There are a few basic rules for passing good zoning laws:
1. If you live in a glass house, don’t make a law against glass houses.
2. No hand-me-downs: laws for big cities don’t work in small towns. City doesn’t work in country and vice versa. Laws from the north don’t necessarily work in the south. (Ecology counts.)
3. The fewer laws the better.
4. The simpler laws the better: no complex what-ifs, except-thats.
5. Don’t pass a law if there’s a better way to accomplish the purpose.
6. Laws should have a clear edge, so you can tell who’s in and who’s out.
7. Never pass a law to catch one person or to eliminate people you don’t like.
8. You can’t legislate prosperity, virtue, taste, ethnicity or loyalty.
9. Always address the DEEPEST cause and problem. Often it’s just simple poverty so be prepared to put some money into it.
10. Property value is not the highest human value.
11. The jurisdiction’s employees or commissioners are not the persons being served.
12. Contingency or complaint-driven enforcement can backfire into lawsuits quicker than a wink.
So let’s suppose we’re setting out to compose a zoning law, which is probably the least one-size-fits-all sort of law-making. First set the priorities.
1. Health and safety: dangerous substances, practices or structures.
2. Infrastructure: this is the single most important purpose of forming a community corporation or cooperative: the financing, maintenance, and operation of water and sewer, plus whatever else the community decides to take on. Streets and sidewalks. It’s important not to exceed the capacities of the people paying into the system.
3. Community morale: seasonal festivals, school support, church functions, the library, business practices and so on.
4. Interfacing with larger governmental units: state, federal, water districts, and so on.
Let’s look at the history and structure of the community. Now we can be specific. Valier was originally a marketing town with a founding population that arrived from Belgium, guided by their priest, as a pre-existing village or at least network of families who already had relationships in the Old Country. They brought along assumptions they probably didn’t know they had, like living in a village and going out to farmland rather than homesteading, which required residence. So Valier has more of a hub-and-spoke function than some places: often the older folks and those with school kids stay in town while another part of the family lives out on the farm. Since some of those farms have no water and must come to town to get it, the hub and spoke is even stronger.
But the real foundation of Valier was created by the Conrad brothers, a couple of cavalier frontiersmen who had little use for legalities and operated through cronies. With their roots in trading, including whiskey, they weren’t too particular but they were smart and hard-driving. (See Barnaby Conrad III's brilliant book, "Ghost Hunting in Montana.") First they ranched on this land. Then they pushed through Swift Dam, just as they managed to nip off a corner of the reservation for their own ranches, without much thought for the future and hardly any for the reservation. Anyway water rights would have meant something quite different in those years when the Blackfeet were living in log cabins at a subsistence level and the Rockies were packed with snow. The BIA agents never agreed among themselves whether the land should be irrigated and did a poor job of digging the canals. Today the Blackfeet are ready for big-time pivot irrigation and are rehabilitating their canals. When Swift Dam failed in 1965, killing dozens of people along Birch Creek, attention suddenly came to bear on its ownership, operation and legality, but not a lot was done beyond rebuilding the dam. Now the Winters case has put the legal ball in the resevation's court.
Swift Dam (which is at the heart of Ivan Doig’s latest novel, “The Whistling Season,” though he didn’t address the politics much since he makes it a point to avoid writing about Indians) is up in the Rocky Mountains impounding the run-off water which is then fed down to Lake Francis, a second impoundment, where it is let into canals. This water is owned by the Pondera Canal Company which is a corporation. Grain and alfalfa farmers own shares which determine how much water they can use. If there is not enough water to fulfill their shares, they take proportional percentages. If the Blackfeet claim water, it will reduce their shares even more. The best case scenario the lawyers see is a 30% reduction in available water, enough to take some farmers under economically, even if the drought breaks.
If irrigation farming crashes, then Valier will have a dim future. Already the original market and boom (when the dam was going in) town is greatly diminished, so that the town plat is zoned in terms of dividing lots according to a much larger business district. My own house lot is actually three commercially sized lots divided from street to alley rather than from side-to-side. Small shabby houses from those years still exist alongside quite fancy three and four bedroom houses.
The town has capitalized on Lake Francis as a resort property, especially for fishing including ice fishing in winter. Therefore, many people own small vacation or weekend houses in town and park camp trailers in yards or in informal camping spots. The town maintains a summer campground along the lake. As the economy gets tougher, people may be living in these tiny houses or camp trailers. Maybe because they have no other place to go.
We're getting some experimental houses: one of those concrete-poured into styrofoam blocks structures and a strange mega-ribbed quonset hut. There have always been dilemmas over house trailers, modular houses, portable houses, and so on.
Operations have sprung up just outside the city limits, sometimes with unclear implications. Feedlots, sorting corrals, acres of grain bins, and an airport where the man who used to spray crops is now making a living by selling herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizer. He stores those materials on the airport and allows farmers to dilute them from his water hydrant -- a practice for which he has a permit, but which causes the farmers to drive the already dusty main street of the town in heavy trucks. No one in town is clear about who is really using the airport. Malmstrom Air Force Base? Homeland Security? Border patrol? Private parties? There is one story about a helicopter pilot whose mom lives by the airport -- he lands out there and runs home to give her a hug now and then while his "bird" idles!
Now the engineer the town asked to give formal and “scientific” feedback is saying that we need a new well and that it should be drilled out by the airport. But how much contamination might there be from aviation fuel and farm chemicals? On the other side of town are feed lots. Over the years an unfortunate tendency to postpone, deny, minimize, make exceptions, just get by, and cross fingers has developed and now runs headlong into people who have just moved to town, thinking they’d found an idyllic little cranny in an insane world. NOW they find out that we need to dig up the streets again, install water meters, and buy a new water storage tank because the present one would not be able to provide enough water to put out a major fire. This affects insurance.
In my experience this sort of train wreck cannot be “fixed” by a mayor and commissioners, no matter how expert and dedicated they are. It’s time to get out the newsprint and magic marker and to draw people into discussion. More important: LISTEN.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Monday, January 14, 2008
“REDEMPTION: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America”
“REDEMPTION: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America” by Nathan J. Winograd. 2007. Subsidized through Almaden Press.
There’s a rhetorical story, an old chestnut, that I first heard in Portland, OR, where I was an animal control officer. It was told by Portland Commissioner Jordan and it went like this: “You’re standing on the bank of a river when suddenly you see a drowning baby floating by! At considerable risk, you swim out and save the infant. Next day there is another one. And then more, so you organize a baby-saving crew that has their own boat to get out there to save all those babies. Taxes have to be raised to pay for it. Eventually, it dawns on someone that it would be a good idea to go upstream and find out how all those babies are getting into the river in the first place.”
This book is about saving the babies when they are seen floating by, one by one, with the utmost intervention for each one of them. Except the babies are dogs. To many people dogs are very much like children in fur and their relationships to “their” dogs are nearly as strong. What we were doing at animal control was as much about preventing babies from going into the river as about saving them. This book has a religious term for a title: “Redemption,” which is God saving humans from damnation, and reveals that the paradigm for the writer is not about babies but about having the god-like power of saving animals in kennels from being killed. To keep up dedication to this end, it is necessary to locate a Devil, which the writer identifies as the HSUS mostly. The Humane Society of the United States is a nonprofit that makes huge amounts of money but maintains no kennels. To Winograd, kennels are where the action is, which is true for many people.
This three-cornered interpretation of what happens in the dog world is very much like the psychologist’s diagram of what happens with co-dependent people: there is a victim, a persecutor and a savior. This structure underlies all attempts to reinterpret or restructure the interaction. The victim needs the help, the persecutor is defensively righteous, and the savior gets much gratification for being “compassionate” and for achieving small successes.
Another structural and conceptual force at work here is that because humane societies commonly run shelters, they have often been contracted by jurisdictions to either accept impounded animals or to actually hire and supervise animal control officers. This leads to confusion about the purpose of the officers: to prevent cruelty (a role that makes one look good in the eyes of the neighbors) or to impound dogs, which is not done to punish the dog but to keep them safe for owners to redeem. Even animal control entities that are not entwined with humane societies are often seen by their jurisdictional supervisors (usually city or county commissioners) as “dog catchers” -- impounders of animals. But impounding animals is strictly a by-product of enforcing animal laws, the same as a jail is a by-product of law enforcement. The real work is educating, warning and citing human beings and it does not happen in a kennel -- it happens out in a neighborhood.
I’ve wondered and wondered about the fascination some people have with the kennel and with the killing of animals that cannot be placed with owners. Maybe it’s partly because it’s a place anyone could go and see. This author insists that ALL animals can be placed and that ALL homes are loving. He thinks that all dog-owners are like himself: people who carefully choose their pets, cherish them, and supervise them. But the larger American custom comes from rural land and small towns, much like where I live. Dogs sometimes choose for themselves and will simply attach to a family much as they would attach to a pack. A humor writer on the radio told about his cat who “slept all night” and “went out mousing all day.” Then he met a man several blocks away who said his cat “went out mousing all night” and “slept all day.” It was the same cat, who had little reason to mouse at all, since he was getting fed in both homes.
In my experience the dogs that get impounded are not really stray or unowned at all. They are CARELESSLY owned dogs who think of their dogs as free-lance and don’t bother to go to the shelter to look for them, don’t bother to put identification on them, simply wait for a new dog to enter the household from a friend, or by showing up with one of the kids, or just occupying the front porch one morning. Since in Portland officers stayed on the same “beat,” we got so we could recognize individual dogs. There’d be a few who were impounded, unclaimed, adopted out again, only to go back to their previous home. When we finally had enough time to send officers or volunteers to check on newly adopted dogs, they had sometimes “run away.” When we insisted that they could not adopt a dog without a decent fenced yard, this stopped. We’d been pouring dogs through a sieve.
HSUS likes to demonize puppy mills. Many are beginning to demonize AKC propaganda about how much one’s status and admirability will be improved by getting a dog. Some are even realizing that cute dogs in the media cause overbreeding and therefore dissemination of substandard versions to people who don’t realize what they are getting into. It’s interesting that “Redemption” shows as its “cover dog” a Jack Russell terrier, a breed now so popular that over-optimistic people buy them and then are appalled when the busy little critters drive everyone nuts. There is a Jack Russell Rescue organization.
Having a dog is like having a mother and eating apple pie. To Americans (and probably English even more so) all dogs are Lassie. Killing them sounds atrocious. Shelter attendants obliged to do it pay a high psychological price. The drugs attract all the wrong people. As a nation, at least in the cities, no one is home in the daytime except the elderly. Many burglaries are committed in the afternoon -- better than night for remaining unseen. The dog may bark, but who will hear it?
This book is actually a defense of specific programs that Winograd managed. I also was part of specific programs (Multnomah County Animal Control) and know that many of the things he says are untrue. For instance, in 1973 we were already working hard to get subsidies for spay/neuter programs and LA was one of the first to start their own clinic. He does not name some of the people I can identify, but he does name Phyllis Wright, because she was the HSUS rep trying to guarantee humane euthanasia and kennel practices. As such, she was one of the few to actually enter the kennels.
Winograd doesn’t recognize the programs that have become very popular around here, where a team of veterinarians volunteer to spay or neuter pets in small towns for free or at low prices. They rent a gymnasium or cafetorium for the day and sterilize a hundred animals at a time. The owners of the animals, including the children, bring their pets and blankets and comfort their animals while the veterinarians circulate among them until they are stabilized enough to go home. Feral cat programs are expanding: cats are caught, sterilized, and put back into their ecology. I read about vets who convert RV’s into rolling offices and circulate through neighborhoods.
In short, there is a huge complex of forces out there, many of them economic and some psychological. We have not thought much about the religious dimension. One of the most frightening phenomena has been little teams of people (usually young adults, maybe of the “Goth” persuasion) who appoint themselves Death Angels and kill animals, leaving them in dumpsters. My starting premise would be that we are all struggling to understand how humans are animals but animals are not humans in the face of the Revelation that it takes very little change in a genome to create a new species. One way of maintaining superiority is to assert one’s ability to kill, rather in the way that a male -- challenged by an uppity woman -- might demonstrate superiority by killing the female. Sick, demonic, damning as such a phenomenon is, you can read about it in the daily paper.
Ideally we would not have to kill nearly so much as we do. In the best of worlds, animal control officers could pass through the streets and visit the houses without condemnation. (The first officer shot to death on duty happened this last year.) And humane societies could both maintain proper kennels and work to reform our larger society without lining their pockets and crowing about it.
There’s a rhetorical story, an old chestnut, that I first heard in Portland, OR, where I was an animal control officer. It was told by Portland Commissioner Jordan and it went like this: “You’re standing on the bank of a river when suddenly you see a drowning baby floating by! At considerable risk, you swim out and save the infant. Next day there is another one. And then more, so you organize a baby-saving crew that has their own boat to get out there to save all those babies. Taxes have to be raised to pay for it. Eventually, it dawns on someone that it would be a good idea to go upstream and find out how all those babies are getting into the river in the first place.”
This book is about saving the babies when they are seen floating by, one by one, with the utmost intervention for each one of them. Except the babies are dogs. To many people dogs are very much like children in fur and their relationships to “their” dogs are nearly as strong. What we were doing at animal control was as much about preventing babies from going into the river as about saving them. This book has a religious term for a title: “Redemption,” which is God saving humans from damnation, and reveals that the paradigm for the writer is not about babies but about having the god-like power of saving animals in kennels from being killed. To keep up dedication to this end, it is necessary to locate a Devil, which the writer identifies as the HSUS mostly. The Humane Society of the United States is a nonprofit that makes huge amounts of money but maintains no kennels. To Winograd, kennels are where the action is, which is true for many people.
This three-cornered interpretation of what happens in the dog world is very much like the psychologist’s diagram of what happens with co-dependent people: there is a victim, a persecutor and a savior. This structure underlies all attempts to reinterpret or restructure the interaction. The victim needs the help, the persecutor is defensively righteous, and the savior gets much gratification for being “compassionate” and for achieving small successes.
