* RADIO RANT: Indians--"I Know Nothin'"

Last Sunday night (7/27/08), conservative talk-show cretin Bill Cunningham uttered his version of the conservative mantra that goes something like "Native American tribes fought other tribes; ergo Euro-colonialism/genocide was entirely justified." And of course this formulaic defense can be uttered without really knowing anything about indigenous history. Thus Cunningham's stupidity began: "The Sioux did worse [things] to the Arapaho and the Iroquois" than the U.S. did to the Indians, blah-blah-blah. I could give Cunningham ten years to find a historical battle between the "Sioux"–a Great Plains tribe–and the Northeast-woodlands Iroquois. It's the constant recitation of such half-baked non-truths by such pundits and their "dittohead" acolytes that makes the conservative discourse so infuriating.

* RADIO RANT: Indian Wars (Still Going On)

Billy Cunningham is the "new" conservative talkshow host in these parts, replacing Matt Drudge on two local radio stations. Last Sunday night (11/25/07), I tuned into a discussion (or rant) regarding the "Indian Wars." To one caller's allegations of land theft & immorality, Cunningham replied [not verbatim here, but close], "It was war. We won. Get over it!" (I'm reminded of Paiute poet AC Louis's anecdote about a white student who told him, "We shoulda killed you all when we had the chance"!) "If the Indians had won," Cunningham continued, "they'd have done worse to us." No. We especially wouldn't have forced you to follow another culture's jealous monotheistic deity. But this radio guy is adamant that the Natives were apparently in need of a little good ol' Western Civilizing: "Why do you think they call them savages?" (And the phrase "Stone Age" was also tossed around liberally—er, conservatively.)

Hell, if these "GET OVER IT!" people (including some of my own students) were JUST talking about a survival-of-the-fittest social Darwinism, then I wouldn't be so upset. But if this "might makes right" is what you folks ultimately meant, it also means that you have to surrender any lofty pretensions regarding your Western ethics & religion, and acknowledge Christianity as a hypocritical & bankrupt enterprise, as mere prop and rationalization for capitalism & colonialism [cf. Vine Deloria, Jr.].

* Call Me Ishi. Or Buddy.

Ishi (the last Yana Indian) has been best memorialized by Native critic Gerald Vizenor, I think, in an essay called "Ishi Obscura." The marvelous first sentence is —"Ishi was never his real name." Ergo my serendipity here, dog-loving as my whole life has been:

* U.S. Pontificates on Genocide

So—the U.S. House of Representatives wants to "declare" the "slaughter" of Armenians by the Turks during WWI "genocide." Gee, that was less than a score of years after the Wounded Knee massacre. I don't care how many times "our government" has apologized for its own attempts at genocide; "we" shouldn't be allowed, even today, such a facile moral high ground.

* It's a Hormonic Imbalance

So George Bush fucks up again: "childrens do learn. . . ." There's plenty of Hopi, and Lakota, elders who say that a precise use of language = a healthy culture. I fear for "ours."

* RADIO RANT: Michael Savage on Ecofeminism

Thanks, Mr. Savage—you've given me a better title for my ENGL 945 course. Last night (9/5), you made reference to "wackjob moron feminist treehuggers." What an interesting appellation! Henceforth, then, I think I should call my Native Ecofeminist class "Wackjob Moron Feminist Treehugger Squaws." Okay, maybe squaw isn't a word you'd be brazen enough to utter on the radio, but I assume it's an epithet that swims around comfortably in your consciousness.

* RADIO RANT: Savaging the "Noble Savage" Now

Last night (9/4), Michael Savage was slamming a San Francisco "hippie reenactment" of the 1967 Summer of Love. The event began with "some Native Americans shamans" [sic], Savage said, or read—adding, "Shamed men, you mean. Ashamed to go back to their reservation!" This may have been true, actually, on a level beyond our commentator's ken (and shaman is a dangerous & problematic word itself); but no, Michael was just offering another gratuitous knee-jerk insensitive racist dig at a minority group, the kind of kick in the side his audience has grown to know, love, & expect.

