LIFE IN THE MIDST OF DEATH

In this part of the world we don’t have spring.  One day we’re getting desperate over the severity of the winter and a day or so later we’re dumped into early summer.  Or sometimes people say that winter is when the really bad days outnumber the good days and summer is when the balance tips over so the really good days outnumber the bad ones.  Because tongues of Arctic air lick us and blasts of Mexican air wash over us, all the while waves of wet Pacific air drench us -- left-to-right on your weather map -- we have “seasons.”  They’re just more mixed than in other places.

Nevertheless, at the post office yesterday the little lady (she’s very short but always impeccably groomed) who occasionally comes to the door to convert me to Jehovah’s Witnesses (a hopeless task, but it’s nice to see her) told me that the apple tree in her yard had hung on to its withered fruit and is hosting robins at last.  Others are saying that the gophers are up and the rangers say the grizzlies are moving around, scowling over whatever they were dreaming.  The geese are reconnoitering and the kids are having to be sent back to their rooms to put on long pants and proper shoes instead of flipflops which they will actually wear in the snow while they sprint to the warm car.  Their systems are attuned to spring break in Florida before they even get out of eighth grade.  The forecast for today is forty-five degrees which means that the mountains of snow in town will be converting the streets into trout streams.  Night before last the temp was below zero.  It snows every month.  NO flip-flops yet!

A big fat book has accompanied me through the winter:  “The Education of the Senses” by Peter Gay, a reflection on the relationships between the genders and their arrangements through the “bourgeois century” that still haunts us.  Now I’m switching over to a different big fat book:  “Landscape and Memory” by Simon Schama.  My thoughts are going out of the house and into the terrain.

I subscribe to a number of listservs, academic exchanges of information, and rarely say anything on them, though often I end up laughing at their absurdity (most of the people are very young and urban) and -- less often -- very much intrigued or informed.  Recently someone wanted to know how the practice of Native American religion had been changed by the forced relocation of tribes.  I think they may have been thinking about African religions being changed by being brought to a whole new continent, but it’s an interesting concept and probably pretty enlightening.  I suggested that even Christianity had been radically changed over the centuries by its relocation: moving it from indigenous villages along the Mediterranean into the court of the Roman Empire and then north across Europe made deep changes in assumptions and practices.  All denied, of course.

Some religious practices are so deeply human that they persist, coming up again as green as grass through the old snow of winter.  It’s Ash Wednesday.  If I were in the pulpit on Sunday, I would talk about the natural fasting of spring, reinforced by social rules to keep people from eating the seeds they must plant soon or the newborn domestic animals or even the milk that feeds them.  A liberal pulpit would find satisfaction in the congruence of nature and ceremony.

But the listserv did not post my remark.  One literary association and one historical association have begun to ignore me.  They don’t want to hear anything about nature unless it agrees with their assumptions, which are curiously distant from actual nature or any other kind of reality.  They are almost hypnotized by rules, not the nature-based rules of the past but near sci-fi or magic realism of an imagined or possibly computerized future.  The future is not spring, but spring break, derived from the academic calendar.  Academics control one’s future success, they think, so one must conform to it, go in debt to it, nearly worship it.  (Churches are passé.)

Part of this strange world-view might be an overdose of “cute” nature -- all those baby bunnies and kittens, fawns and lambs.  Soon enough that preoccupation with sweetness goes to commodification.  (Easter bonnets.)  And that is joined by rather acid cleverness, so that the University of Chicago student body indulges in competition among “Peeps” tableaus -- tiny marshmallow baby chicks arranged as social commentary.

Ash Wednesday means that people in Valier will wear marks on their foreheads.  No one will have to ask what the ashes mean.  It was a winter that encouraged contrition, humility, and a consciousness of vulnerability.  We are perhaps too little prepared to push back against the bureaucracy that caused the Crucifixion at Easter, too admiring of centurions, but we have our renegades.  There were a lot of deaths this winter, not just humans but also domestic animal herds that died of starvation.  The grizzlies, of course, will be grinning at the amount of ungulate winter kill from the deep crusted snow.  And spring has brought media images of deaths in riots of people craving release from tyrants.

Simon Schama begins his book by locating and describing cemeteries in Europe, often mass graves from WWII but also tumuli from ancient times.  We have them in North America, but he hasn’t gotten to this continent yet.  He speaks of going to a burial ground connected to his family and discovering that the marker stones themselves were being buried in a sea of crowded dandelions, lichen, and accumulating soil.  He says it was becoming a geological layer.  And he says this memorable thing:  “the heart of one of our most powerful yearnings: the craving to find in nature a consolation for our mortality.”  

So many youngsters find their consolation in denial.  People in media do not die.  They are a tape loop.  One can still watch childhood worlds if you grew up watching television with your feet sticking straight out in front of you, your blankie in your hand.  There is another stage when young people trek the mountains seeing only glorious vistas, never parsing the ecology into its mesh of life and death.  The occasional urgent person, often female, will decide to war against all death, all immorality, all suffering, all meat eating, all use of nasty words.  Everything must be beautiful.  God must be love.

I think I will use what I learn from this book to identify and reflect upon the burial grounds of this place.  But I’ll wait until summer.  Spring is when people die, just when the green grass comes, and there will be people standing in clusters among the stones -- the living among the dead.  Not all of them will want to be converted into media.

ALL OUR BONES (ARTIFACTS: Part Two)

Back to the bones.

We are constantly digging up things, including skeletons. Some on purpose, like paleontologists searching in Africa and finding the remains of eohumans that are six million years old, and others accidentally (possibly homicide victims) when making highway cuts or excavating for basements. When rationalizing their study of skeletons, scientists have proposed the idea that there is a difference between the ancient and the merely historical, but where do you draw that line? The day Columbus hit the Americas? The day the United States made itself into a nation? The day the glaciers began to withdraw from North America? The day they crucified Jesus?

