CHILDSCAPE

The Bullshoe Sisters: a force for education

when they grew up.

One of my chief pleasures and a driving reason for me to read is finding new ways to look at old things.  This is not widely shared around here.  People like to find the BP (“best practice” which is an interesting phrase linked to technologies, including health care and enforced by insurance) and then stick with it, even though new discoveries and goals develop.

Writing about historical indigenous people is often a matter of rehearsing the same old scripts and assumptions, some of them mistaken interpretations imposed by the oppressors of the times: missionaries, cavalry, railroad magnates, Euro adventurers and the like.  Even today the academics arrive with their heads full of romantic factoids which the local tribes are happy to exploit. 

So I’m pleased to be reading “Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory,” by Clive Gamble.  Gamble is English and thinks about the two major “revolutions” in the three million year history of hominid evolution: one is the sudden (in archeology years) explosion of creativity that created art, music, religion, language — the whole realm of metaphor that some believe is the real beginning of modern humans — the second is the development of agriculture and the relation to sedentary life.  (Not sitting down but settling in one place and building an environment that can be defined as containers, like houses.)

For instance, there is a lot of difference between a hearth and a fire.  A hearth is a place specially occupied by the fire, a “fire place,” which is related to crucibles, blacksmithing, and other technologies of metal that demand high heat over a short period of time.  This is different from the “fire place” that is used for cooking, even baking, because a camp fire can be improvised and baking can be done in a hole with a fire built on top of it, the way Blackfeet prepared camas roots.  People who do metallurgy are sedentary and repetitious.  People who only use fire as they travel are improvisers.  

This is one major difference between tribes.  The people of the Pacific Northwest lived in cedar plank long houses and built hearths, erected totem poles, created shell middens of considerable size.  The people of the prairie used technologies of tanning, cording, flintknapping, and left evidence of camps along streams where cottonwoods grew in predictable favored spots according to the seasons.  Since most of their materials were biodegradable, they are invisible to us now.  

Blackfeet kids at Heart Butte used to complain about getting more light-skinned as though it were yet another incursion of “pale faces,” but it was clear that they don’t go outside much these days.  This is windy country so it is a temptation to stay indoors by the TV, a kind of hearth, and they keep the light out for the sake of viewing screens.  In the days of lodge-dwelling, people were mostly outdoors, even maintaining a separate cooking and smoking fire outside the lodge.  They were good at rigging shade with pieces of tipi or leaned together leafy branches, but it was bright shade.  Photos that record skin ordinarily covered by clothing reveal much paler areas.  So having an “indoor hearth” has changed the people and what they do and what they think of themselves.  

Gamble talks about what he calls “scapes”, the environment one is aware of and uses, so there is a landscape of habit which for early Blackfeet would have meant trails more than “bushwhacking” which on the prairie would mean something more like “grass crushing,” the social landscape meaning how the people are distributed and connected, and the task scape which might mean hunting patterns or might refer to special sources of materials like the yellow clay used for paint.  He discusses the “childscape” as the territory and the pattern of knowing it through travel and work that shapes and limits the raising of children.  This is one of the uses of story which always includes the sky for Blackfeet children. 

When I was still teaching on the rez, I took a photo of the Rockies and used it to learn the horizon line of the peaks until I could “write” it like a cursive sentence.  I’d walk to the blackboard and “write” it or put it at the top of a page.  The kids always recognized it, but were surprised that it could be learned, which means that they had lost the map-drawing skills of their ancestors.  But there was a fascination with “white man’s maps” in Atlases and highway guides.  

Reciprocally, whites who come to the rez get very frustrated with the lack of street signs because people here (even whites) go by the social landscape and the task landscape, which are learned and repetitive, often anchored by landmarks like the location of community dumpsters.  People whose garbage is invisibly collected don’t register such objects or the logic of their location.

The Rockies at sunset

Anyway, white man’s maps are drawn as though from a satellite, looking from the top down. Indian maps, especially along the Rockies, are from the side and mark distinctively shaped peaks as well as the erosion valleys and canyons with uses.  The criteria for most things is experience — reacting to what one has learned through living with the sensory characteristics that translate to usefulness.  But other things known have been arrived at by analysis or implication, more often recorded as narrative than as abstract ideas.  