* Shakespeare = Culture

A colleague just turned me on to an editorial in the Omaha World Herald a few months back (23 June 2007 [7B]), by a professor at the University of Nebraska-Kearney who has set himself up as another Apostle of Culture, as one more Savior of High Literature. Doctor Thomas Martin laments the fact that students at the U of Nebraska-Lincoln don't even have to take a course in Shakespeare to acquire a major in English. I, too, lament the fact that English students (graduate students, more crucially) aren't exposed to all the major eras & figures of British and American literature. But I also think that they should have to read some Continental literature in translation (Dostoevski, Goethe, and the like); and maybe a course in Spanish(-American) lit., from Cervantes through García Márquez?; and some American Indigenous lit. would be a good idea, too. Ay, there's the rub: where should one stop, given the economic pressures that English departments currently face? In fact, Martin asserts that majoring in English sans Shakespeare is "comparable to a medical doctor who did not take a course in anatomy." This analogy is, first of all, completely absurd on the level of logical categories. But it also ignores the fact that Shakespeare himself, as literary historians remind us, was never the Great-Be-All-and-End-All of the English canon until well into the nineteenth century, and that the canon of "essential works" of which Martin speaks is itself a historically constituted body. This lack of historicity is Martin's main problem. For him, "literature" still has an "essential quality"; it is still "timeless," and its theme is an unchanging "human nature." (And someone play "God Save the Queen," while we're at it.) But literature, in reality, is always situated in place, and time, and ideology: there's never anything disinterestedly "eternal" about it. And yet he complains that English departments have turned "into sociology departments, emphasizing the topical literature of race, gender, class and ethnicity over the traditional works of literature." Huh? Shakespeare's corpus, too, we recognize, is a "topical" one, utterly involved in "race, gender, class and ethnicity." This recent turn of events—our "sociological" or political focus—is merely evidence that we are now conscious how all texts are inescapably complicit in such politics. Professor Martin also claims that the "faculty in most modern institutions of higher learning lack respect for their ancestors," who are —as is clear later in the editorial—the good ol' dead white English males. But ancestors is a strange word, when mine happen to include the non-white and non-European. Can't I be true to mine? (And all of them?!: what fun to teach Black Elk, and James Joyce, and Albert Camus in the same course!) Martin's entire argument, in sum, is quite an ethno/Eurocentric one. Other once-upon-a-time word choices that Martin tosses around include "liberal education," "spirit," "conscience," and "reasoned"—all of which smack of Matthew Arnold and other self-anointed Apostles of Culture—and all these all-too-humans have had their own self-interested, political reasons for appealing to such values! Our latest apostle here is finally so bold as to speak of the "moral in a classical work" as something of great use in one's Socratic "self-examination." Ah—for indeed, Martin finally admits—his "discipline is philosophy," after all, and his castigation of the English discipline arises from someone no doubt deeply immersed in a much higher calling than mere "literature," all mere shadows, sophistry, and illusion compared to his calling. We must thank him, then, for descending, if only momentarily, from the Clouds (. . . of Aristophanes).

* RADIO RANT: "Let It Lie!"

The English-teacher schoolmarm in me has a whole list of future-blog bitches regarding English-language usage in the popular media. (One that has especially irked me on sports-talk radio is the ubiquitous dangling modifier, "Having said that.") But one old chestnut has especially struck my Queen's-English-obsessed heart these last few weeks. (I often point out the irony to my Anglo students, that the mixed-blood mutt that I am has HAD to obsess about, CARE about, "their" language, to be "good enough," more than they have.)

Well, the problem is the old "lie" versus "lay" deal. Whether it's Michael Savage or the ESPN-talk-guy-du-jour, it's inevitably, "So then I went to lay down [in bed, on the couch, etc.] . . . ." No, you went to lie down. You lay down, Michael Savage, that copy of Mein Kampf you've been reading so assiduously. [Low blow, admittedly, but he does worse to "my" side. And yes, I know that the past tense of lie is lay.]

Worse yet, these last few weeks, I've heard several examples of characters in sitcoms making the same error. (Characteristic: "I'm going to lay down now.") The writers might easily say, "Well, that's how everyday people talk. Most of us make the same mistake." Well, geez, you can't actually help the "State" (and the state of public education) by some proper modeling/brainwashing here?! A lot of "everyday" people also say "fucking" as a phatic interjection every 3rd or 4th word, but I don't hear that in your "realist" aesthetics. (If that was your rationale. Actually, I wonder if you know the proper usage, either.)

