HOLY FAMILY MISSION by Hugh Black (notes)

“THE HISTORY OF THE HOLY FAMILY MISSION, FAMILY, MONTANA. FROM 1890 TO 1935”

by Hugh M. Black, B.A.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Saint Paul Seminary in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 1960.

The Preface mostly lists sources and gratitude to helpers. Sources include:
1. Unclassified material in the archives of the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus made available by the Rev. Wilfred Schoenberg, S.J., Oregon Province Archivist. Two principal accounts are the “Litterae Annuae” and “Historia Domas,” which Black had to translate from Latin.
2. The Archives of the Diocese of Helena, which contains financial reports and baptismal records of the mission.
3. Montana Historical Society, esp. the microfilm copies of “Woodstock Letters,” a Jesuit publication.
4. “Indian and White in the Northwest” by the Rev. Lawrence Palladino, S.J., a book. This is available for download on the Internet.
5. “Catholic Activity among the Blackfeet Indians” by Sister Mary Dorothy Sullivan, F.C.S.P.
6. Personal interviews with people who were there.

CHAPTER I: HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

[This material takes a conventional white point of view “pre-post-modern”. The Blackfeet are seen as pitiful when they only had dogs, lifted to savage and warlike dominance with horses and guns (little discussion of hunting, much of war) but inclined to be dependent on great men -- at first chiefs and then white men. Historical facts come from Ewers.]

Blackfeet religion is “a mixture of pantheism and animism,” and involves a “Sun cult.” The people are seen as superstitious and attached to polygamy and whiskey. The tension between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the American Fur Companies is discussed and then the withdrawal of Hudson’s Bay in 1869 which left the Canadian prairies open to American whiskey traders until the Royal Canadian Mounted Police restored order in 1874. The word “squaw” is used, not as a compliment. Smallpox and the end of the buffalo are listed, followed by a period in which traders were welcome but not settlers.

First Blackfeet treaties and agreements are noted in 1853 and 1855. Major Alfred J. Vaughan is said to be one of the few decent Indian agents, but the fact that he was a Southerner meant that he left at the beginning of the Civil War. Then the Montana gold rush was on. Brother Van Orsdel arrived intending to be a missionary to the Indians but “the conduct of these whites was so detrimental that he felt compelled to turn his attention to them.” (Stella W. Brummit, Brother Van. (NY: Missionary Education Movement of the U.S. and Canada, 1919).

Though Black is sympathetic to the innocent victims of the Baker Massacre, he defines the actions of the young defiant Indians as “guerilla war,” which ended with the massacre. An intriguing side-note is that Malcolm Clark’s “niece, Mother Angela Lincoln, O.S.U., dedicated her life to the conversion of the Montana Indians shortly after she received the news of the death of her uncle, and became the first delegated Mother Superior of Holy Family Mission among the Blackfeet.” Her cousin, Helen Clark, was famous in her own right and “revered on the Blackfoot Reservation for her holiness and kindness.”

In 1870, in an attempt to prevent corruption, President Grant went to “faith-based” management of reservations and assigned the Blackfeet to Methodists, which they didn’t like. The idea didn’t work and in 1892 was abandoned.

After 1865 the Blackfeet reservation was diminished again and again, the borders constantly being moved inward, because of the greed of incoming ranchers and miners, with the compensation being uncertain annuities. Black discusses Agent Campbell with approval but notes the ultimate failure of his farming efforts. He says, “After the middle of the century, one can no longer speak of the Blackfeet as a nation, since in 1950 eighty-five percent of them were of mixed blood.” [Of course, the US “nation” was probably more “mixed blood” than that.]

The missionary found “that he had to clothe, feed and house the children without remuneration, that he had to estimate the reliability of each Indian promise, and that he had to oversee and often do much of the physical labor at the Mission.” Father Prando said, “After all the Indians are but children.”

CHAPTER II: CATHOLIC MISSIONARY ACTIVITY AMONG THE BLACKFEET

Some time shortly after 1820, the first Catholic missionaries were converted Iroquois who came from the St. Lawrence River to the Flathead. The Flatheads made four expeditions to St. Louis between 1830 and 1840 to beg for more missionaries. Protestants volunteered to come but were turned down because “they married, and...had neither black gowns nor crosses nor the great prayer (the Mass).” In 1833 the evangelization of the US Indians was assigned to the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). Father Peter DeSmet came to the Flatheads in 1840 and established St. Mary’s Mission, which was occasionally raided by Blackfeet, who took horses and “Christian Indian maidens.”

[Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet was born in 1801 in Belgium and died in 1873 at St. Louis. He was ordained in 1827 during a stay at St. Regis Seminary (1824-1830) but had to return to Belgium between 1833-1837 because of poor health. From then on he trekked all across the northwest, both the US and Canada, until by 1846, after an ordeal ending at Fort Edmonton, he could no longer. Then he concentrated on raising money and organizing support from St. Louis. In 1868 he went into the camp of Sitting Bull and talked him into the treaty of Fort Rice.]

The Blackfeet softened when an old chief was converted while staying with the Flatheads and also by noticing that the Flathead did much better in battle with a “blackrobe” along. In 1846 Fathers DeSmet and Point, S.J. went to Fort Lewis to negotiate peace between the mountain tribes and the Blackfeet.

[Father Point was born in France in 1799 and came to the U.S. in 1834, founding the College of St. Charles at Grand Coteau in Louisiana before beginning missionary work in 1841. In the fall of 1846 he came to the Blackfeet, staying over the winter, and then was sent north to Canadian Missions. He died in Quebec in 1868. He wrote and sketched throughout his life.]

By erecting a large lodge in the middle of the Blackfeet camp circle where he could teach classes and lead Mass, Father Point converted 27 adults and 640 children. He felt that all were respectful but balked at giving up polygamy. [This is before anthropology was able to explore the economics of having many wives, a benefit to both the women and the men who depended on their labor.] He was near Fort Lewis and had better luck getting the white men there to marry their Native wives.

“There was no priest among the Blackfeet from May 1847 to Summer 1859.” It was agent Vaughn who requested missionaries. Father Adrian Hoeken, S.J., and a Jesuit lay brother came to look over the situation in the summer of 1869. This was the period when the agency kept moving and the “Piegan War,” a guerilla war, was confusing everything. The Blackfeet were resisting the Jesuits.

The tide was turned by a young priest, Father Philip Rappagliosi, S.J., [Born in Rome in 1841. He spoke Blackfeet and was stationed at St. Peter’s.] a strikingly handsome young man who welcomed martyrdom in the service of conversion and partly died because of starvation with the Indians in 1877. He deeply impressed the Blackfeet.

Also inspired were three Roman Jesuits, Fathers Philip Canestrelli, Joseph Damiani, and Peter Prando, who were at St. Peter’s. Damiani and Prando were among the founders of the Holy Family MIssion. Prando managed to talk White Calf into repudiating three of his wives in order to convert. [Prando was born in Italy in 1845. He came to St. Peter’s in 1880, was with the Blackfeet for a while, but was sent to the Cheyenne and Crows with whom he is more identified. He died in 1906, which would be three years after White Calf.] He was optimistic and funny, very popular.

But he was locked into battle with John Young, the Methodist agent, “stiff, blunt and unbending, formal and abstemious, a type not likely to endear himself to the Indians...” [Helen West's description.] He was a reformer. [It has occurred to me that if he’d been able to morph the original Wesleyan Methodists “method” of group revival and support, he might have had better luck, but he was from a later period of the denomination imbued with middle-class American and Victorian standards.] Young’s career was ended -- in spite of his best efforts -- by the Starvation Winter when the buffalo disappeared and 600 Blackfeet starved. He was transferred out and, tactfully, Prando -- who had been an enemy of Young, was sent to the Crow reservation.





CHAPTER III: HOLY FAMILY MISSION IS FOUNDED

Some of the religious persons in this part of the story are:

Father Cataldo, who had much experience, was made superior general of the Rocky Mountain Missions in 1877. He is the founder of St. Aloysius Gonzaga University in Spokane. He resigned in 1893 and took charge of the Alaskan Missions. He died in Oregon in 1928.

Father Bougis, born in the Ardennes, France, in 1860. Came to the US to study philosophy at Woodstock College, Maryland, and then to St. Peter’s in 1885 to teach boys and learn Indian languages. He was at Holy Family between 1891 and 1895, then did mission work in Alaska and California. He came back as superior for the year 1911-1912), returned to California and died there in 1920.

Bishop Brondel, born in Belgium, was a pastor and Bishop in Washiington State before becoming Bishop of Helena on March 7, 1884. He died in 1903.

Father Damiani was single-handedly the superior of St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s (Gros Ventre and Assiniboines) and of Holy Family. Understandably he wore out and was sent for a rest to California until 1893 when he returned to Holy Family only.

Mother Catherine Drexel, born in Philadelphia in 1858 to a banking family, inherited five million dollars in 1885 (along with her sister Elizabeth) and devoted much of it to Indian MIssions. In 1889 Catharine joined the Sisters of Mercy and in 1891 founded her own order, Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament devoted to Indians and Colored People. She died in 1955.

St. Peter’s was the earlier mission. Louis Riel, leader of the Red River Metis Rebellion taught there some time between 1875 and 1885, the year of the Rebellion. When he left, Father Bougis took his class: “seventeen Indian boys and eighteen half-breed boys.” They were taught catechism in Blackfeet and also received lessons in English, French and Latin.

In 1885 Father Cataldo asked permission to build a mission on the Blackfeet Reservation as well as others. Damiani came, persuaded many, and built a “quite ample” log church and a “rude building” for the religious to occupy. This was on Two Medicine River, not too far from the location of the Government Agency at that time. White Calf gave him part of his allotment so there would be land for a farm and school. In 1889, a grant of $14,000 came from the Drexel sisters, but it was necessary to wait another year until federal funds could be added, over the objections of the Indian Commissioner, T.J. Morgan, who thought there should be secular government boarding schools.

A long two-story frame building in two sections was constructed. (Boys were to be on one side, girls on the other.) Total capacity was one hundred students. In August 22, Father Damiani trekked by wagon from St. Peter’s to Holy Family, with provisions and three Ursuline nuns, to begin the classes in September. Father Tornielli came in a month to act as superior so Father Damiani could travel. Father Bougis described going on to the reservation to collect students, who returned crying. If children ran away, which many did, the agent cut off the family’s rations (the only source of food for many) until the student was returned. Father Bougis reported that the school “was considered the best Indian school in Montana.”

Lay brothers Thomas Devlin (Irish?) and Jerome Caldos, spent 1892 working at the mission, the same year Miss Drexel sent a herd of cows and steers and an irrigation ditch was dug from Two Medicine River in order to grow grain and vegetables.

In 1895 a new building for the boys was built of sandstone quarried from the adjacent cliffs, which had previously been used for buffalo jumps. The building was forty by sixty feet, three floors and a basement, and beautifully paneled inside with sliding doors so that classrooms could be consolidated into larger spaces. The high windows looked out on the Two Medicine flood plain, which ultimately undermined the foundations of the empty budling in 1964. Two scholastics, John Carroll and Augustine Dimier, came to care for the boys and live with them. By now there were five nuns who lived with the female students in the earlier building. In 1891 the wind blew the roof off. In 1895 a runaway boy froze to death.

Financially the mission was barely surviving. Sympathy for religious-based schools was fading and the school took a twenty percent cut in government money in 1896. The Willow Creek School near Browning had been built in 1892 as a Government boarding school. Fifty children who wanted to attend Holy Family were rejected and only sixty-seven accepted.

At the end of 1897 a fire destroyed the girls’ building. Mother Drexel financed a new sandstone building. Pneumonia and measles swept the students. The basement floor of the boys’ building flooded. Father Bandini, younger than Father Damiani, came as Superior to oversee the construction of the building. When he had finished the job and gone to Spokane, he died in three months, worn out. The two scholastics also declared a need to be transferred out “to recover their strength.”

In 1900 government aid was discontinued. Father Achilles Vasta, S.J., came for the summer of 1899, but in fall of 1900 Father Prando went to the Crow Reservation. The word picture painted by Mother Mary Amata Dunne, O.S.U., was of a horde of shocked, dirty and infested children brought into a situation of poverty almost equal to that in their homes, except that it was “civilized” poverty where they were asked to scrub in soapy water carried from the irrigation ditch and heated, and made to eat vegetables. According to her, hair was not cut and parents hovered to make sure. But if dirty buckskin could be smuggled out of sight, it was burned and replaced with “white man’s clothing.” One problem was persuading children to sleep in beds with sheets, though a shortage of furniture often meant sitting on the floor for classes. Her position is that the music (Jesuits “always had an organ and kept it in tune.”), the art and the beauty of the sacraments comforted both the students and the mostly Italian teachers for the hard work and poverty. She claims they were mostly warm enough but it was hard to dry clothes in the winter.

Chapter IV: “LIFE AT THE MISSION”

This chapter is rich with particulars. It is a vivid illustration of the determination of the Italian Jesuits to continue the old battle of the agriculturists (equated with civilization) versus the hunters without resorting to fratricide as in the case of Cain and Abel. They were acting out of confidence born of 10,000 years of inventing farming, which ironically was not much different at the mission from that in Biblical times. But this was not a Biblical climate.

Hugh Black quotes at length Father Prando’s description of the weather. (Translated from the Italian in the Jan. 6, 1900, “Letters of the Province of Turin,” by Dr. Anthony Chiuminatto, College of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota.) I shall requote, partly to convey what the weather was like and partly to illustrate that Father Prando was an educated, eloquent, and sophisticated man.

“The climate in the country inhabited by the Piegans is rather severe, and for him who does not have good lungs it is better that he stay away from it. The Summer is short, and the passage from the latter to Winter and from Winter to Summer is almost without Autumn or Spring. The land lends itself but little to agriculture; hay is cut once a year and the maintenance of life is in raising cattle.

“The winter is severe and the cold often reaches 25 or 30 degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit thermometer; sometimes it goes to 40 degrees and once it went to 50 degrees below. From the end of December to the end of April the ground is almost always covered with snow. The North wind is generally accompanied by snow in Winter and by rain in Summer; sometimes the West winds are so strong that they impede travel, and in Summer they bring big storms with lightning, thunder and hail, and in Winter, the blizzard...

