WRITING BETWEEN CULTURES

from Terraturepossessions.com

In every human culture there is a mystical edge of magic where what is taken for granted meets the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.  This boundary can create a kind of person who seems able to cross over into some other world and return to the rest of us with powerful new systems and ceremonies.  This includes the resurrection cult we call Christianity with its saints and heretics.  I’m composing this on Saturday as though I were a Seventh Day Adventist or even observing Shabbat, because the European number cult valorizes the number Seven.  Of course, you may be reading it on Sunday because as a cultural Christian I’m just in the habit of the Seventh Day post being a little more concerned with religion than the others, so tend to choose religious subjects for that day.

In the world of indigenous people there are many examples of this phenomenon but they mostly operate in an oral society where their stories are told and ceremonies are enacted privately, or even secretly, in order to escape from a larger dominating culture that would label them and try to eliminate them.  But to a certain kind of seeker, this hiddenness only adds to their power, their sense of privilege.  Those who hurt or wonder or seek solace are MORE attracted than those already content with the mainstream.

The people on this edge who are Blackfeet tend to connect it to political empowerment.  Others pull in sex, dissociation (traditionally among Blackfeet achieved by fasting, dehydration, torture, exposure, rather than drugs), and the ecology itself, emphasizing sun and altitude instead of the Christian water and wind.  Animal symbolism in the north is more about horses and eagles than the SW where coyotes and crows are the messengers.  Phenomena of this sort arrange themselves according to their own logic but then are assigned labels by investigators.  One of those labels is “shaman,” which originally applied to a certain sort of person in the far tribal Russian north.  The concept doesn’t always apply in other contexts, so it is controversial.  The idea of the "medicine man" is related.

Castenada

Though we know Louis Riel, Crazy Horse, and other indigenous visionaries, two others have broken over from oral to written documents:  Black Elk and Castenada.  Both had ties -- interpreters -- in the white academic world.  In fact, Castenada earned a Ph.D. by representing his work as comparative religion.  Black Elk was interpreted and edited by Joseph Epes Brown, a professor at the University of Montana.  Castenada paid little attention to Christianity while Black Elk, who once traveled Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, who was at the original Wounded Knee where a bullet grazed his leg, AND at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, was a Christian convert who only slipped his “Sun Worship” below the surface without losing his faith in it.  He said he did this for the sake of his children, who would have to live in a Christian world.

The difficulty in moving from one religious system to another, especially when adding the desire for holocaust-level destruction that constantly invades them, is in trying to locate and resist the supernatural.  The rival is labeled Evil which legitimates killing, whether Crucifixion or Genocide or just Holy War.  Even police pursuing "Law and Order."  

Nationality gets mixed in, confusingly, and values shift between generations over time.  Violence and criminality can act as a validation of the importance of a rival system like Charles Manson’s.  Even a benign movement like Greenpeace can be criminalized.  Even the supposedly beatific Mother Theresa can be seen as a cult leader when one discovers after her death that she was obsessed with depression and lack of faith and all the donations she was sent were not spent on food and medicine, but hoarded in a secret bank account.

Black Elk and Neihardt

From anonymous in Wikipedia:  “Black Elk Speaks” is a 1932 book by John G. Neihardt, an American poet and writer, who relates the story of Black Elk, an Oglala Lakota medicine man. Black Elk spoke in Lakota and Black Elk's son, Ben Black Elk, who was present during the talks, translated his father's words into English.  Neihardt made notes during these talks which he later used as the basis for his book.”  

Black Elk was interpreted by Joseph Epes Brown as a ceremonialist and a benign guru, acceptable to any conscientious person.  Brown's book, called “The Sacred Pipe,” was about those ceremonies.  I asked Professor Brown if I could audit a class of his, which he resisted.  The content was a ritual that was supposed to be performed at a young woman’s coming of age, using the red earth pigment that is common in prairie ceremonies.  Brown said the pigment was supposed to represent the cow bison’s practice of breathing bloody foam from her nose over a calf in order to protect it.  It sounded to me more like a way to attract wolves, but I didn’t say anything.  Brown was a handsome, graceful man, very dignified, fond of turquoise jewelry.  Not a person with whom to pick a quarrel.

from Thehouseofvines.com

Later I realized that he was setting up his class, who busily wrote down this ritual, so that in the following session he could reveal that he’d been playing the trickster in order to raise their consciousness about over-credulous acceptance of faux nature-knowledge.  Tricksters abound in the liminal edge between the primary culture and breakaway systems.

