THE TRAIL NARROWS

The urge to leave a record.

This morning I woke with a new plan for spring.  To discard many boxed things I’ve loaded into one You Haul after another, carrying them across the continent because I believed they were important, even valuable.  I come from two lines of hoarders, maternal and paternal, who believed in paper and saved the documentation of the family back far enough that letters from Andersonville have come down to my generation.  (For those who don’t know, Andersonville was the notorious Civil War prison in Georgia where Union soldiers were held under Auschwitz-like conditions.)  

So here’s a list of what I’m going to discard now.

My boxes of old Glacier Reporters, because bound books of them have been given to Blackfeet Community College.  When I started in 1961, there WAS no BCC with a library and the Museum of the Plains Indian had a limited archive that has been raided several times: once to weed out anything that wasn’t relevant to the material culture of the 19th century and once to weed out anything about white people.  In short, politics break through scholarship on the rez.  It's print stuff in an oral culture.  But the people themselves are capable of wrestling with that now.  The Millennials will decide.

I hope they value it as much as the people who constantly come in from outside, determined to squeeze more out of the 19th century.  It’s time for the rez folks to get into the BIA and FBI files.  The descendants of the demonized early whites have already destroyed much of their trader records which were mostly about buying and selling anyway.

I’m just now beginning to reorganize my library of books about Blackfeet and what we used to call “vertical files” of articles and tear-outs.  The death of Darrell Kipp has shaken some of my ideas.  At one point Piegan Institute was supposed to be an archive of scholarship as well as an immersion school.  

I’m putting a list of all my Blackfeet books on prairiemary.blogspot.com, which is taking a while as I add a dozen books at a time.  If you’re looking now, come back in a month.   I don’t think most Blackfeet scholars even know about all of them.  Like university classes, media pieces and published books go over and over the same old worn out stuff and ignore the cutting edges.  Of course, the post-colonial stuff is almost unintelligible and rarely digested.  There’s a great need for translation, esp. the things written in European languages.

I have one four-drawer cabinet and a few scrapbooks of materials about Bob Scriver, but I’ve already discharged my obligation to testify to his life.  The book is “Bronze Inside and Out, A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver.”  The Montana Historical Society has tricked and ignored me, so I do not feel good about giving them anything.  We don’t live on the same planet.

Alvina Krause

A few materials remain in my possession about Alvina Krause (my B43 Acting Class journal, for instance) and have already been offered a home in the Northwestern University archives.  I managed to get an article about her published in the Stanislavsky Studies international journal, for whatever that’s worth.

The materials from my ministry (newsletters, correspondence, pamphlets) seem curiously irrelevant now.  The individual congregations turn over their membership and their focus much more than they realize, but esp. the Montana people — the most ephemeral — have no time, energy or central location interested in these materials.  I’m divided between stuffing them into mailing cartons and sending them to the individual groups or just taking them to the dump.  The denomination and districts are so absorbed by the need to “market” — meaning increase membership and income — that they see nothing of value in the little low-population edges far away from Boston.  They have become an urban phenomenon, or maybe the Unitarians always were.

Aside from that, I think that the UUA and the whole concept of denominations is on its way out — again.  They are luxuries and when low status populations like women and people of color manage to get into the leadership, they are no longer valuable to the old white men who have the money, since their idealism clings to Edwardian British values. 

For a while I saved a lot of material about Cut Bank High School which I intended to digest into a novel about how we destroy our children: the boys by encouraging violent sports, extreme street fighting for betting, and substance abuse; the girls by discarding any who don’t look like movie stars and put out like whores — except for a few destined to be moms sustaining the grudgingly necessary families.  By now none of these forces are undocumented by the media or even unstudied by sociologists.  The destructiveness of American schools is no secret, nor is it unconscious any longer.  Now what I have is redundant.  I liked the kids, so I’ll keep the yearbook.

The family archive on my father’s side rests with my cousins except for the little book I made from photos of all the places the Strachans lived, mostly pretty minimal rural prairie houses.  Everyone is much more comfortable now.  Even my house would count as pretty nice.  Beulah Strachan raised her children in a tarpaper shack.  But that much of the story is told and the other relatives are intent on silence.  I might do an end-run around them to the five emigrant Scots sisters who originally came to America, but it would have to be fiction.  Still, they had very suggestive divergent fates.  There is another writer among their descendants, Kathy Rouzie.

Beulah Swan Finney Strachan, my grandmother

What I will save, burdening my niece Adrienne Lulay who is my inheritor and executor, the family photo albums, partly because I still want to use them for my own memoir.  I need to learn more about layout and the kind of programs used to do tricky things like montages.  There is no video, but I’ll go to CD technology maybe.  None of the current cyber-technology can keep itself from transforming and updating.

