THE WORLD GOES AROUND

The issue of whether the government should allow two Arapaho Indians to kill two bald eagles for the sake of freedom to practice their traditional religion has been going the rounds. I blew my cool on the subject on a listserv called “The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment” which I’ve belonged to for many years. This is what I said.

Both eagles and Indians are "third rail" issues -- not just in America, but also around the world. They are sacred subjects with much mojo attached, and yet trying to get anyone to do anything practical or even moral about them is pretty damned tough. The issues are confusing, painful, and internally contradictory. They take a lot of stamina just to investigate. When you're living in the middle of wind turbines that chop up hawks and eagles on their traditional migratory paths, where Indians who are as mainstream as anyone else try to re-create old ceremonies without living that life, which is what validated them in the first place -- let's just say there's plenty of blame to go around. And I suppose that's why so many people make a leap to romance, totally detached from first-hand contact, and then become enraged if anyone challenges that. There is a big split in the nature of the discourse. One is practical, experience-based, and in situ. The other is theoretical, spiritual, and seeking some kind of absolution or participation. (I'm trying not to be pejorative.)

We tend to run headlong into each other.

A few miles from here to the north -- I can see them -- is a wind farm. Sounds great. Clean energy. There are a HUNDRED of these massive turbines with blades big enough to drive a car into. There is no plan for what to do when they wear out, which they will. The problem of how to hook them up to the grid has not been solved because they are intermittent power and there is no practical way to store it. The transmission lines that the Canadian company wants to build has not been completed because they were so ham-handed about forcing condemnation on the land owners and have built on wetlands and archeological sites as they promised NOT to do. Condemnation of Montana lands for the sake of a corporation from a foreign country? The court cases are proceeding.

There are government subsidies and these enterprising companies (some of them are Irish) are determined to use them before they dry up. Therefore they want to build another wind farm (There are maybe a half-dozen so far in this and adjoining counties) a few miles north of the one I can see from the street in front of my house. (At night they are topped by pulsing red lights.) They need to be on a ridge where there is strong wind.

Because there is strong wind, the hawks and eagles and other cruisers have used that area for migration and nesting for millennia. You can see the ledges with nests in that ridge because there are big white swashes of eagle poop under them. Bald eagles are fish hawks and stick to waterways. The birds that will be chopped up in mounds will mostly be golden eagles and other raptors. I helped to raise a golden eagle and am sentimentally attached to them, not for their symbolism but because of holding them, talking to them, squirting the hose on them (they love it), protecting cats from them, shooting gophers to feed them, and other little acts of personal nurturing.

That's the eagles. Now for the Indians. I do not know the Arapaho tribe or rez -- only some individuals. I DO know Blackfeet after fifty years of contact teaching people a few years younger than myself, then their children, then their grandchildren. (With long periods when I did other things.) Bob and I participated in ceremonials that other white people didn't know existed, but that now their grandchildren have decided to resurrect as much as possible. The people I participated with were 80 in 1961, so you see they were 19th Century folks, very very different from these modern entrepreneurs. I've seen people be very white, go Indian, decide that was a mistake and come back to being white, then try to manage some kind of compromise. It ain't easy and I support them. If two Arapaho want to catch two live eagles in a ceremonial manner, I can't see what terrible damage it will do. I would hope it would help them resolve their identities and fates.

A woman my age, Marie Heavyrunner, was just found in the crawl space under her house -- dead, tied, wrapped in plastic. She'd been there since July when she is rumored to have received a check for $90,000 for her oil leases. (Have you read "Mean Spirit?" Linda Hogan. She’s been speaking about the new boom.) The dead woman’s son is the suspect. Another relative helped him somehow. They were part of a drug gang which had taken over the house. The woman was my age, 72. I worked with her late husband, a very much respected WWII veteran, a man who helped liberate the death camps. I taught his son by a different wife and his grandson who served ten years for murdering his cousin -- hit him in the head with a baseball bat. All through those ten years I tried to keep him supplied with books, magazines, and letters in hopes that he would write. He was released on parole, re-offended and went back in. The tribe and the FBI are stone-walling all attempts to find out more about Marie’s case because they want the leasing to continue.

An old Blackfeet woman called me late at night which she often does when she gets scared and wants advice from a white woman. She thinks I have secret information. She's my age and went on relocation so most of her life has been in cities with white people. She was being paid by the oil companies to get old people to sign over the frakking rights to their leases. I was horrified. She couldn't understand why. "It's good money and I need it!" she said, and this is true. A couple hundred dollars per signature. The old timey people think she knows best because she's been in the city and knows a lot of white people.

Today it was announced that one of the oil companies had realized that Red Blanket Hill was sacred and had scrubbed their plans to drill there. Bob always told me it was a place that attracted lightning because there are iron deposits under it. I would not want to be drilling there in a thunderstorm.

Now the subject of religion.

Seizing eagles is easier said than done. This is not Santeria where a rooster has its throat cut. (I don't know whether anyone ever eats those birds. Soup?)

