ECOLOGY AND TERRITORY

Grizzly bears do not read.  They know nothing about laws.  What they know about boundaries is not on our maps.

Grizzly bears are individuals.  We write laws and draw boundaries for the “aggregate.”  Bob used to make jokes about the waterfowl laws that said, “no more than X number of ducks may be shot in the aggregate.”  He’d ask,  “Where is the aggregate on a duck?”  It’s the bear biologists and wardens who learn individual bears and try to figure out what specifically needs to be done.

Grizzly bears are omnivorous, opportunistic, seasonal, and habitat-controlled.  The map of the interior of a grizz body and brain is about these things and requires those who study them to think in other ways than print, mostly using their own similar but not-the-same senses.  But we are becoming technically clever:  radio collars, ear tags, hair and feces analysis.  Maybe not so clever when studying the economic, political, and legendary terrain of bear knowledge, which is generally recorded in print.

Formal enforceable laws about bears suffer from the same layered complexification as about humans in the West.  The first consideration is keeping bears out of dense human populations where they could create havoc.  That’s part of the second desiderata, which is keeping them away from scattered human households and domestic animals.  Politically, one must observe at least eight layers of laws: land ownership, private rights and the jurisdictions of towns, counties, states, federal, international treaties, and tribe.  And we're close to the Canadian border, which means Alberta law.

Psychologically, there are also layers to consider.  One is the individual belief that people are living in an earlier century and decade when bears were not regulated, because people come to the West to escape modern life.  Another is the Western belief that landowners are the kings of their land, going back to early European concepts.  Some go to the realm of myth and legend, transcending reality in order to merge with the juju of kissing bears, claiming privileged virtual worlds.  (The bears know nothing about this level of existence.)  Domestic bears are an oxymoron, because though individuals can with great effort be shaped and forced into templates of pet-dom and money-making stunts, in time their feral nature will break through.    An animal without the environment that created it is no longer an animal, but a kind of meat robot full of brain-wired workarounds.

Many people understand ecology very little, because we are still thinking in terms of individual standalone objects.  Little kids learn to read by using booklets that ask,  “What does a pig say?  What does a duck say?”  In my academic ag family, I had little booklets that taught the species of sheep, goats, pigs, horses, goats, cows.  Most are named according to the places they were developed: Dorset, Suffolk, Belgian, Hampshire, because they adapted to the conditions in that place and to the uses that justified their economic costs.

There are sub-categories of grizz according to their places, mostly big federally defined reserves: national parks, national forests.  Yellowstone bears, Glacier bears, and now beginning to be “prairie bears.”  What are the uses, the ecological relationships, that justify the cost and effort of protecting bear populations in these places?  I would propose that a major one is the control of hubris in human beings.  This is closely related to the indigenous (“Indian”) claim of spiritual resources.  In our greed society these kinds of wealth count for very little unless we can hunt, photograph, and otherwise market them.

Bob Marshall Wilderness: the Chinese Wall

But there are other economic and political forces in play.  Greed for resources.  Ranches and mining that depend on advantages gained by cheap fees for federal land use that were meant to encourage the settlement of the West for the sake of their tax income.  These areas are where state and federal most often conflict.

In the beginning of the protected species idea and first laws addressing it, there was a memorable cartoon in the New Yorker.  One little fish says to the other, “I’m not surprised that I could put an entire dam on hold — I’m just surprised to find out I’m a snail darter.”  Often little remnant or evolving creatures become the concern of people who could be described as “stopping progress.”  Now the law includes the concept of “takings,” in which one sues on the basis of governments preventing one from profiting by development.  It’s more common in the cities but it’s not about anything that actually exists — only about what COULD presumably result in profit.

Thinkers are beginning to propose that the historically happenstance “states” or even reservations are so arbitrary — think of the boundaries that are straight lines — that they need to be redrawn according to the ecology of the continent but also the phenomenon of the scattered population now piling up along the coasts and thickening into cities dependent on huge amounts of power, water, and proper sewage treatment.  I personally believe this is an excellent idea, but suggesting that gets a reaction sort of like eliminating all football teams:  very emotional, a kind of patriotism.  

The argument of the thinkers is that it has mostly already happened along the major commercial and travel corridors, so that we have megacities on the coasts and through the valleys.  As the ocean rises (which is not just theoretical since island nations are now submerged and arctic coastal natives are having to move inland), this will also force realignment and allocation.  New York City has already had to devise ways to close entrances to the subway in case of floods, which have already happened.

I expect major population collapses in the coming years, hopefully after I’m gone, most likely in Asian cities first.  Mosquitoes are not the only vectors.  The accumulation of unnatural molecules and garbage gyres may cause the scales to tip subtly, quietly, until we realize that responses like diabetes or HIV or autism are shortening lives drastically, maybe catastrophically.

Even now efforts to protect charismatic megamammals, and bugs as small and charming as the mission blue butterflies in the hills of Berkeley, remaps the insides of our heads.  The secret to managing animals is always managing the habitat, and all habitats are connected to what is around them and woven into them, like the habitats of humans.

Those who are pushing back against regulations often have good reasons.  They must state their positions strongly and emotionally in order to preserve their own space and terms of survival.  Demonizing them won’t do any good nor will despair.  Close cooperation and understanding are what will create an ecology of the mind that preserves what we love.

DOES SOVEREIGNTY EQUAL SEQUESTRATION?

The most common reaction I hear from non-rez people when rez people demand control of their own affairs and concerns is,  “Well, fine.  Then let them pay for their own education, law enforcement, roads and housing!”  Of course, this is pretty hypocritical when it comes to ag folks who depend on national subsidies or counties and small towns who ask for infrastructure or law enforcement grants.  Much “national security” money is disguised local law and order subsidies.

These matters used to be settled in “Game of Thrones” fashion:  sword against sword, which at least made for population control.  Now we’re more subtle, particularly when it comes to “out groups” like sex workers or HIV sufferers.  (More like “Madmen.”) It used to be that lepers were sequestered, put on an island if possible.  And now at least one activist has suggested that priests who molest children be put on islands where they could devote their lives to repentance.  Nowadays we’ve figured out how to monetize sequestration, so there is even more motivation to capture and incarcerate needy people who are too ready to declare themselves powerful, even if they have to use a gun to do it.  They may face extreme sequestration:  solitary confinement for decades.  We’re talking criminal sequestration or possibly war captives.

