WE KNOW ONE WHEN WE SEE ONE
The photo is a beautiful woman, presumably “Indian,” against the backdrop of Monument Valley, one of the most often locations of the idea of “Indians.” She is wearing an outfit based on Pendleton blankets, overlain by a splendid turquoise and silver necklace as wide as her shoulders, reaching nearly to her waist. Hair is slicked back, neither braids nor windblown. We know rightaway that she is an “Indian” though no indigenous person before white contact has ever dressed that way. She is representing an evolved version of the original people of this continent.
As the work of reknitting a new culture for a people who are a composite of places and times goes forward, it sometimes devolves into provincialisms and micro-issues that people sink their teeth into and claim are definitive. Often contentious — like blood quantum that entitles access to tribal resources — or misunderstood and hated like the Bering Straits land bridge that never existed — or denied like the sea people of SE Asia riding the currents to South America before Europe had figured out the concept of nations — these points of argument and semantics have sucked away too much energy and reduced thinkers to tiny logics. Once so popular that whole university departments were invented for them, then the popularity got boring and the faculty and facilities were defunded.
But somehow the bits and pieces of a childish know-nothing public have accumulated into a whole new way of looking at the world — various and sometimes baffling, asking for reconciliations necessary because of federal attempts to do better (like moving rez folks to the city, where they learned a LOT from the ghetto people they met) plus new definitions of “owning,” how DNA works across generations, “nations”, family, and even “wealth”. What use is money if you have no water?
My work to understand why a Blackfeet Horn Society member, entirely sincere, could also be a faithful Methodist, has been an effort to go under and before our useless definitions of religion as human institutions to the original interaction between humans and the earth, a “place” that we have ignored and neglected, partly for political reasons and partly because we’ve clustered up in cities where we have no interactions with the earth except for carefully marketed excursions.
The timeliness of now is that what I call a “riptide” has become robust enough through enough different sources that we can understand everything in new ways. A human being is no longer mom’s best boy trying to be a hero, but rather a responsive, story-building participant in a community that sustains and guides its members, sharing everything right down to food gathered locally.
This is the opposite of trying to monetize one’s identity while suppressing alternatives. The idea releases a lot of energy from youngsters and makes sense of the attitudes of many old people. It bridges the specific poetry of life with new ideas that are hard to grasp.
I’m going to keep this short. Several generations of cats alongside me are sharing their body warmth and comfort with the increasing sunshine pouring through the window.