On my mother's side I'm alienated enough to tell the double story of the Hatfields/Pinkertons with no restraint, maybe as fiction.  The Hatfields and McCoys are nothing compared to Hatfields against Hatfields with Pinkertons trapped in the middle.  (My mother was the only sib of the Pinkerton girls who didn't marry a Hatfield.)

Pinkertons - my grandfather on the right, seated

I may not have time to finish one small part of this project, but again a death hustles me along, this time the recent death of Mike Burgwin who did so much to professionalize animal control.  I did get a book self-published ("Dog Catching in America"  but I see that www.lulu.com/prairiemary is marketing it as a PDF instead of the Print On Demand that I expected.  Animal Control has developed much farther since our time, so maybe it’s just a collection of war stories by now.  In the background the study of the relationships among animals — including humans — has expanded and become more startling and absorbing than anything we expected.

My life has been a series of lives:  theatre, the Blackfeet reservation in all its aspects, animal control, Unitarian-Universalism both as scholarship and as practicum, a return to the reservation with special attention to geology which has persisted even after the forced return to Portland, OR, where the interest in geology — this time in regard to cities — grew deeper: the basic engine of ecology and therefore of mutation that drives evolution.

Now that I have the great privilege of living in a quiet, safe place where I can write, I’ve tried to do as much as I can towards developing skill.  Since 2005 blogging has replaced publishing (it IS today's publishing) and I’ve had a writing friend of great force and daring (Tim Barrus) who has pushed me along.  Now I’m looking for master concepts that can project a future I won’t share and don’t much want to.  We knew it was coming, this present quandary produced by too many people, the exhaustion of resources, technical shifts that get out ahead of our ability to assimilate them, global warming and so on.  But we had thought maybe 2025 was a good predicted onset.  We’d be gone.  Now we know a lot of people are likely to be underwater.

When I’ve fallen in love with a writer, I’ve expressed it by buying and reading all their works, so Peter Matthiessen is probably the next death that has prodded me.  Wendell Berry is still a bit in the future.  A.B. Guthrie, Jr. died quite a while ago, also Norman McLean and Richard Stern.  The whole category of “Montana writers”— which was kind of invented anyway — is dented by the death of Jim Harrison.  Wallace Stegner and Jim Welch are gone.  I don't want to write like a lady.

The big secret about publishing is that it is the publishers who control the fates of writers and these days do it only in terms of sales.  No one cares about the quality of the writing. Publishers have concluded that Indians and women don’t sell except in romantic genre eBooks.  Of the major publishers of literature of the West based in universities, one is captured by self-aggrandizers and the other fell under the ax of the post-structuralists.  The real action is in Canada but even there it’s a bit of a struggle.  No one in the US knows their work, not even the tribes that are on both sides of the border.

My shelves of psych and communication insights have somehow become outdated.  Eric Fromm, though he was a death camp survivor, is not adequate to the AIDS pandemic, a country like North Korea where the whole nation is a death camp, or the total questioning of everything, even male/female or the nature of reality as managed in the brain.  Now I have shelves on neuron research, hominin evidence, revisionist long history (pre-human).  They are the only way I participate in the frenzy of acquisition around me.

There’s plenty to do and some of it will be muscle work like sorting and carrying books.  I’d better do it while I’m still only 76.

"I just LOVE your work!"

It is in the very architecture of humans that they want to relate one-on-one with individuals and if they can’t do it by being intimate, they will do it by picking a fight.  Both are a big pain in the ass, but many of us tolerate and try to harness this stuff so that we can get work out there to the public.  Sometimes you can get money out of it. But it’s frustrating when the work is vital, sometimes desperately needed, but people won't pay attention.  It’s like dealing with a puppy — you point but all the puppy will look at is your finger.

Cuts Wood School in Browning has had this problem from the beginning.  Nobody is as appealing as a primary grade Blackft kid with braids, bright eyes, round cheeks, a busy mind . . .  you know.  So people come hoping to make particular friends with their own little pet Blackft, but in the days when Darrell Kipp was there, he was so fascinating that they forgot even about the little kid they’d had on their lap, and instead began to burrow into Darrell, asking questions about his private life, trying to be his one, his only, his most precious friend.

Darrell Kipp

Then Dorothy Still Smoking would say,  “Just leave the check on the windowsill.”  To be frank, it could be a form of whoring, unless the person really came through and really did learn in order to understand, to look at what they were pointed at.  Children are not keepsakes.

The same thing used to happen with Bob Scriver.  People came and looked at the sculpture to see if it were popular and would reflect well on them, but soon their radar locked onto Bob and like guided missiles they were in his home, yearning to be in his bed.  I resented that, since I was already there.  In fact, a marriage can be destroyed that way.  