If sovereignty triggers sequestration, as it did with Native American literature (only Indians can write about Indians), the risk is that transactions that depend upon open borders can’t happen.  Native American literature at first seemed to benefit by “owning” all the NA books, but pretty soon what had become a point of principle (let ethnic people gain the profits derived from their lives) turned into a battle and then a no-one’s-land, because it was just too much trouble.  The readers and publishers sequestered it.  This had not happened when colonial explorers sent back excited reports or anthropologists had worked out cultural patterns for an academic audience.  Those were markers for entitled knowledge among the readers.  Now they feel guilty.

“Roundup Ready” alfalfa and wheat is genomically altered so that glyphosate (the active ingredient in the herbicide) won’t hurt it.  The idea is that the weeds won’t have this gene, so they’ll die easier.  And the assumption was that genes are safely sequestered inside the cells of the wheat.  It was a shock when the weeds quickly grabbed that gene for themselves.  Now we have “roundup ready” weeds.  What’s worse is that the altered genes have made the wheat different enough to disturb human digestion of the grain: celiac disease.  The lesson is that SEQUESTRATION IS NEVER POSSIBLE.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/science/earth/looking-for-ways-to-beat-the-weeds.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

People who want to treat people with HIV as lepers think that they can SEE HIV and thereby shut them off socially, avoid them, isolate them.  But they can’t.  If it were possible, there would be no lepers by now, but they still exist in spite of being obviously mutilated at later stages.  Life is a participation, a constant interchange of energy.  If participation is blocked completely, there is death and that’s what happened with HIV at first, frightening everyone until the persons who seemed most at risk, gay men who were “out,” seized sovereignty as surely as the Indians on Alcatraz.  Now they were “roundup ready.” 

The management of boundaries is an important factor in the constant process of exchange that is life.  From cell walls to no-fly lists, all these filters change everything -- not just one gene, one herbicide, one crop.  When law enforcement can’t keep order on a rez, people move to the nearby small towns.  Where the chickens go, the foxes soon follow.  Or maybe they are already there and grinning. 

Some boundaries are closed from the inside and others are imposed from the outside.  The folks who want their borders closed, ending immigration, must feel insecure, unable to handle any differences, any change.  They have not realized that illegal immigration is a long-standing phenomenon, economically entwined.  A soft version of it is the family that cocoons, as was common among homesteaders and small town people who had only themselves and nearest neighbors to help.  Of course, when times change the children break out and grow wings.  This has happened to plenty of younger Indians who flew the rez.

Gerrymandering is an artificial boundary-drawing which proposes to be promoting equity but is in fact oligarchic, serving those who are already rich and powerful.  Organic natural edges of populations are overlain with surveyors’ lines.  When a voting bloc is interrupted by the Rocky Mountains, only to make voters conform to certain types, the lines through the mountains are impossible to find, but there are too few people worried about it for the powerful to care so long as it prevents their opposition from gathering force.  Lines become irrational and unjust. 

A default line is covertly drawn between those who can afford HIV drugs and have lives orderly enough to self-administer properly and those others who either can’t afford them, can’t get their heads together enough, don't live in one place (like not under a bridge) long enough to take drugs properly, or who risk deportation or incarceration if they ask for help.  Tricks are the vectors who break the line, carrying the virus home to their families and lovers.  Not just the virus, but the attitude, the secrecy.  Part of the reason they do it is that they WANT to break the line, be dangerous, like white men who want to go live on the rez where they feel they can be violent alcoholics without interference.  Just now the law forbidding violence against tribal women by white men has been approved.  A line protecting white men who abuse Indian women has been erased.  The white men protest that they themselves aren’t safe now.  So?

So a line can be a law, a boundary, a social category, a chemical category, or any other concept grouping that our brains can grasp.  But then thinking must struggle to keep up with the implications.  Like teenagers who don’t know where the boundaries are, we want to be in charge of everything inside our walled community but soon discover this will cause us to be isolated.  So then we try to simply associate with “people like us” and watch the “guy on the left and the guy on the right.”  Most of the time that works, until we run into someone who’s not at all like us.  Esp. if it takes a while to figure out just how different.  How different is a gray hoodie?

So Shannon Augare, a handsome Democratic Blackfeet State Representative was drinking in Cut Bank one evening -- with his mother, Marla.  Only a short distance across the river that marks the edge of the reservation he was pulled over by a Glacier County sheriff’s deputy.  After a short discussion Augare simply drove off because the deputy had no jurisdiction.  The sheriff’s office contacted the Blackfeet Tribal police who found Augare parked and his mother in the driver’s seat.  Those officers drove the pair home.  No alcohol tests.  The Glacier County sheriff issued citations and there will be a trial.  Of course, the trial by society is already underway.  And somehow the FBI has stepped in.  Cue the music.  This is a discussion we need and Augare, with his lawyer Tom McKay, are eloquent.

You know what outcome might be interesting?  If Glacier County were redrawn to match the Blackfeet Reservation boundaries.  It’s been suggested before.  Cut Bank bar owners would be put out of business.  But maybe the rez is now “roundup ready.”

RE-CRIMINALIZING CONDOMS

When I was born in 1939, condoms were illegal.  Canada and the US were both trying to re-populate the prairies with productive farmer tax-payers, now that the governments had managed to eliminate all the Native Americans who were far too elusive and different to be useful.  NA’s were defined by their tribal “centers” rather than their “boundaries,” but nations are based on boundaries.  Some nations, like islands, have natural boundaries and so if their populations increase too much, things get crowded and emigration is necessary.  My grandfather, born in 1875 in Scotland, was the oldest of four children born to Archibald Mitchell Strachan, who was born in 1850 and who brought his family to the North American prairies where they survived but did not exactly prosper in spite of virtue and education.   My father was born in 1903 in South Dakota. 

