HOW CAN WE HELP THE HELPERS?

Like Steve Jobs, I have some little key stories, homilies that I use all the time.  One is about my little brother on a camping trip at Lost Lake, which is on the side of Mt.Hood.  We stayed in our folding camp trailer near the shore in a mostly undeveloped campground.  My brothers discovered the salamanders that lived along the edge of the water and enjoyed playing with them.  When it came time to go home, Paul had attached strongly to his mud-puppy with its little hands and wide mouth and he didn’t want to give it up.  

My mother explained that Portland is no place for salamanders, but Paul insisted,  “He’ll be all right.  I’ll keep him safe in my pocket!”  Of course, that would kill a salamander.  In fact, removing any living creature from its environment might kill it, because living beings are interwoven with their surroundings, adapted to them.  Some of those surroundings are created by humans but that only means they are adapted to one kind of person.  In the early days of Euro exploration, when sailors insisted on dragging home treasures and treated other human beings like keepsakes, many Native peoples died in the perfectly comfortable London surroundings of the sailors.  It wasn’t just psychological — it was physical: failure to adjust to food, climate, germs, uncertainty.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_junger_our_lonely_society_makes_it_hard_to_come_home_from_war?utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=button__2016-05-18

Sebastian Junger, the war correspondent, has a TED talk in which he points out that PTSD may not always be the result of combat — in fact, a small percentage of soldiers see actual killing up close and personal —but rather the consequence of going from a regimented, organized, tightly bonded band-of-brothers where decisions are made for you, to a society that has become confused, torn, alienated, uncertain, judging and hostile.  It’s not even particularly admiring of soldiers.

People who “rescue” young women from Asian brothels are disconcerted when the girls want to return to where they knew what was expected of them, were protected in some ways, and had many friendships.  Going to another country or starting a small shop was beyond many of them.

“Helping” people depends on the assumptions of the attempt.  Many do-gooders do it because they assume they will be admired and the receivers will be grateful.  When that doesn’t happen, bitterness can be the result. If the “helping” has lasted long enough for the helpees to get used to it and depend on it, removing that help can be devastating.  This is the problem of Indian reservations:  what was intended to be a protecting reserve becomes a unique environment sustained by outsiders, a trap.  It’s heresy to say so, but maybe reservations — which were not used by conquerers outside the British mindset — are only a delayed cruelty that cripples the People so that they can’t function in the larger society.

Such situations are always triage:  some will be able to cope and others will not.  Those who survive will be most like the conquerers — either were in the first place or become that way.  The problem is often those who are neither here nor there or waffle back and forth, like frequent offenders of criminal law who go in and out of jail or prison, carrying subtle dangers in and out with them.  Behaviors, networks, diseases, addictions — all things that were meant to be confined by prison walls.

Less dramatic and more sentimental are the people who come in and out of reservations, partly because of romantic notions about accessing a secret Shangri-la where they will be appreciated at last; partly about the stubborn conviction that spending the summer painting buildings and getting to know old tribal people will do the tribe good; partly as scholars looking for material that can be published to enhance their tenure; and partly by rabble-rousers, usually counter-culture youngsters who bring in radical political notions along with drugs.  These are innocent compared to the people who take criminal advantage of any place where laws are complex and overlapping, populations are in disagreement, the larger culture demonizes individuals, corruption dominates all levels of government and some people suffer so intensely that raw survival is their only concern and the help they wish for is death.

So being a helper can be approached from the values of the helper, from the values of the receiver of help, from those who find the situation an opportunity for abuse, or from the larger context of a nation, a planetary given imposed by the environments of locations.  It’s three-dimensional chess that is dynamic, because every intervention creates a whole new set of givens.  The environmental givens overwhelm everything else: floods and forest fires, earthquakes and volcanoes, drought and famine all challenge the survival of humans, who are — after all — as vulnerable as soft little wet salamanders.

Those who work with minority populations who are suffering — let’s say street people, let’s say delinquent boys — okay, “at risk” or whatever euphemism you want, most of them imposed by helpers from outside — will find that the suffering might not be hunger, numbness, fear of death, loss of family, or whatever other horrors are in Pandora’s box.  It’s not enough to supply food, shelter, literacy, or even skills that can be monetized.  Down there in the bottom of the box — according to the story — was “hope.”  You cannot “give” people hope. 

Hope is an emergent capacity of human beings.  Emergent means that it comes from the right conditions for it to spontaneously kindle.  Those conditions will not always be there even after all the animal needs are met, including a belonging group with a name for itself.  Some have been damaged so deeply — looking at it from the helper’s view — that they cannot be “saved.”  Unless they go back to the life that they adapted themselves to.  The people in that context will consider their return to be salvation.

So this becomes damage to the helper, who feels it as loss, failure.  Where is the helper’s hope?  It can’t come from praise of those who assumed everyone is pleased to be just like them, prosperous and happy, and who enjoy the reflected participation of praising people they define as saviors.  These latter folks will only be damaged by the knowledge that their safety can be removed so easily by an economic Depression, a health challenge, loss of a loved one.  This is the point where some kind of belief system, a conviction of what the world means, will be very “helpful.”  If you believe Jesus loves you, even when a scroungy, mean, hopeless little humanoid spits on you, that “helps.”  If you can’t believe in Jesus, then what?

