IMAGINING HEAD-SMASHED-IN

Jack Brink is a nearly unbelievable name for a guy who writes about buffalo jumps! I mean, BRINK!!!?? A buffalo jump is a place where pre-horse people of the northern plains caused groups of buffalo to run over a cliff which hopefully killed them but perhaps only maimed them enough to be killed with spears and arrows. The practice persisted until probably 1830 to 1850. Brink’s book, “Imagining Head-Smashed-In: Aboriginal Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains” has been published by the Athabasca University Press, whose directing editor, Walter Hildebrandt, was previously at the University of Calgary Press when my book about Bob Scriver was accepted for publication there.

Athabasca University has no campus. It is a child of the oil boom that made the Athabasca oil sands suddenly valuable and caused a stampede of people to northern Alberta. The University exists as an electronic being, almost a “cloud” entity in computer parlance. I don’t know what will happen when this boom begins to recede. The changes in the economy and in publishing are coming as fast as the coming of the horse that completely changed the culture of the northern Plains.

One of the main astonishments of the Athabasca University Press is that you can download any of their books for FREE. Also, you can buy either hard-copy or soft-cover versions, all printed out and with a pretty photo front: a bison skull prepared for a Sun Lodge ceremony (painted with red dots on one side, black dots on the other, eyes stuffed with grass) and superimposed Georgia O’Keefe style against a prairie horizon at the “magic hour”-- which is when the sun is low, either at dawn or dusk, or in winter which lasts a long time in Edmonton. Athabasca is even farther north.

As I write this, I’m downloading the book, so this blog is in reaction to an interview with Jack Brink on “Quirks and Quarks,” a program that comes over the Yellowstone Public Radio station (when it hasn’t been knocked out by the weather). Brink is Archeology Curator at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, which institution also has custody of Bob Scriver’s Blackfeet bronzes, one of which portrays a man hazing buffalo with a robe. Brink’s BA is from University of Minnesota and his MA is from the University of Alberta.

Brink was eloquent in describing the way the tribespeople managed to get the bison near the jump, the piskun, and then running fast enough to go over the edge. He emphasized the planning and the cooperation that was necessary, involving at least a hundred people, both to run the beasts over the edge and then to process them once they were piled in a huge quivering avalanche of flesh, blood and brown hide. It would be necessary to cut them up (which took a whole day for two or three inexperienced young women with modern knives to cut up one animal when the feat was attempted recently at Blackfeet Community College) and then to slice the meat into thin pieces to dry on racks over smoky fires in the sun. Once thoroughly dried, the meat could be stashed in bags made of hides and buried or otherwise hidden or carried along until needed in winter when there was no game.

Head-Smashed-In is a new generation museum that depends less on “look what we found and now own” and more on “this is what you’re looking at” (the whole cliffside is there in cross-section) and "this is what we can see by studying it." Tech imagination lets near-magic phenomena guide you, like stories that mysteriously appear on rocks (projected from overhead), then fade again. These exhibits were preceded by many years of walking along, combing the grass for small clues, and sifting the tailings of the bottom of the cliff. Among the objects found was the smashed-in head of a youth who didn’t run fast enough or was in the wrong place.

The grass yielded long lines of small cairns. Most of us around here know that runners hid behind cairns (rock piles) and stood up at the strategic moment to wave a hide that would help scare the buffs, but Brink told about very small rock piles that might have been more markers than hiding places. They might have been the anchors for a pile of brush or dung piles, which make a lot more sense when you think about the actuality of hand-lugging big piles of rocks over the prairie. The trouble with studying stone culture is that it is enmeshed in materials of wood and sinew which degrade back into the environment, so the technologies of glue and fiber are lost. Brink said these lines went back onto the prairie many kilometers and made vectors in V-shapes, or long curves, or maybe just straight lines. The necessary learning for working a buffalo jump would include “reading” these lines and what they meant.

Beyond that, this technology was based on cooperation and was the source, the NECESSITY, of putting the tribal welfare ahead of the individual. The political shattering of most tribes that makes progress so difficult today is NOT essentially the culture of the northern Plains. Not that individuals didn’t act creatively to invent new things and ways, but that when it came to the crunch, people followed their leaders. This was destroyed two ways: the horse, which made it possible for a skillful hunter (esp. with a gun) to go out and kill a couple of bison without enlisting the help of anyone else; and utter poverty which made the people dependent on oppressors. They are still afraid to give up that dependence entirely, though it’s happening little by little. They still suck up to powerful people and movie stars (who are NOT powerful) and they still hunt for their own families instead of collaborating as a group. This is how environmental forces shape culture.

