WAIT WAIT! SAY THAT AGAIN!

Scientists tell us that we moved beyond Neanderthals in the sense of evolving skills because of new developments in the ability to make art and tell stories.  Most creatures can make war or reproduce, etc., but it is art, music, dance, and stories that make us humans.  

We know that there are differences among groups of humans and try to treat them as differences between species, or nations, or religious bodies.  In fact, the culture-making capacities are often what separate us, creating differences and even conflict.  But culture making can also reconcile us.

In the past there have been two cultural thinking mistakes when it comes to the "surf" between the American indigenous people and the European indigenous people, who try to represent themselves as somehow Platonically (a line of thought that started with Plato) and abstractly definitive. Writing is supposed to be better and "higher" than talking.

This has been encouraged by some because writing has been a feature of the Eurasia culture, but the American culture has emphasized oral literature.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition

"Indeed, if these final decades of the millennium have taught us anything, it must be that oral tradition never was the other we accused it of being; it never was the primitive, preliminary technology of communication we thought it to be. Rather, if the whole truth is told, oral tradition stands out as the single most dominant communicative technology of our species as both a historical fact and, in many areas still, a contemporary reality."

— John Foley, "Signs of Orality"

These thinkers about "orality" distinguish between the oral traditions of a whole culture and the individual who tells stories, testifies to his or her experience, and so on.  The latter has been emphasized by anthropologists who come to settlements of oral people and write down what they say out loud, either to the recorder or to a group.  The oral people themselves may come to think that only the written record is what counts. Thoughts about the larger culture were neglected.

Thus, if we consider oral "literature," the first "Nat lit" was first person stories told in the people's languages, perserved by machinery like tape or video.  One of the early problems in "reviving" the indigenous languages is that there's not much to read.  The technical work of inventing an alphabet of the sounds used by the people in question creates a representative code that has to be learned, and not easily.  Even then, one must learn a new way of holding the oral/pharyngeal cavity to make the right vowels and new ways of using tongue, teeth, lips, and even epiglottis to make the stops and hisses of the consonants.

Contemporary tribal people can "read" oral languages on video.  Once they are "translated" even into written accounts, the story changes according to word choices.  Sometimes there is no such concept in the written language as there is in the oral version or vice versa.  Translation of the oral language is complicated by the spoken words always having a "subtext" of gesture, facial expression, pauses, volume, and so on.  In the written versions we try to add footnotes, print differences, illustrations, spaces.  Oral and written are parallel but different art forms, as though one were sculpture and the other was painting.

Early "Nat Lit" literature might be Chief Pokagon speaking in his own language at the World Fair in Chicago just before the 20th century. The written version we have was translated by a woman of the Edwardian era who understood it all a slightly different way. This kind of collaboration happened often and accounts for the uplifting tone of NA oratory.  Much of what was written down to be read in an indigenous language was in homage to the power of certain Books that were thought to contain religious truth.  One whole religious denomination, Bahai, is based on all the various Books together.  The premise is that if it were written down and "true" all religious writing would agree.  

The modern concern about "Nat Lit" writing deals with none of that.  Instead it is at first drawn from anthropology notes, so that tribal people are reading "who they are" as filtered through someone visiting.  Then gradually those writing about tribes began to be tribal people themselves, but almost always educated by whites, which inevitably means assimilated at least enough to manage and be understood by white people.  

This had nothing to do with blood quantum, but more to do with managing and reconciling two systems of thought.  Ruth Beebe Hill claimed that she did this by translating "Hanta Yo!" out of English into Sioux with the help of a Sioux man, and then back to English again so she could sell the product. Since in the Sixties she was in the habit of coming to visit us in Browning instead of the Sioux, I had to think about this early on.  

Books are objects in a way that oral stories can only be on recordings, preferably video.  As far as I know, no one is selling CD's with spoken literature in an indigenous language.  Perhaps they ought to.  People could buy them for the prestige of it, even if they can't follow the talk -- they do that with books.  The tribes themselves haven't had access to early recordings until recent years because they were archived in academic or scientific institutions.  Now one can get some things on the Internet, including the free spoken language through radio like Canadian Windspeaker.  https://windspeaker.com/radio  (Thunder Radio is owned by Montana Blackfeet: KBWG-FM 107.5 MHz - Browning, MT.  Spoken mostly in English.)

But there is another element, which is the ecosystem and the ecopolitical system of the place that gave rise to the language.  If I say "sweetgrass" and you've never smelled it, you won't be able to think of it.  If I say Auntie in Blackfeet, it will mean something different than it means in English.  This sort of thing makes stories thin or even misleading when they are taken to a different culture.  Many traditional oral stories, as the Bible was drawn from by scribes, are moral, much more crucial to human life than the experiencing plants, though maybe as crucial as having proper aunts.  The difference in meaning is something like a rural person trying to explain life to an urban person.

Contemporary writers are identified as part of the Nat Lit selling commodity, either self-identified or having the role thrust upon them by publishers.  They justify their label by constructs claiming provenance, descendence unproven by DNA which shuffles the genes in each generation, or by the way people "look," creating the weird premise that all Native Americans look like the buffalo nickel.  The actual facts of the content or the genetics of the author get pushed aside by this stereotype, this genre.  Consequences can be major.

More to say later.

NOT NECESSARILY TRUE STORIES

It seems clear that the overriding common denominator of all cultures is survival, which is socioeconomic, which means what counts is whatever sells.  Money is the solvent that will dissolve all the boundaries.  And all the cultural nuclei as well.  

