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Wild Indigenous Cab Ride, KevinAThompson
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This one just blew me away. I just bought the DVD because I knew it would be a keeper, and boy was I right. Director Spike Lee always employed an epic sensibility, evidence of his true love for the Hollywood masterpiece, and in Miracle at St. Anna, he has done the genre justice.
This is a war epic, no doubt. Miracle at St. Anna is more of a war movie than most, because it shows the effect of war on the so-called non-combatants.
Civil Wars are the Nastiest Wars:
Wars of invasion can be destructive, of course, but often the goal of the invader is to capture some strategic military points and neutralize the military forces of the enemy. The defender's goal is to push the enemy off his territory, and if possible, do it with such force that the invader will think twice before trying it again. That is an oversimplification, I'll admit.
But civil wars are battles for the heart and soul of a nation. Different factions work to purge the entire body politic of the defined enemy, who is essentially their neighbors but who differ from each other in language, religion, skin color, region, economic class, political ideology or some combination of traits. To "purify" the nation, one must exterminate the enemy entirely. Tear down his temples, outlaw his language, rape the women, desecrate their cemeteries, etc. No one is a non-combatant. Everyone from babes in strollers to old folks in wheelchairs is a worthy target of your wrath.
As in the U.S. Civil War, the enemy may be your own brother, or your fellow graduate from West Point. Choosing sides gets messy. Civil wars usually have extremely high body counts, as the goal of battle is not to "win" battles but to shed as many gallons of blood as possible.
Occupations and Civil Wars Can Blur Together:
This is part of the background of Miracle of St. Anna: Italy's Fascist party dictator, Mussolini, was allied with Adolf Hitler, Nazi party leader of Germany. Mussolini came to power first, and invaded Ethiopia to make up for the lost time that Britain, France, Portugal and even Belgium had in already acquiring overseas colonies. Germany, like Italy, had been only a collection of duchies and micro-states before they unified in the 1860s. Though Mussolini was militaristic, Hitler added the element of race hatred as a stated ideology to the German version of fascism, called Nazisim.
When the Nazis invaded eastern Europe, they usually found locals willing to identify local Jews and hand them over to the Germans. Oddly enough, it was the Italians who hid more Jews from the Nazis than they turned in. It seems the Italians had a stronger sense of humanity than almost any other European Christians. The Italian people also distrusted Mussolini and eventually overthrew him.
This created a problem for the German troops on Italian soil. The Italians were their supposed allies but Italian partisan rebels were attacking them. In reality, the Germans were fighting the Italian people while actually being allied with the Italian government. This also happened in South Vietnam, where the U.S. was supporting the South Vietnamese government against the communist North, but huge elements of the South Vietnamese population were against their own government and therefore the U.S. slaughtered South Vietnamese civilians as suspected communists. Not surprisingly, the U.S. lost this one.
The U.S. was essentially engaged in a civil war with at least two factions of Vietnamese society. That is also what has happened to us in Iraq (and has not yet concluded).
The Real Deal on Film:
Spike Lee does not provide all this background in the film, but it is all evident in gory detail. Lee also tells the story through the eyes of Buffalo Soldiers, American men of African descent, who of course have been present in all phases and events of U.S. history and every major conflict the world over in the 20th century. There was something satisfying about this, seeing white-on-white brutality through black eyes (of the director and the characters), as subversive as Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo)writing about an"Indian with a camera" and taking the power to show, and therefore define, visual reality, a power Euro-Western media and academia institutions usually reserves for themselves. But we people of color have always possessed the power to see and even influence these white-on-white bloodbaths.
Author James McBride, the half-Jewish, African American author of St. Anna, commented that these European events were now part of Black History because black people were part of them. And Lee doesn't soft soap the racial hypocrisy of the U.S. fighting racist dictatorships in Europe while maintaining a violence-based caste system at home.
Spike and the Italians Redux:
I read once that Spike Lee grew up in a series of Brooklyn neighborhoods that were often mixtures of African American , Italian and Puerto Rican. Except for his first two films, the romantic comedy/drama She's Gotta Have It , and School Daze , a musical drama that highlighted black-on-black color conflicts, Italian-Americans have usually featured heavily in Lee's films. Several actors on The Sopranos appeared in small roles in Spike Lee films. Jungle Fever and Do the Right Thing have black-Italian conflict as their central themes.
Spike has now taken his appreciation for Italian people back to Italy. Miracle at St. Anna has long dialogues in Italian, German and Spanish, but mostly in English and Italian. It's also about Americans overseas, but this time the Americans are black Americans, facing Italians who have never seen a black person up close, except in racist propoganda posters that portrayed Africans as a form of monkey, yet show more respect to our heroes than do their white American officers.
