"OFF THE PATH" an anthology about on the rez

When I came to Browning MT in 1961, I wanted to teach English partly because of a fantasy of creating indigenous writers like my 4^th grade teacher, Mildred Colbert, Chinook.  The superintendent at that time, Phil Ward, shared that dream because he was formerly an English teacher as well.  He wrote poetry.  If you’re reading this, you know what I write.  Phil Ward and I were white.  Do-gooders.

Fifty years later I get the news that Greg Hirst, a former student, will teach English in Heart Butte this coming year after a fine career in Wolf Point.  I’m already trying to make contact.  But somewhere I heard about an anthology that included a Blackfeet writer and ordered it:  “Off the Path, An Anthology of 21^st Century Montana American Indian Writers, Vol. 1.”  I just finished reading it and am absolutely so swollen with excitement that I could split screaming. 

Here are the names and their enrollment:  Adrian L. Jawort, who is also the CEO and editor, and Cinnamon Spear, (both Northern Cheyenne),  Luella N. Brien and Eric Leland Bigman Brien (both Crow which is Apséalooké) and Sterling HolyWhiteMountain (Blackfeet).  Luella and Leland are sibs.  I reach for the phone, but am hampered by the lack of a directory for cell phones.  The phone number of www.offthepasspressllc.com was in the front of the book and that worked.   I talked to Adrian and I’ve left a message for Sterling, but -- after all -- it’s Friday afternoon in August!

Adrian L. Jawort

Poor Adrian -- I swooped down on him with no warning and out of any context at all.  No matter.  He’ll get used to me -- I’m not going away.  Not because I’m going to horn in on what he’s doing, but because THIS anthology is what I want to see published.  TRUTH.  REALITY. CONTEMPORARY.

Sterling HolyWhiteMountain

These ARE 21^st century college grad people.  They do not wear feathers, they do not bend the knee to the gatekeepers, they know their stuff.  The most accomplished (Iowa Writer’s Workshop ring any bells?) is Sterling and you can see him reading on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Crs1Z9dZr8Q  In his story he talks about “court vision,” meaning basketball court -- not the other kind.  Court vision is when a player has mental awareness of everyone, what they’re doing, what they’re about to do, where the ball is going and how fast it’s traveling.  It’s something like getting the big picture.  That’s what these writers have.  

They talk rough -- they talk about booze and drugs with name-brand familiarity.  They know murderers and the murdered.  They’ve seen their parents slug it out.  The only thing that surprises me is that they don’t talk about dogs very much.  Sterling mentions them.  (I make it a policy to smuggle at least one imitah into every short story.)   They throw in words from their tribal languages.  Almost every character is from their generation, sort of half-in and half-out of success and the middle class, some of them convinced the only way to have a life is to leave the rez.

The staff of "Rez Made" clothing

And yet Sterling has a clothing company, http://rezmade.com, based in East Glacier.  Check it out.  The people in the photo above is very much the same kind as the ones in the stories, except there are a few maniacs in the stories and none in the pics.

Alcoholic dads are the worst monsters but they have multiple personalities and can also be your savior -- how do you cope with THAT schism?  How do you keep the pattern from rising up inside you and taking over your own innocent relationship many years later?  Cinnamon Spear makes you feel it.  Her other story, about having to give up $1,000 to save her little sister from a dumb mistake, and sleeping rough for a few nights because of it, while wondering what she has really done -- well, it’s not an Indian story.  I mean, it is, but there are no horses or feathers -- just the reality, a mix of innocence, yearning, family loyalty and murder.

Rez girls at Indian Days. wearing Rez Made

Cinnamon Spear also gives us the goody-two shoes girl who always does the right thing and has almost no experience on the wild side, but falls for a demon boyfriend.  It’s okay.  He’s in prison.  It’s a theoretical relationship based on letters.  Oh, boy.

Adrian Jawort masterfully handles the indigenous relationship with the dead in a story about meeting his brother for coffee -- because he needs to tell the brother he’s dead.  The brother is.  The story is so good you won't mind that I just gave you a spoiler.
  

Luella N. Brien and her twins

A prom girl conceived on her mother’s prom night gets ultimately trashed out at her own third prom by her “stereotypical Indian poet boyfriend as one of the props.”  That’s one of Luella N. Brien’s stories.  

Her bro Eric has a beginning website:  http://www.ericbigmanbrien.com  His story is about the writer's brother who wants the writer to take him in during Lent, because he has been told he will die on or about Easter.   Family is what happens when you're trying to have a life.

