GROWING INTO IDENTITY IN A PLACE, EVEN A PLACE IN A BOOK

Limberlost second growth

In the lives of human beings there is a transition point between the part of childhood called the “adrenarche”, an awkward medical term that means the adrenal glands are waking up and in turn waking up the sexual maturation we call “puberty”.  During adrenarche (9 to 12) we are developing our identities as individuals and in puberty we are using our new identities by testing them in relationships that will be the hearts of families and the driving force of work.  That’s the ideal.  It is shaped by place.

During my own transition, my family traveled to East Lansing, Michigan.  Summer is the time of ceremonials, conferences, Chautauqua, organizational general assemblies, both religious and not.  My father worked for an ag wholesale supply cooperative which was near-religious for him because he grew up on the high prairie in the time of grain elevators when farmers were cooperating to control their own crops.  In Canada this meshed with the communal impulse but on the US side it had to be defended against accusations of communism by idealizing it as democracy in action.  The summer convocation was always on the campus of some agricultural college, that year in East Lansing.

Gene Stratton-Porter

My father’s mother grew up in southern Michigan, so the trip became a bit of a pilgrimage.  We stopped in Mendon, Michigan, to visit distant cousins, one of them Florence Dickerson, the female mayor of the town and another an older woman named Sarah Blum, a treasured friend of my grandmother.  Florence shockingly had had half her face removed because of cancer, but one soon forgot it was different.  Her personality was strong.  

Also we visited the Limberlost, the location of Gene Stratton-Porter’s classic “Girl of the Limberlost” and of several other beloved books I read because they were left from the childhoods of my parents and grandparents on both sides.

The lower part of Michigan and upper part of Indiana was a place of marshes, swamps and flood plains once spreading among massive hardwood forests.  Streams were “soft-bottomed” and so slow-moving that they were reflective as ponds.  One Michigan stream was actually called “The Looking Glass River.”  The drama that fed the Stratton-Porter novels was the ecology-destroying but enormously valuable cutting down of hardwoods to make furniture and homes for the population growing across the country at the “turn of the century” (from 1800’s to 1900’s).  

A Michigan Mansion

People were Victorian/Edwardian in the middle class way, able to build, furnish and decorate rather fine homes.  When one looks at the prominent historical places in Ionia County, Michigan, they are elaborate homes and county seats, the architectural egos of a people just forming “country clubs” and theatrical establishments.  They were upwardly mobile in a way that echoed the British class system.

Stratton-Porter’s heroines (few male heroes in her books) were all girls coming to consciousness as they moved from the relatively involuntary growth of adrenarche into the self-directed purposes of adolescence when -- in this new era -- education became important.  She herself was a self-taught photographer of birds and moths in the Limberlost, a woman of major achievement though she never finished high school.  Her husband was a pharmacist and she was interested in herbalism, particularly celebrating ginseng.  I own nearly all of Gene Stratton-Porter’s novels, reading them again and again.  Visiting the Limberlost was right on the line between fantasy and reality, a favorite "place" of mine.

Stratton-Porter was a bit of a racist, in her day against Asian immigrants because she was living in Los Angeles to preserve her health.  She was killed in a car crash with a streetcar at age 61.  So much for caution.  If she had been more aware and accepting in her youth, she might have written about the Chippewa and Métis who lived interstitially and persistently in Michigan while the farmers used industrial steam engines to drain swamps and process huge trees.  Often stigmatized and unable to access venture capital, the original indigenous people of the area took labor jobs and seasonal work.  It’s a novel waiting to be written.  They are still there, sending their children to Headstart.

Michigan writers seem to sort themselves between whether they are focused on the big industrial complexes, the automotive centers that support major cities and black populations; or instead are concerned with the hook-and-bullet macho tales of Ernest Hemingway and Jim Harrison that persisted in the northern part of the state.  By now, younger writers are facing the collapsed and rusted factories that once supported a flowering middle class and their pretensions, the last of the World War survivors hanging on with their memories in the small towns, today often bedroom communities.  

In sequence, the hardwood forests and slow streams supplied the early rural people with fish, fowl and deer.  Then industrial-level draining (steam engine pumps) diminished the “wild” lands and the trees were cut — both of which seemed like ways of increasing wealth/land until the ecology was changed and the same people hurried to establish the many nature preserves.  None of them would support a bear or a wolf.

  

When the major factories began, they were a chance to jump up income and learn major mechanical skills while commuting home to the farm.  Some farmers built runways and bought small airplanes like the ones that have been doing “touch and go” practice in Valier this weekend.  With enough growth of income, horizon and skill, a man could go anywhere and thrive.  Naturally, they headed to LA, the same as Gene Stratton-Porter.  A few relocated to San Francisco or even Lake Tahoe.

But a few hung on in the place they knew and, indeed, loved deeply after a lifetime of farming it, walking it, building on it.  After the streams were no longer used for transportation, the families near Portland, MI, who weren’t quite as early as homesteaders, sorted themselves along a country road.  The sources of prosperity that built the big houses were diminished now.  Industrial-style innovations in homes — electricity, piped gas and water — were early and a little risky so that big houses occasionally caught fire but weren’t rebuilt.

This house is now the location of a golf club.

Still arrogant and defensive, the young people sorted themselves into reconfigured families, some clamping onto the known world to prevent it from changing, to prevent themselves from leaving.  Others worked themselves to death on both farms and assembly lines.  The next wars were in Korea and Vietnam, soul-killing.  The drug of choice in this world of psychic twisting was alcohol, encouraged by older veterans who believed the best of times were those spent holed up in a motel with a bottle and woman.  And then drugs.

