OUI, JE SUIS CHARLIE

World leaders except the USA.

On one side of my family I have a cousin with very little experience of the world.  He has not traveled, been in the military though he’s of an age that ought to have been drafted, or been to college. He has cocooned himself in right-wing assumptions, a prosperity-based church, and playing the piano in public lounges.  Somehow he has locked onto history as a Truth without any consciousness that dates, names, battles, and triumphalism in general are 19^th century, totally outmoded by the realization that people rearrange facts to suit their own views, dropping out what is inconvenient.  History has been the written work of European white men.  Howard Zinn is one of that tribe, but events jogged him out of the groove so that he among others have asked what about the illiterate black woman -- what does SHE know about what happened, let’s say in the American Civil War?  Or in Africa today?  The answer is "plenty."

Paris beheadings

I was appalled when my California-suburban cocooned cousin responded to “Je Sui Charlie” with a re-copied list of Moslem atrocities over the centuries, concentrating on beheading and implying that the latest acts are typical.  I assume this is to inflame us all with Christian determination to start a new Crusade (send money).  Of course, it would be perfectly possible to counter with one of the most systematic industrial beheadings in history: the use of the guillotine to kill thousands, including the French monarchs.  In its time it was as rousing, popular, and public as the recent march in Paris.

In Valier there is considerable pride that the village immigrated en masse from Belgium. It seems clear to them that this was because the prairie irrigation project that is the keystone of the area was so attractive.  They think of Belgium as being like “Poirot,” the fussy but civilized detective from Masterpiece Theatre.  World War I, which was fomenting in the years just before the migration, seems irrelevant to them.  Neither do they think of King Leopold II (1835-1909) who took advantage of Belgian law to personally and privately own Congo, based on exploitation of natural resources ranging from rubber to diamonds, which he finally sold to Belgium, the nation, for an enormous sum, much as the Conrad brothers sold their ranch to Cargill for a million dollars.  

Congo amputations imposed by Belgians.

Leopold’s Congo notorious management makes the Taliban look like beginners.  Whippings, amputation, death, and the slavery of the people still echoes in political consequences, including the terrible turning of factions against each other in the wholesale machete murders of neighbors.  I doubt you could find more than a half-dozen people in Valier who know about Leopold II and his sowing of dragon teeth.  I’m sure Belgians are not eager to talk about it.

A more entertaining example of the use of history for ego-inflation comes from a cousin on the other side of my family who daily at the breakfast table flung accusations of inescapable shortfalls attributed to essential natures of the family.  This pompous cousin informed us that the Cochran branch of the family was more prosperous because they were tougher.  His evidence was that they arrived in Oregon by walking across the prairie on the Oregon Trail.  (The Oregon Trail people are full of pride, something like the Daughters of the American Revolution, which -- incidentally -- includes descendants of the Indian Nations who fought against the Brits.)  My cousin said the Pinkertons were relative cream puffs because they came on the train.

Traveling on the Oregon Trail

His weak sense of chronology had skipped over the simple fact that when the Cochrans came, there WAS no railroad across the continent, though they could have taken ships around South America.  There was no Panama Canal yet either.  But it WAS helpful that the Cochrans were earlier, when the land of the Willamette Valley had just been taken away from the indigenous tribal people and re-allotted to white people from back East, which was a quick jump to prosperity.  I’ll follow up all this later in other posts.  

In some ways the Euro-American insistence on channeling everything into one fast, slick, industrial channel owned and driven by profit -- like the railroad -- has been efficient and effective judged by prosperity in the sense of money for the right people.  It has also been destructive, mostly to sub-groups of individuals who were sacrificed to national goals, like the Chinese and Irish immigrants who actually built the railways.

This fantasy account of the Pinkerton/Cochran comparison is really rooted in the marriage of our grandmother, a Cochran at a time when the family ran woolen mills and was prosperous enough to cede original homestead land for the Oregon Pioneer Park in Brownsville, OR.  She married a man her father considered beneath her, partly so she could escape a critical step-mother.  She was vulnerable to protection and nurturing by a fiery, seemingly powerful man, but also vulnerable to criticism -- family-on-family --  about who was better, since her husband’s fiery nature turned out to be more proclamation than alliance-building.

Group of King's Daughters

On the other side of the family, cocoon-man’s mother’s history was not known, but her ways were always ladylike and quite English.  She was a poet of romantic sentiments and the only aunt I know of who sent her children to church, though she didn’t attend.  Only recently was the family contacted by genealogy tracers in England who had identified her mother as one of the King’s Daughters, a euphemism for a huge group of orphans whose parents had died in the terrible plagues like cholera that swept Britain.  The children were deported to Canada and Australia with the rationale that the great spaces of land needed people.  It was assumed that they would be gladly adopted or at worst become something like indentured servants.  Their fates varied with their luck.

