TWO RECENT BLACKFEET DEATHS (fictionalized)

Camp Disappointment Memorial Obelisk

Suddenly one of my old blog posts came to life and began accumulating hits.  It was posted on December 7, 2011, and is entitled “A Card File Made in a Decade.”

It begins with this explanation:  “When I moved to the edge of the Blackfeet Reservation in 1999, I started cutting out all the obits from the Great Falls Tribune and sticking them on cards, which I filed. By now I have 2 file boxes mostly full. At first I kept dates of publication, but then I stopped. Mostly I figured I would use them for genealogy since they list next of kin. But someone was inquiring about rez violence because of what I’ve been blogging, so I sorted my cards. . .” 

There are enough computers and adepts on the rez now to do effective searches for information.  People were prompted to search this time in order to frame up background for two recent deaths.

Tom Mancha (60) is alleged to have recently murdered his wife Charlene Little Dog Mancha at the obelisk commemorating Camp Disappointment, the site where Lewis and Clark realized the boundary with Canada would be the 49th parallel.  It has become a popular spot for bad behavior.

Mathew Grant (21, visiting from the Canadian Reserves) was found dead in an alley of Glacier Homes, an extension of Browning, weeks after he disappeared December 15.  Cause of death is not determined yet.

I am not a journalist and I am white.  But my history with Browning goes back to 1961.  Very little is showing up in the media and in my experience these stories soon fade.  But maybe there are some dedicated and aware tribal members who won’t let that happen this time.

I tried to think what I could do to help, since I have no power, no information, no muscle, no connections.  But I do have an imagination, so I’m going to use it to invent two generic deaths and try to make them vivid.  As though they were cell phone images.  These are totally invented.  If you quote the stories, make sure you note that they never happened in reality.

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FIRST STORY: Domestic Violence does not necessarily happen at home.

When he beat her up, which was totally unpredictable until minutes before the violence began, he began by demanding her cell phone.  At least once she had managed to dial 911 and scream for help before he smashed it, her little friend she kept in her pocket.  After that she bought a cheap emergency cell and hid it.  But he found it.

This time they were drinking in the county seat, but not in the upgraded tavern where the rez professionals and businessmen went.  And when it was closing time, they took a bottle with them.  One more DUI and there would be real trouble, but her reminding him of that was a mistake.  

They hurtled through the snowy landscape, heedless of livestock or deer.  Not much other traffic at this hour.  He veered off onto the rising turnout road up to the obelisk so suddenly that she fell over on the seat, which made him even more angry.  There was no one else on the parking space at the top where in daytime a person could look out over the valley to the far away ridge where the Louisiana Purchase watershed ended.  

In the past he’d tried to drag her out the passenger door and knew she would lock it, so he just yanked her by the hair past the steering wheel, which she tried to grab but couldn’t.  She wasn’t exactly sober.  Then he had the tire iron.  She only felt the first blow.

SECOND STORY:  ‘Spose you think you’re better than us.

The little group sorta thought of themselves as Ninjas in their black sweats.  They didn’t have anything to do and didn’t think they should have to do anything.  They were tough guys, not exactly welcome with their families, though some were more tolerant than others.  No one was very sure how these guys paid for drugs, but they always had them.

What they really liked was violence.  They talked about blood lust and sort of confused it with historical battles.  Their scars, tats, and piercings were supposed to be like war paint and they would draw faces with painted designs they saw in movies or at pow-wows, but they didn’t have the stamina for actual dancing.  Their energy was rage.

This was a cold night and they hadn’t found a place where they could hole up to slam, so they were just cruising the alleys.  Then they saw a guy come out of a house and walk their way.  They didn’t know him.  

“Hey!  Who are you?”

“Oh, uh, I’m Stephen.”  He was soft-spoken, in newish jeans with a nice jacket.  A bit of an accent. 

“How come we don’t know you?”

“I’m Kainai.  Just visiting my cousins.  Going over to the Community College to use the library.”

The guys doubled over with laughter to cover their true feelings, which were that they were intimidated.  None of them was a good reader or had a high school diploma.  Their older relatives had tried to make them understand that school was access to success, but they refused to believe it.  Elders had also impressed on them that the Canadian part of the Blackfoot Nation was the Grandfather people who knew the old ways, and should be respected.  This thought also threatened them, so they turned mean.

“So you think you’re better than us, aayy?  College boy?”

“Hey, nice toque!  Lemme try it on!”  They snatched his hat.  “You got any money?  You want to help us have a good time?”

The boy was confused, which the guys took as weakness.  They were right.  Then they turned seductive, mock coaxing.  “Come on with us and we’ll show you how.”  The boy now wearing his hat grabbed him between the legs.  He yelped and tried to pull away but then the knife slid between his ribs.  There was just enough light from the houses to see the blood.

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These stories never happened.  Or maybe they happen all the time.  But why?  What should we do about it?

BLACKFEET CHAIR HARRY BARNES' REPORT TO THE BLACKFEET TRIBAL BUSINESS COUNCIL

Because the Glacier Reporter prints Harry Barnes' reports to the tribe but the newspaper doesn't put them on their website even though half the tribal members live off the rez, I asked Harry if I could repost them here so people far away could have access.  I'm white, but I care.  Anyway, this particular issue is not confined to the rez.  Denying it is what the healing community calls "enabling," not helping.

MORE NUMBERS THAN ONE CAN COUNT

Trained as an electrician, I had to study a lot of math, algebra, and trigonometry. I thought I just had to show up and not get shocked. I thought I left all of that behind in High School and college. Then getting into business I found new challenges in numbers and my mind was still resistant to all them figures. Everywhere there was numbers. This week I have to share some sobering numbers with you, but I hope you will read it all.

