CODE SWITCHING: NOT JUST A SECOND LANGUAGE

I posted this because I don't understand it.  Help?  *

Internal “code switching” is not just moving between languages, or as drastic as split personality (a response to trauma) or schizophrenia (almost surely an organic brain miswiring).  It isn’t even as marked (necessarily) as the “internal family therapy” model in which people change their brain templates according to which family member has imposed those assumptions in past situations.  (Needy mom; narcissistic dad; superstitious granny; comforting aunt; artistic uncle -- if circumstances echo the circumstances when that template was imposed, it will emerge unconsciously.)  In fact, conscious and skillful code switching is a sign of sanity and even good health.  A person who can mediate among codes, especially in their own minds but also in social settings, has hold of cultural and personal evolution, letting new things EMERGE that can persist and contribute effectively. 

Minds and their patterns are closely woven to the rest of the body and will switch a person from one code to another as necessary: a fisherman at sea when a storm comes up doesn’t just rationally stop fishing and start making preparations to survive, the actual connectome in the brain changes from one based on fishing to one of seamanship.  If two women are talking and a child interrupts with a need, this will switch the connectome and lose not just the topic but also the brain connections that sustained it.  If this does NOT happen, the child will go without help.  If it happens enough, the child will have that pattern forever and stop asking for help, perhaps in despair, or maybe with determination to take care of oneself.

If this happens intensely enough, maybe in combat or as a victim of abuse, a person can enter a state of alienation, so rarely used or perhaps newly invented, that they feel hypnotized, like zombies.  A mild observation is that on the rez at a funeral, the closest mourning relatives will chew gum in order to preserve their poise.  Somehow it keeps the brain away from weeping and keening, which is the way the old timers grieved.  In fact, if the modern Blackfeet wanted to grieve in the old way, they would cut off the first section of the littlest finger of their youngest daughter. But the code has changed: what it’s proper to do has changed.  Many reasons.

If a social group with one code (let’s say the public health people who try to force change for the good of the group and the good of the individual, never questioning why because that was already settled long ago, and never stopping to consider what is or is not force) tries to affect (I will NOT say “impact”) a group with a different code. (Life is short, the purpose is to survive with as little pain as possible, resources are limited, change is dangerous, you must must must stay hidden or you will be arrested and incarcerated which takes the one thing you have: your freedom and your cohort.) The result is frustration “justifying” violence.  The enlightened sit down to study out the code and survival strategy of those they are trying to affect.  (Just giving up the word “impact” might help.)

Usually successful people who are doing social-change tasks reach “enlightenment” by absorbing a progressive code.  Listen to those you serve, closely monitor for results, share with others doing the same work, keep in touch with research, find your ego-balance somewhere else.  Don’t expect any sudden changes, but that doesn’t mean they might not happen.  Honor your clients.  (Isn’t there a better word yet for those who need help?)

The hardest “other” code for me to understand is the rule that says:  “Don’t find out.  It will be worse than you think and cause you to vomit and reject me.”  Everytime I’ve tested it, it has not been true.  Censorship in the interest of respectability is not a concept I accept.  Would I tell you about the mourning amputations among the Blackfeet otherwise?  Some will be angry with me for telling you.

The secret codes, like the ones that govern sex and money, are the ones most in need of daylighting at present, because they are so gridlocked, damaging and unjustified that they need to be torn apart, reconsidered, and possibly abandoned.  They are a deteriorating infrastructure as surely as bridges and sewers.  The living situations of us all have changed, if only because of electronics, but also because of culture-mixing and uneven pockets of disastrous profiteering scraping across the continent:  coal-mining, off-shoring, immigration “reform”, college loans.  We have no consensus nor even an array of possibilities on hand.  I do NOT mean to go back to a past that never really existed and I do NOT mean Puritanical moral locks on all the doors.

Nor have I addressed the terrible anguish of having to learn a new code.  I had brutal teachers:  7^th graders, some Blackfeet and some not.  They treated me like an equal, which meant I was soon humbled, since they don’t give each other any slack.  I had to give up a lot of cherished convictions, most of them about my own place and value in life.  Teaching English went down the drain:  the subject no longer exists.  Many still didn’t know how to read, so how could I get into their frontal cerebral lobes to tinker with the big literary ideas of society and character?  What right did I have to do that anyway?

I’m still fighting to hang onto the idea that “high” intellectual concepts can be applied to “low” ghetto problems with the outcome being useful to the “low” people.  Why would the “high” even need such ideas except to gloat and be patronizing?  In fact, to communicate theories to people trying to stay alive, is dangerous.  They feel you are talking down to them, trying to make them hurt for not getting lots of degrees and making lots of money and saving their families (however defined).   Being like “you.”  Right.  Gunshots are ringing in my ears.  (Oh, only fireworks. Guns are the suicide weapon.  Around here it’s silent knives that murder.)

I value Deleuze and Guattari with their metaphors of rhizome and nomadism, but when I went to the people who touted that frame of thought and who had come up from the ghetto to announce their survival through conversion/education, I found they were terrified.  They were beholden to the extortion of academic approval, but also beholden to the betrayal of their intimates.  Anyway, they were just plain afraid -- it was one of their codes: Life is dangerous.  Don’t stick your head up.   I could not keep my own job, so what right had I to endanger theirs?  But I was shocked.  I know some very uneducated people who are far more courageous, sometimes children.

In fact, those seventh graders knew things about their community that were terrifying to adults.  Normally only emergency responders know these worlds exist but they don’t ask many questions about the formal philosophies involved.  Sometimes the order-keepers shoot people; sometimes they find them dead and carry them out for burial.  Mostly they lock up people.  I asked the priest what he said to such people.  He had no answer.  The response was lost.

