THEY'RE AFTER US!

An old Blackfeet lady (my age), well-educated, once in religious orders, sophisticated, a mother, a person who has lived in major cities, called me late at night for a bit of reassurance. She said she thought I was the only one likely to be awake at that hour and she was right. She is feeling ill, broke, put-down and bereft. She’s right about that, too. She thought I might say something useful. I don’t think she was really right about that.

The next morning she called me early in the grip of full-blown paranoia. People had targeted her, people were trying to get into her room (they had a key), a friend had died with strange marks on her stomach. I tried to talk her out of it, but no go, so I lost patience, just told her she was paranoid. She said thanks a lot, I was the one who put her there. She might be right about that. But it’s not really paranoia if they’re really after you. And “whites” (which is a code word for powerful people who control your life) have been after Indians since Columbus landed. Mortality rates are high and the percentage of them that are unnecessary deaths is high.

1. Population growth (most people are Catholic) beyond the carrying capacity of the business structures (including the Tribal Corporation), the land itself, or federal willingness to provide goods and services. Most prominently there is never the will to fund proper law enforcement, which is partly a function of enough officers well-trained and equipped and partly a function of social expectations. (No one expects much or even expects that expectations can rise.) Indian justice presumes that for major crimes, federal officials will step in, but they have no motivation to do so. When it comes to “minor” crimes (which may have major consequences) the presumption that Indians have a separate (sovereign) culture traps them in a box. There is no Supreme Court appeal. In the end it’s a small world with political forces powerful enough to prevent justice. Murders go unsolved; suspicious deaths are not investigated; rumors about mysterious deaths constantly circulate.

The federal government, after admitting they embezzled the trust funds of NA people, refuses to give them the money. Time after time the expectation is raised, then dashed.

2. A serious split in the tribe began early when some people had the advantage of white fathers (literally) who were in business or owned land or otherwise were employed so that prosperity went disproportionally to those folks. Their early advantage expanded into a major class split within the tribe itself. Most outsiders are totally unconscious of this.

3. A genetic heritage once fitted the people to the land in ways that no longer exist in terms of diet, exercise and practices. They were meat and vegetable eaters, always on the move. There was no sugar or alcohol.

4. This makes them vulnerable to diabetes among other things. Genetic vulnerability to diabetes is exacerbated economically by the tendency to eat cheap food -- high sugar, high carb, high salt and high fat but low nutrition. Partly this comes from eating fast food and junk food, fat beef instead of lean game and buffalo; and partly from being dependent on commodities and food banks. The foods from those sources are also high carb, high sugar.

5. The boarding school approach to breaking the old culture (plus the impact of population decimation from smallpox, cholera, and massacre) broke families and their generational wisdom. At one point there were only about 500 Amskapi Pikuni -- Montana Blackfeet -- half of whom were children. Many became stranded between cultures.

6. This compares to modern AIDS devastation in Africa, though American tribal people will resent me saying so. They do not like comparison to low status groups. One of the strong suppressive forces left by missionaries is the flat denial of things like genetic vulnerability (which translates to their ears as being physically faulty though it was physically supreme under conditions two hundred years ago) or lack of parenting (which translates in their minds to being morally deficient) or any other comparison hinting that they are not “just as good” as middle-class white folks. They want to say, like those missionaries, that they are just as bourgeois and middle-class as anyone else -- ironically at a time when many folks are criticizing that paradigm as destructive, not just to the people but also to the planet, just when we are turning to the authochthonous people as examples of more “noble” ways of living. Many rez folks are now educated and employed well enough to BE middle-class and -- to them -- this is success. White visitors can’t even see middle-class Indians, though some -- despite white-type success -- have maintained or renewed their connections to old-time religious ceremonies and self-disciplines.

7. The people are in a “syndemic.” (This word comes from Merrill Singer.) An “epidemic” of major proportions is a “pandemic.” When that overlaps and converges epidemics of disease, economic need, family disfunction, drugs, trauma, it becomes a “syndemic.” When one adds extreme weather and drought, it is called an “ecosyndemic.” The good news is that if you have a name for it, you can think about it. But the feedback mechanisms are not adequate to let the tribal members and rez residents participate in the knowledge flow. It feels simply overwhelming.

