REFLECTION ON THE BILDUNGSROMAN I WROTE SO I COULD REFLECT ON IT

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This little short story I posted yesterday about “the kid” is a key genre known by many peoples — maybe all peoples who tell stories.  It's a "bildungsroman" -- a story of coming of age.  It's a natural source of stories.

Here I’ll look at the specifics and where I got them in a way sort of like dream analysis: a bit here and a bit there, all stuck together.  It’s not “deep” or “special” in the way that some intense dreams might be, but just an assemblage of raw materials that are always around: family history, writing by friends, scenes from books, natural history, and so on.  We all have this resource.  You don’t buy it or learn it.  You are it.  

What you learn is how to access and use what you already know.  This is what T helped me learn to do with more courage than I had earlier, to go into the darkness and violence.  But I wanted this little exercise to be something that could be used in a classroom without being censored.

In a shadow way the original premise of the powerful father with intimate henchman son-in-law comes from current politics, both Trump and Manafort having closely associated sons-in-law, extensions of themselves through their daughters.  So this is a generational story (a genre?) that prompts the grandfather and “the kid” in an alliance that helps the kid grow up.  

The psych-out passive-aggressive women, who don’t help, come from a complaint of a friend about his childhood.  Women who are dependent on marriage will sometimes sacrifice their children.  Step children, esp. defiant boys, are easy to force out, but that's not this story.

If I were developing this into a novel, I’d look for ways the women resented their husbands taking priority over them, the limits put on them.  The outcome among the women is often alcoholism, violence or runaways, except that the larger culture may hold them in place.  

Gay is a wild card.  It can be a reason for throwing a kid out, or it can be a way for a kid to find a new family.  

The situation of extended family on a subsistence farm away from urban areas is certainly common in America and was the way most people lived a few decades ago, including my family on both sides.  My mother’s family was the one with tension among collaborating/competing alpha males, in that case brothers, living along a "creek".  People were forced together without enough ways to find happiness, because the economy -- and the lack of possibility that’s in cities -- holds them there.  And the culture insisted this was right and proper and just “suck it up.”  Those with a bit of education could escape through books.  This is as true in Valier today as it was in Roseburg when my cousins were kids.

I stole some of this from T from when we were writing together — alternating posts.  All writers and artists “steal” and sometimes they know it.  Other times they don't see it until much later.  Objections come from people who are trying to convert the art into a saleable product, reducing it to what they think will make people buy.  Stealing makes them nervous.  "Intellectual property" is sort of diaphanous.

Very UN-T-like is the low key of the story.  No “rising action” emergencies like near-drowning or accidental shooting.  No sex.  Everything is simply “told, not shown” which according to the experts is a rookie thing to do, and a big no-no because it isn’t immersive which is what they think sells — that experience of becoming part of the story because of triggered inner states like fear or love — hormonal and visceral responses.  By this state of the media, it takes something pretty outrageous to reach people's guts.  I'm not going there.

It’s a mode of story that I got from two sources, both oral.  One was listening to young kids tell the plots of movies or about something that happened, like over the past weekend.  They take great care for the narrative sequence and try to make sure they get in all the steps of action.  But they don’t tell description or motives.  The other source was casual story-telling while at coffee or sitting around.  Campfire stories sometimes, but those tend to have more description and artistic strategies that build suspense.  

I developed this style when writing “12 Blackfeet Stories” because I wanted the stories to be simple and logical in sequence so they could be retold orally, not dependent on a paper book being read.  I wanted them to be like people’s oral histories of their families and even maybe to be confused with reality, which they are based on, so that people told the stories to each other as truth.  A film with a lot of flashbacks and dream episodes can be pretty hard to tell someone.  Also, I wanted others to write stories and hoped this would be one way for them to copy.

When people talked to us about artifacts, people like John Hellson, they didn’t point out materials and so on, as much as they told stories about them.  They didn’t say, “the brass tacks on this belt were originally meant to be for upholstering furniture.”  They said, “This was my grandmother’s belt.  You can see that as she grew older and wider she had to make an extension in the back with this thong.”

Each of the "12 Blackfeet Stories" is based on an artifact in Bob Scriver’s book that is a photographic record of the Scriver Collection.  “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains.”  The collection includes a gun collection that Bob bought complete.  A trader sells guns by telling a story about them.  One could sell a physical pre-existing book by telling a story about the bound object:  “This is a copy of ‘Bob, Son of Battle’, which belonged to my Scots immigrant grandfather, and it is written in an imitation of a Scots vernacular which makes it very hard to read.  See, here on the front is a photo of Bob.”  (I'm teasing you.  Bob and Battle are both collies, way before Lassie.)

Published in 1898

A bildungsroman could be told about every culture, place or time, whether or not the people there themselves told oral stories about boys coming of age and acquiring the powers of a man.  Most do.  In our culture, at least, they weren’t often told about girls.  There is a new genre called “Princess Stories” about girls like Arya in “Game of Thrones” who are of special birth and so claim power.  The “specialness” may not be genetic royal blood, but just the conviction that they can rise above class and hardship.  

