NATIVE AMERICANS IN HYDE PARK

When I attended Meadville/Lombard Theological School,  I knew it was purpose-built to be a Unitarian seminary, newly organized as a merged school in 1928,. At 57th and  Woodlawn in Hyde Park, all four corners were occupied by Unitarians -- the academic building, First Unitarian Church, three former grand houses used as student housing, and a fourth massive brick building that included the school kitchen, a crucial nucleus.  The first breach was war between two prominent men hired to be school leaders who got into a war. One fired the other, who then sued and was awarded the building with the kitchen. Most recently, much diminished, the school sold the buildings and moved to the Chicago "Loop" where they rent space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meadville_Lombard_Theological_School The Neubauer Consortium repurposed and renovated the building. I see this is a happy development.  Even so, I didn't expect the development of interest in Native Americans as in the announcement I copied below. While I attended, I had expected to study the "religions of Native Americans" but was surprised that there was no such offering.  In fact, most people had no consciousness of "Indians" beyond movies.  No one was analyzing the commonalities among the hundreds of variations due to ecosystems.  This redirected my interest into a much more primal investigation of the impulse towards the Holy.  The top floor of M/L was the hideout of Mircea Eliade so I nodded to him daily, but he was so popular that I was never in his classes. I settled for his invaluable books and use his thought constantly. But now I am surprised that the Neubauer is using my old familiar building to think about tribal peoples,  Though the Crow are not the same as the Blackfeet, at least they are in Montana.  Here's the announcement.  (I'm also a huge fan of the Field Museum. Newest Field Museum exhibition will highlight Native American women and warriors

Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society to host companion show. For many years, Native American communities weren’t given the opportunity to tell their own stories in museums. As a response to this, with respect to indigenous history, the Field Museum’s newest special exhibition will be the institution’s first large-scale exhibition curated by a Native American scholar in collaboration with their community. Apsáalooke Women and Warriors will open in March 2020 at the Field Museum in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, which will host a companion show. Both locations highlight the art and culture of the Apsáalooke (pronounced “Ahp-SAH-luh-guh”) people, also known as the Crow. Each site will feature historical and contemporary cultural material, from historic battle shields to high-end fashion designs, and will explore the powerful roles that women and warriors hold in the complex society of the Apsáalooke Nation, a living people, of the Northern Plains. “We are delighted to work with a prominent Apsáalooke scholar, Nina Sanders, as our guest curator, and with so many Apsáalooke artists and cultural teachers,” says Jaap Hoogstraten, Director of Exhibitions at the Field Museum, who is also overseeing renovations to the Field’s permanent Native North America Hall, slated to open in 2021. “The exhibition tells the stories of the historic journeys and spiritual quests of the Apsáalooke people—told from Apsáalooke points of view. By featuring items from Field Museum collections as well as newly created artworks, the exhibition will offer museum visitors fascinating and often unexpected entry points into these stories.” Apsáalooke Women and Warriors explores the history, values, and beliefs of this American Indian community known for their horsemanship, artistic pursuits, and matriarchal ways of life, and honors the tradition of “counting coup”—performing acts of bravery. Visitors at both sites will learn about Apsáalooke origins, cultural worldviews, and the powerful roles that both women and warriors hold in the community through a unique mix of traditional objects and contemporary Native American pieces from the perspective of guest curator Sanders. The Field will feature a total of 21 never-before-displayed Apsáalooke war shields from the museum’s collection, with seven on display at a time. Apsáalooke warriors made the war shields, while women were keepers of the shields. Visitors will have the ability to draw connections between the shield owners’ stories and the shields based on their craftsmanship and imagery. “The shields inspire us, they remind us that people have the ability to defy the laws of physics and change the course of nature and history. The shields represent superhuman potential and divine intervention,” says Sanders. Sanders is a descendant of one of the shields, meaning one of her ancestors made the shield. “The shields were used in and out of battle—every part of the shield manifests the needed supernatural aid required for the warrior to succeed and survive in battle. For example, you will see one with a hawk squirrel because the man might have needed the strength to move quickly through the forest, depending on their role in battle.” Along with the shields, the Field will also display horse regalia, a 9-foot-tall modern tipi, and over 20 works of contemporary art, including paintings, photography, unique beadwork, and high-end fashion. “It was important this project be truly collaborative and as inclusive as possible. From this the exhibition grew into an opportunity for both the Field and the University of Chicago to exhibit the shields, the artwork, and intellectual contributions of many Apsáalooke people,” says Sanders. “There are over 20 Apsáalooke contributors but we acknowledge that we cannot possibly represent each and every narrative and cultural belief system in our community. However, through a significant collaborative effort we can make a good impression on the Apsáalooke people, other Native Nations, and hopefully compel other institutions to reimagine collaborative exhibition-making.” Apsáalooke Women and Warriors also highlights Apsáalooke gender and a look into an egalitarian society. The three genders include bía (woman), bachee(í) (man), and batee (two-spirited). Apsáalooke women are the keepers and influencers of the Apsáalooke way of life. Women, as well as men, were allowed to choose their partners. Men are responsible for protecting the women so that they can carry on as life-givers, culture keepers, and foundation of the family and community. Sanders further explains, “In the community, people who identify as LGBTQ are considered two-spirited, imbued with the qualities and characteristics of all genders. We have many stories about exceptional batee people who counted coup or made beautiful works of art.” “When I became a curator of the North American Anthropology collection, a big part of my mission was to work with Native American artists and curators,” says the Field Museum’s Alaka Wali. “The cultural items in our collections are powerful—they are still living. Having representation from the communities who are part of the heritage is important because they can speak to the cultural materials and bring them to life in a way that we cannot.” The Neubauer Collegium’s exhibition, co-curated by Sanders and Neubauer Collegium Curator Dieter Roelstraete, presents the themes of the Apsáalooke Women and Warriorsexhibition in the context of a major research university. (Sanders and Wali are currently serving as Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellows.) The smaller, more intimate exhibition is ideal for distilling the themes and ideas encountered at the Field, taking visitors inside the domestic space of an Apsáalooke tipi through an immersive sculptural installation in the gallery. A shield loaned by the Field will be at the heart of this exhibition site, further emphasizing the central role of Apsáalooke women in their culture, both past and present. This site will also include two tipis positioned outside the gallery in the Collegium’s public spaces and several works of contemporary art and objects made by Apsáalooke artists. “A project of this importance and scale required close collaboration among a large group of people from the Field Museum, the University of Chicago, and, most importantly, the Apsáalooke community. I’m thrilled with the results, and I’m excited to share them with the public,” says Jonathan Lear, Roman Family Director at the Neubauer Collegium. “We properly consulted with the families and relatives of the items displayed in the show, and have taken this feedback to properly care for these ancestors,” says Meranda Roberts, a co-curator of the exhibition site at the Field Museum, postdoctoral researcher, and a person of Northern Paiute and Mexican-American heritage. “This collaboration is so important and will help shape ongoing renovations of our permanent Native North American Hall, and will set the precedent for other museums for how to work with the Native community.” Apsáalooke Women and Warriors will be presented in English and Spanish at the Field Museum, with select sections also in Apsáalooke, and will run through April 4, 2021. The Neubauer Collegium companion show, free and open to the public, will be presented in English and will close in August 2020. Entrance to the Field’s site will be included with an All-Access or Discovery pass to the Museum. Apsáalooke Women and Warriors is an exhibition jointly organized by the Field Museum and the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, opening at both sites in March 2020. Media contact: Mark Sorkin (718-290-7076)