Woody Kipp, BCC journalism professor

These writers all have a touching conviction that a person can be a writer as a career but no one wants to teach English, so they all go for journalism.  It has worked for some, thanks to its immediacy, but they should talk to Woody Kipp.  Some take up Indian Studies and it IS time for them to crowd the white guys out.  I'm not sure they realize how many of these programs are being dropped by universities.  A few writers, like Adrian, already free lance here and there.  But the tribal colleges are welcoming.

There are no more than a few scattered sentences about the landscape or about Indian Days when the lodges are put up in the old circle:  moyis, “the circle where we live.”  No talk about vision quests or sun lodge tortures.  Instead, someone at the Indian Days pow-wow asks where the “49” is being held, and if you don’t know what it is, too bad.  You're missing something.  (It’s a hybrid of “Innun” singing and old white traditional songs, that I suppose got mixed in the Carolinas.  The first one I ever heard was a version of "She'll be comin' around the mountain when she comes.")

Darrell Kipp and I used to talk about NA writing and I always thought he’d break into the big time with a killer novel, or at least a chapbook of poems.  But he spent his life for kids and Blackfeet language, aside from being one of those solid people the rest of us count on.  Maybe there’s no shame in that.  Maybe it’s just as good -- being the person who inspires a new generation with a different vision -- maybe one that can only be seen if you have the equivalent of social “court vision” for those younger people.  They don’t fuss about grammar, they say fuck whenever they like, but -- curiously -- none of these people use slang for personal parts.  A penis is a penis.  Just a penis.  Good enough.

Okay, so "Breaking Dawn" is not realistic.

But love, oh, love, how they all love love and can’t resist falling into it, can never quite get over it, never believe it could ever happen a second time.  It will save them, make everything all right.  They crave the fusion.  Now how is that different from being a young white person or any other category of young adult?  I guess part of the difference is that on a reservation or just by being Indian, a person is always aware that the one you love might die.  Tonight.  Suddenly. There will never be an arrest or a trial.  But you could write about it.

If you want to read about it, go to their website www.offthepasspressllc.com or use Amazon.

REFLECTING ON AN ESSAY BY TIM BARRUS

"An Honest Try", a portrait of Bill Cochran on "Tornado" by Bob Scriver

This morning I got an email inquiry about whether Bill Cochran actually was the model for “An Honest Try,” Bob Scriver’s motif for his big rodeo series that finally was his breakthrough to public consciousness.  I was pleased to report that not only did Bill pose as the rider of that bucking bull, he was a driving force behind the whole series, the guy who knew the difference between a bull that spins and one that hooks and how to ride them.  Concurrently I’ve got a conversation going with Daniel Herman, a history professor over in the rainshadow of the Cascades who sees the difference between white educated liberal “understanding” of Indians and real day-to-day relationship with them.  

The Blackfeet Heritage Center in Browning, MT.

Originally built as the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife

These sent me back to reread Tim Barrus’ essay called “Invisibility” in his anthology, “The Blood Runs like a River Through My Dreams.”  It’s well-established that Tim was only using Nasdijj as a pen name, but he WAS living on the rez.  He knew many tribal people who found that if they admitted he was their friend, they would be punished by authority figures who wanted to please white liberals, a great source of income and patronage.  (And patronizing.)

This essay is about a man called “Mose Zah.”  Rest assured that it’s not his real name but he was a real Navajo.  He was an old rodeo hand dying of AIDS, which meant that people drew away from him. Where the infection came from is unknown.  He seemed to love “buckle bunnies” almost as much as horses in almost the same come-and-go way.  There are many old rodeo hands on many reservations who are quietly dying of somethingorother, not necessarily even AIDS.  Some die alone.

Particularities are always important in writing, but Tim is capable of a poet’s specific lyrical displacement.  He combines the same old obvious with a sudden luminous re-framing.  For instance:   “His was a world of hay, Wranglers, Airstream trailers, sweat, heat, and dust that seemed to cling to the inside of his mouth, strange and sweet and rising from the ground.  His was a world of hanging on even as the animals that screamed to scrape him off flung him with their forthright weight into the dirt where he sat briefly stunned and coiled like a spring about to spring again.  His was a world of manifest masculinity where the boundaries between women and men sometimes seemed set in stone.” . . .

Aussies out there, out back.  Nothing fancy as rodeo.

“He was never all that discriminating about women.  He always seemed amazed that they wanted him.  You hold the light from a woman like you hold a winning hand of aces close to your cautious smile.  Something in me thinks the women were a camouflage.”  At any rate, for whatever reason, no “buckle bunnies” came to take care of him.  

"Buckle Bunnies" are rodeo groupies.

