"THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET," MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER

Lawrence Durrell, the reality

Lawrence Durrell as I imagine him.

Today on OZY (my alternative source of news and views that I depend on to balance out the wimpy stuff other places) had a review of Lawrence Durrell, one of my all-time fav writers.  Long ago I found a paperback of the first of his Alexandria Quartet in a beach house where I was ignored enough to read in sweaty peace with an ocean breeze to keep me awake.  

http://www.ozy.com/flashback/lawrence-durrells-alexandria-quartet/33474.article?utm_source=dd&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=09242014

Eugene S. Robinson --Leather Lit with roots in Africa

What’s strange is that the review was written by Eugene S. Robinson.  If you went out of your way to find my opposite -- a massive, black, rock bandsman who writes a sex column of surprising good sense that addresses totally “evil” and transgressive sexual situations (which everyone -- even people in small towns -- seems to think are peak experiences to pursue), who wrote a book about fighting, who is the lead in a band that is way out there -- he's it. 

  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rRjyJhqnU0   An illustration of what happens if you break boundaries.  And yet the trespasser was not hurt.  The KIND of violence this guy understands is mostly Asian-based, meaning it’s as much psychological leverage as just raw destruction.  Intelligent force.

In terms of the British empire "Downton Abbey" hegemony enforced by mothers (nationhood, class status, dependable income, good reputation, law-abiding, always in control, respect for authority, and oh-yes-romance) my two big deficits are contemporary counterculture music and anything physical, whether dancing, working out, or athletics.  I’d rather watch and think about it.  Eugene S. Robinson wouldn’t give me the time of day, but both of us love Lawrence Durrell.  Maybe it’s the thing about using the weakness of overbearing people to one’s advantage.  Maybe there’s a kind of rural canniness that exists in the rougher parts of mega-urbs.  Maybe it's just Berkeley.  Maybe we like purple writing.  In one interview he says that he doesn’t use the genitalia metaphors that Freudians so cherish, but if he had to, he’d say his band’s mode was more vagina than penis.  Whatever.  Watch his hands.  Especially in the ring or at the mic.

Robinson is an editor of Ozy.  How he got to be such a hip, smart, literate guy, I do not know.  I just respect it.  http://www.bonereader.com/2012/03/08/the-many-faces-of-eugene-s-robinson/  This interview was not much help, because it’s all about how to “play” the music scene and, anyway, I think it’s already a little out of date.  But it’s the best set of clues about how to survive commercially as a writer that I’ve found yet.  I’m just not sure which clues would really work.  The subjects of the song lyrics are far more relevant and dark than anything I see in the emagazine essays about life as a privileged thirty-year-old urban ignoramus.  I think, for instance, that the “religion” (noninstitutional) of the future is forming here -- NOT in any pews or pulpits or books.

https://vimeo.com/58024793  Here's a story song that’s more accessible to me than the wild defiance stuff.

http://www.ozy.com/ozy-tribe/our-team/day-to-day-team/eugene-s-robinson/  This is as close to a bio as I could come.  “No place else in America is even remotely interested in trying the probably near-impossible,” says Robinson. “Which is, in my mind: making the compelling interconnections between what we think and what we do come ALIVE.”  I guess that’s a good description of the passion that made the Durrell family so productive and seductive.  And sex is probably the most intricate and intense sort of framework to describe human interaction -- unless it’s violence.  The trouble with most violence is that it’s stupid, unmodulated, and has no point of focus.  It’s just big explosions with a high body count.  (Writing is too often like that as well.)  The Alexandria Quartet is still alive, still relevant.

Alexandria

My seminary group counselor (and for a summer my employer) was a black man also named Gene Robinson, but in the past every time I tried to google his name, I got Eugene S. Robinson.  (There's a third one, also black.  Maybe a fourth. I'll have to disambiguate.)  The Hyde Park Gene Robinson was not so literary as his namesake but trained in the context of CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) which is meant to produce savvy, compassionate, chaplain-type people.  This morning I found him online.  He's done well.  And good, as well.