Another structural and conceptual force at work here is that because humane societies commonly run shelters, they have often been contracted by jurisdictions to either accept impounded animals or to actually hire and supervise animal control officers. This leads to confusion about the purpose of the officers: to prevent cruelty (a role that makes one look good in the eyes of the neighbors) or to impound dogs, which is not done to punish the dog but to keep them safe for owners to redeem. Even animal control entities that are not entwined with humane societies are often seen by their jurisdictional supervisors (usually city or county commissioners) as “dog catchers” -- impounders of animals. But impounding animals is strictly a by-product of enforcing animal laws, the same as a jail is a by-product of law enforcement. The real work is educating, warning and citing human beings and it does not happen in a kennel -- it happens out in a neighborhood.
I’ve wondered and wondered about the fascination some people have with the kennel and with the killing of animals that cannot be placed with owners. Maybe it’s partly because it’s a place anyone could go and see. This author insists that ALL animals can be placed and that ALL homes are loving. He thinks that all dog-owners are like himself: people who carefully choose their pets, cherish them, and supervise them. But the larger American custom comes from rural land and small towns, much like where I live. Dogs sometimes choose for themselves and will simply attach to a family much as they would attach to a pack. A humor writer on the radio told about his cat who “slept all night” and “went out mousing all day.” Then he met a man several blocks away who said his cat “went out mousing all night” and “slept all day.” It was the same cat, who had little reason to mouse at all, since he was getting fed in both homes.
In my experience the dogs that get impounded are not really stray or unowned at all. They are CARELESSLY owned dogs who think of their dogs as free-lance and don’t bother to go to the shelter to look for them, don’t bother to put identification on them, simply wait for a new dog to enter the household from a friend, or by showing up with one of the kids, or just occupying the front porch one morning. Since in Portland officers stayed on the same “beat,” we got so we could recognize individual dogs. There’d be a few who were impounded, unclaimed, adopted out again, only to go back to their previous home. When we finally had enough time to send officers or volunteers to check on newly adopted dogs, they had sometimes “run away.” When we insisted that they could not adopt a dog without a decent fenced yard, this stopped. We’d been pouring dogs through a sieve.
HSUS likes to demonize puppy mills. Many are beginning to demonize AKC propaganda about how much one’s status and admirability will be improved by getting a dog. Some are even realizing that cute dogs in the media cause overbreeding and therefore dissemination of substandard versions to people who don’t realize what they are getting into. It’s interesting that “Redemption” shows as its “cover dog” a Jack Russell terrier, a breed now so popular that over-optimistic people buy them and then are appalled when the busy little critters drive everyone nuts. There is a Jack Russell Rescue organization.
Having a dog is like having a mother and eating apple pie. To Americans (and probably English even more so) all dogs are Lassie. Killing them sounds atrocious. Shelter attendants obliged to do it pay a high psychological price. The drugs attract all the wrong people. As a nation, at least in the cities, no one is home in the daytime except the elderly. Many burglaries are committed in the afternoon -- better than night for remaining unseen. The dog may bark, but who will hear it?
This book is actually a defense of specific programs that Winograd managed. I also was part of specific programs (Multnomah County Animal Control) and know that many of the things he says are untrue. For instance, in 1973 we were already working hard to get subsidies for spay/neuter programs and LA was one of the first to start their own clinic. He does not name some of the people I can identify, but he does name Phyllis Wright, because she was the HSUS rep trying to guarantee humane euthanasia and kennel practices. As such, she was one of the few to actually enter the kennels.
Winograd doesn’t recognize the programs that have become very popular around here, where a team of veterinarians volunteer to spay or neuter pets in small towns for free or at low prices. They rent a gymnasium or cafetorium for the day and sterilize a hundred animals at a time. The owners of the animals, including the children, bring their pets and blankets and comfort their animals while the veterinarians circulate among them until they are stabilized enough to go home. Feral cat programs are expanding: cats are caught, sterilized, and put back into their ecology. I read about vets who convert RV’s into rolling offices and circulate through neighborhoods.
In short, there is a huge complex of forces out there, many of them economic and some psychological. We have not thought much about the religious dimension. One of the most frightening phenomena has been little teams of people (usually young adults, maybe of the “Goth” persuasion) who appoint themselves Death Angels and kill animals, leaving them in dumpsters. My starting premise would be that we are all struggling to understand how humans are animals but animals are not humans in the face of the Revelation that it takes very little change in a genome to create a new species. One way of maintaining superiority is to assert one’s ability to kill, rather in the way that a male -- challenged by an uppity woman -- might demonstrate superiority by killing the female. Sick, demonic, damning as such a phenomenon is, you can read about it in the daily paper.
Ideally we would not have to kill nearly so much as we do. In the best of worlds, animal control officers could pass through the streets and visit the houses without condemnation. (The first officer shot to death on duty happened this last year.) And humane societies could both maintain proper kennels and work to reform our larger society without lining their pockets and crowing about it.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
STRACHAN BROTHERS
This post was actually prepared for Paul's daughter. Paul is the younger of the two boys and died of a heart attack last March. Mark, the older, is living happily and healthily in New Mexico. I'm the oldest, 68, living in Montana. The family then was living in Portland, OR, in NE Portland, believing that life was safe, slow-moving and even boring. My father brought my mother here as a bride and she died here in 1998. Paul lived with her until then because of a head injury.
We were all big on cowboys and horses. At about this time the movie star Hopalong Cassidy rode in the Portland Rose Festival Parade. We were situated at the east end of the Broadway bridge and "Silver" didn't much like the whole scene, beginning to balk and even hint at bucking. Mark and Paul so badly wanted to run out and touch that horse, but Hopalong became very testy, warning everyone to get back!
The counters in this old kitchen were concrete. The original stove was probably wood or gas. One cupboard had a hole in the back to the outdoors so that it could operate as a "cooler." If the climate here were more even, I could use one of those! Mr. Otto, who was a good carpenter, converted the cabinet under the counter in front of Mark so it was a flour bin that tipped out. We always had a good time at Halloween. My mom would drape herself in a sheet, put goop all over her face and draw on terrible scars -- then she'd hand out one black jelly bean at a time, saying in a quavering voice: "Here's a zombie bean for you, my pretty!" Once my father squatted down, opened the door, and jumped forward yelling "BOOOO!" One little kid was so scared he fell off the porch into the cotoneasters, so we didn't do that anymore.
Grandma loved to play for us to sing: old favorites, classroom songs and the like. We all briefly took piano lessons. Grandma may have made this rug for us and it was originally "her" piano, sold to the Bruce Strachan family to get through a tight spot. My mother loved to play it, too. It was in the "sun room," a windowed porch off to the north side of the house.
The albums behind those glass doors are what I'm deconstructing and sending you now. Up above on the shelves is my father's collection of 78 records, mostly classical, which my mother sold after he died. Paul was always a hard charger who got a little off balance, while Mark stayed safe.
Something tender about little boys with their cuffs rolled up. Looks like these jeans had double knees. I don't know whether they came that way or my mother customized them.
This is our front yard but looking at Hanisches next door. Bob Hanisch was very proud of his rosebushes. This must have been Spring. They're using the kind of hand tools that Strachans always like. The one Mark has slid like a nail-puller, I think -- but maybe not. We had a very useful bayonet, army-surplus, and a machete, likewise. One year my mother decided to REALLY improve the lawn and ordered a load of chicken manure. She didn't realize it was not composted and we didn't use the lawn that year until after the fall rains, but it was really GREEN.
We were all big on cowboys and horses. At about this time the movie star Hopalong Cassidy rode in the Portland Rose Festival Parade. We were situated at the east end of the Broadway bridge and "Silver" didn't much like the whole scene, beginning to balk and even hint at bucking. Mark and Paul so badly wanted to run out and touch that horse, but Hopalong became very testy, warning everyone to get back!
The counters in this old kitchen were concrete. The original stove was probably wood or gas. One cupboard had a hole in the back to the outdoors so that it could operate as a "cooler." If the climate here were more even, I could use one of those! Mr. Otto, who was a good carpenter, converted the cabinet under the counter in front of Mark so it was a flour bin that tipped out. We always had a good time at Halloween. My mom would drape herself in a sheet, put goop all over her face and draw on terrible scars -- then she'd hand out one black jelly bean at a time, saying in a quavering voice: "Here's a zombie bean for you, my pretty!" Once my father squatted down, opened the door, and jumped forward yelling "BOOOO!" One little kid was so scared he fell off the porch into the cotoneasters, so we didn't do that anymore.
Grandma loved to play for us to sing: old favorites, classroom songs and the like. We all briefly took piano lessons. Grandma may have made this rug for us and it was originally "her" piano, sold to the Bruce Strachan family to get through a tight spot. My mother loved to play it, too. It was in the "sun room," a windowed porch off to the north side of the house.
The albums behind those glass doors are what I'm deconstructing and sending you now. Up above on the shelves is my father's collection of 78 records, mostly classical, which my mother sold after he died. Paul was always a hard charger who got a little off balance, while Mark stayed safe.
Something tender about little boys with their cuffs rolled up. Looks like these jeans had double knees. I don't know whether they came that way or my mother customized them.
This is our front yard but looking at Hanisches next door. Bob Hanisch was very proud of his rosebushes. This must have been Spring. They're using the kind of hand tools that Strachans always like. The one Mark has slid like a nail-puller, I think -- but maybe not. We had a very useful bayonet, army-surplus, and a machete, likewise. One year my mother decided to REALLY improve the lawn and ordered a load of chicken manure. She didn't realize it was not composted and we didn't use the lawn that year until after the fall rains, but it was really GREEN.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE: The Movie
Everyone more or less understands that “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” is not a “story” as in “novel,” but rather an historian’s review of the Indian wars of the prairie -- that is, probably more accurately, the American clearances quite in parallel with earlier clearances within Britain itself when centuries of occupation of “wastelands” by poor people were ended by their expulsion to make room for raising sheep. This was made even more deadly by a fungus plague on the potatoes that marginal people ate, so that many many starved and the lucky ones were shipped to the Americas to crowd out THOSE marginal people, who had no place else to go. (The potato was the Irish buffalo.)
The “battles” or “massacres” -- depending on one’s point of view -- are mostly those of the late 19th century, the ones made indelible by decades of Westerns. Writing in 1971, Dee Brown had a fine sense of justice and covered one heckuva lot of territory, so fine detail got lost here and there just because of the overwhelming amount of information mixed with controversy. This is why I confine my own research mostly to the Blackfeet and even then get mixed up, get things wrong, put up hackles on those who disagree, find new material, change my mind anyhow.
“Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee,” the movie, is an effort not to offend anyone while not entirely erasing the power of the story. This is made possible by a lot of preceding movies that have created a pantheon of fine Native American actors -- no more Victor Mature and Natalie Wood. The faces of August Schellenberg, Eric Schweig, Wes Studi, and Gordon Tootoosis have become as meaningfully iconic as the photographs of the historic characters they portray: Sitting Bull, Gall, Wovoka and Red Cloud. This is emphasized by marking the rhythms of the narrative with inserted mock-daguerrotypes.
In the index of “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” there is no entry for Ohiyesa, Charles Eastman. He was present immediately after the massacre and tried to help survivors and this is the link used to develop his story. His wife was actually the superintendent of schools on the Dakota reservations and they met just about the time of the massacre. Events on all sides are conflated and rearranged to make a skeleton for the story.
In the Blackfeet tradition there is a custom of making one’s hands into two people “talking to each other.” They’re usually supposed to be “boy” and “girl” and they tell little teaching stories to each other. In this movie the key scenes are also paired people, two profiles, talking to each other as powerfully as they can. They summarize the issues, or at least some of them: Sitting Bull states his case to Bear Coat (Miles) who then states his. The rest is context and a kind of flow of movement. Later it is Red Cloud who gets his say.
To make the plot develop, the central dialoguers are Eastman and Senator Dawes, the man who hatched the idea of divvying up all the reservation lands in the same way they had earlier divvied up the prairies by opening them up for homesteading. (My paternal grandparents homesteaded in Faulkton, SD, near the Brule Sioux reservation when the “excess lands” were opened up.) The ultimate flaw of both Dawes Act lands and Homestead lands was that the acreage was too small, sometimes unusable, and people went broke, so most land ended up in the hands of speculators, banks, and the federal loan insurance program. Things go bad and ultimately the conversation of Eastman (who tried so hard to assimilate and paid such a high price) and Dawes (who tried so hard to force assimilation for all Indians -- for their own good, he believed) ends.
The movie opens with the Custer Massacre or Battle (depending on your point of view) in a remarkable sequence that begins with two little boys sitting by the Red River, continues with them seeing Cavalry and fleeing through the woods to their village, into the midst of a battle with invading scouts, then lifts into the air and from overhead -- a true bird’s eye view -- shows the deadly mandala of Custer surrounded. Just this particular sequence is VERY powerful and quite beautiful. Filming just north a few hundred miles of where I am now, on the high prairie, the movie takes full advantage of wild horses, long horizons and towering skies.
Aiden Quinn, an Irish actor, was previously cast in Peter Matthiessen’s “At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” which treated the same situation and issues and outcome except that it was all in the South American jungle and the hero, Moon, assimilated into the Indians instead of an Indian becoming white. Matthiessen is an eloquent and dedicated defender of the American Indian, so Quinn has thought about all this a lot. He’s an intelligent and sophisticated international man, undeniably liberal. He knows he wasn’t really Dawes, who was not so admirable.
I watched this on DVD, so I had the advantage of two voice-over versions -- quite clearly “value added.” One was made by the French director, who very carefully chose his icons and moments to create an almost Kabuki stylization of the story we know so well. But he allowed the actors -- esp. the Indians -- to really ACT. This Sitting Bull is believable as a person who traveled with Buffalo Bill to Europe. I’ll bet you five bucks that Yves Simoneau is a fan of Jim Welch and has read his novel about the Indian member of the show who got stranded in France and assimilated to THEM! (“The Heartsong of Charging Elk”)
The other track was Aidan Quinn talking alongside Adam Beach, who is still too young to be an icon. “Dude” this and “Dude” that, he enjoyed calling Anna Paquin a “hottie.” (She didn’t play the game, he reports.) Adam ran for chief of his tribe the year before this was made, and he wasn’t elected. I won’t say more. But there are many young Indian women (and whites, come to that) who think ADAM is a “hottie” and would love to play! The back-and-forth, almost a father and son talk, was wonderfully informing, maybe in ways they didn’t intend.