My father, the oldest son of an oldest son, did not feel economically secure enough to start his own family until he was 34, partly because he was still helping his parents.  He was very concerned with limiting family size to two, as were his siblings.  A progressive man, he had a collection of pamphlets from Margaret Sanger, who actively promoted birth control.  His three sibs all limited their families to two, but somehow -- accidentally, I think -- there was a third conception at our house, my younger brother who is now dead.  As a human being, he was a joy -- quite gifted --  and not resented, but it was an extra cost that weighed the family down.

My parents’ birth control method -- actually my father’s choice -- was condoms.  He made such a big fuss about them that on his wedding day his brothers got access to his suitcase and laid in on top of his honeymoon pajamas a stallion condom, QUITE large.  Maybe you didn’t know that horses used condoms.  So do bulls.  (They need a little help putting them on.)

Condoms have nothing to do with virility.  They are about fertility and disease, a safety measure that has nothing to do with human marriage and everything to do with biology and planning.  (Check out veterinary supplies.)  My mother had her own ideas about birth control, so after the birth of the third child, she had her tubes tied.  (She was one of four sibs in a family that never quite had enough money, also didn’t marry until late because she was helping to support her birth family.)  I don’t know why my father wasn’t the one to have a vasectomy.  My parents were always faithful (so far as one can ever know), did not drink, did not party.

Condoms were illegal.  My father ordered them by mail and they arrived in a plain brown wrapper.  In our house it was a major crime to get to the mail before the adults. This became a personal challenge when I was three, because I liked to open packages, and also when I was thirteen, though by that age what I was after was magazines.  WWII and the resulting world-wide wave of accidental and orphaned babies plus venereal disease (today called STD’s) that changed society’s view, but even then “rubbers” were kept quietly in the back.  One asked the pharmacist, who might be inclined to give unwanted advice or even to refuse.  The conservative back-to-the-past forces of society like this.  It’s a great source of power for a righteous small town pharmacist to know who is buying condoms and in what quantity.

A movement is underway to forbid the CARRYING of condoms.  Not the purchase, not the practice, not the possession of icky used condoms, but packaged any-brand condoms, because it is ASSUMED that a person carrying a condom is a prostitute.  It’s obvious that the cops have slipped the paradigm of arresting people carrying little baggies of illegal drugs over onto sex.  (EVERYTHING gets slipped over to the obsession with sex.)  It is totally insane thinking.

Think of the unintended consequences:  sex without condoms obviously means unwanted pregnancy , anal sex to prevent pregnancy and a steep rise in both anally and vaginally transmitted diseases.  Carrying condoms is part of prevention to prevent spur of the moment unprotected sex.  On the one hand the authorities ban the carrying of condoms and on the other hand they make not wearing a seatbelt a criminal offense.  If they think banning condoms is an effective way of controlling prostitution by exposing sex workers to suffering and death, why do they not think that banning seatbelts is a good way of eliminating bad drivers?

Backdoor Johnny, a character I invented who is a creative thinker, sees this most recent development in a different way, since he has developed a brisk business in DNA collection and identification that depends on the collection of ejaculate from condoms, esp. those used by people in the sex biz. [See this blog on Jan 21, 2013. The idea is that he sells info from his database the same as Facebook sells its info about you.]  Backdoor Johnny sees that this law is intended to force “bare-backing” is so Johns will not be so easily traced, because they are liable to be cops or law-makers.  (He makes a LOT of money getting them into his database because of the potential blackmail.)

Sister AIDS, another invented character who is a creative thinker, looks at these laws in another way.  [www.strachanscriver.blogspot.com  SUNDAY, JUNE 10, 2012.  The idea is that a nun contracts HIV from a needle stick.]  She sees them as controlling women, children and nonconforming men by forcing them to take risks.  Sex exploiters are all in favor of unwanted children being born, because that’s where they get their “product,” a constant stream of marketable human beings that no one cares about very much because they are too economically fragile to form coherent families, whether genetic or chosen.  Sister AIDS belongs to a category of serious women that bad cops and legislators very much underestimate.  In the past they have devoted themselves to orphans and abused women, but now they begin to understand that it’s important to go to the source of the troubles.  Look at the testimony in this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=c9qBrFCSGDg

Pope Francis I may be conservative but he is also sensible and he must know that one of the main reasons Roman Catholics have become non-observant and even non-attending is that they know the consequences of having too many children and so use forbidden birth control.   Celibacy and female priests aside (which are the concern of priests, not congregants), growth in the Roman Catholic Church would be improved by quantum leaps if Francis I would endorse the use of condoms and birth control.  If people no longer had to go to confession knowing that what they do for family planning is a necessary sin, then they wouldn’t have to lie.  If they don’t have to lie -- and the priests know very well that they are but are not inclined to punish them for it since they understand the reasons -- they will be far more whole and less self-deceptive when it comes to other issues. A religious organization cannot depend upon secular authorities to enforce their medieval understanding of sex, their self-destructive attempts to control reproduction.  Locking the doors to prevent escape will not work.  You know the counselors’ saying:  “When a door closes, a window opens.”  Even a stained glass one.

If religious workers cannot see that bad sex is both the cause and the result of devaluing human beings, buying and selling human beings without their choice, using violence to control the vulnerable, and stripping all the love out of sex, then who can?  Certainly not legislators or cops.  These two categories are far more interested in their appearance to be doing something than they are in actual effectiveness.  But this is also true of religious leaders.  We need to create centers that draw people in, not boundaries that keep people out.

"THE STONING OF SOROYA M.": More Than a Parable

After watching “Lord of the Flies” and seeing what happens when the good old Brit rules fail, it’s instructive to watch “The Stoning of Soraya M.” and see what happens when rules are enforced, under corrupt circumstances or not. Soraya’s story is true. She was a blameless wife in a small village in Iran who was accused of adultery and stoned to death. The movie was made by Iranian ex-pats who did not shrink from reality. Using a puppet, CGI, and tricky technology, the method of killing is vividly cruel. The actress playing the victim, buried in a hole to keep her from escaping, knew what was coming but when movie blood ran down her face, she was no longer acting. The full horror hit her hard. The laws in question were Sharia laws, not English Common Law, but the two movies watched together make it clear that there’s more involved than just rules. So what is that?

My reference is a chapter in a Victor Turner book, whose ideas about liturgy I admire so much. The book is “Dramas, Fields and Metaphors” and the chapter is “Passages, Margins, and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas.” He suggests that culture is always balancing structure (laws, inspectors, punishers) against communitas which is basic human decency and care for each other. Maybe one could say laws versus principles is the same thing; even Leviticus versus Jesus.

