NATIVE AMERICAN ARTIFACTS HAUNT US

I don’t hear about many people wanting to collect “artifacts” of the 21st century Blackfeet, though some want to buy Western style paintings or objects like beaded tennis shoes or baseball caps.  I suppose an enterprising person could sell beaded iPod holders or rawhide Kindle covers.  In fact, this sort of thing is made and often kept by tribal members themselves.  At graduation mortarboards are beaded by relatives as an honoring.  New Pendleton blankets are awarded as honor gifts.  Military members are honored with eagle feathers.  The symbolic artifacts of the 21st century are by Indians for Indians.

Sometimes I wonder whether the true fixation is not on the actual objects of the 19th century so much as it is on the 19th century itself.  Plenty of people want to re-enact Civil War or Mountain Man events and lifestyles.  Now and then someone will come to the reservation expecting to step into a 19th century world.  Even the little co-ed who insisted she was only interested in joining the true lives of the People -- except that she couldn’t figure out the roads -- had in mind a 19th century fantasy of free living and possibly free loving.  Romantic in every sense.

Some of the “collectors” in the 1960’s crossed over into participation in ceremonial life: Bundle Opening ceremonies and so on.  As far as I know, Bob Scriver was the only white Bundle Keeper (not counting me, who was just a newcomer auxiliary anyway, since a Keeper is supposed to have a wife) who grew up here with the People; he was the same age as George Kicking Woman and James Welch, Sr., father of the novelist, and probably had his hands on the material culture of buffalo, small mammals and birds more than either of them.  Even I slept with foxes, bobcats and gophers.  But others learned the prayers, the songs, the protocols and Adolph Hungry Wolf goes so far as to live a 19th century life in a cabin so remote he runs his computer off a photovoltaic panel.  He and his former wife Beverly (who is genetically Blackfoot) wrote many books about how to create objects, how to regard the land, and so on.

In some ways the language is the ultimate intangible artifact.  People, both Blackfeet and not, have in the past been afraid to learn their own language because they were punished in school for speaking it.  This harsh treatment was extended to all immigrants to force them to become “American”, but Indians were not immigrants.  The English speakers were and they were simply more powerful.  Their strategy worked for decades, demonizing and stigmatizing the speaking of the original language.  

Then came a revolution in our understanding of language, so it was a high value to be multi-lingual esp. when dealing with a “dead” or diminished language so it was not a threat to the standing order.  We began to understand that a language was not “just” a language (what is the word for “dog”) but also a map of the world, a specific view of the world packed with information about it that might not be available without the language.  

The dark side of that came up when many people tried to learn Blackfeet -- those notorious romantic co-eds again -- and discovered it’s a lot more than just learning a vocabulary off some cue cards.  In fact, immersion schools for youngsters supported by their tribal families who can expose them to recordings or elders, the use of particular methods (acting out words while one speaks them with others), and the political will to stick with it -- these will work.  But it not just a matter of good will and a dictionary.

Two powerful cultures run into each other like a tide meeting a river with much mingling and opposing force.  The benefit is in rethinking practices previously taken for granted, but the dark side of that is loss.  Being acculturated enough to maneuver in the post-modern world is tough enough.  Preserving one’s identity-heritage in the midst of fighting for prosperity makes the task even harder, sometimes an exercise in split-personality, particularly when the larger culture has the media on its side, perpetuating stereotypes instead of going to the heart of the reality, which requires constantly renegotiating.  This is what Sherman Alexie calls the “Toughest Indian in the World,” the 19th century one that lives in our stubborn imaginations.  But killing that icon will be a loss to whites.

Why is it so stubborn?  I have some ideas.  One is that Indian Wars are part of a “founding” time, though the 19th century prairie clearances are the ones that have stuck, the defining “war” that helps us sort of sidle past the just-preceding and overlapping Civil War between the States.  We are stuck between seeing native Americans as ravenous savages whom we had to defeat in order to claim the continent, and seeing them as victims, but our rather guiltily cherished and ennobled “others.”  Ambivalence is always tenacious.  When we buy scalps to hang in our “man cave,” that’s one side.  When we buy a white buckskin fringed and beaded parade shirt for $200,000 and hang it in the front room, that’s another side.  A beaded key chain is another. 

Even in small white villages next to the rez, which is probably where racism burns the hottest because of competition for resources, the “broken arrow” narrative persists.  It is brotherhood in the Romeo and Juliet mode, across the unreasonable social barriers that divide us, which is a moral force against the idea that one has permission to kill anyone not like “us.”

Native American artifacts, whether objects or songs, whether explicitly secular or specifically religious, whether made, found, dug up, stolen, or bought, carry within themselves -- as surely as bread and wine -- the emotional and cultural content of major forces in our world and in our brains.  Because of that their treatment needs to be guided by careful thought and strong laws.  Otherwise the passion of them escapes into political confrontations capable of harming everyone, but most particularly our ideas of how to co-exist with each other despite our differences.H

ROGUE ANTHROS: John Hellson and Adolph Hungry Wolf

One of the useful characteristics of rogue anthropologists is their clandestine modes of operation, so this blog is violating a few unwritten rules. But that is the nature of blogs and probably the dynamic that makes some people afraid of them. They are not accountable to any funding or otherwise controlling agency like an institution or publisher. In a way, I’m joining the rogues. This will probably eliminate me from consideration by many of the small new publishers who are replacing the old tweedy Manhattan and Boston publishers. They’re gone anyway. The new publishers tend to be “nice ladies,” some of whom pulled themselves out of real trouble by struggling through school where they learned respect for authorities. Rogues put them into a state of panic.

