"HIPPIES, INDIANS AND THE FIGHT FOR RED POWER" by Sherry Smith

A much better review of Sherry Smith’s “Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power”  was published at www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38813  David Farber wrote it. What I mean by “better” is that it is more measured and addresses Smith as academic-to-academic, because this is an academic book based on written archives and formal interviews.  That’s not my turf.  I chose ONE tribe (Blackfeet) fifty years ago and most of what I know comes from first-hand experience.  Not bigshots, just whoever was here when I was here, including now.

Smith’s idea is to understand how Indians and their supporters came together to make social change on big occasions, one chapter for each.  They are:

Frank’s Landing on the Nisqually River  (Nisqually)

Alcatraz Island in San Francisco (pan-tribal)

The commune country of northern New Mexico (Hopi, Navajo)

The BIA building in Washington, D.C.  (pan-tribal)

Wounded Knee Village on the Pine Ridge reservation (Sioux)

Oddly, or perhaps because of the way Smith researched, the “tribe” that comes out looking good is the AFSC (American Friends Service Committee).  My own denominational affiliation during this time was Unitarian Universalist.  (Like many Blackfeet, I couldn’t make a living on the rez so I had gone back to Portland.  I found the UU church in 1975.)  The UU’s, often fellow travelers with the AFSC, pretty much stayed clear.  They had suffered major trauma over black and Vietnam issues, but also -- I found after I had entered the UU ministry -- they were mostly progressive, urban, liberal people who could NOT understand Indians except in the most literary terms.

In 1976 my Portland UU minister, Alan Deale, knowing my background, asked for advice.  Dennis Banks, Russ Redner and Kenneth Loudhawk (with others) had been arrested while driving a Winnebago loaded with unstable nitroglycerine in eastern Oregon.  They were lucky that this happened in a far different political climate.   They were released on bail.   Deale had been asked to be the person to whom they reported daily and he wanted feedback about “Indians” from me.  My sympathies were with them, though I thought driving around in a hot climate with a load of explosives was pretty ill-advised.  In fact, the sheriff of the impounding county was so nervous that he ended up taking it out into the sagebrush and exploding it.  This offered a way out of a very “hot” trial, since there was now no evidence and that particular case was dismissed.

However, Banks was still wanted in connection with the death of Annie Mae Pictou Aquash and it was unclear what Oregon would do about extradition to South Dakota.  It was certainly clear to the rest of us what South Dakota would do to Banks.  Governor Jerry Brown in California would not extradite, so Banks ran for sanctuary.  The sympathetic old lady who had put up the sizable bail lost her money, but Deale managed to get her reimbursed through connections within the UUA realm.

There were funny blunders in the practicalities.  Banks gave a very Vine DeLoria Jr. - type “sermon” one Sunday and the Loudhawk and Redner group served fry bread during the traditional coffee hour afterwards.  They understood UU’s as “granolas,” so the frybread was whole wheat.  When I teased the women -- really little more than kids -- their eyes went big for fear that they had broken some rule.  That’s the use of teasing on a rez.

But when there was an appeal for food, I loaded up a box of what I considered to be “pow-wow food” -- hamburger, eggs, oranges and Sailor Boy hardtack -- and they were at a loss.  There was too much of it for them to eat in a few days and they had no freezer, so what would they do with all that meat?  They were urban people and I was used to rural culture.  On the rez there would be no problem at all, because everyone’s relatives would be over to share in the feast.  But if you live in ghetto apartments, you don’t let people know what you have.  Anyway, you might end up living in your truck.  No fridge.  I should have loaded them up with canned food and packaged cookies.  

What impressed some UU people most was that Kenneth Loudhawk’s father showed up and he was one of those solid, grave, intelligent people that every culture depends upon.   The other point of connection was parades: every UU dearly loves a demonstration.  These things don’t generally show up in journalistic accounts or scholarly aggregations of names, dates and so on.  No one would read this book for the pure adventure of it.  It’s not “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee,” though Smith’s account of the book’s influence is pretty good IMHO.  This is like Paul Rosier’s book about the Blackfeet -- hard to read, but an indispensable reference work if you’re doing old-fashioned history: names and dates, quotes, and so on.