Genre (or, more pejoratively, “pulp”) fiction loves all this stuff.  Montana Gothic fiction uses it poetically to create whole worlds of visions and exploits, extraordinary people, and embeddedness in nature.  It also makes a space for a novel like “The Fancy Dancer,” which is a gay romance between a priest and a motorcyclist, a half-breed escapee from Leather Lit.  It's by Patricia Nell Warren, a white contemporary Montana writer.

Grass Dancer

Mainstream critics will attack such stories on grounds that they are immoral or hoaxes or sacrilegious, which are all code for “they are outside my culture stream and therefore I’m justified in condemning them.”  But consciousness of the suffering of Native Americans as the continent was cleared by force, as smallpox and other diseases accompanied the massacres, as the de-cultured impoverished people became addicts to substance dysphoria, as family and ceremonial systems were smashed, others defended the indigenous entitlement to their own ways.  Castenada and Black Elk were therefore honorable.

Lit critics don’t address these dozens of best-selling books.   Black Elk was using his own language, so his books are essentially translations.  Castenada, born in Peru, was also bringing a non-English point of view.  Comparative religion people like Eliade or Campbell are happy to write about them.  They so vividly and persuasively illuminated the numinous.

TWO TRAGIC NA WRITERS: Louis Owens and Michael Dorris

Louis Owens

Michael Dorris

TWO TRAGIC NA WRITERS,  Louis Owens (1948 - 2002) and Michael Dorris (1945 - 1997), were nothing like each other, except that they were both constant targets in the decade-long Native American literary flame wars during which mostly unknown low-quantum people attacked successful writers who were identified as Native American with low quantums.  Maybe the idea was that resentment would make them famous.  Or maybe they had some kind of psychological glitch.  Actually, they were going by Euro rules invented in the 19th century when the first lists were made.

There is room for the possibility that Owens’ death was an accident.  He was shot by his own gun in the parking lot of the airport as he prepared to board a plane.  The gun was found on the ground and could have fallen out of the vehicle, somehow accidentally firing as he got out.  There is no room for doubt that Dorris committed suicide, which he had repeatedly attempted earlier and finally achieved with pills, alcohol and plastic film.  But the tragedies finally made people question what all this bullying and nit-picking about writers was really doing.

Here are two vids about Owens:

A short one produced by the Autry Museum for exhibits.

https://vimeo.com/94255714   

And another for French-speakers (Quebequois?)

https://vimeo.com/60451524  

Owens worked as a firefighter and forest ranger before developing a career as much as a professor of writing as of NA studies.  He was a Steinbeck expert and on the board of the Steinbeck Quarterly.  His novels were tribal rez-based but murder mysteries rather than memoir.  He contributed to the 1997 SAIL journal dedicated to Gerald Vizenor.  (SAIL, V9, No. 1, Spring, 1997)  His Ph.D. was from the U of California, Davis, and he won awards for his teaching.  I have friends who knew him well and saw no signs of trouble except for a lot of pressure from commitments.  Also, he was a very attractive man, as well as a family man.  That can get complicated.

Louise Erdrich

Returning to Dorris, he was a classic American “shattered man,” with a suicidal father he never knew.  He was the only boy in a female household, and a bachelor who formally adopted NA fetal alcohol children.  The whole thing blew up and probably would have done so much earlier if it hadn’t been for the dedication of Louise Erdrich, his wife, co-writer, and mother of three daughters by him.  This pattern is so common among marginal, low income, alcoholic, single-parent, child-abusing families in small town settings that one can find examples everywhere.  Erdrich, however, came from a solid family.  By the time Dorris ended his life, she had divorced him and had to bear a certain amount of guilt for that.  Just after his death, she spoke at Powell’s in Portland.  A lot of NA people were there, almost as though it were a memorial.  She was clearly agonized and no one was disrespectful.  

If a person spends time on a rez, esp. a person who tries to make a difference with kids, stories like that of Dorris repeat over and over.  One never gets used to it.  They are what happens when consistency and nurturing are destroyed for any reason.  Some people get mean about it and attack whomever they can.  Others admire the courage of those who succeed in spite of handicaps -- some do -- and work to resist what is most destructive.  