A final objection: Tom, this "rule" is obviously becoming defunct, out of ignorance + usage. Well, maybe. And I could admit defeat more magnanimously if only I hadn't spent my life learning such rules—and, as I said, sucking up to the Great White Ways because I was a bit less than white. (At least I NEVER made my students adhere to that stupid don't-end-your-sentence-with-a-proposition rule; I'm mean, that's so archaic—except in the most formal of rhetorical situations—that I don't have the words that express my disdain for. It.)

[Added 8/21/07:] Again, tonight, on CNN, a fellow speaking about the Utah mining disaster: ". . . leave the bodies where they lay."

* RADIO RANT: Women's Rights vs. Animal Rights?

Paul Zeise, a beat writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, has created a new round of controversy in the Michael Vick saga by uttering the following on a Pittsburg talk show: "It's really a sad day in this country when . . . Michael Vick would have been better off raping a woman [rather than running a vicious dog-fighting racket] . . . . Had he done that, he probably would have been suspended for [only] four games [rather than a year] and he'd be back on the field." To me, the meat of this new controversy is that several national sports commentators have come to Zeise's defense (e.g., John Fricke), via at least the implication that the current atmosphere of "political correctness" has led to a privileging of wild animals over our own women.

On one important level, these people are right, of course: Kobe Bryant and the legion of athletes charged with rape and spousal abuse have been getting mere hand-slaps from their leagues & teams, as the patriarchal game of wink-wink continues. They should be getting much more severe penalties. However, this issue is really independent of the Michael Vick episode; and the stance above, in its ostensible attempt to be anti-sexist, reveals once again an utter anthropocentrism: i.e., a human (woman) is more important than another animal. I, for one, believe that being instrumental in the violent deaths of many individuals of another species is a greater crime than the sexual abuse of any single member of our one species (whatever the gender). There, I've said it. Zeise, Fricke, et al. are wrong; it is hardly a "sad day," but a positive evolution in the general consciousness, in my mind. What is sad is that this debate seems to force one to pick & choose between women's rights and animal rights. But again, they're separate issues.

Of course I'm completely wrong in the "separate issue" thing, but this twist of an admission takes the argument to entirely different level. A major tenet of ecofeminism is that what the patriarchy does to women and "animals" (and to Natives and the environment) comes from the same source, an imperialist White male need to identify and ostracize an Other, including a propensity to commit violence against "her"—to maintain at last a master/slave, Self/Other, civilization/nature hierarchal binary, to reassure the Self of its superior status. What is truly surprising, then, is that these commentators are speaking of the two crimes as if they were fundamentally different things!

* Noodles Marco Polo; Halfbreed Suppers

Popular demand has clamored for my "Noodles Marco Polo," referred to in the previous post. ("Right"!) Well, they're pretty much plain, "buttered" noodles: I love egg noodles/pasta, but I don't care much for either the tomato-y or cheese-creamy sauces most people put on them.

—1/2-pan of water, w/ tablespoon of oil: bring to boil.
—Add 1/2 package of pasta of choice (= approx. 2 servings/platefuls). (I prefer the thick, "dumpling"-size egg noodles; but fettucini, etc.—they're are all good.) Cook approx. 5 minutes, or to al dente state. (There's nothing worse than mushy pasta. Plus, they'll be cooked a bit more later.)
—Drain noodles in a colander. Turn heat to low. To the still-hot pan, add approx. 2 tablespoons of butter or margarine or olive oil. (The last is my new preference.) Add a pinch of basil, some garlic powder (and/or chopped garlic clove, if ambitious). Add now-drained noodles. Stir vigorously. Add as much grated Parmesan cheese as desired. Stir again. Salt and pepper to taste. (I use "No Salt," i.e., potassium chloride, which I now prefer to sodium chloride for purely irrational reasons.)

Wow—I actually have this as dinner/supper several times a month: no meat! (And no animal products at all, if you don't use butter. [Oops—correction: the EGG noodles, of course.])

(Oh, yeh: I suppose you should leave the "salt & pepper to taste" to other people, if you're lucky enough to live with someone else. I keep forgetting that possibility. And, oh, you might want to double the recipe, you lucky one.)

