NA RENAISSANCE READINGS

NA Renaissance readings were all over Portland in the Seventies, but mostly in the downtown Powell's.  Since then readings are not so important, but at the time it was what was done.  Everyone was much younger then.

Greg Sarris, so handsome, spoke in the Gay bookstore. He was orphaned, adopted, highly educated (an English professor for a while) and chief of the Miwoks, the model for the Ewoks in "Star Wars."  He's approaching sixty by now.

Elizabeth Cook came early to the Hawthorne street Powells, a little funkier and more anthro than the downtown store.  We visited for half-an-hour.  She too was highly educated, a professor, and very elegant.  I remember her with a shawl.

Louise Erdrich came to Powells downtown with a crowd three times the norm.  It must have been later because it was just after Michael Dorris had died and she walked wrapped in grief as though it were a blanket.  The people, mostly indigenous, were silent and respectful.

It must have been about that time that Vine Deloria Jr. came but he spoke at the City Club as part of a luncheon.  I couldn't afford the lunch and wasn't a member anyway, but they let non-members come to sit in chairs to the side.  It was a time when women wore dresses and black stockings with black patent leather heels.  Deloria had been to Powells and bought a big picture book of the Spanish Inquisition.  His talk was about how savage white men were to use the torture machines illustrated in the book.  It was vivid and some of the younger women left early.  I was sitting with indigenous street people who were hugely enjoying themselves.

Louis Owens was another college professor but he never spoke. I knew a member of his close circle who were still trying to fathom his death.  He was in the car park of the airport, supposedly leaving to give a speech, when he was found in his pickup shot dead.  His gun was there.  It was never resolved whether it was an accident or a suicide.

Janet Campbell Hale had been born too dark to please her family and suffered for it, but she was a direct descendent of Dr. John McLoughlin and his tribal wife, a McKay,  For decades he was nearly the king of the Willamette Valley.  His quite elegant house is in Oregon City where it can be visited.

Sid Larson, Jim Welch's cousin, organized a kind of festival in Eugene, OR, where he was a prof.  I attended.  Joy Harjo played her sax.  N. Scott Momaday was there, rumbling with stories.  I kept in touch by mail with Sid for a while.  Jimmy Welch's father was Bob Scriver's boyhood best friend and Jimmy himself was always friendly.

Ed Edmo was a Unitarian Universalist with his white wife. He was local. In fact, he said the Columbia Highway was built right through the location of his childhood bedroom.

Canadians counted as local to us.  Adolf and Beverly Hungry Wolf were local, almost, often in Browning in summer.  Adolf is white, Beverly is Blackfoot.  Hugh Dempsey (white married to a Blackfoot) stopped by the shop and we stopped by Dempsey's work space in Calgary.  

Richard Lancaster (white) was a madman who locked onto "Old Jim" Whitecalf and wrote a book.  Bob would lock the door if he saw him coming.

When Ivan Doig (white) came to speak, I chided him for not writing about Blackfeet since as a boy he helped herd sheep near Heart Butte.  He didn't write about Metis, either, but only the Scots immigrants of his imagined family.  We both attended NU at the same but he wouldn't talk to me.  We hadn't known each other.  I visited with his wife.

RezNet was a whole other scene, a "bulletin board" that included Sherman Alexie until he got mad and left.  But that's a long story.

What I'm trying to convey is that NA writers were a loose company of people, several kinds, mostly well-educated.  The rivalries of today's lit scene just weren't there, at least not where I could see them.  They were not "old-time" Indians unless you count Percy Bullchild whom I never met, though I taught many of his relatives.  Woody Kipp was always around, but he was another prof and journalist.

These people are grouped as the "Second Wave" of Native American Literature.  I don't know any "Third Wave" people but maybe we're already on the Fourth Wave.  Politics have become so hostile and separated that there are no ways to meet them.  A Potawatomi poet grandfather told me "we don't write for white men anymore -- we write for each other."  There's no money or real fame in it.

NOT NECESSARILY TRUE STORIES

It seems clear that the overriding common denominator of all cultures is survival, which is socioeconomic, which means what counts is whatever sells.  Money is the solvent that will dissolve all the boundaries.  And all the cultural nuclei as well.  

Beyond subsistence, prosperity is a 19th century value of the bourgeois, the famous Middle Class.  While living controlled, walled, standardized lives enforced by rigid morality and relieved by underground wickedness, the Middle Class loved little adventures into the “wild” (like climbing mountains or exploring other people’s countries or religions), and always wanted souvenirs.  When people come to the rez and ask for a tour, I take them up and down the roads and valleys, pointing out the history, and at the end they say,  “Yes, but I really want to buy something.  Are there no shops?”  A dream-catcher maybe?  Or something authentically beaded with glass beads?

When Euro culture first confronted indigenous culture, there was immediately a juxtaposition, a confrontation, between the two peoples.  They dressed differently, they spoke differently, they interpreted the world differently, and they smelled different because they ate and sheltered differently.  But underneath all that they were the same species and so it didn’t take long for the organic but culture bound differences to begin to blur.  One anthropologist, describing the Blackfeet (Macfee, “Modern Blackfeet”), spoke of four cultures: whites, indigenous, whites who lived like indigenous and indigenous who lived like Euros.  He talked of the 150% “man” who incorporated elements of both cultures — not building “scare walls.”  Or pay walls.