Bob always wanted to take every animal he liked into the family bed.  Even patron ladies — I always wondered about a few of the men.  I told him if he tried to bring his beloved horse into the bed, that was a deal-breaker.  But these are cultural jokes (rather nasty ones) that assume everyone always wants sex with important people and even if that were true, it distracts from analyzing the true psychic dynamics.

Bob Scriver and George Montgomery

It’s particularly strange that the middle-class people of Montana claim a special relationship with Charlie Russell even though he’s known to have been sterilized by syphillis which his wife shared, that all his life he consorted with prostitutes, children, and Indians, drunk or not, and came from a perfectly respectable and rather prosperous family in the MidWest where he had a close relationship with his grandmother.  Anyone who attempts to write an honest biography (Taliaferro, for instance) will be excommunicated because the SELLING is that he was a gentle, kind, virtuous old man who just painted things that they pretended he had seen (though he came AFTER the buffalo days).   How he loved his horse!  This leaves his wife to be the wicked one, if only for social climbing.

Not much out there about how Charlie’s work skyrocketed in price and popularity because his timing was right.  The resource exploiters needed to look sympathetic and middle-class art made them seem cultured.  (If you can tell what the figures in the picture actually are, it’s middle class.) They tried to imply they were equivalent to French impressionists and Italian old-masters, and they were sort of right.  It was a little like Caravaggio painting Christian situations featuring his own favorite bed mates (including a little boy) and selling the work to the Pope, who pretended not to notice anything but the purported subject.

There are well-known artists who have “worse” pasts: born in bordellos, child prostitutes, sleeping on both sides of the sheets and so on.  And that’s just the sex part which has always been hit or miss, fight or switch.  No one says anything about all that when selling to the middle-class righteous, but the info might be leaked quietly if it would enlist the sympathies of rich men with dubious pasts.  Besides sex, money participates in about the same patterns.

"Bacchus" by Caravaggio

People love arousal, CRAVE arousal, and nothing does the job as well as yearning, esp. yearning for something one can’t have.  But somehow — I think from being educated — I’ve grasped that the thing to do with yearning is not to find the artist and fuck him or her, but rather to look at where their finger is pointing: at their work, whatever it might be.  At what THEY yearn for.  Not always art.  And then to learn as much about it as you can.  Be your own lover.  You might be really good at it, creating masterpieces, contributing to the world.  Aside from that, to stand beside someone and see what they see is about as intimate as a human being can get.  Physical arousal is easy.  You can buy equipment.  But emotional/
intellectual shared arousal can be ecstatic to the point of merger for a lifetime.

I don’t go to the Russell auction anymore.  The people I knew are all dead or don’t go either.  The publicity is not enticing:  how much money was made, who topped whom.  Nothing about the actual art.  But I remember one morning when I did go.  I was having breakfast in the motel coffee shop because I’d left Valier very early.  The auction is held in a rather grand motel with a huge space in the middle and a swimming pool indoors.  The motel takes all the room furniture out and stores it in trucks.  Then the artists bring in stands and screens for the art and sell from the rooms.  (After the auction when the rooms are empty it’s a good chance to shampoo the carpets.)

In the café an obviously upper-income woman sat down in the next banquette and we exchanged pleasantries.  Then she asked me if I knew any good places to visit, because she had been there so many times that she’d seen all the museums, galleries, locations, and phenomena and she was bored.  I suggested that she go to the college and ask a geologist about the area, or go to the nearest Native American center or senior citizen center and spend some time visiting with them.  I suggested that she buy a cheap paint set and try her hand at portraying the buttes near town that Charlie painted.  I thought she could inquire at a ranch supply place about persons who would let her ride horses with them.  Etc.  She rejected all my ideas.  She wanted something upscale she could go watch and then claim she had crossed off her bucket list, as though she would ever do anything so vulgar as to carry a bucket.  Then she saw a celebrity, excused herself and hurried over to court him.

It was the same pattern in the ministry.  No one wanted the content of the thought — they all wanted the special inclusion in the inner circle, the most beloved, the disciples — except it never occurred to them that disciples have duties.  I never considered it pleasant to have such acolytes.  I always worried that they’ll want to oil my feet with their hair.

DARRELL ROBES KIPP

Darrell Robes Kipp

The phenomenon of the reading Indian is one I’ve never seen described.  Usually the readers are women, mixed blood or cross tribal, the product of parents who did well at Haskell or American Indian Art Institute (AIAI).  Sometimes they are male gays who have somehow managed to escape from the macho-styled booze and swagger micro-culture version of the mainstream.  Earlier they were veterans who were exposed to the paperback practice of reading-while-waiting.  And then there were the political movers-and-shakers who flew back and forth across the continent, trying to bring change but in the end mostly reinforcing status quo. There was plenty of time to read.