It’s possible to go too far in either direction. Too far with law and you have Sharia stonings, too far WITHOUT law, and you have boys killing each other. But it’s hard to imagine too much loving kindness unless it becomes merely indulgence with no shape or order. There are instances of communitas emerging from groups in chaos when natural leaders find expression.

Two things make the laws in “The Stoning of Soraya M” so horrifyingly enforceable. One is laws, rules and punishments that invade far too many realms better addressed in the modern world by counseling, separation, arbitration, and so on. (Sharia law reaches into the home, affecting sex, diet, dress and so on.)

Second, people with power use laws to punish the vulnerable, the poor, the stigmatized, the “immoral,” the indigenous -- criminalizing them so the powerful can do what they like and profit from it. Too often Sharia law treats women like livestock. Lifting up of “the least of these” is urged in the stories and songs of poor people, often joined by religious persons like Jesus or St. Francis. The original Islamic movement DID include this force. Poverty becomes a solidarity and a source of kindness that is good for society as a whole. Happiness as individuals or as society depends upon successfully maintaining the tension between the two. Otherwise the result is demonstrations, revolt and guerrilla opposition.

The next series of movies that I’m watching is by Bela Tarr. “Satan Tango” is a seven hour depiction of a society so crushed by totalitarian control, poverty and corruption that life is only alcoholic misery. (It’s in Hungary -- oh, poor Hungary! In the Fifties I got up to listen to the 5AM news in hopes that they’d managed to revolt! Then the US let them down, which prompted e.e. cummings to say, “Let’s bury the Statue of Liberty because it’s beginning to stink.” The poets and the tricksters. also align themselves with communitas, the poor and the suffering.)

What I see around me in prairie small towns is the encouragement of “the majority rules” interpretations of democracy, instead of the communitas concept of protecting the minority. It’s not quite out of control, but enough to tilt the allotment of funds towards the benefit of the rich and powerful. Cut welfare, schools, subsidies for the arts. Okay, call it Republicans versus Democrats, except that it doesn’t parse out exactly.

Originally the rule of law was meant to restrain dictators, like the English kings who had the power of life and death over their subjects, like today’s remnants of the Ottoman Empire. In “The Stoning of Soraya M.” part of the dynamic was that Iran had had a dictator, the Shah, a tolerant leader who was open to Western-style freedoms. In the name of political freedom, the forces of Ayatollah Khomeini took back the country, conflating religion with secular governance. Then vengeance overran justice and once again people pretended to be God. Even in the US we intend the “rule of law” to preserve us from chaos and violence, but it must be constantly monitored and restrained to keep the government from pressing us into invasive rules. (Somebody please tell the Supreme Court.)

Reformation can finally be triggered when people are strangled by laws with disproportionate punishments. The US is going broke by incarcerating SEVEN TO TEN times more of its citizens than any other country. (Can that be true? A factoid from the radio.) Lives are destroyed. Families are broken. Commerce suffers.

In both Iran and the US the most inflammatory laws are about sex. The pill, the cost of raising children, the genome, fertility strategies, and so on have made many former rules simply obsolete. Can the 140 children of a sperm donor inherit his estate when he is already married? Bureaucratic structures like marriage are under attack from two directions. People ignore marriage by just living together, snubbing the rules as trivial and confining, with the result of confusing responsibility for finances, children, and inheritance. But on the other hand people who see marriage in the more romantic communitas sense of love and sharing want it certified for their own previously excluded kind. Such turmoil is the perfect opening for abuse. We are told that even in America today Sharia law is causing the death of women by the hands of their own family.

Our society is addressing the communitas forces through stories like this movie, even as the legislatures pass ever more complex laws, adding to the mess until we end up with something like our strangled fat tax code. The lack of realistic solutions prompts guerrilla activism: Occupy, street marches, wikileaks. Government pushbacks come in the name of law and order: the cops with pepper spray, fire hoses and truncheons. Our only hope seems to be that somehow the striving forces will produce a dialectic solution we can live with. But when?

Surely we could work out something better than trying to stone each other to death with words. The operant myth here might be the one about the hero who slew a dragon and sowed the land with its teeth. (Missile silos fill the earth around here.) They germinated and grew into ranks of soldiers. Someone threw a stone into the midst of them. The man who was struck by it turned on the next man and soon the whole company was killing each other until there was no one left. Sound like a presidential primary? Didn't Santorum just take a hit for religious conservatism?

"THE BITTER WATERS OF MEDICINE CREEK" by Richard Kluger

Some years ago I made a rule for myself that I would not read or buy books about Indians unless they were about Blackfeet. This was to keep me from spreading out on a shallow sheet of generalizations or irrelevancies about Indians, which happens to too many people. But this book meant that I had to demote my “rule” to “advice.” “The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek: A Tragic Clash between White and Native America” by Richard Kluger is about country I know as well as Montana because I grew up in Oregon. In fact, Montana was once part of the political category, though never really part of the ecological unit -- at least not the east side.

Medicine Creek is a place at the bottom of Puget Sound once inhabited by the Nisqually tribe. They were displaced by Isaac Stevens, a statue of whom stands on “Marias Pass” at the continental divide because he’s the one who identified the way through the Rockies that made the Great Northern high-line possible. This has been confused and disguised by the creation of Glacier National Park which is bordered on the south by the pass. So there is a Blackfeet connection after all.

Stevens was not a very nice guy and he did not like Indians, so it was a bitter day altogether when the United States negotiated the far more benign and intelligent governance of Hudson’s Bay out of what is now the Pacific Northwest. The British manager of Fort Nisqually, William F. Tolmie, had been like the “White-Headed Eagle”, Dr. John McLoughlin whom I was taught to venerate (though no one lingered on the fact of his Indian wife, whom he loved and had formally married). In fact, Tolmie remained in the area and resisted Stevens as much as he could.