Maybe Cinderella and the Little Mermaid are Princess Stories, and surely “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is.   And Princess Leia. But’s not a bildungsroman if the protagonist marries their way up, is it?  And has babies?  Struggle as an individual is what makes heroes strong.  So in this story Milt and Hup have used marriage in a slantwise way that might be cheating.  The kid will not.

A sub-category of male bildungsroman is the outcast story, the boy caught in war, the boy who is gay, who is an immigrant, who has grown up on the street, and still he manages to survive and to grow into adulthood.  “Kim.”  “Empire of the Sun.”  “Huck Finn.”  I meant this short story to be in that sub-category.  And to be a pattern.

BACK COUNTRY FAMILIES (A bildungsroman)

Stock photo from Google Images

Milt and Hup were very tight in that classic way of buddies that sometimes develops between men in combat.  They hadn’t been in combat together, but they both saw life as hostile and out to get them, so the feeling that they had each other’s backs was strong between them even though Milt was old enough to be Hup’s father but wasn’t.  Instead he was Hup’s father-in-law.

So Hup had married Milt’s daughter, Giselle, in order to have a formal, legal relationship to Milt.  He didn’t really love Giselle, but then he didn’t really love any other woman either.  The kid heard about all this with horror.  He’d gone to sleep behind the sofa where he’d been reading until his eyes got tired.  It was a good place to lie on his stomach where people wouldn’t step on him or spot him and think of something for him to do.  His mother was confronting his Aunt Theda, Hup’s sister so Milt’s daughter.  The two of them were shouting in a rage, but not quite at each other — rather at the injustice of life that refused to obey any kind of proper order.

“You know it’s true, Giselle.  It’s like my dad just gave you to Hup, his possession — men own women.  It in the goddamn wedding vows.”

“It’s perverse.  It shouldn’t be.  I’ll leave him.”

“You can’t.  You have no money, you have no skills, you have no close friends to help you.  You are trapped, honey, and I can’t help you because I’m in the same situation.  That’s the way it is here in this back country.”

The kid hadn’t thought of this as “back country.”  To him it was the center of the universe, it was home, there was no other conceivable place.  Neither could he understand why it was wrong for two men to love each other, two men he also loved in the world.  The only man he loved more was his father’s father, Papop.  Milt and Hup were subsistence hunters because that was how one survived in this rural place, but Papop was a fisherman and since the farm was bordered on one side by a river, he and the kid would walk down together and almost always return with a stringer of fish.  He didn’t even mind cleaning them.  It wasn’t like the bloody sad work of gutting animals.

The men of the farm were a fierce lot, knotted up with the necessity of work and the danger of not calculating some kind of risk, whether from the prices or from weather.  They didn’t keep many animals, so there wasn’t so much risk from bulls or boars.  They WERE the bulls and boars.  They called the women “hens,” and roosters made them laugh, esp. when the feathered ruffians fought for dominance.

Very rarely did the men take the kid hunting.  They said he was noisy and couldn’t think like a deer.  But they were wrong.  He often practised following the vague deer trails around the farm, through the woodlot and the undeveloped land beyond their boundaries.  When he glimpsed an animal, he slipped along behind it, watching to learn what it did, not intending to interfere.  

He was even better at understanding fish.  It may have been because he was an excellent swimmer, but somehow he understood water, its dynamics and power.  He could imagine hanging in a quiet spot behind a boulder or along the bank, but he also sensed the rush of narrow places and waterfalls.  He liked “rush”.  When he grew older, it would become a problem, a drug problem.

But now he just loved most going with Papop on his canoe, floating quietly along through the sun-dappled river under the arching trees and not even saying anything, because fish can hear, you know.  It was the walk back to the house when they could talk.  “Papop, did Grandpa Milt really give my mother to Hup?”

“Well, that’s the way it’s been done for centuries, boy.  And then she gave you to him!”

“Does it mean Hup loves Grandpa Milt more than my mom?”  

Papop had a pretty good idea where the kid got this idea.  Those damned women were always fomenting discord, always trying to grab attention by confronting.  Why couldn’t they just bake pies, get a little praise for it, go to church?

“There are different kinds of love.”  The kid could never get much more out of Papop.  He could feel that there was a whole lot more to be said.

“If Milt owns me because he’s my father, do you own Milt?”  

Papop laughed bitterly, but he wouldn’t answer.  Then they were back at the house, almost late for supper.  At the last minute Papop muttered, "Nobody owns Hup."

None of the men was much good at vegetable gardening.  The women refused to do it.  They wouldn’t even grow flower borders.  So the kid got to do the honors.  Hup did the basic digging and planting, but then he handed the kid a hoe.  “Keep it sharp,” he said.  

So the kid did until he accidentally chopped his foot — not very seriously, but it infected and made him limp for weeks.  Papop showed him how to soak it in a bucket of salt water.  Hup said the kid’s limp was psychological, to get out of work.  Milt agreed that work was everything, work was survival, work was food.  They told the kid to stop dreaming and pay attention.  The women stayed out of it.

The kid certainly was a dreamer.  Even his school teachers said so.  They didn’t know that the storm of attempted sorting in his head over the women’s family quarrels and the men’s tough attitude about “manliness” was sometimes making him almost deaf and blind.  He went to the library and read books, because it almost helped.  He read Hemingway which did help and tried Faulkner, which didn’t.  He didn’t know about Steinbeck.  Then one day he found Whitman.  He had found his heart.  The others didn’t matter now.