Poverty discourages reading, both because libraries in poor places are poorly stocked and usually run by overprotective white women and because no families can afford to buy books.  Once when I was relatively affluent, I sent books by the Native American Renaissance writers (most of whom began as readers) to the library of a rez school.  That summer I came by to say hello and the librarian thanked me.  I didn’t see the books on the shelf.  She had locked them up because “they’ll only steal them anyway.”  Darrell Kipp’s response was, “Wonderful!  They WANT them!  Let’s give each kid a whole shelf of books!”)

When I had taught there, I posted big maps of the rez and kept out on a counter a very large atlas of the world.  There was almost always a kid trailing his or her finger along the names and lines.  That was reading.  We composed a story about ourselves, “One Windy Day,” and everyone read it.  The ones who couldn’t read got someone to read it to them.  I ordered enough copies of “The Old North Trail” for a class to read together and gave them time to do it.  Each chapter had a puzzle question sheet asking for details to be written inside circles or as lists or under little sketches.  The girls and the readers did it easily, but some had to ask for them to tell the answers.  They did and I didn’t prevent that, because the non-readers remembered the answers, which was the point.

All persons' circle

Darrell Kipp was a reading Indian and the conventional expectation was that he would write a book, but the only one that got “published” was a small stapled book that a benefactor created out of his talks.  She paid to have boxes of them made but didn’t market them.  Darrell gave them away to people who appreciated them.  http://www.pieganinstitute.org/renewingways.html  You could download most of it at this url.  Rather than books, Piegan Institute created videos. http://itvs.org/films/summer-sun-winter-moon  This one was an opera with a libretto by Darrell and music by Rob Kapilow.

Darrell wrote all the time, long impeccably-typed letters about his doin’s that he mailed from around the country.  (There was no Internet.)  He was known as a poet, but I don’t remember seeing any poems.  He sent the beginnings of a novel once but it was ambiguous and a little menacing -- not about Indians at all, very different from the letters.  I didn’t know what to say.

Shirlee Crowshoe

When Darrell died -- all of a sudden and without a diagnosis for a long time though he faithfully attended the “man clinic” at the Indian Hospital -- I searched for his letters and mag clips and put them into red 3-ring binders along with the bits I’d written about him and his work, which includes Cuts Wood School, Piegan Institute, a summer series of August lectures.  He did not work alone but with a loose assemblage of changing people.  Dorothy Still Smoking was the original impetus, Ed Little Plume was the Blackfeet language expert (not just knowing the words but pronouncing them beautifully), and Bill Grant, an architect from back east with roots here, designed buildings both classic and functional.  Rosalyn LaPier brought in academic skills.  Shirley Crowshoe was an endless and dependable supply of information. There were many more whom I can’t name, and a cloud of kids who included some who stand out in every crowd.  I’m confident that they will be productive, maybe not by writing.

The problem now is what to do with these binders.  Darrell’s family will have a huge body of documents to deal with.  They are college-educated and worldly, but they have political and confidentiality issues to deal with.  He had kept journals since high school, by the end enough of them to fill a suitcase.  I never saw them, but he told me about them and I pressed him hard to find an institutional final home for them so that scholars could use them, but I’m no longer confident about ANY institutions being safe protectors.

I could just hoard my dozen binders.  I could try to publish parts, but that would raise copyright issues.  Publishing is dead.  Anyway, how arrogant is it for a white woman to come along and just capture a Blackfeet man’s work, even believing it’s for his benefit and the benefit of others?  I have no degree in Indian Studies.  Aren’t only Indians supposed to write about Indians?

Darrell’s mom was part of a little circle of Blackfeet women who had done well in school and became officer workers employed by various Indian-based governmental offices and agencies.  They had a steady income and shared resources in emergencies.  His father worked for the railroad.  His best friend at graduation was Joe Fisher.  I never did know why the Fisher brothers had educations beyond the norm.  Probably they were trained in WWII.  They were engineers working locally.  Jim Fisher was the Browning school system engineer. I don’t quite know what Emerson did.  

After military service in Korea, Darrell and his friend got the idea they should go to college and to them that meant Eastern Montana in Billings.  They simply presented themselves and in those days all high school graduates could go to college.  They had no idea where they would live or how they would pay their way, but the college was up to the problem and got them located and employed.

http://www.turtletrack.org/Issues15/CO08_2015/CO_0815_RevitalizingLanguage_Video.htm

At the first summer vacation Darrell planned to hitchhike home -- this was the mid-Sixties -- but his roommate, son of a Great Falls lawyer, offered him a ride to his home.  This was his first taste of upper middle-class affluence and he never forgot.  Instead of having to thumb his way north to the rez, the roommate’s mother bought him a bus ticket.  (In those days there WAS a bus to Browning.)  The family remained his good friends.  This was the beginning of his interfacing between the poorest on the rez with the well-to-do in the cities.  Eventually he earned a degree from Harvard and also an MFA from Goddard.