The Kennewick Man, found in Washington state along the Columbia River, created a huge furor. He was older than our conventional notion of first white contact but he had characteristics that were suggestive of a Caucasian. (The characteristics recorded by scientists are expressed in percentages -- or bell curves -- but people forget that. Some Indians have skulls like Caucasians. Some Caucasians have skulls like Indians.) The local indigenous people made a claim based on religion, so some Caucasians immediately invented a religion to make a parallel claim. I attended a public meeting where the tribal spokesman asked all those present who approved of organ transplants to raise their hands. Only the white people raised their hands.

So it is not just disrespect to skeletons that is in question. American indigenous people feel that their flesh and blood is being co-opted, that the right to be one’s own body is violated by transplants, or even DNA databases from cheek scrapings. And yet there is a small contingent that demands the newest medical miracles, including stem-cell and bone marrow transplants. None among them refuses blood transfusions.

The elevation of indigenous peoples to a state transcending nobility and approaching the supernatural is so pervasive that the people themselves feel that they are carrying something special enough to be magic. It’s really being “Other” all over again, but this time elevated instead of denigrated. Recently a boy in Minnesota with cancer rejected chemotherapy and resorted to what he and his family thought were “healing” ceremonies provided (for a price) by a tribal member. And why should that person go uncompensated, any more than a formal physician should do his work for free? This is partly what it operating in the “plastic shaman” phenomenon. (And the “Indian as Super Lover” parallel. Ruth Beebe Hill’s “Hanta Yo” Ayn Rand-type perfect lover.)

Back to skeletons. Early indigenous peoples were not above using the bones of “other” humans for necklaces and the like. Esp. “found” bones rather than -- let’s say, “created bones,” that is, murdering someone to get his finger bones or ribs. Murder to get a scalp is the whole idea, since the scalping was originally evidence of death, like the ears of a wolf or the tails of gophers. Whole heads (“bring me the head of whomever”) are bulky for a walking people, but a scalp could be attached to clothing or shields. Imitation scalps abound, mostly horsetails, on fancy buckskin shirts. (It is possible to take a scalp from a person who continues to live, but that party will probably want to keep his or her hat on, particularly in cold weather.) I have never seen a blonde or redhead scalp that I can recall. Maybe I don’t want to.

I’ve run across several stories in which someone failed to stay dead, but if the bones were filleted out of the flesh and the separated parts were thrown in a river, that person DID stay dead. This story of this an artifact, though it isn’t physical.

But you can’t generalize about bones -- or any other artifacts. Objects must be related to place, to situation, to specifics. Not just for scientific purposes, but in order to understand where they came from and what they mean: context. If you read Louis Owens’ novels (a good Halloween project) you will not forget the tribal practice of a people in the hot, wet, bug-ridden south. The body of one’s brother is put in a tree. In a year one returns, takes down what is left and cleans the bones with a fingernail grown out long specifically to scrape out the crevices. Then the bones are gathered into a bundle.
[ Here are the novels, all available through the University of Oklahoma Press: Dark River, Nightland, Wolf Song, Bone Game, The Sharpest Sight. Owens is worth Googling. He was a major Steinbeck scholar as well as working on Native American literature.]

SKULLS

Skulls are a special case. When they are perfectly clean (and some of the ones I’ve seen are neatly numbered with India ink because they were part of collections), they attract people. Quasi-humans, they acquire names. Along with skeletons, skulls have become iconic, somehow transcending death with a universalized face of holes and grins. In catacombs (common in Europe) and the bones of genocide excavations, the skulls get lined up on shelves or in stacked piles since they are relatively uniform. They seem made of ceramic, “bone china,” mugs. Wherever there are adolescents, skulls abound along with daggers, pouring blood, snakes, lightning and other punk icons meant to suggest the power of horror. Skulls became fetishes in some South American tribes, adorned with rows of colored tile. Movies these days are full of realistic decapitations.

Prairie indigenous people were persuaded not to leave their dead in coffins on the ground where they could be knocked about by large animals and invaded by small animals. They built “dead houses,” frail wooden mausoleums with no doors, and put the coffins inside. I have seen them. The coffins had been opened and the heads were all missing, even the heads of a mother with her baby in her arms, though these were not clean skulls. These were faces and hair, even recognizable, with living descendants who knew them. Few would defend disturbing them. Those houses are gone now. The people were put into the ground and the houses were burned.

When skeletons are returned by museums, the oldest people were wary about having anything to do with them for fear their spirits would be angry and make bad things happen. So the next generation down took over and invented ceremonies of grief and appeasement. The bones were interred in the ground with Pendleton blankets, sweetgrass, other assorted objects and many salty tears. Some of the grief might have been a little dramatic, but in the end it was a true catharsis and cleaning of old wounds. It was dignified and the blankets even made it seem a bit luxurious. The bones were not in metal coffins, but in short wooden boxes, sturdy and clean.

There are still thousands of skeletons in museums public and private, in personal collections, in forgotten cabinets. We had a skull ourselves. It was a clean one. I don’t know where it came from and I don’t know where it went, but at the beginning of the Sixties it gazed out among our books. We had two skeletons: a real one from Turtox biological supply company, which was probably a person who died in the street in India and which we returned, and a plastic one cast from the skeleton of a robust German man who died long ago.

I include all sort of thoughts here because I think that in the end no legal rule or moral principle can tell us what to do about human remains. Each case must be a delicate negotiation among the facts, the emotions, the times, the politics, the individuals, the resources, the possibilities, the implications. This not just about autochthonous peoples of America or even about only autochthonous people. It is about ALL human beings.