CULTURE POTLATCH

Kwaikiutl potlatch container -- maybe eight feet long.

“There is far, far more freedom in creating stuff no one reads versus 

most of the garbage Americans are addicted to.“

Our culture is shifting -- ALL the cultures are shifting -- and, like the glaciers pulling back and the islands being swallowed up and the old oceans thawing and industrialization breaking down even as the resources that make the machines and the fossil fuels that run them are running out, the elements of human life are rearranging.

My great focus, as I look back, has been how meaning emerges from ecology so that the prairie makes one kind of person and the sea coast makes another.  I think about my fourth grade Chinook-elder teacher explaining ON HER TERMS the artifacts of the Kwakiutl in the Portland Art Museum.  On EQUAL terms with a huge Monet waterlilies painting as big as a billboard.  That’s also where I saw Caravaggio’s painting of a naked curly-headed boy, thought to be his intimate, laughing above a clutter of cultural symbols.  I was not yet adolescent and no one explained, but I understood anyway.  

Fancy overlays of interest in Indians come from anthropologists, often prurient (the giveaway is that they suddenly start writing in Latin), or maybe with the German romantic literary love of the “natural person” who is without blame -- which progresses from Madonna worship (the Dear Mother) to ideas about Gaea (the planet that loves us and will save us, even in spite of the gyres of garbage in our seas.  And then there’s the compassion industry:  “Send us $5 or we’ll kill this puppy,” becomes “Send us $5 of we’ll kill this Indian.”  Well, actually, more like, “We’ll let him die.”  But Indians are great material for stand up comedy.  And extortion.

Everyone with their prying fingers that smell of commodity cheese wants to know the real truth about Indians.   What are they really like when they walk around naked and beaded.  (Of course, they don’t do that!)  Now that the cultural taboos are fading -- actually, they sort of went over a cliff in the Seventies -- we can see that it’s a “spectrum disorder” -- some are as middle-class and respectable as anyone and then -- across the span -- there are the distorted, predatory numbskulls.  Some talk about tricksters, but these are NOT the tricksters, who are smart, greedy and resourcefully projecting the image of the staggering smart-alecks in front of Icks.  (Liquor and powder.)  They really enjoy stigmatizing and patronizing other people, because it turns off their consciences.

Now I’ll begin to tell stories.  Bob and I did hard physical labor in the foundry all day.  At suppertime we went to Joe Lewis’ cafe, the nicest in town -- they had booths.  The waitress was an older woman with hair dyed flat black and highly rouged cheeks.  She was a sweetheart, a little old to be on her feet all day.  Joe Lewis himself, usually sat at the end of the lunch counter, nursing what I now suspect was coffee with an “augmentation.”

Our crew was mostly local Indians of one sort or another because American reservations have a mixed population, magnetized by the opportunities offered by confused jurisdictions and states that didn’t give a damn.  We usually hired our helpers off the street because when they were sober, they were competent and willing.  When they were drunk -- well, that’s the story.

A slobbering, staggering, urine-smelling man came in and made a bee-line to Bob, hoping to beg some money.  This shows he was really out-of-it because anyone who thought he could borrow money from Bob was fantasizing.  Maybe he thought he was talking to someone else, but since Bob was the city magistrate and sentenced this bozo for public drunkenness often enough, I think he just got the idea of money (fines) upside down in his head.  He leaned over the table and drooled into Bob’s meal.

Bob’s reaction was to silently stand up, throw the plate -- food side down -- onto the floor hard enough to shatter the plate and to stride out and drive off.  The drunk staggered on, Joe Lewis had disappeared, the waitress was looking for something on the bottom shelf behind the lunch counter and I don’t know what the other customers were doing.  I was trying to figure out what I should do.  I was hungry.  What did I have to eat at home?  Bob always paid so I didn’t have money on me.  I wasn’t stranded since the town was only ten blocks across in those days.  The drunk didn’t drool into MY plate!