I was off the rez between 1973 and 1982 but being in Portland gave me the chance to attend speeches by prominent NA writers: Erdrich, DeLoria, Welch, Sarris, Alexie, et al.  Every summer I went back to Browning where things got more and more tense.  Since I wasn’t risking property or my person and since I was contemptuous of the constant FBI whispering campaign and since most of the AIM people on the rez were former students, I saw things quite differently from Bob Scriver and the other white townspeople, a dwindling group once the BIA began to use Indian preference in hiring.  The small town whites had come after WWII and were aging out, simply locking the door on their businesses.  

In the morning I’d take my mail down to the Red Crow Kitchen and sort it in a booth while I had breakfast.  At one table sat the white locals and at a booth across the room sat the AIM prominants and fellow-travelers.  I’d eavesdrop, then on the way out stop off to exchange a few words with each group.  Except for their points of view, they sounded remarkably similar.  The dominance/submission dynamics that are in every society were palpable but never flared high enough for violence at breakfast.  The kind of woman who runs a cafe on a rez does not tolerate any behavior that will interfere with business. 

Anyway, the two groups justified each other.  Each needed the other to brace against, to make their lives seem bold and romantic instead of the constant pursuit of small profits.  A couple on the white side helped to keep the lid on.  Paul Kingston came to Browning as a priest, stepped out to secular life, married a nun, Barbara, who was his equal in dedication and faith, and raised a set of exceptional kids.  They have been a stabilizing force for good by example and faithfulness to both their God and their community without being overbearing or sentimental.  For income they run a Subway franchise.

In fact, both Curley Bear Wagner and Buster Yellow Kidney, both gone on ahead now, gradually evolved from politics to a kind of shamanism, looking for the values of ancestors.  They made money from it but it’s hard to blame them for that.  Maybe it’s more problematic that they distracted interested parties from the real-world politics and institutional templates that still pin down tribal people, but are now being addressed.

Smith’s previous book was “Reimagining Indians” which reviewed individuals (mostly men) who had interfaced between whites and Indians.  I took offense at her depiction of Walter McClintock, whose “The Old North Trail” tells me more than Ewers’ official history of the tribe.  She seemed to want to take down most of the people in the book, all of which were prominent in their time.  Her “take” appeared to be heavily post-colonial and hard-line feminist, though it was all well-researched.  This new book is mellower.  

Curley Bear in a mellow mood.

MINISTERIAL BATSHIT

The image of the saintly battle chaplain -- like the four who gave away their life jackets to the enlisted sailors and died on a sinking ship while singing hymns -- is pretty well destroyed by now, replaced by the evil old man who molests choir boys, the female evangelist in boudoir-wear with her arms raised and tears streaming down her face while she makes miracles happen, Elmer Gantry, Lucifer with a reverse collar and a tail hanging out his backside, etc.  Much informed by Satan in goat-foot boots with a cape swirling around him and a black leopard on a leash.  No wonder people go batshit!  Who wouldn’t like to strut that way?  (Although, I’ve always fancied a green wool Irish cape and a calico cat in my arms.  But no one respects that image.) 

By now you’re onto my fav juxtaposition of the wildly, savagely, mind-blowingly extreme against the homely humble detail.  Let me try it again.

Annual General Assembly for the Unitarians alternates between college campuses and major city hotel conference centers -- possibly resorts.  The clergy are always divided according to economics: the guys (always) who have big churches with generous budgets see the occasion as a chance to blow off steam and enjoy themselves, so they go for the city.  The ones who have the small churches (beginners and women), maybe with no travel allowance at all, beg for the cheap campus.  

This particular year the venue was a fancy hotel.  I walked into the little convenience shop with a personally wealthy female colleague who looked just like Cher.  She left Chicago seminary to avoid freezing to death in both the physical and emotional sense.  Her ministry (thirty years now) has been a huge success but not a political one.  In this shop was an old woman in obvious distress.  Her daughter, late middle-age, was desperate for help.  They had been on a tour and the box lunches had given the old woman uncontrollable food-poisoning.  Aside from nearly losing consciousness, she was gripped by diarrhea she could not prevent from streaming down her legs and pooling on the polished floor.  

“Cher” and I helped her sit on a stack of newspapers while the shop owner, also a woman, railed and scolded about not being able to sell them -- think of the money lost!  She had called the hotel manager, who was making arrangements with the daughter to put the old woman in a room where she could recover.  The daughter went to get the hotel’s wheelchair.  In those days there was no impulse to call EMT’s for help.  I’m not sure there was such a thing. 

So “Cher” threw down a twenty on the counter (more than the value of the papers), and we tried to think of comforting things to say about the utter helplessness, humiliation, and shock of the old woman -- about how it happens to everyone, that it’s simply not anything that can be controlled, that it’s unpleasant but not evil, and so on.  Gradually things resolved.  The mop and bucket came, etc.

