THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

My father proudly and sometimes obnoxiously declared he was an atheist.  His grandfather, the hot-tempered Archibald Strachan, taught him to avoid any angry gods, but did not cause him to give up patriarchy -- just the fantasy justification.  In fact, his claim of being religion-free was just a failure to recognize that nations, national monuments, battle sites, the industrial revolution, and progressivism were his true religion.  Empire.  Dominance. Virtue. He had no real understanding of Christianity except for obvious institutions, which his parents respected but did not join in the sense of being members of a congregation.  

Also, he did not understand that his nationalism had no tolerance for the weak, the faulty, the nonconforming.  Scots pride brushed off the indigenous, the black, and even women by considering them children. He stigmatized by diminishing.  Yet he himself was not powerful except when he was spanking his children.   Every August the family took a car trip to the Co-op convention he was paid to attend and which he managed to leverage into a kind of pilgrimage through American engineering feats and patriotic admirations like Mount Rushmore.  But he never tried to explain, say, Fort Ticonderoga, or Hoover Dam.  They never came to life for us kids.

My most impressionable adult years were in Browning, Montana, and now I've lived for twice as long in a little mostly white village just a few miles away.  The population of this town is roughly the same as my elementary school in Portland where I lived until college: about 3 or 4 hundred kids.  The population of the Blackfeet rez is about the same as my college when I attended, maybe 8 thousand.

Another 8 thousand tribally enrolled people live somewhere else, maybe on another rez or, going back generations, in some coastal city or a foreign country.  So far, the boundary has been set by provenance; that is, inheritance from ancestors which is inaccurately described as having blood quantum, which cannot be determined from blood.  (Provenance is proven by DNA, but the main thing is birth certificates/baptismal records and oral claims by old ladies.)  It's expressed in fractions, though it has nothing to do with genetic inheritance, which is always totally re-assorted at conception.

The problem is that by neither appearance nor culture do the actual persons add up to a category in any other way than fantasy.  This is sort of the dilemma of being an American.  No longer is patriotism or citizenship definable by appearance or culture, though since the original whites  -- whom we pretend are British but are actually by majority German -- maintain the power of determining the terms of the Rule of Law and the ordering of government.  Losing that makes them crazy, as we observe.

But what do we do when different ways of categorizing people and the measurement of the boundaries among them simply aren't there?  I remember the joke -- which might have been true -- about the full-blood man in the army determined to maintain segregation.  The sergeant issued his order to the lines of men:  "All blacks to the left, all whites to the right!"  Left standing was the indigenous man.  The sergeant didn't even know that's what he was.  

The indigenous man asked, "Which way should I go, Sarge?"

Sarge bellowed, "I don't give a fuck!  You choose!"  There's no punchline about which way the "Indian" went.  No man's land?

He didn't have the choice of those dealing with paper, who simply leave out the people who don't fit the binaries.  Like the full-bloods who are the products of different tribes being gathered into schools at the romantic age, so that no parent or grandparent provides a big enough fraction of a tribe to be enrolled in any of them.  A reality that doesn't fit the paper plan.

Why is our census still including race when we're all mongrel?  We are no longer "breeds" like cows or dogs.  What how else can we be grouped? I was always fascinated by the sizeable group of indigenous/Asian/Latino people in Portland.  Skin not so dark, glossy straight hair, a little different lilt in their voices but not from any one place except where they are now.  I called them "Tomorrow's People" because they looked like those computer tricks where all races are combined into one face.  If there was a little black in the mix, they might have fluffy hair.

In the end nations have nothing to do with the way people look or eat or talk or descend from.  They want to be safe, to have families, to have health care, and to work. Many of us in rural Montana have doctors from India and do well with them.  People are human in both places.

"If the social contract is broken, and people turned to authoritarians for better lives, then it is exactly this deficit that must be repaired. Democracy isn’t giving people what they are desperate for — that is what every authoritarian moment tells us.”  -- Umairh

Here are some interesting tweets to read or hear.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/15/the-us-hidden-empire-overseas-territories-united-states-guam-puerto-rico-american-samoa

This long-read blog post is about the legal empire we never really understand because it is so vast and scattered.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/07/is-the-gop-finished-history-weighs-in.html

A columnist and a college professor talk about the history and nature of this scary time we live in.  They don't focus on individuals so much as process.  Process is what I'm after, too.

The Theological Triplets (Christian, Muslim, and Judaism) come out of the same place/time, the land they call "Holy," and all three support this deforming idea of kowtowing to the emperor to get what we want.  We must move to an ecological "fittingness" model of ecoplace.  We can abandon or diminish our imposed legal boundaries in favor of natural living, conditions that come from participation by all who are there in that place, which is a New Religious and Scientifically Supported way to organize, then maybe we can dump this idea that survival is a matter of power and wealth.

We don't form an enduring future from "owning" the water supply, but rather by sharing what there is, as best supports us all.  And working together to find the new aquifers, the new ags, the new desalinization plants and methods.  This realization is coming to life through our children.  The planet doesn't wait on us.  Many will die of thirst in the future until we understand.  It's a hard way to learn.

POPULATION HYDRAULICS

When Europeans finally landed on the SE coast of the North American continent and saw that there were people, but people quite different from themselves, they thought they had found a new species.  A species is a biologically defined category based on whether two kinds of animal can mate and produce children.  If they can, they are not separate species.  It took about nine months to find out that these people were NOT a new species, but human beings.  Still, the Euros hung onto the idea.  