“When it has ceased to snow and the sky has cleared, the West wind rises and sweeps the snow away in a curious phenomenon. The wind begins up in the mountains and one first sees it come down the mountains in long waves of white foam, then becoming one billow after another, two or three meters high; the mountains seem to be rejoicing...

“As the wind continues to gather strength, the snow rises on high and forms huge clouds which rise higher than the mountains, and in the distance one sees that the wind is blowing on the mountain tops; as the wind comes down, the tops of the hills are the first to be swept clean, and in the valleys, when the wind is not too violent, one sees the snow move along the ground at from a half to a whole meter in height.

“As the whirlwind increases, the snow is carried away in a horizontal line to a greater height, and traveling against the wind, one experiences much difficulty because one’s face and eyes are struck by these very minute crystals which hurt in the manner of punctures by needles. Too, when the wind is a fury, it is impossible to travel because it blinds one; and even though the sun is shining, one cannot see the road. And this is a kind of blizzard with clear sky.

“These blizzards sometimes come up so suddenly that many people are caught on the road and everyone runs for the nearest shelter, if any is to be found. And it is a thing of absolute necessity to have strong horses, and a buggy equally strong, otherwise accidents of a serious nature can occur.”

The nuns and girls maintained forty stoves in their building. They were kindled at 4AM. There were times that the wood nearly ran out. During Communion Mass in Heart Butte one morning, the cold metal chalice froze to the lips of Father Egon Mallman.

Boys were separated from girls in dormitories, dining rooms, classes, and at Mass, with the exception of school programs or all-school picnics. Someone supervised the children at all times. Some of the students were over fifteen. In Spring things could get “effervescent.” Students constantly ran away, were whipped for it, or expelled.

Two classes for boys, older and younger, and two classes for girls were taught. After school there were chores on this working model farm. For recreation the boys took to baseball after a slow start, and the girls fell in love with the phonograph, dancing to “Wild Irish Rose” until, says Black, “even the Irish nuns were satiated.” The boys had a good band, directed by Brother Nicolaus Fox and later by Mr. Dittner, until about 1927. The girls had a small string orchestra.

The community attended programs. If anyone objected to the constant instruction, catechism, devotions, Masses, feasts and so on, it was certainly not recorded here. Blackfeet love and respect religion of all sorts.

Three Jesuit fathers stand out in this period.

Father Aloysius Soer was born in Holland in 1853. Inspired by Father DeSmet’s letters, he came in 1887 and served Nez Perce for nineteen years, rising to Superior. He was at Holy Family from 1905 until 1932, the year of his death and about the time the mission closed, and all the whole time he yearned for the Nez Perce! No one could easily understand his words because of his heavy Dutch accent, but it was said that “just to see him preach was sermon enough.” He was noted for invariably visiting the sick, even on one occasion when he had to cross a stream with his clothes and religious materials on his head. He was the historian of the mission and left many letters.

Father Thomas Grant was born in NYC in 1870. He was orphaned and much of the time grew up in Jesuit boarding schools. He began as a missionary to the North Cheyenne, then spent time on the Crow reservation -- his favorite -- and came to Holy Family as superior from 1915 to 1929, when he returned to the Crow until his death in 1929. He is credited with averting a Cheyenne war in 1894. He had “wry neck” which forced him to hold his head on one side, like a bird taking a closer look. He could be very strict but was also a good story teller.

Father Jerome Galdos came for a year in 1892, then returned in 1909 and stayed for 25 years. More than any of the others he fits the idea of the wise, white-bearded, gentle and self-sacrificing priest. Once when pneumonia flattened the teachers and most of the students, he both taught classes and nursed the ill, sleepless and cheerful. He was the primary manager of the farm, along with a hired farmer and half-a-dozen local helpers.

CHAPTER V: EDUCATIONAL GOALS

The big paradigm for Holy Family, as explicitly stated by Father DeSmet, was to repeat the success of the Jesuits in Paraguay, where they had managed (with huge subsidies from Spain and Portugal) to separate the Indians and completely reshape them, right down to dictating their marriage partners. The US did not work out the same. Reasons included lack of government money, inability to separate the children from the families and communities who denied and mocked what they learned, and the general low quality of the floating opportunistic white men all around them. [These factors persist.]

The Flatheads were converted with less trouble and forced into assimilation anyway because their reservation was a checkerboard with white land. Commissioner Morgan proposed college preparation for Indians, saying education should “lift the Indian students into so high a plane of thought and aspiration as to render the life of the camp intolerable to them... There is urgent need among them for a class a leaders of thought, lawyers, physicians, etc...” [This is just now happening.] But the government position settled on the idea of educating Indians to be good wage-earners in an industrial world. [Well, a rural version of industrialism, maybe.]

Since the government decided to build its own schools and not subsidize the Jesuits, they were free to go their own way, which was exemplified by St. Ignatius:
1. to save the child’s soul by instruction and formation
2. to make available to the tribe the sacraments and Christian instruction
3. to make the students capable of rearing a good Christian family on the reservation
4. to raise the moral and intellectual level of Blackfeet life to that of a civilized Christian country.

[The devilishness of these goals has been the Jesuit conviction -- and they were not the only ones to think this way -- that they were right and thus entitled to throttle all other less-sanctified systems of thought. Post-modern, post-colonial criticism has exploited that blind spot into a world-wide philosophical system with major impact on Native Americans. The fury of the criticism has captured many of the NA intellectuals.]

Special attention was given to the “refinement” of the girls with much value given to neatness, cleanliness, maintenance of the home in cooking, laundry, and needlework including beading and working with buckskin. [These lessons went deep. The old mission-educated Blackfeet ladies that I knew in the Sixties insisted on high standards in their homes and person, according to nun’s ideas of what those were.]

Classroom standards for the basics were high enough that after the first state tests in 1928, the Superintendent of Education wrote them a letter of congratulation. The classrooms were primarily English-speaking but hymns and prayers might be translated to Blackfeet.

The Ursuline nuns were financed entirely by the Jesuits, but the nuns had exclusive authority over their own affairs and classroom practices. The exception was that the superior could ask a nun to leave or request another to be sent. The Reverend Mother Amadeus was governor of the Ursulines until 1900. She loved and believed in Indians.

An underlying assumption not often considered is that the religious persons considered the mission to be a real home, and wanted to include the children in that. Patronizing but nurturing, this assumption leaned heavily on moral rules which included hard work, being on time, keeping one’s word, and so on. The teachers felt they had the entitlement of actual parents, and therefore were vulnerable to all rejection, anger, and failure to perform in the same way as biological parents. When the students went to their biological homes, even for a month, and were pulled back into the original orbit, the religious persons were wracked over the need to punish the behavior without rejecting the individual, especially in the case of girls.

Father Soer wrote to a Superior that if the mission closed “the doors of protection to them” it would “occasion future sins of the flesh; in fact, in many cases to allow their eternal ruin.

“For what happens if they stay home? Scandalized by sin and feeling themselves abandoned, they surrender to the passions of the flesh and seek to enter marriage. Meanwhile, having lost purity, they will have relations with many, because temptations, unfortunately, abound on the Reservation, between those married as well as those unmarried. Very quickly, in the manner of children... governed by the devil, they finally contract marriage. Such marriages are easily upset by the devil, and consequently there are many adulterous unions and cohabitations on the Reservation.” [And that was before cable TV.]

By 1930 things had settled down and vacations were more frequent.

Here’s the beginning of a story relevant to Father Soer’s opinion. It’s told by Mary Ground in “Grass Woman Stories” which is available through the Blackfeet Heritage Center. Mary was always a defender of the Holy Family Mission, though she was also an active practitioner of the old-time religious ways. The book is one sponsored by the schools, a small stapled pamphlet with original drawings and a photo of Mary.

“This happened in June of 1896. I was at Holy Family Mission and it was just before vacation. I used to interpret for the Indians who couldn’t speak English. First thing, old Brocky came in to the Sister. He had on an old blanket coat and he was crying, so the Mother Superior called me. She brought the old man into the sitting room where I was and he could hardly talk, the way he was crying.

“She asked me, ‘What’s wrong?’"

It turns out that the old man’s daughter, who was married, had attracted a lover who killed the husband and took the wife. The old man wanted the mission carpenters to make a casket for the husband, his son-in-law.

“Father Damiani and Father Prando were at the Mission then. The fathers had their own carpenter.

“She [Mother Superior] told us to take him [the old man] over to Father Damiani. I told the father, “Old Brocky here wants to know if you could help him out and fix a coffin for his son-in-law, who got killed. Frank Double Runner killed him.” Frank’s two brothers were attending Holy Family Mission and Frank had one of them called out to help him, using the ruse of rounding up horses. The three of them hung around in the cliffs by the mission and finally went up towards Browning, by Willow Creek School. The brother pretended that he was going down there to get food, but betrayed the adulterer and the woman, who were finally shot and buried in one big coffin together.

It’s clear that schools were centers of action, places with resources, family members and authority figures. (The Methodist missionary Matson went out to reason with Frank Double Runner but after his hat was shot off, he withdrew.) I expect one could find similar stories in Iraq today or even in urban ghettoes. In times and places of disorder and transition, religious schools offer limited refuge.

CHAPTER VI: MISSIONARY ACTIVITY

Parallel and interwoven with the mission school was the work of converting and sustaining the Blackfeet to Catholicism. Two big forces worked against the diligent priests:

1. The practice of attributing every subsequent tragedy and misbehavior to the conversion -- and there were ALWAYS tragedies and transgressions in those tumultuous days.

2. The idea that if a priest were to be called to a deathbed, he would pray for the death of the person. [This is not too different from the media-created notion that if the priest arrives to give last rites, that means there is no hope.] In 1914 Paul Calf-Looking Senior waited a little too long and died without rites.

The tangles of marriage -- stranded between old-time patterns and Catholic modern morality -- ended in confusion and rationalization for bad behavior. If one family began to get ahead, all the ne’er do wells showed up to live with them, which was hard on the children. Then there were the predatory whites who circled the reservation like coyotes, offering whisky.

Here’s an interesting quote, a footnote in the manuscript: “In 1876, Father Constantine Scollen, O.M.I., a Canadian missionary among the Blackfeet, wrote: “The Crees have always looked upon the white man as a friend, or, to use their own language, as a brother. They have never been afraid of him, nor have they given him any cause to be afraid of them. The Blackfeet have acted somewhat differently; they have regarded the white man as a demi-god, far superior to themselves in intelligence, capable of doing them good or evil, according as he might be well or ill-disposed towards them, unscrupulous in his dealings with others, and consequently a person to be flattered, feared and shunned, and even injured, whenever this could be done with impunity.” This is from Alexander Morris, “The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba, the Northwest Territories, and Keewa-tin.” Toronto: Belfords, Clark and Co., 1880, p. 248.

Efforts to preach and offer mass really rather demanded demi-god strength. Distances were long, weather was extreme, horsepower was from real horses, places to stay were uncomfortable, and the priest had to have learned to speak Blackfeet. Father Bougis visited seven camps: “Big Nose, Under Mink,Many (Merry) People, Three Suns, Three Bears, Wolf Tail, Fast Buffalo Horse” and netted twelve baptisms.

In 1895 Prando replaced Bougis and fared a bit better. He had a little cart and gave out holy cards and medals. Attending every distribution of rations, he took the opportunity for confessions, baptisms, blessing of marriages. One day he was walking along the Two Medicine road when a wagon came along driven by a half-breed woman with a baby. Taking the initiative, he persuaded her to bring the baby over to the river so it could be baptized. When they returned to the wagon, there turned out to be a second mother and child hiding in the wagon, so he escorted her back down for a second baptism.

In addition to the 2,000 Indians spread over 3,000 miles, Bougis and Prando served the white settlers iin Dupuyer and Choteau. Prando built a church in Dupuyer. Bishop Brendel, having mercy, sent a diocesan priest for the towns.

In 1901 Father Prando wore out and the Rev. John B. Carroll, S.J. took his place. Then Father Soer served until 1932 when Father Robert Kane came. When there was an automobile, Sam Choate would drive Father Soer around.

Father Kane learned to drive the car himself. He had many adventures, including one with Ted Pendergrass -- a bodacious cowboy -- who got him stalled in the middle of a Two Medicine river crossing. Nevertheless, at the destination was such a large number of Indians that Father Kane founded a mission station he called “Upper Two Medicine Mission.” On his way there one winter day he was caught in a blizzard bad enough to paralyze travel. He had two boys with him. The Mission authorities were so worried that they sent out the Mission truck, but it got stuck, too. Then they sent the tractor but even that was soon stuck. Two days later the Indian Agent sent out fifty riders to find Father Kane and the boys, who were located in a cabin where they had taken shelter. No people were there, but wood and provisions.

Eventually congregations were formed in Heart Butte and Browning. Mr. Brown began to solicit contributions to build a church. People gave him animal furs, livestock and other valuables which he auctioned for $1,200. In 1904 the new St. Michael’s Church was constructed for $1,500. Father Carroll was sent to Alaska, so Father Soer served Heart Butte and Browning. As more government schools were built, Father Carrolll was recalled from Alaska to live in Browning. He built a lean-to onto the church where he cut his own wood, did his own cooking, and walked five miles out to Boarding School to give Mass and instruction. Progress was inch-by-inch.

When the first Protestant minister, Edward Dutchen, came in 1895 he bluntly told Father Bougis to get out. The boarding school became the scene of a wrestling match over who would instruct the children. By 1912 the Catholics won. The Jesuits asked the Provincial Superior to take over the northern part of the reservation. The Rev. Thomas A. Daley came, but didn’t speak Blackfeet, so had to help from Father Soer until 1920.

In Heart Butte, more traditional, a church was built and blown down by the high winds twice. In 1910, someone who read an appeal for funds in The Indian Sentinel sent $500 which was enough to get the church of St. Peter Clavaer built. The first Mass was celebrated on August 13, 1911, and the church became the center of a cluster of cabins. In 1933 Father Hannon came. Then in 1935 the Reverend Egon Mallman, S.J., who had to pick up the slack for the whole south half of the reservation when Holy Family closed in 1938. He was helped somewhat by two lay catechists, Eli Guardipee and Sam Choate who taught and acted as interpreters. Children were taught in the day schools scattered around the reservation.