I don’t want to just dump these red binders.  I might have time to condense them into something chronological or organized by topic.  But what if I don’t?  Who can I trust?  Who would benefit?  Should I put them in with the archives of Piegan Institute?  Do they belong to an account of Blackfeet insight and progress, or ought they to be part of mainstream dialogue?

How he loved to joke!

Dialogue was the real connection between Darrell and me.  Sometimes he got a letter from me, but more likely I stopped by or ran into him on the street and we talked and talked and talked.  Blackfeet is an oral culture, meant to be face-to-face.  I’ll write about the Blackfeet language revival later.  Is culture meant to adapt, to be personal, to begin on the street, to be full of intimacy and challenge?  Is it meant to die bit by bit as tribes do, so as to make room for the future?  In the beginning the People were afraid to learn their own language because their conquerers punished them for it.  It took courage to shake that off, to stop expecting a blow to the head.   Now they INSIST on learning the language.  Even white people know a few words. It's romantic and politically correct.

But the real recovery has been the ideas under the words.  They are stored in the land, pushing up like grass through the old lumber of the past.  That’s great.  Now what do I do with these red binders?

On this blog I wrote about Darrell on November 23, 2013.

JUSTIN MANY FINGERS: KAINAI

Justin Many Fingers

Narcisse Blood was killed in a car accident not long ago.  He was a center post for many innovations and creations and it has taken a while for people to begin to pick up the threads and begin again.  Justin Many Fingers is a performance artist and dancer from the Blood Reserve of the Kainai, north of Montana in Alberta.  It is a place that has been sheltered from whites, which has protected the aboriginal heritage but also given the People a secure base from which to operate in the larger world.  Justin is an example of that.

Another factor is readiness to work with worldwide indigenous peoples.  Darrell Kipp, also gone now, was much empowered by this force since the Hawaiians and the New Zealand Maori had done a lot of work with language restoration and were happy to share.  I first met Narcisse at a Piegan Institute sponsored conference.  These People are “reconciliation” People who wish to preserve and energize the old ways, but not punish the present.  Inclusion and transformation are the values.

Beverly's book is key.  (This is an historic photo -- not Beverly.)

Justin appeared at the Valier library with a posse of Blackfoot folks that included Beverly Hungry Wolf whom I know from the Sixties when she was married to Adolf Hungry Wolf.  Their daughter Star had recommended that they stop on a research visit to the location of the “Baker Massacre.”  The couple raised their children 19th century style in a log cabin with a creek for a water source and a photovoltaic sheet for electricity to run Adolf’s laptop.  Their children, now adult, have moved on to good jobs in the cities.  The Hungry Wolfs divorced and Beverly is remarried, teaching at one of the tribal colleges.  Everything moves on.

Justin Many Fingers

Justin has been active in many contexts and now is about to take on management duties.  This is his self-description on “Linked-in”:

“I’m 28 years 5 months.  My address is my suitcase and a back pack.

I live for the arts, as long as I have food in my tummy, a pillow under my head, and a studio to create, I'm all good. 

“I love traveling and making new friends and family.

“I am I bit crazy because I like to live life without any limitations, I live to push beyond them.”

Troy Emery Twigg and Cherish Violet Blood were with this group.  They had worked together on a production called “Making Treaty 7,” a previous key work.  (Treaty 7 is the Canadian Blackfoot treaty.)  I’m quoting from the website, "makingtreaty7.com".

“The board and staff of Making Treaty 7 are deeply mourning the tragic loss of ELK SHADOW / PONA KO’TAKSI, also known as Michael Green, and MIDDLE BULL / TATSIKIISTAMIK, also known as Narcisse Blood.  Elk Shadow was the founder and visionary behind the Making Treaty 7 project.  We celebrate his commitment to a shared belief that “WE ARE ALL TREATY PEOPLE”.  We are committed to ensuring that his spirit will live on.  Elk Shadow, One of Long Vision, had no boundaries and could not see color.  He was an inspiration to everyone he touched.  “This is the most rewarding and electrified piece of art that I have ever created in over 30 years,” he told us, “and to have, through this process, through the Sundance, been blessed with a spiritual awakening is a gift I could never have expected.”  Middle Bull was the Cultural and Spiritual Advisor to Making Treaty 7.  He was the Grandfather to the cast and crew;  he was the walking encyclopedia of our language, our culture and our history.  Together, Middle Bull and Elk Shadow brought First Nations and non-First Nations together.  They were the heart and soul of Making Treaty 7.  Narcisse will be truly missed within our spiritual circles.”