Now Brink’s book is downloaded to my hard drive. I’ll look for the part where hunters who had closely examined their prey were able to get close by disguising themselves as calves and imitating the sounds they made in distress while other hunters disguised themselves as wolves and pretended to be attacking the faux calves, so as to bring the bison running to defend their child. White observers who wrote about it said they were so convincing that if they hadn’t seen the men disguise themselves, they might have shot them.

My UPS man is enrolled Blackfeet. On these snowy days he comes to my door exhilarated at the stories he remembers as he drives that brown truck across the prairie. We exclaim over Willow Rounds, not far from here, stone tipi rings. We imagine being rolled up in bison robes, chewing on dry meat or maybe slurping up soup boiled by dropping hot stones into rawhide-lined pits.

http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120137

RESERVATION LIFE

To be white and living on one of the vast dry high-altitude reservations of the plains West was to step into almost a different dimension. It wasn't that people were different in the way that another country might be different, but that one's most basic assumptions about everything were challenged. Ordinary tribal society was a tissue of dreams, half-memories, secrets, superstition, and outright lies meant to baffle and deflect.

It is often as difficult for Native Americans to grasp as it is for white people to understand that not all tribes that are seen as tribes today were, in fact, formally tribes until the BIA starting requiring organized tribes to function in political versus historically matrilineal ways. The Navajo were a loosely-knit band of nomadic Indians who spoke a similar Athabaskan dialect of which there are over fifty variations on the Navajo Nation alone. Changing Woman is the chief deity of the Navajo whose mythology reflects their extraordinary migrations that hit the Southwest when Anasazi culture was ready to decline. But these migrations (from the North) were family-led, not tribal in nature.

When an anthropologist went to such a place, carefully taking down notes all day and transcribing them in the evening, he (almost always "he") was a dog watching a movie, picking out what seemed real to him, but not what might seem at all real to the people doing the acting. (This is no longer the case since most people have been assimilated more effectively by television than by any missionaries.) In the Sixties and Seventies the complex swirl of rez life included Aquarian pilgrims hoping to find a way to fit in.

At the point when my father-in-law came to Browning, 1903, the Blackfeet and their Cree/Metis adjunct had been refugees, staying in place while their culture was dismantled and suppressed around them, losing from their own sky the constellations of belief that had guided and protected them for millennia. One agent forbade beading as a savage and subversive preoccupation, though clearly glass beads were provided by Euro traders or maybe Asian trade. Mission teachers went after obvious things like braids and eye contact, while never noticing abuse to children. Today all that trauma -- major destruction and perversion of families, never enough food, the confusion from losing the stories that told them who they were -- is either suppressed by the Indians themselves, glossed over by whites wanting to look good, or inflated into monstrous exaggerations for the political ends of both categories.

Everywhere on the planet, the absence of money causes other economies to develop: trade in secrets, behind-the-scenes deals and contacts, and maybe sexual privileges. The reservations today are now no better or worse than their surrounding white towns, which they are rapidly moving into anyway, since reservation housing is never quite adequately funded. Nothing is ever quite adequately funded except expense accounts. But in 1903 the straightforward men who came to trade in Browning had been buffalo hunters and horseback warriors a few decades earlier. By 1961 when I came, there were still a few old people who were born in 1880 or maybe slightly earlier, but the main reservation treaties were signed in 1851, the buffalo had been gone since 1883 (Charlie Russell arrived in Montana in 1880), and only a few child survivors of the Baker Massacre in 1869 were still living. Since then, another half-century has passed and today's parent generation is tall, strong, prosperous and educated. Their grasp of history is based on classes and books and most are firmly Christian. One just became the head of the state Office of Public Instruction.

Tim Barrus and Tina Giovanni went to live and teach on the Navajo Nation in the 1990s, escaping the many AIDS deaths destroying what had been a brilliant renaissance and new creation in San Francisco, especially fueled by gay talent and energy. Tim was particularly struck by the Mariano Lake high-desert landscape of Hosta Butte. From their BIA house they could see for over a hundred miles -- a hundred miles and nothing man-made in sight. Mariano Lake was an awakening. BIA housing is not closed off from the community. It is very much a part of the community. The Pinedale Trading Post was groceries, post office, and laundry for everyone. You only made the trip off the reservation if you had to. There were children who only knew Mariano Lake. Like kids everywhere, when given a bit of educational support, they bloomed like the Navajo country after a rain.