Hope, the capacity to be helped even by people who ask us to create a new identity, to be “reborn”, can be either a individual emergence or a group emergence, possibly labeled religious or political or even cultural through the arts.  I’m transcribing and consolidating old conversations and note how often the counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies comes up.  Did it do damage by breaking all the rules, just for the pleasure of seeing how brittle they were?  Did it start to liberate us, but then scare us into being obedient suits?  Did we aim for Jesus and get Trump instead?  How do we help ourselves without getting stuffed into someone's pocket?

THE BIGGEST PICTURE

It’s hard to believe that I moved back here in 1999, which now amounts to sixteen years.  Things have changed considerably.  I did get the book about Bob Scriver written and published, just barely before the whole publishing industry collapsed.  But I have not been able to redeem Bob’s work from the profit stranglers who control Western art.  The best thing about this Charley Russell trope was that it was land-based and authentic.  That was left behind long ago.

The whole concept of “reservations” for a captured indigenous people has changed radically, which means that my thinking about them must also change.  This empowers my thought about the environmental movement that has always been present in one form or another.  What was specific and experienced has now become planetary and even cosmic.  My grandfather's Rodale organic gardening and Bob's practice of keeping “wild” pets as babies have now become concerns about universal chemical pollution and the extinction of species.  So many people are concerned and involved that the flow of information and concepts and the demand for response is almost overwhelming.  

Another self-assigned task has been preserving and using my father’s photos, not because they were artistic or historic, but because they illustrate a little strand of life across time.  In researching the genealogy that they record, I discovered many things, including distortions and tragedies.  My family has not wanted to hear about these, because their idea of the virtue of relatives is fragile.  We are separated now.

The connected steps I’m following are:  cosmology leads to planetary morphology leads to geology leads to ecology leads to the historical formation of cultures leads to human individuation leads to creations.  There is no reference to theology.  Its place is taken by survival of elements at each step.

Parallel to all this has been trying to keep up with what a human being is and does, particularly in terms of neuro- research.  There are five aspects to this:

1. The specialization and collaboration of one-celled creatures into complex animals.  This is crucial to brain function.
2. The message system of the whole body -- not just the senses represented by organs like eye and ear, but the hundreds of small awarenesses, roughly sorted into internal vs. external at the skin barrier but including every tissue and extending down to the molecular level.  Action responses are included from molecular secretions to whole-animal skilled exertions like athletic feats.  Some estimate that there are 200 differently specialized brain cells assigned to subtle perceptions like whether one is right-side-up (head on top for humans).
3. Empathic access to the thoughts and feeling-states of other people through identification, special “mirror” functions of cells in the pre-frontal cortex, experience, and communication systems like speaking, music, art, and words, both oral and written.  Results might include bonding, families, patriotism.
4. “Group think” which is a phenomenon that forms spontaneously, an aggregate of individual ideas and responses.  Philosophies and governments.  A weltanschaung.
5. Interaction with the infinite, including planetary conditions, sun storms, and massive evolutions of creatures and phenomena.  A consciousness that there is far far far more than we CAN know.

“Millennials” are so different from me that I not only don’t understand them, but I begin to resent them for their narcissistic domination of so much.  On the other hand, I’m old enough to see how change ripples through everything, most of it useless to oppose.  Peoples who have lived through the Great Depression or the World Wars were stretched to their limits and knew it.  

The generation that has been in control of the US and probably much of the English-speaking world is just about gone.  I relate to them better than to my own generation, partly because of the ten years with a man so much older and partly because of being in Browning, which is just leaving the 19th century.  But my own generation is dying as well.  

A K-12 Portland classmate died last week -- a woman who had a heart attack.  (Actually, I see by her obit that she was only my classmate after 1947 -- moving from California.) This person was intelligent and conventional, charming and dependable, quite mild and gentle.  She had two children but her husband, whom she met on vacation in San Francisco, somehow evaporated, probably about the time she went to PSU for an advanced degree.  Her work was books and then computers.  She was the kind of person I was expected to be, but risked and paid dearly NOT to be.  I don’t know where that difference came from except that at some point it dawned on me that it was better to actually live adventures than to just imagine them.

It made a difference that our teachers at Vernon and Jefferson -- and then later in university -- were mostly born at the turn of the 19th century, just before WWI, about the age of Bob Scriver.  It was a time about to turn violent and by WWII to murder children as well as destroying cities.  Our teachers were educated just at the beginning of the Roaring Twenties when all was optimism and determination, but the war had decimated men of an age to marry them: anyway they were few and scarred.  The Edwardian women threw their hearts into secondary education.  They were not allowed to teach in universities, so they taught what is now considered graduate level to adolescents who barely grasped it.  Here we were, pondering Kitto and Edith Hamilton.

That generation witnessed the desperate war against Nazism, an evil and oily snake impossible to kill.  The Millennials so enjoy waving the ghosts and skulls around to upset their elders.  They give it Goth Glam, quite unconscious of how easy it is to commit genocide.  In fact, they have a hard time thinking of adults as human.

Now both the brokenness of war, often internal to what was thought of as a group joined by faith, and the continuousness and interwovenness of human-caused destruction (sometimes identified as Evil), are becoming clear but not effectively opposed.  We keep trying to "solve" it.   We begin to think that the roots are paleobiological tendrils reaching back so far they are invertebrate.