Sometimes Father Soer was invited to Havre where the Reverend Francis Sansone, S.J., served three classic German and Bohemian congregations. He was always delighted and enjoyed speaking German again. In 1932 Civilian Conservation Corps camps were set up at Many Glacier, Babb, on Sherburne Lake and at St. Mary. Father Kane served them.

A few supernatural apparitions were recorded. Helen Clark, daughter of Malcolm Clark, appeared to Florence Magee who lay dying. Florence didn’t know that Helen had just died, but described her clothing, which was exactly the same as what Helen Clark wore in her coffin.

The exemplary members of the congregations included Percy DeWolfe, Joseph Tatsey, George Kipp and Eli Guardipee.

By 1934, when anthropology had advanced enough to explain Blackfeet religion a bit better, Father Jean Lessard, O.M.I., a well-known missiologist and missionary, said, “We should never have set aside all their pagan customs... And now, it is uphill work... We have to be careful because if we resurrect any of their paganism, it is so close to their heart, they will go all the way.” But the truth is that the Blackfeet simply embraced both ways.


Chapter VII: ADMINISTRATION OF HOLY FAMILY MISSION: 1900-1930.

The Jesuit Father Superior in charge of the Mission had absolute authority over nearly everything. The other side of that power was total responsibility for everything, including the weather -- at least in terms of preparation. He was the peacemaker, the personnel department, the fund raiser, and so on. Black notes “the extreme sensitivity of the Blackfeet...often too ready to listen to their children’s stories of mistreatment...necessitating the dismissal of the teacher in question.” [This is still common today.] The Father Superior was hard-pressed to find good teachers, esp. among lay people. [This is also common today, except for the increasing number of Blackfeet teachers.] The problem wasn’t just in the classroom. When the cook went off to become a religious, in the next year a series of eight cooks went through the kitchen -- including periods of time when the brothers or nuns had to pinch-hit.

The highest responsiblity was for the souls of the children, but then next was physical safety: enough warmth, clothes, food and health care. He also had to run interference with the government, the white community (tradesmen who might be asked for credit) and the tribe, both formally through the council and informally. Because the old-time band tradition was to depend upon the strongest leaders to help the weak and poor, the Father was interpreted as the “chief” and petitioned for all sorts of supplies and remedies for grievances. Sometimes he just didn’t have the means and then had to defend against the bitterness of the disappointed and thefts by those who took matters into their own hands. Besides everyday maintenance, a chief was expected to provide for feasts which traditionally involved gifts.

Maintenance of the property took much attention, energy and funds. Buying supplies and selling surplus crops or livestock were also his responsibility.

In 1904 France exiled the Brothers of Christian Instruction of Lamennsis, who offered Holy Family two teachers, Brothers Salvinus and Rene. Salvinus, who was especially gifted, stayed for seven years as teacher, choirmaster and sacristan. The two men left at the same time that Rocky Boy’s people were sent to the Blackfeet Reservation and Fort Shaw closed its school, creating an overpopulation crisis.

Charles Owens and his family came to Browning and made friends with Father Carroll, who felt Charles was God-sent. Charles’ father and brother were experienced farmers and took charge of the farm while Charles taught classes, but then he left to become a Jesuit.

Other teachers described include:

A nameless big fat German man who lost his temper all the time, refused to work in the fields and had no discipline.

Raymond Philibert from St. Louis who was an inexperienced teacher but proved to have a knack for it and who was especially devoted to the Sacraments.

William Mellen from Drummon, Montana.

William Van der Wansen, a former lay brother of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who had done mission work in the Americas, gone back to Belgium, and then left the order so he could return. Described as “hard working and cheerful,” he was teacher, sacristan and choir director.

In 1920 William Shepherd, S.J., came from Alaska for a year.

In 1922 the Superior, Father Grant, had to teach.

In view of the current debate over water rights, I will quote at length the paragraphs about water rights:

“The superiors at Holy Family were involved in a dispute from time to time during these years with the Government over water rights. With permission of the Government, Holy Family had dug, at its own cost, an irrigation ditch in 1892. The first canal which the Government constructed in the Two Medicine Valley was a partial failure, and Holy Family granted the Government the use of its ditch for some distance down the valley. Then, in 1908, the Agency dug a new ditch whose intake was a short distance above that of the Mission canal. Since this lowered the river level below the Mission intake during the dry season, Holy Family at this time obtained permission to use water from the Government ditch. This agreement was not formalized in writing.

“In 1918, the United States Reclamation Service raised the question of mission water rights by billing Holy Family at a rate of $1.00 an acre per year. Father Grant replied with a vigorous protest. After recalling the history of the irrigation ditches, he argued that since the Indians were not charged for the use of Government water [sic], it was unjust to demand payment from an institution supporting their children. He prepared to defend his rights, and had gone to an irrigation meeting in Seville (near Cut Bank) to do so, when he received word from the Mission Bureau that Holy Family was exempt from charge.

“The problem came up again in 1931. At this time the Society assigned the matter of the water rights for its Montana missions to the Rev. Francis C. Dillon, S.J., a veteran ‘troubleshooter,’ and in a short time the question was settled in favor of the Mission.”

A major part of administration is the careful keeping of records [a part that both the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Tribal Council notoriously shirked] and these religious folks conscientiously maintained a daily diary, an “Historia Domus” and yearly reports on the state of the Mission and its progress. Fund-raising was constant, much fortified by Mother Thomas, O.S.U, in charge of the food and personal needs of the priests themselves but devoting every spare minute to shameless begging letters.

Nevertheless, money kept shrinking. At first Mother Drexel could help. Almost nothing came from local parish funds. From 1895-1905 were identified as the “lean years,” when government support withdrew. Father Damiani was superior for most of this time except for ten months in Brazil (1899-1900) when Father Achilles Vasta, S.J. took charge. For a while Father Damiani was the only priest on the reservation. He left for Alaska in 1905.

At about that time some tribal resources began to be available and at the time of allotment, the Mission Bureau was given title to the 320 acres of mission land. In 1909 the land was exempted from taxes and back taxes were refunded, which was used to pay debts, make improvements, and buy a bit more land.

Between 1900 and 1907 Brother Thomas Campbell and Brother Roch Terragno took on the cooking and chores and the Lamennais Brothers provided teachers. Father Damiani retuned from Alaska in 1912 (now over seventy) and stayed until 1915, when Father Grant became Superior. Remarkably, it is reported that he “skillfully directed mission affairs through the fourteen years with scarcely a problem or extraordinary happening. He was careful to avoid all unnecessary conflicts with the Agency or white interests, and , despite the childishness of many of his parishioners, he maintained universal good will toward the Mission.”

Donations began to come in after 1915. $1,000 was used to add a laundry room to the girls’ school, build a small barn, paint the interiors of both schools, and construct an ice-house for meat. In 1918 Father Soer’s brother, Mr. Arnold Soer, sent enough money for a new Ford automobile and in 1919 he sent another $470 to keep it in repair on the rez roads. Father Grant bought 280 acres of grazing from Paul Calf Looking, and in 1922 another 280 acres for $840.

The winter of 1919-20 was unusually severe, following a drought. There was little hay and Father Grant had to borrow to pay for coal and feed. 86 of the mission cows died, as well as other livestock. Desperate ranchers around him helped themselves to the mission hay. Father’s neck, not improved by stress, forced him to go to Minnesota for treatment.

In the summer of 1921 the sills and walls of the church were raised and several farm buildings were renovated. Still, Father Grant reported that the mission assets were greater than the debts. Agent Campbell’s “Five Year Plan,” which emphasized farming and organized granges, was very helpful to the mission where the Superior was also the “president” of that grange. An electric light plant was installed for $2,000. Several “friends” of the mission gave enough money to put a bell in the church tower and paint the exterior. Other farm buildings were painted and spirits were up, but there was a steady small erosion of the Mission.


CH. VIII: THE YEARS OF DECISION: 1930-35

Father Ignatius Dumbeck, a young man, arrived in July, 1929, to give the Mission nuns their annual retreat in August, to take a look around, and (he rightly suspected) to become the next Superior, a task which he didn’t feel he was up to. Everything had gradually slid downhill: buildings were leaking and cracking, the kitchen stoves had been repaired to the limit, the well was condemned, and the agricultural machinery was worn out. In his report he used the word “ramshackle.” Ten years earlier Father Grant had seen that white men were moving in on the reservation and that the survival of the mission was a gamble.

What Black calls “tribal money” -- which may have been Bureau of Indian Affairs controlled money -- was dwindling. Bishop Finnigan of Helena preached back east and begged donations. An appeal was made to the tribe, but a government inspector used Catch 22: no money could be allotted until they had improved the place. In one last burst of optimism, Dumbeck was elected to make the “Hail Mary” pass. An appeal was made to the Marquette League for renovation funds, which supplied $11,000.

Father Grant figured the buildings of Holy Family were worth $20,000 and the land $6,320, but the running expenses that same year (1928-29) were $18,500. He spent the Marquette League funds thus:
1. A used power plant from the Browning School Board at $50.
2. Weather-proofing of doors and windows, begun by Brother Jacob McGuire and finished by a Browning carpenter: $975.
3. Lumber for farm buildings directly from Montana mills at $18 per 1,000 in carload lots delivered to Browning: moving the barn away from the river and adding to it; building hog and chicken houses, fencing for a dairy herd of six cows.
4. A new hay mower with a sickle attachment, a Caterpillar #15 tractor, and some other machinery purchased at discount for a total of $2,692. The Caterpillar alone cost $1,475 but paid for itself in three months of work.
5. Repair of the roof on the boys’ building at $664.
6. Insulation of the dormitories.
7. Repainting of the interiors.
8. A new Majestic cooking stove for $398.
9. A dish-washing machine, a new oven and a bread mixer.
10. A new well and 600 feet of 2 inch pipe at a depth of six feet to get below the frost line.
11. Sewer upgrade to meet government specs.

From other sources came funds for a “Magic Marvel” flour mill so whole wheat bread could be produced and sold. Produce, esp. cabbage and carrots, were sold as well as beef, the principal source of profit. Bishop Finnigan went out of his way to provide support by visiting, helping Father Dunbeck study plans, and soliciting money. They managed to cut expenses by $4,000 and to find $3,700 from the tribe and the Indian Commission. In 1931, Father Dunbeck figured that the stock and garden had yielded a profit of $5,700 as well as supplying the Mission kitchen.

Then trouble came from the Two Medicine River, which was eating away at the bottomland in spite of a retaining wall built by Father Grant. Using that new Caterpillar, an old riverbed was deepened and the river was diverted into it. Cost was $500. Dunbeck also constructed an underground water reservoir up the hill (in preference to a water tower, which could freeze) at a cost of $5,000, paid for through Bishop Finnigan. The worn out windmill that pumped the water into the tank had to be replaced.

All this was done by 1931, but then Bishop Finnigan died. Father Soer had also recently died. In 1930 Brother Caldos was permanently incapacitated by pneumonia. The auto also died. More land was needed, back wages needed payment, leases demanded money. Dunbeck mortgaged the mission livestock in 1933. Under the strain, he began to fail himself.

In early June, 1934, hail damaged the buildings and smashed the garden and grain fields. Most of the windows were broken out and the roofs were ruined. The Most Rev. Ralph Hayes, then Bishop of Helena wrote: “It was sad to see the ravaging force of the storm, which lasted but fifteen minutes. A large field of alfalfa would have been ready for the cutting within a week; ... large fields of wheat and oats and barley have simple disappeared from view; potato fields and truck gardens beaten flat to the ground and ruined for the year. All this is a most serious loss to the Mission. Under the most favorable conditions, the financial problem of the Mission is almost hopeless, and the only solution lies in the fact that the Mission is able to supply... all the flour and vegetables of the children, and the grain required for the cattle, from its own fields. With crops destroyed for the year, a very serious problem is presented.”

Bishop Hayes and the Marquette League helped to repair the roofs ($940) and replace 300 panes of glass, but Father Dunbeck collapsed in July. Bishop Hayes reorganized the classes so that all would be taught by nuns, a cheaper source of labor. The Department of the Interior promised $100 for each of 15 of the 35 orphans at the Mission, but then said the state of the buildings was not good enough to house students.

Father John Prange, S.J., came to be the new superior. Bishop Hughes died and was replaced by Joseph M. Gilmore. Reverend John B. Tennelly became the new head of the Mission Board. They were the last team to struggle to save the Mission and they lost.


Ch. IX. CONCLUSIONS

Black notes the style difference between the early priests who had such confidence in God and their own spirituality, as compared to the newer men who dealt with the practicalities of poverty and politics. It’s hard to know what factors in what proportions undermined and destroyed the Mission. But it’s even more impossible to know how much good was done in those arduous years of effort and self-denial.

What Black does NOT address is the accusation that J.L. Sherburne [NOT J.H., his father] -- possibly deliberately -- was the party who foreclosed on the Mission. This man has been so thoroughly attacked that his family is highly defensive and not all of them were in sympathy with what he did anyway.

Also, Black does not frame the end of the Mission with the worldwide Depression sweeping the globe. (In the Thirties all the Unitarian congregations in Montana collapsed.) As recorded in the Foley Report, the young, old and vulnerable of the reservation were starving again, as they had when the buffalo ended. People everywhere were dispersed and lost, especially in the West, and many High-Line communities were devastated.

The other personal observation I cannot resist contributing is that people like Mary Ground became anchors for the religious revival of the Old Time Blackfeet ways in spite of all those catechism lessons and Holy Masses. I don’t consider this a failure. After all, being Bundle Keepers never prevents anyone from attending Mass today. Conscientious men like Louis Plenty Treaty who responded to Campbell’s plans for farming were also active in the Horn Society long after others had forgotten there was such a thing.

Also, those old ladies the nuns intended to make “refined” as girls became order-keepers in their own families and their communities. It wasn’t until the reservation was opened to alcohol that many women began to drink with the consequent damage to their children, both physically and spiritually. In the Sixties the worst threat one could make to a child was “I’m going to tell your grandmother!” Very often, grandmother got their attention with a stick, just as the nuns had. Pride and discipline were kept alive.

