PRAIRIE FUSION

The first wave of invasion from Europe was disease and the result was not “fusion” unless you count corpses, but fusion is not about destruction. It is about a new cultural entity arising. This is called “emergence.”

The second wave of invasion might have been horses. The prairie People and their dogs were already prepared for them because horses could be treated like big dogs. Still, they added the inconvenience of having to graze because constantly new grass had to be found and they didn’t winter well. But horses meant the ability to move fast and far and the glory of the power of a fighting man on a horse confronting someone on the ground. Leland Ground once told me his father’s name was actually “Fights from the Ground,” because his grandfather was a classicist who preferred to dismount when engaged in a battle.

With horses ceremonial Bundles could be bigger and now that Euro material culture was being transported, the Thunder Pipe calumets could be decorated with silk satin ribbons and brass falconry bells, while not giving up ermine hides and eagle feathers. in other words, the Bundles were material “fusion culture”. So were guns and steel needles. But they were the dangerous thin edge of a developing industrial revolution which unfolded across the continent, one reason the US could develop so quickly.

The “fusion” issue that still preoccupies many is the one between Euro culture and the various indigenous cultures. In the traditional Blackfeet lands, this first takes the form of Hudson’s Bay factors and hunters exploiting the fur-bearing creatures. The white men of the time were hard and adventurous, sometimes from the tough sea islands of north Britain. The indigenous women, maybe Cree, were also strong and carried the secrets of survival: what to cook, how to shelter, the maintenance of moccasins, and the tanning of hides. The children of these people were called “Métis” or mixed and arranged themselves culturally according to allegiance to mother or father. Some stayed close to their mother’s family and became “landless Indians.” Others learned to make wagons and play fiddles, becoming patriarchs of families who settled into towns.

English/Blackfeet partnerships included Culbertson and his Blackfeet wife, Natawista. The pair lived on a steamboat part of the time and on a riverside estate in St. Louis the rest. When Natawista was in the fine house, she wore a red silk dress in the fashion of the time, but kept her braids.

Half-breed can be a term of contempt and low-standing, but consider Charlie Russell’s cousin named Bent. “Because of his knowledge of both European-American and Cheyenne culture, Bent became a prominent and powerful person on the reservation. During the first several years, he tried to moderate hostilities between the two cultures. He learned that, as a half-breed or mixed-race man, he was an outsider to both.”

Those in power considered mixtures bad, to be avoided because they weakened allegiance to the powerful. Also, since the white entitlement to privilege stood over against the captured blacks who were defined by appearance as lesser and slaves, there was a morally confusing area in which some blacks were far more virtuous and capable than some whites. This raised too many questions.

Looking at people of mixed cultures as though they were perversions of what is “proper” is a strategy of weakness. Making divisions between groups is an invitation to inbreeding and forced entitlement for children of powerful people because they are weak. Before contact the prairie People grouped in families and affinities who moved over the prairie according to seasons. If someone was a troublemaker, they were driven out or maybe they just left, exasperated. They might join another group where they made a better fit. In short, each group developed a balance among about a hundred known people that was not based on notions of “race” or “class” or even inheritance, just acceptance. It was resilient and various.

If there was violent conflict between what we now call “tribes,” the women and children of the enemy were captured and taken into the band. This mixed genes enough that no one had to worry about who might be their cousin. In modern times when various strategies tried to change the lot of reservation people, those of marriagable age went to government schools with many tribes because to the whites, all Indians were alike. Luckily, many “Romeo and Juliet” mixtures developed into marriages and soon there were children who had connections to many tribes, unifying them across the continental ecosystems.

Slowly pan-Indian ideas developed and the pow-wow circuit across the continent created other opportunities for “fusions,” something like the ceremonial cycles of earlier times. During WWII and later, many tribal people were moved to cities with the idea that they would thus become assimilated. Instead they mixed with ghetto people and soon fused with blacks, Filipinos and Hawaiians.

Africa-rooted cultures are so colorful and full of energy that they attract even the most sophisticated of other places and times. In two separate strategies, some former slaves captured Christianity, imbuing it with the emotion and other-worldliness of the Pentecostal, and others went for the underculture, blasting dissonance and vulgarity into amazement.

Anthropology never quite gets hold of it. The problem is that anthropology — partly to justify the idea that they are a science and partly because of their formation in the 19th century age of taxonomy — puts everything in categories. The old idea that humans are labeled according to place and inheritance causes resistance to the new thought that we are all fluid and processing composites of influences, not just from environment but also from family, social structures, stories, and ultimately all experiences.

Religion has the same problem because of coming from an oasis culture dependent on one central authority that controls access. “Fencing the Communion” is always a force for installing gates and charging toll. Creating definitive “faiths” excludes all the other possibilities in order to encourage solidarity and allegiance. If each person is a complex dynamic transit through time within a guiding environment, the implications are vast. For us, hardly thinkable. But it’s time to try on the sky-domed prairie.