I have no way of knowing how many years I have left, but a felt obligation to do something with them.  I no longer have the illusion that I can influence others -- that was snuffed by ministry.  The drive to write remains strong for its own sake.  I do have a passionate sense of what I love to write about.  I want the basics, the foundational concepts that are transforming right now.  

Why else would I live along the Rockies where the planetary plate tectonics have thrust up ramparts of stone and some day in that rain shadow grass and forbes might return to replace the human-distorted monoculture of grain because climate change from rising temps have prevented industrial irrigation.  We are told that we’re about due for another immense upthrust, a massive earthquake.  We are told that the two sub-continental plates press together so hard that the earth vibrates with stress, a kind of unheard resonance, all the way down the Old North Trail to the tip of South America.  It is a mystical idea that some claim to feel physically.

My understanding is not of the Christian petulant insistence on their individual survival in Heaven, but rather a kind of Taoist acceptance of my participation in these interacting forces.  I have no idea which action or thought or insight on my part will affect the future, but it is inescapable that my small actions, even washing the dishes, have impact.  (I may be creating a new life form in my neglected dishpan.)  Or maybe a word-scrap of my old-fashioned lyric realism will trigger something transformative in someone not born yet, just as reading has done for me.

INSTITUTIONS: BOXES

An institution is an organization of people for management purposes and there are many patterns.  Some develop spontaneously and others are derived from pre-existing organizations or invented to meet some need.  We are currently struggling with the consequences of defining an organization as a person, particularly when it comes to rights.  It has nothing to do with reality, everything to do with advantages.

But many other problems come from the boundary of the institution: who is in and who is out.  The model for that is the wall, esp. the defensive wall around a town or a fort.  Consider the problem of the Pope, or at least the Catholic church.  There are two kinds of congregations:  those that include everyone in a given area or those who are gathered from among the people in an area because they have affinities or beliefs in common.  At one time all Catholic parishes were the first kind because everyone was Catholic -- that’s the only church there was.  

If someone was not Catholic, it was because they were foreign and therefore semi-enemies or because they were heretics who challenged the church from inside.  They were killed.  This worked until a LOT of people became “protestant” because the church was too corrupt for the people to bear.  Then they became "gathered" from several places.  

Because the church was defined in the same way as a “nation”, the two were politically conflated, so a king could choose the nation’s church and two kings could be at war because they were of opposite religious positions -- or were they of two religious positions because they were at war?  Nations are more recent than religions, so the Pope could claim higher authority granted from God.  Sometimes this was a good thing since he could sometimes broker peace.  When Henry VIII snubbed the Pope, he stepped out of the loop.  Elizabeth I was smart: she made the loop much looser.  People could stay in the country without conforming to a religion.

Today it is not kings but technology that challenges the Catholic church.  In the emphasis on keeping order, the church insisted that anyone who was a member could not have premarital sex, could not use contraception, could not abort, could not marry outside the church, could not divorce, could not commit suicide.  The invention of birth control pills, economic pressure to limit the size of families, knowledge of problems in gestation that might require termination and a host of fiddling stuff like sperm sorting, in vitro fertilization,  surrogate mothers, mitochondrial transplants, etc. etc. and molecular knowledge of the actual process has made it impossible to use the old common sense understanding of when a baby is “ensouled,” just as technology makes it very hard to make decisions about exactly when death has happened if machines are making the body breathe and the heart beat.  

The only instrument the Catholic church had for enforcing its boundary was access to Communion.  But the people were stubborn.  They just left.  Priests were merciful and slipped them communion anyway.   Confession was supposed to keep them under surveillance but they left that, too.  Enough stayed in the pews in some places to keep a congregation going.  But priests were supposed to obey even more strict rules than their people.  Yet they no longer felt the empowering call of faith nor did they obey even the most basic decencies of secular society but hid behind their privilege.  The church refused to cede any more power to the state and therefore gave up its soul, denying corruption, even in matters of wealth.

An institution is maintained in two ways:  the magnetic and rewarding core around which it is gathered and the protective or confining boundary created around it.  Science is blamed for discrediting the core; society is blamed for breaking down the boundary.

Now let’s look at Indian tribes.  At first they were organic, pulled together by a core of genealogy, successful survival on the vast prairie, ceremonial sharing, language, and their existence as the only real choice since an individual in such an ecology cannot endure.  There were no towns so the only walls were natural -- mountains and rivers.  When the Euros came, they were semi-religiously committed to their identity, representing nations that were still kingdoms, still struggling in competition, driven by the need to dominate and grow.  They imposed all that on the tribes.  “Tribe”, they thought, was a sort of mobile nation.  They set about inventing boundaries, which mostly separated the land they wanted from the land they didn’t want.  Then the Indians were pushed into the unwanted lands -- until there was some advantage in suddenly claiming it back.

Signatories of the Box Elder treaty.

In Europe the people were listed so taxes could be demanded from them.  In America the tribes were listed because their existence after the buffalo had collapsed was dependent on commodities and because there was a pretense that they had been “paid” for their land.  The early lists were genealogically based,  as they would have been in Europe.  This seemed sensible when the indigenous people were so very different.  

There were two points of view:  one was that the tribes were a different species and possibly could not have children with Euros, so that the boundary would always be there.  The other was that Indians would intermarry with Euros and in a few generations there would be no Indians.  (Dr. Thomas, principal in Heart Butte at the end of the Nineties, went around saying that if he could import a dozen beautiful blonde Swedish girls, there would be no "fullblood" Indians in the next generation.  Then he wondered why all the Indian women were angry at him.)  The truth is a wandering ambiguity that cannot find a definition.  At what point does a tribe stop being a tribe? 

