BEN YAGODA & THE EGG & I

From the review of Yagoda’s “Memoir: A History” by Judith Shulevitz: “Ben Yagoda asks the question we’ve been waiting for: How do we know when we’re being duped? The answer is almost worth the delay, even though it’s a quotation from nearly a half-century ago: Think of the memoirist ‘as a person to whom you have just been introduced,’ a Times Book Review columnist named Raymond Walters Jr. wrote. ‘Size up as best you can the personality of the man or woman who is talking and take it constantly into consideration as you judge the truthfulness of what he has to say.’” For obvious reasons, Tim and I think about these questions.

Anyone who reads books carefully, anyone who has dealt with many people in a range of settings -- from those with every reason to deceive to those struggling hard to find rock bottom honesty -- ought to be able to reach a judgment. But it would be far from a guarantee. By now most grownups have come the conclusion that truth is conditioned on context anyway. (Since realizing that there is no “real truth” is part of being a grown-up, I’ve got a loop going here.) This evening’s movie, the second episode of the sixth season of “Wire in the Blood,” kept quoting Nietzche in which he says, “Power over Truth,” meaning what’s considered truth depends upon who has the power.

You already know about Barrus’ books, both by himself and with pseudonyms. (There were more than “Nasdijj” and, in fact, most genre writers use a lot of pen names.) Now, under our real names, Tim and I are writing a “Vook” which is such a new medium that no one can really define it except that it mixes electronic print with videos, so the context of “The Fallen and the Flight” is just as provisional as our credibility. No one knows how much power an ebook can generate, let alone money. Tim has frankly disguised the young men who make the videos. The only context for them is that they are members of Cinematheque, a guerrilla school for boys with art talent who want to get off the streets. They are intense and fragile at once, flammable. As an old lady, I find affinity with their HIV through my Diabetes II, so we’re all about blood and being stalked by death. The modern condition.

I got irritated with Tim the other day because he said he’d wanted to partner with me for my creds, which are academic rather than street-earned. He still has the idea that universities reward true achievement, can define it, put a value on it. He thinks that if I say he’s a genuine high grade artist (which I do believe) then people will stop blowing him off as an imposter. But I am not the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Anyway I long ago abandoned the illusion that a Ph.D. really means a lot more than that you’ve paid out a lot of money and jumped through a lot of hoops. Even being ordained is more political than sacramental. The lifeline I could throw him in this regard is pretty frayed. I want him to write with me because he likes my writing. It’s my problem. He’s reassured me again and again that he values what I write.

At the other end he was annoyed with me because I suggested that his support group -- not just the boys but adults with big creds -- amounted to an NGO. To him that implies a lot of people sitting around a table in a conference room, arguing and negotiating themselves into a state of paralysis: “suits.” He wants to be seen doing things as a guerrilla, coming out of nowhere.

Shulevitz concludes her review, “Truth is the least of memoir . . . though truth can’t be dispensed with. (There’s that little matter of having to speak in good faith.) The power to persuade is all. ‘Once in a while the person talking is just plain funny; the wink in her eye and the tone in her voice tells us we shouldn’t take anything she says too literally,’ [Yagoda] writes. ‘Then there are the prodigious story tellers. They look us straight in the eye, and have us from the first word.’” I’m the winker. Tim’s the prodigious one. The question is whether the good faith between the two of us, which is real, can include the reader/watcher.

A Vook is more than words. Vids of faces, esp. when Tim is earnestly speaking to the camera, all alone except with his dog, ought to tell you something. But we all know about Photoshop and CGI. Is there any such thing as visual confirmation of the truth?

Shulevitz suggests that the point of a memoir may be to justify a life. One critic suggests “[I]naccuracy is a problem to the extent a memoir depicts identifiable people, depicts those people in a negative light, (demonstrably) gets gists as well as details wrong, is poorly written, is self-serving, or otherwise wears its agenda on its sleeve. The more of these things it does and the more egregiously it does them, the bigger the problem is.”

In the Nasdijj memoirs the author disguised people BECAUSE he was depicting them negatively and “wearing his agenda on his sleeve.” They were certainly vividly written. It was the journalist unmasker who “revealed all.” He was the one who had a covert agenda (endorsing Sherman Alexie as a noble if victimized Indian) and who got facts and gists wrong -- on purpose -- in order to make his case against the author by ripping away all the protection from the people involved. The problem was not the subject of the expose -- the author of the memoir -- it was the writer of the expose, the destroyer of the author. That’s where the power is now: attacks and suspicion.

