her work famous but who was so possessive and jealous that the marriage wouldn’t work.  Then her second husband, also very jealous and intent on limiting her, died of cancer.  The third “man” was her son who had a hard time separating from her, resented her work and also wanted her for only himself but by trying NOT to be like her.  

The movie, towards the end, shows “Grub” the son reconciled and collaborating with his mother to protect a wild but calm hippo pool where a local family has protected and addressed the animals for decades, believing they are ancestors -- which they are in the broadest sense, of course.  Few animals are as ugly and potentially deadly.  In the pool we see only their ears, eyes, and nostrils above the water -- ugly, alien, wary.  Among them float filamentous white flowers so delicate they could be spun of glass.  Sublime.  But they aren’t going anywhere.  Pretty soon Jane and the others went on up the path.

"SOURCES OF THE RIVER" A Review

My friend Paul Wheeler, whose tales I occasionally post here, sent me a copy of “Sources of the River” by Jack Nisbet quite a while ago, but I’d been neglecting it until my cousin Katharine in Portland mentioned that she’d met Nisbet and admired him.  It’s a 1994 book with the sub-title “Tracking David Thompson Across Western North America.”  Several books are like this: a modern trip along an historic route described in a journal.  (Dan Flores has written about more southerly expeditions.  Ted Binnema takes on the pre-literate north/south trails of the tribes.)  Lewis and Clark (1804) are the most famous but only the earliest by a few years.  Thompson was earlier if you count his trip as beginning in Churchill, Manitoba, in 1784 when a ship on Hudson’s Bay landed him at his first post for the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Churchill is the town where the polar bears gather in the fall to wait for arctic ice to form.  One of the most intriguing sentences in the chapter about the place is p. 14:  “Along the way they often passed clusters of polar bears lying on their bellies, heads together and bodies radiating out like the spokes of a wheel.”  Bits of Thompson’s journals throughout alternate with discussion and descriptions of Nisbet’s modern visits to the places, which were by the time he got there far more comfortable than when Thompson was there.  

In Thompson’s time guns and horses are just arriving at the northern prairies and the usual push/pull among the people is becoming intense with the Blackfeet emerging as the most ferocious defenders of their patch.  Thompson rises through the ranks at “factories” (trading posts run by Brit “factors”) established by Hudson’s Bay and teaches himself to become a surveyor and then cartographer.  Having just watched the BBC movie “Longitude” about the struggle to develop the accurate clock necessary to figure out longitude, I was prepared for the descriptions of Thompson working diligently and thoroughly around the clock on his observations and formulas.  At first he sent these by ship back to England where professional cartographers converted them into invaluable maps of the unknown new country.

David Thompson was the John Adams of Western Canada, in fact, his near-contemporary.  And he had a wife, Catharine rather than Abigail, half-Cree and inherited from a previous clerk’s family as was conventional for the time and place. She was barely fourteen to Thompson’s twenty-nine.  Like the Adams, they were faithful in what was evidently a worthy collaboration that lasted into a quiet old age in eastern Canada.  Fourteen children resulted.  However, Catharine did not leave a cache of letters.  There was no formal post anyway.  Communication was hand-carried by passers-by.  Sometimes there was no paper or ink, so that notes were left written on the walls of the various forts or on a section of wood.  His 77 journals are archived in Toronto.  His maps were grabbed up and reproduced willy-nilly with and without permission on both sides of the Atlantic.  The redrawings of the territory by Jack McMaster are fascinating adjuncts to this text.

There is no Sacajawea in this story, but an equally colorful woman emerges, a person who didn’t travel with Thompson.  In fact, he sent “Qánqon” away for “loose” behavior when he first met her as the “wife” of a furman.  An exceptionally tall, strong and vital woman, her personal history was recorded by Claude Schaeffer, curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning in the Sixties.  (We often consulted him.  His papers are in Calgary.)  I can think of half a dozen Blackfeet women like this one but Qánqon was from near Kootenay Lake and no Indian man was willing to take her on.  “Loose” behavior sounds like a mix of sex, violence, and attitude.  She decided to be a man, and took a series of wives.  Schaeffer says there’s no evidence of her being physically transsexual, but the rumor was that she devised a leather phallus.  She was rough on her wives, beating them as was often the custom.  She traveled far on the West side of the Rockies, carefully maintaining the fiction that she was male.  When bathing in a relatively shallow river, she was bare below the waist and seen by a man though she quickly crouched down to hide her gender which he testified was female.  He dubbed her “the Squatter” or some similar term in his language.  

Later she capitalized on her passing familiarity with the white men and, still pretending she was a man, played a cross between John the Baptist and a cargo cult by traveling in the wake of Thompson’s party, telling all the tribes that she was the representative of an important company that would generously reward all the people with whom she was friendly.  In this way she built up a herd of horses and a well-equipped lodge, and went into conjuring.  Her story is not nearly so well-known or popular as that of Sacajawea in spite of her potency as a feminist role-model.  Nor did anyone name a waterfall for her.  Her death was violent with her adversaries finally eating part of her heart to make sure she stayed dead.

David Thompson, now working for the independent North West Company, had many miserable and dangerous times getting over the Rockies so as to establish trading posts through the Bitterroot and into Pacific Northwest Territory.  He discovered that the trade-off for the severe and sudden weather of the treeless east side of the Rockies was that on the west side, milder and much wetter, thick forests supported little game.  Often they ate their horses, the dogs, or near-carrion.  Their stomachs were often in revolt from eating moss or roots unfamiliar to them, and once they got into the major fish-packed rivers that ran to the sea, their appetites failed to meet the diet of salmon, salmon and more salmon.  Supplies came to them from Hudson’s Bay, a long way to pack stomach soothers, ink powder, and soap --  small but vital necessities.  

Eventually they managed to come sailing into Astoria under their Canadian flag, startling the Americans in their toehold there.  Parallel scouting had been done by sea, searching for the mouth of the Columbia River.  Thompson traded one of his men for one of theirs, a Hawaiian man of high vitality who would go back with them to northern Alberta and then across the Atlantic to England.  The stories of the Hawaiians who came to the northern plains as well as the life-paths of the Iroquois trappers that Hudson’s Bay brought in when locals questioned the rewards for trapping beavers have never been told.

Nisbet, a handsome man, is an academic anchored in Spokane  (jacknisbet.com/) who is actively teaching, exploring, writing, and speaking around the “Inland Empire.”  His many books are listed on his website.

WRITE THIS DOWN!!

In the very beginning of the invasion from Europe in the sixteenth century, the people on the North American continent did not write things down but the invaders did. In fact, the invaders governed themselves with pieces of paper signed by important people. Because the people already on this continent had no paper documentation -- just their own living experience -- this made the Euro people sure that they themselves were “better” and that there was no problem with them “owning” this land. In fact, using paper, they sold big chunks back and forth among themselves in Europe -- kings signing papers with the occasional Papal Bull. (There can’t be a Papal Cow.) But the people already here went on living their lives the same as always while Louisiana was purchased and repurchased. There was no change in the land.

