"HOW, TALL MAN?"

Wide Trump with Tall Comey

In the Sixties one of the people who often dropped in at Scriver Studio to gossip and take a little break from selling or inspecting or advising — whatever — there was a big man with a booming voice who loved to break up the monotony of his sales route by coming into a business where he wasn’t known and demanding,  “Who here called for the FBI?”  People immediately assumed he WAS the FBI and hurried around to help him.  He said he could even demand to see their financial books and they would comply, intimidated and probably guilty of something.

By the time Wounded Knee II rolled around in 1973, I was leaving the rez.  By then the image of the FBI was something like Mormon missionary teams, “suits” with shined shoes and stony faces.  They were scary and not on the side of the People.  Even Bob, who disliked authority figures of all kinds, had a tendency to turn to them for information and help in this paranoid time, and they loved to fan the flames, literally.  When some years later the shop was on fire in the night, they assured him it was AIM (the American Indian Movement) who were the arsonists.  It turned out that the cause was fumes from the underground gas tank belonging to an abandoned service station on the block, accumulated through broken sewer pipes into the dark room of the studio and ignited by the water heater.  But the fumes of paranoia were worse.  Bob never recovered.

It’s realistic to say that today’s FBI director, James Comey, is head and shoulders above others.  He is resolute and careful enough to begin to erase the image of J.Edgar Hoover in a red ruffled party dress, calling himself “Mary.”  He is righteous about the persecution of MLK, Jr.  and young enough to be my son.  (He was born in 1960, when I was at NU, earning a BS.).  In 1982, he was just about to enroll at the U of Chicago Law School where I was transcribing professor’s materials, using very early computer “stations” with a big industrial hard drive some mysterious place.  Few professors could operate their own work stations, and we were told to ignore the sounds of “Asteroids” coming from offices, because it was the way they learned to use computer programs.  The internet was not known.

I didn’t know Comey, but I knew some of his professors.  Scalia was still there and sometimes I delivered his mail, but I never transcribed his writing.  Sometimes big handsome men would appear from some outfit like the Rand Corporation and demand help.  Everyone was very conscious of their own importance.  I never met anyone there who knew anything about “Indians.” nor who ever said anything about Wounded Knee II.  In fact, I never met an anthropologist on the U of C campus, not even Victor Turner.

What I’m getting at is that the suits we’re watching on the news are so important that they only deal with other suits.  That means they are ignoring the big picture, the back country, the exceptions and exemptions, the sorrow and the suffering.  These people are from a writing culture, guided by documents.  The exception in the example of the crisis of the moment is that Trump is an oral culture guy, a face-to-face guy.  He plays to the audience.  

The composite accumulations of video moments have impressed me greatly, particularly the one of Trump’s handshakes with people of all kinds.  He pushes them back, he yanks them forward, he squeezes, he evades, he ignores, he pats.  So far the only exception is Trudeau who took Trump firmly by his handshake arm.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/10/investigating-president-trumps-weird-habit-of-yanking-peoples-hands-in-photo-ops/?utm_term=.52b25b98f1c9

It’s enough to make a person want to back off to give a dignified bow or maybe hold up a hand like a movie “Indian” or like Keith Olbermann, Trump’s pursuer on Twitter.  Trump wouldn’t know an “Indian” if he sat on an arrow and he would be easy to scalp: a good yank ought to do it.  But it wouldn’t be much of a decoration on a warshirt.  His own suits flap in the breeze, partly because he’s gaining weight and partly because he feels the heat in that bulky body.

I’m mocking, I’m undignified, I’m using my own life path to claim something, and I’m just sort of heartsick about the whole mess.  It’s all blackened pots and kettles, but no stainless steel.  Unless Comey comes through.  He might.  If he manages this with as much grace and grit as he has shown so far, that will be a beginning in changing a culture of the FBI that’s based on bravado and old movies, the urban pursuit of immigrant gangsters.

Maybe he’ll be able to begin turning things around on reservations where the FBI has jurisdiction over what used to be the “ten major crimes” with murder at the top of the list.  https://leb.fbi.gov/2012/may/indian-country-and-the-tribal-law-and-order-act-of-2010  Praiseworthy attempts have been made to bring the duties up to date from what originated as U.S. Cavalry attempts to keep order among a “foreign” conquered people.  Today the reservations struggle to maintain both casinos and colleges and to resist drugs, which often originate in Mexico with “Indios” who can “pass” on a rez.

