ARCHAIC MUSHROOMS

The psychological impact of unexpected cold wet weather is that the household tightens around the heat sources. (Squibbie under the cat-incubator which is the hanging lightbulb next to my computer and Crackers on the electric blanket.)  My foot-warmer is on and I’m wearing socks.  I wouldn't be surprised to find mushrooms in the yard.  Now I’m retrieving “saves” from the summer when my brain was looser and more inclined to wander.

http://edge.org/conversation/touched-by-the-tremendum-march-27-1990

Here’s a remarkable one from “The Edge” which has a sub-category called “The Reality Club”.  It is an argument AGAINST “reality” as we define it today, entitled “Touched by the Tremendum”  The talker is Terence McKenna and the date of this talk is 3-27-90, though one might guess it was from a couple of decades earlier since it is a “pitch” for psychedelic experience triggered by psilocybin.  I saved it because I am so interested in the human mind and whatever will keep it from being locked into one punishing connectome -- call it Calvinism if you want to, but it could be fascism, or profit.

Briefly, and perhaps not quite accurately, McKenna goes back into the paleobiome.  Our curiousity about it has generated a lot of theories.  There is general agreement that humans evolved in Africa. We are thought to have begun like the other primates as arboreal bands living on fruit.  Then a planetary climate shift -- I need a geologist here -- dried up whatever climate patterns supported the forests so the hominids came down to the grasslands where they followed grazing herds to pick off laggards and carrion.   

Now McKenna goes theory airborne. The dung the herds left behind were the growing media for psychedelic mushrooms, which humans discovered.  Also, the exposure to new foods and new social patterns triggered many mutations, including the transformation of arboreal location hoots and hollers to pack-hunting signals, which led to language.  As a bioethic premise, this is lots of fun to explore.  He feels that the mushroom-powered capacity to dream led to the development of the early Mediterranean climax cultures.  He thinks that the symbols found in early writing and taken to mean “wheat” are really about mushrooms.

The next step is that the horse culture raiders from the high grassy Mongol plateaus, not just riding but also driving chariots, came down on these people and pushed them north into Europe, where they made homes in the shelter of the cliffs along rivers.  (This is Neanderthal habitat.  It also makes chariots impossible.)  Just before this shift is a time he calls “the Archaic.”  McKenna’s idea is that what we seem to be searching for in our predatory and destructive modern lives is a restoration of the Archaic through dreams.  He feels that our fascination with both medieval Europe and classical Greece were attempts to recover our capacity to dream that didn’t go back early enough.  In Europe, deprived of herd-supported fungus, the people turned to honey and learned to ferment it into mead.

His reasoning is centered on Western Civilization as it developed in Europe.  Why didn’t the people following the great American prairie herds ever get hooked on buffalo chip mushrooms?  Or did they?  There was peyote, of course.  McKenna and his brother went to South America and returned with the news of ayahuasca that enchanted many.  In fact, it turns out that Central and South America have a rich and complicated history with psychedelics.  It wouldn’t be unreasonable to premise that humans are always trying to get out of their minds, whether it’s through the generation of endomolecules like adrenaline or serotonin or oxcytocin or testosterone -- or by ingesting something from the environment.  Deprived of access to vegetative sources in rural life, we turn to manufacturing designer drugs.  (I’m not counting Big Pharma.)

I looked up psilocybin, which appears to be one of the most benign of these substances, often classified as an endotheist drug because it is said to be spiritual and put one in touch with “god.”  (Again, this betrays the European hegemony over matters of the mind by defining anything that feels holy as “theist,” related to a big being in the sky.)  In Oregon, where there is lots of rain and many cow pastures, people go out looking for Magic Mushrooms quite a lot.  Only some kinds of mushrooms have the proper substance.  And it seems to be rather fugitive, so that sometimes drying the fungi disperses the psilocybin.  At least those who went into the fields got fresh air and exercise.  Of course, one must avoid toadstools.

All ingested molecules must interact with the molecules already present in the body, including both those floating in the blood because they have been produced various ways and those inside the cells.  The effect of an entheogen is not just altered by these metabolic interactions, but is also much affected by context.  Look back at the five steps of function that I framed up some weeks ago.

By Thammuz

In terms of the sensorium, the first step, which is the gathering of information from outside the skin, psilocybin seems to increase acuity of eyesight and general sensitivity.  The effect on the second step, which is the sorting and filtering of the neuron coding of the sensorium, may be where the substance is most active.  The third step is also a process likely affected, as this is where the conclusions of the sensory nexus come together into value judgments and editing.  The hope is that these character-producing patterns can be opened up to possibility and renewal.

