"SINAAKI" : IMAGES OF BLACKFEET

Today (Friday) the Piegan Institute presented “Si’naaki,” the images of the Blackfeet people. First some time-lines. This is the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Piegan Institute. It is the fourteenth year the Blackfeet Immersion School has existed. (Eighty percent of the students on the Browning High School honor roll have been students in the Immersion School.) And this is the eleventh of the these mid-August history conferences organized by Roselyn LaPier.

The first speaker was DAVE BECK, who is delighted to be married to Roselyn, esp. in view of their terrific daughters who always get pressed into service at these events in the same way that Blackfeet kids have always been aides to hospitality, even at old-time ceremonials, though these girls do not keep tobacco pipes lit, which used to be an important duty of the orderlies. Dave was addressing the famous Edward Curtis photographs, which are now available online at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/award/iencurt/ct06/ct06toc.html and other places. The question is “Was Curtis presenting cultural images or was he reinforcing stereotypes?” The answer is both.

Curtis lived 1868 to 1952.
In 1898 he met George Bird Grinnell, a “scientist” with connections to Indians.
Through Grinnell he was on the Blackfeet Reservation to photograph the 1900 Okan or Sun Dance.
In 1906 he was scrambling to get funding for a twenty volume work that would include photos of ALL Indians “before they vanished.” 227 people signed up for subscriptions to all the volumes. J.P. Morgan was among them and helped with a little extra funding. They were particularly interested in the Piegan religion.
In 1910 Curtis made another visit to the Blackfeet and this time there were many artists and anthropologists around.
In 1930 the final volume of the set called “The North American Indian” was printed and distributed.
This sort of pressing documentation of what is thought to be disappearing is called “Salvage Anthropology,” because it is felt that perhaps some crucial information can be permanently recorded. The Smithsonian is sponsoring a parallel “Handbook” but has finished only 15 books of 20 planned. The Plains Indian book is done. The editor has been Frederick Webb Hodge.

Here are the Federal Indian Policy Periods:
1. Treaty making/removal: 1778-1871
2. Forced assimilation: 1887-1934
3. Reorganization: 1934-1950’s
4. Termination/Relocation 1950’s to the 1970’s
5. Self-determination: 1970’s to the present.
(Sol Tax, anthropologist at the U of Chicago, said, “there has only really been one federal Indian policy: “to figure out how to get out of the Indian business.” My own comment: ordering the BIA to make itself unnecessary is ineffective.)

Curtis -- along with Grinnell, Ulenbeck, Wissler, and the artists who came through on the railroad -- was part of a great flurry of activity in the forced assimilation period when people believed that Indians were doomed. The characteristics of forced assimilation were:
* to outlaw tribal religion (though some sympathetic authorities looked the other way)
* to outlaw tribal governments
* the allotment of lands (1887 Dawes Act)
* boarding schools
* population decline (1883 is the Starvation Winter)
* belief in “social Darwinism” which grouped “races” hierarchically with the white Euro males at the top and NA’s or blacks (labeled "savages") at the bottom. (The 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago had demonstration village groups arranged to show the progression. My own comment: At the same time, this was the first World Religion conference that included Indians such as Simon Pokagon.)

Impacts of Edward Curtis’ work:
* preserves a connection to the past
* helps to convince Americans that Indians are disappearing
* sometimes contradicts the community knowledge base

The Curtis technique:
* photos were staged
* props from trunks were provided, more colorful than accurate
* romanticized Indians and their lives
* preserved likenesses of people and places, though they were sometimes misleading.

There are two new digitization projects:
NU and the Library of Congress
Washington DC and the U of Montana (documents)

Criticisms, some from the audience:
Despite their flaws, the photos are a valuable resource.
The Indians’ names were rarely recorded! The accompanying notes often put the names down, but they were dropped out of the captions. They became just generic “Indians,” though the white people were named. Indian clothing became “costumes” as though they were not real. They were “dress-up” best.

Beck’s calm presentation was free of demonizing and accusations of evil intent. Neither did he excuse anyone. What was, simply was, and it’s our job to figure out what to do with it. The photos speak for themselves.

These presentations would not have been so richly rewarding or even possible without the projector laptop throwing the pictures up on the wall. Darrell told about opening up Bill Farr’s photo book of the Blackfeet (“Reservation Blackfeet, 1882-1945”) and finding in front of him a photo of his own grandmother! He did not OWN a photo of his grandmother! Later he took some budding tribal college historians up to the Glenbow Museum library. They were all intent on hitting the mall, but Darrell managed to make them agree to stay an hour. Then one girl, going through a big pile of images, came upon a likeness of herself! Except that it wasn’t her -- it was her great-grandmother, who looked just like her. Heck with the mall! They stayed until closing.

BILL FARR’s presentation was about Walter McClintock, but he listed some other early photographers: Charles Stevens (or Stephens?) in the 1890’s, Fred Kresler (sp?), Roland Reid, and Thomas B. Magee who was local.

Walter McClintock came in 1896 for the first time as an artist accompanying a survey of forest lands. He fell in love with the place and returned every year until the 1912’s. From 1912 to 1940 he came often, but sometimes missed a year. Between 1903 and 1912 he took more than 2,000 photos that are extant. No one knows how many discards there were. He was particularly interested in the Sun Dance and came early so that he could record the preparations. He valued the remote and the old-timey. Then for many years he toured and lectured, showing his photos. He had pretty much one version, his first one, and didn’t revise it. His great gift was “intimacy,” being accepted as one of the family so that people relaxed, sort of forgot he was there, and just let things be, so that sometimes stuff like an alarm clock in a tipi gives away the true period and has to be airbrushed out.

Why was this eager, absorbed young man given such access? He came in July, 1896, just as the Blackfeet were beginning to emerge from thirty desperate years. The first Whitecalf described the tribe as being “lost in the fog” and Curly Bear remarked that a “dim mist was clearing.” What turned the tide was the arrival of the railroad, which suddenly gave access to the outside world. People stepped off the train from Chicago and Seattle every day. The center of gravity on the reservation shifted from the south along the traversable rivers to alongside the railroad. And stuff began to arrive as the Mercantiles replaced the old Trading Posts. The alarm clocks were here! The people pored over their Sears Roebucks and Monkey Wards catalogues. (Insert joke about the old chief who ordered a good sturdy woman from the corset section, only to be heartbroken when he opened the package and discovered she had escaped, leaving only her underwear!)

McClintock’s success was due in part to his close partnership with Siksicogwan (Blackfeet Man) AKA Billy Jackson and his nephew, Alex Fox (Yellow Bird) who ranched on the Milk River. There McClintock appears to have imbibed Hudson’s Bay rum in quantity and to have found a “fat and sassy” girl friend (sans corset). In those days, 1898, he had to get a pass to visit on the reservation which provides a bit of detail, but his personality remains a bit of a mystery. He was present but not deep into the reservation innards.

Siyeh (Mad Wolf) took the next step by adopting him and naming him White Weasel Moccasin. Adoption in those days was a formal strategy for creating bonds and bestowing obligations: there is a record of a chief who adopted an Eastern man and sent him a letter asking him to get a red bird (cardinal) to wear on his hat, because it is the obligation of a good son to make his father happy. Adoption of this sort was not an idle formality. It was more like a marriage that ties two families together so that there is greater access to knowledge and power, explanations and advocates. McClintock brought boxes of goods when he came.

Siyeh had never adopted anyone before (at least not whites) so why did he do it now? Probably it was the example of George Bird Grinnell being adopted by Four Bears and named “Fisher Cap.” Whitecalf also calls Grinnell his son. Sometimes “the Father of the People.” Tearing Lodge calls Grinnell “the shield of my people.” In other words, they sought to make Grinnell responsible for the tribe and it worked pretty well to the extent that Grinnell had power, but he sometimes got caught by conflicting motives, as when he helped to force the selling of Glacier Park.

By 1895 Mad Wolf was disillusioned and said “the old leadership is unraveling.” Many older men retreated to ritual lives. Mad Wolf may have hoped that McClintock would be a new and younger Grinnell. The two had more in common than he knew, since both were Yalies. Mad Wolf wanted to push the claims for the common hunting grounds that had never been satisfied.

McClintock was a political zero, but did record many things at a time when the younger Blackfeet were wanting to move on, to be modern and participate in the world. They wear “citizens’ dress” to the Sun lodge. But the old people want a record of their own time and these photos become a “weapon of the weak” self-evidently showing those ready-to-abandon children what the truth was. The photos were direct, intimate, local and forceful, and confronted the identity issues that always plague Indians.


After lunch of buffalo meat and fry bread, DARNELL RIDES AT THE DOOR presented what she called “Indians in a Box,” which was a wonderful overview of her own family from the early days via a box of photos. We saw a portrait of John “Grover” Ground (1890 -1953) at Carlisle Indian School. (This was the grandfather of my friend Leland, who uses the name of “Eagle Calf,” John’s name.) We saw William Langdon Kane’s painting of Old Painted Lodge (1833-1930) the father of John Grover Ground, who was sometimes called “Go to Ground” -- Leland says “Jumps Down to the Ground” because he got off his horse to fight. He was an interpreter and interlocuter.

Darnell skillfully guided us through the years: photos of famous and beloved old Mary Ground who lived to be more than a hundred years old and was a key ceremonialist in spite of having blue eyes. We saw Leland aged maybe four and his older brother John. There was a funny photo of young Gene and John, Mary’s sons, as teens, leaning on their mom and putting their hands on her head like a hat. No one ever did that to the ancient but VERY dignified Mary Ground most of us knew! This is what Farr meant by intimacy, the relaxed joking of related people.