Out of such historical movements come a great hunger for stability, for family, and for propriety.  This is what IMHO left the grandson welcoming the fundamentalism of religious and political right wingers.  In my own sibling cohort, with a mother who aspired to return to the status of the Cochrans who had endowed colleges and enjoyed prestige, we all went to college -- my mother and a scholarship paying my way, and my brothers going on the GI Bill earned by their service in the Marines.

My brothers, one coming out of the Marines, one going in.

My Pinkerton grandfather and the times played a nasty trick on my mother.  Her father paid her way through the first years at Albany College (which became Lewis and Clark) and she actually earned her tuition at one point by raising corn on leased land with a leased mule.  Then the Depression meant there was no more money and she had to drop out.  What she didn’t know at the time was that as a descendent of the Cochrans, she qualified for a scholarship.  Her father knew and did not tell her out of pride.  Decades later, when she returned to college, he was contrite and helped her.

Fundamentalisms and conservative movements are sometimes seen in terms of making time stop, of getting control of change, or even returning to times conveniently remembered as “good,” due to a little strategic editing -- more unconscious than planned.  Who knew that vaccination and antibiotics would seem to solve the problem of  cholera-orphaned children -- only to be replaced by those orphaned by AIDS or drug-resistant TB or famine or unstable families who simply throw out their children.  Who realized that if it weren’t for the constant pruning by opportunistic disease and addictions, natural disasters and industrial erosions, the population load of the planet in itself would become a plague?

I’ve just read the final 1995 report of Martin Marty’s “fundamentalism project”.  It is meant to be secular, tolerant, inclusive, and postmodern -- abandoning the idea that some sort of climax culture was “modern,” inevitable and permanent.  The hope was that violent terrorism could be understood.  Marty makes it clear how difficult such a stance can be, partly because the fundamentalist groups war against each other, regardless of what the rest of us do.  In the end it’s all families.  

In case you didn't take comparative religion classes, this is Mohammed.

APPALACHIA AS A WAY-STATION

Lucy May Pinkerton Strachan, 16 years old in 1925

My mother’s papers are mostly about her family.  She was a proud Daughter of the Oregon Trail, which records the origins of the travelers -- in her case Kentucky and Missouri.  She grew up at the southern end of the Willamette Valley in Oregon, hill country not unlike the Ozarks and Appalachia.  But she scoffed that some there “live in the hollows and pool their ignorance.”  She was talking about her in-laws.  The Pinkerton girls went for education, the Hatfield boys went for land, and the two families were joined by three marriages, three brides for three brothers.  These same marriages also split the families through rivalry over who was the Alpha.

The Appalachian mountains themselves were created in something like the same way.  A collision of the underlying tectonic plates threw ancient bedrock up into mountains higher than today’s Himalayans, wore them down but then split them to either side of the growing Atlantic Ocean basin so that half ended up being the island and peninsula countries of Norway and Britain, on south to the Atlas Mountains of Africa.  The other half is what we call the Appalachians today.  The migrations of humans across the Atlantic ocean merely made threads across what had once been contiguous, esp. for Scots/Irish people.  To them the soil, the vegetation, and the coal mining were familiar.

At first the new coastal colonial nation was content to accept the remnant range of Appalachians as a natural barrier marking off the Indian lands beyond.  But the coast filled up and newcomers crowded over the mountains.  The French and Spanish circled around to the Mississippi River and ascended into the prairies along the drainage of the Rockies.  The fertile Ohio Valley area between the Appalachians and the Mississippi grew in a three-way settlement pattern among Brits crowding over the Appalachians, esp. after the Irish famine and the Scots land clearances;  French preserving their empire; and the Native Americans trying to maintain their own Five Nations and more.

The Old Northwest, a Territory or a Colony of the new nation, USA

The Old Northwest, a distinct political entity, formed around the waterways represented by the Great Lakes.  In my paternal grandmother’s time, (b. Oct 28, 1871, Quincy, MI, just south of Lansing) this was still forested country and she told about walking with her mother on a path where a group of Indian men stood aside to let them pass.  The NA tribes had also formed a nation around the connected lakes but now they dwindled to an interstitial population hardly recognized by others until the recent renaissance of consciousness.  Hit hard by Euro diseases and finally exhausting their wealth of beaver, many became Metis, then even paler, or moved on farther West.  

The land went to agriculture.  Canals were dug, railroads built.  This is where the main culture we accept as American was formed -- in the “middle.”  By mid-19^th century when the farms and towns had finally committed most of the land and the prairie clearances of tribes had ended in the first treaties, movement still farther West began, often launching from St. Louis, which was supplied by steam boats from New Orleans.  

Now my mother’s direct ancestors began to move along the Oregon Trail behind ox-wagons.  These are her “provenance”, her mother’s “tribe.”