The fourth step, which is taking action, is discouraged in a religious atmosphere of meditation and isn’t safe when what is happening inside the skin is more powerful than what is happening outside the skin.  People may feel they are in a different world entirely and forget which side of the street to drive on.

The fifth step, which is empathic sharing with the people around one, depends on who they are and what they think, because that will affect the way the experience is understood and what happens in future.  A kid or outsider may get contradictory opinions: one of approval and one of blame and restriction.  Usually such a contradiction makes the person defend the practice.

At least, in contrast to the home lab inventions, psilocybin is organic and has been used for millennia, not unlike alcohol or marijuana.   One can find it spontaneously and without cost.  Those who feel the secret to a good future is buried in the Archaic past will value this.  Big Pharma, without some way to make big profits exclusive to itself, will continue to demonize psychedelics of this kind while promoting equally marginal psychotropic medicines because they are medical and conform to certain protocols imposed by the government -- which is controlled by Big Pharma.

At the same time religious professionals based in institutional churches such as Christian denominations and Jewish synagogues, will rely on sensory cues (buildings, music, incense, flowers, candles, formal clothes), prayer, strong metaphor and community consensus to support a feeling of holiness and meaning.  It’s harder than it sounds, which is why many people only know blunted and mediocre experiences that have been brought in from other places and are not supported with proper training.  

I tried to cook up a diagram that would relate the health-preoccupied Christian Science church to the industrial/capitalist CVS juggernauts to the homeopathists and herbalists to the military/mafia of street drugs, but it was too complex.  Maybe the rhizome pattern with mycelia instead of stolons.  Anyway, maybe the entheogens and endomolecules are not the real key to the longing we feel, however Archaic they may be.

The strongest drug is always passion.  If religion doesn’t supply it, there’s always sex.  Or danger.  Or narcissism.  Words and dogma are judy abracadabra from outside the skin.  Only when meaning is felt inside can the real connection happen.

THE STORY MARY GROUND TOLD about FRANK DOUBLE RUNNER:

In 1977-78 the Blackfeet Heritage Program undertook to create a set of small booklets that preserved some of the old stories.  One booklet is focused on Mary Ground, born in 1883 and married at sixteen.  She had fourteen children, one husband, and a LOT of ideas and opinions.  Her children have been dynamic in the community and had a big part in producing this series.  Chuck No Runner, her grandson, illustrated this booklet.  It is probably time to re-publish the series, using up-to-date online technology, but a small stapled booklet is always appealing to the lovers of the local.

Mary was controversial because she had blue eyes, implying white genes.  In fact, she is said to have gotten her name, “Grass Woman,” because her putated father rejected her and insisted that she be exposed out in the prairie grass.  She survived a night and was then rescued.  Like many of the old-timers, she was active in both the Catholic church and the surviving Bundle Keeper circles.

This material was transcribed from a sound recording.  I won’t even try to capture the local ways of talking that flavor the tale and give it authenticity, but it is a wildly exciting story.  In 1886 she was living at the Holy Family Mission on Two Medicine as a student and often acted as an interpreter.  “Old Brocky” came grieving to ask the Mother Superior to ask Father Damiani and Father Prando to get their carpenter to make him a coffin for his son, who had been killed by Frank Double Runner.

Frank was one of three brothers.  Ed and Paul went to school at the mission but Frank, who was inclined to be wild was “running around with” Brocky’s daughter.  Paul Brocky was breaking a big pinto horse and rode him up the cliff along Two Med, when suddenly Frank Double Runner stood up from the brush and shot him.  Paul’s horse bucked but he hung on. Then the pinto ran down to the river where Paul died and fell off.

Holy Family Mission School on Two Medicine

Frank, on his own horse, came to the little cabin where Rose Big Beaver’s mother, Paul Brocky’s wife, lived and told her he had killed her husband and would shoot her if she didn’t come with him.  Rosie (whom I knew as a grandmother) was five years old and crawled back under the bed to hide.  The mother got her best finery out of a trunk, put everything on, and went with Frank who hid her in the brush near his parents’ home.

He got his brother, Eddie, to come with him on the pretext of wrangling horses and got food from his mother.  They went back to the top of the buffalo jump cliffs, hid the horse, and watched what was going on in the valley for three days.  Frank threatened to go down and kill all the children, but Eddie talked him out of it.

