Monday, September 2, 2024

Ken Morrison and the Abanaki. The Embattled Northeast: The Elusive Ideal of Alliance in Abenaki-Euramerican Relations, the Solidarity of Kin


 Cannibal giants metamorph negatively, pretending to be kin until killing and eating people with that age old cannibal perfidy. People became cannibals when they hardened their hearts toward their kin. Restoration of social relation could heal these rifts, the Wabanaki thought, by addressing the cannibal as father or grandfather, appealing like Dr. King to a higher nature, conscience. Kindness to the giant was their hope of transformation, a notion transferred to the last episode of Fargo, season five. Unlike Fargo's desperate hope for an ersatz salvation, the Wabanaki were destroyed.

Truly naive, the European technology that the modern Algonquin have embraced, Iphones, computers, nano parts and digital DNA, to make the analogy. The myths are pictures of the native and the alien, Algonquin vs. European, giant vs. Glosknap, cannibal forces of conflict vs. their resolution. But these are viewed by the European scholar of the past after the conflict ends in his favor, but what about when the conflict is not resolved and the viewer is the native? In the war of the natural vs. digital the conflict is global, but the giants and cannibals are still the devourers. English treachery and the greed of European morality altogether dispossessed the occasional good English altruist who skewed the native just enough to ensure total extinction. So Weymouth kidnapped five Wabanakis to England. KIDNAPPING AND TECHNOLOGY were the two salient seductions of what the alien did to the native. Does it make you think of our own time at all?

Wishful thinking makes the scholar say the opposite of the fact, that "from the beginning of contact the Algonquians had an informed realistic view of the challenges of the cultural encounter." 119 This is so horribly wrong since Glusknap (old spelling) and that (theology of) acceptance of the other, like the Jesuit astronomers' redemption coming from space, made them miss entirely the horror of evil they encountered. Myth and folklore document this adaptability, this naïveté, in the cultural evidence of stories and poems.

Myth says one thing history another, but when they are one and the same we have apocalypse. I love this kind of talk, that "myth is central to the study of cultural encounter precisely because it provides the template shaping people's ongoing production of identity" 120. This identity provides security with common shared public values. But Contact makes for decentering when people question these values. However it came, Algonquian values from the conflict of summer and winter, relatives vs. strangers, the center vs. the periphery, women in camp vs. men hunting in the forest, made for adaptive values, the critic says, trying to make a whole thought of their one world, which itself is a human misnomer. There is no human whole thought. It is impossible that humans solve their contradiction even if some myth or religion they practice says it does. Positive against negative, the hero Gluskap against the cannibal giants of windigo, Kiwakwe, chenoo, seek a solution of good and evil, but there is none, the positive sharing power of Gluskap vs. the negative antisocial giants of greed, is supposed to transform the world, meaning absorb and redeem the evil that is made human in other tribal members.

Gluskap learns to be good by one struggle at a time until he releases the captive animals and forbears revenge. It is a perfect tale for society within itself, in its one world, but it utterly fails when confronted with the outside; there only the Hopi view survives, http://www.colorado.edu/ReligiousStud... IMPLACABLE WAR WITH THE OTHER. Do not compassionately stay your hand against the enemy. Execute him. Every effort Gluskap made to transform the world was to bring the natural, the animal into harmony and kinship when the people sought to survive the drought by taking to the water as fish or the forest as game: "my relative of a strange race, my spouse's parents" 123.

Treating animals as kin they extended this courtesy to the English, a big mistake, a kind of genocide by myth. To utterly oppose the English however was to deny their religion and its constructive myth to accommodate the world. But the world is implacable. Read for yourself 124 the catalog of cannibal giant English. Cannibal giants were vicious, envious, selfish in nature, refused to share, pretended to be kin in order to eat human flesh, thus violating the paramount order of kinship. Humans could become cannibals but could cannibals be human? Gluskap said yes. Since humans became cannibals when they hardened their hearts, cannibals could be human if softened in healing. The invited in the Nephilim. This dialectic annihilated the people.

Gluskap showed that technology should be used to socially construct the people for human welfare. In their grasping, Europeans were considered to be like the cannibal giants. How the Wabanaki were corrupted by commercial contact with Weymouth and kidnapped is the cautionary tale of our own Black Science of the present. For you can have a new kidney and new genes if you will just get aboard ship. When the Wabanaki subsequently eliminated the Popham colony the internal pressures triggered by this betrayal of their religion weakened them. 128 Hence cultural contact, wave on wave of epidemics, liquor, factionalism and division, the cannibal virus so to speak. In post contact history Gluskap's teaching became more urgent. Europeans were identified with sinful Adam, rebaptized, etc. Post contact history we have a lot of and more is coming.