Tim already had special feelings for kids, had worked for the United Nations Year of the Child by organizing art shows, painting a giant block-long mural on the building where he worked, and taking his own photographs. He had worked in special education in Taos and Santa Fe. In California, he had worked with deaf children. By this time he was carrying enormous guilt for not being able to somehow pull his small son, Tommy, out of his damaged brain into something like a normal life, but also constant joy in his daughter, Kree, born wise and tough, a survivor from the beginning.

Given that Tim and Tina's training and certification was special ed, which means adapting to the child, inventing methods, not getting stuck in issues of curriculum, life on the Navajo reservation was both shocking and transcendent, the kind of experience that marks a person for life. An old lady set up her loom in the front yard of their home. Sheep, horses, and goats were everywhere. The people gradually came to know them. It was a while before the corrosions and tragedies surfaced.

The difference between deaths and other losses on a reservation is that, like a small town, you know the victims by name. You help deal with the debris afterwards. You have to deal with your own grief, and one of those ways is by writing.

It's a strange phenomenon that often white people who have never been on a reservation except to drive through on a holiday are the ones who are most insistent about what the reality of reservation life truly is. They split into two groups: those who want to hear about the miserable and degraded things so that they can shake their heads at all that misery, and those who want Indians to be next to angels, noble and magic. The first of these groups was only too happy to accept Tim's stories so long as they appeared to be memoir, thus adding a little spice to the voyeurism while allowing them to feel that everything was all right in the end since he could write a famous book. The second of these groups, especially the members attempting to worm their way into what might seem to be a privileged career as an "expert" on Indians, attacked Tim once they found a way to discredit him. They seized on his participation in the San Francisco gay life -- defiant and transgressive and flamboyant as it was in those times -- and "revealed" it in sensational articles in men's magazines and the alternative press.

In the actual time of being "cloaked" as Nasdijj, Tim was in a wheelchair and then recovering from a double hip transplant, paid for by the three books. Barrus and his wife moved to North Carolina because Duke University Medical was the only place willing to try the then experimental surgery Tim needed to replace bone with ceramic (most hip surgery is still done with titanium). Tim still limps as one leg is now shorter than the other, a by-product of the surgery. The title "Geronimo's Bones" is clearly personal.

At this time of rabid right-wing fundamentalism, attacks on homosexuality mixed with a barely hidden racism. These righteous people wanted to be virtuous, prosperous, straight and white and were willing to use any means to enforce that idea. It was in their interest to vilify Tim Barrus.

Tim Barrus did not take it, so to speak, sitting down.

THE FORCES AT PLAY ON NA LIT

“Indigenous literature,” as Europeans call it, varies greatly according to the point in history when first-contact with the local people was made, as well as other factors. One of the first problems, of course, was the difference in language, which in the Americas was usually oral, so that “literature” would have to be defined in the ways that would include European oral literatures: ballads, sagas, fairy tales, legends and so on. Since Euros considered their oral literature suitable for non-literate people like peasants and children, their impulse was to see NA oral literature also as primitive because it wasn’t written down. The tough and sometimes raunchy NA stories became Disney-fied.

As soon as the indigenous people along the east coast understood what writing was, they became literate in spite of efforts to prevent them, as well as slaves, from learning it, lest it give them an advantage. But to no avail. Benjamin Franklin had a helper who could set print, that is, as well as reading and writing letters to the editor, he could assemble print on a typestick in mirror-order. The biggest trouble in the earliest days was that when native people were around enough Euros to learn these skills, they caught germs for which they had no immune defense and died too young to accumulate much.

Since students learned to read and write in English or whatever, it took a while for the indigenous people to figure out they could write down their own languages phonetically. The kind of missionaries who were “book-focused,” mostly Protestants, were intent on providing translations of the Bible and various prayer books, so they were very helpful in learning the indigenous languages and providing a body of print. There were sympathetic Victorian ladies who volunteered to be interlocutors, giving many the idea that Indian Chiefs sounded like poetry-smitten governesses.

