SYSTEM DYNAMICS & DEFINING STAKES

Every day I read a number of blogs about publishing and bookstores as well as writing and reviews of writing. Also, blogs about art and listservs about environmentalism which has exploded in astonishing ways. Right now they are arguing about ecoporn and whether a passage in Timothy Treadwell’s journal (he’s the guy who was trying to merge with grizzlies and did -- along with girl friend -- when one of the bears ate them) in which he says he’s so moved when he holds his favorite female bear’s scat in his hand, still warm from “being inside her.” (The scat -- not the hand.) In addition, I get practical inquiries about things like genealogies and the viability of teaching jobs here. And, of course, I’m reading about liturgies and shamans, which always brings in a lot of comments that are meant to show how much the reader knows, how much magic power they have. (I mostly zap them.) And there are always Native American issues, which I try to confine to Blackfeet most of the time. This does not exhaust the kinds of reading I do in a day, except that you can pretty well rule out immersive fiction. I try to keep in touch with it, sort of, through a little panel of cousins and friends who love good novels.

What I want to reflect on a bit now is two entwined issues: system dynamics and defining stakes. I suppose you might say I’m prompted by last night’s town council meeting in which a consulting engineer tried to defend himself against a chiding mayor. I don’t understand what was underneath this, except that it was clear that the assumptions of everyone involved -- and even those who were not directly involved -- were pretty much mismatched. I came home to watch the last DVD of the series “Vera” (first season) which plays off the idea of a police commander who looks like someone’s dumpy mom. (Barbara Blixeth played Brad Pitt’s mother in “A River Runs Through It.”) This is not Helen Mirren in the menacing city. One wonders how ever she got into such a job except that it’s way out in a tiny town on the English coast. (Fabulous scenery amped up with cloud-enhancing filters.) The stakes are always murder, with subsets of motivation that vary from one suspect to another. The dynamics are always steady “plodding” as they say over there, mixed with insights that come from knowing the territory since Vera grew up there.

System dynamics are confronting a lot of politicians right now: how should they interpret the “Occupy” movement and handle the very practical issues of a lot of mixed people camped in a park? How should they interpret the economic issues of Europe as they go tumbling along, partly in reverse? Small businesses must also be struggling with what strategies they should use now that they’ve fired so many people that the remainder are cracking from overwork, but the only hope seems to lie in increased productivity. Which brings us to the issue of what the stakes are. Bottom line: profit. Jobs. And a life. Re-election. The survival of a nation without internal chaos.

Here in a small town which sees its survival as dependent on growth, we are seeing new people move in, some of them eager to participate in our local doings. They are quite different in terms of their understanding of process and stakes. Those who have come in from big cities and the corporate world misread local agendas but attract local people who think big city people are sophisticated and informed. I have the opposite prejudice, having worked behind the scenes for too many years to ever be trusting of big city corporate guys.

Heart Butte, the Blackfeet village thirty miles away, has a variation on that prejudice. They hire urban romantics, pull them this way and that in their own interests -- too local to be intelligible to outsiders -- and then sent them packing out of town with all the dissatisfactions and outrages attached to them. The stakes are always contradictory and rooted in history: how does a Native American assimilate to the mainstream culture without losing identity? Can you earn a Ph.D. at a good university without discarding many of the patterns that make you a tribal member? Worse that than, for many people the symbols have displaced the realities. A “good education” is a check list of certificates and entitlements, NOT a transformed way of interacting with the world, which I believe it is. Even in Valier, even in Great Falls, I don’t think this last is a common viewpoint. Money makes the world go around. Money comes from jobs. Jobs come from a check list of certificates.