Yagoda’s book, like many histories of ideas, is clarifying and ultimately reassuring. We’ve all been through a lot over the centuries and the story is not nearly finished yet. My first awareness of authors came on a family visit to the home of the author of “The Egg and I.” My parents assumed that because they loved the book and movie, the author would love them. Actually, she was very patient with us and let us hold her puppies. Tim is not so different.





Betty Macdonald lived in this little chicken coop house and wrote about it in “The Egg and I.” These photos were taken in August, 1947, near Center, Washington. We forget how people lived during and right after WWII. Even today some people would be pleased with this little shelter.

FROZEN RIVER: A Review

Indie films and Native Americans -- okay, “Indians” -- seem like a match so natural as to be inevitable. The newest one I’ve seen is “Frozen River,” just now being mentioned on the new West Lit blog. (The cowboys have discovered the Indians! And they’re female!) This film is also highly suitable for the discipline called “border studies” which might be described as something like philosophical geography.

The Mohawk Nation preserves its autonomy strongly enough that their reservation/reserve sovereignty persists on both sides of the Canadian/US border, which is a river because many of the early treaties between nations of all sorts defined territory by physical features like rivers or mountains. Through Montana the border is the edge of the drainage of the Missouri/Mississippi rivers, created by a row of small volcanic hills and then defined by surveying the 49th parallel. The Blackfeet Nation is on both sides of the line, but it is not contiguous. The US side is against the line, but the Canadian side is scattered into small areas. Nevertheless, in theory tribal members have free passage between the countries. It’s sometimes hard to convince border agents of that. Mohawk have more successfully insisted that their boundaries take precedence over the national line.

Two women, one played by Melissa Leo (my favorite “Homicide” detective) and the other by Misty Upham. Misty is Blackfeet and must be part of the family of “Doc” Upham who used to play in club bands with Bob Scriver. She grew up in Seattle, a part of the Indian community over there. Every Upham that I’ve known has been pretty remarkable for brains and enterprise. Leo, who is coming up fifty, looks her age (she’s a smoker -- that’ll do it) and Misty dumped her Pocahontas image by cutting her hair and gaining 65 pounds. (I’m not sure she realized what that would do to her health, but she has taken forty pounds back off.) This is a reality story, not a reassuring little parable. The two women collide more than they meet, and bad fortune throws them together into a scheme to make money by running third-world illegal immigrants across the border from Canada to the US. They don’t need a boat because the ice on the river is multiple feet thick in winter when temps go far below zero, though sun in the daytime produces a layer of slush.

Another border is between the Indian woman and the white woman, sociological but not economic -- both are at the edge of survival. Thanks to racial profiling, a white woman is not likely to be stopped by off-rez police, so she has a smuggling advantage. On-rez it’s the Mohawk who has the sympathy of the officials so long as she doesn’t ruffle the Tribal Council hens. (Mohawk keep the pattern of tribal matriarchy.) The ties between them are about their children: Leo’s husband was an addict and gambler who took off with the family’s hoard of money meant to buy a new trailer. Upham’s husband is dead, gone through the ice while smuggling, which is how she got into the racket, but he left her pregnant. Since she’s living in a tiny camp trailer with no water (she sleeps in her coat), she can’t keep her baby. So the strong bond is children, the most basic human motive for women. This pushes the plot and resolves it in the end.

Such a setting provides plenty of suspense and the same kind of bleak but sublime long horizons against the sky as on the prairie. The cast was mostly local with white bit parts most likely to be doubling crew members. There is a growing pool of experienced tribal actors, especially on the Canadian side where the government supports arts. Budget was under one million dollars. It was Courtney Hunt’s first writing and directing undertaking.

When one looks at amateur painting, the most usual deficit is in “values,” which means the dark/light dimension, white-gray-black. Colors, composition, drawing and so on may be pretty good, but the sameness or skewing of values will give away inexperience. Likewise, the element most often missing in Indie movies is what Marshall W. Mason calls “beats” in his book, “Creating Life on Stage: A Director's Approach to Working with Actors,” which is drawn from his career with the Circle Repertory Company in NYC. When one listens to the voice-over comments for an Indie, the chatter is most likely to be excitement over how “felt” the story is, how realistic, how from the heart, plus a lot of memories of good times and scary times. When one listens to an old pro Hollywood or London director, the talk is far more technical and analytical, much more about art-form concerns. “Beats” are a way of divvying up the timing and emphasis into a coherent and controlled whole, rather than taking a sort of general scenario approach.

On the other hand, as Hunt points out, this story has children and dogs in it, found at the last minute and barely guided in what they did. Equipment was limited so camera angles were confined, there was no studio, and even local merchants controlled what could or couldn’t be done. (The local trailer sales emporium was leery of the low-class image of trailers.) This movie was made simply with heart and faith. It was “found” as much as composed.