This is certainly not the ultimate “Indian movie.” But taking into account the materials at hand (Schellenberg, Schweig, Tootoosis and Studi are not getting younger) it’s an important landmark and certainly strong enough to justify more “Indian movies.” I loved the just previous generation (Graham Greene and Tantoo Cardinal) more than I loved the Fifties movies, and I admired this one. I love Sherman Alexie’s vision, which is true to the present. But I think there is another generation coming that will be even more stunning.
This movie ends like Welch’s “Fool’s Crow” with Eastman riding off into seclusion, crossing the same river he played by in the opening. It works.
The “battles” or “massacres” -- depending on one’s point of view -- are mostly those of the late 19th century, the ones made indelible by decades of Westerns. Writing in 1971, Dee Brown had a fine sense of justice and covered one heckuva lot of territory, so fine detail got lost here and there just because of the overwhelming amount of information mixed with controversy. This is why I confine my own research mostly to the Blackfeet and even then get mixed up, get things wrong, put up hackles on those who disagree, find new material, change my mind anyhow.
“Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee,” the movie, is an effort not to offend anyone while not entirely erasing the power of the story. This is made possible by a lot of preceding movies that have created a pantheon of fine Native American actors -- no more Victor Mature and Natalie Wood. The faces of August Schellenberg, Eric Schweig, Wes Studi, and Gordon Tootoosis have become as meaningfully iconic as the photographs of the historic characters they portray: Sitting Bull, Gall, Wovoka and Red Cloud. This is emphasized by marking the rhythms of the narrative with inserted mock-daguerrotypes.
In the index of “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” there is no entry for Ohiyesa, Charles Eastman. He was present immediately after the massacre and tried to help survivors and this is the link used to develop his story. His wife was actually the superintendent of schools on the Dakota reservations and they met just about the time of the massacre. Events on all sides are conflated and rearranged to make a skeleton for the story.
In the Blackfeet tradition there is a custom of making one’s hands into two people “talking to each other.” They’re usually supposed to be “boy” and “girl” and they tell little teaching stories to each other. In this movie the key scenes are also paired people, two profiles, talking to each other as powerfully as they can. They summarize the issues, or at least some of them: Sitting Bull states his case to Bear Coat (Miles) who then states his. The rest is context and a kind of flow of movement. Later it is Red Cloud who gets his say.
To make the plot develop, the central dialoguers are Eastman and Senator Dawes, the man who hatched the idea of divvying up all the reservation lands in the same way they had earlier divvied up the prairies by opening them up for homesteading. (My paternal grandparents homesteaded in Faulkton, SD, near the Brule Sioux reservation when the “excess lands” were opened up.) The ultimate flaw of both Dawes Act lands and Homestead lands was that the acreage was too small, sometimes unusable, and people went broke, so most land ended up in the hands of speculators, banks, and the federal loan insurance program. Things go bad and ultimately the conversation of Eastman (who tried so hard to assimilate and paid such a high price) and Dawes (who tried so hard to force assimilation for all Indians -- for their own good, he believed) ends.
The movie opens with the Custer Massacre or Battle (depending on your point of view) in a remarkable sequence that begins with two little boys sitting by the Red River, continues with them seeing Cavalry and fleeing through the woods to their village, into the midst of a battle with invading scouts, then lifts into the air and from overhead -- a true bird’s eye view -- shows the deadly mandala of Custer surrounded. Just this particular sequence is VERY powerful and quite beautiful. Filming just north a few hundred miles of where I am now, on the high prairie, the movie takes full advantage of wild horses, long horizons and towering skies.
Aiden Quinn, an Irish actor, was previously cast in Peter Matthiessen’s “At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” which treated the same situation and issues and outcome except that it was all in the South American jungle and the hero, Moon, assimilated into the Indians instead of an Indian becoming white. Matthiessen is an eloquent and dedicated defender of the American Indian, so Quinn has thought about all this a lot. He’s an intelligent and sophisticated international man, undeniably liberal. He knows he wasn’t really Dawes, who was not so admirable.
I watched this on DVD, so I had the advantage of two voice-over versions -- quite clearly “value added.” One was made by the French director, who very carefully chose his icons and moments to create an almost Kabuki stylization of the story we know so well. But he allowed the actors -- esp. the Indians -- to really ACT. This Sitting Bull is believable as a person who traveled with Buffalo Bill to Europe. I’ll bet you five bucks that Yves Simoneau is a fan of Jim Welch and has read his novel about the Indian member of the show who got stranded in France and assimilated to THEM! (“The Heartsong of Charging Elk”)
The other track was Aidan Quinn talking alongside Adam Beach, who is still too young to be an icon. “Dude” this and “Dude” that, he enjoyed calling Anna Paquin a “hottie.” (She didn’t play the game, he reports.) Adam ran for chief of his tribe the year before this was made, and he wasn’t elected. I won’t say more. But there are many young Indian women (and whites, come to that) who think ADAM is a “hottie” and would love to play! The back-and-forth, almost a father and son talk, was wonderfully informing, maybe in ways they didn’t intend.
This is certainly not the ultimate “Indian movie.” But taking into account the materials at hand (Schellenberg, Schweig, Tootoosis and Studi are not getting younger) it’s an important landmark and certainly strong enough to justify more “Indian movies.” I loved the just previous generation (Graham Greene and Tantoo Cardinal) more than I loved the Fifties movies, and I admired this one. I love Sherman Alexie’s vision, which is true to the present. But I think there is another generation coming that will be even more stunning.
This movie ends like Welch’s “Fool’s Crow” with Eastman riding off into seclusion, crossing the same river he played by in the opening. It works.
Friday, January 11, 2008
AUNTIE MARY
Americans seem to have a number of internalized but conflicting commands: be a big shot but stay humble; own land and stay on it but be a wanderer with no ties; be brilliant but don’t outshine others. Among them seems to be equal and opposite commands to stay in touch with family, even if you have to reconstitute them with genetic information, but remain an individual with no ties or obligations. I feel this pair. When I was young, I wanted to be just myself, uncompromised. My phrase was "a free and independent individual." I renewed that a couple of times through my life, but now that I’m planted firmly in one place and have the Internet to roam virtually, I’ve been reweaving the net of family.
Originally, as was traditional, I looked for the descendants of Archibald Strachan, an emigrant from Kilmarnock, Scotland, to the South Dakota prairies in the homestead era. But slowly I began to get email messages not from HIS family but from his WIFE’S family! Soon I was seeing the project as deciphering the lives of the Welch sisters, at least the ones who married and emigrated. I found that our lives had criss-crossed back and forth without us knowing it. One cousin had lived only a couple of blocks from us in Portland, OR, without either of us making the connection.
There was one person I didn’t pursue: my brother’s daughter. He didn’t marry her mother -- never married anyone -- and then suffered a head injury that made him unreasonable, unemployable, dependent on my mother. I thought it was prudent and respectful not to intrude, but left clues big enough to be found. Now that daughter has found me. I’m so delighted that I couldn’t sleep last night! Neither my other brother nor I have had biological children and I’m about to the stage in life when I’ll need to pass some things on. Another one of those contradictions.
Adrienne is 27, looks like Scarlett Johannson, is finishing up her Master’s in large animal fertility studies at Oregon State University, and waiting to hear from Veterinary College. She’s been happily married for over a year to a Forestry major, named Paul like her father. She’s had a good family and a little brother. She has two horses, a big multi-breed dog, and an orange cat named Sampson. I hereby declare that with her permission I’m ready to adopt the lot! I’m SO delighted! If I’d sat down and designed a niece, I could not have done so well!
My cousin Jeannie and I sort through the strands of heredity all the time and talk about how heritable culture is and what impact it has had on us. When we make a new discovery or develop a new theory, we feel rewarded. Not everyone is impressed with such stuff, though it seems to be a preoccupation across the country. The most recent U of Chicago alumni mag includes two dynamite articles about inheritance, identity and physiology. To me this is enormously explanatory and reassuring. To others it implies we’re machines and possibly out of control. See for yourself:
http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0812/features/kittles.shtml
http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0812/features/fish_out_of_water.shtml
Alongside this push/pull about whether the “genes made me do it” or “I did it myself by choice” is the dilemma of how much we owe our relatives. If my sibling is in trouble, how much help do I owe? Or looked at the other way around, if I need some emergency help, who am I entitled to ask? My cousin Scott, knowing I’m in a tight patch, sends me a phone card every Christmas, which is why I could talk to my newfound niece for an hour last night. But I don’t think he wants me sleeping on his sofa. His sister Jeannie willingly makes room for her son and his family and pets, and would find a place for me to visit but it would be stretching it to go with a big fat cat under each arm expecting to move in for good. Different families have different limits and expectations about all this. In the past Indians put almost NO limits on what one family member, no matter how distant, could expect from others, but assimilation has changed that.
I’m feeling an obligation now to risk and disclose a little less, for the sake of not exposing my niece to side-stream embarrassment or criticism. So long as I thought there was only me to be responsible for my ideas and actions, I could get out on the edge a little more. But now I’ll have to test the effect on her. I have hunch she’s pretty sturdy and won’t be horrified by, for instance, her auntie having been a dog catcher -- or a UU minister! Some people would, you know.
In fact, I think that one characteristic she might share with me is a sort of feeling of solidarity with the great extended family of Mammals. (This is the sort of thing that makes Mark snort.) See the articles above about hiccuping cats and tribal DNA. I have such a strong mental picture of all life unfolding out of the previous lives -- it quite overwhelms the Biblical story of God sitting by the mud modeling little creatures, finally getting around to people. So, maybe for lack of children or close descendants until now, I’ve summoned up a sort of ultimate family that included not just everybody but also every creature.
Now I can focus on the obligations of an auntie. Maybe not Auntie Mame, but I had such great aunties myself! Aunt May, my father’s sister, was a graceful lady and an accomplished painter. Aunt Elsie, my uncle’s wife, was a poet published by the Saturday Evening Post and Arizona Highways among other magazines. Aunt Jo, my other uncle’s wife, was a woman of competence and grace. On my mother’s side was Aunt Bec, who was an army nurse in Oxford and Rheims, and my beloved Aunt Allie, the kindest and most animal loving of us all. My mother’s cousin, Nadine, also counted as a well-loved auntie. Aunties tell you about life and if you get it really wrong, they set you straight, but they never reject you. To tell the truth, I think I’m going to be a good auntie. For sure, I’m going to LOVE this girl -- already do.
Originally, as was traditional, I looked for the descendants of Archibald Strachan, an emigrant from Kilmarnock, Scotland, to the South Dakota prairies in the homestead era. But slowly I began to get email messages not from HIS family but from his WIFE’S family! Soon I was seeing the project as deciphering the lives of the Welch sisters, at least the ones who married and emigrated. I found that our lives had criss-crossed back and forth without us knowing it. One cousin had lived only a couple of blocks from us in Portland, OR, without either of us making the connection.
There was one person I didn’t pursue: my brother’s daughter. He didn’t marry her mother -- never married anyone -- and then suffered a head injury that made him unreasonable, unemployable, dependent on my mother. I thought it was prudent and respectful not to intrude, but left clues big enough to be found. Now that daughter has found me. I’m so delighted that I couldn’t sleep last night! Neither my other brother nor I have had biological children and I’m about to the stage in life when I’ll need to pass some things on. Another one of those contradictions.
Adrienne is 27, looks like Scarlett Johannson, is finishing up her Master’s in large animal fertility studies at Oregon State University, and waiting to hear from Veterinary College. She’s been happily married for over a year to a Forestry major, named Paul like her father. She’s had a good family and a little brother. She has two horses, a big multi-breed dog, and an orange cat named Sampson. I hereby declare that with her permission I’m ready to adopt the lot! I’m SO delighted! If I’d sat down and designed a niece, I could not have done so well!
My cousin Jeannie and I sort through the strands of heredity all the time and talk about how heritable culture is and what impact it has had on us. When we make a new discovery or develop a new theory, we feel rewarded. Not everyone is impressed with such stuff, though it seems to be a preoccupation across the country. The most recent U of Chicago alumni mag includes two dynamite articles about inheritance, identity and physiology. To me this is enormously explanatory and reassuring. To others it implies we’re machines and possibly out of control. See for yourself:
http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0812/features/kittles.shtml
http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0812/features/fish_out_of_water.shtml
Alongside this push/pull about whether the “genes made me do it” or “I did it myself by choice” is the dilemma of how much we owe our relatives. If my sibling is in trouble, how much help do I owe? Or looked at the other way around, if I need some emergency help, who am I entitled to ask? My cousin Scott, knowing I’m in a tight patch, sends me a phone card every Christmas, which is why I could talk to my newfound niece for an hour last night. But I don’t think he wants me sleeping on his sofa. His sister Jeannie willingly makes room for her son and his family and pets, and would find a place for me to visit but it would be stretching it to go with a big fat cat under each arm expecting to move in for good. Different families have different limits and expectations about all this. In the past Indians put almost NO limits on what one family member, no matter how distant, could expect from others, but assimilation has changed that.
I’m feeling an obligation now to risk and disclose a little less, for the sake of not exposing my niece to side-stream embarrassment or criticism. So long as I thought there was only me to be responsible for my ideas and actions, I could get out on the edge a little more. But now I’ll have to test the effect on her. I have hunch she’s pretty sturdy and won’t be horrified by, for instance, her auntie having been a dog catcher -- or a UU minister! Some people would, you know.
In fact, I think that one characteristic she might share with me is a sort of feeling of solidarity with the great extended family of Mammals. (This is the sort of thing that makes Mark snort.) See the articles above about hiccuping cats and tribal DNA. I have such a strong mental picture of all life unfolding out of the previous lives -- it quite overwhelms the Biblical story of God sitting by the mud modeling little creatures, finally getting around to people. So, maybe for lack of children or close descendants until now, I’ve summoned up a sort of ultimate family that included not just everybody but also every creature.
