"THE OLD BULLS SOCIETY:" American Indian lit crit

The Old Bulls' Society was the Plains Indian men that were seasoned, wise, and admired.  They didn't have to prove anything -- they just WERE powerful.  They had earned it.

In terms of today's Native Literature scholars, there probably ought to be three if I include Vine Deloria, Jr.  I'll come back to him.  

Gerald Vizenor

The two old bulls I’m thinking of are Gerald Vizenor, who is a member of the White Earth Chippewa tribe, which was once part of that troublesome diaspora of sort-of Indians who had no land, no reservation, and therefore in the Euro-way no national identity.  Now it is government-recognized but I don’t know the rules of membership for that tribe.  Vizenor is, from one point of view, Metis, which is included in the term “aboriginal” by Canadians.  Everyone sets up their own boxes.

Carter Revard

The other person I’m thinking of is Carter Revard, who was seen as a white raised by Indians until recently when he discovered Indian “blood.”  He is one of the most brilliant and generous of all those in the broad category of NA writers.  Both Vizenor and Revard are very much respected in Europe.  Revard and his wife spend a lot of time there because of his wife’s scholarly work.

In addition to “Indian” stuff, Vizenor uses a lot of post-modern philosophy and Revard is an expert on early English.  He can make delightfully raunchy explications of Chaucer and word play comes as easily to him as Gourd Dancing, the specialty of his tribal family.  In the late Nineties I was on Rez Net, a bulletin board for Indians only.  (I confess that I was there under false pretenses but some people recognized me at once, laughed, and didn’t rat me out.)  That was the time of the Flame Wars, which got a little bit mixed up with “snagging” and commodity cheese jokes.

Carter Revard kept us rounded up -- at least a little bit -- but not enough to suit Sherman Alexie, an “apple” always on the defensive so he was on Rez Net only weeks.   I don’t really know much about Vizenor’s work.  I haven’t thought much about Cree Chippewa until lately.  My focus rule now is Blackfeet or rez resident on the Blackfeet rez only.  (I left RezNet before I was thrown out.  I asked about going back now and they laughed like Napi and said, “Hell, no!”  No matter.  I’m too old for snagging.)

When it came to AIM, Vizenor was a dissenter, maybe because his Swedish mother was peaceful and maybe because his Anishanabe father was murdered when he was two years old, so that he has a high aversion to violence.  But his attempts to criticize them led to death threats.  He has been a bureaucrat, a reporter, and an international educator posted to China for a year.  Thirty books to his credit.  Be aware that VizJim (Mackay) of Wikipedia has pinned his credentials on Vizenor and dominates the man’s Wikipedia entry.  Vizenor has a lot to say about mixed blood people.  I do not know what he thinks of European citizens of Cyprus who have never been to the USA.

by Arnold Krupat

I would put Arnold Krupat in the company of these other two distinguished scholars, except that Krupat is white.  He attended Yale and teaches at Sarah Lawrence.  I don’t see any fiction or autobiography on his list of books.  I haven’t read them, so I don’t know how much of himself he slipped into his scholarly lit crit, but his emphasis IS on lit crit and not on his experience as an Indian.

Vizenor, of course, would challenge the very word “Indian.”  His contribution has been to question the assumed, much as Vine Deloria, Jr. and Ward Churchill have done -- the former of them genetically tribal and the latter attached to a tribe but without genetics.  These academically defined men, all of whom have been professors in major white universities, are not in the least what the tribal people on a reservation “look like.” In fact, I know very few who even read such rarified books or even Vizenor’s Napi-type stories.

But things like existentialism and post-modern theory have been -- well, I could say either “mined” or “cherry-picked” -- by politically active genomically entitled tribal people to embolden them to demand justice.  A reservation in the WWII years and immediately afterwards was a culture of compliance, still nearly colonial.  Those who could not be obedient, self-medicated with alcohol.  At least that’s one way of looking at it.  Vietnam set them free but taught them to use pot.  Or heroin.  These sorts of iconoclastic ideas have not created any new heroes in the larger culture other than AIM, which began as a city movement.  Nor do they really appeal to those who are now beginning to succeed as ranchers and small-town entrepreneurs, nor to the comfortable academic culture-definers.

