ROGUE ANTHROS: John Hellson and Adolph Hungry Wolf

One of the useful characteristics of rogue anthropologists is their clandestine modes of operation, so this blog is violating a few unwritten rules. But that is the nature of blogs and probably the dynamic that makes some people afraid of them. They are not accountable to any funding or otherwise controlling agency like an institution or publisher. In a way, I’m joining the rogues. This will probably eliminate me from consideration by many of the small new publishers who are replacing the old tweedy Manhattan and Boston publishers. They’re gone anyway. The new publishers tend to be “nice ladies,” some of whom pulled themselves out of real trouble by struggling through school where they learned respect for authorities. Rogues put them into a state of panic.

Anyway, the two rogues I’m going to discuss are about my age and people I know. They despise each other. John Hellson is a half-dozen years older than 71 and Adolph Hungry Wolf might be a little younger. Both of them showed up on the Blackfeet Rez in Montana in the Sixties, not long after I did, and both of them were drawn to Bob Scriver, who often acted as an interlocutor between the outside world and the rez where he was born. John, Adolph, Bob, and I are all white, which makes us politically incorrect from birth because of the post-colonial rule that only the indigenous can write about the indigenous. (Bob was the only one of us born on the rez.) It was a useful rule for breaking up the colonial practice of ransacking cultures under the guise of “salvage anthropology,” the idea that the cultures were disappearing so “scientists” were justified in collecting artifacts, stories, and ceremonies in order to preserve them. The rogues were not so scientific and not affiliated with any institutions, but maybe because of that they acquired huge amounts of “stuff.”

Both married Blood Blackfeet women (“Blood” the tribal subdivision) from excellent families so they had unique access that by-passed the usual taboos as well as the suffocating forces of both the reservation itself, which constantly tries to present itself as more virtuous, more deserving, more missionary-responsive than they might actually be -- as well as more pleasing to publishers, universities and museums.

The problem was how to make a living. One way was Adolph’s method which was self-publishing. The Good Medicine books that he and his family produced are invaluable. He was especially alert to photographs, the old kind mounted on cardboard that are called “cabinet” photographs. They are meant to be held and “read” with long scrutiny. Finding some of these in a suitcase he bought at an auction, he carried them everywhere with him and whenever he found old-timers, he'd ask them to “read” and interpret for him. Then he put the information on the back. He is an educated man who values history. ALL his info is now available in four volumes he self-published, expecting shouts of joy and honor. Instead, he discovered that the world had changed radically in the last fifty years. http://goodmedicinefoundation.com/media/books1.html

The nineteenth century world of James Willard Schultz, George Bird Grinnell, and even John Ewers is no longer of much interest to young people. The gray-headed white people who used to obsess over all that horse-and-feather stuff is thinning out fast. Now the cutting edge of Blackfeet anthro research is academic indigenous people and those closely associated with them (like white profs married to Blackfeet: consider Rosalyn LaPier and Dave Beck at the U of Montana; or the people who cluster around Darrell Kipp and Jack Gladstone). With modern technology like GPS or molecular analysis, these people find ancient campsites, begin to sift through the archives of Hudson’s Bay or the Roman Catholic Church, translating the first earliest letters “home,” breaking through into a far more elegant and detailed account of early days even before the horse.

Repatriation, the law returning every artifact and skeleton to the tribe where it originated, created a huge opportunity for clandestine profit from artifacts in much the same way as Prohibition made alcohol worth criminal attention. This change did not affect Hungry Wolf so much as it did John Hellson, who had been surviving by brokering objects. The glorious beaded buckskin suits had intrinsic value of their own because they were beautiful. But there was a lot of stuff that was just floating around -- no one knew what it was or cared very much except the very old people who remembered what it meant, not least because they were keyed into a close sensory knowledge of the land and animals as it was before the fence and the plow. These two guys -- who “lived the life” -- picked up that often religious information. They were not cynical. They LOVED this culture. Adolph still lives in a log cabin with a creek for a water source. His computer is run by a solar panel. Otherwise, no electricity.

Evolution happens when one portion of the population is separated -- usually geographically -- and in that niche evolves in a different way. Then later it may reunite with the main body and make a contribution to the gene pool. The great NA political furor over who had enough proper provenance to study Indians has obliterated far more worthy issues and separated Hellson and Hungry Wolf from the mainstream. Anyway Indian tribal identity is NOT determined by genetics, but by provenance: who was your grandmother? It only goes back to first official white contact, though whites were in the West almost as soon as the continent was discovered -- think of Spaniards bringing the horse. Hellson or Hungry Wolf are almost directly European, not even in America long. John is from Cornwall, England. Adolph is from California but his folks are Austro-Hungarian.

All that is old news. The problem that is now presented is how to recognize and preserve the undisciplined work of these two rogues: Adolph orderly and in plain sight (mostly), the other dubious enough to land Hellson in prison. Out of the blue Hellson called me a day or so ago. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. He was weaving the same old sorcerer’s spell that captured Bob Scriver in the Sixties, unbroken until he stole some of Bob’s artifacts while he was supposed to be curating them. Today’s accredited and honorable researchers, in particular the indigenous ones, have nothing but scorn for the rogues. As far as they’re concerned, the work is contaminated, even toxic. And yet part of the advantage these adventurers had was that they were willing to explore the taboo, the sexual that had to be written about in Latin, the unsuspected and imperceptible to other white outsiders and some red insiders.

FORGET EVERYTHING YOU LEARNED !

By now it’s firmly established in the minds of most of those paying attention that we are going through a paradigm shift, one that was predicted twenty years ago. But we never really thought about the specifics, which are now coming down on our heads daily. So much has changed without our even realizing it.

The one that slaps me upside the head all the time is the change in publishing. It’s FAR beyond the idea of print being presented electronically instead of ink on paper. It’s FAR beyond print of any kind. Now we are out of the books-as-objects biz, a paradigm that treated books like gizmos, making as many as anyone could accurately estimate would sell (after some market research), tarting them up as nicely as possible (design, cover, blurbs), advertising far and wide, then -- in time -- discounting and finally destroying the leftovers to free up warehouse space. With a little luck, reviewers in newspapers, mags and on the air would say nice things. There was a thing called “hand selling,” when clerks in bookstores recommended their favs to customers. Accounting was just a matter of figuring out what was spent for all this and deducting that from the amount made from sales. You prevented the books from shipping across national boundaries and had to pay someone to create a foreign language version. This is still the model in most minds.

But now a book is NOT an object. It might not even be a “book” in the sense we are used to. It might be videos (with music, print text and voice-over). It might be only spoken, with the speaker as much a selling point as the actual prose. (What would “Outlander” be without the elegant Scots accent of Davina Porter?) And then there are the graphic versions, which are drawn in frames: “comic books.” And eventually the movie or even a series on television. How strong must a narrative be to withstand so many morphs? Or will a narrative line even work now?

Many people have finally realized that all these incarnations of "literature" exist, but may have nothing at all to do with fleshly bodies. Not many people have thought about what sort of “literacy” is required to make sense of them, how to create them, or how to read/watch/hear/interpret them. With mags, newspapers, TV reviewers popping like soap bubbles, how do we even know what is out there?

The REAL action is in the chaos of marketing. The internet has no national boundaries, which means that copyright must be totally rethought. No one knows how to do world-wide market research. We have to make up words like “vook” for a video book or “vlog” for a video blog, and what is a series-written tale in blog form anyway? A “blovel”? Anyone could download it and forward it anywhere in any order. What about mash-ups now that everything is code and can throw images, sounds, scenes from movies into one big suggestive stew. What about parody? The kids who act out Jane Austen or Diana Gabaldon, half-mockery and half-fandom? What sort of genre is it when video clips from old movies and BBC series can be cut together to create a rather convincing facsimile of Outlander -- all in the name of encouraging favorite actors to take favorite parts. Most of this is way beneath the radar of formal publishers, who don’t even have the time and resources to look for examples of illegal variants -- much less do anything about them through the cumbersome means of lawsuits.

I watch all this. It's remarkable that I can, sitting here on the prairie. Yesterday I watched “The Edge,” two interviews of Daniel Hillis who is an engineer working in oncology research. (Cross-disciplinary is where it’s at.) He explained that cancer is not a “thing” but a process that ought to be called “cancering.” (That Hopi idea is now mainstream, whether or not it’s accurate in Hopi terms.) Cells with corrupt genetic code are cancer and the body normally pops them. Though this is the same process in every case, we persist in thinking there are as many kinds of cancer as there are different cells in the body. Lung cancer, skin cancer, toe cancer. But the digitalization of the genome has been a revelation, and one of the first things it has revealed is the proteome. (Well, it has revealed the EXISTENCE of the proteome -- there are millions of proteins.) The genome is the template and the parts list: the proteome is the actual molecules made in the body, molecules that “talk” to each other by constantly changed in amount and kind.

Hillis is not even a doctor. He is an engineer. His work is learning to sort and recognize the conversation among the proteomic molecules by designing the “machinery” that will read what’s in the blood at any given time. He displayed a tablet (maybe an iPad) with the “read-outs” of two sets of blood samples on top of each other but color coded so there were three colors: the molecules present in only one sample, the molecules present only in the other, and the molecules present in both samples. This “reading” is so specific that one isotope of carbon can be distinguished from another, along with the changes they cause in the molecule, assuming they do. He says that the most recent research is able to “hear” the conversation inside a single cell, what each molecule is saying to the others. All this is at the outer limits of human perception and conception, made possible only because of computers. Eventually, we will be able to “see” not just cancer cells, but "who" is “saying” the dysfunctional molecules that create them.