What is still vividly in my mind is the memory of big-shot male ministers hanging in the doorway, laughing, mocking, making no move to help.  Over the next few days they teased Cher and I about how dumb we were for not just getting out of there.

I’m not sure whether that was the GA where the San Francisco minister -- a big name in a big church -- stood in the ministers’ meeting to face his Jonah moment.  He had been told about Jonestown before that congregation moved to Guyana but after the practice of victimization and sexual assault had begun.  In fact, earlier, Jim Jones had come to this UU minister to investigate whether he could get credentials in the UUA.  He couldn’t -- only because he had no BA or BS, a prerequisite for seminary.  It would not be until after the mass murder/suicides that the confessing alpha minister realized the woman who had come to him for help, relating incredible events, had been telling the truth.  But he just couldn’t bring himself to get involved by investigating.

In case you don’t know the Jonah story, it recurs several places:
Book of Jonah (Old Testament)

2 Kings 14:25 (Old Testament) Makes mention of him.

Matthew 16:4 (New Testament)

Luke 11 29 &;30 (New Testament)

The set-apartness of clergy was once taken for granted, though it could be used as much to evade ordinary life as for empowered intervention.  We used to let chaplains go into prisons and nuns counsel death row inmates.   The Red Cross was sacred because it was a Christian symbol.  It has become a target.  Now the tendency is to erase special privileges.  In the Sixties the clergy insisted they were entitled to be human -- that they could get divorced, hooked, insane, greedy just like everyone else.  And the people believed them.  The confidentiality of the confessional disappeared from the state laws.  (NOT the confidentiality of the lawyers -- who do you think the legislators are?)  Now clergy are just social workers.  There is no sanctuary.  There is no martyrdom, not even the Tibetan monks who self-immolate or the idealistic young tartars who strap on bombs.  They're just considered nuts.

The Pope is a joke.  Jesus is just another rabbi.  The shaman is a drug pusher.  All sacredness is emptied in a diarrhea of the soul.  We contaminate the planet.  People confess self-hatred and speak of suicide.

But not all of them.  If there is no separate class of priests, then we are all priests.  If there is no big Humanoid we can expect to set things right, then we’d better get busy ourselves, and we are.  But let’s be practical.  It costs, there will be clean-up, and some people will stand apart to laugh and mock.  

The Great Falls Tribune ran an editorial by a man claiming that there is NO hunger in America because poor people are fat.  He sees them buying food with their welfare debit cards.  Unless he sees skeletal people, he figures everything is okay.  He’s inside the Big Fish.  He sees nothing but fish guts.  He doesn’t go where the hollow-eyed, barely walking, sore-ridden poor live.  (If they can be said to live anywhere.)  I suspect that he DOES pass homeless people, but takes no notice.  He doesn’t help out at the food pantry or the Salvation Army.   He doesn’t walk along the railroad tracks or go into ghettos.  When he goes through the rez, he locks the car doors.   And he never reads National Geographic where he might see famine and refugee camps.  Or the squats where homeless kids hide out.

So we need photographers who DO go there.  Witnesses and testimony.  Not in court -- on YouTube.  Songs, dances.  And we need to own our own fish puke, our own bat crap.  You don’t see what you can’t name, so we need names, vocabulary, either written or spoken.   A new theology.   It used to be that this was the work of clergy.  Now it’s everyone’s job.   

(Wouldn’t want to leave you depressed, so I’m linking to a jolly song.)   http://www.godvine.com/In-the-Belly-of-the-Whale-Unique-Performance-About-Jonah-293.html

ENVISIONING A BETTER WORLD

This week I’ve been watching a steady sequence of social consciousness films, independently made because people really believed in the message. (If you watch one on DVD, there will be trailers for the others.) “The Stoning of Soraya,” “Satan Tango,” and tonight was “Sin Nombre” -- all are very hard to watch and yet they are the reality of some people, lived without escape, without fantasy. The worlds of isolated mountain Iranian villages; or poverty-stricken, rain-soaked Hungarian farms; or Mexican immigrants on trains trying to get into the US, are so foreign that we don’t try to imagine them because we don’t know they exist. And yet, if we don’t know about them, how can we make decent social decisions in our lives? This is not escapism or fantasy.