As industrialization began to change the face of Europe, ideas about the indigenous people became reservoirs for romantic thoughts about nature as a refuge from the pestilence and ordure of growing new cities full of factories served by gin-soaked wage labor. Thus in France and Germany, American Indians have become so identified with natural nobility and the innocence of animals and children that most folks don’t realize it is a concept -- they think it is actual fact. Because the first steam engines came to the American prairie as steamboats up the Mississippi/Missouri network and mighty railroads across the grasslands (often built by near slave-labor Chinese), the trope of the wild and innocent people who had lived there gracefully captured the whole world’s imagination, even that of the Indians themselves! Nineteenth century prairie tribes (AFTER the advent of the horse) became an idyllic version of Eden and their destruction by disease and massacre is the American Holocaust.

An email friend remarked that he didn’t know any Indians, that he was 1500 miles away from any Indians. I laughed. He was probably within five feet of an Indian descendant and if he was in a city he was probably within ten miles of a cluster of self-identified Indians. This continent is seeded with reservations, reserves, and ranchos (the California version). One hopes they do indeed constitute little seeds that protect kernels of wisdom from a badly fragmented set of cultures, but in any case they are there.

The idea of the “Vanishing Indian” (See Brian Dippie’s definitive book with that title) came out of the idea that Euros ought to hurry to record 19th century Indian culture before it escapes entirely. Thus the work of George Bird Grinnell, Walter McClintock, Frank Bird Linderman, James Willard Schultz, Doug Gold, and Charlie Russell -- all of them white men writing about Indians -- blurrily separated from “proper” anthropologists but were and are very popular, esp. when reporting legends or feats of bravery.

The next wave is writers who claimed they WERE Indians: Ernest Thompson Seton (Black Wolf), Grey Owl, Long Lance. This wave continued into the present, revived by the Aquarian revolutionary counterculture echoing the German Romantic anti-industrialists. This tendency has not settled down. A new twist is people who live like 19th century Indians, reporting from cabins and lodges. To most people, this IS unreflectively what Native American writing is all about, that yearning to escape to a better world.

But then came a wave of literary impulse supported by better education for Native Americans. A man like James Welch or a woman like Louise Erdrich could attend college and dare to be novelists in the adult Euro sense, writing about their own lives in the twentieth century instead of constantly putting readers into a time machine. They could employ such sophistications as Magic Realism. This was called the Native American Literature Renaissance, a host of Indians across the country writing about their own lives on reservations and in cities. I have a bookcase full of them from Adrian Louis to Louis Owens and back again with books of lit crit about them.

Woe to the unwary romantic who felt that he or she was psychically an Indian without a tribal membership to flash! The theories of deconstruction, post-colonialism, and other philosophies made the case that white men were stealing not only the land and the wealth of the Indians, but also their culture and their identities. The idea was that if the whites would just stop writing about Indians, then the Indians would get rich writing about themselves. At least those who ever got around to writing a book.

So why didn’t more Indians get to scribbling? Why weren’t they published, instead of posers? Academics leapt to the fray, universities serving as forts for the defense and interpretation of “pure” Indian thinkers by whites and Non-Americans. For a while there was a wave of books. Then they crashed into the remainder bins, leaving only a few in print and some rather embittered Indian intellectuals in the rubble of university departments.

About the time of the breakthrough understanding of the double helix of DNA, and about the time that a new generation of Indians were challenging whether or not their children should be on the tribal rolls if their blood quantum by provenance fell below a certain fraction, there was a great fascination with challenging the Indian identities of writers. For purist critics, only 100% blood qualified, which left standing maybe Ray Young Bear (whom no one read, though they ought to) and a half-dozen others. Bringing down best-selling “Indian” writers became a vicious pastime: Tom King, Ward Churchill, Louise Erdrich and Jim Welch, Paula Gunn Allen, Michael Dorris, and many others were attacked. As Sherman Alexie began to make money and become well-known, he was also criticized -- sometimes for a short story that hinted at homosexuality. One could demonstrate greater sophistication and inside knowledge by telling people the “real” stuff about Jay Silverheels and Grey Eyes. This quarreling and nit-picking, verging on Hollywood celebrity culture, discouraged ordinary whites from reading the books. Two sobering suicides of NA writers made some Indians reconsider their English majors. Probably the last blow was the publicity about reservation casinos. If one of the great pleasures of reading about Indians was nostalgia for a lost Eden, why worry about it if they’d all gone to Vegas?