It's an ordeal, a test of courage and skill. One digs a pit, makes a lattice of branches and leaves, puts bait on top -- a rabbit will do -- and waits for an eagle to come try to grab it. Then one grabs the eagle. But the eagle grabs back. Their talons are like scissors and are infectious, though golden eagles are less so because they eat live animals. Bald eagles eat fish and carrion.

Wearing eagle feathers is all very totemized these days. I daresay it was more of an honor before one had to apply to the US government for a boxed-up dead eagle found in the woods or along a highway.

When people talk about religion, they are generally informed only by the media. I consider the current wars over God or non-God to be an adult game equivalent to YA vampire novels. All about love and sex and who's in and who's out. It is NOT religious.

Religion is in many layers and pockets everywhere, not just in institutions or books. It is what we truly believe and that is determined by actions.

Like maybe seizing an eagle.

_________

I tried to download some of Tony Bynum's photography of oil wells and windmills, but don't have the tech skills. So here's the website. Have fun exploring.

http://www.glacierparkphotographer.com/

THE SACRED OBJECT

My D. Min thesis was never completed or submitted because my advisors could not understand it and, indeed, some of the elements were still not clear in my own mind, and a few were only beginning to develop in the larger culture.  In 1982 some of the necessary components were missing.  For instance, fMRI had not been invented.

The first element was the power of sense memories, which I had learned in acting classes from Alvina Krause.  They call this “The Method.”

The second was Mircea Eliade’s understanding that introspectively one can “feel” the difference between sacred and profane, both in terms of locations (which are, after all, sense memories) and in terms of objects. (To me, sounds and smells can be sensory “objects.”).  

The third was Robert Schrieter’s insistence that meaning and sacrality are immanent, welling up out of the lives of people, and cannot be taken from one context to another without changing their meaning unless their deep roots are understood.  This was especially striking since Schreiter (CPPS) is a priest pondering the Substances of Communion. 

A fourth is something recent:  the physical evidence of how the brain works when it is operating in “sacred” mode.  Different areas “light up” on monitoring equipment.  Something really happens that is not imaginary, which assertion still doesn’t answer the unanswerable question of what the world is outside of our sensory engagement with it.  People insist passionately on the reality of some things only they can see.  We can prove that they are “seeing” something, but not reach what it is.

Another element is something I avoided but others do not: perception-altering drugs, most specifically LSD, peyote, and atahuasca.  I am not qualified to say anything about them, but to some people these substances are “sacred objects” or the means to perceive “sacred objects”.  These drugs, in their origins, tend to be used in ritual ways, often with a guide.  

What I realized was that the sacredness of objects has many sources, only one of which is the identification of the specific physical “thing.”  I will say that a sacred object is one which has the power to alter the consciousness of those who value it and use it in the context of their understanding.  I’m not just talking drugs, but also holy objects.  That is, the valorization is partly in the culture, partly in the experience of the individual, partly in the nature of the object, and partly in its ritualized use.

My thinking is much guided by my own experience in the Sixties as a Bundle Keeper, which was not something I initiated.  Bob Scriver “had the dream” telling him to acquire a Sacred Thunder Pipe Bundle (see my biography of Bob, “Bronze Inside and Out,” for particulars), but he had it while sleeping up against me.  I was entirely open to it but it didn’t mean to me what it meant to him.

Nor did it mean to Bob what it meant to the old-time circle of Bundle Keepers who maintained the ceremony below everyone’s radar, even local Blackfeet.  And again it did not mean to those old-timers what it had meant to the earliest Bundle Keepers in the 18th century, nor did it mean what it means today to the genetic descendants of those old-timers.  Each kind of Keeper had different assumptions and associations that were kindled by the experience of handling those normally hidden objects in ritually patterned ways.

Many people see the Bundle and its contents as valuable in themselves, but even a diamond only has ascribed human value.  These wrapped-up birds and mammals, this elaborately decorated pipe stem, even the things one does in certain ways, emerge from life on the prairie at ground level -- a floor of trampled-down grass under the lodge, paths guided by landmarks or traces in the dust, foods drawn from the land either as roots dug up or grass made into buffalo by steady grazing.  If a person doesn’t have that sensory context of meaning -- and I don’t mean driving by in a car or reading about it in a book -- then the object cannot be valorized in the old way.

A Bundle can be valorized as an object of veneration, the way the Catholic church treasures the bones of saints or splinters of the cross.  That’s not the same thing.  When modern grandchildren of the old-timers open their Bundles, much of their feeling of doing something sacred comes from their feelings about their grandparents and old memories of playing around the circle of singers while the ceremony was proceeding.  Maybe their faces were painted, according to old band traditions by people they knew.  The family bands are no longer in existence.  The families themselves are diluted now, as fractionated as the land ownership.

An anthropologist can say,  “Oh, this means this and that means that.”  But it will be derived from thought or asking informants rather than a deep re-experiencing of sense memories.  This is what people try to get at by saying a sacred object is “dead,” as though it were an animal.  The question then is whether it can be “re-valorized” and of course it can.  But it will be different, with a different value.