Eugene Robinson, D. Min

Eugene Robinson, DMin

Manager of Spiritual Health, EWW
Staff Chaplain, Mental Health Services
Education: BS (Chemistry), Paine College, Augusta, GA; MDiv, ITC at Morehouse School of Religion, Atlanta; ThM and DMin, Columbia Theological Seminary, Atlanta
Professional: Certified Supervisor, ACPE; Certified Marriage and Family Therapist, Northwestern U., Chicago; Member, AAPC; Diplomat, American Psychotherapist Assoc.; Licensed AAMFT; Studies in Clinical Psychology, GSU, in progress.
Faith Group: Progressive Baptist of America
Experience: Center for Family Studies, Chicago; Grady Health System and GAPC, Atlanta; Connections Center, Decatur GA
Specialty Training/Interests: Workshops on Family and Marital dynamics, Grief, Personal Growth for Teens and Men, Team development, Communications

He was counseling at the center attached to the First Unitarian Church of Chicago with half or more of his clients coming from the South Side black community, often kids in trouble.  A bit of a Robin Hood, he used the rich people’s fees to subsidize the poor kids.  He was like a stabilized, rather white, version of Tim Barrus (who IS white).  He was fascinated by me because he claimed my pale face kept turning all colors, and they were a giveaway of my emotional state.
  

Part of the cultural switcheroo of the U of C campus is that the high intellectuals all trooped down to the black Checkerboard to hear emotional jazz while other black men tended to the emotional lives of the wives and students of those same brainy white folk.  Good thing, because my “own people” -- relatives, other Unitarians, and Montana humanities folks -- find me totally out of sync, rude, and excludable.  In fact, Gene Robinson had to save me from a CPE supervisor of my own kind who was trying to fuck me over.  These are the kinds of twists and turns that Durrell loves.  They trace the subversive.  The book about Hyde Park has not yet been written.  

It won’t be written by me, because I was at the Seminary Coop Bookstore with my butt on the warm cement floor of the History of Science alcove.  (Better than theology.) And because fascinating as blacks are, engrossing as the city is, my heart is gripped by the Blackfeet Reservation.  A BIG book about this prairie place on the East Slope cries out to be written.  It might never be read.  I don’t know whether I could do it or not, but I’m tempted to try.  The bootlegger culture, the mission culture, the hunter culture, the fort culture, the military culture, the stubborn woman-centered family culture, the college grads,  the PTSD white vets, the drug dealers, the Mexican family men and the kids creating their own worlds.   All still there. Nothing like what anyone thinks, even themselves.  A steady pressure to keep things secret because at this altitude the ultraviolent [sic] light is so strong it suppresses life instead of supporting it.

I try not to be a shadow-rider who goes along watching myself on the wall as though it were a mirror, but it’s hard not to be if one is writing: it's a reflexive task.  My remedy so far has been ridge-riding, following along parallel to the real trench warfare to keep from being captured by the pussy Brit-worshipping hegemony intent on control.  But it does rather make one a target.  It must be nice to be a heavyweight African-American rocker with writing chops.

BROWNING UNITED METHODIST PARISH -- BUMP!

Browning Methodist Church in the early days.

A more recent view of the church.  The entrance is now at the side.

The history of any group is like the history of a person and yet it includes many persons over time and that means far more complex dynamics and forces.  The national culture will have a lot to do with the small local group, so that in some ways the little three-church Blackfeet Methodist Parish has been at the mercy of the nation, particularly since it is on  a reservation in a remote place where Jesuits had been since the very earliest white contact.  The assumption that religious people would automatically be conscientious, moral, and protective -- as well as being prepared to convert people to a whole new way of being in the world -- was at war with the reality of religious political competition.  Clearly these guys were not active in their local churches.

Brother Van went hunting with the Blackfeet, but earlier the Jesuits went with them to battle

 and they won.  Long coats trumped short coats.

The US legislature found it convenient to escape from accusations of corruption on reservations by assigning each to a different religious group (denomination) and trying to make them responsible for the results.  This backfired bigtime in the way things do when many boundaries are introduced.  One of my themes on this blog has been that creating boundaries with different rules on the two sides always creates devious ways of creating profit.

Demonize and extrapolate however you want, human local greed has always been the mice that eat the leather hinges of the armor, as they did in the armories of the Middle Ages, so that the rigid pieces meant to be protective were simply useless.  This quick list of clergy (which includes me) begins in 1893 with the official designation of Rev. E.D. Dutcher as the pastor/missionary and Rev. W. W. Matson as the director of the Boarding School.  Brother Van had been a sort of free-lance missionary and good-will ambassador before that, but he had wandered off from the difficult reservation scene and became popular among the settlers.