Lately it has been fashionable to hate and blame the Mission schools, but perhaps that’s too easy.

A TENTATIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

At the moment I'm preparing a reference book for Lulu.com that includes reference material for the Reservation Blackfeet -- that is, Blackfeet people on the Reservation. That means I'm dropping out the nearly half of the people on the tribal rolls who live OFF the reservation.

It also means that I'm dealing wiith matters after about 1855, which is the time the major prairie tribes signed their peace treaty, creating reservations.

A reservation is a default creation, imposed upon the people it is meant for. They didn't ask for "reservations." In Canada they are called "reserves" and in California they are called "ranchos," but even all the ones called "reservations" are quite different in their details. The government of the USA drew boundaries to contain aboriginal peoples in order to free up territory for settlement by immigrating Europeans and to reduce costly cavalry deployments to keep the peace. Mineral deposits and oil were major reasons to push back reservation borders. As I write, and part of the reason for the book I am assembling, is that water rights along the southern border of the Blackfeet Reservation (which is Birch Creek) are now in negotiation to try to sort out state law about water (first person using it has first rights) as opposed to federal law about water (determined by the Winters case to be whatever water is needed for the use designated by the Federal Government when the area was designated as a reservation, a game reserve, or whatever). Tempers are frayed, partly because the state side is highly developed and the agriculture in the area is dependent upon it, but the reservation side has been repeatedly bungled and aborted by federal officials and (more recently) the tribe.

Because reservations in different places and different ecologies were defined according to the ideas of the times over a period of two hundred years, no two of them is alike in terms of economics or governance. Everything has to be negotiated case-by-case. Over the years the lands become valuable in ways no one expected (oil, casinoes, water) but also lose value (global warming, radioactive contamination).

The only answer I can envision is education, knowledge, research. The best "hand" to play is the one with the most cards.

Below is my Table of Contents for relevant material that's hard to find. I may add more essays by myself as explanation. I have been stunned by the amount of material on Google Book Search -- government and academic reports and transcripts that I had no idea existed. They will be hard to find, which is why I've posted notes on some. A few books are hard to read for a high school or tribal college student, so I have supplied notes with the recommendation that the book be tackled after getting a grip on the notes. Any suggestions would be appreciated.


1. Treaty with the Blackfeet

The True Spirit and Original Intent of Treaty 7. Treaty 7 Elders and Tribal Council with Walter Hildebrandt, Dorothy First Rider and Sarah Carter. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996.

2. Harrison-Fagg Report

Missouri River Basin Investigations Project. THE BLACKFEET RESERVATION AREA--ITS RESOURCES AND DEVELOPMENT POTENTIAL (Billings, MT: Missouri River Basin Investigations Project, 1972).

3. Fleeing Value of the Rez

Brief history of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Montana by Ralph M Shane (Unknown Binding - 1966)

Geology and ground-water resources of the Two Medicine irrigation unit and adjacent areas, Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Montana by Q. F Paulson (Unknown Binding - 1965)

1998 special SEED examination report, Lower Two Medicine Dam, Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Montana, Bureau of Indian Affairs by Charles Swanson (Unknown Binding - 1999)

1999 intermediate SEED examination report, Lower Two Medicine Dam, Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Montana, Bureau of Indian Affairs by Jim Bowen (Unknown Binding - 2000)

10 year forest management plan for the Blackfeet Indian Reservation by Pete Sawyer (Unknown Binding - 1994)

Water resources of the Browning-Starr school area, Blackfeet Indian Reservation, northwestern Montana (SuDoc I 19.42/4:97-4134) by M. R. Cannon (Unknown Binding - 1997)

Field inventory of mineral resources, Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Montana (Report BIA) by Michael Sokaski (Unknown Binding - 1980)

Historical report on the Blackfeet Reservation in northern Montana by Thomas R Wessel (Unknown Binding - 1975)

Soil investigation report Columbia Falls-Glacier Park Forest Highway, Summit-Glacier Park section, Route No. 13: Lewis & Clark National Forest and Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Glacier County, Montana by G. E Meyer (Unknown Binding - 1951)

Evaluation of the mountain pine beetle infestation, Blackfeet Indian Reservation and east side Glacier National Park (Montana, 1979) (Forest insect and ... Northern Region. State & Private Forestry) by M. D McGregor (Unknown Binding - 1979)

Report of E.B. Linnen, Chief inspector, dated February 3, 1916: On the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Montana by Edward Bangs Linnen (Unknown Binding - 1916)

Geology and ground-water resources of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, northwestern Montana (Hydrologic investigations atlas) by Geological Survey (U.S.) (Unknown Binding - 1996)

Socioeconomic influence on Blackfeet Indian education by Dean Jack Jensen (Unknown Binding - 1973)

Economic analysis of the Blackfeet Indian Irrigation Project by John R Glenn (Unknown Binding - 1985)

Economic changes in Montana affecting the Blackfeet by Paul Wallace Gates (Unknown Binding - 1975)

Indian Reserved Water Rights: The Winters Doctrine in Its Social and Legal Context by John Shurts (Paperback - Mar 2003)

4. The Foley Report

5. F.C. Campbell in the GF Tribune, July 1,1906

6. Sherburne School

7. Holy Family Mission

Mission among the Blackfeet. Harold Harrod.

7. “Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation”

BLACKFEET HERITAGE, 1907-1908. Edited by Roxanne DeMarce. (Browning, MT: Blackfeet Heritage Program, 1980).

1998 BLACKFEET GENEAOLOGY, TREASURES AND GIFTS, edited by Roxanne DeMarce (Browning, MT: Blackfeet Heritage Program, 1980).

MODERN BLACKFEET; MONTANANS ON A RESERVATION, Malcolm McFee. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972).

SELF-EVERYTHING for POD

My sort of loose rule about this blog is that it’s supposed to be regional, but instead it’s acquiring a lot of subjects that ought to be on my “other” blog, merryscribbler.blogspot.com. But also part of doing this is to cut trail for other writers around here, especially Blackfeet, so I suppose I can justify writing about Lulu.com that way. I’ll just follow this cowpath or game trail or whatever it is. Certainly no superhighway.

The main confusion I see about using Lulu.com is that people constantly mistake PRINT on demand for PUBLISH on demand. Since their awareness of publishing was mostly a matter of pulling a book off the shelf in a bookstore, that’s the lens through which they see everything else. Writers, of course, cling to the moment in movies when the author gets a life-changing letter of acceptance for their manuscript. I thought “Peanuts” had a nice comment on that: Snoopy gets a letter of acceptance all right. It says, “We like your book and intend to print it. If anyone buys it, we’ll print another copy.” Snoopy is caught between triumph and despair. Aren’t we all?

Today’s publishing industry is a particularly complex and global phenomenon that needs a good deal of deconstruction for both writers and readers.

These are possible classical steps we read about in the biographies of writers, plus some comments which I make only as an observer so far.

GETTING IN THE DOOR

1. The publishing house actively seeks out writers. When I was teaching in Browning in the Sixties, the textbook rep actually came to me and suggested I write a book about Blackfeet for his publisher. Of course, in those days I didn’t BEGIN to know what I needed to about Blackfeet and would only have been able to produce the same kind of over-researched, under-analyzed and hackneyed work that already floods the market. But at least I had a sense of it being possible.

2. The slush-pile reader recognizes something in a manuscript and begins to play Maxwell Perkins inventing and shaping Thomas Wolf. This is one of the hardest fantasies to give up. “I’ll write a lot of off-the-top-of-my-head stuff, then someone more literate will give it shape, structure, decent spelling and grammar, and etc.” But these days that fantasy has been passed to the agents, often previously employed as editors and slush-pile readers. Some end up practically ghosting the book -- in fact, it’s a fine line. But one can always hire someone to edit one’s baggy old manuscript. (Few will do it for free.) THEN submit. Or self-print.

3. A famous writer will pick up one’s manuscript and make it all happen. After all, didn’t Carl Hiassen recognize “Aragon” and get it published? Hmmm. We may not be getting the whole story.

4. In the academic context, one’s submitted manuscript is run past a committee of three “impartial” scholars, sort of like a doctoral thesis. If you’ve ever tried to get a doctoral thesis off the ground, you’ll recognize the hazards. There’s no such thing as an impartial scholar -- the model is science, but even in scientific fields people are far less objective than they purport to be. If the field of the subject is small, one may be suppressed by a frank rival or by a person criticized in the text. “Given wisdom” trumps most everything. Even ordinary commercial publishers seem to operate as committees rather than insightful and dedicated individuals.

THE MANUSCRIPT IS COMPLETE AND ACCEPTED

5. I’m just learning about this. a) Copy editing -- spelling, grammar, fact-checking, redundancies and obscurities eliminated. b) Layout -- creating a decent-looking and readable page by combining pictures and words, setting margins, pagination, etc.

6. Then the actual printing, which in the past has been done in batches. Part of the art of publishing was estimating how big the batch should be. U of Calgary Press says they rarely print more than a thousand copies. The problem that crops up is that a mis-estimate means either having to tool up to print another batch or having to warehouse a lot of copies. Warehouses cost money and the government taxes the books. This has been addressed by persuading bookstores to load their shelves with books (another estimation problem), creating the practice of allowing bookstores to return all unsold copies. These become remainders or are pulped. Print-On-Demand has become a major breakthrough for regular publishing houses who want to avoid both over and under production of copies, especially when dealing with the “long-tail phenomenon” of having sporadic demand for backlist books that would ordinarily go out of print, be remaindered and/or pulped. BUT this puts those “long tail” books into competition with books that would otherwise replace them over time: why read an imitation Zane Grey if you can read the REAL Zane Grey?

DISTRIBUTION

7. On the model of commercial distribution, books have been sent to warehouses which supply the bookstores with microfiche for ordering. Google and Amazon, et al, have now created direct relationships between publisher and reader.

8. Shipping will become ever more important as gas becomes more expensive. However, print on demand means that there can be “Espresso” printing machines distributed through the country so that one goes into a kiosk at Starbucks or Kinko’s, requests the book, walks out with it in an hour or less. Ebooks mean that the books travel through wires and satellites over the Internet, lacking only a pretty binding. One can take the downloaded manuscript to Kinko’s and get it bound or put it in a 3-ring binder, or just file it. I predict that custom on-demand binding will become more important and that this can flower into an art form. But some kinds of reading are so ephemeral that they will never even be downloaded -- just read on a portable screen device and then discarded.

Other possibilities are that the book may be audio or that the print manuscript might be interrupted by video. How does one “lay out” a video? The nastier possibility is the IMpossibility of corraling the manuscript -- once digitized online it can be copied.

This tech explosion, which affects both formal publishing and self-publishing, is not confined to manuscripts. Writers and publishers should carefully watch the fields of music and film, both of which can be “self-published” now with very similar issues. The sharpest issue may turn out to be tech progress: the 8-track, cassette, CD, DVD, MP3 and... I know there are already other challengers out there. An actual book or painting or score never goes inaccessible, but these other media can be blocked by lack of the right equipment. I’ve already got material in early versions of Writenow software that I can’t open on a contemporary platform.

Distribution is dominated by the bar code and ISBN, at least in venues where lots of books are handled. If you’re selling a self-printed book at a fishing tackle store, they won’t mind so much. But then a self-distributor must establish a route and regularly check back by phone or in person. People who run fishing tackle stores expect that. It means you’ll have to keep careful records.

PROMOTION

Tech advances open ways of promoting writing, but they also shut out readers who only relate to paper books. (I don’t know what the percentage of the population is, but it’s probably higher than techies think.) Readings might reach them. Unless a person has built a reputation or relates to a specific group of people, it’s unlikely that a writer will be solicited to read, so you have to give them the idea. With liberal congregations like Unitarians, writers might be allowed to piggyback on services, maybe even "preach."

Posters, mailings, brochures, and so on might work. Websites for the tech-competent. Amazon is experimenting with several things: access to the first chapter or at least early pages, selling “shorts” for 49 cents to introduce authors. In a bookstore one does something similar by taking a book off the shelf.

Get on TV or the radio. Offer yourself to schools. Montana has a humanities “speaker’s bureau” that will book writers. Book festivals are good for promotion and also provide community with other authors.

You can pay someone to do promotion -- there are companies. Lulu.com lists some that they know will do a good job, which is in itself as important as the actual printing part that they do themselves.

So what I’m saying is that self-printing is only one step. One must do self-distribution, self-promotion, and -- what is much harder -- self-evaluation and self-editing. One must choose oneself and be one’s own agent, self-reassuring, self-networking, self-researching. It’s no longer possible to be a passionate inky wretch in a garret and expect much of anything, except to perhaps become a skilled, distinctive, very fine writer. How many of them are out there, undiscovered?

But if one does all this self-this-and-that, where is the time to develop as a writer?

YOUTHFUL DESIRES by Darrell Reimer

(Darrell Reimer also blogs as "whiskeyprajer.blogspot.com)

Remember “The Naked City?” The beginning and ending was always “there are ten million stories in the Naked City -- and this was just one of them.” Well, on Lulu.com in the lit and fiction category there are 10659 books so far -- and counting. So how on earth is a poor reader supposed to know where to start? Surely a person can’t be expected to make good choices on the basis of self-designed covers and first pages.

Always happy to be of service, I offer you this modest recommendation, a review. It’s what a blogger should do. But in the interest of the sort of transparency that the Bush administration avoids, I should say that I know Darrell Reimer. Only from his blogs, though, and his comments on other blogs. And, of course, he says very flattering things about MY POD Lulu.com productions. Anyway, he has a FINE book cover for “Youthful Desires,” his book, which was done by a friend who really is an artist.

Print-on-Demand (that’s what POD stands for) is a new development that means a person doesn’t have to wait around for a publisher to get a book into print. BUT it is only PRINT on demand -- not PUBLISH on demand, so one must either contract with a company to get the publicity out or depend upon friends and word-of-mouth. There is a good deal of prejudice out there against print-on-demand, because of the association with vanity presses -- quality has nothing to do with it, the author simply pays to have the book made. With Lulu.com the author doesn’t even have to pay -- just have enough computer skills to post the manuscript like a blog. Suddenly ANYONE can have a book out there for people to buy -- IF they know to buy it.