P.S.: "dinner" or 'supper"? We poor halfbreeds in SoDak had three meals: breakfast (totally optional), lunch, and supper. "Dinner" was that place your better-off relative took you out to every few years. But now, where I work, these people speak of "dinner" as an everyday occurrence. In fact, I've been to a good dozen or so every year these last few years. But I keep wondering, keep asking myself: "Aren't you guilty, Tom, for having dinner so often?"!

* A Dream Deferred: Aunt Bea!

On my GREAT INDIAN pages, I have some incredible Andy of Mayberry dialogue demonstrating the Anglo ideology regarding the Native American, circa 1960. Yep, the discourse presents the Indians as living a healthier, closer-to-the-earth lifestyle, but at the same time—the Indians are "devils." Curiously and/or symptomatically, this last statement (specifically: the "Shawnee—they're devils") has been expunged from the most recent TV version of this sitcom episode—that is, the one I just saw tonight. But I'd already transcribed the "devil" line from the original version on VHS, and so I wonder—uh—why are they erasing such "history"?

But that's the obvious socio-political shtuff. This time I noticed something maybe more precious. It's when Andy comes in and sees Aunt Bea, who's having a great time hammering on the piano & singing, apparently hammered from alcohol for the first time in eons, and Andy says, with a curious look: "You haven't played that piano in years." OH!—now there's an eternal note of sadness for yu'. As a musician who's progressed from various you can't's, I know how hard it is to make the psychic evolutions, and still love to play. "But Aunt Bea! What social/familial forces made it an either/or for yu, Auntie? Why'd yu' have to give up your music?!"

* God Is Red (and White and Red and . . .)

As a volunteer for NASCA (the Native American Spiritual & Culture Awareness group), at NSP (the Nebraska State Prison), I attended a fine get-together last TU night, of a buffalo-stew supper & speech-making. But I was troubled when another volunteer gave a talk himself, a wasicu who claimed to have had a vision of Leonard Crow Dog's father at age 6(?), and claimed that Leonard himself later told him that, yes, that was his father. He was embarrassingly apologetic (& understandably so) thruout his speech about how he wasn't trying to "over" on another people's religion, and that he still didn't "know much" about Lakota ceremonialism per se. And yet he went on to recount his own hanblecia (vision quest) from a few years ago, spoke cryptically of the heyoka, and generally put himself forward as an earnest initiate into Lakota "religion." (An awful word, at last, in this context.) I'm still not sure what to think of the fellow. He may well be an earnest & wonderful & enlightened dude. But in my teaching of NatAmer lit, etc., I've come across so many Indian wanna-be's & "Plastic Indian Medicine Men" that my initial response HAD to be negative, or at least suspicious. . . . But then, what about MY motives for this negativity—jealousy? As someone w/ Indian blood whose "red-skinned" mother herself had been raised an "apple," both of us less "close" to Rez ceremonialism than this guy? As always, such issues transcend any simple binary of "Red" & "White." Well, he ended with a fairly eloquent appeal to "us" Natives to be true to our traditional religious ways. But I suddenly wanted to ask him whether he had been true to his. Or wasn't that tradition (i.e., Christianity) good enough for him? Or why couldn't any Indian there that night have had a vision of, say, St. Francis, circa age 6, and have left his hopeless Hopi ways for good?!

* John & Martha VIII

(There are several levelsl of irony here, too.)

* ANDY of MAYBERRY

I just channel-surfed past The Andy Griffith Show, recalling my longtime judgment that it's the best TV sitcom ever. (Save yr "hayseed" jokes.) I've seen plenty of (reruns of) All in the Family, M.A.S.H., Seinfeld—and now I'm a big fan of Everybody Loves Raymond, having never followed the original run; but all the 70's thru even the 90's sitcoms seem dated, compared to the Everyperson/Everyplace comedy&realityland that was Mayberry. Of course, the first several seasons were the true masterpieces. The show already began to decline when "Barney" left, when "Goober" replaced "Gomer," when "Howard Sprague" and color TV showed up. And of course, there is not even a mention of an African-American, and the Native American is complete stereotypical myth when said race does appear in discourse (my transcription of crucial passages from the episode, "Aunt Bea's Medicine Man"). . . . But when Opie lets his baby birds go, and then laments the empty cage, and Andy says, "But don't the trees seem nice and full?"—all is forgiven.