I had the opportunity to testify before the Department of Justice in a government to government consultation last month and the subject was the “Violence Against Women Act”. The original law was modified to address the high incidence of violence on Indian Reservations, especially directed towards women. For the first time it also allowed Tribal Courts to have jurisdiction over non-members who commit acts of violence against tribal members. Of course we have to make our Court system look like their system. 

As I prepared for my testimony I looked for data on our Blackfeet Reservation so I could speak from the local perspective. I was appalled at the numbers! They were not only staggering, they were absolutely scary. One in four Native women can expect to be victims of rape in their life time. Compared to other Montana Reservations, Blackfeet has a violent crime rate four to five times higher. According to the Montana Crime Boards Annual Report 2005 thru 2009 there were 2,214 reported cases of domestic violence, 89 forcible rapes, 36 attempted forcible rapes on the Blackfeet Reservation! 

The University of Montana Childhood Trauma Research Center conducted a survey of 7^th graders in Browning Schools and found a significantly large percentage of children who showed symptoms of Child Traumatic Stress with additional components for traumatic grief. In the 2007 study of 193 students, 62.2% scored above criterion in Violence exposure and 54.4% were above criterion for the Child Traumatic Stress scale. In a subsequent 2010 Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACES), Browning Middle Schoolers scored an average of 14. The National average is 4!  When acts of violence against Blackfeet women occur, they do not happen in a vacuum. A future generation becomes desensitized to violence and comes to accept it as a natural way of life. Our children all are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

That brings me to my next subject, BULLYING. Many have said the Browning School District is not doing enough to stop bullying. Why do they allow this to go on? Why haven’t they stopped this? I have talked to the Superintendent and several staff members on this very topic. I believe the District is working very hard in an attempt to reduce the incidences of bullying. Countless hours of training has been devoted to staff on this nationwide epidemic. I also believe it may be beyond the District’s ability to completely eliminate bullying. The District has received an Aware Grant (see last week's Glacier Reporter) and feel very strongly that this will go a long way in mobilizing the public and providing  some tools to combat this plague. Keep in mind how many of our children have been desensitized to violence. This is not a School district problem in Browning or Heart Butte which faces the same issues. This is a Reservation problem that will require all of us to participate in finding solutions beyond the blame game. I am working with the districts to get Resource Officers in the schools. Just one piece of a broader solution.

My good friend Father Ed Kohler added a scary statistic to his sermons to try to awake me and others to our problems ( He always struggled just to keep me awake). He said 40% of the babies being born at the Blackfeet Community Hospital had drugs in their system. I always thought that was too many. Visiting with Tim Davis from BCH a week ago he said of ten babies born in the last two weeks 7 had drugs in their system! I am not a math wizard but that seems like almost 70%. Drugs and alcohol have become one of our greatest challenges. 

If we look around the world wherever there are pockets of intense poverty (certainly we live in one) there are certain things that follow that poverty – drug and alcohol abuse, spousal abuse, and child abuse. We suffer from all of these. Why do the Police do nothing to stop the dealers? Everyone seems to know who they are, but no one wants to help convict. The Police do have a big role in the drug problem. But again this is a Reservation problem. The Montana State Patrol will be cross deputizing our Blackfeet Law officers who will be able to ticket non-members. That will give us a little more safety. During the 2009 thru 2013 measuring period there were 33 fatal accidents on the Blackfeet Reservation. Of these at least 30 were drug or alcohol related. We need to come to grips with the numbers. 

Each of us as community members, as parents, as grandparents, as uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters and yes as cousins, must take ownership of our collective challenges. Every member of Blackfeet Law Enforcement, School District employee, Tribal Council Member and Tribal employee, and HIS employee must own up to our role in a broad based solution. School District Aware Program aims to educate and bring parents into the loop for solutions. Blackfeet Community Hospital needs help in their “Healthy Women – Healthy Babies” initiative where you can be a part of positive change. And we as leaders must recognize that our role is to empower, engage, and support community members to bring about a better future for our young people. They are the ones we will expect to take care of us. Invest in our future.

RELIGION AND JUSTICE ON THE REZ

On 12-7-11 my post on this blog was a list of names from a card file I’d been keeping for years.  On each card was the obit from the GF Tribune for some person either on the Blackfeet reservation or related to it somehow.  I had noticed that the cause of death was unknown for some of these people.  There are always complaints that murders and other criminal deaths and violence on the reservation are going unprosecuted.  This is not unrelated to the number of people who just disappear.  This morning a comment was submitted on this post that was about just such a case.  I don’t want to use the person’s name and it came in anonymously anyway, but I’ll quote the part that is a reference to the Bible.

When Cain slew his brother Abel ...God the creator heard Abel's blood that was crying from the ground all the way to heaven.  

When King David saw another man's wife, he made arrangements for that other man to be on the front lines of the battle. To make sure that he would get killed. And he took that man's wife and when the man of God came he exposed what King David did. God has forgiven you ....but the sword (or Judgement) would never leave his house. Jesus taught ..nothing would be hid ...any said or done in secret would be shouted upon the roof tops.

There were enough clues for me to find an article about this case in Indian Country Today, where the reporter emphasized that the Blackfeet rez is considered a lawless place that tolerates murder and she attributed much of this to drug use.   (Oh, thanks, Paul Harvey!) This is a very tangled and emotional subject and I want to pull it apart in a slightly different way.