Like all discontinuities, money for bridges and gates is a great way to make a little money by charging toll for people and materials.  Part of the wealth of Malcolm Clarke came from him owning a narrow access canyon north of Helena.  In contrast, the Blackfeet never realized that they could charge toll for Marias Pass, the only way for a railroad to get through the Rockies.  When the concept of “intellectual property” came into law, the tribal people were a little more quick to claim exclusive entitlement to their own stories and knowledge, though the Jesuits and the anthros wrote down a lot of it.  Good thing, because otherwise there would be no record now.

There were two steps to getting money out of Napi — one step was writing things down and the next step was publishing it, so that it was in a form that was a “thing”, a solid object that could be exchanged for money.  In The beginning there were no tape recorders and, anyway, only the Blackfeet understood Blackfeet, which was an oral language, which is why the written spelling never settles down.  Gradually certain people made themselves into bridges by translating an oral language into a written book.  Sometimes they had help.  Maybe missionaries or progressive ladies who couldn’t bring themselves to consider some human things of a more intimate nature.  This meant that others could promote the “unauthorized, unbowdlerized real versions.”

The “first” of something tends to dominate everything afterwards, so the main genre of “writing” about indigenous people was recording the myths the way the Greek playwrights and the Grimm brothers did.  In oral traditions there are always variations, so then there was a marketing opportunity advertising true authenticity, the one true and only version, which is a Euro preoccupation.  

Because the category of indigenous people blurred and melted around the edges, the criteria for ownership of “intellectual property” kept morphing.  Does a person have to be a recorded tribal member with a provenance based on a list made by a conquering military?  What if the tribe is not recognized by the federal government, but on its own recognizes the author’s membership?  What if a person, esp. people relocated to cities or sent to government boarding schools at the age of “falling in love,” ended up with membership in a number of tribes?  Are the rules like those for people whose parents belong to a number of nations?  Is a Pan-Indian like a United Nations citizen?  What does the world do about people born in a country not recognized by the other nations as a real nation?

Where did we get the idea that only tribally enrolled people can write about  tribal matters?  (Hint: it was probably either from a lawyer — or a publisher trying to promote a book.)

I must confess that I’m not genetically or legally a Native American.  If one accepts participation in old-timer’s ceremonies, with their consent, then that’s worth something.  If one accepts living on a reservation, that counts for something.  But it’s possible to live on a rez like an ex-pat in a little enclave of others from elsewhere, without ever really feeling or participating in what goes on.  

Every rez is like a raspberry with many drupes, compartments, protected groups organized around centers like a spiritual conviction or within boundaries, like illegal drugs compelling secrecy.  So writing about one will be inspirational and writing about the other will be muck-racking, exposé.  The words, characters, plot and environment might be in the same place but quite differently described. 

Autochthonous people, tribal people, are hard to confine once they understand that there is a much larger world out there — except for those who can’t wait to escape the rez.  Can’t both these folks write about their lives?  Some people never go farther away from their homes than they have to and are content.  Couldn’t they be poets?  Like Emily Dickinson?

I wrote a book I call “Twelve Blackfeet Stories.”  It was written very schematically, starting with a time-line list of the history of the Blackfeet that I developed in a course from Darrell Kipp.  I divided it into generations (twenty year intervals) and wrote a story for each generation based on events of that period.  I buried in each an “Easter egg,” an artifact from Bob Scriver’s book called “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains”.  The first story is about the coming of the horse.  The last story is about a contemporary boy trying to recapture the old time spirituality by fasting in a dream bed in the Sweetgrass Hills.  

But then twenty years went by and I had to write a thirteenth story, so I made it about coming back from Great Falls in a blizzard, like right now.  It was about a guy coming back to his home rez after being raised in Texas.  I based it on and dedicated it to a guy named Linden who was on RezNet, an Indians Only internet bulletin board in the Nineties.  He’s dead now.

Don’t tell Sherman Alexie.  He was on Rez Net, too, but someone said something critical of him and he left.  I was on the bulletin board under false pretenses, so I left.  Not long ago I asked about going back since RezNet is still going after passing decades.  They said, “LOL”.  When my mother died, the people on that bulletin board reached out to comfort me, even though some of them had figured who I really was.

Everything is a story.  No publisher offered to make “Twelve Blackfeet Stories” into an object that could be copyrighted and sold as merchandise.  Anyway, it was hijacked off my blog so you can just download it from pirates.  And I put it on www.lulu.com/prairiemary who will print it, bind it and sell it to you.  There’s not much point in copyrighting it because nations enforce copyrights and what is a nation now?  What is the center of the internet?  Where is the boundary?

The "Twelve Stories" are written in way that could be told as oral stories.  "There was this old woman who hated progress and that meant she hated horses . . . "  "There was this basketball player who joined AIM . . ."  "There was this man who finally went home but hardly recognized it. . ."  There is no wall.  You'll have to find the center.

TOO TOO SOLID FLESH

"Bones"

Work, recreation and research have a tendency to merge in my days.  For instance, last night I watched an episode of “Bones”  (Season 4, Episode 6), the gruesomely explicit CSI series.  The most bizaare body so far was a basketball player who was behind the bleachers when they hydraulically folded into the wall.  People love these imitation corpses and make lists of the "best."  The “shock” bits disguise what is actually a discussion of what it is to be human, made of vulnerable suffering flesh.  "Bones" also explores the morality of sex quite a bit, as the Asperger-types question the voluptuous and emotional folks.