Obviously Ken's work on Algonquian myth in Mapping Otherness https://books.google.com/books?id=QPN... would appeal to me, stories stuffed with the cultural evidence they embody, the tension between myth and history, to reverse the ethno historical dependence on European documents. I have an immense appreciation of Howard Norman's books on the Cree.https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... All my writing on Pop, Susan, Wonk Yaps, Orcs, is like the Indian myths, except mine are about the Caucasoid, http://encouragementsforsuch.blogspot... stories with evidence of cultural encounter (with the transhuman and science as if they were European conquerors). In the conflict of these cultures with the mythic origins of the native, i.e. the natural world, everything said of the European conflict with the native applies to the transhuman conflict with the natural, except there is no Glooskap who struggles the hard way to preserve against evil; there is only evil as a kind of joke. No maturation through concern for others, but there might be a killing of the giant frog that ate all the world's water at the end. When the Algonquian were deprived of world and water they changed form into fish and bear and thus became the other by transplantation, a sort of combine with the energy of the other. But in this alienation into animal others as kin, their strategy of goodness, once transformed, hoped to change the European into kin, which shows how wrong they were. Glooscap faced the challenge of the other European constructively, like kin, hence the benignity of this belief empowered their annihilation. They should have read Franz Fanon.


Ken Morrison: In Memorium. Pre-Contact, Contact, Post-Contact Glooscap. Contact Beyond the Abenaki!

I come to these matters as a poet, not hampered by any particular disbelief. Maybe a little kin to the Abenaki, dreams, visions, I take the case Ken lays out as prophetic of our own. Hence I design five scenarios of Contact beyond the Abenaki:

Countdown 1: Baptizing Martians
Countdown 2: Oracle AI
Countdown 3: The Conscious Unconscious
Countdown 4: Collective Psychopathic God particles
Countdown 5: Woman and DNA Against the Gods

I lived next door to Ken Morrison, 1946-2012, http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/nat... for 15 years. At that time there were three professors on our half block, Kenneth M. Morrison, Professor of Religion at ASU, Lew Alquist, Professor of Art at ASU 1946-2005, a positive influence on our artist son, http://www.rememberlew.blogspot.com/ and myself, sometimes Renaissance English. Ken's interests in gardening and research paralleled mine. We both moved to be neighbors within three months of each other. His dissertation written in 1975, the same year as mine, was on the Abenaki, various tribes that lived in the river basins of New Hampshire, Maine, and New Brunswick who fought many wars against the French and English. His Abenaki and their relations with New England and New France, 1600-1727, had much in common philosophically with mine of the same year, Restorations of the Golden Age in New World Discoveries [1500- 1680], which was preceded by a faux MFA thesis, Ameryca! (Austin 1973-4). Ken inspired two stories after I knew him, Christmas City and Gardens and Grapefruits http://users.synapse.net/kgerken/Y-07....

We had come to Phoenix for the medical internship at Good Samaritan, but in the first ten years here lived south of McDowell at 24th street. We were there when the freeway was built, had moved into the derelict neighborhood just a year before. All social relations had fragmented, leaving behind drug houses, gangs and illegals. Our immediate six neighbors on all sides were widowed white women in their 60's and 70's left over from the lowering social tide. They had pomegranates and grapefruit trees and oleanders to hide the gangs. We had three breakins before our first black chow joined us as a stray. Finally, when the immediate neighbor lady to west went belly up (she and her daughter inspired the notorious Susan http://www.friggmagazine.com/issuetwe...) and the house redeemed from demo by a speculator at the last minute was rented to people who stored motor oil in five gallon buckets under the lemon trees, I had to move. The house next to Ken was the one provided. Ken had only arrived there himself three months before. The day we moved in I looked over the back fence and there were four card tables set up with candles with people playing canasta! No wonder I thought it was heaven. http://aereiff.blogspot.com/2012/12/a...

Ken's study is anthropological, ethnohistorical, sociological, but from a personal point of view that is engaging and well expressed. His writing puts his best face forward. My writing on the new world is often symbolic, facetious and opaque, but I never set out to be a scholar or professor, only a poet, which is no excuse for being neither.