The historical events in this book (mid-19th century) begin when Stevens -- directed by the US government to gather the Indians into the smallest and fewest reservations that he could -- assigned the Nisqually tribe to a couple of small stony islands in Puget Sound where there was no pasturage for their many horses or fertile ground for gardens. When the tribal leaders gathered, they were stunned. Leschi, Chief, refused to sign. “Signing” in those days consisted of making an x where the literate whites said your name was written. Since Leschi refused, Stevens or someone acting on his behalf, simply but secretly simply added the x.

Over the next two years the outraged Leschi and his small band of followers were on the run and on the campaign trail, trying to gather support to force a change. They went to the east side (similar to the dry side of Montana) where the tribes were wilder, more war-like, and less harassed by whites wanting their land. Their success was mixed. Sometimes those tribes were used to guard whites against them, esp. when Stevens went on his own campaign through the eastern part of the state. The situation amounted to war because the Nisqually nation WAS defined as a nation or a treaty would not be necessary.

Forces drawn into the situation included the Hudson’s Bay men, whose sympathies and sometimes protection were extended to Leschi’s side, partly because their wives were Indian; the US Army who found Stevens arrogant and overbearing, unwilling to negotiate; militia raised by Stevens when he imposed martial law; the judicial establishment whom Stevens attacked and evaded; vigilantes; and Ezra Meeker, frontiersman and historian -- plus other peace lovers and war lovers.

Long story short, Leschi was accused of murder, demonized, exonerated in one trial (“hung jury” -- irony in the term) and subjected to retrial in country friendlier to Stevens, and then hung. He was never proven to have fired the fatal shot, which was part of a war skirmish anyway. Evidence that tended to exonerate him was suppressed. The British Tolmie was Leschi’s interpreter in both trials. Meeker was one of the holdouts on the first jury that refused to convict.

Richard Kluger examines all the facts he could find, renders opinions and interpretations as fairly as he can, and then brings us up to date on the fate of the Nisqually who after many years of poverty appear to have made a recovery through the efforts of both Indians and whites, both men and a couple of remarkable tribal women. The tribe does have a “smoke shop,” and does have a casino (“Red Winds”) plus an ingenious business that does underwater scuba work, including the removal from the sound of destructive old lost fishing nets that entangle sea life. It was founded by a female diver, Cynthia Iyall, who had learned to hunt geoducks (giant clams) that way. The Nisqually were finally given more appropriate land and have reclaimed some of it to salt marsh for salmon spawning.

Kruger never mentions one of the hottest issues: since the tribe’s treaty was counterfeit, does it have a remaining legal claim to the ground under Sea-Tac airport? If he had brought this into the book, his book would never have seen print.

Native American treatment across this continent was rough, often unjust, full of dubious characters on both sides trying to throw events their way. What’s at stake is the reputation of the nation. If you think the events at Medicine Creek with its mix of contentious tribes and blundering authorities, its side tales about plural wives and loyal brothers, sounds very much like recent events in Afghanistan et al, you’d be absolutely right.

In the end (Kluger doesn’t tell us how much he was a part of this.) it was decided that it was impossible to exonerate Leschi in retrospect through the official courts, so an unofficial tribunal was convened to publicly reflect on the evidence and reach a morally binding conclusion. Kluger is a little disappointed that the verdict was brief, a simple statement of the opinion that Leschi was not guilty and should not have been convicted.

Isaac Stevens -- oh, how modern this sounds -- had made a lot of enemies but also created lots of “clients” in his years as governor, so he was finally gotten rid of by electing him to be senator. His wife was much relieved to move to Washington, D.C., which she considered to be civilization.

The rhetoric of this book is high-falutin’ and the information is sometimes detailed to the point of fatigue, but the clarity of the argument and the even-handed description of injustice and character failure make it a book worth reading and a benchmark to be met by subsequent analyses and attempts to get the general public to think and think again about the events that made this country possible.

BRAINS: BRUISED, BLOODY, BRAZEN

Coming unglued. Losing the vessel of identity. We know it when we see it. We can even feel ourselves when we’re slipping towards the edges of sanity through rage or confusion or depression. What is it?

Microbes: Up to one fifth of all people with schizophrenia were in their mother’s wombs when the mother had flu. We know viral infections of the brain (rabies, HIV) or the meninges can render thought impossible.

Parasites: Research on rats and toxoplasmosis suggest that toxo worms can not only persist in brains, but influence behavior.

Trauma: Direct penetration wounds obviously damage the capacity of a brain. It has become obvious that bruising from explosions outside an intact skull can damage the capacity of a brain. Scarring or clotting or blockage of the blood supply by spasms or bits of plaque or fat (we say “stroke”) can eliminate the functioning of the parts they affect.

Molecular: Ingestion of drugs; practices that trigger internal generation of molecules like serotonin or adrenaline; malfunction of secreting organs like the thyroid or the adrenals can radically change brain function.

Genome or proteome malfunction: The orchestrating and triggering functions of these molecules can suffer mutation of their codes, causing mental malfunction, as though a page of instructions were missing or printed upside down.

If all these causes interrupt sanity, to what degree can people be held responsible for the resulting actions? How much of being crazy is really psychological, meaning based on bad assumptions about the way the world works, or stuck in obsessive repetitions or outright hallucination. How much can be the result of conflicts between two irreconcilable purely mental forces like survivor guilt or Oedipus complex, Peter Pan syndrome, grandiose narcissism, post-traumatic syndrome, and others. So far there is no physical evidence of these -- not even an fMRI or brain wave reading. We diagnose on the basis of behavior or sometimes by free-association, story-telling, or art work that follows a pattern. It is the pattern that has the name, not the person. And we argue about both the name and the pattern, so they move around as we speak of them.

The legal tests for insanity are primarily whether the person can tell right from wrong plus sometimes “impaired impulse control” -- inability to resist. These definitions are cultural, negotiable. How much of insanity is dictated by society, particularly in the case of stigmatized persons -- like defiant Communist citizens consigned to “mental hospitals”. How much of insanity is really a nuisance quotient, so that quiet, withdrawn, invisible people are NOT considered insane or at least no one checks to see whether or not they are.

What holds an identity together? Memory, but that can be challenged and sometimes what we truly and sincerely remember can be proven false. Little things, like the way we dress and where we live. Family. (It can fall apart or turn on you.) Purpose. (What if you don’t know what you want to do?) Friends. (These days it’s hard to find friends who will stay.) Patriotism. Membership. Allegiance. Admiration from others. Or even hatred from others. A body of work.