This particular episode was about an office romance that aroused jealousy enough for someone to throw a stapler at the victim’s head which triggered an aneurism.  (Okay, so they were reaching.) The payoff was throwing the body down the elevator shaft so that the car “mulched” (their word) the body into gobbets, one of which wore a high-heeled shoe. 

Villain, Hero, Woman

Then I watched a new addition to Netflix:  “The Salvation”, a Danish film, a “Western” filmed in South Africa in frank imitation of a spaghetti Western, except this was, as one reviewer remarked, “ink-soaked denim,” the usual pattern of one vengeful and powerful man confronting villains oppressing a town.  The town is half-burned, a jagged, shattered, charred background for urban shooting war.  Mads Mikkelson specializes in these roles, a righteous family man confronting a totally evil greedy-man (the handsome but menacing Michael Raymond-James.)  Everyone already knows the plot, just as we all know that the CSI show will end in solving the mystery.  

We recognize the steps and the characters, so the skill of the film is in the style, which is surprisingly restrained, almost barren.  I didn’t know there was dry terrain with buttes like that in South Africa, but maybe they were CGI.  Most of the victims are shot neatly in the middle of the forehead and drop in place.  

The restraint is more menacing than the episodes of fire.  A bad guy shoots a good kid on the roof of the hotel by sending bullets up through the ceiling.  This breaks the bottle of kerosene the boy was carrying, which drips through the ceiling and — since the bad guy is smoking a cigar, sets him on fire.  There are the traditional pair of women, a blonde heroine who is killed early and a dark heroine who at this point is tied to a bed, about to be immolated.  We don’t see how she got loose — the editing cuts to the villain using her as a shield on the balcony of the hotel.  I shouldn’t spoil the rest.  But note that she’s not Indian (there are no Indians — everyone is a “settler”) but she was captured and tortured by Indians, which made her a savage victim.

Twitter, as I follow it, includes a lot of indigenous people in both Canada and the US.  An on-going thread is about a book, “The Orenda” by Joseph Boyden, which has become the focus of outrage and political sword-waving about its perceived message: “the emergence of Canada: Indian savages, do-good Jesuits and the inevitability (even desirability) of colonization.”  It’s an apologia for the destructive “settlers” of the Empire.  (No reference to contemporary Palestinians with the same problem.)  The setting is the last years of the Huron Confederacy (1600's) in what became central Ontario.  If you want more, I’m quoting Hayden King, a professor at Ryerson in Toronto.  He’s Pottawotami and Ojibwe from that same area.  http://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/the-orenda-faces-tough-criticism-from-first-nations-scholar-1.2562786

A friend had sent me a copy of “The Orenda” months ago, but I didn’t read very far into it because it was so “witchy” as Blackfeet would say.  Indeed, most of the doin’s in brush-and-stream country is usually dark and grotesque, the country of the starvation people who eat what Blackfeet call “nothing food.”  (Bison are real food.)

Until this review I hadn’t known that the tribal torturer (equivalent to a Spanish inquisitor) was named “Tekakwitia”, but I immediately recognized the name as similar to that of the first Native American saint, who is particularly celebrated by the Blackfeet here.  The Browning Catholic Church put a statue of her in the yard.  In fact, a young woman of this community was named for her, familiarly called “Tekkie.”  She had Down Syndrome which meant she was cheerful and generous, much loved.

The villain Tekakwitia is the father of this woman with the similar name who recently was deemed a saint.  The point of Tekakwitia the Torturer in this novel is that he converts to Christianity — he is REdeemed.  Then the suffering of the Jesuits become worthy.  Hayden King sees the whole book as “the marginalization of the perspective of the Haudenosaunee, the centering of the Jesuit point of view and the cultivation of old tropes, specifically the savage Indian — amounting to a tale about the inevitability of colonization.”  

From a purely historical point of view, like the CSI scientists, that’s the fact of the matter.  From the warmer moral relationship point of view, the fault of the book, according to King, is that it makes it seem that the victims triggered their own destruction and deserved it because they were such vicious sadistic savages.  I won’t venture to guess what that California private school teacher — the one who wanted to come learn all about the rez so she could inspire her upscale students — would made of this book.  I daresay she will be careful to not know it exists.

Adrian Jawort is a contemporary NA writer in Montana who honchoed “Off the Path,” a unique anthology of writing by and for NA’s because he saw that NA’s must read and publish for themselves, about their own lives today.  He’s in Billings and writes for “Indian Country.”.  I reviewed the anthology with admiration.  It is full of suffering honestly told.   https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/opinions/steven-bearcrane-cole-case-hits-close-home/  The piece linked is about the death of Adrian’s brother.

This is not Sherman Alexie joking around.  Jawort is reality-based and not from the 1600’s.  It is not Algerian/French theorizing, nor are there any Jesuits or saints.  Jawort told me his second book, “Moonrise Falling” and third book, “Off the Path II” were gothic in that intense genre that is often expressed in film as horror.  I challenge you to read them.  I’m not up to it right now.  I wonder what Hayden King said about them if he reviewed them.  Surely he knows they exist.  You can buy them on Amazon.

Academic and urban indigenous people immediately see this Goth/horror approach as insulting to their identity and some react by attacking the character of the writer.  These folks want to be seen as blameless, maybe even a bit romanticized, certainly middle-class and prosperous. They feel being indigenous is an entitlement even if they have never lived in Indian Country and have very low blood quantums.  To them being “Indian” is innate rather than survival-based from interacting with the land itself.  And they want revenge.

