NOVEMBER SNOW

This Monday morning there’s snow on the ground, the house is not quite warm, and the feral cat family is not showing up except for the big orange and white tom that Caspar (the old bull dyke white cat from across the street) beat hell out of yesterday.  Fat lot of good that did!  I guess I need to track him down to see where he lives.  With this much snow on the ground, it shouldn’t be hard to follow his trail.  Also, I can probably find where Patches and the three kits have their home nest.  I know it’s on this property below.

The house belongs to a Frenchman who lives in Florida and who specializes in renovating and “flipping” empty properties in small towns.  There’s a big pile of brush next to a shed and I suspect the cats have a burrow under that shed which they do not intend to flip.

So I’m having a “board meeting” with me, myself and I, plus whatever fantasy selves I can summon up.  The main topic seems to be “incompleteness.”  Too many things started but not finished -- a basic character flaw.  When it works it’s because I start half a dozen things, wait to see which one is catching hold and working, then abandon the others.  But the dark side of that is getting captured by something that works, mostly, but not entirely, with the reasons for non-completion being things that are out of my hands.  A good example is blogging, which is not one thing, but several.

I can easily maintain the schedule of at least 1,000 words a day, which has somehow become 1200 words.  (It’s notoriously difficult to write short.)  But the reason it's easy is that I work so many different threads.  Half of readers come by following, though only a double-dozen using the blogspot “follow” feature, and now more than half come through search engines.  This means if I put in a trendy tag or use a subject that is “popular,” the number of hits for a post will double or triple.  Sometimes posts that are years old will come alive with a hundred hits.  If I can trust the indicators, I’m running between 600 and 800 hits a day, 1,000 if the topics are popular.  Some posts are slow at first, then mushroom.

But I’m not playing the “hit whore” game, which is just pushing for popularity.  I don’t care how many people are looking.  NO one except a couple of long-time readers ever comments, but I think that’s in part because of my topics and style -- they aren’t the kind of thing that attracts hipshots.  I’m beginning to cluster posts into “books” that I can put on Lulu.com or on a long-form PDF host.  They will immediately become pirated “free” material.  The channel for making money is to promote, tour, tout, pay for advertising, build a platform -- all the things a publisher used to do and that now publishers will demand that the writer do.  I don’t want to be a drummer for a publisher.

Me, 1965

I see that I have an almost unmanageable plethora of stuff: a book of cowboy short stories, a book of Indian stories, a couple of essay collections, plus my “Bone Chalice” project.  Sometimes people ask whether I have a memoir but I resist even collecting "memories" from the blog.  What they want is to vicariously chase buffalo, pour bronze, preach to Unitarians, and catch dogs -- without any interest in what those things mean.  They are just excitements, adventures.  Momentary but hardly momentous.

I do not think it is possible to be a really meaningful writer now.  It’s partly a matter of the culture not valuing “literary” writing as much as sensationalism, but more than that there is STILL no delivery system that works.  I’m sure people are out there writing amazing stuff, but no one knows how to find it.  A person can spend hours exploring and find only half-assed on-line mags, special interest groups, and a hail of bright pretty vampire-killer mommies just now discovering S/M.  There are other sub-groups if you know where to look.

My frustration is probably my fault for being imprinted with formidable men.  In Montana David Quammen is the only man of that quality I’m aware of who is about my age.  Maybe Richard Manning. The Unitarians, who promised to be exceptional, have turned out entirely trivial.  The Montana female writers, as soon as they had a reputation, moved to a better climate.  I thought the candidates for a salon de refusée might be interesting, but they’re emotional cripples.  So much for a cohort.

What is a singleton, aging, arrogant woman with increasing carpal-tunnel-syndrome and a falling-apart house doing at the keyboard anyway?  Pleasing herself.  Maybe it IS masturbation -- is there something wrong with that?

Now and then I can put an oar in on the Blackfeet Reservation.  That takes the number of hits up quickly -- still no comments.  We’re all hunkered down thinking about it -- except the FBI which rushes around interfacing with Homeland Security, Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, Border Patrol, Customs, etc. and sucking down money for tech stuff -- leaving none for ordinary beat-cop maintenance.  Who is responsible for the law that lets them keep what they impound?  Pure evil greed.  Clever quiet corruption.  Trace THAT.

