A DIASPORA THAT DIDN’T BECOME A NATION

Grant-Kohrs Ranch

In my pickup in case of having to wait, as when I take my wash to the laundromat, I keep a book that’s suitable for short reads — that is, without a long plot line and a lot of characters to be remembered.  For a while I’ve been packing around Patricia Nell Warren’s anthology, “My West: Personal Writings on the American West: Past, Present and Future.”  The articles were written over decades and appeared in many places, but most of them lead back to the Grant-Kohrs ranch in Deer Lodge, Montana, and through that ranch to the lives of the Grant progenitor, John “Johnny” Francis Grant (1831 - 1907).

Warren (b. 1936) is a high energy woman who grew up on that ranch, spent years in Europe and in California, wrote key books about gays (“Fancy Dancer”, “The Front Runner”,) and the long threads of her own mixed heritage (“One Is the Sun”), and — when publishing collapsed — ran her own publishing house.  I’ve reviewed her books on this blog, but this post is not about her.  “My West” is primarily about the Grant-Kohrs Ranch as she knew it, a remarkable near-colonial mix of European luxury imported by immigrants, and a 10 million acre grassroots ranch now a national historic site.  https://www.nps.gov/grko/   Compare to the Chateau de Mores https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chateau_de_Mores   Or the empire of the Conrad Brothers whose ranch included the location of Valier, where I live.

Johnny Grant, was a product of the Hudson’s Bay Company which is to say his father was a white employee with a convent-educated Metis wife, and so was his grandfather and his half-brother, James.  These alliances and many like them created a diaspora nation that cast a web of alliances all across the high prairie on both sides of the 49th parallel.  Not only did they blend the practices of tribal people, mostly Cree and Chippewa, with the pre-Victorian Scots values of order, thrift and profit, they produced generations of genetically sturdy children who could choose their identification from a range of life-styles extending from close-to-the-land old ways to orderly modern towns.  

Eventually, there were enough of them with enough culture in common to try to establish a nation called after their heartland, the Red River country.  The Louis Riel Institute, www.louisrielinstitute.com, is named for their revered leader who was hanged by Canada.  In Canada the Metis are classified with Aboriginal original peoples and have their advantages, but in the US the Metis are only considered tribal if they self-identify as Cree-Chippewa.  

Speaking of Johnny Grant specifically, he was born in Edmonton when it was still a “fort,” raised in Quebec until he was fourteen, then sent by his father to Fort Hall in Idaho and Fort Vancouver in Washington.  In 1861 he created his ranch site in Deer Lodge (“Cottonwood.”)  In 1867 he sold the ranch to Conrad Kohrs (no relation to the Conrad brothers).  His four more or less formal wives produced more than a dozen children, all of which he cared for by making sure they had homes and entitlement to scrip.  The records of these efforts are our main source of information.  He also adopted many children, some of them African-Canadian.  After years of struggle in the birthing of nations, including the boom and bust of land speculation, in 1907 he completed the circle of his life by returning to Edmonton to die.  He was not involved directly in the Red River Rebellion.

The Grant name is still alive on the Blackfeet Rez.  Other names I recognize in Riel Institute account of his life are Delorme, Bruneau, Barnes.  Harry Barnes is the current chair of the Blackfeet Tribal Council. The bio of Johnny’s half-brother, James Cuthbert Grant (b.1836) brings up the names of Cadotte, Red Head, Magee, McKay, Rides-at-the-Door, Chocquette, Higgins (he was involved in the founding of Missoula), and Robare, fondly called the little town too wicked to exist.  It was on the Robare ranch at the edge of the Blackfeet rez that the little town of the same name was established by persons who had been thrown off the reservation by the Methodist agent who had his own ideas, like temperance and anti-Papism.  Thus, a saloon was built adjacent to the Catholic priest’s house.  It was in that saloon that the plans for the original Swift Dam were made.  It was on Major Steele’s Blackfeet wife’s rez allotment.  Steele served two separate terms as the Blackfeet agent.  The last traces of Robare were washed away by the flood of ’65 when Swift Dam broke.  Mrs. Rose Grant, aged 84, wife of Jimmy’s son Richard, was killed along with eight family members.

According to Dorothy Floerchinger’s historical work (Conrad newspaper, Nov 20, 1991), “Just east of the Sheep Creek bridge north of Dupuyer are graves of Jimmy Grant and two little children who died of measles.  For years those graves were unmarked until an old-timer pointed them out to Paul Bruner and he placed a stone marker on them.”  (I haven’t looked for that marker, but I will.)