In the meantime, Gene Stratton-Porter bloomed and then escaped with a camera in her hand.  She was said to have had more than fifty million readers around the world.  Her house still stands in the Limberlost.  We visited it just as I was growing into myself.  The whole planet is different now.  Except in books.

APPALACHIA AS A WAY-STATION

Lucy May Pinkerton Strachan, 16 years old in 1925

My mother’s papers are mostly about her family.  She was a proud Daughter of the Oregon Trail, which records the origins of the travelers -- in her case Kentucky and Missouri.  She grew up at the southern end of the Willamette Valley in Oregon, hill country not unlike the Ozarks and Appalachia.  But she scoffed that some there “live in the hollows and pool their ignorance.”  She was talking about her in-laws.  The Pinkerton girls went for education, the Hatfield boys went for land, and the two families were joined by three marriages, three brides for three brothers.  These same marriages also split the families through rivalry over who was the Alpha.

The Appalachian mountains themselves were created in something like the same way.  A collision of the underlying tectonic plates threw ancient bedrock up into mountains higher than today’s Himalayans, wore them down but then split them to either side of the growing Atlantic Ocean basin so that half ended up being the island and peninsula countries of Norway and Britain, on south to the Atlas Mountains of Africa.  The other half is what we call the Appalachians today.  The migrations of humans across the Atlantic ocean merely made threads across what had once been contiguous, esp. for Scots/Irish people.  To them the soil, the vegetation, and the coal mining were familiar.

At first the new coastal colonial nation was content to accept the remnant range of Appalachians as a natural barrier marking off the Indian lands beyond.  But the coast filled up and newcomers crowded over the mountains.  The French and Spanish circled around to the Mississippi River and ascended into the prairies along the drainage of the Rockies.  The fertile Ohio Valley area between the Appalachians and the Mississippi grew in a three-way settlement pattern among Brits crowding over the Appalachians, esp. after the Irish famine and the Scots land clearances;  French preserving their empire; and the Native Americans trying to maintain their own Five Nations and more.

The Old Northwest, a Territory or a Colony of the new nation, USA

The Old Northwest, a distinct political entity, formed around the waterways represented by the Great Lakes.  In my paternal grandmother’s time, (b. Oct 28, 1871, Quincy, MI, just south of Lansing) this was still forested country and she told about walking with her mother on a path where a group of Indian men stood aside to let them pass.  The NA tribes had also formed a nation around the connected lakes but now they dwindled to an interstitial population hardly recognized by others until the recent renaissance of consciousness.  Hit hard by Euro diseases and finally exhausting their wealth of beaver, many became Metis, then even paler, or moved on farther West.  

The land went to agriculture.  Canals were dug, railroads built.  This is where the main culture we accept as American was formed -- in the “middle.”  By mid-19^th century when the farms and towns had finally committed most of the land and the prairie clearances of tribes had ended in the first treaties, movement still farther West began, often launching from St. Louis, which was supplied by steam boats from New Orleans.  

Now my mother’s direct ancestors began to move along the Oregon Trail behind ox-wagons.  These are her “provenance”, her mother’s “tribe.”

From the Kentucky/Missouri complex:  

1845 James Cochran and Elizabeth Bevins; 

1847 William Cochran and Mary (Polly) Johnson Cochran.  

1851: William Philpott from Virginia; Sarah Darby from Kentucky.  

1852: James Cochran.  

Then those who arrived through birth:  

1851: William Thurston Cochran and in 

1857: Lucy Jane Philpott.

These last two married and became my maternal great-grandparents, forever locked into arrogance about their origins which was tightly connected to church affiliation, the Cochran rigid Presbyterianism v. the more graceful Philpott Virginian affiliation which I suspect was Episcopalian.  Lucy Jane, a high-spirited woman, died young because of complications of childbirth and WT remarried a woman called “Sarah,” whose step-children did not like her.  They called her “Sairey”. These patterns are hard to discard.

Massive sweeps of human population go back to the primal migrations of homo sapiens out of Africa far back in history but nevertheless governed by bodies of water, mountain walls, tribes, commerce and disease.  “Gunpowder, Germs, and Steel.”  Never resolved, always contending (push those neanderthals out of the way), always creating new extinctions and metis groups.  We pretend it’s about religion, but that’s the consequence rather than the cause.  Sometimes the ferment comes to rest for long enough that a generation can grow up.  They think, “Oh, this is the way the world is.”  And they fight to keep it that way -- if it’s to their advantage.  They lose anyway.  Eventually.

My mother left a pile of clips, photos, letters and so on, which she did her best to organize before her death.  The individuals named above settled mostly in the Willamette Valley and did well, though there were eccentrics and black sheep among them.  Clergy, judges, businessmen.  There were still full-blood tribal Indians in my mother’s girlhood (b. 1909, Payette, ID). She took great pride that during the Roseburg Strawberry Festival, the chief of the Calipooyas chose her serving table and accepted his bowl of berries and cream from her own hands. All this material remains for me to convert into what some might call a novel.  Her predecessors belonged to the great triple movement across the Atlantic in Colonial times and on over the Appalachians after the American Revolution and then to the coastal green West across the arid sea bed of the high North American “desert”.

The progression across the continent went parallel to time, at right angles to time, in opposition to time.  Ways of doing things changed, persisted, became irrelevant.

My father’s father was in Scotland until the end of the 19th century.  But the family namesake fortunes were also related to the Atlantic Ocean since the Strachans, though the present descendants are barely conscious of it, were involved in the Great Triangle of trade: sugar cane, rum and slaves.  

Selwyn Strachan

The proof is a complex of Caribbean people named Strachan, who are black.  Former slaves took the names of their owners, or were assigned them.  In some genealogies, one traces back several generations and then hits a research barrier.  I think this is one of them.