Even when his aunt and mother had another fight over whether or not he might be gay, he didn’t care.  The poetry of Whitman sang in him through every fiber and breath.  

When his Papop died in his sleep (heart) the dynamics of the farm life were irrevocably changed along with the inheritances because now Hup owned the farm.  None of them had realized how Papop’s quiet presence had been a calming and a constraint on these two belligerent men.  Hup had never dared smack his wife and son around until Papop was gone.  Milt pretended he didn’t know.

The kid, who was growing quickly by now, heard his mother screaming one last time, took his fishing rod, and his Whitman book, and left in Papop’s canoe.  Teach a boy to fish, and he can feed himself.  Of course, the rivers were clean in those days.  But there are always men who read “Leaves of Grass” and he found them.

(Discussion of how and why I wrote this will follow tomorrow.)

"TEACH ME TO WRITE!"

As a babysitter, I was fairly worthless.  I could hardly get a diaper onto a baby straight because I was so afraid of sticking them with the safety pin. (Things were primitive then -- no disposable diapers with tape.)  If the mother expected me to clean her kitchen and all her crusty week-old pots and pans, I didn’t.  The other extreme was finicky upscale literary types who instructed me in the highly technical strategies of salt-cured cast iron.  Dishwashers had not been invented yet.

The most upscale place I babysat was in Evanston, IL, while earning my BS in Speech Education.  The father was a founding editor of “Rogue” magazine, a soft porn mag that Hugh Hefner snuffed.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(magazine)  There were piles of them and I read them all.  It’s both a problem and a convenient disguise that somehow I convey dependable wholesomeness.  Even when I try, I fail at the actual practice of wickedness.  Mostly, I can keep my evil side secret without trying.

In the earliest babysitting days, my most dependable job was just down the street.  NE 15th between Alberta and Killingsworth had an assorted sequence of houses, built at different times with different resources.  Ours was small, but beautifully built and finished.  Judy’s, across the street, was three-stories and originally occupied by the old maid daughters of the hardware store family that built the house I was in.  A couple of blocks down the hill was a very basic house that could have been a farm house on the prairie.  They had one little girl, a toddler who slept soundly, and they were a handsome young couple who loved to party.

The wife had a huge accumulation of “True Confessions” magazines.  If you don’t know this genre, it’s roughly like today’s Christian romances, where there’s lots of implied sex which the heroine struggles to convert into religious love.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Confessions_(magazine)   Actually, it’s a pretty good account of today’s hookup culture except that it was found evil and condemned by my mother.  As soon as she found out what I was reading in that house, she forbade me to babysit for them again.  Of course, it didn’t help that they came home at 3AM smelling of booze.  

“True Confessions” was frank about its genre and stuck strictly to the basics: overwhelming sexual passion, a man who needed reforming, tragedies, transformation and redemption.  The details were sort of redneck, blue-collar, repetitious.  No aspirations to literary poetry.  Lady porn.

My interest in “True Confessions” and “Rogue” gave me self-permission to explore porn a little bit.  That genre has almost dissolved itself.  Where do you go after kink?  If the babysitters are used to butt-fucking as birth control . . .   Girls used to fantasize about becoming nuns. 

Today’s Facebook and Medium outpourings feel the same to me.  But many of those writers DO aspire to unique soul-plunges, the memorable metaphor, transcendent passion for some doomed devil of a human.  There are two sides of writing that they miss.  One is the drudgery of marketing, which is the heart of publishing.  It will demand half of all the time you could have been writing.  The other is learning the practicalities of constructing a genre story.  For this second aspect, no one is better than Steve Pressfield.  www.stevenpressfield.com/  He’s generous about passing on what he knows.

If you can understand and actually “do” what Pressfield recommends, which isn’t always easy even for him, you can sell writing.  I read his email newsletter and enjoy it, but I don’t write that way, so I don’t even try to sell.  You might say I was writing “Big Idea” nonfiction, but for a pretty rarefied audience and the content is very hard to keep coherent.

Big idea vocabulary is still developing in a technical scientific way that now draws on pop culture slang as much as Latin.  I got to it through environmental writing — at first just pastoral natural history.  But now — geology drilled down to the fossil molecules.    I keep wishing I’d taken organic chemistry.  My interest in “True Confessions” and “Rogue” gave me self-permission to explore porn a little bit.  That genre has almost dissolved itself.  Where do you go after kink?

One of the most boisterous and problematic genres is bio/autobio writing.  The craving to understand what it is to be human has led to an unseemly curiosity about other people’s thought lives, especially if there seems to be an element of instability, disguise, untruth, crossing into uncharted territory.  We’ve become accustomed to an author as a trapdoor, entry into a world we would never know otherwise.  In some ways it’s the old Halliburton “Royal Road to Romance” stuff.  Done well, in the hands of Vollman or Langewiesche, it’s beyond immersive.  The author will have gone there.