From the Kentucky/Missouri complex:  

1845 James Cochran and Elizabeth Bevins; 

1847 William Cochran and Mary (Polly) Johnson Cochran.  

1851: William Philpott from Virginia; Sarah Darby from Kentucky.  

1852: James Cochran.  

Then those who arrived through birth:  

1851: William Thurston Cochran and in 

1857: Lucy Jane Philpott.

These last two married and became my maternal great-grandparents, forever locked into arrogance about their origins which was tightly connected to church affiliation, the Cochran rigid Presbyterianism v. the more graceful Philpott Virginian affiliation which I suspect was Episcopalian.  Lucy Jane, a high-spirited woman, died young because of complications of childbirth and WT remarried a woman called “Sarah,” whose step-children did not like her.  They called her “Sairey”. These patterns are hard to discard.

Massive sweeps of human population go back to the primal migrations of homo sapiens out of Africa far back in history but nevertheless governed by bodies of water, mountain walls, tribes, commerce and disease.  “Gunpowder, Germs, and Steel.”  Never resolved, always contending (push those neanderthals out of the way), always creating new extinctions and metis groups.  We pretend it’s about religion, but that’s the consequence rather than the cause.  Sometimes the ferment comes to rest for long enough that a generation can grow up.  They think, “Oh, this is the way the world is.”  And they fight to keep it that way -- if it’s to their advantage.  They lose anyway.  Eventually.

My mother left a pile of clips, photos, letters and so on, which she did her best to organize before her death.  The individuals named above settled mostly in the Willamette Valley and did well, though there were eccentrics and black sheep among them.  Clergy, judges, businessmen.  There were still full-blood tribal Indians in my mother’s girlhood (b. 1909, Payette, ID). She took great pride that during the Roseburg Strawberry Festival, the chief of the Calipooyas chose her serving table and accepted his bowl of berries and cream from her own hands. All this material remains for me to convert into what some might call a novel.  Her predecessors belonged to the great triple movement across the Atlantic in Colonial times and on over the Appalachians after the American Revolution and then to the coastal green West across the arid sea bed of the high North American “desert”.

The progression across the continent went parallel to time, at right angles to time, in opposition to time.  Ways of doing things changed, persisted, became irrelevant.

My father’s father was in Scotland until the end of the 19th century.  But the family namesake fortunes were also related to the Atlantic Ocean since the Strachans, though the present descendants are barely conscious of it, were involved in the Great Triangle of trade: sugar cane, rum and slaves.  

Selwyn Strachan

The proof is a complex of Caribbean people named Strachan, who are black.  Former slaves took the names of their owners, or were assigned them.  In some genealogies, one traces back several generations and then hits a research barrier.  I think this is one of them.

By the time of the Boomer Generation, which I barely precede (b. 1939), there is even more emphasis on national origins because of the bookend Great Wars displacing peoples.  The Great Depression in between was a monster that still haunts everyone.  And now there is much awareness of the “Spanish flu” that was the shadow of WWI, because it seems a foreshadow of Ebola.  Flu nearly killed my mother as a child and did kill her doctor.  Her younger sister, who did not live long enough to become an aunt, was killed as a teenager in a car accident.  A great industrial powered mobility resulted from the invention of the automobile and the webwork of highways Eisenhower mandated.

My maternal grandmother @WWI.  The baby is the girl killed in an auto accident as a teenager.  

The older girl served as an Army nurse during WWII.  My mother may have been in bed with the flu at this point.  

Aliene may be the bump under the apron.

None of this means much unless it informs our futures.  War, economic depression and industrial developments still threaten us, nibble at our edges, put damp poisonous hands over our mouths and noses.  The one saving grace seems to be electronics but we forget that the sun itself could flare out to fry our infrastructures, satellites and all, with one burst of cosmic energy.  Some of us -- in black moods -- think that might be a good thing.  Others think of migrating to the stars.  And still others fancy going back to visit their roots, to see what is there now.  But it all depends on which roots one chooses to claim, doesn’t it?

Most of my life has been on the Lewis and Clark trail.

In fact, I'm living on it right now in Montana.

MEEK'S CUTOFF

I claim special privilege of insight for this movie.  One is that it’s my family history:  I’m entitled to belong to the Daughters of the Oregon Trail since my great-grandmother could easily have been one of the women in this film.  The Philpotts and Cochranes were early immigrants and my great-grandfather donated the land for the Pioneer Park in Champoeg.  No matter how much I question such things: the mythology of endurance and tenacity in the face of hardship, the faith in relocation as a form of salvation, the belief that one is privileged by ancestors -- all remain part of my identity.

A second qualification is that my family camped across the country, particularly in the Northwest, by means of a folding tent trailer, not that different from a covered wagon.  The scent of sage, the yellow blooms of rabbit brush, the slow burn of alkali dust, the twisty shredded bark of found wood for a campfire, and the steady brushing of wind are all part of my sensory vocabulary.  When I see someone trying to find footing in a swift stream up to their waist, I know that slow and uncertain progress.