By the time of the Boomer Generation, which I barely precede (b. 1939), there is even more emphasis on national origins because of the bookend Great Wars displacing peoples.  The Great Depression in between was a monster that still haunts everyone.  And now there is much awareness of the “Spanish flu” that was the shadow of WWI, because it seems a foreshadow of Ebola.  Flu nearly killed my mother as a child and did kill her doctor.  Her younger sister, who did not live long enough to become an aunt, was killed as a teenager in a car accident.  A great industrial powered mobility resulted from the invention of the automobile and the webwork of highways Eisenhower mandated.

My maternal grandmother @WWI.  The baby is the girl killed in an auto accident as a teenager.  

The older girl served as an Army nurse during WWII.  My mother may have been in bed with the flu at this point.  

Aliene may be the bump under the apron.

None of this means much unless it informs our futures.  War, economic depression and industrial developments still threaten us, nibble at our edges, put damp poisonous hands over our mouths and noses.  The one saving grace seems to be electronics but we forget that the sun itself could flare out to fry our infrastructures, satellites and all, with one burst of cosmic energy.  Some of us -- in black moods -- think that might be a good thing.  Others think of migrating to the stars.  And still others fancy going back to visit their roots, to see what is there now.  But it all depends on which roots one chooses to claim, doesn’t it?

Most of my life has been on the Lewis and Clark trail.

In fact, I'm living on it right now in Montana.

PIPES AND WIRES, THE SERPENTS OF THE INTERNATIONAL CORPORATIONS

It’s a dramatic title, but something needs to get the attention of complacent citizens or Montana will be right back with a squeezing snake around their throats.  We’re still suffering for our willingness to let Montana Power go play with fiber-optics instead of tending to business.   The infrastructure of commerce is dependent on sewer, water, oil, gas, electronic webs across the state.  That’s not counting irrigation canals, highways, and satellites/cell towers.  They resist regulation or taxation as hard as they can.  For a long time the government let them cross reservations with impunity, paying no fees.  Even now they demand the right to slice through your property whether you want it or not.  They cross international boundaries easier than you or I going up to shop in Alberta.  And “they,” being international corporations, only pretend to be human beings by passing a law that says they are, so they can disassemble and evaporate if one pursues them. 

Profit is often achieved by shifting something of low cost and value (like wind) from one place into an element of high value (electricity) in another place.  The problem is always getting it there.  Thus those networks of pipes and wires, some of them short and some of them long.  We’re finding that they degrade faster than we thought and in many cases no one made a map of where they are.  (An exasperated governor just now ordered a map of the HUNDREDS of pipelines webbing the state with records or legal agreements over responsibility for maintenance.)  We’re finding that when they cross nature’s watercourses and geological faults and animal migrations, we’ve got trouble.  Two oil pipelines have broken open in recent weeks: one major and one minor, though the workers who had to clean up the latter did not consider the resentful rattlesnakes on the scene very minor. 

One of the most dangerous aspects of all this is that low value wind on the rural landscape is in low population density places and the high value electricity (or water) need is in high population density places like cities.  In a democracy a majority of votes rules what happens, leaving the rural population at a definite disadvantage.  To the city eye scanning the country, there is nothing to disturb -- unless it’s a mountain range or a grizzly bear.  They can’t see water tables or antelope trying get to their birthing grounds or a change in crop yield.  They don’t think about rattlesnakes.

Another dangerous element is the middle man who controls the flow, negotiates the deals, and -- lately -- initiates the eminent domain and gets favorable legislation passed to suit company needs.   The city people need to think about what they will do if the middle men get them on-line, dependent, and -- once they are hostages -- hike the prices or demand even more favorable laws and deals.  This is one of the reasons for nationalizing or at least governmentally regulating basic utilities.

Pipes and wires are often hard to understand without a technical education.  For instance:  “Highways have on- and off-ramps, and so towns along the route can see some of the benefit. High-voltage direct-current transmission lines, while efficient for long distances, aren’t designed to drop off electricity along the way — they’re basically no-exit highways.  It’s possible to add “off ramps,” but it’s very expensive. As a result, states may not be as willing to seize land for the project as they were for Eisenhower’s interstate.”  Ask the by-passed small towns how their motels did after the big four-lane highways were built.    

They tell me that some of the strange things that happen to Valier electricity is related to the huge wind farm just north of us.  (Since the tie-line is not yet built, where IS all that electricity going now?  I can see the hundreds of windmills turning.)  People are just beginning to wonder what happens at the end of the lifespan of the turbines.  What about maintenance?  Obsolescence?

In Shelby, to the north, coming in on the highway one sees transmission lines marching out over the hills in every direction as well as the modal railroad/truck exchange where warehouse containers leave the tracks on 18-wheelers.  (They’re big enough to live in, just as people used to do with boxcars.)  The mayor there has been determined to make the town profitable any way possible, including hosting a private prison.  One is ill-advised to pick up hitch-hikers. One can smell the sour-gas bubbles from wells or is it diesel from the engines?

All these lines and pipes are thick enough to begin interfering with each other.  A company called Lightsquared proposes to build a web of internet support to address our lack of dependable high-speed broadband connection, but it will evidently interfere with the Global Positioning Systems in the big field tractors that shuttle chemicals and seeds onto the land in calibrated amounts as well as measuring the harvest results.  These systems are what make profit possible in a business dependent on a very narrow margin with disappearing topsoil.  Farmers also use bush planes over the long-horizon ranches and these are dependent on GPS.  Mother Nature is a major player.  As I type, sun flares are potentially interfering with ALL electronic systems on our planet.