A strange phenomenon of the Sixties and Seventies was people who had no real connection to the Blackfeet place or lives, much less history, coming onto the reservation and wanting to participate in ceremonies.  Partly it was old left-over Brit drive to explore and colonize as signs of privilege and enlightenment.  Sometimes it was an earnest seeking for enlightenment.  Most of the time it was a big nuisance.

I remember the first time a stoned hippie showed up dancing wildly at Indian Days, thrashing branches around in all directions.  (They say gorillas do that to impress the others.)  Then there was the market in sacred objects that soon developed, wrapping the original bundles in many more layers of “information” about what they were, what they were worth, what they meant, how rare they were, how privileged a person would be if they bought one.

Pretty soon there was a backlash -- this is part of the post-modern point of view that Cliffords doesn’t address because it was so new in the 1980’s -- that only Indians should own their sacred objects and the bones of their ancestors and eagle feathers.  That only they should know the privileged information and write it up or talk about it for profit.  It was a bit of a problem that most of the earliest information had been “collected” in terms of objects and written information by white men because Indians were an oral culture.  And then there was the difficulty that storytelling per se is also patterned and assigned to specific times of the year or ceremonial circumstances.  (Books can be opened anytime.)  These new people wanted to “participate” by creating medicine wheels or re-arranging the existing ones.  They wanted to go make dream beds and see if they could have a vision.  Some of them began to create artifacts, esp. in Germany, working meticulously to be accurate and authentic until the only way to prove they were replicas was by carbon dating or genome analysis -- some kind of highly technical and expensive testing.  To them it was the object that was important.

By now the question of which Native American objects are sacred is very much muddled and the politics -- to say nothing of the profits -- are so intense that one hardly dares mention the subject.  The courts are hard-pressed to sort things out.  People commit suicide.  But I remain convinced of my original insights:  that something sacred can be felt as sacred (almost like a radiation); that this feeling is visible in the brain if one is looking with an fMRI; that the holiness and meaning arises from the time/place and the ecology unfolding from it; and that it does not reside simply in the object, which is far too easy to commodify.

THE SYSTEM HAS A BLACK EYE

(This is the last in a series responding to "Circle of Violence," an article by Hall and Finley in Indian Country Today.  I might return to the subject later.  I welcome your comments.)

As I read through the studies of violence to Native American women, which were mostly anecdote mixed with statistics and a little art work to relieve the grimness, several thoughts began to form about why nothing seems to be effective in changing the situation in spite of decades of activism and its obvious atrocity.

Shame and fear are in the way of gathering decent statistics.  Over and over the studies gave figures showing that NA women were raped more often, battered more often, killed more often, more likely to be attacked by white men, and so on, but ALL of them were accompanied by notes about how reluctant everyone was to be interviewed, how untrustworthy the figures were, how few women even bothered to go to the police, how many reports were simply lost, hidden, ignored or discarded.  No one really knows or could prove how bad it is.  But let me assure you that on the ground where it happens, people KNOW it is very bad indeed.

I’ve never forgotten the power of disclosure at the U of Chicago one spring.  Women had been complaining about violence against them -- you understand these were hyper-educated, very hip, politically-empowered feminist women -- but the administration had done nothing.  The women made stencils that said,  “A woman was raped here” and went out in small groups one night with a map they had gotten from police reports.  They marked the places and they were EVERYWHERE.  Talk about consciousness-raising.  But there was always the nagging problem of not knowing who the predators were.  U of Chicago is on the South Side, surrounded by poor people crammed into bad housing.  Black people.  The liberal bias against portraying black-on-white rape was strong.  The rapists were bad because they were poor, deprived, put-down.   But in the case of white-on-red rapes the liberal bias goes the other way, to sympathy for the victim.  Unfortunately, there are not a lot of liberals on reservations.

Rape has been discussed and expanded by one sector of the feminist movement until it is diluted to impolite behavior on first dates.  The sexual revolution, in trying to say women are entitled to sex, has seriously eroded our understanding of rape as a serious crime, not because it’s naughty but because it does bodily and emotional harm of deep seriousness.  Because it has been defined as a crime of men on women because women were considered property -- the real crime was taking a man’s woman and making children on her body without the MAN’S permission.   We reject that now.  But again rape has been trivialized.  If “she” is no one’s woman, she is anyone’s woman.

We are living in a brutal society.  The local kids here think it is very funny to kick a boy in the genitals because it is portrayed that way in movies.  BIG yucks.  Indignation if rebuked.  Rape of men is a joke, a source of plot devices in media tales, a “given” part of a prison sentence.  Rape is thought of by many as something natural, inevitable, and not particularly harmful.  But in fact it is thrusting into a person’s viscera, using force, without lubrication, carrying in infections, tearing through the walls of vagina or rectum, possibly carrying HIV.  With Viagra there may be no exhaustion of the ability of the penis to stay hard so that assault can last for an hour or more.  Without Viagra or even an erection, pushing in objects like bottles, sticks, guns, pipes, is devastating.  What was it that cop used?  The handle of a toilet plunger? 