Third, because Montana has the same green wet strip on the west edge that sustains easy prosperity, unlike the eastern vast flat dry ancient seabed -- far more of a challenge -- and because my life has rubbed along among the indigenous people of all these places, I’m prepared to think about issues most people don’t know.  Especially the larger context of culture, ecology, and spiritual balance.

No art form can replicate a reality entirely because then it wouldn’t be an art form anymore -- it would be a second reality.  An art form selects those aspects of the reality that can configure meaning and transmit it to someone else.  When one draws a tree, one draws the closest leaves in detail but lets the others recede into a blur, the same as one’s eyesight is edited by the brain.  

Here is an historical account of the actual facts of Meek’s Cutoff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meek_Cutoff

And here is the website for the movie:   http://meekscutoff.com/

From my point of view, these are the best reviews. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0739998/news

Kelly Reichardt had done mostly wet green stories until she came to this one, which is drily existential, a peneplain of suspense with a vague beginning and an even vaguer end.  Her specialty is the small moment, the quiet gesture, the authentic detail.  The only thing inaccurate in this case was that no animals were killed or hurt in the making of the film.  In reality the Oregon Trail was as hard on the animals as it was on the people, who also died -- gaunt and sick.  One of my female ancestors went mad.  Well, was “never the same again.”

Once the script has been developed and the location scouted, casting is crucial.  I’m always interested in the way the faces rhyme: these are distinguishable but similar enough to be related, even Peter Greenwood except for his Spanish moss hair.  (More usually he plays a Kennedy or a gallant, upper-class gent in a tux.)  The women have almost doll-faces.  It is the Indian who has the very different look.  Rod Rondeaux has had a deliberately invisible but long-time presence in movies because he has been a stunt double.  http://www.indianstunts.com/RodRondeaux.html  You’re not supposed to recognize him.  He was in “Comanche Moon” so I watched it this afternoon to see if I could recognize him, but I did only once:  he was putting a horse away.  None of his acting in “Meek’s Cut-off” was corny, like the acting in “Comanche Moon,” which was an entirely different kind of Western: self-mocking Cormac McMurtry, a Texas hybrid, very violent.

For those who couldn’t handle a slow, realistic, no-explosions plot, the end of the movie -- just the Indian standing at the edge of what look to me like the cliffs of the Columbia Gorge (though you can’t see over that edge), just looking, with the woman’s sewing basket (her “possibles kit”) in his hand -- is too ambiguous to be borne.  What has come out of that impatient criticism is very interesting: an intense curiosity to know what it is the Indian says when he speaks “Indian.”  (There are no sub-titles.)  Rondeaux is evasive.  (Do not play stick game with this guy.)  He knows the trick of film-acting:  don’t act.  Just be real.  This is a man who has been around, been hurt, seen a lot, thought a lot.

http://www.slate.com/content/slate/blogs/browbeat/2011/04/18/what_s_the_native_american_man_saying_in_meek_s_cutoff.html

The lines were written in English, translated to “down river Nez Perce” and probably augmented by Cheyenne and Crow since Rondeaux is from the Crow rez.  Judging by his French surname and receding hairline, he’s got a bit of Metis in him.  The trick riders around here undoubtedly know him -- probably the rodeo crowd as well -- and they will know that the Crow -- unlike the Blackfeet -- were allowed to keep their language and also allotted an excellent piece of land for their reservation.  They were, in WWII terms, collaborators with the US Cavalry.  He’s complicated.  The pioneers are not.  They have locked onto a goal and intend to get there, no matter what.  By the time of the movie, they have no choice anyway.

Kelly Reichert wanted us to have to interpret the guide in the same way that the pioneers do -- read the body language of someone from a different culture.  The heroine who succeeds in this understands that he’s not stupid, that he will negotiate, that he’s very much engaged in the world and will participate in their lives as much to see what will happen as for any big reward.  She knows that moccasins need to be maintained and that kindness is an investment in the future.  

The Meek character (note HIS “possibles kit” with all the elk teeth sewn onto it!) has his tall tales to sustain him. (“An’ he ET that thar bear!”)  The Indian character has his mythic vision to guide him.  In fact, the Christian baby Jesus and Moses promised land stories aren’t a bad fit.  And so they all rub along together, walking separately, embracing in times of trouble.  A story is a river is a trail is a life. 

I’d love to read the original short story by Jon Raymond that this script came from.  There were three Jon Raymond books on Amazon.  I ordered all three.  Sixty cents for the books. (Forty cents for one, nineteen cents for another, a penny for the third.)  Twelve bucks for the shipping.  I think they are all set in Oregon.  Is this an existential peneplain or what?  Just keep walking, reading, writing.  Wading.