But writing about minds exposes the writer to great danger.  If I wrote a fiction story using recognizable elements of my town or the rez, I could be shot, beaten — people take this seriously.  Problematically, they see their own patterns in any fiction and cannot be convinced it’s not about them.  I could call it journalism, but that’s part of the reason everyone is so angry about journalism right now.  We don’t want to know everything about ourselves.  Nor do we want our mother to know -- we don't want to know about HER either.  We want to feel solid and eternal.

At some subconscious level I had the notion that being a minister would be a kind of safety — that I would be given cultural permission to confront evil through spirituality and people would believe that I would keep their secrets as though a Catholic priest in a confessional.  (Legally, the protection of confessions varies from one state to another and is not under the control of religious institutions.)  As it turned out, ministry was an excuse for avoidance and knowing things about people was a burden.  Most folks have no idea how boring and banal their wickedness is.  Thumb on the scales stuff, anything in the interest of profit.  They never listen.

These are not issues that Steve Pressfield considers.  They seem merely good sources of motivation for war or politics, which supply context for detail and character.  I’m not putting all this stuff “down” as vulgar or low-class.  This is the truth that people can’t handle.  The worthiness of writing rests with the reader, not the writer.  Print is meant to stay there on the page, stay the same, which is one definition of “truth”.  Writing on the internet or any computer is much too fluid and flickering to be “truth” unless you can handle abstracts at a deep level of analysis.  What is the algorithm of truth?

All that is too damned fancy.  Here are some practical notes from Pressfield’s online feed, which I certainly recommend even if you don’t write, just because he's so lively.

He’s writing genre, people’s books.  They have categories like “Supernatural Thriller”  and are mostly fiction.  I should make a list.  “Police Procedural”, “Redemption”, etc.  He does have a nonfiction category (or set of categories) he calls “Big Idea”

There are formulas to follow to make the books work, largely about plot sequences,  conventions and obligatory scenes

He’s often bouncing off ideas illustrated in movies.  Expect quotes of dialogue from movies he likes.  He accepts outside opinion and advice from people he trusts, even if they rip his work to shreds.

He’s willing to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.

He uses index cards to keep track of scenes and characters. All is practical.  No risks.  Things you can work with.

HEY, JUDE!!

Judy and Mary pull their weight!

Sib Train

One summer when I was in high school — maybe 1955 or so — my family, which always traveled by car across America for a month, decided to let me stay home — not quite alone but with my best friend from across the street.   I did not spend the summer writing a juvenile masterpiece about madness as young women do these days — didn’t even think of that because it wasn’t “done” unless you were Anne Frank.  The revelation of the summer came through that best friend, Judy.  

I have a short list of people (friends and relatives) whom I google now and then, because they inconsiderately die without telling me.  Just a day ago I searched for Judy, who is on that list though we had a snit-fit and haven’t make contact for years.  A website said she was single and Republican.  I happen to know she’s Croatian/Irish, VERY Catholic, so I could assume she wasn’t divorced, so maybe widowed.  

Partly I was thinking about her because I just watched “The Right Stuff” as part of my attempt to understand male heroism.  Judy’s father was a test pilot like Yeager, but had seven daughters, which caused his wife to make him find a safer occupation.  J. and I used to act out the little preoccupying scenario of bereaved wives that is so dear to Americans — something like the English having this “thing” for childbirth. (Both produced by WWII, I think.)  We played in the attic of Judy’s house and got so into the weeping and wailing one afternoon that I remember Mr. Dixon poking his head up at the head of the staircase, a horrified look on his face from what he expected to find.  Instead it was two flat-chested girls with black lace rags on their heads and tears streaming down their round cheeks.  Grinning sheepishly.

This time I just went ahead and called Judy (who is now Julia).  At least two male voices answered the phone on extensions (still a landline) and bellowed for Julia.  It took her maybe six beats to recognize my name — she’s not used to my married name YET.  (Only fifty years to learn it.)  Nor is she widowed.  But she came close to dying a while back, in a sort of clot storm that got into her heart and lungs.  Now she’s on oxygen but don’t imagine it holds her back.  She and some of her nine-child family (all grown and multiplying) were just about to leave for the beach.  

So that summer that we were “batching” in my house was the summer Judy (not yet Julia, but taking the first step) was sent to charm school.  What she learned, she passed on to me as homework.  Some of what she taught me was the proper use of deodorant, which came as a little pot of pads saturated with something.  There were the lipstick lessons — you needed a little brush.  And the proper use of tweezers and razors.  It took the proper equipment to achieve allure.  My generation is too modest to tell you what more there was.

She was dark with heavy hair falling to her shoulders.  I was a freckled redhead with hair like boiling foam.  It would be fashionable now if it hadn’t gotten thin and white.  It was the era of “torsolettes” (corsets lite), padded bras, latex Playtex girdles, and crinolines which we stiffened in sugar water rather than starch.  When WWII ended and Dior could get back into business, his “New Look” was to satisfy GI imaginations: tiny waists with big bosoms and near-hoop-skirts.  In fact, I did have a hoop skirt — pretty much a nuisance, but less sticky than a sugar-dipped crinoline.