Once that paradigm shift is in place and we see all these old familiar things in a new way, it can profoundly change the way we do things. For instance, Danny Hillis repeats again and again that the only way we know to treat cancer now is to administer poison to the patient and try to calibrate it so it kills the aberrant cells but not the healthy ones -- at least not enough of them to kill the patient. Or we can cut or burn the bad cells. But this is wasteful, clumsy, has terrible side-effects and benefits only the pharma people who want to sell a lot of pills, hopefully in a constant regime rather than as a one-time event.

More futuristic is the practice of killing all the cells in bone marrow that are manufacturing rogue cells, and then infusing new bone marrow cells from someone else. Even MORE futuristic is infecting someone with a harmless virus that carries along healthy code and “infects” the molecular assembly line. A proteomic “patch,” to use computer jargon. This will totally upend the pharma industry assembly lines who are dependent on mass-producing pills in a Third-World low-pay environment. They are Exxon in a world going to wind power. The new way is one-on-one-once.

The difficulty is not just in terms of profits and marketing strategy. In my age group, which is seventy and over, I find many many people who simply cannot start DIS-believing what they have learned about the world in the past decades, what their teachers told them long ago. The ones who can accept a new paradigm are the ones who were anthropologists anyway, or who got bumped out of one context into another -- maybe more than once. It’s hard to STOP believing that writing a famous book will make your life worth living. Or even stop believing that there is any such thing as a famous book worthy of being famous, since the marketing is what controls fame -- not the quality. The same problem as political leaders.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/hillis_master10/hillis_master10_index.html
There are two hour-long talks, but Hillis is very clear and easy to listen to.

TIM BARRUS FIGHTS AIDS

This article was originally written for an eJournal that specializes in DeleuzeGuarttarian theory. The editors had assured me that the subject was vital, the article was worthy, etc., but then they looked up Tim Barrus and found Nasdijj. The article was dropped. But they can’t block my own blog. I might have a bigger readership.

It’s a little longer than most of my posts, but I assure you that I wrote it..

Prairie Mary


CINEMANIFESTO

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
—Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist

I.
Cinematheque, a Paris-based art school for boys at-risk, was a collaborative response between a wealthy artist dying of AIDS and his good friend, Tim Barrus, who had been banished from America for political incorrectness. (He implied he was half-Navajo.)  Backed by an endowment, Tim began to collect boy whores from the Hotel du Nord and repurpose them in his Paris loft as artists.   Traumatized, outcast but still vital, they had banded together to survive through online porn shows and hustling until the HIV virus had invaded their bodies, making their lives dependent on expensive medication and careful protocol.  Then they needed help.  What they mainly knew was sex, but what they craved was love and dependable bonding: a family. 

This actual world of desperate boys is surprisingly coherent and worldly but feels powerless, shut out.  Through art Tim Barrus and Cinematheque made it literally visible as a virtual world -- that is, one created by words and images on an assortment of vlogs (blogs with videos).  People horrified by the social implications tried to brush it aside as invented.  Or maybe this world has been assailed and discredited for opportunistic selfish reasons -- like human traffickers who operate freely in the deliberately unknown.  Scoffers claim the boys don’t exist even as the same people stalk them. 

In 2007, by accidental internet contact, a witness was added: myself, Mary Scriver, a teacher, minister, writer, who testifies to authenticity and validates the boy-world by adding context.  The manuscript of “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs” developed as correspondence between Scriver and Barrus. This article derives from these sources.

Merrill Singer has described the “syndemic” nature of interacting diseases, overlaid and intensified by social burdens like poverty, stigma, violence and ignorance as well as catastrophic events like floods, landslides, earthquakes and volcanoes.  Singer vividly traces the vectors of forces that create nodes of destruction often blamed on the people caught in them.  HIV-AIDS is a unique disease in that it creates vulnerability to opportunistic diseases most people can shrug off, to mishaps such as falls, and to stigma that prevents care or funding.  It is not highly contagious so long as the mingling of blood and other bodily fluids is prevented, but -- once caught -- is viciously virulent, nearly always fatal in the end.  Meds can reduce it to a chronic condition, but a nauseated and haunted one.  On the level of nations this pandemic wipes out generations and is not at all confined to gay male hustlers, though they probably bear the highest burden of stigma.  The nation then becomes vulnerable to pharmaceutical blackmail, especially in Third Worlds.

Contemporary philosophers and social critics have established the legitimacy and value of using “high” formal concepts to reflect on “low” pop phenomena, often bringing to the surface new understandings not unlike the “upwelling” in oceans that brings up food from cold dark depths.  In this instance, the new food for thought is about the status of adolescent boys around the world -- regardless of economics, which becomes moot in the face of HIV infection, since no amount of money is enough -- and about the power of community, both the small loft group of Cinematheque and the larger networks of gay artists, philanthropies, and counterculture persisting from fifty years ago and earlier.  These empowering forces do not depend on governments, corporations or even public awareness.  There is no hierarchy.  Everything is invented according to need.
 
Barrus and his collaborators have no thought of creating an empire or an institution.  To them Cinematheque is simply a phenomenon, something that happened half-deliberately, based on the specific and unique people involved.  The boys, even those compromised by medical issues, grow and change daily. Some come, some go, some die.  Barrus constantly invents some new technique, some new project, even some new location, so that no one can get entrenched in habit or drawn back by old pimps and dealers -- or even punishing families.

II.

Electronics are vital.  The Internet is not just used as communication within the group, no matter how physically separated, but also is a platform for expression, though the boys have a hard time trusting exposure.  It is on the Internet that the New Media of video -- not long-form narrative as in theatrical production but a poetry of mashed-up, collected, staged and overlaid images and sounds -- connects both within and without the group. 
 
Boys who refuse school do not refuse Flip video cameras or iPhones.

Tim says:  it begins with music because it has to begin with music/ music drives them/ they are always plugged in/ sometimes, it is all they arrive with/ they’re junkies, whores, thieves, failures/ what they really are is alone/ if they are still alive/ there has to be a spark somewhere/ if you can find it/ put your face down into the smoke and blow on it/ it will either come to life/ or it will die/ you will find that — with them — there will never be too much middle ground where everything is almost inherently safe/ no one and nothing is that/ not even music/  

They live with iPods in their ears.  Barely within the limits set by providers, their videos are platforms for outrage, despair, confusion, hatred, laughter, love and sex.  If self-expression is redemptive, then this work is religious.  But like any religion, the first revelation is only the beginning and often seen as heretical.
At one point Barrus was in Argentina with one desperate boy when another -- away from both the group and Barrus --  became desperately ill with gonorrhea of the rectum, which in an HIV-infected person quickly becomes life-threatening.  An intense and personal video message brought him back barely in time. 
  http://www.blip.tv/file/3887043/    Some might think this video is too personal to share, but how many other boys need this message?  An STD for a person with AIDS is easily fatal.  A bad cold can mean hospitalization with a high fever.

III.

Barrus, who would fall down laughing at the idea of being a guru/leader, is always on the move.  “Nomadism” is his stock in trade, a lifetime of shuttling around the planet -- San Francisco, Key West, Manhattan, Tangiers, Hong-Kong -- until his most comfortable setting is not so much his own art loft in Paris as waiting for a flight in some vast airport hub.  Rooted in rural Michigan (mistaken for suburban) where men lived mostly outdoors, Tim is nevertheless an urban animal, because the extremes of the cosmopolitan city or the remote commune are the only places safe for those who are defiantly, flamboyantly different, looking for a new world order.  Or not.  When avascular necrosis forced his own health up against death and required his hips and shoulders to be replaced, he recovered by taking refuge in the country, alone but for his wife and dog.  Maybe a boy.

This would terrify many people.  Even to read about Cinematheque they need the example of Scriver, a witness, who is open to these forces while living an ordinary retired old-lady life in a small Montana village.  She needs to justify “why” and “how,” both to the reader and to persons within that world.  First, she has to account for her desire to “save” people; second, why she would choose these specific people; third, what she thinks “saved” means anyway;  fourth, what makes her qualified to say anything at all.  I would answer this way:
 
1.  The desire to save is a universal human and possibly even an innate mammal impulse.  “Lassie, bring help!” 

2.   My connection to these boys began with the prize-winning book by Tim Barrus writing as Nasdijj: “The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping,” which I read and loved.  Barrus metaphorically walked out of that book and looked into my face.  I seemed to recognize him.  Since then the connection has been near-daily email communication, sometimes brief messages and other times elaborately produced videos.  Since April, 2007, some boys have become men, “graduates,” still vigorously alive in spite of infection.  They are off the streets.

3.  Salvation cannot be imposed on another person.  It must bloom from the heart, even in the face of death.  Seeing and accepting people as they are is the first step.

4.  My qualifications must be renewed daily: a long relationship to the multi-valent world of the Blackfeet Reservation; a reading life licensed by an MA in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago; and a willingness to be rebuked, corrected and guided by people from another world entirely.  Though I have a bit of background in anthropology, psychology, teaching and literature, my core education as an undergraduate was in theatre -- the art of entering the lives of others -- not at all the rule-governed objective judging mode of much witnessing that makes of real life a lab experiment.  Boys-fucking-each-other is quite different when considered from inside the experience than when it is depicted from outside.  This is not a matter of ordering certain behavior to cease.  If one can imagine what’s inside a boy’s head while he accommodates a customer, perhaps it is possible to understand his craving for drugs.  If one can imagine the rest of one’s life on the nauseating chemotherapy drugs that keep AIDS at bay, perhaps one can understand the relief of marijuana.
 
Global sociological realizations have only bonded me closer to this experiment.  This shadow world tells us much about the surface life it silhouettes; for instance, the economic uses of uneducated boys in a world that has little need for unskilled labor and an obsession with sex as power.  Men seek to dominate other men either directly through the ownership of money, status, and women or maybe -- as we have come to obsess about -- through literally screwing lower status men.  Gay men have been socially defined as perverse, weak, worthless, stigmatized and therefore fair game for aggression, which is why the empowerment of gay men is vital to their survival.