Willow Creek Student Body

Photo from the Tom Magee collection via http://blackfootdigitallibrary.com

Finally they went on up to Willow Creek School, just past Browning along highway 89 and Willow Creek.  The superintendent was Mr. Matson, who had been warned by the police about the rampaging Frank.  Eddie, who was hungry by now, went down to the school to get food, but once he was there, he warned Matson who sent a messenger to the Agency. 

The cops were afraid of Frank, so Matson said he would go up and talk to him.  Eddie tried to warn him out of it, but he was determined.  That is, he started to go but Frank, who was an excellent marksman, blew his hat off.  Everyone froze in place for a long time.

Then they saw Frank and the woman go down to Willow Creek where there was always a lot of tall brush.  After a long time there was a shot.  It was Rosie Big Beaver’s mother being killed.  Then in a while there was another shot.  When they finally got the courage to go look, both of the lovers were dead.  “They made one great big rough box for both of them.”  Mary reported that Dick Kipp was the one thought to have finally gone to see what had happened.  

Flint Smoker's Daughter -- a Curtis photo

Dick Kipp is a controversial figure.  He was said to be a survivor of the Baker Massacre who was adopted by Joe Kipp, so that he was actually a child of Heavy Runner.  Every name from those early days is loaded with political and family implications both good and bad.  

Double Runner (as distinguished from Double Rider) is recorded in the 1907 census list, but there are only two facts included: his father was Oh-mak-cro-mak-chist-opee and he is full Piegan, 59 years old. (I have no translation of his name.) None of his children are listed.

By contrast there is information about “Packing Tail Feathers Coming Up Hill” who was the father of Brocky.  Jim Whitecalf claimed that it was Tail Feathers who ran out to try to stop the Baker Massacre -- not Heavy Runner as is claimed other places.  Brocky was the nephew of Double Rider and the step-father of Chewing Black Bone, a familiar figure from the James Willard Schultz books.  Rosie Big Beaver’s grandson, “Hoppy,” was in the first 8^th grade class I taught in 1961.  

Might be Brocky -- maybe not.

Holy Family Mission and Willow Creek School both have histories clearly offensive to Frank Double Runner.  Holy Family was Catholic and Willow Creek was Protestant, so religion seems not to be the offense.  Perhaps he was mistreated or humiliated as a child in one of the schools, or maybe both places.  Clearly the echo in our time is strong since we endure so many school shootings.  Willow Creek was a disgrace, according to the government inspectors, but Holy Family was harsh in the opinion of some.  

One of the dynamics of Mary Ground’s reputation is that she LIKED the school, allied herself with the nuns, and generally defended them and their rules.  This is not so surprising when one considers her ostracism due to suspicions that she was partly white.  But resentment against the schools was and is pervasive, in spite of the advantages (food as much as instruction), and probably others would have considered becoming snipers if they’d had a good enough gun and been good enough marksmen.

Piegan chiefs visiting Washington DC.  

Back row l to r: Whitecalf, George Steele (agent and morphine addict), then "Tailfeathers Coming over the Hill".

It’s interesting that Double Runner took his brother and his lover with him on the run.  Is this Bonny and Clyde, plus one, or Butch and Sundance plus one?  A movie of this story, possibly book-ended by an old lady telling the tale, would be a naturally vivid film which is often the case with short intense stories as contrasted with long wandering tales.  It’s easy to imagine the young mother taking out her finery from the trunk and putting it on, knowing what was coming.  Did she hurry so she could join her lover?  Or did she slip on the bright garments solemnly and ceremoniously, knowing they would be bloodied?

If I were writing the script, I would bring in the “gaze,” the constant hidden eyes in high places watching to interpret the encampments along the water.  I would reference Hugh Dempsey’s account of outsider tribes petitioning to hunt buffalo on Piegan land in order to feed their children.  Dempsey tells about them watching covertly for a while from a ridge, then when the moment seemed right, making themselves visible by moving out into plain sight.  At that point they would either be invited into the camp for a parlay, or if tempers were high, simply shot on the spot.

Perhaps Frank knew that the power for the future would lie in education and both craved and despised that.  Maybe he realized that in terms of history he was dead already, unwilling or unable to move past that barrier.  In traditional terms, his lover had no choice but to go with him and probably accepted that.  Did she wear her finery because she knew she would be buried in it?  And what about Eddie -- was he brave or a coward to desert Frank?