White people on the reservation in early days tended to be Anglo-Scots so there was a Presbyterian church as well as the Methodist group.  The Presbyterian minister was Rev. James Gold, the father of the Doug Gold who is sometimes a focus of blame (mostly because he conflated cultural naiveté with IQ) and sometimes praise.  He brought in a doctor to address the plague of trachoma that was blinding so many and also instigated the building of what is now the elementary school, built with local Indian labor, then acted as the first superintendent.  But in the end the Presbyterian congregation shrank and finally gave over its remaining members and all its assets to the Methodists in 1942.  

The Methodist congregation then became an awkward combination of mission church, meant to do good works and convert those who were still in their old culture, but also an institution for the support of the white middle-class ranchers, shop-keepers, BIA and IHS employees.  The total failure of the government to even feed the people had been loaded onto Rev. Major John A. Young (1876 to 1883).  In 1883-84 600 Blackfeet people died of starvation and disease and were piled on Ghost Ridge near the Badger Creek crossing with highway 89.  It was a worse tragedy than any bloody massacre.

This is a list of clergy actually assigned to the church. It is drawn from the Centennial History (1893-1993) and is necessarily sketchy.  The most complete history is by Howard L. Harrod.  “Mission Among the Blackfeet.” (1971) A Yale graduate teaching at Vanderbilt, Harrod is gone now.

Rev. Francis Asbury Riggin (1899) was the first. The church was built along Willow Creek outside of town.  

Rev. A.W. Hammer (1909) The “Methodist ranch” was defined in these years.  Acounts differ as to who provided the land, the government or the Blackfeet person who was assigned that allotment. In 1913 the church building moved into town.

Rev. Henry Mecklenburg (1921) encouraged female social workers who went into homes, something like the social workers in city tenements after WWI.

Rev. Allen C. Wilcox (1926) seems to have shifted the emphasis to upgrading the property.  He left at the end of the war in 1945.

Pulpit carved by Albert Racine

Altar carved by Albert Racine

Rev. Stephen C. Smith (1945) was confusingly followed by Rev. Edgar B. Smith (1947), who started the business of used clothing that grew and grew until it nearly crowded out the people.

Rev. Paul Hollenbeck came as a summer interim before Rev. George Ritchey (1952) arrived to support the post-WWII boom.  Children were a major part of the growing American interest in a church home and so the classroom extension was added. 

Rev. George Cox (1956) came next.  He was a stone mason and built the fireplace in the relatively new Babb log church.  Rev. Charlotte Bridges, a Baptist minister from New Hampshire served as interim.

Rev. Jim E. Bell and family arrived in 1959.  Bell was an officially commissioned missionary who wished to expand both Babb and Heart Butte.  The Babb land was donated by Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Thronson, who were both buried by myself, acting as interim minister in 1988-89.  In 1961, when I came to teach high school English, I was merely an attendee of the church but I lived in one-half of a small duplex that also housed “Papa Harry Pearson,” a retired lay worker who provided all sorts of support. (1963-79)

1964 was a time of disaster.  The Babb church burned down and there was a terrible flood that swept away Swims Under Church at Little Badger.  A second ministry team, the Rev. Conrad Himmels, arrived to free up Rev. Bell’s energy for the larger reservation.  Mrs. Himmel opened Browning Day Care Center in an Air Force base building moved across from the church.

Rev. Walter Mason

Rev. Walter Mason and his wife Alagene came in 1974 and stayed until 1981.  Apistatoke Church in Heart Butte was closed.  Money was a major problem -- the churches were shrinking as the nation’s interest in religion was fading in favor of social justice.  

1981-83 was a double ministry: Rev. Vicki H. and Rev. Richard Marine. They were followed by Rev. James R. Bentley who directed a lot of improvements, including to the historic Methodist cemetery outside of town.  The first set of stained glass windows, created by Brent Warburton, were installed in 1985.  Work camps from the midwest began to arrive in the summers of these years.

One of Warburton's windows.

Rev. Ron Barr arrived in 1896 and took a special interest in Heart Butte, acquiring a bus to transport the people into Browning and then reopening the church there in a quonset hut-type building.