Certainly Dorris, for all his damage, got out the message about fetal alcohol syndrome vividly and dynamically.  People know NOT to drink during pregnancy.  The only way to attack him for this was to claim that he wanted to incarcerate all pregnant women to make sure they didn’t drink.  It’s an obvious joke remark, though there are always people who take jokes seriously.  There are worse things than being portrayed by Jimmy Smits, but it’s not enough to compensate for the loss of a child. http://articles.latimes.com/1992-02-02/news/tv-1665_1_broken-cord

One wonders what would have happened if these two handsome men --  Owens and Dorris -- had taken a bit more of a defiant punk attitude towards being attacked by people who didn’t think either writer was Indian enough, both the competing writers and the whites trying to curry favor.  Since I don’t speak French, I watched Owen’s body language in the panel vid.  He clearly had legs too long to fit under a conference table.  He would be far more comfortable on a trail outdoors.  

In some ways James Welch (1940 - 2003) could be grouped with these two, but he seems to have been protected by his sheltering Missoula context, esp. Richard Hugo and Jim’s wife.  He was a drinker.  Also I wonder whether his education as a kid in the Minneapolis schools had something to do with it or the steady devotion of his parents, and even his service to the Montana State Parole Board whose “clientele” was predominantly Indian.  The French connection also helped him.  What other NA writer has a medal from a government?  

James Welch Jr.

But I’m always aware that there are many more young men (NA women live in a different dynamic web -- they tend to go with poetry) out there who are brilliant writers but never published because the book industry has done more filtering and ejecting than it has discovering and promoting.  They seem to have been entirely dependent on the academic institutions to identify writers, except for a few cases, flukes, and the journalism world.

Indian reservations, like the white communities, swallowed the propaganda of the GI Bill that education was a sure-fire road to success.  But the prospective students didn’t always have the necessary basic foundation in things like spelling and math, much less the literary canon.  In the tension between individual and group that a writer always wrestles with, the tribe will pull hard for group in spite of writing being a solitary pursuit.  There are always needy people at home.  Rez politics and federal NA politics are powerful and deadly.  Attachment to place and family is another ongoing problem for rez people that whites don’t understand.  

Ken Lopez remarks about “Winter in the Blood”:  “Welch's first novel is extraordinarily depressing for white readers. My American Indian students at the University of North Dakota, on the other hand, thought it was very funny, which in itself is a lesson in cultural relativism. And they felt that it accurately represented reservation life in the Northern Plains region, which was the land and life most of them knew intimately.”  http://www.dancingbadger.com/james_welch.htm

I suspect that the key problem is a mismatch of categories on the part of both young people and institutions.  The institutions are still European and some young people now inhabit a world much more like the pre-contact hunter/gatherers.  I suspect that the real interface is on the Internet, a “place” where people look for survival and each other, a place that still provides oral culture and honors image as language.

"THE OLD BULLS SOCIETY:" American Indian lit crit

The Old Bulls' Society was the Plains Indian men that were seasoned, wise, and admired.  They didn't have to prove anything -- they just WERE powerful.  They had earned it.

In terms of today's Native Literature scholars, there probably ought to be three if I include Vine Deloria, Jr.  I'll come back to him.  

Gerald Vizenor

The two old bulls I’m thinking of are Gerald Vizenor, who is a member of the White Earth Chippewa tribe, which was once part of that troublesome diaspora of sort-of Indians who had no land, no reservation, and therefore in the Euro-way no national identity.  Now it is government-recognized but I don’t know the rules of membership for that tribe.  Vizenor is, from one point of view, Metis, which is included in the term “aboriginal” by Canadians.  Everyone sets up their own boxes.

Carter Revard

The other person I’m thinking of is Carter Revard, who was seen as a white raised by Indians until recently when he discovered Indian “blood.”  He is one of the most brilliant and generous of all those in the broad category of NA writers.  Both Vizenor and Revard are very much respected in Europe.  Revard and his wife spend a lot of time there because of his wife’s scholarly work.

In addition to “Indian” stuff, Vizenor uses a lot of post-modern philosophy and Revard is an expert on early English.  He can make delightfully raunchy explications of Chaucer and word play comes as easily to him as Gourd Dancing, the specialty of his tribal family.  In the late Nineties I was on Rez Net, a bulletin board for Indians only.  (I confess that I was there under false pretenses but some people recognized me at once, laughed, and didn’t rat me out.)  That was the time of the Flame Wars, which got a little bit mixed up with “snagging” and commodity cheese jokes.

Carter Revard kept us rounded up -- at least a little bit -- but not enough to suit Sherman Alexie, an “apple” always on the defensive so he was on Rez Net only weeks.   I don’t really know much about Vizenor’s work.  I haven’t thought much about Cree Chippewa until lately.  My focus rule now is Blackfeet or rez resident on the Blackfeet rez only.  (I left RezNet before I was thrown out.  I asked about going back now and they laughed like Napi and said, “Hell, no!”  No matter.  I’m too old for snagging.)