One of my all-time favorite movies about Indians, “Loyalties,” is a big budget version of a similar theme that would be interesting to watch alongside “Frozen River.” One of Tantoo Cardinal’s early films (I would not hesitate to suggest that Misty is the next Tantoo.), it happens much farther north in Cree country. Anne Wheeler, who started out very much like Hunt, is the director but she had professional English actors and a budget. That story is about an English doctor who mysteriously arrives with his family to work in the Boonies. His wife is confused and paralyzed by the environment so the doctor hires a local woman to help her -- that’s Tantoo. When I looked at the imdb.com remarks, I was gratified to see that people said that though they’d seen the film twenty years ago or more, it remained vivid in their minds. Same here. The two women become friends and then more than friends when she and the English woman must protect the children at a high cost.

Today, a time when immigrants are treated with such suspicion and when the long tradition of citizens being able to cross the border peacefully without a passport has ended, we all need reminding that it is the fate of our children that should be our ultimate loyalty.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: OH, HELLO!

Camille Paglia has always been at the periphery of my vision as one of the femme terrible writers who stalks the edges of polite scholarship -- sort of the Patricia Limerick of sexuality. It MUST be about sexuality, right? After all, she’s lesbian. Her life must be all about that. Her name came up recently so I got curious and have been downloading a few of her pieces, esp. from the BU journal, Arion, though she writes for Salon.com as well. And occasionally indulges in the sort of cat fight that was featured in that grand old Western called “Frenchie” in which Joel McCrea (the sheriff) had to take off his badge and use the pin on the back to puncture a bustle because he couldn’t hit a woman and if he tried to pull them apart he was likely to get damaged.

So, gingerly, gingerly, I turn to the first two pages of “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art” which is the beginning of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. This is a thesis, a “groundbreaking and controversial survey.” By now it’s rather old news from the Seventies, but I remember it fondly.

“Portraying Western culture as a struggle between masculine, phallic, sky-religion on the one hand, and feminine, chthonic, earth-religion on the other, Paglia seeks to show that Christianity did not destroy paganism, but rather drove it into the underground of Western culture, to later emerge in Renaissance art, Romanticism, and contemporary popular culture, especially Hollywood.” I like this one, but like everything else it gets distorted. For a long time in UU circles it meant that men were Xian (from outer space) and women were earth mothers (kitchen gardens).

“Paglia associates Apollo with order, structure, and symmetry, while identifying Dionysus with chaos, disorder, and nature.” This degenerated into Apollo “owning” technology and science while women wrote poetry and committed suicide if you took the bell jar off their heads.


“Paglia discusses sex and nature as brutal daemonic forces, and she criticizes feminists for sentimentality or wishful thinking about the cause of rape, violence, and poor relations between the sexes. She also stresses the biologic basis of sexual difference and sees the mother as an overwhelming force who condemns men to lifelong sexual anxiety, from which they fleetingly escape through rationalism and physical achievement.” This is an excellent counter-argument to the idea that both sex and nature are automatically wonderful, if over-commercialized, idyllic gates to heaven, much benefited by the use of hallucinogenic drugs to kill the inner Apollo.

“In keeping with the theme of unity between classical art and pop culture, the "sexual personae" of her title include the female vampire (Medusa, Lauren Bacall); the pythoness (the Delphic Oracle, Gracie Allen); the beautiful boy (Hadrian's Antinous, Dorian Gray); the epicene man of beauty (Lord Byron, Elvis Presley); and the male heroine (Baudelaire, Woody Allen).” This totally neglects my most favorite person, the Sean Connery who is the King of Scotland: experienced, competent, humorous, and a little gray around the edges but still quite physical. Old cops, old soldiers, the sadder but wiser guy -- where’s he? And where’s my mermaid?

“Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements." This is where I’m REALLY different from Paglia. Imagine the eohuman at the edge of the forest -- edges are important -- gathering food of various kinds and then snoozing in the safe “arms” of the trees. These moments are just as important as the occasional arrival of a jaguar among the bonobos. It all depends on where you put the emphasis. I choose celebration. Perhaps the women put the emphasis on the food and baby-cuddling while the men put the emphasis on fighting the jaguar, but human understanding of life and the surrounding world comes from emergent meaning of ALL of life, not just the emergencies. Much of even the horrifically based Xianity (from crucifixion to apocalypse in one easy book) has long pastoral stretches.