From "Wisakedjak"

Justin played the historical character Champlain in a production called Wisakedjak, which “is not just entertainment, it is the embodiment of sacred teachings.”  “To get to the essence of this half human, half spirit being, whose escapades  have been passed on through an oral and nomadic tradition, is like being played by the trickster himself. He is a shapeshifter, the original rebel without a cause, a stranger in a strange land, the manifestation of our hubris as well as its antidote.”

In terms of comparative religion, Wisakedjak is NOT Napi or Jesus or Starboy, but he occupies the same niche as an interlocutor between realms, including those of cultures. Champlain with his 17th century big hat, long jacket, and writing plume is clueless. (For more, go to “Troutinplaid.com.”)

As clueless as the drunken Major Baker of the US Cavalry who bore down on the peace camp of HeavyRunner and massacred women, old people, and children -- the men had gone to hunt.  One can read similar stories in the newspaper every day, but the people -- who are roughly the same color as American indigenous folks -- are in Eurasia.  Carol Murray, local Blackfeet historian, was the guide.  For many years since the location of the camp she and her husband, John, have organized annual commemorations.  If the road is passable, that is, since it happened in the middle of winter.

Baker Massacre commemoration on site

There are many accounts, some written and many more told by survivors only in their families.  There was great fear of retaliation on both sides.  In fact, it was used to justify the suppression of ceremonies, the language, and newly forming organizations of every kind, including the young educated men who wanted only discussion of ideas.

Carol Murray, Amskapi Pikuni

Now the discussion can happen freely and this group is leading it.  So much is just beneath the surface if we aren’t afraid to access it.  Canada has been much better about funding and supporting the arts and they are the better for it.  Many of our best Native American actors, like Graham Greene and Tantoo Cardinal were trained by Canadian companies.  They have resisted the commercialized entitlement wars that try to “own” cultures, wasting energy on suppressing others, American style.

Justin dancing in Iitahpoyii

Iitahpoyii de Troy Emery Twigg @ Studio 303  on Vimeo.  This is Justin dancing on vid.  I hope you can find it.  Yosemite hides links, at least from me.  vimeo.com › Studio 303 › Studio 303’s VideosVimeo

THE EVOLUTION OF BRAINS

This is continuing comment on “The 10,000 Year Explosion”.

Cochran and Harpening did a brave, dangerous thing.  It had two steps.  The first one was to point out that mutation and evolution, which go hand in hand, are a changing code flow that make bodies change, including the brain.  That is, people today think in a different way that they did only centuries ago or in different environments because their brains have evolved but the same cells evolve differently when challenged by different tasks.  We think about this when we say that kids’ attention spans are shorter but more of them have an ability to see patterns quickly -- both of which we attribute to the impact of the internet.  

We do not think of “thinking” as anything concrete, but as a kind of vapor that hangs in a thought bubble over our heads.  But “thinking” is X and O, electrochemical charges, molecules and blood flows -- very real.  Its codes and functions change.  They say there are over 200 different KINDS of neurons, each specializing in some certain information.

With that insight in place (one hopes) the second step was to study a specific population, assert that it has demonstrably evolved differently than the surrounding population because of stigma and oppression or restrictions, and then describe specifically what became different and why.  They chose  Ashkenazi Jews to study.  Probably they could not have done that in an Ivy League university, but they were working in Utah.  This meant NOT studying Mormons who practice polygamy.  Maybe they haven’t evolved.   Or maybe they HAVE. (Jokes.)

Most Americans are not aware of the subdivisions of the Jewish population over the millennia or what has happened to them.  The subdivision called Ashkenazi (meaning German) Jews were practicing Judaism and identifying with it in Germany, but barred from the main culture and, anyway, compelled by their beliefs to marry within their faith community.  The result was that by 1800 they were small group who specialized in finances because Christians are supposed to avoid usury (that’s the theory, anyway).  

Such work does not make the world love Jews running banks, but it DOES make those peoples' IQ’s go up, because success is predicated on handling complex transactions and lots of math and theory.  A magazine length version of this reasoning is in the Journal of Biosocial Science 38, no.5 (2005): 659-693.  The article by the same two men is called “Natural History of Ashkenazie Intelligence.”  

I recommend this whole book, esp. for Valier since it talks a lot about how brains developed to handle agriculture, particularly crops but also pastoral herding, much helped by a mutation that allowed milk and other dairy products as a source of food.  It knocked out the enzyme that made people lactose intolerant.  Good nutrition means good functioning, no matter the creature.  Belgians carried lactose tolerance and other traits good for agriculture to the early immigrants to Valier.

The dark side of the Ashkenazi evolution, which through bottlenecks caused the survival of “smart” people, was that the same mutations (there were several) that made them smarter also carried along -- if there were not quite the right changes in the right amounts -- deadly diseases.  Mostly the mutations had to do with the dendrites of brain cells proliferating (involving fats).  These changes were detectable by 1800.  Below normal dendrite numbers meant below normal intelligence.  The right number within a narrow spectrum meant high intelligence as expressed in IQ.  (I have a lot of quarrels with IQ.)  Too many dendrites meant disease and early death.  They do not have children.