Darnell’s presentation ended with her grandmother, the first Miss Blackfeet, a beautiful young woman who was painted in a borrowed buckskin dress by Winold Reiss. Years later the picture was on the cover of a magazine called “FATE: Witchcraft in Britain Today,” in which she was supposed to be a Crow maiden, her true identity completely lost until her face was recognized.


The last presentation was the most marvelous of all: an overview of the life’s work of VALENTINA LAPIER. Much of her work can be found in images on the Internet by using Google, but it was moving to hear her tell about the pain and despair in her life and how she had found her way back out by painting and other art work. Her work is abstract but iconic, using patterns from traditional clothing and decoration, and stylized horses and trees that have personal meaning for her. This is skillfully done, so that the images are suggestive to anyone and don’t have to be explained. She spoke about going to France and sitting alone in Monet’s garden on a slightly rainy day, totally absorbed into the living colors and shapes. These days she has a gallery and workshop in East Glacier and seems totally confident about what she is doing and who she is.

Those horses will be stampeding through my head tonight as I sleep, along with the horses I saw along Highway 89 on the way up and back. One field held a band of old-time wild mustangs, grey and dun with long tails and manes. In another place a paint horse had ended up outside the fence but was sticking with his band by moving alongside the barbed wire. Two youngsters were running and bucking in the morning, as though playing tag, but had settled into grazing by afternoon. There is a wild flower I’ve never seen in such profusion. It’s purple. I should have stopped to pick a sample, but the most likely candidate seems to be “Silky Phacelia” also called Scorpionweed or Purple Fringe. It’s a little late for it, but everything is late this year. Nora Lukin’s fingers were still stained a little bit purple from picking sarvisberries. She said only about half of them are ripe. Good things still to come.

It’s important to see things and also important to name them. That’s how people know who they are. Best of all is creating new images.

WHAT IS INDIAN LITERATURE?

What we have here is either a slippery slope or an entering wedge. I’m not sure which, but maybe I can get the slant right.

When the first Euros encountered the Native Americans they got them wrong straightaway by calling them “Indians,” because they thought (hoped) they were in India. So the first Euro writing was about Indians, to let everyone back home know what they were like.

When some Euros learned Indian languages and Indians learned Euro languages, the Euros reported what the Indians said, but they were translating so they might have gotten it wrong. Indians who could speak English or French or Spanish might not have said quite what they meant either.

Simon Pokagon wrote what is identified as the first book by an Indian, but some say his lawyer’s wife helped quite a bit. When Black Elk told his fabulous tale to Joseph Epes Brown, he began a genre, the mystical as-told-to.

For quite a while as anthropology began to take shape, there was an absolute craze for authentic Indian myths which has never quite abated. Some collectors of these stories, like Ulenbeck, were careful to get them in the original languages so they were “right.” The idea of natural variants was not appealing to these scientifically minded folks, so the pattern that developed was “you write something and then I’ll tell you whether it is right.” First the stories were meant for children, so they were expurgated, but then authenticity became important so the “colorful” stuff was restored.

Then along came the enthusiasts like James Willard Schultz who never heard a story too good to touch up a bit, and that led to the “rural myths” that involved Indians facing new-fangled stuff in a blundering way, like building a fire in the oven of an electrical stove. Then came the wild picaresques, prompted in part by the effects of alcohol.

There was a romantic movement in which hippies and traumatized veterans went to the rez to be inspired and healed, writing about their close relationships to Indians as a sign of their initiations and deservingness.

In the Post-Colonial Theory period everyone had a great hunger to read stories by “real” Indians who had presumably been suppressed all this time, prevented from writing novels. But then along came purists who said novels were a Euro-invention and “real” Indians could produce only traditional tribal orally-transmitted stories or maybe their own experiences, tragic as they indubitably were.

After that it was considered that any non-Indian who wrote an “Indian” book was stealing bread from Indian writers because there was only so much market and a non-Indian crowded out the Indian and prevented him from winning prizes. Telling his story (clearly there was probably only one: like, fighting one’s way on the rez) better than he could would keep him from selling his own version. The exception might be the genetically-white person raised by an Indian family.

But it was all right for non-Indians to critique non-Indians who wrote Indian books, even though it would be pretty hard for them to judge what was authentic and what was not if they’d never been around Indians. The judgments became increasingly harsh, justifying scorn and maybe some retribution, in much the same pattern as PETA, the people who defend poor helpless animals by encouraging folks to throw paint on fur coats.

Critics split about non-Indians who grew up on reservations. Maybe it comes down to whether a person is more shaped by genetics or by environment, but a genetic Indian might argue that a white person on a reservation was privileged and therefore didn’t have an Indian experience. Why it would be a privilege to be white on an Indian reservation, why Indians wouldn’t privilege themselves over whites, didn’t come clear for a while. Now we know: Indian are husbands, white people are wives. It used to be the other way around. There were some exemptions for people like Tony Hillerman, because criticizing him makes one very unpopular.

So now the ground rules are laid out:

Only Indians can write Indian stories, unless they are myths. Then they can be written down by white anthros, esp. if they are written for children and prettily illustrated but absolutely the definitive version.

Whites who write Indian stories but admit they are white are better than whites who pretend to be Indians and write Indian stories. No Indians pretending to be white and writing white stories have been detected, nor Indians pretending to be white and writing Indian stories. Maybe there’s potential left here.

But the best thing to be is a white professor who writes about why white writers who write stories about Indians are very bad. In fact, such writers should be exposed and put out of business. In fact, they should be persecuted [sic] and prevented from ever writing again or ever teaching again. In fact, they should be stalked on the Internet, and their families as well. In fact, if you ever meet them, you should punch them in the nose. Because what a white professor of Indian literature should oppress is white people who write about Indians -- because Indians have miserable lives and only the privilege of telling the story themselves to compensate them.

This might not work if Indians get good enough to write as well as white folks and compete on a level playing field, as they say, but a white college professor can control that playing field by ghettoizing Indians, insisting that only Indians can write Indian literature. If there are a bunch of liberals hanging around, insisting on an Indian professor, hire a “ringer” they way they do in Colorado: a guy who SEEMS to be an Indian but isn’t academically qualified. Then if he gets to be a nuisance you can express shock and horror as you wave goodbye. If you accidentally hire a REAL Indian who is REALLY qualified but becomes troublesome, you have two choices. Either put so much pressure on him to produce that he buckles and maybe even commits suicide, or just find that your budget has come up short and eliminate his department.

If all else fails there’s always the death threat: jihad. It works for the Muslims. They can drive famous people into hiding, take books off the market. Why can’t it work for Indians? Don’t go too far. Shooting a phony Indian would be like shooting an abortion clinic doctor for destroying life. Someone might think it was terrorism. The law might finally get involved. Just dink around on the Internet and made yourself a stalking shadow.

The above is satirically stated but I could name real life examples of every sentence. It would make this post too long.

EDUCATION SURVEYS

This morning, mixed in with the night spam, was a questionnaire from one of my alma maters, or however one forms the plural. The questionnaire, from Northwestern University, makes assumptions as all questionnaires necessarily must do. This one assumed that by now I was rich, honored, and grateful -- therefore would write a check to NU if they could find the right button to push.

Most of the questions (besides income) were about which organizations I might belong to within the NU realm (I had not realized there were so many!) and through which media I got my information. There was no allowance for alternative newspapers or radio or 'zines -- just the category as a whole. I did not check ANY organization. (A surprising number were based on athletics -- well, maybe I’m not surprised: this is NU asking.) I’m probably the only alumn this side of Tahiti who doesn’t watch television, doesn’t HAVE television. They wanted to know my major, but it doesn’t exist anymore. The School of Speech is renamed and reorganized. They didn’t ask whether I ever went to any other universities.

They did ask me whether my classes prepared me for my vocation. I had to say no, but it wasn’t their fault -- no place to mark that. I was educated to be a nice upper-middle-class high school dramatics teacher in a city east of the Mississippi. When I asked the placement bureau for jobs west of that river, she informed me there was nothing there. But while crossing the "Big Nothing" through Montana on the way home I bailed out and took a job teaching Blackfeet on their reservation. What I discovered that I needed was to know how to teach elementary reading to high school kids.

There was no place for me to mark which courses changed my life: Alvina Krause’s acting class, Paul Schilpp’s philosophy of religion class, three weeks of a physics class before the faculty discovered I couldn’t do math. I loved them all passionately and they have equipped me to wrestle with human and cosmic issues ever since. None of it was of any use in a high school English class, at least not if the principal and parents had anything to do with it.

The assumption behind these questions was that if the pr folks knew what my organizational affiliations were (and they were careful not to ask about any political organizations or religious allegiances) and where I got my news of the world, they would be able to coax me into sending them money. Not for any specific purpose but for the further benefit of one of the richest universities you could find, assuming you could discover its true worth. We KNOW that any corporation (no matter that its purpose is high minded) would be considered derelict if it didn’t hide its assets as deeply as, say, the Catholic church or the Wilderness Society. The point of view was simply commodified education, not for the good of the nation but for the good of the institution. (Warren Olney asked for tomorrow's "To the Point," "Can capitalism without democracy succeed?" I have a feeling we're already finding out that capitalism kills democracy, so we'll know shortly.)

Somewhere these question askers must have information about what difference it makes if people get their news from TV (though there must be radical differences among the various channels and networks) as compared to blogs (though again the whole spectrum must be out there). No allowance was made for the huge decline in the value of newspapers as a source of info or a check on the cynical chaos of the nation. They are no longer clams, digging for news; now they are oysters, clinging to the pier and grabbing whatever floats by. I mean, I read newspapers because of what they used to be. Maybe I’ll stop pretty soon.

