WHERE HAVE ALL THE MYTHS GONE
Jack Elliott lives and works about an hour or so north of me, on the Canadian side of the border. We only know each other because we both think about the Blackfoot Confederacy on both sides of the border and because we are connected by membership in Academia.edu, which notifies each of us about the work of the other. Elliott concentrates on history, esp. very early times, while I also talk about contemporary rez folks I’ve known since the Sixties.
Elliott brings up something important:
“As as an archaeologist I have felt for some time Blackfoot and other plains people lived in a physical environment which was part of a multivariate & complex religious landscape filled with spirits and various spiritual sign posts, so to speak. In other words, a very different and more complex “real” environment than what we see or occupy today. But then I’ll never prove that, not only do I exist in a different reality, but the physical evidence for the traditional sign posts were picked up a century ago and piled in rock piles at the corners of fenced fields. “
Mostly I try to describe the real land but the actual geology and what depends upon it is always overlaid by what the culture brings to it, both changing and redefining it. He’s quite right that traditional sign posts were erased when the stones that defined places and trails were removed to corners of the geometric fields defined as arbitrarily as the 49th parallel itself. Even those who study meteorites, which on the prairie can be seen to fall flaming to the ground (and now with space debris doing the same) have been moved to the same rock piles, so that scientists can never mark their location patterns. They can only go to the rock piles with a metal detector and pick out the iron signals from the meteorites.
But no detector will pick out the patterns that formed from the aura of the experienced world as it was for the First Peoples. Some creatures are extinct — I don’t mean the dinosaur and megamammal fossils that erode out of the prairie but also the swift fox, a clever little animal that has now been reintroduced, and the condor, which is barely recovered in California and can’t come back to Montana because it depended on dead bison from the great herds, which are now gone. That’s not taking into account the vast grain fields and the web of irrigation canals that the beavers would love to convert back to free streams.
Horses were an addition rather than a subtraction, and so their meaning and mythology had to be built on what came before, partly from dogs and partly from elk, since they were called “elkdogs.” The forces surrounding dogs, who went where people went and bonded with individuals, followed the pattern of seeing them as people, even speaking. The pattern of elk was formidable, both warrior and sustenance. I don’t know of any elk speaking in a story — they remained prey.
“A physical environment which was part of a multivariate & complex religious landscape filled with spirits and various spiritual sign posts” is an accurate description of the world of the people before there were horses, when long distance travel was done by walking or by boat of some kind, following a continental layout of paths or waterways, but they weren’t afraid of travel and knew there were other kinds of people out there. In fact, they spoke of traveling into the sky as though it were a place as much as a dimension, a direction.
There was no separation between “religious” and secular and no hierarchical institution of privileged people who made rules and designed theological systems. There was no assigning of one place or action to “holy” or “sacred” because the whole world was sacred. This is what missionaries and all the other Euro invaders failed to understand because they were so limited to what they already knew.
At first my idea — shared by others — that if we went to the high prairie on the east slope and lived simply and attentively, we could get closer to the landscape understanding of even the romantic horse people. The wind is the same, the cold, the beating sun, and even in some places the grass full of camas and sweetgrass. But we are not the same. White people are not the same, but neither are the tribal people, many of whom are descended from both kinds. And as Jack notes, the land itself is different.
Now, searching through a lot of writing, I begin to realize that some people simply don’t have the capacity for metaphor which is so vital to thinking and particularly crucial for being able to feel the poetic dimension of whatever world they are in. In fact, they only register what is important in their own lives and don’t see anything else, neither the sunrise nor the beaver tracks. They don’t know any individual dogs and never try to figure out the lives of other people. But those were what the indigenous people found were the keys to survival.
Not to perceive the mythic auras of the geological and biological world around us, to live in a world of plastic and motors, is to be vulnerable to collapse because of unsuspected forces, just as the Covid-19 is sweeping through our lives today. The last solar storm hit Quebec in 1989. The Carrington Event hit in 1859, Solar tongues like this one hit about once a century. In 1859 they only killed the telegraphic apparatus, now our satellite system and electrical grid would be crashed.
Science telling us these stories has made us realize that “stone age people” only left stone material culture, plus their own bones. We’ve lost the mythic and symbolic guides they knew that guided their survival. “Religious” is a term used loosely that slips in and out of meaning European institutions based on hierarchy and wealth versus the indigenous ability to see holiness in all things. We’ve lost some of the awe and insight that protected us. We must seek new dreams.
