HOW NOT TO GET RICH AND FAMOUS

Cory Doctorow

Dave Lull, a librarian administrator who is an alert scout and tips the rest of us, whether or not they have a hat, sends me an article by Edward Kosner that appeared in the Wall Street Journal and that is a review of Cory Doctorow’s “Information Doesn't Want To Be Free: Laws For The Internet Age ,” a slender book from McSweeney’s.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-information-doesnt-want-to-be-free-by-cory-doctorow-1416355531

This link below also proved to be interesting, though my comment wasn't posted.

http://io9.com/cory-doctorow-is-here-to-take-your-questions-1660631716

Edward Kosner

Following is from Wikipedia,therefore unattributed and not copyrighted:  “Edward Kosner (born July 26. 1937) is an American journalist and author who served as the top editor of Newsweek, New York, and Esquire magazines and the New York Daily News during a forty-five-year career. He is the author of a memoir, “It’s News to Me,” published in 2006, and is a frequent book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. He lives in New York and on Amelia Island on the Atlantic coast of northern Florida.”   Kay Graham fired him as the editor of Newsweek.  I have no idea why, except that he’s aligned with the 2%.  He’s an example of what Tom Sheehan imagines to be a person sitting at a big desk deciding who gets in and who’s out.  Those who have actually edited know that in a sense they have reality by the throat (censorship of a kind), but reality fights back through advertisers, paper prices, and readership numbers.  As an editor he probably makes a lot more money than most authors.

The single best and surest way to make money on the Internet is to compile lists of people that connects them to their interests and histories.  These lists are valuable, esp. when the numbers are large and interrelated.  So when I responded to a promotional dialogue with Cory Doctorow, I was handing over a particle of gold dust to Kinja.  Since this was promotional, I also acted out the position that the Internet is an instrument of promotion, not publication.  I suppose Doctorow might be expecting that his book will be pirated.  I’ll wait until it’s a used book that drops below 99 cents on Amazon.  By that time the conversation will have moved on.  Maybe not very far on this subject, which seems stuck.

Caxton demonstrating his printing press

When copyright was invented in England to defend against the newly invented printing press (it didn’t, esp. after offset printing was invented), it was a matter of national law and then international treaty.  (If there was no treaty with another country, material could be legally copied there.  Doctorow calls this “geofencing.”)  In the Eighties, when I was going back and forth between the US and Canada, I had to check that I wasn’t carrying any books because they would be impounded at the border, at least if entering Canada where they were hypervigilant about the Great American Elephant rolling over and squashing them.  Now I buy books on Amazon.CA as freely as the US version of the website and with no particular tariff -- just the exchange rate.  I buy books from Ireland, which never had much use for English anything.

One of the uses of Internet-compiled lists of people is surveillance by law enforcers.  Dirty books are the least of it. Libraries in the US are constrained by law not to release the names of borrowers and their interests even if they are borrowing books about bombs or torture.  The Internet “feels” secret and out of the local social context, but it is quicksand revealing where and who you are, what you look at online, who you talk to, what you buy.  And we notice that it indicts governments and law enforcers as well as law-breakers.

Elizabeth R. Scheffler Appointed Director, 

Office of Public Records and Repositories

But the real dirty secret is that laws are only enforced if they are funded and they are only funded if the general public will support it or if the party in question has deep pockets or a bully pulpit.  So Doctorow, Kosner, McSweeney, and Kinja all either feel they have the resources to insist that copyright be enforced or feel that there is enough profit even if pirated.

Another vicious little aspect to copyright is that unless you can prove that you created something and the date when you did, someone else with deep pockets can claim your work, copyright it, and sell it legally.  In lieu of viable copyright law, I publish my work on the Internet, mostly on blogs but also with “print on demand” websites like lulu.com.  In that way I can prove the identity and date of creation.  Bob Scriver spent many hours and dollars to get his sculpture recorded with the National Copyright Office.  Since he created more than a thousand large and small sculptures, it amounted to a good bit of money.

"No More Buffalo" by Bob Scriver

His earliest copied and most commonly pirated sculpture.

But it made no difference.  The copying went on and not only was it too expensive to stop (and anyway we usually didn’t find out it had happened until quite a bit later and there was no “recall” as there is with automobiles) but also it undercut the value of the legitimate and legal castings by casting doubt on their origin.  A “good” copy is hard to distinguish from the “real” thing.  Usually patina is a giveaway or maybe carelessly set-up molds.  Not many people can tell and so the entire market for bronzes has been undercut.  Many, if not most, of the people who think they own “Remington bronzes” only own bad knockoffs.  But, hey, haute couture has the same problem.

Represented as a Remington, it's not even the right sculptor!

Fraser, the true sculptor of "End of the Trail"

This law, meant to address print, was made useless when the easy reproduction of almost every art form (including sex, if you don’t insist on real flesh) coincided with devices allowing music to be portable as much as reproduced easily.  When movies and books followed, those art forms became part of our lives, creating desire and all its fetishes.  Our lives became so easily virtual that some people are quite content to avoid reality.

One of the realities they evade is that the worship and privileging of “creativity” per se is a fetish, a conditioned response.  Say you’re a writer or an artist or a musician and there will be an immediate gasp of admiration and the assumption that you can make money out of thin air, even if you aren’t at the moment. Those who seek to enforce copyright law are using that idea of the sanctity of creativity to cover the REAL desire, which is for money.   What if we passed laws saying that all productive and valued creative people would automatically be granted enough money to live on?  Who would decide who they were?  (Their friends.  But that’s already the way it is.  Publishing is a circle jerk.)

For some unenlightened populations, there is no consciousness of the actual creation of something like writing or music.  It just seems THERE like a tree.  The law allows for certain uses:  quotes while reviewing or referring to research, copying while learning to paint or write, and pastiche which is an art form in itself.  “The Wind Done Gone” has been ruled legitimate as satirical comment on “Gone with the Wind.”  Curly Bear Wagner went a bit far when he tried to copyright Chief Mountain and charge a fee to everyone who took a photo.  Of course, the ensuing controversy was a good example of promotion.