One of my several other alma maters is the University of Chicago, also well-heeled, but very conscious of their elevated reputation as progressive intellectuals. (Maybe conservative when you get to politics or economics.) Still, they could NOT have given me the education of an Alvina Krause, which was “Method” acting -- a plunge into the depth of passion and crisis that the U of Chicago confines to student health, though it ferments all around the campus (in both students and professors) and is addressed by a ring of helpers and therapists, usually either Jewish or black and therefore not afraid of emotion. U of C money-raising is far more subtle. And the “Criterion,” publication of the Divinity School, actually contains valuable essays, not just boasting. They do still call it “Divinity School” though maybe that’s not as inclusive of religion as some would like. (Not all religions are based on a divinity.)

I predict Meadville/Lombard, my denominational alma mater, might change its name pretty soon. They can spot a trend. They’ve sold the old building, will move to modern space, and have loaded the faculty with black professors in anticipation that Obama will raise Hyde Park to new heights so the “liberals” will reign. They’ve kind of given up asking me for money.

All my other alma maters (almas familias?) are far more plebian and service-oriented. Anyway, they’re state universities. In fact, all the Montana universities are now merged into one big administrative blob, so what does that mean in terms of alumni allegiance? Mostly I think it means that people in Montana are Montana-centric and that’s all they think you need to know. Which campus is irrelevant. What matters is whether you went to school in-state or outta-state, because that will break handily between the Old Montanans and the New Montanans, separating them out without any more enlightenment about what it means than the fact that one sociological side has an Australian shepherd in the back of the pickup and the other side has a golden retriever. Well, maybe the New Montanans have pricier pickups. Which means they get better gas mileage and probably pledge to their alma mater.

The newspaper and radio (That’s the Great Falls Tribune and Billings NPR/PRI) are saying that the national college entrance exam test results show that only about a fourth of the people taking the test are ready for college. What will happen to the other three-fourths? NU and the U of Chicago will say, “Go away.” The state colleges will organize remedial classes. Meadville/Lombard will say, “What important UU’s do you know?”

Does this mean that the people who scored in the low 75% can’t get a decent education? Heck, no. In the Sunday paper was a story about a kid who hated high school and refused to attend. His dad, who was a film reviewer, made the kid go to movies with him and write about them alongside him, after much discussion. (Remember how Norman Maclean's dad taught him here in Montana?) At the end of three years the kid passed his GED and college entrance exams. This is the way people used to learn: alongside their parents at work. They called it “apprenticing.” So this kid had an alma pater, I guess.

The State Superintendent of Public Instruction is touring to get people braced to hear the news about the results of the No Child Left Behind tests this year, which come out at the end of the week. They will look ghastly, but authorities are quick to explain that it’s not the fault of the kids -- the people who administer the tests are “raising the bar.” Therefore the kids are actually doing just as well so not to worry. (Marriage is just a piece of paper, kid -- like your diploma.)

Another of these surveys says that college has now devolved into what a lot of people thought high school was, a sort of respite before the real world, except college is for rich people’s kids so they can enjoy it even longer. The idea is that youth is precious, admirable, bursting with joy and beer and sex and oh-how-can-you-deny-it-to-them? And that’s just the girls! These kids can do homework later alongside their own kids.

Why was I so serious! I shoulda lightened up! The survey asked me, "What was the worst part of your NU experience?" I answered honestly: Trying to learn to swim. I nearly drowned. If I'd lightened up, I might have floated!

MIRACULOUS!

It’s Sunday morning and all over the Xian world, people are preaching sermons. But not about the same subject at all, though they might think they are. Some are angry, some are ecstatic, some are reassuring, some are boring. The trouble with religions is that they are ineffable. They just can’t be pinned down, nor can their morality.

Some examples:

A woman called me yesterday. I like her and she likes me. She’s older and is remarrying a widower. They have every indication of a successful marriage and want me to be the “officiant” because I was an ordained Unitarian minister. I said no. I no longer do weddings. I suggested that since one of their close friends in a geologist, they get HIM to be an officiant because “cleanliness is not next to godliness, but geology is almost theology.” (This is the title of one of my favorite sermons as well as one of my most sincere guides to life.) You can register the governmental legalities at the county seat before or after. The law just wants to know who’s going to own what and who will be responsible for the children. The law wants order, not spirituality.

Most people are paying no attention to the law’s wishes these days, even though the laws were written by “most people.” Some people are asking why the state should use religious authorities (assuming you think a minister has any authority at all) to enforce a legal requirement. (My guess is that the state simply can’t enforce their law and wish to rub that off onto religion.) But the idea that lingers from theocratic states that colonized this continent is that a “real” or “proper” marriage has to be authorized by a church. (I’m going to have to use a lot of quotation marks. In a more formal context, I’d have to supply definitions for these words.)

This morning in the GF Tribune there is a description of a symposium called “A Return to Indigenous Beliefs” which was organized by “Long Standing Bear Chief.” (Harold Gray.) Included were Xian, Celtic and Buddhist people (self-identified), though none with formal credentials from institutions so far as I know. Probably the main crediential was a checkbook. LSBC comes from a family of boxing promoters, a connection he doesn’t wish to emphasize which is why he uses his Cree "Indian" name. I don’t criticize his religious beliefs, because I am cynical about what they are and admit it, but I think anyone would doubt his business methods. I hear complaints best taken to the Better Business Bureau.

Using the words “indigenous” or “autochthonous” are ways of escaping the theocracies of the world, which are quite properly seen as colonizers. If it’s “indigenous” it’s seen as “free,” because Xian authorities never even saw such beliefs as “real.” Small atypical and iconoclastic religious groups -- even or maybe especially the ones that tout vague concepts like “peace” or “unity” -- often draw in “seekers” from someplace else who have little or no grasp of that group’s legitimacy or practices. Not only religious groups but also “non-profits” that claim to be saving the environment or little children or -- a recent phone scam here -- the police chiefs of Montana, fall into this pattern of inventing something semi-real that is profitable to someone, usually the organizer. Even an institution as venerable as the Unitarian Universalist Association or Amnesty International or the Humane Society of the United States has a hard time defending money used to sustain leaders and offices in a privileged manner rather than financing the actual work.

A Blackfeet leader, a person I like and respect and would defend, presented me with a moral conundrum this week. It didn’t involve money and my opinion was the only thing asked, though the person didn’t like the answer. The situation was that someone much respected and “old-timey” was diagnosed with cancer by the Indian Health Services hospital. The family responded with prayer, smudges, ceremonies of blessing, and reconciliation of old quarrels. Then the cancer diagnostee was sent to a specialist who would do surgery if necessary. But tests showed that he didn’t have cancer after all. The leader would like this to be interpreted as the actions of the family actually curing the cancer. I strongly reacted against that, but have had to backtrack to understand why.

Part of it is that to my mind this is endorsing “magic,” but magic IS a big part of traditional Blackfeet beliefs. Part of it is that the leader felt that this family “deserves” the feeling of empowerment since they are sometimes criticized by Xians as useless, so the idea may used to promote conflict. Part of it is that I know, I KNOW, that someone will claim this cure and use it to empower themselves, not a family or the tribe. The potential for scams when offering to heal others is pretty high, esp. if the others have a fat checkbook.

My own training is ALWAYS to look past institutions and purported events to as much reality as can be achieved. (Not a lot, I’m afraid.) But also to look at the dynamics released by an specific event like a “miracle.” Often they are used to justify hope, but also they are soon turned to the uses of power. Nothing is more seductive than this combination, esp. in a place where people don’t have a lot of money and very little connection to the world at large. They don’t read. They pay no attention to anything outside their small reservation world unless it comes along and waylays them. Their educations don’t include critical thinking.

One of the recent “waylayers” has been Scientology, a huge movement with giant financial resources and very little global credibility. When I tell people away from here that Scientology has gotten to the Blackfeet, they are aghast. “Oh, tell me it’s not so!” they beg. Scientology is known for twisting and victimizing people, using showbiz celebrities as fronts. It sure works on some Blackfeet, esp. since the entering wedge comes through drug rehab groups on the rez, where people have already established that they’re not exactly hard-headed realists. I mean, drugs aren’t even a good business opportunity since one’s customer-base constantly self-destructs. Drug users are dancing with the devil and not just the Xian one.

Going back to the beginning, which is my frequent strategy when preaching, I know a lot of ministers of many denominations who make a nice little bit of money off performing marriages, often for people who are not even of the minister’s faith but who want their wedding in a “pretty” church because they want the ceremony to be “perfect,” like the cake and the bride’s gown. The more dubious the actual marriage, the more money one can make. Parallel, many people want to somehow participate in the Blackfeet tribe because of the scenery (“so beautiful!” they say and they don’t mean downtown Browning) and the “perfect” experience of seeing themselves as friends or even adoptees of the Blackfeet. They’re buying charisma and prestige. I don’t think it should be for sale.

PENNY DERIVATIVE NATIVE AMERICAN LITERARY CRITICISM

By now we know a lot more than we ever wanted to know about the debt industry: how some manipulation made dubious debts acceptable through redefining the collateral, bundling bad bets, reselling the portfolios, building-in balloon interest, and all that stuff. It was quite a heads-up that put some people on the streets.

And some of us know how to make a "career" academically by always being a doctoral candidate, starting a thesis here, then finding some compelling reason to move there to a different university, being delayed by the death or retirement of an adviser, slightly changing the defining terms so that more coursework is necessary and so on. Bundling oneself as a “doctoral candidate” can last for decades before bankruptcy. Sometimes the subject itself, not just the scholar, simply ages out, becomes irrelevant.