When it came to AIM, Vizenor was a dissenter, maybe because his Swedish mother was peaceful and maybe because his Anishanabe father was murdered when he was two years old, so that he has a high aversion to violence.  But his attempts to criticize them led to death threats.  He has been a bureaucrat, a reporter, and an international educator posted to China for a year.  Thirty books to his credit.  Be aware that VizJim (Mackay) of Wikipedia has pinned his credentials on Vizenor and dominates the man’s Wikipedia entry.  Vizenor has a lot to say about mixed blood people.  I do not know what he thinks of European citizens of Cyprus who have never been to the USA.

by Arnold Krupat

I would put Arnold Krupat in the company of these other two distinguished scholars, except that Krupat is white.  He attended Yale and teaches at Sarah Lawrence.  I don’t see any fiction or autobiography on his list of books.  I haven’t read them, so I don’t know how much of himself he slipped into his scholarly lit crit, but his emphasis IS on lit crit and not on his experience as an Indian.

Vizenor, of course, would challenge the very word “Indian.”  His contribution has been to question the assumed, much as Vine Deloria, Jr. and Ward Churchill have done -- the former of them genetically tribal and the latter attached to a tribe but without genetics.  These academically defined men, all of whom have been professors in major white universities, are not in the least what the tribal people on a reservation “look like.” In fact, I know very few who even read such rarified books or even Vizenor’s Napi-type stories.

But things like existentialism and post-modern theory have been -- well, I could say either “mined” or “cherry-picked” -- by politically active genomically entitled tribal people to embolden them to demand justice.  A reservation in the WWII years and immediately afterwards was a culture of compliance, still nearly colonial.  Those who could not be obedient, self-medicated with alcohol.  At least that’s one way of looking at it.  Vietnam set them free but taught them to use pot.  Or heroin.  These sorts of iconoclastic ideas have not created any new heroes in the larger culture other than AIM, which began as a city movement.  Nor do they really appeal to those who are now beginning to succeed as ranchers and small-town entrepreneurs, nor to the comfortable academic culture-definers.

Vizenor, Revard and Krupat are retirement age and soon will slip over the time horizon.  Their “type” is subtly related to a parallel generation of anthropologists who investigated the range of tribal indigenous people tribe-by-tribe without pressing them into the pan-Indian mold. Those who define “Indians” as “vanishing” are themselves vanishing, just as publishing has done and the academic world shows signs of doing.

http://www.offthepasspressllc.com/#!Adrian-Jawort-Sterling-Holy-White-Mountain-Igniting-The-Fire-via-MT-Public-Radio/c14qc/32ED8FF4-23EB-4A53-B9A9-7DBCAB87F51B

The likes of Adrian Jawort and Sterling Holy White Mountain are stepping up now.  They are Millennial, MFA,  “Indian Country Today,” YouTube.  They publish their own anthologies.  Only the alert and initiated know they’re what's happening.  I expect Revard knows about all this, partly because his descendent, Robert Warrior, is continuing NA scholarship in a hip and participatory way at the University of Illinois.  Sterling is one of Warrior’s Tweet followers.  Both stand in the hybrid-category “American Indian Literary Nationalism,” which is the title of an award-winning book.  I think they mean tribal sovereignty.

Prof. Robert Warrior

Recently the fiction dimension of NA experience has migrated to the movies like “Winter in the Blood,” and “Jimmy P.  “ which are produced by white people.  The latter film, produced and directed by a Frenchman, does not depend upon post-colonial political theory, but on psychoanalysis.  One could argue that “Winter in the Blood” is simply an indigenous Western.  At least it’s closer to contemporary experience.

“Contemporary experience” is always receding towards that time horizon that paradoxically erases old conflicts at the same time that it reveals new ways of thinking.  But not everyone has the awareness to keep track.  The academic experts are better at the past than the future.

Spotted Eagle Fire

It's too early in the day to have official decisions about the Heart Butte fire, but as I type there is rain enough to make my garage leak, so prospects are good for people to be able to return home today.

Until one gets on the mountain (west) side of the area, there's really more field than forest, so what they will see when they get there will look rather like this:

It won't take long to green up before snow comes.  In fact, fire has been the friend of the ecology so long as the people were nomadic and could remove family and home for a while.