Like “Vera,” my outsides are misleading. I have her same notion of how to dress and the same tendency to stage outbursts, which are acceptable in men but not women. But that’s minor compared to being interpreted by persons with an entirely different value system, quite a different idea of what’s at stake. When I work on Bob Scriver issues, most people assume I’m trying to get money and status out of it. Because of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel, they assume that I’m still in love with Bob Scriver (I am), but only because he was a big shot once. (Right now his bronzes at auction go for less than the cost of casting them. Some collector somewhere is going to clean up when the value of them rises again, which they will.) The idea of thinking about anything for some other reason than making money is just too far from their own lives for them to consider.

What I saw last night was corporate methods applied to a local management problem. Fascinating. Not good for a small town. Somewhere in the background I could hear the hissing friction of hands rubbed together as the vulnerability of this town to schemes and stakes on an international level was increased. The more divided, the more distracted, the more contradictory, the more secrets, the easier it will be to run scams. The easier it will be for a bear market to become a scare market. As if we weren’t already there.

"OH, MY DARLING, SHALL WE GATHER BY THE RIVER?"

Sam Peckinpah was reputed to be too violent and to have no respect for women. These two categories were favorite rubber stamps for a certain kind of liberal for a long time -- maybe still. But watching Peckinpah movies is a good way to get rid of those assumptions, esp. if you go back and watch again with the commentators. Not that they’re right. In fact, I get pretty irritated with them. I’d much rather talk to Sam himself. The trouble was that he was a drunk. These commentator guys don’t know much about that. They’re all nice boys who are so pleased that they were able to escape to their tree house where their wives can’t find them. And they know exactly the right “in” thing to drink, but their wives won’t let them drink too much.

WE INTERRUPT THIS PECKINPAW FESTIVAL TO BRING YOU OTHER IDEAS.

But don’t think this is a rejection of Sam Peckinpah. I love him and I love the moral and artistic construction he made of Westerns and his understanding of land and the people of land. What I want to know is what is the deep historic and human structuring that made him so powerful that these men -- jejune and turned back in on themselves as they are -- would sit down to write articles, organize pilgrimages, sit in libraries researching, teach classes, and create whole departments to house courses about the American West -- while the whole time living in cities, going to the “empty” West only on summer vacations to do very travel-agent suggested things: white-water rafting, back-packing, but mostly sitting around in nice places to eat. The West as a theme park. How do we get out of it? It’s important because people are profiting by defining human experience as a matter of props and scripts. Why should we pay for being human? Is there no way to reach raw experience except violence and sex?

Another thread I’ve been following is the writings of Clay Shirky -- actually, I’ve been watching YouTube vids. I couldn’t figure how what major chord he was striking for me until I came to this in his official bio: “Mr. Shirky graduated from Yale College with a degree in art, and prior to falling in love with the internet, he worked as a theater director and designer in New York. His company, Hard Place Theater, staged "non-fiction theater", theatrical collages of found documents.” There is nothing more real than an audience present in front of a stage. NOT a critic.

Got it. A theatre director (I spell it the English way -- it’s an affectation but it pleases me and this is my blog) is a person who looks deep into the human structure of a play in something like the way a good psychoanalyst (of whatever persuasion) looks into a human identity, which is like the way a good physician looks into the functioning of the body or the way a good engineer looks into the forces interplaying in a bridge (like the engineer who rigged that bridge in “The Wild Bunch” to fall with horses and stuntmen on it without killing them -- you don’t necessarily want a bridge to do the ordinary thing of joining two shores but that means rethinking the problem) -- or Nassim Taleb looking into the structure of financial transactions. Taleb is actually the closest to Shirky because he is not looking so much as individual human beings but at the patterns among humans of various kinds. This is probably also the secret of Malcolm Gladwell: he can find little repetitive patterns in the big picture, give them a name, and explain where they come from. But they are small, not the big picture.

It is PAST time for us to analyze the big picture. Even in Afghanistan the military is shifting to looking at the pattern instead of past assumptions. Shirky was, not surprisingly, working at an investment firm before he went to his present academic position. He has not addressed an analysis of universities and maybe he’d better not. It’s not a pretty picture and a lot of people would be very angry indeed.