One can’t fault the reality that point of view.  It’s what also creates the monomania of Jesuits and settlers, that feeling that they are part of a privileged, admirable community.  But I wish they’d get over attacking the writer, trying to force him to eat his own legs.  It didn’t work for the Iroquois.  Attacks on Joseph Boyden come from the same vicious attitude they want to claim is “unIndian.”  

But the publicity must be great for sales.  Maybe even motivation to wade through this elegantly written and very long book, somewhat based on the life of Jean de Brébeuf.  King said it was the bloodiest book he’s read since “Blood Meridian.”  Some will consider that an attractive feature.  If you want authenticity, buy Jawort.  If you want to be an activist, how about getting involved in the neglect of NA murders?

EARLY ONE MORNING: Writing Starters

When I was teaching in Browning or Heart Butte, I liked to do these little starter bits to hand out to the class.  They could continue on with them or start something new.  Once in a while it worked.  Other times they figured it was some kind of trick and balked.  But right now I thought I’d try some “morning” beginnings for fun.  I chose books about the same time periods to be illustrations.  If you want to go on with one of them, be my guest.

____________

If I were an Indian . . .

And it was buffalo days . . .

The day started early but the oldest and the youngest were already up.  Sun shone in the entry on the east side of the lodge because the calf hide was thrown back.  Not to let air in, because the sides of the lodgeskin were already rolled up to let the cool dawn breeze move through.  My little sister was curled against me but the baby was outside with grandmother.  I could hear him crowing while grandmother kicked up the fire and moved things around.  Puppies were yipping somewhere.

I’d been dreaming but I was too awake to remember, and yet I was still too sleepy to roll out and stand up.  I could smell the grass, the smoke as people threw wood on their fires, and then I heard the voice of the camp crier moving across the circle.  Now it really was time to get up. 
_________

And it was between the Great Wars at a residential school . . .

The bed still felt strange, too high, and the smells were all wrong: harsh soap, starched sheets, indoor air that hadn’t been moving.  I could hear the Sisters in the hallway, arguing.  That meant the Mother Superior wasn’t making her rounds yet, probably indulging in another cup of coffee.  She didn’t seem to eat much -- none of us did -- but she drank a lot of hot weak coffee.  The rest of us drank tea.

I hadn’t been here long enough to get used to it.  The other girls assured me that I would, but I missed my family and my dog.  I’d been careful to see how we traveled and was already plotting how to slip away and walk back.  The problem was shoes.  These lace-up heeled shoes were too tight anyway, but they had taken my moccasins.  It would be easy to hide bread in my pockets.

The best part of the day was the first part: Mass.  I did love ceremonies of all sorts and the Sisters had a foot-pump organ.  The children who had been here a while had been taught to sing and though it was strange-sounding, I liked it.  I even hummed with it.  I would try to remember while I walked.

_____________

If it was the Seventies . . .

The radio alarm came on automatically with the weather and ag news.  It gave us barely enough time for clothes and a washrag on the face before school.  Grab toast on the way out.  Mom already dressed and starting the pickup to drive to her job in town.  The dogs and cats milling around under our feet, hoping to remind us they needed to be fed.  As soon as my mom had pulled out, we could smell our uncle’s reefers.  He’d stay up until the school bus picked us up, then go back to bed.  This was the longest he’d ever been unemployed.

I didn’t really wake up until I was by the window watching for our horses in the field by the road.  The sun came up slowly because there was a fog bank to the east.  My best friend got on the bus two stops later -- I saved the seat but anyway we all sat where we always sat.  We were excited because it was an assembly day so classes would be short.

_____________

If it’s now . . .

She tried not to wake up because it would just be another shit day.  The cardboard she’d put down to sleep on wasn’t enough to keep her hips from aching, but she was warm enough because there were people on either side of her.  Wait now.  Kika.  One was a dog.  Judging from the size and alcohol-sweat smell of the other one, it was a man.  Her mouth was bitter and fuzzy.  She smelled garbage and piss -- couldn’t escape either one in an alley.

Back into sleep.  There were birds flying and cat tails.  It was an old memory from when she had been on the rez.  They had told her the water birds flew far far far away and that the people used to make soft beds from cat tail fluff.  She heard the birds yelping.  Well, maybe it was only seagulls poking in the trash.  Or a car alarm somewhere.  The dog sensed she was awake and wagged its tail.  She reached an arm over it.  Maybe she could slip away before the man woke up.

______________

To do these, first you sit without writing and try to imagine, using all senses the way an actor might to become the character.  Then you pretend you ARE that person and reflect about what would naturally come next.

What interests me is that even in these short bits and even though there are just four entirely different historical periods and no narrative plot-line, they begin to suggest ideas for where to go with any of them or several of them or even the implications of all four.  The hard part is ALWAYS to get something down to work with and even harder than that is getting your brain “connectome” into the proper pattern for story telling -- if that’s what you’re going to do.  There’s no particular obligation to have a plot line.  Any of these four could be worked into a poem or an essay of some kind.  Maybe a character study.  A play. You could read them to an art class and see what they drew.  Or just draw. 

It’s clear that I already had patterns in my own head about waking up, that thing about being in two worlds at once, the first light at dawn, who or what might be in the bed with you.  What noises would be made by those already up.  Then that suggests more.  What news would the camp crier have?  Would that man in the alley wake up mad?  How to slip away from the boarding school for the long walk home?  What that assembly might be about.

