HALF A CENTURY IS ALL IT TOOK

The first thing I read on my computer every morning is likely to be Delaney Place (delaneyplace.com) which is timely excerpts from books, maybe historical but also sometimes literary or philosophical or some other category always intriguing.  This morning it is a few paragraphs from "A Country of Vast Designs" by Robert W. Merry.  It's about the years in the 19th century when Mexico and the US, with Britain also involved, were fighting over who would pull Texas into their nation, with Texas also fighting hard to be its own nation.  It was what Trump keeps imagining is happening now, military and deadly, settled but not quite completely.

When I came to Browning in 1961, the Cold War  (1947 to 1991) was not yet ended.  Maybe Putin doesn't think it ever did.  The first night I collapsed into my "new" bed, exhausted from the train ride, I woke up at 10PM when the curfew howled from the watertower next door, and in my confusion tried to take refuge from an impending atomic bomb attack.  The tiny building was little more than a shack resting on railroad ties, so there was no refuge.  Only gradually did I realize that I didn't need to respond as I had been taught in Portland and Chicago.

I feel a little bit like that now facing what is intense in many people's imaginations.  I worry about what I will do when the food distribution collapses, how to manage if there is a major earthquake on the Pacific coast and waves of people begin to arrive homeless, how I will live if Social Security is ended.  This morning I awoke to the shouts of men with machinery but I still don't know who they are or what they're doing.  The town is built on an aging web of water and sewer piping, so it's likely to have something to do with that.  In earlier years I would go out to investigate and have a lot of questions for the men.  Now I just want to stay in the house, writing, hoping they aren't going to shut off the water.  They used to warn us, but not anymore.

The idea I originally had was that this high prairie place, not necessarily this town, would be "safe," at least from nuclear attack.  Between leaving in 1973 and returning in 1999, I lived in Portland again, then Chicago, Hartford, Rockford, then traveling a circuit in Montana among bigger towns, then Kirkland across the lake from Seattle, and Saskatoon in Canada.  People were most scared in Saskatoon, because many were Ukrainian, meant to populate the prairies after escaping Stalin's starvation plan.  They knew that there is a kind of sub-war, what we're now calling fascism, surveillance capitalism we thought was about curbing crime.

There has always been a "gray" layer of society that is neither virtuous nor evil, but opportunistic.  In some ways its existence is necessary to address the tension between law and justice.  The law is the written and enacted rules, but when applied it sometimes ends as injustice, which is why there are so many layers to the law.  Mostly, esp. in a small town, the police respond to complaints: barking, theft, drunkenness, and the like.  They are directed by a layer of "chiefs" who are like editors for writers -- they weren't on the spot of the event, but they can encourage or restrain street officers.  Above chiefs are the political leaders and presumably, through media, those leaders control chiefs.  Most of this corruption is secret, never seen by the public unless there is a crisis.

Standing against this shifting, culturally influenced life in actuality, is the court system which is meant to invoke the rule of law, clear back to the original constitution.  In addition, organizations with the purpose of monitoring and alerting people may or may not be aware or willing to go public in some way.  When I first joined the Unitarian Universalists, they were an educated and idealistic body who often stood for justice, even against law.  The huge shift in society, undoing many restrictions imposed by families, has also affected the UUA, so that it has become concerned about socioeconomics of minorities and the necessity of reassurance.

Ultimate justice does not exist.  It may be unjust for all life to be destroyed, but only from our point of view.  Genocide is unjust -- even immoral -- from our human point of view, but the rule of law supports it, criminalizing simple existence.  Or possibly imposing reasons for war when "emergency measures" suspend both justice and law.

Underlying all of this is biology and ecology, the essential nature of human beings as we have cumulatively evolved from reptiles to mammals to primates, keeping a set of instincts and reflexes that may have kept us alive as a species (not individuals) but are deeply destructive to what we call nations, including the reservation societies that have formed because of limits imposed by the larger nation.  By now they have regained strength and insight enough to define themselves as international nations. 

In 1961 the law on this Montana rez was controlled by the US, loosely overseeing what was once simply the interaction of grouped families you could call clans.  Prevented from moving apart, influenced by their place on the ecotone (some encouraged assimilation, some protected old ways), and constantly roiled by "brilliant" political interventions like sending people off to the city to become welders or office drones, but never following through with support that would create success, the end result was always unpredicted.  Blacks taught Reds how to be political.  Government schools at high school and college level mixed the supposed "tribes" of certain blood quantums into marriages across distances and different ecologies, creating "pan-indigenous" as an entity.  The secret goal was always "make them be like us."  Except controllable.