*  I'm told the joke is that "foca" means seal but sounds like an Anglo-Saxon four-letter word that's not considered polite.  The sweet baby is in the wrong code.

ALISON MURIE: Now Immortal

From Raven Murie

We're sending sad news: our mother Alison died on May 29 after a brief
illness. All three of us were there with her. This is the second massive
tree to fall in the past 16 months (Martin died Jan. 28, 2012) and it only widens the gash in the
landscape.

Knowing her preferences, we held no memorial service or funeral, so
there is no single forum for sharing memories. It's a stretch to find
the words to say or write at a time like this. But we are a family of
words: readers and talkers who naturally would welcome your Alison
memories. Equally, as people who occasionally wrestle with the work of
writing, we'd understand if the words don't come at all. We just want
you to know what has happened.

Here's a link to what we wrote for the Yellow Springs News obit:

http://ysnews.com/news/2013/06/alison-gass-murie

Sadly,
R, N, J

Janet:  hedgehog@siscom.net
Norah: triadpages@yahoo.com
Raven: ravenmurie@gmail.com

Bit of a blunder here.  I took a photo off the 'Net but since I never knew Alison in person, only in print (which was wonderful), I pulled in some stranger.  The photo at the heading now is from Raven who certifies it IS Alison!

This is Raven's comment:

Mother wasn't eager to have photos taken, but she tolerated our tendency to snap photos at family gatherings. This photo was taken about a month before she died, at a family gathering celebrating my birthday. . . The mysterious thing leaning against her chest is the head of a walking stick she carved  for herself. It came with her whenever she left the house. 

We do have younger photos, going back over the decades. Daddy had and used a camera all the time we kids were growing up, so there are many pictures of all of us in our prime. But we didn't want to publish an image no one would recognize as the present-day Alison Murie. It's a bit comical sometimes to find an obit of someone who died at a ripe old age accompanied by a photo of the deceased taken well before the first wrinkle showed up. Vanity? Severe lack of images? I'm sure there are reasons.

Thanks, Raven.  This looks like a well-earned and sharp-eyed face.  I expect Martin Murie was glad to see it every morning.  

Prairie Mary

BIRD ON THE HEAD: CODE SWITCHING

A dependable source of creative ideas is code-mixing, applying the assumptions and practices of one sub-culture to another.  The current kafuffle over Johnny Depp’s portrayal of Tonto with a bird on his head is not at all remarkable if you look at the early portraits of indigenous American people and not any more strange than the women’s hats of the time of the Lone Ranger (post-Civil War) which wiped out whole species in order to put birds on heads.  What makes it strange is that birds on heads in one code is a marker for the savage, still half-merged with nature, and in the other code they are a marker for ultra-civilized, controlled, prosperous, high class females.

“Lone Ranger” won’t be available in Valier until it gets to Netflix, which may be sooner than planned if the reviews are an indication.  So instead I watched “Dead Man,” a 1995 precursor.  (Forget all that pirate nonsense for jr. hi kids.)  “Dead Man is a 1995 American Western film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. it includes Robert Mitchum in his final film role. The film, dubbed a “Psychedelic Western” by its director, includes twisted elements of the Western genre. . . .Some consider it the ultimate postmodern Western.”  

Postmodern is code for code juxtaposition and demolition. Jarmusch reports that “the first adult film he recalls having seen was the 1958 cult classic Thunder Road, starring Robert Mitchum, the violence and darkness of which left an impression on the seven-year-old Jarmusch.”  The latter was born in 1953, during the Lone Ranger era.  In “Dead Man” Depp plays a clueless young white man on the frontier who is taken in hand by an amused and competent Indian, Gary Farmer.  The latter is so authentic that he speaks Indian languages, plural.  The Blackfeet words I recognized were “napiyahki” (white men, who are “so stupid”) and Apistatoke (Jesus Christ, which in Blackfeet -- Siksika -- is not an expletive.)

Culture codes are emergent rather than composed by someone, but widely shared influences (major wars and economic developments) act on lots of people who don’t realize others feel just as unique.  What they think is “their” code may become genres or more formal categories of thought, like “postmodern”.  When one’s original culture code is oppressive and destructive (as the mainstream was in the Fifties), it can be a great relief to break over into a culture that fits better, so that for many Fifties kids, the Dionysian years of road culture, beat poetry, sex exploration, and drug use were magnetic.  Now that those kids are rich and famous, they use the tropes of their youth.  This is particularly true of people with an academic, European and Japanese philosophy background, even if they never earned a degree.  (Jarmusch)  “Lone Ranger” appears to have confused critics who try to compare it to the Jack Sparrow films.  They should have gone to “Dead Man,” which is much more clearly connected.

The original Lone Ranger (says this radio addict born in 1939) was part of the WWII “stand-down” story that was replayed in movies and Western series, trying to persuade a society accustomed to the worst possible violence that it was better to obey a code of laws, but that sometimes exceptional people had to get tough to preserve order.  (This theory still motivates the UN.)  The new “Lone Ranger” is for a time when the codes of law and regulation have become so oppressive and rigid that the only way to get justice is to break out into what might be seen as terrorism, guerrilla strategy.  Now the military man is ineffective, and the guerrilla skirmisher knows the terrain.   This is a metaphor that works for the Middle East.

I always like Jay Silverheels, in character or out.  To me, he was not wearing buckskin but khaki.  His fringe was modest, his hair was neat, his manner was dignified.  He was the best of military, at ease, in a time of peace.