If you go through every day being observant, questioning, reading history and listening to the stories people tell, it’s easy to come up with ideas.  The hard part is keeping the focus and being tenacious.  I once saw a vid of a boy learning to do a backflip off a stone wall maybe three feet high.  He was landing on concrete -- it had to be painful, knocking the wind out of him.  If he didn’t land on his feet -- which he didn’t for about ten tries -- he’d lie there for a minute or so, then gather up and try it again.  Finally he succeeded and that was the end of the vid, but it was a major statement.  

His neurons were saying,  “Didn’t quite push off hard enough.”  “Didn’t tuck in enough.”  Or other stuff like that, until they were all coordinated and so were the muscles.  The pain would kick in later.  He must have waked up bruised.  Writing is the same way, except it’s the ego that takes the bruises.  That can hurt more, heal more slowly.
 __________

An upbeat story . . .

This battered old oak table with its round top had been part of her life a long time, so when they built the new ranch house, she insisted on a big east window in the kitchen where she could sit at her table in the warming sunshine to start the day.  In the still-unpacked boxes from the old house she'd found a slightly crushed old Valentine candy box full of ancient photos and was sorting them.

Upstairs she heard the noises of her six-year-old moving around.  She never had to be told to get up and would soon be down to have her hair braided.  Out across the yard trudged her eight-year-old with a bottle of lamb formula under each arm.  His grandfather had given him a couple of bummers to raise for a 4-H project.   His sister called him "MomBoy."  The lambs stuck their heads through the fence, bleating.   The dogs barked at them with no effect.

Then the mobile phone, set on vibrate because she hated loud noise in the morning, began to hum and slide around on the table top.  That would be her husband, due to fly back from a conference.  She smiled.  "I just found a picture of you as a toddler with your great-grandmother!" 

"THE WHITE QUIVER" AND "THE BRAVE"

Helen Fitzgerald Sanders

“The White Quiver” by Helen Fitzgerald Sanders is dedicated to Helen Clarke.  Sanders thanks Horace Clarke, Little Dog, Bear Head, the Sanderville brothers and Louis Hill.  If these names are familiar, you will be clued in that they told Sanders mostly what she wanted to hear.  They are all very clever diplomats.  Sanders claims White Quiver is an old and honored name, but maybe “quivering white” might be closer to the truth.  She’d be the white and the quivering is pretty much erotic or at least romantic.  She outright invents a “kissing ceremony” in which all the Indian virgin girls kiss all the big old warriors.  Of course, the eponymous “White Quiver” is heroically “hot” and the best kisser.

“Towering a good head above the warriors about him was a young man of giant stature and noble face.  His bronze-colored, hard-muscled body, which showed the purification of icy waters and stern suppression of the flesh, was bare to the waist save for a snow-white quiver that hung across his shoulders. . . .Only his eyes moved and they followed the Dawn Mist. . . He, oblivious to the people about him, watched the Dawn Mist in a dream of wonder.  Her black hair and pale face were like the meeting place of the night and day.  She seemed to him to be a creature of the clouds -- a pale, fair silvery mist of the morning that shapes itself for an instant against the blue, then is lost -- less of a reality than an illusion.”

This is uncomfortably like Ruth Hill’s Hanta Yo with its Nazi Ayn Rand flavor.  It is important to keep books about Indians in the context of the times when they were written.  About the time this one was written (1913), my grandmother’s household would line up to kiss relatives goodbye after a visit, particularly if they were men going into danger.  One day the schoolteacher the family was boarding accidentally got into the line of family and the departing uncle kissed her, to great shock and hilarity.  Of course, a kiss in those days was a puckered-up business flavored by a mustache, not the open-mouthed, tongue-tangling slippery experience of today’s movies. Even a peck was significant.

“The Brave” is a book from the end of the Eighties, a time of social outrage and growing awareness of people pushed off the edge of the world.  The brave man of the title isn’t even sure whether he’s an Indian or Hispanic.  He has spent his life in a toxic dump where he was born and has produced a endangered family.  The author, Gregory Mcdonald, had by this time sold two successful detective serieses, informed by a Boston U education and years as a reporter.  He can write what he wants to, so he starts this story with a horrifying description of the crime: a snuff film.  The rest of the book is about the victim, why he would voluntarily do such a thing, and the slowly growing realization that this man is already essentially snuffed by society. 

Here’s a sample of the flat, dialogue-heavy, in-the-know writing:

“You get a good-looking male Indian, you get a really handsome boy. Man.”  The uncle looked inside a plastic coffee cup.  “You an Indian?”

Rafael did not know how to answer. . . 

“Alky’s your thing,” the uncle said.  “Trouble with you alkies is you ain’t got no asses.”

He took a quart bottle of vodka from his desk and poured into the two plastic cups.

Strangely, and this is the extraordinary dimension of the story, Rafael is released by his impending death and the book ends two ways: first in a spontaneous and instinctive night-long ceremony of cleansing and second by a ceremonial breakfast with his family.  Without them the book would be unbearable, and even with them it comes close.  Johnny Depp directed a movie of this story but I have not seen it.  It’s not on Netflix.  So these two books are an angel and a devil book. It’s clear that the devils are governing bodies who do not take action and do not care if people die.  But the Indian brave of the book has an angel’s name.