Genetics are the least helpful markers of identity in persons.  Identity of a person is formed after birth.  Though physical heritage is the carrier of the person’s identity -- its presentation and capacity --  in fact the person develops through culture.  It is those who endow the child’s culture who are the true parents.  Some institutions also shape the child -- church, state, business.  Many institutions are simply economic.  But we are discovering how corruptible and violent economics can be.  Economics can be based on conditions and resources that disappear, leaving shells that can do damage.

Jesuits in Argentina.  Pope Francis at lower left.

The institutions of church and tribe would like their members to be clearly and totally committed, to be at the nucleus of the organization out of attraction and dedication.  They may ask for oaths of allegiance, ceremonies of joining, and the wearing of marking clothing, tattoos, badges, hats.  But there will always be concentric circles, so that the outermost circles wander off, and there will always be breakaway circles, either that stay within the larger institution (like Jesuits or Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s allegiance to conservative sub-groups of both Americans and Catholics) or that separate entirely.

St. Anne's Catholic Church in Heart Butte, MT.

Among the Blackfeet an economic subgroup was defined by the tribal council as Siyeh, a subsidiary with a separate board that is shielded from intervention by those whose allegiance to their own subgroup (family, we hope) is greater than it is to the tribe.  An educational subgroup was defined by the tribal council as Blackfeet Community College, which responds to the standards and guidance of national educational organizations.  A voluntary and entirely independent subgroup, Piegan Institute, was formed by Darrell Kipp, Dorothy Still Smoking, and Ed Little Plume for the purpose of preserving the Blackfeet language and scholarship about Blackfeet people.  All of these subgroups still exist and operate.  The Catholic parishes also thrive.

New resources found on Blackfeet lands (oil) mean that the half of the legal tribe that lives elsewhere has suddenly taken an interest in the land.  The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was supposed to have recused itself as soon as the tribes were able to manage themselves, are now forced to umpire factional war within the tribes.  No one knows what to do next.

The present Pope knows what to do.  He is gradually eliminating corruption along with secret wealth, and setting up a glowing heart of attraction while he and others try to understand how to integrate modern technologies with millennia-old cultural rules about families and reproduction, health and morality.  

The Blackfeet wait for someone to do that for them.  What is the glowing heart of being Blackfeet?  Or is it time to go back to the land as the definition, saying those who love this place are of this tribe?  Maybe like subscriptions, three levels of membership:  those who live on the rez, those who live within a hundred miles of the rez, those who are far away.  Should there be an automatic full-membership for those who are certified Blackfeet speakers regardless of genetics or location?  That was the oldest way, before first contact.

YOU'RE NEXT. (Fiction)

It was an ordinary mid-morning, beginning to chill down into winter but no snow sticking yet.  X sat in her office squinting at the spreadsheet on her computer screen, wondering whether it was time to get her eyes checked again.  But she liked her familiar frames and Indian Health Service was always a hassle.  Maybe she was looking at too much data at one time, so she should simply enlarge the font, but she liked to see a lot of data at once because of the complexity of interacting forces.  They were always like that when you were dealing with government money.  Someone somewhere had built in stipulations, exceptions, thresholds, and a million other threads that held down innovation.  The people in her office just did their best and usually it was okay.  No one wanted to come this far north this time of year to check facts and figures.

Someone knocked on the door though it was standing wide open.  She left it that way even when she was gone in case someone needed to borrow her stapler or something.  Three people were standing there, two men and a woman so they probably were neither FBI nor Mormons, but they had that strange formal tense look of people on a reservation who weren’t used to Indians.  

“We’d like to have a little talk,” one of them said, and the woman closed the door.  

The other man said, “Maybe you’d like to close out your computer so you can give us your full attention.”

“What is all this?” she asked, thinking, “Wow, maybe this is a Hollywood scouting team planning a movie!”

“We are investigating fraud and corruption,” said the older man, and all three produced credentials, none of which she recognized or understood except that these were clearly not movie scouts.  “The Designated Division for the Closing Down of Crime and Corruption in Outlying Regional Territories.”   DDCDCCORT.  Garble.

Her first thought was not for herself but for her program.  It served kids and they would suffer without it.  Who was cheesing in on their money and what was their angle?  But they were grilling HER, about her personal life which they evidently found shocking. Obviously they were from a superior class that -- like I said -- knew nothing about life on a reservation: the poverty, the incarcerations, the families jammed together without even really being genetically related, the frayed relationships, the unappeased hunger for some kind of control or stability that often gave way to substance and behavior abuse. These people appeared to be modern versions of Procrustes who wished to force conformity to their standards, no matter the collateral damage.

Why had she dropped out of college in 1988?  Why did her grades suddenly improve at a certain point -- was she getting help of some kind?  How much money did she make in 1995 and how was she able at that income level to buy a new pickup?  What relation was she to Y and did she know what prison he was in right now?  Who gave her the job she was in right now?   

The rest of the building was strangely quiet.  No one rattled the doorknob, meaning to enter, nor did anyone seem to be passing in the hall.  The entire staff had put themselves in lock-down as though a shooter were in the building and in a way, there was.