COMPUTER DREAMS WAKE UP

While teaching in Heart Butte in 1990, I learned the most basic things about computers.  Even at that, I knew more than the administrators because I’d recently been a UU minister among city people who knew a lot of technology and they coached me.  So when Heart Butte fired me, I bought a Lisa -- a very early computer with a great big body and a little tiny screen, something like the first televisions in the Fifties.  I spent the summer struggling with it and in fall, when I went back to Portland, I took it along and plugged it in next to the washing machine in my mother’s basement.  That was the only 3-prong plug in the house.  It took eight months to find a new job and apartment, but it was claiming computer skills that got me the job as a clerical specialist for the City of Portland.  Soon I was trading up to a series of increasingly better computers.  Then I got to the point (MAC Mini running Yosemite) where I could see the tech stuff was excessive and backed off.  Recently I had to get an “Old Person’s Guide to Yosemite” to keep working.  To me, it's the writing, not the little tech tricks.

Back in my mother’s basement,  the internet was barely operating but a professor in Dillon, MT, was creating a little sub-web.  If you used the right protocol, quite complex, you could be messaging directly to the little teacher’s college.  Blackfeet were there.  The first time I got through, tears were running down my face because I was so homesick for Montana.  Incoherent and without much to say, but connected.  Pretty soon I was on Rez Net and gleeful.

Now I’ve been publishing on Blogspot.com since 2005 when I finished my biography of Bob Scriver, “Bronze Inside and Out.”  I’ve published 3496 entries on the blog, called “Prairiemary,” almost all of them 1,000 word essays on something that interests me.  It gets about 800 hits a day, and can top 1,000 if the subject is “hot.”  Today, when I just looked, since July my blog “prairiemary” has had these totals of different “hit sources” since July:   California 4,697; Montana 4,269; Washington 1,752; Oregon  1,077; New York  1,041.  Canada  3,003; United Kingdom  1,972; Germany  830;  Australia  678;  France  640.