When I first was cruising along on the Native American literature listservs in the Nineties there was a lot of excitement. The NA Literature Renaissance was in full swing, or so I thought, and it was exciting to be buying books by Indians at Powells for $5 each. I’d buy three copies (I was working for the City of Portland then) so I could keep one, send one to Browning for the town library and another to Heart Butte for the school library. They were wonderful and I read them as quickly as I could. Everyone loved Louise Erdrich and her partner, Michael Dorris, for their mix of legend, romance and reality. I loved Jim Welch’s first two books, “Winter in the Blood” and “The Death of Jim Loney,” because he was Blackfeet and even these bleak high-line stories rang true. I’d been raised in Oregon to believe that Dr. John McLoughlin, the “white-headed eagle,” was near-royalty so I read Janet Campbell Hale’s “Bloodlines” as the scandal it truly is: a direct descendant of that man pushed out as not belonging. Leslie Marmon Silko and N. Scott Momaday wrote classics: “Ceremony” and “The Way to Rainy Mountain.”

Then the Portland bookstores began bringing in the NA writers to do readings and I began to see them in person: Sherman Alexie, very tall and droll; Greg Sarris, very handsome and kind. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, so patrician, sat and visited with me for a half-hour. Vine Deloria overwhelmed the Portland City Club with his erudite challenges. Sidner Larson, Jim Welch’s cousin, organized an NA lit conference in Eugene that was a total blast. Joy Harjo played her saxophone and recited her poetry. I went back to Portland and posted to the NA Lit listserv in the way that I’m still doing on this blog. On the listserv I got into a tussle about running traplines with Rolland Najiwan and Carter Revard played peacemaker. (Rolland is still a good e-friend, though he’s up in Canada and we’ve never met.)

The books couldn’t be written fast enough! Historic people from when the Indians spoke their own languages were brought to the front and translations were made. Old translations were rediscovered and there were arguments about how authentic they were. Who REALLY wrote Chief Joseph’s surrender speech? Maybe that’s when the backlash began. The literary stock of Native Americans was rising like a leaping salmon. The critics moved in like derivative bears. Those who can, do; those who can’t, criticize. Those who are Indian just ARE Indian; those who aren’t, can pretend. So the critics added another layer: criticism of Indians who aren’t Indians but assume that persona. Critics didn’t quite dare to criticize “Ramona,” cherished love story; “Laughing Boy,” which won a Pulitzer; “When the Legends Die” which I’ve read out loud to Indian classes five times. I still love it. Sometimes they took a swipe at Hillerman.

Then there was the hair-splitting over who was an Indian and who was not. The truth is that the “most” Indian authors, Ray Young Bear maybe or maybe Adrian Louis, were less appealing to many people (even Indians) than David Seal (“Pow-Wow Highway”) or Dan Cushman (“Stay Away Joe”) -- and what about “Billy Jack?” The real bonanza would be when a “real” Indian book was made into a movie, though the movies that really struck it big were “Dances with Wolves” by a white man about a white man and maybe “The Deerslayer” by a 19th century white man. Those were far better tales than the nasty little movie called “Warparty,” made here on the Blackfeet Reservation by supposed “Indian lovers” who admired Japanese fatalism. When the absolutely authentic Inuit movie, "The Fast Runner", was made, few Indians watched it.

The idea of the genetic Indian, the hereditary Indian (going by pedigree of ancestors), the cultural Indian, the voluntary Indian, the legal Indian got all mixed up. Phonies included Black Wolf (Ernest Thompson Seton) or Grey Owl (Archie Belaney) or Tonto (oops, a real Indian, Jay Silverheels) or Iron Eyes Cody (Italian or something). The whole idea of literature per se got lost and everyone went hareing off after identity politics, much of it powered by jealousy and the need to “know more” than the next guy. Some Indians made a career of starting flame wars to finger people who were “too white.” Other were gumshoes of the wee smalls, keyboarding away like beavers. There were two tragic suicides of Indian authors.

Then came the collapse. Everyone just got tired of it. No one could understand all the complicated theories. What I hadn’t realized was that the NA lit books were so cheap and so available because they were being remaindered: the last copies no one wanted being dumped for the printing cost.

I love remainders. So often the BEST books were the least bought, mostly because they weren’t promoted or sold in the right place. (A publisher assured Vine Deloria that there were no bookstores on reservations, so there would be no effort to sell his books there.) The Internet and Print on Demand would soon resolve this problem. Now anyone with access to a computer can order a copy of almost anything. Publishers don’t have to make “print runs” of thousands of copies that have to be stored. They just make what’s ordered.

Remainder houses, like Daedalus and Hamilton, are still selling books of which too many copies had been made (luckily not pulped) and I still buy them. That’s how I came to own “The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping.” The author claimed to be half-Navajo, but, hey, sometimes Bill Clinton claims to have a Cherokee grandmother. I don’t pay much attention one way or the other. Being an Indian wasn’t the point of the story, which was really about a victimized kid dying of AIDS. I thought it was a good book, which is how I came to be email corresponding with Tim Barrus, who was quite frank about being Tim -- not Nasdijj anymore, his nom de plume for the book. He doesn’t write books anymore: he teaches video to at-risk boys in Paris.

One lone scholar was still toiling away in Britain, obsessively writing and writing on his thesis about people who pretend to be Indians: Forrest Carter, author of “The Education of Little Tree,” who turned out to have a history in the KKK; Jamake Highwater, long ago identified and investigated; Ward Churchill, laid bare by his own university; and Ruth Beebe Hill. Huh? Ruth Beebe Hill who wrote “Hanta Yo” expecting it to be much more than a little mini-series on TV? Those were the days! Sasheen Little Feather accepted Marlon Brando’s Oscar with a speech about injustice to Indians.

Ruthie only knew a couple of stunt Indians in Hollywood, but they were real enough genetically. Nevertheless her gimmick was to import a big ol’ Sioux-speaking guy into her household. (Her house was Ayn Rand’s house in LA, which she was supposed to be taking care of. It was mostly a matter of cleaning glass since it was built for Marlene Dietrich and had a LOT of mirrors and windows.) Ruthie and her Sioux spent all day with their heads together translating her whole book into Sioux. Then they translated it all back into English. Ruthie felt this “cleansed” it of all Euro concepts since if you don’t have a word for a concept, it’s gone. Evidently there’s a Sioux word for cunnilingus, because that concept triggered absolute outrage among the tribal people who read the book. Personally, it triggered a lot of laughter, but that’s because Ruthie was always making a play for my husband. (He wasn’t Indian -- neither am I, but we lived on a rez and she would announce a royal visit now and then.) He used to roll his eyes behind her back.

So years after this was all water under the bridge, one lone scholar in Britain, toiling away at his thesis year after year, sometimes deriving enough material from it to make a presentation at a conference now and then, discovered Internet stalking and zeroed in on Tim Barrus. It’s always fun to target Barrus because he fights back in such an outraged, profane, over-the-top way on video and then all the nice polite scholars pull back and say, “Tsk, tsk, tsk.” I suspect that the stalking became more fun than the thesis.

This scholar/stalker of not-Indians-who-don’t-write-anymore knows who he is and now so do we. And where he lives. See, technology, like literature, moves on and the thing about Internet stalkers now is that you can make them ping. Remember those old submarine movies where the sonar pinged all the time? This guy moves across the green screen while a periscope scans the horizon and every time he types “Barrus,” it pings.

Actually, I guess this scholar is trying to write science fiction now. Anyway, he sorta drifted off his faux Indian rant or even faux Martians and got hung up on child trafficking in Cyprus. I guess I don’t have a penny to spare for his derivative thoughts.

OUTRAGE AND INDIGNATION

An older Indian lady who has spent nearly her entire working life in big cities doing office work for government agencies calls me up occasionally and tells me all sorts of lies and half-truths about people she doesn’t like, most often white people but also competitors. I let her rave on, though I often feel as though I were trapped in a Louise Erdrich novel. One day, one of the few times I ever lost patience with her, she gave me hell because she claimed Bob Scriver was “stealing” the faces of the Blackfeet. “Just look at the faces of his sculptures,” she said. “Those are Blackfeet faces! He had no right to steal those faces!”

Evidently in all her city days and education she never encountered the idea of the “portrait,” which is SUPPOSED to look like the person one is portraying! Evidently in her time back on the rez she never picked up the information that the faces looked like the people who posed for the sculptures because Bob asked them and paid them to pose! A few were portrayed using the old photos of Blackfeet that are all over the place in this part of the country, taken when it was still believed that Indians would soon disappear.

To be honest -- by that time the people were no longer living in the old way and had to scrounge around for their grandparents’ gear so they would look “authentic” to the photographer. Anyway, the photographer’s portraits have been used over and over and over again by painters, sometimes with considerable skill and other times not. One of the more vivid recent versions has been the work of Tom Gilleon (www.timberlinestudios.com/) whose signature is the division of a canvas into nine equal parts with a grid and then filling each square with a vivid sketch of an Indian’s face or an Indian artifact. (He is also famous for his many variations on the theme of a single tipi or lodge on a mystical landscape.) The classic portraitist of the Blackfeet was Winold Reiss (www.winold-reiss.org) who painted the Blackfeet from life.

Where did this old lady’s objections come from? She is certainly a genetic Blackfeet and she is certainly somewhat aware of a body of theory that developed in France, Algiers, and then Berkeley, California, about how indigenous people are exploited by colonialists, though I doubt she could name those thinkers. Rather than taking the practical and legal approach of Eloise Cobell and Earl Old Person, who are suing the U.S. Government for the money the USA brazenly diverted from the Individual Indian Accounts over the years, money they were supposed to be holding in trust to protect, these theory-based critics were saying that any depiction in any arts were taking money out of their pockets, because THEY should be the only ones entitled to write about themselves or paint their portraits or take their photos. Whether they could do it well is beside the point, to their minds. They remember being tipped a dollar for permitting their picture to be taken by a tourist at Indian Days. Some go so far as to say that since the novel is a literary form that developed in Europe, it is an “un-Indian” art form and no Indian should be depicted in a novel. Any Indian writer who writes novels (they’re after Erdrich and Welch because of their success) is un-Indian. Of course, they constantly comb tribal rolls for evidence of legal status.