Chief Mountain

Doctorow is right that in order to make money it is necessary to create desire for your work.  If no one gives a rip, copyright will have no impact at all.  But if people are obsessed with it, no amount of law-making will keep people from pirating it.  For both Bob and I, the obsession is not even with our  personal creative work, but rather with the fetish of Plains Indians, that 19^th century “feather fetish” that is a pain in the ass for real Indians.  As satire, Curly Bear copyrighting Chief Mountain really works. 

INTERESTING TIMES ON THE REZ BORDER

We have an “interesting” situation here on the interface 3-way interface (rez/county/fed) with the Blackfeet reservation but before I address it I want to tell two stories.

http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/04/041121.gilkey.shtml

The first one is from “Shantung Compound” by Langdon Gilkey, one of my most brilliant and inspirational professors at the U of C Div School.  Gilkey was a colorful guy who wore a necklace and bandanna instead of a tie and ran class by sitting on his desk, inviting us to suggest a topic on which he could riff.  He wrote quite a few books, but “Shantung Compound” was about being interned by the Japanese at the beginning of WWII.  He was a young man at that point, not quite as young as in the movie, “Empire of the Sun”.  Most of the Westerners who had been rounded up were missionaries, and some of the stories were about the conflict between the different styles and assumptions.  His fav group was the Trappist monks, whose worst suffering came from being unable to achieve solitude in the camp, but whose strength was their solidarity.  If the Japanese demanded that offenders step forward, the whole group would step forward to accept punishment.  Because they tended to be big guys in identical robes with full beards and long hair, the Japanese couldn’t tell them apart, so this foiled all attempts to divide and conquer.

The conservative Protestants were interned as family units and the often aggressive parents put their family well-being ahead of even their Christian principles.  The camp was ruled by a committee of intern representatives, one of whose duties was the allocation of resources.  The most precious of these was space.  At some point it became necessary to shrink the spaces allotted to the families, but the policy was so ferociously opposed that the committee could not make the families comply.  In the end they had to resort to getting the Japanese guards to come with guns to force the families to obey.

The second story was told to me by the daughter of a white Browning school administrator deep in the past. I ran into her in Portland twenty years ago, so I may have the details wrong. In those days the administrators (principals and superintendent, both white and enrolled) did their drinking in Valier, which had bars then.  They were adult male entitled people who drank together to show solidarity.  It’s a status marker, a way to be seen publicly as a unit and to blow off steam in enough of a group to be relatively safe. Like a cop bar.

But the father of the woman who told me this story didn’t like to drink, didn’t want to be out at night, and liked time with his family.  So he refused to join the group.  They didn’t like this, so after they got pretty well lubricated, they piled into a car and went up to this administrator’s house to make him come drink with them.  He wouldn’t even open the door.  So they began to pelt the house with rocks, eventually smashing the big picture window in front.  That sobered them up enough to scatter.  How this was finally resolved is unknown to me, but it stayed in my head as a good example of pack behavior.  I know the people involved, and they are decent human beings.  But they didn’t like anyone getting out of line.

So now let’s talk about Shannon Augare.  I don’t know Shannon.  I knew Calvin Augare, who might be his uncle, and who was Bob Scriver’s hunting buddy, the man who saved Bob from going blind by forcing IHS to look at Bob’s enflamed eye and then driving him to Great Falls to a specialist.  He was a man of principle who insisted on results, so that’s the way I think of Shannon.  The deal was that a Cut Bank cop followed Shannon from a bar to  the reservation, pulled him over, accused him of being drunk, argued and reached into the car for the keys, which caused Augare to drive off.  He was served a citation the next day.

We’ve got several “third-rail” issues in this situation:  one is drunk driving and another is law enforcement on reservations.  People die in car accidents a LOT -- often by colliding with livestock.  There are also many violent incidents on the rez, often against women or even children.  The FBI sort of waves the cases on.  The newspaper stories -- which always have a sensationalist tilt anyway -- testify that this is a place and time that is having a hard time re-aligning laws, perps and victims.  Shannon is both a state senator and on the tribal council, which means in some minds he is presumed to have too much power.  An enduring Blackfeet sin is “getting the big head.”  Montana feels that way, too, except for recent immigrants.

Shannon Augare had previously been involved in one of those strategy blockades in the state senate, foiling a planned vote by not showing up.  (He’s a D, Cut Bank is R.  He's either culprit or rescuer, depending on which side you favor.)  I went to look at the drinking “hole” in Cut Bank, which is in the middle of town and newly redecorated, probably benefitting from the renewed oil-drilling action, maybe a half-mile from the rez -- the dividing river is at the edge of town.  It is not a big town.   I did a walk-through before business started because the last time I was in a Cut Bank bar was 1962, the height of oil-drilling action, and it was a very unpleasant experience.  Cut Bank is an oil town and a reservation vampire.  They are not friendly to reservation law enforcement and would love to see some fancy Blackfeet “suits” brought down to what might be considered their proper status, according to Texas immigrants with images of John Wayne dancing in their heads.  I don’t suppose the rez cops are very fond of oil roughnecks.

MONTANA FREEDOM CAMPAIGN REPORT CARD

Looks good from my point of view -- just turn it upside down.

Of course, it was stupid and self-deceiving for Augare to think that he could step out of line in any way, even if his mother was with him, which she was.  And it was stupid of the local cop to pursue and attempt to detain Augare in a way that could easily have escalated into tragedy.  The cop had a partner with him and a video cam running which may have given him an exaggerated sense of authority.  But my guess is that he just wanted to nail Augare.  Every person on the scene was offending, enabling, and persecuting.  Very mixed.  