Other prejudices intrude. If I told you I just read a smashingly good anthology of short stories written by a “Canadian Mennonite preacher’s kid” you’d sigh. You’d say, “I never figured you for a person who read that Christian lit stuff.” We all know that Canadians are sort of mild-mannered and unarmed. Mennonites -- um, are those the ones with horses? And preacher’s kids who went to Bible School for college -- oh, well. Either holy terrors or mealy-mouthed little prigs, right?

Okay. Try this one. A house-husband who cooks in a creperie and used to be the vocalist for a rock band. Happily married. Knows about the basic drugs and the youth culture...

Forget all that. Stereotypes don’t apply here. These stories sting with contemporary dilemmas, ache with love broken by culture, tickle with small comforts. His short stories are not dashed off in incoherent moments of self-indulgence, but worked out over decades with much reflection and support from his “cobbers” as he terms his fellow writers. (He lists them on his blog and there I am, though I’m an old lady who was once a Unitarian minister and I don’t even know what a “cobber” IS! I mean, aside from other writers.) These seven stories were cherry-picked from those written over decades: dated 1991, ‘92, ‘93, 2001, 2000, 2002, and 2005.

The first, “Footnote to a Bread Recipe” (1991) is about sweet and innocent first love for a boy in a rural place where the old maiden ladies bake rich buns for him to take home to his sweetheart -- a gypsy girl who works for a lawyer! Her grandmother comes and sweeps her back into that life, displacing the boy into a cross-continent working drift until he ends up in a houseboat, gently rocking, with a new girl friend. But he can’t stop thinking about the bread baked by those old maiden ladies.

The second story, “Kissing Einstein” (1992) is about a child caught between warring parents and finding solace in a poster that refuses to just stay stuck to the wall.

The title story “Youthful Desires” (2000) explores the trade-off between lustful love and faithful friendship and hinges on a vision or trope or metaphor that has been preoccupying me ever since. These college people are on a complex campus that includes a monastery. The protagonist can see through a window into a large room, maybe a gymnasium. He (and his buddy sees it, too, so it’s not a hallucination -- maybe a folie a deux) sees what appears to be “flying nuns” in that room, wearing old-fashioned black robes and veils, seemingly dancing or doing some kind of Eastern judo, right off the floor and flingiing each other back and forth. What does it mean? Why is it so compelling? He goes over to find out who they are and asks the monk who comes to the door, but the monk, puzzled, says there are no nuns there. You’ll just have to read it to form your own opinion.

“The Spirit of ‘76” (2002) is about the hell-on-earth we all read about in Dear Abby. “Mike Mentzer, R.I.P.” (2001) is about the weight-lifting community and their great hero, whose death plunges them into sorrow. Darrell’s gift is both his empathy for ordinary guys in tough trade-offs and his grip on the big problems that theologians take on. In my opinion, that’s the heart of ministry AND the heart of literature: “Where do we come from? Where are we going? What must we do to be saved?”

Go to Lulu.com. Type in “Darrell Reimer” and/or “Youthful Desires.” If you’re entirely broke, return some bottles or something so you can at least download it through the library’s computer. I mean, this is not a book for rich people or stuck-up people. It’s about how to get by in a tough world.

A Photo Story about Stained Glass Windows

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/multimedia/churchart/index.html

Instead of a conventional blog this time, I think I'll just refer you on to the URL above. Stacy Byrne, a reporter, gathered facts and photos (many by Robin Loznak), to create a unique Easter story that's short on dogma, long on beauty.

If you fool around a bit, you'll probably find some other interesting photo stories, like what did or did not sell at the recent C.M. Russell Auction.

COME BACK, MARSHAL DILLON!

Since there is a constant muted but perceptible buzz about the contemporary shortage of Westerns, a statement in a TV review caught my eye. “He’s a 21st century Marshal Dillon,” says the executive producer of “The Unit,” which is written by David Mamet and former Delta-Force member Eric L. Haney. The producer means that Dennis Haysbert is big (6’4 1/2”) and has one of those deep Black Velvet voices. “He carries himself in a way that demands you...look at him.” He’s a “compassionate warrior.” If he were given an order to do something wrong, “He’d find some way around it.” Yeah, that sounds familiar.

When I was in seminary, we used to talk a lot about the “wilderness” meaning the space where one didn’t understand what to do, couldn’t interpret what was happening, but knew that danger was involved -- a test, an ordeal. In the Bible the wilderness is often the desert. Then we would talk about how in modern times the wilderness has moved to the inner city. Sophisticates would suggest that the true wilderness was the human heart and mind. Now it looks as though we’re back to the Biblical desert, but in modern times.

What we’ve considered the “Western” genre has had some strange and sometimes unacknowledged rules. For instance, if an Indian writes about the West, it’s not a Western -- it’s a Native American novel. If a white writes about an Indian, that’s a Western. A white cannot write a Native American novel or movie. Everyone understands that “Smoke Signals” and “Skins” are NA movies, but “The Missing” and “Dances with Wolves” are Westerns. Dennis Haysbert is black, Mamet is white, and I don’t know about Haney but his name sounds maybe Irish. So this is a Western, maybe sorta.

I wonder if there will be female Delta force soldiers. Probably not. Women can be side-kicks or evil adversaries, but rarely six-foot-tall and so on. But Westerns can morph into other genres and when they do, sometimes there can be the equivalent of the massive male, like Sigourney Weaver in her robot loader in "Aliens." Westerns really make good sci-fi (like Star Wars) because if outer space or a strange planet aren’t wilderness, nothing is. The moral dimension is there in Aliens: the scary creature is only trying to have babies and protect them. The heroine knows it, sees the justice of it, but sacrifices herself to save her own kind. It’s a very severe version of killing people who are different (usually darker) for the sake of one’s own kind.

The most recent Western I’ve read is Wheeler’s “The Final Tally,” a reissue of an early Eighties book. It’s interesting because the writer is just learning the rules at that point so the skeleton shows. The gimmick is that “Santiago Toole” is both a doctor (“above all do no harm”) and the sheriff (“enforce the laws”), which means his moral dilemmas are persistent and unresolvable. For instance, in this story there is a teenaged daughter whose father has made her into even more of a monster than the usual fifteen-year-old girl you’d like to slap silly. She’s about to shoot Santiago, but he has one of those female sidekicks, in this case a half-Shoshone wife named Mimi. Mimi shoots the girl in her gun hand.

The most successful Westerns always have an element of macabre humor (like ghetto Westerns, e.g. NYPD Blue), so when the girl’s finger is shot off, a magpie swoops down and steals it out of the grass. Santiago the Doctor heals the girl, there is a trial, she is convicted and Santiago the Sheriff hangs her. The author has some fun with the size issue. Santiago is not particularly big, but the good-guy cook is really big and the biggest one of all (collossal) is a pesky federal marshall who keeps trying to take over. So Santiago uses his wits -- well, the author’s wits, which sometimes appear in the story as good luck. There is also a judge who is the obligatory eccentric geezer (Gabby Hayes, Chill Wills) -- he makes little ammunitions loaded with sand and shoots flying insects.

How is this different from Deadwood, the sophisticate’s Western? A Western is supposed to be rural. Deadwood is Manhattan in the Black Hills. The forces and descriptions in a Western are about terrain, geology, weather, and large animals. I got this far in my thinking and went to the blogosphere for ideas. I found this: http://www.bfi.org.uk/education/teaching/western/pdf/bfi-edu-western.pdf/ It’s a guide to Western movies meant to be for teachers in English schools. It has some good bits.

“The Western has never been about that sliver of time between the American Civil War and the onset of modernity. It is, to use Jay Fred MacDonald's words, a "memory and vision of the deepest meaning of America." ... the genre itself is visionary, paring the past down to essence. Civilization is reduced to its bare particulars on the frontier, the edge of all things, so that each object that rises in the empty country acquires a weight in isolation verging on the symbolic.

“The Western is a man standing framed in a doorway, alone looking out at a desolate expanse; the line that separates the wilderness and the garden; the cost of violence; the moment at which society's foundations are laid over blood and sand.”

All of a sudden, I have an insight. Westerns are about the terrible price we are willing to pay in order to create a new country. Though it is often bloody and cynical, in the end the product is optimistic, an orderly human community in what was a wilderness. It is about looking forward to the vision and believing it. This is what makes it unique to the American West (and to outer space). Even people who are getting very frustrated with the wrong moves and the selfishness of some developments, still believe in this dream. (Which is why the “buffalo commons” idea -- giving up and bringing back the buffalo -- won’t work for a Western.)

Europeans don’t really have Westerns because their “orderly human community” vision dwells in the past, a lost Golden Age. Their stories are about the collapse of Empire and the heroism of those who tried to sustain it. They are about decadence, corruption, implosion. They are built on ruins. This is also why Native Americans don’t write Westerns -- their world was destroyed and must dwell in memory. Southerners don’t write Westerns -- not because of their climate, but because their plantation vision was destroyed and because it was founded on the moral evil of slaves who were not even allowed to have a vision of an idyllic past in Africa -- at least not until Roots.

If you accept this, then it is obvious that few are writing or reading Westerns because few are optimistic about the orderly human community vision in our future. The urban wilderness and the terrorist “other” are winning. Most attractive visions of the future are technology-dependent, which destroys the religious dimension that nature has become and even destroys nature itself. The movies that come closest to Westerns are the apocalyptic ones where the former civilization is wiped out, leaving a strong man and a few other survivors to begin again on the new frontier, trying to understand how to clear the wilderness which is often depicted as the debris of ruined cities.

Maybe most deadly of all the recent Western-killers has ironically been the actions of the true believers, who thought they could go into Iraq and create a new order friendly to our aims, brushing aside the local Iraqis in the same way as America has brushed aside the Native Americans. This has been a “cowboy” war in which victories are assumed to be easy for the righteous and the moral dilemmas of the frontier are simply ignored. We are driven by mercantile greed. “Deadwood” is a cynical anti-Western both because the goal of order is profit and because nature (the dependable religious dimension of Westerns) is excluded. The fat banker, the corrupt saloon keeper, and the homesteader-hating rancher were always the villains in the past, because they are community destroyers.

Are we healing the world (the doctor) or are we punishing the world (the sheriff)? And to what end? This is the moral dimension that needs to be explored and lately appears so unresolvable that no one can plot a true Western based on optimism. Lately we have so abused nature in the West that it would be fair to use the word “demonic.” Think of the hellish images created when the Italians (whose ideal world was ancient Rome) got their hands on the romantic American West.

Only if the writers are able to define a human community of the future that is more than International Corporate Oil interests will “The Unit,” be a Western. Perhaps the preservation of the beloved community back home can do the job (displaced from the future to a different continent) but only for Americans. Think Mamet is up to it? If not, we aren’t looking at Marshal Dillon. Instead we’ve got Colin Powell, unmanned by his own morality.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

The invention of movable type, a technological advance over monk-operated quill pens dipped in ink, made books so much less precious that Bibles were no longer chained to the pulpit for the exclusive use of the priests. Ordinary people read the Bible and inevitably said, “Wait a minute! It says here... but the priest never told us that!” The new knowledge led to the Protestant Reformation (and that prompted a Catholic Reformation) and the Euro world tilted on its axis. A monopoly and a corruption had been broken by movable type.

So now comes our new technology, digital internet supported by satellite. It changes the book, the radio, the television, the movies. It changes the bookstore, the record store, the local movies. It changes the writers, the financiers, the delivery systems. (My movies didn’t come today and I’m peeved!) The computer itself changes, so it’s no bigger than “a paperback book.”

In fact, paperback books were a technological innovation that changed readers, making books even cheaper than before, sold in grocery stores and gas stations, so that the stories interested a different level of people. They coincided with WWII and Korea, with the military “hurry-up-and-wait” habit that gave the ordinary guy a lot of time to read.

At my local library, there is a stack of paperback Westerns and mysteries, all well-worn, that come and go all the time without the librarian even bothering to check them in and out. They sell on the Internet for pennies, and stacks of them are in the back of used bookstores. A friend of mine here in East Glacier acquired a “short stack” of them and in the midst was one with my father’s name written into it, originally bought in the Fifties in Portland, Oregon, not sold until his death at the end of the Sixties. But today you can hardly give away a Western manuscript to a publisher. (Anyway, PETA will soon ask us to stop riding on horses as something that imposes on their dignity and anyway the writers seem hardly able figure out which end a bridle goes on.)

So now we come to the Internet, where the print flies all over the place. Arguably, blogs deposed a president and the Republican power-grab -- or you could say it did if those jokers hadn’t provided so much of the content themselves with mere email.

I blog a thousand words a day, which I’ve done for years, but no one read it because there was no Internet. In the Sixties I used to hear people say, “Mary Clearman Blew is the only female writer in Montana,” and I gnashed my teeth because I wrote all the time -- I just couldn’t get published. (Yesterday I bought an anthology of female writers in Montana. It’s a fat book.) Now I PUBLISH daily plus creating Print On Demand books. People worry about the world drowning in self-produced books and blogs, but I think the danger is not great. It’s a lot of work and takes a lot of time and you have to have something to say. (I heard a woman say, “I’d love to have a blog, but I just can’t think of anything to blog about.”) Now the bloggers are all making videos. (Some day they may say, "Prairie Mary is the only female still blogging in Montana.")

The technology alone is not enough to make change. It’s when there’s a suppressed need or purpose that the techie stuff grabs the imagination and the opportunity. And those needs and purposes are not always available to the predictors. Would they have predicted GNXP.com? Tech-sophisticated guys from India talking genome issues? Or who knew EMT’s can write the belt buckles off most of today’s mystery writers?

The effect on publishers and bookstores has been devastating. Rooms of authors have been thrown on their economic keisters. Foreign investors have been disgusted by the small return on their investment. Book advertising has shrunk to the point that major newspapers are closing down their book review sections. But libraries, at least those with tech-literate librarians, have been a little quicker on their feet. Strangely, it’s coffee roasters who have seen possibilities.

As I type, I’m streaming my public radio station, which is in Billings, a good long day’s drive away. The airwave transmitter has broken -- blown down again, probably, though it always seems to happen when they try to raise money so I sometimes think George Bush is jamming. Streaming works, though it requires an expensive machine, but if I’m streaming why not go to an all classical station to escape all this chatter? Say, a nice government-supported Brit radio station?