Non-Indians come at this from a different angle. Often they claim to have a special affinity for Indians, a compassion that gives them unique insight and entitlement to act on their behalf. (Some animal lovers also claim this.) Or maybe they take the position that only anthropologists know the “real truth” about a specific tribe and since they know the anthro lit, they are entitled to decide what is or isn’t authentic. (The only Indians who count are the ones at first contact, uncontaminated.) They are even willing to tell old-timers that they’re going about being Indians “all wrong,” though no one ever issued handbooks as though Indians were Boy Scouts. Anyway, these people take no account that we are now in the 21st century, not the 19th.

Of course, even the spearhead of the whole radical theory movement as it worked out in the Red Empowerment organization (some say DISorganization) called AIM, as fronted by Russell Means and Dennis Banks, was quick to sell out to go act in romantic Hollywood inventions like “The Deerslayer” or “Dances with Wolves.” They were a bit nonplussed by a gritty and more accurate movie like “Skins,” which was written by Adrian Louis, one of the most realistic and eloquent of NA authors. They never seem to know what to think about the fine professional actors Graham Greene or Tantoo Cardinal, also authentic. But a lot of whites wondered why those two would act in a movie made from a book by a nonIndian former KKK member, “The Education of Little Tree” by a man named Carter. (Maybe they needed work?)

Certain scholars set themselves up to sort the “sheep” from the “goats” with the usual binary black-and-white thinking that characterizes Euros, though some of the scholars were Indian. This created a climate in which “permission” was granted to savage whichever people were designated as “fake.” This baggy, incoherent, emotional and inconsistently enforced category included a multitude of artists and writers. People like Howard Terpning were given a pass, because he made it a point to come to reservations, spread around some money and praise, give key people some prints, and then leave before anyone got mad. People like Richard Lancaster were given a pass because he was too scary in person and because unmasking him would have meant bringing unpleasant things about families out in the open.

Some of the people who were thought to be irreproachable by whites not on the rez, like Jim Welch, were criticized by his “fellow tribesmen,” but Adolf Hungry-Wolf, who is frankly white but devoted to the 19th century life of the Blackfeet (I know of no rez people who live as Adolf does or who knows and practices the ceremonials as completely as he does or who has preserved photos with more devotion), is constantly assailed for being a phony. Clearly, “phoniness” depends largely on who’s on the payroll and which tribal contingent they belong to -- because it’s VERY clear to anyone who lives here for a while that a tribe is fractured in every which way: blood, provenance, feuds, family allegiance, wealth, leadership offices, location on the rez, and a hundred other directions. Yet people refer to them as “the Indians,” as though they were one lump.

In fact, all this quarreling and name-calling is so time-consuming and potentially expensive (ask any lawyer what the fees might be) that many producers and publishers are reluctant to have anything at all to do with Indians. Even universities, tired of lawsuits, have quietly shut down their departments of Native American studies and the once-hot professors have retired. The once brilliant Native American Renaissance of literature is over. One might suggest it committed suicide.

The latest source of indignation is tourists who take photos of Chief Mountain in Glacier Park without asking permission from the Blackfeet Tribe, since it is a sacred mountain. Clearly these people are taking the French as role models. The French recently embarrassed themselves by demanding that no tourists take photos of the Eiffel Tower without asking permission. They stopped short of claiming it was sacred.

"RABID"

When I was planning to write a book on animal control, like twenty years ago, I started watching for books about dogs and stashing them to read some day. One was a little paperback originally written in the Seventies by a pair of English authors, David Anne and Anthony Fowles, called simply “Rabid.” I’ve never read “Cujo” by Stephen King, which I think is a later book. I sometimes wonder how many times American writers get their ideas from English or Canadian books. (I can think of several echoes.) Before the Internet came along, it was hard to get books from both countries plus Australia because of trade agreements. Economics can raise barriers more effective than border inspectors. Or could.

The basic idea of “Rabid” is very simple: that people simply lose or never grasp why some laws are made and feel free to evade or ignore them to suit their own convenience and preferences. In fact, my own concern about rabies (because my cats catch bats which are “presumed to carry rabies unless otherwise certified”) is brushed off by local officials, even veterinarians and even though we are officially a rabies quarantine area because of other rabid wild animals, like raccoons. If one wants a bat tested, one will have to pay for it. At first I was very worried and certainly got rabies shots for my cats, but then I gradually sort of absorbed their attitudes and needed the money for other things. Anyway, the cats are hard to catch if they see the carrier cage come out and they wail for the entire thirty mile drive to the veterinary office.

The heroine of this novel called “Rabid” is even more self-centered and willing to cut corners than I am. The plot of the story entwines rabies with sex. I don’t think they meant to imply that rabies IS sex, but they may have meant to say something about selfish, narcissistic behavior. (I read that narcissism is again popular as a pop diagnosis for uncooperative people, but does it ever really become irrelevant?) A rather insecurely married couple, unable to have children, are very attached to their dog, which dies. Another, very ugly but “woofly,” mongrel shows up in their summer vacation villa in France and the woman wants it. Then they are presented with the problem of getting it through the relentless quarantine that has kept England rabies-free for many years. (Yellowstone bison with brucellosis being the opposite problem -- keeping them IN.)

The couple has a friend, a childhood dear friend of the husband’s, who is a bachelor with a boat. The wife sees that if he nips across the channel, they can send the dog back with him. She goes along for the ride. Yes, a “double-meaning” ride. Of course, the dog DOES have rabies and the ensuing pandemonium and destruction is ghastly. The writing team low-balls the story by killing off sympathetic characters, children, and sweet innocent dogs. Some rats also die and, by the end of the story, some human rats. It’s all excessive and pathetic.

Descriptions of the progress of the disease are gruesome but, as far as I could tell, fairly accurate. When people in the book are slow to understand just what rabies means, the authorities bring in a movie to show them in which a man from a Middle-Eastern country where there is still rabies in the dog population dies strapped down on an examination table. When our Multnomah County dog license sellers became over-lenient about making sure every dog was licensed, I showed a similar movie. Dog licenses require proof of rabies immunization, because a high percentage of immune domestic dogs not only protects the individual dog but also is a buffer for the community as a whole. One of the strong reasons for licensing dogs is to get them inoculated, as well as returning them home and helping to finance animal control.

The movie I borrowed to show was from a doctor affiliated with the Oregon Health Sciences University research hospital in Portland who had acquired it in hopes that it would help him understand how to treat a boy afflicted with rabies. It’s an oddity that it’s wealthy people who breach the quarantine laws. In this case a man with a private plane flew his son and his son’s dog up from Mexico. The dog was rabid and bit the son. The situation wasn’t realized soon enough for effective early treatment and the boy became one of the first and the few to survive the full onslaught of the brain virus, because of this doctor. The boy was on full life support and I never did hear whether there were permanent consequences to his mind. (The book never addresses the need to kill a suspected rabid animal without shooting it in the head, which prevents proper diagnosis.)

The movie had been made in the Thirties in Chicago (when the new movie industry was centered there) and the victims were several toddlers who craved and cried out for milk from the nurses -- wearing rubber gauntlets up to their elbows -- held for them in cups, but then attacked and struck the cups away. The movies were silent, filmed on the roof of the hospital for the sake of the bright sunlight. The children were black. Children are more often bitten and rabies is more common in low income parts of town.

By the end of the book, not only people had died but every animal in a twelve mile radius had been killed -- including a famous pack of fox-hunting dogs and a fine race horse plus many beloved pets. About the only leavening element is the loving relationship between the original offending man and his father-in-law, who blames himself for raising a girl who could not think of anything but getting her own way.

No doubt about it: this is a sensational book, but it certainly does have a point to make about human irrationality about both pets and disease. It could have used a bit more rational discussion but it is certainly a good entering wedge for such a discussion. Often, politically, it is the sensational, sentimental and lurid that finally gets people’s attention enough for them to react at all.

This book has several other titles, such as, “The Day of the Mad Dogs.” August reading, I suppose.

"WHITE MALE BODY"

A "white male body" properly clothed and equipped. This is my father.

This quiet internet-supported life in a village surprises me sometimes with the synchronicity it can pull in. I’ve been preoccupied with issues of preparation for the end of my life -- not in a morbid way, but in the practical consideration for dealing with all these books and papers I’ve hoarded “for retirement.” If I don’t do something with them, they’ll eventually just be chucked into the dumpster but it’s hard to know how many coherent years I have left. There’s no one else willing to take them on, mostly because people with the same interests have their own piles of books and papers to address. And they aren't particularly significant in the big picture.

Luckily, part of the technological revolution is that I can aggregate parts of the material into blogs and then blooks, which will at least be orderly whether or not they’re valuable. Clearing out my so-called bunkhouse for a visit from my niece and her mother, I spotted the history of Unitarianism in Montana stuff I’d been saving and brought it inside for a bit of sorting and review. (These poor guests may end up making their own beds! But at least I got the roof tarped so they won’t get soaked if it rains.) Among the papers was a xerox of a book: “Confessions of an Agnostic Clergyman” by E. Stanton Hodgin, who was the minister of the Helena Unitarian congregation when it still owned the building it built and where I was ordained (now the Grand Street Theatre). It is his wife to whom the memorial Tiffany stained glass window in the theatre was dedicated. He left after her death and served Minneapolis, LA and New Bedford, Massachusetts -- all with honor for many years in each place. Raised a Quaker, he was not a pacifist and thought that WWI had to be fought, but was devastated that afterwards Teddy Roosevelt would not support the League of Nations, which Hodgin saw as the key to peace. I read the book yesterday. You can buy it on Alibris.com for about forty bucks.