In Browning after WWII and during Korea there was so much street level chaos that the town organized its own justice system that competed with both the tribal system (which was unitary and competed with family systems) and the FBI federal list of crimes.  Neither addressed whites except in the town.  Bob Scriver was the city magistrate and one of the two Justices of the Peace.  That made me, because of being always near him, the "bailiff."  I watched this competition between justice and law, moderated by money (fines) and confinement that was sometimes more like a shelter, a place to sleep and a minimum to eat.  

It's all very vivid to me, still.  Most remarkable and unexpected is that the grandchildren of the drunks I knew this way have turned out to be achievers.  The great-grandchildren even more.  In the newspaper, the names of the leaders are the same.  So . . .  Kenner's question: what does it mean?  SURVIVAL.  Or not.

WORLD HISTORY IS REPETITIOUS

I’m not very interested in names and dates of history, and openly suspicious of accounts of the past that congratulate the people recounting the tale.  But there are some points of history that are more than just “counts.”  The numbers actually point to forces almost geological in their size and impact.  But numbers lie, so all of this is provisional until we know more.  Still, sometimes they account for things in the present.  The task of sorting all that into meaning belongs to all of us, but esp. writers.

One set of demographics is that of the evolution, accompanied by migration, through the land masses as they shifted, erupted, sank, or dried out. The actual “demos” (the people) are by now nothing but fragments of bone which yield scrapings big enough and whole enough to create a bricolage genome.  Since genes mutate at a known rate, we can figure out (very blurry) beginnings and endings of populations.

“We”, meaning white people, have been very intrigued by the populating of Eurasia.  Those who want to have a hero military father-figure were delighted to know that Genghis Khan sowed his seed everywhere.  They were less pleased by the proof that Homo Erectus and the earlier Neandertals interbred when the “Erectus” fellows came north.  In fact, the estimates of the variations over millennia on the theme of hominin are suspected to number in the hundreds.

Europeans and their great wave of emigrants to the empires have so dominated our terms and imaginations that we see everything through their eyes.  Now they are forced to look at everything with new eyes and readjust their assumptions.  Not only are we reclassifying the former planet “Pluto” into something not quite defined yet, the idea that Europe is a continent has been challenged.  The inhabitants are also being scrutinized.  Three waves of incoming populations have been suggested.  About 45,000 years ago the African hunter-gathers moved in.  You must imagine “filtering in” rather than a great march north, and they continued to evolve as they met new conditions.

About 8,000 years ago, farmers from the Near East moved in.  Remember that new people bring in new cultural memes along with their genes.  This one has persisted for a long time, even in America.  Family-based, dependent on hoarding to survive hard times, the high values were loyalty and defence.  

4500 years ago, the pastoral people who included Genghis Kahn, swooped in on horseback. They were nomadic sheepherders from Western Russia and their type also persists.  Consult “Game of Thrones.”

Compare this to the proposed pattern of people in the Americas.  People with Siberian genes “paused” in Beringia from 21,000 BCE to 27,000 BCE which at the time was continentally attached at both ends.  The American end was blocked by huge glaciers, so they became boat builders and populated the Pacific Coast because there is always food where water meets land.  The Monte Verde Paleo-Indians had arrived in Chile by 14,000-15,000 BCE.  When the glaciers withdrew, about 10,000 years ago or a little more, they followed the melting edge towards the east and came south along the Old North Trail.  Of course, since the Inuit travel around on the ice now, presumably they could travel on glaciers then. 

In the meantime science and technology had exploded in Europe and arrived in 1492 in ships with compasses, riding down the pre-existing people with sails and microbes.  “All of the 84 mDNA lineages that the researchers sequenced are now extinct.  In 1610 the CO2 level, the one that gives us the greenhouse effect, sank abruptly because the Native Americans died in such numbers that carbon-fixing forests replaced farms and towns.”  90% of the population died off, not because the Euros were capable of killing that many people, but because their microbes did.