The Real Power of the Miracle of St. Anna:
There was also something very Catholic about this movie, and I mean that in the best way possible. The peasants and country priests have the faith of martyrs that should make any Christian feel inspired.
This movie combines everything that is horrifying about Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan. I purchased the DVD because I thought it was a keeper I would want to watch again. But the emotional punch was just too much and I don't know when I'll be able to see it again. But the lessons of war and faith are so well presented here that I know I'll be drawn back.
This is truly one of the great ones.
God bless Spike Lee, author James McBride and everyone else involved.
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Posted by kevin thompson at
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I thought one of the old elitisms/racisms had died until I saw a documentary on a Cable channel ( I don't recall which) about pre-historic humans. Academicians were discussing some female statuettes from ice-age Europe. One of the "experts" said that the sculpted female forms were not "art" because they were probably fertility charms. So because the statues served a ritual purpose, and not being the "pure self-expression" of a their human creator, they were not "art."
Once I read an art critic describe the great U.S. painter Andrew Wyeth as "merely an illustrator", and not an artist, because a lay person can look at a Wyeth painting and actually know what s/he is supposed to be looking at.
So was Michelangelo's painting on the Sistine Chapel, merely an "illustration" because the painter used Biblical themes, and was Michelangelo not an "artist" because the Church clearly commissioned the work and because his paintings served a religious purpose?
Apparently so.
"Art" is only what a "pure" or "fine" artist does. That which is the pure self-expression, emerging from the artist's own soul, ego or whatever. If this art serves any other purpose, then it is no longer art, but "crafts." Designs on a pot or a quilt are crafts are not "art", no matter how much artistic creativity, patience and technical skill is required to pull it off, because pots and quilts serve a purpose beside looking pretty.
Of course, you can see where I'm going with this. That means the only "artists" are those privileged enough to attend college and elite art schools. Other creative people, who express their creativity on other projects, are merely "craftspeople." This cleverly removes whole fields of creative work from competing with the "fine art" world. Scratch off graffiti artists, tatoo artists, African tribal sculptors, Appalachian quilters, Navajo weavers, auto detailers, and scores of other types of artisans who have never attended an academy of fine arts.
Following this nonsense to its logical conclusion also eliminates Western artists who actually do train in prestigious art academies and then work for several years in advertising, animation, graphic design, children's book illustration, and comics before pursuing their individual modes of artistic self-expression.
OVER CATEGORIZATION OF CREATIVE EXPRESSION:
The Eurowestern academy spends a lot of time categorizing various aspects of reality. Not to oppose this, but the motive is not always out of a pure desire for understanding of reality, but to serve some political purpose. When the Academy decides some complex skill is not art, it guarantees that the practitioner can not be measured against the more privileged practitioners who are within the Academy. The Eurowestern Academy often seeks to create the illusion that Europe is the only creator of various fields of endeavor, and thereby deny the creative genius that has arisen in other cultures.
Its been said that the novel is the supreme literary creation of the world. I must admit, a good novel is an impressive thing to behold. In college I was taught that the novel was a creation of Europe and Europe alone. Other cultures created epic poems, "myths," and songs but the prose work we call a novel was the creation of Europe. Again, an outright lie.
A Roman North African writer, Apulieus, produced Tales of the Golden Ass in the second century AD (or C.E.). It is a mixture of comic and tragic episodes, linked together by the journey of a man transformed into a donkey by spiritual forces. The Golden Ass also includes the tale of Cupid and Psyche, from which we get our modern terms "psychology" and "psychiatry" and the basis for the medieval tale, Beauty and the Beast. The Golden Ass ends when the protagonist finds redemption from the deity Isis, whose true name is known by the Ethiopians. The Golden Ass reads alot like Cervantes' Don Quixote, (written a thousand years later) and I don't know why it is not considered a novel in the Eurowestern tradition. Perhaps its origins are not European enough.
When A Novel is Not a Novel:
In grad school I read an article about novels produced in Hausa culture in West Africa. For a period in the late (European) Middle Ages) the literate Muslim culture produced long works of prose fiction, based on current events. The article described one epic novel, written by an African enslaved as a child, sent to Egypt, and who then gained his freedom. He returned to Hausaland (now northern Nigeria) and wrote a fictional account of a boy who is enslaved, survives and returns to his homeland. The work is fiction and the writer did not claim it was his life story verbatim, though historians considered it valuble nonetheless because of the details it provided of the slave trade of that time period.
But here is the kicker. The scholar who wrote the article continually referred to the artform as the Hausa "novel" (italics added). The scholar, or his editors, could not bring himself to refer to these Hausa fictional prose works as novels, despite all the identical characteristics with the Eurowestern novel. So even this scholarly treatment diminished the Hausa novel by always placing novel in quotation marks.