On the lawn at the Big Hotel in East Glacier.  I don't know who it is.

Mary Ground’s story is a thread that leads us through a past that presages our present.  She would not be surprised.  It’s possible to find photos of some of these people and many interlocking stories have been recorded.

AND UNDER THAT PORTLAND, ANOTHER PORTLAND

Myself and Duncan McTavish, early Fifties

It’s been raining for a few days which always prompts memories of my first decades living in Portland, OR, 1939 to 1978.  They were defined by our house, 51XX NE 15^th Av. which my father bought from my uncle, whose first real-estate job was selling bank repossessions resulting from the Great Depression.  It was a beautifully detailed house that’s still occupied and has probably had additions made.  My father’s proposal to my mother was in part based on offering a life in that house.  And a life it was!   In 1998 we carried my mother out in a body bag early in the morning after her death.  Before the mortician zipped up the bag, I laid in a big bouquet of pink Stargazer lilies.  She was 89.

I live in Montana now, the place I went after college in 1961: the Blackfeet Reservation.  I bought this house with one-third of her house.  (I have two brothers.)  I don’t think about Portland a whole lot since there’s so much to think about right here, but among my other names I claim “Stays Put Woman.”  I suppose that’s “Stays Put Woman #2.”  My father was a traveling man and I admire that life but I’d need a lot of money to do it now.  No more sleeping in the back of a pickup or van parked in some hidden spot.

Paul, Mark, Mary Strachan (mid-Fifties)

This morning I took a cruise through the Oregonian and found a series being reprinted about NE and N Portland. http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/08/roots_of_gentrification_key_mo.html#incart_river 

One heading is “East Portland Was Almost a City.”  In my years it was still Albina, a farm town that had developed into an immigrant community: many craftsmen and small-time manufacturers; furniture, fuel, grocery and drug stores; libraries, banks, J.C. Penneys and Fred Meyer.  We went everywhere on foot or by bus because my father used the car in his work as a field man for Pacific Supply Cooperative.  My paternal grandparents had chosen this section of Portland and originally bought a doctor’s house on 15^th.  A third-degree cousin still lives on that street.  It was a calmly functioning location with undercurrents of heart break because of ties to Europe at war.

Vanport Flood (1948) no fatalities -- the water rose gradually.

Then came the Vanport flood, which revealed another internal town, this one African American from the South.  The Kaiser shipyards had brought in labor and housed them on the Columbia River flood plain.  Now they were displaced into old houses near the Willamette that they didn’t own.  Economics were literally black and white.  By the time divorce forced me back to Portland in 1973, Jefferson High School and Vernon Grade School were mostly black.  Burned out on teaching but looking for a dependable civil service job, I became the first female animal control officer.  The hiring panel included a black man with fire in his eye.  He was sympathetic to my rez stories.

Animal control is a street service job and I learned Portland all over again.  My assigned section was SE which included hippies (Hawthorne), academics (Reed College) and low income recently-country people plus felons (Errol Heights).  NE and N was black.  I discovered that Roselawn, a short and narrow street that ended behind our house, lined with small owner-built houses where my classmates had lived, was now considered one of the most dangerous in the city.  Our most effective officer in NE was a small blonde woman who took no nonsense off anyone.  We were an activist, progressive animal control operation and I became education coordinator, working with other city entities and the media.  Now I learned the political ropes.  I can’t tell you how disappointed I was when Goldschmidt turned out to confirm all his wife’s suspicions.

Pretty soon my night classes and new church membership (Unitarian Universalist) had pushed me to leave for Chicago again, this time to U of Chicago and its adjunct UU seminary.  I didn’t come back to Portland until I’d left the ministry ten years later, been “non-renewed” from Heart Butte School, and was once again broke enough to take refuge with my mother, already harboring my brother who’d suffered brain damage in a fall.

It was a good thing he was there because now the house was engulfed in gang wars and the more subtle real estate destructive corruption, both based in the expanding black community.  The first night I was back, sleeping in my van at the curb, there was a shotgun exchange back and forth across 15th a hundred feet from my head.  Gunfire was usual in the evening, close enough that my brother, former Marine MP, made us turn out all the lights and sit on the floor until it had gone by.  In the morning he took his mug of coffee out to the street, wandering back and forth to add to his collection of spent cartridges.  In a few years at least nine bodies were found next door or nearby.  I was there sleeping on a rollaway for eight months until I found another civil service job with the City of Portland Bureau of Buildings.  Yet another Portland.