Now I can focus on the obligations of an auntie. Maybe not Auntie Mame, but I had such great aunties myself! Aunt May, my father’s sister, was a graceful lady and an accomplished painter. Aunt Elsie, my uncle’s wife, was a poet published by the Saturday Evening Post and Arizona Highways among other magazines. Aunt Jo, my other uncle’s wife, was a woman of competence and grace. On my mother’s side was Aunt Bec, who was an army nurse in Oxford and Rheims, and my beloved Aunt Allie, the kindest and most animal loving of us all. My mother’s cousin, Nadine, also counted as a well-loved auntie. Aunties tell you about life and if you get it really wrong, they set you straight, but they never reject you. To tell the truth, I think I’m going to be a good auntie. For sure, I’m going to LOVE this girl -- already do.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
VALIER, MONTANA, TOWN COUNCIL 1-9-08
I’ve been in Valier almost ten years now and have been attending town meetings fairly regularly for a couple of years. But I didn’t lose my temper -- didn’t even speak much -- until last night. There were two causes: first, that the town council (NO citizens present to speak of) had a little meeting before the regular meeting to pass a new ordinance about zoning. The second was that when I asked about why we even need a new ordinance (in a little village of 350 people, mostly related) I was told it was to “get rid” of an old man who had been living in a camp trailer on a residential lot. This was described as a shocking circumstance that destroyed the property values of the empty and run-down lots next to him. The fact that he’d moved away and sold the trailer and lot was not relevant. “We don’t like him,” was the bottom line. In other words, the policy of resentment: we make laws against anyone we don’t like. Or interpret the laws to hurt our enemies while holding ourselves and our friends safe from prosecution for one reason or another. This is what makes me say we have not left our high school years behind.
Though, in truth, no one on the council (two members have just been elected) seemed very interested or concerned about zoning. The ordinance was clearly from somewhere else: it restricts “apartments for servants” on the second floors of garages. I can’t bring to mind any garages with second floors, much less servants -- unless one counts house-cleaners like my neighbor. I think she’d be upset at being called a servant!
The zoning appears to have been thought up by the mayor and city employees. If the the homes of the mayor and at least one city employee were in Portland, OR, they would be out of compliance because of trashy yards and/or living in an old house trailer. The mayor says she's not responsible and directs all complaints to her husband.
Last summer the village employees went about ordering low status people to do this or that. My friend Hans had to move his grass cuttings pile out of the “alley” which was hard to tell from the rest of a vast empty lot. He makes part of his living growing potatoes and bush berries there and would soon have composted the grass. They nearly forbade him to run the soaker hoses that keep his plants alive, but gave him a variance. They outlaw soaker hoses because “we can’t tell when people are using them.” Control is the primary concern.
But behind that was another issue. After a decade of pretending there was no problem, the hundred-year-old infrastructure of the village can no longer be ignored, mostly because of the high prairie water shortage. As usual, budget constraints have been relieved by shirking maintenance. So an engineer was engaged to study the problem. He says we need a new water tank (in addition to the old one), a new 8 inch main down Montana Street (which runs past my house and was partially dug up last summer in order to put a liner in the sewer) plus new mains on three other streets which have inadequate feed, and a new well. We have four wells in various states of disrepair and nonfunction, mostly because they are fifty to a hundred years old and because the water table has sunk so low. Of course, we need “community input.” It will arrive when the community realizes water meters are inevitable and it will NOT be mild. (The engineer had some fascinating videos of the insides of the well -- stuff falling off in the insides, stuff sticking out from the sides of the bore.)
Another consultant was hired at $30,000 to manage all that community input the state requires. She comes up from Helena and mailed questionnaires to everyone. They are the worst questionnaires I’ve ever seen, clearly ripped off from someone else’s working check list, probably some kind of bureaucrat with access to state records. It asks things like “Is the WIC program adequate?” Who knows? I don’t know any of the people or even IF there are any people in this town who receive Women Infants and Children assistance, much less whether it is enough to be adequate. Most people have gone through briefly, putting checks according to guesses.
Similarly, they ask whether the education system is doing a good job. In Valier that means, “Is the basketball team winning?” I’ve never seen a curriculum. They certainly don’t publish standardized test scores. I wrote a long addendum about bus service, laundromats, and the like. The well-dressed young woman who is “doing” this questionnaire did not include all that I said -- maybe fifty per cent. She handed out a “so far” compendium of remarks. Evidently she didn’t like some of the things I said or worried someone would be offended. If she left off half of my answers, what happened to those of other people? This is a “let’s-not-do-it-and-say-we-did” kind of deal.
I lost it enough to shout but not enough to curse, thank goodness. And I was quiet for the rest of the meeting. The poor engineer -- engineers are notorious for avoiding emotion -- almost had his hands over his ears and would not meet my eyes. The Mayor’s husband sat in the back of the room, looking slightly menacing. He is an EMT and had to leave on a call halfway through the meeting. The Mayor was so upset that she said she “couldn’t go on without a hug” from a child who came with her mother, one of the outgoing city commissioners. Clearly this was true. She would not speak to me or look at me after the meeting. I hope I don’t need an EMT while her husband is on duty.
I often get comments on these blogs sympathizing with the horrors of living in a small town. There are also rewards and mitigations. Maybe it’s time for me to pay my dues by getting more involved. We’ve got a circle going here: no one wants to be on the town council because the problems are so difficult and people are so impatient about them, so the council never feels empowered to be effective. Many of our citizens are old and think of other people as children to be chastized and ordered around. We used to have someone who went door-to-door visiting them but she got old herself.
We have not had a state or county government very interested in village-level problems. Now they mandate these “surveys” and “reports” that are so complex and major that it seems worthwhile to pay $30,000 for someone to write a grant for money to fix the wells instead of just using the $30,000 to fix the wells. Of course, those middle-level buffer businesses are cleaning up. And they don’t even have to guarantee their work or meet any state standards, except for the engineers. When people are no longer involved directly, they are happy to hand off to someone else without ever realizing how much cost there is or how much they could actually participate in the outcome. Thus, the slogan around here is often, “you do something and then I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it.” And that gives rise to the Zoning of Resentment.
I have very little to do with teaching anymore, but when I’ve subbed it was obvious that no authority figure had any credibility. I’d say something. The students looked at the people among them whom they thought were smart or successful, and if those guys seemed to think it was probably right, the rest of the class went along with it. Everything was complicated by them needing peer confirmation all the time and sometimes their “smart” or “successful” people were wrong or simply in a bad mood. That’s another reason I say we’re operating like high schoolers.
Maybe I’ll be one of those “smart guys” and begin to deal direct with state bureaucrats to see what they actually say, instead of a second-hand version from the Mayor or some consultant.
PS: I did not know that the Mayor's charismatic and talented father had just died until I'd already written and posted this blog. No wonder she was thrown a bit off-stride, needed a hug from a child and support from her husband. Such is the nature of a small town that she may have thought we all knew about her loss, but I didn't. I don't know whether I'd have shown more restraint if I had. I'd have tried harder. Anyway, sincere condolences to her for her loss. She is an intelligent, competent woman who longs for a village that is a little closer to her ideal.
Though, in truth, no one on the council (two members have just been elected) seemed very interested or concerned about zoning. The ordinance was clearly from somewhere else: it restricts “apartments for servants” on the second floors of garages. I can’t bring to mind any garages with second floors, much less servants -- unless one counts house-cleaners like my neighbor. I think she’d be upset at being called a servant!
The zoning appears to have been thought up by the mayor and city employees. If the the homes of the mayor and at least one city employee were in Portland, OR, they would be out of compliance because of trashy yards and/or living in an old house trailer. The mayor says she's not responsible and directs all complaints to her husband.
Last summer the village employees went about ordering low status people to do this or that. My friend Hans had to move his grass cuttings pile out of the “alley” which was hard to tell from the rest of a vast empty lot. He makes part of his living growing potatoes and bush berries there and would soon have composted the grass. They nearly forbade him to run the soaker hoses that keep his plants alive, but gave him a variance. They outlaw soaker hoses because “we can’t tell when people are using them.” Control is the primary concern.
But behind that was another issue. After a decade of pretending there was no problem, the hundred-year-old infrastructure of the village can no longer be ignored, mostly because of the high prairie water shortage. As usual, budget constraints have been relieved by shirking maintenance. So an engineer was engaged to study the problem. He says we need a new water tank (in addition to the old one), a new 8 inch main down Montana Street (which runs past my house and was partially dug up last summer in order to put a liner in the sewer) plus new mains on three other streets which have inadequate feed, and a new well. We have four wells in various states of disrepair and nonfunction, mostly because they are fifty to a hundred years old and because the water table has sunk so low. Of course, we need “community input.” It will arrive when the community realizes water meters are inevitable and it will NOT be mild. (The engineer had some fascinating videos of the insides of the well -- stuff falling off in the insides, stuff sticking out from the sides of the bore.)
Another consultant was hired at $30,000 to manage all that community input the state requires. She comes up from Helena and mailed questionnaires to everyone. They are the worst questionnaires I’ve ever seen, clearly ripped off from someone else’s working check list, probably some kind of bureaucrat with access to state records. It asks things like “Is the WIC program adequate?” Who knows? I don’t know any of the people or even IF there are any people in this town who receive Women Infants and Children assistance, much less whether it is enough to be adequate. Most people have gone through briefly, putting checks according to guesses.
Similarly, they ask whether the education system is doing a good job. In Valier that means, “Is the basketball team winning?” I’ve never seen a curriculum. They certainly don’t publish standardized test scores. I wrote a long addendum about bus service, laundromats, and the like. The well-dressed young woman who is “doing” this questionnaire did not include all that I said -- maybe fifty per cent. She handed out a “so far” compendium of remarks. Evidently she didn’t like some of the things I said or worried someone would be offended. If she left off half of my answers, what happened to those of other people? This is a “let’s-not-do-it-and-say-we-did” kind of deal.
I lost it enough to shout but not enough to curse, thank goodness. And I was quiet for the rest of the meeting. The poor engineer -- engineers are notorious for avoiding emotion -- almost had his hands over his ears and would not meet my eyes. The Mayor’s husband sat in the back of the room, looking slightly menacing. He is an EMT and had to leave on a call halfway through the meeting. The Mayor was so upset that she said she “couldn’t go on without a hug” from a child who came with her mother, one of the outgoing city commissioners. Clearly this was true. She would not speak to me or look at me after the meeting. I hope I don’t need an EMT while her husband is on duty.
I often get comments on these blogs sympathizing with the horrors of living in a small town. There are also rewards and mitigations. Maybe it’s time for me to pay my dues by getting more involved. We’ve got a circle going here: no one wants to be on the town council because the problems are so difficult and people are so impatient about them, so the council never feels empowered to be effective. Many of our citizens are old and think of other people as children to be chastized and ordered around. We used to have someone who went door-to-door visiting them but she got old herself.
We have not had a state or county government very interested in village-level problems. Now they mandate these “surveys” and “reports” that are so complex and major that it seems worthwhile to pay $30,000 for someone to write a grant for money to fix the wells instead of just using the $30,000 to fix the wells. Of course, those middle-level buffer businesses are cleaning up. And they don’t even have to guarantee their work or meet any state standards, except for the engineers. When people are no longer involved directly, they are happy to hand off to someone else without ever realizing how much cost there is or how much they could actually participate in the outcome. Thus, the slogan around here is often, “you do something and then I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it.” And that gives rise to the Zoning of Resentment.
I have very little to do with teaching anymore, but when I’ve subbed it was obvious that no authority figure had any credibility. I’d say something. The students looked at the people among them whom they thought were smart or successful, and if those guys seemed to think it was probably right, the rest of the class went along with it. Everything was complicated by them needing peer confirmation all the time and sometimes their “smart” or “successful” people were wrong or simply in a bad mood. That’s another reason I say we’re operating like high schoolers.
Maybe I’ll be one of those “smart guys” and begin to deal direct with state bureaucrats to see what they actually say, instead of a second-hand version from the Mayor or some consultant.
PS: I did not know that the Mayor's charismatic and talented father had just died until I'd already written and posted this blog. No wonder she was thrown a bit off-stride, needed a hug from a child and support from her husband. Such is the nature of a small town that she may have thought we all knew about her loss, but I didn't. I don't know whether I'd have shown more restraint if I had. I'd have tried harder. Anyway, sincere condolences to her for her loss. She is an intelligent, competent woman who longs for a village that is a little closer to her ideal.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
H-ANIMAL
The “H” listservs (H standing for Humanities) are a group of respected ways for people of specific disciplines to communicate informally. They have become increasingly important as journals and conferences seem to proliferate at the same time than they decompose. One of the new ones is H-Animal, where I have already come a cropper -- partly out of overdone bravado at finishing my dog-catcher book and familiarity with some of the people involved which led me to be what was called “snarky” and partly because I am “outside the box,” therefore not academic.
Here’s their formal declaration: “H-Animal aims to serve as an on-line home for the growing number of scholars across disciplines who are engaged on the study of animals in human culture. H-Animal welcomes scholars from across the humanistic and social science disciplines -- historians, sociologists, literary and film scholars, anthropologists, philosophers, geographers, and so on. Because scholars who study animals as parts of human culture are scattered across disciplines, H-Animal aims to be both an intellectual forum and a clearinghouse of information. Its discussion list serves as a place to post CFPs, bibliography and research questions, and initiate broader discussion. It's [sic] book reviews and journal round-ups help keep scholars abreast of new writing about animals. The network's home page, meanwhile, provides links to teaching syllabi and other scholarly resources.”
In what way am I out of this box? The academic world exists through institutions and precedents. I understand that institutions exist to create structure, certification, and continuity. I’m clearly no longer part of a formal institution.
I grow increasingly impatient with precedent, which is also very much a part of “law” as we do it in this country, because law and universities have been linked since the first colleges in the country, founded to prepare lawyers, doctors and clergy. As I’ve remarked before, these are the “gentry” of a democracy, not privileged by land ownership, inherited, but privileged by “learning,” the mastery of a body of knowledge meant to effectively maintain order. Each new generation of scholars learns what the previous one knew, assuming always it was THE knowledge, eternal and unchanging. That’s where the train went off the tracks.
The world changes. We don’t just learn more, we come upon new knowledge that completely overthrows what we thought we knew. Academics have a very hard time with this, because then who is certified to teach the new knowledge? How do we keep from tipping into chaos? Sometimes we just don’t. We go ahead and tip as we did in the Seventies. Or more likely, the forces that had been dissenting take the occasion to revolt and seize the helm, as slightly after the Seventies. Some have better reason to do so and better evidence for their arguments than others.
What I see in animal studies is pretty much stuck and scattered, and I assume that’s the reason for this list, although the forces that want order and predictability are coming up against old renegades like me who are looking at the world in quite a different way, one that can be interpreted as vulgar and non-academic. My view comes from living on a reservation for a long time and from being an animal control officer. I've been recommending a dazzling video made by a Blackfeet grad student in Missoula: http://www.reznetnews.org/multimedia/video/rez-dogs. I also recommend an account of dogs in Nepal as posted at http://cameratrapcodger.blogspot.com/2008/01/stalwart-pariah-dogs-part-2.html These “essays” appreciate dogs that have their own lives, moving in and out of human orbits to suit their own purposes.