* My Bourgeois Palate

I grew up in north Rapid City, SoDak (informally, the largest Rez in the state, I swear) eating potted meat sandwiches and mayonnaise sandwiches and government commodity canned & boxed goods—including commodity powdered milk: could you EVER get the lumps out, however much you stirred?! And what WAS bulgar, anyway? And why did canned commodity beef always smell like dog food? I remember getting food poisoning at Garfield Elementary: the school nurse drove me home first, to drink some milk, but when I told her sheepishly, as we stopped at my mailbox, that I'd have to mix it up first, she drove me straight to Sioux San (the Indian hospital).

Well, my tastes have remained pretty simple through the years, still including an occasional Totino's "dollar" pizza—the staple of my college years. But the English Department has introduced me to (Asian) Indian food, and frankly, I'm a fanatic about it maintenant—thanks, in part, to my wife's further "enabling." I also have two home-eating "vices": brie (or camembert)—which I buy once every few months, to spread lasciviously on French bread—and NOW, olives stuffed w/ garlic! Yes, they're damned near $5 a jar, but OH, they're good. My excuse is that they're not quite as expensive—or "decadent," to use the wife's word—as many of the sweets that she covets. But then, I don't like sweets, anyway. (Did we ever get commodity "candy" as kids? Not that I remember.)

* YouTube Debate: The Unasked Questions

I believe that tomorrow night is the CNN "YouTube" Democratic debate, for which "home youtubers" can send in their video questions for the candidates. Questions you WON'T hear in the debate:

1) What should the government be doing about Silicon Lizard? ["Silicon Lizard" = the title of an old surrealist poem of mine]

2) Please raise your hand if you think all this talk about religion in the primary debates has been a bunch of disingenuous, pandering, hypocritical bullshit. [Assuming no hands are raised, a follow-up question (the one that Larry King asked Paris Hilton!):] What is your favorite passage from the Bible? [Then:] How many minority groups does this passage alienate & ostracize?

3) Would you consider a gay Native American paraplegic as a running mate?

4) Please raise your hand if you really consider George W. Bush to be an illiterate nincumpoop who will certainly be remembered as the worst president in history by far.

5) Tell us what you think—or know—that the candidate to the right of you likes to do in bed, as his/her most lascivious & taboo turn-on. (The candidate on their far right can speculate instead on whether metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.)

6) When did you last beat your significant other?

7) If elected, do you promise never to serve, and to leave the country & never come back? [a paraphrase from somebody else's poem, by I forget who]

8) If you idiot Democrats couldn't even beat George W. Bush in two straight elections, what are you wasting our time for, again? (Shouldn't we select a candidate, at least, whose first name is CHAD?)

9) Given you liberals' great concern for global warming, will you promise to campaign around the country without the use of fossil-fuel transportation? (Hey, it'll work those hips & bellies off o' some of yu'.)

10) Will you PLEASE promise never to end a speech with anything close to "God bless America"? If not, could you define both "God" and "America" in your campaign materials? If no to both, could you please read Dante's Inferno and accustom yourself to the most nether circle of Hades, because that's where I'm telling you to go?

* Eco-Indian vs. Eco-Anglo

In The Journey, a museum in Rapid City, SD, humankind's concern for the environment is emblematized in a two-part exhibit, with a definite value-judgment timeline implied. On the left side of the presentation [photo above] is an archetypal Indian, as it were, living as one with the land–although, frankly, he looks rather stunned just to be alive. In the 2nd photo (the Native guy can still be seen, now on the far left), the Euro-American–or, the "new & improved man"!?–has a similarly healthy concern for the environment; moreover, with the aid of charts and graphs and Darwinian science, this dapper fellow must be considered even more eco-conscious: indeed, he is a fine tribute to human evolution, to the advance of civilization itself.  [Oh, my daughter tells me that the person on the right is a woman! Still hard to tell, even from the larger version of this photo, but now I guess she's right.]

