WRITING BETWEEN CULTURES

from Terraturepossessions.com

In every human culture there is a mystical edge of magic where what is taken for granted meets the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.  This boundary can create a kind of person who seems able to cross over into some other world and return to the rest of us with powerful new systems and ceremonies.  This includes the resurrection cult we call Christianity with its saints and heretics.  I’m composing this on Saturday as though I were a Seventh Day Adventist or even observing Shabbat, because the European number cult valorizes the number Seven.  Of course, you may be reading it on Sunday because as a cultural Christian I’m just in the habit of the Seventh Day post being a little more concerned with religion than the others, so tend to choose religious subjects for that day.

In the world of indigenous people there are many examples of this phenomenon but they mostly operate in an oral society where their stories are told and ceremonies are enacted privately, or even secretly, in order to escape from a larger dominating culture that would label them and try to eliminate them.  But to a certain kind of seeker, this hiddenness only adds to their power, their sense of privilege.  Those who hurt or wonder or seek solace are MORE attracted than those already content with the mainstream.

The people on this edge who are Blackfeet tend to connect it to political empowerment.  Others pull in sex, dissociation (traditionally among Blackfeet achieved by fasting, dehydration, torture, exposure, rather than drugs), and the ecology itself, emphasizing sun and altitude instead of the Christian water and wind.  Animal symbolism in the north is more about horses and eagles than the SW where coyotes and crows are the messengers.  Phenomena of this sort arrange themselves according to their own logic but then are assigned labels by investigators.  One of those labels is “shaman,” which originally applied to a certain sort of person in the far tribal Russian north.  The concept doesn’t always apply in other contexts, so it is controversial.  The idea of the "medicine man" is related.

Castenada

Though we know Louis Riel, Crazy Horse, and other indigenous visionaries, two others have broken over from oral to written documents:  Black Elk and Castenada.  Both had ties -- interpreters -- in the white academic world.  In fact, Castenada earned a Ph.D. by representing his work as comparative religion.  Black Elk was interpreted and edited by Joseph Epes Brown, a professor at the University of Montana.  Castenada paid little attention to Christianity while Black Elk, who once traveled Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, who was at the original Wounded Knee where a bullet grazed his leg, AND at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, was a Christian convert who only slipped his “Sun Worship” below the surface without losing his faith in it.  He said he did this for the sake of his children, who would have to live in a Christian world.

The difficulty in moving from one religious system to another, especially when adding the desire for holocaust-level destruction that constantly invades them, is in trying to locate and resist the supernatural.  The rival is labeled Evil which legitimates killing, whether Crucifixion or Genocide or just Holy War.  Even police pursuing "Law and Order."  

Nationality gets mixed in, confusingly, and values shift between generations over time.  Violence and criminality can act as a validation of the importance of a rival system like Charles Manson’s.  Even a benign movement like Greenpeace can be criminalized.  Even the supposedly beatific Mother Theresa can be seen as a cult leader when one discovers after her death that she was obsessed with depression and lack of faith and all the donations she was sent were not spent on food and medicine, but hoarded in a secret bank account.

Black Elk and Neihardt

From anonymous in Wikipedia:  “Black Elk Speaks” is a 1932 book by John G. Neihardt, an American poet and writer, who relates the story of Black Elk, an Oglala Lakota medicine man. Black Elk spoke in Lakota and Black Elk's son, Ben Black Elk, who was present during the talks, translated his father's words into English.  Neihardt made notes during these talks which he later used as the basis for his book.”  

Black Elk was interpreted by Joseph Epes Brown as a ceremonialist and a benign guru, acceptable to any conscientious person.  Brown's book, called “The Sacred Pipe,” was about those ceremonies.  I asked Professor Brown if I could audit a class of his, which he resisted.  The content was a ritual that was supposed to be performed at a young woman’s coming of age, using the red earth pigment that is common in prairie ceremonies.  Brown said the pigment was supposed to represent the cow bison’s practice of breathing bloody foam from her nose over a calf in order to protect it.  It sounded to me more like a way to attract wolves, but I didn’t say anything.  Brown was a handsome, graceful man, very dignified, fond of turquoise jewelry.  Not a person with whom to pick a quarrel.

from Thehouseofvines.com

Later I realized that he was setting up his class, who busily wrote down this ritual, so that in the following session he could reveal that he’d been playing the trickster in order to raise their consciousness about over-credulous acceptance of faux nature-knowledge.  Tricksters abound in the liminal edge between the primary culture and breakaway systems.

Genre (or, more pejoratively, “pulp”) fiction loves all this stuff.  Montana Gothic fiction uses it poetically to create whole worlds of visions and exploits, extraordinary people, and embeddedness in nature.  It also makes a space for a novel like “The Fancy Dancer,” which is a gay romance between a priest and a motorcyclist, a half-breed escapee from Leather Lit.  It's by Patricia Nell Warren, a white contemporary Montana writer.

Grass Dancer

Mainstream critics will attack such stories on grounds that they are immoral or hoaxes or sacrilegious, which are all code for “they are outside my culture stream and therefore I’m justified in condemning them.”  But consciousness of the suffering of Native Americans as the continent was cleared by force, as smallpox and other diseases accompanied the massacres, as the de-cultured impoverished people became addicts to substance dysphoria, as family and ceremonial systems were smashed, others defended the indigenous entitlement to their own ways.  Castenada and Black Elk were therefore honorable.

Lit critics don’t address these dozens of best-selling books.   Black Elk was using his own language, so his books are essentially translations.  Castenada, born in Peru, was also bringing a non-English point of view.  Comparative religion people like Eliade or Campbell are happy to write about them.  They so vividly and persuasively illuminated the numinous.