Many Animal Studies people seem to be thinking that people are indispensable to animals, one way or another, in deliberate ways. That’s why they call it Animals in Society. There are no biologists or natural history people mentioned in the description: no representation of what the animals think and do. But maybe the animals themselves only think of humans as a convenience. Or maybe a nuisance. And a lot of animals aren’t in human culture at all, except that they ingest industrial poisons and suffer displacement. First the breast milk of polar bears begins to contain pesticides -- then their ice melts. What we do to ourselves, also happens to them. What we do to them, also happens to us. Boria Sax of H-NILAS (Nature in Legend and Story) would rightly say animals are indispensable in tales and dreams. But as we become ever more urban we have less and less actual physical experience of animals. All we know are pets and icons.
I’ve been reading about species genomes (the close relationship between the dog genome and the human genome, for instance) and mammal brain anatomy. Evolutionary evidence is fine stuff and I love fossils, theories and imagining back to the very first ocean one-celled animals. I love the reaching out across the cosmos to the black holes and the star nurseries. But that’s not the same thing as realizing that WE are animals, that our lives are woven into the lives of animals, that viruses and larger parasites constantly move through us (see the recent NYTimes article called “Tiny Specks of Misery, Both Vile and Useful”). Our companions bring both minor and culture-changing effects. We ARE animals, we are ANIMALS, we contain reptile/mammal/primate to say nothing of billions of tiny symbionts.
Most people (not just list people) think without reflection that the rest of the world is just like them, but to be in another place is to be in another culture which might not share the same assumptions at all. We are not all grad students or professors in university towns but thinking can go on in other places. Whole swaths of “animals in society” are invisible from the ivory tower enterprise of finding an ideal “way” of treating all animals, very like the religious enterprise of finding an idea “way” of relating to other people, which lately seems to be universally botched.
People have had a hard time dealing with the idea that humans are just big talented animals with very little to distinguish them from the rest of living creatures. The one aspect some have grabbed onto as a sign of superiority is a kind of co-dependence on animals, the idea that only THEY can relieve animal suffering and really understand them. They have a child's inability to come to terms with the whole problem of suffering in general, that it is inevitable. Even anesthetics cause damage. Maybe to some extent focusing on cruelty to animals keeps these people from thinking about human suffering, which Christians of some kinds believe is imposed as deserved punishment anyway. Others see it as something like a sacrifice that can be “offered up.” And Asians have alway recommended detachment, not possible for scholars -- or is it?
On the H-Animal list the comparison is explicitly made to scholars of the “other” humans: the black, the female, the Native American, the queer, the handicapped, etc. This is the track that many scholars have been on since the Seventies: reversals and challenges to what was once the status quo of social power. By now the dynamics of change have made a difference but those young revolutionaries are now in power and see no need to change. It has become a dogma in a pun-like literal way: “underdogs” must be cherished and saved. But university management have moved on -- these departments are closing.
So far no one has talked about the incredibly challenging information arriving from genetic research -- the plain fact that all life is continuous, connected, interwoven, symbiotic, conjoined and that the slightest change in the helical 4-molecule formula can create a whole new animal. The evolution of life from the slime level is never referenced. The terrifying prospects of extinction aren't mentioned -- just sadness at loss species-by-species like objects missing from the cupboard. (Surely someone has written about the relationship between animals and the “cabinet of curiosities?”) There is no notice that we, as complex high-on-the-food-chain animals, will probably be extinguished rather early. It may have already started with the march of malaria northward and subtle poisons creating autoimmune and diabetic disease, small but deadly molecular ecologies gone awry. There's been no talk about zoonoses like AIDS changing our civilization, a way of remote places defend themselves that we have ignored.
Maybe the grad students who initiated H-Animal are using university as a place to hide. How’s THAT for snarky?
Here’s their formal declaration: “H-Animal aims to serve as an on-line home for the growing number of scholars across disciplines who are engaged on the study of animals in human culture. H-Animal welcomes scholars from across the humanistic and social science disciplines -- historians, sociologists, literary and film scholars, anthropologists, philosophers, geographers, and so on. Because scholars who study animals as parts of human culture are scattered across disciplines, H-Animal aims to be both an intellectual forum and a clearinghouse of information. Its discussion list serves as a place to post CFPs, bibliography and research questions, and initiate broader discussion. It's [sic] book reviews and journal round-ups help keep scholars abreast of new writing about animals. The network's home page, meanwhile, provides links to teaching syllabi and other scholarly resources.”
In what way am I out of this box? The academic world exists through institutions and precedents. I understand that institutions exist to create structure, certification, and continuity. I’m clearly no longer part of a formal institution.
I grow increasingly impatient with precedent, which is also very much a part of “law” as we do it in this country, because law and universities have been linked since the first colleges in the country, founded to prepare lawyers, doctors and clergy. As I’ve remarked before, these are the “gentry” of a democracy, not privileged by land ownership, inherited, but privileged by “learning,” the mastery of a body of knowledge meant to effectively maintain order. Each new generation of scholars learns what the previous one knew, assuming always it was THE knowledge, eternal and unchanging. That’s where the train went off the tracks.
The world changes. We don’t just learn more, we come upon new knowledge that completely overthrows what we thought we knew. Academics have a very hard time with this, because then who is certified to teach the new knowledge? How do we keep from tipping into chaos? Sometimes we just don’t. We go ahead and tip as we did in the Seventies. Or more likely, the forces that had been dissenting take the occasion to revolt and seize the helm, as slightly after the Seventies. Some have better reason to do so and better evidence for their arguments than others.
What I see in animal studies is pretty much stuck and scattered, and I assume that’s the reason for this list, although the forces that want order and predictability are coming up against old renegades like me who are looking at the world in quite a different way, one that can be interpreted as vulgar and non-academic. My view comes from living on a reservation for a long time and from being an animal control officer. I've been recommending a dazzling video made by a Blackfeet grad student in Missoula: http://www.reznetnews.org/multimedia/video/rez-dogs. I also recommend an account of dogs in Nepal as posted at http://cameratrapcodger.blogspot.com/2008/01/stalwart-pariah-dogs-part-2.html These “essays” appreciate dogs that have their own lives, moving in and out of human orbits to suit their own purposes.
Many Animal Studies people seem to be thinking that people are indispensable to animals, one way or another, in deliberate ways. That’s why they call it Animals in Society. There are no biologists or natural history people mentioned in the description: no representation of what the animals think and do. But maybe the animals themselves only think of humans as a convenience. Or maybe a nuisance. And a lot of animals aren’t in human culture at all, except that they ingest industrial poisons and suffer displacement. First the breast milk of polar bears begins to contain pesticides -- then their ice melts. What we do to ourselves, also happens to them. What we do to them, also happens to us. Boria Sax of H-NILAS (Nature in Legend and Story) would rightly say animals are indispensable in tales and dreams. But as we become ever more urban we have less and less actual physical experience of animals. All we know are pets and icons.
I’ve been reading about species genomes (the close relationship between the dog genome and the human genome, for instance) and mammal brain anatomy. Evolutionary evidence is fine stuff and I love fossils, theories and imagining back to the very first ocean one-celled animals. I love the reaching out across the cosmos to the black holes and the star nurseries. But that’s not the same thing as realizing that WE are animals, that our lives are woven into the lives of animals, that viruses and larger parasites constantly move through us (see the recent NYTimes article called “Tiny Specks of Misery, Both Vile and Useful”). Our companions bring both minor and culture-changing effects. We ARE animals, we are ANIMALS, we contain reptile/mammal/primate to say nothing of billions of tiny symbionts.
Most people (not just list people) think without reflection that the rest of the world is just like them, but to be in another place is to be in another culture which might not share the same assumptions at all. We are not all grad students or professors in university towns but thinking can go on in other places. Whole swaths of “animals in society” are invisible from the ivory tower enterprise of finding an ideal “way” of treating all animals, very like the religious enterprise of finding an idea “way” of relating to other people, which lately seems to be universally botched.
People have had a hard time dealing with the idea that humans are just big talented animals with very little to distinguish them from the rest of living creatures. The one aspect some have grabbed onto as a sign of superiority is a kind of co-dependence on animals, the idea that only THEY can relieve animal suffering and really understand them. They have a child's inability to come to terms with the whole problem of suffering in general, that it is inevitable. Even anesthetics cause damage. Maybe to some extent focusing on cruelty to animals keeps these people from thinking about human suffering, which Christians of some kinds believe is imposed as deserved punishment anyway. Others see it as something like a sacrifice that can be “offered up.” And Asians have alway recommended detachment, not possible for scholars -- or is it?
On the H-Animal list the comparison is explicitly made to scholars of the “other” humans: the black, the female, the Native American, the queer, the handicapped, etc. This is the track that many scholars have been on since the Seventies: reversals and challenges to what was once the status quo of social power. By now the dynamics of change have made a difference but those young revolutionaries are now in power and see no need to change. It has become a dogma in a pun-like literal way: “underdogs” must be cherished and saved. But university management have moved on -- these departments are closing.
So far no one has talked about the incredibly challenging information arriving from genetic research -- the plain fact that all life is continuous, connected, interwoven, symbiotic, conjoined and that the slightest change in the helical 4-molecule formula can create a whole new animal. The evolution of life from the slime level is never referenced. The terrifying prospects of extinction aren't mentioned -- just sadness at loss species-by-species like objects missing from the cupboard. (Surely someone has written about the relationship between animals and the “cabinet of curiosities?”) There is no notice that we, as complex high-on-the-food-chain animals, will probably be extinguished rather early. It may have already started with the march of malaria northward and subtle poisons creating autoimmune and diabetic disease, small but deadly molecular ecologies gone awry. There's been no talk about zoonoses like AIDS changing our civilization, a way of remote places defend themselves that we have ignored.
Maybe the grad students who initiated H-Animal are using university as a place to hide. How’s THAT for snarky?
Monday, January 07, 2008
THE NIGHT TERRIER
This little scribble was produced at the home of Michael and Linda Sexson, faculty members at Montana State University, at that time active Unitarian Universalist fellowship parents, and noted authors. Lynda Sexson, Professor (PhD, Syracuse University, 1982) Religion and Culture: Literature;.and Michael Sexson, Department of English - Professor. (Ph.D. Syracuse University) Literature & Religion, Mythology.
A list of their books will give you an idea of what their interests and expertise are like. By Michael: Quest of Self in the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Studies in Art and Religious Interpretation, V. 1) By Lynda: Ordinarily Sacred; Hamlet’s Planets: Parables; and Margaret of the Imperfections. Together they edited Corona 4: Marking the Edges of Many Circles. But it wasn’t one of their books that had such a impact on my life: it was a conference they organized in the Eighties.
It was about computers, which they saw in their own unique way and -- because of excellent contacts in the academic world -- could explore from a humanities point of view. Naturally Michael was attracted to the Macintosh platform and the little squibble at the top of the blog was the result of one of his experiments. He sat me at whatever Mac he had at the time (I had never even touched one until then!), turned on a “draw” program, explained a few basics, and gave me a twenty-minute time limit to produce an image. I generally doodle terrier faces, so I did -- a little stranger than usual since I wasn’t used to drawing with a mouse. At some point I hit the reverse button that made the drawing white-on-black. Mike left me alone but when he heard the printing (it was a daisy wheel printer: chatter, chatter, chatter) he came back to see what on earth I’d done! He said NO ONE had ever produced an image like this one, which made me very proud as that was a period in my life when I thought being creative meant being one-of-a-kind.
The image has been kicking around in my boxes of unfiled material ever since. I’ve taken to calling it “The Night Terrier.” When I was doing animal control, I adopted an energetic little wire-haired terrier, probably crossed with a Jack Russell terrier, which I named Pipsqueak. My mother called her “Pippi Longstockings” and she responded to just “Pip.” This morning terriermandotcom.blogspot.com has an essay about Jack Russell terriers: so appealing, so impossible, such a potential bad dream. They are full of energy, hard if not impossible to control, intelligent and appealing. I gave Pip away so I could go to seminary. She went to a family of kids where she was much loved, kept busy, and lived to a happy old age. In the end she was found dead in one of her favorite sleeping places: the bottom of a closet where the kids’ shoes were piled up. The earlier terrier archetype was Duncan McTavish, a Scottie/Sealyham mix who went with my nuclear family through many adventures. Michael interviewed me a bit about my image, but the real goal was to compile a working document that showed what images computers brought out of people. I never did see it -- don’t know if it were ever completed.
But this is supposed to be about the computer conference. People were PASSIONATE! Far from cool techies! Thomas Moore was there to explain how computers tapped into our human way of making inanimate objects into something human: ventriloquists’ dummies (the computer as Mortimer Snerd), Pinocchio (the computer as liar), and oracles (futurism). They weren’t tools, they were relationships! The psychologist who invented a computerized counseling program (It asked: “How did that make you feel? Tell me more. Did it have anything to do with your mother?”) told us how he came in early from lunch once and found his own secretary earnestly explaining her problems to the computer. She never mentioned them to him! Fred Turner talked about the changing shape of humanities disciplines and what computers and the Internet might do to them. (Little did any of us realize!)
I suppose a conference quite like that might not be possible with modern college kids. They’re into iPhones with images and (more than anything else) music, constant “texting” to friends, and YouTube, Facebook, etc. definitions of themselves not as psychological entities but as consumers, thumbs against the world. On the other hand, I’d love to see what Mike and Lynda would do with these elements. If they aren’t mythic, religious and “in quest of the self,” I don’t know what is. But the principles of discipline and definition that they use are entirely different. It seems to me that kids have pushed computers back to being tools, a “palm pilot” handheld and earphoned expansion of themselves rather than a little separate person squatting on the desk. They are a FAR more suspicious bunch than the generation that included the Sexsons and myself, but also shockingly self-revealing.
Last night my blood sugar sank into the seventies (no bedtime snack), which is not medically significant particularly, but does cause me to have a change in consciousness, a less secure lid on my subconscious. I had a “night terrier.” Not a night MARE, which is something that seizes you and carries you off -- at the most extreme the terrifying ride of the shaman who dies in sleep, is borne over a valley of bones, and is born again at dawn. Night MARES are intense enough that people can die of heart attacks.