Vizenor, Revard and Krupat are retirement age and soon will slip over the time horizon.  Their “type” is subtly related to a parallel generation of anthropologists who investigated the range of tribal indigenous people tribe-by-tribe without pressing them into the pan-Indian mold. Those who define “Indians” as “vanishing” are themselves vanishing, just as publishing has done and the academic world shows signs of doing.

http://www.offthepasspressllc.com/#!Adrian-Jawort-Sterling-Holy-White-Mountain-Igniting-The-Fire-via-MT-Public-Radio/c14qc/32ED8FF4-23EB-4A53-B9A9-7DBCAB87F51B

The likes of Adrian Jawort and Sterling Holy White Mountain are stepping up now.  They are Millennial, MFA,  “Indian Country Today,” YouTube.  They publish their own anthologies.  Only the alert and initiated know they’re what's happening.  I expect Revard knows about all this, partly because his descendent, Robert Warrior, is continuing NA scholarship in a hip and participatory way at the University of Illinois.  Sterling is one of Warrior’s Tweet followers.  Both stand in the hybrid-category “American Indian Literary Nationalism,” which is the title of an award-winning book.  I think they mean tribal sovereignty.

Prof. Robert Warrior

Recently the fiction dimension of NA experience has migrated to the movies like “Winter in the Blood,” and “Jimmy P.  “ which are produced by white people.  The latter film, produced and directed by a Frenchman, does not depend upon post-colonial political theory, but on psychoanalysis.  One could argue that “Winter in the Blood” is simply an indigenous Western.  At least it’s closer to contemporary experience.

“Contemporary experience” is always receding towards that time horizon that paradoxically erases old conflicts at the same time that it reveals new ways of thinking.  But not everyone has the awareness to keep track.  The academic experts are better at the past than the future.

GENES AND MEMES

Muhammadu Buhari won election over President Goodluck Jonathan

It appears to be a good time to think about the Yoruba of Nigeria since the long -time leader of this democracy has NOT been re-elected and has stepped down gracefully.   It's a little worrisome that Buhari is a former general and considered strict.  But now we have to think of everything in global terms, so I’ll give it a try.

The Yoruba were an oral culture that didn’t really cohere as a group except with their language until they developed in place “out of earlier Mesolithic Volta-Niger populations by the 1^st millennium BCE.  Oral history recorded under the Oyo Empire derives the Yoruba as an ethnic group to the 4^th century BCE with urban structures appearing in the 12^th century.  The urban phase of Ife before the rise of Oyo, c. 1100-1600 was a significant peak of political centralization in the 12^th described as a “golden age” of life.”

The Yoruba had a council of elders meant to prevent dictatorships.  Their own version of Robin Hood developed from farmer’s union network that went underground and opposed any domination by other groups.  Because one of their basic foods is yams, which contain a plant version of estrogen, there are many twins.  This wasn’t developed by the mysterious writer or writers of the Wikipedia entry.  But there is an echo in Navajo mythology.  Some cultures welcome the unusual and others try to destroy any variation.  The practice of the time was to pay off conquerers in war by handing over people to be slaves, but the Yoruba often just conquered some other weaker group and handed THEM over.  Still, some involuntarily contributed to the human Gumbo of the New World.

Igbo and Ora

This time period caught my eye.  In Europe this was the insanely chaotic and power-mad time that drives the plots and theories of “Game of Thrones.”  In a little essay derived from E.R. Truitt’s book, “Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art” Truitt says, “Certain technologies are so characteristic of their historical milieux that they serve as a kind of shorthand. The arresting title credit sequence to the TV series "Game of Thrones" proclaims the show’s medieval setting with an assortment of clockpunk gears, waterwheels, winches and pulleys.” It appears that Rube Goldberg was a throwback to medieval times.  It was the age when every town had erected a clock tower (cock power).  The Valier Baptist church finally turned off their electronic version, but the Main Street crossroads put up a small version on a pillar in the corner park.  

The emperor's new nightingale

“Most [mechanisms] were designed and built beyond the boundaries of Latin Christendom, in the cosmopolitan courts of Baghdad, Damascus, Constantinople and Karakorum. Such automata came to medieval Europe as gifts from foreign rulers, or were reported in texts by travellers to these faraway places.”  This is no doubt the origin of the idea of the clockwork God, who sets the world to ticking.  More to say about that paradigm in a later post.

Truitt emphasizes the idea that mechanical wonders imported to Europe impressed the people as magic, at root demonic.  Eventually that led to our idea of the contrasting sanctity of the wilderness and nature.

Mechanisms of pain and death.

Meanwhile in Medieval Europe there began a practice of horrific torture to enforce domination and a kind of fatalism about literally crushing individuals for the sake of the whole, which they claimed would continue after death.  Followers of the “Game of Thrones” story recoil at the episodes of torture, but the practices of Medieval Europe rival any examples elsewhere.  I once heard Vine Deloria, Jr. speak to the Portland, OR, City Group, elegant local elites who met for lunch.  He had just visited Powell’s and carried with him a book on Medieval torture which he described to us to make the point that the demonization of North American tribes by whites were quite equal to the white past.  So this suggests another line of inquiry:  why do people torture?  It seems we are now embarked on another Era of Torture, linked to prisons.