If the Hausa novel did not show any evidence of having been influenced by Europe, then it was not "really" a novel.
Superiority that Can Not Stand the Competition:
Most readers will probably be more familiar with this phenomenom as it has played out in the world of Sports. Even (or especially) at the height of white Eurowestern world power, whites were uneasy about competing against blacks on the fields of athletics. One world champion boxer flatly refused to fight black American Jack Johnson, the only real contender, on the grounds that it was beneath him and would demean the title of "champion."
There was a fear that one on one, stripped of all money, military power and color privilege, the strongest white man might not be stronger than the stongest black man, and that would put a crack in the illusion of the superiority not only of the white military machine, but in the natural superiority or every white man over everyone black.
For decades, the Olympics adhered to a strict rule against professional athletes competing in the Games. Supposedly an athlete who had gotten paid for his efforts was no longer a "pure" athlete. The International Olympic commitee used this rule to strip the gold medals from Native American athlete Jim Thorpe (who later founded the NFL) because it learned that Thorpe had played minor league professional baseball.
The real reason professional athletes were not allowed into the Olympics was to prevent them from competing with upper class athletes from families whose fortunes could support them as they trained for the Games. A poor man who used his athletic skills to put food on the table was eliminated from the competition. It had nothing to do with his (or her) ability that s/he had gotten paid cash for past athletic endeavors. This rule guaranteed that the upper classes need never be humbled by the lower classes on the field of competition.
The Final Question:
This begs the question: if one is so convinced of one's superiority, why must one work so hard to keep it from being tested? Wouldn't natural superiority just naturally win all the time and be willing to defend itself against all challenges?
Notes and Sources:
Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee), Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History, 2006, for use of the term "Eurowestern," which I prefer to "white" and because it can encompass Europeans, the U.S. Canada, Australia, and even parts of Africa, India and the Caribbean where the Euro-colonial outlook dominates thought.
Apuleius, Tales of the Golden Ass
Mariba Ani, Yurugu: an African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior., 1994. In Chapter 3, "Asthetics: the Power of Symbols" , Dr. Ani writes ". . .'Arts or art's sake' is a peculiarly European and should be rejected as a critical standard for other cultures. . ." She goes into much more depth about the connection about how political and economic power is used to decide what is considered "beautiful," and how the goal is not really about beauty but about upholding power.
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Posted by kevin thompson at
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PBS still seems to be the only major network who knows that Native American people actually are still part of the United States. (I was still surprised that Native pople were not mentioned during the 2008 presidential campaign,not even to mention how governor Palin is trying to take food out of the mouths of Alaskan Natives.) In April 2009, PBS aired "We Shall Remain", a five-part series about Native Americans of what has become the United States.
Part One was about the true (er) story of the Pilgrims and the hosts they turned on, the Wampanoag. Part Two was about Tecumseh and his brother, the prophet Tenskwatawa, and the pan-Indian military coalition they almost succeeded in creating. Part Three was about how the Cherokees assimilated to White cultural ways and getting removed anyway. Part Four was about Geronimo. And Part Five was about the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee.
Each 90-minute segment had a different director, and each had a different style. The first three segments employed dramatizations, employing Native actors speaking real Native languages, which was refreshing.
Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa:
This segment corrected a usual historical emphasis on the Shawnee military genius of Tecumseh while downplaying the spiritual foundation of Tecumseh's cause--the spiritual prophecies of his younger brother, Tenskwatawa. It was the Prophet's vision that motivated Tecumseh to attempt to create a pan-indian coalition that would hold back the westward expansion of the United States.
Unfortunately, the segment portrayed Tecumseh's failure as mainly a military failure, due to his being outgunned by the U.S. In actuality, Tecumseh's vision might have come to fruition if the Choctaw leader Pushmataha hadn't kept the Choctaw out of his coalition, of if he had convinced the Muskogee/Creek Confederacy to join him resisting the "Americans." (The brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa even discussed freeing slaves on the Anglo plantations and enlisting them to their cause. Tecumseh dismissed the idea, fearing that there would not be sufficient time to assimilate the newly-liberated slaves into Shawnee society.)
The segment also ignored that the mother who abandoned the brothers (and their five other siblings) was either a Creek or a Shawnee (among many) who resided in the Creek Confederacy. According to Joel Martin, the Creeks refused to join Tecumseh's coalition because at the time, the Creeks were still relatively secure from Anglo-American expansion and did not want to surrender any of their autonomy to Tecumseh. Ironically, the Creek connection was still obvious because two of the on-camera commentators were Shawnee with common Creek surnames, such as Harjo.