8. Treaties require that the US government provide education and medical care. This meant one thing in the early days and another thing now, much as the US Constitution meant one thing when it was written and another thing now. Post-modern thought, poorly understood, has taught many kids that education is a white man’s imposition on them and that they should resist it as illegitimate. (I’m NOT kidding.) Discipline in schools, even simple classroom order, can be defined as political oppression, even with a Blackfeet superintendent, principals, teachers and school boards -- which the schools have. The response has been to lower standards to the point where rez kids can’t cope with college-level work. They have no concept of remediation to catch up, but simply conclude they are inferior and go home. But those who have family support and guidance can zoom up to the Ph.D. level and some are MD’s.

The need for conscientious support in a hospital -- accurate record-keeping, proper med dispensing, careful cleaning, preventative education -- are LIFE-SAVING but not seen that way. Insistence on high standards come across as just more oppression and withholding.

9. There is a glass wall around the reservation. The newspaper is owned and controlled off-rez, though the actual editor is a sympathetic white with anthropological training. There is no sense by the surrounding white community that rez probs are very much like their own and vice versa, so there is very little sharing or sympathy. When the state legislation required that all Montana schools teach Indian history (which happened right here!) an educated woman said to me, “I don’t see why WE should have to study THEIR history!”

10. Pop media do not “get” Indians. They INSIST that they are either doomed drunks or doomed heroes. Anything other than that is simply not defined as Indian so it becomes invisible. People tell me there are no US Indian actors but I could name twenty who are Indian -- just not seen that way. HEATHER LOCKLEAR??? My fav example.

So, in general, it is right for an old lady Indian to be paranoid. I’m paranoid myself even though I’m white. The forces ARE aligned against us. We are at least somewhat victims. But there is no intent to single us out for punishment as individuals. In fact, there is no intent at all. No one person or group to blame. It’s structural: ecopandemic. The way the cookie crumbles, the chips fall, and we daren’t even eat ‘em. It’s grandiose to think we are the target; narcissistic not to understand that others suffer. Right here.

NEO-JAINISM

A recent article in the “Opinionator” by philosophy professor Jeff McMahan attracted a good deal of attention on my listservs, which include environmentalists, hunters, and animal studies people -- a broad assortment easily set at each other throats. Some took this article as absolutely received word and others said it was obviously provocation and still others were laughing too hard to have an opinion. The premise of the article was that suffering in the world could be addressed by eliminating all the predators -- which seemed to be defined as lions and tigers and bears (oh!) with little mention of predatory human beings. Or consideration of how we are going to get rid of carcasses if all the meat-eating bugs, rodents, and microbes are gone.

What sprang to my mind was a dim memory from World Religions class: the Jains, a religious group in India so concerned with not eliminating other life that they wear gauze masks to keep from inhaling gnats and carefully sweep the ground ahead of their feet to prevent stepping on ants. I looked it up.

Jainism is very old, going back nearly to the beginning of agriculture ten thousand years ago, which may be significant. The dislocations of such a major shift in civilization is bound to demand a new paradigm. The core of Jain reasoning is that every living creature has a soul and that the deepest moral command is kindness to all, because of reincarnation. When any living creature dies, it becomes another new living creature which is either “higher” or “lower” than the previous version, according to how much virtue was achieved. Thus: “Every soul is the architect of its own life, here or hereafter.” They speak of karma, a kind of fate, which is a bit of a joke to American culture (“My karma just ran over your dogma!”)

First you must believe in the soul, the ability of the “living” part of a being to separate from and survive the death of the body. “When a soul is freed from karmas, it becomes free and attains divine consciousness, experiencing infinite knowledge, perception, power, and bliss.” But don’t expect God or guardian angels to help you out if you’re Jain. “There is no supreme divine creator, owner, preserver or destroyer. The universe is self-regulated and every soul has the potential to achieve divine consciousness (siddha) through its own efforts.”

Jainism is one of the roots of Buddhism. Jains claim their beliefs are so ancient that they have always existed. Archeology and very early manuscripts tend to support this since there are traces back to nine thousand years before Christ -- that’s about the time Isaiah was alive, one of the thinkers that McMahan quotes. The Hindu stream of thought is independent from Jainism, but takes so many ideas from Jains that some think of them as a variation of Hinduism. And I have a hunch that Jesus talked to a few Jains.