Since the many other populations of practitioners of Judaism -- those not Ashkenazi who are from other world populations -- have gathered in Israel, and since Europe and North America had mostly stopped resenting Jews so much after the Holocaust (until now), intermarriage has lessened this curse/blessing.  WWII didn’t just murder many Jews, but also drove many of the smartest and most accomplished people into enclaves like Manhattan, where they were impressively high achievers.  But there are still people who when they have hardships will look for someone to blame -- they still focus on Jews and immigrants.  I have no answers for that.

I have a special interest in two populations: Blackfeet and the Smash Street Boys.  Both have been confined and stigmatized, the originally hunter/gatherer Blackfeet tribe for about as long as Jews have been changing in the US.  The traits that were encouraged until after the horse arrived have not been helpful today, but the transition to the new world is happening, with the help of Metis and tribes who were traders, like the Mandan genome that helped the original Joe Kipp make deals and build forts.  

Joe Kipp

The Smash Street Boys time span is way too short for actual DNA mutations that are consistent, though they are under enormous molecular pressure both from the HIV in their cells and the violent meds in their blood streams.  Nevertheless, one can speculate, particularly in terms of the epigenome, which is a sort of molecular annotation of the four gene elements.  But their sources are multiple and each boy is too unique for anyone to suspect a bad seed gene.  There is no such thing anyway, since no gene can be expressed without an environment.  The universal environment for the boys is unstable and punishing families.  Poverty, bad mental health, lack of nutrition and shelter -- the “bad seed” is really a toxic seed bed or as one playwright has it "A Chalk Garden".

What’s intriguing is that both Blackfeet and SSB are natural artists and, as well, take to the cyberworld like ducks discovering ponds.  Nor are they afraid to stick their heads down into the muck.  They know muck.  They do not sit paralyzed in front of a keyboard but at once begin to explore.  If their internal heads were watched via fMRI, the paisley patterns of the connectome and its underlying blood flow would be urgent and various.  Of course, head phones would be necessary to fortify the brain waves with a beat.

I don’t think IQ tests can pick up such things.  IQ tests only identify those who do well on IQ tests, which correlates pretty well with good grades in schools.  We are now calling into question the efficacy of stair-stepped schools, the constant sorting according to previous assumptions and expectations.  This system, which worked pretty well a century ago, might be creating the wrong kind of people. Or at least brain mutations perpetuated by the wrong kind of environment.

Darrell Kipp, founder and director of the Piegan Institute and

Cuts Wood Immersion Blackfeet School.

DARRELL KIPP'S FUNERAL MASS

The day dawned clear and golden with dry highways.  On the way to Browning a coyote crossed the road, searching the willow brush along Two Med creek.  A golden eagle -- I am not making this up -- flew along with me for a few miles at Antenna Hill and, just before I got to Browning, a raven was lingering along the way.  In Browning the dog people -- all of them variations on huskies and shepherds if not wolves -- rushed out to challenge my little pickiup and then finally a Newfoundland the same size as the vehicle.  The rest of the animal life was the same old groups of cows and horses.

Near Cuts Wood School, where Darrell’s body had been through Sunday, cars were everywhere, some of them probably parked overnight after the Nanamska (Bundle Keepers) ceremonies on Sunday that GG Kipp guided.  The Catholic mass was scheduled for eleven AM but people were taking seats by ten AM.  The basement held a megascreen relay for the overflow.  

I sat in my usual place: the back pew.  On one side was Sandra Watts, tribal attorney who got her law education in Oregon with my cousins' husbands, and on the other was an extremely ancient woman who explained that her name was “Bubbles” by pantomiming the juggling of balloon-sized bubbles.  In front of me was Dorothy Still Smoking, who teamed with Darrell to create the Piegan Institute, even kept Darrell moving through some tough times.  (He was not the only one with ideas.)  And on the other hand, Donna Douglas (I don’t know her married name), the cheerful and competent granddaughter of Vina Chattin for whom one of the elementary schools is named.  Donna’s hair is white now, but she does not dye it fire-engine red as her grandmother did.

King Kuka’s Roualt-style chunked-stained-glass Stations of the Cross glowed dramatically in the bright sun, tinting the people primary colors.  We were startled to realize that one young woman with green hair that we assumed was stained by colored light, really DID have green hair!  Most of the people were adults.  Maybe the babies were downstairs.  

Many boys, some pre-teens, all dignified, scrubbed, braided and attentive, were standing to spare more seats for older folks.  A few of them were drummers for an honor song.  I suspect they all had close ties to Cuts Wood School, all devoted to Darrell Kipp if not related.  (Darrell always joked Kipps were numerous as tin cans on the landscape.)  They acted as orderlies in the ceremony, bringing forward the wine and  communion wafers.

