CULTURE COMMODIFICATION: SELLING THE IDEA OF INDIANS

Maybe it was the great sailing ships that established that there were other worlds where the people were so different that they were like different species and the sailors were surprised that they could start pregnancies -- if they realized that they had.   They brought back monkeys and macaws and what they thought were unicorn horns, not that narwhal tusks are any less amazing. The Church was always eager for the drama of conversion, so they encouraged the idea of new territory.  People = souls.  The Pope had his cabinet of curiosities, the same as any nobleman.

But it was the 19^th century, the scientific people and the wealthy -- who needed something to spend money on besides war -- who really fueled the commodification of culture.  They loved lists and categories, inventories of what they had or wanted to have.  Then came anthropology, studying cultures in an attempt to capture what they were all about.  It was so much fun to sit around a campfire with strange people not wearing any clothes.  And the women were amazed at the stories.  Too bad they were so attracted that they actually went into the field.  After all, the men might have thought, nothing can beat a feathered penis sheath for a cultural artifact, but would Margaret Mead think so?  (I’m thinking she would.)

America, the continent rather than the nation, was a bonanza of indigenous cultures because it was so big that each region had its own terms of survival.  It wasn’t until industrialization expanded military control (railroads) and profit development (dams and mines) that the “tribes” -- a phenomenon of who was there and traveling together -- became defined as sort of semi-nations and signed treaties that were never observed, only paper, sometimes not signed by the USA. 

Treaty of the Traverse des Sioux by Francis Davis Millet

Indians were thought to be disappearing anyway, falling under the relentlessly inevitable wheels of time.  This encouraged even more the idea that they were commodities who could be “owned” through their material culture (collected by museums -- only to preserve them, of course, while the People drooped over their horses, confounded by the Pacific Ocean.)  One powerful way of transforming people’s lives into profit was the Rumpelstilskin method of making them into books.

Since the tribes were oral cultures, with some use of forms of writing to keep tallies, they didn’t write things down -- they just told each other.  The white men who came then listened and wrote out the books.  At a time when even white people weren’t necessarily literate, the books did sell and everyone felt they were valuable.  It took a while before the tribal people realized that THEY could write books.  By that time they weren’t very tribal anymore.  

The gluteal crevice was between being literate or knowing the stories.  The issue became political.  Money always does.  They call it “intellectual property” which means that if you want a picture of Mickey Mouse on your hat, you have to pay the Disney corporation.  (Disney is dead.  Anyway, he wasn’t a mouse.)  This is a fantasy.  But many people guide their lives by fantasy and I’m not even talking about religion.  

One fantasy is that “Indians” are anything but individual people in communities and categories that overlap and separate in a dynamic changing world.  Darrell Kipp used to call it “the hydraulics of the prairies.”  The movie-driven Pan-Indian illusion that all Indians had horses and wore feathers, is invented.  How does one “steal” an invented culture?  From whom?  Sherman Alexie, for instance, comes from a tribe that survived on salmon and a very good way to eat that was!  I grew up eating Columbia River salmon bought from Indians.  They were not invented, but that didn’t save their fish ladders when Celilo Falls was flooded.

When some of the Indians finally got hold of college degrees, which is what publishers think enables Indians to write, there was a Renaissance of American Indian Literature.  Immediately the internecine wars began over who was “more” or “less” Indian than the next guy, because everyone fancied they would make money, including the publishers.  

The legal definition of “blood” was not biological.  It was provenance, hereditary descent from the people who originally lined up to be recorded for the issuing of commodities.  It was whoever was THERE.  Indians are the people who were THERE.  Blood had nothing to do with it, except that you and your relations might not survive if you weren’t there for handouts.  As I write, this is happening in Tibet.  Take names, make lists.  More like a cop than a soldier.  This is how you make order out of chaos.  This is something that a writing and therefore bureaucratic culture does -- not an oral culture.   And the fact that it is legal does not make it just. 