Such tech problems can be worked out to some degree if the big international corporations can check their arrogance.  Tonbridge, trying to build MATL, the tie-line meant to take our wind-power electricity out of this nation over into Canada, clearly expected to trample Metis Larry Salois underfoot.  They thought, "What did he know?"  Tonbridge should have read a little history.  Metis are a diasphora nation, dispersed but not dissolved, and they know how to organize.  (Canada hung the Metis leaders, but did not extinguish their culture.)  The compensation for long distance country with thin population is passion and law.  All of us, not just the Metis, value our private ownership.  Though eminent domain is an honorable and sometimes necessary way to benefit the greater community, it is not designed to enrich merchants, especially when they are not from this country.  Metis, half-Indian, know about predatory merchants not from here.  You’d think the Irish execs of Tonbridge would remember their own oppressions.  Tonbridge’s legislative catspaw is Welsh.  You’d think he would also remember.

Understanding grows of the value of features Tonbridge didn’t care that they were obliterating: ancient traces of early cultures, wetlands that support so much small but crucial life, and even small oil drilling sites.  These had legal protection in Tonbridge’s original contract. Tonbridge had enough control of the Montana legislature to pass a law exempting them from their own contract.  But in the end the expense and indignation of litigation became a deterrent.  They are now ready to sit down with Larry to negotiate.  What Larry is trying to protect is not just his mother’s land -- it is the memory of history that teaches us what is valuable. 

"SOURCES OF THE RIVER" A Review

My friend Paul Wheeler, whose tales I occasionally post here, sent me a copy of “Sources of the River” by Jack Nisbet quite a while ago, but I’d been neglecting it until my cousin Katharine in Portland mentioned that she’d met Nisbet and admired him.  It’s a 1994 book with the sub-title “Tracking David Thompson Across Western North America.”  Several books are like this: a modern trip along an historic route described in a journal.  (Dan Flores has written about more southerly expeditions.  Ted Binnema takes on the pre-literate north/south trails of the tribes.)  Lewis and Clark (1804) are the most famous but only the earliest by a few years.  Thompson was earlier if you count his trip as beginning in Churchill, Manitoba, in 1784 when a ship on Hudson’s Bay landed him at his first post for the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Churchill is the town where the polar bears gather in the fall to wait for arctic ice to form.  One of the most intriguing sentences in the chapter about the place is p. 14:  “Along the way they often passed clusters of polar bears lying on their bellies, heads together and bodies radiating out like the spokes of a wheel.”  Bits of Thompson’s journals throughout alternate with discussion and descriptions of Nisbet’s modern visits to the places, which were by the time he got there far more comfortable than when Thompson was there.  

In Thompson’s time guns and horses are just arriving at the northern prairies and the usual push/pull among the people is becoming intense with the Blackfeet emerging as the most ferocious defenders of their patch.  Thompson rises through the ranks at “factories” (trading posts run by Brit “factors”) established by Hudson’s Bay and teaches himself to become a surveyor and then cartographer.  Having just watched the BBC movie “Longitude” about the struggle to develop the accurate clock necessary to figure out longitude, I was prepared for the descriptions of Thompson working diligently and thoroughly around the clock on his observations and formulas.  At first he sent these by ship back to England where professional cartographers converted them into invaluable maps of the unknown new country.

David Thompson was the John Adams of Western Canada, in fact, his near-contemporary.  And he had a wife, Catharine rather than Abigail, half-Cree and inherited from a previous clerk’s family as was conventional for the time and place. She was barely fourteen to Thompson’s twenty-nine.  Like the Adams, they were faithful in what was evidently a worthy collaboration that lasted into a quiet old age in eastern Canada.  Fourteen children resulted.  However, Catharine did not leave a cache of letters.  There was no formal post anyway.  Communication was hand-carried by passers-by.  Sometimes there was no paper or ink, so that notes were left written on the walls of the various forts or on a section of wood.  His 77 journals are archived in Toronto.  His maps were grabbed up and reproduced willy-nilly with and without permission on both sides of the Atlantic.  The redrawings of the territory by Jack McMaster are fascinating adjuncts to this text.

There is no Sacajawea in this story, but an equally colorful woman emerges, a person who didn’t travel with Thompson.  In fact, he sent “Qánqon” away for “loose” behavior when he first met her as the “wife” of a furman.  An exceptionally tall, strong and vital woman, her personal history was recorded by Claude Schaeffer, curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning in the Sixties.  (We often consulted him.  His papers are in Calgary.)  I can think of half a dozen Blackfeet women like this one but Qánqon was from near Kootenay Lake and no Indian man was willing to take her on.  “Loose” behavior sounds like a mix of sex, violence, and attitude.  She decided to be a man, and took a series of wives.  Schaeffer says there’s no evidence of her being physically transsexual, but the rumor was that she devised a leather phallus.  She was rough on her wives, beating them as was often the custom.  She traveled far on the West side of the Rockies, carefully maintaining the fiction that she was male.  When bathing in a relatively shallow river, she was bare below the waist and seen by a man though she quickly crouched down to hide her gender which he testified was female.  He dubbed her “the Squatter” or some similar term in his language.  

Later she capitalized on her passing familiarity with the white men and, still pretending she was a man, played a cross between John the Baptist and a cargo cult by traveling in the wake of Thompson’s party, telling all the tribes that she was the representative of an important company that would generously reward all the people with whom she was friendly.  In this way she built up a herd of horses and a well-equipped lodge, and went into conjuring.  Her story is not nearly so well-known or popular as that of Sacajawea in spite of her potency as a feminist role-model.  Nor did anyone name a waterfall for her.  Her death was violent with her adversaries finally eating part of her heart to make sure she stayed dead.