“The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. [Ho, ho, Freud ahoy!] She is the garden and the serpent.” I’d start the analysis way back, before Genesis, before the waters and the land were separated, because I don’t divide everything into conflict: I start with the fused unity. God is that than which nothing can be greater. God (genderless because not anthropomorphic or -centric) includes nature. Nature and God are the same except that God can be theoretically greater than nature. It is humans who made this division and humans can take it away without any slithering and blaming.”

“Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. . . Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility." Well, THERE’s a provocative idea! The dark side of Emily forks her Harley and splits to Big Sur. At least this gives her some power again. But maybe she’s my mermaid, with fused legs, in a sea of dreaming about the leviathan.

“Throughout the 1990s, Paglia said that a second volume to Sexual Personae would be forthcoming . . . Eventually, she decided not to proceed with the book as planned, as it would need to undergo too many revisions . . .” This is endearing. So many people light on one smashing idea and then can’t give it up for fear of losing their readership. But never fear the feminists who attacked her probably guaranteed her a place on the shelf.

John Updike wrote about Sexual Personae: “It feels less a survey than a curiously ornate harangue.” [Some people would say this about Updike, whom I love dearly.] “Her percussive style — one short declarative sentence after another -- eventually wearies the reader; her diction functions not so much to elicit the secrets of books as to hammer them into submission.... The weary reader longs for the mercy of a qualification, a doubt, a hesitation; there is little sense, in her uncompanionable prose, of exploration occurring before our eyes, of tentative motions of thought reflected in a complex syntax.” And, of course, some people weary of Updike’s ornate, twining, teasing, multi-syllabic coiled speculations. Not me. I love both styles. Why can’t we be inclusive? Bibfeldtian?

I see that I’ve wandered off into secondary comment and gossip. So I’ll keep reading but stick to primary sources in future.

INDIAN ARTIFACTS: THE BADGER TIPI

Out beyond the fancy tourist Native American artifacts, the authentic, the historical, and the humble ritual objects, is something else that is beyond the intangible: the core of the Native American process and the materials from the land, just as Native Americans would create according to precedent, but without any of it coming from Native Americans.

I tried this once when I was circuit-riding for the Unitarians. When all the Montana people gathered, we created a Bundle of red material that contained Important Objects from the group: a fossil, a fishing fly, a beloved poem, a bolo tie. The idea was that when we met again, we would open the Bundle and tell each other about what was in there to add recollection and community bonding to our meeting. It didn’t work. We weren’t enough alike, the reunions didn’t include the same people and the objects didn’t mean that much. No one could remember who had custody of the Bundle. Bundles arise from intense meaning in a specific community.

Darrell Kipp used to joke that if “today’s Blackfeet” created a Bundle, the first thing included would be pickup keys, then a TV remote control, and some big rubber sneakers. Of course, now there would be a lot of small electronics, though no one would leave them in the Bundle unless they were considered passe, and that happens so quickly that in five years no one would be able to remember what the thing was. A VC what?

Bob Scriver moved to a slightly different sort of ceremonial, the painted tipi. Again, one began with a dream which he did, seemingly not planning it but certainly hoping for it. Later he made a sculpture of the dream in which he transformed himself into a Blackfeet boy on a horse, looking down at a badger. In the dream the badger has a half a moose hide that he’s trying to pull down his hole. Watching are two crows and two “thirteen-line spermophiles.” (Ground squirrels with stripes: “Striped Squirrel” is a local name.) A wolverine was interfering and the boy defended the badger. It was fall, the aspens were golden and berries were bright red.

These animals became the basis of the Bundle that went with the lodge, each with its own song and gestures. Bob called this a “badger tipi” and associated it with his father. Bob had kept badgers as pets, liking them even more than the pet bobcats and foxes. They’re powerful but droll little creatures. The eerie part of it was that in the coming year the animals themselves seemed to surrender and to reveal their meanings. The badger was a small roadkill I found along the highway when I drove to Browning because Bob’s father had died and I went to be with Bob. (Bob had divorced me in the interval between his father’s major stroke and his eventual death.) The dead squirrels showed up during his daily walks with his grandson which were meant to improve his heart after his heart attack. Of course, as a taxidermist it was easy for him to prepare the skins with red beads like berries for eyes.

The actual canvas “skin” was commissioned from a local tipi-maker. The design and actual painting of it and the association of the songs with each animal was the “enchantment” of it, which made a couple of old-timers from Canada Bob was paying to paint nervous enough to leave halfway through. Tom and Alice Kehoe, noted anthropologists, were there with their children throughout, taking detailed notes, treating it as authentic though they were well-aware that it was not historical. George and Molly Kicking Woman were active participants, as family members. Molly made the ceremonial berry soup while I made a huge pot of spaghetti for lunch.