Then came the FBI, rubbing its hands together in anticipation.  It appears Carl Pepion called them in, setting up a competing triangle of motives and roles.  Essentially, he brought in guards to use their fire power to force compliance to what he considers the “right thing.”  (Carl is the Tribal Chief Prosecutor.)  Sharp, the tribal council chair, is sticking to the principle of sovereignty.  A body cannot be sovereign if it has to resort to the FBI, which originally was limited to ten major crimes (murder, rape, and others) but has managed to wiggle into many situations without really being on the scene: armchair analysts playing a long game with no skin in the game.  (see footnote)

I’m in Valier, adjacent to the rez.  We’re involved in all sorts of three-handed games, but so far the FBI has stayed out, though there is other Federal pressure.  Mostly we’re wrestling with infrastructure erosion versus economic issues, which are less violent but sometimes seem equally insoluble.  Water rights, for instance, are as much a sovereignty interface problem as who gets to pull over whom for drunk driving.  At least it’s not likely there will be a massacre like a hundred years ago when the cavalry was called in to show who was boss.  At least I hope not.  I don’t want to see blood, no matter the source or kind.

FOOTNOTE:

http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/law-enforcement-bulletin/may-2012/indian-country-and-the-tribal-law-and-order-act-of-2010

Indian Country and the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010By Michael J. Bulzomi, J.D.

“In 1885, Congress passed the Major Crimes Act to address the resolution of cases in which a crime involving two Native American parties occurs in Indian country. This Act established federal jurisdiction over seven crimes committed in these instances. The original seven covered by the Act include murder, manslaughter, rape, assault with intent to kill, arson, burglary, and larceny. Subsequent amendments to the Act have added seven more offenses: kidnapping, incest, assault with a dangerous weapon, assault resulting in serious bodily injury, assault with intent to commit rape, robbery, and felonious sexual molestation of a minor. “

This whole document is worth reading in regard to the Shannon Augare incident and the general background.

THOUGHTS ON WATCHING "LAW & ORDER SVU"

This post was started before I knew that Dick Wolf had a new series opening.  I had been following Chris Meloni which led me to “Law & Order SVU.”  This series is intentionally provocative, but I’m not responding to the “ripped from the headlines” sensationalism of the cases.  Rather I’m thinking about the development of an American “repertory theatre” body of actors something like the beloved BBC actors we watch in so many roles.  Since I’m typing up acting notes from classes I took at the end of the Fifties, I’m thinking about acting per se.  And I’m thinking about the show in terms of how I have understood the tussle between law and justice over the years, esp. in the five years I was an animal control officer.  

The first phenomenon, a “stable” of extremely skilled actors who work well together, seems to be due at least in part to a shift from Hollywood to New York where many of the actors also appear on the stage.  Then, in turn, long-term series like “Hill Street Blues” leading into “NYPD Blue” and “Homicide” leading into “The Wire” -- mostly driven by a person or persons with a vision -- has supported a high level of writing.  Now I read in the NYTimes that Wolf wants to create the same kind of talent complex in Chicago, which is where I took my undergrad degree in “Speech Education,” actually a lot of theatre.  I KNOW there are a host of small repertory theatres and very fine actors who do academic teaching.

As I watch “L&O svu,”  I recognize many regulars from “Oz” and “The Wire” or even as far back as “HIll Street Blues”.  (My boss at Animal Control was very much like the sergeant who cautioned the officers to “be careful out there.”)   Chris Meloni’s career kicked off with “NYPD Blue.”  With a face like an Aku-Aku effigy, he somehow manages to make it ripple as subtly a summer pond in a breeze.  Both as the sociopathic convict in “Oz” and as the stalwart moral enforcer in “SVU”, he radiates intelligence .  He can say more with a brief sideways glance while leaving a room than anyone who would wheel and give a lecture.  When he left the series, fans also left.

The two shows are quite different.  “Oz” was character interaction in a pressurized environment where all bets were off.  Death removed main characters.  But if a person followed industry backstage gossip, it was not long until one realized that under the chaotic plot lines were the lives of the actors.  If one of them needed a break, something happened to put the character on hold, the way it happens in soaps.  In fact, “Oz” was much like a soap for tough guys with great bodies but it sometimes reached for epic novel.  Because the lid was off sex as a subject matter, the same old familiar plot lines of greed, turf and intimacy took on new life -- went deeper, hit harder.

“L&Osvu” is very patterned: first, for television so episodes will fit between advertisements, second, because it is presented in the same mold as the Law & Order franchise: segmented by titles with a cue noise, case presented, evidence accumulates, climax, resolution in court.  Clearly the key is again justice versus law.  MUCH of the script is explanation of the law, psychiatric information, medical information, so the acting has a lot of technical exposition in it, rather than emotional impetus.  But sometimes there is a socko combination, like “John Boy Walton” as a murdering madman, once a responsible and loving husband, brain destroyed by tertiary syphilis.  This is not just theatre -- this is wising up the American couch potatoes.  As the series grew popular, other major actors appeared in one-shots:  Piper Laurie, Margot Kidder, Karen Allen, Penny Fuller (once a classmate).  The scripts are not for interchangeable twenty-something kids.

One of the recurring themes and the one I wrestle with in my own life is how much a private citizen should trust and rely on public authorities.  When I was an officer on the street addressing animal problems, I often only had a little scrap of information about something much bigger -- like the man who filed complaints against every barking dog in his neighborhood because he was dying of cancer and couldn’t tolerate noise.  Or the man whose neighbors accused him of keeping crowing roosters -- who was actually staging cockfights and probably distributing drugs.  Or the barking dog a judge complained about in the house that abutted his at the back -- it was chained to the motorcycles of the Gypsy Jokers to keep rivals from meddling with them.  (The judge said he had no idea.)  So many times I was ineffective.  So many cases seemed unresolvable and are still in my head after thirty years.

I go back in memory to problems in my family or ministry involving abused children, old people, or dementia.  I never felt I knew who could help, how to approach them, or how they might react.  I don’t think I’m much different from most citizens, though it does help to be in a small community now.  My mother said she wanted to talk about my brain-damaged brother, but was so afraid of doing it that she would shut any conversation down.  I ought to have gone to a social worker of some kind.  I had no idea there was a closed-skull trauma specialist at OHSU.  My minister friends were as much at sea as I was, though they meant well.  