Having named an African 12^th century Yoruba culture and the parallel-in-time Medieval period in Europe which started out well but ended with the “Little Ice Age” that seriously damaged agriculture.   That sent adventurers searching for warmer climes.  This period include the years of plague:  “The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people and peaking in Europe in the years 1346–53.”  

But the wave of disease that followed the arrival of Columbus in North America killed so many people that the drastic depopulation of the continent actually changed the climate.  Without humans and their fires, the carbon-generated warming was removed.  This is not popular information -- another line of investigation to be pursued.  

In the meantime I found this little time-table from Wikipedia, that dubious source, which seems at least a place to start thinking about pre-Columbian oral cultures, which turn out to have some written codes after all. I left in the links because most people know little about these groups.

• 900–1150: Pueblo II Era in the American Southwest
• 1000–1200: Early Mississippian culture in the Eastern Woodland1000–1200: Dresden Codex written and illuminated. This Yucatecan Mayan codex from Chichén Itzá is the earliest known surviving book from the Americas^[1
• 1000–1200: Acoma Pueblo and Old Oraibi are established, and become the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States^[2][3][4
• 1142: League of the Iroquois is founded, and the Great Law of Peace is adopted by the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, and Oneida people.^[5] Wampum invented by Ayenwatha, which the Haudenosaunee used to record information.^[6]
• 1150–1350: Pueblo III Era in the American Southwest
• The Inuit Thule people largely displaced the old Dorset culture in Arctic Alaska.
• The most important city of the Mississippian culture of mound builders, Cahokia on the Mississippi River opposite modern Saint Louis, Missouri, reached its zenith with a population near 20,000 or perhaps 40,000. No other city in the United States would boast of such a large population until the early days of the Republic
• Natives of the American Southwest began building spectacular cliff dwellings housing hundreds of people in the later half of the century.

Again it appears that the 12^th century began with leaps forward in development and clustering of nomads, but by the 1400’s it is changing and then is ended by the shadow of plague. “ Etiology, the modern branch of science that deals with the causes of infectious disease, recognizes five major modes of disease transmission: airborne, waterborne, bloodborne, by direct contact, and through vector (insects or other creatures that carry germs from one species to another).  As humans began traveling over seas and across lands which were previously isolated, research suggests that diseases have been spread by all five transmission modes.”  Some writers will talk about diseases that result from animal domestication about ten thousand years ago (smallpox).  Both Asia and Africa have donated diseases to everyone else.  Disease is entwined with climate because it affects vectors like insects (mosquitoes are moving north now and bringing malaria with them).  But also famine or malnutrition, stigmatization that prevents access to care, and the simple deprivation and filth of poverty also encourage disease while loading people with what amounts to torture.

Erlich's crew in Greenland

At the eye doctor yesterday I was squinting my way through Gretel Erlich’s powerful and terrifying Harper’s magazine essay called “Rotten Ice,” meant to be a metaphor for the phenomenon of the melting of the ice cap of the planet.  The essay is taken from her book, "This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland."  The people in Greenland -- who exist on the narrowest of terms -- are being destroyed, one-by-one and as a culture.  

I drove to GF and back through the vast mono-crop landscape of wheat-raising on which several nations depend for their bread.  Only a few miles to the north on the higher land the growing season will sometimes be too short to ripen barley, which is tougher than wheat.  If one thinks about the ice-destruction in Greenland, the Irish potato famine, the Black Death in Europe, and the depopulation of the native peoples of North America, one can become very jumpy about the safety of these wheat crops, which are vulnerable to hail or even out-of-season snow, let alone some aberration of their genome or invading entity.

And yet “Green Land” was named that by a people who planted vineyards there in their time.  “A careful examination of the climate record reveals that Europe experienced a relative warm period known as the Medieval Warm Period (hereafter referred to as MWP) between the years 600 and 1150, cooling of the climate between the years 1150 and 1460, a brief warming between the years 1460 and 1560, followed by cooling known as the Little Ice Age (hereafter referred to as LIA) between the years 1560 and 1850.”

The point is well-made by Erlich that both the planet and people are flexible, responsive, adaptable, complex and always changing.  Whatever the cause, the glaciers are melting according to forces and currents that are complex and often unseen, like the warmer water that causes the glacier to melt from the bottom, to “rot” until one day the ice structure collapses.  What that means in terms of civilization can’t be known yet, but it will be painful, support chaos, and winnow down the human beings -- not through their genes but through their memes, their behaviors.

Yoruba trader