Maybe Mose just cherished his singularity.  “It was a life he lived as easy as a song, and all the notches on his fence post represented his conquering certain ornery animals who had warned him they would kick him if he dared to ride them, and he did.  One hand held high in the air between the shifting gravities halfway to the moon.  All his women and all the animals he rode could bounce him abruptly off into a shuddering and a scrambling of his cowboy bones.”

The story action is simple.  Tim takes the old man in his wheelchair out to see his horses, then brings him back exhausted and feeds him canned chicken noodle soup.  The horses are what matter.

“And then we hear them dully in the distance.  Horses with their colts running toward us in undulating melt.  Horses with their fear in their nostrils crashing through the neighbor’s corn.  Mose’s eyes singing some pieces of a song I do not understand.  Relieving paralysis, the coming of the horses.  The horses run in pounding breathlessness all around both our graves.  These holes we dig as men, as friends, as fathers, as sons, as husbands.  His riotous thoughts hold electric imaginary reins as if to ride sprays of wind upon the backs of spilling horses, bursting into life with their breath again, the grateful running of the horses, stirring all the prairies of the universe with sacred leaps, and thirty seconds of this stirring is all you ever had because that is all there ever was and that is all there is.  Thirty seconds and the color of smoke all around you as you wonder at the awesome running of the horses -- flying and falling and biting in a buzz of flies -- resonating something carried forward in the urgently escaping terror of the horses, whirlwinds into the specter of his sleep.”

Tim’s writing has always been confronted in terms of the politics of certain subjects, never in terms of the actual writing.  If you look carefully at the above, you’ll see that he uses lyrical displacement -- that is, he chooses a word just next to what you expect (“singing eyes”) or pushes one grammar category over to another, often nouns to verbs, Hopi gerund style.  "SACRED" leaps?  A moment to reflect, then you consent, but you only get thirty seconds.  This is serious, not pretty.

The key to much of his writing is what the French and feminist theorists call “the gaze,” or so I think, though I haven’t done much reading in that school of theory nor has Tim ever suggested it.  But it’s only natural for someone who has spent a life in photography, always looking for the still and telling moment, the frame that finds the story, the point of view that reveals the subject -- never mind what it tells about the viewer, which is the viewers’ problem anyway.

This emphasis on the seen -- though often accompanied by sound (buzzing, resonating, song) -- is part of something hard to talk about:  projection onto a surface both enduring stone and evanescent (like Indians).  Consider the suggestiveness of this scientific definition:  In optics and acoustics evanescent waves are formed when waves traveling in a medium undergo total internal reflection at its boundary because they strike it at an angle greater than the so-called critical angle. The physical explanation for the existence of the evanescent wave is that the electric and magnetic fields (or pressure gradients in the case of acoustical waves) cannot be discontinuous at a boundary, as would be the case if there was no evanescent wave field. 

This sculpture is made of Chinese soup spoons.

It is as if the gaze is actually a projector that might swing away or be switched off unless it hits a screen, a boundary.  Then it is a capture, a binding.  Lately Tim has been talking about what images do to time.  We regard greatgrandparents long dead, or search the faces of strangers, or famous people for as long as we wish, as close as we want.  Flickering time -- now we remember and now we don’t.  Once we were little children and now we are old.  Are we here or are we not?

For Mose, red-blooded cowboy and full-blooded Indian, his blood now carries frailty.  His defenses are gone; he is hitting his limits.  He cannot be cured by chicken noodle soup -- but he can be comforted.  He can be given a moment.  This is not about any subcategory of humanness -- this is its essence.  The act, a few hours, is now made permanent in writing, a word-picture of this old cowboy taking soup from a spoon held by a man.  That’s what Barrus is really about.  The freedom to be in the moment.

WENDY ROSE: COMBUSTIBLE

Spontaneous combustion is something that happens because of an interaction of conditions.  Like the individuals that the media labels “jihad” which is more accurately a few individuals who use political terms to explode into lethal objections.  These incidents get splashed all over: “terror porn.”  A new economic alliance of nations along the Pacific coast of the American continents, but only from Mexico south, which will have far more impact on politics, goes quietly unremarked except in certain contexts, like “The Economist” magazine which is part of the reason the latter is considered far more important than “The New York Times.”  The Economist recognizes processes, the hydraulics of life, instead of the sensational or the institutional.

I try to follow that same practice when considering even ordinary and taken for granted assumptions that seem real and solid.  If you’re a “long reader” rather than a quick hit reader, you’ll know that what I think about includes art, Native Americans, writing (which might or might not include publishing), religion (which might or might not mean institutions), education (which might or might not mean institutions), small prairie towns, natural history, sex and HIV-AIDS.  That’s not an exhaustive list, but what pulls them together is that I try to understand them in terms of process, pattern, relationship, echo and metaphor.  It’s not a board game -- it’s a dance.

