Early receipts
Written (alphabetical) culture comes out of math, marks made on whatever surface was available in order to make a record and to draw up agreements about crops, boundaries, ownership, profit and control. It also defines “correct” language and supports “proof” in science. It mostly happens in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain and can be done by isolated individuals.
Spoken (oral) culture (sometimes sung) is the basis of human emotional interaction, collaboration, and a bridge to animals. Prayer is in here somewhere and the fancy that there are gods who can interact with humans. Much of it comes from the dark brain and so is full of sound and movement.
These are arguable premises that I intend to explore a bit since I have just realized that in my solitude I am functioning almost entirely in writing (keyboarding) but much of my thinking comes out of interaction with this place and its oral culture, the living patterns of people living on a "sublime" land, using the classical literary definition of sublimity as a combination of inspiration and terror. Rocky Mountain high.
I see that white people with university educations are parasites on a living, various, and ironically defined oral culture. The first of these written-culture people were fur-traders, learning the language in order to make a profit. The second group was missionaries, trying to use the written word to create an imagined culture (religion) category in order to control people and expand their empire. The third category tended to be solitaries or small face-to-face groups guided as much by personal individual circumstances as by any governmental fiat or decisions from tribes en masse per se. Today Indians are parasitized by government, commerce, and academia.
Let’s set up a little historical parable: the Flathead Valley people want and need buffalo meat. These are west side fertile valley people who used to live on the east side prairie nomad lands, but got thrown off by the Blackfeet. They like the climate over there a lot better, but they still remember the taste of buffalo and they are not content to eat carrots, though the Jesuit missionaries keep telling them peace and safety is more important than food.
St. Ignatius Mission with Cardinal Carroll
Nevertheless, small parties of west-siders thread through the high passes and arrive at the Blackfeet camps. (I’m not going to source this, but a person could -- there are anthropological records of oral stories. Be careful -- half of the Blackfeet canon is Canadian, so spelled "Blackfoot," and there are two languages so add Siksika. ) Carefully approaching the camp, which is down in the cottonwoods along a river for the sake of carrying water and firewood, one brave west-sider scout goes to the bluff overlooking the camp.
It doesn’t take long for the People to notice him and react. Men go into a lodge or sit in a circle under the trees to discuss what to do. If they are feeling generous, compassionately remembering what it is to have children who are hungry, and having recently seen large herds of buffalo, they go and call the scout down to talk terms. If they are angry, cranky, had bad hunting, or lost a battle with some other prairie tribe, someone goes out and shoots the scout dead.
"Little," Pine Ridge Oglalla
This is not inevitable. The guy who went to kill the scout might be a bad shot. The scout may have sensed the temper of the camp after hours of watching their lives and to have judiciously disappeared. Some impatient hothead might just go out there and on his own kill the scout, even though the calmer folks had suggested this scout might be bringing useful news or even items to trade. Or that he might be with a group large enough to raid the camp.
There will not have been any written treaties. No one keeps a list of who’s in the camp because it changes all the time. No one records blood quantum, more accurately genealogical provenance, which is kept track of by the old ladies constantly rehearsing who’s who while they work. More important is reputation, which is by family affiliation and stories. The value system of generosity, bravery, potency, skills, and entertainment value count more than anything else.
The problem was that no one could read, not even English.
Not even some of the whites.
Now move to today. On a rez much is about writing, not least about treaties. How much land and where it was according to the written Dawes act is the base, more than the rez boundary, which is a changing river on the south and a surveyed straight line on the north. Maps were drawn up and assigned in writing. Commodities were given according to a list. Marriages had to be recorded in writing. (It's a little confusing to decide who was truly married, even today.) The white dominating culture insisted on their language, their (conflicting) understanding of one Biblical anthology accumulated on another continent millennia earlier. Children were forced to attend school long enough to learn basic arithmetic and reading, but not enough to make them able to manage negotiations with the written contract and ledger bookkeeping overseers. “Don’t worry your noble little head -- we’ll just take care of it for you.”
So they sort of “forgot” to write stuff down in those columns, they got the grammar wrong (number, gender, antecedents, parallel construction, tense -- VERY tense), and they wandered off to do something else, because this is the structure of WRITTEN language, not spoken language. Oral language means watching someone’s face to see if they get it.
Gradually the People realized that a pen is a weapon and that writing, in its relentless progress across a page, can make sentences into the bars of a cage. They demanded the means to learn how to do this kind of communication and thinking at a college. What they found was academia: rules, prestige, hierarchy, precedent, old men controlling young men, and a huge body of writing, all parasitic on the actual lives of Indians, pushing them into one frying pan after another until they had cooked-up written descriptions of Indianness, which is why they are called “pan-Indian.” (jokes)
The writing cultures were mostly Christian (translators of their holy book) and so they, by reflex, “fenced the communion,” which is sort of like "heading them off at the pass." That is, in earliest times only the initiated (and controllable) in the converted community were allowed to take communion, which consecrated ordinary bread and wine from the table by redefining it as the mystical body of their “Christ.” Christ is what gives Christianity its name -- it’s not Jesus-ism.
Christ meant the Anointed One or Messiah, who is a figure meant to come and save everyone. In anthropological terms, a “Big Man,” a superman. A hero-chief. It’s unclear whether such a person would be the scout on the hill or the wisest man in the talking circle, which would depend on whether he were a “war chief” or a “hunting chief” or a “camp leader chief.” Jesus seems to have been the last kind, as was Chief Joseph.
For an oral face-to-face culture, the value of a person is carried by that person himself, not any media-created version of what they call “wisdom,” which means always knowing what to do and actually doing it. Tribal councils that are elected on written ballots are not the same thing as becoming the person everyone turns to with respect. Wealth probably is respected too much, partly because money is a writing concept.
So now comes something educators in 1961 thought would be a great gift and bring Indians into the larger community of America: television. But the media evolution continued on to the Internet (writing) and then YouTube where we can create a virtual (parallel, but flexible, re-framable, negotiable) imaginary community that speaks in images rather than languages and doesn’t require the presence of real people. In the meantime, kids do texting -- writing -- which derives from their devotion to money. Texting and credit cards go together. But music is in there, too.
Both written and spoken communication.
Images have not quite crowded out alphabets or score-keeping. Here I am, merrily scribbling about it! But the generational divide also frees up the oral culture and makes a demand for more human empathy, however you explain it neurologically. The old white writing-based people insist that they are the only ones who can decide what is legitimate Native American writing and the vicious quarrels over that create so much trouble that publishers (who deal in writing) decide to just avoid the whole category. The post-modern academics are too damned hard to understand. Anyway, they tend to sneak out the back door to go watch Truffault movies about boys in trouble.
The writing-based people -- academics and publishers -- are parasitic on the oral culture people. When they limit the oral story sources with constant curation, esp. curation for profit, they are crushing themselves. Maybe it would be a good thing to shoot the scout.
https://vimeo.com/21163086 This is an excellent reflection on dogs, who never write anything. It mixes English with Siksika, writing with speaking.
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