Holy Family Mission on the Blackfeet Rez

So far I haven’t seen any articles about what WWI and the “Spanish Flu” did to depopulate Europe and lower carbon dioxide, but the Cistercian monastic movement began as an effort to repopulate the land emptied by the Black Plague in 1347 when 12 Genoese trading ships docked at the Sicillian port of Messina.  It’s estimated that 60% of the population perished.  The Cistercians were part of complex: Berdardines, Franciscans, White Monks, Benedictines, and then Trappists, who represented a return to strictness and manual labor.  The men who came to the Blackfeet were mostly from one of these orders and brought with them the preoccupation with growing crops.  The Holy Family Mission on Two Medicine River was one of the places where a fertile broad valley with nearby water made crops practical and successful.

Aeon is one of the websites I value and visit often, even contributing to comments.  Today this article — about a place sometimes called “Anatolia” struck me.  It was hard to read because it references so many places that have no clear pattern in my mind.  Here’s the formula for access in case the link doesn't work:

https://aeon.co/essays/the-boundary-between-europe-and-asia-is-a-cultural-fiction?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c7d249f523-Weekly_Newsletter_8_April_20164_8_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-c7d249f523-68600437

Anatolia

It is highly relevant now because that’s where the Syrian refugees are coming across water on a place called the Hellespont, the same as Cubans tried to get to Florida.  It’s where the little boy called Alan washed up on the sand along with many other bodies.  It’s only about a mile across.

“The region is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and the Aegean Sea to the west. The Sea of Marmara forms a connection between the Black and Aegean Seas through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits and separates Anatolia from Thrace on the European mainland.

“As with so many parts of the ancient world, then, Anatolia’s historical role shifted over time. During some periods it was the buffer zone between regional powers; but at other times it was the regional power, and the margins of empire were located elsewhere.”

Swerve.  Today it was excellent weather and I was happy to drive to Cut Bank to do the wash at “Washaway,” one of the more pleasant laundromats.  Ben, who with his wife owns and operates the place, is always eager to offer coffee and talk about politics and history and war — he is a WWII veteran.  And he worries about the rez issues, partly because Larry Reevis, constantly full of ideas, comes in many mornings to visit.

One thing that preoccupies all of us is the issues (multiple) of Sovereignty — that is, the right of the reservation to govern itself.  The area, mostly defined by economic forces (the oil is gerrymandered to Cut Bank as much as possible), political forces (Canada is the northern border) and geological features (the Rockies on the West, Birch Creek on the south), it ignores the once important tribal boundaries — Edmonton to Yellowstone, Rockies to Black Hills.  The confusion and competing powers of these elements have created a kind of Beringia or Hellespont, a place of passage that will disappear in the future because everything will disappear in the future and much already has, including many kinds of humans, rough drafts that didn’t make it.  (We'll keep trying.)

The rez was originally created partly as a refuge for a people who were culturally very different and partly as a confinement so they wouldn’t resist the Euros (descendants of Genghis Khan) invading everything.  It has been a resource and an irritant, an anomaly and an ethical dilemma since the Euros came.  But now we question everything.  Like, whether Europe is even a continent.  (We've already decided Pluto is not a planet.)

When I was little, one of my favorite books was “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.”  It’s been re-issued and now reads a little like “Stay Away, Joe” for kids with Irish instead of Indians.   “A national bestseller when first published in 1901, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch endures today as one of the most memorable literary creations by a Kentucky author.. . .“Alice Hegan Rice spins the memorable tale of a family struggling against all odds in the Cabbage Patch, an old Louisville slum "where ramshackle cottages played hop-scotch over the railroad tracks." This hopeful story follows the Wiggs as they face eviction from their dilapidated house and take in two orphanage fugitives.”

What makes me think of Mrs. Wiggs was that she named her children for the continents:  Asia, America North and South (twins), Australia, Europe — I don’t remember any of them being named Arctic or Antarctic.  But maybe I’ll write a story about kids on Moccasin Flats (which doesn’t really exist anymore) named Beringia, Siberia, Yukon, et al.  And maybe they could argue sovereignty and the shadowy but persisting sovereign nations on the high prairie that don’t just cross the official rez borders, but also international borders.  Kids’ clear eyes might be just what’s needed.

In the meantime, I’ll pray (well, something like that) for the Syrian kids wearing flotation jackets while trying to cross the Hellespont in rubber boats.  There IS a culture problem, as always.  But we evolve.

In the meantime, I'd better see what this book is about!