Being Catholic meant that Judy was preparing to marry and to raise babies.  Nine of them by the end, though she was in real life widowed by the railroad her husband worked for, then remarried a widower with children.  Her second wedding was in St. Andrews, the cathedral church on Alberta Street in Portland, located there because in our childhood the neighborhood was occupied by immigrant artisans and shop-keepers, all Catholic.  It was two or three blocks from us so we heard its bells (real bells) and Judy went to parochial school there instead of at Vernon where I attended.

Father Bertram Griffin, the remarkably progressive priest, officiated at Judy’s second wedding and married all the kids to the family as well as the two adults.  The oldest boy and oldest girl were each asked to accept special responsibility.  I was Presbyterian with a pinched, arrogant, ambitious minister, so my model for ministry was Father Bertram.

http://www.catholicsentinel.org/Content/News/Local/Article/Pioneering-activist-pastor-dies-at-age-68/2/35/5135
His first act on being assigned to this parish, which by then had gone Black, was to sell the gold and silver Communion vessels and use the money to install a phone for poor people to use in emergencies and to search for work.  When I decided to go to seminary, I went to tell Father, who didn’t know me but blessed me anyway. 

So Judy’s preparation for marriage was not just beauty tricks, but a solid theological grounding which these days causes her to be an often indignant Republican.  I remember most vividly a summer day when we sat on my front steps and searched the concept of “Limbo” in terms of why babies who died before Christening would go there instead of Heaven.  She explained about Original Sin and Life After Death, and I would have none of it.  In fact, I resolved never to have ANY babies in order to save them from Limbo.  It seemed all I could do.  Later in life it was struggle enough to save myself from living Limbo.

But Judy’s influence came with me right through seminary, when the thought of Father Robert Schreiter, in a class at the Catholic Theological Seminary that was then part of the U of Chicago seminary cluster, became a foundation stone of my personal connection to sacred felt thought.  I am constitutionally unable to accept institutionalized anything, but “felt thought” is my guide for life.  Schreiter's belief was sort of Jungian — go deep enough and we will find the holy unity of humans in primal concepts.

It’s not that Judy and I are “in sync” about anything.  She’s conservative, maternal, and nurturing — quite capable of managing a relationship to the institution of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.  She keeps order and her lawn is green and short.  We can get frustrated with each other, which is why we gave it a rest for so long.  Her mother came to my mother’s graveside service.  

I doubt that Judy can really understand my life, because she has no experience with my kind of stuff: the vocabulary alone.  The thing is, it doesn’t matter.  I wouldn’t tolerate her life for more than half-an-hour.  But I understand the value and dignity of it.  I don’t reject it — just avoid it.  Watch from outside.

It’s almost twenty years since I chose a solitary and minimal life so I could write, but the kind of writing I do pushes the writer out to the edge of madness.  I wouldn’t have had the courage without my co-writer for the last ten years.  I didn’t intend to write with so much risk because I didn’t know it was there.  I thought I’d write novels about women who succeeded, sort of heroines but humble.  Wives of sculptors, friends of Blackfeet, walkers of the grassy prairie.

Instead, I’m exploring ideas that are so sci-fi that it’s hard to put them in human terms.  They are both crushing and dispersing — far beyond anything the nice middle-class UUA ever confronts.  And yet it’s a source of deep exaltation.  To someone not on that path, the whole thing sounds like madness or maybe a drug high or some claim to what shamans know.  This makes people rush to get at it, to get some for themselves, totally misunderstanding, which is why it’s a good idea to be solitary and hard to find.  Anyway, it takes concentrated energy.

But if Judy — I mean Julia — might die without telling me, I’d better break into my umbilical life and make contact.  So I did.  It was a good idea.  We’ll stay in touch now.

Julia, mother of the bride or maybe the groom

Anyway, pretty in pink

MIXED FEELINGS ABOUT THIS MÉTIS ISSUE

Metis Nation British Columbia Board of Directors

Years ago an older man in Browning (the Blackfeet Rez) was talking about himself and his grandson.  Bob had hired him to stay in his studio-house to keep it safe while Bob went back East on sculpture business. (Bob and I were divorced.)  Bob was Anglophone Quebecois by parentage, which is a category that doesn’t exist in the USA.  It means English speaking people living in Quebec, which implies colonialism that labels French speakers, who are often partly indigenous, as “lesser,” pushed into categories as discussed in an earlier post.  Actually, Bob was culturally “rez white”, meaning he had absorbed a lot of tribal culture but was genomically white.

In Browning being Blackfeet in the context of colonialism means being stigmatized, or did in the past.  But then they passed it along.  Several times the government had tried to push other people onto the Blackfeet, forcing them to share payments and commodities.  This was highly resented and -- following the Euro-pattern -- the Blackfeet who were tribally enrolled and assigned to the rez spoke with stigma about the “Cree,” esp. the groups who had ended up with no land.  Many of them were actually Métis.  That’s what this grandfather was.  Among whites “Crees” were considered trustworthy “because they have to work for a living — they don’t get handouts.”  

So Bob trusted this grandfather to housesit because he was “Cree” but the grandfather lamented to me that he didn’t know what that was or any of the history.  Everything was dominated by being Blackfeet.  I got him a copy of “Strange Empire,” by Joseph Kinsey Howard who was himself Métis, a journalist in Great Falls.  The book is an account of the Red River Rebellion, which was an attempt by the Métis to form their own country just north of here across the line.  Canada repressed the rebellion violently.  Many of those people ended up taking refuge close by.  