Ameryca is all about contact effects and the primitive which contact destroyed, and then destroyed itself. http://encouragementsforsuch.blogspot... Restorations of the Golden Age is about the metaphor of discovery more than discovery itself, how inflated rhetoric of poets made the new into the old, into impossible topographies of gold, into the woman and lovemaking, into the act of love as a love voyage, into other world destinations, Bermuda into Hades, Virginia into heaven, or the new, new man. So myths of the gold tree, the gold man, heaven and hell, beauty and love were preoccupied filters, metaphors of the new but as the old. This very playful but serious business preoccupied the best minds of the English Renaissance which criticized empire even while they built it and criticized commercialism even while establishing it. So while the ship captains were probing the coasts off Penobscot and kidnapping Wabanaki to take back to the King, the poets at home were laughing and chortling and not getting at all how in this the beginning of the new world they were sowing its end in its destruction. but they did get that woman was the world and the new world was the world, so in a 400 year shot they progressed civilization to ruination and the earth to apocalypse.

Ken was an atheist or if not then a profound agnostic so I find it noteworthy he cried for three days after reading Buber, as his Obit says http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/nat.... I took it as axiomatic that a professor of religion would be antagonistic to faith. The founder of the ASU Religion Dept was a pronounced skeptic in his writings about spirituality. http://pennsylvaniafathers.blogspot.c... I say this from their universal rejection of supernatural paraphernalia, angels, inspiration, miracles and denial of scriptures in various ways. Ken made a perfect investigator of Indian religion, but shortsighted as the Algonquin about evil.

Is it consciousness if it only happens after the fact? All these reflections come some years after Ken's death, but last night, 7/13/15, wasn't the first time I had a dream visit with Ken. I dreamed of taking his class, needed for a doctorate, political theory or post modern grammar, which he taught. He had a radio show. Sitting next to him before class, convivial etc, after waking, I searched him looking for an authority he used to cite named Sam Gill on native American religions, and found it! His biblio is fascinating. Then I found his pdf on baptism! It all reminds of the dream I had of Carroll Abbott that sparked the writing of Native Texans http://humanbotany.blogspot.com/2011/... as if all these things lay just under the surface waiting to be awakened. I hate to say it, but when we finally get to where we forget ourselves so much that we are not conscious then our best work perhaps can emerge, if we live. I live in the unconscious origins http://perkiomenapocrypha.blogspot.co... long before these realizations of the singlehearted love of my wife from the moment practically we met, stemming from that second in June 1959 when Yeshua made himself known to me and I joined with the roots of 1024 genomes in ten generations.

Mapping Otherness: Myth and the Study of Cultural Encounter https://books.google.com/books?id=QPN...
The Cosmos as Intersubjective: Native American Other than Human Persons http://www.newstudiesonshamanism.com/...
The Solidarity of Kin https://books.google.com/books?id=-t6...
Baptism and Alliance 1990 http://www.uvm.edu/~mlwalker/Thesis%2...
Towards A History of Intimate Encounters: Algonquian Folklore, Jesuit Missionaries, and Kiwakwe, The Cannibal Giant 1979

Threnody for Kenneth M. Morrison

These ideas abound in Ken's essay Native American Other than Human Persons, reality assumptions embedded in Algonquin: the master of animals, human and animals communicate in dreams, entities who live in other space time dimensions. Animals are human beings who have donned costumes and masks that created their animal forms, green corn and harvest rituals, first salmon, buffalo renewal ceremonials, bear ceremonialism revolve around human well being gained from gifting acts to other persons where words are intentional beings that represent an objective reality as kachina masks give physical form to cosmic persons encountered in dreams.