According to the Dawes Act that re-assigned ownership of the rez into individual family land acreage, though it was strongly resisted by the People, there was an effort to "give" people land they knew.  The old people chose to stay close to the mountains where the foothills provided game and water.  Young progressives and mixed-bloods went to the flats to raise grain in the modern industrial way.  The community of Heart Butte is named for the bit of mountain they are next to, but the Spotted Eagle fire took its name from an early group whose leader was Spotted Eagle.  Here he is:

This appears to be from McClintock's "Old North Trail," which is an invaluable photographic and written account of the People around 1900 until WWI.  There are still many Spotted Eagle people in Heart Butte.  A "spotted eagle" in terms of animals is a young golden eagle.  In fact, Joe Spotted Eagle, who was part of the Bundle Opening circle that Bob and I knew in the Sixties, also went by Joe Young Eagle.  Rather strangely, if one googles for "spotted eagle", you're likely to get images of a manta ray with a barbed tail with the same name.

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/longform/news/local/2015/09/03/big-fire-runs-extreme-behavior-mark-montanas-fire-season/71666764/

This is a long story, pretty thorough, that tells a wild story about Floyd Comes at Night's narrow escape.  The trouble in a small impoverished community is that people don't have computers, telephones, radio that picks up KSEN (the emergency station) and so on.  Floyd didn't have enough gas to get to Browning so he just went as far as he could.  Then the car radio could get KSEN and he ran the radio until the battery was exhausted.  Luckily, he didn't have to run the heater.

HANTA YO! MEANS GET OUTTA THE WAY -- NOT.

Ruth Beebe Hill

I AM NOT RUTH BEEBE HILL and I’ve never been able to read “Hanta Yo” past the first few pages without laughing.  Here’s an ASAIL review that will clue you in as to why.

https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~rnelson/asail/SAILns/34.html

Ruth Beebe Hill  (April 26, 1913 - May 28, 2015)

Ruth Beebe Hill, age 102, passed away Thursday May 28, 2015 at her home on San Juan Island, WA. Ruth Florette was born on April 26, 1913 in Cleveland Heights, OH, the daughter of Herman C. and Flora Mae (Frantz) Beebe and sister to Robert G. Beebe. On October 17, 1940, Ruth married Dr. Burroughs Reid Hill in Denver, CO and they had one son, Burroughs Reid Hill, Jr. Ruth resided on San Juan Island for over 35 years. She was a founding member and active for many years in the San Juan Islands Chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution. Ruth was actively involved with the Ayn Rand Institute, having mentored under Ayn Rand while living in California. She was world famous for her bestselling novel, Hanta Yo, published in 1979. Ruth was preceded in death by her father in 1972 and mother in 1949; brother, Robert; husband, Burroughs Reid in 1982; and son, Burroughs Reid, Jr. on November 7, 2014. 

I’ve joked that I’ve outlived all my enemies.  Not quite true, though I’ve outlived many because they were Bob Scriver’s enemies and therefore about his age.  Ruth was a year older than he was.  She had been packing the manuscript of “Hanta Yo” around with her, probably since she started kindergarten.  It was a totem, a raison d’etre, endlessly rewritten on one pretext or another -- the last one being that she was translating it into Sioux (ANCIENT Sioux, no less, with the help of a live-in example of the tribe) and then back to English.  It was hard on the clarity of the writing, to say nothing of other problems.

In the late Fifties, after Bob Scriver’s second wife, Jeanette, left for California, a family named Roberts offered to give Bob a show on their valley ranch near LA.  They admired his cowboy sculptures.  Bob had not been able to afford bronze yet, but was prepared to put effort into the hydrocal castings, which were fragile but otherwise indistinguishable from bronze.  About the same time Ruth Beebe Hill showed up and offered to present another exhibit at her house at the same time, but she wanted the Blackfeet sculptures.  (I never heard about sales.)

Ruth’s house was actually Ayn Rand’s house and had been built for Marlene Dietrich by her producer and lover, Josef von Sternberg, according to Ruth, who was there as the caretaker, a friend of Ayn’s.  It was set on wooded grounds so that huge mirrored walls and windows could be installed.  Someone else will have to follow the bisexual and exhibitionist strains from Dietrich and whether they attracted Rand and Hill.  It appears that to them marriage was to legitimate the children.  “Hanta Yo” in part raised such a hullabaloo among conservative Indians because of the inclusion of oral and anal intercourse.  One wonders.  Of course, some of the protests seemed a bit over the top.

Vigorous reviews -- part of the NA flame wars which didn’t stop until there were two suicides of admired NA writers -- meant that the book dwindled from a major screen extravaganza to a B-level TV series.  It appears from the descriptions that it was a kind of fascist romanticism -- very German in that Hiawatha way.  (“The Education of Little Tree” was written by a formally affiliated fascist, but Dietrich made a great point of her anti-Nazi stand.)  Mixing the assumed innate virtue of childlike primitives with the bourgeois conviction that wealth is a reward for superiority, there is a whole genre of these books.  They are NOT like many other books written by white people about tribal people.

