ACTING OUT: A RESULT OF GUILT AND SHAME

A few nights ago I was looking for illustrations for something or other I was writing and — as happens every once in a while — I ran across something that stunned me.  It wasn’t one of those pay-for-tattling websites, but just an ordinary newspaper story about a man from Browning, respected and educated, from a good family, a grandfather, a ceremonialist, elected to a responsible role in the community, who had a son who “made it” on one of those legendary athletic scholarships.  Here were his mug shots from an incident in one of the state’s bigger cities.  Evidently he had flashed some people in a coffee kiosk and the mall security grabbed him.

Long ago I was his teacher.  The last time I saw him I sat next to him at the funeral of a respected elder.  Of course the consequences of the exposure were a domino chain: loss of respect, loss of role.  I don’t know how his wife reacted but she’s not a weak woman.  Shame? Or guilt?  For what?
  

Women around here, whatever color, are often caught embezzling.  Usually they say they want money for their families.  But men occasionally do unaccountable defiant but self-destructive things, stuff a junior high kid would do, and though there’s often alcohol or drugs involved, they are stupid acts — maybe self-hating.  Shame, guilt . . . frustration, overwhelmed by everything.

It took me a long time to understand that Native Americans feel so very ashamed that they could not defend themselves from the Euro-invaders.  They weren’t equipped, they didn’t understand what was happening, and Euro-disease wiped out many.  There is no justification for holding them accountable and yet they feel that way.  For generations now.

It’s not so different from young Jews who feel that a Chosen People ought to have been able to find a way to prevail over Hitler, a way to explain or escape or even offer some kind of accommodation, the way England did at first.  Maybe you remember how Americans tried to shame the French not so long ago, because that nation criticized the invasion of Iraq.  They renamed “French” fries to be “American” fries and they tied the whole thing to the German capture of France in WWII, claiming that the French didn’t fight.

It’s like family crackups that the children feel they caused, that they ought to be able to fix, so when they can't, they leave home, hoping that will make it all settle down.  This is never real and most people never get it resolved because they can’t see past blaming.  Often the blaming is so clever, so accurately aimed at a soft spot, that the one who takes the blame punishes themselves, clear to the point of death, taking desperate chances to prove that they are brave or else maybe giving up.  

Especially women can sink into depression, a terrible burden on their right to live, always trying to propitiate the mysterious gods who made them inevitably come up short.  Stockton links this to the suicide of Virginia Wolff, probably accurately.  She never could satisfy her father, whose standards were impossible anyway.  He caused her to be ashamed of her beauty, her talent, her intelligence.

Those young Indians who finally refused to take the blame were in the cities, talking to defiant Blacks, but defiance and blame only perpetuate stigma.  It becomes a rebound weapon against themselves.  A tool for their enemies.  When Bob Scriver’s museum burned, the FBI was quick to say it was AIM that did it, which only pushed the fear and rage up higher.  No one looked at the structure of society and how it traps stigmatized young men; the same thing happened in Ireland.  Plenty of evidence, many strong theories, individuals who saw clearly.  But the little worm of debasement ate into them like toxoplasmosis making rats love the smell of cat pee.

Blacks have a different context.  They were not victims of invaders that they failed to repel — rather they were captured, chained, taken across the sea to a different country, and kept enslaved by a strong cultural consensus and brute force.  Ever read “Mandingo”?  Slaves were penetrated and boiled into soup.

Down deep in many Native Americans is the idea that they might be able to restore their tribe to its former power.  Whites make noble angels of them, and they kind of believe it.  Casinos with all their glamour and clatter of money sort of appeal to that.  I suspect that Englishmen — and certainly Scots — have that same wish to reconstruct past glory.  It’s unreal and finally makes them angry.

My first impulse is to go have coffee with this man and try to understand what happened, why he was so out of character.  But I suspect that he was IN character, that something festering had broken loose and burst constraints.  When I try to imagine how he would react if I tried to talk to him, I see that there is no way he could believe that my intentions were good and he probably doesn’t have that much insight into himself anyway.  It might take a sweat lodge with wise older men.  But where are they?  HE was supposed to be them.  