If when we go to sleep at night, we lose our boundaries and fly, walk through walls, become animals, and walk naked through our old classrooms where we fail to prepare for tests -- none of these things would we or could we do when we are awake -- does that mean that in the night we have no identity? Some cultures would say we are inhabited by spirits.

When we are awake and in unusual situations, sometimes we find that we have far more strength, wit or resourcefulness than we ever suspected. Suddenly we make the fast move that catches the fly ball, or we lift the fallen beam off the leg of the survivor, or we are inspired to write a poem better than any written before. What is that? What “gets into us” then? How we would know the moment was exceptional if all the other moments had not been consistent and as expected?

Jason Russell, hailed as a hero full of bravery and perception in his video about Kony 2012, is now video-taped running naked through the streets, raving. Pressure? Drugs? Always a little out of touch with reality? Guilty of being a handsome privileged white boy with delusions of heroism? Now it is Kony, the warlord, shrewd, wary and full of cover stories, who seems to have a strong sense of his identity, though it includes unutterable cruelty. Is he sane?

Staff Sergeant Bales slips out of camp at night to murder civilian families. Brain malfunction or character malfunction? Is this the natural path of development for a swindler? Or does he have a brain tumor? Or is he part of a rogue culture that justifies such actions as revenge? Is he mad with grief?

I just reread “The Brothel Boy” and ordered some other books by Norval Morris. His field of expertise was the insanity defense in criminal trials. He was the sanest of men. I knew him and have been thinking about him while I watched some war crime movies made in Australia. (Morris was from New Zealand but fought in the Australian army.) Aussies have a sharp consciousness of law because the country was started as a penal colony. They also have a tough outlook on life, something like the American West. Endurance, stoicism, the valor of standing by your identity, be it country or religion, count big with them. “Breaker Morant” is about the heroism of the victim or the victimization of heroes -- however you want to look at it.

At bottom, isn’t insanity a kind of ambiguity? A not-knowing for sure? Maybe that’s why we’re suddenly so insistent on knowing the “truth” in the face of the obvious impossibility of knowing anything for sure. Parallel universes mean parallel histories mean parallel cause-and-effect chains.

Somewhere recently I read an analysis of the difference between the American legal and governance system, which is based on proper procedure, and -- what country was it? France? Where the system is based on justice, regardless of technicalities. Does compassion come to play anywhere? Isn’t compassion far too fickle to depend upon, a mere fund-raising tactic? Or is compassion just a function of mirror-cell empathy that interferes with identity?

THE VULNERABILITY OF BEING "DISGUSTING"

This is my last post responding to “From Disgust to Humanity:  Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law” by Martha Nussbaum, and some people will be grateful since the subject makes them feel a little disgusting for even reading about such matters -- as well as vulnerable.  It’s the vulnerability I want to address.  Nussbaum’s last chapters are about sex shows defined as a court case about women dancing nude.  She speaks of Justice Richard Posner carefully reviewing the history and uses of such dances through the ages and defending nudity as a necessary part of the meaning when describing eroticism.  Later she considers whether such businesses can be considered a nuisance, possibly a danger to the surrounding community.

She does not consider the male sex worker or the vulnerability of sex workers, which is simply addressed by the law in terms of assault and murder.  Female sex workers are targets of obsessive rage and disgust-prompted gaze-aversion by nice people that allows the workers to be attacked and killed with impunity.  I don’t think it would be hard to find police cases where exotic dancers emerging from their place of work are attacked with acid, knives, guns.  The novel and movie “In the Cut” outline the sort of obsessed control freaks who try to destroy women.  Yet the former mayor of Great Falls, owner of a bar just outside of the city’s zoning restrictions (restrictions imposed because of worries about danger and nuisance to neighborhoods) hired exotic dancers and was convicted of “allowing” prostitution in a secluded back room.  This went on for a long time until the mayor’s DUI convictions piled up enough to provoke authorities.  (Arguably, DUI presents more danger to the public than exotic dancers or even prostitutes.)

As Tim often says, “you probably won’t believe this,” but decades ago a local rancher took me across the Canadian border to a nude dancing establishment in Lethbridge, which has always been a notorious “sin town.”  I thought we were going to the movies.  It’s about the same distance from here as Great Falls is.  The two dancers (it was afternoon so things were a little quiet) were at opposite extremes on just about every measure.  One was a very young girl, just beginning, awkward and insecure.  Her farmboy/boyfriend/pimp sat at the edge of the stage and coached her.  The other dancer was a muscular dark-eyed woman with bright red hair (not natural) whose dance was gymnastic and gynecological.  She was in total contempt of her audience, spoke taunts, and glowered in particular specifically at ME.  (Sometimes when you’re curious to know about something, you find out a lot more than you bargained for. ) 

That first girl was about as vulnerable as a human being can be, skinny (the rancher remarked, “that little girl needs feeding!” as though she were a calf), pale, goose-bumped, poorly made up, bad haircut, homemade costume, callow young “boyfriend” who could not have protected her.  I suspect the tough redhead had a gun and could use it.  But there would be no danger to the community in this place because its viability depended upon secrecy.  It was in a warehouse district, unmarked, and large alert men leaned against the walls with folded arms, watching the clientele.  I went back some years later, found the building, and saw when I circled the block that the back entrance was protected by a high brick maze (probably bullet-proof) that allowed cars to pull in so that the distance to cross when entering was very short and unseen.  Of course, such an arrangement -- which would protect emerging women -- was also convenient for taking in drugs -- or drugged women.  Use your imagination.  

Men can also be prostitutes.  But women’s vulnerability is shared by boys.  Small children are, of course, vulnerable to everything and adults must take responsibility for their safety.  Across the planet trafficking in small children of both sexes is common.  We’re told that in some places when they are no longer useful, maybe infected with HIV,  they are simply taken into the woods and shot.    