My '90's apartment was the farthest to the left, main floor.

On a ridealong with one of the city building inspectors who was assigned N and NE Portland, I saw the kind of things that were common in Southside Chicago.  The city, prompted by the minister of my childhood church, Vernon Presbyterian, began a crackdown campaign on slum landlords.  I helped design the computer algorithm that identified them.  One had rented to me in the Seventies.  I’d had to pay the electric bill for his fancy big house to keep the security lights on around our apartments.  

Now, in the Nineties, the apartment building where I rented had a major hole in the roof and I tried to get one of the building inspectors to cite it, but he was afraid to be too aggressive and the renter was afraid he’d have to pay more.  It came to nothing.  There was a coke dealer living under me and another one across the hall.  I liked the one across the hall.  He was Japanese, a gentleman, no furniture at all except a bedroll, and when he came home at 3AM, he knocked on my door because my cat came into the building with him and sat at my door, waiting.

Elementary school students in Portland memorize the bridges.

During this time attention was being given to earthquakes, which might take out the many bridges across the Willamette, and to the rising problem of the homeless and the many Hispanic drug peddlers.  On the bus going home I could see them -- mostly youngsters -- running through the downtown and sometimes shooting.  Several people were killed in cross-fire.

Once the bus was caught in a confrontation and one of the men was backed up under my window at PPD gunpoint.  I should have moved away, but I was hypnotized by the three-carat diamond stud in his ear.  Another time I was waiting for my own bus when the bus that served my old nabe came by.  The door opened and everyone on board began to rap on the windows and yell at me, "Get on the bus!"  My mother was on the bus and she had said loudly,  “Oh, there’s my daughter!”  I got on the bus and bowed to the seated crowd, all of us laughing and applauding.

West Hills slide destruction

Then I transferred to the Site Development team, all soils engineers, geologists, and one landscaper.  Now I learned about the slowly sliding West Hills, the unpredictable Johnson Creek drainage, and flood plain mitigation rules that enraged everyone.  Newcomers moved to Portland, lived there ten years, saw no floods and assumed this was the way it would always be.  

Developers were constantly after the empty land where Vanport had been.  My boss, a particularly intelligent and principled man, was called on to say why it wasn’t a great place to build a new prison.  He pointed out that the people would be locked in, unable to escape a flood which was inevitable.  His questioners said, “Who cares?  They’d just be convicts anyway!”  And Bill said quietly, “My brother is a prison guard.  I take a different view.”

Portland as it was once, Mt. St. Helens intact.

My basic view of Portland is as a river-bound location in a valley among volcanoes.  The people and the patterning of their residence has changed from the original native American settlement to trader cabins to homesteaders, on and on.  Same here in Montana on the East Slope.  Fortunes go well, then collapse, then give way to a new order.  It’s personal.  But then it’s NOT personal.  It’s not even human.

Mt. St. Helens erupting.

BROWNING UNITED METHODIST PARISH -- BUMP!

Browning Methodist Church in the early days.

A more recent view of the church.  The entrance is now at the side.

The history of any group is like the history of a person and yet it includes many persons over time and that means far more complex dynamics and forces.  The national culture will have a lot to do with the small local group, so that in some ways the little three-church Blackfeet Methodist Parish has been at the mercy of the nation, particularly since it is on  a reservation in a remote place where Jesuits had been since the very earliest white contact.  The assumption that religious people would automatically be conscientious, moral, and protective -- as well as being prepared to convert people to a whole new way of being in the world -- was at war with the reality of religious political competition.  Clearly these guys were not active in their local churches.

Brother Van went hunting with the Blackfeet, but earlier the Jesuits went with them to battle

 and they won.  Long coats trumped short coats.

The US legislature found it convenient to escape from accusations of corruption on reservations by assigning each to a different religious group (denomination) and trying to make them responsible for the results.  This backfired bigtime in the way things do when many boundaries are introduced.  One of my themes on this blog has been that creating boundaries with different rules on the two sides always creates devious ways of creating profit.

