Thursday, March 12, 2015

HOW MUCH CAN WE KNOW EACH OTHER?

Browning, MT

In the Nineties beginnings of "bulletin board" internet sharing communities, I was subscribed to "RezNet," which was for Native Americans only.   I’m not an Indian.   A former student, now retired from a successful career as a management person in a think tank, was supposed to monitor it but didn't have time, so he used me as a scout.  He said, "When they ask whether you are Indian, just tell them you’re from Browning.”  (Browning is the headquarters of the Blackfeet Tribe.)  It worked and that was the birth of “prairiemary.  I was on RezNet for several years.  In the end I confessed I was white and resigned.  Some asked me to stay because they already knew me.  Others said they had recognized me early but since they knew me, they didn’t blow my cover.  Recently I asked if I could rejoin and they said,  “Nonononono!”  and laughed a long time.  They weren’t angry.  Neither was I.

At one point there had been a ferocious argument between me and some other women because I claimed I knew what it was like to be Native American because I’d lived in Browning a long time.  It took them days to convince me that my experience of place was not like theirs, that I didn’t have the internal “feelings” of a related and included person, and that they EXPERIENCED things that I didn’t even guess.  It’s not about knowing the names of stuff.  Nor was it just about surviving a holocaust.


On the other hand, I defended my position by saying that I’d participated in Bundle Opening ceremonies that they didn’t know about, since even in the Sixties they were kept very secret, esp. from children, since when it was forbidden -- even criminal -- activity even children would be punished by white authorities.  They imagined that I was just there like a tourist, ritual-cruising, or an anthro looking for article material, but I was there sincerely as a “keeper” doing everything I was supposed to except that I didn’t know the songs.  Mary Ground, an ancient, sat next to me and prodded me with a sharp finger if I went wrong.  But I knew the land and the animals.

Part of my array of sense memories has ever since been those ceremonies with their packed circle of old people, the smell, the rhythm of the hand drums, the taste of the ceremonial sarvisberry soup, and the sound of Blackfeet words and songs.  As a keeper I took the wrapped animals in my hands and prayed with each while holding them to each shoulder.  I do not attend the contemporary ceremonies that use the same materials.  The participants now are middle-class, wearing new versions of the clothes of their great-grandparents.  Many are attached to the tribal college.

Bob Scriver's portrayal of the opening of a Beaver Bundle

When I was teaching at Heart Butte, one of the more remote communities, the girls complained that I didn’t understand them.  That night I wrote a first-person essay inhabiting the world of the girls.  Next day I took it to class and gave them each a copy, asking them whether it were accurate.  Reluctantly they said, "Well . . . it was close."  Then their assignment was to write their own version.  They did well, though I couldn’t grade someone’s experience and didn’t want to distract us by correcting grammar, etc.  At some point I sent the essays to the state education officials.  Accidentally, my essay got in there, too, which is why I have no copy now.

The state officials picked out my essay and assumed one of the kids had written it, so they praised it highly and suggested we should try to get this child a scholarship for college.  I confessed.  They then rejected the entire pack of essays.  They had not only rewarded the most “white” piece but also punished the others for not conforming to grammar rules.  (All is not lost.  The present state superintendent of education in Montana is tribal, though quite assimilated.  Her father was a student of mine and has served as the superintendent in Heart Butte.)  

No one inquires what it is like to be me, though lots of people assume they know -- not just Indians.  “Indians” are a vivid, romantic, often fantastic category that unified a wide array of people.  Old white English teachers are -- to use a Blackfeet locution, “nothing people.”  (They call themselves the “real people.”)   Anyway, as one tribal woman in the community pointed out, white teachers only drifted through -- there was no use in getting to know them.

Jackie Parsons is a force in the Montana humanities, 
a tribal judge, and a casting director for movies.

I am very much gripped by the media culture’s template of the reliable, earnest, loving woman who finds a brilliant and promising but flawed man and through her love and support redeems him, allowing him to flower into true genius.  This was the motor in my marriage, easily recognized by people who knew us both and accepted as explanation and justification.  I knew that man “inside and out.”  (My published biography of him is called “Bronze Inside and Out.”)  Better than he knew himself, since so much of himself was unconscious, in the limbic “dark” brain.  

He said to me once,  “You know what you CAN do, but you don’t know what you CAN’T do!”  How does one know until they try and fail?  In his inner world all failures were simply blanked out, shameful.  His fourth wife was well-known as a drunk, but he protested,  “I asked her if she was an alcoholic and she said she wasn’t.”  So, to him, she was not.  He was a great believer in will power, not insight nor unconscious motives.  The world when he was maturing was the same.

But I grew up in “know thyself” times and took Method acting training as well, which is all about searching one’s self and others.  The classes I took from Alvina Krause at Northwestern in the late Fifties were intense, rather like the more passionate religious devotions that insist on discernment and vocation.  But acting was taught as a “tool of the trade,” not a narcissistic indulgence, for the purpose was always what the CHARACTER was about, not the actor.  Art can be religious.

My preaching years

Thus, when I did actually go to seminary and enter the UU ministry, I was surprisingly unsuitable.  It was about masking, cheerleading, entitlement, and being comfortable.  People, both colleagues and parishioners, were constantly trying to figure me out while hiding who they were.  People who were dying or in emotional anguish or considering suicide, didn’t tell me because they didn’t want me to not like them anymore.  They were ashamed of "having cancer."   (They didn’t see my taste -- sometimes preference -- for the dark and crazy.)  If they would accept any help at all, it would be from a shrink or doctor, because to them “church” was Sunday morning dress-ups.  Maybe a little social action.  Being accepted and praised.

So now I’ve disclosed a lot about myself, but you still know “nothing.”  And I have no way of knowing my readers.  I could pay money for analysis of my blog readers, and since they are global, I would probably be surprised and interested.  But it would only tell me algorithms
Anyway, I’m too busy writing.  Maybe you want to come along, maybe not.

Blackfeet Country

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