The big Depp political pitch frames Tonto as being forced into subjection as a sidekick. That’s according to the Hollywood code.  (Politicos know that the secondary person is often the power person.)  Having been a sidekick to Bob Scriver for a decade, I see quite a different version of the role.  Apprenticing to someone powerful and charismatic can be a great way to learn a new code, for one thing.  Since I was on the Blackfeet Reservation where Bob was white but Indian-identified, this was a multiple sort of code -- what even journalists now refer to (see Zimmerman trial and the discussion of the ebonics of one witness) as “code switching,” the ability to switch from set of assumptions and language to another.  Of course, for the uninitiated -- like the current batch of movie critics as well as lawyers trying to stick to a legal code -- this can be highly confusing, not to say derailing.  (The law is often a runaway train, which is a sub-trope in many movies.)

Representing this basically Jarmuschian technique of looking at society through an opposed and critical set of standards will please a lot of underdogs:  not just Indians but also blacks and kids -- maybe even women who can see themselves as sidekicks instead of puppeteers managing a man to be their surrogate.  A lot of Indians see themselves as using whites for cats paws, even as the “cats” manage the Indians.  

Society has a fixed idea about Indians, a deep part of most people’s psyches, that is partly a defense against guilt.  It is VERY hard to break up, as Sherman Alexie discovered.  His beginnings are in stand-up comedy, a genre dependent on code clash and natural to Sherman because he was a nerdy outlier in his own tribe who wished to escape to a white world of respect and success but could only do it by exploiting his Indianness.  Once there, he was trapped.  And he was going in the opposite direction from the mainstream.  Now he is very quiet about the Tonto controversy because, it is rumored, Johnny Depp has commissioned him to create a script from a book called “One Thousand Women” about a scheme to “tame” the Indian by sending the excess women created by the Civil War to marry and subdue them.  (I’ve ordered the book but not read it.)  

Women as a good influence is another old trope.  Even now marriages around here operate on the premise that the husband will be an aggressive bad boy while the wife will make him put on clean clothes and eat properly with a fork.  The principal when I taught at Heart Butte, a white man in an old-timey Indian community where the residents valorized the idea of being a full-blood, was fond of saying that if he imported a dozen Swedish blondes, there would be no full-bloods in the next generation.  (He was an old Navy man.  It was hard to tell whether his wife was a blonde -- sometimes she was a redhead.)  Then there’s the joke about the legendary Old Indian who ordered himself a good sturdy wife from the Monkey Ward catalogue, but when the package came she had escaped, leaving only her harness of elastic and whalebone, clearly a sign of being civilized.

In 2006 when the big Nasdijj code-clash hit, Sherman was still trying to convince everyone that he was an authentic Indian who was wickedly copied by others, an act of theft.  But being Indian can’t be defined.  Writers have ALWAYS assumed different identities than themselves one way or another or there would be no genre except autobiography and even then it would be unreliable.  And everyone switches code in a small way now and then, depending on who else is in the room.  In the end what counts is survival, as Tonto -- both Tontos -- knew very well.  In our times that is likely to mean money.  How else can the Lone Ranger afford all those silver bullets?  Let alone a fancy horse!

INDIAN CULTUREOMICS

When the Europeans discovered that there was a whole alternate universe across the sea, they were stunned and fascinated.  We’ve been trying to duplicate that across the voids of space -- a new planet, sci-fi fantasy.  By the time anthropology had been invented, the idea had formed that there was one mass of strange people that extended all over the continent, they had been decimated by disease, pushed back to the west and then again pushed back some more, without any regard or consideration for their culture.  So from the beginning the cultureomics of Indians has been distorted, disturbed and lumped together.

In Elizabethan days, though in America, some on both sides of the culture gap tried an old strategy: leaders exchanged each other’s sons when they were entering adrenarche (8 to 12 or so) which is generally the human cultural learning period, and then took them back when they entered puberty so they would marry within their genetic category.  Except they discovered that the white boys didn’t WANT to fit back into their original culture and the Indians found that their own boys were completely disabled by a failure to learn the proper skills of hunting and raiding.

In those days the cultures were obvious and intense, varying across the continent according to the survival skills of their region which formed them into tribes.  The “Fish” Indians, the Plains Indians, the Pueblo-dwelling Indians, the Woodland Indians, each had quite different skill-sets and -- to a small extent -- genetic variations.  Yet even then people moved from one band to another, one tribe to another, and some lived on the road as traders moving precious objects (usually small because they were carried in a canoe or on a travois at best) from as far away as China (jade!), clear around the Pacific Rim to Chile.  None of this was documented in writing until the Euro traders, the fur buyers, the dogma-carriers got into the system.

Pueblo

Haida

In their writing anthropologists separated the peoples into tribes without regard for fuzzy edges.  The linguists made distinctions and development schemas, the genomics people built elaborate systems that required computer data-bases, political interests looked for common causes, and the pow-wows knit pan-Indians back together into a new "tribe" with a new material culture.  Modern competition pow-wow dance costumes are a hurricane of neon/dayglo movement never imagined or possible in the past.  Hunters are a sneak-up culture.  Some still dance that way.

These two movements -- separation by affinity groups and unification by affinity groups -- have mostly been invisible to the person in the street except via the media.  The people say -- with longing for that magical imaginary land -- how much they love those people, how much they yearn to go to them in that land that is always somehow within driving distance of LA.   (Someone estimated that every person in America has a descendant of Indians living within five miles of them -- they just don’t know it.) The Indian “trope” is dominated by Plains culture, infused with German and Rousseauian hippie and tree-hugger ideas, and split between those who identify with the victims of massacre in innocent villages and those who identify with the “hard men” survivors of the Civil War who became agents of destruction.  Then there are the romantic women who long to be captured, ravished, simplified and then returned to “civilization,” objects of awe and envy.