Peggy Salois, a lay leader, and Rev. Mary Scriver, a UU minister, served between 1987 and 1989 when Rev. Richard (Jake) Jacobsen, a Navy chaplain, arrived, went into culture shock, and left.

Rev. Donna Lee Martin came in 1990.  Her husband Marshall was a major contributor to the maintenance and programs.  This period was remarkable for the expansion of programs and outreach to both local tribal people (Charles Newbreast) and people like Evelyn Attwood, a Native American certified as a Rural Chaplain.

Heart Butte Methodist Church

Rev. Rowland Freeman (1994) led a group of young people in making the stained glass windows in the bell tower.  

I think I'm missing a couple of people in these years.

Rev. Jim Barth has been the most recent pastor.  He and his wife, like  Rev. Jim and Mary Bell, lost a newborn child.  They were able to make this into a ministry.  They began to call the parish “BUMP” which disconcerted me, since I’m aware of the movement to use Blackfeet words.  But then I watched the vid.  http://www.bumpmission.com  Both the language and the music were there.

Rev. Calvin Hill

Now a new page begins.  Rev. Calvin Hill has arrived.  An enrolled Navajo, a speaker, he also speaks Hopi, Zuni and English.  Rez and boarding school raised, he has a lot in common with many Blackfeet.  Perhaps now the two shadow cultures can merge into one creative way of going forward.  "Hurry up please, it's time!"

(Previous posts about this parish begin in May, 2009.)

A THOUSAND LITTLE SCHISMS, FANCIES, SLIGHTS AND ADVANTAGES

The most difficult concept for off-rez people to understand is that the rez is not defined by its boundaries.  Boundaries, agreed-upon and recorded lines making a distinction between what’s on one side and what’s on the other, are a Euro concept that goes back to the Egyptians trying to keep track of farm land that was overlain by fertile silt from rivers every spring.  There has to be an edge to a “built” environment.  Euros privilege what is “built,” “owned,” “planted,” “used.”

A tribe is based on centers.  It develops organically from a central anchoring point and then spreads out through interaction or proliferation, which means it is rhizomatous and nomadic, concepts that paradoxically come out of Euro thinkers working against the confinement, enforcement, and destruction from the Euro ideas.  Tribal center-based organization is so natural and gradual that it is rarely defined or described.  It is a “felt” concept that feels like reality.  And it is.

So thinking about the chaos currently “felt” on the Blackfeet reservation means bringing up to consciousness things that have been taken for granted.  This chaos IMHO is a necessary turning out of pockets and emptying of closets.  It is, in Eric Berne’s terms, a game of “Uproar,” which means that when you are losing at chess and have run out of effective strategies, you just turn over the table and let the pieces scatter.  Then you have to start a new game.  Maybe with new rules.

In ancient days the most common “center” was a nuclear family which quickly extended as far as resources would allow.  Not all members of the resulting band were genetically related.  New members might come voluntarily, attracted through friendships or adventures, but others might be captured, particularly women.  This meant -- since women carry the culture and teach it to the children -- a continuing flow of new ideas.  New ideas, combined with the variety of personalities, meant that occasionally there were dissenters and iconoclasts in the band.  These could lead to breakaway groups who decided to travel a different path.  

Check out Tony Bynum's website: tonybynum.com

To put this is more familiar terms, religious groups are held together by affinities and divided by controversies.  The stronger the affinity, the more internal friction can be tolerated and even translated into growth in numbers and sophistication.  If major controversies show up -- often over resources, though they might be disguised as ideologies -- the group will split.  Unitarian congregations in big cities -- already centered on freedom to think -- will often have satellite “fellowships” (small groups with no ministers) who differ in some opinion or style.  Once in a while there will be sweeping religious movements to re-consolidate all these groups.  Sometimes that comes from economic or political pressure from outside, and once in a long while it results from a flashing and intense new idea that pulls everyone together.  Tribes work just like that.

Orange is buffalo range, red is tribally occupied

The Amskapi Pikuni division of the Siksika nation was at one point reduced to only 500 souls, half of them children.  The loss of continuity, connection, and expertise was drastic.  The result of trauma and starvation was mixed, pitting compliance in the interest of survival against defiance for the same motive.  Some collaborated with the Euros and others opposed them to the point of death.  Another group just hunkered down to wait, knowing that all things pass.