Publishers didn’t much like contemporary realism about Indians anyway. Readers found it “so depressing,” their usual excuse for avoiding difficulties like poverty. Jim Welch found that his “Indian Lawyer” book would not sell, though the historical “Fool’s Crow” was everyone’s favorite. Publishers printed small runs, advertised very little, remaindered unsold copies early, and never tried to sell Indian books to Indians. Then they concluded there was no money in NA lit. The vortex grew. Attention to stories about lost innocence shifted to Africa where Djimon Hounsou replaced Cochise as Nature’s Nobleman.

More later. This is a long story. I'm composing it while wearing the red shirt with NW Indian canoeists on the back that Phillip Red Eagle gave me. Are you impressed?

ANOTHER MILLION DOLLAR INDIAN ARTIFACT COLLECTION: DAVID HUMPHREYS MILLER

I was interested in the Great Falls Tribune Sunday story (8-31-08) about the proposed acquisition of the David Humphreys Miller collection. Actually, they say it's worth 1.4 million. (Inflation, you know.) With the Miller collection in mind, let’s take a look at what makes collections of Indian artifacts (and portraits) valuable.

First of all, let’s be blunt. Indian artifacts were often the trophies of the wars that cleared the prairies for white development. A scalp, a quiver, a shield, guns and bows and so on might have been actually collected off the field the way my uncle acquired Herman Goering’s tableware and stationary after WWII. This collection is in part made valuable by its connection to the Battle of the Little Big Horn or the Battle of the Greasy Grass or Custer’s Last Stand. Naming rights to the event is part of the dynamics.

Second, Indian artifacts were often sold because the People were pressed into need by the loss of their former economy and the graft of the US government, from agents to railroaders, who constantly skimmed tribal wealth. (One might accompany this point with the CMR portrait of the Indian mother selling a buffalo horn hat rack, trudging down the sidewalk in front of an elegantly porched Great Falls house where a prosperous but oblivious white woman rocks her child.)

Third, Indian artifacts are based on the 19th century assumption that Indians were doomed as a separate people, that the death of their previous culture would mean NO culture at all, so they would stop existing. The idea is that we killed them, but we saved their good stuff as curiosities or maybe “works of art” or for a veneer of scientific research.

Fourth, religious artifacts are laden with the “magic” quality that many attribute to the American Indian of the 19th century and that contemporary Indians use to accrue value and status to themselves. But it’s my understanding that the value and status of ceremonial objects and their allocation to the stewardship of individuals, though they were connected to prosperity (both bringing it and necessitating it for the expensive performance of the ceremonies) actually belonged to the tribe itself. That is, the elders of the tribe determined worthiness to manage ceremonies, because the "magic" affected the welfare of the whole.

Yet this is problematic because the “tribe” was an assemblage of independent bands whose leadership shifted according to the task at hand so as to put capable people in charge. There was no “tribe” as a whole until the US Government began to impose the requirement so as to have a coherent entity with which to deal, who could sign treaties in the European manner. Many problems have been created by their failure to recognize that in the best of times (even now) the bands never universally assented to decisions. The tribe’s most powerful portion, not necessarily a majority, is associated with a lot of small groups who go along only if they must and often with a great deal of noisy objection. If two factions are about evenly matched -- well, watch the newspaper.

Even in the case of Lyle Heavyrunner, who is a good man and a capable leader (as well as posing for one of the buffalo hunters in Bob Scriver’s major bronze called “Real Meat”), is only a member of one branch of the Eagle Calf (John Ground) family and the branches are not unanimous among themselves. Add the complication of several different tribes intermarrying and interacting (or parts of tribes since no two tribes merged -- certainly not traditional enemies like the Sioux and Blackfeet) and the fact that some of these artifacts (Black Elk’s) possibly represent a synergy with Christianity, and entitlement becomes very cloudy.

Sioux are not a prominent tribe of Montana, are they? Aren’t they a South Dakota-based tribe these days? Or maybe Hollywood-based? (The pattern has been that Sioux play the parts and Blackfeet do the dangerous stunts and provide the horses.) Are the Sioux willing to let these materials stay in Montana or are they going to come over and claim them back the way the Blackfeet went up to Edmonton and demanded back the materials Bob Scriver sold up there?