In those days the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife and Studio was a regular stopover for artists, anthropologists, media people, and what the English call “Chancers.”  It’s probably atypical that there was never much drinking, but in summer there was eating out because tourists meant seasonal restaurants.  Ruth had adopted Bob as a source of reliable information about the Sioux, although what he knew was all about Blackfeet.  She assumed they were the same.  

She wanted to know between which two ribs on the side of a running bison a horseback hunter would send in his arrow.  Bob did not ridicule the idea that a man on a galloping horse was doing well to merely stay on the horse, but patiently explained that the idea was to shoot the animal in the suppootsies (guts) BELOW the ribs but angled towards lungs and heart, and then go on to the next target, leaving the first one to bleed and fall where his women could find it to begin their work on the carcass.

Ruth decided to take Bob to dinner to Wilma Franklin’s, but specified that I was not invited.  Bob and I were not married yet, but were practically Siamese twins, so we were surprised.  Unawares, I went to Wilma’s for supper and was shocked to discover the three of them.  So shocked that I failed to pay, but Wilma -- grasping the situation -- merely stopped me at the post office next day and I paid then.

Bob thought I was being small-minded until Ruth decided to throw a dinner party in the new house he had just built and asked him not to attend, since she meant it to be an intimate meal for she and her husband, plus a couple of  big shots.  Then he was more on my side.  She put his portrait of Eddie Big Beaver (“No More Buffalo”) on the dust jacket of “Hanta Yo”, but didn’t attribute it to him.  That was another bump.

Back dust jacket of "Hanta Yo"

The first summer I was in Browning, Bob’s eye was infected by Herpes Simplex Keratitis and the possibility that he might go blind was real.  Ruth’s husband, called “Buzzy”, except that she called him “Doctor Hill,” was a Ph.D. researcher at the City of Hope Cancer Research Center.  He remembered a dinner conversation about a drug that wasn’t effective on cancer, but could cure herpes.  It was still experimental and could only be accessed through the experiment.  Buzzy got Bob in and saved his eye.  

The next summer Ruth called in the debt.  She left her son, Reid, with instructions to “make him a man.”  Overweight and asthmatic, the college-aged boy went nowhere without a Coke and a cigarette.  We were building the original foundry, which was actually the old Browning Merc coal shed, and Bob expected him to do a lot of hard labor.  Reid suffered.  He probably would have been sent back for a second summer except that he and the pet bobcat took a dislike to each other.  He covertly kicked the cat and was careful to keep his bedroom door shut, but the cat knocked the screen out of his window and left a big steaming nasty calling card on his pillow.

There’s more, but I’ll skip it.  When Ruth read “Bronze Inside and Out,” she lamented,  “I don’t know what I ever did to YOU!”  Call me bobcat.

It is possible to write good novels about Native Americans without being Indian.  “Laughing Boy,” “When the Legends Die.”  The Tony Hillerman series, Paul Goble's children's books.  “Hanta Yo” was not one of them.  Normally I would say a reader should better not judge a book by its author -- but not in this case.

JUST KEEPING UP -- A LITTLE SMOKIER TODAY

Spotted Eagle, Benchmark Fire Update 9-1-15 1:30pm

By Anne James September 1, 2015 1:42 PM

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Community Meeting Thursday evening in Choteau.

Yesterday: Despite strong winds the Moose Ridge, Spotted Eagle and Sheep Mountain fires experienced limited new growth. However, interior areas of unburned timber and tall grasses continued to burn with some active fire behavior. A heavy helicopter was able to drop approximately 2,000 gallons of water along the southeast perimeter of the Spotted Eagle Fire. This bucket work allowed crews to hold and strengthen fire line to the south of Swift Reservoir and along the eastern flank of the fire. There was no new activity on the Benchmark Fire.

This USFS map shows road closures dure to the Spotted Eagle Fire and other wildfires in the Rocky Mountain District of the L&C Nat’l Forest. 9-1-15 Click on map for full-size image.

Today: Fire managers plan to continue to use water bucket drops, as conditions allow, to extinguish hot spots near the fire line on both the Spotted Eagle and Moose Ridge fires. Crews will continue to build fire line along the southern flank of the Spotted Eagle Fire working towards the west. A red flag warning is in effect due to another day of high winds and lower humidity across the fire area. With these critical fire weather conditions, fire behavior could become more active throughout forested areas of timber and tall grasses.