First, the Judeo-Christian religious/governance world is one that attributes the highest judgement to a harsh God.  (Jesus encouraged mercy.) It is a world dependent on written rules and laws, beginning with the Ten Commandments and the Code of Hammurabi.  The intent is not just to prevent bad things happening, but also to prevent justice from disintegrating into raw revenge that continues violence.  It is punishment-centered.

The Blackfeet culture was oral -- nothing was written out in negotiated or dictated rules until the Euro people arrived and imposed THEIR standards.  The Nitsitahpi used social pressure or simple departure to keep order, which worked fine so long as they were in small related groups where everyone knew what was happening.  Even after the US government drew a boundary separating the governance of the reservation from the rest of the territory, the Blackfeet people continued their old ways alongside the new.

Today there are three kinds of disorder on the reservation:  those that are crimes of bookkeeping and asset diversion (what is called corruption); those that are crimes of violence emerging from the use of drugs and alcohol; and those that are cold-blooded amoral criminal behavior.  I acknowledge the first kind but won’t address it here.

The second kind results from brain damage, either temporary (drugs) or permanent (trauma), that is partly a matter of emotional syndrome and partly actual destruction of tissue resulting in loss of control: extreme over-reaction, rage attacks, inability to curb damage to the weak and innocent.  In all, the result is something like a demolition derby because the body has no brakes, no steering, and a stuck gas pedal.  When I was first teaching in Browning in a classroom that overlooked what was then Moccasin Flats, I looked out one morning to see a woman in a pickup trying to run over a man rolling around under it.  They had been drinking all night and she was trying to kill him but she didn’t have enough control to get a wheel to go over him.  It was lucky that the pickup was old and had a lot of space under it.  I know what uncontrolled alcohol-fueled violence looks like.  Meth is worse.  MUCH worse.  After parties that turn into brawls, no one is a reliable witness.

There is no way a written law can prevent such a thing.  It can only set the punishment and even then it is almost impossible to judge in terms of intentions because there was no thinking involved.  This is the kind of murder that -- like that between Cain and Abel -- was based on emotion and loss of control.  (Maybe they were drunk!)  The Issksiniip Project, by providing ways to kick addiction and deal with strong emotion, can address this sort of crime.  Cops hate mindless brawling because they are likely to be hurt or killed when trying to intervene and because when it gets to the cool logic of the court, there’s really no way to apply principles of justice.

But this sort of situation provides a cover, like King David using war to get rid of Bathsheba’s husband.  Illegals from south of the border who have Indian genes don’t stand out on the reservation.  Legal immigrants are often exceptionally family-loving and hard-working, but there is a small fraction of illegals who engage in drug distribution, child and woman trafficking, gambling crime, and other behavior that laws are meant to prevent.  Today there are about 8,000 enrolled Blackfeet on the reservation.  They do not all know each other and may have relationships with people whose motives are shady.   This is the third category,  which is violent organized crime: cold-blooded, calculated, and obscured by the constant whirlwind of gangs, drinking, drugs, and family abuse.

The FBI would love to be able to come sort through people’s lives to discover and extradite national criminals.  Replacing trust with force has become the pattern since Wounded Knee (actually from the beginning of white/Indian relationships or neither Wounded Knee 1or 2 would have happened), no one from the outside can occasionally visit the rez expecting to understand what goes on.  When I say “outside,” I mean outside the rez boundary, but the FBI keeps withdrawing farther and farther.  They are an urban organization.  Even in Valier I rarely know what’s happening a few miles away across the line.  Court testimony is unreliable, partly because of threats against witnesses and partly because of family loyalties.  Blackfeet naturally try to protect their own.

There has been a movement among the police that originated in cities, notably New York City.  The idea is that if the police crack down on trivial disorder -- trash, broken windows, derelict cars -- that the larger crimes of murder and violence will diminish.  This seems to be true and is beginning to be put into practice in Browning where the old buildings that shelter addicts are coming down. (So now where do they go?)  One can eliminate predators by destroying their habitat, but sometimes that also destroys the innocent.  And the result may be very profitable to people who don’t seem to be criminals at all, just merchants and developers.  (Always follow the money.)

The Great Falls Tribune pointed out to me that I could get death certificates that list the final decision about death for anyone: $10 fee from county and state records.   It would cost several hundred dollars to get certificates for everyone on my short list.  Now they have stopped publishing obits that weren’t paid for and didn’t originate with the families.  For instance, no obituary appeared in that paper for Joyce Clarke Turvey, despite her connection to an historically significant family and her contribution to the Glacier National Park complex.  (It was in the Cut Bank based newspapers.)  Her death was natural -- she was in her eighties.  But not telling her story is a loss of history to a larger community than the rez.  The impulse to secrecy and avoiding trouble is a strong one, but dangerous in a democracy because it reinforces our rising suspicions about what’s going on.

So, three sources of crime:  1)  The bookkeeping crimes of embezzlement and theft that are encouraged by huge blocks of money arriving without anyone following up to inspect its use because the rez is just too scary and far away.  2) The often lethal damage of drug and alcohol fueled rage and trauma.  3)  Criminals taking advantage of the confusion of behavior and the inability of the law to deal with it.

Maybe someone is looking for an excuse to close down the rez.

MORE FOLLOW-UP: MARIE HEAVYRUNNER

from the Great Falls Tribune, March14, 2012

by Kimball Bennion

A second person has been charged in relation to the murder of a 71-year-old women whose body was discovered on her property months after her death, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Great Falls.

Thomas Charles Marc Heavyrunner made an initial appearance in federal court Tuesday, where he was informed of a felony charge of accessory after the fact in the murder of Marie Heavy Runner, who was allegedly killed by Mark Saint Storm Heavy Runner on July 1. Her body wasn’t discovered until November.