That’s only the beginning context of Native American cultureomics. It was an oral culture, they say, no writing.  That just means they didn’t use print with little marks that stood for sounds.  With their Asian gene-and-culture base, they developed Chinese-style, Mayan-style, ideograms.  As it happened, their major cities and temples (like those in the Middle East, often based on irrigation) were in jungle instead of desert like the pyramids, so they’ve been hard to find.  But they had writing all over them.

They say Indians had a Stone Age culture, but in fact it was an organically based culture that used wood, bone, flesh, ivory, and plants -- all things that have been mercifully reabsorbed into the world.  All things unique to the local ecology: cedar and salmon, or adobe and corn.  They say there were many tribal languages, which is true, but there were also trader languages, like sign talk or Chinook in the Northwest.  We know about Code Talkers, now that the last are about gone.  Men superimposed the military concepts onto their tribal vocabulary in order to be hidden so as to survive.

That’s been the chief strategy of many autochthonous people, to stay low, in cultural catacombs, speaking in their own sneak-up code.  When Malcolm McFee, the anthropologist who had previously been a plumber, came to Browning, he was aware of this and instead of talking about half-breeds, a concept based on separation, he talked about the 150% man who could code-switch, claim both.  He saw that some people were genetically white but culturally Indian, and vice versa.  Not because they were raised by the “other side,” but because they had accepted the assumptions that fit the ecosystems that formed the tribe.  Grasslands once, wind farms now. The Christian idea of imposing the Christian code on everything only worked here and there, usually when people were desperate enough to try anything.

Today, codes within Christianity at every level are very mixed and so are the codes within tribes, so far as tribes can be said to exist after generations of assimilation and Pan-Indian mixing.  Sometimes the codes matched and thereby strengthened.  One was education, learning new ways, even if they only exist on paper and -- in fact -- learning the arts of paper itself: reading print, filing, footnoting, chapter divisions, book-keeping.  Now the arts of computer programming often just skip over the paper intermediation.  The Browning School system has ordered tablet computers for all ages.

Culture codes change quickly and vary locally, so behavior and slang that are familiar at one end of the reservation or in one vocational guild, won’t be intelligible at the other end.  “Rodeo” is a code; “housing” is a code; the House of Religion has many codes from Pentecostal to reconstituted Bundle ceremonies.  But the literary template of the 20^th century, drawn from concepts formed a century earlier, has been very much resistant to change.  In fact that’s part of its success: "the Toughest Indian in the World," to quote Alexie.  It appeals to those who long for the “good old days.”  Reenactment is its ceremony.  Artifakes are its material culture.  Breaking away from the mainstream for personal reasons is its dynamic.

Indian “nations” are political and ecological, forces that act against the Euro-national identity and yet are often subsumed within it as mythology, especially for those in the military.  Mainstream media and philosophical cultures tend to use the trope to defend themselves:  “we’re not different, we’re better, more noble, like Indians.”  Sometimes, to make their point, whites and even some Indian writers run the trope backwards so that the Indians are ridiculous, victimized, sordid and tragic.  This is considered very funny.   People want to be on both sides, whichever one looks as though it will survive.  Or maybe they throw themselves on the losing side for reasons both demonic and defiant.  Rock ‘n Roll Indians.  They’re a mash-up culture of their own.  They don’t sing ’49’s.  Evolution continues.

CULTURENOMICS OF THE BLACKFEET RESERVATION

Having stumbled upon the idea of culturenomics in the last post, this time I’m going to try making a stab at tracing threads in two culturenomics.  I will be wrong, it will be crude, and it’s only a tool anyway -- not an eternal truth, but it’s interesting to think about.  The two cultures are Native Americans (whom I intend to call Indians) and the Blackfeet Reservation (where there are all sorts of people).  I’ll do the Blackfeet this time because I’ve already done some of the thinking and then do the Indians in general the next day, beginning with the “bird-on-the-head” issue.  (Tonto/Depp) 

The bedrock of culture is geology, so we need to think about these things as we figure out the nodes and connections.  The reservation is on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains, which means that it has a differential in altitude and rainfall sharp enough to dictate different economics.  That of the foothills, often tourism, is different from the economics of the flats, raising grain.  There are (or were) big deposits of oil on the eastern side.

The valleys descending from the mountain snowpack and crossing from west to east are “long towns” where people on both shores consider themselves a community, where the first missions and ranches tended to locate, where water-travelers first penetrated all the way from New Orleans, and where geology is “cut-down” so that the sandstone bluffs made buffalo jumps and -- later -- quarries and sources of fossils left from the Cretaceous Era when a vast inland sea stretched across the whole continent.  The foothills were then shore lagoons and marshes inhabited by dinosaurs and the vegetation that would become coal and oil.

The differing altitudes of the rez meant that berries ripened at different times so that harvest began in the sheltered valley, continued up through the foothills, and ended almost at the snowline.  Animals responded to the different areas, moving to graze or for shelter.  In winter it made sense to be on the river bottoms by the sheltering trees that dropped firewood.  Then the streams were bridged by ice.  Constant wind scrubbed snow off ridges so that grazing could continue.  Blackfeet were interested in fire, both the forest and grass types, and often initiated and manipulated them.  This has grown into the skills of a crack hot-shot firefighting team.

The reservation started out being the whole top half of Montana and then began to shrink in cook-the-frog fashion, the most painful loss being the strip that became Glacier  National park.  Because it is a large area, other groups were occasionally forced onto it, notably the Cree-Chippewa-Metis complex which later acquired Fort Belknap as their own reservation.  At least the Blackfeet were never moved wholesale to a foreign environment.  Now much of the rez (some say more than half) is in private ownership, not belonging to the tribal trust which is overseen by the Federal Indian Agency.  Hutterites have begun to colonize the rez.