In the days of the worst trouble, I was very young and the complexity of Bob’s life -- twice as long as mine -- tied my hands.  He wanted me excluded.  After the divorce I was hard to explain to schools and doctors:  a former step-grandmother third wife dealing with a runaway kid who’s living with a family not her own in order to escape alcoholism, but who is drinking herself and needs multiple abortions but doesn’t want them?  No practical evidence -- many possible motives.  This is the sort of thing that “SVU” deals with.  I think for many people it is a map to use in their own lives.  It is almost entirely outside the education of ministers, but people like Dear Abby constantly say,  “Go to your minister.”

To watch a long (300 episodes now) intense series like this on DVD’s is like a book performed.  One can proceed at one’s own pace -- I find myself stopping to walk around and the day I watched three discs of “Oz” (twelve episodes) I was like a drunk for a while.  Literally staggered.  There is always a strong point of view, partly guided by Dick Wolf and inspired by the day’s news, but I’m always aware that every script comes from intelligent, hip, probably educated, probably English majors, sitting around a table suggesting premises and working out the plot line.  It is THEIR morality that is filtering into the culture and I do not think it is a bad thing.  

Sometimes it is not a real thing.  They only know their own lives.  There is so much more that they have no idea even exists.  In interview "extras," Mariska said that when she began making contacts to do research she realized that there is far more abuse and sexual abuse than she had ever guessed.  "It's just everywhere."  And Chris said that women on the street would throw their arms around him in gratitude for the fictional defense of women like themselves.  For too many people -- male, female and juvenile victims -- there are no heroes.

NO JOKES FOR CEBULL

Since Federal Judge Cebull has set the standard for what can be joked about on the Internet so low that almost anything can pass, I might as well take advantage.

I’ve had this story about bestiality floating around in my “to blog” file for quite a while:

White House press secretary Jay Carney fielded a question about bestiality during the daily press briefing:

Q: The Family Research Council and CNS News both reported a 93-to-7 U.S. Senate vote to approve a defense authorization bill that, quote, "includes a provision which not only repeals the military law on sodomy, but also repeals the military ban on sex with animals, or beastiality.[sic]" Does the commander-in-chief approve or disapprove of bestiality in our armed forces?

In short, have you soldiers stopped fucking your camels? (And don't put any beans up your nose, either.) Of course, clever PETA never fails to jump on any issue that involves animals.

In watching last night's news briefing, we were upset to note that you flippantly addressed the recently approved repeal of the military ban on bestiality. With respect, this is no laughing matter. Our office has been flooded with calls from Americans who are upset that this ban has been repealed—and for good reason. As we outlined in the attached letter sent yesterday to the secretary of defense, animal abuse does not affect animals only—it is also a matter of public safety, as people who abuse animals very often go on to abuse human beings.

Colleen O'Brien
Director of Communications

I’m amazed that so many people think that such a law has anything to do with real events. I assume they were raised to believe that a law immediately changes everyone’s behavior. What Mama says, goes. So where are the statistics about military animal rape? I’m sure there are vids on YouTube of species boundary violations, but where are the numbers? Or the theory about why such things happen? But the post-modern thinkers are as alert as HSUS. This call for papers arrived via an academic listserv about animals.

Call for papers for Carnets de Géographes

“Towards a ‘humanimal’ geography”

«Ironically, both the pleasure of bestiality for the practitioner and the horror/humor of the shocked observer rely upon this projection of humanity onto the animal. This calls for thinking of potentially other relationships to animals in which we seek not to exploit human-­‐animal difference but pleasure in exploring the breaking down of this boundary [...] Such a queering of the boundary between human-­‐animal may serve a valuable role in reconsidering our ethical relationship to animals,which has previously hinged upon human-­‐animal difference and hierarchy. This ontological certainty must be undermined to establish a nonhumanist approach to animals in particular and to otherness in general.

(Brown and Rasmussen, 2010)

I’m nearing the end of the first volume of the magisterial overview of the history of the novel by Steven Moore and have finally come to my mother’s favorite childhood novel. “The Tales of Genji,” the Japanese Sheharazade. (It’s very much a novel of adolescence, the struggle to come to terms with sexuality.) On page 551 I come to this story. A man “yearns for an unobtainable woman, so turns instead to her cat: ‘To relieve his powerful feelings the Intendant. . . called the cat and cuddled it and with its delicious small and its dear little mew it felt to him naughtily enough like its mistress herself.’”

“. . . So he had the cat at last and he got to sleep with him at night. By day he caressed it and fussed over it. Soon it was no longer shy, and it curled up in his [kimono] skirts or cuddled with him so nicely he really did become very fond of it. He was lying against a pillar near the veranda, lost in thought, when it came to him going Meow, Meow ever so sweetly. ‘My we are eager, aren’t we!’ He smiled and stroked it, then gazed into its eyes. . . .

“‘How odd of him all at once to take such a liking to a cat!’ the old women muttered. ‘He never cared about such creatures before.’

“The Heir apparent sent for the cat, but the Intendant never returned it. Instead he kept it to whisper sweet nothings to all by himself.”

Hello, kitty! Once a person is alerted to such phenomena, they are clearly everywhere, though often in diluted form and especially in history. Are we to forbid people to love their animals? Or even other people’s animals? We aren’t having much success in getting folks to love each other in any sense except entwined with violence. We are having such a hard time understanding how humans as a species are different.

When I was an animal control officer in Portland, OR, we generally got two or three bestiality complaints a year and no one ever knew quite what to do with them. One was a public event about which PPD asked for advice: a stripper had two Great Danes in her act. Was it cruelty? Resorting to French philosophy, we said it depended on the reaction of the dogs -- mutuality as a principle. Of course, it’s an open question whether any animal can give informed consent, so that would mean the act was statutory rape whether the dogs like it or not. I think the stripper simply moved to another city. Evasion can be a good law enforcement strategy.

I would recommend it to Judge Cebull, but earlier in the sequence of events. Evade friends who want to send you dirty jokes at work, esp. if they demean the very context that makes one’s work dignified. If they fail to get the hint, use your delete button. Everyone in Montana knows a lot of sheep jokes and no doubt they are problematic for sheepherders, but their jobs do not depend on social respect -- only respect from their dogs, which insist on respect from their sheep, even the black ones.

