Idris Elba
“Beasts of No Nation.” starring Idris Elba is going to be the next big “game-changer” on Netflix. I can hardly wait, not just because I’m an Idris Elba fan, but because the concept of “nations” is on the table now. Of course, since I've spent so many years on the Blackfeet rez, the idea of nations is always walking up the street here, scaring some with its swagger and prompting sneering or sentimentality from newspaper stories. The white people think they’re a nation, though Valier’s Belgian roots are so recent (about a century) that they get a little distracted about which is their nation, and almost none have any consciousness of how mixed up Belgium’s roots really are, split between France and Germany, also conglomerates.
Blackfeet, a loose confederacy at first contact, became fragments reduced to a few hundred people -- half of them children -- corraled on reservations and managed first by the army (they were formally assigned to the army in the cabinet) and then by missionaries, a rivalrous free-lance Jesuit contingent and the legally assigned Methodists. That was the Piegan, Southern Pikuni branch. The US management plan was to let them die out. Instead they transformed and regrouped. Now their problem is how to pry the BIA off their backs and find some way to unite the whole when survival has made them so various, one group going this way and another going that way. The “half-breed” problem has been solved by physically over the years replacing the dyad “white/red” terms with a spectrum of people.
Another interesting factor is that the Canadian Siksika survivors, assigned to various reserves, were treated by Canada as a separate people who should be preserved that way. (English empire thinking -- keep the wogs as admirers and clients.) White people were kept out. Language was preserved. Only the ceremonies were suppressed by the inevitable missionaries. They were meant to be children, dependents, the Queen’s people.
So now, part of the Siksika strategy for a return to the identity of the Nitzitahpi is to reconstitute the three parts of the original coalition in a new cross-border "nation". (The fourth part, the Scabby Robes, died with Darrell Robes Kipp.)
Israeli soldier -- the more things change, the more they stay the same
The idea of nations is still a fragile one: consider Israel, which was created by displaced peoples from many other places as a kind of compensation for genocidal suffering and persecution. Not that Jews haven’t contended with that since Pharoah, but that this particular iteration was engineered [sic] by Germans, supposedly the most rational and introspective people, at least since the Thirty Years War in Europe which was supposed to establish where the lines were between nations. (See “Game of Thrones.”) Then, supposedly having settled who was in and who was out of which invented coalition of tribes and princedoms (if not kingdoms), those peoples set out on their wooden sailing ships to impose "nations" on all the other continents.
Of course, the Chinese were far more experienced and the only thing that finally brought them into the Euro-world was addiction to opium, which the “modern world” supplied. The commodities always more valuable than even blood diamonds are drugs and human trafficking.
Recently, relieved of overlords like King Leopold II of Belgium, some Africans fell back into the original tribal hydraulics. (Darrell used to talk about tribal hydraulics on the Plains before contact.) Force and food, force and food. Sex is secondary, since it can always be forced onto the stigmatized and weak -- the starved. But now there is the “Liberia dynamic,” which is educated urban people who enter the tribal tides and master a form of surfing on the constant political waves from the larger world. I will be fascinated to see how this story plays out in terms of the international corporations who can now destroy nations with their HIV/AIDS or Ebola pharma drugs, as effective as opium politics.
Uzodinma Iweala, author of "Beasts of No Nation"
Harvard grad, like Darrell Kipp.
I’ve ordered this book -- “Beasts of No Nation," by Uzodinma Iweala. It’s only a penny plus shipping on Amazon -- but I’m wondering if this is only “The Wire” writ large. That’s where I learned who Idris Abba is and what he can do. Somehow empires empower wogs even though they try to hold them down. (I’m deliberately using a pejorative, though one that’s so old and stuffy that it’s almost funny in a bitter way.) I’m pretty confident it won’t be another version of “Mandingo,” which I found thrown into a corner when I rented a house previously occupied by Blackfeet. But the movie houses seem to fear this new movie more than “Mandingo” which turned sort of campy. I mean, the superior black man slave gets boiled alive. Eeeeks. I don’t think that works anymore. (But wait -- how different is that from immolating pilots in a cage?)
The boundary marked by the title of this book/movie is that between the animal (beast -- does that mean domestic, wild or feral?) and the nation. (Hmmm -- guess it must be wild since nations are domestic.) So at least part of what we’re talking about here is wild versus controlled by some nation. But not the individual, who might merely be a madman. Rather a man who is uncontrollable and yet able to control. He is the bull, the leader of the pack. We don’t like his methods mostly because (supposedly) we can’t use them. Predator drones (dragons) are as close as we can come. (Pretty damned close to immolating people in cages.)
Idris Abba
Machines are ultimate domestic tools because we can disavow our motives in developing them. A lot of attention is given to smallpox as a destroyer of Native American tribes, but behind the spread of disease was the steam engine that vectored germs from other places up the Mississippi to the heart of the continent and on railroad lines playing off the mercantile dynamics between Canada and the USA, east to west. Modern jungle transportation (helicopters) seems at first to be the key to winning wars (which is what distinguishes tribes from nations) but they are a phenomenon of fossil fuels. Conflict will always come back to person-on-person as it did for the Hutu/Tutsi genocide, self-destroying hatred expressed by machetes. I suppose that could be interpreted as the blooming of seeds planted by Leoopold II.
But who planted these same seeds in the American cities? The major movie chains are refusing to book the Netflix film of “Beasts of No Nation,” claiming that their motives are commercial, that Netflix is breaking protocol. I don’t think so. I think they’re scared. And Netflix is smiling, because what are home watchers going to do? If people are not sitting en masse in a theatre, where they can see who’s black or white, how can violence break out? Will they be empowered to beat their wives and children? Will they run into the streets waving machetes? Or will they even vote? Or order “Game of Thrones” as a “watch-it-again” choice.
Before wolves evolved and heat became electric.
My hope is that such stories will help us at least tell one wog from another, and that the empowerment will be the ability to let Native Americans be who they want to be instead of the conveniently mythic people we want them to be.
Snag = hooking up
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