* RADIO RANT: Blue Earth Inter-Tribal

"Blue Earth Inter-Tribal is the lodge for the 21st century[!!] Native American Traditionalist[!!]." (21st-century . . . traditionalist?!—I want my "New Age" and my "Old-Time" religion, too.) Yeh, and now they're advertising on network radio big-time. These people are f#$%s; er, fakes. There is no such thing as "Indian spirituality" that is not tribal-specific. (And what's up with their "Indian-feather" logo—is that a Star of David inside the circle?!) And as I've said already on my "Indian Pop Culture" pages, if they're chargin' yu' money, they ain't "authentic." This is just so much reprehensible bullshit, and an attempt, furthermore, to take advantage of a mainstream white culture that has found its own religion to be insufficient, wanting, no longer nurturing. (Hey, if that's your case, the SUN DANCE won't help yu'. [Hey-yeh-yeh-yelo.])

* Bury My Heart & Dances w/ Wolves

But at last, the movie is about Eastman's own tortured culturally hybrid soul.
My brother just sent me a homemade VHS recording of the recent HBO movie, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. (Our cousin actually got invited to the premiere a month or two ago, in Rapid City, SoDak, as an employee of United Sioux Tribes.) Well—I hated it immediately, with the opening gross historical inaccuracy of Ohiyesa/Charles Eastman being present as a boy at the Little Big Horn. He wasn't there. He wasn't even Lakota, but Dakota, for starters, an embarrassing fact that was glossed over by the (also historically bogus) use of "Sioux"—even by the "Sioux"—in much of the movie's dialogue. (In sum, Eastman was even more the "outsider" at Pine Ridge/Wounded Knee, for reasons beyond his Eastern education and assimilation.) Also, Eastman was much less questioning of the benevolence of white culture & colonization than the movie presents—especially before the Wounded Knee Massacre, anyway, at which point his memoirs reveal a new looking askance at the wonders of the colonizing project. But the title of his eventual book, From the Deep Woods to Civilization, implies no conscious irony, and he remained an assimilated Christian who never renounced his brainwashing that Western Civilization was positive human evolution at work.

I was also put off by the initial characterization of Sitting Bull as an egoist engaging in petty cruelty. Where is Tatanka Iotanka as wicasa wakan, as singer & seer? (That is, Sitting Bull was above all a "medicine man" who wrote a song to a meadowlark, not a political/hereditary chief per se.) The justification for this seems to be some formulaic plot/character transformation: "middle-aged grump/crank/egoist loses hubris and becomes old, venerable sage." (I myself am waiting for this to happen. To me.) . . . Other problems: Standing Rock (Sitting Bull's rez, in south-central North Dakota) and Pine Ridge (southwestern South Dakota) are sure a lot closer in the movie, "geographically"!?—for plot "integrity," obviously, especially in the conflation of Sitting Bull's murder and the Wounded Knee Massacre itself. And the cinematographic dramatization of this latter, the movie's apparent climax, pales in comparison to, say, Black Elk's or even Eastman's own written memories thereof. But at last, the movie is about Eastman's own tortured culturally hybrid soul. (Note the movie's final crucial image, a "union" of the crucifix and the feather. And this is also a typically Western-Civ. emphasis on the individual ego and all that "suffering hero's journey" stuff, I might add.) . . . A final minor reason for disliking the movie is Adam Beach's acting: sure he's the hunk-Native actor of our day, but I can't watch him in anything now without seeing his shit-eating grin in Smoke Signals in my mind's eye. But this is probably my problem.

However, there are several moving moments in the film, which, as with Dances with Wolves, prevent one from despising it completely. Like the finale of Dances, the words of Sitting Bull and Red Cloud at the "Council"—however historically inaccurate—make the Indian in me want to cheer and cry at the same time. . . . I recall a graduate lit. theory class in which a voluble&vociferous South American "radical" brought up Dances with Wolves, in the context of race and poco theory. She stated categorically that no "Indian" could/would tolerate the movie, given its various misrepresentations of Native culture (not that I'm sure that she could have pointed them out). I sat there—agawk, silent as Kaw-liga (the stereotype is true!?). I wanted to say—and curse myself to this day that I didn't say—"Well, I can name two 'Indians' who loved the movie: my MOM, and my BROTHER (whom they call 'Chief' at his job, to this day). And they both live in that local country where the movie was shot. And they both go up to Sioux San—in Rapid, en'it—for their meds. And your intellectual ass wants to deny them the right to enjoy one of the few semi-positive portrayals of the Lakota in the mainstream media, in their lifetimes?" But I didn't say a word, aware deep in my soul that, someday, the . . . blog would be invented.