If a judge damages his own dignity and that of his position, who can trust him with their camels? Is this joke of Cebull’s not an abuse of human beings? Ruptures of social conduct are sometimes seen as the private privilege of esteemed persons, the enforcers not having to enforce the same rules on themselves. It is a major mistake, but hardly a rare or unusual one. Making a law against it cannot prevent those who enforce the law. Which implies a certain level of contempt for law. Can a contemptuous man serve the law?

RESERVATION JURISDICTIONS

(This post is one of a series responding to an article in Indian Country Today by Ross and Finley.)

In spite of taking on violence against Indian women on reservations, I’m talking about men and women, enrolled and white, different countries, reservations and none, because I think it’s all complexified together -- one of those “five per cent” problems [see the book with that title -- I reviewed it earlier] that just doesn’t seem to get solved because the questions are all too small and too abstract.  I looked at some of the questionnaires in various studies that were supposed to turn up some kind of solution, but they’re coming from assumptions made someplace else.  So I’ll try this my way this time, wandering all around.

One of the cases that has haunted me for fifty years was not a woman.  It was a young man, Blackfeet, handsome, intelligent, bound for great things, well-respected family, father on the school board that originally hired me in Browning in 1961.  It was Indian Days, mid-July, and back then violence sometimes crept into the camp.  The boy was beaten nearly to death, his eye kicked out of his head.  The culprits were Canadian tribal and quickly fled back to their home reserves.

Canada and the United States are nations of law.  Differences are settled and crimes are punished according to law, but there are slight differences between the two countries.  Inside Canada, each province has its own laws.  Inside the United States each state has its own laws.  In Montana each county has its own law and towns have their own laws and so on.  It’s a cat’s cradle of which law applies where and when and to what.  

When Indians are involved, one must take into account international treaty law.  That’s why the attempted murder suspects weren’t stopped at the border: Blackfeet are a divided nation and part of their rights is crossing the border without stopping.  To call a grand jury and indict the bad guys, witnesses were needed.  North American Indian Days last less than a week, then people disperse back across the Americas (some to Europe) and since many stay on the Pow Wow Trail all summer and this was before cell phones, there was no way to even find them, much less take statements.  Those who wanted justice could not find a way.

When the US laws were originally brought in, the Blackfeet still had their old ways of doing things and didn’t understand all the written laws, particularly since no one was very careful about explaining them or enforcing them.  The ten major crimes ( murder, rape, arson, and so on) were handed over to the FBI.  A case like this one didn’t interest them.  It could not be won.  Before white contact, matters like this had been handled by families.  A small band of warriors would have gone out to seek vengeance.  They might or might not have been successful.  But this family was a modern family: Catholic, educated, assimilated.  They would not send out an assassin, though that was not unknown in the Sixties of America.  (Kennedy, King)

Today sovereignty is the cry, but how to reconcile all the sovereignties?  In the days after WWII when veteran men came back traumatized, alcoholic, desperate, only partly sane, families broken, there was so much crime in Browning -- theft, violence and rape -- that the town fathers went together to hire their own police force, the way that college campuses hire their own security police.  They worried about property loss and home invasion more than anything else.  But they also justified what they did by asserting the sovereignty of Browning within the reservation, just as the reservation had sovereignty in the state of Montana.  In those days it was claimed that as soon as land property belonged to private individuals (usually but not always white) it was taken out of the trust managed by the government and was therefore not part of the reservation any longer: subject to state law and taxation.  In those days most of the town real estate was owned by white people, because the businesses were run by white people, so they were the ones with money.  The Bureau of Indian Affairs and all the other federal entities and employees hired mostly white people.

Then came Indian empowerment.  BIA hires had Indian preference.  Businesses, especially tribally owned, had Indian preference.  The school began to have Indian applicants for teaching jobs.  Enrolled people put their houses and lots back into the tribal trust to avoid taxes.  In the next decades the whites who had arrived in the Fifties to start businesses and ranches aged out.  Some had by that time intermarried with Indians, some sold their businesses to local people who were Indian, and some just locked the doors and left -- maybe in a coffin.  By the time the first Headstart kids of the Sixties were out of college and returned, most white people were gone.

The reservation had always had a political split between non-English-speaking full-bloods and mixed-bloods, who often had white fathers and therefore advantages when it came to business -- contacts, access to loans, bookkeeping skills, start-up capital and so on.  Because the full-bloods didn’t trust the more assimilated people to have their best interests in mind, the full-bloods were willing to accept the paternalism of the government to make deals for them.  They felt the government had an obligation to protect them and ought to be held to it.  Now that faded away and a new determination from tribal members to run their own affairs began to drive matters.  

Browning was no longer defined as an island of jurisdiction.  There was a huge squabble (as usual) over who should oversee the police force, ironically led by a guy named Saurez who wore huge down coats because he was always cold away from the south.  All officers went back under the feds, not the tribe or the city.  Jurisdiction has been handed back and forth ever since, but the real problem is not who is in charge of them -- it is who will pay the cost of proper training, maintained vehicles, and enough gas to cover a rez fifty miles on a side.  Then there’s the jail.  Who pays?

Somehow, the paler and more assimilated people took into themselves the white contempt for poverty, drunkenness, illiteracy, violence, and being old-fashioned -- they accepted that stigma against their own people.  A big tough felon whispered the words to me when he said “blanket-ass Indian,” his face full of shame and fear.  This was before it was fashionable to reclaim your heritage and award expensive Pendleton blankets as a way to honor achievers.  The Indians who were doing well wanted separation from the Indians who were not.  Street Indians are like a president’s embarrassing brother -- family, but not exactly welcome when you're trying to maintain an image.  Yet often it is those people who have the real knowledge of old ways.  Often, not always.