So the white men were making money from writing about this directly, and also making money from interviewing “scientifically” the informants they found.  (“Informants” were the ones who wanted to get into that barrel of candy that Mrs. Uhlenbeck, the linguist’s wife, kept around for bribes.)  Since informants were the primary access to information, there was nothing to check them against for accuracy, unless you count the Hudson’s Bay factors reports sent back to headquarters in England.  Those records are accessible, but they are the reports of white men interested in profit.  

Missionaries were trying to convert an oral culture into a written culture (Christian) by translating the languages, which was considered a feat nearly magical and certainly deserving of praise.  But written Blackfeet was not of much use.  Maybe for the English speaker -- if he knew Blackfeet. Not for the Blackfoot speaker who was considered simply a natural phenomenon, not a person with intellectual rights.  

Much of the descriptions of early prairie life are still in French or Italian or German, because those were the nationalities of the missionaries. They recorded everything.  (And also acquired objects to be gifts.) Blackfeet who want to write accounts of the earliest days, would do well to learn French or Latin.  When a priest or anthropologist wanted to write about a true secret, they wrote it in Latin.  Few of today’s militant French defenders of the Blackfeet culture have bothered to translate what must be file-after-file of mission letters sent to Rome.  They prefer the collective dream of the 19^th century version.

Folks who don’t fit their own culture sometimes develop the fantasy of going to a South Sea island and living by being creative.  We might call it Gauguin Syndrome.  Bob used to say that one of the advantages of being a white man on a rez is that the old-timey Indians figured all white men were crazy anyway, so as a kindness they were tolerant.  But their children and grandchildren grew impatient about all this anthro stuff.  They didn’t really understand why anyone would fuss about a lot of old stuff.  Just hand over the candy.  They have a South Sea Island in their pocket: iPod.

Everyone loves the fabulous, fandom expands everywhere, so they used these to accrue value for themselves.  By association they took on the romantic nature of Indians:  which Indians had become their true families, what secret ceremonies they had been able to slip into, who got drunk with them . . .  frat boy stuff.  While they were congratulating themselves on their success at being boy scouts, tribal women quietly interviewed their grandmothers, wrote it all down, learned how to tan and bead -- even quill -- and where to find certain plants.  One day, all of a sudden, they were handed Ph.D’s.  

It was bad for frat boys, but very good for the redemption of the old ways.  Kind of mixed about books, since the women were too busy to write most of the time.  Like Adolf Hungry Wolf (hated by frat boys), the women weren’t talking about it -- they were doing it.  The male Indian students who used to drink and smoke weed with the white faculty, the frat boy fans, were replaced by low-status low-quantum urban Indian women willing to sleep with a prof for a grade or an Indian for the thrill. Commerce trumps everything else for some people.  Except sex.

(I dunno.  This looks kinda African.)

THE BRAIN'S THRESHOLD

Teachers -- even special ed teachers -- agree that the threshold event when someone learns to read -- usually but not always in the primary grades -- is exciting and gratifying.   They can often describe the moment.  Some kids learn to do it before they even start school but no one reads before they can talk.  It is estimated that maybe ten per cent of human beings do not have the brain gizmos that would allow them to read, but almost everyone can speak.  Remembering the sensation of realizing I was reading English for the first time -- looking at the marks on the paper and hearing them in my head -- I tried to read French.  But they remained alphabet on the page that I could sound out, but that never became meaning.  I did not know anyone who spoke French -- had only heard sentences in movies.

Philosophy is more than words

When I read philosophical websites that are mostly occupied by males in their twenties and thirties, usually rather upscale but maybe not, they will insist that the ability to read and write is the definitive characteristic of human beings.  Probably none of them have ever taught anyone else to read and have themselves learned to read at an early age.  They will claim that it’s not possible to think without words and that consciousness is tightly linked to words.

Contemporary brain research is proving them wrong so they just ignore the work, figuring it will go away and is irrelevant anyway.  But it is not and as it unfolds, it becomes more and more meaningful.  When I began reading Suzanne Langer in the Eighties, it was brushed aside.  Now even Chomsky and Piaget need rethinking.  All who depend only on introspection and outward observation are having to reinterpret what they thought was obvious.  

What if there are more than two languages?

Right off for beginners, consciousness -- which in the case of introspection is itself a function of consciousness -- is no longer the key to identity.  “I think therefore I am” is no longer true because “I” am so much more than thinking and thinking is so much more than words.  