An article about Matt Groening reflecting on growing up in Portland, Oregon, has been floating around and some of us have chatted about it. No two of us grew up in the same Portland. The Portland of my childhood and youth was nothing like the Portland I knew later as an animal control officer and then as a clerk for the City of Portland Bureau of Buildings. The only way those views could have been grittier would have been if I’d be a cop.

But none of that compares with Browning, Montana. The most recent tragedies have divided people between those who feel there should be as much outrage and action as for others who have died -- as a matter of honor -- and those who feel that it only makes everything worse to tell people about it. The more hidden the better. Just walk away. Find a better place. Myself, I feel a third way: I think that if we really understood, things might change. We should know everything that explains, that leads to answers.

People tell me this is a fool’s opinion, a liberal white woman’s delusion, because nothing will change anyway. And yet in the fifty years that I’ve known this place, the only things that really haven’t changed have been the land and the alcohol. Drugs are worse; education is better; people are fatter; more young people are achievers -- like Ph.D. level achievers. Like happily married achievers. Like successful business achievers. And then there’s Eloise Cobell, who finally got a bridle bit in the mouth of the USA. No one expected that to be possible at all and they were critical of her path to that achievement: learning the world of banking and law. What business did an Indian woman have learning such things? Now we know.

Bob Scriver used to say that during the Great Depression, which is when he was in high school and college, things around here weren’t much different than usual, because everyone was already living at ground level. Now people keep telling me that they will NOT live in an old house or drive an old car, and they don’t. Ranchers around here are doing a little better than the rest of the country. There is a lot to lose. Since I work with an international group, I’m am acutely aware of what the Great Recession is doing to the growing edge of social action -- shutting it down. The safety net in this country is full of holes now. Subsidies are so politically-based instead of compassion-based, that they amount to subjugation and extortion.

But come back to the local. A teenaged girl -- smart, beautiful, intelligent, achieving, well-loved and all the other qualities that are supposed to be protective -- has been lost. She called 911 to say she thought she had overdosed. They got to her quickly but lost her at the hospital. Would this tragedy have been avoided if she had known how dangerous it is to mix alcohol with pills? If she had known how dangerous prescription pills can be? But one of the worries is that if one teenager dies of suicide, it becomes a script for others, so I’m not using her name. The praise, regret and sorrow can be alluring to someone who is normally brushed aside and ignored.

And what about Marie Heavyrunner? I think there are secrets about this death that have not come out yet and that no one wants to become known, like the relationship to oil lease money. This house was finally raided as a gang drug house. There is always buzz about drug gangs. Why aren’t they challenged as soon as they are detected? (This isn’t the first murder on their tab.) Because people like the excitement? Being “in the know”? Because they think that’s really the way life is and there’s no way to oppose such a phenomenon?

Watching all these independent movies, usually written by someone who infiltrated the scene or read a book or had a relative involved, has given me an acute consciousness that this planet has many layers of government and structure. In addition to the obvious United Nations, there are underground networks of incredible extent and power. Some are criminal, some are religious, some are financial, some are NGO’s, some are international corporations and cartels. A person with a cool temperament and a lot of luck can play three-dimensional chess through them in a lot of different ways for a lot of different motives, both good and bad. Places with borders, overlapping jurisdictions, and de facto no man’s lands are great for these interstitial people.

We love the novels and films about all this, especially the ones with heros who know how to make the moves that save everyone. In actual fact, not many people are hip enough to get involved. Or, NOT, which is even more hip. Certainly no one is able to control all these levels and dynamics by passing laws, making inspections or even hiring soldiers of fortune. The culture itself must form an opinion, a NORM, and express it in every way that they can, and that’s what will turn things around.

It used to be normal to own other people. It used to be normal to beat horses to death in the streets. It used to be normal to have open sewers. We changed that. Three-dimensional chess might be complex, but straightforward awareness and determination are not. You can do it at home.

PLAGUE AND PARTICLES

Only one of the Great Human Plagues has been eradicated so far in this ever-so-clever scientific world: smallpox. The suspicion is that someone somewhere (probably us) has a freezer of the last bits of it, so we can use it as a weapon. (Only if provoked, of course, though we provoke rather easily.) Cholera, malaria, flu, bubonic plague, typhoid, tuberculosis -- now joined by HIV-AIDS -- are somewhat treatable and almost completely preventable if their supporting ecological conditions (mostly poverty and hunger) are changed.