Until the code written in the cells of the Euros, transferred there as zoonoses from cows (cowpox) ten thousand years earlier, swept across this continent and wiped out huge percentages of the People. Then the land WAS empty. The first writing was about Indians, colonists writing back to Europe about these curious fragmented People.

In the earliest years the autochthonous people (misnamed Indians), on this new land (misnamed America), studied the Euros carefully and decided to learn writing and printing. They did. Benjamin Franklin had them working with him in his print shop. He used some of their ideas and they wrote and some even went to college before they died of euro-diseases. Then came the Prairie Clearances where the Indians were nomads and used to war, documented in pictograms, and had nothing to lose except themselves. The Cherokee had learned to write and had their own printing presses, but all that was dispersed. The Indians had to go underground on their own land.

Journalists, then as now eager for sensation and horror, wrote about the Indian Wars, building an image of Indians as little more than animals or maybe supernatural devils. But the do-gooders, as aways, set out to throw their weight the other way and began to write about Indians as human beings, noble and childlike. The religious people, esp. the Catholics, saw the advantage of Indians as souls. A woman sat down with what she took to be a chief (Pokagon) and wrote down what he told her. He was very careful what he said.

Oppressed and stigmatized people have always been careful to protect their inner lives and their level of understanding, because the less they are seen as a threat the better spies they were (are) -- the better chance for survival they had (have). After many decades Indian books were still “as told to” and often slightly (ahem) “improved” by sympathetic exploiters. Few are aware of the yawning gulf between the celebrators of the 19th century Indians who love James Willard Schultz, thinking his tales are about “real” Indian life, and the actual 20th century Indians who despise Schultz, seeing him as a drunken exploiter. When the academic historians come upon this, they try to change the subject.

Often the first writing that comes directly from a stigmatized and hidden people is full of rage. White writers as benign as Hillerman, as prize-winning as LaFarge, as sympathetic as McClintock, were set upon with firestorms. The early Indian writers were those who did well in school and made white contacts -- often mixed bloods or people displaced to the city by Eisenhower’s policies after WWII. This enraged the full-bloods who really KNEW what it meant to be stigmatized and oppressed. That became a huge issue. The internal war between the lesser-quantum and total-quantum people overwhelmed issues of truth, witness and change as bewildered liberals tried to find a way into an argument that had nothing to do with them. Finally most ran for cover.

For a while Native American writing was fashionable and it was considered a Renaissance, a triumph of progress and education. But it was merely a ploy on the part of a publishing industry desperate for some new wave (women? YA’s? shocking drug use? ethnic minorities?) to drive up sales so the acquiring conglomerate would get its usual ten per cent profit. These Indian books were not meant to be read by Indians. As a publisher told Vine Deloria, Jr., people on reservations don’t read. There are no bookstores there. Liberals and academics were supposed to read and praise these books, and they did, but it wasn’t enough.

So now, here I am, wanting to encourage Native Americans to write, to support those who can and do write. But the publishing industry has gone to smash and that’s both an advantage and a disadvantage. The revelations about secret ordeals and mystical visions are gaining a little juice again, but I have no taste for them. My friend Rolland Nadjiwan says now the Indians are writing for Indians. Does that mean I have no part to play?

There is no good history of the Blackfeet in the Twentieth Century. Should I begin to write it? Should we divvy up the territory/time-frame and write about it in class? I’ve already been gathering evidence and posting it on lulu.com. Should I be pushing self-publishing? But the people here, like all the rest of us (including my cousins and Tim), don’t feel as though that’s real publishing. They want the validation of a proper Manhattan publishing house taking out ads or at the very least an important movie star taking an option. Would Charlie Rose interview us? Otherwise it feels as though it never really happened, that our writing is not worthy of respect.

Whose point of view should be represented: the ones who quietly got their teaching certificate, attended church, washed their cars and grew grass in the yard? Some would consider that contemptible collaboration with the enemy. The ones who lived high and wide, drinking, drugging, roaming the pow-wow highways in the night, growing braids and whooping it up? The ones who quietly lived in their grandparents’ old log cabins back in the foothills, preserving the old ways but sunk in poverty and depression and hating themselves, thinking it is their own fault somehow, accepting the stigma of the blanket? We need testimony from first-hand, people who can put their experience out on the table. But they are afraid. How do we encourage them? Or maybe the real question is why? When they know that, then they can speak and write, documenting on paper their living experience.

ARTIFACTS: FLESH & PAPER (Part 9)

“Blood” is the preoccupation of Indians and yet the identity of an Indian is not determined by actual genetics after all. The criterion is “pedigree” or “provenance” (which are approximately the same thing) created by People self-announcing identities about two hundred years ago when the army began making lists of Indian people in order to trade (in the earliest days) or issue them food and clothing when the buffalo were gone. At that point European notions of “race” and “tribe” were imposed on the varied and constantly transforming People of the land. Everything since depends upon that original rather uncertain bit of recording and the records kept by semi-literate government employees since then.

Imagine a long line of people wrapped in blankets which the women likely kept over the lower half of their faces, needing as much advantage as possible, not speaking English, filing past a wobbly table on the trodden grass where a young army clerk used a quill pen to make a list of names. Like immigration authorities on the Atlantic coast, if he couldn’t figure out what the person in front of him said, he just “gave” him or her a name. An interpreter was some help.

Access to food and shelter depended on what that clerk wrote down. There were no “certificates” or “licenses” or other papers to present. Everything depended on whether he wrote down you were Blackfeet or Cree or white or Chinese. Maybe you belonged on this side of the 49th parallel and maybe you depended on the other side. Maybe you belonged on both sides. Authorities complained that too many people did the last, drawing rations from both the Great Mother from over the Sea and the Great White Father. Everything since has derived from that first list. If you were, as they say, “standing behind the door” or gone fishing when that list was made, you weren’t Indian. Whole tribes have been declared “not Indian.” Just last week it was the Little Shell band of Cree Chippewa who had always been in the wrong place to be listed. They’ve been campaigning for decades to be recognized. Still no success.

This is the foundation on which tribal rolls rest, plus petitions to councils to add new people as they are born. By the time the missionaries had been around a while, some people had baptismal names that were European. The culture had always accepted the idea that a person had a right to change names if they felt different. And it had not been particular about keeping track of which babies belonged to which fathers or even which mothers, since people swapped parenting responsibilities around to even out the burdens and rewards. Living alliances were based on practicalities, not legalities.

When blood typing began, which was associated with war because of combat transfusions dramatically shown in newsreels, Indians were aghast to be told that they might be Asian which to them meant Japanese, the enemy. Later more detailed DNA knowledge confirmed that American Indians are genetically Asian, that they came across the Pacific rather than the Atlantic. By now credulous people across the world get their blood tested to look for “tribal” allele characteristics and Oprah announces which African tribal roots she claims. (Alleles are little groups of genes.) Few listen to the scientific advice that mostly there is no certainty in such alleles, only hints and probabilities. If “tribal” membership had to be defined by the inclusion of specific alleles, siblings of the same parents might turn out to be “one-in” and “one-out,” because there is a fifty-fifty chance of inheritance between the two parents.