It is tragic Ken and I never conversed deeply over these matters that mean so much to me in fictional reality, if not in philosophy. Communication with a person is altogether different from reading his work. I never took him seriously as an intentional being because he did not seem to see beyond his words or himself into the realms, as if he were giving by rote things he had heard but did not know himself. This is the same impression I get of all the people I have met who say they are influenced by Buber. In all this writing and talking Momaday http://humanbotany.blogspot.com/2011/... was never mentioned, as if the bear were deceased with the past, Rainey Mountain gone with the American prairie, as if all those thoughts about the other than human beings were theory and not the teachings of the great hearted chow-chow and all the dogs who love the dawn and the moon and the night air who cover us with their love, the direct apprehension of reality without interpretation. Denatured, like Richard E. Wentz who writes so much of the Pennsylvania Dutch but thinks heaven an obsolescent metaphor or those writers about fraktur or any other primitive religion who have not known its verity. They at least were able to get Nietzsche into their hearts. This was felt so that when Ken's garage was broken into and he was nonplussed I merely screwed a 3/4 sheet of plywood over the broken door. He would send away for exotic plants that could not thrive in our heat, so I gave him stands of aloe which still proliferate in his yard long after he is gone. If we never really had a conversation, I did hear of his activities, helping his grad students get posts at which he was good and many students would visit him at home. But he smoked, another rote effect, which caused his demise no doubt. He had moved to Oregon to live with his brother in law Geoff Glover, http://www.thesiuslawnews.com/v2_news... also early deceased, mentioned in the acknowledgments of Kinship, who had visited many times, who would repair his house. Ken was sitting at the breakfast there talking and simply on the instant died. At the beginning of Embattled he speaks of a cabin where he took seclusion. He had one of these here and would go many long weekends out of the month and much in summer outside of Prescott on the mountain, but, another anomaly, he double and triple mortgaged his house during the fat years here to pay for improvements to the cabin, so when the evaluations crashed he could not afford the increased mortgages and that was the reason for the move to Oregon. We had a rooster and three hens wild on the street then, who had chicks several times, but gradually got whittled down till only the rooster was left, who would come and roost at night in Ken's aqua vitae and make such racket in the morning that I considered dealing with him, but never did. He was very beautiful, but one morning I came out and he was dead in the drive as if his neck had been wrung. I gave him an honorable burial wrapped in a red T and rosemary. He has a gravestone. So came the end of that first event when we had moved in and saw them in the back yard playing canasta. He did not have a woman. The house was repossessed. an ex-student was recruited and her taxi driver friend to live rent free until the bank ordered them out after six months. So all our lives are contradicted. Ken's studies are anthropological, ethnohistorical and sociological, but from a personal point of view engaging and well expressed. His writing puts his best face forward.

YESU, YESU, FILL US WITH YOUR LOVE, SHOW US HOW TO SERVE, THE NEIGHBORS WE HAVE FROM YOU. 

The Solidarity of Kin

 He says the Wabenaki believed that inviting the lost, fragmented, rejected and rejecting spirit into the family, honoring him, her or it with family titles, father, father-in-law, implicitly comforting them, clothing and reclothing them, and feeding them real food, which means the food of the soul so they do not have to eat the hearts of the enemies in ritual cannibalism or famine, giving them children to play with, brings them back from their cold into the warmth of the hearth and home and kin. Whether we have any such structures and processes any more as a people, that doubt he says is itself a hindrance to the restoration of the human in lost, separated souls. The 2020s are divisive and separative, on purpose, commanding acquiescence of the individual to the group stereotype that is itself a false windigo pretense of the human is the real danger of the ice giant, the only selfish aggressor. It pretends all too well to be one of us and to compel our acceptance of its eating of the human heart. Many if not all of the Wabenaki myths are metaphoric to us, so ritual cannibalism, eating the enemy heart to gain its courage is a metaphor in our language in the saying "eat your heart out," an expression of jealousy, but that is the point, our courage does not lie in the enemy heart but in our own, and our fulfillment is not in the enemy success but in our own. So we are presented with the ice giant verily.

My interactions with this pose a kind of analogy of the Jesuit with the Abenaki cultures where the priest supplanted the shaman because famine and disease (initiated by the priest) especially vitiated shaman authority in the tribes. Who is the priest in this analogy and who the Indian? Who lives or dies? Inviting the priest to serve as kin however is not what happened. The priest was invited to supplant the spiritual governance of the tribe which became its downfall. Consider that the priest cured the disease he himself brought. Amazingly the priest was made over into a new Jesuit Gluskap! "The Jesuit priests then, entered Algonkian traditions sometime during the seventeenth century, performing roles comparable to the benevolent Gluskap" 76. More than Frenchification, this is undermining from within the social structures that had been their means of survival. All this shows the importance of recognizing post contact realities, again a metaphor of the transhuman, technology, modernism, whatever you will, for once the native has been supplanted it does not return, except in reinventions of the modern, which are themselves pretenses of kinship. I see all this as most fertile pollination of the metaphor of contact and multi-dimensionality and take contact as every effect of technology and civilization to bend the will of the (native) person to its empire. Are we the Abenaki? Not if we want to win. Win what exactly? That is the problem the same as where to flee in the Day, to the mountain or to the sea? Well neither, so that leaves, as my interlocutor says, the valley. The worst choice of all. http://insightstatutes.blogspot.com/2... So whether to remain in ignorance in the face of these contacts and be carried by the contemporary delusion or to resist them, alas says Hamlet, that I was born for such a time as this. Well you may think it Hamlet, but it is Esther. I am led merely by the prose in this thought, that Esther has born to intercede for her people against the forces of their destruction, the ice giant Haman, but there was no integration, merely execution, even if Haman was invited to repent. If the priest represents the power of the new contact then the primitive is the tribal, the one on the outs of empire, and appointing the priest to be a Gluskap is absolutely in the vein of baptizing martians http://insightstatutes.blogspot.com/2.... Inviting ET to a bishopric, everyone else takes the mark of the beast except those in that time who do exploits.