The Edwardian angelic book is more complex.  Clearly Helen, who was the daughter-in-law of Colonel W.F. Sanders and a Montana writer, was a diligent researcher.  Her other works include a three volume history of Montana.  “The White Quiver” is full of factoids, densely packed into elegantly jeweled language, always a half-bubble off plumb due to lack of true understanding.  She is clearly one of those people always scribbling notes so never looking up at the reality.  But mocking all her little stumbles and Edwardian conceits is too easy.  She’s dealing with actual historical events, until her blunders become a tip-off that she has left the people of the high prairie and begun drawing on European fairy tales.  Indigenous prairie people always refer to the number four, but Helen begins to cluster things in Trinities, influenced by Christianity.  She also become quite Shakespearean, indulging in three witches evidently transported from Macbeth.

A critical review of the time faults her for having no exciting action in the tradition of James Fenimore Cooper.  The language is beyond Cormac McCarthy or Deadwood in its rococo and extended nature descriptions -- this is very girly book.  Then it suddenly struck me that this book has survived in the vampire/werewolf context: it is science fiction romance.  “Twilight” is the direct descendant.

http://twilightguide.com/tg/2010/01/25/the-twilight-craze-the-rise-of-native-american-actors-in-hollywood/   When the “Twilight” story morphs into “New Moon” which is a werewolf story with many Native American actors, it becomes a doorway for a new understanding of Native Americans, this time coastal and timber people, and reframes the idea of being an Indian.  Now they are not a social problem but an embodiment of the “other,” which is always a romantic lure.  Line up for the kissing -- or more, since we’re in a new century.

The spiritual, the superstitious, the magical, and the yearning to somehow escape life-traps whether economic (they are ALWAYS economic), environmental, or social is deep in all humans .  The young with all their eros and aspirations, their new generation vision of what should be and how to get there, are always the heroes and heroines of stories that cluster around escape from an impossible menace.  Pogo might point out that the menace is we mainstream, middle-class people, so determined to have things nice at whatever cost, whatever blindness, whatever devastation of resources, whatever the consequences to children.  So is it guilt that causes these white people, Helen Sanders and Gregory Mcdonald, to write such extremely different books?  Were they trying to please the people they had visited and therefore thought they knew?  Were they trying to explain the trash-pickers in a dump near the Mexican border or the mixed-blood educated woman in her cabin behind the Big Hotel in East Glacier?  

I think they were confronted with realities so unresolvable that the only reasonable response was a leap into the possibility of another world.  I prefer Mcdonald’s quiet ceremonies, but it’s hard to turn away from Sanders coruscating gorgeous mountain pageants.  I’m not prepared to scoff at either.  Nor do I scoff at “Twilight” or the “New Dawn.”  Doorways, stairways, starways -- whatever.  We need them.

ALL CHIEFS: POSTS ABOUT NA LIT ON THIS BLOG

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "SHERMAN ALEXIE'S PROBLEM WITH CENSORSHIP": 

Please don't bully our Indian writers!!!! If they don't promote your agenda just let them be.

I debated for quite a while about what to do with this comment.  I didn’t want to just block it, but it IS anonymous and that’s a good reason to zap it.  (Someone else made an anonymous comment, a rez person, who when challenged explained the danger he/she faced if he/she were named -- the post is about rez murders.  This is a good reason to both remain anonyous and for me to publish the comment.)  But this other comment is so clueless that it’s hard to know where to begin.  For one thing, Sherman has been quite willing to bully other Indian writers -- plus white writers. (The "Old Bulls" among the NA writers joke "don't squeeze the Sherman.")  For another, this commenter seems to think Sherman is a little beginner needing protection.  He’s nearly fifty, a battle-scarred old warrior with white wings over his ears and a very nice apartment in Seattle.   

The “our” in this comment sounds like he belongs to the writer -- why?  Do all Indians own all Indians?  Or is the commenter one of those fond whites who think THEY own Indians?  The adjective makes it sounds as though he’s either a pet or a doll (“The Indian in the Cupboard”).  Why FOUR exclamation points?  Soooo emotional.

What possible agenda does this person imagine I have:  the one about being a reservation English teacher?  The one about reading and reviewing NA books and buying copies for rez libraries?  Or does she imagine something about my friends who write, some of them Indians and some of them not?  

Why does she ask me to “just let them be”?  What makes her think that any writers should be “let be”?  Like they’re nice statues in the garden.  Collectible.  Passive.  Not involved in their own fates, let alone politics.

In the end I decided to simply use the comment as an epigraph for this post, which is a list of all the posts I’ve written about Native American lit. (Some books written by whites.  Also, Metis are included as “Indians” in the Canadian way.  And I count film as "lit.")  When she ( sounds so sweet -- must be female) finishes reading all these posts, maybe she’ll be a little more aware.

This list doesn’t include Blackfeet, necessarily.  I’ll make a separate list.

4-4-05     Book Review:  “A Walk Towards OR” by Josephy

4-10-05    “Half Breed” (George Bent)

6-7-05     “Common and Contested Ground” by Ted Bennema

6-8-05     “Firewater” by Hugh Dempsey

6-13-05   “Catch Colt” by Sidner Larson

6-14-05   “Viet Cong at Wounded Knee” by Woody Kipp

12-8-06   Adrian Louis’ Strong Brown Wings

9-7-06     What’s a Native American Perspective?