As long as we’re talking about the Scriver artifact collection (which included a gun collection and a RCMP uniform collection), it should be noted that the materials defined as “Sacred Bundles” soon left the Royal Alberta Museum as “loans” to the Blackfoot groups in Alberta and possibly a sale to a Montana Blackfeet person. Also, Scriver artifact materials that were NOT in the sale to the RAM, were impounded at the border when they were sent north by Lorraine Scriver and/or returned to Lorraine Scriver by the RAM curator. They were left for safekeeping at the Montana Historical Society, but impounded by Fish & Game, and went from there back to individuals in the Blackfeet Tribe not representing the tribe as a whole, who has no suitable secure repository anyway.

The Museum of the Plains Indian remains the property of the US Government, who has tried to give it to the tribe, who will not accept it because they also want enough money to maintain the Museum. As standards for museums keep rising -- climate control, access, insurance -- and because the Museum is built on a flood plain (like much of Browning), this is problematic. The damage from the 1964 flood, which destroyed much valuable material plus damaging the foundation, has never been repaired. (This was a war-time no-frills build financed by the Crafts Association of the US Government and the Lions Clubs of America.) The bottom line is whether the university system is capable of guarding and preserving the Miller collection.

The nature of institutions is that they have very weak memories, especially since the people with expertise often come from elsewhere and don’t know the local history and culture. Institutions are political animals and if anyone thinks that the “white” population of Montana is less divided than the historical and present Indian population, they haven’t been paying attention. In an era when institutions are never properly funded -- partly because of so many competing needs like poverty, crop failure, wildfire, and weather disasters and partly because of resistance to taxes and regulation -- institutions are far more tempted than usual to deaccession materials to fund salaries and maintenance. It has been a scandal everywhere.

In this Miller case, the anonymity of the selling party, masked behind representatives, is traditional. It is unclear how the legal owners acquired the collection. Also unclear is how much compensation those representatives are expecting: the honor of it all? Friendship? A percentage? It also worries me that the appraiser is nameless: he could be anyone, maybe the present Museum Services Manager of the Montana Historical Society, an expert on Native American materials who was let go from the Portland Art Museum. (The reason for parting was temperament, not irregularities with his work.) Appraisers are normally paid, sometimes a percentage of the value of what they are appraising, a practice that probably needs to be rethought.

Another factor is the copyright issue in regards to such materials as Miller’s 1957 book: “Custer’s Fall: the Indian Side of the Story.” The law has been changed so much in the past few years, sometimes with retroactive inclusions, that an expert would be needed to confirm that indeed the materials were still under copyright rather than public domain. (Someone is recasting Scriver bronzes copyrighted in the Fifties, I assume because they think they are public domain.) Beyond that, copyright rests on the absence of challenges from the persons who are rightfully entitled to the materials. Who would try to declare standing in the case of Miller’s writing and photographs? Does he have descendants? Why are they not identified?

My last point is a bit of a niggle, but I’m going to put it in just the same. Adolph Hungry Wolf (some people will quit reading at this point) personally and at his own expense, both money and effort over decades, has published a four-book compendium of photos and documents specifically about the South Piegan Blackfeet in every aspect. Anyone can buy it for $400 and have a lot more on hand than the Miller collection.

Unless one is looking for war trophies. Maybe the wars have continued, but more subtly than just killing an enemy outright. Oh, and since it seems to have dropped out of institutional memory, Bob Scriver played an important part in the Exalted Ruler effort by creating a small bronze that was sold in large numbers.

ART & ARCHITECTURE (Spring/ Summer, 2008)

The cover of the new issue of the elegant “Art & Architecture” magazine is a good illustration of a hypothesis I’d like to propose: the more “high end” a Western art magazine may be, the more likely it is to be open to both realistic and abstract art. Conversely, the more “low end,” the more concentrated the art is likely to be on one style and one subject matter. Also, the more “high end,” the more playful, abstract and experimental the subject is likely to be, while the “low end” is more likely to be earnest, associating achievement with ideology, more concrete in values and more influenced by Hollywood.