I am nothing if not facetious. This is all reeducation to the religion, psychology, physics departments. The ice giant is reeducated to be kin. Gluskap is reeducated to be a priest. Students are re educated to be new members of their global re-tribal society of the the new world, Caliban is reeducated to become a man, Prospero puts down his wand, and your phone is bugged. How's them cookies? So it's a tossup as to who you will serve. Because know this, you must you will be brought under control.

Pursuing Gluskap, II. Ice Giants. [Part I: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...] I will admit to this confession publicly made, that "I have done what anthropologists want, taken back the native as my own. It admits too much to live the other way. Whether at bus stop or back fence stories pass as found, plain speaking without fiction embarrasses the text. Away with Eskimo, Caribbean divines, myths carried all along. Excavate the Caucasoid within! You will find that primitive thought lost in the forests of homeless scutter, wander while fleeing the scutes, troglodytes of leather whose shells scupper an alternate universe, these folktales performed at banquets to large quantities." http://newdeadfamilies.com/links/curr... biggest problem I am having with Caucasoids seeking the spiritual, which Ken brings to a head in his intro, citing Beck and Walters, The Sacred, and Gill's Native American Religions, is that when Beck and Walters say the sacred means "something special" they prove they know nothing about it, for it is exactly the opposite. Gill saying humans share a "single nature" expressed in "images, actions and symbols" is mere religion of the self, warmed over Jung http://insightstatutes.blogspot.com/2.... Gill's Disenchantment http://www.colorado.edu/ReligiousStud.... Gill, buber, Morrison are opposed by the one Emmanuel Levinas who says I-Thou is a crack and only we/Thou cuts it. Presenting the noble Hopi practice of demystification, but after comparing it to several other versions of chicanery, proves Gill's own by trying to make the Empty Tomb a disenchantment when it is just opposite. But don't argue with a fool lest thou be like him. Caucasoid spirituality cannot find itself so it must study the other http://encouragementsforsuch.blogspot... and become it, before it eats it up, so here comes Gluskap again and we'd like to prevent him from the social psychosis of those anti-social Caucasoid cannibal ice giants, Gill, Wenger, Morrison!

OK so maybe that's too harsh and Ken gets an exemption from the roundhouse indictment of his profession. After all he's a historian really, not a metaphysician. His writing is calm compared to theirs, and positive in that it looks for connections of a positive sort too between the native and the colony, the Wabenaki and the Jesuit. It presents the dilemma of identifying the positive, reintegrative forces and processes of my own creation. I would think the Flower Guys, as my grand daughter calls them, are reintegrative, joining, rejoining the natural and the human into one fabric, human bodies with flower tops. This theme seeks me out from the initial "way into the flowering heart" of Sir Walter Raleigh's loss of his son in Guiana to years later in all the Pennsylvania Dutch mythology of the flowering heart.

Saturday, August 31, 2024

Excavate the Caucasoid

 

Excavate the Caucasoid

Preliminary report on the behavioral  experiment we ran of your Anthropology 2005

To Messers M, S &G:

The preliminary report on the behavioral  experiment we ran on your Anthropology site is enclosed under separate cover. Notice here serves as acknowledgment to your members of their participation Your names remain anonymous. Briefly restated, the purpose was to mimic traditional fieldwork, isolate a community, present a conflict and analyze the response from a single day, a holiday if possible. You recall that our goal was a population of 50 responses. This was reached.

The final report will appear elsewhere.

 

This tyranny of authority, of agreement in science, intellectual fascism

Such strong displays of emotion and rejection mask serious defensiveness and insecurity. Evidently the idea of excavating the Caucasoid self is intolerable. On one side of the ditch where we are excavating your "community" is on the other side filling in the hole.

 If am guilty of facetious thoughts they are not poetic. Maybe in scrolling communities I should have gone past anthropology to archeology. Dig up the brown guy, dig up the black guy, dig up the short guy. But the intellectual Caucasoid is the holy subgroup. Tamper with his grave at your own risk. I am laughing at your gang. You put on the clothes but there's nothing inside but petulas.

If you think this writing in any way poetic that is because yours is. Listening to the sound of your own voice has passed on this thread.

You say "people have asked" that "we already know that in this community." This vanishing "knowability" you speak of, that subjectivity makes our theory of knowledge "extremely precarious," cultural study "inherently unstable" are all ways of saying no, no, no, I cannot bear to look at the thing.