The big kahuna of boundaries is still the United States/Canadian border, a means of taking refuge from the law since the days of Chief Joseph, who didn’t quite make it across to the north, and Louis Riel, who DID make it across to the south.  Now the customs and immigration officers at the line are fortified by border patrol, DEA, Homeland Security, RCMP, all joining the web of laws unknown, unenforced, misunderstood, outdated or too new to be known.  The most passionate problem is jurisdiction over white people on the reservation.  These days they are sometimes Mexican or Columbian drug peddlers who can fade into the background on a reservation, mixing with Mexican or South American families looking for a peaceful place.  That adds immigration law and the southern border.

That boy who was beaten up at Indian Days fifty years ago, Lockley Bremner, did recover pretty much, though he was not the same.   His family was always religious and he, spiritually inspired, became a respected pastor.  His son, who is also Lockley Bremner, is now the Mayor of Browning but earns his living doing cable installations for one of the successful Tribal enterprises.  He reads this blog sometimes.

(More to come)

VIOLENCE ON RESERVATIONS: A WHITE WOMAN TESTIFIES

I am on the mailing list for Gyasi Ross, an enrolled Blackfeet lawyer, who sent me this url for an article he co-wrote.  I have decided to respond to it from a white woman’s perspective, speaking about my own fifty-year-long experience on the Blackfeet Reservation.  (I was gone for long stretches.)  This will be a continuing thread, not just one post. 

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/ict_sbc/circle-of-violence-an-open-letter-to-people-regarding-the-rape-and-sexual-assault-of-indian-women/

Ross and Michael Finley are addressing sovereignty and statistics.  I’m going to take a personal and anecdotal angle plus some theory.  I might get into trouble.  I might get it wrong.  But it’s past time to shut up.

When I was with Bob Scriver in the Sixties, he was both the City Magistrate and the Justice of the Peace.  This was on the Blackfeet reservation.  The police, which were both tribal and city-hired at the time, brought to Bob for arraignment both whites and Indians.  Even the ten major crimes, which were the responsibility of the FBI (more present on the scene in those days), began with an appearance before the JP.

There were two JP’s in Browning, the other one being Wilbur Renshaw, who was married to the elementary school principal.  Until citations were numbered, it was possible to siphon off quite a bit of money by accepting fines and losing the ticket. Canadian “speeding” tickets alone could be profitable.  Wilbur wrote pulp Westerns and self-published them.  Highway patrolmen and some white officers preferred Renshaw because he was more punitive than Bob, who grew up on the reservation and often employed these same drunk and disorderly characters as day labor.  He had gone to school with some of them, or maybe their parents, and had taught many of them, so his loyalty was divided.  He had that local’s resentment of outsiders, so when a highway patrolmen told him what the penalty for an offender should be (by writing a code on the back of the ticket) he ignored it.   Renshaw was always “on the side of the law.”  He liked to drink coffee with officers and pick up story ideas.  They fancied themselves in the Old West.

Bob was also the backup coroner if the local mortician was out of town, so he attended a few scenes of crime and accident.  Not often, which was lucky, because he hated it so.  He said dead humans stunk, unlike dead animals.

On weekends, in hot weather, on holidays, when there was a big tribal payout, women showed up at the door late in the evening, wanting restraining orders or warrants for the arrest of violent men.  Sometimes they were coming from the hospital, escorted by family members or officers.  Then at 3AM the same women came pounding on the door with the bail money, desperate to bail out the same man and wanting to drop all charges.  This is a familiar pattern everywhere that women are dependent on the men who abuse them.

This pattern is alive today in Valier, except that the sheriff here might refuse to drop charges and other authorities might press for changes in the household.  Public opinion has shifted.  Don’t ask me for specifics.  Everyone who needs to know already knows.  The instances I know about are not Indian though there are Indians living in town.  The Pondera County sheriff is enrolled.  So is the Glacier County sheriff.  The rez is mostly in Glacier County.

In Heart Butte a few years ago one of my former students -- who had gotten involved with a pack of drinking, drugging people -- was beaten to death.  It was daytime, summer, in a small house, and the whole community heard her screaming and knew she was dying.  The lone cop was out of town.  Everyone was afraid to intervene.  I intended to go to her funeral but it had been scheduled earlier than the notice reported because, the priest told me, her body was so beaten that it could not retain embalming fluid.  I spent a lot of time reflecting on what could have been done -- not that I would have had the courage to do it.  Set the house on fire.  Turn a firehose in through the window.  Blast off air horns.  Bear spray.  Firecrackers.  Get the town to stand in a circle around the little house -- well back -- and yell the names of the people we knew were inside.  Shoot off a shotgun over the house.  No one had a taser.  Desperate stuff.  The community told me it was hopeless -- nothing could be done.

Another former student came home early, surprised his wife with her lover, and the wife held him while the lover cut his throat.  The stories we tell about these incidents do not serve to deter violence -- rather they tend to discourage intervention.  Even to shut down the pressing of charges or any access to information.  They also illustrate that much violence is ABOUT women and sexual jealousy even when the victims might be men, and that the transgressors’ courage come from running in packs that claim all the mystique of urban gangs they see on TV.  There are drugs, alcohol, always.  Women also can be violent.

As I go along, I need to balance the scales and keep a sense of proportion, so I’ll tell you some good things.  In today’s Great Falls Tribune are stories about oil drilling on the Blackfeet Reservation.  Two Blackfeet men are featured:  Grinnell Day Rider, one of the best senior students I taught at Heart Butte high school, now the guy in charge of all the Blackfeet oil leases, and Wesley Bremner, another outstanding guy who works directly on the drill rigs.  These are family men.  I would be very surprised to hear about either one of them beating up anyone or even getting drunk.  The constantly violent people are a small minority, a larger group is potentially violent, but the great majority of rez folks are peaceful and orderly.

When I was with Bob in the Sixties, I was never afraid.  Partly I was just dumb and partly I was walking around in the White Woman’s Bubble, because a man of color knows that if he hurts a white woman, the white man will destroy him.  (That bubble is thinning out quite a bit now.)  The White Woman’s Bubble is strong if she is respectable and honorable, like a teacher who doesn’t drink and chippy around.  But it is strongest if she “belongs” to a powerful man.  I was owned, like a horse.  They thought Bob Scriver would punish them harshly, maybe outside the law, though the law in this case would probably function properly, not be ignored as it so often was and is when the victim is tribal, especially if the woman is no church-goer but parties with the lowest.   