Rape is a crime of bodily harm that can lead to death.  It is imposed on the weak by the strong, because they can and because they are enraged, damaged, possibly feeling that they themselves are raped by economic and social forces.  Maybe just looking for a way to go up the pecking order, whether in prison or in the schoolyard.  The “weak” might be younger, more stigmatized, signaling vulnerability because of previously being bullied or abused (often by parents), smaller, “other” in some ethnic or physical way or in sexual orientation: gay,  Whatever “gay” means -- originally it was supposed to mean desiring the same sex, but desire has nothing to do with rape.

While I was at our little clinic to get some blood tests, the receptionist’s son came in for some papers, a ten-year-old with a cowboy’s rolling gait and boots.  Later in the conversation bullying came up.  The mother said that she had taught her children to never, NEVER, let any belittling, shaming or mocking talk get into their heads.  No matter how much other people try to put it there.  Never look at yourself that way, she said, and she was so right.  I hope she also taught him the converse: never make other people feel that way.

When people begin to think they deserve rape, are somehow attracting it, that kind of abuse becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.  The stigma of rape is sometimes stronger in a community than the stigma of being a rapist (“blame the victim”) and having been raped can even constitute “permission” to rape someone again since they have “lost their cherry.”  (Another value left over from the idea that men own women who ought to be virgins so the men can be sure the children were theirs.)  

Great Falls has just been jolted by a sequence of babies killed by stepfathers and boyfriends: infants and toddlers struck, shaken, thrown, bones broken.  It’s the same phenomenon as rape, just at a different place on the continuum.  Women can get low pay jobs pretty easily because they turn over all the time.  When men go out of work, maybe because they do something seasonal, they tend to be idle for weeks or months.  With the economy the way it is, they may be out of work for years, even though they’ve had respectable continuous careers.  They end up mooching.  The cover story is “house husband” or “babysitting.”  The actuality may be vicious depression -- mixed with drugs or alcohol -- that is taken out covertly on whomever happens to be handy.

The main thought I have is that ANY kind of violence, sexual or not, physical or not, affects EVERYONE.  We preserve our sense of safety with our “white woman bubble” or our “proud squaw bubble,”  and that helps but it is not enough.  It is not a woman’s problem or a Indian problem.  It is a human problem that affects everyone throughout their lives from their educational aspirations to their success in relationships.  Solving unemployment saves babies by preventing the violence of frustration.

Partly because of knowing the world of the bottom, partly because of law enforcement and partly because of working alongside “drunks” and “bums,”  I think the needed changes keep failing because the studies and changes are all at the top.  The people at the top appoint a committee, pay for a report, and put it under the blotter.  They don’t think of it as their problem, though rich white people are just as prone to violence.  Covering it up is easier.

The place to start is first-line contact:  training all emergency responders how to take a good report, including photos; how to use rape kits; how to proceed in ways that protect even the guilty.  We must agitate to get police and EMTs the equipment and funding they need.  We must accumulate evidence and statistics, support people who will testify, and keep the conduits to both the public and the supervisors open and flowing.   Police are our witnesses.  Society gives them permission to use whatever force can be justified.  They must not allow themselves to align with violence, out of despair over not being effective.  I’m talking ride-alongs, victim advocates, volunteer witnesses in court, and neighbors who intervene in subtle ways.  I’m talking call the police about violence even if it’s only overheard, keeping a journal of when it happens, and NOT blaming the victim.  If we wait for some big authority figure to solve the problem, then we are setting ourselves up for a kind of rape.

WHAT DEMOGRAPHERS DON'T KNOW

It’s so easy to slip into Us vs. Them thinking.  That’s how we got so screwed up with this question of jurisdictions.  At first white contact it might have been possible to defend the idea that tribal people were fundamentally different from Euro-whites, because the former had been here for enough millenia for the land to shape them, both genes and memes.  But the Euro-whites were still shaped for Europe with a whole different set of ideas in their heads.

In Montana the state law requires that the history of the Indians be taught.  A well-educated, even bookish, white woman said to me,  “I don’t see why I should have to study THEIR history.”  She said this standing on land with thousands of years of Indian history and maybe 150 (pushing it) years of Euro-white history, much of it conflict.

In an essay by James Clifford about the Mashpee tribe trying to establish in court that they WERE a tribe, I found a good answer.  A Indian woman on the stand (everyone seemed to agree she WAS Indian, though the whole definition was in question) said that she was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.  “How could that be?” questioned the lawyers.  

“Well, 149 members of my tribe died fighting in the American Revolution on the side of the Colonies,” she said patiently.  They are us.

But we are many.  The arbitrary distinction between Indian and white was full of exceptions and contradictions from the beginning and now that’s even more true than ever.  The idea that there should be one set of standards about sex and violence for Indians -- either because they are naturally savage and uncontrollable or because they are naturally noble and protective of the vulnerable -- and another for whites (unnatural?) is pretty much nonsense.  In terms of both genes and memes, the ecology (which IS the economy) is pulling everyone back into a unity, lumpy and contentious as it may seem.  We are far more alike than different.  Our interests are mostly common interests.  We learn as we go.