Two successes are the schools and this new idea about Emergency Mental Health Responders, Issksiniip, armed with ears and a heart.  So much local practical history is lost.  I can make up for a little of it, threading among the anonymous righteous and the ignorant liberal outsiders.  It helps to draw on the Blackfoot Nation in Canada. 

(L to R) Blackfeet elected Tribal Council members Jay Wells, Bill Old Chief, Jay St. Goddard, Paul McEvers and Cheryl Little Dog were dismissed on accusations of misconduct in violation of Blackfeet tribal ordinances. 

But NO ONE is thinking about the true problems:  first, that long-game natural resource predators can only benefit from Tribal Council chaos that keeps them weak and looking stupid.  I’m sure the predators are covertly provoking and supporting division, which isn’t hard in such a climate of jealousy and resentment.

Second, the closed cultural system that justified the reservation in the first place is now a trap, because there is no access to justice beyond local families and cartels. For Indians to think only in terms of sovereignty (and I am not suggesting they give that up), is to deprive their own people of citizen rights.  There has to be access to a larger appellate or "supreme" justice that's not local.  This is the same problem as on a national scope: the United States is not participating in the world order of justice.  For instance, the US abstains from signing United Nations pledges to protect children.  http://treaties.un.org  Other nations notice and approach the Native American tribes as though they were true nations.  But the land base is gone: no longer owned by Indians.  Is it?  For sale.  Isn't it?

If there are truly dedicated and competent journalists out there, they should begin to follow the money and regulations involved in water rights; oil, gas and coal; alcohol and drugs; timber -- in all categories both legal and illegal money. Indians make a wonderful “front” for funny business because people are so emotional about them.  (Young reporters fall in love; old editors strike out everything that doesn't fit their personal world-view.)  Many members of the “Cats Paw Clan.”   Track those cats. Take a close look at the county and state levels, the bodies that control regulations about land use, and the personal fortunes that have invested in this state and on this rez.  Montana is overrun with people wanting to exclaim over the mountains, wring their hands over the wildlife, exult over the energy profits from wind and sun.  There are far too many lawyers.  Not enough reading of fine print.  Not enough actual residence.

Even the bees and beefs are snowbirds.  The stock trucks have been going through on their way south all week.  Leaves are on the ground except for the ones freeze-dried onto the trees, dammit.  (My cottonwood won’t let sun through.)  We also hang on as the twirling planet wobbles us into winter, so palpably in a place with this much wind and sky.  Humans here are brief and wary.  I hang onto my keyboard.  If my hands fail entirely, I’ll learn to use the “dictation” feature.  Now I suppose I should set my clocks back.  I always wait too long.  And I’m hungry too soon.

TWO ROUTES TO REZ LEADERSHIP

This time of year around here the more nomadic elements of the population begin to show up on doorsteps or on email in-boxes.  It’s always valuable.  I am always home.  In fact, James St. Goddard, whose family and immediate ancestors were known to and in some cases close friends of the Scrivers, stopped by with his son.  We talked about the two ways to be a leader on the rez.  (I’m excluding whites.)  One is participation in the formal government-invented corporation that is the Blackfeet Tribe and which has a split leadership:  the elected tribally-enrolled people and the US Government Indian Service bureaucrats: the agent and so on, including the FBI which has expanded from responsibility for the ten major crimes to just about anything that interests them.  

This complex of hierarchical management and regulation called a “council” also extends to the state-delegated rez schools (except for the Blackfeet Community College) and Montana Child and Family Services, plus the Indian Health Service.    The council is also the official face to the county (two of them actually, since the rez sticks over into Pondera as well as occupying most of Glacier), the state, federal agencies such as environmental regulation and the US border which is one boundary of the rez.  No one really understands these complicated relationships and duties, which means they are a rich ground for corruption, embezzlement, sweet deals, fantasy and family fiefdoms.  Much of what goes on is secret by default:  no one has the time or motivation to figure it out.

If an educated person of good will hopes to serve his people through this form of leadership, he or she can do it.  Stu Miller would be my shining example.  But there is another route and Stu would not contradict it -- he simply didn’t exploit it.  This form is rooted in the old-time ideas and structures and has the appeal of not only being close to instinctive for some people on the rez but also just going around all the red-tape kudzu of the tribe as a business corporation.  Curly Bear Wagner and Buster Yellow Kidney took this route, which requires learning a lot of tribal history, claiming ancestors, devotion to a spiritual life, and rejection of assimilation.   