"Bronze Inside and Out" by Mary Scriver

The University of Calgary Press printed 750 copies of “Bronze Inside and Out,” and so far they have not all sold.  If you go by money made, it’s pitiful, but typical of most books printed but not pushed.  It's the promotion that makes best-sellers.  If you go by the number of people who read my work, consider that by now 790,767 people have read my blog.  Yet, people who reflect on writing almost totally ignore blogs, even the grand versions with interpolations of video or even music.

I have a varying number of other more specialized blogs, maybe a dozen, and I only post on any one of them occasionally, like the newest one I call “Water Over the Dam” which is about Eastslope Irrigation.  It begins with “Snowball Earth” when ice covered the entire planet, before the glaciation events that shaped this land.  I pay very little attention to these peripheral blogs and am sometimes surprised when one accumulates a couple of thousand hits without me paying attention. 

Paul Seesequasis

But all this is kind of small compared to others and nowhere near the size needed to make money.  Facebook is so corrupt that I won’t go near it.  Google is also not trustworthy.   I use Twitter, in part because Blackfeet in both the US and Canada pop up.  Paul Seesequasis publishes old Indian photos there and since he often draws on the work of Thomas Magee or Walter McClintock,  many are pictures of Blackfeet on both sides of the “Medicine Line.”  Sometimes I even knew those old people, though they are from 1900 or a little later.   I was here in 1961.

In Valier there are several businesses that buy and sell over the Internet, not counting the big irrigation and construction companies.  In a place with dwindling traffic it could be a major source of growth, but many people here seem to think a computer is an instrument of Satan, maybe because their kids are so interested in using it to explore the Dark Side.  (The librarian monitors users and occasionally has to pull the plug on someone.  Once when I subbed at the school, I challenged a computer user who claimed she was messaging to her mother -- who evidently had a very limited wardrobe.)  Or some of them see it as a male-owned machine, because ranchers were among the first users in order to monitor the commodity market.  Women tend to use it for shopping.  We’re still gender-assigned here, though the terms are somewhat different than in the big city.

The gables in the top of the former Meadville/Lombard building.

My seminary has sold its building to the U of Chicago which houses the Neubauer Collegium there.  It’s an extremely elite international think tank and I monitor through the computer.  They are friendly.  Likewise the U of C itself.  I buy used books for a few dollars through Amazon.  A dozen environmental and religious mailing lists and, of course, the automated international news sources, including the NY Times and the Economist, have made it unnecessary to subscribe to any paper but the Glacier Reporter.  I’ve written several other books but since I can’t find a publisher (two are about Blackfeet and publishers are afraid to publish controversial Indian books), I just put them on the internet as blogs people can download for free. Google is my main research method, but sometimes I use Google to find other search engines that are more specialized and less manipulative.

Ironically, in the international drive for profit by trying to control, force, nudge, exploit, and whatever else will work, the internet is now at the point of diminishing returns.  The mystique of quietly and secretly communicating with someone is gone.  It was never real.  We’ve become aware that internet communication is closely monitored in many ways, not always perceptibly.

The difference between a console on a desktop and a pocket hand-held instant messaging and photographing device can be both a great convenience and a stick of dynamite. CIA Director John Brennan and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson have allegedly been hacked by teenagers.  It’s almost a point of honor for that level of “suits” to brag that they don’t understand computers and refuse to use them, which now turns out to be at least crippling if not stupid.  But it’s replicated in small towns and schools across the country.

They say that porn was the early engine that drove some of the most ingenious and useful ways of accessing and organizing material, for instance, Wikipedia.  But now porn has become such a familiar constant in our lives that Playboy is actually resorting to putting clothes on the girls (few are old enough to classify as women) in order to keep them interesting.  Netflix is so predictable and so focused on sex and money, that when I run out of CSI reruns, I’ll have to go exploring.  (I was interested that the First Bush watched CSI, too.  Though now the Third Bush’s presidential campaign is the equivalent.  I had fun playing with what CSI might stand for in that context.)

In terms of print rather than movies, there is an online market for immersive (meaning sensational) romance driven by young women and sports for young men.  Most of the writing is not very good, so it depends on being extreme:  time-travel, sadism, impossible exploits -- all pretending that’s not what they are -- also, exotic locations, like right here.