Some say the most important contribution of Jains is the end of ceremonial animal sacrifice which had become so obsessional that it was consuming too much wealth at the expense of feeding families. In the Old Testament related ideas show up in the story of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son or Isaac having to be tricked into blessing Jacob, since Isaac preferred Esau, his hairy older twin son who usually brought hunted meat as sacrifice, while Jacob the smooth son brought ag products. Their mother, Rebecca, preferred Jacob and helped in the deception, aware that the twins had quarreled even in her womb. Some versions say that Esau sold his birthright for a mess of stew (which would include meat) and others say pottage, which is cooked peas or lentils. Reading these old stories is highly suggestive.

What I see in the kafuffle over McMahan’s proposition that all predatory meat-eaters be genetically altered to make them browsers is a new paradigm shift which cries out for a story. The culture shift we are in right now, which leaves so many families suffering from hunger, is about the new technological and bureaucratic advances that have made the planet a “sim world” where ecologies can be altered (global warming) and whole populations can be eliminated by denying assistance in the face of disease. After all, a virus is simply a bit of code. We ought to be able to alter it. So then the boys on the stone altar of trafficking could be spared -- but the angel is late. Abraham is not writing the check.

That’s one angle. Another is the preoccupation with suffering. a physical response to damage or sometimes childbirth or bodily disfunction, which it has been possible to formally escape if you have the money for drugs. At one time it was considered immoral for a woman to use anesthetics during childbirth because that agony was mandated as Eve’s punishment for disobedience. Suffering has become a kind of pornography. Consider the agony of Darth Vader as he changes from a Jedi to a menace. And all those movies about the 19th century when soldiers had legs amputated while biting bullets. Yet the promise to eliminate suffering seems to be the only way to get people to write checks. In general, they will do it more generously for animals than for people.

Here’s another idea: the suffering that comes from overpopulation of humans which we then impose upon animals, all of us living in little bureaucratic cubicles making and manipulating code, quite like chickens stuffed together in cages to lay eggs. This time we have sold our heritage for a plastic credit card. Salvation by prosperity, often at the expense of others who labor for low pay and live in hovels. Maybe cutting their hearts out with obsidian knives would be kinder.

The most sophisticated shift in recent thinking is well represented in the comments responding to this essay. It is ecology: the idea that all things -- living or not: animal, vegetable, mineral -- fit together in a constantly shifting and deeply interrelated pattern that is an entity in itself. Pull out the tigers from the jungle and see what comes undone. Send out frankensalmon to the seas and see what comes undone. Every change sweeps around the planet and every change, even so small as the size of a fish, raises the possibility that humans will no longer fit. It’s time to get back in touch with the continuous sharing with all beings that was taken for granted before the boundaries of agriculture were imposed. Which takes us back to Jains.

MERRILL SINGER: PROPHET OF SYNDEMICS

As I was doing the background reading for an article I’m just finishing up for an online e-magazine called “Rhizomes” which is about Deleuzeguattarian thought, I kept coming across the concept “syndemic” and the name of its deviser, “Merrill Singer.” He is a professor in Hartford, Connecticut, a medical anthropologist with a dual appointment in the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Health, Intervention and Prevention, University of Connecticut. I googled his books which were formidably expensive. So I made direct contact to see where he might deal with HIV/AIDS in adolescent boys, thinking I might be able to download an article. In response and almost by return email, he sent pdf’s of seven of his articles that are highly relevant. Like everyone else, he has never directly studied that specific demographic. Still, the material is powerful.

The idea is that a “syndemic” (unlike an epidemic, which is an outbreak of disease, or a pandemic, which is a disease that is sweeping everywhere like HIV/AIDS) is two or more diseases interacting (like people who have HIV/AIDS which makes them vulnerable to Hepatitis C and tuberculosis) but then on top of that social conditions or environmental contexts create an ecosyndemic, like malarial mosquitoes, poverty, poor nutrition, bad water, violence, stigma, victimization, climate shift and so on. These complex forces create a net of vectors that make nodes of misery where many of them meet.