Consider US "public" radio, mostly supported by the educated and high income people (and I begin to see that the relationship between the two categories is reciprocal: that is, one must be high income to get educated which will earn you a high income) with their voluntary donations. Most of the rednecks and squareheads around here (snob alert!) are happy with their wailing country, Golden Fifties, and obscene hip hop, so long as the ag market and the weather are included. (Missing from NPR. I don’t care if it’s snowing in Billings anyway.) But the machinery of relaying the signal breaks down (high winds will do that, since the transmitters are up on ridges), so maybe all the highbrows should just go to streaming. Many of the listeners are cheapskates (like me) who never feed the kitty anyway. And public radio has been going more and more to chatter, less and less to solid music. YPRadio even took opera off of Saturdays. Since the Fifties I’ve listened to opera on Saturday afternoon. Every time I moved to a new place, I’d find the local public radio station so I could listen to Saturday opera while I pushed furniture around.

Public access airwaves television (which is not the same thing as highbrow public television) has been more of a local community (the paradigm from churches is “parish” -- everyone within certain boundaries -- rather than “gathered” like NPR) with taxes going to pay for the transmitter up on the hill. But the change from analogue to digital transmission and the availability of “pizza pan” satellite television or movies and TV series on DVD’s, has meant that the high-ridge transmitters around here have aged into uselessness. There isn’t really enough public pressure to get a new digital installation up there. Many people are still using their old analogue TV’s anyway. We’ll have to wait for the government-mandated switchover to see what really happens.

This is of great benefit to the economy of China, since we all have to keep retooling and buying new equipment. Good for Walmart.

But it changes the way we read and write. And some of the population has switched over to an aural culture: talk and music. Some of the best writers have gone to satellite TV. (Interesting article in the last Vanity Fair about the guy who wrote “The Sopranos.”) IPods accompany people to work -- you can listen as you drive but must take mass transit to read. For the REALLY techie among us, one can fold videos into written blogs. Even I can slip in a photo now and then. I’m told the Great Falls Tribune is anxious to become an eNewspaper-only so as to get out from under the burden of printing and distributed a daily paper. But there are people here making their living from that “burden.”

Consider this, both content and format:
The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated March 30, 2007
Helping Small Publishers Distribute Their Works Quickly, Cheaply, and in Multiple Formats
By DAVID GLENN
HAVE IT YOUR WAY: During the next few weeks, someone might wander into the Tattered Cover, the large independent bookstore in Denver, and ask for the latest book by Fatemeh Keshavarz, a professor of Persian and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. The new book, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than "Lolita" in Tehran (University of North Carolina Press), explores several aspects of contemporary Iranian culture and was designed in part as a corrective to Azar Nafisi's best-selling Reading "Lolita" in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random House), which Ms. Keshavarz views as simplistic.

If things go according to script, the clerk at the Tattered Cover will suavely tell our hypothetical customer, "Yes, we have Jasmine and Stars. Would you like that in hardcover, audio, e-book, or large print?"

Interesting to contemplate, but I have no conclusion yet. Yet it struck me that at least one of the NPR fund-raisers seemed to have NO consciousness of this kind of thing, still laboring along under assumptions that relate back to the Fifties when the term “high brow” was invented. Maybe “low brow” techies are the new “high brow.” They probably won’t be shocked by Lolita and they probably have a brother fighting in Iraq.

But if I wanted to peeve a nation, I'd simply blast their satellite feed. There goes TV, banking, ATM's, family communications, travel arrangements, etc. That's why I print out all my blogs and fill them.

FLESH: A RELIGIOUS PARADIGM

I’m bouncing off of horror and mayhem in the media, esp. the news, and Venter’s new DNA quest which discovered an ocean of alphabet soup. The frame I’m working with is the idea that existence is a flow, a process, and even what seem to be stable, concrete entities are not at all. Since I’m watching epics about India through my Netflix connection, I’m thinking about Alec Guinness impersonating a droll and resigned Hindoo holy man. And then there are those EMT blogs with their riveting accounts of saving -- or not -- lives by knowing how flesh operates to stay alive.

I don’t think I’d have much trouble convincing anyone that a person is flesh, so vulnerable to trauma and aging that it cannot be maintained much beyond a hundred years. If we know this, why are we so horrified by abuses of flesh -- is it the pain? Why do we so love to read things like those EMT blogs? And if we really believe in “souls” -- our own identity without flesh -- why are we so unresigned to death which only removed our flesh?

It takes so little to kill someone. I remember a story about a murderer who killed people by inserting a steel hatpin into the crack where the top vertabra attaches to the skull. It was a pre-MRI tale and took the coroner a while to figure out. (I’m always impressed that the coroner on shows like “Wire in the Blood” can come to such definite conclusions. And yet it is so difficult to confirm something obvious like what killed Anna Nicole Smith. Which is not to say that fixing the blame is any easier.)

I’m thinking about the article in the Smithsonian about the sculptor who produced masks to preserve the semblance of men mutilated in war. If it were only flesh, why does a change in shape change our attitude towards the people whom we love? And why do we have such different attitudes towards such different configurations of flesh? (Whiskey Prajer has posted a joke mudflap with a paunchy, gimme-cap-wearing old guy where the busty sweet young female usually is. Actually I think that guy is kinda cute...)

Anyway, what’s the difference between a cup of ocean brine and a human being except organization, community, a balance between differentiation and connection. Why should we want to separate and preserve one human or one species out of all this unrelenting torrent of beings? The difference is just a stem cell, right? The difference between the cysts that doctors sometimes cut out of people (a cyst is an encapsulated blob of cells that might have hair and teeth or other person-bits in it that have somehow lost the game-plan and didn’t know how to make a whole person) and a person or creature with the uniquely shaped and configured cells of muscle, bone, brain and gut -- all nicely arranged the way they’re supposed to be, so that they function.

I read the blog called GNXP.org almost daily though I have to struggle to understand it. I see there that the scientists have managed to implant the single gene that allows mammals to see the color red into a mouse, which normally doesn’t have that gene. Sure enough, tests showed that the mouse recognized red. So will we find a gene for infrared and implant it into humans who will then be able to see in the dark? Can ultraviolet be far behind? Will this stand the art world on its ear? What will it “feel” like to see these extra-spectrum colors? What does it feel like now to people who are color-blind, tone-deaf? Are they lesser? Can we implant some colors and sounds for them? The GNXP guys (85 to 90% male -- quite a few from India) are always searching for “G” which is what they call intelligence instead of the battered old concept of IQ. They are not very secretly hoping there is a gene for G and they have it, even though the evidence so far is that it takes a lot of genes working together in a favorable environment (nutritionally at least) to create a high G. (Better ocean, better fish.)

I read about memory and the theories about how those sensations are encoded in the brain. (Muscle memory as well?) Will there come a day when they can stick a head in one of those things that looks like a clothesdryer and say, “Look, here is the smell of the bakery in the little hamlet of Cannon Beach, Oregon, in September, 1977. This part here is fresh Haystack Bread, and this code is for iodine and kelp.” Heck, I don’t need code. I can summon it up any time I want. But how does it work?

I don’t believe in souls. I believe in identity. But I believe that it is a process, a trajectory as much as its container, my body, is. A dance on a dancing stage. So how do I know who I am? How do others recognize me? Pheromones? Do pheromones remain unchanged while we grow fatter and thinner, older (always older -- never younger.)

If we were both in Cannon Beach in September, 1977, would we have the same memory molecules in our different brains? Or does Haystack Bread smell different to you? How do we know that when a mouse sees red, it sees the same color we do? How do we know we’re different people but in the same world at the same time? And how did we get so attached to each other? OR... so angry with each other.

Alec Guinness’s Hindoo character says that everything is pre-ordained and happens as it was meant to all along, no matter what we do. So if I try to make this world one way and you try to make it another, it doesn’t really matter because it will be the way it will be, as it was already ordained all along. (He says God but I don’t believe in God.) So is there any use in trying to save each other? If you were meant to do that, you will. Otherwise, you won’t, and no blame attached. I don’t think I like this. Let’s go back.

Molecular coding, DNA, controls the way your egg/sperm combo unfolds in the world, within the limits of that world. One of the codes, which we never see, determines how much energy any entity will have to spend in the world and evolution has taught each species in its particular world how to spend its energy. We’re told that each species has a quota to spend. So David Quammen has explained to us why salmon die after they spawn: it’s because they’ve spent their whole lives growing in the challenging world of that seething ocean and then struggling up a tumbling mountain stream to get to the very place they hatched, guiding themselves always by pheromones in the water. No more energy is left after that. Does this mean that if I write books with all my strength and ability, I will die after the last one? Well, obviously, or it wouldn’t be the last one, would it? Have I spent my energy on too much trivia when I ought to have saved it for now? Or am I holding back?

If I come to someone who is dying, should I do my best to be like an EMT and try to save them? But what if the whole world is dying? Of course it is. All along the edges where the global warming is changing the ecology, the trees are dying, the bees are dying. Because we’ve made this planet into one big ecology where the whole meshing of DNA bits must be recalculated and reintegrated, because the barriers of sea and mountain that created small protected islands are all breached, the flowers are blooming without bees and the cranes are flying without frogs. But we are so ATTACHED! How can we keep from grieving?

And how can we be sure we won’t be extinguished pretty soon ourselves, souls or no souls -- God or no God. Alec’s Hindoo would say, “Doesn’t matter. If it’s meant to be, it will happen.” After all, the planet will go on without us. Without us messing everything up, the DNA can go back to unfolding without any Petri dishes. Then will there be a place somewhere on the planet that “remembers” Cannon Beach in September? Has to be -- that moment has unfolded on and on and on and on...

Some scientists are saying that every possible unfolding is happening in parallel. Somewhere there is a galaxy with no earth, in another there is an earth that evolved humans who protected their planet. And another that performed a “save” at the last moment. We can only hope we’re on the right unfolding string.

I consider these religious questions and they do have a moral content. To me, a lot of the pattern is intensity. But does that mean I’ll be used up sooner or persist longer? Alec? “It is already decided.” I know two things for sure: I’m not alone and I won’t be “lost,” just transformed.

The Bible has two big paradigms in it. The Old Testament one says all the world is tribes, oases and kings/patriarchs. The New Testament one is the family: mother, father and child. The line between the two is blurred. But this new scientific worldview based on alphabet soup, all astir and recombinant, is a major break. It comforts me, but will it take hold on a planet? Alec?

"A LITERARY MEMOIR"

This is what you want to look for. That's Richard S. Wheeler, not Cary Grant. And he says he did NOT hob-nob with Olivia Havilland. Sure, Richard. Define "hob-nob."

AN ACCIDENTAL NOVELIST: A LITERARY MEMOIR by Richard S. Wheeler

Richard S. Wheeler, who succeeds at the impossible task of making a living by writing Westerns, has written “A Literary Memoir” which describes how he “climbed the mast of a sinking ship.” It is well-worth reading, but there is a caveat. Asking Wheeler about personal information is a little like asking Cary Grant whom he slept with last night and whether that person was any good in the sack. The reaction is first stunned silence, and then a change of subject. You’ll get roughly the same reaction if you try to dish dirt about the evil devils known to be out there in the book world. Wheeler is a gentleman.

You can tell by looking at him. No dung-caked boots, no broad-brimmed hat, no worn-out jeans. Rather, the garb of a midwestern editor or newspaperman, both of which he has been: navy blue blazer, gray flannel slacks, stingy brim hat. Not that he couldn’t ride a horse if he had to, and not that he hasn’t had long patches of Scott Fitzgerald life in the early days, but his intention now is to stay warm, keep the house paid up, listen to others spin the yarns, and keep on writing. As he notes, sixty books are a plenty good enough scope into his innards. If you can’t figure it out, check your own innards. (That’s my advice. He would never say anything so rude.)

It appears from the outside as though he (as my uncle said about my cousin) “started at the top and worked his way down.” That is, at university he set out to be a pundit (“One who is or assumes the part of an expert in making pronouncements, criticisms, predictions, etc.”) and made a pretty good stab at it, writing editorials. Of course, it’s much easier to be a pundit if you’re in your twenties, but gradually, his age and inexperience betrayed him. There were a couple of flings with Hollywood, where he hobnobbed with Olivia deHaviland and the like while he tried to sell screenplays or at least ghost a few star memoirs. (That’s the stuff we want to know about, Richard!) But all the pretensions and aspirations were smashed when his first marriage hit the wall and he was found weeping and incoherent at his desk.

After that, the world kept reconfiguring around him except that he held on to the idea that he loved the West, esp. around Santa Fe and Billings. When he hit the very lowest point, he began to write Westerns because he knew the territory. But because during his editing years he was working on major intellectual books and during his years as an acquiring editor he read tons of Westerns, he managed to produce a kind of crossbreed: thoughtful and atypical Westerns.

“Westerns” are not considered to be highclass and the la-di-dah do not read them. Books about the West are piled in two heaps, one rather pretentiously called “literature” where the most popular writers are people like Cormac McCarthy who go out of their way to depict degraded gruesomeness or Ed Abbey who arguably advocates terrorism. The other is called “genre” and over there people just shoot each other all the time. Both use a lot of history.

So here’s Richard, writing “sweaty” genre stuff, as though it were literature. And here he is as a person, no longer pretentious and never prepared to scoff at those struggling to survive, since he’s been there, done that. His own development as a person was on an ascending gradient as his pundit quotient sharply declined. Only his wardrobe didn’t change.

And again he’s done a crossover into historical biography, generally considered literature. But he has such loyalty to the Western Writers of America, genre people in general, that he doesn’t make a fuss about it. In another of those unaccountable reconfigurations, Western genre literature has been invaded by all sorts of even lower-prestige self-publishers and dabblers in porn and etc. How far up the mast can a guy go?

The crow’s nest, right? The point on the ship where one can see far and maybe sight land. So when he writes a book about it -- even though it might better be called “The Reluctant Memoirist” -- we should pay attention.