By now, because of my blog,  I’m occasionally contacted by people who are trying to establish online “magazines” of clever nonfiction and startling narratives.   Content is running short.   They pay maybe $50 and might charge a $3 “reading fee” which is a lot less than established paper publishers will charge to read.  The level of outlay necessary to send manuscripts online is finally about like it was in the old days of two-way postage for heavy packages.

The real catch is that one must write for the fancied demographic of the readers, which is just the same as that of the publishers, so that the circle of reader/writer/publisher becomes a repetitious whirlpool.  They keep asking the readers,  “what do you WANT?”  But  only the people inside the circle ever respond.  People out across the world don’t read these little ego-cyclones.  Soon they screw themselves into the ground.

New technology predictably goes through stages on the way to maturity.  A lot of us are going to be pleased when this computerized “yellow journalism” shock and horror is over and we’ve all seen "everything".

For those who like that stuff, here’s something that not even CSI has touched.  What REALLY happens to a body before it is reduced to a skeleton is that it fills up with gas, swells until it explodes, leaving a puddle of guts.  Now that I’ve used this little Halloween image, I can delete it from my archive.   I hope it turns out to be a hoax, like the cattle the aliens from outer space are supposed to kill around Valier.  One of the pleasures of computers is being able to delete things.  Too bad there’s no real life delete button.

IS JOHN WALSH A NAUGHTY BOY?

General John Walsh

Every now and then, in the chaos of our shifting and inventing world, some issue comes to the top and bites dignified people in the ass.  Most recently it was plagiarizing and the victim was Senator Walsh of Montana who had done military service (in the National Guard but including “combat” in Iraq).  With a brush cut and good posture, he looks military in uniform.  Two cultural norms are in collision.  Maybe three.  Or four.

One is that a person ought to “own” their own creativity: whatever writing, inventions, art, and so on they have originated.  Copyright, trademark, patent are three legal theories for ownership of valuable stuff from best-selling books to the image of Ronald MacDonald.

Medieval cult of the book

Another is the product of academic practices that go back to medieval times.  A student works with a professor and with respected written materials (that book worship thing) until they feel they have mastery of the material.  Then the student writes a massive thesis demonstrating their learning and goes before a panel who questions them closely while they “defend” their thesis.  When this thesis is accepted, the result is the awarding of a degree.  This is described in monetary terms: one “earns” the credential (BS, BA, MS, MA, Ph.D.) and it is worth money in terms of hiring.  The predominant goal is the continuation of the body of knowledge, which is assumed to be definitive and unchanging.

A third is very modern and partly the result of the internet.  Knowledge is seen as a shared “cloud”, as a body of material held in common.  This also applies to something like the cultural heritage of a tribe.  Then the highest virtue is not knowing more than anyone else -- competing -- but rather sharing for the greater good.  Entitlement may go to the group, not individuals, even to all of human beings.  In the highly respected “Euro”-style Encyclopedia Britannica, each essay included is signed and justified by the prestige of the writer.  But the global "folk" Wikipedia is written by whoever gets interested in the project, unedited and unsupervised but possibly with references, unfortunately often citations of sources just as vague.

People who know degrees are not impressed by initials: they want to know specifics.  The MA in Religious Studies at the U of C is a filter for the Ph.D. level work, but was included as part of the Meadville/Lombard D.Min. as a marker for "learned" ministry.  The Ph.D. thesis in any part of the U of C is notoriously difficult and takes years.  Many people never complete it; those who do often see it published as a major contribution to the field.  Such rarified intellectual work is not relevant for congregational ministry.

Meadville/Lombard (now moved downtown)

U of Chicago Divinity School

At that point in the history of M/L (’78-’82) the school was moving from the BD (Bachelor of Divinity), which had been the standard degree for ministers, to an MA and a D. Min. which would require a thesis.  My MA in Religious Studies is from the U of Chicago Div School but my doctoral thesis could not pass at M/L. On this blog now you are seeing the result of my work on my thesis, at least where I began.  I could not get my thesis past my committee of three, each of the three demanding that I conform to their conflicting ideas.  

Others had similar dilemmas.  The school was barraged with objections to the MA foreign language requirement (I passed a French exam and am glad I did) and ML students were piling up like cattle at a fence in a blizzard.  Potential new students went elsewhere.  Finally, M/L just gave everyone in the pile-up an M.Div. -- no thesis needed.  By now their D.Min has disappeared.  At one point before I left Chicago, I went into the stacks and read a dozen theses.  IMHO they were not useful or even interesting.  Just recapitulations.    

What I’m saying is that degrees are negotiable, variable, and political.