One must realize that “I am a composed cellular creature with a dashboard that is only fractionally conscious and entirely dependent on sensory information gathered from all over the body, even including microbes in my gut.”  That is, a person is a vessel of information dependent on instrumentation.  Those senses, the instruments, are developed from health, access, and the culture that teaches us one language but not another.  The world outside the skin is so much more than can be taken in by the senses that it must be edited, digested, transformed, and symbolized even before it gets to the main dashboard of the brain.

The brain operates on the pattern of the tree -- or maybe we should say “bush” since there is not one main trunk but many branches, mostly developed through gestation, birth and the immediately following years, and dependent on events over which no infant has control.  These are mostly provided by caretakers, generally the parents, who try to make sure of nutrition, protection, warmth, and so on, and who also interact with touch and voice to call out the formation of the whole body, but especially the brain.

Only luck in timing and circumstances can give parents the chance to do their best.  War, famine, disease, insanity, geo-catastrophe all interfere.  Variations in the parents’ and culture’s beliefs will cause variations in the kind of human being that develops through the experience of the growing creature, who forms his or her brain according to what happens -- not simply receiving, but interacting, which with luck will mean demand meets capacity, instinct triggers response, need is supplied, and space for expansion welcomes exploration.

In order to read, one must have already learned to speak, which happens during a “window” in learning ability.  It’s sensible to assume that speaking can’t happen without some level of maturity in the air management paraphernalia dependent on the bellows of the lungs.  Babies can make vowel sounds early, but consonants depend on delicate management of the interruption of the air stream to make sibilants (“s,z,ch”) and plosives (“k,t,b,p”) with tongue against teeth and palate.  Beyond that is the action of the larynx, the push of the diaphragm, the uplift of the ribcage, and mastery of the lilt of the particular language and its gender-indicating inflections.   None of this is available to someone looking at marks on a surface.

Between speaking and interpreting silent marks is a sequence of abilities that are probably handled by different parts of the brain.  One is the ability to recognize shapes, which some suggest derive from hunting, learning to recognize the ear of the rabbit in grass, the butt configuration of a deer in a confusion of leaves, or the print of a paw in mud.  Another is the ability to follow and retain a “trail” of varied marks from left to right, recognizing the line length, maintaining control of which tier of the lines one is looking at, so that the letters stay in words, the words stay in sentences, and the brain follows the stream of them in an orderly fashion.

At first this process is helped by “sounding” the marks out loud, but then one learns to just hear them in the head, and eventually they become transparently silent so that the reader is only conscious of the meanings and even later the meanings become a structure of understanding.  Religious performance in litanies may be community-shared out-loud words in unison, which have an emotional impact like that of music, particularly if the words are familiar and have been repeated often enough in history to have become associated with specific occasions, so that they call out the emotions of those times.

If the meaning of the words is too dissonant in terms of their application to the occasion or in terms of the context of the person at the moment, they will be jolted into awareness.  This has been happening lately when people recite the Pledge of Allegiance or quote the inscription at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.  Sometimes the words of songs are deeply meaningful and sometimes they are offensive.  (Perhaps meant to be.) Their meaning can change over the decades or even after some kind of life-rift that reconfigures one’s understanding of the world.

Humans originally came to consciousness in one place, one culture, one family configuration, but now people must be highly flexible as they accept new terms of life. Many cope by narrowing and rigidly limiting their experience to people like themselves, denying that anything outside a “compound” of familiarity is good or even exists at all.  But other people let themselves become mirrors, shadows, without a center, merely responding to what is around them.  The growth necessary to really understand a whole new terrain can be like trying to read French without ever having heard it spoken -- much less understanding nuances like what is inflected to be male or female, what shows public relationship or marks intimacy.  

The problem of translation between two contexts becomes the problem of a double-identity that generates a third, more universal, more experience-based.  Those who master this, which can include something like a religious conversion, are different.  To those who don’t know anything but their own lives, the difference can be threatening.  But, once felt, this threshold experience that invites one through a door into a broader world is the very definition of consciousness and “being human” in a human body.