David Thompson, now working for the independent North West Company, had many miserable and dangerous times getting over the Rockies so as to establish trading posts through the Bitterroot and into Pacific Northwest Territory.  He discovered that the trade-off for the severe and sudden weather of the treeless east side of the Rockies was that on the west side, milder and much wetter, thick forests supported little game.  Often they ate their horses, the dogs, or near-carrion.  Their stomachs were often in revolt from eating moss or roots unfamiliar to them, and once they got into the major fish-packed rivers that ran to the sea, their appetites failed to meet the diet of salmon, salmon and more salmon.  Supplies came to them from Hudson’s Bay, a long way to pack stomach soothers, ink powder, and soap --  small but vital necessities.  

Eventually they managed to come sailing into Astoria under their Canadian flag, startling the Americans in their toehold there.  Parallel scouting had been done by sea, searching for the mouth of the Columbia River.  Thompson traded one of his men for one of theirs, a Hawaiian man of high vitality who would go back with them to northern Alberta and then across the Atlantic to England.  The stories of the Hawaiians who came to the northern plains as well as the life-paths of the Iroquois trappers that Hudson’s Bay brought in when locals questioned the rewards for trapping beavers have never been told.

Nisbet, a handsome man, is an academic anchored in Spokane  (jacknisbet.com/) who is actively teaching, exploring, writing, and speaking around the “Inland Empire.”  His many books are listed on his website.

WHERE ARE THE BOOKS BY BLACKFEET?

New forces seem to be at work in Blackfeet history.  For a while now there have been enrolled people with solid academic backgrounds who have organized conferences, produced papers, attended workshops and so on.  They bring family stories and an experienced context to what they say.  Piegan Institute has been archiving materials for more than twenty years, always keeping them accessible.  Blackfeet Community College and the Museum of the Plains Indian also have records.  From early times white people have been interested, some of them mixing history and historical books into their business of artifact trade which they value because the material culture gives them daily reminders of old times.

As materials located in Europe but about Blackfeet have begun to be translated by people like Mary Eggermont-Molenaar, a whole trove has been revealed like glaciers melting back to reveal long-lost bodies.  The letters of Jesuits, like Father Philip Rappagliosi edited by Robert Bigard, are an entire library.  (The Pope could make important reparations to religious boarding school victims by underwriting the wholesale translation of all those papers into English.)  Ray Djuff started out to discover everything about his beloved Glacier National Park and is now accumulating information about the Two Guns Whitecalf family.   Andrew Graybill is closing in on the final manuscript about the Malcolm Clarke family, marveling at the fact that Helen Clarke, Malcolm’s Blackfeet daughter, was the first Montana school superintendent while the present Montana Superintendent of Schools, Denise Juneau, is also Blackfeet.  Greg Hirst is working on the Chief Heavy Runner family tree, which includes him.  My book about Bob Scriver, who was white, draws in a lot of local history.  Jack Holterman’s books, many published privately and now out-of-print, are among my most reliable reference works.

Almost all of these people share a special interest in the 19th century Blackfeet.  Local Blackfeet often say to me,  “I’m going to write a book of Napi stories and get it published.”   They don’t know that the whole industry of publishing is in the midst of chaos, unsure what to do.  But they are even less aware that the anthropological and ethnic tales of the early 3-named white writers (James Willard Schultz, George Bird Grinnell) have given way to the newer academically based writers like John Ewers, Clarke Wissler, and Adolf Hungry Wolf or even tribal members like Percy Bullchild -- and those in turn have given way to a wave of reconstructing writers like Ted Binnema, Roslyn LaPier, Dave Beck, and Jack Brink plus a horde of enrolled scholars from Canada who are deeply invested both in early history and contemporary technology that reveals subtle traces of all practices.  Many of the older historians around small-town Montana are still clinging to the tales of the Indian wars, the forts and whiskey trade, and the earliest white settlers -- often because those were their relatives. 

Just recently, seining the web for information about my co-writer, Tim Barrus, I pulled in an old argument between David Treuer, an Ojibwa writer whose work I don’t know http://www.davidtreuer.com,  and Sherman Alexie  http://www.fallsapart.com who has managed to become the first contemporary pop Indian writer.  Sherman quickly jumped on the platform for allowing only Indians to write about Indians, on grounds that it is a) privileged information (the old anthropological gold standard) and b) the value of it should accrue to Indians since their lives have been so exploited by fictions.  There are auxiliary corollaries, like the idea that only an Indian could properly understand or that there is an Indian “way” to write.  Treuer’s argument is that Indian writers should be held to the standard of any other writer, free to create any style or point of view that is aesthetically valuable and coherent.  (I’m unclear as to whether he defends the cynically sentimental and pandering “Education of Little Tree,” written by a white racist and still such a best-seller that the University of New Mexico Press can’t afford to stop selling it.)  It’s like a wrestling match between a fox and a hedgehog view of Indians,  the former valuing many approaches and the hedgehog sticking to his one “true” view.

This is relevant to Blackfeet history because there are two similar views:  one is that only the 19th century ecology-based pre-contact buffalo culture of the people identified with this tribe is “real,” and the other is that any concern about or by the people associated with this tribe is by identification “Blackfeet.”  The latter group asks,  “Where are the books about the twentieth century’s successful middle class on or off the reservation?”  And then they ask, “Where are their books, the ones they wrote?”

Here’s my answer:  they are on tape.  Yesterday’s novelist is today’s videographer.  After all, video has two strong characteristics that are quintessentially Blackfeet:  the camera loves the land and pulls it into the story on every side and videos are a media most often collaborative among a people that is suspicious of the lone genius.  Whether it’s Piegan Institute’s ground-breaking “Transitions” about re-learning the language, or “A Dream for Water” their collaboration with Native Waters through Montana State University, or John Hall’s “Rez Dogs” through the film program at University of Montana or even a curious collection of unedited videos that Paul told me about late last night at  American Indian Film Gallery: The Films   (http://www.jfredmacdonald.com/aifg/ ) -- this is all “writing,” making a record.  Here’s Eloise Cobell, so young I barely recognize her even though I knew her then.  She is now history in a way she could never have anticipated and neither could anyone else.  Suddenly, footage of her carefully explaining her job as the Tribe’s treasurer is invaluable.