That was the place that became Ick’s after Joe Lewis had died.  Al Racine, woodcarver and sign-painter, had painted his trademark “Napi” trickster on the side of the building, eating a short stack.  It had later been altered to show a different kind of consumption, but his big black Sundance hat, his wide smile, remained.  The bear he rode, his pack-cougar, and the rattler he used for a whip weren’t there anymore.

I doubt that the drunk even remembered what happened, but others must have told him.  I didn’t see him for months.  He probably went to a different rez for a while.

Our best employee, about my age, was Carl Cree Medicine who also came around to borrow money when he was drunk.  Technically he was asking for payday loans.  He and his wife fought and at least once she defended herself with a knife, so that time he came staggering in the door bleeding from the groin.  He’d been to the Indian Health Service but he hadn’t been properly bandaged.  They didn’t divorce and Carl finally got a grip on sobriety.

He stayed employed by us for a long time and eventually his son became Bob’s foreman, almost a member of the family.   He was skilled and dependable and in Bob’s last years when he was often bedridden, it was this young man who helped him, supporting or carrying him.  When Bob died, Lorraine -- the widow -- gave the young family the house next to the museum. 

Carl himself produced art and sold it.  But his real creativity was organizing and running a “lodge” for street alcoholics so they could settle on benches and chairs in an old Government Square building, cigarette in one hand and coffee mug in the other, continuing the testimonies and brags that they normally exchanged in the back alleys where on warm days they sat on logs with their backs against the tall plank fences, soaking up sunlight.  In winter the shelter saved lives.  Carl is dead now.

One day I recognized a man who had just deserted his family in order to take up this life.  I waded through the weeds and just flat asked him why.  He said it was because he was free on the street.  No one nagged him to do what THEY wanted, scolded him about his behavior, made him feel bad all the time because they wanted to control him.  He couldn’t find a job.  He wanted to sit and remember better times.

So that’s sort of my literary pattern, staying broke and getting my back up against a sheltering fence where I can sit and remember.  The difference is that I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I never slobber in anyone’s food.  I’m solitary rather than tribal.

My cats say that’s a lie.  There’s them, for one thing, but what about Tim and HIS tribe?  And I NEED to be solitary, because I need the time for thinking.  About what?  About the blunt fact that as the culture recedes and morphs, it reveals all the things taboos and willful disregard have covered up.  Who realized how many boys were sexually assaulted?  Who understood the amount of violence just outside the limits of suburbia and often perpetrated by the law enforcers meant to stop it?  Why has wealth become a scandal?  What do HIV and Ebola really mean?

What happened to the insights and progress of the Seventies?  We thought we had freedom.  Were we bought off?  Or was it that industrialization itself made brutes of us?

DANCE-AWAY TRANSGRESSORS

Kevin Spacey, "Ordinary Decent Criminal"

“Dance-away Transgressors” are people who might be simply pests and might be terrorists but are always tricksters.  I just watched “Ordinary Decent Criminal” in which Kevin Spacey is an Irish example -- not NRA, not Garda, but just a clever guy who gets away with  theft .  A fellow needs to feed his family, after all.  The roots of this role go back into the primates, who mostly trick each other for food or sex.  Robin Hood is an English version. Brer Rabbit comes from Africa.  Napi and other prairie tricksters closely related to Coyote come from around here -- Napi is a Blackfeet word.  There’s been one in every seventh grade class I’ve ever taught.  Usually, but not always, a boy.  Some of them are grandparents now and have turned out fine: high energy, good sense of humor, ability to connect with others like themselves, creative thinkers.

Brer Rabbit, dance-away trickster

Transgressors who dance-away are the little guys, not the 500 pound gorillas who sleep where they want to.  Transgressors use their wits rather than their muscles.  Think Judo.  Think a million-zillion movies.  Think frontier bandits. Think the underdog-always-wins if he or she is tricky enough.  Think abused runaway kids.  At first they get the label “transgressor” which is the same as “bad boy.”  Because they were beaten or humiliated they learned how to land a counter-punch, dancing away just in time.  Because their abusers were often not so much malicious as out-of-control (drunk, high, fubar brain wiring), they’re easy to evade and even control -- up to a point.  They pass out, don't they?