Her mind was fogged with guilt and shame, always her default emotion.  She couldn’t think properly.  But after a few hours of repetitious and intrusive grillings about things she had thought of as innocent until then, and flashes of scenes from old television shows, she began to remember a conversation she had overheard on a seminar in Denver, not part of the official program but talk between men in a booth behind hers. 

“This is the long-game of taking down the reservations,” said one.  “We’ve learned it from the sociology of war in the Middle East but it works very well here, especially in a place with Third World conditions.  First we begin to raise “concerns” about something everyone can agree is bad, for instance a health threat or an environmental problem or maybe something that deprives kids.  When the media has begun to get interested and is actually finding documentation that supports this 'issue', we can move.”

“Always make the other guy do the leg work,” remarked the second man, his mouth muffled by his hamburger.  She heard his beer mug go back down on the table.

“Right.  Then we go into the situation, target someone at the center of the ‘problem’ . . .”

“Manager.  Tribal councilman.  Someone with a few enemies.  Anyone effective will have enemies.”

“Right.  Someone is always waiting to capture control of assets.  Then we surprise that person on their own territory.  Rock them back on their heels.  Convince them that they are in grave danger, facing years of incarceration.   That’s the way we get them to give us names.”

“Get them to squeal, rat out their co-workers!  Brilliant!”

“It gets better.  We withdraw, write a lot of paper indictments, and then wait.  Schedule trials.  Suggest we might make deals.  Revisit the situation to keep it alive.  Wait for them to react.”

“And the info comes in, stuff you never even suspected.”

“Yeah, the pockets get turned out.  Eventually, we have enough to drop the small fry and take down our real targets, the ones who constantly oppose what we’re trying to do.”

“How long do you figure it will take?”

“Oh, we can wait years.  We’re patient.  The final rewards justify it.  Anyway, politically, a quick jerk to our dragnet can often bring people into line with our goals.”

She never found out who these guys were, never dreamed that they’d be interested in her little pocket of the world.  But she should have thought about the big picture -- not just regional or national, but about planetary forces like resource development.  Who had time to reflect about it when it took so much energy just to drive the ten miles to the office through a blizzard, or figure out what to do when all the toner in the whole town had been used up and it could only be gotten by driving to the county seat which would take hours, but an application to a trust fund that would only accept paper (fossils!) had to be put in the mail today?  

“Why is it you don’t always answer your cell phone?”  (Someone didn’t pay the bill.)  “Why are you paying your relative to assist you?  (She was the only qualified person available.)  “Do you call personal friends from work?”  (My co-workers ARE my personal friends!)  “Do you rob Peter to pay Paul?”  (Who doesn’t?)

It was like the movies, which was not reassuring.  She did not have the superpowers of the heroines in movies.  For a rez person she had a lot of experience, but she was essentially a country person who operated by reputations and families.  

Back in the office, there were more questions:  “What about Z?  Do you think he’s really qualified?  Does he come to work on time?  Does he drink?  Does he party when he’s out of town?”

When the little trio left, they had a page of names with notes attached.  They took X’s computer, cell phone, pager, tape recorder and spread sheets along with them in storage boxes.  The team woman would be assigned to sift through them, boring work the men didn’t want to do.  “It’s like netting fish,” said one man to the other, as they drove off, both in the front seat.  “You never know what will come up from the bottom.”

The team woman slumped in the back along with the boxes.  She was cold and wondered whose phone X would borrow to call people this very minute.  Of course she was.   Would she warn the people she had named?  What would happen if she knew a reporter well enough to be honest and the reporter was clued in enough to get the big picture?  A movie plot.  But an old one.  Probably only a TV show.

BLACKFEET IN THE LARGER WORLD

The blue sphere that is our planet is like a balloon in that if you press on it in one place, that force will affect all the other parts.  Not many studies that I’m aware of have considered the native inhabitants of the North American continent in terms of the other continents and what was happening there at the same time.  Yet, the butterfly-wing theory reasoning that the tiny insect flurry of air in Australia can combine with many others to create hurricanes in Florida, or that one malfunctioning combustion engine or cow with indigestion can add up to a change in the atmospheric temperature, would suggest more global interaction than we might guess.  Not so separate.

What got me thinking about indigenous people specifically was reading about the plague of locusts that hit the US mid-west in the 19th century. Materials promised to and meant for the reservations of the prairie were diverted to the Euro people newly homesteading in the states from which most tribes had been displaced.  “After all,” said government officials who endorsed the repurposing, “These white people are citizens, but Indians are only dependents.”  Something similar happened when the Irish potato famine or the Scots enclosure movement shoved out many many emigrants to America where they soon overcrowded the east and invaded the west.   Starvation is more powerful than any other human force.  Whose starvation wins makes history. 

The point is that not all of that manifest destiny stuff was simply greed for land with no other motive.  In fact, many people had no other place to live but a miserable ghetto.   in Scotland the Highland Clearances caused families to be thrown off the estates and wastelands where they had lived for centuries in order to make way for sheep,  Newly homeless people were living in graveyards for the sake of the shelter behind the tall headstones.  They emigrated for survival.  If they had filtered west one-by-one, or a family at a time instead of in a huge onslaught justified by blindness and corporate/government greed for the profits of railroads, commodities and taxes, maybe the US would be a blended population.  (Well, at least sooner.  It’s blended now and getting more so.)