IV.

In the last year or so Barrus has been experimenting with transparency: instead of skulking in the dark, he and the boys have been on Facebook.  Society has changed in ten years.  A new generation has evolved new values which have released older people into greater frankness.  But it backfires.  As I write, two boys in hospital with serious medical issues (hip replacement, brain swelling) looked up to see strangers coming into their room, wanting to know all about them.  They knew where to find them, that they were vulnerable.  Journalists looking for scandal?  Or former pimps come to take revenge? The boys were removed to a secret protected location.

In his own lifelong struggle to understand and manage his extraordinariness (which so many tried to stamp out), Barrus worked with Fritz Perls, the Gestalt therapist, and learned from him the technique of the “red chair.”  The one wishing to “work” sits in one chair facing the empty other chair, imagining a relevant symbol there -- then talks to it or him/her.  Well, actually -- yells, questions, accuses, and explains -- whatever it takes. 
 
Parallel to his writing, Barrus has been a lifelong teacher of atypical kids, the kind that are separated for special handling: autistic, deaf, hyperactive.  He has done triage for drug overdoses in an ER, had special training in handling violence and has acted as a veterinary assistant.  More than that, as a young man he was a prostitute.  (I’ll wait for a moment while you get over that.)  Whores learn a lot from expensive, highly educated tricks.  They develop extremely sensitive antennae.  And big-time street creds.  More conventional folks should consider the fact that Barrus, as a single parent, raised a happy, achieving daughter who teaches with her husband overseas and he is grandpa to two more little girls.  That is, Barrus’ qualifications are as accidental and near-random as the forces that afflict the boys, but very apt because they are responses to the same forces.

As a nineteen-year-old Barrus was managing Headstart programs.  When slightly older he was chair of the board of directors of the Ingham County Office for Young Children and then worked with the Moore Living Center in Lansing where the patients took control of the institution.  In San Francisco he administered a United Nations art program celebrating the International Year of the Child.  He taught in Taos, at San Felipe del Rio, and on the Navajo Reservation.  Somehow he survived the AIDS plague though he lost a community of photographers, sailors, and writers. He was not immune. 

V.

At present there are hundreds of thousands of children, particularly boys, living on fringes, down sewers, under whatever conditions they can bear, a simmering and suffering cauldron of potential disease and disorder that must be addressed.  Official concern is growing, but Cinematheque is an example of a passionate, private, and partly posthumous effort that breaks trail.

Small independent groups form when social conditions and other forces and needs push and draw them together.  To reflect on what those might be in the instance of what we’re calling “Cinematheque,” it is necessary to describe the group, though it is by nature covert, private, and guarded because of real social dangers.  It is stigmatized, and therefore marked as fair game for exploitation and abuse.  Even describing the group is difficult without triggering stereotypes that aren’t valid, so I will try to use new language.  If I sound like a social worker, I have failed, since even “do-gooder” concepts are stereotypes.

The one constant is that everyone in the group has HIV-AIDS, but not everyone is at the same point on what is a “continuum” disease.  In early stages the virus is hard to detect.  You can’t tell a person has it by looking at them.  By the time (possibly over decades) it approaches end-stage, it is devastating.  At any point along the way a crisis can be precipitated by mishaps, contagion, or interruption in medication (as when the younger boys, sequestered in the mountains of Italy, were in an earthquake).  Constant vulnerability and the need to be guarded, to anticipate future emergencies, does not come easily to adolescent boys.  Guarding against giving the infection to others is not a high priority.  Telling such a boy to stay off skateboards is useless.  At any rate, being wrapped in protective custody, no matter how comfortable (especially for the do-gooder) is not an answer.  It’s a capture.

Most of these boys acquired HIV by “hustling,” meaning sex acts for money.  Some began on the street doing fellatio instead of cleaning windshields at what would normally be primary school age.  They have learned a “vocabulary,” a “grammar,” a set of mores and interpretations based on this which is so compelling that it’s hard for them to think any other way, particularly according to conventional social rules from which they are excluded anyway.  They speak a private language, partly self-invented.  They believe “normals” automatically despise them.

But the boys didn’t all come to sex work the same way or at the same stage or in the same country.  They are polyglot.  Some were products of war, others poverty, often broken families, alcoholism, drug use (though that can arrive later as a way of self-medicating to endure sex work), “criminal” behavior, refugee or illegal immigrant status, and abuse (sexual or violent).  A few were mentally or emotionally vulnerable to begin with -- more have been pushed out of rationality by circumstances or the viral infection of the brain.  Courts, schools, families, lovers -- some have been abandoned by them all.  Predators are also organized: human trafficking of boys as sex slaves is a world phenomenon, largely ignored if not denied.  Drugs that control the boys are very useful.

Economic forces are crucial (sex for food and shelter) but wealth is relative: some boys are from extremely wealthy families, which does not guarantee anything.  Some have become superstars, just like popular models or athletes, and make a lot of money for a while -- which they would have to give up if they gave up sex work.  Drugs are also a wild card.  “Using” to make an unbearable life tolerable is one thing, whether it is to tolerate sex work or the constant nausea and stabbing peripheral neuropathy of nerve damage.  But at the same time as it can be a tranquilizer, it can be a means to suicide. Users entangle in criminal relationships that mean exposure to law enforcement and/or drug cartels and mafias -- both of which use violence and death as enforcers.  Money will not cure AIDS, but enough money could fund the research that would find a cure.  Many suspect that the income flow from the present antiretrovirals are so bountiful for big pharma that they covertly discourage success.  AIDS meds are a powerful political weapon -- funding cut-offs can kill millions of people and precipitate revolution.

VI.

No matter whether imposed by the disease or the peripheral complications, disability and death are constant companions.  Cinematheque takes care to present boys who “look good,” while quietly supporting those who use walkers or wheelchairs, those who are bedridden with fever, those struggling through withdrawal.  People are sympathetic until they see ugliness, which they interpret as “evil” and which therefore reinforces stigma.  The boys themselves need at least a little distance from the idea that they are lepers.  Managing grief is a major part of daily life and this raises religious issues in a world where priests give small children HIV by molesting them.

Not all the boys are “gay” and not all the gay boys are homosexual in the same way.  (“Gay” or homosexual means simply same-sex desire or acts -- nothing to do with personality, style or gifts.)  Some came by the virus through injected drugs.  Most are imprinted with male sexual acts, uninhibited in that behavioral mode, but yearning to partner-up emotionally with someone they can trust.  This is not unlike the female paradigm in modern society: the Harlequin romance model.  The boys tend to be gynephobic, fearing what is unknown.  Some are polyamorous, meaning attracted to many others of various kinds.  To love is to fuck.

Pimps treat boys as property, selling them if they can.  It is an organized crime.  Own or be owned.  In the toughest part of the world, infected boys are simply taken into the woods and shot, like "downer" cattle. If boys escape, they are pursued, maybe killed unless they are still worth money.

VII.

In our times we have more willingness to explore the edges and reluctance to constrain free expression have expanded, even in the face of opposition.  Thus art, with its tolerance or even valuing of shock and deviation, is a natural way for stigmatized and sequestered boys to rebuild their hearts, to see new ways of life, and to acquire practical skills for making a living.  It is an ideal means to the end of helping a boy become a man, should he manage to live so long.  The availability and fascination of electronic arts, especially videos and music, are huge advantages with intense emotional content and absorbing skills. Tim’s way of helping the group in the face of a new loss is to assign a video project difficult enough that they are soon grumbling about it instead of grieving.
 
Not that he doesn’t have other strategies:  flight lines (“getting out of Dodge”) work well; getting each boy his own dog helps; going up on the roof or walking on the beach for a little one-on-one.  But in the end it is Art that is a means, a strategy, a handhold for climbing out of misery, a consolation, an alternative way of earning a living, and something approaching religion: memorial, ritual, absolution, prayer.  Sometimes Tim doubts the worthiness of the art, succumbing to the social definition of art as frivolous unless it is famous and worth a lot of money.  But the truth is that art is a universal human component that our society too often suppresses, and it is a process rather than a resulting object.  All the boys are or soon become artists.

How society made such a group necessary (many more boys petition to join than can be included) is easier to understand than the personal forces that allowed the actual beginning of this group.  One was that Tim, who had spent his life working with handicapped and troubled kids, also had other skills.   He had always been a photographer, a painter, a poet, a free-lance writer, an editor and publisher in several contexts -- not just the various kinds of “gay” -- and he was perfectly acceptable in Paris where he had a loft.  Tim’s ultimate qualification was that he had also been a whore when he was about their age.  But he was not an ashamed, hidden, victim/whore -- he had made it into a form of theatre: flamboyant, confrontive, embellished and proclaimed, just as he had done as a semi-delinquent long-haired kid with eyeshadow and a vest with fringe to the floor.  He did not apologize or avoid:  he went on through.

Tim’s challenge has been to find the resources in himself to oppose the death and suffering of boys. Yet the strongest resource is love of the boys themselves.  He worked with governmental bodies and NGO’s at every level.  He came back to transparency, even though it meant stalkers and attackers plagued the group because of their vulnerability.  Now it has become too much. The loft on the Pigalle became too dangerous. Beyond that, Tim’s own AIDS has now flared into AIDS dementia. It appears that the famous rages against publishers were early symptoms that have now progressed to memory loss. A fall broke his collarbone and leg. The avascular necrosis is advanced enough that he cannot travel. He is sixty.