Demonize and extrapolate however you want, human local greed has always been the mice that eat the leather hinges of the armor, as they did in the armories of the Middle Ages, so that the rigid pieces meant to be protective were simply useless.  This quick list of clergy (which includes me) begins in 1893 with the official designation of Rev. E.D. Dutcher as the pastor/missionary and Rev. W. W. Matson as the director of the Boarding School.  Brother Van had been a sort of free-lance missionary and good-will ambassador before that, but he had wandered off from the difficult reservation scene and became popular among the settlers.

White people on the reservation in early days tended to be Anglo-Scots so there was a Presbyterian church as well as the Methodist group.  The Presbyterian minister was Rev. James Gold, the father of the Doug Gold who is sometimes a focus of blame (mostly because he conflated cultural naiveté with IQ) and sometimes praise.  He brought in a doctor to address the plague of trachoma that was blinding so many and also instigated the building of what is now the elementary school, built with local Indian labor, then acted as the first superintendent.  But in the end the Presbyterian congregation shrank and finally gave over its remaining members and all its assets to the Methodists in 1942.  

The Methodist congregation then became an awkward combination of mission church, meant to do good works and convert those who were still in their old culture, but also an institution for the support of the white middle-class ranchers, shop-keepers, BIA and IHS employees.  The total failure of the government to even feed the people had been loaded onto Rev. Major John A. Young (1876 to 1883).  In 1883-84 600 Blackfeet people died of starvation and disease and were piled on Ghost Ridge near the Badger Creek crossing with highway 89.  It was a worse tragedy than any bloody massacre.

This is a list of clergy actually assigned to the church. It is drawn from the Centennial History (1893-1993) and is necessarily sketchy.  The most complete history is by Howard L. Harrod.  “Mission Among the Blackfeet.” (1971) A Yale graduate teaching at Vanderbilt, Harrod is gone now.

Rev. Francis Asbury Riggin (1899) was the first. The church was built along Willow Creek outside of town.  

Rev. A.W. Hammer (1909) The “Methodist ranch” was defined in these years.  Acounts differ as to who provided the land, the government or the Blackfeet person who was assigned that allotment. In 1913 the church building moved into town.

Rev. Henry Mecklenburg (1921) encouraged female social workers who went into homes, something like the social workers in city tenements after WWI.

Rev. Allen C. Wilcox (1926) seems to have shifted the emphasis to upgrading the property.  He left at the end of the war in 1945.

Pulpit carved by Albert Racine

Altar carved by Albert Racine

Rev. Stephen C. Smith (1945) was confusingly followed by Rev. Edgar B. Smith (1947), who started the business of used clothing that grew and grew until it nearly crowded out the people.

Rev. Paul Hollenbeck came as a summer interim before Rev. George Ritchey (1952) arrived to support the post-WWII boom.  Children were a major part of the growing American interest in a church home and so the classroom extension was added. 

Rev. George Cox (1956) came next.  He was a stone mason and built the fireplace in the relatively new Babb log church.  Rev. Charlotte Bridges, a Baptist minister from New Hampshire served as interim.

Rev. Jim E. Bell and family arrived in 1959.  Bell was an officially commissioned missionary who wished to expand both Babb and Heart Butte.  The Babb land was donated by Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Thronson, who were both buried by myself, acting as interim minister in 1988-89.  In 1961, when I came to teach high school English, I was merely an attendee of the church but I lived in one-half of a small duplex that also housed “Papa Harry Pearson,” a retired lay worker who provided all sorts of support. (1963-79)

1964 was a time of disaster.  The Babb church burned down and there was a terrible flood that swept away Swims Under Church at Little Badger.  A second ministry team, the Rev. Conrad Himmels, arrived to free up Rev. Bell’s energy for the larger reservation.  Mrs. Himmel opened Browning Day Care Center in an Air Force base building moved across from the church.

Rev. Walter Mason

Rev. Walter Mason and his wife Alagene came in 1974 and stayed until 1981.  Apistatoke Church in Heart Butte was closed.  Money was a major problem -- the churches were shrinking as the nation’s interest in religion was fading in favor of social justice.  

1981-83 was a double ministry: Rev. Vicki H. and Rev. Richard Marine. They were followed by Rev. James R. Bentley who directed a lot of improvements, including to the historic Methodist cemetery outside of town.  The first set of stained glass windows, created by Brent Warburton, were installed in 1985.  Work camps from the midwest began to arrive in the summers of these years.

One of Warburton's windows.

Rev. Ron Barr arrived in 1896 and took a special interest in Heart Butte, acquiring a bus to transport the people into Browning and then reopening the church there in a quonset hut-type building.