The Blackfeet -- in the US the Amskapi Pikuni division -- had the great good fortune of staying in place, though their rez kept shrinking.  (It also turned out to be an advantage to have the main body of the People remain in Canada where the indigenous population was treated differently, but we can come back to that another time.)  In my thinking for “The Bone Chalice,” about the experience of Holiness, which is essentially deep human meaning, I asked the question, “What is the one crucial element that cannot be removed without making a people into something different?"  For the Blackfeet it has to be their relationship to the high prairie along the east side of the Rockies.  It was adapting to this place -- it’s resources and pressures -- that made them who they were at first contact.  No matter what ceremonies are observed, it is more deeply crucial to keep the underlying relationship to the land that the Sacredness came from.  Otherwise rituals are hollow.

The Blackfeet land was unique because of the Mississippi/Missouri drainage which made it possible for Euros to navigate right into the heart of the country.  The earliest Euros probably worked their way West a few at a time as French voyageurs and Spaniards may have marched to a place close by.  French explorers (Verendrye) and then the Hudson’s Bay Company came in from the north.  But the wealthy, the titled, and the artistic came up the big rivers from the very beginning.   This has informed the unfolding of life on the rez.  The original Cobell was an Italian sailor.  The crucial interlocutors of the two Blackfeet speaking communities were two mostly Mexican brothers properly called “Sandoval” but also “Sanderville.” 

Everyone is very conscious now of the pressure of an oil boom returning, activating memories of the last boom in the Fifties and the long fall-out from it.  Not so many are aware of the long-time split between the people who took their Dawes allotments out on the flats where grain could be grown, mostly people with a white patriarch who understood credit and machinery, versus the people who settled in Heart Butte and Starr School, old-timers good at hunting and, later, livestock.  Not everyone has thought about the implications of the three “resort” communities: East Glacier, St. Mary and Babb, which bring in great numbers of international outsiders over the summer.  And I myself still don’t understand why there is some kind of onus on being from the South Rez, except that there is always a split between those who want to be as modern and self-managed as possible versus those who think the government still has an obligation to fulfill treaty obligations even if they are paternalistic.

What no one saw coming was the emergence of pan-Indians, people who are full-blood or nearly so, but from a number of tribes.  There were several strong forces working against the localisms of the tribes:  regional government boarding schools (gathering young people at just the right age), political alliances, relocation, and AIM (which is as much an emotional as a political force).  To some degree I expect that military service both took people off the rez and drew other people, attached to veterans, back onto the reservation.  The pow-wow network across the continent also stirred people together.  Since federal crimes mean criminal incarceration and quite a few crimes (if prosecuted) on a reservation are technically federal, then the federal penitentiaries play a part in “relocation.”

I’m always sympathetic to those tribes who want their definition of a tribal member to derive from residence on the reservation, esp. if that land was not a banishment to unwanted swampland or desert.  But the formal governmental fashion at the time of the present laws was to make a tribe into a corporation.  Clearly the federal aim was to evade the treaties that give tribes sovereignty, the right to set the terms of their own reservations.  So then the membership in the corporation -- how many “shares” a person had -- was based on provenance -- that is, family descent instead of place.  If the families could see their land as merely an asset, they would lose their deeper connection to it.  

Of course, I’m sympathetic because the idea is self-serving to an extent.  White as I am, I have a fifty-year relationship with this place and the people here.  I can at least be an observer, but genetically I’ll always be a rainbird with Scots tendencies.  Because what happens here affects the rest of the world, even the Highlands where people know what it is to be displaced.

ALL THE NEWS THAT'S CAREFULLY FILTERED

When I blogged about violence on reservations, it attracted a New York Times reporter. “I am working on an article about the prevalence of violence against women in Native American communities and the various efforts by Native American law enforcement and the federal government to address the problem.” I sent him my long article about this subject, which I hope to publish someplace and did post on this blog and on iNewp.com. We spent a good part of the morning talking. He had not googled to find out about me, but I had googled him.

It soon became clear that he was looking for a sensational story. He had no idea about the cat’s cradle of jurisdictions on a reservation nor what distinguishes Blackfeet as a tribe -- like their form of government or the Baker Massacre or what buffalo meant to them. He thought the photo of Heart Butte I sent (the one at the top of the page) was “beautiful” but had no sense that this reservation once included the part of the Rocky Mountains that became Glacier National Park. He grew up in Fresno.

Same old, same old. Plenty of Hollywood images, grade school level assumptions, and just plain blanks. Too much please-the-informant (me) with a quick readjusting of assumptions. Too much put-down-the-reporter impatience on my part. I feel a little guilty now. Not much.

Among the things I knew that he didn’t was that reporters come through here all the time, along with academics, bureaucrats, photographers, and so on. They are more numerous in summer. We’re not much impressed. A thing I know that he didn’t know I knew is that reporters only do the dirty work of asking questions. The power is in the editors, who will assign a point of view and outcome before the reporter ever starts and completely rewrite the story once it is brought home. This reporter seemed to think that the New York Times could go up against the FBI and make them toe the mark. I read the NYTimes online -- used to subscribe to the book review when there was one. I have watched the Times shudder, stumble and shrink, just like all the other newspapers and publishers. What they need is something to increase circulation -- NOT a confrontation with the FBI.