This was only one of the sources of mixing, acquiring, and discarding that have resulted in today’s tribe.  The usual generational variation was accentuated by the practice of early whites, usually men, of marrying tribal women, sometimes as access to powerful families, sometimes for their personal comfort and convenience (frontier life means the need for a supply and repair source -- a moccasin maker, hide tanner, house owner), and occasionally out of true love.  The Culbertsons are an outstanding example.  But there are no Culbertson’s now.  The Kipps are another example and there are many Kipps now.  But that’s only to go by Euro ideas of descent which are patriarchal and ownership-based.  The older ways were much more individual, using “dreams” as the justification for nonconformity.  Each man had his own vision.  Each Kipp is unique.  And a descendant of Culbertson's wife, Natawista, showed up in a Cut Bank classroom -- he just wasn't named Culbertson.

Women could be a source of either unity or division, depending on how well they got along esp. in polygamous households.  Though men could be violent, women held the plurality and had the potential to make life miserable for a tyrant.  Their children and brothers added credibility.  A skillful woman who knew the territory and its resources from camas to paint minerals to the efficient processing of a buffalo carcass was an invaluable resource for a warrior or hunter.  This continues, except now a skillful person (unassigned as to gender) can navigate the Internet, keep household appliances operating, shop wisely, and chair a productive meeting.

The first split among the Amskapi Pikuni was between full-blood and mixed blood, with the advantages of a white father tending to pull people out onto the flats to grow grain while an old-timey father might choose a Dawes allotment in the foothills because of the hunting and water.  When everything was in trust, the fortunes of all were tied together and they still are for the lands and resources held in common.  In Canada where the tribe was treated as a cooperative, individuals are held down in some ways (no chance to use individually owned land as collateral for a loan or to cash it in at retirement) but supported in others (no need to acquire enough money to buy a ranch).  The Devil’s Bargain on the US side is that people were allotted land of quite different qualities and though the argument was that they were certainly capable of managing their own assets, the disadvantages of not having English language and not understanding the strange Euro practice of bookkeeping standing for reality meant that many people lost their land one way or another.  Fractionation is another dismaying problem.

Being located meant community formed out of neighborhoods, either the way people cluster around amenities (originally a fort) and or in what I call “long towns” along the rivers.  Now they cluster on the Internet.  The oil community -- those who manage the work -- or the livestock community form out of mutual interests. Newly built housing clusters have created neighborhoods, almost accidentally.

There is less chaos than there is subtle conflict between forces meant to provide survival.  Complicating the picture even more is the infiltration of covert outsider forces, mostly white businessmen, who use enrolled people as cat’s paws -- masks -- to access entitlements meant to level the playing field for the enrolled.  Sometimes the tribal members are well aware they are being used and other times they just see the advantages of having a patron.  No one spends much time wondering how much such white players want to prevent change because it will lose them money.  In the background always hovers the threat to close down the reservation.

In a community where there is no money at all, there are systems of violence (who are you afraid of, who is an enforcer), sex (who do you love, who shares your parenthood), and secrets.  Secrets include the illegal substance networks and a certain amount of human trafficking.  Now that we learn about it, we see that can mean trafficking in labor.  But fire-fighting has progressed from when authorities would simply seize drunks off the streets and take them onto the firelines without even notifying family.  If they survived and were paid, no one cared much.  Today fire-fighting is professional, requiring training and health-monitoring.

CHIEF MOUNTAIN HOTSHOTS 
L to R: Lyle St. Goddard, Rod Bullshoe, Willard Pepion, Eli Stillmoking, Doug Malatare, Joanne Cadotte, Josh Salway, Sheldon Brewer, Loren Young Running Crane, Tim Sure Chief, Allen Dale Vielle - Bottom L to R: Steve Bullshoe, Earl Old Chief, Jovon Fisher, Dale Tatsey, Gordon North Piegan, Brenda McDougall, Clinton Dusty Bull

Ideas need to be thrown out to keep us from treading the same old dead-end paths. What we need is that one huge compelling and energizing goal that can pull everyone all together.  In the end it’s always survival, but along the way there are many small strategies that move towards mini-survivals.  Pick up the chess pieces carefully and take a good look at the chessboard.  It’s strategy that counts.  A lot of little strategies can add up to a big result.