Friday, May 17, 2019

SITTING TOGETHER TO WORK AND EAT

Probably some of the happiest days of my life were sitting at a battered old table in Scriver Studio, turning the ears of tanned trophy animal capes inside out.  (Capes are what they call the skins of the head and neck that will become something to hang on the wall.)  When Bob Scriver started his taxidermy business in the Fifties, the Al-Can (Alaska/Canada) highway was complete, but still largely gravel as it had been built during WWII.  While the taxidermy business developed, the road was gradually paved.  Hunters were quick to venture north on adventure trips and when they came back, the Scriver Studio was the first (and best) taxidermy shop in the US.  

Most of the few employees were rez folks but for a few years in there, I was a white woman among them.  On certain days we sat around a worktable with a pleasantly warm light, each of us working on a cape with a little sharp knife, turning ears inside out so we could replace the natural cartilage with a duplicate plastic version.  The skins were tanned, clean and rinsed of the mild acid bath that had tanned them for the past few months.  There was no stink or blood, but they were slippery.  I vividly remember the feel of them.

Sullivan Hameline was Cree, a big older man with a belly.  If he were asked to "hold the fort" when Bob and I left on an errand, he loved to stand at the Dutch door to the front with the top open, leaning on the closed bottom, teasing the customers.  "Are we on an Indian reservation?" they asked.

"Oh, yeah."

"Could we see some Indians?"  They never realized they were talking to one.  He wasn't scary, just a big cheerful guy.  He had two bad habits.  One was putting bandaids on the tiniest scratch until he was using up a box every few days.  The other was using the electric knife sharpener so often that the blade of his knife was soon worn down to a sliver.  

He could tell hair-raising stories about winters that were so tough that the poor people on Moccasin Flats in one-room cabins ran out of fuel and pulled up their floors to burn -- maybe even burned the doors, hanging blankets instead.  While he was working with us, one of his children died in a household accident.  I don't remember what happened exactly, but we gave him some money and went to the funeral.

Carl Cree Medicine was our other steady employee, smart and reliable unless he drank.  Then he was scary.  In spite of his name, he was Blackfeet.  "Cree Medicine" is the same as Louise Erdrich's "Love Medicine."  Cree is to Blackfeet as French is to English.  Was then.  Some of his relatives with the same name have become well known.  His son, David, at that time almost a toddler, became Bob's best-ever foreman.  He was valued enough that when Bob died, his widow gave David the house next door to the museum. 

By that time Carl had become the head of the street people's shelter where the cigarette smoke hung from ceiling to knee height and the coffee was always on.  Bob had given him certificates of achievement while working at the Scriver Studio, and Carl had framed them to hang by his desk.  Then he began to create small sculptures, though the circumstances and machinery of promotion were not quite powerful enough to make him famous. 

Bob's management skills came from being a music teacher and he was strict.  I was treated just like the guys except that I went for lunch with Bob and he picked up the check.  I sat at the counter in the little diner eating the best roast beef sandwiches ever made ("Crabby Jack" Higgins slow-roasted the meat overnight.  I've never been able to duplicate the tender richness.)  Usually I was the only woman except for a waitress.  It was a steamy warm place full of laughter and rough jokes.  

I've always  thought it was an innocent time with all sexism, racism, competition pushed away by sharing the work.  But maybe I was blind and not so much innocent as simply dumb.  Maybe Carl and Sullivan were seething with resentment and suppression.  Years later I got like that, but just then I loved being "one of the guys."

Was it feminism for me to be there?  To be working at Scriver Studio?  I asked the question to myself because of a question asked by Umair Haque, who is allergic to sunlight and looks a bit vampirish anyway, all dressed in black, except for his closest companion: a little white fluffy dog of enormous innocence.    https://eand.co/why-do-enough-american-women-still-support-patriarchy-53767f2d7a4

Umair  Haque and his guard dog.

Umair finds this new appetite for punishing women by banning abortion to be demonic.  He is trying to understand where it comes from.  "Why is it that even on the Democratic side, mediocre men with no agendas or ideas save yesteryear’s failed ones are polling at twice, thrice, quintuple the numbers the women — who are the radical, daring, transformative leaders — are? None of that could be happening if American women — enough of them, this time on the Democratic side — didn’t buy into patriarchy, too."

His first conclusion is that we all live in danger of annihilation, and this is used by males (bosses) to emphasize that women need protection and to suggest that only they can provide it.  They say, "If you submit to our power structures, our rules, our ideas, then, yes, you will be subordinate to us — white men. But you will be above everyone else. You’ll be above everyone else: minorities, gays, immigrants, refugees."  All the people Trump fears and demonizes.  Ironically, what men offer women is protection from violence that they say can only be countered by their own violence.  (But there is no evidence that Trump has ever shown violence or force in the masculine mode.  He doesn't even seem to own guns.)

This view endorses women's right to be "fighting for the right to behave like elite white men. It’s the right to be violent, angry, vengeful, ignorant, greedy, self-interested, and vain. It’s Instagram feminism — all butts and boobs and bank accounts."  Sometimes women of color swallow this bait and preen in selfies that are defiant advertising for being secondary to powerful men.

The positive role model Umair chooses is Elizabeth Warren.  She needs no descriptive words.  See for yourself.  She is far from the old granny governor who was put in office by men.  I guess she's a feminist, meaning a competent woman.


Things change.  Umair and the feminists have still not figured out that sex is not binary.  There are more than two choices of gender and more than two kinds of females.  And there are many kinds of power, far more ways to protect from annihilation than we are using.  

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