Another outstanding character is Lewis J. Duncan, a socialist, the Unitarian minister in Butte as well as the Mayor of Butte, and then the Governor of Montana. Alan Deale used to advise me to get a handle on him. So I googled and one of the references was to Duncan’s consoling letter to the widow of Victor Berger. This led me to a Master’s Thesis by Dustin A. Abnet called “Radical Union: Gender, Personality, and Politics in the Marriage of Meta and Victor Berger.” It's online, so I downloaded and read it this morning with considerable profit, because it explicated some matters I didn’t know about in gender politics, since I always resist them. I tend to deny there ARE gender differences. You know, Annie Oakley’s theme song: “Anything you can do, I can do better!” and then the line in “Kiss Me, Kate!”: “He may have hair upon his chest, but, sister, so has Lassieeeeee!” As it turns out, “White Male Body” is not a porn classic, but a “term of art” among the gender politics people.

Abnet’s thesis is that Victor Berger was caught in the surf between two strong definitions of masculinity in contention at the turn of the 19th century. Of German Jewish origin, he was a strong believer in a man’s right to own property and get ahead through his own efforts and virtues. But as a defender of the working classes, he could see that they were easily victimized by those moguls of the Gilded Age and that they needed protection through the socializing of the means of production: the raw materials and the big industries. He trod a fine line between communism (which means everyone owns everything with the practical outcome being a dictatorship of those who get hold of the power to make decisions) and capitalism, when those who have access to money can oppress the others and impoverish them further. Very relevant right now. Maybe I should send this thesis to the presidential candidates!

But Abnet’s analysis is not about economics, but rather how Victor Berger’s confused sense of himself affected his marriage to Meta, a genteel gentile who met Victor when she was nine years old and he, fourteen years older, stepped in to protect her family after her father had died. The two paradigms of masculinity, what a “ white male body” should be like and what entitlements that meant, were partly “Father Knows Best” (dominating, possibly violent, erratic and self-centered, expecting total obedience from family) and partly Professor Baer from “Little Women,” (kind, protective, wise and nurturing). Partly privilege and partly obligation. Physically the ideal man was supposed to be like Teddy Roosevelt, robust and well-exercised, an outdoorsman of bravery like Ernest Hemingway; but on the other hand refined, graceful, and capable of enjoying the high art of opera and so on.

Victor himself was a big beefy man with a red face, who could not stay on a diet. Friends seemed to find him rather like Santa Claus, rosy and comfortable. Those who felt his anger might have thought him simply choleric. He was a little scary and confessed that he had the potential to commit a murder, though he mostly deflected actual violence. Acquaintances would not have found him “unmanly” in the sense of being a sissy, but rather in the sense of not having left off being a boy. Lesser classes (like non-whites or poor people) were more identified with children than women. (One sees this is the rhetoric about American Indians, who are considered proper “boy” subjects. Childish. Not feminine. Thus the association with scouting.)

Abnet is astute in describing how Victor controls Meta, who is after all, much younger -- and equally astute at identifying the role of Victor’s dominating matriarchal mother who tells him what to require of Meta. He sees that Victor’s willingness to put Meta down, to mock her and control her, comes from his very real fear of his overwhelming mother. (Hey, do I recognize this!) And Meta fought back by slamming doors, etc. (Oh, yeah!) Once Victor criticized her lousy dressmaking (she made it for a daughter who was actually wearing it at the moment). Despite the presence of company, Meta stripped the dress off the child and threw it into the fireplace! (One wonders about the poor kid!)

Victor also demands sexual access in spite of being gone a great deal and having other lovers (once taking a little twirl with the family maid!). He rails against contraception and never quite figures out that Meta is using a diaphragm. (Her pregnancies made her miserably ill, which some researchers claim is the result of a rich female hormone supply!) She had two daughters, both of whom knew about that diaphragm. (No information about their own marriages or children is provided.)

More than anything else, Victor insisted that Meta share and support his political life, just as Bob used to expect me to do that for his sculpture career. Victor harassed, pressed, demanded and provoked Meta into standing up to him, and then claimed he did it on purpose for her own good. Both men created monsters. We used what we learned to strike out on our own. But Meta never left the marriage and Victor never quite cut her off. When it was time for retirement and the challenge of learning to live together again, Victor fell in traffic and was fatally run over. Meta was able to manage widowhood competently and was well provided for, though Victor (mostly because of his mother) had never felt he made enough money, but he did (mostly because of his mother nagging him to get into insurance).

Other people’s lives are never quite as fascinating as our own, but they are certainly explanatory. Maybe John Edwards could profit from reading this thesis. (Or maybe his wife!) Maybe I should read more historical gender politics. Might there be a potential companion book: “white female body?”


Part of being a white male body in a certain era is having to scrape one's face every day.

A FAMILY OF READERS

December 3, 1940. The first step in mastery, of course, is learning how to turn pages. Then later one figures out which way is up. I probably had a little help here, but I don’t recognize the book so it’s hard to tell.


November, 1941. The ideal is to have a really big chair. We had two stuffed chairs in the front room: one was the big red chair and the other was the little red chair. (Actually, they were both maroon.) The big red chair was my father’s and the little red chair was my mother’s. But everyone got to sit in my father’s big red chair sometimes.


September, 1942. Once in a whlie nothing is so good as getting down on the floor, esp. when some beginning readers are already crawling. Dads didn’t wear sweatsuits then, but my father didn’t mind wearing his suit on the braided rug. It was wartime now and Look, Life and Time were vital to knowing what was happening.


Feb/March, 1947. Now I was eight and pretty good at reading out loud. (At least I thought so.) The big red chair doesn’t quite hold us all, so Mark is in one of the little wooden red chairs which really WERE red. The next door neighbor made them for us. He was a gentle old carpenter.


Saturday, Sept 8, 1948. Boys like their own kind of books. What better thing to do on a warm but rainy day?


July, 1949. Both my grandma and grandpa had been schoolteachers back in their homestead days in South Dakota. In fact, my grandpa, Samuel Strachan (born in Kilmarnock, Scotland) was a school superintendent for a while. I don’t know what was funny. This doesn’t look like a joke book! Maybe it was a joke about a Scotsman -- they both knew a few!

WHAT'S THAT YOU SAY? WOULD YOU WRITE IT DOWN?

A new book, “Proust and the Squid”, pulls together ideas from two main sources: brain research and cultural history. The author, Maryanne Wolf, is a reading expert. She says, “We were never born to read. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species.”

In other words, brain research shows that our brains are not just computers made of something like Jello in which little sparks of knowledge wander around, but rather more like a car engine in which different duties are assigned to different tiny structures: carburetor, spark plug, distributor, and so on. It takes a collaboration and a certain amount of “muscle training” through pressure, repetition and challenge to achieve the particular skill of handling print. By contrast, speech is genetically programed by millenia of selection (those who were mute didn’t make it) and will develop naturally in any child unless the program, esp. timing, is somehow disrupted.

BUT different cultures developed different ways of going at “print” which was separately developed only a few thousand years ago, mostly as a matter of accounting (how many bushels of wheat, how many rice paddies). In China the idea of word=picture was developed into the graceful columns of brush strokes we admire. In the Mediterranean the word was analyzed into sounds and a letter assigned to each sound, which turned out to be more flexible. However, the Hebrews only recorded consonants and let the reader invent the vowels. They also wrote their sentences right to left, rather than left to right.

It is wisely applied pressure and guidance that seems to keep our children learning to read. “This plasticity at the heart of the brain's design forms the basis for much of who we are, and who we might become.” But who knows how to develop that? Look/say? Phonetics? Motivation? Reading out loud? There is a third set of thought in this book: What about the children who don’t have all the little structures they need or never discover how to find them? The dyslexics-- they can talk, they just can't read.

The point of the squid reference is that the creatures have big long nerve cells that can be studied easily to see exactly what goes on. This has been much fortified by fMRI (functional magnetic resonance image) studies that light up whatever little human brain structure is in use when people read or pray or sing or imagine chopping wood. Some suggest this method can actually distinguish between memories of things that really happened and memories that come from the individually remembered stories we invent or dream or read. Why WANT to enter the magical kingdoms of the literary world if you don’t know how to read and thus can’t get through the gate? Why not just settle for video?

The difference between a print-based world and a sound-based world is stark to me when I deal with my former student, L., who is only ten years younger. When he wants to make contact, he uses the phone. He has a cell phone; is always on it; calls family, friends and business associates constantly. But when he wants to make contact with me, he gets frustrated, because the best way to relate to me is in print: email, letters, blogs, listservs. That’s my social world. My single line is always busy (I’m on dial-up all the time.) I don’t have either voice-messaging or call-waiting. Whether I’m just out in the yard or have driven to the grocery store, I just don’t answer. I don’t tell people where I’m going. He feels he should KNOW. I want the control in my own hands. It’s MY business.

I am NOT fond of the telephone, esp. as my hearing fades a bit, and I really HATE being on the long leash of a cell phone. I hated having to answer five lines when I worked at the City of Portland. I hated the long queue of voice mail that awaited me every morning. It was bad enough being at the mercy of the dispatcher on the radio when I was an officer.

It’s not just the media that make the difference. We inhabit quite different worlds composed of different kinds of information. We are both enthusiasts for movies, but I like the long, reflective, complex ones and don’t object to subtitles. I don’t mind when there is a shot held so long that one wonders whether it is a still. He likes funny movies with lots of word play and word jokes, lots of sight gags, lots of action and moving fast.