There were no settlements in the earliest days but they formed in various ways.  Political boundaries have dictated some settlements, like Robaire which was deeply involved in reservation life though it was technically south of Birch Creek on the southern boundary.  Evicted Catholics and rum-runners formed this town.  On the east boundary of the rez, once it was pushed west a bit, was a cluster of oil wells with headquarters in Cut Bank, the only part of the county not on the reservation.  Heart Butte is also in a different county, but it is one of two “old-timer” settlements formed by people who still hunted and kept the old ways.  The other one is Starr School.

Three resort towns, East Glacier, St. Mary and Babb, overlap with Glacier Park culture, but also ranching. (Del Bonita, which is little more than a border crossing, is ranching and rodeo culture).  Kiowa Kamp is a little tourist crossroads at the confluence of two roads:  highway 89 and the road that goes to Starr School.  Both Heart Butte and St. Mary have Metis presence, having offered refuge to Louis Riel and other Red River rebels.  Holy Family Mission is a special case, having once been a cultural center and still retaining its church.  The same is true of Boarding School, which is on Dumpground Road, though the dumpground is long gone.

Browning has cloned and re-cloned.  Housing projects form neighborhoods technically in the city.  They often have names formed colloquially the same way as the old band names:  Hell’s Corner, once notorious for bootlegging; Chinatown where the architect designed overhanging second stories that reminded people of Chinese streets; Knott’s Landing and Disneyland (sometimes Dizzyland) that were more famous for behavior; the Easter Egg houses where the homes were painted in pastel colors.  The complex build-out that started in the Kennedy Era now is listed on maps as “North Browning” or “South Browning.”  There are other places that are only names: Red Blanket Hill, Palookaville, Cree Corners.  You’ll probably have to find someone over fifty to tell you where they are.

People tend to gravitate to the locations where they fit or to be shaped by their location.  The Browning/Heart Butte axis is dynamic.  Kinds of employment matter, so the people who get GNP jobs or tourist jobs in cafes or motels are exposed to different cultural ideas.  Blackfeet descendants who grow up off the rez are different, assimilated.  At one point around 1900 there were only 500 people in the Pikuni branch of the Blackfeet and half of them were children, so their descendants are different, the young ones being less “buffalo-culture,” more mission-imprinted.   

Much of this has been attached to “blood quantum” and genetics, but in fact there is NO blood quantum, only descent from persons listed on the early rolls.  Genetics as it is understood now was not known in the 19^th century.  In those days when it was a matter of appearance, dark skin tied to the African-American population was a stigma.  Early Blackfeet populations used their lodges as shelter at night or in severe weather while otherwise living in the open.  Even cooking was done over an exterior fire.  Their physiology adapted to the intense ultra violet of high altitudes as well as a much higher level of Vitamin D.  They were dark where skin was exposed.

Another cultureome node-and-connection system would come through families, depending not just whether they were white or tribal but also the “kind” of white: military, traders, hippies, scholars, direct from Europe, environmentalists, artists.  The “kind” of Blackfeet/Cree/Metis etc. they hooked up with created a little threads of influence.  The major early white families (Conrad, Clarke) and the 20^th century traders (Sherburne, Scriver, DesRosier) plus the Indian agents (McFatridge, Campbell, Steele) all brought their own “culture” with them, weaving new threads into the peoples, sometimes intermarrying.  But there was a strong pre-existing network of powerful families gathered around individual patriarchs and sometimes matriarchs:  Little Dog, Tailfeathers, Running Crane, MadPlume, Mary Ground. 

Cuts Wood School, drawn by a student

Institutions like schools vary from the Tribal college, Blackfeet Community College, or Winold Reiss‘ art school  to the old one-room school houses where individual white people taught and formed alliances like Clare Sheridan’s friendship with the Tailfeather’s family or the Uhlenbeck linguistic project involving the Tatseys, or McClintock’s close friendship with Mad Wolf and annual summer visits injected ideas and understandings in both directions.  Of particular importance have been internal projects like Piegan Institute that brought international Blackfeet scholars into contact with local white history hobbyists as well as maintaining Cuts Wood Immersion Language School.  Some of these interactions have never been recorded or noticed by outsiders, even those who live just across the rez boundary.

Darrell Kipp, co-founder of Piegan Institute

Culturenomics at this level is complex, arguable, sometimes meant to be secret, but it can be what tips the scales or -- just as significant though neglected -- PREVENTING the scales from tipping, holding the status quo in place.  At least enough to survive.

THE GENOME, THE EPIGENOME, THE CONNECTOME, AND NOW THE CULTUREOME

Sometimes the obvious is not so obvious.  An idea like the “connectome” meaning the various bits of the brain that are played like music in chords so that code we might identify as 1-5-7-16 (to use Arabic numbers to indicate nodes instead of the medical Latin names since I’m just making this up), gives a person -- when connected -- one emotional state, while the combination 3-1-7-5-5-5 shifts the person’s thought over to a skill on the other side of the brain, perhaps analysis.  Except that the nodes and pathways are far more multiple and resourceful than this sort of safecracker combination might suggest.  For instance, if one node is damaged by trauma or disease, the other nodes might find a way to workaround.  

The workaround might even be social, among people, so that it’s hard to catch Alzheimer victims in the early stages because they are so clever at inventing explanations or just creating distractions, even by quarreling.  The human brain is a pattern-making organ (like a pipe organ playing Bach or Rock) with rhythm as a unifying force, just like music.  (They call them brain waves and they cannot be found by dissection, but they are the essential sign of life.  They are not the chords played by the nodes, but they keep order among them.)