In fact, the idea still haunts us.  People even suggest that male and female human beings are separate "species", but clearly that’s not the case since they produce children all the time.  Some people play with the idea that humans and one of the more human-seeming apes might have a child, but it can’t happen.  They ARE separate species.  They don’t even have the same number of chromosomes, so there could not be a zipper-like match-up of genes as is necessary to make a new being.

The Euros would continue to war against each other for the next few hundred years, struggling to establish nations, which to them meant control of territories defined by borders and signified with flags and kings.  They brought these ideas to the New World and imposed them on people who might push each other back and forth but never fought gunpowder-horseback-armor wars with horrific death rates.  They also brought their deadliest weapon: microbes.  This emptied the villages and sent a wave of depopulation across the land, which persuaded the Euros that there was nobody out there.  So they grabbed the land.  As an educated white woman told me not long ago, “the Indians weren’t using the land anyway.”  Meaning they hadn’t plowed it.

The whites also brought an old Egyptian concept of establishing borders to show where one person’s set of rights ended and another’s began.  This went back to the flooding of the Nile which annually erased all markers of fields but renewed the fertility necessary for the crops of the time.  Geometry was invented to re-establish boundaries.  By the time the 15^th and 16^th centuries came along, the Euros had forgotten that part but remembered that Kings (as in King Tut) and God (the ultimate SunKing who authorized all the other ones) had the power.  Kings meant nations.  So they looked for them in America.

Instead of kings and nations, they found chiefs and tribes.  They never got their heads around the idea that these were fluid entities that responded to circumstances, as did the survival-based occupation of territories.  In brief, the People went where they had to in order to eat and defended their movement however they had to, and they followed whomever they trusted at the time for whatever the situation was.  The people who were related, who observed the same customs, told the same stories, and MOST of all spoke the same language, formed into bands who occasionally gathered as a whole in a unified ceremonial time.  This appears to be a universal human practice.  

At the core was a small intensely related group of people and then the farther people thinned out until at the fringes were folks who might have split allegiances, or who were immigrants from somewhere else, or were captives or were just antisocial.  There was no real boundary, but only a moving migration of people in and out, closer to the center of identity or farther away.  My guess is that in their minds even their dead relations were therebutnotthere, just a little farther away on the edge as though they were hunting in the Sand Hills. 

The Sand Hills of Alberta

Most Euros couldn’t get their heads around this.  But some people had always been like this, especially once the big sailing ships were devised and the sailors realized that there were people in very pleasant places who would accept them so long as they behaved.  They left their former identities.  And then there were the gypsies.

Once the Industrial Revolution put paid to the old life everywhere and Native Americans were confined on reservations (though some always walked off), the government ended up stranded in their assumptions between Indian ways and Euro ways, so they just drew a boundary like roommates, one messy and one neat.  Secretly they figured the NA’s would eventually die out anyway, either by assimilation or attrition.  But they didn’t.

Since the relationship between government and People was forced into the equating of tribe with nation (The Blackfeet Nation) so that this relationship between them had to be by treaty until they realized their mistake and started calling the treaties “agreements”, they were vulnerable to international law.  The United States does not like international law.  Now they are trying to UNdefine tribes as nations and UNdefine the reservation as a nation with boundaries because then they can go to a lower internal level of law.  But the Blackfeet “treaty” was never even signed by the government.  To regularize the present, it is necessary to call for “do-overs” of the past, some of them legal and others practical.

Cunningly, the US killed all the buffalo and sent all the children to schools to learn to be white.  But they couldn’t kill the culture.  They made lists of the original people and called that “blood” though it was only provenance, meaning descent.  No one even knew what blood types were until 1901.  They didn't mean blood -- they meant sperm and ovum.  The genome is much more recent than blood types, and it cannot guarantee that a person belongs to one tribe or another because of that moving edge of the population.  Naturally, as soon as the provenance lists were being drawn up, all sorts of folks showed up claiming to be Blackfeet because it meant survival.

Nevertheless, there some direct descendants of people on that original list and they were likely to be more intensely and culturally Blackfeet than others.  We speak of them as “full-bloods,” meaning that all their known ancestors were named on that list.  Few are left.  Few Blackfeet speakers are left, but some of them are children, which is a new phenomenon.

Darrell Kipp at Nitzipuwahsin School with a star pupil.

Fractionation of people’s ancestry as well as their land allotments on the reservation tend to undefine them, but the real definition of the Blackfeet has got to be something in the heart.  To demonstrate it by living on the reservation, learning the language and the ceremonies, knowing one’s ancestors, and claiming this identity is basic.  Some tribes will not accept membership from people who don’t live on their reservation.  The movement to claim membership without “being here” takes people away from the land that made them who they are.  But sometimes the only way to earn a living or get higher education is to leave.

There is also another movement already underway and strong enough to be named:  reconquista after the recapture of the European Iberian peninsula.  The brown people are coming back this way -- no wonder the Euros are scared!  Their secret is the same as the Nile: fertility.  Their motive is the same as all species: survival.  The industrial revolution has led us into a desert.  Now the People have the advantage, esp. the ones who have the culture and the land in their hearts.  They are in favor of education -- on their terms -- and they are creating a new culture that combines many old ones.  The fringe is coming to the middle and the old boundaries are breached to let in the waters.