He’s Blackfeet. I’m largely Scots. That’s meaningful in terms of family customs. Not that his family is illiterate -- they can and do read -- but it isn’t the custom at their house. At my house we all trekked off to the library, we subscribed to magazines, and when it was time for a gift, we gave books. Our parents sat and read us books in the evening and the newspaper in the morning. (Many comic strips still speak in my head with my father’s voice.) I have the same problem as with L. when I interact with my niece-by-marriage who has very similar genetics to mine, but quite a different culture -- one like L.’s because she grew up in the same place. It’s not a case of different values (though that’s the result): it’s a case of different environmentally shaped brains. To those two, computers are for, well, COMPUTING! Book-keeping, databases, business, numbers. For me, computers are writing and reading. I hate numbers.

There is considerable discussion about the difference between a mind shaped by reading on computers and the mind shaped by books and whether reading off a Kindle is different from reading off paper. I don’t see a BIG difference, though the content on a screen is more likely to be like a magazine than like a novel. Posture, location (reading in bed as opposed to reading in an easy chair or in the bathtub), stuff like scribbling in the margin (which I like), duplicative potential, being able to add comments and send to a friend -- that sort of thing counts, I suppose.

I suspect that most of the academics who theorize about this stuff only know their own kind of person or if they know truly oral people, don’t relate to them very deeply. Not a lot of thought is given to “learning to speak Blackfeet” which is totally different from learning to speak French specifically because you can READ French. There’s very little to read in Blackfeet. Even what exists must have been sounded out into English letters with some ambiguity introduced by accents and so on.

I’m hugely interested in all this, so I appreciate “Proust and the Squid.” I was supposed to read “In Search of Lost Times,” you know, when I was in Richard Stern’s class. I never got past the middle. But I think I am TRULY searching for lost times in some ways, mostly by reading.

LET NOTHING EVIL CROSS THIS DOOR

When something like the Knoxville UU shooting happens, I wonder whether living way off here in tiny Valier is a protection or an exposure. On the one hand, I’m “isolated” away from the identified UU community, and on the other hand, partly because of the Internet connections which many tech-friendly UU’s embrace, I’m anything BUT isolated! (Go to http://www.uua.org/news/newssubmissions/117645.shtml if you want to sit in a virtual pew.)

The media interpreters, always in some world of their own invention, have accepted the shooter’s note blaming everything on “liberals.” Those inside the UU world, knowing it in all its various glory, see a much more complex picture. For instance, here’s another dimension:

“Something that I have not seen mentioned on this list nor in any of the media is that (Jim) David Adkisson and his ex-wife Liza Alexander were participants at SUUSI (Southeast UU Summer Institute). David was there in 1995, 1996, and 1997. Liza attended from 1994 to 2001. A compilation CD of SUUSI music was created in 1995 and features a song they sang together ('I Don't Love You Much, Do I'). A couple in the SUUSI community used that song in their wedding after being introduced to it on this CD. (They’re working through many emotions about this.)

“Much of the media is painting this as a somewhat random attack on a UU congregation, with only a brief mention that his ex-wife was a member of the congregation in the past. One person on the SUUSI list wrote :

“David was not a stranger to UU-ism; some of the comments I've seen suggest that he is seen as your average angry ditto-head who decided to take his anger out on the highly-visible liberal religion, choosing that church for its banners.

“It's all too easy to imagine that could happen again, except that it doesn't seem to have happened the first time. Postings on other UU discussion lists I'm on suggest that they are preparing to hunker down for future random attacks from disturbed conservatives. Knowing that he had a personal connection to both UUism and that church might relieve a few worries.

“Maybe we DON'T live in a world where someone would target a church simply because of it's social action work and its core beliefs. (The fact that our churches are only as likely to get shot up as other churches is not exactly good news, but it's better than getting paranoid.)”

Many people come to UU congregations because others, often dedicated Christians in other congregations, turn to face them and say, “Hey! What you are is a Unitarian!” In other words, “Look, you oddball, you iconoclast, you belong with others like you!” UU’s tend to be “other,” and what that “other” is like depends upon the larger culture in that place. Sometimes the congregation is resisting relentless and evangelical Jesus-talk (OT versions of the NT), and sometimes the congregation is resisting bland commercial secularism, and sometimes it’s the simple hypocrisy in the larger culture. If the context is a big city, the congregations will often sort themselves out into mystical/Buddhist, progressive/social action, and Jeffersonian Christianity-without-miracles. When I was serving four small fellowships in Montana, each was quite different because of the larger community and they weren’t always comfortable with being grouped as a state.

One of the UU phenomena that tends to stand against this sense of division is the district “camp” or temporary congregation based on a loosening of bonds, an openness to experiment, and a celebration of the people as themselves. SUUSI is one of the big ones. They all tend to have returning members who long for that experience, maybe because they are a little too tightly wound and confined in their ordinary life. As it happens, I got an email this morning from a granny friend who took her little granddaughter for a walk alongside a stream. The girl, who has always been bull-headed, was determined to wade and explore, but grandma, of course, was concerned about safety and resisted. The compromise meant wet pants, but no one really minded. There was always the potential of tragedy. This is a very small pattern of something that went berzerk in Knoxville.

Most thoughtful people know that the opposite of love is indifference, not hate. We know that without risk there is no growth. And most ministers are aware that the extreme of iconoclasm is the killing of a much-loved person or something closely associated with that person. A woman as icon, a church (whatever kind) as icon -- can lead to an attempt at destruction, the idea being “if I can’t have you, no one else can either.”

After 9/11 the UU denomination formed a trauma-response team and protocol. Immediately traveling to Knoxville, these experienced ministers guided trauma recovery to a ceremony re-sanctifying the church which ended with the cast of “Annie” (onstage at the time of the shooting) singing “Tomorrow.” At the end of the ceremony they sang "May Nothing Evil Cross This Door." One might say that this redemptive response began when the usher threw himself in front of the shotgun to save others. An icon only stands as a marker for something much deeper and braver.

Jim (Dave) Adkisson is alive, which he hadn’t planned. His fourth ex-wife, Lisa Alexander, says he was making death/suicide threats at the time of their divorce in 2001, so this impulse has been there in potential for almost a decade at least. He’s a kind of guy we all know: truck-driver, associate degree in engineering, former military helicopter mechanic, motorcycle driver, aging, up against the financial wall though he’d always managed his bills earlier, newly denied food stamps. Good-looking, intelligent, ambitious, but a heavy drinker -- and all those marriages. His expectations were far beyond his achievements. We’ll find out a lot more before this is over.

Much of it will be about ourselves: the UU’s, the fellow-travelers (the summertime UU’s), the un-UU’s and the anti-UU’s. “May Nothing Evil Cross this Door” is the first hymn in the UU hymnal, but it’s really a poem by Louis Untermeyer written in 1923 when the world was still recovering from “the war to end wars.” Of course, war does NOT end wars, and one cannot close the door on evil so as to live in walled safety. Yet I see that impulse everywhere at every level: it is deeply human -- maybe it’s so deep it’s mammalian. It is to Knoxville’s credit that they resist this impulse, but we should not make an icon of them, because icons are closed. It was Adkisson who saw them as an icon instead of living human beings he might have reached out to for help.

M*ST*RB*T**N

Night before last I watched “Flags of our Fathers” and then last night “Letters from Iwo Jima,” the Clint Eastwood binary about the epic WWII battle for a tiny volcanic spot in the Pacific that made our bombers able to reach Japan with our Atomic bombs. The American side centers on the raising of the flag at the top of Mount Surinam and all the misapprehension, commercialization, symbolism, and historic meaning of it, esp. the impact on Ira Hayes. The Japanese side is literally “underground” in the caves and passages an ingenious general ordered dug as defenses. But all this is another blog and maybe it’s already been discussed enough.

The film needs to establish the bonding among raw troops coming from many parts of American society, a society of men who must be tough and stick together. One of the traditional means to that goal is hazing, and so the more sophisticated recruits tell the rube from Oklahoma -- who is “gee whiz” and “gung ho” to a ridiculous extent -- that he won’t be able to ship out to the battle unless he has filled out his mstrbtion papers. In a barracks the practice can hardly be a secret, but this kid doesn’t know the word -- it’s just another big word to him. He rushes off to his commanding officer to get his mstrbtion papers in order. (I'm leaving out the vowels to baffle the web crawlers so I don't get a lot of icky spam.)

The CO was probably not amused by this corny old joke and kicked his butt, to the amusement of the so-called buddies who are really secretly preoccupied with the “c” word -- that is, courage. (Since Larkin says in his “aubade” that “courage is no good. It means not scaring others. Being brave lets no one off the grave.”) So, okay, each guy is being pseudo-tough to keep from scaring others and secretly wonders whether he is brave. And mstrbtion is the shared male “secret” that is considered funny like maybe farting. It’s possible to play a trick like this because knowledge about such matters is on a steep gradient between those who have no idea and those who know entirely too much and do it to the point of self-destructive pathology.

By now the researchers have established that everybody “does it.” Esp. boys of a certain age when, as one scientist remarked to me, “it’s like having your you-know-what stuck into an electrical wall socket all the time.” Girls are just better at concealing it. Researchers also know the physiology of what happens: stimulation brings blood from the rest of the body to the point of focus until it stretches all the tissues, engorging them until at some point there is a trigger that reverses the process all at once in a big rush. This feels very good. Viagra helps by supporting dilation. It was originally a heart relief drug to get the feeder arteries to open up more. And those who use it report headaches from the distention of arteries that feed the brain. (A high school student once asked me to explain what an *rg*sm was. Trying to be honest without getting fired, I told her it was like a sneeze: that is, the tension builds and builds until it discharges all at once. Forty years later she tells me my metaphor was NOT HELPFUL!)

