HOW I KNOW TIM BARRUS

Cover Image from "Puer Papers" Spring, 1979

It’s unclear how self-revealing I should be. On the one hand, everyone in this village sees every move I make and feels free to comment. That’s fine. They don’t interfere and sometimes they help. The people my age have heard the stories and opinions and now acknowledge me as a “character,” which is an affectionate compliment in Montana. Some people   even call me “young lady,” which passes for a compliment — they think I’ll be pleased since I’m 76 and YL is clearly code for something, like “Character who is old.” They mention their moms a lot. (I’m not a mom.)  What do I do that's so risky?  I think outside the box.  That means NOT Hollywood boxes: sex and crime.  Other ideas.

It’s the “successful” youngsters who are baffled, which is part of the reason I’m not at all qualified to be a teacher again. But there is one bunch of youngsters who understand: “boys at risk,” which is code for “they drive everyone crazy.” That’s because their world-view is not about beer and good grades. It’s more about survival and cosmology, though they might not describe it that way. Since 2007 when I read “The Boy and his Dog Are Sleeping,” I’ve been in conversation with this tribe of constantly changing boys who have HIV and confront it by making art, often photography.

Tim Barrus wrote the book, which is only about one dying boy. Officialdom, as in publishing, is mostly about profit. Tim had no real way to defend himself from attack by moral/political inquisitors because to him Indians were People, not pawns to be pressed into Procrustean conformity to missionary ideas. He’d known them as People since he was a boy picking up pink quartz flint-knapped tools on the plowed fields of his grandfather’s farm.  Sometimes he came across Indian corn that had gone feral and survived.

Later he was a teen cooking for a timber crew, caring for an abandoned Chippewa baby because all day he was in the kitchen where he could feed it and wash it until -- after weeks -- Mom got out of jail. (There were older women watching but they never intervened.) He was a natural nurturer, a lover of puppies.  He himself was only cherished until he started primary school. Then some teachers were abusers and a few held the magic key to other worlds.

"You'd better show some respect!"

This was also true in his birth family, particularly his raging alcoholic father, a kind of person Indians know. Like an Indian his father sometimes sought relief in wilderness, often in boats. He took Tim as a safeguard in case of accident, even the ones he caused himself by driving drunk. If the boy began to fear or complain, his father left him on frozen lakes or star-crammed desert — with no assurance that he’d return — to toughen him up. Eventually buying him a Harley-Davidson worked better, though it meant the boy could escape down the highway and did.

I’m not a mommie-person, coaxing and comforting. As far as I can see, many forms of compassion are just domination and give me a stomach-ache. I respond to wonder and justice — like, I wonder where the justice was in this attack on a writer who helps boys? So, metaphorically, I went over and sat down next to him to listen. (It’s easy on the Internet. Some of those sitting with me, cross-legged on the ground with their cell phones to their ears, were in Africa or Asia. Many Russians.) Sometimes, before the haters and their pillories got to them, the boys themselves talked to me. Some are dead now.  I still grieve for them.  Always will.

The planet's kids talk to each other.

I’m dazzled that T. is still writing and even mentioning me. He says he’s hard to love — I find it hard to accept that anyone loves me, so it’s a kind of sharing. We fit. Somehow he has gotten through my defenses, which means he is capable of doing dire harm. But he seems able to love people (me, for instance) without owning them and telling them what to do.

We live in our dark brains, more than many others do. The image of the dismembered boy in this cross-media production called "Just Before the Cure" — a young blonde boy who once looked a bit like Tristan — still speaks though his flesh is now all-in-a-pile. Other people might turn away from horror, but we think it has something to say. The skull of Orpheus is singing. Eavan and Kilian, the Irish poet-boys, recognized that story and named the ancient singer.

Publishing is still mostly a matter of people with capital investing in paper manuscripts, printed, bound, stored in warehouses, distributed to book stores, promoted by reviewers, and so on. It’s a business model. The content doesn’t matter so long as it sells. It doesn’t even have to be what it says it is -- or is accused of being -- so long as it sells. But now publishing is text-and-video with sound and takes on its own life because it sings, all its teeth in a grin. It follows the paths of music, which means intricate patterning, the reader joining the chorus, a planetary shower of meaning that can change whole cultures — and about time, too.

A visionary future.

They say that the 2%, now realizing how much money they have and wondering how to spend it since just hoarding is not much fun, are turning to nonprofits and experimental strategies. In 1961 when I came to the rez, the Peace Corps was just forming. I had realized that a reservation was an internal “third world” and so I joined a white sculptor near-shaman born in 1914. We were quiet participants in ceremonies of people born in the 1800’s. They were Bundle-Keepers, focused on a rolled-up bundle of animal hides — more like scientific study-skins than today’s tanned hides — but science was often blind to their meanings, which come from watching the live animal on the prairie.

So intent on categories and labels, the anthros sometimes didn’t feel the true meaning of them. A notorious photo shows an anthro holding forth to an old Blackfeet man. The anthro is comfortably seated on a Beaver Bundle, one of the biggest and most significant Sacred Bundles. The polite old Indian must not have told him what it was. Anyway, such a thing doesn’t need polite social juju to make it potent. It is what it is and exerts great power that can’t be felt, anymore than one feels x-rays, though derived images exist.

At Risk Boys also know how to be invisible, minimal, interstitial. They are a force for the future we can’t predict because they have abilities we can’t recognize. No one knows what their limits are, so long as they can stay alive. People sometimes remark that in news stories we see indigenous people suffering and then, at the same time are impressed by their Dionysian rhythm of joy and participation. That’s what these boys can be like. They are a tribe, self-determining, evading capture.

Alessio Pizzech, opera expert, with a singing Orphean skull