Jimmy’s death at 45 was dramatic.  His wife was in a romantic relationship with another man, half-tribal, and they were camped between Birch Creek and Dupuyer.  Someone told Jimmy and he set out to confront the runaways.  The two men confronted each other in a shoot-out and Jimmy’s first shot glanced off a rib.  The lover shot twice and his second bullet pierced Jimmy’s heart. 

At daybreak a posse of six “citizens” went out, dividing into three “squads.”  By 9AM they were back in town and did not venture out again.  The body of the lover was found, riddled with bullets.  No one says what happened to the wife, but the Blackfeet along Birch Creek fled to the agency for a while.  The story about the deaths was in the New Northwest Newspaper of August 17, 1883.  They said, Grant “was highly regarded as an honest, industrious and sober citizen.”

Dorothy Floerchinger (1901-1996) was one of several diligent female historians around the area.  I spoke to her several times and have always wondered where her papers went.  (Her grandson owns the laundromat in Conrad.)  Now I know:  http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv02397  Her maiden name was Bruner, a Metis name connected to the Grants.

The Red River Nation was a potential that never really became a country, an idea something like the current proposal of “Cascadia” as a sub-national area extending from southern BC down through Washington and Oregon, west to include the Flathead Valley, but leaving out SW Oregon.  Nations are formed by ecology, family connections, trade, travel routes, and sometimes other affinities such as religion.  The Red River Nation was aborted in part because England was worried about their connections to the rebellious Irish and possible alliances with them.  Once the Hudson’s Bay Company gave up “Rupert’s Land,” that Canadian land was still part of the British Empire.  Worries about the potential of the Irish continue until the present.

We often think of history as long ago and mostly irrelevant, partly because it has been written by the victors, but no more.  The Metis diaspora nation is part of what joins us on the high prairie.  A phrase often used in the context of a religious congregation is “a community of memory and hope.”  They persist just a little beyond us as testimony that life goes on.  When times get tough, they’re good to think about.

FANCY DANCERS

Somehow I seem to be producing a series of posts about gay men, partly because of friendships and partly because they can be a powerful metaphor, embodying nonconforming lives based on intimate relationships.  I’ve compared them to tribally enrolled men, who often have highly productive but sociologically ambiguous lives that raise religious questions.

“Tom Meeker is a handsome rookie priest stranded in a dying rural parish. Vidal Stump is a proud, gay half-breed with a criminal record and unlawful desires. Father Meeker must choose between his sacred vows and his secret attraction to this Fancy Dancer who lures him into forbidden love.

First published two decades ago, this provocative, hard-hitting novel was the first bestseller to portray a gay priest and to explore gay life in a small town.”  (http://www.anobii.com/books/The_Fancy_Dancer/9780452263208/019971144dca592e16)

Marshall W. Mason says in the Afterword of “The Circle Repertory Company: the First Fifteen Years” that at one point he was interested in making a film from another of Patricia Nell Warren’s books, “The Front Runner” but it didn’t work out, as most movie projects do not.  I would like to raise a vision of a film of “The Fancy Dancer” shot on video with all the special effects that Tim Barrus and Cinematheque have developed over the past decade.  

Full disclosure: I only wrote with Tim rather than making video, but I’ve seen most of them, often repeatedly.  One of the early vids juxtaposes two dancers: one Asian man dancing in a bare cement space and one white dancing in a standard mirrored studio.  The two overlap contrapuntally, seeming to dance as partners, then merging into one dancer, then separating and contrasting.  Another vid in the same mode melds skateboarding with surfing.  Physical movement is one of the hallmarks of Cinematheque and is key to the lives of boys.

In the years Marshall and I were in the community around Alvina Krause at NU and Eaglesmere (1957-1961), we were not close but both of us walked and thought in multiple levels, overlapping or informing each other, slowly unfolding as we came to grasp more and more about what it is to be human.  It was so intense that ever after I’ve had a little trouble finding a world as idealistic and piercing.  The rez in some aspects, the world of sculpture before it was seized by the cowboy commodifiers, sometimes ministry, and mostly writing have been far more to me than they seem to be for other people.  These things are full of bright shadows, in that paradoxical way informing the work of some artists.  My skill level only pursues them, but Tim, in the years he had strength and health, captured.  His poetry still does.

Marshall and some other NU people were fortunate — oh, fortune had nothing to do with it and not money either — because they created The Circle Repertory Company, which was as much workshop as theatre, in the same way that Cinematheque is a school, in the sense that a school is a place to grow, a kindergarten.  For me my school was seminary, a seedbed, a place of insemination.  But then I had to return to the land.  Like Sam Shepard, who was peripheral to Circle Rep, I am a Westerner.  (Actually, Marshall is, too, but I don’t think he identifies that way.)