I’m thinking of Tim’s adolescent boys, sometimes legally adult, depending on the country.  Self-supporting, they are under the same economic sword as women, which is one kind of vulnerability.  Smaller and less developed than they will someday be, they are vulnerable to violence.  (Think Mathew Shepard.)  Not experienced enough to have awareness, strategy, and a portfolio of possible resources, they can be deceived or overpowered.  Spared the contempt some men have for women, they are nevertheless hated for being “pansies,” “nancys,” -- or should I say, “marys.”  A further vulnerability is simply being invisible, their existence denied and ignored by the larger culture, even though in hard times it is boys who are thrown out of their homes or who leave voluntarily, runaways.

I’m aware of my own vulnerability for even being associated with Tim Barrus or writing about these subjects.  It is my age, isolation in an orderly small town, and education that makes me able to talk about it in ways I could not when I lived in the city.  Even as a clerical person in a city bureaucracy, I felt I had to keep bear spray in my desk because of the raging people who sometimes came to the counter over nuisance issues.  And yet Portland is or was known to have chickenhawks who included local politicians.  (The mayor of Portland was caught shtupping his underaged baby sitter.  Female.)

This failure of awareness (both ignorance and suppressed knowledge) leads to inconsistent laws and enforcement, which undermine the integrity of the police and courts, and fail to protect all citizens and youngsters.  Tim and the boys often stage workshops on how to keep safe: partly practicalities like tying safe bondage knots, partly safeguards like taking another boy to the location to watch from nearby, maybe by carrying a tiny “smart phone.”  HIV-AIDS is not the only hazard.  Men pay to beat boys and get carried away.  The core group of Cinematheque had already discovered that pay-per-view cyber-sex was safer in the immediate situation, but could create a known public image that put them at risk from stalkers who wanted to “own” them or destroy them.  Thus, masks.  In the past Tim had also worked with female prostitutes to improve their safety and, indeed, much of what he taught came FROM them and their sorry experiences.  He himself had been raped.

Law makers are often liberal white people who simply don’t have enough raw and rough experience.  Considering whether pasties and g-strings will incite disorder if they are left off is a far cry from trying to protect sex workers.  Underlying disgust distorts reality and encourages denial.  Someone needs to bridge the gap in consciousness.  But it’s very easy to use disgust to shut up any reports.

WATER WARS START AT HOME

Avonlea and Cranston, those famous small towns, have got nothing on Valier for story material, though it can crop up unexpectedly. Last night’s town council meeting was a good example. Jackie, the town clerk, had offered me an agenda earlier in the week which I declined, saying that I didn’t really care what was on the agenda because I watch the dynamics. She looked puzzled. No doubt she has not been subjected to as many classes and workshops and theories on group dynamics as I have in the course of the last fifty years -- not counting “Anne of Green Gables.”

As every political entity knows, pressure creates heat and we are no exception. It also encourages patriotism, so the meeting began with a Boy Scout color guard presenting the colors and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. At that point there were more kids than adults in the room, though maybe thirty chairs were arranged in preparation. The evening’s work started out peacefully and continued that way until the very last item: paying the big stack of bills waiting for approval. I used to leave at that point, but then I realized that there was something about that process that evoked more real discussion than anything on the formal agenda.

Sure enough, Jerry picked up the new lawyer’s bill and found the amount offensive. I’ve served on a jury with Jerry so I know that his attention to detail and just recompense is a sign of wary intelligence, which is why he runs a successful business. Much of the town’s underground infrastructure is in his head because he’s dug it all up to fix leaks and then reburied it. (The town is full of maps in people’s heads. Not on paper.)

The lawyers were only hired at the last meeting, arriving as a pair from Choteau, Stoney Burk’s firm. Stoney is -- or was -- my lawyer because research indicated he was one of the few honest lawyers around. Besides I’ve known his brother, Dale, pretty well since the Sixties when he was writing about Montana artists. He runs Stoneydale Press. But these youngsters are a different story. Stoney had written my will when I moved back here and owned property for the first time. It temporarily made him the executor of my estate until I found my brother’s daughter. She’s found now, so I didn’t need that will and swung by the office to pick up the old one.

These young lawyers wouldn’t give it to me. I’m still incredulous. I stormed and stamped and threw threats around. Stoney wasn’t there and couldn’t be reached by phone. It was a fencing match. The young one finally gave me an imitation will to get rid of me. When Stoney was told, he mailed me the original documents. At the Town Council meeting when they were interviewed they recognized me but couldn’t remember why. I told ‘em. They were critical of Stoney. I told ‘em what I thought of that. They said blithely, “Oh, do call us if you need anything.” It’s not me who has the need.

So the reason the bill from these guys was high was that we’ve got some people in town who have not been paying their water bills. The mayor called the lawyers to see whether it was legal to shut them off. Jerry was pointing out that he’d simply called the relevant state agency for direct advice and it cost NOTHING. So this was the first evidence of what happens when a corporate business trained person from out of state (the mayor) runs athwart of a local Montana businessman used to navigating the state regulations. I’ve been expecting this.

What I didn’t predict was two other people: Rod, another powerful and well-connected business man who doesn’t like fooling around with minutia and irrelevance and who is strong enough to face down even Jerry. He’s new to the council. The other person was Jackie, who has been pushed into cross-fire because she’s the one in the office that everyone calls. She’s bank-trained, very reluctant to offend anyone, loath to being forced into bill-collecting, and unused to having the mayor actually sitting in the office at the next desk. She felt very much blamed and criticized, entirely unjustly.

The struggle -- and it was a good faith struggle, not based on bad motives -- was about (in my opinion) the welter of guidelines for this issue of shutting water off. People never keep straight in their minds that there are two main kinds of law: actual written law (felony, misdemeanor, originating in Chinese boxes of jurisdiction), regulations developed by administrators or their boards which might have fees, penalties and so on, and tort law, which means that anyone could be sued for anything anytime. These people are in general folks who operate by rules rather than principles. The question of justice and good will didn’t come up. Jackie went for the town’s ordinance book several times. She lamented that there was no procedural handbook. The town’s two other employees, who knew more about this issue than anyone else in the room, said nothing. It was going their way.

Then came fear. The mayor pointed out that she was calling the lawyers to protect the council from lawsuits and suggested they could be sued over their decisions, exposing themselves, their businesses, their homes, and so on to huge loss. Rod said if that were true, he was resigning the council immediately. And you could expect no replacement. The discussion worked its way around to the idea of the council being protected unless they stepped outside their roles in a malicious or unjustified way. (This did this last summer, pushed beyond tolerance by a messy unmown yard, an obsession.)