The theory that human beings first came to the North American continent over the Bering Straits provokes resistance from the indigenous people because it is used politically to say, “Well, we are all immigrants, aren’t we? What’s a ten millennium time difference? You get no special status from being here earlier.” So the Blackfeet, for instance, will announce staunchly that they were ALWAYS HERE and will stand by that opinion. (Luckily, their reservation IS where they were at first contact.)

The sudden interest in DNA has made many tribal people suspicious, partly because their medical needs are met by the Indian Health Service separately from the general population, which can suggest that there’s something “different” about their care. The feeling is that they may be lab rats or that some experiments may be being performed on them secretly. (It’s happened before. For instance, many unauthorized sterilizations in a certain period when Indians were considered genetically inferior.) The opposite lurking idea that Indians are exotic and superior hints that they may have some miracle drug hiding in them that would cause them to be “strip-mined.” In particular, older folk are not friendly to transplanted organs and anyway are tired of being reduced to bureaucratic statistics and percentages.

Now and then rumors sweep the reservation. Mysterious infections are targeting Indians! (Because they demand antibiotics in excess of ordinary use, “super-bugs” resistant to antibiotics are more likely to develop.) The People are being given wrong meds on purpose! (Training dispensary technicians with rez educations is not easy.) Everyone has polio! Everyone has AIDS! Everyone has hepatitis or TB or H1N1. Everybody has diabetes. So people are already nervous about protecting their bodies.

The problem is the consequences of resisting DNA information: there are not many Native Americans signed up to be genetic matches for kidney transplants (more and more needed for diabetes sufferers) or bone marrow transplants. The great irony is that while the tribal people are obsessing about sending in an inner cheek scraping to be put into a DNA database -- for fear that it will somehow prove they are genetically evil, or possibly genetically so valuable that their every body fluid will be demanded, or maybe from another planet -- the modern food they are eating is killing them.

There is another DNA trapdoor that was installed at the beginning of records. Though there are many legal ways of defining what an “Indian” or “Native American” is (according to the purpose of the category: education, grants for housing, etc.), the most basic definition was a “full-blood” or “half-blood.” That has now been extended to one-quarter. Some have their eye on one-eighth. The intention (not admitted) from the beginning was the elimination of Native Americans via diminishing blood quantum. There was no provision for multi-tribal blood quantum. There was no provision for highly educated, successful, middle-class tribal people. Now what? Stay tuned.

ARTIFACTS: CEREMONIAL OBJECTS Number 7

The crux of the matter is that for the American autochthonous people, everything was sacred: land, people, animals, plants. But some hundreds of years ago, in order to keep the peace when science began to depart from religion, the Europeans invented the idea of the “secular” and divided life into two realms: the sacred and the profane or ordinary. This was good in a way because it let science go ahead and learn without some cleric hanging over their shoulders, telling them what they couldn’t think, but it was also bad because it meant that things became just “things” and could be used without thinking about morality. One wonders what would have happened if the “New World” had been “discovered” by the Chinese instead of the Europeans.

Too late now. We’ve struggled for more than half a millennium to reconcile the “split” world with the “whole” world of Indians. Government officials admit the sacredness of one place and the locals immediately come up with another. The officials say, “Not EVERYTHING can be sacred! You need boundaries! Buildings, categories, what’s in and what’s out. The system of protecting designated sacred things won’t work unless you know which is which. So, now which of these material culture objects is sacred?” The real answer is all of them.

Mircea Eliade used the word “valorized” to mean not just sacred but also intensely meaningful: full of symbolism and energy. One hybrid way of thinking about sacred things might be to distinguish between the potentially sacred and the “valorized” or energized. By their very nature, these objects are imbued with special value for their creators and users but have conflicting value for “outsiders,” from the Indian people who have converted to Christianity and been taught to despise and destroy anything “heathen” or “Satanic” to the whites who fancy that the magical efficacy of other people’s sacred objects have actual magic powers that they can co-opt. To some of today’s people, the iconography of the Catholic church probably has more energy, but there is also a natural tendency and deliberate attempt to conflate the two worlds, Christian and traditional, into some new synergy.

In the Southwest and Northwest there are ceremonials that are like theatre, so flamboyant and impressive. People wear masks and interact with the onlookers. Other things are secret, which makes everyone want to see them even more. Artifacts from such events would be in high demand. Kachina dolls carry a little of that glamor.

Northern prairie ceremonials, mostly based on “Bundles,” which are just what the word says, containing objects both humble (the hide of some small animal wrapped in calico with only its head sticking out) and spectacular (a Thunder Pipe which is a yard-long brass-tacked pipestem with the entire tail of an eagle attached in a hanging fan, along with clusters of brass falconry bells, ribbons, ermine skins, and some kind of colorful bird like a parrot or rooster. The value of such objects depend on whether the collector is looking for decoration or for scientific understanding of the symbolism, but there is also an element of faddishness. In the Sixties no one paid much attention to Bundles, but after a roving anthropologist began to talk them up, they were suddenly worth thousands of dollars, high prestige items.

In the old days these items had two components: the actual physical artifact and the songs and protocols that were associated with them. This particular anthropologist (who had no academic credentials) knew this and often managed to get the object “transferred” to him, meaning that he was ceremonially initiated and entitled to use the ritual that went with the object. If that were not done, the recipient basically had acquired a computer with no program, an appliance but no electricity. The anthro was also smart enough to know that the rituals were a “value-added” feature that drove the price higher. Among the believers, however, the transfer came with certain obligations and curtailments and not observing them meant that the value leaked out of the whole complex. The anthro suffered from "unluck."

These Bundles and associated or parallel objects have been highly controversial, even if for decades they had been stored unused. Contemporary tribal people have acquired them and renewed the ceremonies as best they can, but the original lives of the People are so different that there is question about what the re-enactments can mean. There’s no problem among Indians about whether one religion is privileged over another, but there is a problem among psychological philosophers about what natural objects can mean to a people separated from their life close to the land. Rather than an upwelling of emotion and meaning, the ceremony can become a performance in honor of the past and even a demonstration of status. (Not that that those can’t be emotionally powerful.) Somehow the materials that are left with the tribe or restored to the tribe have migrated from the hands of those closest to the old ways into the possession of those with the most resources, the new middle class Indians. Most white people know nothing about such objects, don’t understand the examples in museums and are innocent of the tribal dynamics under the surface, but politicians quickly recognize the power of the issue.

Whites do collect items from their own religion: rooms of crucifixes, triptychs, statues, vestments, altar accessories, Buddhist bells, Hindu statues. Having the idea of the “secular” at hand, they are able to “de-commission” and “de-sacralize” churches, Communion silver, and so on. Some whites trying to sell Native American sacred objects will use that strategy to say that a Bundle or coup stick is “dead.” Therefore it can be sold. Going in the other direction, tribal people can demand that museums resurrect objects that have been hanging in glass cases for many years, thus ripping pieces out of valuable collections. Curators who balk can be “cursed.” Confrontations can get pretty disorderly. Feelings run high.

