THE BACK OF THE BOX

When I was a kid (b.1939), vitamins were such a new idea that the Cheerios box featured educational comics with little pixies, each representing a different vitamin, and a girl named Cheery.  Today Honey Nut Cheerios have had to be taken off the market because people are allergic to nuts, and the new recipe for the dough is announced to be “gluten free.”  We have gone from looking for good things to add to looking for bad things to remove.  

I remember having measles, scarlet fever, and chicken pox.  One of my brothers had rheumatic fever, which can affect the heart.  He did develop a bit of a heart murmur which obsessed my mother ever after, though he was cleared to compete in wrestling in high school and had no problem.  Now people in small towns nearly force their boys to play aggressive football, even knowing that it will probably at some point cause brain damage from concussions.  Our ideas about what is dangerous, esp. for children, change all the time.

Other ideas about what to do will persist without anyone even noticing.  Here’s a benign example:  people know I have a lot of books and that I write all the time.  Their assumption is that it’s like the reading they know, which was mostly in school.  They ask, “How many books do you read in a week?  Three or four?”  The number of books read in a time period is the way schools and libraries try to encourage reading.  You read it, then discard the book.  It’s over.  Consumed.  Consumer thinking.

But I read half-a-dozen books at a time.  Sometimes I only read a few pages, put the book down, come back to it months or even years later.  I read by chasing themes in content, or because there’s a side-issue that’s suddenly gripping.  On the shelves I try to keep general subjects together, which means the contents may be separated in the writing by years.  My grandmother’s books mix with what came in the mail today.

Jared Diamond’s “The World Until Yesterday” is living in the bathroom where I’m working my way through child-raising practices in self-contained tribes away from “civilization.”  More focused on coping with trauma and predation (tigers) than on diseases, there are strategies so negligent that adults often have burn marks from getting too close to fires.  No one intercepted them or taught them not to get close.  Compare with modern fire-retardant chemically treated child’s pajamas which turned out to get into the child’s system with damaging consequences.

On the other hand, children growing up in the Amazon rain forest where dangers are everywhere, are on their mother’s backs at first, then within her reach, then within her eyesight which is close in a jungle.  Lifelong, they go in groups.  But in safer places, like the Australian outback, Diamond assures us that the infamous deadly snakes are rare and there are no big mammal predators.  Children go on “walkabout” alone.

My copy of Gambles’ “Origins and Revolutions” is traveling through the house everywhere.  I have to hunt it down because I read short bits, need a quote, or am ready for the next bite.  Then I’m distracted and put it down in a new place.  I need Diamond’s information about tribes, in that constantly on-going dialogue we’re all having about whether things are getting better or worse and what changes we should make.  Once we accept responsibility for ourselves and our lives, how they evolve, we have a lot of research and thinking to do.   

Are isolated change-resistant enclaves, like the upscale mothers of Marin County — who refuse vaccination and thereby start epidemics — right to so emphasize what’s “natural”?  There are tribes who leave their children almost entirely unsupervised.  Child mortality is high, but those who survive are the ones with brains, gumption, and confidence.  The adults are admirable, except not very compassionate. There is an isolated group that cherishes their babies, refuses all abortion, tolerates handicaps.  The gene for club feet is in this closed population and the rate of affliction has risen to 15% of the babies.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2075152-did-zikas-recent-mutations-let-it-explode-as-a-global-threat/?cmpid=NLC|NSNS|2016-2801-GLOB&utm_medium=NLC&utm_source=NSNSAL

Clearly the way we raise our children is an interaction among morality, danger, attachment, and all sorts of other contingencies.  Now, as this new plague traveling with the mosquitoes expanding their territory across oceans because of airplanes and climate warming, and the first horrific cases of babies with tiny heads are beginning to hint that there are other consequences due to the same virus (possibly paralysis), the best we can do is to warn women not to get pregnant.  As though that ever works!  Women have been warned not to get pregnant for centuries. Might as well warn mosquitoes not to bite.  And I’m not looking forward to the mosquito-phobes (who also tend to be bat-phobes) insisting on intense spraying of Valier this summer.  (Dandelions are also a target.)

