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.

NAPI'S FINE HOUSE

When a Blackfeet has ideas about writing a book, which they have no doubt will be published and earn lots of money, they almost invariably say they’re going to write the true version of the Napi stories, which they learned from their grandparent (usually about my age by now).  Though the stories were originally oral, there must be a dozen versions of printed Blackfeet Napi stories out there floating around, not counting other tribes. Why add to the pile?   When I ask these would-be authorities, they just look confused.  In their minds it is clear that a book about Blackfeet should have Napi stories in it, that there are definitive versions that are more valuable than the others, and that everyone in the greater world will fall on them with great delight and tons of money.  (They have not gotten the news about the collapse of the publishing industry, but that’s beside the point.)

If you speak to a white person over sixty about a book about Blackfeet, their minds will turn to James Willard Schultz -- dramatic horseback adventures of hunting and war.  If the white person is a little younger, the book will be about post-colonial misery and injustice: alcoholism, lousy housing, drugs, broken families.   If the white person is female, it will be about a cross-race romance.  Everyone thinks of their little sub-category as representing the whole.  They never question this, never investigate, and even if they come to the rez, they will see it on those terms.

Star Boy

Let’s go back to Napi stories.  The anthropologists like Wissler, Ewers or Kehoe had a great interest in them and scientists recorded them as accurately as they could in the early days of contact, hoping to understand the culture better.  Anyway, in those days it was salvage anthropology: save what they could.  At the same time the missionaries were looking for equivalents to the Christian stories so they could say, “You see?  These are universal elements.”  So Starboy or Blood Clot Boy became versions of Jesus.  And there WERE correlations, but they became an argument something like genetic purity: kill all the buffalo that have domestic cow genes.  (An old Aryan idea: variation as pollution.)  

The general public saw Napi stories as more like Aesop fables or the Greek myths.  Entertaining.  Suitable for children.  (Which they were, since they were meant to socialize the tribal children with tribal values like generosity, courage, and willingness to experiment.)  But trivial, non-threatening.  So James Willard Schultz, Frank Bird Linderman, George Bird Grinnell, the Demings, Walter McClintock did pretty well selling the stories.  None were Blackfeet.  None got rich.

In the Sixties local people began to pick up the idea of Napi, Natoosi (Sun), and others.  For instance, Napi's Lookout; The Story of Willow Rounds by Dorothy M. Hamaker (1964)  (A white rancher’s wife.)  And not long after that the Blackfeet themselves were chiming in.  Percy Bullchild’s “The Sun Came Down,” was commercially successful.  

Napi and the Bullberries (The Indian Reading Series Stories and Legends of the Northwest, Level II Book 17) was by Joan Kennerly, Carmen Marceau, Doris Old Person and June Tatsey (1978)  (Four Blackfeet sisters, “the Bullshoe girls,” who were all involved with education.)   Darnell Doore  (Rides at the Door) (1979)  Blackfeet Heritage Program, Browning Public Schools, put another turn on the wheel.  There are others, I’m sure.

Loki

Brer Rabbit

Napi is a trickster figure and a universal in stories around the planet.  Here he’s Brer Rabbit and there he’s Loki.  He’s the guy that thinks he’s so smart, but gets carried away.  On the other hand, because he’ll try anything, he’s creative and makes contributions. 

A few years after I left the reservation for a while, I earned a degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School with a focus on anthropology.  There I learned about revising sacred stories or writing parallel new ones in order to make a point. 

Windigo

In part I learned this in a dark way from a student who combined the Baker Massacre with Dracula, a figure from European vampire lore, very much like the cannibal figure of the Windigo, the woodland tribes’ starvation horror figure.  (There’s a modern movie version spelled “Wendigo.”)  On the other hand I tried playing “what if” with traditional teaching stories of the Gospels.  Sometimes this was pretty enlightening.  What if Jesus had turned all the wine at the wedding party into water instead of the other way around?

What Napi story might I invent for the situation of today’s Blackfeet?  I’ll give it a try.

______________

Napi’s neighbor, Striped Skunk, was experimenting with the white man’s way of building a house.  First he wove one of grass, but the wind soon got rid of that.  So the next one was made of logs, which stayed and looked good.  

Napi was jealous, but he didn’t get upset until he looked over one day and saw that Striped Skunk even had lights on in his cabin.  How did he manage that?   

When he went over and demanded to know the secret, Striped Skunk showed him that he had captured a Farting Horse, which emitted a gas from under his tail that could be set on fire, making a pretty good light.  It was warm, too, which is a big advantage in a prairie winter.  So Napi went over one night and stole the Farting Horse.  

Indeed, the gas burned bright and warm, but Napi kept Farting Horse picketed next to his lodge so it wouldn’t run away.  Pretty soon the horse had eaten everything nearby and stopped farting.  This made Napi very indignant and he decided to find out where in the horse the farts were coming from, so he cut the horse open.  It didn’t work.  No clue.  

Napi was pretty sure the horse was getting something from the ground -- it was always going along in the grass with its nose down.  So he went to look for whatever it was.  All he found was horse dung, which would burn, but nothing like farts.  However, he did find a lot of shiny black rock, something like obsidian.  Thinking about Striped Skunk’s log cabin, he decided he would make a house of this black rock, which would be very beautiful and strong.  So he did.  In it he burned buffalo chips and horse dung, because there was never enough wood on the high hilltops where he liked to live because of the view which made him feel important.

Then came spring and the thunderstorms.  Lightning struck everywhere.  Striped Skunk was always careful to open his Pipe Bundle at that time and to give away what he could to his family and friends.  One day in spite of this his cabin was struck by lightning and would have burned but all his friends and neighbors came quickly and put the fire out.

Napi’s lookout house up there so high was also struck by lightning, but he had thought,  “Ha!  Nothing will happen to me!  I don’t need to do any ceremonies because this house is made of stone.”  Alas, it turned out that the black shiny stone was coal and it burned very well.  The tribe tried to get up there to help, but it took a long time to climb such steep slopes and the house burned completely.  Napi spent the rainy season huddled in front of his smoking, smelly fire of dung.  He couldn't even afford a canvas lodge.

________

I tried to get oil into this story but failed.  Maybe you can do it.  This is a creative story -- anyone can add to it or change it.  Just like life, especially tribal life.  I don’t recommend this music, but it IS very windigo.  Maybe it is sound from a windigo who thought he could eat oil. Or was that drinking frakking liquid?  http://tiktik.bandcamp.com/album/windigo-psychosis