When Tim realized what was happening, partly through formal diagnosis from MRI scans, he was prepared. The Cinematheque group has recently changed its name and retreated from Paris to a remote location that echoes a much older form of response to disease and disorderly society:  the monastery.  Cinematheque is no more. Something new is born: The Studio. A bonded pair of Irish boys, now men and partners, have assumed leadership of the group. Tim arranged their funding. Individual boys travel to stay with him for intervals, partly taking care of Tim and partly learning how to fish.

Now Tim writes poetry, nothing like the wildly purple erotica of his early poetry. Now it is stripped, burned, influenced by several poets on Facebook. You can find it there under his own name: Tim Barrus.

SO WHO ARE YOU REEEEAAAAALLLY?

When my father died (in the Sixties) my mother went through his things with trepidation. He made his living by traveling (a field representative for an ag wholesale cooperative) and she had always joked that he had a second family somewhere. It’s interesting that she imagined not a mistress but a second family. The issue was not sex but enough income for our family. He turned out to have a few previously unknown bank accounts but there was no money in them and no evidence of bigamy.

Something like that was also true of Bob Scriver. Not after his death so much as after the publication of the book I wrote about him, people told me secret things. I knew he had a lot of secrets and, in fact, got a little hooked on finding them: secret correspondences, secret financial arrangements, and the usual secret trysts. Once in a while he would go on a trip without me, saying he needed me to tend something at home, though in early years he always needed me to come along. Towards the end he sent me off alone on missions several days long to deliver or retrieve sculpture, usually to meet a deadline. When I got back there would be small signs of unmentioned guests. I had my own secret life in an attic room where I read books. No trysts. Whole worlds.

The advent of email has made it possible to pretend to be anyone -- “no one knows you’re a dog on the internet,” goes the joke. People use this convenient mask to persecute others -- no need to cut up the bedding to make pointy hoods. And yet it’s not impossible to discern consistency, authenticity. In fact, maybe it’s easier since it’s possible to lay on the table side-by-side text from years of communication. Apart from content, rhetoric can be a giveaway. Or a confirmation. (Nothing is more of a giveaway than absolute unvarying consistency.)

With my co-writer, Tim Barrus, our entire relationship is in print. Most of what I know about him is from books and emails, fortified with videos -- sometimes simply his talking face and other times carefully edited and overlaid with images and his voice. He is a person who has re-invented himself many times from childhood on, usually out of a need for survival. He also has a taste for theatre and a deep instinct never to reveal what cards he holds. I don’t press for facts, I don’t ask questions. But I “listen” (read) very closely for the core of what he says and I am satisfied that it is real and coherent. I listen the way a psychotherapist might.

So many of our television programs and movies are about deceptions: spies, secret agents, alternative realities, and the like, with revelations that are theoretically more “real” than appearances. But I often doubt the motivations of the screenwriters. The stories are covertly and cynically about control, power. That makes them political.

I’m watching “In Treatment,” which takes a long time because psychotherapy takes time and there are multiple weekly sessions over almost three seasons. The clients depicted are dramatic: types denying who they are and wanting to escape their lives. In reality most clients are pretty predictable -- they just don’t have enough power. And most psychotherapists do not discover stunning revelations about themselves. Most psychotherapists are not Gabriel Byrne. Too bad.

I myself, in my various roles and functions, am probably not completely known by anyone. (Maybe no one is completely known by any other single person, even spouses or family members.) This person remembers my animal control years. (My boss says I had balls.) Another person remembers me as a Lucille Ball of an English teacher with red curly hair. Classmates from seminary remember me quite differently from parishioners and people in one place brought out an entirely different side of me than those in another.

A religious leader soon runs into the problem of expectations. For those whose norm was a big powerful man with good connections, I was a loss. For those whose norm was closer to who I am, I was fine, though I was hurt when one parishioner insisted I was like the Vicar of Dibley, that vaguely ridiculous BBC program. I despise being patronized. The fight always on my hands is that no one thinks a tubby old woman can think. I think this is in part because lots of tubby old women pretend they can’t.

People who go into the ministry are admonished to be authentic, not to put up a front. (I’m talking Protestants here.) People can feel a charlatan, a phony, a hypocrite, we were told. Yet people can’t distinguish between a role and a private individual. When I left the ministry and re-assumed my un-ordained self, some people dropped me as being now powerless and therefore of no account. But others refused to let me be a private person. To them, being their minister meant something like a genetic role: you can’t stop being an aunt or a grandmother. Once assigned your part, you cannot set it aside. As for me, I sometimes continued to act as though I were a minister and became a target for it. Those in power marked me for extinction. I learned late. Maybe not at all.

So now I’ve snuck up on the Obama problem: people who refuse to allow him the role of President of the United States of America, partly because of his temperament, partly because of his race, and mostly just because he is not like them or anyone they know. Nor do they intend to find out about the type. How do we resolve this problem? I’m not sure we can.

Obama is powerful, check. Obama is well-connected, check. Obama is plenty intelligent, maybe over-educated, and even gets along with his mother-in-law. He has not told us whether he wears boxers or shorts. People who support him do not care. People who simply cannot stand him would not be reassured by the information, even if they believed it. But they would be quick to accuse him of hiding something. Maybe tiger-striped bikini briefs with his name in rhinestones. (These people have good imaginations, mostly based on the theatrical power plays of hyped-up wrestling.)

Therapy patients and seminary students are taught that the key to success is being who you really are and keeping your focus, but it’s a long-run sort of strategy. In the short run you need to rear up like a grizzly bear mama and fake it like Sarah. Of course, it will destroy your tabloid family. But for a little while you’ll have lots of money.

PIEGAN BLACKFEET HISTORY: 1920 - 1930

By the time we begin to look at this decade, there are living people who witnessed and remember. Writing history becomes something different because people are invested in defending their own families, their own lives, their own political causes. Some (Indians) have said to me that this is one reason that a white person should write Blackfeet history, because whites are outsiders. They are mistaken. In fact, one of the ways white people from far places have participated is political. They were involved in intimate matters but unknowingly, ignorantly, self-servingly. But still, writing history is not a matter of DNA. It’s about access and motivation.

By this time formal, possibly local, history begins to offer alternatives. I’ve been using Foley, who was writing evidence for a lawsuit against the US government -- not that he had to stretch much to find indictable offenses -- and Rosier, who was as objective as he could be while writing for an academic degree. Also, there are now picture books like William Farr’s “The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882-1945” so we can see for ourselves. (These are not the romantic posed tableaus made by Roland Reed.) The “cabinet” photos collected by Adolph Hungry Wolf in his four-volume history of the Blackfeet are also revealing.

This was a time when families lived in log cabins (one is recreated at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary) furnished with a metal bed, a wood stove, a simple table, a few chairs, and a washpan hanging from a nail on the wall alongside a nailed-up wooden box for salt and baking powder. In a trunk under that bed would have been a fabulously beaded white buckskin parade suit now worth as much as some Russell paintings. In 1961 I saw both. Up in the rafters I saw the Thunder Pipe Bundles. Local historians like Jack Holterman, who had taught in a one-room school on the rez, began to write his memories in the Sixties. “Blackfeet Heritage, 1907 - 08”, derived from a card file meant to indicate who was entitled to commodities, is invaluable, though packed with gossip. By now the historian must research the materials as well as the events.

Around the world this time period meant a recovery from war, a taking of stock, and an effort to regroup. It had become very clear that the Indian situation, with no attention being given to it, was out of hand. The decade goes back and forth between people being appalled when they realize what has happened (or rather NOT happened) and then making mighty efforts at reform. Some fascinating personalities began to emerge.

1921 was the beginning of the F. C. Campbell years. He had served one year in the tumult after Wilson left (In the end convicted of bigamy! Talk about greed!) and now returned with enough energy and determination to last until 1929. He was a big red-headed man, a type like George Washington and William Clark. Louis Hill, the railroad tycoon, had secured a ten year lease for oil from Wilson, but Campbell was more concerned with agriculture. His first act was to travel house-to-house, succeeding in meeting four-fifths of the people. His awareness of the people fueled his obsession with family gardens and small animal management. Over the winter of 1920-21 two-thirds of the people had needed rations to survive. Half of the full-bloods had no money at all and not everyone was cutting wood for winter. The suffering was enervating and pervasive.

Campbell believed in cooperative granges which could pool resources to buy farm equipment, but also liked motivating competitions in terms of who could grow the most bushels of grain per acre and who could raise the heaviest sheep. He organized fairs. A small flour mill was started in Heart Butte. But it was always an uphill battle and the opposition was powerful. Among the most critical was James Willard Schultz who was convinced that his father-in-law, Yellow Wolf, had been allowed to starve without help while Schultz was in exile in California. He founded “The Executive Committee for the National Association to Help the Indian” and published a pamphlet entitled, “The Blackfeet Are Starving.”

Two brothers, Oliver and Richard Sanderville, become effective intercessors for the older full-bloods, though their origins are Mexican, “Sandoval.” They were related to the Clarke family on the Blackfeet side as well as to Pablo, a Flathead personality, through George Starr. (Yes, Starr School.) Richard Sanderville stayed in Heart Butte, calling himself “Chief Bull” and aligning himself with the Methodists who clustered around Swims Under. He also has lively ties with Washington big shots. Oliver Sanderville goes by Kyiyo and attaches himself to Starr School. Other important names are Richard Hazlett, Robert Hamilton, Joseph Spanish, Levi Bird, and Oliver Racine. Paul Rosier’s book, explicates details of the interests, influence and achievements of these men. Rosier is working from files and letters, which means his sources are primary, but the loss is that the women are largely missing. I knew some of these women as old ladies and cannot believe they just stood by, but they tended to work through their husbands.

1924 is the year Native Americans become citizens. 1926 is the year of the Merriam Report which really lays out all the management failures of Indian Affairs and the failure to meet treaty obligations to address Indian poverty, unemployment, lack of health care and shortage of education for all Indians, not just the Blackfeet.