We never really know whether our instrument is controlling our understanding of the world, the cosmos -- all else besides what goes on inside our skin.  We do realize that one’s instrument determines what one can detect, but it makes us suspicious that the sensory information we can collect (far more than six senses, including senses in the muscles and the gut) tells us that what we pick up out there is something organized in the same way we are.  On the other hand, once the elements of existence find a good strategy, they tend to repeat it over and over fractally -- just on different scales.  We have our music preferences and so does Mother Nature.

There I go again -- anthropomorphizing “elements of existence.”  First thing you know, I’m liable to be giving them names and calling them gods.  This seems to be in our nature -- or is it in our culture.  Probably both.  When in doubt, use inclusion.

And then there’s emergence.  In the brain’s structure there are many rooms.  Maybe small ones, little more than compartments.  But when they are added together and interacting, changing modes, “playing the notes,” what emerges is our identities, our music, our architectural style.  We think the world emerged this same way.  Lots of little things accumulated until one day their interaction jumped existence to a new plane, called “life.”

One of our abilities is to think of things that are “more so” but nonexistent as far as evidence goes, so what’s beyond “life?”  What’s beyond human beings?  That’s hard to think of, so let’s apply this connectome idea to society, humans in the aggregate.  One of the nodes is called “religion,” which another one of those things that doesn’t exist except as a concept and, in fact, is greatly confused because it mixes so many things.  What most of us mean is a social institution -- not an individual belief system -- and that institution can include congregational worship, hierarchies, budgets, buildings, various relationships to governance, morality, long documents, charity and more.  What emerges from all this?  Sometimes order and sometimes chaos.  It has little to do with the feeling of the holy.

Right now we are in a time of chaos.  Something is budding up through our lives but we can’t tell what it is.  TED to the rescue with statistics which are a whole new kind of knowing when we look at them via animated video.  This one is full of energy:

http://www.ted.com/playlists/56/making_sense_of_too_much_data.html

TED enthuses, “You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world."   This is fascinating but probably already out of date.  (The vid is dated 2006.)  Something else seems to be going on in the past seven years.  Part of the change is NOT showing up in data, nor is ever digested into useful ideas.  As Rosling says, in his blunt Swedish way, there are too many people hoarding data for some reason (probably mostly commercial, but then consider the obsession with governmental secrecy), partly because of the fixation on passwords and the failure to present information in any kind of intelligible way, and partly because they just like being the “only ones who know.”  Or maybe the data says something they don’t like.

I can think of two more barriers against people collecting data in the first place.  One is that too much is criminalized, so that no sensible kid on the street -- even one not infected with HIV or using drugs -- is going to allow himself or herself to be detected because he or she will immediately be “taken into care,” that is, incarcerated.  Likely without the most basic provisions for food,comfort and safety, let alone disease treatment.

Beyond that, too many “sets” of people out there simply "don’t compute": inquirers have no name for the types, don’t even conceive of them existing.  Old vets living in hooches in the woods.  Lunch counter waitresses with no home address. Some people are invested in being unseen. Illegal immigrants.  Self-administered witness protection plans.  My crazy brother avoiding diagnosis.  Likewise, it took a while for medical people to even figure out that HIV was a retrovirus that arose in Africa.  They still don’t get that it’s a SYNdemic, in which poverty, a host of diseases, empty food, drugs, family breakdown, economic factors, lack of shelter or a place to wash-up and so on, ALL interact so that it doesn’t matter how powerful any drug is, how adherent the compliance to protocols.  If the other pressures are not addressed, the virus cannot be defeated.  It will simply self-renew while possibly morphing.  It has too many allies and workarounds.  In the culture.

Now we’re talking culturomics, the connectomes of society, which are as many and various as the brain connectome.  Tracing graphs doesn’t have to be grim.  Here are a couple of brilliant jokesters turning out what patterns they can from the google avalanche.

http://www.ted.com/playlists/56/making_sense_of_too_much_data.html

Fractal-style, each sub-culture has its own culturomics, often unseen by the mainstream and particularly overlooked by the media though now that we have the concept of “black ops” and so on, there is increasing suspicion of a super-rich “black cabal” controlling things.  Yet this is such a recurrent trope from the earliest days that one has to look at it with suspicion.  It may simply be a personification of paranoia that keeps focus from splintering out in unmanageable ways.  All in your head.  Well, you can’t keep a culture in your hip pocket, can you?  Maybe in a book or movie, though.  Even a poem.  Or an image.

TED TALKS POLITICS

For a while the Internet focus has been on the social site posts, the small talk about daily life that create the illusion of a huge circle of friends among people who are basically in very small affinity circles.  It seems to me this goes back to People magazine which abandoned the idea of a magazine being about big subjects like War or the Economy or Science, even if they were made accessible to ordinary folks by saturating the mag with photos -- think Life or Look, which were really a 20^th century people's art form, printed on slick paper for the sake of the photos, and more often in black-and-white than color.  So memorable.  Iconic. Unifying.

Other people made pulp tabloids that didn’t care about photo quality so long as the subject was sensational.  But then they got “nice” by using slick paper, color paparazzi snaps of celebrities off their diets or with their clothes off, a faux village subject to curiosity and gossip in a way that is embedded in all primates, even pre-human.  Not so noble.  This is now on the Internet (YouTube), but also it persists in “real” life. There are women in this town who sit together doing what they call “chit-chat,” metaphorically searching for fleas and bonding with each other, forming hierarchies, alliances and outcasts.  They are the emotional terrain of the town.  They prevent chickens, demand an end to dust, and work the system to protect their children.  They do not think about the meaning of democracy or how to prevent cancer.  They do local awareness and maintenance.