Evacuations: The evacuation notice for Heart Butte has been partially lifted. Residents east of BIA Route 1 are returning to their homes. There are no other evacuations.

Community Meetings: A community meeting for the fires is scheduled for Thursday at 7PM in Choteau at the Stage Stop Inn.

Spotted Eagle Fire

Acres: 48,815
Cause: Lightning
Location: 25 miles W of Dupuyer, MT
Containment: 0%Total personnel: 181

Read More: Spotted Eagle, Benchmark Fire Update 9-1-15 1:30pm | http://k96fm.com/spotted-eagle-benchmark-fire-update-9-1-15-130pm/?trackback=tsmclip

MONTANA AUTHORS

http://www.humanitiesmontana.org/map/index.html

This map linked above is of the high prairie as much as it is a Montana map.  It lists only 6 authors.  They are:  Mary Clearman Blew (“All But the Waltz”), Wallace Stegner (“The Big Rock Candy Mountain”), A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (“The Big Sky”), Rick Bass (“The Book of Yaak,”) Judy Blunt (“Breaking Clean”), James Welch (“Fools Crow”).  The map is the work of Humanities Montana, which means it is Missoula-based and framed by academic standards.  All college grads.

Wallace Stegner

Sharon Butala

Two of these writers are simply too big and important to ignore:  Wallace Stegner has been a foundational force for good, founder of a famously influential writing program.  A.B. Guthrie, Jr. came out of a journalism background.  They are gone now.  I have connections to both of them: Stegner’s boyhood home was in Eastend, Saskatchewan, and when Sharon Butala, an important writer herself, spearheaded the preservation of his home, which is now a writers’ retreat, I was serving the Unitarian Congregation of Saskatoon and often passed through on the way to and from Browning.

If this map is opened to Canada, then there is a whole other set of authors to explore.  The map will be black with names.

"Bud" and Carol Guthrie

Guthrie lived in Choteau and had a ranch where Bob and I hunted in the Sixties.  He didn’t know we were there, but might not have cared since he was still unredeemed by a devoted wife.  I visited with him on video but don’t know where the final product went.  Maybe it will show up on YouTube some day.

James Welch, Jr with his French medal

James Welch I knew in part because his father was Bob Scriver’s playmate in the Twenties and in part because of a landmark conference in Eugene, OR, organized by Sid Larson.  Then later he participated in a Guthrie festschrift in Choteau where we had a chance to visit.   Judy Blunt  and Mary Clearman Blew were also there.  Rick Bass I contacted in passing at the Montana Festival of the Book.  These four are about my age.  The point is that a specific generation, people who have been involved with Montana Humanities for a long time, are in the majority.

Judy Blunt

Mary Clearman Blew

Of course, the University of Montana has been the assigned humanities university since its founding.  “Montana Margins” and “The Last Best Place” were the Missoula-originating indexes to Montana writers.  They don’t seem to know what to do with the renegades, the movie people, the gays (even the closeted ones), Indians, or bloggers -- those granular novelists.  Even Montana gothics and extreme lit writers are not acknowledged.  Many poets and historians, genre writers (unless they lived in Missoula and wrote crime novels), just aren’t there.  If you fight these people, you will be deleted.

Rick Bass

I will flatly assert -- and be happy to be contradicted -- that two forces defined Montana literature in its heyday, which is now past.  One is the hegemony of the academics and the other is the hegemony of the bourgeois merchant classes.  When books stopped selling as well as iPods did, the Montana Festival of the Book withered.  When it became clear that the category had been mostly a selling platform, the “idea” of Montana literature -- the bookstores and publishers moved out.  The NA writers are invisible because they all went to the Indigenous Studies department, even those with low quantum -- choosing to identify with NA’s rather than Montana writers.  Homestead-focused writers (mostly women) went to history and moved to Idaho.  The gays and the goths went to California.

The bourgeois merchant classes have gone online.  They don’t buy books as much as they buy computers and become absorbed in the technicalities of production rather than the literary content of Kindles.  Anyway, that is a global community that sells online, not at festivals.  They buy apps, not books.

Native Americans are much more comfortable with the global community, which for many years has been growing a network of political indigenous communities.  They are not bourgeois, but what some call “Class X,” educated and sophisticated but not necessarily wealthy people.  France has not consciously caught up with them, though they use the post-modern tropes that are written in French.  New Zealand is “on it.”  Maybe Argentina.  Hawaiians lead the way.  But it’s problematic to translate an oral culture into a written one.  Video solves the problem.  Music is key.