Actually, the people we called “Cree” (I never heard the word “Métis" until we were dealing with Alberta) were often half or more white.  An interesting aspect of “Cree” or “Métis" is that they formed a spectrum from an end preferring to emphasize “white” to an end preferring the old tribal ways.  I suspect the indigenous (well, they were born HERE, right?) who resulted from marriages with tough old Hudson Bay factors from the Orkney Islands were quite different from those who mixed with French voyageurs, partly because of the many-centuries-old competitive animosity between England and France.  (Vrooman tells me not to give these complications too much weight.)  

But it often struck me how my mother-in-law unconsciously saw Cree as French Quebecois.  When I see unconscious stigma, I try to make it conscious.  The results are not usually happy.  But IMHO I think the more we talk about such things, the better chance we have to change for the better.

For me, this history is in the background of James Boyden’s writing.  While searching my shelves for my copy of “The Orenda,” I found Boyden’s little book about Louis Riel (on the Euro end of the scale) and Gabriel Dumont (on the indigenous end), the main Red River leaders.  When the HB factors had a chance to return to Britain, they often dumped their indigenous wives along with the children.  The voyageurs stayed and helped their offspring.  When the roamers and hunters fell on hard times, the more assimilated townspeople helped them.  And vice versa.  It's a rare occasion when differences create a synergy.  Through the generations, these differences translated into degrees of prosperity, which always complicates prejudice.

I have almost no knowledge of Cajun, Creole, Arcadian, Michif and so on, but each offered the opportunity to blend two streams both genetic and cultural.  I’m sure it played out in different ways depending on the times, ecology and settlement of the place.  I’m impressed with how often the fiddle went along for the dance.  Great material for novels as Peter Bowen knows.  (His mysteries feature Métis people from Choteau.  Peterbowenmt.com)

Bob Scriver (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Scriver)  was born in Browning, but his parents were born in rural Clarenceville where the hired help was usually French-speakers.  So the corny joke — to English speakers — was that Bob’s strait-laced grandmother noticed her hired man was leaving for his home to get lunch and wanted to offer him lunch on the farm.  She called from the porch, “Voulez vous coucher avec moi?”  The joke, of course, is that instead saying “would you like to eat with me?” she had said “would you like to sleep with me?”

So, guided by “Dr.Fish Philosopher” on Twitter (websites:  https://zoesctodd.wordpress.com  and her personal blog https://zoestodd.com), I go to Wikipedia for a definition of polity:  “A polity is any kind of political entity. It is a group of people who are collectively united by a self-reflected cohesive force such as identity, who have a capacity to mobilize resources, and are organized by some form of institutionalized hierarchy.”  

As I understand her, she is saying that if you define Métis as a genetic, ethnic, racial sort of category, it psychologically removes the moral obligation to treat them as equal fellow human beings deserving protection and valued in spite of their difference -- even if they challenge one’s own worldview.   Defining any group as uniquely different clears the way to struggle over class and power, almost saying that some group is not human, only subspecies.  ("Half-breeds.")  But this makes them very angry and can lead to violence.  To say nothing of corrupting one’s values.

If they are seen as self-identified political bodies, then we can negotiate and find new ways.  Anyhow, inevitably, as the generations turn over and the economics shift, the “new” Métis — or whatever they will end up being called — will be very different from the earlier peoples.   Now that cyber-identities are worldwide and it’s no longer necessary to deal so much with neighbors, some people cling harder to old polities and other people want to create new ones, like “Green” people united by care for the natural world. 

I’m so delighted to discover Prof. Todd’s body of work.  I see she self-identifies as “Michif (also Mitchif, Mechif, Michif-Cree, Métif, Métchif, French Cree) which is the language of the Métis people of Canada and the United States, who are the descendants of First Nations women (mainly Cree, Nakota and Ojibwe) and fur trade workers of European ancestry (mainly French and Scottish Canadians).” 

I used to wish for an American indigenous ancestor and Vrooman tells me that my mostly Scots grandmother, who was from Canada and whose maiden name was “Swan,” might easily have been Métis because "Swan" is a Métis family name.  Her closest friend from prairie days was Georgia Coleman, who looked "Indian".  "Coleman" could easily be an English conversion of some other kind of "man."  It was always a mystery where MISTER Coleman went to.

There is more stigma attached to an aunt from Brandon whose mother was brought to Manitoba as a street orphan from London on one of those population-shifting acts of colonial Britain.  The researchers who found this information said to be careful how we shared it.  Class, status, entitlement are passionate and dangerous issues.

Yes.  Care full.  Caring.  Real People.  All kinds.

DANGEROUS TERRITORY

Jeanne Moreau

In terms of demographics, there is one group I know better than others:  baby boomer males, the sons of the warriors of WWII.  As a teacher, they were my first students.  Later the sons were my colleagues and their fathers were my bosses.  (I married a WWII veteran.)  I know very little about my own age group, esp female.  And, in fact, I come to realize I know very little about anyone, even groups to which I’ve had much exposure and interaction.  (UU’s stand out as an example.)