“Fittingness” becomes the criteria for something persisting unless it is an exceptional or "counter" practice or object that grabs the imagination.  The wheel was not invented by Blackfeet because it is mostly useless without roads, esp. in gumbo country where a “stone boat” — a wooden sled — or a travois can go places where a wheel would soon be bogged down.  In some ways glassified stone that could be knapped to an edge was more useful than metal.  But mirrors were fascinating, unique.

A childscape doesn’t just provide knowledge of materials and territories.  It teaches how to do things, how to learn, how to tolerate failure or even pain.  Missionaries and other Euro-taught and now-teaching people have pressed most rez kids NOT to rely on themselves but to ask for the “proper” way to do things.  They are punished if they do the wrong thing, which teaches them to do nothing without permission.  Guided by social opinion from the very beginning, they can be crippled by confusion and double-binds.  Pretty soon there is rebellion.

Since the Sixties, living territory has become even more treacherous because of political counterculture resistance to “best practices.”  In fact, the generation breaks introduced by new technologies and coalitions of same-aged kids — supported by music waves, the internet, and the media’s fondness for labeling — mean that kids don’t look to adults anymore but depend on each other, even when it comes to risky stuff like mind-altering substances, sex and reproduction, criminal matters, and precautions in a dangerous environment.  These are all part of the childscape, which patterns the child's thought into adulthood.

Gamble demonstrating how to butcher a sheep.

Clive Gamble is hard to read, partly because of anthropological neologisms for concepts that are uncommon and partly because of more classic jargon.   But far more than having to learn vocabulary, it is necessary to reframe one’s childlike from-the-outside perceptions -- as though “Other” people were dolls -- into the world-as-perceived-with-the-senses and the assumptions about them that are experience-based.  We are used to filtering, skimming, reducing to materials that can be marketed.  We are not used to being submerged in a landscape.  Sub- merged.  Land- scape.  Judging from computer games and videos, we want these experiences, but don't know we're IN them.

WHAT CAME BEFORE LANGUAGE?

A woman on her way out to Heart Butte to interview for a position as an arts coordinator and artist-in-residence, stopped by in Valier to say hello, since in researching Heart Butte we had chatted on the phone and gotten a little acquainted.  She is an experienced teacher who has her own studio.  I had made muffins, cautioning her that my muffins are loaded with berries and nuts but contain no sugar or salt.  She was game for that and arrived just as the muffins had come out of the oven and were cool enough to put on a plate.  The knife I was using to lift them made the muffin tin slide around the stovetop.  She put her hand out to hold it still and I reflexively snatched it aside from her.  She didn’t say anything for a minute, watching to see whether there might be more to it.  Maybe I got burned?  “I was just going to hold it still,” she said.  I scowled and grumbled.  

I live alone.  I didn’t know this woman.  I didn’t interpret what she was doing as helpful but rather as interfering.  It’s a thing we all do once in a while, but she was shocked and I was chagrined.  It was so little, but it’s a clue to a new theory of how humans began to become themselves, a new species.

Bob in his studio

On a pleasanter occasion, I stopped by Scriver Studio to visit for a while on my way to somewhere else.  Even after our divorce, Bob and I remained friends and even after a couple of years after the divorce, living elsewhere, the materials and their handling were deep in my senses and muscles.  He was at his work table, mixing plaster, mold-making, moving things around in the clutter as they were needed.  I watched, then without thinking, I reached out to get the next step ready, to keep things from tipping, knowing what he would do next and how the materials would act.  He just accepted me as though it were natural, which it was.

When I wrote Bob’s biography, “Bronze Inside and Out,” I based the whole book on the steps of casting bronze -- what it FELT like to work with the sequence of materials: plastilene, blue plaster, white hydrocal, Koroseal, wax, investment, bronze, patina.  Our relationship was still anchored by having done so much together, sharing non-verbal understanding of what to do.  But we were better with objects than the subjective emotional element.

About communication long before there was language.