A couple of summers ago, broke and a little confused myself, I set out to read as many genre Westerns as I could -- hadn’t done that since Zane Grey -- since I already had read shelves of trendy Western Literature. After I read the first Wheeler Western, I wrote him a fan letter. Back came a box of 17 Wheeler books. I read ‘em all. They confirmed what I already suspected: some genre Westerns are a heckuva lot better than some fancy WL and some admired WL is below the usual genre standard. I wrote 17 reviews, posted them on Amazon, and the rest is a friendship.

There are two ways Wheeler shines. One comes, I think, from his years in Method acting classes in Hollywood, which I also have in my background. (Neither one of us acts or intends to.) Method acting is not about mumbling, as is popularly supposed, but rather is about trying to recapture a moment of the past by recalling the sensory record of that time: smell, taste, color, temperature, and whatever else can be brought back. For some physiological reason, this triggers in the actor the emotion of that moment in a way so vivid that an onlooker is convinced of its authenticity. “Method” works in writing as well as acting, and gives Wheeler access to the interior of his characters, besides making his settings real.

The other way is that his general educational background is so broad and his own experience is so deep, he’s able to find the atypical that is often overlooked. In the art world the example might be Mian Situ’s evocation of the Chinese in the West. Indeed, in print we’ve had scholarly inquiries into women, children, blacks, Jews and Hispanics in the West, all respected WL categories, but Wheeler put them into genre tales.

The next step along these two lines was historical biography: the recovery of the conjectured interior life of Meriwether Lewis, Buffalo Bill, Bat Masterson, Thomas Francis Meagherm and Doctor John McLoughlin, the “White-Headed Eagle.” This enterprise rather challenged those history buffs who feel they have custody of the myths and do not want them changed.

How did he make it? What was his final secret? Friendship. Generosity. The Cary Grant factor. In many ways this book is an homage to all the writers and editors and agents who stick together, preserve their ideals, form a community of the solitary because they are all in the same boat. Pundits don’t always think of that.

But I'll try my hand at being a pundit. In Wheeler's real life he has married his genre approach to high-class Western Literature in the most literal way: marrying Sue Hart, who is a professor of Western Literature at the Eastern University of Montana. I predict that the two categories of writing about the West will find some kind of marriage as well.

EMERGENCY RESPONSE BLOGS

Some years ago a televison producer did a survey of a “real life” show that sent camera crews along with emergency responders on various 911 calls and then followed through the first aid and transport to the hospital or whatever. They did car crashes, fires, violent quarrels, persons unconscious and so on. When the producers got the results of their survey to see who was watching the shows, they were startled to find that their most faithful watchers were pre-schoolers! (Don’t ask me how they did their survey, since most of these little folks could neither read nor write.)

These little guys were carefully noting what to do, remembering all the safety tips about handling dynamite or storing gasoline or preventing choking, though they were too small to ever perform a Heimlich Maneuver on any being bigger than a cat and not heavy enough to do chest compressions. Sometimes they COULD dial a phone and even knew their address. They CAN push OnStar in one of those communicating cars. Or sometimes a neighbor will sense trouble and request a welfare check, whereupon the ambulance crew might find a tiny mite next to his unconscious or even dead mother, a glass of water next to her head and a blanket unevenly pulled over her.

I can barely remember being the age when I was confident of my ability to cope with any emergency (when I wasn’t having ghastly nightmares) and officiously instructed others what to do. There was a right way for everything and people ought to do it, I thought. A comforting idea. Maybe this was exaggerated in part because I was born in 1939 and grew up hearing about the patriotic derring-do of soldiers, all failures and most tragedies being muted by newsreels and on the radio for the sake of an illusion of Churchillian omnipotence. As an adult it took me some effort to get over the grandiosity of thinking I could fix things and immediately plunging in to set the situation right. It was a handicap to a ministry, where humility and caution are far more helpful. But the same qualities were very helpful when I was an animal control officer and obligated to intervene.

So when someone sent me a blog entry about the results of an ostrich attack (death by disembowelment), I was eager to see what the emergency responder did and whether it worked. (They transported the bodies and the police shot the bird in self-defense, which resolved the danger.) This has turned out to be the doorway to a whole array of blogs written by emergency responders in the most vivid prose. As it turns out, they are more likely to be dealing with poor, old, addicted people than ostriches, so a social element enters into it. Some of these bloggers are very right-wing, law-and-order people -- just as I was as a little child -- but I probably have too much exposure to bleeding-heart liberals already, so it's a good corrective. If I saw what they see, dealt with what they must handle, and was as frustrated by stupid regulations as they are, I’d be a lot more like them.

In addition to blogging and partly due to POD technology, many of these people are selling books either composed of their blogs or along similar lines. If I had the money, I'd create me a library -- or at least a shelf -- of these books even though my days as an emergency responder are over. They're great story material and some are better written than most best sellers.

One of my shortcomings as a blogger is not linking enough, so I’ll link with some of my regular check-ins below. But it’s quite possible, once a person has found the first one, to blog-hop across a dozen of them, all various in tone and content. Some read like the most hard-nosed noir novels, especially the ones in the South where the tropical creepy-crawlies abound and people stay up through the relatively cool dark nights, getting into trouble. Or the ones in the city ghettoes where the dispatcher tries to urge caution and waiting for backup as two guys venture into collapsing buildings without enough information. On the other hand, there are episodes of enormous built-in comedy when dealing with naked people, over-amorous people, and the inevitable people who get their big toes stuck in the bathtub faucet for lack of anything better to do.

But there are also serious entries about procedures, equipment, and workshops that mean some people are taking their role professionally and striving to become ever more competent. Most moving to me are the stories about teamwork in which medics, cops, and bystanders collaborate to save an impossible situation. Painful to read are the ones that try to express the exhaustion, sordid working conditions, mocking, and contempt that come their way, especially in down times when they’ve tried to find some quiet corner to catch a few winks or eat a sandwich in a smelly, worn vehicle.

Perhaps the National Animal Control Association will trigger some of these kinds of blogsites for animal control officers, or maybe they’re out there and I just haven’t found the right links. The public rarely knows what really goes on in their “nabe” unless they hang by the scanner listening to dispatchers (and even then they don’t really see and smell the scene) or live in a place like a village or a reservation where nothing happens unobserved and one's neighbors might be the interveners.

This is probably the reason why so many of our laws and regulations are inhumane (like closing down the feeding of street people or evading emergency services in ritzy hospitals or denying various services to illegal immigrants or children) or simply unrealistic (like trying to legislate obsessive/compulsive old alcoholics out of keeping too many animals). The newspapers like happy-talk about sexy singles or athletic retirees. The television wants something really exceptional with a visual dimension they can play over and over, like a plane crash.

Our picture of the world has developed a serious distance from the reality of the world. Hopefully bloggers who “tell it like it is” can bring us back to our senses as well as teaching us what to do in situations we hope we’ll never face. After all, only a small number of us have OnStar and all they do is call 911. A three-year old could do that.

(I couldn't make these link, but maybe the URL is better anyway.)

ambulancedriverfiles.blogspot.com
rockymountainmedic.blogspot.com
thelawdogfiles.blogspot.com
medicscribe.blogspot.com
Paramedic Blog (phillydan.spaces.live.com/PersonalSpace)

"DIABETES FOR DUMMIES" IS FOR ME!

When I was recently in Great Falls, I strolled through the bookstore as usual (mostly on my way to the magazines) and stopped idly when I saw a copy of “Diabetes for Dummies” at 40% off, probably because it was published in 2004 (2nd edition) and diabetes research travels so fast that there must be another edition out by now. It was EXACTLY the book I needed! The author was Alan L. Rubin, MD, who is not afraid to tell it like it is. I have to keep saying to doctors, “I am NOT STUPID!” but ironically, Dr. Rubin doesn’t think I am.

The biggest problem I seem to have when talking to doctors about my diabetes is that they try to manage me, partly by not telling me complexifications and if/then exceptions (assuming that I won't be able to handle them), and partly by trying to scare me into compliance with their standards. (Their standards do not necessarily agree with each other, which is a major part of the problem.) The second biggest problem is that they were educated some years ago and since then their biggest source of information has been some pharm salesman. They can hardly keep from resenting a patient who gets on the Internet and raises questions or studies they’ve never heard of. And they stubbornly cling to the idea that it’s all about sugar. I suppose they’ve developed this nasty practice because many people’s response to diabetes is denial.

Apart from the doctor, my problem has been trying to understand what my blood glucose readings should be and WHY? WHY, WHY, WHY everything! (Doctors hate that. Nurses aren’t real tolerant of questions either.) Everything in diabetes depends upon the patient to consistently take readings, record them, and adjust accordingly. (Unless you live with your mom or have a particularly protective housemate.) The very essence of the problem is that normal mammal bodies do that automatically, but diabetes means the monitor is broken and the conscious mind must take over.

Establishing a new routine (blood stabs, pills, exercise, etc.) takes energy and memory. If one is confused, angry, depressed, or inclined to just check-out -- things don’t go well. I don’t know how drunks, or ancient or demented people can survive -- maybe they can’t. I joked that if the cats cared as much about my blood sugar as much as they did about their cat food level, I’d have it made. They DO wake me up, keep me on a schedule, etc. If they were dogs, they might even force some exercise on me. The doctor was not amused. She did not suggest what I am considering: an alarm wrist watch. If you’ve ever been around people with HIV or AIDS, which I have, you’ll be aware of their alarm pill boxes. Good for people like me who sit down at the computer with a book and look up hours later.

The strategy of not telling me things, whether I need to know them or not -- and who are THEY to decide whether I need to know? -- and then -- going in the opposite direction, threatening me with ghastly fates like blindness or amputation, makes me shriekingly angry and breaks trust, so that I go back to the Internet with renewed determination to just rely on myself.

“Diabetes for Dummies” does not make me angry. Dr. Rubin explains that the idea is to stay as close to 100 blood glucose as possible, with a little wiggle up to 120 and down to 80. One of the myths he addresses is the idea that if one is in perfect control, one's readings will always be perfect. BUT he is the first to say that going below 80 is not a good idea and that if one tends to go that low or lower, there is some risk of slipping into incoherence without realizing it. In my case, I found the prospect so scary that I kept my blood sugar a little higher than I probably ought to have.

When I was first given a prescription the doctor was reacting to my blood sugar, which was over 300 but she didn’t TELL me that. She just said, “Take this pill and this pill, etc.” When I got home and started the regime, my blood sugar plunged and the little meter got all excited. I called the doctor’s office, but of course she was busy. The nurse said, “What do you want US to do?”

“How do I know?” I asked. “I’ve only just been diagnosed.” She came back with a complicated set of directions about cutting pills in half. I didn’t even know the names of the pills or the routine, so I asked questions. Nurse left, nurse returned, said (exasperated), “Oh, just don’t take ANY meds except for high blood pressure.” So that’s what I did for the next six months. Reading and pamphlets told me to lose weight, eat no sugar and few carbs, go to low-glycemic foods. That worked. At least I thought it worked.

Then suddenly I got a call summoning me for a doctor’s appointment. It was just before Christmas and the roads were bad. “What is it FOR?” “I don’t know. I just do what I’m told.” It must have been a six-month checkup. I had my usual cheese and toast breakfast. Maybe two slices instead of one, since I didn't know when I could get lunch.

When the doctor saw me she was visibly upset and rather angry. Later it developed that my urine test showed sugar in my urine, which is bad, because if one’s kidneys must deal with much sugar, it damages them. (I read it in "D for D"!) Thus began a complicated cat-and-mouse game of questions and guarded answers, her trying to figure out what I was REALLY doing (sugar buns, jam on my toast?) and me trying to find out what she was REALLY asking. It turned out that I WAS doing things wrong, to some degree, even though my A1c test showed I was within the recommended boundaries. But there were exchanges that still ring in my ears: “How can I be throwing sugar in my urine when my blood glucose tests are all where they ought to be?” “Because you’re deliberately taking readings only when you know they’ll be good.” It wasn’t true.

What “D for D” has done is put me in position to know when I’m being manipulated. Now to find a doctor who won’t manipulate, particularly when their strategy is “everyone else is doing it,” and “most people” and “all the other gals like you...” These quotes are from more than one doctor. In this part of the world, one resists authority figures but does what similar people around one are doing. If everyone is mowing their lawn, you should get out there, too. So the doc says, “Everyone is taking this pill!” Conformity equals morality.

In the City of Portland I worked as a clerical specialist. My desk was pushed up against another desk belonging to another clerical specialist so I could cover for her. She was a middle-aged black single mother dying of diabetes. She’d already had rejected one kidney transplant, couldn’t find another match and was automatically at the bottom of the list because of the rejection, and was now dependent on peritoneal self-dialysis which she did in the lunch room while she ate her sandwich. The City would not give her a disability pension and her fellow clerks had already donated weeks of extra vacation to preserve her salary. Many days she would simply put her head on her desk and moan. This to me is diabetes. I don’t need to be threatened. Many of my Blackfeet friends have died of diabetes. I know it can be deadly.

I need reassurance and so does my diabetic buddy here in town. But neither of us can find a doctor who is straightforward and informed on the subject. Great Falls has plastic surgeons and bariatric doctors, but no diabetes specialist or dermatologist (in spite of high skin cancer rates). If our readings go up to 140 or 150, we wonder if we’ve just knocked a month off our life-spans or endangered our toes. If they went up to 200 we’d head to the emergency room! But how low can we go before we pass out? “D for D” says, “Oh, most people would agree that 60 is about the lowest you should go.” I’ve only gone that low twice in a year. Here’s a comparison: The rules for pilots are:
1. No more than one hypoglycemic loss of consciousness in the previous five years and one year of stability after that one incident.
2. Evaluation by a specialist every three months and multiple readings every day.
3. Carrying a meter in flight along with quick treatment stuff for hypoglycemia. A test showing a reading between 100 and 300 (What? I thought your head would blow off at 300!!) a half hour before takeoff, every hour of the flight, and a half-hour before landing!

Well, that puts it into perspective, doesn’t it? That’s got to be TIGHT and state of the art. (Don’t bother to do this if you’re an ex-governor of South Dakota and might need an excuse for a fatal traffic accident.) Incidentally, if you’re injecting insulin, there are special regs for even being a PASSENGER and carrying the equipment. (You’d better ask before you fly!) And if you’re diabetic, you can’t be in the military in the US, but you can in other countries. Don’t let THAT get around! And Doc Rubin is gutsy enough to give the levels that are probably “maintaining” for someone who will die in a few months as opposed to levels for someone who will most likely recover from whatever extra problem is weighing on them.

