TOO TOO SOLID FLESH

"Bones"

Work, recreation and research have a tendency to merge in my days.  For instance, last night I watched an episode of “Bones”  (Season 4, Episode 6), the gruesomely explicit CSI series.  The most bizaare body so far was a basketball player who was behind the bleachers when they hydraulically folded into the wall.  People love these imitation corpses and make lists of the "best."  The “shock” bits disguise what is actually a discussion of what it is to be human, made of vulnerable suffering flesh.  "Bones" also explores the morality of sex quite a bit, as the Asperger-types question the voluptuous and emotional folks.

This particular episode was about an office romance that aroused jealousy enough for someone to throw a stapler at the victim’s head which triggered an aneurism.  (Okay, so they were reaching.) The payoff was throwing the body down the elevator shaft so that the car “mulched” (their word) the body into gobbets, one of which wore a high-heeled shoe. 

Villain, Hero, Woman

Then I watched a new addition to Netflix:  “The Salvation”, a Danish film, a “Western” filmed in South Africa in frank imitation of a spaghetti Western, except this was, as one reviewer remarked, “ink-soaked denim,” the usual pattern of one vengeful and powerful man confronting villains oppressing a town.  The town is half-burned, a jagged, shattered, charred background for urban shooting war.  Mads Mikkelson specializes in these roles, a righteous family man confronting a totally evil greedy-man (the handsome but menacing Michael Raymond-James.)  Everyone already knows the plot, just as we all know that the CSI show will end in solving the mystery.  

We recognize the steps and the characters, so the skill of the film is in the style, which is surprisingly restrained, almost barren.  I didn’t know there was dry terrain with buttes like that in South Africa, but maybe they were CGI.  Most of the victims are shot neatly in the middle of the forehead and drop in place.  

The restraint is more menacing than the episodes of fire.  A bad guy shoots a good kid on the roof of the hotel by sending bullets up through the ceiling.  This breaks the bottle of kerosene the boy was carrying, which drips through the ceiling and — since the bad guy is smoking a cigar, sets him on fire.  There are the traditional pair of women, a blonde heroine who is killed early and a dark heroine who at this point is tied to a bed, about to be immolated.  We don’t see how she got loose — the editing cuts to the villain using her as a shield on the balcony of the hotel.  I shouldn’t spoil the rest.  But note that she’s not Indian (there are no Indians — everyone is a “settler”) but she was captured and tortured by Indians, which made her a savage victim.

Twitter, as I follow it, includes a lot of indigenous people in both Canada and the US.  An on-going thread is about a book, “The Orenda” by Joseph Boyden, which has become the focus of outrage and political sword-waving about its perceived message: “the emergence of Canada: Indian savages, do-good Jesuits and the inevitability (even desirability) of colonization.”  It’s an apologia for the destructive “settlers” of the Empire.  (No reference to contemporary Palestinians with the same problem.)  The setting is the last years of the Huron Confederacy (1600's) in what became central Ontario.  If you want more, I’m quoting Hayden King, a professor at Ryerson in Toronto.  He’s Pottawotami and Ojibwe from that same area.  http://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/the-orenda-faces-tough-criticism-from-first-nations-scholar-1.2562786

A friend had sent me a copy of “The Orenda” months ago, but I didn’t read very far into it because it was so “witchy” as Blackfeet would say.  Indeed, most of the doin’s in brush-and-stream country is usually dark and grotesque, the country of the starvation people who eat what Blackfeet call “nothing food.”  (Bison are real food.)

Until this review I hadn’t known that the tribal torturer (equivalent to a Spanish inquisitor) was named “Tekakwitia”, but I immediately recognized the name as similar to that of the first Native American saint, who is particularly celebrated by the Blackfeet here.  The Browning Catholic Church put a statue of her in the yard.  In fact, a young woman of this community was named for her, familiarly called “Tekkie.”  She had Down Syndrome which meant she was cheerful and generous, much loved.

The villain Tekakwitia is the father of this woman with the similar name who recently was deemed a saint.  The point of Tekakwitia the Torturer in this novel is that he converts to Christianity — he is REdeemed.  Then the suffering of the Jesuits become worthy.  Hayden King sees the whole book as “the marginalization of the perspective of the Haudenosaunee, the centering of the Jesuit point of view and the cultivation of old tropes, specifically the savage Indian — amounting to a tale about the inevitability of colonization.”  

From a purely historical point of view, like the CSI scientists, that’s the fact of the matter.  From the warmer moral relationship point of view, the fault of the book, according to King, is that it makes it seem that the victims triggered their own destruction and deserved it because they were such vicious sadistic savages.  I won’t venture to guess what that California private school teacher — the one who wanted to come learn all about the rez so she could inspire her upscale students — would made of this book.  I daresay she will be careful to not know it exists.