As is traditional, there is a badger facing the “door” on each side, its alimentary canal and heart marked out. The black top with four stripes and round stars is there. The bottom shows hills and potholes. The back has a false door which is blue because when a badger goes into his hole, he goes backwards so he’s looking out at the sky. The part Bob loved most was that at the top of the back there was a “dream butterfly” which was actually a moth, and in its center was a little decoration based on a badger tail. The badger I had picked up along the road became a “flag” to fly from the end of one of the tipi poles, while another badger hide went into the Bundle. Songs were “found” either from the pre-existing Blackfeet repertoire or from Bob’s “dreams.” This was also true of the face-painting: stripes like a badger face. The whole process was recorded in photos which are included in Bob’s book, “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains.”

After Bob’s death his remaining artifacts, those left over the sale to the Royal Alberta Museum, went to the Montana Historical Society. They had no credentialed curator of artifacts and were totally baffled and confused about what they had acquired. I tried to tell them but was not welcome. Actually, I was a co-creator of this lodge and would have “painting” rights. If someone wanted to make a replica, they would need to compensate me. Officials cannot figure out a category for such an object, which has disappeared. I’ve been told it was in storage with Bob’s art and (by the same person) told it was missing. Many of those artifacts were returned secretly, not to the tribe but to prominent individuals from the tribe. In turn, some of those were quietly re-sold off the reservation.

To the minds of the people who control these materials, the only value comes from identifying a strictly Native American object. They have no way of dealing with things that fall between categories, especially since the categories were invented by 19th century anthropologists informed only by watching and asking (often erroneously) the tribal people who had every reason to be secretive and deceptive for self-protection.

If you think of Native American artifacts as antiquities, that brings them into the present dialogue between nations about classical and other antiquities collected in museums as part of empire building, even though some materials remained in place, concentrated into local museums. Sorting out what to do is very difficult and often passionate. Not many tribal peoples have been included in this thinking. Not many are aware of the Rosetta Stone or the Elgin marbles. Many Americans don’t take NA antiquities seriously -- they are still categorized in a split way, either children’s bow and arrow sets and toy Indians or magical noble elements exceeding all others.

Philosophically there are three sources of principles: origins, destinations, and process. This small essay has discussed all three in a specific case, but there remains a much larger and more significant discussion of the autochthonous materials of people in the Americas before, after, and during the transformation imposed by Europeans.

INDIAN ARTIFACTS: INTANGIBLES

Earlier in this series I talked about Uhlenbeck and his collection of linguistic material, which he took (without removing) in the form of stories and later analyzed for grammar and structure. He did not publish books of stories for popular consumption like the many versions of Napi stories. (See Monday, October 02, 2006, “WHO TELLS THE TALE.”) Nor was he an anthropologist looking for information about how to hunt buffalo or make horse gear. Another kind of person who loved the early Piegan and recorded their lives was the artist, like Sharp, Schreyvogel, or -- of course -- Charlie Russell.

By now the scientific study of native peoples has specialized in a dozen ways. The study of the plants, which was Walter McClintock’s original training and government assignment, was much of the information ending up in “The Old North Trail” as well as the only published book by John Hellson. (Ethnobotany of the Blackfoot Indians. Canadian Ethnology Service Paper No. 19. 1974 $81.90, "used" at Amazon as I write.) Blackfeet Community College has a faculty member who is also a tribal member and who runs a geodesic dome greenhouse on the campus. For a while he raised sweetgrass to sell. (It’s harder to find these days -- it’s ALWAYS hard to find -- because it requires human tending, if only by being burned over, and the old-timers who used to watch and thin the patches are gone.) More recently Mr. Fish decided it was more important to come into the early 20th century practice of urging people to grow kitchen gardens. Considering diabetes, he’s undoubtedly right. People are aware of the Amazonian jungle being touted as the source of miracle drugs and suspect that old people’s knowledge of medicinal drugs has somehow been taken.

Most people would think of sweetgrass braids as NA “herbs”, which can be bought online at http://www.siyehdevelopment.com/heritage.html They are nice to tuck into a linen cupboard like lavender. I grow my own and use it to smudge as a kind of prayer discipline, which is close to making magic of the ordinary lives of a specific people rooted in a circumpolar ecology. (In some of the Eurasian contexts, sweetgrass is thrown under rugs to scent the house.) When one becomes closely familiar with a culture, shared similarities are as likely as singularities. None of these scientific and semi-scientific bodies of information are what most people would think of as “artifacts,” though that’s what they surely are. To be apparent to most people they need the “value added” layer of scientific or historical interpretation.