9-20-06   A Quick Check-list of NA Writers

7-27-07   Ward Churchill:  Lucky He’s Not a Bison

8-25-07   Native American Writers:  A Constellation

8-26-07   Starboy: James Welch

9-15-07   Sherman Alexie Leads the Way

10-18-07   The Nasdijj Trilogy

12-23-07   Frank Bird Linderman

1-12-08     “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee”

2-3-08      “Rez Dogs” -- the Video

3-10-08    “The Business of Fancy Dancing”:  a Reflection

6-13-08    “The Stick Game” by Peter Bowen

6-22-08    “The Boy and the Dog Are sleeping: by Tim Barrus, A Review

8-16-08     Penny Derivative Native American Literary Critics

9-8-08       Joseph Epes Brown and Black Elk

10-29-08   The Forces at Play on Native American Literature

11-6-08     Alexie, Barrus and Louise

11-15-08   Native American Lit Renaissance: Where Did it Go?

11-25-08   Indian Trouble: a Double Chapter

10-29-08   The Forces at Play on Native American Literature

1-9-09       The Riel Rebellion Ends

1-21-09     Time and the Writer

6-4-09       Politics of Identity and Resentment

6-16-09     “Rain in the Mountains” (movie)  a Review

6-29-09     What Can the Internet Do for Oral Literature?

6-30-09     Michael Two Horses

8-8-09       “Trickster”:  Notes from Lewis Hyde

12-12-09   “The Education of Little Tree”: a Reflection

2-3-10        Gyasi Ross and the Native American Generations

6-18-10      “Rolling in the Ditches with Shamans”

8-16-10      Write This Down!

12-18-10    Metis Stand their Ground

1-20-11      Yu’pik “Swan Lake”

2-5-11        When it Comes to Indians, You See What You Expect

2-6-11        “The Edge of Eternity”

6-6-11        “Lost Birds,” “Split Feathers” and Roots

6-8-11        Trace DeMeyer:  “One Small Sacrifice”

11-29-11    “American Holocaust and Survival”

1-24-12      Heather Devine on Joseph Kinsey Howard

1-31-12      “The People Who Own Themselves” (Metis)  a Family Story

4-19-12      Directory to Reviews of Books by or about Indians on this Blog

6-19-12      “Shamans and Religion” by Alice Beck Kehoe

6-27-12      “Far North”  (film)

7-30-12      “Always an Adventure” by Hugh A. Dempsey.  A Review

1-31-13      Priests on the Prairie

2-2-13        “Gujaw and the Reawakening of the Haida Nation”

3-30-13      Knotting a Shawl for a Planet

5-3-13        What You Get Is What You See

5-23-13      Wendy Rose: Combustible

5-28-13      Sherman Alexie’s Problem with Censorship

This is the bottom line:  being a successful published author has nothing to do with the actual writing, whether or not the writing is authentic, actual, of proper ethnic origin, etc.  It doesn’t have much to do with the quality of the writing, though there is a minimum level and probably also a top end where writing becomes too intense and experimental to sell very well.  (Like some poetry.)

BEING PUBLISHED IS ABOUT INFRASTRUCTURE: the pop-it-beads of publishing and how they connect.  Discovering:  finding something that will sell.  Editing: rewriting as necesssary.  Agenting: the interface between the writer and the publisher.  Finding peripherals:  illustrations, graphs, sourcing any quotes.  Fact checking:  making sure names are spelled right, dates are accurate, things are as represented.  Layout:  choosing a font, organizing the pages.  Artwork:  esp. cover and dust wrapper.  There are other things about making a physical book which involves stacking up the objects, storing them in a warehouse, shipping them out to stores and keep track of all of this.

Print on demand means only printing after orders have arrived.  Distribution services can contract to manage wrapping, mailing, paperwork like invoicing.  There’s a LOT to all this.  I do not know any Native Americans who do this work or who aspire to do any part of it or who think of being publishers through an institution like the tribe, the tribal college, Indian-focused museums, or a reservation church.  I do not know of any tribal college that teaches this.

I do not know of any tribal bookstores except those in museums or tribal colleges.  I do not know of any reading groups on the reservation who read books by or about Indians.  My experience is that journalists, political figures, and even teachers have an EXTREMELY LIMITED knowledge about what NA writing is out there or where to get it.  In general they know nothing about ordering online, esp. used books.  We don’t need more cell phones: we need transmission towers and optical fiber connections.

TOO MANY PEOPLE WANT TO BE THE CHIEFS, 

NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE WANT TO BE THE INDIANS.

KNOTTING A SHAWL FOR A PLANET

Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time:  Indigenous Thoughts Concerning the Universe

Edited by MariJo Moore and Trace A. DeMeyer,  Dedicated to Vine Deloria Jr

This anthology includes short pieces by  Suzan Shown Harjo, Gabriel Horn, John Trudell, Dean Hutchins, Lois Red Elk, Suzanne Zahrt Murphy, Amy Krout-Horn, Jack D. Forbes, John D. Berry, Sidney Cook Bad Moccasin, III, Trace A. DeMeyer, Clieord E. Trafzer, William S. Yellow Robe, Jr., Bobby González, Duane BigEagle, Carol Wille`e Bachofner, Lela Northcross Wakely, Georges Sioui, Keith Secola, Mary Black Bonnet, Kim Shuck, Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Dawn Karima Pe`igrew, Stephanie A. Sellers, Natalie bomas Kindrick, Basil H. Johnston, Barbara-Helen Hill, Alice Azure, Phyllis A. Fast, Doris Seale, Terra Trevor, Denise Low, Vine Deloria Jr., Jim Stevens, ire’ne lara silva, Susan Deer Cloud, Odilia Galván Rodríguez, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Tony Abeyta, MariJo Moore.