BUT what remains always valid for me is Peckinpah’s personality: his own dilemmas and the force and ingenuity he used to overcome them. He embodies ideas. We still want to know the personalities of our generals and we are offended if the President is so transparent that we can’t see him, even when he is clever enough to sit down for a beer with us. But Peckinpaw was produced by a specific set of events IMAO: ranch-raised, mother-devoted, school-resistant so military school, intense and responsible third-world exposure (Marines in China at the end of WWII), then academic history and local theatre. I haven’t quite “got” this yet. It seems to me Shakespearean.

Sam was a competent rural man in terms of hard, direct riding and shooting (not just in movies) but a thoughtful man searching rather desperately for a dependable center pivot, a moral one. Keeping your word no matter what? It hasn’t worked for me. Faith? Entering one’s house “justified,” as he said? Who decides what’s justified? This is the dilemma also of a world society seeking to leave a code-specified world (like the Taliban’s) but uncertain what the next key is, except money. We are just now learning what a false god money is, because it is a construct -- a pretend thing. It’s neither a horse nor a gun nor a plate of beans by a campfire. It’s all just paper that can be wiped out overnight. It can take your house, inflate the price of food so much that whole countries starve. Yet it’s nothing.

Once when I was still preaching, I asked if anyone in the congregation would give me a paper dollar. There were willing offers. As I said to them, it wasn’t different from buying me a drink. Then I set it on fire and burned it down to the corner where I was holding it. They were appalled, aghast, jumped to their feet to stop me. So much emotion! But it was just a piece of paper.

“Theatrical collages of found documents,” like the evidence that big Pharma has sold drugs they know might kill you (Avandia, most recently). Freedom of information is the scariest bomb on the planet. Might make drunks of us all. So why is Clay Shirky so centered and calm? I dunno. I’m going to watch him carefully. No suit -- there’s a good clue. Willingness to confront and decipher high tech elements. He doesn’t waste time combing his hair. (I don’t know how Robert Sapolsky, my other favorite guru, gets around that. He doesn’t wear a suit though.) Both Shirky and Sapolsky and others (Tim Barrus is of this ilk.) are fluent, intense, and evidently anchored in real life. You don’t have to work through their print -- you can watch them on YouTube even if you’re illiterate.

In the Sixties when Peckinpah was making his movies, I was in Browning, Montana, living out the very things he was filming. That has been my anchor and it continues to be, but the theatre education I got at Northwestern and the seminary education I got at the U of Chicago were very much focused on systems, the way forces intermingle to create something new. I don’t have to own Scriver bronzes to know what they mean and it is the meaning that is valuable IF it is experience-based, not just commercially constructed. Even Montana seems to have lost track of this. Even though they watch old Westerns every night on the Ted Turner channel while they drink a six-pack of beer.

THE GLOBAL VILLAGE

Because this blog is mostly in the style of personal essay -- maybe even “the new journalism” in which the reporter includes his or her own story and reactions in the story of something else -- and probably wanders into memoir and identity politics and because about half of the readers have found this blog by Googling something that interests them and so sees the blog through that filter, and because we’re in some kind of time warp where everyone wants to be a writer, many people take this blog personally. Should they?

Beyond that, some will try to break the glass/paper wall into my actual life and some succeed. I just spent a long time on the phone with a woman right here in Valier whom I had not known was a reader. She will be surprised to see herself mentioned. We were talking politics along the lines very common here: newcomers who are different vs. old timers who insist on the status quo. I am uncomfortably on both sides. How much should I discuss that? Both of us insist on our authenticity and insight and, in comparison to many of the townspeople, we’re quite a lot alike. But we are totally different.