In 1929 Campbell is replaced by Stone, who had been his assistant. By now there had been major investigations and hearings by Senators Frazier, Wheeler and Pine.) Senate investigator Liggett wrote a long report, so “hot” that it was not released until 1932. He identifies six cluster of complaints:

1. Indians are defrauded by deliberate conspiracy.
2. Tribal possessions are dispersed without compensation.
3. There is no account of the tribal herd.
4. Indian interests are always secondary. (Primary seems to be the Great Northern railroad.)
5. Agency officials dominate the Tribal Council.
6. No accounting is made or reported to the legal owners of leases. (This is the matter that is now being pursued by Eloise Cobell that the lawmakers in Washington STILL refuse to pay.)

Something like the split between having a bare table in a cabin that shelters priceless objects, Glacier National Park achieves a population density and development status that is separate from the Blackfeet Reservation, though important Blackfeet people still put on their regalia to meet the train. The three resort towns -- East Glacier (Midvale), St. Marys and Babb -- are the face of the Blackfeet to many people, including Winold Reiss who recorded so many of them for Great Northern calendars.

In 1930 Holy Family Mission was closed, blamed by some on foreclosure for debt by the Sherburne Mercantile.

RECAPITULATION OF MY DISSOCIATION LINE OF THOUGHT

Time to recapitulate the path I’ve been following about the change of consciousness we all feel sometimes but find it difficult to account for or even manage because it somehow comes out of the UNconscious. This list is not quite chronological.

1. In the Sixties I had been included in Bundle Opening ceremonies as a “Keeper” with old-time Blackfeet born in the 1880’s. These people were believers who lived the material culture of these objects and responded to their imagery.

2. At a Pacific Northwest Unitarian Universalist Leadership School (a week-long training retreat) I had opportunities to experience and to design worship events in experimental ways, followed by close analysis.

3. At seminary I was introduced to a body of theory. This was the period when Abraxas, a group invested in understanding and developing creative worship, was active. One of the members of that group was the minister “kitty-corner” from the seminary and loosely associated with it. That church was built according to the ideas of Van Ogden Vogt, an early Unitarian liturgist. Critically, I thought that they were only putting mixed content into a conventional pattern.

4. Mircea Eliade noted in “The Sacred and the Profane” that we can feel the sacred when we are in a sacred place or time. In some subtle way, we “know.”

5. Victor Turner and Van Gennep, coming from the context of anthropology, suggested a three-step structure of a thing they called “liminality,” which is to say, altered consciousness in the ceremonies of tribes. One goes “over a threshold,” is in a sacred space, and returns back over that threshold or limen.

6. I found a book called “The Study of Liturgy” by Gregory Dix which analyzed the development of the Christian mass from its Jewish beginnings. I also found a book called “The Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries” by Alfred Gell which related their ceremonies to their material culture. “Alive!” the story of the Uruguayan soccer team that survived a plane crash in the Andes through cannibalism, interpreted as Communion, also related survival to culture.

7. Powell’s bookstore was at that time down the street from my seminary. They stocked English “object relations” books by Winnicott, Fowler, Kohut, et al about the formation of early identity, This seemed relevant to an experience-based theory of worship. (Opposed by my faculty, which was focused on theological systematics and history.)

8. Looking for philosophical fortification, I came to the thought of Suzanne Langer, who was interested in “felt concepts,” which is to say, things you have a “gut feeling” about but can’t necessarily put into words. (“Deconstruction” and so on was just heating up in 1978. I couldn’t understand it.)

9. Brain study with fMRI and ingenious experimental technique was also just beginning, so that the scientific evidence of how brains function was in very early stages. Research had depended mostly on the results of trauma, similar to how psychological theories came out of addressing malfunction instead of health.

10. PTSD was becoming a problem, but undefined and poorly understood. I had a few parishioners who struggled with it, one of them having flashbacks to WWII.

11. Terminology depends upon the “discipline” which is part of the difficulty in studying this. Religion’s version is often defined as “visions” as in the lives of saints. For a ministerial study group I did an analysis of those visions which suggested that the saints were accessing the earliest and deepest layers of interpreting the world in terms of dyads: warmth versus temperature extremes; falling versus being securely held; dazzling light versus total darkness; fed versus starving, and so on. These are the perceptions of infants organizing their world, the structure on which all later categories must be built. We know now that humans “create” their brains according to their experiences in the earliest years. Any later experience that reaches so deeply into minds will touch those structures, evoking strong emotional response.

12. One of the most useful of the liturgical concepts (Von Ogden Vogt) was what I called “the dilation of the spirit” which is recognizable in the Mass as “confession” immediately followed by “assurance of pardon.” Done skillfully, this can touch those deep structures of thought. Doing this means management of the entering of safe space (liminal), providing content that might most likely be in terms of the material culture, and returning the communicants to their lives, though possibly changed.

13. Particularly useful in handling material culture was Robert Schreiter, who in “Constructing Local Theologies” warned against over-valuing specific local materials like bread and wine or lambs and fishes, urging the liturgist to find the deepest meanings of those “things” and then to find the real conceptual equivalent in the materials of the new culture. This is not easy, which is why it is not often done. It addressed the problem I had with Abraxas.

13. In drug culture the state of dissociation is directly related to what people report about hallucinogens, in particular LSD. They report a reorganization of thought that is transformative -- not always positive, depending on what the context might be. “Bad trips” are not unknown, maybe because of the lack of a safe "liminal space.”

14. Among hypnotists, esp. those treating distressed patients who present with “dissociation” that is dysfunctional, the state is recognized -- when it is a result of hypnotism -- as a prerequisite for healing through re-framing -- that is, thinking in a new way. Taking the person into a liminal state allows that transformation. Even intense psychotherapy can produce the same results.

15. Among lit crits, it might be more profitable to use the definition of “immersive” experience, in which someone reading “goes into” the writing and loses track of time, is reluctant to come out. This perhaps was my first dissociation experience (mild) of “being someone else.” This immersion is also closely related to “method” acting. I took classes in undergrad years.

16. Dissociation, visions, split personality, hypnotic trance, freaked, etc. are all references to this human phenomenon. Along with the different names for the experience come different judgments from the larger culture: insanity, heresy, therapeutic transformation, PTSD, visionary, spirituality, brain malfunction, supernatural, magic, all depending on how much the contextual culture is threatened.

17. A basic dynamic of nature is that entities exist as centers of identity with peripheral variations, the “growing edge.” Culturally, psychologically, and as species, a main body has adapted to a specific ecology so that it fits well enough to perpetuate itself. But ecologies are subject to larger forces of change in every dimension from cosmic waves to hormonal balances in the brain. If the context shifts enough, the entity will be snuffed unless one or another of those growing edges of nonconformity happens to be equipped to survive the new reality. I am near-sighted: in a hunting culture before spectacles were invented, I would be eaten by the first tiger that came along. In an academic culture, it’s barely a handicap. Oddballs who can find a niche become geniuses. They may be our salvation.

18. Tim Barrus was in his youth what he calls a “sex worker” in San Francisco at a time of enormous cultural ferment and change: partly due to Vietnam, partly due to the opening of ideas about sexuality, and partly due to the new drug culture. (There has always been a drug culture.) When he began to blog about the “play room” he and a partner created by painting a warehouse interior black and equipping it with “toys”; how most of the customers were men, often military or in authority, like cops and CEO’s; how the events often had little to do with sex but a LOT to do with powerlessness (being locked in a box, being tightly bound, being transported over the Golden Gate Bridge with the threat of being thrown off it); and how willingly these men paid a LOT of money for the experience, I recognized this as a kind of dissociation experience of liturgical dimensions: a “dilation of the spirit” in a counter-culture way. (Possibly a kind of healing.) The center always wants to keep its hegemony, but it’s hard on the enforcers. It’s interesting that the people most anxious to label/libel Barrus are old-fashioned sex workers and out-dated porn producers. (They know who they are.)

To summarize, before I ever knew Barrus I came back to this quiet village in order to reflect and study, in large part on this topic. I brought an accumulation of books, have bought more, use the Internet, do NOT stay in one discipline or another but try to stay aware of method, and find it all -- well -- immersive. Transformative. Immanent. And sometimes rather Terrifying. I mean, what IS identity when it is only conventionally unified? How does one know what’s going on in one’s subconscious? Maybe it IS breaking through to an alternative reality. There’s a lot more to ask and sift through.

ME & THE BOOZSH-WAH-ZEE

My first problem, of course, was learning how to spell the damn concept. I finally taped it to my computer monitor. BOURGEOIS. A combination of bourbon, geology and “is.” I’m sure all three are relevant, not just mnemonic devices. (Took me a while to learn to spell “mnemonic,” too.) Esp. the bourbon.

But try to find a decent definition. Now DECENT, that’s a very bourgeois concept. But a decent definition of bourgeois might be rather INdecent from their point of view. It’s not quite the same thing as the middle class, not quite the same thing as middle-brow, not quite the same thing as, you know, living in a nice house, washing your car often, and sending your kids to the state university. Or at least a good two-year tech school. But what do these people know about humanities? And though they listen to PBS (Garrison Keillor), what do they really know about opera? Everyone wants to be middle-class but few want to be called bourgeois. What’s the distinguishing marker? They need authorities to certify: Are you published? Are you ordained? Do you have a teaching certificate? Do you have a Ph.D? (Most aren’t exactly sure how one gets those things, so they need the marker. They DO know which markers are significant. They believe in Oscars and the lottery.)

The anthropologically interesting and un-Euro cultures or the mysterious cloistered very rich, very poor, or institutionalized seem to be out of consideration as bourgeois except for the media presenting the bourgeois with voyeuristic slices of those other lives. The bourgeois are supposed to be the normal, the norm. But above average.