Living in the world as an artist, particularly as a solitary, is not easy because the visions can come with overwhelming kaleidoscopic impact, but might also contract into darkness.  Unless one has built habit and discipline, there will be no container that can hold and shape the patterns.  If there are others who interfere with that, it dies.  If there are others who can be dance partners, it is elaborated.

Alvina Krause was not self-promoting, nor was she a star-maker, but she had learned in her own life how to be a effectively contained “dancer” and could pass that on to others.  We knew her in old age when even the tribal old warriors dance with slow steps, enormous dignity, wrapped in a blanket but wearing a headdress.  (In her case, a silver comb.)  Deceptively simple her life seemed, and yet it was layers and layers deep, non-conforming in private ways because she was always in danger of exploitation or exclusion.  Inside this small Edwardian-style woman was Marlon Brando on a motorcycle, a leather-lady. 

Paula Ragusa Prentiss and Rob Thirkield

Caesar and Cleopatra  at NU

Marshall is something like that as well and so was his collaborator, Rob Thirkield, who was finally “washed out to sea”.  That’s a metaphor for suicide.  The other suicide that deeply affected the company was that of Joe Cino, who danced his self-slashing death while Maria Callas sang “Norma” on the record player.  It’s much easier to understand Cino in a time when young people practice “cutting” to relieve psychic pain.  I think about Montgomery Clift and James Dean as twilight dwellers, while today’s youngsters go directly to werewolves and vampires, but always keep the intense bonding of pairs.

One of the powerful patterns today, coming from biology as well as philosophy, is that of the rhizome network: nodes connected by long filaments.  This is the pattern of the connectome in the brain, which plays the neurons as though they were the keys of a piano.  The visionary aspect of the artist, priest or dancer is not imaginary — it is the symphonic expression of an electrochemical instrument.  Not just in the brain.  Muscles and bodily fluids play their part as surely as brass and strings.  But the pattern is also expressed in lives of lovers and nomads — fusion and flight.

Still alive in my memory is sitting in the back of the auditorium of Annie May Swift Hall during acting classes watching moments when meaning came alive.  I’ve been more the observer than the performer all along, except for the years in ministry when I led services and preached.  I’ve avoided most intimate relationships for fear of being trapped and prevented, used by people who don’t have the vision.  

That may just be a rationalization, but even just sitting safely in this old house with kittens grappling my ankles, I can feel the danger in great effort and risk.  The world itself flames and gutters, not just with human life but also with the hurtling cosmic rays and ringing of the universe.  Gay men in the arts seem to understand.  So do Native Americans and the best priests.

Patricia Nell Warren's "GENTLE BEING"

Patricia Nell Warren declares convincingly that she got this story from a Montana Métis who heard it from Cree relatives living far to the north.  It is not the usual “my-cat-is-so-clever” story and hit me dead center because of two things.  

One was from increased familiarity with the far north country that comes from commenting on the Twitter tweets of Paul Seesequasis who posts old photos from the northern country of Cree/Blackfeet on up into the Arctic world of the Inuit.  There was a brief exchange not long ago when several different tribesmen offered the names for domestic cats in their languages.  It turned out they were all variations on the English word (I GUESS it’s English!) “puss.”  The name came with the animal.

Namibian wild cat

Cats evolved in northern Africa which accounts for their love of warmth and their dislike of being wet.  Just the same they are enormously adaptable, esp. if there are humans in their lives to take up the slack.  But there were none domesticated in North America until ships brought them over from Europe.  Even then the prairies had no domestic cats until the wagons began to travel west, carrying family pets and pest-eliminators.  

There’s a wonderful short story somewhere about a widowed and solitary pioneer woman on the prairie who made her living by raising kittens and geraniums, both much treasured.  There’s also another one about a woman in these circumstances who was brought a live chicken to eat — live because there was no refrigeration.  The cowboy who brought the chicken stopped by a year later and discovered that she hadn’t eaten the chicken because it made a pretty good pet!  And it cleaned her garden of beetles and worms.

In Warren’s story, called “The Gentle Being”, the tale came as trade as though it were an object, in exchange for several lesser stories.  But the cat herself came as a gift.  A whaling ship off Point Barrow was caught in the ice and finally crushed with no survivors.  Except a cat.  The Inuit people, who came to see whether there were anything worth salvaging in what wreckage came to the surface, were surprised by a little Being coming towards them.  It had “little round paws” and was a bit like a lynx but without ear tufts.  “It’s pelt was painted with white and red and black, in the same way that the northern Crees painted their faces sometimes.”