Peggy Salois, a lay leader, and Rev. Mary Scriver, a UU minister, served between 1987 and 1989 when Rev. Richard (Jake) Jacobsen, a Navy chaplain, arrived, went into culture shock, and left.

Rev. Donna Lee Martin came in 1990.  Her husband Marshall was a major contributor to the maintenance and programs.  This period was remarkable for the expansion of programs and outreach to both local tribal people (Charles Newbreast) and people like Evelyn Attwood, a Native American certified as a Rural Chaplain.

Heart Butte Methodist Church

Rev. Rowland Freeman (1994) led a group of young people in making the stained glass windows in the bell tower.  

I think I'm missing a couple of people in these years.

Rev. Jim Barth has been the most recent pastor.  He and his wife, like  Rev. Jim and Mary Bell, lost a newborn child.  They were able to make this into a ministry.  They began to call the parish “BUMP” which disconcerted me, since I’m aware of the movement to use Blackfeet words.  But then I watched the vid.  http://www.bumpmission.com  Both the language and the music were there.

Rev. Calvin Hill

Now a new page begins.  Rev. Calvin Hill has arrived.  An enrolled Navajo, a speaker, he also speaks Hopi, Zuni and English.  Rez and boarding school raised, he has a lot in common with many Blackfeet.  Perhaps now the two shadow cultures can merge into one creative way of going forward.  "Hurry up please, it's time!"

(Previous posts about this parish begin in May, 2009.)

"H IS FOR HAWK" by HELEN MACDONALD

Helen and a gyrfalcon

“H Is for Hawk” and also for Helen.  That would be Helen Macdonald, an inspired writer, naturalist, historian, academic and falconer of enormous intelligence, experience, and passion.  She’s in England but travels, among other places to Mongolia where their idea of a hawk is a golden eagle.  As it happens, I have some experience with such a bird but nothing like her expertise.  Many people are writing reviews of Helen’s book, “H Is for Hawk,” as she travels around Great Britain giving readings.  Some of them are friends of hers or of her father, Alistair Macdonald, a noted journalist photographer.  

This book records her “working through” of the grief after her father’s sudden death from a heart attack, mostly by focusing on her relationship with a goshawk named “Mabel,” creating an exquisite tapestry of contradictions, paradoxes, deeper meanings, and epiphanies that finally became a portrait of love.  She is not a narcissist nor is she shallow.  This account joins an ancient and enduring stream of material about human fascination with raptors: rapacious and sometimes reptilian, but capable of soaring transcendence that their handlers can momentarily share. 

T.H. White supplies an integument of encounter with his own hawk decades earlier in his book “The Goshawk,” whom he calls simply “Gos.”  He has no experience, no experts, just an old book and his own brain, which is a perverse and undependable instrument.  He has retreated to a hermitage on the grounds of the school where he taught in that miserable English boarding school way that literally flays little boys.  Helen, in contrast, was raised with a brother in a sympathetic and free-spirited family, but she is no less part of the great stream of Anglo thought that gave rise to the King Arthur mythologies in Britain and she is not protected from the emotional roller-coaster of training a goshawk.  We are reading about Helen, T.H. White and “Wart” from White’s “Sword in the Stone” all at the same time in layers of meaning.

The first time I saw hawks flown free was about 1963 here in Browning at the high school where I was teaching.  The hawk trainer had worked with Disney on “Perri” (1957) another Felix Saalten book like “Bambi.”  Perri was about a squirrel threatened by an owl trained for the movie by this man.  Before television, school assemblies were very popular and this man came with hawks.  I’ve tried to find his name but failed.  I talked him into coming down to the Scriver Studio to take a lot at “Eegie,” our golden eagle.  He gave us a lot of information: that she was female, that she would lay eggs but they would not be fertile because eagles mate high in the sky, and that she must have roughage in her food even if it was only paper and cut-up string in hamburger.  

Helen had access to the culled male chicks from a nearby hatchery but we went onto the prairie to shoot a gopher every morning.  Nurturing a predator means meat.  No eagle chow in a sack.  It turns out that the art of flying a hawk is a crucial balancing act because the weight of the bird is key to its temperament and willingness to at least take an interest in flying to hunt.  White overfed Gos to the point of turning her spurts of excrement -- called “mutes” -- to green, a very bad sign.  Helen, feeling the same worry over starving Mabel, didn’t go that far but had to learn to get her into “yarack,” the technical term for the edge of hunger that prompts performance.