Carl Rogers made an investigation of marriage “back in the day” when things were defined by “why not?” instead of “but always. . .” He concluded that any relationship depends upon constant communication to keep assumptions and boundaries straightened out. There is barely enough time today -- if you’re going to live in the media-recommended lifestyle -- for people to talk to their spouses, much less their children. The children talk to each other, set their own norms and find their own help. This means that generational change is happening a lot faster than it has in some other times. He noted that some counterculture people could barely manage a marriage of three people (gender neutral) but that even for people who had no jobs and sat around talking all day, five was probably the max who could really stay in sync.

So what about a little village of 350 trying to accommodate their own children plus move-ins? The main idea is that representatives (at least) of factions will come to the town meetings and speak their minds, but people soon figure out that this will get them only target status. Much better to join one of the several coffee klatches in various places around town -- or maybe the bars. It feels natural to hang out with the crowd closest to oneself in style and reach a consensus among that group which can be brought to bear on the town council, maybe covertly to avoid confrontation.

That, of course, doesn’t take into account the larger forces acting on villages these days: regulations and agendas from entirely outside, that directly impact infrastructure, economic opportunity, transportation, and so on. A vivid example here is the CRP program (I suppose that’s redundundant since CRP stands for Crop Reduction Program.) which paid farmers to NOT farm, to put their cropland in native grass. That meant that the farmers, who were mostly almost old enough to retire anyway, planted their land one last time, sold their equipment and even their buildings, and left for a friendlier climate. It turned out to be a population reduction program. In turn, the small town schools shrank enough to force consolidation and curriculum change.

Then there are subtler forces at work that no one asked for or formally created. For instance, something has happened in the culture so that every student who “tries” expects to get an A. If they don’t, parents come to force an A. Grades are understood as access to college which is defined as access to economic success for a lifetime. But because the grades are given for attitude rather than accomplishment, students who thought they were quite above average find out they can’t succeed even in a small tolerant college because they just don’t have the basics in hand. And those who somehow do succeed in college and go on to professional graduate training, discover that the tuition will absorb all their profit for the first decades of their working life. If they discover that it doesn’t suit them after all, they will be facing an impossible buy-out. But because the government will sometimes offer subsidies to those who return to small towns, some find themselves trapped right back where they started. No one intended any of this.

Here’s something else. Normally the arts in their edgier incarnations are phenomena supported only by the population density of cities. Libraries, concerts, galleries and so on need many people passing through to reach the numbers necessary to provide clients. In the American West this is mostly achieved in tourist towns which are high population in the summer. Even now, with the trend for people to build “trophy houses” out west, they are only in residence for weeks out of the year. So the arts also become itinerant. Summer theatre and so on. Locals, observing their “economic superiors,” may come to understand that “culture” is a sign of prosperity and try to establish on-going local art communities which mostly succeed only near universities. But now the Internet provides a virtual population density that gathers up the population of the entire planet. One (okay, “I”) can sit here reading, writing and corresponding on esoteric topics with a community that I’ve never seen, much less sat down with for “beers.”

The first consequence is a huge avalanche of writers. NPR has just sponsored a little contest for their listeners (a fraction of radio listeners) to offer extremely short stories, which ought to cut down even more on participants, and got 5,000 offerings. What will happen to all those worthy blip-length stories? Could a person publish them according to some theme or locale or genre or nationality or gender? That’s the sort of thing that seems to be sorting out the Internet city into neighborhoods, without ever saying so and according mostly to consumer data. Or has writing become the production of ephemera? A twitterized world? To suit people with tweet-length attention spans.

So my telephone correspondent, who is a few blocks from me in our tiny village community of 350, has never met me, didn’t know where my house is, nor have I met her or know where her house is. She assumes that our goals and ideals are similar, because she reads this blog, which means she has one heckuva lot clearer idea of who I am that most of the people who live here, and yet our conversation revealed that we don’t know each other at all. To me, I’m unique and she’s a type. Maybe for her the same is true in reverse.

We made no date to have coffee. (Neither one of us drinks alcohol.) Maybe it would be dangerous to challenge our identities. Maybe the village, seeing us as alike, would intervene. But maybe there are other people like us here. Maybe neither one of us would like that very much.