Finally the discussion worked its way around to fairness and equity. Four people had been actually disconnected. Three had come up with the back bill immediately. They had been charged fifty dollars for being turned off and another fifty for being turned on. The man who offended the council most was a guy who came home at 5PM on Thursday, found his water off, knew the office was closed on Friday and that the weekend was a three day holiday. So he went out and turned the water back on himself. It was suggested that this was a FELONY and he could be jailed! The other three had paid $100 as what was now being called a “fine.”

I couldn’t resist breaking in. The “fee” or “fine” or whatever was imposed at a meeting I had attended. At that time there was no charge at all. A fee was supposed to recover the cost of labor for the city employees and was not a “fine” but a discouragement for people who repeatedly called the office to ask to have their water turned on or off. But turning the water off for not paying the bill is at the town’s behest, a drastic punishment in itself. To put it dramatically, the town was in the position of requiring people to buy the rope with which to hang them.

The secret of governing a small town is not allowing this sort of thing to fester into bad feeling that will certainly bring people to the meeting in a rage. But the problem is confusion, suspicions of malice, and insistence on plain raw power in the hands that hold the water valve wrench. At one point I caught the amused eye of the local county deputy, who has been educated to the idea that strict enforcement of the letter of the law is often incendiary when a friendly nudge might solve the problem. Especially in a small town where lives are interwoven over time, as deeply connected as water pipes.

After the meeting everyone cooperated to restore the hall's furniture for the Senior Citizen's lunch the next day.

RE-THINKING MONEY

Remember that guy a few years ago who figured out to hack into ATM codes so that every time someone made a deposit, the software rounded it up to the nearest dime and deposited the difference -- never more than a few pennies -- to his own account? He made millions, because there were so many deposits -- until he was detected by penny-chasing software. The discrepancies were so small that they went unnoticed.

Something like that seems to be going on all the time, not just at the level of toxic loans, insecure securities, and underwater mortgages, but also at the gas pump, the grocery store, and the county clerk’s office, little bits of chiseling, add-ons and sleight-of-hand. I’m foaming over the latter today because I went down to the county court house to register a “beneficiary deed” which on my death will automatically transfer the ownership of this house to my niece without probate. I thought I was escaping lawyers. What I discovered was that I could not register this document without a “Realty Transfer Certificate,” a “confidential tax document” that makes her liable for any county taxes on the property. At this point she would not have to pay the taxes until my death, which makes it seem all harmless, but who knows what circumstances will be when I DO die? She might not be in a position to pay any taxes and there may not be potential to sell this house. It might be a liability instead of a bequest. What the State wants is to know ahead of time whom to go after for money. There are lots and houses sitting empty in this town because they are a liability, for instance, the lot where a former gas station’s leaky gas tanks caused contamination VERY expensive to clean up. All inheritors are claiming NOT to have inherited -- in expensive lawsuits, of course.

I keep seeing stories in the newspaper that make me deeply dubious about the practice of levying fines or punishments in the form of imposing a debt. Today there was a story about a woman who embezzled over a hundred thousand dollars. The judge’s sentence was a year in jail and the requirement that she pay back all the money, but how realistic is that? Who will hire an embezzler who’s been sitting around talking about swindles with felons for a year? Assuming she finds a job, at the level of salary she might draw -- which won’t be the top of the market -- how long will it take her to make a hundred thousand dollars? What does she live on? Does the court say how much she can pay for rent, how much for groceries? Won’t she be pretty well trapped unless she embezzles again, this time more cleverly? Or leaves the country?

I just paid off my Exxon bill. Two months ago I paid off the gas I had bought. Since then I’ve been paying off the late fees that were levied because I didn’t have enough money to pay for the gas at what they considered on time. When I first got the charge card, I strictly paid off the total monthly. There was no definition of “late.” Then we went to five dollar gas. Then the bill began to show a “minimum payment” that was acceptable and I used that option. Pretty soon there was a $10 late fee -- which was really unavoidable because the bill always came a couple of weeks later than the others so it was paid in the next Social Security cycle. Then the late fee began to increase. Notification was in those eye-straining tiny print pamphlets that come with the bill. (Unreadable by some elderly.)

Sometimes I sent the money on time, but blizzards and holidays intervened so that it didn’t get there on time. Also, I began to suspect that it DID arrive on time but sat in a pile until someone had time to post it. When I called to protest, the woman on the phone coolly informed me that the solution was to give them access to automatic debit, the ability to take money out of my checking account without my permission or even my knowledge. At the same time my bank began to impose a fee for overdrafts (I’d been exempt as a courtesy for senior citizens) and then raised that fee. I think it’s up to fifty dollars now.

I only have one automatic debit, which is Netflix, $20 a month. Twice I incurred an overdraft fee from the bank because Netflix always debited on the day just BEFORE my SSI deposit showed up in the bank, when funds were lowest. An amount as small as fifty cents can throw one into overdraft. The debit date is the automatic result of the time interval from signup. That is, if you sign up on the tenth, that’s when the debit comes. At least the Netflix telephone staff was willing to explain it all. I had to cancel Netflix, wait until the debit date safely interacted with the deposit date, and then re-enroll. Who knew all this stuff? It was a fifty dollar tutorial. That’s five per cent of my income.

How much sense does it make to impose fees because people don’t have enough money? But if we confine people, which is our only alternative punishment, it costs the PUBLIC money to feed, house and clothe the wicked. Jails are expensive and when we crowd the cells to extreme levels with our severe sentence decisions -- as California has done -- then the courts step in and some felons will go free. Public service sentences quickly becomes a substitute for paying people to do jobs as regular work. Some use credit-rating services as threats, but as we get deeper into the bowels of finance, they turn out to be no indicator of ability to pay.

Will we get so frustrated that we go to Taliban-type whipping? When people used to talk about what would keep drunk drivers from driving, Bob used to remark dryly that if their hands were chopped off, they would drive with their elbows. Will we go to such extremes in our determination to make laws work?

Hopefully, with a new government beginning to take up regulation, inspection and “nudging,” things can be channeled constructively.