Another thing reporters don’t think of is that reservations are not “print cultures.” The NYTimes does not register. Few people sit down to go over every page in the GF Tribune, which is the biggest regional paper. (They might hit the sports section.) They are very aware that the local newspaper is controlled by a white family in Cut Bank, not notably Indian friendly but slowly beginning to be Indian aware since so many enrolled people have been elected to the county commission and so on. The radios, including the local tribal station which is run by the Browning mayor, are always on and so are the television sets, but the real news comes by word-of-mouth.

The reporter was after a perfect case that would reveal that the FBI does not investigate murders on reservations. He didn’t want Marie Heavyrunner’s case after all because arrests have been made. (He doesn’t know that an arrest is only the beginning of a new phase.) “Perfect” meant that I would be able to produce documents and witnesses who could show that evidence existed for a murder that the FBI had failed to pursue. The reporter, of course, would then muster the power of the press. Did I know of any such cases? Off the top of my head?

That’s when I decided I’d get into my two-box card file of obits and pull all the ones that were murder or suicide or simply undetermined, though most of those last will turn out to be tragic but not criminal. This is rough country with dangerous jobs and a lot of alcoholism and diabetes. But also it is a place where people still have nomadism in their blood and no particular reason to stay home. Marie evidently died in the summer, but no one missed her until late October. I blogged the list and will try to keep it current. Three new cards yesterday, only one undetermined. The obits are published early for the sake of those wanting to attend the funeral and console the family.

I have no desire to draw the interest of “gangs.” 2,700,000 hits on Google. One in 2009 at the NY Times. A good YouTube story at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd8m0Z2Sdww Not by the NY Times -- by Al Jazeera. (Not about Blackfeet, but Sioux, not so different.) So I thought I would try using “The Wire,” the much-praised series about Baltimore, as a way of talking about realities. But the reporter thought “The Wire” was not real. “Journalism is about facts that can be proven with print evidence,” he said. Video narrative is too easy to falsify. Right. Unlike print. Sure. Where are my card files? But even the clips are GF Tribune obits, not the “real story.” The old-fashioned idea is that if it’s in print, it’s true. Aren’t we over that yet?

The fifth year of "The Wire" is about the media. ALL the episodes are about the shortage of money; the ubiquity of bribes; and how that shapes institutions and politics. I tried to talk to this reporter about how when money is short, there are parallel economies of secrets and sex, but he couldn’t get the concept, even though he was wanting me to tell him “secret” things and promising not to let anyone know he had talked to me. He doesn’t understand that in small towns and on reservations there is no such thing as keeping thing secret. The struggle is to keep them accurate. He said he would "protect me," but he's the biggest danger.

“The Wire” was mostly written by people who have been “in the trenches” as teachers and street cops, BUT it was some years ago and it was in Baltimore which is different from here, different from itself over time -- one of the points of the story. I’m sure most people who watch are not aware of any of this. I’m also confident that the ONLY way to get people to understand a world they would never enter and don’t want to is by telling them stories. They don’t react to statistics and, anyway, one of the problems of all this is “juking the stats,” meaning redefining categories, “losing” records, or even simply failing to record them in the first place.

After a while I had exhausted the supply of rez stories I wanted to tell and anyway, he didn’t much want to hear the long explanations, so I reached for the most shocking story I know. It’s not about the rez, but about Great Falls where a guy named Bar Jonah showed up, a squat little madman who had served time in Massachusetts for capturing and tormenting boys and then had been told to get out of town. So he came here, because here no one knew him and it was the "wild west." By the time people figured it out, he had hung boys from a ceiling hook in his kitchen (one boy escaped and told), tortured them, butchered them, cooked them, and served them to the neighbors. He never was convicted, because the mother of the alleged victim refused to admit her son was dead. Police found plenty of reasons to keep him in custody until he died of a heart attack. The reporter didn’t want to hear about it. I admit it was totally irrelevant. I never did tell him how a damaged young Blackfeet woman kept her dead autistic child in the trunk of her car for months and months. I’m sure she didn’t mean to kill him.

Bob Scriver used to say a person was much more likely to get away with a totally outrageous crime than an ordinary crime, because people wouldn’t be able to get their heads around it. The reporter and his editor already knew what sort of article they wanted and reality could only get through that filter if something changed their filters.

When I googled this reporter, I discovered an amazing website called “Dowser” after those water-finding sticks that point to underground aquifers. www.dowser.org

They say: We’re living through a global social change renaissance. Millions of people are building organizations and social enterprises, attacking problems with new ideas and models.

But most of this activity is hidden. The news is better at telling us what went wrong yesterday than what’s being done to make tomorrow better.

At Dowser, we present the world through a ‘solution frame,’ rather than a ‘problem frame.’ We’re interested in the practical and human elements of social innovation: Who’s solving what and how. We want to know how people come up with ideas, how they put them into practice, how they pay the bills, and what fuels their fire.

Hey, NOW we’re cookin’ with gas! I had ended my article about violence against women on the rez with a few sentences of suggestions. I should expand that.

CLERGY ON THE REZ

Violence, in particular violence against women, is a topic often visited by journalists.  The February Harper’s includes an article called “Tiny Little Laws: A Plague of Sexual Violence in Indian Country” by Kathy Dobie.  (Thanks to Dave Lull for tipping me to the article.)  It’s about Sioux in Dakota, a tougher rez than the Blackfeet in Montana where I am, but to some degree reservations are alike.  Canadian indigenous women have fought and fought to get official attention for the problem of disappearance of their sisters.  I wish I could remember the title of a knockout Canadian movie about it filmed in Vancouver, B.C. with Tantoo Cardinal.  Was it "Tales of an Urban Indian?"