You charge me for not offering any resolution to the "globalization of whitening." The Resolution here however is to excavate the Caucasoid. Instead of denying that deal with it. Dig him up, that white onion (this is a metaphor). The good thing is he is accessible, you sleep with him, you eat with him. He is you. He's in your family, in your home, in your school. He doesn't live abroad in caves. You know I think you should love him too, just as much as you would any bushman.

Evacuating Science

Science, they say, has no subjective meaning, but what else does the modern have but his so-called science? Two directions spring from this. The first, as in Kuhn's Theory of Scientific Revolutions, concerns the middle echelons of science which establish protocols out of mutually held ignorance turned into peer dogmas, through which must pass all "science" which these referees then co-define.

The other direction occurs with a creative thinker in some field whose work is panned by these "peers," but which eventually turns out to be ground breaking. This work is first labeled nonsense. Our interest here turns on the subjectivity of these two directions. 

The first class is a good worker but who has no independent judgment. Neither has "he" much subjective life. Do not ask what is a subjective life. See the Science of Anthropos. Lacking this subjectivity the worker scientist fills his emptiness with dogma. But the creative thinker takes the subjective as his text and discovers from it that new foundation. In such matters there is no difference between the Caucasoid and the rest.

Exemptions must always be granted to these creative minds. They tend to see the other as the self. Immense empathy may open their minds. Their hearts, whether white or black, their skin, whatever the ethos, whatever the field of study, even if they’re English, their hearts are not empty and their minds are not filled with science. Competency in your specialty should be granted. To debate the validities of subjectivities a mass evacuation is being scheduled.

The modern thinks himself superior. If he gets connected to a freundschaft a lot of emotions are aroused, but they are his own and of his own people and if he thinks a lot about it he can in some ways approach it. But he will never approach another tribe in another culture except as a foreigner.

You are saying that we are, or should all be, at least folk anthropologists. But what Brit culture approaches the Amer native? Pueblo elders are keen on preventing the entrance of modernity, which, again generalizing is in sum, the white man's heart [of darkness]. That heart is woefully lost, especially in its exploration of the [foreign] native, except in a case where it seeks to connect to its own origins. Is there any way you view those origins as "primitive?"

If the white science of anthropology seeks to find in the other old what it has demythologized and lost in itself it is truly parasitic.

So much more to say on this. What shall we do, excavate the Caucasoid?

WHERE HAS THE GENERIC CAUCASOID NOT CONDUCTED CULTURAL WAR to PRODUCE THE MODERN?

If we go with the English example it is evident that to England the animus is not just against the native, it is against the foreign. Every culture ever penetrated by the English was considered foreign to them in large and in small. In Wales the Welsh street names are crossed out on the signposts and graffitied into English.

The larger point about our Caucasoid is that he is THE modern paradign:

THE CAUCASOID IS A SYMBOL OF THE MODERN.

It takes some doing to argue this in the face of his defensiveness. Exceptions aside, the greater point is not about the English, that's just an example, or even about the Caucasoid, it's about THE MODERN.

Biology is as lost as psychology about it.

Is there a Caucasoid culture that has contradicted the cultural war against all other cultures?

Is there a possibility of a "pueblo modernity?" The two are impossibly opposite. To be Hopi is to speak Hopi, live Hopi, respect Hopi. There is no room to be Hopi and be modern. A "modern" Hopi is denatured.

Denaturing the Hopi or any other group by the Caucasoid and by the Modern is the point.

Steal the heart! Steal the nature and replace it with modernity. Then you are all done being Hopi or Zuni or Navajo. Modernity is a diffusion of the FOLK. The children of the modern are so lost in the DARK MODERN HEART they think modernity is an identity.

HEY CAUCASOID, EXCAVATE YOURSELF.

What is the sound of a guinea pig squealing?

A lot of priceless information , misunderstanding of language, bored teenagers, assumptions of the poetic, Marxism, racism,

Single recommendations include an age limit of 30 to protect the immaturity of the members and stated conventions of discourse on name calling.

You are of course correct about full disclosure. To mimic however means in imitation of, that is, it is not just exactly like the real thing, certainly, as you point out, in any traditional fieldwork sense. I'm sure you appreciate that. Also, and importantly for the success of the exercise, and since the experiment is now closed it does no harm to reveal this, it was conducted undercover. Perhaps this has occurred before.