Adrian Jawort is a contemporary NA writer in Montana who honchoed “Off the Path,” a unique anthology of writing by and for NA’s because he saw that NA’s must read and publish for themselves, about their own lives today.  He’s in Billings and writes for “Indian Country.”.  I reviewed the anthology with admiration.  It is full of suffering honestly told.   https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/opinions/steven-bearcrane-cole-case-hits-close-home/  The piece linked is about the death of Adrian’s brother.

This is not Sherman Alexie joking around.  Jawort is reality-based and not from the 1600’s.  It is not Algerian/French theorizing, nor are there any Jesuits or saints.  Jawort told me his second book, “Moonrise Falling” and third book, “Off the Path II” were gothic in that intense genre that is often expressed in film as horror.  I challenge you to read them.  I’m not up to it right now.  I wonder what Hayden King said about them if he reviewed them.  Surely he knows they exist.  You can buy them on Amazon.

Academic and urban indigenous people immediately see this Goth/horror approach as insulting to their identity and some react by attacking the character of the writer.  These folks want to be seen as blameless, maybe even a bit romanticized, certainly middle-class and prosperous. They feel being indigenous is an entitlement even if they have never lived in Indian Country and have very low blood quantums.  To them being “Indian” is innate rather than survival-based from interacting with the land itself.  And they want revenge.

One can’t fault the reality that point of view.  It’s what also creates the monomania of Jesuits and settlers, that feeling that they are part of a privileged, admirable community.  But I wish they’d get over attacking the writer, trying to force him to eat his own legs.  It didn’t work for the Iroquois.  Attacks on Joseph Boyden come from the same vicious attitude they want to claim is “unIndian.”  

But the publicity must be great for sales.  Maybe even motivation to wade through this elegantly written and very long book, somewhat based on the life of Jean de Brébeuf.  King said it was the bloodiest book he’s read since “Blood Meridian.”  Some will consider that an attractive feature.  If you want authenticity, buy Jawort.  If you want to be an activist, how about getting involved in the neglect of NA murders?

"THE ORENDA" by James Boyden: A Reflection

A quote from "The Walrus," a Canadian on-line magazine:

“There is a long history of writers being, in some way, leaders in society,” [John Ralston] Saul says. “Not that they necessarily write political books. It’s more that a great writer has a compelling belief system.”  [Saul] toured the country with [James] Boyden to promote the series ["Extraordinary Canadians"], and noted his authority and gravitational pull within the First Nations community. “Aboriginal kids see him as a role model,” he adds.   

"Margaret Atwood directs me to the chapter on First Peoples in Survival, her influential study of Canadian literature. The book, published in 1972, envisioned a time when First Nations Canadians would not be “made into projections of something in the white Canadian psyche, a fear or a wish.” Instead, they would be “considered in and for themselves.” 

Citing Alberta novelist Rudy Wiebe as an underappreciated interim figure, she says she predicted that “Joseph Boydens would arise” to tell those stories fairly and fully. Atwood sat on the Giller jury that chose not to short-list "The Orenda", a decision she prefers not to discuss.”

-- from an essay about Boyden in “The Walrus”

John Ralston Saul, writer, publisher, president of International PEN

Amazing.  Saul, Boyden’s publisher, actually went on the book tour with him.  Saul commissioned Boyden to write a book about Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont for his series “Extraordinary Canadians.”  I’ve just ordered it.   

Here’s Allan Gregg in conversation with Boyden.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVpwAb37voI

Usually book manuscripts are said to go to publishers “over the transom” on the way in, but this time Darrell Reimer (AKA Whiskey Prajer) has more-or-less thrown two books at me “over my transom,” both of them bound, reviewed, celebrated, and embroiled in the eternal obsession of Canada with itself and its origins.  And they happen to transect something I think about, which may be why this blog accumulates middle-aged men who have a “young man” vibe and who write, but not necessarily successfully in terms of money.  They tend to obsess about heroism and mysticism. They are quite willing to tell me all about it, so I do reflect.  (Am I Margaret Atwood?  In part.  But where are the voices of the aboriginal kids these white folks want to tell us about?)

Gabriel Dumont

Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont are vital to this part of the world, since Red River Nation people took refuge on the US side, some of them among the Blackfeet.  Riel is the visionary, the sometimes crazy mystic, and Dumont is the guy who knows how to negotiate.  Regina at the time was something like St. Louis at the same time, except that up there the fur buyers had to go overland to Hudson’s Bay so weren’t as interested in bison hides as in high-value small creatures, like mink or beaver.  But this particular group of Metis -- who lived on plots that had one small riverfront side for water access, since water was a highway, and then acreage extending away (like St. Louis) -- wanted to own their own land as a group with a boundary within what was just changing from a Hudson’s Bay property into proper provinces of Canada.  They didn't intend to displace Canada so much as claim their own space within it, but the authorities saw them as terrorists.