A man contacted me on the email because he was writing a novel in which there was a long passage about a Blackfeet man’s ancestors going to war. He wanted my advice about equipment and strategy. I’m hardly any kind of expert, but he rejected all my suggestions about where to go that would be more reliable. Then he said that when he was writing, he liked to play music but he couldn’t find anything inspiring while writing this part. I suggested Jack Gladstone, but he rejected Jack on grounds that he was too modern and too adapted to white men. (I’m not so sure.) I suggested Kenny Scabby Robe’s Black Lodge Singers, who had just won “best” in the national competition among drum societies. He rejected them on grounds that they were too screechy. (Traditional singers sing falsetto.) He wasn’t really that fond of romantic Indian flute music either. I figured he was hopeless and recommended the Grand Canyon Suite.

In fact, there is quite a body of symphonic concert music “inspired” by Indians. Most recently offered is the gorgeous oratorio by Rob Kapilow, “Summer Sun Winter Moon” on the topic of Lewis & Clark, which has a libretto by Darrell Kipp. (It was on PBS as part of Native American Month alongside a documentary about a champion Blackfeet girl’s basketball team.) It’s very beautiful, not particularly based on Blackfeet songs, and about the advent of whites as much as the endurance of indigenous peoples, with the scenery dominating the humans.

Bruno Nettl is far more the discriminating and technical collector of music. If you look at http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Blackfoot_music#encyclopedia, you’ll find a sketch of his conclusions about the early music which were much derived from recordings collected by earlier people. Nettl’s book is called “Blackfoot Musical Thought,” which tells you right there that is not going to be “stooping” to think of the autochthonous as being simplistic or instinctive in some primitive way.

He points out that Blackfeet music is vocal plus percussion, which occasions require song, what the internal structure is likely to be. Songs are quite patterned in terms of setting the theme, repeating at certain points, and associating the songs with specific animals or actions in ceremonies like Bundle Opening. By the time you’ve read Nettl’s book, you will not be able to sing the songs, but you will think of them in quite a different way. For instance, in old times there were evidently no songs specifically for children except “mice songs” that were associated because of being small. But the Blacklodge Singers have recorded a rousing modern American-subject fusion version called “Kids Pow-Wow Songs” which celebrates cartoon animals like Mighty Mouse. I’ve played that so many times I’ve almost learned it. “Ohmigosh! It’s Mighty Mouse!” The words are English but the style and structure are classic Blackfeet.

The most generous and thoughtful thing about Nettl is that he sent his collection of historical recordings back to the reservation to be put into the care of the Piegan Institute, purely Blackfeet. They immediately set about transferring the material to disc, translating what was said, asking remaining old-timers (notably Joe Old Chief) to comment, and so on. This blast from the past was revelatory and often set everyone laughing because the comments in Blackfeet by bystanders were understood. Patient wives, waiting while their husbands recorded songs for which they were paid “per song,” urged their men to think of more songs. “We need the money!” they reminded. Piegan Institute’s goal is to recover the Blackfeet language. Many on the rez would not understand the jokes.

Faught’s Blackfeet Trading Post (http://www.browningchamber.com/faughts.html) has a major section devoted to Native American music.

Such intangibles as music or ethnobotany or language or stories are not addressed by NAGPRA though they can just as surely be stolen and marketed. If John Hellson had stuck to plants, he would not have served jail time. When dealing with Blackfeet ceremonial materials, John himself would say, the songs and prayers that carry the “power” of the objects are as valuable as the objects themselves. Both will crumble in time if not kept alive by active use, and yet using them means that over time they will drift away from their roots, acquire deviant variations, and become detached from the lives on the prairie that produced them. It is irresolvable, a human condition.

INDIAN ARTIFACTS: HOME COLLECTIONS

Many people in the West have collections in their basements or garages of things that they’ve simply found or bought from someone else who found it. In Portland, Oregon, my mother had a whole row of stones that had clearly been used for something: mortar and pestle, grinder, pounder. (She lifted most of them from the old man next door when he died. He would have given them to her. He got them from Mister Miller, the amateur archeologist through the block from him. A fellow she hired to do yard work stole the lot.) I suspect that the earlier people were in the habit of just leaving them where they camped and looking around for a new one at the next camp rather than packing them. It was the white people who broke their backs and killed their oxen trying to carry around oak chests and cast iron stoves.

The tendency of people to accumulate and cherish things of little expense but considerable interest is universal and instinctive, something like small boys with cigar boxes of significant objects. (Do you remember that illustrated children’s book called “The Littlest Angel” in which the little boy in question had a box of earthly memorabilia of which the most precious was the collar off his puppy?) It’s an egalitarian “people’s tendency” that eventually collided with the elitist and secretive notions of collecting, along the lines of aristocracy and Papal authorities. Eventually, someone impressed by an arrowhead collection would say, “You oughta start a museum.” The result would be opening up to the public, but reinventing the privilege aspect by charging admission to support maintenance and reward the virtue of ownership.