MICHAEL TWO HORSES: Hero

Prowling around the Internet, with a little help from Maggie Dwyer, another extraordinary research librarian like Dave Lull and George Lessard, as well as a fellow member of the nineties Nat Lit listservs, I was hoping to find out what happened to some of those folks. I came across this:

Obituary for Michael Two Horses (1950-2003)

Michael Two Horses, Sicangu Lakhota/Crow Creek Dakhota, passed away recently at his home in Blacksburg, Virginia. He was fifty years old. His death was unexpected and peaceful.
Mr. Two Horses was Visiting Instructor in the American Indian Studies Program and the Humanities Program, within the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He was also a member of the Virginia Tech Commission on Equal Opportunity and Diversity. He was a doctoral student in the University of Arizona American Indian Studies Programs. His emphasis was on societies and cultures, law and public policy, and American Indian history.

Mr. Two Horses was born in San Diego to Alberta Mariana Bertino and David Two Horses Jordan, and adopted at six months of age by Edward and Sadie Lou Tieri. He served in Viet Nam with Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observation Group, stationed first at Tay Ninh, then at Long Tranh, and was Petty Officer 2nd.

He is survived by his father, Edward Tieri of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, his brother, Albert Tieri of Palm Springs, California, and a large community of friends and colleagues.

Mr. Two Horses will be remembered for his exhaustively brilliant research and writing and his passionately honest dedication to human rights, particularly with respect to American Indian treaty rights, spiritual rights, and cultural rights. During the Makah whaling controversy, he formed CERTAIN, the Coalition to End Race-based Targeting of American Indian Nations. He went repeatedly to Neah Bay while anti-whaling forces were threatening school children, harassing the Makah people, and threatening the lives of the whalers. With CERTAIN, Mr. Two Horses engaged the opponents of the Makah's treaty rights in dialogue, countering their arguments in the media, taking photographs and witnessing to protect the Makah from further physical attack, and acting in conjunction with the Washington Human Rights Commission and the US Coast Guard to protect the lives and rights of the Makah people.

Mr. Two Horses was equally engaged in expanding the scholastic dialogue. He persistently pointed out elements of racism in the dominant cultural perspective on American Indians, in the face of pedagogical tendencies to trivialize these concerns. He declined to acquiesce to that marginalization in the discourse.

He investigated the growing rift between mainstream environmentalists and tribal nations across the US and Canada, and the way that much environmental writing fails to consider the role of indigenous peoples in shaping the so-called "wilderness." "They did not want to acknowledge," he wrote, "in much the same way as colonial writers did, that the human hand has always shaped this continent, and that in creating false constructs of 'pristine wilderness' and of cities as 'fallen' areas, such writing tends to avoid completely the contested lands where members of marginalized races or classes live, and fails to deal with the concept of 'national sacrifice areas' in human terms, inasmuch as the Indians, Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, and poor Whites living in those areas are sacrificed as well. These are zones where uranium mines and coal mines and their pollution of groundwater, or toxic waste dumps are located, without exception in proximity to marginalized peoples)."

He was ruthless toward "plastic shamans," people white or native who hawk Indian spirituality. "They abstract bits of our culture," he said, "and then they sell them as the genuine article, something along the lines of taking parts of the Catholic liturgy and extracting the 'cool parts' and then performing those parts for money. This is the deepest essence of what they do, and it is comprised of both 'snake oil sales' and of a deep disrespect for Native cultures."
__________

Michael was a lawyer/soldier whom I very much respected though I never met him. He stood apart from a ragtag and opportunist pack of hounds that tried to make their own reputations by destroying others over the identity politics of Indian intellectual property. He was clear about what he was doing and careful about drawing lines. Unlike others.