A federal indictment that was unsealed this week charges Mark Heavyrunner with one count of second-degree murder. the same victim, identified as “M.H.R.,” is listed in both charges. Mark Heavyrunner pleaded not guilty to the charges last week.

The trial date for mark Heavyrunner was set for April 17. He is on a federal hold in the Cascade County detention center while awaiting trial.

Details of the case are sketchy, as portions of it still are sealed. The prosecution in the trial of Mark Heavyrunner has a deadline of April 3 to file a trial brief, which generally outlines in more detail the legal authority behind the charges in the case. The defense may also submit a trial brief, but it is not required. U.S. District Judge Sam E. Haddon will preside over the trial.

Thomas Heavyrunner is expected to make a plea to the accessory charge April 5.

Thomas Heavyrunner is released on special conditons and has been ordered to report to federal probation officers in Missoula County. He is not allowed to travel outside that area.

At Thomas Heavyrunner’s initial appearance Tuesday, U.S. Magistrate Keith Strong added additional conditons that Thomas Heavyrunner undergo a mental health evaluation and completely substance abuse treatment.

WHAT DEMOGRAPHERS DON'T KNOW

It’s so easy to slip into Us vs. Them thinking.  That’s how we got so screwed up with this question of jurisdictions.  At first white contact it might have been possible to defend the idea that tribal people were fundamentally different from Euro-whites, because the former had been here for enough millenia for the land to shape them, both genes and memes.  But the Euro-whites were still shaped for Europe with a whole different set of ideas in their heads.

In Montana the state law requires that the history of the Indians be taught.  A well-educated, even bookish, white woman said to me,  “I don’t see why I should have to study THEIR history.”  She said this standing on land with thousands of years of Indian history and maybe 150 (pushing it) years of Euro-white history, much of it conflict.

In an essay by James Clifford about the Mashpee tribe trying to establish in court that they WERE a tribe, I found a good answer.  A Indian woman on the stand (everyone seemed to agree she WAS Indian, though the whole definition was in question) said that she was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.  “How could that be?” questioned the lawyers.  

“Well, 149 members of my tribe died fighting in the American Revolution on the side of the Colonies,” she said patiently.  They are us.

But we are many.  The arbitrary distinction between Indian and white was full of exceptions and contradictions from the beginning and now that’s even more true than ever.  The idea that there should be one set of standards about sex and violence for Indians -- either because they are naturally savage and uncontrollable or because they are naturally noble and protective of the vulnerable -- and another for whites (unnatural?) is pretty much nonsense.  In terms of both genes and memes, the ecology (which IS the economy) is pulling everyone back into a unity, lumpy and contentious as it may seem.  We are far more alike than different.  Our interests are mostly common interests.  We learn as we go.

You can go to any number of websites that will tell you the average rez salaries (low), the value of the homes owned (the websites won’t know what to do about tribal housing), the age groups and racial groups, though only the ones that the questionnaire makers put on the list, which change quite a bit over the years.  (We don’t think about how many “octoroons” there are these days.  We question the definition of “race.”)  Surveys can’t capture things the surveyors never thought of.  One variable that does show up is that a high proportion of the population is quite young and the rate of births to single mothers is high.  Not only does this mean a burden on the welfare system but also that the maturity to raise kids is diminished and fathers are not involved.  In fact, male death rate due to violence, drinking and now diabetes is high, which forces single motherhood.  A high diabetes rate also means problematic pregnancies.

A variable that does NOT show up is the kind of grandmothers that were present and involved when I came in 1961.  Born in 1880’s, they had gone through enormous hardship but had also been mission-educated by tough no-nonsense people, whatever some of their faults.  Those old Indian ladies would not put up with nonsense.  Their grandchildren, born in 1920 or later, were the first educated in public schools and employed as clerks, nurses, and teachers.  Then the children of those women, born in 1940 or later, were the seniors I taught in 1961.  

They were “tracked” in school and in life.  The “high track” has done extremely well, often becoming professionals and leaders in the tribe.  The low track despaired and thought their lack of prosperity was due to being Indian.  But they still obeyed their grandmothers, who never despaired, even when their granddaughters became drunkards.  It’s the children born in the 1980’s and later -- beyond the lifespan of those original hardy grandmothers -- who are now enmeshed in careless sex and violence.  

The three towns against the border of Glacier National Park (East Glacier, St. Marys, and Babb) which are tourist towns in summer, have quite different seasonal dynamics but are pretty “acculturated”.  The two “old-timey” towns (Heart Butte and Starr School) have no bars but more poverty.  Browning, as the hub, is a multi-celled town with its own jurisdiction problems.  Most of the federally subsidized housing projects are outside the formal city limits while the older part of town has deteriorated and fallen into fractionated ownership (split out repeatedly because of inheritance without re-consolidation) so that there are always derelict buildings where drunks can cluster with their dogs and broken glass to risk fire.  They are regarded with both shame and derision.  At the same time, there is a center where such people can go, especially in winter.  

The number of bars in Browning is far fewer than it was in the Sixties and the number of AA meetings have multiplied quickly.  Dry-out programs abound and the old hospital building is now dedicated to it.  The adults of 2000 are actively addressing the problem.  It is clear to everyone that rape and violence are wrong.  It is not clear how to get a grip.  In the case of men from other places (who might be any other races) who are already drifters and felons, law enforcement needs all the help they can get.  Such men defeat far more formidable jurisdictions than a remote Montana reservation, but that doesn’t excuse the community from demanding a higher standard of order, particularly and specifically in regard to intruders.  The message needs to be sent that a reservation does not exist in order to host parties.