I’m reading Peter Gay, which is a revelation: “The Education of the Senses” in which he slides the sheets off the marital beds to reveal that women loved sex all along and their husbands were often more tolerant and skillful than pictured. (He seems to ignore the fact that childbirth could be lethal for women -- sepsis, no anesthetic.) But also I read short pieces on economics (which are about all I can assimilate at one time) and the bourgeois seem to be about as much about capitalism as about sex, which is a river running through just about everything. The economy of sex. Not just pay-for-acts but the bondage of dependence. Labor gradients: you do the work, I sign the checks.

Today we seem to be shrinking, confusing and breaking up the bourgeois, which would be a good thing if it forced us to invent something better than capitalism. About time, in fact. But it’s terrifying, esp. for those inside the phenomenon, succeeding at it. Until now. There are still aspirants who are not getting any sex, money or security (forget education) but pretend that they are and have no defense except to throw tantrums. (I’m writing this on election day.)

Contending forces are in myself: “You shall be a major success that impresses everyone.” “You shall not be proud or boasting.” And underneath that are two other commandments: “You must be decent,” and “Do not get above yourself.” Both of those are seen as triggers for failure, though it seems evident to me that indecency and overreaching are just as likely to accompany success, in fact, are sometimes a prerequisite. I find that worrying about decency or whether I’m getting the big head are stumbling blocks. Just do it. Keep focus.

Mostly, it seems to me, the bourgeois idea is to stay in a group, maybe in order to be a voting block. Or to keep neighbors from thinking you are strange, which might mean they deny you help. Conformity is a high value, as much of an imperative as prosperity. But conformity means to me mediocrity. If the only way I can escape conformity is by foregoing prosperity, well, that’s what I’ve done. I’ll just be quietly eccentric and keep trailing Tim who has played the game the other way around: all the glamour of prosperity (at least in surges) and conformity only to the Grateful Dead.

I played some trump cards (Blackfeet, Bob Scriver) that won and threw in my hand on others (teaching, animal control, bureaucracy). In private life I had a tight immigration policy -- still do. Not at all race-based. What I see is that prestige and respect (which don’t necessarily go together) are not really controllable. One can die a great hero and success -- fifty years later, no one remembers your name. On the other hand, now and then someone is posthumously excavated from history and highly praised for brilliance. What counts most is right now: the bright moment. That is not a bourgeois idea, is it? I guess it depends on how you play it.

So, all right, I’m abstaining from all things bourgeois, including the Montana Festival of the Book. What are the alternatives? High intellectual? My prob with that is that lately the stuff has been such inscrutable theory that I can’t figure it out. And it’s a little like the discussion group I once belonged to in Helena. We spent an entire winter talking about Camus and how the heart and meaning of life was Art. So along in the spring I proposed that we each describe what art we had at home. They scoffed. “Oh, we don’t have time for such trivia,” they said. My last meeting. They’re all talk.

Maybe working class. What’s a good working class novel? In Montana. I resort to a resource from the Seventies in Missoula, a journal meant to explore alternatives, esp. the surreal. In what I suppose could be called an editorial in the Fall, 1977, issue of “Montana Gothic” (not the book but the literary journal then published in Missoula), Peter Koch says:

“It can be argued that there are two distinct categories of the REAL; that which is common and habitual, which I shall call ‘Reality,’ versus that which is suppressed by the first category which I shall call MARVELOUS. If one can believe the great thinkers of this century -- the suppressed will return to haunt the bright plaza of low contrasts called ‘reality’ like lava extruded from a fault in the earth’s crust. If ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’ then the imagination abhors reality (an opposition whereby what can be achieves achieves a clawhold on what is.)

“We have here in Montana a sterling example of the repression of the imagination by what can fairly be judged an unconscious agent, the Writing Program at the University of Montana. . . The state supports writers who express desire and dissatisfaction within a christian framework of good and evil that any Zane Grey novel will acquaint you with.”

Koch left Missoula not long after writing this in order to glory in the ferment of the San Francisco alternative community where Evil was truly life-threatening (viral) and Good was ecstatic. He earned his way with careful, tasteful, high brow letterpress printing, an enterprise that demands focus and calibration. Well, that’s not predictable or bourgeois.

As if that weren’t enough irony, Zane Grey has now been exposed -- though people hardly dare think about it -- as a guy who put his own pleasure before everyone else and routinely, with his wife’s permission and possibly collusion, slept with young girls, photographed his acts of prowess and kept track in a diary. There’s too much proof to blame all this on slander. He spent his days at sea with the girls while his wife wrote at least some parts of those bourgeois novels. Lassiter, ha!

So what does Peter Koch approve as worthy subjects in Montana? He provides a list at the end of this journal so I googled through it. Lee Steen came up as a subsidiary of Swain Wolfe -- a fascinating writer never featured by the Montana Humanities crowd. Steen made people and animals of wood, bringing organic shapes to life -- he ended up burning them to keep warm. Michael Poage (no one in Missoula mentions him though his bio brags of his beginnings with Hugo) became a Congregational minister in Kansas after earning his MDiv at San Francisco Theological Seminary. We echo. Jay Rummel occupied an unlikely triptich: Montana Historical Society, folk music, and fine ceramics. (Yes, Rudi Autio.) He’s my age -- where IS he?

“Blind Boy Bug” turns out to be a band and leads to Milo Miles, a coast-to-coast free-lancer of high reputation. David Thomas -- too many with the same name to figure out. Mary McLean, no trace of her and her “vitriolic tongue.” (Will I do?) Dirk Lee, erotic painter of naked ladies -- no one ever told me about this guy at the MEA English teacher meetings even though most MATELA attenders are female! Norman Boyce Jr. -- no results.

Some things on the list I already knew:
The megalomania of the Copper Kings. (Some of whom were Unitarians.)
The Disappearance of Governor Meagher. (And the horse he rode in on.)
The perverse relic of Club Food George’s foot. (One among the many, honey.)
Jim Welch and the high-line mythos. (I’m here.)
Anarchy in the Rocky Mountains. (It never ends. Sometimes it’s geological.)

Maybe local is the new universal. Recurrent. Will they all move back, leaving San Fran a ghost town? If there’s another big earthquake they might. More likely the money will run out in Missoula, leaving the underlying bohemians. Not a bad outcome.

THE PIEGAN BLACKFEET: 1910 - 1920

As soon as I posted the beginning of this century of notes about the Blackfeet, I got emails that provoked me. One was the comment you can read for yourself from the kid (I assume) who wants info about 19th century Blackfeet so he (I assume) can write a paranormal novel about a Blackfeet woman who falls in love with a wolf. (Him, I assume.) I was entirely out of patience and bit his head off. The other was an offer to advertise with Indian Country Today, the flagship Native American publication. I thought about it and then declined.

The best message I got was from another writer (Ray Djuff, I know for a fact) in Calgary who started out a few years ago with all the standard assumptions about what an Indian “is,” and as he began to research was able to expand and refine his ideas into something more like reality, without discarding the seductive mythology that is part of this continent.

For instance, he says in an email to me:

“Mostly, all I’ve seen [in terms of post-frontier histories of the Blackfeet] are reviews of the “modern”, as in present-day, Blackfeet, and items about these modern people now trying to bridge that gap in terms of preserving knowledge that was known but nearly lost in the post-Great Northern Railway entertainers era.
 
“The passing of the Wades-in-the-Waters and, more lately, Molly Kicking Woman and Mary Ground being about the last of that “Great Northern entertainers” generation.
 
“As much as people might rail [sic] on about how the railway exploited the Blackfeet, its promotion of the natives kept alive traditions that waned much sooner on other reservations.
 
“So there are Blackfeet grandparents alive today whose parents were involved with the railway directly or indirectly through relatives, and these people had regular contact with those who regularly performed traditional activities (songs, dances, story telling, “costume” making) right up to the 1950s, and were encouraged to do so. Can’t say that about most reservations.”


Now we begin notes about the second decade of the 20th century, in which the frontier is ended, which reveals a problem not solved even now: the Indians stay Indians but that doesn’t mean the same thing. They do not stay “raiders of the plains” but their legal structures are all based on that assumption and on a treaty outdated and hardly observed anyway. Horses, when they came at the end of the 18th century, fitted easily into the pre-existing dog paradigms; but industrial patterns and machines of the 20th century don’t. First the steamboat and now the railroad bring in outsiders and goods, but the railroad changes the pattern by being much quicker and running east/west rather than north/south. St. Louis/New Orleans is displaced by Minneapolis/Chicago to Seattle/Portland. Even today Browning is at the end of the mercantile distribution systems from those latter two centers.

A new kind of person arrives through birth, individuals I prefer not to identify as “half-breeds” in the conventional divide-the-pie-minded way, but rather as a “double-breeds” -- maybe a two-layered cake idea, the top layer with a white frosting of money. (I tried to invent some way to get berry jam into this between the layers but failed.) By the Twenties there were enough of them to be a force both economically and politically. When World War I broke out, the Native Americans recognized that situation and many were able to become warriors again, though they still were not citizens.

In the economic dynamics of the time the local mercantilists were small fry. The land was surveyed for the Dawes Act and divvied up among families with some of it mysteriously becoming “surplus.” Two strips were separated from the main rez, one along the east side where oil was suspected and one along the southwest edge of the Rockies continguous with Glacier National Park. Oklahoma’s oil boom was on everyone’s minds.

The agent of the first half of this decade was McFatridge, who was famous for his highly volatile wife, and who finally departed to Canada with $1200 of money not his. The plagues of the decade were tuberculosis, trachoma and VD of various kinds, but all the rez doctors had quit, so McFatridge had to treat them himself as best he could. The Methodist minister, R.A. Riggin, was running cattle instead of doing mission work. The on-again-off-again irrigation canal system, some of it dug by hand by married couples, was now charged against the tribal assets: a million dollar assessment in a time when few men were millionaires. The Great Northern was given right-of-way, timber, grass, and town sites. But the real action was in the tug-of-war over oil leases between full-bloods who wanted paternalistic white management and double-bloods who wanted to manage themselves, with Washington DC trying to figure out what was best for white men, namely THEM.