Arguably much worse, somehow the mostly male suits of the FBI seem blind to the murders of indigenous women and children by outsiders, particularly when the tribal people are off the reservation and possibly trafficked.  The white culture, especially on the super-conservative mad-dog red-neck end, has the idea that “squaws” and “bucks” are fair game, something like “slopes” and “ragheads.”  These lowlifes are such a slimeball faction of the country that one can hardly bear to think about them.  The FBI’s response seems to have been pulling away.  The main office that used to be in Butte is now in Denver.

The legit media is mostly just unaware and baffled.  Sensational media actively feeds on this stuff.  Respectable middle-class tribal people don’t know what to do, but their children watch the vids, play the games, get the ideas into their systems.  This is subversive.

It’s WORSE in Russia, but not different in kind and dynamics.  It has risen like an oil spill tide until it has come up the Potomac, up the shores of Manhattan, into all our lives.  Even tall Comey will be overwhelmed unless the citizens of all kinds get behind him.  Without the bluster and fakery of Trump the salesman.

INTERESTING TIMES ON THE REZ BORDER

We have an “interesting” situation here on the interface 3-way interface (rez/county/fed) with the Blackfeet reservation but before I address it I want to tell two stories.

http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/04/041121.gilkey.shtml

The first one is from “Shantung Compound” by Langdon Gilkey, one of my most brilliant and inspirational professors at the U of C Div School.  Gilkey was a colorful guy who wore a necklace and bandanna instead of a tie and ran class by sitting on his desk, inviting us to suggest a topic on which he could riff.  He wrote quite a few books, but “Shantung Compound” was about being interned by the Japanese at the beginning of WWII.  He was a young man at that point, not quite as young as in the movie, “Empire of the Sun”.  Most of the Westerners who had been rounded up were missionaries, and some of the stories were about the conflict between the different styles and assumptions.  His fav group was the Trappist monks, whose worst suffering came from being unable to achieve solitude in the camp, but whose strength was their solidarity.  If the Japanese demanded that offenders step forward, the whole group would step forward to accept punishment.  Because they tended to be big guys in identical robes with full beards and long hair, the Japanese couldn’t tell them apart, so this foiled all attempts to divide and conquer.

The conservative Protestants were interned as family units and the often aggressive parents put their family well-being ahead of even their Christian principles.  The camp was ruled by a committee of intern representatives, one of whose duties was the allocation of resources.  The most precious of these was space.  At some point it became necessary to shrink the spaces allotted to the families, but the policy was so ferociously opposed that the committee could not make the families comply.  In the end they had to resort to getting the Japanese guards to come with guns to force the families to obey.

The second story was told to me by the daughter of a white Browning school administrator deep in the past. I ran into her in Portland twenty years ago, so I may have the details wrong. In those days the administrators (principals and superintendent, both white and enrolled) did their drinking in Valier, which had bars then.  They were adult male entitled people who drank together to show solidarity.  It’s a status marker, a way to be seen publicly as a unit and to blow off steam in enough of a group to be relatively safe. Like a cop bar.

But the father of the woman who told me this story didn’t like to drink, didn’t want to be out at night, and liked time with his family.  So he refused to join the group.  They didn’t like this, so after they got pretty well lubricated, they piled into a car and went up to this administrator’s house to make him come drink with them.  He wouldn’t even open the door.  So they began to pelt the house with rocks, eventually smashing the big picture window in front.  That sobered them up enough to scatter.  How this was finally resolved is unknown to me, but it stayed in my head as a good example of pack behavior.  I know the people involved, and they are decent human beings.  But they didn’t like anyone getting out of line.

So now let’s talk about Shannon Augare.  I don’t know Shannon.  I knew Calvin Augare, who might be his uncle, and who was Bob Scriver’s hunting buddy, the man who saved Bob from going blind by forcing IHS to look at Bob’s enflamed eye and then driving him to Great Falls to a specialist.  He was a man of principle who insisted on results, so that’s the way I think of Shannon.  The deal was that a Cut Bank cop followed Shannon from a bar to  the reservation, pulled him over, accused him of being drunk, argued and reached into the car for the keys, which caused Augare to drive off.  He was served a citation the next day.