At one point I spent a lot of time reading about plagues. Ebola, for instance, is an inefficient disease because it is so virulent that people drop in their tracks in days, which is not always enough time to get to the next host. Another mistake on the part of plagues is the vulnerability of their vectors, which carry infection through the air, through liquids like water, and from one person to another through contact, which means that all those routes, if detected, can be interdicted. Using a condom, eliminating mosquitoes, purifying water, are all effective strategies but -- directly or indirectly -- the greatest ally a plague has is political. The lack of political will allows both the actual infections and their vectors to continue, even thrive and find new resources.

Lack of political will comes from stigmatizing (I always hear in my mind, “stinkmatizing”) and possibly criminalizing those who need help/money. The countervailing force is first, the awareness of other human beings as having value and empathizing with them, and second, the awareness that politicians can very well fall victim to stinkmatizing. They themselves, regardless of disease status, can become marked for exclusion. None of them is invulnerable to tragedy. They must see that though it is effective to have needy clients, whether they are constituents or whole nations, a failed nation is worth nothing and will prey on prosperity.

Many people working from many motives try to throw life-saving resources to suffering people. Most will choose one issue and put all their effort into it, perhaps because of personal experience with it. We become increasingly aware that ALL diseases are essentially molecular and therefore intermeshed, planetary, trans-species. A man just walked across Africa -- the gorillas and chimpanzees were gone. (They think ebola.) A man just drove the highways of Florida. The mammals were gone. (They think Asian pythons.) A disease is only one aspect of economics, ecology, transportation, and constant change even in the surface of the planet and its oceans expressed as climate, earthquakes, tsunamis. Even in the dynamics of the sun with its massive storms sending plasma curtains and particles our way.

I have chosen a location on this planet -- the east slope of the Rocky Mountains -- where I can age out with low resources and high spiritual renewal. For whatever reason, I’ve had access to major thinkers and accumulated a library that guides me to bigger libraries. Our diseases here are Alzheimers, diabetes, alcoholism, meth and violence. Our families are still stable enough -- for the most part -- to get the stink off loved ones, but we still struggle with racism and poverty. Some people seem unlovable.

Activists press me to respond to their issues and I’ve wondered what I should do. If the ethical rule I use is to do the greatest good for the greatest number, then I think I know what the answer is: the deepest cause of malignant loss and self-destruction is our understanding of what a human being is. We think we are nothing, maybe even a plague in ourselves, that can only be purified by apocalypse -- near universal destruction.

Therefore, I choose to address the nature of what it is to be human in an age that is discarding both anthropomorphism (thinking everything, including God, is in our image) and anthropocentrism (thinking that everything should be about us and what we want and need). I have a few realizations.

One is that there is no such thing as an individual. Solitary as I am, my head and heart are so crowded with people (I count animals, maybe even entities like trees or mountains or shorelines) that I sigh to meet new ones. A few are intensely meaningful to me, my very core.

The next thing is that my “identity” and consciousness (I think so I am) is a very small part of what goes on in my body. Eukaryotic cells formed over years of collaboration, drawing on the mitochondria in each cell, have been joined by a jillion little molecular creatures (QUITE real and physical though below human perception) from gut flora to eyelash fauna. Keeping them in harmony means emotion affects them and is produced by them.

To take this back to the subject of plague, my mother nearly died in the Spanish flu epidemic -- in fact, her doctor did. Her mother and grandmother died of cancer. These things intimidated her in a subtle way. She chose endurance maybe more than she ought to have, though she could be a good crusader as well. And endurance, tenacity, are valuable qualities. She is in me now. I am guarded, vigilant.

Constantly I have to fight awareness of all the bad things, mistakenly or on purpose, that I’ve done in my life. The failures, the fudges, the desertions -- I could create a virulent case of self-hate with no effort at all. Some people help me right along with my list of faults and others do NOT help when they refuse to admit my faults exist. Honesty is tough and slippery, but it is what I pursue. It can make me unwelcome, but if I can maintain honesty, it is productive. I get things done.

A human being is one element in an inconceivable interweaving of tiny forces. For two thousand years of Western religion we have tried to preserve our individual selves with a fantasy about everlastingness, but it has become pernicious. Now we must see that our salvation is in participation, to create memories and hope that will speak to others and break down stigma. At the same time we must be judicious, generous, disciplined in some ways and abandoned in others, demanding and forgiving, open and yet observant of boundaries in the molecular moments that add up to a life. If (when) we are taken by trauma or disease or simply old age, then we will have left glowing trajectories across the particle-detecting cloud chamber of the galaxy.