This is not “Officer Krumpke’s” complaint that people think they should get off the hook of criminal punishment because Twinkies or pot made them do the crime. This is a cooler and statistically valid observational explanation of ghetto and what Singer calls the “hyperghetto” which interacts with both the prison system, which is a vital and functioning part of the larger society regardless of how we try to sequester it, and the military, which is constantly fed the low-level soldiers it needs by the desperation of bright young kids trying to escape drug-and-sex dominated culture. He does not take on the corrupt super-rich who support and promote child sex trafficking, but it’s not hard to see what the transportation around the globe of children, making them into human petri dishes, does for the spread of the diseases of sexual use.

He can explain that AIDS is a particularly resourceful and shape-shifting virus, entering the human population from monkeys, possibly as early as 1880 and probably making first entry in Zanzibar, then called Leopoldville. Perhaps you’ve heard of this notorious center for colonial Belgian corruption and degradation and how it shipped everything everywhere -- the Devil’s natural resources. In fact, Singer’s article called “Doorways in Nature: Syndemics, Zoonotics and Public Health,” which appeared in the journal called “Social Science & Medicine,” is clear and bold, confronting squarely our stubborn human conviction that we are special. We cannot protect ourselves by claiming special status and developing miracle medicines.

Pigeon holes are of little use when they were built “one-size-fits-all” but one is sorting as many turkeys and parakeets as pigeons. Less facetiously, it is a true Kuhnian paradigm shift to understand that life on this planet is a continuous dynamic sheet of interacting molecules only conditionally separated by skins and membranes. Grouping this life as plants versus animals, let alone species, is a thought-convenience. Long ago I read an article discussing the sharing of one-celled creatures between intimate humans: the horde of little “monsters” that live in our skin and guts, lodge in our eyelashes and livers. Not just lovers but also mothers and children, nurses and patients, siblings or pets who share a bed, soon host a submicroscopic migration between the continents of bodies that becomes a kind of bonding.

To put it more crudely, I once heard a woman sigh to a friend, “Oh, I just hate to take a new lover because it always means a new yeast infection.” The answer to the yeast infections and eyelash monsters of the world is not sterility but accommodation. What global conditions of a woman’s body, what habits, what environment both in and around her body, will discourage infections of all kinds? The answer to process is always balance. But in a boy with HIV/AIDS, the defenses have been removed.

So what are the vectors of eu-eco-syndemic? Religion? Prosperity? Kindness to one another? A far simpler and more regular life? Regionalism? Education? Just about the time we figure this out the whole mighty system shifts: one of Singer’s articles is entitled, “Ecosyndemics: Global Warming and the Coming Plagues of the Twenty-first Century.” The return of worldwide infections, now supported by modern transportation and shipping, is underway. We have witnessed the evasion of antibiotics by clever infectious agents and they never did phase viruses anyway. I always remember my friend who caught fungal pneumonia and nearly died because, as the doctors said, “The DNA of the fungus is foundational to human DNA, so what will kill the fungus will also be extremely destructive to you.”

Ideas are powerful vectors, carriers of behavior that can interrupt disease, violence and mis-uses of substances. The statistics of MRSA, antibiotic-resistant infections, are now abating simply because of a return to the old protocols of washing hands and scrubbing contaminated materials.

Other key terms are iatrogenic, damage caused by healers through carelessness or wrong beliefs, and anthropogenic, damage caused by humans in ignorance and -- often -- greed. Global warming imposes on all planetary life the consequences of greedy use of fossil resources, triggering change beyond anything we ever thought possible. But at the same time the planet itself is dynamic -- the continents are still adrift on tectonic plates that cause devastating earthquakes and volcanoes. I read once about the phenomenon of the magnetic poles (which are always moving slightly) suddenly switching ends. No one knows what that does to life. No humans had evolved yet the last time it happened.

When humans become aware of all this, their first reaction might be panic and then denial or maybe sudden obsession with the deus ex machina that will save them if they beseech it properly. Personally, I have made the shift from salvation as personal and individual to the idea of salvation as participation in the Now. The least I can do is to think and act in a way that creates the greatest joy and beauty in the whole wraparound sheet of planetary life.