I don’t think a Western style therapist would be any help because they all work from theory and NOT experience.  Not many have experienced being mocked, excluded, and shunned.  Maybe that’s why the most effective analysts are often Jewish.  “Jimmy P” has nothing on the reality of being “Indian” and I’m not going by the movie — I’ve read the book carefully several times.  “Winter in the Blood” is closer.

My mother’s family were major blamers and ridiculers.  My father’s family is deniers, people who are nice no matter what.  I’ve got both in me.  My strategy has been to think things out, to learn how things work, to explain and justify.  But none of that ever changes the accumulated shame-and-blame feelings.  The feelings just sit there like toads and stare.  Someone said to me, “Why can’t you believe that I love you?”  Well, there’s the answer: a panel of toads, all with their webby little thumbs turned down.

The toads say,  “Why couldn’t you save your marriage?  Why didn’t you finish your doctoral thesis?  Why couldn’t you save your brother from death on the street?  Why haven’t you written a best-seller?  Why didn’t you cure your step-daughter’s cancer?  Why couldn’t you save her daughter from suicide?”  

All this assails me until I have to laugh at such grandiose narcissism.  But that’s not the same as taking on the burden of the loss of an entire culture, the destruction of a continent.  The actual offense of the man in the mug shot — he just pleaded no contest, paid a fine or something — would never have become public if he hadn’t been Native American, but it was a satisfaction to some to once again punish people they stigmatize.

The shrinks call such incidents of disruption in the middle of a lifetime of constructive work “acting out.”  It’s considered a defense mechanism, a way of relieving pressure.  I like the image of a container (hot philosophical concept at the moment) that holds a roiling hot mixture, reacting, getting deeper, until it causes the container to leak — tell things, do things, provoke, make something happen even if it’s bad.

I like that container idea because it offers a way to address the guilt/shame issue that triggers so much frustration.  Two ways, actually:  one is to make the container bigger or stronger, and the other is to stop adding to the heat inside.  Ways to do those include reframing the situation, finding a community that understands, increasing one’s skill level in any way, and others, including the Native American favorite:  laughter at the absurdity of little fool Napi — yourself — trying to save the world.  Well, we DO manage to save little patches here and there.  But some atrocities can never be reconciled.

TREUER OR TRUDELL?

North American Indian Days, 1962. I took the photo.

If I had been writing about “Indians” in 1961, I would have been presented with several options:  mostly anthropological information about material culture (which was important to Bob since he was portraying them with sculpture in the contact days of the middle 19th century), the existential despair of a broken culture portrayed as a bad joke, like “Stay Away, Joe,” or the mocking columns in the local paper that were written by John Tatsey and admired as “true” though they weren’t.   Or maybe the fond patronizing of Doug Gold who used the pattern of frontier myths built on the mistakes and minor tragedies arising from conflicting cultures.  There was a parallel stream of stories by Frank Bird Linderman or James Willard Schultz, as different as the personalities of the two men but not particularly Blackfeet, and the romantic portrayals of Charles Marion Russell, whom we locals called simply “Charlie.”

Likewise at the time — actually a little earlier than myself — were photos posed and dressed up with artifacts that the people had long since sold to whites in order to eat, or the peaceful domestic scenes of Walter McClintock who came out to live with his friends every summer and brought crates of stuff.  

Actually, my real pattern was “Tangled Waters” (1936) by Florence Crannell Means, the wife of a trader on the Navajo rez.  ($1.37 on Amazon just now)  (Not related to Russell Means, I think.)  It was realistic in terms of many things, still from a sympathetic — yet white — point of view.  That is, it was about the dilemma of having to sell one’s heritage in order to eat, which F. Means would solve through education.  (It’s unclear what R. Means thought the answer was.  Hollywood?)

When AIM and Red Empowerment formed, they saw that their lives and material culture were of great value to some white people, but that the brokers who made the profits were also white people.  Their resentment soon came out politically — whites are selling our heritage! — but the true nature of the value or what to do about it was never really explored.  The American Indian Literary Renaissance tried to create a category that added value to novels and poetry, and it was partly successful, but the core problem of educating Indian people to write their oral language was never really addressed.  The missionary complex that reduced everything to “correctness” was a killer.  But so were political storms of indignation on behalf of "the po' Indian."  Too much trouble for most publishers.