Last summer I went to attend Curley Bear Wagner’s funeral, as I try to do for all my former students.  I was too early and sat out on the steps of the church with a little cluster of street people, both men and women, visiting about who we knew and just life in general.  I thought how natural and easy it seemed.  How much we shared.  Then they wandered off to sleep in the brush along Willow Creek.  They had a bottle.

CONSCIOUSNESS

Plains Indians did not evolve to handle alcohol.  Their most basic genome is Asian and did not evolve where people routinely drank alcohol of some kind with all meals as Europeans have.  This is not a lot different from lack of immunity to smallpox.  One’s body develops in a context and if the element, whatever it might be, isn’t there, then the body doesn’t learn what to do with it.  That’s genes.  

The memes were not there either.  Indians drank like frat boys.  Too much, too fast, to the point of passing out.  Drinking happened someplace where the law wouldn’t come knocking because Indians drank illegally, which added that delicious element of evading authority.  But the physiological consequences were more major than for some Northern European redneck, whether he drank beer in a bar or scotch at home. Indians had the kind of allergy that promotes addiction, like lead poisoning.  One friend who went to college a teetotaller in the late Fifties, was held down so alcohol could be forced into him, and was hooked from then on.  White people will be skeptical.  Think heroin.

I was startled when I read the local newspapers from right after WWII and the Korean War.  Quarter-page ads in the Browning paper made that Hugh Hefner pitch for being upper-class in the Brit style: wearing a smoking jacket in a wing chair at a warm hearth where a classy dog snored.  Sipping something expensive from a cut glass decanter.  The captions made it plain that this was the way successful men were.  My family was very much WCTU until they began to be prosperous.  Then there was wine on their table.  Advertising works.  So do genes.  We’ve got new alcoholics, some from grade school years.  And we’re not Native American.

Drugs and Indians were a little more familiar.  The SW peyote vision groups were very patterned, very contained, and in a religious context.  In Central and South America the use of atahuasca and the like were also consumed in a religious context, guided by an experienced overseer.  Marijuana is a mostly peaceful substance, accepted enough that young NA professionals who picked up the habit in college continue it to alleviate the stress of trying to be a success.  I’ve never known an Indian who admitted to using LSD, which surprises me, though I don’t know why they’d tell me.  Tobacco and coffee are accepted drugs everywhere in the West.  Kids everywhere huff glue and solvents.   The real killers, the real violence promoters, are speed, cocaine, and meth -- brain rotters, behavior exploders, body eaters. I was in Saskatoon when meth first hit the town and a policeman told me that it meant that what were formerly drinking parties had become brawls that caused serious injury and death, but there was no way to prosecute because no witness/participant was sane enough to give an accurate account of what happened.

Though much of this amounts to money-making substance abuse, Plains Indians have always been interested in the management of their own consciousness through dreams, both the regular kind and the vision quests triggered by isolation and starvation, maybe dehydration.  The mountains near here and the Sweetgrass Hills are seeded with dream beds where someone made themselves a little man-sized fence to lie down in while they meditated and waited for a vision.  These are near-Tibetan practices.  I should think they would work against violence, promoting self-control under stress.  But they could be preparation for courage as warriors.

The ordeal way of addressing consciousness, like the Sun Lodge vows to put skewers through the chest and back muscles and dance against a taut rope until they tear free, is a different kind of self-challenge.  I’m suspicious of it, because it seems to me like showing off, trying to get power, self-abuse.

The ultimate self-violence is suicide, often by hanging, sometimes in jail where it was thought by jailers that all means had been removed.  Kids play with blacking out themselves and each other by shutting down the blood supply in their necks.  Suicide is rage and despair -- one often sets off others.  I would like to see statistics on how many men who assault women later commit suicide.  In modern institutionalized society, it is so often female nurses and teachers who must control male children that some men become deeply misogynist.  That’s aside from the shame of the man who beats up his wife when he’s drunk or high.  I’m not talking about alley people.

Here’s a crucial insight:  both sex and violence are ways of creating internal drugs that cannot be controlled by either medical therapy or legal intervention.  Testosterone and adrenaline are well-known molecules that intertwine in subtle but potent ways.  Testosterone is the I-love-sex drug, but it is also the I’m-not-afraid-of-anything drug.  It gives energy and courage, even creativity.  Adrenaline is speed, rallying the body to do more, sharpening the senses, causing people who share danger to bond.  Some of the internal drugs will damp down these internally produced molecules, so that formerly dynamic men will shrug, sleep, let opportunity pass them by, never rise to challenges or threats.  Others will amp everything up. 

A human being is in a sense a retort, a beaker, the container for molecular bodily reactions that can overwhelm rationality.  Thus, we need to think about an ethical structure and a social setting that provide safeguards.  Otherwise too many people become suicide bombers that explode their own families.  Dramatic words, but a sharper scalpel than the hammer of good-versus-bad used by many people.  

How do we teach people to self-monitor?  How do we empower neighbors and intimates to intervene and then give them ideas about how to do it?  What laws help and which rehabilitation schemes can we support instead of prisons where the chemicals bubble all day and night?

Maybe it’s better not to tell rez stories about this subject, so I’ll say I lived in low-rent apartments in Portland so I’d have more money for books.  Across the hall lived a Japanese man with no furniture except his sleeping bag.  He was a cocaine dealer but a pot user.  Gentle but drifty, he would knock on the apartment door at 3AM to let me know my cat had had enough of nightlife and wanted to come in.  He meant to get a real job -- sometime.