Beyond subsistence, prosperity is a 19th century value of the bourgeois, the famous Middle Class.  While living controlled, walled, standardized lives enforced by rigid morality and relieved by underground wickedness, the Middle Class loved little adventures into the “wild” (like climbing mountains or exploring other people’s countries or religions), and always wanted souvenirs.  When people come to the rez and ask for a tour, I take them up and down the roads and valleys, pointing out the history, and at the end they say,  “Yes, but I really want to buy something.  Are there no shops?”  A dream-catcher maybe?  Or something authentically beaded with glass beads?

When Euro culture first confronted indigenous culture, there was immediately a juxtaposition, a confrontation, between the two peoples.  They dressed differently, they spoke differently, they interpreted the world differently, and they smelled different because they ate and sheltered differently.  But underneath all that they were the same species and so it didn’t take long for the organic but culture bound differences to begin to blur.  One anthropologist, describing the Blackfeet (Macfee, “Modern Blackfeet”), spoke of four cultures: whites, indigenous, whites who lived like indigenous and indigenous who lived like Euros.  He talked of the 150% “man” who incorporated elements of both cultures — not building “scare walls.”  Or pay walls.

Like all discontinuities, money for bridges and gates is a great way to make a little money by charging toll for people and materials.  Part of the wealth of Malcolm Clarke came from him owning a narrow access canyon north of Helena.  In contrast, the Blackfeet never realized that they could charge toll for Marias Pass, the only way for a railroad to get through the Rockies.  When the concept of “intellectual property” came into law, the tribal people were a little more quick to claim exclusive entitlement to their own stories and knowledge, though the Jesuits and the anthros wrote down a lot of it.  Good thing, because otherwise there would be no record now.

There were two steps to getting money out of Napi — one step was writing things down and the next step was publishing it, so that it was in a form that was a “thing”, a solid object that could be exchanged for money.  In The beginning there were no tape recorders and, anyway, only the Blackfeet understood Blackfeet, which was an oral language, which is why the written spelling never settles down.  Gradually certain people made themselves into bridges by translating an oral language into a written book.  Sometimes they had help.  Maybe missionaries or progressive ladies who couldn’t bring themselves to consider some human things of a more intimate nature.  This meant that others could promote the “unauthorized, unbowdlerized real versions.”

The “first” of something tends to dominate everything afterwards, so the main genre of “writing” about indigenous people was recording the myths the way the Greek playwrights and the Grimm brothers did.  In oral traditions there are always variations, so then there was a marketing opportunity advertising true authenticity, the one true and only version, which is a Euro preoccupation.  

Because the category of indigenous people blurred and melted around the edges, the criteria for ownership of “intellectual property” kept morphing.  Does a person have to be a recorded tribal member with a provenance based on a list made by a conquering military?  What if the tribe is not recognized by the federal government, but on its own recognizes the author’s membership?  What if a person, esp. people relocated to cities or sent to government boarding schools at the age of “falling in love,” ended up with membership in a number of tribes?  Are the rules like those for people whose parents belong to a number of nations?  Is a Pan-Indian like a United Nations citizen?  What does the world do about people born in a country not recognized by the other nations as a real nation?

Where did we get the idea that only tribally enrolled people can write about  tribal matters?  (Hint: it was probably either from a lawyer — or a publisher trying to promote a book.)

I must confess that I’m not genetically or legally a Native American.  If one accepts participation in old-timer’s ceremonies, with their consent, then that’s worth something.  If one accepts living on a reservation, that counts for something.  But it’s possible to live on a rez like an ex-pat in a little enclave of others from elsewhere, without ever really feeling or participating in what goes on.  

Every rez is like a raspberry with many drupes, compartments, protected groups organized around centers like a spiritual conviction or within boundaries, like illegal drugs compelling secrecy.  So writing about one will be inspirational and writing about the other will be muck-racking, exposé.  The words, characters, plot and environment might be in the same place but quite differently described. 

Autochthonous people, tribal people, are hard to confine once they understand that there is a much larger world out there — except for those who can’t wait to escape the rez.  Can’t both these folks write about their lives?  Some people never go farther away from their homes than they have to and are content.  Couldn’t they be poets?  Like Emily Dickinson?

I wrote a book I call “Twelve Blackfeet Stories.”  It was written very schematically, starting with a time-line list of the history of the Blackfeet that I developed in a course from Darrell Kipp.  I divided it into generations (twenty year intervals) and wrote a story for each generation based on events of that period.  I buried in each an “Easter egg,” an artifact from Bob Scriver’s book called “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains”.  The first story is about the coming of the horse.  The last story is about a contemporary boy trying to recapture the old time spirituality by fasting in a dream bed in the Sweetgrass Hills.  

But then twenty years went by and I had to write a thirteenth story, so I made it about coming back from Great Falls in a blizzard, like right now.  It was about a guy coming back to his home rez after being raised in Texas.  I based it on and dedicated it to a guy named Linden who was on RezNet, an Indians Only internet bulletin board in the Nineties.  He’s dead now.

Don’t tell Sherman Alexie.  He was on Rez Net, too, but someone said something critical of him and he left.  I was on the bulletin board under false pretenses, so I left.  Not long ago I asked about going back since RezNet is still going after passing decades.  They said, “LOL”.  When my mother died, the people on that bulletin board reached out to comfort me, even though some of them had figured who I really was.

Everything is a story.  No publisher offered to make “Twelve Blackfeet Stories” into an object that could be copyrighted and sold as merchandise.  Anyway, it was hijacked off my blog so you can just download it from pirates.  And I put it on www.lulu.com/prairiemary who will print it, bind it and sell it to you.  There’s not much point in copyrighting it because nations enforce copyrights and what is a nation now?  What is the center of the internet?  Where is the boundary?

The "Twelve Stories" are written in way that could be told as oral stories.  "There was this old woman who hated progress and that meant she hated horses . . . "  "There was this basketball player who joined AIM . . ."  "There was this man who finally went home but hardly recognized it. . ."  There is no wall.  You'll have to find the center.