When I was a kid, childhood diseases were considered inevitable.  We were all vaccinated for smallpox.  A classmate died of tetanus because her father wouldn’t get her the vaccine because they were poor and it was costly.  About the time I was born, the daughter next door died of polio.  Luckily we never got mumps or whooping cough, since there were no vaccines for them.  Now there are, but people still resist.  Vaccination was a group experience when we lined up in grade school, but now in the US it is likely to be a private experience, which makes it easier to refuse.

I got pneumonia and had a penicillin shot.  Since my bed was up against one of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that lined our house, I found “Riders of the Purple Sage” and read it in a fever haze, my first grownup novel.  Earlier, when my brother had rheumatic fever, I was put to sleep on the couch downstairs, which was very exotic to me.  I had the idea that people only slept on the second floor.  I had found “Biography of a Grizzly” which was a small book with little drawings, so I read it all night while the mantel clock struck away the hours.
  

That's a geyser, not a volcano.

The story happens near Yellowstone.

Engulfed in grief for poor Wahb, dying old and alone, I finished about the time the others got up and had to convince them my fatigue and red eyes were not a symptom.  When I discovered that my mother, on medical advice, had burned my entire paperdoll collection, a village that lived in a suitbox under the brothers’ bed, it seemed to me related to the death of Wahb.  

Holocaust, natural death, disease, and care-taking were combined.  Every bit of fabric was washed with bleach or Lysol.  All surfaces in the room were scrubbed.  Somehow my father’s books were ignored.  It was as though books were a kind of privileged status, protected and protective.  They made your brain big.

When I googled for information about Zika, what I got was advertising for an amusing video game called “Tiny Brains”.  So here’s what we’re teaching kids:  you are entitled, privileged and smart BECAUSE of adults helicoptering your lives and emphasizing amusement.  The adult bargain with fate is that if they pour every attention and expense into the present happiness of their children, other people’s children can go to hell.  They don’t even need school lunches.  And if you don’t obey the adults, they will withdraw that support and kick you out, the same as your boss treats you at work.  What this kind of attitude creates is genocide supporters and gated cities.

By Jim Kirwan

But the planet is relentless.  Mosquitoes, viruses, climates — old age.  No one gets out alive.  What matters is what you do until then.  There are two kinds of survival: individual and group.  Your life is shaped by how you define your group, and to what degree your group helps you survive.  So now what shall we do about Zika and the other plagues coming out of Pandora’s box?  Personally, I don’t eat boxed cereals anymore.  I get my info from books.  And the occasional website post.

https://aeon.co/opinions/artificial-food-has-made-human-civilisation-possible?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=f72a7e8e04-Daily_newsletter_Thursday_28th_Jan_20161_28_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-f72a7e8e04-68600437

CHILDSCAPE

The Bullshoe Sisters: a force for education

when they grew up.

One of my chief pleasures and a driving reason for me to read is finding new ways to look at old things.  This is not widely shared around here.  People like to find the BP (“best practice” which is an interesting phrase linked to technologies, including health care and enforced by insurance) and then stick with it, even though new discoveries and goals develop.

Writing about historical indigenous people is often a matter of rehearsing the same old scripts and assumptions, some of them mistaken interpretations imposed by the oppressors of the times: missionaries, cavalry, railroad magnates, Euro adventurers and the like.  Even today the academics arrive with their heads full of romantic factoids which the local tribes are happy to exploit. 

So I’m pleased to be reading “Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory,” by Clive Gamble.  Gamble is English and thinks about the two major “revolutions” in the three million year history of hominid evolution: one is the sudden (in archeology years) explosion of creativity that created art, music, religion, language — the whole realm of metaphor that some believe is the real beginning of modern humans — the second is the development of agriculture and the relation to sedentary life.  (Not sitting down but settling in one place and building an environment that can be defined as containers, like houses.)

For instance, there is a lot of difference between a hearth and a fire.  A hearth is a place specially occupied by the fire, a “fire place,” which is related to crucibles, blacksmithing, and other technologies of metal that demand high heat over a short period of time.  This is different from the “fire place” that is used for cooking, even baking, because a camp fire can be improvised and baking can be done in a hole with a fire built on top of it, the way Blackfeet prepared camas roots.  People who do metallurgy are sedentary and repetitious.  People who only use fire as they travel are improvisers.  

This is one major difference between tribes.  The people of the Pacific Northwest lived in cedar plank long houses and built hearths, erected totem poles, created shell middens of considerable size.  The people of the prairie used technologies of tanning, cording, flintknapping, and left evidence of camps along streams where cottonwoods grew in predictable favored spots according to the seasons.  Since most of their materials were biodegradable, they are invisible to us now.  