In 1962 a federal game warden came to the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife and threatened to padlock the place because of the mounted songbirds which Bob Scriver had acquired by paying kids 50¢ each for bringing in the stiff little corpses of the birds killed in an early spring blizzard. (Not unusual in Montana.) Bob had been aware that he needed to have a taxidermy license to mount waterfowl and even that he could only have his mounted eagle because it had belonged to his father since early in the twentieth century. He had not really thought about songbirds, but the penalties for collecting them, their nests, and their eggs are draconian. The violation is a felony: $2,000 and six months in jail for each offence. (Check it out, interior decorators!) Today everyone is so intense about eagle parts, it is such an enormously emotional political issue, that my Blackfeet friends and I have joked that a good way to exact revenge on a white man would be to “gift” him with an eagle feather just before he crossed the border into Canada. It would be as effective as planting drugs. Where would you get the feathers? In moulting season walk along the edges of pothole lakes and keep your eyes open. Check along cliffs where eagles nest. No need to machine gun eagles from airplanes.

These two tendencies, one to accumulate found objects and the other to find objects precious and regulate them, run headlong into the American principles of populist access versus European elitist status markers, the same as Herman brilliantly traced out in “Hunting and the American Imagination.” On the one hand, a private hunting preserve was the marker of landed gentry, and on the other hand immigrants felt that this new creation should belong to all men -- the Americas, free for the taking. Except for the indigenous people objecting and trying to hold the boundaries of their own livelihoods and territories. That makes three forces in play, if you’re keeping track.

So NAGPRA requires the return of authochthonous religious and ceremonial objects as well as human remains. But the American constitution protects the right of private citizens to own their own possessions without threat of search and seizure. And the American Indians claim a higher God-given (gods-given?) entitlement to seize materials immorally owned by people who are nonbelievers. Thus Bob Scriver sold his Native American artifacts to Edmonton to escape the US NAGPRA law, which he incorrectly thought allowed his collection to be seized, and then the Premier of Alberta returned the Sacred Bundles to the tribal people in obedience to the moral law of religious privilege.

At the crux of museum law is the distinction between private and public. Clearly Bob’s little museum in Browning was private, though he was required to have a public bathroom and allowed public access to anyone who came up with the admission fee, as well as free admission to all locals -- Indian or not. Just across the road the Museum of the Plains Indian was public, though it was built with money from Lion’s Clubs and the American Indian Crafts Board (mostly whites), who didn’t think they were displaying fabulous treasures, but rather presenting examples of what the local people could make for sale. The idea was sold as being something like helping Appalachian women to make and sell quilts. The Sacred Thunder Pipe displayed outside its Bundle was innocently shown as an example of fine workmanship, the same as the elegant beaded and feather peyote rattles which are also religious objects within the context of their use.

Academics and philosophers can make distinctions between profane and sacred, secular and religious, private and public, museum and collection until the cows come home. (A ritual for cows.) Politicians and Department of the Interior rule-mongers can draw lines and prescribe behavior and impose penalties all they want. What REALLY counts is whether the public realizes that something is considered bad behavior and -- probably more important -- understands why.

Native Americans have so far tried to enforce their moral rights by demonstrations of extreme passion (a recognized indigenous rhetorical strategy) more than reasoned argument, with considerable success. But they have also triggered suppression, secrecy, and avoidance. No one wants to get mixed up in such messes, especially if there are actual legal penalties involved. At the same time there is an aspect of defiance in American political character (just ask the gun lobbyists) that resists just as passionately any kind of restriction on what is considered historically legitimated ownership. This leads to some fancydancing on the part of the truly big and prestigious museums, who mix elitism with academic privilege. It makes for good jobs for educated tribal people who can provide some political cover.

There’s a built-in problem: how are people going to understand what and why Indian artifacts require legal protection unless they know the moral and practical reasons why -- and how will they figure out what those are without some coaching and examples in museums? Especially since some of the most sacred materials are secret?

I have no answers. This is for our entire society to work out together.

INDIAN ARTIFACTS: PAUL DYCK

Paul Dyck’s collection of Indian artifacts is the star in the crown of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. Paul Dyck himself was extraordinary and his wife, Star, even more so. She was the sort of glamorous tomboy whom we associate with old-time major film stars, competent, protective and very beautiful. I loved her. I have no memory at all of Bob flirting with her, which would have been hopeless since she was definitively Paul’s woman. Nor did I flirt with Paul who treated me like a captive deserving compassion, which made me smile.