No, this was a night terrier, digging and biting and dragging things out of holes. I was on a campus, my shoes fell all apart but they were red shoes: at least the pieces that were left were. There was a huge hole in the earth, an amphitheater, but it filled with water and people were swimming but there were no lifeguards and one woman drowned. Her body was deflated, a rag, and somehow I was responsible for it, so I laid her out on the pavement and asked a nearby policeman (who was the desk sergeant from “Foyle’s War”) to guard it. Then I entered a classroom where there were a lot of big suspicious women and no one was in charge. I was supposed to speak.
Thomas Moore would listen to all this very carefully and then begin to ask me to free-associate. He’s from the James Hillman school of thought: nothing is too sacred to reflect upon because all of life is sacred, but sacrality doesn’t necessarily mean institutional dogma. We each create our own dogmas. (And karmas, and, as in the joke, may your karma never run over your dogma.) I always listen to my night terriers. This one is easy: worrying about whether this bio of Bob is good enough to redeem my seminary years. That deflated person who drowned? She’s me -- the worst possibility. But you see, I found a sympathetic authority figure and went on. Now I think that being creative is a matter of courage.
Duncan McTavish, guardian of the garden -- no garter snakes allowed!
Sunday, January 06, 2008
SAM & BEULAH STRACHAN IN RETIREMENT
Beulah with her tatting kit, never far away. Sam with Five Acres and Independence: A Handbook for Small Farm Management (ISBN: 0486209741) Kains, M. G. (Author) Oldfield, J. E. (Introduction by)
At some point -- which I have never properly figured out, but either during or just after WWII -- the Sam Strachans moved to a small house on NE 63rd street in Portland and also, at least for a while, owned another similar house on 65th. This was an area of town still largely woods and they bought, as the title of the book says, “Five Acres” or about that. The little house (what we might call a “starter house” now) had two bedrooms and a partly finished cellar. (My house in Valier is much the same.) We kids were not encouraged to go down in the cellar, but it was at least partly dirt where potatoes were heaped up for storage. The smell was rich and dark. But I also seem to remember a kind of simple office where ledgers were in rows at a ledge-style desk. I suppose the KK archives were there.
The garage was big enough for Grandpa to build a Kozy Kamp in it, and he always seemed to have one puttering along. He used old-fashioned tools and I would pick out the long clean curls of wood from planing the sides of boards so as to hold them up to my head alongside my red curls, brushed into sausages.
But the point of the acreage was the garden, partly row crops and partly cane fruits such as raspberries or boysenberries. Sam subscribed to the ideas of Rodale, so there was always a stone pile where garter snakes lived and a compost pile that rarely interested us much. What we loved most was the surrounding woods, thickety small growth of alder and other brush. It was just big enough for a small child to imagine being lost, but one was never out of earshot of traffic, not that there was much of it. We didn’t live there -- just visited -- so we never created the kind of little hooch or hut that kids in residence manage to make out of scraps. Rather, we made nests and beds among the bracken. To us it was an introduction to what scholars formally call “wilderness” but to adults it was potential development, which eventually happened after we were gone.
The inside of the house felt quite different from my mother’s house on 15th. Looking back at my father’s photos of the prairie houses, I see that it was furnished with the goods and chattels of those houses -- I can pick out the mantel clock and some of the pictures on the wall -- but also in the style of those places: pictures are hung high on the walls. The light used was generally the one in the middle of the ceiling and never had a very strong bulb in it. The floor had old woven rugs. My grandmother’s little pump organ was there -- I don’t know where it finally went. (Many things were gradually sold as money was too short.) The fireplace was very much in use.
The kitchen had a built-in dinette and a bit of a pantry cabinet wall across from it. There was no dining room and I can’t remember a big extended family meal there. Maybe by this time Beulah was not quite up to it. They ate what they raised, mostly, and Grandpa impressed us because he put sugar on his sliced tomatoes! He claimed it tasted the same as salt, but we doubted it. Margarine at that time was white and came in a bag with a little capsule of coloring in it. I would beg to break and mix the coloring, as one was presumed to do, but Beulah thought it was an unnecessary bother. They just ate it white unless I insisted on “helping.” I thought it was “the way things are supposed to be.” In my primary years, I had a strong Martha Stewart streak and felt that order must be maintained in the world. (Maybe that was the war influence.)
Grandpa Strachan died in that little house February 22, 1951. The story I had in my head was that he was working in the garden, came in to lie down for a nap, seemed all right (didn’t complain), and was only there for a bit when Grandma heard him make some kind of vague sound. When she called to him and got no answer, she went to see what had happened. It was a heart attack, close to instant. In my own mind this account became mixed with Marlon Brando in the “Godfather,” dying among the tomatoes, so I was startled to discover that it happened in February. Not that Sam Strachan was in any way like a Mafia Godfather. He was always essentially a school superintendent turned gentleman farmer and entrepreneur: quiet, diligent, organized, and reliable. The Thomas Jefferson ideal that his father, Archibald, came to the Dakotas to pursue -- with no success. Wrong temperament. Tough environment.
Beulah Strachan moved to her daughter’s home, a new dream house on the west side of the West Hills, and the whole dynamic of the family changed as they reorganized the financial arrangements that had protected the parents in their old age. Beulah and Sam had been so entwined since Septemeber 19, 1901, when they married, so used to working side by side in their pith helmets, that she hardly knew how to live alone. She died March 31, 1953. Canada geese are supposed to have this kind of faithful bond. It is a mixed blessing, but it had worked beautifully for five decades through many hardships. Their lives, their “lifestyle” if you insist, are my ideal, but one I’ve never come close to achieving. Maybe now.
Saturday, January 05, 2008
HUMANE SOCIETY OF THE UNITED STATES
If the Humane Society of the United States were a religious institution, which it very nearly is, preaching the doctrine of compassion and the horror of cruelty, it would not be a mainstream denomination because it has no actual churches (shelters). Not even a Crystal Cathedral. However, the minister --er, President Emeritus -- John Hoyt IS or was a Presbyterian minister who found the perks and income much nicer with HSUS. (Just as Bill Schulz, once head of the UUA and constant protester that he only wanted to minister to small worthy churches, found that the only job that wasn’t a step down was as head of Amnesty International.)
Also, since Hoyt’s ministry amounted to circuit-riding among HSUS-sponsored events, he could give the same sermon repeatedly. I must have heard it half-a-dozen times when I was working with Multnomah County Animal Control in the Seventies. The money-story was about a pair of Canada geese, which are believed to pair for life, except that one of them is shot. Guaranteed to bring a tear to your eye. Don’t get me wrong: Reverend Hoyt is one of those likeable, handsome, well-coiffed men that Americans have always loved because of their Anglophilic confusion of clergy with gentry. “A Man Called Peter,” the kind of man Huckabee hopes will be elected President of the US.
I don’t recall meeting Wayne Pacelle, the present president. He got his start with the Fund for Animals and has said he wants HSUS to be the NRA of animal issues: a political powerhouse and a cash cow. He is not above violence (though not personally), which rather suggests the extreme Christian Fundamentalists who feel any measures are legitimate to stop abortion.
I did meet Cleveland Amory before he died. Besides being a co-founder of HSUS, he (ahem) “embodied” the Fund for Animals which the initiated called “the fund for Cleveland Amory” since it mostly just supported Amory while he traveled around speaking. It may be that HSUS was meant to be a replacement, more of a screen for fund-raising, but it has far eclipsed Amory’s small personal “fund” and has inflated in much the same way as the pharmaceutical and energy lobbying corporations for about the same reasons. This is far beyond what HSUS doing when I first helped organize conferences with them. At that time they were busy trying to stamp out their rival, the American Humane Association, which works to protect children as well as animals. Now HSUS has attracted critiques like that at ActivistCash.com which analyzes their enormous and complex staff, budget, endeavors and lawsuits. HSUS recommends a rebuttal site.
Perhaps it was PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which first grew out of the post-modern Marxist reification of the small, the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the nonhuman and demanded special studies of such categories as the Black, the Female, the Queer, the Native American and so on. Many scholars, especially the minority scholars who were members of the groups they studied, rose to prominence through these innovative university departments. Among them was Peter Singer, who emphasized the suffering and exploitation of animals. So long as prosperity supported expansion, these departments thrived, though there were sometimes intra-departmental kafuffles over what was “true” feminism and how black one had to be and a few people who turned out not to be at all Native American. Today these programs are being closed down as money-losers, while the minorities and rights-based scholars are finding that people think their books are unintelligible.
Since I was “initiated” as an animal control education coordinator, I had occasion to be “backstage” with the Seventies HSUS people, meeting their planes, buying them dinner, and so on, in the same way that later when I was an ordained UU minister I was backstage with denominational officials -- not just the local congregation leaders, but the big-time national officers. I found them remarkably the same. Their focus was always on maintaining the institution that paid their salaries. How do we increase our income? How do we get more members? What issues will attract publicity? Who are the effective fund-raisers out there and what will they charge us? These are hard-headed business people -- not celebrities or hand-wringers. They make money by being irreproachable. Rather like the Pope. Or Mother Theresa.
Among the issues HSUS takes on are: disasters (they show up, get on television, then disappear), dog fights (esp. the celebrity cases like Vick), high-profile humane stories like the truck-load of collies stopped at the US/Canada border, zoos, rodeos, hunting, wild horses, dog races, puppy mills, etc. Easy to demonize. Their budget for the people who travel to “hot spots” to make media appearances is about $2 million. If you look at their website, journalist’s inquiries are guided to a full panel of specialists. They have an adaptable policy towards agricultural animal abuse and oppose the eating of meat and the wearing of fur. (Pacelle is vegan.) Money changes hands.
Lately academics have begun to question some of the policies and practices of the HSUS. Michael Fox remains with them (there are lots of insider jokes about “Michael’s little foxes,” the diligent female researchers he uses to produce his work) but I don’t see Peter Singer’s name at the moment, which makes me curious. They still list Jane Goodall. So a flag went up in my mind when the HSUS announced the awarding of a panel of prizes to professors who teach animal studies courses. I know two of those recipients and they are certainly worthy, but they have hardly been big anti-cruelty forces, except to the extent that any conscientious person would be. But spreading a little money around ought to dampen crusades.
In the last few years I’ve become more and more sensitive to the proliferation of nonprofit corporations based on do-good principles, partly because there are many of them in Montana working for conservation, ag reform, peace, grizzly protection, and a host of other issues. I notice that their CEO’s dress well, drive nice cars, and eat in nice places. Many of them have law degrees but have never been working lawyers -- rather they tend to have ties to legislators or media. I don’t think I’ve ever met one who wasn’t a college graduate. I have no doubt that some of these foundations are legitimate, hard-working, and effective in the use of their resources. But I’m also beginning to have suspicions that they are unregulated storefront preachers, passing the hat for their own good. How could anyone blame them when it works so well for HSUS?
Also, since Hoyt’s ministry amounted to circuit-riding among HSUS-sponsored events, he could give the same sermon repeatedly. I must have heard it half-a-dozen times when I was working with Multnomah County Animal Control in the Seventies. The money-story was about a pair of Canada geese, which are believed to pair for life, except that one of them is shot. Guaranteed to bring a tear to your eye. Don’t get me wrong: Reverend Hoyt is one of those likeable, handsome, well-coiffed men that Americans have always loved because of their Anglophilic confusion of clergy with gentry. “A Man Called Peter,” the kind of man Huckabee hopes will be elected President of the US.
I don’t recall meeting Wayne Pacelle, the present president. He got his start with the Fund for Animals and has said he wants HSUS to be the NRA of animal issues: a political powerhouse and a cash cow. He is not above violence (though not personally), which rather suggests the extreme Christian Fundamentalists who feel any measures are legitimate to stop abortion.
I did meet Cleveland Amory before he died. Besides being a co-founder of HSUS, he (ahem) “embodied” the Fund for Animals which the initiated called “the fund for Cleveland Amory” since it mostly just supported Amory while he traveled around speaking. It may be that HSUS was meant to be a replacement, more of a screen for fund-raising, but it has far eclipsed Amory’s small personal “fund” and has inflated in much the same way as the pharmaceutical and energy lobbying corporations for about the same reasons. This is far beyond what HSUS doing when I first helped organize conferences with them. At that time they were busy trying to stamp out their rival, the American Humane Association, which works to protect children as well as animals. Now HSUS has attracted critiques like that at ActivistCash.com which analyzes their enormous and complex staff, budget, endeavors and lawsuits. HSUS recommends a rebuttal site.
Perhaps it was PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which first grew out of the post-modern Marxist reification of the small, the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the nonhuman and demanded special studies of such categories as the Black, the Female, the Queer, the Native American and so on. Many scholars, especially the minority scholars who were members of the groups they studied, rose to prominence through these innovative university departments. Among them was Peter Singer, who emphasized the suffering and exploitation of animals. So long as prosperity supported expansion, these departments thrived, though there were sometimes intra-departmental kafuffles over what was “true” feminism and how black one had to be and a few people who turned out not to be at all Native American. Today these programs are being closed down as money-losers, while the minorities and rights-based scholars are finding that people think their books are unintelligible.
Since I was “initiated” as an animal control education coordinator, I had occasion to be “backstage” with the Seventies HSUS people, meeting their planes, buying them dinner, and so on, in the same way that later when I was an ordained UU minister I was backstage with denominational officials -- not just the local congregation leaders, but the big-time national officers. I found them remarkably the same. Their focus was always on maintaining the institution that paid their salaries. How do we increase our income? How do we get more members? What issues will attract publicity? Who are the effective fund-raisers out there and what will they charge us? These are hard-headed business people -- not celebrities or hand-wringers. They make money by being irreproachable. Rather like the Pope. Or Mother Theresa.
Among the issues HSUS takes on are: disasters (they show up, get on television, then disappear), dog fights (esp. the celebrity cases like Vick), high-profile humane stories like the truck-load of collies stopped at the US/Canada border, zoos, rodeos, hunting, wild horses, dog races, puppy mills, etc. Easy to demonize. Their budget for the people who travel to “hot spots” to make media appearances is about $2 million. If you look at their website, journalist’s inquiries are guided to a full panel of specialists. They have an adaptable policy towards agricultural animal abuse and oppose the eating of meat and the wearing of fur. (Pacelle is vegan.) Money changes hands.
