CULTURE POTLATCH

Kwaikiutl potlatch container -- maybe eight feet long.

“There is far, far more freedom in creating stuff no one reads versus 

most of the garbage Americans are addicted to.“

Our culture is shifting -- ALL the cultures are shifting -- and, like the glaciers pulling back and the islands being swallowed up and the old oceans thawing and industrialization breaking down even as the resources that make the machines and the fossil fuels that run them are running out, the elements of human life are rearranging.

My great focus, as I look back, has been how meaning emerges from ecology so that the prairie makes one kind of person and the sea coast makes another.  I think about my fourth grade Chinook-elder teacher explaining ON HER TERMS the artifacts of the Kwakiutl in the Portland Art Museum.  On EQUAL terms with a huge Monet waterlilies painting as big as a billboard.  That’s also where I saw Caravaggio’s painting of a naked curly-headed boy, thought to be his intimate, laughing above a clutter of cultural symbols.  I was not yet adolescent and no one explained, but I understood anyway.  

Fancy overlays of interest in Indians come from anthropologists, often prurient (the giveaway is that they suddenly start writing in Latin), or maybe with the German romantic literary love of the “natural person” who is without blame -- which progresses from Madonna worship (the Dear Mother) to ideas about Gaea (the planet that loves us and will save us, even in spite of the gyres of garbage in our seas.  And then there’s the compassion industry:  “Send us $5 or we’ll kill this puppy,” becomes “Send us $5 of we’ll kill this Indian.”  Well, actually, more like, “We’ll let him die.”  But Indians are great material for stand up comedy.  And extortion.

Everyone with their prying fingers that smell of commodity cheese wants to know the real truth about Indians.   What are they really like when they walk around naked and beaded.  (Of course, they don’t do that!)  Now that the cultural taboos are fading -- actually, they sort of went over a cliff in the Seventies -- we can see that it’s a “spectrum disorder” -- some are as middle-class and respectable as anyone and then -- across the span -- there are the distorted, predatory numbskulls.  Some talk about tricksters, but these are NOT the tricksters, who are smart, greedy and resourcefully projecting the image of the staggering smart-alecks in front of Icks.  (Liquor and powder.)  They really enjoy stigmatizing and patronizing other people, because it turns off their consciences.

Now I’ll begin to tell stories.  Bob and I did hard physical labor in the foundry all day.  At suppertime we went to Joe Lewis’ cafe, the nicest in town -- they had booths.  The waitress was an older woman with hair dyed flat black and highly rouged cheeks.  She was a sweetheart, a little old to be on her feet all day.  Joe Lewis himself, usually sat at the end of the lunch counter, nursing what I now suspect was coffee with an “augmentation.”

Our crew was mostly local Indians of one sort or another because American reservations have a mixed population, magnetized by the opportunities offered by confused jurisdictions and states that didn’t give a damn.  We usually hired our helpers off the street because when they were sober, they were competent and willing.  When they were drunk -- well, that’s the story.

A slobbering, staggering, urine-smelling man came in and made a bee-line to Bob, hoping to beg some money.  This shows he was really out-of-it because anyone who thought he could borrow money from Bob was fantasizing.  Maybe he thought he was talking to someone else, but since Bob was the city magistrate and sentenced this bozo for public drunkenness often enough, I think he just got the idea of money (fines) upside down in his head.  He leaned over the table and drooled into Bob’s meal.

Bob’s reaction was to silently stand up, throw the plate -- food side down -- onto the floor hard enough to shatter the plate and to stride out and drive off.  The drunk staggered on, Joe Lewis had disappeared, the waitress was looking for something on the bottom shelf behind the lunch counter and I don’t know what the other customers were doing.  I was trying to figure out what I should do.  I was hungry.  What did I have to eat at home?  Bob always paid so I didn’t have money on me.  I wasn’t stranded since the town was only ten blocks across in those days.  The drunk didn’t drool into MY plate!

That was the place that became Ick’s after Joe Lewis had died.  Al Racine, woodcarver and sign-painter, had painted his trademark “Napi” trickster on the side of the building, eating a short stack.  It had later been altered to show a different kind of consumption, but his big black Sundance hat, his wide smile, remained.  The bear he rode, his pack-cougar, and the rattler he used for a whip weren’t there anymore.

I doubt that the drunk even remembered what happened, but others must have told him.  I didn’t see him for months.  He probably went to a different rez for a while.

Our best employee, about my age, was Carl Cree Medicine who also came around to borrow money when he was drunk.  Technically he was asking for payday loans.  He and his wife fought and at least once she defended herself with a knife, so that time he came staggering in the door bleeding from the groin.  He’d been to the Indian Health Service but he hadn’t been properly bandaged.  They didn’t divorce and Carl finally got a grip on sobriety.

He stayed employed by us for a long time and eventually his son became Bob’s foreman, almost a member of the family.   He was skilled and dependable and in Bob’s last years when he was often bedridden, it was this young man who helped him, supporting or carrying him.  When Bob died, Lorraine -- the widow -- gave the young family the house next to the museum. 

Carl himself produced art and sold it.  But his real creativity was organizing and running a “lodge” for street alcoholics so they could settle on benches and chairs in an old Government Square building, cigarette in one hand and coffee mug in the other, continuing the testimonies and brags that they normally exchanged in the back alleys where on warm days they sat on logs with their backs against the tall plank fences, soaking up sunlight.  In winter the shelter saved lives.  Carl is dead now.

One day I recognized a man who had just deserted his family in order to take up this life.  I waded through the weeds and just flat asked him why.  He said it was because he was free on the street.  No one nagged him to do what THEY wanted, scolded him about his behavior, made him feel bad all the time because they wanted to control him.  He couldn’t find a job.  He wanted to sit and remember better times.

So that’s sort of my literary pattern, staying broke and getting my back up against a sheltering fence where I can sit and remember.  The difference is that I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I never slobber in anyone’s food.  I’m solitary rather than tribal.

My cats say that’s a lie.  There’s them, for one thing, but what about Tim and HIS tribe?  And I NEED to be solitary, because I need the time for thinking.  About what?  About the blunt fact that as the culture recedes and morphs, it reveals all the things taboos and willful disregard have covered up.  Who realized how many boys were sexually assaulted?  Who understood the amount of violence just outside the limits of suburbia and often perpetrated by the law enforcers meant to stop it?  Why has wealth become a scandal?  What do HIV and Ebola really mean?

What happened to the insights and progress of the Seventies?  We thought we had freedom.  Were we bought off?  Or was it that industrialization itself made brutes of us?