From early days the gay community has had a special interest -- even romance -- with American Indians, just as have the Irish and the Jewish communities.  This is partly related to oppression and stigma and partly to their feeling of “being different,” even from their own culture.  Of course, the American holocaust of the prairie clearances is less than a century earlier than WWII.  Latin America is much interwoven with Native Americans and shares stigma, though it is whites who are the first immigrants to the Americas, then forcing blacks to immigrate, chained in the holds of ships.

Looking at this little map list in terms of book contents instead of the authors, four are autobiographical or memoir, that is, drawn from the authors’ lives.  “All But the Waltz”, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”, “The Book of Yaak,” and “Breaking Clean.”  The events in these books are in Montana, except that Stegner’s family went into Canada.  “The Big Sky” and  “Fools Crow” are historical but located in Montana places the authors knew because they lived there.  These are romantic books, as contrasted with debunking mythology.  Even “Breaking Clean,” about Blunt leaving an abusive and entrapping situation, is not news and not nearly so appalling as some less-famous accounts.  All six books would fit into "borderland studies."

Narrowing the scope of Montana literature comes from the academic and bourgeois forces, which don’t like scandal or controversy.  They can handle victimhood better than injustice, but their understanding of science is pretty much focused on technology that will make money.  They like sex but only if it is sentimental and semi-hidden; they do not indulge in graphic description.  They’re Garrison Keillor people, not William Vollman people.  They think “religion” is about “God” and must be “Christian.”  (Zen stuff is not considered real -- a kind of poetry.)

There’s nothing wrong with that, really.  It’s just that there is a lot more happening on the high prairie. that is much more likely to be explored by Canadian writers.  The presence of the KKK, Fenians, the crime belt in the borderlands, insanity, Mafia cooling safe-houses, trafficking and the like are not published.  I have no doubt someone is writing about these under-cultures somewhere that publishers don’t know about or reject.

The environmental writers, by contrast, are booming.  Resource exploitation, species extinction, overpopulation, genetic tinkering, drought, and all the rest of it abounds with built-in scandal and danger.  Since the regional newspapers feel that what sells now is “happy stories,” nonfiction in these fields has an online presence, strong in terms of conferences and networks, international alliances, and political energy.  They’re entities almost overwhelming on blogs and websites.  They have left high school behind.  They know Wallace Stegner’s writing.

Humanities Montana has not kept up.

SOME HEART BUTTE EVACUEES CAN GO HOME

http://www.kpax.com/story/29927175/spotted-eagle-fire-update-some-evacuees-can-return-home-in-heart-butte    

The Blackfeet Tribal Council has partially lifted an evacuation order for the town of Heart Butte.

Nearly 200 residents were ordered to leave their homes Friday night after the Spotted Eagle Fire exploded to more than 50,000 acres and crossing from national forest onto tribal land.

Tribal officials say fire crews have made progress on the fire, and are now allowing all but a few residents to return to their homes.

Right now, all those living on the east side of BIA Road 1 are allowed to return.

But those on the west side - which is closest to the fire - are still under an evacuation order.

Officials say those 15 or so people will likely need to remain in a shelter in Browning for another couple of nights.

More than 100 firefighters from the state, local, and tribal agencies are still battling the fire.

There is no word yet on containment of the fire. There have been no reported injuries at this time.

Firefighters have been doing burn-outs and structure protection with limited air support.

Over the weekend, ten Volunteer Fire Departments joined other fire crews in conducting a reconnaissance of the burn area, identifying locations for containment lines and performing burn out operations along BIA Route 1 road to remove fuel.

Four air tankers were able to drop retardant in the vicinity of Heart Butte in support of efforts to protect the town and other structures in the area. Heavy smoke and gusty winds limited their activities.

The Volunteer Fire Departments, which include Cut Bank, Valier, West Valley, Sunburst, Teton, Babb, Dupuyer, Heart Butte, East Glacier, and Browning, have thus far been the backbone of this firefighting effort. 

“On Friday evening the fire grew from approximately 200 acres to close to 50,000 acres. The VFD’s were very instrumental in protecting the community of Heart Butte. It has been an honor working with the community as they have come together during this incident.” said Alan Sinclair, the Deputy Incident Commander for the Southwest Area Incident Management Team 4.

On Sunday, the resources included 16 engines, including the VFDs and three that belong to the National Guard, two graders, and two National Guard water tenders. 

The Gila Hotshots also arrived on the fire after being released from the Bench Mark Fire located west of Augusta.