Lately academics have begun to question some of the policies and practices of the HSUS. Michael Fox remains with them (there are lots of insider jokes about “Michael’s little foxes,” the diligent female researchers he uses to produce his work) but I don’t see Peter Singer’s name at the moment, which makes me curious. They still list Jane Goodall. So a flag went up in my mind when the HSUS announced the awarding of a panel of prizes to professors who teach animal studies courses. I know two of those recipients and they are certainly worthy, but they have hardly been big anti-cruelty forces, except to the extent that any conscientious person would be. But spreading a little money around ought to dampen crusades.
In the last few years I’ve become more and more sensitive to the proliferation of nonprofit corporations based on do-good principles, partly because there are many of them in Montana working for conservation, ag reform, peace, grizzly protection, and a host of other issues. I notice that their CEO’s dress well, drive nice cars, and eat in nice places. Many of them have law degrees but have never been working lawyers -- rather they tend to have ties to legislators or media. I don’t think I’ve ever met one who wasn’t a college graduate. I have no doubt that some of these foundations are legitimate, hard-working, and effective in the use of their resources. But I’m also beginning to have suspicions that they are unregulated storefront preachers, passing the hat for their own good. How could anyone blame them when it works so well for HSUS?
Friday, January 04, 2008
ECONOMIC SUCCESS
Lake Francis with the Rocky Mountains in the background.
We are all concerned about economics these days, perhaps esp. on reservations where things are getting better -- maybe too slowly. A recent study of rez econ suggests that they are generating about a billion and a half dollars both for themselves and the rest of the state.
I keep trying to develop my own doctrine of economic success and this is what I have so far: two principles. First, that profit is increased by complexity. This is because profit comes from moving goods, services or energy across gradients, that is, from a place where the commodity is plentiful to a place where it is scarce but desired. The second is that mechanisms for prosperity and development depend upon stability. If laws, the weather, society, technology change too rapidly or drastically, it produces uncertainty and confusion.
So these two principles are balanced against each other, because moving stuff across gradients can change the situation but it is compensation for change that produces the progress in development.
If things change too quickly, in too major a way, too unexpectedly, without compensation, the whole system can lurch out of control Consider fur-trapping: one instability was over-trapping, so that the beavers became scarce, but the real disaster was the fashion change that made beaver felt hats unsaleable. The over-trapping was predictable, even to the simplest denizen of the frontier, but maybe not so easily was the fashion change predictable except to urban observers of the scene far removed from trappers.
What I draw from this is the conclusion that the reservation, in its present complexity, is doing quite well because there are many points of entry for new workers and businesses, as contrasted with the old days when there were only a few players: the government, the tribe, the school, and a little circle of white merchants. That last, a little circle of white merchants, is what now characterizes the small and shrinking high-line communities based on the mono-culture of irrigated agriculture. The unforeseen threat is the disappearance of the water: no snow pack, no run-off, no irrigation. What that throws into sharp focus is the sloppiness of early legal arrangements about water rights and access. The assumption was that Indians would die out so there was no need to be too careful. The Conrad Brothers simply built Swift Dam at the headwaters of Birch Creek and let the paperwork follow in time.
But the sticklers DID do a tight job of creating the Pondera Canal company and guarding the water impounded in Lake Francis. The town cannot, for instance, draw water from the lake for the town’s trees and lawns without buying shares in the company. So now they are laced into their own corset.
Beyond that are the dynamics of the one-celled social entity versus the multi-celled. We spent a lot of time on this in workshops about church growth. A one-celled church includes maybe a hundred people, all pretty much alike, and this is the most natural and easiest way for a congregation to form -- or it was in the old days. What has changed for churches is the cost of a building and minister. Now the minimum size that can support these basics is more like two or three hundred, unless they are exceptionally prosperous or committed. Valier is still pretty much a monoculture and at about three hundred adult residents is still barely able to operate as a single-celled unit. The same several dozens of business-owners and leaders rotate through the town council chairs until they are exhausted, but they feel obligated to protect their own interests.
Since the interests of the leaders are in maintaining the status quo, even though they realize that progress requires change, most new things come either as appearance (new street signs) or needy infrastructure (not enough water, government rules about sewers). Councilmen make agreements without public notice and all surveys are controlled “to suit Valier.” This is encouraged by the high level of criticism from people exceptionally sensitive to change (low-income, elderly), but it totally evades the input of new people with new ideas. Even those who move to town with relatively high prosperity and experience are generally excluded by simply not letting them know what’s going on. Realtors collaborate in this -- they are not frank.
Sometimes determined and wealthy new residents DO manage politics by checkbook, not because they are interested in the town but because they are managing major projects that might stir up resistance and therefore need to know and influence local politics. They move on when their projects are done.
So, complexity on the rez means prosperity or at least the opportunities for it -- and uniformity in small towns means stagnation. This baffles those church-attenders who have believed that success is based on virtue! Isn’t it virtuous to protect one’s family and home and business? Not when virtue is defined as the maintenance of the status quo. Whether the origins of the idea are in the class-based European society or in the steady-state understanding of an ideal world according to the Bible, the consequences of the assumption can be deadly. Mono-culture is not just a problem in crops, where it can mean that one new disease or pest can wipe out square miles of grain.
But the rez community should not get cocky. Alongside the creation of many new opportunities are many new pitfalls, for what is opportunity but the chance to risk and fail? In the old days problems were managed by simply striking camp to leave or by throwing out the trouble makers. That tendency persists among people who move constantly among the schools and tribal housing, never achieving commitment to one course of action long enough to build up equity and skill.
So the successful community is one that manages a balance between change and consistency, judiciously balancing one against the other. The rez should learn from the small white town and the small town should pay attention to the rez. The forces preventing healthy exchange and understanding are about the same on both sides: fear of the future, longing for the past, preoccupation with one’s interests in the present.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
AUTHORS ARE MOTHERS; PUBLISHERS ARE FATHERS
Publishers are fathers, authors are mothers -- printers are... obstetricians? This observation is prompted by the reaction of the University of Calgary Press to -- at last! -- the appearance of “Bronze Inside and Out” yesterday, which was, “It’s beautiful!” Kind of what a father would say on seeing his newborn. When I complained about the lateness of the printer (which had the manuscript -- ready to go -- in October), the same U of Calgary Press person sympathized, “Oh, it must be like waiting for a baby to be born!” Implying that pregnancy is uncomfortable and the end is wanted -- but at least acknowledging that though the publisher is responsible for the original impetus, it is the mother/author who gestates the baby.
But that’s not how I feel now, though this book is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh and the “pregnancy” has been about fifty years long. I could keep it safe while it was unborn. Now I’m feeling like a parent whose child has just started school, going off alone into adventures. I want to be a “helicopter author,” hovering over the book and trying to guide it along. I know what sorts of pitfalls and burnings are out there waiting for it, some wanting to destroy it and some wanting to exalt it beyond common sense. Who should I alert? What follow-up articles should I write? What speeches should I make?
Bob Scriver was not one of those easy-going sweetheart artists like maybe John Clymer or Tom Sander. Personally difficult, he seemed to have a gift for getting into scrapes and controversies. Maybe it was the times, maybe it was being white on the Blackfeet reservation, and maybe it was a factor of his success that he attracted coyotes. Anyway, some people will react to the book in about the same way that they reacted to the person.
The first reactions of another sort of reader were to get rid of me, to shut me up, to deny that I could write a book, to reduce me to a stenographer instead of a contributor, to grab my book and make it into something else. I’ve had to assert my participation in this story. Minor players have some questions to answer (like Phil Scriver’s pretense of being Bob’s cousin so as to get at his business affairs) but I’m not going to pursue them. Let some ambitious journalist do it -- that’s their job. Rather, I’m interested in the big institutions who control Bob’s estate. By delaying decisions in his lifetime and putting his work in the hands of his widow (the fourth wife, now deceased: I was the third), he essentially put everything in the hands of lawyers. (Insert lawyer joke here.)
The goal became the conversion of goods to cash as quickly as it could be done. In the process, value was lost. Collections like that of the huge Fery mural-like paintings that used to line the walls of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife were sold one-by-one at auction. If the collection of animals had been kept together and displayed with those paintings, it would have remained something of unique beauty and value. Now it will never exist again. A collection of John Sharp sketches of the Blackfeet reservation was dispersed at auction. I’m unable to find out what happened to the John Rogers sculpture collection, though I’ve asked.
The molds of the original animals that Bob collected and used to make the paper mache shells for these full-mounts had been carefully stored. They also had considerable value, but they were destroyed. They were NOT the molds that were intended to be destroyed, the molds for the sculptures. In any case, Bob had been selling the copyrights of many of his bronzes to entrepreneurs who set their own edition limits, contracted with foundries, and owned their molds: these were not destroyed. New castings are available today if you know whom to contact.
The Montana Historical Society, whose chief focus is the sorting and preserving of valuable documents, cannot locate the most crucial documents of the Scriver estate: the records of sales. Much of the value of art of any sort and especially sculpture comes from being able to trace the ownership of the specific piece from artist to current owner. Bob was meticulous about keeping these records and also gave bronze buyers a certificate confirming their ownership of that specific number of the limited edition, along with the number expected to be cast. The MHS says it “cannot locate” these papers because it doesn’t have enough money. Yet the papers they removed from the studio had already been sorted into files which the MHS archives lists. Perhaps the provenance records had been removed in the year or so that Bob’s lawyer managed the estate in situ. He is a dealer in Scriver bronzes. Perhaps there is a deeper and more sinister motive: I hear rumors that MHS removed bronzes that had been ordered and paid for by customers.
No provision was made for the continuing publication of the three books that Bob self-published about his work: “An Honest Try,” “No More Buffalo,” and “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains.” A copy of the latter is for sale in the gift shop of the CMR Museum for $550. I’ve seen it on the Internet for as much as $800. Bob accurately predicted that the artifact collection would not be kept together, but that the pictorial record would endure.
The original lawyer tried to keep the estate in Browning as a foundation with himself as the director. The lawyer who took the estate away from that first lawyer (professional courtesy?) was quick to broker a deal to break it up. Bob had wanted everything to go to the Royal Alberta Museum, which had bought the Scriver Artifact Collection. In the last decades of Bob’s lifetime, he had become much entwined with the CM Russell Museum in Great Falls, serving on their advisory board. They had made repeated offers of space for his work, but he was always talked out of it (By whom? His lawyer?) or became doubtful. He was extremely aware of art wheeling and dealing in the state (some would say “corruption”) and if he smelled it, he veered off. At one meeting he gave an impassioned scolding to all present, but everyone put it down to senile dementia. Indeed, he was not mentally or emotionally balanced in the last decades. Probably the stroke in 1988 pushed him over the edge. The lawyers, of course, don’t want anyone to think about this.
For a while there was a four-way deal: the RAM, the CMR, and the MHS with the full-mounts (oh, what a nuisance) dumped on the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. (As was Arnold Olsen, in time.) Then there was a quick shuffle of peas under walnut shells and the CMR was excluded. MHS became the legal owner of everything with long-term “loans” of the Blackfeet series of bronzes to the RAM and those full-mounts to the RMEF. The irony is that the MHS has failed to even unpack the estate in the building that was supposed to house it, a steel warehouse with gallery space out by the Helena airport. In the meantime, Ed Mitch -- one of those entrepreneurs who collaborated with Bob -- gave his collection of Scriver bronzes to the CMR where they are exhibited today.
The MHS, which is truthfully bursting at the seams, is now aspiring to a new building. The location and designing of this edifice is very much open to speculation and plotting, which renders the MHS more vulnerable to examination for its policies and capacities than it has ever been. Whatever plan is settled upon, it will take a huge funding drive. Other competing institutions may not be motivated to cooperate.
This book will be jostled and dissected. But -- there are a lot of less political things in it. Funny stories, hunting adventures, hair-raising foundry moments. Heart-breakers and spiritual uplifters. In many ways, it is a story of unrequited love: I loved Bob Scriver, who didn’t love me; Bob loved the Blackfeet, who didn’t love him; and all three of us loved the east slope of the Rockies which doesn’t have emotions -- only grandeur.
But that’s not how I feel now, though this book is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh and the “pregnancy” has been about fifty years long. I could keep it safe while it was unborn. Now I’m feeling like a parent whose child has just started school, going off alone into adventures. I want to be a “helicopter author,” hovering over the book and trying to guide it along. I know what sorts of pitfalls and burnings are out there waiting for it, some wanting to destroy it and some wanting to exalt it beyond common sense. Who should I alert? What follow-up articles should I write? What speeches should I make?
Bob Scriver was not one of those easy-going sweetheart artists like maybe John Clymer or Tom Sander. Personally difficult, he seemed to have a gift for getting into scrapes and controversies. Maybe it was the times, maybe it was being white on the Blackfeet reservation, and maybe it was a factor of his success that he attracted coyotes. Anyway, some people will react to the book in about the same way that they reacted to the person.
The first reactions of another sort of reader were to get rid of me, to shut me up, to deny that I could write a book, to reduce me to a stenographer instead of a contributor, to grab my book and make it into something else. I’ve had to assert my participation in this story. Minor players have some questions to answer (like Phil Scriver’s pretense of being Bob’s cousin so as to get at his business affairs) but I’m not going to pursue them. Let some ambitious journalist do it -- that’s their job. Rather, I’m interested in the big institutions who control Bob’s estate. By delaying decisions in his lifetime and putting his work in the hands of his widow (the fourth wife, now deceased: I was the third), he essentially put everything in the hands of lawyers. (Insert lawyer joke here.)
The goal became the conversion of goods to cash as quickly as it could be done. In the process, value was lost. Collections like that of the huge Fery mural-like paintings that used to line the walls of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife were sold one-by-one at auction. If the collection of animals had been kept together and displayed with those paintings, it would have remained something of unique beauty and value. Now it will never exist again. A collection of John Sharp sketches of the Blackfeet reservation was dispersed at auction. I’m unable to find out what happened to the John Rogers sculpture collection, though I’ve asked.
The molds of the original animals that Bob collected and used to make the paper mache shells for these full-mounts had been carefully stored. They also had considerable value, but they were destroyed. They were NOT the molds that were intended to be destroyed, the molds for the sculptures. In any case, Bob had been selling the copyrights of many of his bronzes to entrepreneurs who set their own edition limits, contracted with foundries, and owned their molds: these were not destroyed. New castings are available today if you know whom to contact.