Western people, barely identifying as Canadian, were sympathetic, but the Protestant Anglo power structure -- paranoid as usual -- set out to destroy them and seemed to succeed, though the Metis only went underground.  Or to Montana.  The many French names around here are traces of them. Riel was their saint, Dumont was their rational, effective general.  Joseph Kinsey Howard told an early version of the story in "Strange Empire."  My other tie to this story is that my paternal family homesteaded in Manitoba and were briefly wealthy in Brandon.  My father’s bachelor’s degree was from the U of Manitoba.  No one in that family ever even mentioned the Red River rebellion.  I'm not sure they knew about it, but how could they not?

In his youth I think my father had literary pretensions, though he never carried through on them or had any notion of how to get hold of ideas to turn them into something real.  They say that oldest daughters try to fulfill the goals of their fathers.  (Or was it mothers?  Not in my case -- though she tried hard to be the high-status respected person that HER father wanted to be.)  John  Pinkerton was a defiant Irishman as opposed to my defiant Scots paternal great-grandfather, Archibald Strachan.

The Canadian authorities, extensions of England, had more animosity against Irish and Scots than against the French Catholic Metis.  “The Orenda” is about war between two huge aboriginal nations -- Huron and Iroquis -- which a Jesuit priest walks into and ends up influencing, both in history and "The Orenda".  I got that off a review.  I’m finding this book very unpleasant to read.  (One can imagine boys reading it and exclaiming, "Jeez!" and "Gaw!")  The introductory ordeal is about capture of a Jesuit in winter -- twenty pages written in an airport concourse.  It's convincing, but last winter went to thirty-below, it was not comfortable, and I’ve thought about it enough.  Anyway, I’m not big on Woodland Tribes and their involvement in the entering wedge of Europe, warriors fighting on both sides, sometimes determining outcomes.  Too bad they didn’t have guns, horses, walls and flags.  

Recommending Rudy Wiebe to me as an exemplar of writing about First Nations backfires.  I’ve met him.  Here's his voice:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOM597JMexs   He explains that his version of Mennonite comes through Russia -- Darrell Riemer’s version is gentler and more American in the sense of North America.  Wiebe in person is arrogant, stiff, opinionated, thinks he owns indigenous people and is incredibly naive about women.  That IS Ukrainian Russian.  Darrell is farther to the east.  I don’t know his particulars, but I certainly prefer his style.   I'd love to spend some time with John Ralston Saul.

Maybe some of this stuff accumulates into a certain kind of man created by expectations of place, family and self.  How heroic does a man have to be?  How famous?  How rich?  What counts? How much does a man have to suffer?  We sit in our Christian churches pondering an example splayed in front of us.

I suppose the sub-type of these men that I’ve known best have been grandiose narcissists.  (I don’t see why that has had to be pejorative and stigmatized.  It's a feminist obsession.)  Coping with such men at the very least keeps a person on their toes, but they are hard on male children unless the man has reached some kind of moral center in himself, possibly based on mysticism of some kind.  Then they attract boys the way iron filings cling to magnets, so naturally and so irresistibly.  In my opinion, Bob Scriver never did reach this moral center, but he certainly pressed me hard to find my own -- not on purpose -- and maybe that was part of his search.  He hoped I'd teach him.  Pretty tough since he needed to be always right, which is a self-defeating way to go.  In the end, I abandoned morality, at least the conventional version. Mine is much stricter.

I'm attracted to competent people.  He was a skilled, focused, powerful person who pushed through barriers.  I suppose he was like "Dumont".  His French-Canadian brother-in-law, the one who posed for the Scriver Jesus portraits, was more of a "Riel."  Two men with strong ties but not brothers go back to the beginning of being human.  Bob Scriver and James Welch Sr. as kids exploring the railroad snowshed and nearly being squashed; Tom and Huck; Gilgamesh, in tales from both Old Testament and New; the man who became friends with the beaver's son.   The story seed grows some powerful adventures, some of them deadly ordeals.  This still doesn’t quite explain to me why critics would admire Boyden’s description of a man’s frozen testicles in an agonizing restoration of circulation.  But then, I didn’t really want to know about Margaret Mead’s small waist and wide bum, either.  It’s as though writers can’t write about “primitive” people without telling us the things forbidden in polite society.

Is this how to be a model for aboriginal kids?  Oh, just NOTICING THAT THEY EXIST is a beginning.  They still today freeze their balls, get captured and knifed, go into visions, live off rage, and form close relationships with other boys.  But I don’t think that’s what James Ralston Saul had in mind.  It’s just an effective selling point.

Aboriginals are really into the hospitality industry.

Of course, the great hue and cry about whether Boyden is “Indian enough” is underway, but it makes a lot more sense up north where the tribal people still have an obvious ethnographic identity instead of just a membership entitlement card.  For Boyden to recover some of the past farther east and south -- where today to be Mohawk is to be an ironworker on skyscrapers in Manhattan -- can’t be a bad thing.  To recapture the massive injustice and pure greed, the terrible suffering imposed on innocents on both sides, is probably beyond any writer.  An exercise in grandiose narcissism.  But, you know, some good work can come out of the attempt.  And it may be helpful when the great reconfiguration of nations that I see coming actually lets All Peoples sit at the table.