Blackfeet kids at Heart Butte used to complain about getting more light-skinned as though it were yet another incursion of “pale faces,” but it was clear that they don’t go outside much these days.  This is windy country so it is a temptation to stay indoors by the TV, a kind of hearth, and they keep the light out for the sake of viewing screens.  In the days of lodge-dwelling, people were mostly outdoors, even maintaining a separate cooking and smoking fire outside the lodge.  They were good at rigging shade with pieces of tipi or leaned together leafy branches, but it was bright shade.  Photos that record skin ordinarily covered by clothing reveal much paler areas.  So having an “indoor hearth” has changed the people and what they do and what they think of themselves.  

Gamble talks about what he calls “scapes”, the environment one is aware of and uses, so there is a landscape of habit which for early Blackfeet would have meant trails more than “bushwhacking” which on the prairie would mean something more like “grass crushing,” the social landscape meaning how the people are distributed and connected, and the task scape which might mean hunting patterns or might refer to special sources of materials like the yellow clay used for paint.  He discusses the “childscape” as the territory and the pattern of knowing it through travel and work that shapes and limits the raising of children.  This is one of the uses of story which always includes the sky for Blackfeet children. 

When I was still teaching on the rez, I took a photo of the Rockies and used it to learn the horizon line of the peaks until I could “write” it like a cursive sentence.  I’d walk to the blackboard and “write” it or put it at the top of a page.  The kids always recognized it, but were surprised that it could be learned, which means that they had lost the map-drawing skills of their ancestors.  But there was a fascination with “white man’s maps” in Atlases and highway guides.  

Reciprocally, whites who come to the rez get very frustrated with the lack of street signs because people here (even whites) go by the social landscape and the task landscape, which are learned and repetitive, often anchored by landmarks like the location of community dumpsters.  People whose garbage is invisibly collected don’t register such objects or the logic of their location.

The Rockies at sunset

Anyway, white man’s maps are drawn as though from a satellite, looking from the top down. Indian maps, especially along the Rockies, are from the side and mark distinctively shaped peaks as well as the erosion valleys and canyons with uses.  The criteria for most things is experience — reacting to what one has learned through living with the sensory characteristics that translate to usefulness.  But other things known have been arrived at by analysis or implication, more often recorded as narrative than as abstract ideas.  

“Fittingness” becomes the criteria for something persisting unless it is an exceptional or "counter" practice or object that grabs the imagination.  The wheel was not invented by Blackfeet because it is mostly useless without roads, esp. in gumbo country where a “stone boat” — a wooden sled — or a travois can go places where a wheel would soon be bogged down.  In some ways glassified stone that could be knapped to an edge was more useful than metal.  But mirrors were fascinating, unique.

A childscape doesn’t just provide knowledge of materials and territories.  It teaches how to do things, how to learn, how to tolerate failure or even pain.  Missionaries and other Euro-taught and now-teaching people have pressed most rez kids NOT to rely on themselves but to ask for the “proper” way to do things.  They are punished if they do the wrong thing, which teaches them to do nothing without permission.  Guided by social opinion from the very beginning, they can be crippled by confusion and double-binds.  Pretty soon there is rebellion.

Since the Sixties, living territory has become even more treacherous because of political counterculture resistance to “best practices.”  In fact, the generation breaks introduced by new technologies and coalitions of same-aged kids — supported by music waves, the internet, and the media’s fondness for labeling — mean that kids don’t look to adults anymore but depend on each other, even when it comes to risky stuff like mind-altering substances, sex and reproduction, criminal matters, and precautions in a dangerous environment.  These are all part of the childscape, which patterns the child's thought into adulthood.

Gamble demonstrating how to butcher a sheep.

Clive Gamble is hard to read, partly because of anthropological neologisms for concepts that are uncommon and partly because of more classic jargon.   But far more than having to learn vocabulary, it is necessary to reframe one’s childlike from-the-outside perceptions -- as though “Other” people were dolls -- into the world-as-perceived-with-the-senses and the assumptions about them that are experience-based.  We are used to filtering, skimming, reducing to materials that can be marketed.  We are not used to being submerged in a landscape.  Sub- merged.  Land- scape.  Judging from computer games and videos, we want these experiences, but don't know we're IN them.