It’s true enough that there have always been opportunists who were both Indian and white and who capitalized on the public’s near-worship of Indian spirituality. But the plastic shaman hunters just added another level of opportunism to build their own prestige. The worst (least restrained and most self-serving) of the plastic shaman hunters in those days were female. low-quantum, urban, somewhat educated. Margaret Mead said that armies should never allow women to join because they don’t know when to stop. I’d have to reject that as a truth statement, but there’s some observed evidence in it.

Sherman Alexie, who carries weight because his name is known from his movies as well as his books, attacked Tony Hillerman (white, writing about Indians) in his novel “Indian Killer,” but the accusation fell flat. Later he accused Tim Barrus of “stealing his heritage.” Naturally, he didn’t mean that his own heritage included child rape and abuse. At the most extreme the local “director of culture” here forbade anyone to take photos of Chief Mountain because it is sacred to the Blackfeet. I agreed with the policy to keep hikers off the mountain.

I’m not sure what good all the pursuit of the “immorality” of certain writers did, except that a lot of people -- including a lot of very talented Indian writers -- simply walked off to avoid all the blaming and rivalry. It just wasn’t worthwhile, spiritually or any other way, but the persecution revives now and then to settle scores or give a little leverage to an insecure achiever. Some of the victims are personally known to me, like Adolf Hungry-Wolf, whose four-book accumulation of First Generation material has been stiffed by scholars but remains the best single source of material on the Blackfeet anyone could have, most of it unmediated by interpretation. (Oh, those middlepersons!)

Changing the focus, Neah Bay, the topmost leftmost corner of America (except for Alaska) is a tough little rez with a hardy bunch of people. I’ve visited several times, but only in “pacific” intervals. In the midst of the true danger and need of the Makah attempt to hunt whales in the old way and though he’s in Seattle, only hours away, I never once heard Sherman Alexie comment nor do I think he went there. Michael Two Horses did.

SWEET SORROWFUL SUSPICION

At last -- I thought -- I’d gotten to the point where my diabetes regime was predictable, practical and effective. The doctor at the Valier Clinic hadn’t turned over for a while, the very strict pharmacist in Cut Bank had moved on, and all my statistics were normal and happy.

Then suddenly I was told that all my prescriptions were blocked until I scheduled an appointment with the doctor. The good a1c I’d had didn’t count.

Without my prescriptions -- though I take few pills -- my regime might crash and burn. But I really resented being pulled in and suspected it was a money-generating scheme for the clinic. Remember that I had worked “backstage” as a ward clerk with this clinic and knew that “benevolence” was not their middle name. Their first, middle and last names are all “PROFIT.” So, kicking and screaming, I went to the clinic this morning, belly-aching and making accusations and spreading paranoia on all sides like a flu virus. The others were much more docile, because that’s the way is in Valier. You’re docile or you’ve somehow got a grip on enough money and power to throw your weight around. This is so true that if you’re not docile, everyone assumes you’ve got some secret source of money and power even when you don’t.

But no one had told me not to eat, so I couldn’t have the blood workup that was the reason for me being there. And it was NOT the doctor who had called me in -- it was a state agency that had decided to “survey” the state’s diabetes cases through the doctors. I don’t know which state agency. I don’t know whether they were covertly checking for illicit drugs. I’m told Medicare will pay for it, a nice little raid on the public purse, but I’m not told how much the survey would cost or what the goals and parameters might be. Nothing has been in the newspaper.

Big Health Care doesn’t have their fingers on the pulse of this state, they have their two hands around the state’s throat. It’s a major industry. So why all the secrecy or did I just not see the stories or recognize them? Or was some Helena agency hiding from the Big Health Care forces? Diabetes is such a GREAT source of income: something everyone has, assumed to be all their fault, and that people themselves believe can be treated with pills alone. They pretend to diet and exercise, but who has time? Want sugar, take more pills. Anyway, the effectiveness of the diet and exercise is in the twenty years BEFORE the diabetes is diagnosable, so the motivation is just not there in the most crucial years. I predict that diabetes will become a bigger money-maker for the pharm industry that even AIDS or anxiety.