Whaling Ship

The cat rubbed against their mukluks and cried out to them.  Until then they had thought — since it was strange — that it might be dangerous.  But strange things can go both ways and the difference might be one of Holy Power.  So they picked it up, causing it to purr, snuggle and close its eyes with bliss.  She became part of the treasure of that little group of people.  They fed her bits and since their food was almost exclusively meat, the cat was pleased and thrived.  When the weather warmed enough for small rodents and ground birds to be about, the “Gentle Being” caught and ate them and occasionally brought the humans an example of her success.  They pretended to be grateful because meat-gifts were also part of their culture.  

The cat came into heat but this is one of the few accounts of a female cat calling for a lover that didn’t bring a tomcat out of nowhere.  When white traders came on ships, the People hid the cat for fear of it being claimed back into the ship world.  No other cat ever left a ship.

Then Warren adds an element from contemporary news, the recognition that cats know when someone is ill or suffering and will go to sit by them, often by the ailing part of them.  People interpreted this as potentially healing and asked to have the cat present at healing ceremonies, which brought many practical gifts to the people, like flints and needles.  Even today nursing homes say that their cats will begin to sleep alongside old people who are slipping over the edge of the world.

The cat herself lived another ten years.  By then she couldn’t trot along the trail with them so a woman would take the cat into her hood as though she were a baby.  We’ve all seen the photos of little faces peering over the mother’s shoulder.  I’ve never seen a face that was a cat.

Warren tells us that when the Gentle Being died, they carefully skinned and tanned “that wonderful soft many-painted pelt with the greatest care.  From it they sewed a Medicine Bag, in which to keep all of their most precious healing things — teas, crystals, feathers, whatever was needed.”

Crackers and Squibs

Squibs and Crackers, my two cats, were fourteen before they became too miserable for me to force them to go on.  I did not skin them and make a Medicine Bag.  Warren’s version of contents sounds a little more California that the Blackfeet Bundles I know.  But’s that’s okay.  We each draw on the world we know. 

Once Bob bought a domestic cat hide, raw, at a fur sale.  I handled it after it had been tanned but Bob said it was nothing like it had been when it was still raw — it had gone flat and -- well -- dead, without the active musculature under the skin to make the fur rise and fall, fluff and shrink.  So much of a cat is its jeweled eyes but they were gone.

Without Squibs and Crackers, the house was immediately claimed by Finnegan and his Bunny, a strange little blue female who has attached to Finnegan so tightly that he sometimes gets impatient with the crowding and pestering and bites her throat and kicks her stomach until she gives him space.  Finnegan is a skinny, long-legged, gray-striped tom with an arrowhead face and a coat so flat and short it’s like velveteen more than fur.  These are cats from this spring and I will likely be dead before they die.  They are climbing cats and love the tallest bookshelves which gets the tops dusted at last.  They are feral.  If I moved away, they would quickly adapt and I have no intention of letting them become too dependent or attached.

Bunny hugging Finnegan

The terms of life are often harsh, even insupportable, but we all do the best we can.  If another little life comes along to walk and sleep beside us, we should be grateful.  This is what the Inuit once knew very well — probably still do.

WRITING BETWEEN CULTURES

from Terraturepossessions.com

In every human culture there is a mystical edge of magic where what is taken for granted meets the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.  This boundary can create a kind of person who seems able to cross over into some other world and return to the rest of us with powerful new systems and ceremonies.  This includes the resurrection cult we call Christianity with its saints and heretics.  I’m composing this on Saturday as though I were a Seventh Day Adventist or even observing Shabbat, because the European number cult valorizes the number Seven.  Of course, you may be reading it on Sunday because as a cultural Christian I’m just in the habit of the Seventh Day post being a little more concerned with religion than the others, so tend to choose religious subjects for that day.

In the world of indigenous people there are many examples of this phenomenon but they mostly operate in an oral society where their stories are told and ceremonies are enacted privately, or even secretly, in order to escape from a larger dominating culture that would label them and try to eliminate them.  But to a certain kind of seeker, this hiddenness only adds to their power, their sense of privilege.  Those who hurt or wonder or seek solace are MORE attracted than those already content with the mainstream.