This recurring pattern of ordinary people who are not powerful, not running businesses, but forming friendship networks -- quilting parties -- persists all these millennia so it must have some kind of evolutionary effectiveness.  The trouble with evolution is that you cannot tell who will survive by looking at the future -- the path to survival is clear only in retrospect.  

http://www.ted.com/playlists/126/the_big_picture.html  Here’s a useful talk about how social patterns, business networks, governments and -- eventually -- survival strategies evolve.  I don’t know where I got this quote: “Running fast in a herd while being as dumb as shit, I think, is a very good adaptation for survival.”  The strategy evolved on the prairie and the African veldt, and worked very well, esp. for the animals in the middle of the herd, until someone figured out how to chase the whole bunch over a cliff, a piskun.  Same with schools of fish: works great until someone has a big enough net to drag out the whole number together. 

Gladtfelder studies flocks and schools.  His premise is that their ability to stick together, turn quickly, and sacrifice the outliers for the sake of the middle, is not the result of a plot or some God-given rule.  Rather it is EMERGENT from small-rule behavior in the brains of the individual creatures.  If-then rules.  Likewise, chit-chatting women are using small-rule behavior to create the town.  Each is responding to the others.  And they ARE willing to sacrifice -- or at least exclude -- outliers.  Standards for keeping up the yard are in reality markers for the prosperity of the household in question, which is key to the prosperity of the whole town.  In recent years three of the worst eyesores have disappeared because their crazed and helpless owners died.  They would have rejected help on the grounds of personal dignity and self-determination.

Humans are not fish or birds.  Much of OUR evolution doesn’t come from survival of the individual body but rather from the survival evolution of our culture.  Cultural evolution is challenged in a Ted Talk by Eric X. Li.  http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_systems.html  Li is trying to convince us that political systems only work for the cultural systems out of which they emerge.  The Euro-Marxist world view was a disaster for China in many ways.  He describes the system he feels is right for China and begs the West to give up the Christian notion of proselytizing, converting everyone to our system.  A system that is not EMERGENT will not persist.  A system based on Confucian rules will survive in China -- NOT in America with its Calvinist rules.  I was fascinated that Li says China has a “committee on committees”, called the Party Organization Department, and it is the heart of power.

The heart of this EMERGENCE is the trade-off between the survival of the individual versus the survival of the group.  So the next TED talk in this little mini-sequence is about the Egyptian Spring, the revolution that speaks eloquently of individual dignity and self-determination, because the persons who have authority over the whole group have used it to torture and repress, not as Li recommends, a meritocracy-based authority that responds to the needs of the people.

Recent photo of Egyptian demonstrators

http://www.ted.com/talks/wael_ghonim_inside_the_egyptian_revolution.html   Today Egyptians (who are living in the seed-bed of Christianity) are ready to start on the pendulum's path to glorifying the individual which at its extreme is currently (and arguably) paralyzing the United States.  But the survival of both individual and group -- in terms of nature -- is to overproduce, then reduce by attrition.  It’s just tough when the eliminated parties are people you care about.  If the natural attrition is designed, whether it is genocide or welfare, the results will be people who depend upon the context that was assumed when the plan was designed.  And that can change.  That context can be destroyed.  As the Nazis discovered.

Little chit-chat groups are the equivalent of the beat cop who addresses broken windows, thereby keeping order in bigger ways.  But it also maintains the local status quo and can quickly turn into code enforcers who think they know everything, though they may only have experience in schools -- not life -- and quite different ideas about survival.  The context they assume is THEIRS, to protect THEM, and this plagues us all through government, advertising, the arts, even the assumptions of computer programs.  They are constantly building blind corrals.  We’re lucky if there’s no cliff at the end.

I would propose that the many small individual experiences of people resisting the Roman Empire are what gradually caused Christianity to emerge, but that when the Roman Empire swallowed up the religious principles, converting them to laws and literally killing non-compliants (hundreds were crucified -- not just Jesus), it was already on the way to self-destruction just as Christian churches so strong on expelling outliers are now.  The wild card is corruption, debilitating culture parasites rather than outliers.  Pope Francis I seems to know that.  I hope.

In general, human culture evolves by developing a consensus, a flock, a herd, a school -- and then individuals may become outliers who leave either voluntarily or under pressure or by mortality. (Like Saint Francis and the Franciscans.)  If they persist and if they are in sympathy with others, soon there is an alternative culture.  It may turn out to be the one that survives when the larger context (climate change, pandemic) shifts sharply.  Or it may be that the larger culture takes an outlier group back into the original group as a reformation or energizing progress.  (The re-inclusion of gays in mainstream society.)  Chit-chatting women may turn out to be an excellent way of keeping corruption to a minimum.  House-keeping.  Realizing their grandchildren are gay.  As they chit-chat, they show each other photos and brag.  If they are lucky, their grandchildren will be able to praise them.

NARCISSUS AND ECHO: The Labyrinths of Interpretation

Who among us has not kissed a mirror?  It is at the far humanoid end of a chimpanzee’s capacities.  And yet Narcissus is one of the most powerful and interpretable of the classic Greek myths.  The Greek version told about the son of  two river gods, exceptionally proud, disdaining those who loved him. He was attracted to a reflecting pool where he saw his own reflection in the water and fell in love with it, not realizing it was merely an image. Unable to leave the beauty of his reflection, Narcissus died.  (Well, became a plant suitable for potting.)