 

In all fairness, how else would such amazing posts have been elicited from such obviously specious logic and details? I thought before the fact that the exercise belonged more in a psychological setting, but the principals picked the forum. I'm just doing my job. I certainly wish all of you the best. The real work now begins in analyzing the data which is not exclusively my task. I am however to consult in it and perhaps write the final report. Objectively, the data itself would answer all your questions.

If you want a look at the preliminary report please let me know and I will see if they will allow its release to you.

Mass Evacuation

Debate the validities of subjectivities. What else does the modern have but his so-called science? A mass evacuation is being scheduled.

 

Seeing Through Be

 

Seeing Through Bear


Bear is a template of the wilderness” (Scott Momaday, Conversations, 9).Bear is a looking glass to see mountain, “if you look at him very closely and long enough, you will see the mountains on the other side.

“I am a bear,” Momaday says, which when I hear this I hear, “I am a man, unperjured.” “You accelerate your activity…feel greater kinship with the animal world and the wilderness," (Conversations, 16). “I am less interested in defining the being of Bear than in trying to understand something about the spirit of wilderness of which Bear is a very particular expression… In the Bear’s House),

I don’t suppose I’d have been so interested without experiences of bear in the Mogollon and White Mountain wilderness before the time we camped with dogs or be writing this without having formed a bear out of clay and felt the profundity and joy of its squeezing. Inquiries finding out wilderness, touch it, “don’t give themselves easily to any domination.” Bears are hard to control (Conversation, 15).

I saw Bear at a bookstore signing. Nobody was there when I took House Made of Dawn (1968) to sign so I asked a picture with his signature. He asked “of what?” “Anything at all.” He drew a bear.

Conversations (1989) with Momaday is one way to enter. Participation with prairie and herds in The Way To Rainy Mountain includes bear, prairie, herds in all its lenses. I got Conversations at a showing of his Scot Momaday exhibited a series of bear monotypes at the Ohl Gallery. Some appear as covers for The Ancient Child (1989) and In the Bear’s House (1999).

Seeing mountain through bear, "even Urset, who is the original Bear...is symbolic and transparent, more transparent than real" (9). A see through bear, a mask, what on the other side? Bear is "an imitation of himself, a mask. If you look at him very closely and long enough, you will see the mountains" (9). “I have been possessed of Bear’s spirit” (9). He doesn't say Bear has possessed my spirit. What spirit is this? Who knows about it? To me it is not an animism, a primitive idol or a demon, but the One thing that possesses him. I have notes of it on scraps of paper on my desk, of the doe bearing fawn, they crouch down till they bear, the untied wild donkey's ropes, whose home is the wasteland, the salt flats. He sees wilderness through Bear and though wilderness this One, should you learn to name it: “Let me say at the outset that this is not a book about Bear (he would be spoken of in the singular and masculine, capitalized and without an article), I am less interested in defining the being of Bear than in trying to understand something about the spirit of wilderness” (9). So he says that while we have not seen the spirit of wilderness or even the wilderness, we have seen the bear. Somewhere else we have seen.

Like Elephant, I first encountered at circuses getting pickup loads of elephant manure for the Drug Garden, he makes me love Bear more. The intoxication is greater than the smell, the straw, the large beings, the air. You are very close to them and that memory lasts. Ur-bear, All Bear, One Bear in Momaday is a principle of vitality when he says

Asked to sign House Made of Dawn and then to draw a pic, Momaday drew a bear.

Seeing mountain through bear is the essence. "Even Urset, who is the original Bear...is symbolic and transparent, more transparent than real" (9). A see through bear, a mask, what on the other side? Bear is "an imitation of himself, a mask. If you look at him very closely and long enough, you will see the mountains" (9). “I have been possessed of Bear’s spirit” (9). He doesn't say Bear has possessed my spirit. What spirit is this? Who knows about it? To me it is not an animism, a primitive idol or a demon, but the One thing that possesses him. I have notes of it on scraps of paper on my desk, of the doe bearing fawn, they crouch down till they bear, the untied wild donkey's ropes, whose home is the wasteland, the salt flats. He sees wilderness through Bear and though wilderness this One, should you learn to name it: “Let me say at the outset that this is not a book about Bear (he would be spoken of in the singular and masculine, capitalized and without an article), I am less interested in defining the being of Bear than in trying to understand something about the spirit of wilderness” (9). So he says that while we have not seen the spirit of wilderness or even the wilderness, we have seen the bear. Somewhere else we have seen.