Converting the sacred to the monetary is a human characteristic, including both white and red people. The difference is that Old-Timey indigenous people are not likely to have cash reserves and may be forced by poverty into withdrawing their piety from artifacts so as to survive. There are plenty of brokers for all sorts of artifacts, including the holy ones, among the tribal peoples themselves. Likewise, there are fakers who have learned to invent convincing tales that make ordinary items seem exciting. And always there is the political issue of “demanding respect.”

The ceremony that comes to mind on the Indian side is “stick game.” On the white side one thinks of “poker.” Religion always has a charlatan dimension as well as a heartfelt and truly faithful side. Artifacts are not exempt from that.

ARTIFACTS: PAN-INDIAN POP CULTURE (Part 6)

Recently there was an uproar over a YouTube post that put “synchronized pow wow dancing” (which is already controversial) to Chubby Checkers’ twist music. Four guys wore ribbons and feathers that furiously thrashed around them as they exactly matched their steps to the drum and each other -- and the energy and beat were right with the music. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSzhOEWW8c4 I love it and so did the aboriginal Canadian grandpa, Rolland Nadjiwan, who sent it to me.

The classicists want everything Indian to remain as “pure” as it was at first recorded encounter by whites (though each tribe had no doubt evolved over millenia, always adapting to new ideas and influences), usually in the 19th century which has become the stereotype for all Indians. The realists point out that many people who self-identify as Indian can’t provide a fractional provenance big enough to make them legal members of any single tribe but may genetically be from mixed tribes that add up to close to a hundred per cent. As well, many grew up in the diasphora, urban or scattered in a way that cut them off from first-hand experience on their “home” reservation. And anyway those tribes who can afford to will stage major annual pan-Indian pow-wows where people exchange ideas. So the bottom line is that for many Indian people, pow-wows are their main focus, to the point of being “religious” or at least revivalist.

Responding to the maribou and neon satin ribbon idea of pow-wow outfits, some have tried to return to “authentic” costumes as depicted by the earliest (white) artists. Pulling wolf-skins over their heads and dangling fox and otter hides over their arms has caused the less romantic dancers to call them “road kill dancers.” The natural NA tolerance (often mingled with a little kidding) runs up against a serious, almost obsessive, desire to recapture an historical truth. One might guess that the lower the “blood” quantum, the more intense the feeling.

We used to occasionally acquire dance headgear that was invented out of pieces of pop cans, deconstructed child’s dimestore dyed turkey feather headdresses, iron-on sequin clothing decorations, and all sorts of other ingenious conversions of bits. The final effect was quite artistic, but hardly historical. Bob used to say that what made it Indian was the resourcefulness, the eye for color and movement, and the identity of the artist -- which was always what had made the artifacts of the past authentic.

The history minded will instruct you solemnly that a “grass dancer” is meant to dance on the long prairie grass of the dance arena, carefully side-stepping to trample it into a flat surface. Not much need for that on astroturf. Personally I’m still nostalgic for the old night-bonfire and daytime-dust sort of environment of the early Sixties, but most people today would rather have breathable air and good lighting. Today’s kids who do prairie chicken dances may never have seen the birds on their leks and the hoop dancers use hula hoops. The public mind is still stuck on war dances, scalp dances and rain dances.

Two objects have caught the public imagination: dream catchers and talking sticks. Each has origins in genuine tribal inventions. The idea of a dream catcher -- a hoop with a web across the circle -- is that if it hung over the head of a sleeper, it would “catch” dreams. Good ones, it is suggested usually, or maybe that it will filter out the nightmares. The principle of the talking stick is that the person who holds it in a group “has the floor” and others should not interrupt, but rather wait until the stick comes to them. Attractively decorated, both these objects are easily sold to tourists. Dream catchers are charming and maybe useful for coaxing a fearful child to sleep. Talking sticks are practical, making life easier for chairmen trying to keep a meeting orderly.

I used to work in a Portland office with an engineer whose father had once been walking down the street in Browning when he was approached by an Indian man with a rolled-up buckskin under his arm. The father nodded hello and the Indian wanted to talk to him. It appeared that the rolled-up buckskin was a “certificate of adoption into the Blackfeet tribe” that had been commissioned by someone who had not appeared as promised. The Indian man explained that he had counted on the money from this transaction and he begged my friend’s father to allow himself to be adopted. The price was a bargain.

This hard-headed engineer was convinced that the buckskin was a valid document, equivalent to a legal birth certificate. I would try to tell him that the whole thing was a bit of a con, but he would stubbornly insist that his father was a true member of the Blackfeet tribe and therefore so was he. It was emotional. In some ways that might be as binding as a legal transaction. Until he tried to collect his annual tribal Christmas payout.

When two cultures confront each other and one is inscrutable to the other, who knows what is “true” and proper. To a Protestant, does a scapular mean anything? To a Catholic does a phylactery mean anything? People are constantly coming up with small, possibly secret, practices that entail objects hard to interpret to others. Native American objects can be quite inscrutable. Consider moccasins that have beaded soles. Some say they are funerary, meant to honor a dead person as they walked to the Shadow Land. Others cynically put them down to compulsive beading -- someone just didn’t know when to stop!

As in every dimension, the material culture of the “Other” is split between the sublime beauty of a squash blossom necklace and the gimcrackery of Made in Japan cheap loom-beaded ersatz leather belts for kids. People speak of one extreme or the other, depending on their attitude at the time, but rarely stay aware of the objects and materials that are everywhere around them, part of daily life, like Indian blankets or even the landscape. Most rarely of all do they consider the evolution of culture, the continuum of innovation and tradition that stretches deep into the past beyond their ken or that of any anthropologist either.

LANCE FOSTER, ARTIST & WRITER

Lance Foster's new book, "The Indians of Iowa," is now in print.

You can actually read the first 25 pages of this book online for FREE through Google books, and those pages have the chapter about the Ioway in it:

http://books.google.com/books?id=A5GqVzsxHp0C&dq=lance%20foster%20indians%20of%2\
0iowa&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=dC7rpHvxBo&sig=dDjTUhV9BqOBKY5r-Tsu5ijkZ\
YY&hl=en&ei=ud22SqX0GIeqtgOBt8zQDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onep\
age&q=&f=false
I doubt you can click right on this link. You'll have to cut and paste it or just search at Google books.

Lance says: “Nope. I don't get any money for this Google stuff. In fact, if I ever get any money for the book, maybe $1 for every book sold I hear, the Press only pays the royalties once a year-- and I won't know if/how much until next August (2010). Anyone who thinks authors of books get rich ---hahaha! --are sadly mistaken, unless that author is Stephen King!