The Montana Historical Society, whose chief focus is the sorting and preserving of valuable documents, cannot locate the most crucial documents of the Scriver estate: the records of sales. Much of the value of art of any sort and especially sculpture comes from being able to trace the ownership of the specific piece from artist to current owner. Bob was meticulous about keeping these records and also gave bronze buyers a certificate confirming their ownership of that specific number of the limited edition, along with the number expected to be cast. The MHS says it “cannot locate” these papers because it doesn’t have enough money. Yet the papers they removed from the studio had already been sorted into files which the MHS archives lists. Perhaps the provenance records had been removed in the year or so that Bob’s lawyer managed the estate in situ. He is a dealer in Scriver bronzes. Perhaps there is a deeper and more sinister motive: I hear rumors that MHS removed bronzes that had been ordered and paid for by customers.
No provision was made for the continuing publication of the three books that Bob self-published about his work: “An Honest Try,” “No More Buffalo,” and “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains.” A copy of the latter is for sale in the gift shop of the CMR Museum for $550. I’ve seen it on the Internet for as much as $800. Bob accurately predicted that the artifact collection would not be kept together, but that the pictorial record would endure.
The original lawyer tried to keep the estate in Browning as a foundation with himself as the director. The lawyer who took the estate away from that first lawyer (professional courtesy?) was quick to broker a deal to break it up. Bob had wanted everything to go to the Royal Alberta Museum, which had bought the Scriver Artifact Collection. In the last decades of Bob’s lifetime, he had become much entwined with the CM Russell Museum in Great Falls, serving on their advisory board. They had made repeated offers of space for his work, but he was always talked out of it (By whom? His lawyer?) or became doubtful. He was extremely aware of art wheeling and dealing in the state (some would say “corruption”) and if he smelled it, he veered off. At one meeting he gave an impassioned scolding to all present, but everyone put it down to senile dementia. Indeed, he was not mentally or emotionally balanced in the last decades. Probably the stroke in 1988 pushed him over the edge. The lawyers, of course, don’t want anyone to think about this.
For a while there was a four-way deal: the RAM, the CMR, and the MHS with the full-mounts (oh, what a nuisance) dumped on the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. (As was Arnold Olsen, in time.) Then there was a quick shuffle of peas under walnut shells and the CMR was excluded. MHS became the legal owner of everything with long-term “loans” of the Blackfeet series of bronzes to the RAM and those full-mounts to the RMEF. The irony is that the MHS has failed to even unpack the estate in the building that was supposed to house it, a steel warehouse with gallery space out by the Helena airport. In the meantime, Ed Mitch -- one of those entrepreneurs who collaborated with Bob -- gave his collection of Scriver bronzes to the CMR where they are exhibited today.
The MHS, which is truthfully bursting at the seams, is now aspiring to a new building. The location and designing of this edifice is very much open to speculation and plotting, which renders the MHS more vulnerable to examination for its policies and capacities than it has ever been. Whatever plan is settled upon, it will take a huge funding drive. Other competing institutions may not be motivated to cooperate.
This book will be jostled and dissected. But -- there are a lot of less political things in it. Funny stories, hunting adventures, hair-raising foundry moments. Heart-breakers and spiritual uplifters. In many ways, it is a story of unrequited love: I loved Bob Scriver, who didn’t love me; Bob loved the Blackfeet, who didn’t love him; and all three of us loved the east slope of the Rockies which doesn’t have emotions -- only grandeur.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT
"BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT: A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER" has now been delivered to the officers of the University of Calgary Press and will be shipped out to buyers as quickly as possible. Bookstores in both Canada and the USA have access to wholesalers -- I don't have the books myself. Amazon.com has been taking orders since Thanksgiving.
I think the press has severely underestimated the number of copies that will sell, so it would be a good idea to order now. Otherwise it will mean waiting for them to get around to a second printing and if there is anything I'm learning, it's that Canadians don't hurry.
Prairie Mary
I think the press has severely underestimated the number of copies that will sell, so it would be a good idea to order now. Otherwise it will mean waiting for them to get around to a second printing and if there is anything I'm learning, it's that Canadians don't hurry.
Prairie Mary
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
WESTERN ART MAGAZINES
Beside me is a foot-high stack of ‘zines that I’m supposed to sort and file as archives. But I’m running out of room and now there are two new magazines to consider. I’ve already got a backlog of Art of the West and Southwest Art as well as Wildlife Art. These have been engines of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel for years now, though they’re a little different from each other.
Art of the West is bi-monthly and comes from Minnetonka, MINN, where the co-Publishers, Allan J. Duerr and Thomas F. Teirney, and the editor, Vicki Stavig, have their offices. But Bill Frazier, who is a Big Timber attorney specializing in art issues, is a contributing writer. He writes a back page noting scams and issues that have less to do with aesthetic questions than consumer affairs. Interestingly, the consumer in question is often the artist! Fraser was recently the head of the Montana Arts Council which also works for the benefit of artists.
One of the major aspects of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel is the print market, which Bill Frazier recommends against, saying that artists occasionally become convinced -- often through the persuasions of an optimistic brother-in-law trying to help out -- that getting prints made of the more popular paintings will be a major economic breakthrough. But without contacts, a marketing plan, and other machinery of the industry, the artist merely ends up with boxes of prints in the garage, gradually wrinkling in the damp. My own bias is a little different: I see the reproduction market as the source of much of the industrializing, the coarsening if you like, of mass producing (the whole point of industrialization) and moral weakening of art. Think Thomas Kinkade. But then I’m an idealist and a romantic who thinks art should be “pure,” approaching religion. The print industry people, who have made Terpning a wealthy and rather callous man, try to keep that sort of fancy talk while all the time cranking out “limited editions” that are anything but -- merely “print runs.”
Art of the West was started iin 1987. They do self-publishing, book-binding, and other related technologies, including print-making so it is rather surprising that Frazier takes a dour point of view.
Southwest Art is more broad-based in terms of genre and also in terms of geography: partly in San Francisco, partly in Florida, partly in Colorado, and with an editor, Susan Freilicher, of unspecified location. This mag is owned by Cruz Bay Publishing Co. which is owned by Active Interest Media. Inc. (“Log home dwelling vegetarian karate adepts,” according to Yahoo. 13.80 M in revenue in 2006 with 99 employees. Doesn’t say whether the head guy, Efrem Zimbalist III -- “Skip” if you know him personally -- is counted in that number. The official contact is in California.)
SWA is much more open to abstract art and Native American art (which are sometimes the same thing), but if you follow these 'zines you will see the same ads for the same galleries and auctions over and over. The editorial copy will support those ads so that you will see the same paintings and sculptures over and over, read the same names of the same artists again and again, until they’re far more familiar than the content of the art history course you took in college. Yet the content rarely says a lot that’s enlightening. NEVER anything that is critical. Everyone is the greatest.
American Art Review is out of Kansas and casts a much wider net in terms of subject matter, though it’s all representational. The articles themselves are written by professional academically trained curators and directors, which is quite different from the two ‘zines above. They tend to be formal and historical as well as analytical. They are attached to specific institutions, generally exploring one exhibit.
Wildlife Art is published by “Pothole Publications” based in California. You can buy a business profile for thirty bucks. (I won’t.) It overlaps a good bit with the “cowboy” subject matter but it is a distinct genre and I’ll come back to it in a later post. It’s a dollar less, a little more naive, a little thinner in size.
So now back to the newer ‘zines. Western Art Collector is a frank guide to the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. Same familiar ads, same subject matter, but now more than ever like a race horse guide. What auctions are coming, what artists are promising, and -- most important -- constant attention to the prices: the estimated worth, the auction total, the rate of increase over the years of an artist’s career. Lots of “society” photos of customers and dealers partying in their fancy dress, champagne glasses in hand as they celebrate snatching a “masterpiece” from the jaws of some other white-haired matron who offered them five figure checks to give it up because it is her “heart’s desire.”
This ‘zine comes from Scottsdale, AZ, where they say the streets are lined with Industrial Cowboy Art Galleries, and it is under the umbrella of International Art Publishing, or if you prefer, Libri dell'editore. (Spaghetti Western Art, perhaps?) It’s seven bucks and monthly. You can get it online ten days ahead of the poor schmucks who have to wait for the mail or ride their horse a hundred miles to a newsstand. There’s an interesting emphasis on tourism: what to see when you travel to participate in the auction events, which have settled into seminars, quick draws, banquets and awards. Friendship circles charter a plane to fly out West.
But if you OWN your own jet, the high end mag you want is Western Art & Architecture, from Cowboy to Contemporary which is an eight dollar mag (ten in Canada -- they’re aren’t keeping up with the exchange rate) and has a lot of overlap with the Bozeman-based Big Sky Journal. (Though it’s an inch taller and a quarter-inch wider -- more white in the layouts.) BSJ is seasonal and WA&A also appears to be quarterly. Same editor and publisher. Ads are an intermix of the Big Sky Journal architecture and real estate with the usual galleries as the other Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel ads. But this publication is trying to step away from the Industrial Mass-Produced style into something more sophisticated. The writers are from the House & Garden-type high-end shelter mags. (H&G has just folded.) More Taos here, elegant art-centered hotels, timber-and-boulder houses mixed with glass-and-steel houses. An interesting close relationship with the Thomas Nygard Galleries in Bozeman.
What will happen next? I’m fascinated.
Art of the West is bi-monthly and comes from Minnetonka, MINN, where the co-Publishers, Allan J. Duerr and Thomas F. Teirney, and the editor, Vicki Stavig, have their offices. But Bill Frazier, who is a Big Timber attorney specializing in art issues, is a contributing writer. He writes a back page noting scams and issues that have less to do with aesthetic questions than consumer affairs. Interestingly, the consumer in question is often the artist! Fraser was recently the head of the Montana Arts Council which also works for the benefit of artists.
One of the major aspects of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel is the print market, which Bill Frazier recommends against, saying that artists occasionally become convinced -- often through the persuasions of an optimistic brother-in-law trying to help out -- that getting prints made of the more popular paintings will be a major economic breakthrough. But without contacts, a marketing plan, and other machinery of the industry, the artist merely ends up with boxes of prints in the garage, gradually wrinkling in the damp. My own bias is a little different: I see the reproduction market as the source of much of the industrializing, the coarsening if you like, of mass producing (the whole point of industrialization) and moral weakening of art. Think Thomas Kinkade. But then I’m an idealist and a romantic who thinks art should be “pure,” approaching religion. The print industry people, who have made Terpning a wealthy and rather callous man, try to keep that sort of fancy talk while all the time cranking out “limited editions” that are anything but -- merely “print runs.”
Art of the West was started iin 1987. They do self-publishing, book-binding, and other related technologies, including print-making so it is rather surprising that Frazier takes a dour point of view.
Southwest Art is more broad-based in terms of genre and also in terms of geography: partly in San Francisco, partly in Florida, partly in Colorado, and with an editor, Susan Freilicher, of unspecified location. This mag is owned by Cruz Bay Publishing Co. which is owned by Active Interest Media. Inc. (“Log home dwelling vegetarian karate adepts,” according to Yahoo. 13.80 M in revenue in 2006 with 99 employees. Doesn’t say whether the head guy, Efrem Zimbalist III -- “Skip” if you know him personally -- is counted in that number. The official contact is in California.)
SWA is much more open to abstract art and Native American art (which are sometimes the same thing), but if you follow these 'zines you will see the same ads for the same galleries and auctions over and over. The editorial copy will support those ads so that you will see the same paintings and sculptures over and over, read the same names of the same artists again and again, until they’re far more familiar than the content of the art history course you took in college. Yet the content rarely says a lot that’s enlightening. NEVER anything that is critical. Everyone is the greatest.
American Art Review is out of Kansas and casts a much wider net in terms of subject matter, though it’s all representational. The articles themselves are written by professional academically trained curators and directors, which is quite different from the two ‘zines above. They tend to be formal and historical as well as analytical. They are attached to specific institutions, generally exploring one exhibit.
Wildlife Art is published by “Pothole Publications” based in California. You can buy a business profile for thirty bucks. (I won’t.) It overlaps a good bit with the “cowboy” subject matter but it is a distinct genre and I’ll come back to it in a later post. It’s a dollar less, a little more naive, a little thinner in size.
So now back to the newer ‘zines. Western Art Collector is a frank guide to the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. Same familiar ads, same subject matter, but now more than ever like a race horse guide. What auctions are coming, what artists are promising, and -- most important -- constant attention to the prices: the estimated worth, the auction total, the rate of increase over the years of an artist’s career. Lots of “society” photos of customers and dealers partying in their fancy dress, champagne glasses in hand as they celebrate snatching a “masterpiece” from the jaws of some other white-haired matron who offered them five figure checks to give it up because it is her “heart’s desire.”
This ‘zine comes from Scottsdale, AZ, where they say the streets are lined with Industrial Cowboy Art Galleries, and it is under the umbrella of International Art Publishing, or if you prefer, Libri dell'editore. (Spaghetti Western Art, perhaps?) It’s seven bucks and monthly. You can get it online ten days ahead of the poor schmucks who have to wait for the mail or ride their horse a hundred miles to a newsstand. There’s an interesting emphasis on tourism: what to see when you travel to participate in the auction events, which have settled into seminars, quick draws, banquets and awards. Friendship circles charter a plane to fly out West.
But if you OWN your own jet, the high end mag you want is Western Art & Architecture, from Cowboy to Contemporary which is an eight dollar mag (ten in Canada -- they’re aren’t keeping up with the exchange rate) and has a lot of overlap with the Bozeman-based Big Sky Journal. (Though it’s an inch taller and a quarter-inch wider -- more white in the layouts.) BSJ is seasonal and WA&A also appears to be quarterly. Same editor and publisher. Ads are an intermix of the Big Sky Journal architecture and real estate with the usual galleries as the other Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel ads. But this publication is trying to step away from the Industrial Mass-Produced style into something more sophisticated. The writers are from the House & Garden-type high-end shelter mags. (H&G has just folded.) More Taos here, elegant art-centered hotels, timber-and-boulder houses mixed with glass-and-steel houses. An interesting close relationship with the Thomas Nygard Galleries in Bozeman.
What will happen next? I’m fascinated.
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