The whole time I was reading this article by Dobie I kept thinking something was missing.  Clergy.

If it weren’t still winter here, remnants of official snow emergency still hanging on, I’d drive around a little bit and interview some present reservation clergy but it will be an excuse to return to the subject later.  I should say up front that when I came in 1961, I attended the Browning Methodist Church and in 1988-89, the year after I withdrew (with honor -- I have a letter) from the Unitarian Universalist ministry, I served as the unofficial interim for the Methodists.  Their “called”  minister unexpectedly couldn’t come for a year.  The Bishop, whose task it is to assign ministers to churches, always struggled to figure out what to do about the rez parish, which includes Browning, Babb and Heart Butte.  Lots of stories to tell, but that’s not what I’m after this time.  Anyway, he settled on me.  I spent the year very happily preaching creation instead of creator.

I need to provide background since there are Europeans and Asians reading this blog.  A reservation, from the beginning, was an ambiguous enterprise and they were set up differently from each other as they were invented from the first efforts to push all the Indians to the West and let them have Oklahoma and the prairies (“Indian country”) to the late “rancherias” in California.  

The US and Canada had contrasting approaches even on the prairie.  On the Canadian side, a reserve was meant to be like a wildlife reserve with white people excluded to protect the indigenous, who were totally different from the immigrants.  On the US side a reservation tended to be “wasteland” provided to stop war.  When the lands turned out to be valuable, like Black Hills gold, the war immediately proceeded.  Blackfeet were lucky to have their backs up against the Rockies and to have delayed long enough for the War Between the States to have slaked some of the appetite for war.

In the beginning the Euro-based  US government was white (with black slaves), though it was a mix of countries, and it was Christian in the broad sense.  (One of the three Abramic religions, the one filtered through the Roman Empire and split by the Protestant reformation.)  The assumptions were that religion was a matter of dogma, big buildings for worship, bureaucracy with all the trappings of grandiose authority, threatened but impalpable rewards and punishments in an afterlife, and documents, especially very old ones like the sources of the Bible.   Some of this might have been more familiar to the south in the mighty empires of the Mayans and Incans, but not on the northern prairie.

For the northern plains tribes, religion was simply an aspect of everything.  The emphasis was on propriety, right behavior, with two major sources of discipline:  good fortune in war and hunting or vengeance through family and clan affiliations.  Their culture was seamless, immediate, and deeply derived from their relationship to the land.

To Christians the Indian religion simply did not compute as religion.  Therefore, the people were pagans, barely removed from being animals and therefore, in Catholic terms, souls for the harvest but in Protestant terms, savages to eliminate.  Of course, as always, when individuals became familiar with the indigenous people, many of them realized their personhood.  As always, some of the people back East romanticized them to the point of near-sainthood.  

You know all this stuff.  

The first missionaries were mostly Jesuits who used schools and gardens to soften their determination to convert.  Today there are long-time parishes  in Browning, Heart Butte, Babb, East Glacier, and Holy Family which is the remnant of a mission residential school.  As everywhere, there is a shortage of priests but the churches are packed.  

At some point the reservations -- they were corrupt from the onset -- were assigned to various denominations which were supposed to reform but who were immediately drawn into war with the Jesuits.  The Methodists have tended to be a church for what was a sort of colonial enclave of white shopkeepers and administrators but now is more mixed-blood nurses, teachers, ranchers.  The Baptists and Pentecostals are truly grassroots, self-governed and led by inspired but Bible-based clergy.  They are highly emotional, often very conservative, and definitely indigenous.   The original Blackfeet and Cree ceremonies persist and are sometimes friendly to whites -- for a price.  No one persecutes them and bits of their ceremony slip into Christian worship.

Putting aside these issues of history, style and sociology, what would I like to see these clergypeople address when they mount into the pulpit?  Here’s my list:

The nature of justice:  the importance of principles even if there are many “rules” in terms of law and in conventional behavior.  Some might call this prophesy or even witness.  

The removal of stigma: discouraging the blaming of victims (not labeling anyone as deserving of abuse), encouraging repentance and reform.  This is the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament and ought to be the defining characteristic of a Christian.

Finding courage and faith to persist over years, decades, centuries and millenia in what many call “the Good Fight,” the struggle everywhere for good people to find better ways and to insist on them.

Practical strategy for dealing with bureaucracies.  Church people KNOW about this stuff.  Don’t tell me any clergypersons are innocent about it.  

Personal salvation, of course, however you define it.  There’s a lot of variation here, but private piety should not justify evasion.

The most important one is forming the community, constantly reminding them of the good of the whole, the power of the saving remnant, the need to protect the least of these, and all the other human ways of setting the norm for what the people can be.  We’ve got to move from “winner take all” to “protection of the minority.”  The most erosive force on a reservation is the idea that Indians are “like that,” that bad behavior is to be expected on a reservation, that there is some kind of curse that hangs over the whole population, that forces from other places have done this to a captive people and therefore all change has to come from the outside.

I will be returning to something like this subject for months.  Clergy or not, female or not, Indian or not, it is our lifework.