Few can combine this way of life with academics (academic=assimilation), though a few can manage it through the mediation of the Blackfeet Community College or Piegan Institute.  Generally, this interfacing takes so much energy that there is not much left for political leadership.  But these are the people who attract a certain kind of outsider who combines what they feel is a deep relationship with impoverished, neglected and suffering peoples with a determination to do good.  In the best of all worlds, they would pay attention enough to do this appropriately and without personal pride.  In worst cases they become fomenters of discord or missionaries trying to impose change or devotees of deconstruction.  

Sometimes they form nonprofit cults of personality which support individuals.  This taps into one of the key problems with social change: is it for the group or for the individual?  Traditional Blackfeet weren’t tribes just because they went around in a bunch, or because on first contact the white people defined them as Blackfeet or Sioux or whatever.  They were a people interwoven through descent, through practices, and through relationship to the land.  It was an ecology that required cooperation for survival.  When horses and guns arrived, that changed: an individual could survive alone.  Then the ideology of individuality took hold.

America is a country gripped by the struggle of being an individual incompletely reconciled to group demands.  Much of our literature and history is about this.  For example, the demand of the colored man to be seen as an individual instead of a category, or the wartime need to use uniforms and obedience to create group identity.  This has become the central issue of many seemingly diverse tribal dilemmas.  It is also a key to American Indian literature.  Sid Larson is Jim Welch’s cousin; his career (after an exciting picaresque period as a lawyer and bar owner) has been academic.  I’m quoting  The Real Thing: An Essay on Authenticity by Sidner J. Larson (Wicazo Sa Review Volume 15, Number 2, Fall 2000)  He’s a professor and administrator at Iowa State University.  (Universities are where students as individuals sharpen their wits against the education establishment.)  He walks on both sides.

“. . . when dealing with bureaucracy, a certain level of hysteria often must be reached before anything can be accomplished. Similarly, the clash and conversation organized around issues of authenticity almost always provide the kinds of fireworks that at the very least make it difficult to ignore those issues.

“Such conflict has played a role in development of concepts of self, Indian and mainstream, that are suspicious of the limiting and coercive aspects of society, and that have in critical ways turned to authenticity as a desideratum in place of sincerity.”

I take this to mean that stream of thought requiring that only Indians may think about, write about, or take any deep interest in Indians.  It is a “third-rail” issue, meaning that if you are white -- even with years of attention and participation with “real” Indians -- you are not entitled to say anything about it.  “Language, for those who prize authenticity, has lost its value as a source of ethical truth or consolation and is valued instead as an agent of spiritual self-realization necessitating abandonment of social norms.”  This is where the hippies, the gays, the PTSD veterans, the oddball scholars, and the celibate old ladies make common cause with back-to-the-old-time Indians.  They think of writing as a kind of shamanism.

Sid brings in Lionel Trilling, saying ,“Trilling described a vital component of this subversion as an Angelism that insists on direct access to spirit by circumventing the conditions and circumstances of life, with the direct and certain result of devaluing man's life in society. An attendant problem is erosion of the willpower to struggle with the important grounding of societal limitations to a fantasy of unfettered will characteristic of modern culture.”   My echo is the angel/devil split in the way Indians are portrayed.  Always the best or the worst. 

“In order to move toward more positive and specific answers in the American Indian context, it is also necessary that existing work be completed by a larger constructive philosophical effort that does not rely on irrationality as its foundation of authenticity. A place to begin might be to work toward temporal unification of the past, present, and future by working to resolve the American intellectual middle class's dramatic contradiction of living with the greatest possibility (call it illusion) of conscious choice, believing itself the inheritor of the great humanist and rationalist tradition, and the badness and stupidity of its actions.” 

The illusion of choice is rapidly dissolving for everyone.  The power of this paragraph is that it is not just addressing the Indian middle class, which is invisible, but also the greater category of the American middle class, which “thinks it’s so good” (to use a rez locution), but is capable of incredible blundering, mishandling, blindness, and denied malevolence in almost everything it does politically and socially.  The result is economic -- lost survival.  Blacks dominate our thinking in this country because they are so connected to the urban ghettos, looming large in the media.  Indians are invisible.  We see blacks as a group, even when they are not.  

We see Indians mostly as individuals, rather than tribes, and yet we don’t even recognize an Indian without feathers and paint.  Savages or angels are clear images.  Both have feathers.