“Oh well, the way I look at it is that it's not much different than someone reading a book in a bookstore...if they like it, usually they will buy it, and if they don't, then they saved their money :-)”


This is the link to an article in the Helena Independent Record:

http://www.helenair.com/articles/2009/07/24/local/top/49lo_090724_pwk.txt

This is Lance’s art blog:

http://lancemfosterstudio.blogspot.com

* * * * * * *

Going to the art blog site will give you access to photos, a mini-graphic legend, and other places that Lance Foster posts. Readers of “Prairie Mary” have become accustomed to his insightful comments, often daily monitoring which I appreciate very much. Lance’s great strength is that he is both multi-cultural (Native American + Euro) and multi-disciplinary: landscape architecture, archeology, NA history, and art plus a good deal of knowledge of Euro systems of legend and psychic theory. As is often typical of NA’s, he has a lively sense of of humor, for example this book cover which I hope will make it onto my blog. (Google has new rules about what images can be reproduced.)

If you can’t see it, a warrior on a galloping horse aims his nocked arrow at the sky. The moon that is his backdrop is a crescent holding the dark moon in its “arms.” The rider wears jeans and a t-shirt with a cell phone for a logo, as well as a ball cap with an eagle feather attached to the button. His horse is running down a highway with a tilting power pole in the background. A great image of syncretism in good humor!

Another of his entertaining images is an Indian offering Van Gogh, bandaged where he cut off his ear, a replacement ear -- of corn. His art is straightforward: strong lines and images, well-composed, and story-telling. He himself does not have the blade-like face we often associate with images of NA’s, so rather often his art shows massive monolithic faces like his own, especially when he is dealing with “spirits.” He has a profound interest in the supernatural, skeptical and believing at once. That is, he is strong in his belief that SOMETHING is there, but open-minded about what it might be or what it might mean.

Lance Foster is not recognized by the art power-brokers of the state of Montana, neither the cowboy art cartel that values 19th century images nor the humanities/academic gate-keepers who have a captive clientele that includes very few Indians. He has academic credentials: some of his degrees from the University of Montana. We sometimes talk about organizing a salon de refusee for artists, writers, and those who combine both categories. It’s hard to know why the exclusion: oversight? Failure to fit the stereotypes? Failure to flatter the right people? Politics? We don’t even know what our guest list might look like, just that we run into others all the time. Maybe blogging below the radar will bring us together. Or maybe it will break us apart into allegiance to larger networks, national, continental or even planetary.

Lance’s new book is an example of clarity after thorough research. He doesn’t try to include every fact known to historians, but there are some strong new ideas here, mostly about the swarm of explorers who came on the heels of Lewis & Clark & Sacajawea, destroying the ways of the People in decades. In fact, that may account for some of the lack of inclusion, since there are people invested in supporting the uniqueness and prowess of the two celebrated explorers. Lance talks about Moses Reed, who deserted the expedition and was captured by the Otoe. It was a military expedition and therefore could legitimately by Euro law have executed Reed, but the Otoe made a case for merely forcing him to run a gauntlet of the exploring party -- that is, running between two lines of the men who would strike him as hard as they could. This was their “gentler” convention.

Ioway Marie Dorion was the Sacajawea of the Oregon Trail, going with John Jacob Astor and barely escaping when the party was massacred on the way back. She had been the wife of Pierre Dorion, hired to be the interpreter, and she traveled with two small children plus being pregnant. After the escape with her children, she trekked 250 winter miles in near-starvation until they joined the Umatilla tribe where they stayed for the rest of their lives.

About the only names that pop up as familiar in my mind are Black Hawk, a war chief, and Spirit Lake, a massacre made famous by MacKinley Cantor’s massive novel of that name. As usual, we cling to the sensational. But Lance has supplemented each historical chapter with a more personal and contemporary reflection about something like mixed blood people or modern pow wows.

The principal of the high school in Heart Butte, Robin Krantz, is one of the Ioway Sioux Lance describes. The tribespeople there have been using “Ioway” to designate the tribe and Iowa for the state name to keep them separate. She is married to a white man but both have lived in Heart Butte a long time so they are woven into community life. I don’t think anyone in that community knows Lance or his work, so I’ll have to make sure I get a copy of this blog to Robin.

Lance Foster is not getting rich, but he is not giving up. He is rich in ideas, living “the life” without knowing the future -- a modern hunter-gatherer. We can learn a lot from him.

PLAYING MARGARET MEAD

Here-Now is one of my fav NPR radio programs, which might be conditioning since I listen to it during my lunch break. But lots of times I like it for reasons Robin Young might not expect. Today Sarah Chayes, former NPR reporter who now runs the Arghand Cooperative in Kandahar, was supposed to be telling us about the injustices against women there. Instead, she ended up expressing some things I’ve seen right here, esp. on the rez. No, NOT the stoning of women!

She was talking about how the pressure of the situation has taught people certain things. For instance, stuff that was being stored was just jammed into the closets and shelves any old way -- not sorted into kinds of supplies, sorts of equipment, and related objects. This, she suggested, was because EVERYTHING had been in short supply so long that it was all valuable, but there was no way to predict uses, so it was enough for it just to be there. Everyone had plenty of time to sort through the mess. One of the things her co-op sells is handmade soap, but the different scents were jumbled together so that they mixed smells and lost the identity that made them saleable. She tried to get across the idea of “quality control,” that is, delivering what one said would be sent. But everyone shrugged. Soap was soap. They were not used to being picky -- it was a foreign concept, literally.

Worst of all was a kind of passive acceptance of whatever the “mighty leaders” said, since it had been impossible to predict previous orders from what they knew about life. It all seemed highly arbitrary but backed by infinite mysterious resources. So when they were told to think for themselves in the new context of planning, their minds went blank. Part of the blankness was fear of punishment if they got it wrong. The idea of owning their own decisions just didn’t compute. Seemed like a trick.

But once they start thinking out of the box, stand back.

"Navajo speaker presents idea of 51st virtual state,” Elizabeth
Hardin-Burrola. April 13, 2009. © Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press.

“Gallup, N.M. (AP) -- Mark Charles would like Native Americans to start thinking outside the box about themselves and their political voice - or lack of voice - in the United States. Charles, of Fort Defiance, Ariz., spoke to a small group of community members at the University of New Mexico-Gallup on Thursday about his idea for the country's Native American people to join together to create a "51st Virtual State" for native people. A graduate of the University of California-Los Angeles, Charles is a public speaker, writer, computer programmer, minister and consultant on Native American issues…Charles explained he came up with the idea of a 51st virtual state for Native Americans after returning to the Navajo Nation and living for three years with his family in a traditional hogan in Cross Canyon, Ariz…Although there are more than 500 Native American tribes in the United States, the total population of Native people is so small that their political voice is marginalized. Candidates aren't very interested in communities that have no real voting power, he said. Even the Navajo Nation, with its large population, isn't a strong political block, Charles said. "As a Navajo people, as a nation, we can't vote together," he said, noting Navajo voter power is split between Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. However, if all Native Americans who are enrolled members of a state or federally recognized tribe could become citizens of a 51st virtual state, Charles explained, they could have a greater political voice…"

The metaphor of the “nation” has been so strong (not quite so strong as the metaphor of “money”) that we’ve forgotten until now that it’s an invention and arbitrary. We’re now living in a world where “failed states” are afflictions that nations can’t control: pirates, terrorists, nuclear arms . . . secret banks. So why not invent something entirely new? Voting by affinity, a virtual state. We’re about to the point where being “Indian” is more a state of mind than anything else anyway.