In the apartment below me was a single woman with a small boy.  She had acquired a boy friend who was younger, desperate for money, and only there because he had no place to go.  He was not good to the boy, though the woman let him stay because he was her babysitter.  He was dealing cocaine as well.  One day I heard him shout, “I’m going to kill you!”  It sounded desperate.  I went down there and knocked on the door.  Everything went quiet.  The woman answered.  Over her shoulder I said to the man (I was bigger then he was.), “I’ll give you twenty minutes to clear out.  If you’re not gone by then, I’m calling the police.”  He made the deadline.  The boy always grinned at me after that.  The woman was angry but the boy was her future.  Mine, too.  But I didn’t offer to babysit.

GENES & MEMES IN RELIGION

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

By now everyone but the Flat Earth Society knows that human beings are made from molecular code stored in a set of double helixes called chromosomes.  Some of the code makes the molecules that fit together to create our bodies and some of the code is the controls, the “dashboard.”  By turning molecules off and on, esp. during periods of growth like gestation and childhood, that code is powerful.

It has been proposed -- and is useful to consider -- that in our behavior and ideas are codes that both create our personalities and societies and also act as the “dashboard” that shapes the process.  These are called “memes” to suggest “genes.”  Consider that I’m publishing this on a Sunday, which has been a “day of rest” for a very long time.  Originally it was number magic, having to do with the number seven.  You’d have to do some research to figure out why it is the seventh day, but it is coded in the story of creation when God set the example by resting on the seventh day.

A day of rest is a very good idea for lots of reasons.  Time to recover, time to think, time to reflect on what it all means by (perhaps) going to church.  The point here is that it’s good for the individual and good for the community as well as the relationship between the two.

Religion is defined many different ways, some of them useful and some of them not.  Number magic arises from natural rhythms (moon cycle, female fertility cycle, ten fingers on two hands, four directions, four seasons) and is only one of the sources of what is sometimes called “mythology,” or story -- the search for order, for cause and effect, and ultimately for survival.  But religion is not so much about survival of the individual -- though we’ve been playing it that way for awhile -- as it is survival for the group, the tribe, the nation, the ecology, the planet.  The species.

Some people get locked into dogmas that developed in other places, other times, when survival was dependent on other strategies.  Absolute obedience to the male leader, stigmatizing women and children as dependent property who have no will or value except for the Father, claiming all of creation as belonging to a Supreme Father for the use of his favored dependents, came from the strategy for a harsh environment in which groups of people compete in deadly ways.  Think Afghanistan.  Think ghetto.  Think Mafia.  Last man standing wins.  Until he ages and is replaced by a new strong man.  And while he’s the Big Man, he’s responsible for everyone and everything.  That’s the price he pays.  It’s all his doin’, his fault.  He could end up on a stretcher in a cage, his two sons with him.

This strategy for survival, which is detailed in the Old Testament, was opposed by Jesus, who brought a New Order in which those who protected the family, who valued women and children, who worked together, who gloried in creation rather than trying to drive it into a corner and squeeze wealth out of it, would be those with the memes for the new survival.  The struggle between the OT and the NT continues today, now identified as political parties.  Many who claim Jesus actually, not so secretly, think they are Jehovah.  Their idea of bureaucratic and military hierarchy was reinforced when the Roman Empire adopted Christianity and rolled it into their own colonizing across Europe.  

But that’s only one part of the world, maybe pretty much the same as “Western Civilization.”  The Asian world and the tribal worlds of Africa and the Americas were creating memes deeply embedded in a different code, which also nudged their genes in a different direction.  Their religious bundling, their stories and ethics, were close to the land in a weaving that is older than the Old Testament or any writing at all.  It still depends on stories  but they are told aloud.

In the old Blackfeet world the main group was the band that developed out of families.  Some families thrived.  It was not that they were “fitter” in terms of a hierarchy of warriors and princesses, but that they “fitted” their lives to the land and each other.  The bands with cranky, stingy, over-competitive leaders who only protected their favorites withered because as soon as people were able, they left.  Depressed mothers might let their babies grow up unloved, uninstructed, unfed.  Maybe the mothers died.  But because it was a band, because there were aunties and grandmothers, someone generally pulled those babies into their own lodges and kept them going.  If a man were killed, the other men stepped in.  

Peer pressure was a major force in those days.  I read about the strategy of  standing outside a lodge with a dysfunctional person inside and talking about them in loud voices so they’d get the message without a confrontation.  A relative might make an intervention.  A wise older person of either gender might have advice.  If all else failed, as in a case where a violent man beat up his wife, her family might come and beat him up.  Might even take all his belongings and destroy his lodge, which was actually his wife’s anyway.  If he were a man who could take a hint, he might come home to find everything piled up outside the lodge.  If he were a man or a group of men who were trouble, they might come home to find that the whole band had moved without them.  There’s a story about ornery disobedient children who were left behind that way.  There’s also a story about a family of grizzly bears who moved in with a Blackfeet band and whose behavior was so atrocious that a couple of warriors simply killed them.

Nowadays in those situations, everyone looks away.  Mind-your-own-business is a meme.  But the essence of Blackfeet life was in a group, not as an individual and that might be one of the things that separates those times from the present more than anything else.  It’s not that life was idyllic, romantically perfect.  It was hard work.  Disastrous things happened.   But the point of salvation was to save the band, not one’s own soul.  Behavior was tied into consequences for everyone. 