But Bob was intensely jealous of Paul for other reasons. The two of them were like two roosters when they were in the same room, violence just under the surface, though Paul made it clear that his attitude to Bob was indulgent contempt. His collection was bigger, better, older (which is good in terms of collections but not other things) and he knew more about artifacts anyway. He was three years younger. Bob had his khaki and Paul had his tailored denim cowboy outfits and high dogger-heeled boots. Paul knew his way around a ranch. But his connections to the Blackfeet were through his father and his childhood in Alberta, so he came to the ceremonies Bob sponsored with quiet respect. Bob’s collection was worth a little less than one million dollars (less if you subtract the collection of Mountie uniforms and the gun collection). Dyck’s collection was worth $22.5 million.

Paul was a classy guy with obvious European ancestors, namely THE Van Dyck. (Yes, he wore a Van Dyck beard.) His approach was aristocratic, knowing and quality based. Likewise, his art was based on a classical and difficult technique of glazing specially mixed paints (egg-based matrix) and his subject matter, though recognizably Native American, was abstract, phantasmagorical, elitist.

He used the dimension of secrecy. Bob loved a good secret and would reveal choice pieces to only privileged persons, often good customers. He didn’t exhibit his collection but it was around, part of the household. Paul’s materials were sequestered, maybe not even in this country. Some had been collected by his ancestors and went back to the 1600’s. Even now they are sheltered down in the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, which has received a grant of $350,000 to “help” with the cost of identifying, listing, sorting, and other dimensions of curating. (Bob’s NA materials are in Edmonton and I don’t know their status or handling.)

The custom of maintaining a secret cabinet of treasures, collections and gifts, goes back to the Popes and other major figures of wealth -- goes back and back and back. One could argue that Native American Bundles are not unlike those cabinets of precious and sometimes religious objects. It is a marker of value to require security and thus being locked up so secrecy is a compliment to Native American artifacts. On the other hand, secrecy is closely related to sacred mysteries and amps up the psychological power of the objects. This is partly why the taboo exists on not opening Bundles and not describing the contents. But lack of transparency means many opportunities for skulduggery -- switching, removing, misrepresenting, and so on. In fact, fake holiness is a major problem when dealing with Native American materials and practices. People so badly WANT them to be mysterious and effective. If they are protected, hidden, they become more magnetic.

Paul Dyck was far from capitalizing on the magic aspect of artifacts, but he was strongly alert to repatriation and it’s problems, both practical and political. Though it might seem intuitive to just give everything back to the original owners, in fact there are major injustices. Families have split into different factions -- which one gets the object? Some things are so old that the tribes to which they belonged no longer exist. Tribes have no museums nor any curators prepared to give fragile object the care they need nor any budget to pay for experts, materials, atmosphere control, proper storage furniture. security. If the Buffalo Bill Historical Center needs $350,000 as only part of the money to curate, what must the tribes need? Most basically, returned objects -- since the dynamics that forced their sale in the first place have not changed -- simply get sold again.

Paul and an associate published a very elegant and scholarly magazine about cultural materials, which always included a section about recent NAGPRA returns. ( Native American Graves Protection Repatriation Act. http://www.nps.gov/nagpra/ ) Read it carefully. Consider many angles. This is very delicate and new territory with many unforeseen consequences. No culture has tried to return artifacts until recently.
Dyck was an artist (http://www.supreme.state.az.us/admnserv/artproject/dyck.htm) and an author: “Brulé : the Sioux People of the Rosebud” as well as a world-class collector, but in every category also he was a perfectionist and a purist. His contribution to NA artifacts was the demand for authenticity, accurate identification, true NA sources, and fine workmanship. He was not against the collection, sale and trading of Native American artifacts, but rather against unethical, shoddy and deceptive practices in that context.

He was also a shrewd politician. To deal with laws is to deal with politics, to deal with laws about Native American matters is to enter political territory that is full of quicksand and trapdoors. Everywhere are quibbles -- is this skeleton identifiable as Native American? Is this rattle really part of a Sacred Ceremony? It all comes to value, which comes to definition, which cannot always be pinned down for sure. Those on one end of the value gradient push for high and those on the other end push for low.

When Paul saw, like Bob Scriver, that there was neither the money or heart for a free-standing Paul Dyck museum, he (UNlike Bob Scriver) began to work with the Buffalo Bill Historical Center to make sure they knew what they were going to acquire and helped to design the new part of the Center meant to receive the objects. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. But who was he joining? Big money, Republican or conservative forces in the state of Wyoming (Dick Cheney was on the BBHS board), and a female Native American curator from Oklahoma. The consequences will play out over centuries.