So we’ve got three changing forces here:  a mutating media, an evolving people, and a challenged understanding of what “writing” or “publishing” or even “history” really are.  If there is so much happening in so many ways, how can anyone -- even Sherman Alexie -- suggest that it ought to be -- or could be -- fenced, “owned,” restricted in any way?  We are challenged just to understand what is happening while we are making new history.

"SEARCHING FOR GOD IN THE SIXTIES": A Review

The most lively and theological of correspondents in the earlier and more frisky online days of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment was “Doctor Dave,” an irreverent scholar teaching at George Mason University. His field is early theological and literary history (which are often entwined) of the American northeast, cornerstones of everything else that has has happened since. Few scholars have used R. Crumb as an interpretive text of this arcane material, but the strategy is justified.

Those who had competent high school teachers probably are aware of the American penchant for thinking in dyads: the Apollonian vs. the Dionysian, left-brain vs. right brain, male vs. female, or just “In” vs. “out.” Dave is working with the Arminian (rules and structure for proper living) versus the Antinomian (the essential goodness of humans that makes social impositions unnecessary). More poetically, the Cage versus the Abyss. This topic is manageable because the book is confined to social thought in the Sixties, pinned to American writers: Emily Dickinson for structure, Ken Kesey for anti-structure, Norman Mailer for mantra: “You never know what vision has been humping you through the night.” Emerson for idealism, Anne Hutchinson for spiritual, Norman O. Brown for the thoughtfully erotic, and Charles Manson as the ultimate Antinomian. Dave is not out to force a choice, but rather to provide a map of the branching and weaving game trails through the wilderness. There is a “soundtrack” which seems vital for boomers. (Dave was born in 1949.)


Here’s the deal. When you’re little, parents, church, school. politicians, and so on tell you what the world is about. As you age and get to approximately adolescence, the edges of the guide come unstuck and begin to peel off. What is under it is Nothing. The most terrifying emptiness of nonexistence. The slow realization that the world is masked by one’s own social constructs which are often controlled by what Dave calls “the combine.” (He lives close to Washington, D.C.) When the Big Earthquake comes, is it better to run outside or stay inside? What you do will probably be determined by what humps you through the night. The outcome is not at all guaranteed. We divide between those who believe there IS a Truth, even if we can’t ever -- as limited human beings -- know what it is, and those who believe that they have the Truth right there in their breast pocket, directions which they are willing to impose on everyone else. (Fascists.) How do you admit there is no truth without entering despair?

Oddly, since Dave didn’t grow up with a father, it is often the “gray-flannel man” with his wage-earner’s lunch bucket, who humps him: the conformity and false security of the Eisenhower years after WWII. (Rather dauntingly, he locates Obama with Eisenhower rather than Kennedy.) Our social pendulum swung towards the search for freedom in the Sixties, which proved to be problematic in unpredictable ways, reported with sharp intelligence by such people as James Baldwin. The problem is that both extreme Antinomianism and extreme Arminianism are intolerable, but we are constantly forgetting, lighting out from bondage in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land, often enduring hardship and violence, and then finding that’s not where we wanted to be after all.

Dave begins with Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” where the resident fascist is Nurse Ratched. He plays off Randle P. McMurphy, who has become conflated with Jack Nicholson’s portrayal in the movie, a figure of the irrepressible Irish energy that has always confounded Brit imperialism. The decade begins with Jack Kennedy, who seemed a figure of energy before his mask came off, but also with the civil rights movement, folk music, and marijuana. There IS a Truth and its name is Freedom! But Joan Didion was suspicious. What humped her in the California night was disorder, premonitions of murder, and she was right. Martin Luther King and the Kennedys knew that, but they marched out to their assassinations anyway. Is that Freedom? The young of the country thought so: they were Romantic. So romantic that they formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and got to work.

Vietnam was an insurmountable challenge. The underclasses who fought the war were pressed into the most basic human existence and it did not make them “good.” Martin Luther King was replaced by Malcolm X and a kind of counterracism. Marijuana was replaced by LSD, celebrated by intellectuals. Cartoon image: punching one’s way out of boxes. Literary exhibit: Kesey in “real” life, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” lurching across the country with a recording journalist on board. San Francisco was where it was at. Except for Woodstock. And then came Altamont. Hell’s Angels weren’t just symbolic, man. The Diggers, rooted in good works, become Charles Manson, rooted in seductive nothingness, ending in murder again.

By now the “fathers” of the combine were ready to take control. The seventies are beginning, though no one has really come to terms with the Sixties, and thus is this book necessary. Now it is Camille Paglia who says romanticism leads to decadence and anarchy, calling the oligarchs back to fascism in order to restore order. (One third? of the population in prison.) Again startling the reader, Dave sees Bush as part of that Dionysian disorder, always going with his gut. What mask, what cage, what pretense or pontificating system will hump us through the night now? Is there any use to this struggle at all?

Kesey’s cynical take on Adam, the natural man, is Chief Bromden who kills the now lobotomized McMurphy and escapes out the window. It is cynical because earlier the image is planted of a pup frolicking in the moonlight who then heads for a lethal highway and the Chief goes the same way. Kesey knows that the Chief’s home village, where he thinks he’s going, was obliterated by the Columbia Highway. But neither Kesey nor Williams, who forgets his history at the end of the book and says we are all immigrants coming from Egypt (Europe), really knows Indians. I will claim some familiarity with real Indians. This leads me to a third possibility that is not about dyads and outside most previous thought along these lines. I’m pointing at tribal Afghanistan where lessons from Sixties Afghanistan have taught us something about dealing with “fathers.” See http://blog.stevenpressfield.com/2010/01/tribal-engagement-tutorial-mental-models/

Maybe a tent is just another cage. Nevertheless, Dave’s brave mix of scholar’s notes and personal investment is invaluable to those picking their way among the rubble of broken dreams, still scanning for the pole star.