Women were protected from violence and unwanted sex by staying with the group: sisters, brothers, aunts and parents.  Only the ones tempted by illicit desires went off by themselves to hide what they were doing.  Then they were vulnerable.  Consider the “meme” of polygyny, multiple wives.  An errant husband faced a committee.  Of course, they had to agree and that was a problem.  (One wise and experienced husband advised marrying sisters, who had already hashed out their pecking order.)  But it was pretty hard for a woman to duck out on her share of the work.

 Ostracism was the most severe punishment because a single person would be hard pressed to survive alone.  In fact, loners generally found another band.  Today’s understanding of tribes as hard-edged, document-defined groups is as unreal as today’s hard-edged survey-defined reservations.  In the old days things were interwoven.  We call that “nature.”  We call that “ecosystem.”  Some call it “spiritual.”  It’s one element of religion.  What worked then and there will not necessarily work now, but it’s worth thinking about.  This is a period of tumultuous growth, especially on reservations.

(Still more to come.)

DO NOT FORSAKE ME, OH MY DARLING!

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

When I was teaching on the rez I had a special fondness for a family that was funny, intelligent, outspoken, and good-looking.  Suddenly they were sad.  Their father had left.  He had gone to drink with the street people, who really ought to be called “alley people,” since they sit along the board fences that divide many yards from public space, joking and passing the bottle back and forth.  They used to keep the bottle in a brown paper bag, but now they don’t bother.  The police don’t roust them as long as there’s no violence and no one complains.

I spotted this father there and marched over through the weeds to talk to him.  “How ya doin’?” and all that.  He was friendly so I just asked him,  “Why did you leave?  Your kids need you!”  He said,  “Too much pressure.  They want too much.  I couldn’t take it anymore.  Out here I’m free.  I have friends.  No one is mad at me.”

Dr. Val Farmer, well-named, is an advice columnist for rural people.  This week his subject was wives who are so worried about how things are going that they almost attack their husbands, trying to get their attention, spur them into action, make something happen.  He advises the women to try honey instead of vinegar.  When I ran into this with my parishioners (even in the city it happens), I thought of it more as a wall that men put up to protect themselves and women pounding on it -- which caused the men to put up more of a wall.  My advice was to somehow make a wall unnecessary.  Talk.  Make a gate.  Throw peace offerings over the top.  Whatever strategy works, but first you have to recognize the dynamic.

The accepted balance of forces in many modern marriages in the rural West is that the woman is the moral guide and the goal setter, while the man works as hard as he can. It’s understood by working classes everywhere that sometimes a man gets overwhelmed and manages to evade his wife, maybe at the local saloon.  The woman has the man’s balls in her hand -- not sexually, but in terms of his pride and potency.  If she can build him up, lure him along, things go better.  If she begins to squeeze, he will evade, wall her out, and eventually maybe turn violent to get relief.  

If he owns the ranch, he will not leave.  Often it’s the woman who sets the alarm clock and says on the forty-below morning, “Get up!  Feed the cows!”  If she’s a good woman, she will have a hot breakfast ready, but it’s the man who has to go out and do it.  Unless they find a way to make it a team effort.  Breakfast is a start.  Some women will drive the pickup and open gates.  Some will go out there and feed the cattle themselves, because if the cattle die, no one will eat.  A desperate woman may get violent with her husband, if she has one.  They leave.  Many story lines branch out from this basic situation.

A more romantic illustration of the pattern is “High Noon,” in which Grace Kelly sets the moral standard (non-violence), and Gary Cooper tries to meet it, but circumstances will not allow him to escape from using force.  Not violence.  I would argue that force is a necessary element of life, especially in the West.  But it’s a thin line between force and violence -- which I would define as excessive or unjustified force -- and eventually Kelly’s character crosses the line, too.  A reservation is part of the West.  The assumptions and work can be the same for everyone.

When I was in Saskatoon as a minister, I attended a workshop for clergy that was presented by social workers exasperated by conservative pastors who sent abused women back to their husbands with the advice to do what he said because that’s what the Bible dictates.  (The Bible was created in what is now Iran, Iraq, Syria, et al.  Heard of Shiria law?)  The formula these social workers gave us has been useful ever since.  Their premise was that domestic abuse is about control:  men (or women) frustrated by helplessness, despair, no hope for the future, and no emotional resilience, will try to control the family.  Usually the man is the controller, because he brings in the money with a job or by working the ranch.  It goes in concentric circles: first, he forbids his wife certain clothing or too much makeup.   Pretty soon he wants her to sever connections with family and friends.  Soon there’s secrecy, sequestration in the house, slaps, then fists, then a weapon -- all accompanied with verbal abuse.  It can end up with lethal punishment.  The victim, often a pleaser, is a frog being gradually cooked in a constricting set of circles.   The perpetrator uses stigma to justify his actions:  she was a slut, she was cheating on him, she was nothing but a squaw.  (Ouch!)  I'm entitled to treat her as I see fit.

After this workshop I realized that my congregation in their worry about the challenges of our small size was trying to control ME.   After some thinking, I was the one who left.  I had not found a way to satisfy them and I did not want to live behind a wall.  I opened the newspaper today and saw instances of the same pattern in this town, on the tribal council, in the US Congress.  It is pervasive, not just in intimate relationships.

Women trying to tough it out in a violent household usually leave several times and then return again before they manage to break the tie.  The Saskatoon counselors taught us how to design a strategy.  Stash a gym bag of the baby’s clothes with a friend.  Make a backup set of car keys and hide them because the first thing a rural man will do is throw the car keys out into the snow to prevent his wife from leaving.  Buy a bus ticket and hide it somewhere.  Set up a separate bank account.  Make contact with helpers.   This kind of conspiracy seems dishonest -- but it can be lifesaving.   A man out-of-his-mind, maybe on booze or meth, cannot be successfully confronted.