People who wish to do needy and hurt kids some good -- to help them -- are often frustrated because they are employed people who are controlled by their salaries and who cope with kids by controlling them any way they can. That sets off alarm bells in a dance-away transgressor. You have to go to their terms, to empower them.  It’s not a matter of money.  It’s not a matter of explaining to them that  they are being bad and hurting themselves.  They already know that.  

Most do-gooders are operating with the backing of some institution, which means a hierarchy, which means that the front-line do-gooders are also being controlled -- by people who want results because their jobs depend upon them.  Dance-away transgressive kids then become liable to force, confinement, misguided operant conditioning, secret threats, and other abusive practices.  The supervisors of the frontline people may allow serious violence: drugs, restraint chairs, tasers, stock prods, sexual favors -- all the things we hear about at Guantanamo -- all the while hiding those practices.  The people who raise money for the institution would not like publicity about such practices, but they aren't there, so it's easy to pretend they don't know.

When I was a toddler, the cynical old lady next door advised my mother to “break that one early or you’ll never be able to do it.”  Where are the toddler-whisperers?  Aren’t toddlers mammals, too?   We break horses and children.  That approach sometimes creates a killer horse.  Or a zombie horse.

Do-gooders always think its about money because it is.  Christopher Hitchen’s criticism of Mother Theresa was that all the time she was lovingly carrying babies and saying kind things to dying people, she had enough money stashed away to pay for food and medicines but never used it.  She was NOT a dance-away transgressor.  She was a stubborn do-gooder who didn’t want to lose her role, her image of herself, or her absolute control.  The obsession with control is what leads to sexual abuse of children by institutional religious workers.  And others.  Esp. the ones who are “broken” in both senses.

Being a dance-away transgressor is a culture, a role in a complex of cultures, a way for the little guy to survive when the larger culture is greedhead hoarding and ostentatious displays of power.  It’s not always a conscious choice.  Sometimes it’s just a revulsion against the way things stack up, a necessity for emotional survival.  Transgressors can be as stubborn as do-gooders.  If a dance-away is caught and punished -- as they usually are when the enforcers of the status quo are lucky and circumstances create a trap (say, a disease that makes them dependent on help) -- they just learn from it and go right on.  For every set of bars there is a set of spaces between them.  Even if that space is a death dance, feet moving in the air beneath a suspended body.

James Bond is a dance-away transgressor, but he acts in the interest of the government.  A case can be made that the American Indian tribes taught the Revolutionaries how to win the war against the British Empire because they fought as dance-away transgressors (guerrillas).  The case is also made that the Ulster Scots have been the element of success in most American military conflicts, to argue that their history -- thrown off their land, forced to emigrate, living on margins and borders, surviving famine and disease -- has taught them to be dance-away transgressors, living in remote places, hideouts.  But James Bond has no dependents, no ties but his employer, no intimacies -- just sex.  That’s one price for being a dance-away.   The pretense is that he is a "good" transgressor and necessary because the really bad transgressors keep dancing away.  They are always one bad guy -- break him and the problem is solved.  Fantasy.

James Bond, alcoholic

Contemporary boys get thrown out of their homes, escape from schools, work their way north across international borders, live in the interstices of the cities any way they can.  They teach us not to see them.  What James Bond knows that even the Kevin Spacey character didn’t quite grasp, is that if a dance-away transgressor has intimates, those people can be punished.  So the trafficker doesn’t threaten to kill the kid -- he threatens to kill his best friend or maybe his family back in Ecuador.  Then it is very hard to dance away.  Pimps learn not to hurt offending girls, but to hurt her best friend and make her watch.  Script writers picked up on that idea so quickly that it implies they already knew the pattern in their own lives.

At the heart of the dance-away lover paradigm is fear of capture or fear that intimacy (falling in love, believing in a family) will only break your heart in the end.  Or that people will find out what you’re really like.  Or that they will demand that you change in some unbearable way -- maybe get rid of your dog.  Proving to such a boy that such a thing will not happen will take time -- maybe years.  Might never happen.  Might not be true anyway.