Culture splits the males I’ve known best into rez guys and academics.  They interact with each other, the academics looking for some romantic dream and the rez guys hoping for a way out and up.  I watched, I tried to use what I knew, even hoped for a kind of mind meld.  The natural outcome would be writing a novel about them.  But why write anything when there are real people to consider?  The best understanding I have of novels is that they are an attempt to understand a cultural situation, usually one that affects upper-middle-class people since that’s who writes them, publishes them, and buys them.  They are a phenomenon of prosperity — either the aspiration to be wealthy or worry over having achieved that state at least to some minor degree.  And they are a closed loop.

By chance and by reading, there’s a third dimension, a kind of class or mob or tribe, that society-at-large has created out of the interaction of these two age groups: the fathers with PTSD who are invested in control versus the sons who see an explosively exciting world and want the freedom to be a piece of it.  Fathers who compete, who beat and rape their own sons, who try to force them into molds, and other fathers who work desperately to save those boys, confront those fathers.  It’s easy to see on the rez and in the small towns.  It seems inevitable, unstoppable.  Eternal.  Oedipal.

The best solutions come from the sons working together, if they will.  Females can do little but listen, locate resources, make connections.  It’s not “little” to do these things.  It works best if one can draw a circle around the emotional participation while preserving outside in the excluded edge the analyst, esp. one who can inhabit her own self.  It will be necessary to go back and forth between gut sonar and brain parsing.  No one can referee.

In terms of anthropological and sociological forces, what pushes boys even as early as latency or adolescence to form into something like a tribe or race?  They reject family, fly out the window of the nursery, and yet take Wendy along with them in case they need mothering.  The house they build for her — in England they call playhouses “Wendy houses” — is a tree house, which traditionally excludes girls.

The recent death of Jeanne Moreau has stirred one community (mostly old Freudian shrinks but also post-modern French females) to bits of analysis and old preoccupations.  The ideas are unlikely to be shared by contemporary American males but are intensely cherished by some men my age devoted to Truffaut (1932-1984).  I keep my link to Psyart  (http://psyartjournal.com/home)  in sympathy with those men since I have fifty-year-old relationships with the cinephiles, never developed.  But also I play these concepts against cutting edge neural research about how brains are organized and operated, just to keep from going mechanistic.  It’s a “tension.”

Here’s an example post from Norm Rosenblood, a seasoned analyst in Canada.

To: PSYART@LISTS.UFL.EDU

Subject: Re: Jeanne Moreau, R. I. P.

Another interesting dynamic  in JULES ET JIM is the wish to die together. Ernest Jones has two fine papers dealing with it. One of them, during his stay in Toronto, was prompted by a Canadian newspaper article containing the description of a refusal to be rescued from drowning in the Niagara river.

One of the themes in the dynamic is the wish to merge with a maternal object. The Elizabethans described sexual intercourse as "dying". The concepts, Thanatos (destruction ) and Eros, have challenged psychoanalytic theorists for years.  The combination of both instincts might possibly be the driving force of Jules, Romeo and Juliette and Thelma and Louise. The theory might also account for post coital sadness--the quest for permanent oblivion (merger) fails and the ensuing guilt and rage remain as residues of the wish.  Too bad Don Juan didn't know what was ailing him.

"And I am desolate and sick of an old passion".-Ernest Dowson,

Norm Rosenblood

A dynamic I only have glimpsed is that of the sophisticated sexworking male who lives in a community of others with the same interests, both as a kind of family and as a kind of discussion group.  They’re not unlike the Psyart crowd but much younger and not Freudian.  The death that can preoccupy them is not their own individual bodily deaths, but rather the death of the world, both cultural and palpable.  They are a sort of conversation of courtesans, privileged access combined with guarded loyalty.  What if a play were written that depicted their talk in terms of the seminar (root: semen) groups in which Jesus participated and which developed into the Passover where wine and bread became blood and flesh?

The relative freedom to speak in sexual terms has led to some remarkable thinking, beyond the “death of God”.  Yesterday I read a piece about the origins of Christianity in a rape — Jehovah overpowers the young Mary (juvenile by some contemporary definitions) and forces his generative ability into her body so that she must carry it through pregnancy and birth.  Indeed, she attends the human intrusion to his end in death.  (This is also a theme in the Aliens movies where a totally Other being forces humans to gestate its babies.  Microbes do it all the time.)  This God-Other kills the object of many people’s love through a culture (Greco-Roman) that unrelentingly and arrogantly kills whole categories of people in genocide.  The people interpret their experience with myths, going to the abstract level, but selectively.

Now what if this supper/seminar were juxtaposed with a circle of old indigenous people passing around a tobacco pipe to center them while they think and speak together.  The smoke rises as a spirit.  Don’t call this a peace pipe — it might not be peaceful at all.  The old circle might be in Afghanistan.

iNDIGENOUS LITERARY CONTROVERSY

Wab Kinew and James Boyden

Once again Indigenous Canada is throbbing with controversy over who is or is not a “First Nations” author and whether they are illegitimately raiding the heritage of the People.  I was sent a copy of “The Orenda” by James Boyden some time ago but never finished reading it.  I’d better sit down and do that now, since it seems to be the pole around the issue-dances this time.  First I want to make some remarks.  (“Constant readers” will know I’m white but have a fifty year relationship with Blackfeet/Blackfoot.)