This cover shows a Deborah Butterfield abstract (but still representational) horse made of wrecked car metal standing next to a restored vintage Mustang, candy apple red with the license plate “neigh.” Of course, the two are parked in a port cochere so imposing that surely it must be entrance to a fine institution rather than a home, but it is actually Jane Sturdivant’s home and the house is in the midst of remarkable grounds that include ornaments acquired on European travels, ancient stone bits rather than fancy or sentimental stuff. There are no naked lady statues but also no garden gnomes or merry plastic frogs. Jane occasionally rides one of her elegant and quite real horses through the grounds. There are no cows and I suspect that deer are discouraged.

So that’s one end of the scale and the other end might be a story about Charles Finn, photographed by Tom Ferris, who looks for old buildings to disassemble, seeing in the rust, peeling paint, and weather-blasted gray wood a beauty that can be literally re-framed in what Finn calls “microhouses,” tiny buildings suitable for a hermit or artist. He values stone, adobe, adze-squared timbers.

The imposing vanity houses of the rich that now dot Montana use the same surfaces and substances, creating monster houses of timber, stone, corten steel and glass, all of them evidently uninhabited or only photographed after the set arrangers have made a thorough sweep. Never a flung-down newspaper or a box of tissues or a vagrant sock. Some locals, living in flimsy little pieced-out shacks that were good enough for their great-grandparents, are resentful, but I encourage them to imagine these houses as ruins centuries from now: an elk enjoying the cool of the stone hearth, a cougar stretched out in the rafters, or a bear making muddy pawprints on the huge windows.

Ever see one of those affordable modular homes exploded and splintered by high winds or an accident while being moved? Toothpick wood and pink spun glass batting all over the place. Bent aluminum siding, cracked pvc pipe and torn up laminate flooring. But when it is in place and intact, it might make a pretty nice home for a family -- some of Uncle Charlie’s paintings of cows on the wall, lots of family photos, maybe an arrangement of blue ribbons won at rodeos or fairs. Laundry being sorted. Athletic equipment in a corner. It’s a different aesthetic and a different kind of practical.

Fifty years ago “House Beautiful” magazine published a series about a Japanese aesthetic called “Shibui.” Many, many people, including me, saved those issues, which were printed on heavy paper in subtle colors. This is from a googled business catalog: “In Japan, people think of beauty in levels—from blatant, brash, and bold to the ideal of beauty: Shibui.

“Shibui” means the type of beauty that doesn’t need announcement; its quality speaks for itself. It involves the maturity, complexity, history, and patina that only time can bring—like a fine vintage wine. Shibui objects have a history which they convey. They speak of understated elegance, utility (each piece serves an important function), rare beauty, and unobtrusive sophistication.”

In Japanese terms the microhouses made of recycled materials might be wabi-sabi, which centers on transience, like rust. This is from Wikipedia: “Andrew Juniper claims, "if an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi." Richard R. Powell summarizes by saying "It (wabi-sabi) nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect."

My understanding of “iki” all these years has been that it was kind of gaudy and childish, but this is what Wikipedia says: “An iki thing/situation would be simple, improvised, straight, restrained, temporary, romantic, ephemeral, original, refined, inconspicuous, etc. An iki person/deed would be audacious, chic, pert, tacit, sassy, unselfconscious, calm, indifferent, unintentionally coquettish, open-minded, restrained, etc.

“An iki thing/person/situation cannot be perfect, artistic, arty, complicated, gorgeous, curved, wordy, intentionally coquettish, or cute.” So I expect that Mustang is pretty “iki.” But the Butterfield horse is wabi-sabi.

And Shibui? Is there anything in this magazine I would consider Shibui? The land, of course. The prairies are Shibui except where they’re wabi-sabi, like old homesteads. Most of the paintings approach kitsch (dunno how to say that in Japanese) and I’m including the high-priced ones. But I have two nominations: one is the Lord family retreat in Truckee, CA, near Tahoe, which is consciously meant to be influenced by Japanese buildings.



The other is an ancient buckskin dress, identified as being Nez Perce, pre-1820. Patched and fringed with pale but not white buckskin, the top is banded simply in black and white stripes, “lazy” stitch which means that a short string of beads is not then tacked down bead by bead, but left to be a little fluid. These dresses are really two deerskins, one as the front and one as the back, pieced at the hem, with the tail (hair on) of the deer folded over at the top under the chin, pinned down with beading. The stripe at the top of the arms alternates black, white and red.

Plains Indian DNA refers back to the high Mongolian prairies, you know. This dress makes one wonder whether aesthetics might be encoded in DNA.