"It did not emerge, appear: it was just there, immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon's hot dappling, not as big as he had dreamed it but as big as he had expected, bigger, dimensionless against the dappled obscurity, looking at him. Then it moved. It crossed the glade without haste, walking for an instant into the sun's full glare and out of it, and stopped again and looked back at him across one shoulder. Then it was gone. it didn't walk into the woods. It faded, sank back into the wilderness without motion as he had watched a fish, a huge old bass, sink back into the dark depths of its pool and vanish without even any movement of its fins"  (Faulkner, Go Down Moses, "The Bear," 209).

Bear and Wilderness, is immobile, fixed, "there,"  bigger, dimensionless, sinks back without motion, too big to see, too big to move. It looks back. You think you see but you don't, but it sees you.:

 

"...the timber stood around a pool of light, and the bear was standing still and small at the far side of the brake, careless, unheeding. He brought the rifle up, and the bear raised and turned its head and made no sign of fear. It was small and black in the deep shade and dappled with light, its body turned three-quarters away and standing perfectly still, and the flat head and the small black eyes that were fixed upon him hung around upon the shoulder and under the hump of the spine" (In the Bear's House, "The Bear Hunt," 88).

That's the way of Bear, in the shade, going away, turning to look. Too big to see, somehow kindly, compassionate. It helps enormously to know that this is his attempt to perceive the spirit of wilderness. He calls it "ruse of vision," "seen he does not come," "dimensionless," "then he is gone" (In the Presence of the Sun (1992), "The Bear," 3).  

The ruse of vision 

Exactly so in the Mogollon, my little children as witnesses, Bear, wilderness see you. How does it feel? You are never very sure what you are looking at or what wilderness stands for among the shifting lights and shapes. For if Bear stands for wilderness then Wilderness stands for  something the same that you hunt in the dappled camouflage of lakes, shade of forests, that turns away even as it looks at you. I live among you though you know me not.  It is also a flower but the flower is not a defenseless being.

After the hunt, he carries the bear on his horse. "In the early morning he rode into the town...and he rode stone-faced in their midst" (89). He is like a rabbi after communion. Father Momaday's name for it is Great Mystery. In all this lies the “burden of primordial memory” (Conversations, 20) and the knowledge that he is wild, not tame, for “I am violent. Or I can be. I have been at times. I understand violence. I understand that it can happen." They, his morality, society reasserts itself, "on the other hand I’m opposed to it. It sickens me” (Conversations, 35). Botanists and biologists praise violence all their lives on their knees lest the spirit of wilderness take them. “There are people in the world who would not wish to be in the world, were not Bear there as well. These are people who understand that there is no wilderness without him. Bear is the keeper and manifestation of wilderness. As it recedes, he recedes” (In the Bear's House, 10). "The Kiowas…believe that the buffalo is the animal representation of the sun. Bear is the animal representation of the wilderness” (9-10).

The audience for these thoughts allows that Kiowa are tolerable, but that a failure of humility against the Natural marks a certain presumptive thinking. Bear represents wilderness like wildebeests, however fears of  darkness, light, animal and plain are buried, just like the botanists and biologists. The forces that exploit fear the thing greater than themselves. Behemoth and Leviathan said early what Bear says late. "My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen" (Job 42.5). "Will the wild...consent to serve?" (39.9). It is a numinous landscape of stars, bears and wilderness calls with eagle, hawk, bear, star, (“Eagle Alone,” Conversation, 91). You would not think that this could end, these flights. Momaday has said of all creation, "it calls for a willing suspension of disbelief" (36).

Bear is wily in his public appearances as if humility required him to seem not so sure. Grandfather teaches Urset One Bear yet one thing more with willing suspension of disbelief: "...grace. I do not know what is meant by grace. Where in the story is a place for grace?" So,

"Grace is the substance of story, albeit invisible and remote. Grace is the soul of story."

Urset: "It is a presence without its mask." 

Yahweh: "Or perhaps a mask behind which there is no presence." Urset: "There is nothing?"

Yahweh: "A mask of words behind which there is nothing, only silence, a perfect stillness" (In The Bear's House, 37). 

Wilderness

 

Wilderness tongue tied on a leash,
 You draw up like and  pet,

opened its mouth

Which had cedar teeth,

Although the bones were subway tubes,

left a wake
 like a plane down

with the nose pierced,
a mud trail with spurred undersides.

Sheets of flame

Shot up from its hands,

smoke poured from nostrils.

and snort up the snout,
my tongue tied Iron Hold,

 Jaw hooked river.
 Lightening spears the head.
 Strip off the coat,
take away light,
You can clothe yourself.

Cited:

Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday. Charles L. Woodard. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1989.

N. Scott Momaday. In the Bear's House. NY: St. Martin's Press. 1999.