In 1919 an election was held to choose whether Browning (newly incorporated) or Cut Bank would be the capital of Glacier County, which includes the bulk of the Blackfeet Reservation plus an off-rez strip to the east, much of which land had been conveniently removed from the rez. When Cut Bank won (for suspicious reasons) it became a platform for predation on the reservation. Only recently have there begun to be Blackfeet sheriffs and county commissioners. Only now have the remarkable number of lawyers thinned out.

After McFatridge left, a series of temporary agents was capped by Horace Wilson, famously drunk right through Prohibition along with all his staff. He may have been related to the infamous Wilson on the Sioux Reservation in the Sixties, but was once sighted drunk in Navajo country. The new doctor, George Martin, is reputed to have been a morphine addict.

During the War two commodities were gold mines: beef and sheep (for wool uniforms). Cutting “wild” grass hay was a ready source of profit for full-bloods without capital. But the fence around the reservation that was supposed to keep out the white cattle herds had been taken down and there were few internal fences. Worries about overgrazing begin to arise. By 1918 there have been four years of severe drought.

Though it’s easy to see the reservation as a bubble, it is much affected by outside events. WWI was a long, miserable, destructive event that probably helped the reservation economy at the time, but brought to bear new pressures in the next decade.

In this decade the U.S. Census reports that 2,268 Indians are living on the Blackfeet reservation, about the same number that lived there in 1885. About the same number that attended my high school in Portland, OR. A high proportion are young. The present population of Browning inside the city limits is about half that, but when the many housing projects surrounding the town are counted, there are probably more like 3,000.


 

"THEN LET THE WIND DIE DOWN"

This is a guest blog that I asked Tim Barrus to write about the experience of liminality (see yesterday's post). This is in part what people say is S/M. Tim also posted this on his Facebook page with a video illustration.

Prairie Mary


Then Let the Wind Die Down

I was eleven the first time. Lake Michigan near Traverse City. I was wearing the buckskin coat. The one with the fringe I loved. My dad had killed the buck and had had the coat made for himself but I had appropriated it. We had driven that whole day down from L’anse in the Upper Peninsula. We would spend the night at the lake, and I had waded into it wearing only the buckskin coat. I was not quite waist deep and I was walking north.

The sun was setting behind the lake. The water only barely covering my cock and balls as I pulled myself through the water, walking north. Always due north. That was the first time, and at eleven, I did not know what it was. But I knew it was something because it had never happened to me before. Not like this.

The next time would be onstage. I was a dancer and I was dancing. Suddenly, the audience became irrelevant. I was no longer dancing. I was the dance. I do this with writing now.

The next time would be in China. The magician was showing us how to manipulate the marionettes (puppets) via string so the puppets could perform the magic tricks. Suddenly, the magician leapt backwards doing a complete acrobatic flip, and then he disappeared. What came to me was both the question and the answer and it had nothing to do with magic tricks. Question: what will you do with the puppets now that they have been abandoned to your person. Answer: the children who need them will find you.

The next time it happened, I was shown into an almost empty room with a chair in the center of the room which I sat down in. A door opened and a woman with a big heavy box pulled the box into the room. She left. Inside the box were six new wolf puppies. I was not in my body then. I had given it to them. They will tear your clothes off, they will. Their eyes still blue.

It has happened to me dozens of times on Grant Street in San Francisco. It has never not happened if I am in China town. So I once decided to move there. Just walking down the street was extraordinary.

It has happened to me in ruins. That is all I can say.

It happens in Shinjuku whenever I am there. It finds you. You do not find it (the idea of you finding it is ludicrous) and it happens.

It has nothing to do with nature or new age anything. Shinjuku is the most contrived environment on the planet. But it is very powerful in Shinjuku. Other people who I have never met and do not know have written to me that it happens to them there as well.

It has happened to me on the beach in Tunisia. It has happened to me in brothels in Tangier.

It happened to me once after having just taken off from La Guardia on a jet. It was night. We flew around the Twin Towers — close enough to touch them — and then we took off straight to California.

It happened to me once diving in the Keys.

It happened to me sailing a windjammer through a storm just off Nassau. It has happened to me several times while writing. I can MAKE something similar happen at will. But it is not the thing.

It happened to me today high on LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. You can only call to it using these tools. It doesn’t mean it will happen but I have gotten quite good at communicating with it to see that it does. LSD and psilocybin mushrooms beckon to it.

The dogs and I walked about twenty miles today. It was with me most of that time. I can taste it on the wind. I am not sure how I constructed this video to show you (not that you will believe it which is fine) what it’s like walking in and through the thing. I need to make visual representations (all of them quite inadequate) of what it’s like to be inside the thing. Usually, I am walking through. Or swimming through. Or flying through it.

Different cultures have different words for it. The Hopi break it up into four worlds. Asian cultures are replete with references to it.

I find that it’s not so much a thing as it is a process.

It enfolds me. In much the same way that color itself as place enfolds the male walking through the video.

Most people cannot access it. I would caution you to not even try.

I do not call it peace or bliss or even experience those things while walking in it and through it. Bliss is far too sophomoric a term. It is not bliss. It is not joy. It can be terrifying in much the way the universe itself is violent and terrifying. It does not CARE and either does the universe.

It does not matter what you believe. You are not important to it in any way. Americans in particular find that hard to handle. Americans want to be the POINT.

But they’re not the point of anything. They are not germane to anything. The universe does not know Americans exist.

It is not god. There is NO god. Get over it.

I have a term for it. It is only MY term. I call it the way.

I used to work with it during my sex worker years. You can’t really call what I was doing sex. It was role playing.

Men would pay me to take them on sexual adventures. Experiences that were powerfully sexual to the men involved. How would I know this. I would ask them to talk to me about their lives and they did. I never once found any of these experiences I would create to be sexual. I found them to be about the way with power.

There were so many of them. It would fill a book. I would guide you through eroticism, light, sound, sensory deprivation; experiences where you could touch and learn many things, things outside your consciousness. But there was one thing you could not touch and one thing you could not under any circumstances access and that was me.

Many people in the sex work universe would put labels on what I was doing such as sadomasochism, but that term is so misleading. It’s ALWAYS about power. But it’s not always about a power where you get tied up and jerked off. It was a little bit more complex than that.

Imagine: It’s night. It’s PITCH black. I have taken you into a tropical jungle. I have tied you naked to a tree. All night, you hear the animals and the predation and the life all around you. In the morning, you see the sunrise come across the sea, and you didn’t even know there was a sea.

This is slightly more than being tied up and jerked off.

Imagine: The two of us are in scuba gear. The water is warm. The air from the tanks tastes stale. We are in a cage. Great white sharks are pounding the cage. You are hysterical. Yet I am holding you silently while you shake. These are not experiences you can even IMAGINE. You just can’t. They are not what you know. I am only now learning tiny, tiny, so small as to be molecular fragments of the way.

Imagine: We are making love (it is only the image of me; it is not me) in a canoe in the middle of a lake under the northern lights.

The way can heal you or destroy you. It can terrorize you or set you free. It’s all up to you in how you use it.

In my lifetime, I have only known two other people who could do this. Who could access the way. I know there are many more mentioned as mythical figures, but I am not talking about (Mary will not believe this but it happens to be true) mythology as mythology just doesn’t kick my interest when reality itself is so volatile. Only two men and one of them was an Asian puppeteer.

Imagine: I have shackled you to a line of naked men and I am marching the lot of you up to the roof and you have no idea what will happen next because you have no power here.

Imagine: I have blindfolded you and put your hands into the colors. You are sitting on the canvas. Now paint.

Mary will tell you about ideas like what is and is not therapeutic. I only believe in power (I did not say god). I do not believe in ideas and I do not seek any false idea that unifies the other ideas. This is mush. I believe people love to be confused and therefore not responsible for what they access whether it’s compassion or murder.

It’s about the power and the way. I walked twenty miles today. I am exhausted. The dogs are in bed. I will be there soon. With any luck, I will have the kind of dreams where you can see the wind die down.

OVER THE THRESHOLD

When I was a Unitarian minister, like many others of the kind, I kept a “traveling sermon” that I used when doing pulpit supply. Since one was usually only there once as a replacement while the regular minister was elsewhere, one was free to be memorable and risky. So I told about a moment one warm afternoon standing on the Chicago El platform when suddenly, for no reason, I was flooded with fusion, joy and harmony. It only lasted a few moments. Invariably, no matter where I was preaching, a few people would approach me afterward to tell me about their own similar experiences. One man said he was at a campground, bathing his infant son in a plastic dishpan set on a picnic table, and it was still so vivid in his mind that he could remember the pattern of pine needles on the tabletop. He wept. A woman was driving, topped a hill, looked out over a valley and “blissed out.”

They wanted to know what it was. Supernatural? A serotonin surge? A brain glitch, maybe a petit mal attack? Too much coffee? Or were they breaking through the membranes of the universe into some other reality? The best descriptions I found were in terms of “liminality” in the work of Victor Turner and Van Gennep, anthropologists describing exotic tribal ceremonies. They spoke of “liminal time and place,” that is, a state of mind in which one goes over a threshhold (a limen) into a protected but risky “place” and then comes back, often profoundly changed by the experience. I wanted to figure out how this worked in better known ceremonies, like Catholic mass or even something like a dinner party or a very intense movie. I had the advantage of participating in Blackfeet Bundle-Opening ceremonies with old-timers in the Sixties. The principles I developed for myself helped me to design ceremonies that “moved” people over that limen and then back again.