Now and then I think of a man who commented on a previous post about re-framing. It was about this re-thinking business, but it was during the New Orleans immediate aftermath and this man had been looking for practical physical rebuilding advice. He said that once he figured out the idea, he thought it was more helpful that any lumber and nails stuff. The world HAD changed.

So many of our disciplines and taxonomies and categories are based on assumptions that are outdated. Academic departments and disciplines don’t really fit the data we’re trying to understand, so we end up having to work cross-discipline or invent a sub-set. You can’t get to anything via Google without thinking through how some computer or computer programmer might have understood the subject. Too many things are set up as dyads when they are really continuums. Too many things don’t fit into any known category or the category something fits into is psychologically abhorrent, like saying Pluto is no longer a planet.

The whole planet and everything on it is shifting around. But it’s always done that. The dangerous times are when there are serious rifts between layers (generations) or when one religio-cultural-moral-legal complex that had evolved into a working system stops being relevant before a new one has had a chance to form. (Like Iraq.) Right now my guess is that a new global one IS forming, but it’s only gotten to some of the people, most of them young. Then again, Valier, Montana, time-lags, which might be a good thing. When all the keyboards are disabled, we’ve still got our pencils.

The economic shift is forcing new systems and the consequences will be tragic in terms of suffering, but chastising in terms of bad money practices. Major moral changes I see are in sex and drugs. Despite the kind of diseases one would expect to drive everyone into Puritanism, the young have been exposed to so much sex through the media that they just take it for granted and assume there will be a cure. Sex is no longer the sensation is was fifty years ago -- the new sensation is violence: real-life violence, like people blown into parts or having their heads slashed off. As far as drugs go, the pharm people have persuaded us that all drugs are good unless proven bad. But I think even the young agree that meth is bad and see marijuana as good. They see jailing people for small offenses and forcing drugs underground as a source of violence. I thinks that's true. If sales of marijuana in this country exceed sales of corn, wheat and soy combined, then we’ve created a new Prohibition and we know what that did to the country. Drug dealers are a virtual nation.

The kids will never stone women who want their own lives, but they will get stoned. And they don’t mind watching while people they don’t know are put to death. Looks more like Rome than the Taliban. Are they creating their own underground virtual nation?

HEAD-SMASHED-IN BUFFALO JUMP

Yesterday there was a good deal of messaging that was prompted by an article in The New York Review of Books, “Google and the Future of Books” by Robert Darnton. Vol 56, #2, February 12, 2009, in case anyone is looking for this on paper. The article is about the resolution of the lawsuit against Google’s plan to digitize all books, which was resolved in Google’s favor, kicking up fears of monopoly. The article takes a long historical view, tracing the impact of technology and the birth of the whole concept of copyright. Google is digitizing books without copyrights, books with expired copyrights that are out of print, books with copyrights that are “orphaned” (the publishing company has dispersed, the author can’t be located), and everything else they can get hold of. The question is how to manage all that stuff. (I do worry a bit about sunflares or the reversing of the planet’s polarity wiping out all the virtual books. But those catastrophes wouldn’t do ordinary books much good either.)

A respondent suggests that the real news is that ebooks are now profitable enough for anyone to care. And that other entities besides Google are puttin’ out the books on the Internet.

Athabasca University Press, is a “virtual” university far to the north in the province of Alberta where developing oil sands means there are a lot of vigorous people who have liberal gaps in their arduous work lives which they choose to fill indoors taking online courses. The director, Walter Hildebrandt, was the director of the University of Calgary Press when they accepted my book, “Bronze Inside and Out.” (It is partly available online through Google Books. I didn’t give permission nor did the press.)

Athabasca U Press is scouting a new trail by making their books available online for free, as well as the journals they publish. One CAN get the books bound conventionally, Print On Demand. I tested this service by downloading “Imagining ‘Head-Smashed-In’” by Jack W. Brink, one of the intrepid archeologists and paleontologists who have made Alberta one of the most exciting places to regard the deep past.

“Head-Smashed-In” is the name of a buffalo jump, a place where for millennia native peoples have chased the animals over a cliff in order to kill them for meat. One of the first things I learned was that it was the buffs who were supposed to get their heads smashed in, rather than the people, though some unfortunates did get caught up in the melee. Also, I had not known this had been the name of the place for a very, very long time -- in Blackfeet, of course.

A rather fabulous museum exists next to the site -- not ON it, since that would destroy what remains of the site. If you are going to southern Alberta this summer, mark on your map both Head-Smashed-In near Fort Macleod and the Tyrrell Museum near Drumheller, which addresses the much, much earlier dinosaur era and the slightly overlapping megamammal period of the mastodons. I know people who consider these “religious” institutions because one comes away infused with wonder at the clear evidence of nearly inconceivable events.

I just read “Imagining Head-Smashed-In” online. It is full of gorgeous photos of the land plus illuminating paintings of how things must have been -- FAR more complex and skillful than the usual conceptions of bison pouring lemming-like over a cliff. It turns out that this specific piskun (Blackfeet for buffalo jump) is archetypal, an example of how the actual cliff is only part of the operating terrain which includes a wide grassy basin above the cliff that stretches for kilometres, the abrupt sandstone break which leaks high quality spring water at the bottom, and then another smaller area suitable for the work of cutting up the carcasses, rendering fat, roasting meat in pit-ovens, cutting and drying muscle meat, cracking open leg bones for marrow. The final elegance is not far away: the river valley of the Old Man River, excellent for winter camping and stashing the preserved airtight packets of meat in rawhide while working on the hides of the animals.

This efficient and arduous work demanded cooperation among a hundred or more people until the arrival of horses made it unnecessary and then the elimination of the buffalo herds made it impossible. (See a parallel with printing?) To properly understand the remnants that they found, Brink and his crew replicated as much as they could. Buffalo chips (dung) DOES burn as well as wood, but only if there is a stiff breeze. Buffalo bones burn rather well, so long as they are greasy. Since the grease is nutritionally valuable, the bones were smashed and boiled in rawhide-lined pits heated with hot rocks, then the fat skimmed off. (One of the most outstanding tribal families today is named “Grease-Melters.”)

The crew figured out why the boiling pits contained one kind of stone and the roasting pits contained another: quartzite holds heat better for boiling while flat plates of sandstone are better for roasting pits. This is the sort of detail that can make historical novels come alive. They also discovered that smashing bones is a lot harder than one might think, not least because one’s face and clothes become spattered with marrow and grease.