Vine Deloria Jr. held degrees in both law and theology.  His father was an Episcopal priest and missionary on the Sioux reservation and his aunt, Ella Deloria, was an anthropologist.  He was a ground-breaker, a trail-maker, and an iconoclast, a revisionist historian and an institution-builder among Native Americans -- taking on the larger society on their own ground with their own assumptions.  He was five years older than me and died in 2005, leaving a huge body of work, including twenty influential books.  I saw him speak in Portland, OR, and visited with him via email.  (I am white with a long history on the Blackfeet reservation.)

I think Deloria was consciously and deliberately both participating in and creating a great shift in world-wide thought away from the European Enlightenment, which was a system of scientific, evidence-based ideas that have been a great source of technology and a certain kind of progress, but which have also been misused to oppress people who didn’t fit what were sometimes mistaken conclusions.  Deloria’s most famous dissension was rejecting the land-bridge that was supposed to be the access of Native American peoples to the American continents.  This notion has been proven and disproven in many dimensions, which didn’t bother Deloria.  He just wanted people to think -- and then to act in conscientious ways.

The paradigm shift he accepted was called by some the Aquarian or New Age idea that had American roots in the renewed contact with the Asian world that created the Transcendentalist movement in New England.  Through the Sixties and Seventies it has resulted in renewed understanding of women; LGBTQIA issues; a wave of lyrical poetry and romance novels; the spreading practice of Buddhism, Hinduism, and the other Asian world-views; mysticism, especially mystical science-fiction; the legitimacy of the sensual; and the inclusion of all peoples.  Slowly, it created a new awareness that allowed us at last to see the People already here.  It has justified the Pan-American tribal culture grown up around Pow-wows and a hybrid material culture as well as promoting political solidarity among the whole planet’s indigenous people, even the ones who have barely discovered the rest of the world and those, like Wiccans, who are in a wonderful new term, “chrononauts,” cruising time as much as place.

This shift in the way of looking at things has been met by a parallel shift in physics and cosmology which no longer uses only the principles of Newton to explain existence.  If you don’t see the elegant irony of that, you’re not Vine Deloria Jr. and you should hang around with indigenous people.  I agree with William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. from Fort Peck who said the best response to life is laughter and supplied a celebration of that idea in his short piece.

I’m reviewing this anthology from a pdf rather than from a paper book.  Computer technology has been -- in that two-sided way that so many things operate -- a great gift to the indigenous people who immediately saw the value -- but also made it possible for some to invade the great online Pow-Wow, confusing it through flaming paranoia, opinions from the uninformed, and mouseholes where the publishers came and went -- always making money for themselves -- not the writers.  In that busy boundary too many people were sorted on the grounds of genealogy as determined by the White Eyes who keep lists and databases.  It is impossible to determine tribes by genetics but only by treaty-governed descent from listed parents.  The better criteria is whether the writer participates in this deeper understanding of human survival and contributes to the principles that protect it.  For millennia the tribes prospered by pulling in new blood.

The tone of this anthology suggests that we have gotten past the arguing and legal quibbles that undercut the very sources of understanding.  Tribes were given the right to determine their own membership and then, when Ward Churchill was declared an Indian by “his” tribe, their decision was mocked, undercutting NA sovereignty.  People like my close friend Tim Barrus (whose work was praised by Marijo Moore, one of these editors) were attacked as fake when in fact they saw the world in the same heart-shaped way as the indigenous and ought to have been pulled into their world.  Only the suicides of two fine and honored NA writers brought us back to reality, but in a horrid way.  We don’t know how many indigenous people stopped writing out of fear.  We do know that the publishers abandoned Native American literature as too much trouble.  No money in it.  

Now we know better.  The people represented here write out of love.  This anthology is assembled from memories, essays, poetry, and unclassifiable writing to form a knotted shawl for the universe.  Don’t make it into something it is not and does not need to be.  The epigraph declares:   “All the tribes say the universe is just the product of mind ... It fits perfectly with the Quantum. Indians believe the universe is mind, but they explore the spiritual end of it, not the physical end.” Vine Deloria Jr.

The editors say,  “This anthology does not reveal secret ‘how-to’s’concerning the ceremonies of Indigenous peoples, neither does it reveal the ‘power’ of medicine people, nor reveal knowledge meant to be kept in tribal protection.”  Well, actually it comes awfully close to providing a lot of material for wanna-be shamans, but one of the shifts in this massive, universal, essentially autochthonous understanding of life, is that things cannot be confined in boxes, trademarked for commercial profit, or hoarded to benefit only one’s small group.  

A principle of the quantum is that things cannot be nailed to the floor or “owned” but that the more explored, the more given away, the more stars and galaxies named, the more there are.  The problem is not acquiring “enough,” but rather to find space to shape one’s small corner from the plenty of the planet.  These writers have done this work and the editors have performed the service of spooning the ceremonial soup into bowls for you to sup from.  Some of this work has appeared other places and much of it will be quoted again, the pdf escaping into the googley world.  In the European paradigm which depended on things brought home and measured out of ships’ holds for profit, this would be bad.  In the cosmic Vine Deloria Jr. paradigm, things fly on their own and find new mates, creating in their polyamorous way an even Newer World.

We must honor this anthology and these writers.  I included their names so you could seek them out and buy their work.  Some have websites. Some are academics.  Some are dead.  All are verbal fancy dancers.  Fly with them.