You can go to any number of websites that will tell you the average rez salaries (low), the value of the homes owned (the websites won’t know what to do about tribal housing), the age groups and racial groups, though only the ones that the questionnaire makers put on the list, which change quite a bit over the years.  (We don’t think about how many “octoroons” there are these days.  We question the definition of “race.”)  Surveys can’t capture things the surveyors never thought of.  One variable that does show up is that a high proportion of the population is quite young and the rate of births to single mothers is high.  Not only does this mean a burden on the welfare system but also that the maturity to raise kids is diminished and fathers are not involved.  In fact, male death rate due to violence, drinking and now diabetes is high, which forces single motherhood.  A high diabetes rate also means problematic pregnancies.

A variable that does NOT show up is the kind of grandmothers that were present and involved when I came in 1961.  Born in 1880’s, they had gone through enormous hardship but had also been mission-educated by tough no-nonsense people, whatever some of their faults.  Those old Indian ladies would not put up with nonsense.  Their grandchildren, born in 1920 or later, were the first educated in public schools and employed as clerks, nurses, and teachers.  Then the children of those women, born in 1940 or later, were the seniors I taught in 1961.  

They were “tracked” in school and in life.  The “high track” has done extremely well, often becoming professionals and leaders in the tribe.  The low track despaired and thought their lack of prosperity was due to being Indian.  But they still obeyed their grandmothers, who never despaired, even when their granddaughters became drunkards.  It’s the children born in the 1980’s and later -- beyond the lifespan of those original hardy grandmothers -- who are now enmeshed in careless sex and violence.  

The three towns against the border of Glacier National Park (East Glacier, St. Marys, and Babb) which are tourist towns in summer, have quite different seasonal dynamics but are pretty “acculturated”.  The two “old-timey” towns (Heart Butte and Starr School) have no bars but more poverty.  Browning, as the hub, is a multi-celled town with its own jurisdiction problems.  Most of the federally subsidized housing projects are outside the formal city limits while the older part of town has deteriorated and fallen into fractionated ownership (split out repeatedly because of inheritance without re-consolidation) so that there are always derelict buildings where drunks can cluster with their dogs and broken glass to risk fire.  They are regarded with both shame and derision.  At the same time, there is a center where such people can go, especially in winter.  

The number of bars in Browning is far fewer than it was in the Sixties and the number of AA meetings have multiplied quickly.  Dry-out programs abound and the old hospital building is now dedicated to it.  The adults of 2000 are actively addressing the problem.  It is clear to everyone that rape and violence are wrong.  It is not clear how to get a grip.  In the case of men from other places (who might be any other races) who are already drifters and felons, law enforcement needs all the help they can get.  Such men defeat far more formidable jurisdictions than a remote Montana reservation, but that doesn’t excuse the community from demanding a higher standard of order, particularly and specifically in regard to intruders.  The message needs to be sent that a reservation does not exist in order to host parties.

Last summer I went to attend Curley Bear Wagner’s funeral, as I try to do for all my former students.  I was too early and sat out on the steps of the church with a little cluster of street people, both men and women, visiting about who we knew and just life in general.  I thought how natural and easy it seemed.  How much we shared.  Then they wandered off to sleep in the brush along Willow Creek.  They had a bottle.

GENES & MEMES IN RELIGION

(This post is part of a series responding to an article about violence to Indian woman by Ross and Finley in Indian Country Today.)

By now everyone but the Flat Earth Society knows that human beings are made from molecular code stored in a set of double helixes called chromosomes.  Some of the code makes the molecules that fit together to create our bodies and some of the code is the controls, the “dashboard.”  By turning molecules off and on, esp. during periods of growth like gestation and childhood, that code is powerful.

It has been proposed -- and is useful to consider -- that in our behavior and ideas are codes that both create our personalities and societies and also act as the “dashboard” that shapes the process.  These are called “memes” to suggest “genes.”  Consider that I’m publishing this on a Sunday, which has been a “day of rest” for a very long time.  Originally it was number magic, having to do with the number seven.  You’d have to do some research to figure out why it is the seventh day, but it is coded in the story of creation when God set the example by resting on the seventh day.

A day of rest is a very good idea for lots of reasons.  Time to recover, time to think, time to reflect on what it all means by (perhaps) going to church.  The point here is that it’s good for the individual and good for the community as well as the relationship between the two.

Religion is defined many different ways, some of them useful and some of them not.  Number magic arises from natural rhythms (moon cycle, female fertility cycle, ten fingers on two hands, four directions, four seasons) and is only one of the sources of what is sometimes called “mythology,” or story -- the search for order, for cause and effect, and ultimately for survival.  But religion is not so much about survival of the individual -- though we’ve been playing it that way for awhile -- as it is survival for the group, the tribe, the nation, the ecology, the planet.  The species.

Some people get locked into dogmas that developed in other places, other times, when survival was dependent on other strategies.  Absolute obedience to the male leader, stigmatizing women and children as dependent property who have no will or value except for the Father, claiming all of creation as belonging to a Supreme Father for the use of his favored dependents, came from the strategy for a harsh environment in which groups of people compete in deadly ways.  Think Afghanistan.  Think ghetto.  Think Mafia.  Last man standing wins.  Until he ages and is replaced by a new strong man.  And while he’s the Big Man, he’s responsible for everyone and everything.  That’s the price he pays.  It’s all his doin’, his fault.  He could end up on a stretcher in a cage, his two sons with him.