Tom and Huck in an unreleased movie

Huck Finn was a dance-away transgressor but so was Tom Sawyer.  The problem for a do-gooder is that they see the kids are suffering -- and it’s possible that they are.  But maybe to the kid it’s worth it to have the freedom, at least that’s what a lot of street kids say.  Do-gooders working for institutions don’t understand freedom.  Danceaway transgressors don’t understand healthy dependence (no experience). The other problem for do-gooder institutions is that street kids are vectors as surely as fleas on dogs.  They are contagious for everything from crabs to HIV.  And the consequences are expensive to society.

But the most contagious thing of all is attitude.  When humans lived in a small bands, the biggest, fiercest, best hunter guy made danceaway transgressors behave by forcing young males out, so that they formed their own bands and helped each other survive.  (I’m not just talking humans. Elk.  Horses.)  This was good for the survival of the group because the alpha male dominated the gene pool and presumably he had the survival genes.  So the group went along with it.

But surviving in modern society might best favor the dance-away transgressor, not the ones who avoid every intimacy or are afraid of being known, but the ones with attitude, the hunter-gatherers who find insight, beauty, meaning, alternatives.  The ones who are brave enough to run, but then can find ways to start new groups that don’t depend on money, hierarchy, control, violence.  No primate can dream of this -- only humans.

NAPI'S FINE HOUSE

When a Blackfeet has ideas about writing a book, which they have no doubt will be published and earn lots of money, they almost invariably say they’re going to write the true version of the Napi stories, which they learned from their grandparent (usually about my age by now).  Though the stories were originally oral, there must be a dozen versions of printed Blackfeet Napi stories out there floating around, not counting other tribes. Why add to the pile?   When I ask these would-be authorities, they just look confused.  In their minds it is clear that a book about Blackfeet should have Napi stories in it, that there are definitive versions that are more valuable than the others, and that everyone in the greater world will fall on them with great delight and tons of money.  (They have not gotten the news about the collapse of the publishing industry, but that’s beside the point.)

If you speak to a white person over sixty about a book about Blackfeet, their minds will turn to James Willard Schultz -- dramatic horseback adventures of hunting and war.  If the white person is a little younger, the book will be about post-colonial misery and injustice: alcoholism, lousy housing, drugs, broken families.   If the white person is female, it will be about a cross-race romance.  Everyone thinks of their little sub-category as representing the whole.  They never question this, never investigate, and even if they come to the rez, they will see it on those terms.

Star Boy

Let’s go back to Napi stories.  The anthropologists like Wissler, Ewers or Kehoe had a great interest in them and scientists recorded them as accurately as they could in the early days of contact, hoping to understand the culture better.  Anyway, in those days it was salvage anthropology: save what they could.  At the same time the missionaries were looking for equivalents to the Christian stories so they could say, “You see?  These are universal elements.”  So Starboy or Blood Clot Boy became versions of Jesus.  And there WERE correlations, but they became an argument something like genetic purity: kill all the buffalo that have domestic cow genes.  (An old Aryan idea: variation as pollution.)  

The general public saw Napi stories as more like Aesop fables or the Greek myths.  Entertaining.  Suitable for children.  (Which they were, since they were meant to socialize the tribal children with tribal values like generosity, courage, and willingness to experiment.)  But trivial, non-threatening.  So James Willard Schultz, Frank Bird Linderman, George Bird Grinnell, the Demings, Walter McClintock did pretty well selling the stories.  None were Blackfeet.  None got rich.

In the Sixties local people began to pick up the idea of Napi, Natoosi (Sun), and others.  For instance, Napi's Lookout; The Story of Willow Rounds by Dorothy M. Hamaker (1964)  (A white rancher’s wife.)  And not long after that the Blackfeet themselves were chiming in.  Percy Bullchild’s “The Sun Came Down,” was commercially successful.  