We’ve got several “third-rail” issues in this situation:  one is drunk driving and another is law enforcement on reservations.  People die in car accidents a LOT -- often by colliding with livestock.  There are also many violent incidents on the rez, often against women or even children.  The FBI sort of waves the cases on.  The newspaper stories -- which always have a sensationalist tilt anyway -- testify that this is a place and time that is having a hard time re-aligning laws, perps and victims.  Shannon is both a state senator and on the tribal council, which means in some minds he is presumed to have too much power.  An enduring Blackfeet sin is “getting the big head.”  Montana feels that way, too, except for recent immigrants.

Shannon Augare had previously been involved in one of those strategy blockades in the state senate, foiling a planned vote by not showing up.  (He’s a D, Cut Bank is R.  He's either culprit or rescuer, depending on which side you favor.)  I went to look at the drinking “hole” in Cut Bank, which is in the middle of town and newly redecorated, probably benefitting from the renewed oil-drilling action, maybe a half-mile from the rez -- the dividing river is at the edge of town.  It is not a big town.   I did a walk-through before business started because the last time I was in a Cut Bank bar was 1962, the height of oil-drilling action, and it was a very unpleasant experience.  Cut Bank is an oil town and a reservation vampire.  They are not friendly to reservation law enforcement and would love to see some fancy Blackfeet “suits” brought down to what might be considered their proper status, according to Texas immigrants with images of John Wayne dancing in their heads.  I don’t suppose the rez cops are very fond of oil roughnecks.

MONTANA FREEDOM CAMPAIGN REPORT CARD

Looks good from my point of view -- just turn it upside down.

Of course, it was stupid and self-deceiving for Augare to think that he could step out of line in any way, even if his mother was with him, which she was.  And it was stupid of the local cop to pursue and attempt to detain Augare in a way that could easily have escalated into tragedy.  The cop had a partner with him and a video cam running which may have given him an exaggerated sense of authority.  But my guess is that he just wanted to nail Augare.  Every person on the scene was offending, enabling, and persecuting.  Very mixed.  

Then came the FBI, rubbing its hands together in anticipation.  It appears Carl Pepion called them in, setting up a competing triangle of motives and roles.  Essentially, he brought in guards to use their fire power to force compliance to what he considers the “right thing.”  (Carl is the Tribal Chief Prosecutor.)  Sharp, the tribal council chair, is sticking to the principle of sovereignty.  A body cannot be sovereign if it has to resort to the FBI, which originally was limited to ten major crimes (murder, rape, and others) but has managed to wiggle into many situations without really being on the scene: armchair analysts playing a long game with no skin in the game.  (see footnote)

I’m in Valier, adjacent to the rez.  We’re involved in all sorts of three-handed games, but so far the FBI has stayed out, though there is other Federal pressure.  Mostly we’re wrestling with infrastructure erosion versus economic issues, which are less violent but sometimes seem equally insoluble.  Water rights, for instance, are as much a sovereignty interface problem as who gets to pull over whom for drunk driving.  At least it’s not likely there will be a massacre like a hundred years ago when the cavalry was called in to show who was boss.  At least I hope not.  I don’t want to see blood, no matter the source or kind.

FOOTNOTE:

http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/law-enforcement-bulletin/may-2012/indian-country-and-the-tribal-law-and-order-act-of-2010

Indian Country and the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010By Michael J. Bulzomi, J.D.

“In 1885, Congress passed the Major Crimes Act to address the resolution of cases in which a crime involving two Native American parties occurs in Indian country. This Act established federal jurisdiction over seven crimes committed in these instances. The original seven covered by the Act include murder, manslaughter, rape, assault with intent to kill, arson, burglary, and larceny. Subsequent amendments to the Act have added seven more offenses: kidnapping, incest, assault with a dangerous weapon, assault resulting in serious bodily injury, assault with intent to commit rape, robbery, and felonious sexual molestation of a minor. “

This whole document is worth reading in regard to the Shannon Augare incident and the general background.