Stigma, especially that of stigmatized women, is interpreted as a marker indicating fair game for abuse.  It is one source of the white-man-on-Indian-woman abuse.  This social dynamic is at work in all human societies.  But ironically, if an Indian man is virtuous and gentle, he is also often a target for abuse, even murder, from the jealous and from those who interpret him as powerless.  One of the most tragic recent deaths was the knifing of an outstanding young honor student and ceremonialist as he arrived at a party.  The killer, a young man I know, is retarded, feeling stigmatized himself.  Stigma-based violence triggers vengeful retaliation, creating a cycle.

(to be continued)

PLANETARY KARMA

Johnathan Haidt and Jesse Graham went looking for moral criteria that are shared across cultures and probably are wired into babies, possibly primates.  This is what they found as explained on the vid:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html

In summary, there were five fundamental dimensions:


1.  Care for others, protecting them from harm.
2.  Fairness, justice in treating others equally.
3.  Loyalty to your group.
4.  Respect for tradition and legitimate authority.
5.  Purity in avoiding disgusting things.

That’s obvious -- not very interesting.  But then he starts throwing in loops and I could easily add some more.  One of the most helpful ideas is that “liberals” value care and fairness beyond the other three criteria.  But that “conservatives” value loyalty, respect and purity almost as much as the first two.  I will point out that the first two values are in the United States Constitution, while the others are seen in this country as mostly religious.  So though liberals might be comfortable as “unchurched,” the conservatives identify with their religious subgroup of the nation.  That is their group (even above nation), their authority, and their source of guidance for what is disgusting. 

Those who hold the first two values can tolerate -- even admire -- difference, innovation, and experiment.  Those who hang onto the last three values will see their very existence challenged if there are competing groups, innovative change, and social experiments.  They will be very much more worried about “disgusting” things, often defined sexually, or in terms of dirt or illness, or unrestrained behavior.  Haidt remarks amusingly that conservatives tend to obsess about “disgusting” sex, but for liberals what is “disgusting” is more likely to be food!  (Fat, sugar, bacteria.)  At this point Haidt includes “libertarians” in his kinds of political styles and finds them sometimes on one side and other times more on the other.

Later in a recent article, Haidt comes up with a new idea, speaking about what Tea Partyers “really want” as a kind of sub-category of conservatives. since its clear that though they say they want freedom, what they really want is what he calls Karma.  “The law of karma says that for every action, there is an equal and morally commensurate reaction. Kindness, honesty and hard work will (eventually) bring good fortune; cruelty, deceit and laziness will (eventually) bring suffering. No divine intervention is required; it's just a law of the universe, like gravity. . . Karma is not an exclusively Hindu idea. It combines the universal human desire that moral accounts should be balanced with a belief that, somehow or other, they will be balanced.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703673604575550243700895762.html

But wait!   It’s nice to dress this up as Karma, a natural law that builds retribution into the universe.  But these guys are not willing to wait around for the universe to get to it.  They want THEIR thumb, not God’s thumb, on the scales.  Where is humility, much less compassion?  Where is the realization that morality is conditioned by culture and that a hanging crime in one time and place is only worth a fine and imprisonment in another?

American people who see change as loss are moving to a kind of law that privileges tribe above individual and counts love as nothing, because in that harsh place of its desert origin it is the only way to survive.  I call them “Old Testament” Christians, since they have only pretended to accept the teaching of Jesus.  In American citizens is a default position for those who feel endangered.

For some Islamic immigrants who have established a diaspora of their old ways in modern cities, ancient Abramic Sharia law is trying to preserve itself in the new setting, the “civilized Western world” where the good of the whole has come to be served by the justice system, safety nets and therapies so scorned by American conservatives.  The controversy is probably best accessed through YouTube where you can see videos of men trying to explain themselves.  (Sharia law does not value women or even children, except as possessions.)

Sharia law is being conditionally accepted in civil matters where ever there is a big enough immigrant community for them to have brought their own rules with them.  It relieves the English, German, American courts from trying to decipher what these people will accept as fair, thus getting lost in issues Westerners can’t understand, thus wasting resources.  The problem comes when Sharia law regarding felonies doles out death by stoning, honor killing by families, and amputation for thefts.  This is the old Code of Hammarabi,  “an eye for an eye,” deep in the cellar of Abramic religions.  This way of thinking has no use for liberal compassion or equality, regardless of what impulses might be inborn.  Within the community of Sharia believers, this law system might be accepted and protected, but in the larger world it is an atrocity and criminal almost to the level of terrorism.

The problem for nations is keeping order while preserving national identity -- not that of the immigrant, but that of the pre-existing establishment.  What seems like a convenient bureaucratic compromise at first can become internal revolution if it is allowed to stand.  Trying to identify the natural biological morality of every individual human is one way of arguing against Sharia or intolerant conservatism without pitting one religion against another, but I don’t think it is strong enough.  It will only work after several generations have grown up in the Western world, thus assimilating.  If some Americans are not assimilated to the new world, what hope for immigrants?

We had a problem something like this at the beginning of the history of our nation.  It’s still not resolved.  When immigrants arrived, there were already systems of governance in place, some drastic and others lenient, depending on the circumstances of each tribe.  The immigrants imposed their own harsh laws, hanging many suspected horse thieves and known Indians.  They overwhelmed the Native Americans.  Then there were systems invented in which reservation laws would handle civil matters or low level offenses in ways consistent with their own culture.

As assimilation has inevitably happened, many tribes have given some matters to the state to solve, often social services like divorce or child custody.  But the FBI has kept custody of the felony level crimes -- what used to be called the “ten major crimes” which now include more than that.  The idea was that these were so significant to the larger order that federal machinery was necessary to enforce them.  The trouble has been that the federal forces don’t much care about reservation felonies and preserve the unjustified conviction that the culture is so different that intervention in murder and arson doesn’t matter.  They are “other.”