Napi and the Bullberries (The Indian Reading Series Stories and Legends of the Northwest, Level II Book 17) was by Joan Kennerly, Carmen Marceau, Doris Old Person and June Tatsey (1978)  (Four Blackfeet sisters, “the Bullshoe girls,” who were all involved with education.)   Darnell Doore  (Rides at the Door) (1979)  Blackfeet Heritage Program, Browning Public Schools, put another turn on the wheel.  There are others, I’m sure.

Loki

Brer Rabbit

Napi is a trickster figure and a universal in stories around the planet.  Here he’s Brer Rabbit and there he’s Loki.  He’s the guy that thinks he’s so smart, but gets carried away.  On the other hand, because he’ll try anything, he’s creative and makes contributions. 

A few years after I left the reservation for a while, I earned a degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School with a focus on anthropology.  There I learned about revising sacred stories or writing parallel new ones in order to make a point. 

Windigo

In part I learned this in a dark way from a student who combined the Baker Massacre with Dracula, a figure from European vampire lore, very much like the cannibal figure of the Windigo, the woodland tribes’ starvation horror figure.  (There’s a modern movie version spelled “Wendigo.”)  On the other hand I tried playing “what if” with traditional teaching stories of the Gospels.  Sometimes this was pretty enlightening.  What if Jesus had turned all the wine at the wedding party into water instead of the other way around?

What Napi story might I invent for the situation of today’s Blackfeet?  I’ll give it a try.

______________

Napi’s neighbor, Striped Skunk, was experimenting with the white man’s way of building a house.  First he wove one of grass, but the wind soon got rid of that.  So the next one was made of logs, which stayed and looked good.  

Napi was jealous, but he didn’t get upset until he looked over one day and saw that Striped Skunk even had lights on in his cabin.  How did he manage that?   

When he went over and demanded to know the secret, Striped Skunk showed him that he had captured a Farting Horse, which emitted a gas from under his tail that could be set on fire, making a pretty good light.  It was warm, too, which is a big advantage in a prairie winter.  So Napi went over one night and stole the Farting Horse.  

Indeed, the gas burned bright and warm, but Napi kept Farting Horse picketed next to his lodge so it wouldn’t run away.  Pretty soon the horse had eaten everything nearby and stopped farting.  This made Napi very indignant and he decided to find out where in the horse the farts were coming from, so he cut the horse open.  It didn’t work.  No clue.  

Napi was pretty sure the horse was getting something from the ground -- it was always going along in the grass with its nose down.  So he went to look for whatever it was.  All he found was horse dung, which would burn, but nothing like farts.  However, he did find a lot of shiny black rock, something like obsidian.  Thinking about Striped Skunk’s log cabin, he decided he would make a house of this black rock, which would be very beautiful and strong.  So he did.  In it he burned buffalo chips and horse dung, because there was never enough wood on the high hilltops where he liked to live because of the view which made him feel important.

Then came spring and the thunderstorms.  Lightning struck everywhere.  Striped Skunk was always careful to open his Pipe Bundle at that time and to give away what he could to his family and friends.  One day in spite of this his cabin was struck by lightning and would have burned but all his friends and neighbors came quickly and put the fire out.

Napi’s lookout house up there so high was also struck by lightning, but he had thought,  “Ha!  Nothing will happen to me!  I don’t need to do any ceremonies because this house is made of stone.”  Alas, it turned out that the black shiny stone was coal and it burned very well.  The tribe tried to get up there to help, but it took a long time to climb such steep slopes and the house burned completely.  Napi spent the rainy season huddled in front of his smoking, smelly fire of dung.  He couldn't even afford a canvas lodge.

________

I tried to get oil into this story but failed.  Maybe you can do it.  This is a creative story -- anyone can add to it or change it.  Just like life, especially tribal life.  I don’t recommend this music, but it IS very windigo.  Maybe it is sound from a windigo who thought he could eat oil. Or was that drinking frakking liquid?  http://tiktik.bandcamp.com/album/windigo-psychosis