West Hills UU Fellowship

The second time I saw hawks flown was in the sanctuary of the West Hills UU Fellowship in Portland in the late Seventies.  This group of free spirits and artists recognizes the deep spirituality of nature.  Helen would fit right in with them, not least because they wouldn’t consider her particularly odd or gifted -- they’re all like that.  The Sunday, April 17, 2011 post on Fretmarks.blogspot.co.uk explores Helen’s love of eccentricity and her childhood among Theosophists -- this entry is an excellent introduction to her work.

Helen, who sometimes goes by Pluvialis, has been blogging since 2005, about the same time that I started, and was one of the early blogs that I was careful to follow.  So I was there when her father died, when she plunged into the abyss, and through the long silence that followed until she emerged with this triumphant manuscript.  She had no idea I was out here in Montana, but her friend Jake corresponded with me a bit, so we exchanged our worries and then joy.  The magic of the Internet is that a person may be part of a community more world-wide and alert than they ever suspect.  Lucky Jake lives close enough to Helen to share a circle of real people who love birds.

Mongolian girl training her eagle.

Falconry seems to have become developed on the high plateaus of Eurasia where the skies are wide.  But Helen and T.H. were driven through an ordeal, personal and essentially unsharable, in the tightly overgrown and governed lands of England, making a transect of a great swampy wasteland of emotional undergrowth that tore and sucked at them, and yet they struggled forward because they were following something beloved and high-flying, trailing its jesses as it calls them on forward with desire and frustration.  What emerges at the end is a clear, cool stream of thought and reconciliation.  Falconry is a way of bending nature to one’s own uses that has been practiced for millennia and yet must be individually perfected each time.

Martha Raddatz, F15E combat pilot

Far from being all-too-twee about birds, Helen says they’re like fighter jets.  This quote is from an interview in the Guardian.  She and the reporter were overflown by an F15 and she identified exactly what it was. “She sees parallels between fighter jets and birds of prey. 'That sense of fear and awe and being problematic in terms of being involved in death is very much the same feeling people get when they see hawks. It's mesmerizing.'"  Reading the  book reviews for this book is rewarding in itself.  The people who write about her really stretch to capture what she has done.  Of course, they’re English, they’re literate, and they’re in sympathy, so they write very well.  

Our own “Eegy” died when the Scriver Museum burned -- the smoke suffocated her.  But she was not a high-flier-- she only flew once and that was to the top of the house when the wire was being replaced on her cage.  Then she flew back in. 

We treated Eegy in the off-hand familiar way that we treated all the pets.  Too young to fly at first, she gripped the Dutch door of the shop while we stuffed her with gopher parts until she stopped shrieking for more.  She marched around under the worktables, shouldering aside the pet cats and dogs.  Later, in her cage, she was happy when feral cats managed to get in so she could kill them -- squeezing her talons through them while holding them at leg’s length to keep them away from her eyes. 

During the first fall she was with us there was a too-early blizzard.  We didn’t think of the bird with only a board for a shelter until it was after supper. When we finally realized and went to see how she was faring, she looked like a schmoo, plastered white with only her blinking eye showing.  We each took a wingtip as though she were a toddler and walked her into the shop.  When the weather warmed again, Bob cut a door so she could get under the building.  While he worked, he had to hire Dean Kipling, the kid next door, to fend her off with a stick, because she kept unplugging the extension cord to the saw.  Frustrated, she jumped up to rap Dean in the chest with her closed fists; he resigned.

Eegie bonded with Bob, nibbling behind his ears, but wouldn’t tolerate me once she was adult.  After Bob divorced me and I was gone, he had the idea of getting a fertile goose egg for his bird to raise and she did fine.  He put an old tub in the cage and the two big birds splashed around in it like kids.  If you ran a hose in the backyard, Eegie shrieked until you squirted her.  Once, out riding, we had seen a pair of eagles playing at the edge of a pond, splashing each other and throwing sticks back and forth.

  

Helen at a poetry conference in 1998 which she left early in order to inseminate a peregrine.

I assume not in mid-air.

Helen says Mabel would play catch with a ball of crumpled paper.  Eegie would do the same with a rubber ball by hitting it back to us with her fist.  Even so in play with animals do we work through our human issues.  Everything is connected and everything changes, but somehow the themes recur and recur, even across species and through the skies.

Helen recently -- I think this must be the coat that reminded her of "Withnail and I"