What happens after that depends on how far gone things have gone.  Earlier is better with more chance to pull back from the edge of the abyss.  A person has to set limits of their own: one blow?  Or a beating?  Or a series of beatings?  If the woman is also on drugs or booze, all limits are erased.  Status, income, safety of children, nothing matters at that point.  It’s not about being Indian.  It’s not about living on a reservation.  It’s about out-of-control no matter how many concentric circles are drawn, no matter how many laws or jail terms there are.

(To be continued)

FOLLOW THE MONEY

(This is part of a response to the the Ross-Finley article in Indian Country Today)

I’ve never seen a budget break-out of the cost of a “safe house” for women and children fleeing abuse.  Obviously the place has to be big enough to shelter the number of people involved, with enough kitchen and laundry facilities and protected access.  Locations need to be secret because the abusers will try to find their families and bring them home or take revenge.  Guns could be involved.  There will need to be access to medical facilities for broken arms and internal damage.  Once the “safe house” is established, the cost of food, clothing, and all the other maintenance costs of a household will continue.  That seems obvious.  There will be immense phone bills and cost for transportation as people try to network and look for jobs, maybe a new community.

I have a strong suspicion that the cost of the many studies over the years, whether academic or task forces or NGO’s, have amounted to far more than the simple cost of direct rescue and protection from violence, even if the cost of law enforcement is included.  I’ve been looking at some of these studies on-line and see that there is always a lot of seeking of qualified members (who will be paid plus their travel and accommodation), framing up the methods, getting permission, worry about violating culture norms, and reliance on questionnaires and statistics, all of which cost money to produce and analyze.  There is great concern for creating “resources” which often seem to be people sitting in offices keeping records and telling the abused what to do.

I was really a little shocked by one study that kept saying,  “What is the readiness of this community to accept the changes necessary?”  I understand that the status quo always lends its inertia to opposition, but the tone was very much that of a parent who says,  “Go to your room until you’re ready to behave.”  There was expressed surprise that people wanted to find ways to address violence -- as though the pain and destruction were approved of -- and constant worry about whether the autochthonous culture would permit change.  (More about that later.)  In short, these studies were almost always made by outsiders who were “objective” to the point of being obtuse and who had no skin in the game, to coin a phrase.

Grants are money.  Foundations are about money.  Studies are about money.  People on panels are about money.  Many many people in this country, particularly those with college educations that are supposed to give them good lives without doing manual labor, make their living from these sources.  Someone once asked a writer if she could make a living as a writer.  “No,” she said.  “But you can do pretty well if you can get on enough panels, act as a consultant, make public speeches, and teach workshops.”  She was talking about published narratives, but that’s what all these studies produce while carefully purporting to be scientific and reality-based.  It’s a good idea to be sensational because that attracts more money.  Abuse survivors have more credibility, the same as recovering addicts.

I understand the idea that outsiders are more likely to be trained, to be exempt from local politics, to be objective and so on.  But over the years the “outsiders” have formed their own “inside” and collaborate to set norms and make assumptions that they all share -- none of them particularly attuned to the local situation.  In short, they have their own culture -- very politically attuned -- the determination to prevent violence through the use of bureaucracy, which provides salaries, sometimes to the victims of violence themselves.  But their own urge to control -- for good motives, of course -- is the beginning of new abuse: regulations, inspections, fines, removal of children, scheduling. 

Most of the thinking about abuse of women is in terms of laws, police, programs, counseling centers, and so on.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen any writing that reflected on profits deriving from many of the roots of violence, like alcohol use or men who shuttle through households.  When something stays in place so intractably despite half the population (at least the females) being damaged and children being endangered, then there must be forces holding the situation in place.

I would look at two things, if I were brave and funded.  One would be paper land swindles -- corruption to do with leases, overlooked situations that SHOULD involve leases or easements, taxation and the like.  I recall when it dawned on the tribe that the power and telephone lines crossing the reservation ought to be paying for easements and the resulting indignation the affected businesses.  It’s very similar to the government laws about grazing or mining on federal property -- old laws based on old assumptions extremely advantageous to the ranchers and miners so they would occupy the “empty” West.  I think this current US trust management payout -- and, even more, the reformed bookkeeping -- will be revelatory.

Of course, the drug providers and cookers don’t care whether there’s violence or not, anymore than the liquor providers -- whether saloon, package store or bootlegger -- care about it.  These forces create violence on the whole continent, the whole hemisphere, the whole planet.  What has to be addressed is a society that can’t be tolerated without a numbed consciousness, that doesn’t know how to celebrate without getting sloshed out of its mind.  Even college kids pride themselves on it.

But here’s the ultimate:  there are people who would like Indians to be portrayed in as ugly a way as possible, keeping alive the nineteenth century idea of child-like savages who must be controlled.  Ultimately, it could be an excuse to close down the reservation as a place where people cannot be safe, where businesses cannot make a profit or even get insurance because of burglary and vandalism, where tourism cannot be sustained because of danger to outsiders, and where there is no leadership.  (As though presently there isn’t a government in the country that isn’t paralyzed by polarization and blaming.)  The BIA has been supposed to put itself out of business for the last fifty years.  

Too many people are believing that the way to survive is to be Number One and that the only way to guarantee that is to be the Last Man Standing, with a woman knocked down at his feet.  But we know -- deep down we really do know -- that unless we have a society that protects and supports the least of us, we can’t survive, because we are all connected.  What happens to one, happens to us all.  That’s where the real cost lies.


(More to come)