The people on this edge who are Blackfeet tend to connect it to political empowerment.  Others pull in sex, dissociation (traditionally among Blackfeet achieved by fasting, dehydration, torture, exposure, rather than drugs), and the ecology itself, emphasizing sun and altitude instead of the Christian water and wind.  Animal symbolism in the north is more about horses and eagles than the SW where coyotes and crows are the messengers.  Phenomena of this sort arrange themselves according to their own logic but then are assigned labels by investigators.  One of those labels is “shaman,” which originally applied to a certain sort of person in the far tribal Russian north.  The concept doesn’t always apply in other contexts, so it is controversial.  The idea of the "medicine man" is related.

Castenada

Though we know Louis Riel, Crazy Horse, and other indigenous visionaries, two others have broken over from oral to written documents:  Black Elk and Castenada.  Both had ties -- interpreters -- in the white academic world.  In fact, Castenada earned a Ph.D. by representing his work as comparative religion.  Black Elk was interpreted and edited by Joseph Epes Brown, a professor at the University of Montana.  Castenada paid little attention to Christianity while Black Elk, who once traveled Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, who was at the original Wounded Knee where a bullet grazed his leg, AND at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, was a Christian convert who only slipped his “Sun Worship” below the surface without losing his faith in it.  He said he did this for the sake of his children, who would have to live in a Christian world.

The difficulty in moving from one religious system to another, especially when adding the desire for holocaust-level destruction that constantly invades them, is in trying to locate and resist the supernatural.  The rival is labeled Evil which legitimates killing, whether Crucifixion or Genocide or just Holy War.  Even police pursuing "Law and Order."  

Nationality gets mixed in, confusingly, and values shift between generations over time.  Violence and criminality can act as a validation of the importance of a rival system like Charles Manson’s.  Even a benign movement like Greenpeace can be criminalized.  Even the supposedly beatific Mother Theresa can be seen as a cult leader when one discovers after her death that she was obsessed with depression and lack of faith and all the donations she was sent were not spent on food and medicine, but hoarded in a secret bank account.

Black Elk and Neihardt

From anonymous in Wikipedia:  “Black Elk Speaks” is a 1932 book by John G. Neihardt, an American poet and writer, who relates the story of Black Elk, an Oglala Lakota medicine man. Black Elk spoke in Lakota and Black Elk's son, Ben Black Elk, who was present during the talks, translated his father's words into English.  Neihardt made notes during these talks which he later used as the basis for his book.”  

Black Elk was interpreted by Joseph Epes Brown as a ceremonialist and a benign guru, acceptable to any conscientious person.  Brown's book, called “The Sacred Pipe,” was about those ceremonies.  I asked Professor Brown if I could audit a class of his, which he resisted.  The content was a ritual that was supposed to be performed at a young woman’s coming of age, using the red earth pigment that is common in prairie ceremonies.  Brown said the pigment was supposed to represent the cow bison’s practice of breathing bloody foam from her nose over a calf in order to protect it.  It sounded to me more like a way to attract wolves, but I didn’t say anything.  Brown was a handsome, graceful man, very dignified, fond of turquoise jewelry.  Not a person with whom to pick a quarrel.

from Thehouseofvines.com

Later I realized that he was setting up his class, who busily wrote down this ritual, so that in the following session he could reveal that he’d been playing the trickster in order to raise their consciousness about over-credulous acceptance of faux nature-knowledge.  Tricksters abound in the liminal edge between the primary culture and breakaway systems.

Genre (or, more pejoratively, “pulp”) fiction loves all this stuff.  Montana Gothic fiction uses it poetically to create whole worlds of visions and exploits, extraordinary people, and embeddedness in nature.  It also makes a space for a novel like “The Fancy Dancer,” which is a gay romance between a priest and a motorcyclist, a half-breed escapee from Leather Lit.  It's by Patricia Nell Warren, a white contemporary Montana writer.

Grass Dancer

Mainstream critics will attack such stories on grounds that they are immoral or hoaxes or sacrilegious, which are all code for “they are outside my culture stream and therefore I’m justified in condemning them.”  But consciousness of the suffering of Native Americans as the continent was cleared by force, as smallpox and other diseases accompanied the massacres, as the de-cultured impoverished people became addicts to substance dysphoria, as family and ceremonial systems were smashed, others defended the indigenous entitlement to their own ways.  Castenada and Black Elk were therefore honorable.

Lit critics don’t address these dozens of best-selling books.   Black Elk was using his own language, so his books are essentially translations.  Castenada, born in Peru, was also bringing a non-English point of view.  Comparative religion people like Eliade or Campbell are happy to write about them.  They so vividly and persuasively illuminated the numinous.