The Head-Smashed-In museum is built as steps down a cliff face. Brink chuckles over today’s visitors to the museum assuming that inside they are looking at the actual rock of the piskun, because the reality is that it’s a huge casting created by spraying latex onto a real cliff to create a giganto mold. At the bottom of the cliff is another giga-casting of a partly excavated dig with real equipment scattered around it. To me this is MORE amazing than including an actual rock outcropping in a building.

Even more remarkable is Brink’s gradual realization that the local tribal population should be included, that much information remained among them (the last “jump” was about one hundred and fifty years ago), that there were political issues to resolve between and within the tribes, and that much could be resolved by good humor and participation.

Everyone with access to a computer can read this book. It is this last quality of being inclusive and generous that makes such a specialized subject valuable for everyone as an example, even if they don’t care whether they ever walk the line markers that show where the bison hazers should be or ever boil a bison bone. The story combines the determined strength of early nomads with the careful sifting and reflection of modern scientists in a fabulous tale. Don’t stop before the last lyrical “imaginings” of archeologist and arrow-user.

Imagining Head-Smashed-In: Aboriginal Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains by Jack W. Brink who “is Archaeology Curator at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, Canada. He received his B.A. from the University of Minnesota and his M.A. from the University of Alberta.”

Hardcover: 978-1-897425-00-8 (HC) $85.00
Paperback: 978-1-897425-04-6 (SC) $35.95
E-Book: 978-1-897425-09-1 (e-book) No cost.

THE RIEL REBELLION ENDS

My UPS man is a Salois but his great-grandfather’s name was Toussaint and he came to Montana’s high-line in flight after the disastrous sequence of events that ended the attempt of the Red River people to break away from Canada, first in 1870 when it was “Rupert’s Land” and then later when it had become a British Commonwealth country, in order to form their own nation. In the preceding century, the French trappers who came to the prairies had married Cree women and created Metis families. The classic account of the people, “Strange Empire,” was written by one of their own, Joseph Kinsey Howard, a key member of the Montana literary community, who had a cabin up Blackleaf Canyon near Choteau though he employed as a newspaperman in Great Falls.

Salois had bet a friend, another amateur historian, that the the events of Duck Lake and later Frog Lake had happened in the early spring of 1885 rather than 1886, because Toussaint had taught Salois directly about what had happened. He wanted me to document that he was right, so I got down my copy of “Strange Empire” and confirmed that the year was 1885. Over a century ago and yet still bright in some minds, though others have never heard of the Red River Nation nor Louis Riel, their religiously obsessed leader, nor Gabriel Dumont, Riel’s cousin, general and protector. Metis names are well-represented on the Blackfeet rolls, because they took refuge in St. Mary’s valley, in Heart Butte, and other niches and pockets of the area. Riel himself taught school at St. Peter’s Mission School near Sun River.

Last night my movie was Gore Vidal’s “Lincoln,” gently told with Mary Tyler Moore in a sympathetic version of Mary Todd Lincoln and Sam Waterston as a martyr Lincoln. That was on my mind when I sat down to read Howard’s account of Duck Lake and Frog Lake. (So was Gaza.) According to Vidal, Lincoln’s problem was generals who would not fight relentlessly, as is necessary to win a war. But Riel’s problem was his religious conscience which made him urge restraint on Dumont, a man who knew how to fight without giving quarter. When Dumont could nearly taste victory, Riel would worry about the number of dead and call him off. Dumont was only restrained by his love and admiration for Riel.

Catholic by upbringing and education, Riel was caught between breaking away and making peace with the standing order -- he was “half-assimilated.” He tried to see himself as a part and representative of his people, whom he called the Exovidat, a word he invented to mean “of the flock.” But ovine, sheep, are not suited for warfare. He proclaimed universal salvation in the form of a time-limited hell and tried to make his local priests join the movement. When they were defiant, he declared himself a priest and said the Holy Spirit had left the Roman Pope.

Howard felt there were three causes for the defeat of the Rebellion: alienating the priests, restraining Dumont, and terrifying the Anglo-Saxons who had begun to filter in to the trading posts and early settlements. He also points out that if the Blackfoot/Blackfeet (both sides of the line) had not been devastated by starvation (no more buffalo) and disease (small pox) and if they had backed the rebellion, there might very well have been a new nation brought forth upon this continent. The Fenians (Irish diaspora) were very interested in all this and might have participated.

The numbers involved were very few, in the dozens on both sides, but the archetypal pattern was that of many rebellions. Discontent, denial on the part of those who should respond, an end to patience, desperation, and blind fear. Then, violence more like train wrecks than battles. When Father Moulin was threatened in Carlton before the action began, he said, “My country is the universe. I am not afraid.” Would that more people thought that way.

At Stobart (Duck Lake) a small community was invaded and the Mounted Police and volunteers were put to flight, one-fourth of them killed. A supply depot and store there was so well-stocked that it took the invaders two days to remove the commodities. Major Crozier, a seasoned Mountie officer, set out with 56 Mounties and 43 Prince Albert volunteers. (PA wanted all forces kept as close to PA as possible to protect that larger town.) They had a seven-pound cannon. (Is that the weight of the cannon or the weight of the ammunition? My guess is the latter. I’m not good at battle stuff.) They were ambushed and thrashed, while Louis Riel, horseback on a ridge just out of reach, waved a huge cross from a church and exhorted his people. Gabriel Dumont’s skull was creased but he staunched the blood with snow and continued with the help of a brother. The wounded and dead were dealt with in “civilized” fashion, that is, helped and returned. Crozier evacuated Carlton and withdrew to PA, going through a narrows perfect for another ambush, which Dumont itched to perform, but Riel forbade it.

Canada had no Western military force since they had not participated in the Prairie Clearances. The Mounties were police. Moving army to Saskatchewan from both coasts seemed impossible because the Canadian Pacific Railroad was not complete. But the weather was still cold enough that temporary tracks were laid right on the ice of rivers and over the snows of the foothills, the men in open cars with short windbreak sides and straw bedding. In the worst gaps, they had to get out and walk many miles in temperatures well below zero. Their suffering was intense and sometimes fatal.

Riel and Dumont split along the assimilation line, you could say. Riel was constantly preoccupied with being civilized while Dumont wanted to “fight like an Indian.” Now Poundmaker’s Cree people heard the news and wanted to join in. Assiniboine near Battleford lit the fuse by attacking and Poundmaker’s uncontrollable young men joined in. About five hundred whites, maybe three hundred of them women and children, forted up and watched as their pleasant and nicely equipped little homes were trashed and burned. Then surrounding farmsteads were destroyed, fires burning in the night. The warriors returned to stake out the fort and wait for the occupants to starve, but didn’t know the stores were enough for three months plus there was access to livestock across a river.

On April 2 at Frog Lake two Oblate fathers were observing mass when Protestant settlers began to slip in. Then in strode “L’Esprit Errant,” Wandering Spirit, “vain, ambitious and brutal” in his full battle regalia, a man feared even by Big Bear, though Big Bear’s son, Imasees, was his deputy in leading the young and disaffected warriors. Wandering Spirit hated whites. At the end of the Mass, he and his men herded the whites out towards Agency buildings. Quinn, the agent, tried to oppose them and Wandering Spirit shot him in the face. Chaos and murder ensued. The interpreter, a half-blood, saved two women by hiding them in a wagon and getting them out of there. Boundaries between rebels and loyalists were blurred because so many people were of mixed blood as well as mixed allegiances. Friendships crossed the lines. Think Gaza.