This strategy for survival, which is detailed in the Old Testament, was opposed by Jesus, who brought a New Order in which those who protected the family, who valued women and children, who worked together, who gloried in creation rather than trying to drive it into a corner and squeeze wealth out of it, would be those with the memes for the new survival.  The struggle between the OT and the NT continues today, now identified as political parties.  Many who claim Jesus actually, not so secretly, think they are Jehovah.  Their idea of bureaucratic and military hierarchy was reinforced when the Roman Empire adopted Christianity and rolled it into their own colonizing across Europe.  

But that’s only one part of the world, maybe pretty much the same as “Western Civilization.”  The Asian world and the tribal worlds of Africa and the Americas were creating memes deeply embedded in a different code, which also nudged their genes in a different direction.  Their religious bundling, their stories and ethics, were close to the land in a weaving that is older than the Old Testament or any writing at all.  It still depends on stories  but they are told aloud.

In the old Blackfeet world the main group was the band that developed out of families.  Some families thrived.  It was not that they were “fitter” in terms of a hierarchy of warriors and princesses, but that they “fitted” their lives to the land and each other.  The bands with cranky, stingy, over-competitive leaders who only protected their favorites withered because as soon as people were able, they left.  Depressed mothers might let their babies grow up unloved, uninstructed, unfed.  Maybe the mothers died.  But because it was a band, because there were aunties and grandmothers, someone generally pulled those babies into their own lodges and kept them going.  If a man were killed, the other men stepped in.  

Peer pressure was a major force in those days.  I read about the strategy of  standing outside a lodge with a dysfunctional person inside and talking about them in loud voices so they’d get the message without a confrontation.  A relative might make an intervention.  A wise older person of either gender might have advice.  If all else failed, as in a case where a violent man beat up his wife, her family might come and beat him up.  Might even take all his belongings and destroy his lodge, which was actually his wife’s anyway.  If he were a man who could take a hint, he might come home to find everything piled up outside the lodge.  If he were a man or a group of men who were trouble, they might come home to find that the whole band had moved without them.  There’s a story about ornery disobedient children who were left behind that way.  There’s also a story about a family of grizzly bears who moved in with a Blackfeet band and whose behavior was so atrocious that a couple of warriors simply killed them.

Nowadays in those situations, everyone looks away.  Mind-your-own-business is a meme.  But the essence of Blackfeet life was in a group, not as an individual and that might be one of the things that separates those times from the present more than anything else.  It’s not that life was idyllic, romantically perfect.  It was hard work.  Disastrous things happened.   But the point of salvation was to save the band, not one’s own soul.  Behavior was tied into consequences for everyone. 

Women were protected from violence and unwanted sex by staying with the group: sisters, brothers, aunts and parents.  Only the ones tempted by illicit desires went off by themselves to hide what they were doing.  Then they were vulnerable.  Consider the “meme” of polygyny, multiple wives.  An errant husband faced a committee.  Of course, they had to agree and that was a problem.  (One wise and experienced husband advised marrying sisters, who had already hashed out their pecking order.)  But it was pretty hard for a woman to duck out on her share of the work.

 Ostracism was the most severe punishment because a single person would be hard pressed to survive alone.  In fact, loners generally found another band.  Today’s understanding of tribes as hard-edged, document-defined groups is as unreal as today’s hard-edged survey-defined reservations.  In the old days things were interwoven.  We call that “nature.”  We call that “ecosystem.”  Some call it “spiritual.”  It’s one element of religion.  What worked then and there will not necessarily work now, but it’s worth thinking about.  This is a period of tumultuous growth, especially on reservations.

(Still more to come.)

RESERVATION JURISDICTIONS

(This post is one of a series responding to an article in Indian Country Today by Ross and Finley.)

In spite of taking on violence against Indian women on reservations, I’m talking about men and women, enrolled and white, different countries, reservations and none, because I think it’s all complexified together -- one of those “five per cent” problems [see the book with that title -- I reviewed it earlier] that just doesn’t seem to get solved because the questions are all too small and too abstract.  I looked at some of the questionnaires in various studies that were supposed to turn up some kind of solution, but they’re coming from assumptions made someplace else.  So I’ll try this my way this time, wandering all around.

One of the cases that has haunted me for fifty years was not a woman.  It was a young man, Blackfeet, handsome, intelligent, bound for great things, well-respected family, father on the school board that originally hired me in Browning in 1961.  It was Indian Days, mid-July, and back then violence sometimes crept into the camp.  The boy was beaten nearly to death, his eye kicked out of his head.  The culprits were Canadian tribal and quickly fled back to their home reserves.

Canada and the United States are nations of law.  Differences are settled and crimes are punished according to law, but there are slight differences between the two countries.  Inside Canada, each province has its own laws.  Inside the United States each state has its own laws.  In Montana each county has its own law and towns have their own laws and so on.  It’s a cat’s cradle of which law applies where and when and to what.  