In “Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory,” Clive Gamble proposes that the first concepts were wordless, simply the sensory elements of objects handled and known.  He suggests that there are two basic human concepts:  container and instrument.  What “goes into” what and what happens if you do something with maybe a twig -- poke, bite, wave, strike.  His convincing premise is that the first thinking hominins (not quite human yet, but close) were in small groups doing something, each one watching both the object and the others hunkered around.  As they understood, they began to interact, reaching out to participate or intervene, then checking the reaction in the others.  This was real and effective communication but language came later.  At this point the early human mouth and pharynx were not capable of making sounds with precision enough for language, except maybe yabba-dabba-do.

Looking at evidence like this comes into the Cartesian thought world like a little dust devil, making trouble, not really solid.  But I find it very welcome indeed, because it feeds into a line of understanding that I’ve been following since seminary at the end of the Seventies, the idea of sensory information as the origin of concepts, silent underneath our words and shaped by our grammar.  Suzanne Langer was exploring it.  Benjamin Whorf and his idea of Hopi being a process-based language (not a chair, but chairing), first proposed this at the end of the Fifties. 

Feminist studies pointed out that when two biologists went to study a herd of antelope, the woman’s observations were all about birthing, caring for the babies, and finding food.   The man’s notes were full of fights with predators, rivalry over the females, and scouting territory.  Everyone, according to his or her culture and experience, sees his or her own reality and ignores the rest.  This challenges the Cartesian idea of reality as something independent and “real”.

Awareness, taking everything into account; language, being able to interpret it in words; and reasoning, which is always in words, are privileged in our Western culture.  Writing is more potent than speech.  Declarations, law, business, treaties are all in written words.  Maybe it is the computer and internet that have begun to make it clear that even technical and legal language is shaped by culture, expectation, goals.

Recently, the major overturning of our understanding of consciousness rests on the ideas above, but some of it is neurological research.  We have not allowed for the autonomic nervous system, which maintains the homeostasis of the viscera, which is the basis of a kind of feeling/consciousness. Mark Solms talks about the unconscious conscious which sounds like something Gertrude Stein would write, but what he means is this phenomenon of the body guiding itself along without our attention unless something is going wrong that requires some kind of action.

Mark Solms

And we CERTAINLY never thought that one’s gut biota had anything to do with thinking, but experiments show that they have an influence on one’s mood, “feelings” that influence one’s ability to think. 

That’s not all.  The brain can only handle about seven different concepts at once.  If there are more than that, the brain chooses the most important ones and the lesser matters are “repressed,” or “denied,” or just ignored.  This allows enough metaphorical “elbow room” to deal effectively with matters at hand.  Sub-concepts can be “bundled.” One way to do that is to use a metaphor.  Metaphors are at the heart of language, letting sounds or marks stand for concepts learned by the body through experience with objects and other people.

But different groups of people form their own little cultures with their own ideas about what you should eat or wear, what crimes deserve punishment and so on.  Their language will reflect this.  Their awareness will be shaped by it in very subtle ways.  I once took a college make-up test where several classes came into a large auditorium and chose their own seats.  Strikingly, the Euro-whites spaced themselves out, each claiming as much space as they could.  The Middle Eastern and Asian people sat in a group, not so that they could cheat but because to them that seemed “right.”  Even in the hallway they stood close to each other while the whites left as much space around themselves as they could.

I find that all this is clumsy to talk about, almost too “poetic,” and indeed poets deal with these matters.  But what I’m labeling here as “Cartesians,” meaning those who want a geometric inevitable world that we all share, have a strong emotional resistance to the idea of subjectivity.  Cartesian, supposedly objective thought, enables science, math, technology, and for that reason alone has pushed aside everything else for centuries.  Since it is the basis of prestige and status, esp. among those who claim male-gender-roles, there is a lot at stake.

The way the world looks at itself is changing, trying to achieve the reconciliation of differences that result from the media showing us the worlds of the other and a shrinking supply of resources.  Some people, you could say, are “violently opposed.”  This process is just beginning, but no doubt the issues were always there.  We must teach ourselves not to snatch away the muffins.  That’s a metaphor.

I realize that muffins and cupcakes are gender assigned, but don't tell your mom.