"Searching for God in the Sixties" by David R. Williams. University of Delaware Press, 2010.

FORT BENTON & VALIER

Hope Good, publisher of “Treasure State Lifestyles Montana,” has been commissioning short historical and local essays from me. She has generously agreed to let me reprint those pieces on this blog. Look for the courtesy magazines in waiting rooms and at various advertisers around the area. What you’ll find here are just the stories that I have supplied.


I.

The first story is about the Belgian community that has been a big part of Valier. Bob Scriver’s daughter, Margaret Skogan, finished high school in Valier and married a DeSmet, part of that Belgian community.

Valier sprang up where it is through a confluence of forces. One of the most deliberate was the importation of a Belgian village to what is still called “Belgian Hill.” Eight percent of the Valier population still self-identifies as Belgian and they include some of the most diligent and prosperous families. At first there was a little village called “Williams,” which has since withered and dispersed, leaving the Belgian church, Sacred Heart Mission, and its graveyard under the shelter of the ridge, now easily recognized because of the line of receivers and transponders on top.

Victor Day, Vicar General of the Diocese of Helena, was a native of Belgium so he welcomed the idea hatched in the interest of bringing farmers to the newly irrigated land and helping them escape the ravages of WWI. Father Shevlin, the local pastor, and Emile Monroe, an early guide, met the families and sheltered them in an eight room house “owned by Bishop Carroll” and previously the ranchhouse of the Conrad Circle Cattle Company. A part of that company was the Block Hanging Seven, the ranch where Lake Francis and the other components of the Pondera Canal Company were developed.

The devout farmers were meant to be stable and productive, not prone to the disorder of the oil town to the north, Cut Bank. White people were needed to settle because Swift Dam and the dependent irrigation grid were partly on the reservation and Birch Creek had only recently become the southern boundary of the reservation. The Conrad brothers didn’t bother with permissions and documents, and tried to get the boundary moved even farther north because of the good land between Birch and Badger Creeks, already under irrigation though not very effectively. They knew that occupation by law-abiding whites would help their goals.

The Catholic Church Extension Society helped to build the little church which endured from 1914 to 1963, helping the transplants keep alive their identity as it had been in Belgium. As they learned to speak English and the little town of Williams disintegrated, these people attached to Valier, helping to shape its identity. Principally, European farmers were accustomed to living in a village and traveling out to the fields daily while American assumptions about homesteads meant actually occupying the farmed land, a lonesome practice for farm wives. Valier is often best understood in the European pattern, as a hub with spokes.

In the Sacred Heart Mission days there were twenty-two weddings, twenty babies baptized, and twenty-eight funeral masses. For a while the old European festivals persisted. The church still stands and the graveyard is maintained. A side road from highway 44 provides access. Don’t be surprised if someone nearby meets you there. It is still cherished.


II.

Each issue of “Lifestyles” concentrates on a different community. This story harks back to the dedication of the Lewis, Clark and Sacajawea monument in Fort Benton.


The fate of the nation was determined when President Thomas Jefferson, a framer of the Declaration of Independence, bought the Louisiana Purchase which was defined by the drainage of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. He sent Lewis and Clark to discover how far that drainage reached, using the waterway for the great highway it still is.

The northern limit of continuously navigable water was Fort Benton, naturally the town to want to do something big for the 200th birthday of the nation on the 4th of July, 1976. That’s “big” as in “really big statue” of Lewis, Clark, Sacajawea and the baby Pomp. And there it still is along the levee. On the Fourth the town held a major parade that included the sculptor, Bob Scriver, riding his beloved horse, Gunsmoke, as well as all sorts of characters from mountain men (Corky Evans) to a ten-foot-tall stilt-walking Uncle Sam. (Didn’t get his name.) There weren’t seventy-six trombones, but there were a LOT of fine marching bands and a kilt-wearing pipe band from Alberta as well as floats.

The statue itself was “veiled” with a huge tarp and “unveiled” by Scriver. At the time Montana wasn’t so used to giant statues and the foundry head from New York City, Bob Spring, attended the dedication, beaming at his work.

Since then Fort Benton has repeated its role as the mother of Great Falls. Paris Gibson, a rancher from Minneapolis who had moved to Fort Benton, traveled to the Great Falls and realized with that power source there ought to be a city. Great Falls people at the dedication of the big Lewis and Clark statue were inspired to commission their own version which now stands under a giant flag.

Since those days Fort Benton has reclaimed much human history from Indian encampments to the mysterious death of the first governor, from the wrecks and conflagrations of the steam paddle-wheelers to the faithfulness of a sheep herder’s dog. The original fort is rebuilt. Yet the town remains a modest ag center, showing you don’t need to live in New York City to be sophisticated. In fact, as soon as Europeans realized they could step off a sea-going ship and onto the deck of a steamship, royalty and fine artists eagerly traveled in what amounted to a floating hotel. Prince Maximilian, Audubon, and others were anxious to see the far West.

When Lewis and a sub-group of the expedition had been to the northernmost reaches of the Marias River and realized that the drainage ended at the 49th parallel rather than the fiftieth as hoped, they met a party of young Blackfeet horse herders and killed two of them in a skirmish over guns. Within decades Culbertson and his beautfiul and resourceful Blackfeet wife, Natawista, were holding court on a steamboat that brought in supplies to the Blackfeet and new settlers, then removed thousands of beaver plews on the way back to St. Louis to spend the winter. Wood hawks made their living all along the river by cutting and piling cords of fuel for those paddle-wheelers. Until the railroads were built, this was the only practical means of moving raw baled buffalo hides to the cities of the east where they became conveyor belts for the new factories.