When Indians are involved, one must take into account international treaty law.  That’s why the attempted murder suspects weren’t stopped at the border: Blackfeet are a divided nation and part of their rights is crossing the border without stopping.  To call a grand jury and indict the bad guys, witnesses were needed.  North American Indian Days last less than a week, then people disperse back across the Americas (some to Europe) and since many stay on the Pow Wow Trail all summer and this was before cell phones, there was no way to even find them, much less take statements.  Those who wanted justice could not find a way.

When the US laws were originally brought in, the Blackfeet still had their old ways of doing things and didn’t understand all the written laws, particularly since no one was very careful about explaining them or enforcing them.  The ten major crimes ( murder, rape, arson, and so on) were handed over to the FBI.  A case like this one didn’t interest them.  It could not be won.  Before white contact, matters like this had been handled by families.  A small band of warriors would have gone out to seek vengeance.  They might or might not have been successful.  But this family was a modern family: Catholic, educated, assimilated.  They would not send out an assassin, though that was not unknown in the Sixties of America.  (Kennedy, King)

Today sovereignty is the cry, but how to reconcile all the sovereignties?  In the days after WWII when veteran men came back traumatized, alcoholic, desperate, only partly sane, families broken, there was so much crime in Browning -- theft, violence and rape -- that the town fathers went together to hire their own police force, the way that college campuses hire their own security police.  They worried about property loss and home invasion more than anything else.  But they also justified what they did by asserting the sovereignty of Browning within the reservation, just as the reservation had sovereignty in the state of Montana.  In those days it was claimed that as soon as land property belonged to private individuals (usually but not always white) it was taken out of the trust managed by the government and was therefore not part of the reservation any longer: subject to state law and taxation.  In those days most of the town real estate was owned by white people, because the businesses were run by white people, so they were the ones with money.  The Bureau of Indian Affairs and all the other federal entities and employees hired mostly white people.

Then came Indian empowerment.  BIA hires had Indian preference.  Businesses, especially tribally owned, had Indian preference.  The school began to have Indian applicants for teaching jobs.  Enrolled people put their houses and lots back into the tribal trust to avoid taxes.  In the next decades the whites who had arrived in the Fifties to start businesses and ranches aged out.  Some had by that time intermarried with Indians, some sold their businesses to local people who were Indian, and some just locked the doors and left -- maybe in a coffin.  By the time the first Headstart kids of the Sixties were out of college and returned, most white people were gone.

The reservation had always had a political split between non-English-speaking full-bloods and mixed-bloods, who often had white fathers and therefore advantages when it came to business -- contacts, access to loans, bookkeeping skills, start-up capital and so on.  Because the full-bloods didn’t trust the more assimilated people to have their best interests in mind, the full-bloods were willing to accept the paternalism of the government to make deals for them.  They felt the government had an obligation to protect them and ought to be held to it.  Now that faded away and a new determination from tribal members to run their own affairs began to drive matters.  

Browning was no longer defined as an island of jurisdiction.  There was a huge squabble (as usual) over who should oversee the police force, ironically led by a guy named Saurez who wore huge down coats because he was always cold away from the south.  All officers went back under the feds, not the tribe or the city.  Jurisdiction has been handed back and forth ever since, but the real problem is not who is in charge of them -- it is who will pay the cost of proper training, maintained vehicles, and enough gas to cover a rez fifty miles on a side.  Then there’s the jail.  Who pays?

Somehow, the paler and more assimilated people took into themselves the white contempt for poverty, drunkenness, illiteracy, violence, and being old-fashioned -- they accepted that stigma against their own people.  A big tough felon whispered the words to me when he said “blanket-ass Indian,” his face full of shame and fear.  This was before it was fashionable to reclaim your heritage and award expensive Pendleton blankets as a way to honor achievers.  The Indians who were doing well wanted separation from the Indians who were not.  Street Indians are like a president’s embarrassing brother -- family, but not exactly welcome when you're trying to maintain an image.  Yet often it is those people who have the real knowledge of old ways.  Often, not always.

The big kahuna of boundaries is still the United States/Canadian border, a means of taking refuge from the law since the days of Chief Joseph, who didn’t quite make it across to the north, and Louis Riel, who DID make it across to the south.  Now the customs and immigration officers at the line are fortified by border patrol, DEA, Homeland Security, RCMP, all joining the web of laws unknown, unenforced, misunderstood, outdated or too new to be known.  The most passionate problem is jurisdiction over white people on the reservation.  These days they are sometimes Mexican or Columbian drug peddlers who can fade into the background on a reservation, mixing with Mexican or South American families looking for a peaceful place.  That adds immigration law and the southern border.

That boy who was beaten up at Indian Days fifty years ago, Lockley Bremner, did recover pretty much, though he was not the same.   His family was always religious and he, spiritually inspired, became a respected pastor.  His son, who is also Lockley Bremner, is now the Mayor of Browning but earns his living doing cable installations for one of the successful Tribal enterprises.  He reads this blog sometimes.