Walsh’s 33-year career in service was being burnished with a Master’s degree.  In an unnamed class he submitted a paper on American Middle East policy.  The class was a part of the work for the school’s master’s degree.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/us/politics/montana-ex-guardsman-now-must-fight-to-keep-senate-seat-given-to-him.html action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article  This issue has brought up other issues as described in the above article.  That may have been the goal.

To really judge Senator Walsh’s behavior in this instance means judging the War College.  How do their shining and glorious goals play out in the actual courses, the requirements of each course, the KINDS of qualification for the professors (war experience?), the care for those students suffering from PTSD or any other compromising state?  REALLY judging Walsh means judging the War College.  Closely following the missile silo exam scandal and the veteran’s administration hospital scandal, taking the lid off the War College is probably pretty dangerous.

As for the actual plagiarism, there’s a huge difference between a failure of editing that missed quotation marks and citations and what is described as “up to forty per cent” (2%?  20%?) of a fifteen page paper for a specific class (how much of the grade did it count for -- were there other papers and perhaps tests?) to outright cheating like a covertly downloaded paper from a website provider, deliberate deception.

“Mr. Walsh completed the paper, what the War College calls a “strategy research project,” to earn his degree in 2007, when he was 46. The sources of the material he presents as his own include academic papers, policy journal essays and books that are almost all available online.”  This is from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/us/politics/montana-senator-john-walsh-plagiarized-thesis.html?_r=0  I don’t know what the Times reporter was using for sources.  Times reporters in the past have flunked the truth test.  Of course, some informants to journalists are protected by anonymity.  I’d like to see the bibliography of that paper, particularly since I could read them online.

We are drowning in information, much of it controversial and contradictory, hard for a nonspecialist to interpret.  I’m very bad about “sourcing” (always echoes sorcery to me) because ideas just stick in my head like cockleburs and I don’t always take notes.  My solution is to stay away from traditional academic contexts.  These blogs of mine are speculative.  But if a professor has assigned a 15 page paper (which might be a plan for a thesis but is not much more) in a narrow field, in which part of the quotes are noted and part are not, at the very least he or she ought to be able to recognize that and return it to the student for the missing indicators to be added.  

Low value, unascribed, ephemeral print abounds.

When I taught at the local community college (BCC), we were instructed to automatically flunk every plagiarism.  As it happened, the problem came up in a speech class.  We discussed it at length.  It became clear that to the students print was "print" -- not WRITING.  It had never registered with them that someone had to write all that print.  It was just there. And speaking was not talking on a subject they knew, but rather reading out loud some print.  This is what they had known through their whole public school career.  

It was the very CONCEPT of plagiarism that they didn’t get.  To them “copying” was leaning over to see what some other student put on a multiple-choice answer sheet.  Print rains down on us all the time.  The notion that someone struggled to compose it, to get it to that mysterious level of slick and cute -- much less insight -- just never entered their minds.  It was not cultural difference -- it was small-town inexperience and ignorance.

So we did idea-webbing, brain-stormed lists of possible details, chose a thesis and supported it with evidence -- not as individual assignments but as a group with me doing the “writing” on the blackboard (which was a whiteboard).  The thing that turned the tide was my statement: “We want to know what YOU think -- not someone we don’t know.”  It appears this point was not made to Senator Walsh.

The famous "before and after" of Carlyle education.  This is not Photoshop.

I googled Army War College and was startled to see that it is located in Carlyle, PA, the place where a school for Native Americans was charged with “killing” their old culture and installing the new one: obedience, cleanliness, conformity.  It backfired when the NA’s who attended learned how to present themselves as an assimilated and loyal workforce, but then went back home and used what they had learned to further the goals of their own people.

http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/about/aboutUs.cfm sets the definition of the Army War College.   http://home.epix.net/~landis/histry.html  describes the history of the Carlyle Indian Industrial School, which was founded on military ideas of how to produce soldiers obedient to the goals of the leaders. 

A Scot and a Brit

Examples.  I had one classmate at Div School whom we teased because his footnotes on a page sometimes almost exceeded the actual content.  He was Princeton-educated and successfully earned the D.Min.   He was exemplary at conformity and has prospered.  He was born in England but raised in the US.  I, on the other hand, am Irish/Scots in origin (that should tell you something), female, twice his age in seminary, with a BS (’61) in theatre from Northwestern University which at the time was famed for teaching “Method” acting, emotion-based.  I was at M/L and U of C to develop my “other side.” When I got back to Montana, like a Carlyle Indian, I reverted to type.  At that point, I felt free to use my thesis material my own way.

Butte, Montana

Walsh grew up in Butte.  Think about it.  I'm surprised he wasn't a flat-out, full-bore Marine like my brothers.