When Lewis and Clark, reunited and homebound, got to the shores of Fort Benton, they could not have guessed they would be immortalized in bronze. What they did understand was that they were only weeks from a celebratory dinner party in Saint Louis, complete with oysters and champagne. In 1976 we settled for a smashing parade!

THE PRICE OF FREEDOM

Nausea is my main reaction to accounts of how the “Republicans” have been preparing to discredit and smear ANY nominee that Obama suggests for the US Supreme Court and then their subsequent attempts to do just that to Sotomayor. (I use quotes because I think the conspirators are a splinter group.) They don’t seem to have any particular goal in mind, really, certainly not the prestige of the “Grand Old Party” which now lies in Balkanized ruin across the airwaves. Rather they are like viral playground bullies, enjoying the high enterprise of stripping people naked and piling them up in pyramids.

Now that Tim and I have a manuscript and are getting into the real nitty-gritty of editing, I’ve happened over into a whole stream of these guys -- except that they’re often women, just like the old “flamers” of NA lit listservs. Almost all are young and poorly educated, evidently knowing no other way to make a place for themselves. Lance Foster also notes their identification as “haters” on his blog. http://hengruh.livejournal.com/54595.html . I used to call them “Oswalds,” the idea being that if you can’t be the president, any schmoo can be an assassin.

They have learned to use Google loops of hostile posts that circle back around and around by referring to each other, creating a spiral of accusations that grow more exaggerated as they ascend. They often invoke danger to children, which seems to be the emotional stage of the “haters.”

I’m taken aback to see that again Wikipedia is part of the pattern, so that if you look for Deb Frisch, a target of the haters, you’ll only find Jeff Goldstein, her accuser. It appears that the Rush Limbaugh types now have an interweaving three-strand stream of disinformation going: talk radio, Google loops, and Wikipedia. All three of these sources depend upon poorly educated people who don’t read much and only operate the computer enough to look up their enemies or get onto YouTube or Facebook. They can barely Google and never go past the first two or three panels when they do.

So it’s my fault, or the fault of myself and other teachers, not to have done a better job of educating these people and the people who raised them. We didn’t teach critical thinking, or reading skills, or even the historical basis of this country, which is not my own strong suit either except for the year I had Carlie Gilstrap, who made the Hungarian Revolution come alive. You remember, maybe, that that was the revolution that we promised to help, but didn’t.

My Netflix movie at the moment is “John Adams,” a HBO series about the American revolution that is turning out to be QUITE different from what I expected, partly because of the accessibility of the ideas and partly because of the truly beguiling acting. (I love Thomas Jefferson most, so far, but the version of George Washington -- who is rarely portrayed -- is startling. John Adams’ meeting with King George III as the first United States of America ambassador to England is amazing. Both men are striving hard to take the highest possible ground: George III to be gracious about his now separated people and John Adams trying to overcome his defiant patriotism enough to be civil.) But this series is best watched by intelligent people.

What I hadn’t really thought about is how even then there were two contending forces in our political life that might be seen as embodied by two nations. France was a red-capped mob at the time, decapitating every previous figure of privilege and authority, the way the Chinese did not so long ago. England was embattled, braced to defend its historical identity and upperclass governors. In the US Franklin and Jefferson were beguiled by France, partly because of long stays as ambassadors living in Paris. But Madison likes the English, particularly if he can become landed gentry in a re-creation of the old order. He’s not above dirty tricks backstage. This is NOT different from today’s right-wingers trying to dominate the country because they see themselves as legitimately privileged, up against the New Order which the world at large seems to approve.

John Adams, his “rotundity” as he is called, steers between them. It is George Washington who completely overturns the card table when he resigns instead of becoming “King for Life” as Third World dictators so often do. It is Abigail Adams -- embodied by Laura Linney -- who makes us love Adams’ rotundity while seeing his faults clearly and throwing her weight against them. Her pale oval face walks through colonial rustic gardens, Parisian satin ball gowns, English paneling, Dutch checkerboard tile, in one indelible image after another. This series ought to play in an endless loop somewhere until every citizen has seen it.

But no, we keep having lessons in violence and polarization. My automated blog ads featured a little vid of Tom Cruise in his flop movie called “Valkyrie,” in which he evidently plays a Nazi. It took me a minute to figure out how the computer decided to put it there. It was the word “Blackfeet.” Cruise and Scientology have been trying to drive a wedge into the Blackfeet world, erecting a big tent at Indian Days, and flattering the locals, who can’t tell Hollywood from reality. Nor can actors and cultists tell real Blackfeet from arrivistes and opportunists.

But can I? Are we doing warring movies here? This “John Adams” series comes from a book by David McCulloch, much praised and read by many, but not me. I wonder if it’s even in the Valier library. I’ll go see. One of the differences between my life and the life of many of my “peers” or former classmates, is that here I interact with people who would never be described as aristocracy. They are the people for which democracy was formed but it is often their children who are hypnotized by fake magic, explosions, expensive belongings, and shiny cars that get low mileage. It is those children for whom public education is provided and their parents who constitute the local school boards.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance” is a useful statement only if you know what freedom looks like and have some use for it besides hating and attacking. These days even the Pope is trying to learn how not to hate. He needs more practice, but so do we all. Maybe we could start a school for Popes, Limbaughs and Cheneys. Then confine them to campus while the rest of us go forward with Obama and Sotomayor in the nation’s capitol.