Father Ed had an emotionally tough job because over the past years Darrell and his wife, Roberta, had become more and more closely dedicated to church matters, a support to this priest who once lamented,  “I came here hoping to lead the people to renewal and instead all I do is bury teenagers.”  Today he commemorated a 69-year-old man who had cut trail for decades, renewal after renewal.  At many points in Darrell’s life he barely squeaked through, but very few people had much awareness of that.  He used a quiet network of people he thought of as educated and aware, as well as several circles of people who were great jokers, sometimes in rough ways. 

Charlie Farmer, for instance, visited Darrell in hospital during the last days, pretending to ask to inherit his pickup.  When Darrell improved a few days later, Charlie pretended to be disappointed that he would have to give the pickup back.  Darrell used Charlie as a kind of lieutenant and co-conspirator, giving him various titles and responsibilities.  There was a swimming pool they could see from the original Moccasin Flats school but it was full of blown-in dirt and a couple of dead dogs.  Charlie nagged to re-activate it until finally they hired a backhoe, gave the dogs proper burial (since all Browning dogs are enrolled in the tribe), and brought in a squad of boys with borrowed shovels to shift the dirt out from corners.  In their practical nepotistic way, they hired a couple of Kipps who could swim to be lifeguards and called a plumber to see about water.  (Alas, no Kipp is a plumber.) 

The water treatment shed turned out to have been used to store 200 pounds of “Cap’n Crunch” breakfast food that had been donated by the company because the boxes were mislabeled.  (One of Darrell’s peeves was the practice of giving aged-out, broken, useless things in “charity.”  Another of the stories about him was that once when he went to Blackfeet Community College to teach, he found most of the desks damaged -- they had been that way for months -- and simply pitched them all out the door.)  Charlie finally gave the Cap’n Crunch to Vic Connelly and the rumor was that he used it to wean his calves.  They act as though they’re on a sugar high anyway.  Charlie talked a long time, telling one story after another. 

The second speaker was a man from the Flathead whom I didn’t know.  He was a fine speaker and part of the global academic context.  Hawaiian indigenous language speakers were deeply involved with Piegan Institute.  Over and over they reassured Cuts Wood teachers faced with crisis that they had confronted the same thing and told them what would work.  One of the recurrent problems was people who tried to exploit the school for their own uses and even poisoned relationships.  The Hawaiians said,  “Be tough.  Throw ‘em out!”  So they did.   Jim Thorpe’s daughter was an advisor.  The Canadian Blackfoot people were vital, esp. Shirley Crow Shoe.

Darrell’s father was a hard worker on the railroad who in advanced age sat by the window all day looking at the Rockies.   Darrell wrote a poem about it.  When he was a soldier in Korea, he used his free time to learn Korean and startled a South Korean trade group that came to visit the rez by greeting them in their language.  Words were his weapons.  Make that “tools.”

Mothers, esp. ones mindful of massacre and world war, tend to spoil their sons in order to keep them close and safe. Darrell broke away early, but then in late adulthood came back to help his parents.  He promised he would never put his mother in a nursing home and he didn’t.  Roberta and he talked for a long time to understand what they were doing, which was one of the secrets of their success as a relationship.  Both took care of their parents right up to death.  Darrell never made a secret of his three brothers who died of alcoholism and violence.  Donald remains, the lone brother.  Geraldine, his quiet conscientious sister, was the office manager at Cuts Wood.  There was never a pretense that Piegan Institute was federal or tribal, neither in terms of funding or of control.

Darren is following that pattern.  He has all the legal control and training experience he needs to keep the school operating.  The restraint and equanimity may be a little harder to come by for a young man who succeeded in keeping himself separate from a powerful father by becoming a videographer in his own right.  Roberta is relatively young, still beautiful, and has a strong support group she earned as her own when she formed a study circle focused on earning distance-learning master’s degrees.  They'll be okay.

At one time Darrell had a commune-style fantasy about all his beloved friends and family living in an old-time village where they could visit each other in the classic sit-by-the-fire way to smoke and drink a little.  This picture didn’t include movie stars or Montana big shots and I didn’t spot any at the Mass.  We don’t need them.

The thing of it is, Darrell just doesn’t feel dead.  I found myself talking to him as I drove back across the dun fields.  The railroad was pausing for some reason -- first a string of coal cars, then a string of oil tankers, and finally a line of Christmas presents from China.   The frozen sloughs along the road show extra-tall muskrat midden-houses.  The waterfowl have gone on ahead. It will be years, if ever, for those who knew Darrell to stop turning, expecting to see him right alongside.

Tom Saubert is the artist.