(More to come)

STIFLE YOURSELF !!

The most efficient and least expensive kind of censorship is self-imposed. For all the authors who found the inner courage to let ‘er fly and devil take the consequences, there must be ten more who quietly took out the most powerful, the most crucial bits. No swearing, no obscenity, no politically incorrect, no slamming dead people, no body parts, no terrorism. All the agent has to do is clear her [sic] throat because the women are in charge of censorship. This is because they have so much practice. “Stifle yourself!” roars Archie Bunker and Edith does. (Of course, this was a subversive show where Edith’s stifling covered for a host of forbidden topics.)

I used to say that as a tubby old white woman I could stand in the Blazers’ locker room at half time with giant black muscle men stripping all around me and no one would notice me. If they did, they would think I came to clean the floor. Women and minorities are censored by invisibility. “Was anyone killed?” “No, sir. Just a couple of Indians/slaves/women.”

My Netflix vids have recently included two stories about women on borderlands being raped and killed. One was quite glossy and Hollywood with Penelope Cruz as a woman reporter who goes undercover to investigate deaths in maquiladoras along the south side of the Mexican border. There is enough romance, glitz (fancy parties where the bad guys cruise), chases and violence that the movie did well. The other was on the north side of the Canadian border where aboriginal women from the back country accumulate in the SRO hotels of Vancouver, B.C. The most famous actress was Tantoo Cardinal, who plays a ghost. By the end of the movie the only woman alive is her daughter. This time the villain is entirely charming, then obscene -- and sociopathic. The actors were drawn from the reservoir of fine aboriginal repertory theatre in Canada. Mexico: dramatic, colorful, famous name. Canada: gritty, psychological, fine unknown actors. Great combo for a classroom. (Border studies is a whole discipline in universities.) The point is that the economic migration of marginal women to cities or borders where their work for low pay renders them murderfodder. No one cares. Few can tell one from the other.

Last night’s movie was “The Lost Child,” also with Tantoo Cardinal because that’s how I found these movies: following her list of credits. This one was a Hallmark Hall of Fame sugar donut -- sweet and doughy, something missing: reality. A jumble of generic NA actors. Reality based plot. Central character clearly Jewish pretending to be Navajo when it was supposed to be the other way around. This time the identities were erased by sentimentality.

So it’s almost a relief to turn to a wild and crazy docu-movie: “V-Day: Until the Violence Stops.” The V-word, of course, is “vagina,” because this is about the “Vagina Monologues.” I can hear the marketing people scream at the idea of “Vagina Day” so it’s edited to V-Day and the V is supposed to be about Violence, which it is. The English teacher in me -- and maybe the anatomist -- insists that I point out that the V word is really for Vulva, which is the part of the female organ that can be seen from the outside. And because I have been talking here about Native Americans, I will point out that they have developed the idea that “squaw” means vulva and that it is a dirty word, and that they have built up so much politically correct clout over it that maps throughout the US have had to be rewritten at enormous cost -- a hundred thousand dollars or so -- to erase Squaw Mountain, Squaw Creek, Squaw Valley (what?), and all the other Squaw names out there. In vain do the NA academics point out that squaw does NOT mean vulva. It was a great chance for the Missionary-educated Smut Patrol to besmirch a lot of stuck up white people. Tantoo Cardinal is in this movie, too, but fortified with Jane Fonda.

What a great explosion of energy is released by using this forbidden word ! (No, NOT squaw! Just vagina.) Eve Ensler has taken her monologues to five countries, including Sioux country (Tantoo is Cree, but who cares?), to show how universally the female gender is is the victim of violence. Expanded far beyond the tart observations of one woman, each cast is filmed doing workshops, panels, rehearsals, dances and so on. Parts of the performance are shown.

Ukiah, CA, has everyone in red feather boas, even the local sheriff who says that cops are the ones who see domestic violence so they have every reason to support women in this cause. The Sioux sequence dwells on the land. The Italians are the sassiest. Harlem is the hottest. The Phillippinas are the most openly trafficked as "wives" for sale. The Kenyans are the most shocking because of the custom of clitoridectomy, surgical (without anesthetic and with the mother holding down the child) excision of the bundle of nerves at the head of the vulva. Only five communities are in this film, but 800 have been visited by the performance. I wonder how much lasting impact it had. There were men interviewed, men in the audience, and I wondered how many of them were aroused. Certainly most of the women were.

I wonder how much self-censoring was done by the editors of this video. It is ALWAYS necessary to leave things out, editing by nature is exactly that, and the best reason of all for making this vid palatable to a wide audience is that the point is to get the message out. There is art, quilts and carved squashes that suggest the vulva -- but no actual crotch shots and no enactments of violence. The closest to children was a set of high school girls in an upscale community with a tradition of social action.

Censorship is always about borders, pushing the margins, exploring the envelope. Too little of it and the images cross over into provoking what they are supposed to be resisting. Too much of it and we’re having to revise all the maps. Most of the public discussion is about sex or even violence. But these are not the only issues that are taboo. Money, power, madness. Death.