“D for D” has a section about kids, a section about the elderly, factoids like urine showing “spilled sugar” when the sugar reading is over 180, which is a level that could cause damage. (It didn’t in me, according to the kidney function test.) 180 is supposed to be the top limit after a meal, according to the ADA info.

Dr. Rubin is not afraid to say that information is so slippery and controversial that one can’t really trust even the fancy organizations, even ADA. (And I’ve read some interesting things about their vulnerability to high-powered pharm forces and their supposed scientific tests.) He’s loose enough to say that if someone presses food on you that you are socially obliged to eat (birthday cake just for you), you can probably get away with little damage by nibbling a corner, mushing the rest of it up and hiding it under the napkin. (Don’t slip it to the dog! Do you want the dog to develop diabetes!!) If you’re going to a fancy business meeting or a hot date in a high class restaurant, go to that place the day before and study the menu -- maybe confer with the staff. If it’s really high class, they’ll probably have a diabetic option anyway. Waiters can coach you.

These are the kinds of things a person really wants to know. Like, can I take aspirin? Yes, but it may push you towards lower readings than usual. Is cinnamon really helpful? Looks good, and what can it hurt? Will repeatedly getting woozy from hypoglycemia give you Alzheimers or kill brain cells? No. And he insists again and again that every doctor exam should include feet. In fact, there’s a little fiber one can buy that you can use to test the bottom of your feet for sensitivity, a good monitoring step. And he’ll GIVE you lots of good websites to visit.

His best advice to exercise your sense of humor as much as possible. I sure hear THAT!

SENATOR BUTCHER, BRASH AND BLUNDERING

Brashly (which may or may not be a character flaw, but is certainly characteristic of me), I declared in the matter of Ed Butcher that he simply has an old-fashioned notion of Indian issues and that thought about Indians has been totally revolutionized in the past few decades. So now I’d better back that claim up with some specifics.

Obviously, the post-modern and post-colonial thought of certain French philosophers (French-speaking anyway, though some of them seem to have come from French-oppressed colonies like Algeria) have stood everything on its head and made the victims into the prevailers . Moral force has been brought to bear as a way of breaking up the sentimentalization, Disneyfication, victimization, stereotyping, exploitation, and other ways of pushing around the “little people.” Indians have demanded the right to speak for themselves, to profit from the ideas that emerge from their cultures, and to “gate-keep” against all the officials who have come to take advantage of a captive population, whether in order to write books, to exercise their own ideas of eugenics (sterilizing women, adopting out Indian children to whites), to missionize (whether Catholics operating boarding schools or Pentacostals exploiting desperate people or Bahai expanding their franchise), to establish privilege for themselves and to generally handle real people as though they had no feelings and as though it were a moral entitlement over lesser follks.

In 1990 this was all unknown to me, though I’d lived on the Blackfeet Reservation for more than a decade, when I signed on to a listserv (Reznet -- dunno whether it’s still in existence) that was Indians only. Wow, did I get my consciousness raised in a hurry! The parallel movement was feminism or Black empowerment and included emotional intensity much in excess of anything I knew about Indians except in a context of violence. The people I knew on the rez were more inclined to withdraw than to confront. On this list there was so much political flaming, it was hard to tell from the usual level of indignation. I wasn’t supposed to be on the list (because it was just for Indians) and part of the importance of it was that it WAS a closed and safe community of self-identified Native Americans.

A big component of this ongoing stream was the “plastic shaman hunting.” The idea was to find and identify any white person who illegimately claimed to be or to have privileged knowledge of Indians. This search and destroy operation was meant to certify the plastic-shaman-hunter as a genuine Indian, rather like killing someone in order to be admitted to a gang. It was relentless, sometimes unfair, often deserved, and echoed in the academic community where people struggled to define and legitimate the identity of a Native American -- indeed, even what to call them. This embroiled people like Brooke Medicine Shield (whose books sell like hotcakes), Ward Churchill (honorary Indian), and even much-loved people like Louise Erdrich or James Welch. (Interestingly, the most war-like let Carter Revard -- raised Osage but genetically white and always a gentle healer -- completely off the hook and certainly no one ever even THOUGHT of implying that Adrian Louis was not Indian, for opposite reasons. I mean, if he’s NOT Indian, there’s no such thing!)

Another offshoot of this school of thought was Lisa Mittens, an NA librarian, trying to evaluate books about Indians in terms of a raised consciousness. (Oyate) Too many people tried to make Indians into a proper subject for children, or equated Indians with animals (interesting, but unaccountable and Other), or reduced them to sentimental morality tales. (“The Education of Little Tree.”) This is very parallel with rethinking about books about women. The work goes on, notably with the challenging of Indians as sports mascots for schools.

Quite apart from that is the revolution of thought about life in plants, animals and humans that has resulted from the deciphering of DNA. Creatures turned out to be from entirely different categories than one would think from looking at them. It became clear that the genome was “cumulative” and that even the genome of humans included genes for basic processes of life that developed in fungus. American Indians had earlier been grouped by blood type as “Asian,” which many of them understood as a slander that said they were “Japs” (esp. those who fought in WWII) or “Gooks” (a later generation). Now genome analysis can say much more about relationships, patterns of migration, and so on. But Indians, who were early labeled by genetic descent and “blood quantum,” are deeply wary about such investigations. Too often their physical being is treated as “artifacts,” put on shelves and in drawers, or displayed. Repatriation has been shocking because it revealed how much of Indians’ physical substance was in museums -- not their belongings, but the bones of their grandmothers. Still, what DNA evidence suggests is -- in some cases -- not what anyone expected. A good example is the Kennewick Man, whose skull shape was not “typical” of Indians, causing everyone to jump to the conclusion that a white man was wandering around Indian country thousands of years ago. Now everyone is trying to figure out what a “tribe” or a “race” really is and what it means and whether one is “better” than another.

The evidence of “paleoIndians” is still slowly mounting up. The conventional assumption was that people walked to the Americas over the Bering Straits at a time when the ocean was lower. When VERY ancient meat as well as knotted ropes were found preserved in peat on the South American coast, the assumption of dates and means were challenged. It suddenly became clear that “boat-hoppers” could have followed the ENTIRE Pacific coast line in pursuit of seals or whales. There was no reason why people couldn’t have crossed east-to-west through Greenland. If one looks at the planet with the north pole in the middle -- which we tend to assume is “up” -- it’s clear that whether the Arctic Sea is open (navigable by small boats) or frozen (navigable by dog teams) it is not an impenetrable barrier. In fact, there is a distinct circumpolar culture: certain artifacts, ideas about shamans, the use of sweetgrass, bear cults, and so on. Now the whole idea of the human populating of the Americas is that it was plural, repeated, had its roots in various populations, and was “hydraulic” and “dynamic” once it got here -- different groups pushing people around or reacting to the changing climate. The books on these subjects are many and powerful.

One of the most amazing studies I’ve seen is about the DNA of disease, which mutates and forms its own “tribes.” The routes it takes across the continents and through populations tells a story. The amount of information one can draw from this is a revelation and does not depend on human DNA at all. (Sometimes it’s rather entertaining, as on the riveting blog of John Hawkes when he posts studies about such things as how humans first caught body lice by sleeping in gorilla nests -- without the gorilla.)

Another source of change in regards to Indians is what is sometimes called “queer studies” and other times, more subtly, called “gender studies.” Another consciousness-raising enterprise, this seeks to explore our assumptions about how physical sex, emotional desire, economic conditions (often driven by environment or history) define men and women and those who awkwardly fall in between. People have long been fascinated by Native American arrangements that allow men to identify with women and assume their role, though it’s been hard for them to find a proper name or to understand what was really going on. (They assume it must be about fucking, which is not such a preoccupation in cultures less Puritanical.) “Two-spirited” contemporary Indian people have mixed this research with their own modern situation and produced a point of view that is both tolerant and demanding.

Satellite imaging has opened another source of information that is a window into the past. The Northern Piegan have spent several summers using GIS instruments and their own common sense to trace out habitual paths across the northern prairie. They figure out how far a band with only dogs could travel in a day, what would be the motivation (Berries ripe? Animal migration?), what sort of route a dog pulling a travois and a woman wearing a pack might take (not through heavy brush, not down or up a steep incline), in order to find campsites and prove them with evidence of fires, bones, vegetation and so on. Once found, the camp is noted via GIS and computers can reel out huge maps of the locations which, joined, reveal trails. Two main routes for dogs were found, then a third that had much longer spaces between camps but also stopped where there was water and grazing for horses. This provides new insight about people who have been using the “Head-Smashed-In” piskun since before the Pyramids were built.

As all this scientific re-framing has been proceeding, contemporary reservation dwellers have been quietly doing what more privileged and educated urban whites have not done: had children. And they have been joined by hispanics (whom everyone forgets are Indians, too) and -- to a muted extent -- blacks. They are now a major political force and they know it. This is where any Montana politician can make a major blunder. Someone like Butcher can no longer put down or exclude Indians on grounds that they are “vanished,” “irrelevant,” “ignorant,” or not involved. Even a Republican can expect walking papers at the next election.

Because now Indians have blogs, Google, websites, links, podcasts, list servs, and all the new cyber-machinery of connecting, talking, proposing, listing and monitoring. One can’t go carelessly shooting off one’s mouth in a bar or sending attack mail to individuals without the whole world knowing about it in a matter of hours.

Being brash myself, I have a certain amount of sympathy for Ed Butcher. But I’m dubious about his political skills.

AN INDIGENOUS ANTHOLOGY

Date: March 20, 2007
From: Gary H. Dunham
Subject: CFP: Evolving Relationships Between Indigenous Communities and Publishers

Dear colleagues,

I am putting together an anthology that explores the complex and rapidly evolving relationship between indigenous communities and publishers; please see the summary below. I am particularly interested in contributions from members of those indigenous communities who have dealt directly with publishers without a scholar as mediator or go-between. Your experiences and assessments are welcome.

Best,
Gary


Indigenous Communities and Publishers

Increasingly in recent years, organizations and individuals within a growing number of indigenous communities have set aside working with outside scholars and sought instead to publish themselves the results of ongoing historical, cultural, and linguistic research and preservation efforts. A few indigenous communities have self-published but often this initiative involves an unmediated partnership between publishers and indigenous communities, one that is uniquely collaborative and represents the latest—and perhaps final—stage of a research and representative process long connecting scholars and publishers. This final collaboration, this latest expression of sovereignty by indigenous communities, complicates, enriches, and potentially undermines the traditional publisher-scholar relationship.

The proposed anthology draws upon the perspectives and experiences of indigenous individuals, publishers and scholars and a myriad of case studies to illuminate the complexity, challenges, and opportunities that arise when individuals and organizations from indigenous communities attempt to get a work published themselves.

Send questions and abstracts to Gary Dunham, Director, University of Nebraska Press, at gdunham1@unl.edu.
--------------------------------------------

The above came to me through H-Amerindian, an academic listserv for people who work with Indian materials. Veeeerrryyy interesting! Of course, I can’t send anything for this because I’m not a genetic nor an enrolled indigenous individual. Actually, I’m not even an academically approved scholar of indigenous peoples. It’s just that I’m in this community full of Blackfeet and so on, hanging around for half-a-century, and lately I’ve been doing my best to get them to see that they can bypass publishers and go straight to Lulu.com. In truth, many of them have simply defined the public school or tribal college as a publisher (meaning they footed the bill) or have taken a check to a local printer and come back with a box of books.

Adolf Hungry Wolf, who has a long history of using one specific Manitoba printer, has produced a massive set of books he calls “The Blackfoot Papers,” all on credit. The Blackfeet Heritage Center is acting as promoter and distributor in the USA while Adolf’s own “Good Medicine Foundation” does the same on the Canadian side. He is not indigenous but his wife and children are. But Adolf, as everyone knows, lives more like an Indian than most Indians do. (Log cabin, creek water, a solar-powered MAC iBook.)

My own books, some about Blackfeet and some not, amount to about a dozen so far -- about half already on Lulu.com with the other half still being formatted (by myself). Why mess with publishers? Esp. publishers who don’t edit, don’t promote, barely distribute, print small numbers, and remainder before the end of the first year?

I’m also interested in going a different way entirely: buy a used book (either fiction or not) in good condition, take the cover off, and rebind it in a custom way -- maybe Indian-tanned (smoked) leather, maybe beaded or burned, maybe quilled or feathered, maybe sold in a special pouch or parfleche-- converted into a “Bundle.” Maybe write or draw in the margins or throw in some pressed plants. Pretty nineteenth century thing to do, but a beguiling idea.

One lady (not a scholar) back east sat through one of Darrell Kipp’s speeches about how to start an immersion school. (“Above all, don’t ask permission!”) She made a transcript, got it converted into a printed pamphlet at the local Kinko’s or Office Depot, and sent Darrell a couple of boxes of them. A donation. VERY helpful.

The “scholars” (harrumph) come out on summer break, full of preconceptions, and take back a lot of notes that have to conform to some institution. The “adventurers” (yee-haw!) come out in the spring, find some fascinating character in the local bar who claims to know “all the myths” and publish their adventure as truth. No one ever comes around in the winter, not even the engineers and geologists who are a little more hardy types.

The exception I know of has been in Canada where the University of Calgary Press (disclosure: they’re publishing my bio of Bob Scriver) has published several books where the indigenous people were pretty clearly in control -- though, I guess, they’ve had helpers and editing, especially for layout. The North Piegan have not been writing books so much as generating computer/GIS maps of ancient trails.

So am I making fun of this anthology idea, scuffing dust on it? Absolutely not! It’s about time these post-modern folks took a look at their own practices, their own oppressions, their own foregone conclusions and guarding of the gate. I have a feeling that the dip-net will bring up the same old fish as usual, but there’s always a chance that something new -- maybe even one of those Kuhnian paradigm shifts -- will rise to the top.

Podcasts? (Podfish?) Tribal publishing houses? Or just good old Print-On-Demand Lulu.com? Great project for a high school senior or a tribal college “mom” returning to school. The problem is keeping track -- who will count the beans??