But now I’ll switch sides. How can we drum up support and education for the public’s own health care of their own bodies -- let alone the massive changes that need to be made in the restaurant business, the grocery business, the ag business, the insurance business -- even ignoring the growing conviction that diabetes and other things are caused by environmental pollution, plastics, and food processing chemicals, overuse of poisons -- without knowing any objective measurements?

After all, the state’s humanities people suddenly became convinced by a biz school faculty member that if they only knew how much money everyone made with arts and crafts, the legislature would come to its senses and fund a few basic things like orchestras and museums. Of course, that was before the economic infrastructure collapse, but I didn’t notice any change of heart on their part. Still, was the principle wrong? (I still think it was wrong for art, but maybe right for health. But isn’t art healthy?)

The clinic offers a support group now, but that’s not what I need. What I need is a source of unadulterated food. Another case of fiddling around on the edges of a problem instead of confronting it.

I’m aware that some diabetes assumptions have been shot down now that measurements and cellular knowledge is so much more precise and powerful than the previous equation of “sugar + insulin = health”. In its place is a complex of things that can go wrong with the cycle of metabolism from resistance in the cell itself to antibodies interfering both with the production of insulin and the nature of it. Now there is Diabetes I, people who produce no insulin because the Isles of Langerhans in their livers no longer function; Diabetes II which is more a matter of cell resistance; something called LADA which has to do with autoimmune phenomena; gestational diabetes which is triggered by pregnancy; and so on. The numbering idea stopped with Diabetes III which no one understood.

I learned something interesting, which is that when doctors are given information in conferences or journals, the study is now ranked from “this is only an idea with no evidence or research,” through “this has been studied but the results are not conclusive,” to “this has been studied well for a long time and the results seem convincing.” One of the hallmarks of science is that the case is NEVER closed. New theories and methods turn up new evidence all the time. The best doctors are the wisest in terms of the big picture, not the ones with the longest list of meds.

I did decide to have the blood panel. I don’t need to worry about illicit substances showing up -- not even nicotine. But I’ve been taking metformin for several years now. One is supposed to have regular blood panels for liver function, because research shows some livers can’t handle it for long. Oh, yeah. No one remembered that until now. Too much distracted by the ghastly consequences of diabetes: foot amputation, blindess, kidney damage and for many late middle-aged women, heart flutter that throws clots causing heart attacks and strokes. Too much fear. Not enough thought. I watch the consequences daily in the obits.

I don’t need threats from my doctor or the pharm industry. I beg my friends not to slosh Roundup all over their yards to get rid of weeds. They do it anyway. I know how the doctors feel.

POLITICS OF IDENTITY & RESENTMENT

Only one time did I claim to be an Indian and even then I only took advantage of preconceptions and it was at the behest of one of my former students, who was supposed to be monitoring RezNet and wanted me to do it for him. This was in the Nineties, so long ago that I was working on a Lisa computer. My printouts from that time were dot matrix. I kept them. (Lawyers form a line to the left.)

It was supposed to be Indians-only, but I was coached not to say anything except, “I’m from Browning.” They assumed no white person would know about Browning and that I was Indian. This was the time of the violent NA on-line flame wars and I had my consciousness raised in a hurry. That’s when I invented the nom d’post of “prairie mary” and began to emphasize that I was old. I was convincing enough that one war-like woman intent on tracking down and killing every plastic shaman invited me to join her little side-operation, an even more secret group. That’s about the time I began to worry and got off the list, confessing that I was white. As it turned out, several people had recognized me and several others urged me to stay, which was very flattering, but I still left.

In fact, when my mother died in 1998 and Bob Scriver died in 1999, I had been much supported by the generosity and sympathy of others in the group, one of whom had just lost HER ex-husband. She lived on one of the islands off the Carolinas and sent me a braid of sweetgrass tied in red yarn. We shared dreams for a while -- they seemed to be visits from our lost ones.