My approach to all these matters is through “deep time,” meaning history even before human beings, much less writing.  I accept as evidence the molecular and atomic witnesses of stones and trees, climate and evolved life forms.  Right now there is an unfolding of DNA evidence from the bone of a pinky finger of a little girl found in Siberia that has revealed a whole different branch of hominin.  Named the “Denisovans,” they seem to be a people whose characteristics (particularly withstanding cold) underlie the Asian populations as well as the closely related Native American populations, both those who came via the Bering Straits and those who came by sea along South America, in several separated waves.  

This DNA matrix is the closest thing we have to “blood” relationships though blood is not the only body tissue created according to DNA instructions.  They are “germ lines” which is roughly the same thing as provenance, which is the same as the Biblical “begats” that obsess Euros since inheritance has been a controlling idea of entitlement to wealth and power.  Only a small proportion of contemporary human DNA still includes Denisovan protein instructions, similar to Neanderthal inheritance.  

Now that we know about epigenes, which play the genome like the pedals on a piano, silencing or prolonging, we can understand why different locations support the development and persistence of slightly different appearance and culture, from nose shape to skin color to food tolerance.  Since the people in one place or another tend to develop likenesses among them, they have been seen as races.  But now that they leave, arrive and mingle around the planet,  the concept of physical “race” is not useful.  That “box” is broken.

So the concept label has slipped over to a culturally defined box, culture being a slightly different kind of class.  www.livinganthropologically.com › Biological Anthropology.  Jun 1, 2017 - “Race Reconciled is a special issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology with cutting-edge work by biological anthropologists”.

“Race is a Social Construction. It is a human idea about biology that does not correspond very well to the biology. But anthropology also demonstrates how race becomes biology, or the embodiment of racist inequalities.

“Three things need emphasis. First, as discussed in the previous section Race Reconciled Re-Debunks Race, this does not mean there is no such thing as human biological variation or this variation is unimportant.

“Second, to say race is a social construction does not mean it is not real. Ideas can be very real. 

“Finally, we need to do more to close the loop, revealing how the power of race as a social reality has economic and political implications and the social organization of race becomes biology.”

So now here comes the newest idea:  that the culture confines of a labeled people can change them biologically.  Thus they are made into a physical race.  We call these cultural confines both privilege and stigma.

“ . . . a growing body of evidence establishes the primacy of social inequalities in the origin and persistence of racial health disparities. Here, I summarize this evidence and argue that the debate over racial inequalities in health presents an opportunity to refine the critique of race in three ways: 1) to reiterate why the race concept is inconsistent with patterns of global human genetic diversity; 2) to refocus attention on the complex, environmental influences on human biology at multiple levels of analysis and across the lifecourse; and 3) to revise the claim that race is a cultural construct and expand research on the sociocultural reality of race and racism.. Am J Phys Anthropol 2009. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

"Biology is about organisms and environments, always about specific creatures in specific places, and not simply looking for a mythical code of life." 

This study described below is stunning in its implications: that when we are angry with a particular group, we withhold care so that they are stunted.

“There is also evidence that structures and events at even higher levels of analysis reverberate to the individual level. A recent study of birth outcomes before and after September 11, 2001, provides a dramatic example. Lauderdale (2006) examined birth certificate data for all California births during the 6 months after September 2001, compared to the same period 1 year earlier. They found that women with Arabic names–and only women with Arabic names–experienced a 34% increase in the likelihood of having a low birth weight infant after 9/11. Moreover, the effect appeared to be moderated by parents’ strength of ethnic identification: Infants who were given ethnically distinctive Arabic names had twice the risk of low birth weight after the attacks of September 2001, compared to 1 year earlier. This finding hints at how events structured by global political-economic forces may have embodied consequences that are often hidden from view. (2009:52)”

Think about that in terms of reservations.

There are two other forces I’m thinking about but I don’t know enough to develop any theories.  One is the marked difference between cultural matters on the east side of the continent versus the west side, partly due to time of encounter, partly due to displacement, and partly due to the whole Western half of Canada being basically a Hudson’s Bay franchise.  Population density is part of it, war patterns within the tribes or developed as allies or enemies of the primary colonizing countries, weather, distance, plagues, droughts.  Prairie tribes are drastically different from woodland tribes or waterway tribes but awareness of that is elusive.

The other is another “deep time” concept, the idea that if one looks at the planet circumpolarly, the northern continents were slowly covered by major glaciers that pushed out pre-existing ancient human groups near the North Pole.  Then when the last big glacier withdrew, the repopulation was accomplished by a people who had changed.  The same was true of the plants and animals, except for those which had found refugia like the Sweetgrass Hills.  This is new thought.

We seem to be in a time where thought about evolution of both biology and culture is vital because change is coming swiftly.  To me, this drowns much of the controversy about indigenous writing, but at the same time is helping to develop the New Culture that will carry our biological existence forward.