Every gesture, seemingly self-contained, has consequences.  So the idea that a vaccine is harmful (which recurs all the time because it seems like an intervention in nature) means that worried parents don’t get their children inoculated and now we have an epidemic of measles that will cost far more in many ways.  And the idea that HIV is connected to atypical sex practices (not much attention to the same syringes used for IV drugs that scare parents away from vaccines) means that people assume that only naughty people are at risk -- that being mainstream is a protection, though HIV and Hep C sweep through ordinary populations, swelling and billowing until one can buy at the drugstore a kit for detecting it, as though it were an unwanted pregnancy.  Which it is, in a way.

Many admire the claim by the linguist Whorf that the Hopi speak in terms of process instead of object and find it rewarding to speak of “godding” instead of “God.”  But then they fail to apply the idea even to Indians.  Consider that perhaps there is no such thing as “Indian,” but only “indianing,” a moving process that is as much or more economic as political, very hard to render into institutions like tribes, esp. when the institutional tribe, which was invented by the institutional national government so as to have an entity with which to negotiate, has already evolved far away from the shifting cultural context that defined it as it adapted to prairie or mountain or forest.

Consider Wendy Rose AKA Chiron Khanshendel AKA Bronwen Elizabeth Edwards.  She is one of the finest poets working under the rubric “NA writers” but part of her genius is her marginality as an urban Indian Hopi/Miwok.  (The Miwok are the origin of Lucas’ Star Wars “Ewoks.”  They used to occupy the territory where his studio is built.  Their chief is or was Greg Sarris, the writer.)  Her father was full-blood Hopi but the Hopi recognize only descent through the mother, as Orthodox Jews do.  Since the US government charges each tribe with defining its own membership, Wendy cannot be enrolled.  Her best credential is occupying Alcatraz with AIM, but she also has a Ph.D. in anthropology -- but defining her in terms of what she “does” would require a list of a dozen “disciplines.”  Hang onto the idea of poetry, the notion that such an art is a relating to the universe that subsumes everything else.

One of her more powerful poems is about “Truganinny,” an indigenous woman who was assumed to be the last of the Tasmanians.  Tasmania is a continental shard of Australia in the Pacific, separated long enough ago to evolve unique creatures.  Like the maybe-planet Pluto, its classification as continent/not-continent is right on the boundary.  Like Wendy.  Truganinny, since she was the last -- like Ishi -- was “stuffed.”  That is, mounted to look lifelike the same as her husband had been.  We don’t protect the first populations -- just the disappearing edge of the past.

I know a lot about taxidermists (taxi or “toxi”=poison + derm= skin) because I was married to one.  I’ve spent long winter afternoons turning the ears of trophy animals inside out, because the cartilage is replaced with a piece of plastic.  I thought about what those animals heard in life, what I could say to them in death.  Why will we kill something, then try to preserve it?  In my time with Bob Scriver we came to understand, in a kind of conversion, that we could keep the animals more alive in bronze art than in the actual skins of the animal.  

Here’s the end of Wendy Rose’s poem, which expresses the “last” of a kind’s wish to simply disappear:

Please  take my body to the source of night, to the great black desert where Dreaming was born. Put me under the bulk of a mountain or in the distant sea; put me where they will not find me.

The last defiance of the destruction imposed by the outsider is to resist the saving of one’s own literal skin, which is -- of course -- preserved by the poet, far more effectively than by taxidermy.

I’ve been thinking about Wendy because she left a comment on one of my earlier posts about Native American literature, a slippery category (more even than planets and continents).  What is it?  Who is it?  Who reads it?  All the questions she had were about who is entitled to write about or “as” native Americans, but none were about who is entitled to read it.  How will it make any money for the author if no one reads it except Native Americans, who are notoriously impoverished non-readers?  (Why is that, huh?)

I suggest that native writing -- ALL writing, all ART -- is a spontaneous combustion that flames up under specific circumstances. Bronwen’s transparently comes from claiming to be “Native American” against the rules of her own genetic tribe, a dark place hard as irony.  It cannot be forbidden or suppressed.  It can become violent as terrorism, though not in terms of flesh.  She is what she is, regardless of the label, and I admire her.  Not because she is half-Hopi, even if her own tribe won’t admit it, but because she has made her life an action:  Indianing, not just enrolled.

I do not admire deadly attacks on the street.  But bloody terrorism cannot be forbidden or suppressed.  It is not a “thing” but a spontaneous combustion.  The social forces of exclusion and deprivation that cause the flaring up must be addressed.  Labeling, stigmatizing, jailing, are crude instruments for keeping order because they always fall behind the processes of the bleeding, festering edge.