Some of the group were beginning careers in the then-promising field of Native American literature, buoyed by the renaissance of their kind of writing and the attention of the media. Departments and publications were organizing. One of the correspondents was Sherman Alexie. Some were starstruck by him and others enjoyed plaguing him. He was soon offended and left. Others in the group did make names for themselves in the field.

But much of the media support eroded due to identity politics and the eight years of defying the Bush administration, combined with the slow realization that a tribal person who has enough education to catch the eye of a bigtime publisher is probably assimilated. The double bind is that if a tribal person gets a decent education, that person is no longer very “Indian,” or if the person is very Indian, no white people will read him. The assumption of publishers is that no Indians can read, so Native American books are not often distributed to reservation venues, and therefore even if any ordinary tribal people wanted to read them, they wouldn’t know they existed. So why would they write?

Identity politics has supported immersion Native language classes in the near past, but they are -- of necessity -- oral. Not many tribes had written languages so there is no body of literature for anyone to read alone as when Hebrew was brought back to life. Immersion language classes work, especially for little kids, and are worthwhile, but they haven’t had much impact except locally.

The politics of resentment have come to dominate reservations. Of course, it’s always powerful when people don’t feel as though they’re getting the possessions or the respect that they want and feel they deserve, which is to say that poor people are always vulnerable to the politics of resentment. In spite of major advances, the reservations have still not caught up to the rest of society (at least the society they see on television) nor even to the defined treaty obligations of the government, which hasn’t noticed that Indians vote until lately.

Yesterday I was looking for a good example of the politics of resentment that wouldn’t get me into trouble with any Blackfeet families, since I live close enough for retaliation, when Sherman Alexie fell into my email in-box. It seems that on a panel at Book Expo he attacked Bezos as “imperial”, accusing him of preventing ordinary folks from reading books by insisting that they read them on Kindle, which is enormously expensive and therefore “elitist.” [http://www.edrants.com/sherman-alexie-clarifies-elitist-charges/ The best thinking is all in the comments.] In order to defend himself from charges that he is a “Luddite” (against technology), he discloses that his Seattle apartment shelters his iPod, his cell phone, his computer and his HDTV. But “I have this strange, subterranean fear and loathing of the Kindle and its kind. I think it’s really about childhood. Books saved my life, Edward. I rose out of poverty and incredible social dysfunction because of books.” Also, epublishing would cut deep into his royalties.

He confides he has “to make my books available electronically. I have held out on the matter for as long as possible, but I have no author allies in this fight, so I have to submit. I have to sign contracts for eBook rights. I’m doing this in the blind because none of us know what’s going to happen. The last screenwriters’ strike in Hollywood was largely the result of this same issue. The legal issues regarding the Internet and copyrights and revenue are still unclear.”

Poor handsome, achieving, head-of-the-FallsApart-corporation, having to wrestle with some barbarian like Bezos. “I’m worried about the eBook’s influence on the whole culture.” What? We might all start creating Slam Poetry? Stand up comedy? Did I mention that his most recent poem in The New Yorker is about struggling across the desert with your brother on your back?

Which brother was that? One of those guys who sits in Old Town slipping a bottle in a paper bag back and forth among friends? It won’t be Tony Hillerman, whom he “razzed” -- as he puts it -- in “Indian Killer,” a tactical mistake since no one else much resents affable Tony Hillerman. And it sure as hell wasn’t Tim Barrus, whose LA Weekly attacker was encouraged and reinforced by Sherman, all indignant about any white person who pretended to be Indian.

Here on the Blackfeet reservation Sherman Alexie is a big hero, not because he’s Indian but because he’s like a white man. He even managed to make a movie, which means real success. (We don’t read the New Yorker here. Too expensive.) He’s right -- no one here reads from a Kindle. Not many even read books on paper. They don’t read ebooks either. They watch movies and videos. The library has assimilated all the Nat Lit into the other books.