This problem Haidt is addressing is much bigger than a schism between political parties.  It is a planetary assimilation and order-preserving problem.  Its resolution amounts to a religious conversion of the world’s population.  The real question is whether we can preserve the modern order-keeping on which our lives depend, or whether re-tribalizing will force itself back to the center.  It will take a long time.  There will be many casualties and some of them will be in our power grid, our communications, our tax codes, and our understanding of compassion and justice.  Karma will prevail in the end, but the universe may not agree with our own judgments.  And our thumbs may not be heavy enough.

LOCAL NEWS IN THE SUMMERTIME

The Golden Triangle newspapers are a regional group of papers all owned by the Kavanagh family. The news in them often overlaps and the classified ads are the same. Valier is thirty miles from Browning and only a few miles from the boundary of the reservation, but the ordinary word-of-mouth generally stops at that line. People in Valier rarely know what’s going on in Browning and vice versa. However, the news for Cut Bank, which is in the same county as Browning, tends to be more the same, except that there is always more news in Browning and more advertising. It is an awkward truth that the small white towns around the rez are collapsing while Browning and environs expands both in population and prosperity.

When I came in 1961, Browning had its own separately owned newspaper and Milo Fields was quite an active reporter/photography/editorialist. At that time the white population of Browning was strong and owned most of the businesses and professions. Also, the Bureau of Indian Affairs bureaucrats were mostly white. All that has changed and now the town, to an outsider, looks solidly Indian. Mostly that’s true.

Even when Milo was the editor, one of the most interesting and controversial features of the paper was the report of arrests and trial results. It would run for a couple of months, and then someone’s relative would awkwardly end up on the list (white as well as red) and the list would disappear. Then after a year or so, someone would manage to beg for it to be reinstated on grounds that it was a deterrent to crime. These days the Sheriff’s Log runs consistently, partly because the editors are in Cut Bank where they are somewhat shielded from rez politics and partly because the sheriff’s report conflates the reports for the whole county so that Cut Bank’s escapades are hidden in among the reports for the rez. (The Pondera County sheriff converts everything to numbers: so many arrests, so many horses struck by cars, so many dogs at loose, etc.)

Just as in Portland, some people can’t wait for the printed news, so they follow dispatch along on a radio monitor of their own. The dispatchers, who have long boring stretches to deal with, are aware they are broadcasting and sometimes the sheriff’s log reflects the same consciousness. All that said, sometimes the reports are pretty vivid and the reader is easily drawn into the situation by curiosity.

For instance, a Friday night report: A man calling from a bar says his son is beating up his wife. He’s drunk so the dispatcher is a little skeptical. Three hours later a call comes in that a woman in the East Glacier cemetary is getting beat up. (Cell phones mean calls can come from anywhere. The only cemetary I know of up there is way back in the trees.) At 8AM a man in Heart Butte says his sister is trying to attack him. He is handicapped, at the other end of the rez, and holding his oxycodone pills which his sister wants, but he’s escaped the house and is up on the hill. The cops come. They arrest him.

The next afternoon the airport (in Cut Bank) calls to say they canceled the drag races so the ambulance doesn’t have to be on standby.

Someone called to say girls in Cut Bank were kicking the planters in front of a business out into the sidewalk. The investigating officer says the girls were chasing a mouse so it was not vandalism.

A caller reported a “bright flash and three pieces of metal hanging from the substation across from the wrecking yard on US Highway 2 eastbound. [next to Cut Bank]. Advised GEC [Glacier Electric Company] and are experiencing a power outage. May be vandalism. Officer checked it out. There is a crispy pigeon on the ground. It is smoking but there is no fire. Officer advised he’s hungry and to pick up the crispy bird for lunch. On another day a Hutterite colony called to advise they have no electricity and are running a generator. A bird on fire was seen flying away from the “transistor pole” and the wheat crop is just ripe, so everyone be on the lookout for smoke.

Many complaints are about drunks fighting, but there are also many problems with non-human animals. Dogs bark and one “boxer” which “looks like it has a family” [they don’t mean human] has been chasing joggers. The officer has returned it home, talked to the family, and issued warnings. This time he takes it to the animal shelter. It was a black and white pit bull. On another day there is a complaint about two dogs traveling together: one is small and fuzzy and the other is “big and dumb-looking.” On still another day a cougar invites itself to the Chewing Black Bone campground alongside St. Mary’s lake. The complainant is camping in a yellow tipi. Many bears are clipped by cars, mostly driven by tourists, but they have sense enough to not check for damage to their vehicles until they are a few miles away. Carcasses rarely found.

A complaint comes in that a tourist family with little kids is chasing a grizzly bear up by Many Glacier. Call referred to the Glacier Park rangers. In the summer there are regularly tragedies but they are usually people falling over cliffs. This August it was a motorcycle that went over a cliff, killing the operator. On a lighter note, a “tall blonde male from Washington and Alaska left his backpack with his undies alongside on the steps of the Job Service office in Cut Bank.” They consider this objectionable. Another backpacker has been sleeping at night in the Babb Post Office.

There are always complaints about noise from parties at the Pine Tree Apartments and fighting at the Bear’s Den. These businesses have no listed telephones, so I can’t confirm their location and my knowledge of them is hazy since I don’t patronize them, but I believe they’re in Cut Bank. If not, I may find out who reads this blog. These days they are more likely to egg my car than break in all the windows with a baseball bat.

The Cut Bank kids are always at war with the cops. Someone calls in to complain that the kids have stretched Saran Wrap across the street. Dispatch records that the officer already knows: he just hit it and it is wrapped around his squad car. (Cut Bank is where a MacDonald’s employee put ag chemicals in a border patrolman’s food, which nearly killed him. Last I heard neurological damage had put him in a wheelchair, maybe permanently. Years ago they used to just put Ex-lax in their food.)

There is a strongly defensible theory that addressing these sorts of calls promptly and efficiently will prevent more serious crime and this is probably true, but it takes time and money. The claim that serious crimes are insufficiently investigated and prosecuted is a different problem but it has my sympathy.