Beyond that, publishers dubious of big sales never really promoted more than a few people, mostly the ones who were most “white,” which immediately set up a new jealousy between the full-bloods and the mixed bloods, even those who could pass for white.  These were vicious and based on the dubious legality of tribal membership, which was based on arbitrary provenances from a transient and fluid historic population, identified at a time when the uniqueness of tribal ecologies had already been broken.  They never had hard boundaries anyway, because they valued newness.  Promoters and defenders of NA books have not been able to find another mode beyond pity for massacre, the controlling trope of much writing about indigenous people as well as environmental writing.  The two tend to be conflated.

David Treuer

People like David Treuer have effectively integrated their own backgrounds (legal and Jewish) into a doctrine about Indians, mostly focused on injustice and oppression.  They recognize the accurate dimension of Holocaust, but don't see how many German survivors emigrated to Manhattan and became a new elite, though one with a conscience.

Wiki:  David Treuer was born in Washington, D.C. His mother, Margaret Seelye, was an Ojibwe who first worked as a nurse. His parents met when his father, Robert Treuer, an Austrian Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, was teaching high school on her reservation. When they were in Washington, his father worked for the federal government and his mother attended law school. They returned to the Leech Lake Reservation, where the young Treuer and his two brothers were raised. Their mother became an Ojibwe tribal court judge.

Treuer attended Princeton University; he graduated in 1992 after writing two senior theses, one in the anthropology department and one in the Princeton Program in Creative Writing. . . his thesis advisor in that program was the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1999.

Margaret Seelye

(These are all characteristics admired in the white world.)

Law is teleological: that is, focused on the end goal.  The Great Problem of the native indigenous peoples is that their land, labeled and circumscribed in the European way, governed by documents that are largely ignored, prevented from citizenship, maintained as clients of the government, on land exploited by outsiders, has neither forced them to change entirely nor let them be who they once were, which frankly is not possible.  Even David Treuer, a brainy philosopher, is not able to produce a goal for the future of the NA.  Or maybe I just missed it.

“While also praising Mr. Alexie, a Spokane-Coeur d’Alene Indian, for his abilities as a novelist, Mr. Treuer compares him to Mr. [Forrest] Carter. The characters in Mr. Alexie’s novel “Reservation Blues,” Mr. Treuer says, are like those in “Little Tree”: burlesques, with prose full of mixed metaphors and far-reaching similes. For example, in “Reservation Blues,” when someone speaks, Mr. Alexie writes that “his words sounded like stones in his mouth and coals in his stomach.”

Alexies’s riposte is, “What he’s saying is that the identity of the writer doesn’t count,” . . .“That eliminates the way books work in the world.”  But Alexie has not been able to offer any future for Indians except to move to the city and make money by writing and doing stand-up comedy.  He plays the Indian card, but is he one?

Treuer, on the other hand, pursues a city literary life mixed with rez life and addresses the local future by trying to preserve his tribal language.  We are not told whether he speaks it (or writes it) nor whether he serves on his tribal council.  This is in contrast to Greg Sarris, also assailed for being “insufficiently enrolled” but who is the chief of his tribe.  The more legalistic it gets, the more it is a shell game.

Greg Sarris

Western education teaches logic, accurate categories, and the pursuit of facts, all of which have now been thrown into doubt.  Tribal education and people at large without higher education make decisions on the basis of emotion, popularity and gossip.  This may elect Trump to be the next President of the US.  In Valier it has already elected a scandal-monger who capitalized on complaints in order to become the white Mayor, but only lasted two weeks, in part because he couldn’t lead the Pledge of Allegiance that begins every town council meeting.  He was a high school graduate in the county seat.  They evidently did not teach him parliamentary procedure.

John Trudell and the family he lost.

At this point I need someone to praise.   John Trudel, a name easy to confuse with David Treuer, had lived a more coherent and future-focused life in spite of his family being massacred by fire.  Dead now from cancer, he used literary and movie media for political ends.  He was the leader of the occupation of Alcatraz. Remarkable to think of, even more remarkable to make real.   

A reservation is like a stick game.  People who didn’t grow up with it never quite understand what’s going on: the signs are too subtle, what’s really at stake is not quite known by anyone.  It is a game of relationship and shifting.