The commander of the nearest fort, which was that in name only, was Inspector Francis Jeffrey Dickens, son of the novelist born about a month after the publication of “A Christmas Carol.” He was described as “secret and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.” He was small, red-bearded, precise and gloomy. When he was small, his father had dubbed him the “chicken stalker.” He stammered and was going deaf. Previously he had served in India with the Bengal Police. He set about organizing the defense of the few flimsy buildings, putting even a couple of teenaged girls on sentry duty. One was fascinated to discover she could spit on her gunsight, rub it with a phospor match, and cause it to glow in the dark.

Big Bear and his band demanded the surrender of the whites and got it, except that the Mounties slipped away in a scow they had built. (Dickens, a year later and out of the Force, died of a heart attack in Illinois.) Meanwhile, the Plains Crees and Woods Cree, related but separate groups, herded the forty-plus captives back and forth over the prairie while they raided supply depots. The Plains Crees suggested killing the captives and joining Poundmaker. The Woods Crees refused. Their women hid the young white women from the rambunctious young men. Finally the Woods Crees set the whites free with enough food and horses to get to Battleford.

Thus ends this part of the story, which goes on, even today reverberating into the politics of Montana as well as prairie Canada. Buy the book. Maybe send copies to Gaza. Or Obama.

CLIMAX CULTURE (NOT about sex)

When UU Leadership School was devised in the Seventies by Peter Raible, Rod Stewart and Ord Elliott, the key idea was not church history or personal faith -- though those two defining elements were included -- but rather the nature of the institution itself. They were trying to teach us Organizational Design. All three of these men, plus others, were frank institutionalists who wanted the denomination to persist and thrive. They were deeply idealistic but practical at the same time and had made the Pacific Northwest District a laboratory for some of their ideas -- or maybe the PNWD produced the ideas.

One of them was the sustaining of the religious body without constraints from national boundaries, since the district stretched from the California border through Canada to Alaska. In the end, the district was seriously damaged by the political goals of those interested in a different institution: a separated Unitarian denomination in Canada, so the leaders on that side of the border would have more power. They ripped the PNWD in half. (My mother used to say, “for every bug there’s a bigger bug.”)

Anthropologists have a concept they call “climax culture.” No, it’s not about sex, though when I googled the phrase a large number of those entries came up, demonstrating once again that eroticizing and commodification have modern Western life by the throat, if not some other body part. What I’m addressing is the idea that sometimes all the forces, both internal and external, are aligned in such a way to cause a huge flowering of energy and creativity that is so impressive that people ever after yearn to return to it, even though the forces have faded.

Famously, 19th century Plains Indian culture was one of those climax cultures, one that still beguiles us. In fact, it is so vivid that this week a French scriptwriter has been sending me emails asking for “the facts” about Blackfeet, whom she is convinced are still like the 19th century. She looks for tipis and horses. When I chide her that she’s being romantic, she insists that she is not -- only Hollywood is romantic about Indians. But she believes that the Bureau of Indian Affairs is assigned to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and is an instrument of oppression.

Not that it can’t be, but after the outrageous last massacres following the Civil War, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was removed from the Department of War and assigned to the Department of the Interior. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is, theoretically at least, trying to make prosperity, not war. It is also trying to keep itself as an institution alive, as surely as the Unitarians. The Blackfeet tribe is also trying to keep ITSELF alive as an institution. They are all hoping that organizational design is one of the keys: the tribe is currently working through a new constitution. The whole association of American states (USA) is trying to preserve its coherence and effectiveness, and talks of redesigning our election process to get rid of the electoral college, now that technology has changed everything. Certainly organizational design, or the lack of it, has brought down our financial infrastructure.

But these may be small forces that cannot create a climax culture. New technology, esp. sources of energy, are certainly part of the picture. Horses and guns lifted the dog-and-arrow technology of the Plains Indians into enormous effectiveness. For a little more than a hundred years that empowerment captured the imagination of the planet before industrialization (notably the steam ship and the railroad) ended the story. Now the end of carbon-based energy may be ending industrialization.

Not that new technology, even the internet, can change the world as much as a new idea. For instance, the shift in morality after World War II and during the Cold War -- maybe prompted by “anthropology” -- released many gifted and energetic men in San Francisco to experiment with developing a whole new community, as surely as the shift away from Calvinism allowed the ideas of Unitarianism and Universalism to flower in the open as legitimate denominations when earlier they had been heresies.

Like any sudden release of energy, including that of the Plains Indians on horseback waving Winchester 66’s, the first reaction was chaos and horror on the part of those not included, who were invested in maintaining their OWN institutions. Sex, drugs and rock’n roll were the most obvious SF symptoms, but demonizing them has made them so attractive to the rebellious and transgressive that now they are part of the mainstream: sexualization, commodification, pharmaceuticals, and loud music follow us everywhere, even to small Montana towns, even in religious institutions. Some think the big boom in UUism came when birth control was devised. In Portland the Michael Servetus Singles group became an outlet for libertine behavior that would have hurt Servetus himself, that crusty old bachelor, more than being burned at the stake which he was. Certainly the UUA has been eager to reach out to the gay and lesbian community, to the point of sharing space with the Metropolitan Community Church, which is focused on the same demographic and thus in competition.

The point of Organizational Design was to deliberately devise principles and patterns that would manage the energy of change and variousness into less self-destructive channels. How do we keep the libertines and transgressors from driving all the quietly conservative people out of the institution or on the other hand keep all the conservative people from stamping out every innovation, every experiment or new kind of music (folk music, anyone?), every young person who might be the future.

That wildness in counterculture San Francisco gradually formed itself into a flamboyant climax culture now of considerable interest to us and of deep personal nostalgia to the people who were actually part of the mix. Gus Van Sant’s movie “Milk” will never play in Valier or even in Great Falls, but Netflix will soon have the DVD and then many here will quietly see it. Some of the ideas are already mainstream. The dynamics of terrorist assassination are vital to understand today.

How to think “properly” about gay culture is as relevant in small villages as anywhere else, simply because gays are here -- always were. But there are many kinds of homosexuality, some of them bent to the point of being criminal, like assault on children (which can also be heterosexual). Other modes are benign and constructive and always were, for instance, the woman-identified men of the Plains cultures who stayed in the village to help with heavy work, loved children in a protective way, and -- if necessary -- acted as hunters and warriors. This figure is one of the reasons gay men become so invested in Plains Indian culture.

I think that both eroticization and commodification have become cultural dead ends. We need new principles and I think they will be trans-national if only because our problems are. The tiny beginnings are already here but I wouldn’t point them out even if I could, because the status quo would stamp them out.