Anyway, the two rogues I’m going to discuss are about my age and people I know. They despise each other. John Hellson is a half-dozen years older than 71 and Adolph Hungry Wolf might be a little younger. Both of them showed up on the Blackfeet Rez in Montana in the Sixties, not long after I did, and both of them were drawn to Bob Scriver, who often acted as an interlocutor between the outside world and the rez where he was born. John, Adolph, Bob, and I are all white, which makes us politically incorrect from birth because of the post-colonial rule that only the indigenous can write about the indigenous. (Bob was the only one of us born on the rez.) It was a useful rule for breaking up the colonial practice of ransacking cultures under the guise of “salvage anthropology,” the idea that the cultures were disappearing so “scientists” were justified in collecting artifacts, stories, and ceremonies in order to preserve them. The rogues were not so scientific and not affiliated with any institutions, but maybe because of that they acquired huge amounts of “stuff.”

Both married Blood Blackfeet women (“Blood” the tribal subdivision) from excellent families so they had unique access that by-passed the usual taboos as well as the suffocating forces of both the reservation itself, which constantly tries to present itself as more virtuous, more deserving, more missionary-responsive than they might actually be -- as well as more pleasing to publishers, universities and museums.

The problem was how to make a living. One way was Adolph’s method which was self-publishing. The Good Medicine books that he and his family produced are invaluable. He was especially alert to photographs, the old kind mounted on cardboard that are called “cabinet” photographs. They are meant to be held and “read” with long scrutiny. Finding some of these in a suitcase he bought at an auction, he carried them everywhere with him and whenever he found old-timers, he'd ask them to “read” and interpret for him. Then he put the information on the back. He is an educated man who values history. ALL his info is now available in four volumes he self-published, expecting shouts of joy and honor. Instead, he discovered that the world had changed radically in the last fifty years. http://goodmedicinefoundation.com/media/books1.html

The nineteenth century world of James Willard Schultz, George Bird Grinnell, and even John Ewers is no longer of much interest to young people. The gray-headed white people who used to obsess over all that horse-and-feather stuff is thinning out fast. Now the cutting edge of Blackfeet anthro research is academic indigenous people and those closely associated with them (like white profs married to Blackfeet: consider Rosalyn LaPier and Dave Beck at the U of Montana; or the people who cluster around Darrell Kipp and Jack Gladstone). With modern technology like GPS or molecular analysis, these people find ancient campsites, begin to sift through the archives of Hudson’s Bay or the Roman Catholic Church, translating the first earliest letters “home,” breaking through into a far more elegant and detailed account of early days even before the horse.

Repatriation, the law returning every artifact and skeleton to the tribe where it originated, created a huge opportunity for clandestine profit from artifacts in much the same way as Prohibition made alcohol worth criminal attention. This change did not affect Hungry Wolf so much as it did John Hellson, who had been surviving by brokering objects. The glorious beaded buckskin suits had intrinsic value of their own because they were beautiful. But there was a lot of stuff that was just floating around -- no one knew what it was or cared very much except the very old people who remembered what it meant, not least because they were keyed into a close sensory knowledge of the land and animals as it was before the fence and the plow. These two guys -- who “lived the life” -- picked up that often religious information. They were not cynical. They LOVED this culture. Adolph still lives in a log cabin with a creek for a water source. His computer is run by a solar panel. Otherwise, no electricity.

Evolution happens when one portion of the population is separated -- usually geographically -- and in that niche evolves in a different way. Then later it may reunite with the main body and make a contribution to the gene pool. The great NA political furor over who had enough proper provenance to study Indians has obliterated far more worthy issues and separated Hellson and Hungry Wolf from the mainstream. Anyway Indian tribal identity is NOT determined by genetics, but by provenance: who was your grandmother? It only goes back to first official white contact, though whites were in the West almost as soon as the continent was discovered -- think of Spaniards bringing the horse. Hellson or Hungry Wolf are almost directly European, not even in America long. John is from Cornwall, England. Adolph is from California but his folks are Austro-Hungarian.

All that is old news. The problem that is now presented is how to recognize and preserve the undisciplined work of these two rogues: Adolph orderly and in plain sight (mostly), the other dubious enough to land Hellson in prison. Out of the blue Hellson called me a day or so ago. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. He was weaving the same old sorcerer’s spell that captured Bob Scriver in the Sixties, unbroken until he stole some of Bob’s artifacts while he was supposed to be curating them. Today’s accredited and honorable researchers, in particular the indigenous ones, have nothing but scorn for the rogues. As far as they’re concerned, the work is contaminated, even toxic. And yet part of the advantage these adventurers had was that they were willing to explore the taboo, the sexual that had to be written about in Latin, the unsuspected and imperceptible to other white outsiders and some red insiders.