One example of “liminal” time can be a psychotherapy session, so I’ve been looking in that literature. One of the difficulties with talking about something like “liminality” is knowing what to call it in different contexts. In psychology it appears that “dissociation” is what I’m after, though the concept is still a great cloud of things like hypnotism, trances, speaking in tongues, hysterical paralysis (a limb that won’t move, though there’s nothing wrong with it) or blindness, split personality, denial, Ouija boards. So I’m reading “Dissociation: Clinical and Theoretical Perspectives” edited by Steven Jay Linn and Judith W. Rhue. (Guildford Press, 1994)

Just as I reached seminary (‘78-’82) the Jonestown tragedy hit the headlines. The University of Chicago is already skewed towards logic, tradition, and rationality, identified as “science,” though they were willing to admit that the history of science shows how much it is culturally affected and how scientific paradigm shifts are often treated like heresies. The Div School and Meadville/Lombard, my primary enrollment, were VERY nervous about anything subjective, like personal experience. This was not a place for people who spoke in tongues or were visited by angels. Nor were we supposed to be using mind-altering substances. (You went to Starr King in Berzerkly for all that.) This was a context resistant to the many “experience experiments” that had subjectively liberated so many young people in the Beat/Hippie years. Jonestown was interpreted by Don Browning and others as a liminal experience that went wrong because the participants went into that “other” place and refused or were unable to come out. In short Jim Jones’ insanity was a liminality where all his people joined him.

I was pressed to stick to facts, history, reason, and the profession of my own tradition. The larger message of Unitarianism is that each person should think and act according to individual convictions. I have separated from the present iteration of this idea because it is dominated by therapeutic goals, political solidarity, and commodification responding to the need to maintain the “brand.” So I am cloistered apart from the tradition, which is sometimes highly cerebral and other times ecstatic. It is, after all, just an institutional framework for people who share affinities. It is NOT a real thing but a construct.

Let me make a little typology here, liminal dyads. First of all, those considered subjectively “good” (bliss) vs. those considered bad (trauma). The experiences created by drugs, esp. LSD vs. the experiences created by natural circumstances, like combat in Vietnam. Liminality seen from outside like an anthropologist observing a ceremony vs. the same ceremony from the point of view of a believing participant. Liminality forced onto someone (Patty Hearst) vs. liminality sought and paid for (a host of New Age clients). Liminality caused by actual brain change (perhaps damage or electromagnetic waves to the temporal lobes) vs. liminality induced by a practice (drumming, spinning, meditation).

Complex as this may be, it is matched by the complexity that research is producing in terms of how brains actually work. What looks like a blob of creased gray jello is actually a constantly changing process, growing here and withering there, sorting, suppressing, interpreting, moving content from the unconscious (which turns out to be a number of interacting unconsciousnesses) to the conscious mind which is hardly the rational and realistic logic machine that Freud imagined his was. He was right to believe that even infants are sexual, but after that the taboos on the whole aspect of humanness that came out of his Viennese context cut off a huge area of liminality rooted in bodies. And he could NOT give up the idea of being the outside observer who knew better. Yet he only knew one cultural context and so never challenged it. At least officially.

We are in a time when we are pressed hard to reconceptualize our vision of the world and human beings at a far more primal level than any one culture. We are too mixed to insist that there is one way to believe. We must invent an “ur-culture” and since reasoning, science, traditional institutional religions, and a host of other assumptions are involved, perhaps ceremonies of liminality can help. One of the characteristics of liminal space (play, art, worship, sex) seems to be that it allows us to open to new ideas and sharing with other people as equals. (I am not advocating orgies as a pathway to peace in the world -- we already tried that. It’s way too confusing.) I wonder whether liminality can be achieved on the Internet? I do agree with Professor Browning that we cannot stay in there, that vulnerable place, but must come back to THIS world whereever and whenever our bodies are. Enough with the horror movies already. It’s cheap liminality. Not unlike cheap grace.

THE PIEGAN BLACKFEET: 1900 TO 1910

Before beginning to seriously compose a vernacular history of the 20th century Blackfeet, I’m trying to note the “keynote” to each decade, the same as I noted the “theme” of each generation for my historical sequence of stories called “Twelve Blackfeet Stories” which start with the coming of the horse and proceed up to the present. So this post will not be an organized essay, just a list of ideas as I reflect and begin to sort through my library. I’m relying heavily on the notes I organized in “Blackfeet Paper Trails” which is available as a free download or a low-cost book from www.lulu.com/prairiemary. If it doesn’t work, contact me at mary.scriver@gmail.com.

1900, like 2000, was a year of optimism. There was considerable feeling that things would turn around, that it was a new beginning. With number magic there’s always a bit of self-fulfilling prophesy. The “whiskey” traffic was dying down and the railroad was coming. James Willard Schultz and Joe Kipp were acting as guides into Glacier Park which was visited by the same people in the same spirit as went on safari to Africa or India or Hawaii. These people are very focused on England as a source of civilization so they were shaken when Queen Victoria died, beginning the Edwardian Era, which I think of as the Upstairs/Downstairs years.

The first decade, 1900 - 1910, was when the small towns formed both on and off the reservation. Browning developed, beginning in 1894, alongside the final location of the US Indian Agency on Willow Creek’s flood plain, about two miles from the eventual railroad depot. No one knows why. The post office was established in 1900. The Methodist mission was begun by Rev. E.S. Dutcher in 1893.

There was a lot of exploration for minerals, hoping for another Butte, and Altyn began as a mining town, eventually abandoned and covered by Sherburne Lake. What is now East Glacier was then Midvale, originally clustered around the ranger station. Teddy Roosevelt appointed a man named Herrig as the first ranger in the newly created Glacier National Park. This was the location of the flagship lodge.

Much of the infrastructure that in 2010 begins to fail, esp. water and sewage, was first built around this time. A few years earlier Walter McClintock had come for the first time to do a government survey of Glacier Park and he was returning annually with crates of gifts for his adopted family. “The Old North Trail” has many photos that will make this period real. People still lived in canvas lodges and tents as well as log cabins. The traders who worked from forts -- Power, Conrad, Kipp, Weatherwax, Wetzel -- were old men. J. H. Sherburne had built his mercantile store and Thad Scriver came to clerk in it in 1900. Broadwater and Pepin were there as partners. Willits and Scriver started the Browning Merc in 1907. James Willard Schultz, in trouble for poaching, left for California where he wrote his autobiography. He would return later. Charlie Russell was around and as soon as the railroad got to Glacier National Park, there was an influx of fine artists.

Monteath, the new agent, also has a “new policy” which is the old one. Logan, the previous agent, had left collapsing buildings, dry canals, a scandalous school and a failed hay crop. The biggest problem was the constant incursions of the surrounding ranchers who liked to graze their large herds on the reservation. Monteath issued permits and tried to drive off those without permits. When the ranchers left the rez in the fall, they took their cattle AND the rez cattle. In the big to-irrigate or not-to-irrigate vacillation, Monteath claims he wants to make farmers of the Indians so he’s for irrigation. The last recorded smallpox epidemic comes through about this time, though vaccine has been developed.

In 1902 the headline in the Great Falls Tribune reads: “Piegan Indians in Open Revolt.” Monteath threatens to arrest White Calf, whereupon the Indian Police all quit. Little Dog comes to the agency office to say that if Monteath arrests White Calf, Monteath will be bound with ropes and thrown in front of the next train. Enrolled Blackfeet number 2,084 with 50 births and 33 deaths, the first year that the births outnumber the deaths. 10,000 cows with 4,000 calves and 22,000 horses. Mike Connelly is a nearby stockman who ran his cows on the rez. (His descendants joined the tribe through marriage.) This is a flood year and 75% of the seeds wash away.

Monteath says all his troubles are due to Joe Kipp, Maggie Wetzel (who married Joe Kipp) and Horace Clarke. He wants to eject them from the rez. In 1903 White Calf dies. He is usually identified as the last of the hereditary chiefs. (Ray Djuff in Calgary is developing the first biography focused on his family. Someone is also developing a book about the Clarke family. Events are now far enough in the past to be interesting.) Now the first of the formal tribal councils is organized: Joe Kipp, Horace Clarke, and seven older full-bloods. There’s a terrible outbreak of mange among the cattle.

1904 is year the Conrad Investment Company takes hold in Valier and begin to divert water from Birth Creek. They are able to effectively irrigate, a system that persists to this day at considerable profit. This is a drought year. Bookkeeping begins to be a problem: embezzlement is now a factor. Also nepotism, as agents conventionally employed their wives and grown children.

In 1908 C.A. Churchill arrived as agent. His daughter married J.L. Sherburne, the son of J.H. Sherburne. Schemes and accusations abound as the Dawes Act assigns acreage to each Indian and a system of “patenting” makes it possible for an enrolled person who is automatically defined as an “incompetent” to take his allotment out of government trust and own it himself. Many do that, partly reacting to the epithet of “incompetent,” partly because they wanted personal control, and partly because they didn’t really understand what’s going on. As soon as the land was individually owned, it could be taken for debt and since Sherburne Mercantile had extended credit in large amounts to many people, they used this legal strategy. Of course, the land and its profit that was left in trust with the US Government did not fare much better.

In 1910 150 Rocky Boy Chippewa was dumped onto the reservation because they had no place to go. Until a reservation was found for them (a decommissioned fort) the friction between Blackfeet and what were called in shorthand, “Cree,” was a constant problem.

One might call this decade “Civilization and Its Discontents.” I’m relying mostly on the Foley Report, which is the most detailed account I’ve found of these early years. If you feel I’m in error, let me know now while I’m still in a noting and outlining mode. I will appreciate it.