One might talk about this in a geological way, saying that it is the nature of water to go on, to “love” the waterway, but that in his disdain Narcissus blocked the nature of living process, and therefore sank into the ground, the chthonic (deep earth) pool being a dark vortex only disguised by the obsidian surface.  (A Gaian watercourse that follows the contours of terrain even over the precipice must become a spray, a waterfall.)  

This is meta-level stuff, but old F-word -You-Know-Who managed to get out of the story a syndrome that emphasized childishness, or maybe selfishness, or possibly self-indulgent decadence, but never the kind of obsessively self-critical auto-Puritan that Freud himself was, reaching civilized-world-scale grandiosity in the process.  Some identify the classic Narcissus with the preening of high society, Oscar Wilde’s campy arrogance, or a movie star’s worried concern for image, but any youth could simply and innocently yearn for self-knowledge.

In the “queer” world, usually on the male side, Caravaggio was prompted to create this beautiful painting, the boy trying to decipher his difference from others.  Perhaps this cluster of cthonic Greek myths comes from memories of the hunter/gatherer days before people were forced into roles and made to pay homage in order to finance roads through forests.

Or the dynamic might be interpreted in this teasingly seductive ballet by Norman McLaren in which he elegantly traces THREE figures:  the beautiful young man, a beautiful young woman, and the man’s image from the pond, a ménage a trois.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7DlCdcH4Cc

The woman comes from the story of Echo.  There was a day when Narcissus was walking in the woods.  Echo, a story-telling mountain nymph, saw him, fell deeply in love, and followed him. Narcissus sensed he was being followed and shouted "Who's there?". Echo repeated "Who's there?"  He tried to find her.  At first she ran away but eventually revealed her identity and turned to embrace him, but then he stepped away.  He said, "Let us meet together." Echo, never being more eager to reply to anyone, repeats "Let's meet." 

She exits the woods in order to embrace Narcissus. He runs away from her outstretched arms and says, whilst running, "May I die before what’s mine is yours." She repeats only "what's mine is yours."  Heartbroken by Narcissus, Echo spent the rest of her life in lonely glens pining away for the love she never knew, crying until all that was left was her voice.  But that’s only part of a multiple labyrinth of tales, something like the modern winding thriller hooks of meeting others, misunderstanding them, wanting to part, finding too late that an embrace has locked one’s throat into the crook of a crushing elbow.

My own early story was Echo in love with Pan, the lecherous goat, who, when she escapes him, causes her to be torn to pieces by shepherds (pastoral) and strewn over the face of the earth.  But their children were Iambe (humorous poetry) and Iynx (not lynx cat, but iynx, a singing bird that stands for passionate but restless love).

So the meta-meta theme here is still the on-goingness, the wandering, the dreaming mix of images that express what words cannot:  specifically the changing ways of relationship, now coming together, now struggling to escape each other.  Too different to merge, too alike to forsake the lover.  This particular myth does not address lovers that seek to understand the “other” and by their scrutiny destroy the fragile bonds of acceptance.  This is a story about image and word, reflection and song, kindling and death.

In reality, it rained in the night, jeweling the grass.  Once again lightning struck the Baptist church next door, the explosion half-wakening me to smell the ozone zing. I’m going to end with a poem by Aad de Gids.  He is from the Netherlands so his multi-languages interpenetrate.  If you cannot decipher that -- and you only need to let the words suggest -- stop here.  But maybe this information will help.

In Greek mythology the Oneiroi (Dreams) were sons of Nyx (Night), and brothers of Hypnos (Sleep), Thanatos (Death), Geras (Old Age) and other beings, all produced via parthenogenesis (without sex). Cicero follows this tradition, but describes the sons of Nyx as fathered by Erebus (Darkness).[

oneiros après l'ondée  (Dreams After the Shower)

oneiros, relative of night, sleep and death, roams the evening in balmy

warmth, après l'ondée,with the raindrops still shuddering the longer on

roses' leaves than on the other plateformes vertigineux,the leaves with

smallest fur, greenshining lacquered leaves dripless, evening of vanishings

oneiros lost in his forgotten assignment yet lucky with his next of kin,

all hypnagogic narcotic lethal psychotic apparitions, swarming the fields

of evening in hypothetical greeces, grecian eyes laughing and crying at

once, endowed with the insatiable palate shivering in fragrance of roses

traveling fragrances of oldfashioned blushcoloured roses and ligustrum

of vining honeysuckle forgotten its heliotropism winding wildly around

the trellises other climbing plants or, grounded fundamentalists, offer to its

as insatiable as silent winding and asphyxiating, slow as to seem a caress

no rain is to fall anymore and the release of the vesperide perfumes for

poor oneiros a disdirective labyrinth of mystifications, as meaning escapes

incessantly into other meanings never to reach conclusion rather some light 

loose mappology of dynamics and energy as life seems this wasted time

caught yet inmidst of this dynamic contradances of dissipative meaning,

moments of seeming elucidation, happiness as the smell of carnations does

incorporate, fleetingly that is while also this is enlightenment, that it bears

the promise of ephemerality as "wasted time" is used time, time we lend

Borrowing words from friends, we let the echo die away into the roar of the waterfall, only to find it again in another place, inscribed in stone.  The stream that sinks into the swallowing pond, or flings itself over a cataract, are only dreams we feel and in the end have no names to save.  No words left in the scrabble box.  Gently, gently, we all go mad in the end, leaving through a gate of horn if true (a play on the Greek words for "horn" and "fulfil") or a gate of ivory if false (a play on the Greek words for "ivory" and "deceive").  The message we leave is written in “linear B.”  Some middle-aged woman, smoking late into the night at her dining room table and making notecards from old exam covers, will figure it out.