Anyway, what’s wrong with a practice that simply relieves tension, doesn’t get anyone pregnant, doesn’t spread disease unless one has hopelessly dirty hands or never washes other conveniences, and doesn’t have to offend anyone since it’s normally done privately. I suppose laundry can be a problem. And if one uses an object with too much vigor, it’s possible to punch a hole in one’s internal tubing that will require emergency surgery. What can be wrong with exploring one’s own body and reflexes?

One problem is that human beings habituate to food and sex so easily and emotionally that a person can lose the ability to respond to anything but fetishes or paraphenalia. For a while there was a joke going around that was a variation on the “not-tonight-I-have-a-headache” -- “Not tonight -- the vibrator is out of batteries.” Conditioning and habituation are ways that humans get things organized and compartmented enough to think and create, or -- if you insist -- work. The movies would have you believe that without the right commercially supplied negligee, music and lighting (oh, what a fire hazard in all those banks of candles!) a physical relationship can go nowhere. There’s little encouragement for simple stroking, absorbing the texture and temperature and scent of another person the way one did as a child. The entire erotic substrate of infancy is ignored, including the safety. Oh, I know. Lots of people need adrenaline, but geez! Life goes on after the excitement! If you survive.

There can be quite an anti-social bias in auto*r*ticm and a boastful tone of “I don’t need no stinkin’ lovers!” But flip that over, maybe through inviting voyeurism with videotape, and there is a very thin wall between auto**r*t*c*sm and torture -- doing something extreme and stimulating to oneself, where one can control and guide, can become painful and humiliating when done to someone else. Breaking taboos can hurt as much as electrical currents. And our culture already is far too guilty of linking eros with destruction, pain, power-over, and simple callousness. Some people really get off on the descriptions of torture in the news, finding it a pattern for a sick kind of intimacy, like Mailer’s friend the knifer who described in “The Belly of the Beast” what it feels like to hold the handle of a knife with its tip against the heart of the victim.

On the other hand, curiosity about torture is parallel to curiosity about sex. Shushing and suppressing doesn’t really work. Partial disclosure, especially when it doesn’t allow for human empathy, can be alluring as well as lurid. Far too many kids asphyxiate themselves with a ligature to get the rush, a practice notoriously connected to “ruff s*x.” They need to know MORE, not less, about what they are doing to their brains. Arousal of whatever kind can be easily reshaped by circumstances into something not intended.

Knowledge gradients -- some know too much and some know too little -- are hard to handle, esp. when matters can’t be discussed. Human physiological response gradients invite too many comparisons and damning of simple differences.

Long ago I read this insight: if a grid is set up -- rigid rules about behavior and knowledge and what can be known -- that immediately creates spaces where there are no restraints because there is a total blackout. People do what cannot even be imagined by people who only know the grid. This is true of every human endeavor. In war a hidden enemy leaves us vulnerable, as it did on Iwo Jima. In business seeing those spaces is called opportunity. What do we call it in our private lives? Sometimes aren’t there things it’s better not to know about? Or are you one who needs to know it all? How do you find out how much knowing will hurt? Is that what happened to Ira Hayes?

REVIEW IN THE ALBERTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY MAGAZINE

BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT Review from “Alberta History”, Summer, 2008

Mary Scriver loves to write and she has chosen an ideal topic -- Bob Scriver, her late husband, a sculptor of international fame. A resident of Browning, Montana, he is particularly remembered for his bronzes of Indians, rodeo cowboys, and prominent figures, and prominent figures. Included among them is a 53 piece series of bronzes of Blackfoot culture entitled “No More Buffalo,” a 33 piece set entitled “Rodeo in Bronze,” and individual figures such as Eric Harvie of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, rodeo star Casey Tibbs, “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Teddy Roosevelt, and others.

In this book, Mary also tells her own story, of how she came to Browning and her experiences with the Blackfoot people. She met her husband there and tells of his life and accomplishments in an engaging and literary style.

Bob was born on the Blackfeet Reservation in 1914 where his father owned a store. After a stint at teaching, he opened a taxidermy shop which grew into a foundry for his sculptures. As one who grew up with the Blackfoot, he had a keen interest in their cultures, and participated with them in their ceremonies. His love for them is reflected in his many sculptures. He also collected many artifacts, as had his father, to preserve a disappearing culture.

In 1990 he became the centre of controversy when he feared his entire Indian collection would be seized from under a newly-passed “Repatriation of Indian Artifacts Act.” To prevent this from happening, he took his collection to Canada and sold it to the Provincial Museum of Alberta for $1 million.

This whole story of Bob Scriver is a fascinating one, and a good read.

AUBADE

Now the night doesn’t want to leave the cooling land, even when day’s long red incense-smoky fingers thread through the leafy boudoirs of the robins and feel along the eaves of houses, then down into tangled grass. Dreams, ardent silver, linger in shadows, wanting time to finish just one more chapter -- memory and storylines still wreathing pillows.

The night cat, who sleeps in the window by my computer so as to monitor moon traffic through the yard, thumps down to the floor. The day cat, who spends her nights stretched along my back, tenses slightly to see if I woke up. I try to stay loose, stay warm, stay with the dreams. I open one eye to check the alarm clock but if I turn my head, the day cat will also be up and both cats will wreath my feet, asking for breakfast while I scratch my head.

When I got up this morning, my head was full of one of the first poems I read in the modern poetry unit as a high school student: “Jane, Jane, tall as a crane...” The title was “Aubade.”

“The morning light creaks down again;
Comb your cockcomb-ragged hair,
Jane, Jane come down the stair.”
Where does it go from there? It’s Edith Sitwell. Was the name of her estate “Aubade?” Might it be an old family name? Or the name of the maid? “Aubade, where’s my tea?”

When the cats are fed, the night cat goes out to check the perimeter and the day cat goes back to bed for another hour, hoping I’ll come back, too, and bring my body heat. But I settle at the computer to see what the English and the East Coasters have to say. This time of year the sun comes up red between my back garage and my neighbor’s tree, the sky stained red with faraway fires. Get online. Find search engine. Google. Hmmm. Wikipedia. I’m still yawning.

Surprise! “Aubade” is the formal name for a particular kind of poem or song when lovers must separate at dawn but don’t want to. What a great name for a blog! Here’s a famous aubade in a play:

“Will thou be gone? It is not yet near day;
it was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear!”
Romeo and Juliet. I knew you’d recognize it! The Zefferelli version, surely!

Some resourceful poets slipped the meaning from the romantic to the metaphysical:

“I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.”
Philip Larkin, always the cheerful one.
I like the line that says:
“Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.”

Two others are mentioned in the Wikipedia article, one by Carl Phillips about peaches knocked off the trees by a storm in the night and one by William Empson in 1937 that claims

“Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake.
My house was on a cliff. The thing could take
Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row.
Then the long pause and then the bigger shake.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.”

The last line becomes a refrain, alternating at the end of each stanza with “The heart of standing is you cannot fly.” Double-meanings, ambiguity, maybe even oxymoronic contradiction. (Wait! Go back! Those peaches -- flesh?) This aubade is timely for SoCal, but written in 1937 might also be about war. My big discovery my sophomore year of high school was metaphor, trope, letting one thing stand for another, all roads and rivers are about the journey of life, all dawns are about awakenings, all days lead to partings. Somewhere in there all the Unitarians stopped singing vespers songs and turned to the morning songs: “morning has broken,” “the morning hangs a signal,” “morning so fair to see,” “the morning, noiseless, flings its gold.” Did that mean a turn to optimism? Or a call for renewal?

The aubade wiki mentions song, as well as poetry, and lists a Francois Poulenc concerto (1929) and Maurice Ravel (“Alboarado del Gracioso”) in a piano suite called Miroirs (1906). Then points out, rather playfully, “Eagle-Eye Cherry’s” 1997 single called “Save Tonight.” I didn’t look for the Poulenc or Ravel recorded online, but it was easy to find Eagle-Eye Cherry’s song with accompanying video which is narrative with Eagle-Eye becoming whomever he met.

Now you have enough stuff to do a little school-starting unit as the academic year begins to wake up with crayon sales and spiral notebooks. What new ingenious version of 3-ring binders? What scramble is the superintendent making to find one last teacher who had handle one-fourth French, one-half remedial English and one-fourth PE as well as coaching volleyball? What smoky and mysterious memories of summer?

Once when I was very small, I woke up before anyone else in the house woke up and slipped quietly down the stairs. The back door lock had always been a puzzle -- it was an ordinary skeleton key but had a little device shaped like a question mark to keep it from being turned -- but on this morning I figured it out. I even had enough strength to unhook the screen door. There was the backyard, made strange with shadow and dew. I crept out like the night cat, all alert, then padded silently back to my bed like the day cat. I wasn’t sure I didn’t dream it until my mother exclaimed over the door standing open when she got up. I’ve always had a weak boundary between fact and dream. Ever since I’ve known the earliest hours are the sweetest ones, even with the tang of chill and the risk of night critters not quite departed.

Here’s another aubade from the Unitarian hymn book:

“This land of bursting sunrise, all lavendar and blue, its cloud-strewn, light-swept day skies flow, and every day renew. To east the glow of dawning, to west the blaze of night, ‘round all the long horizon’s rim, the everlasting light. This land of open vistas, life rooted deep and free, thy canyoned plains, thy mountains vast, plumb earth’s immensity.” John Haynes Holmes wrote the words. The tune is “Andujar.” I Googled that and found a whole other world, rather like opening a door. It IS a place -- and a name.