Sadly, this episode portrayed Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa's cause as a "lost cause," with no chance of success. By ignoring the very real chance that the Creek and Choctaw might have joined them and possibly prevented or delayed the westward expansion of the U.S., the producers over-estimated the strength of the U.S. at the time. Also missing was that even after Tecumseh's death in battle, Tenskwatawa lived twenty-five more years as a respected spiritual leader, moving west to Kansas with the Shawnee, who still have not disappeared despite some military setbacks.
Assimilation Blues--Jacksonian Doublecross:
Here's how the Cherokee were rewarded for helping Andrew Jackson defeat the Creeks in the Red Stick Revolt, and by their leaders adopting the slaveholding lifestyle of Andrew Jackson. When Andrew Jackson became president, he violated the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court and any sense of loyalty to his allies and forced the Cherokee people off their land. One Cherokee I know will only handle a $20 bill upside-down so he will not have to see the face of Andrew Jackson.
Fortunately, this segment barely mentions Jackson, and instead focuses on John Ross and the Ridge, two "assimilated" Cherokee leaders. One gem of this segment is seeing Hollywood actor, Wes Studi, speaking his first language, Cherokee, in a major role. We even see him giving orders in Cherokee to his African American servants, though what this means to the current Freedmen conflict is not mentioned.
Nonetheless, this episode explodes the myth of the Indian who must "vanish" in the face of white civilization and who cannot adapt to change.
The Geronimo episode:
The fourth segment, on Geronimo, employed the many photographs of the Chiracahua Apache leader, known as Goy-ath-lay in his own language, along with footage of stunning southwestern scenery. I suspect the relative recent-ness of Geronimo, and the numerous photos of him still available, made it hard to cast any actor who might portray him. I mean, who could "play" Geronimo compared to even still steely-eyed photos of the real McCoy?
I recently saw a 2001 video on YouTube, which featured a still-living old woman who had been a child in Geronimo's camp. Yes, he was that recent. And the controversy and hatreds surrounding his actions are still fresh in the southwest.
Wounded Knee '73:
No dramatizations needed in this one. There was plenty of film and videotape of the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and plenty of living participants, among the protesters and FBI agents, who were willing to speak on camera. Without getting into AIM (American Indian Movement) politics, I was surprised to learn that AIM had been invited to Pine Ridge to help locals oppose the tribal government on civil rights issues. In many ways, this was my favorite segment, due to its immediacy. But after reaching the end of the standoff, there was only a brief mention of cultural and spiritual revivals that AIM helped bring about.
Symbolism and Disappointment:
The logo for "We Shall Remain" is a Plains teepee with an American flag flying atop one of its lodge poles. My Queen and I mused about that symbol. Did the US flag atop the teepee mean the flag dominated the teepee? Or does it mean that the owner of the tee pee is choosing to fly the US flag, as in thousands of Natives who enlist in the U.S. armed forces?
All five episodes featured on-camera comments by living Native people, of the same tribe featured in each history lesson. At least we know some of these tribes still exist, though we are never told anything about their contemporary situation. How many of the tribe are teachers, doctors, traditionals, born-again Christians, astronauts or actors, democrats or republicans, country music singers or rappers? Yes, Indigenous people can be all these things and more.
Perhaps it was beyond the scope of this series to explore how much Native Americans continue to influence American life, and how Indigenous Peoples will increasingly influence American life. There are several tribal colleges with growing enrollments. The Native vote is growing large enough in some states that forces are now working to suppress it. American Indians are the only non-immigrant group whose birth rate has been steadily increasing in recent years. Exploring some of that would help answer the question about who shall remain.
**To its credit, PBS aired "The War that Made America," some years ago, narrated by Aboriginal Canadian actor Graham Greene, that showed the central role Native people played in the French and Indian war. As for accurate casting, there were visibly African people living with the Indians, and fighting as redcoated- British soldiers. This black presence is found in original documents but not usually in history textbooks and Hollywood movies.
Sources:
Joel Martin The Sacred Revolt.
DL Birchfield, How Choctaws Invented Civilization and Why Choctaws Will Conquer the World.
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It's rare enough to see any real information on traditional peoples, so I half-watched a History Channel International documentary about Haitian voodoo while helping cook dinner and setting the table (On Monday, May 18, 2009). After exploring two confirmed cases of people who had been turned into zombies and come back to tell about it, there was some talk from scientists who tried to make their own zombification potion from the natural neurotoxin of the porcupine fish. Somehow, they convinced some seasoned Voo Doo priests to provide them a recipe for the zombie formula.
Of course, the zombie potion prepared in the University lab failed miserably. My wife and Queen, who can spot racism from TV commentators very quickly (and usually picks up some everyday from the news channels), simply said that "science" had failed to take Faith into account on the power of Voo Doo religion. The people who believe the religion will always get more out of it than people who don't.
But it got worse. A white North American scientist then went on to further explain the failure of the lab-produced formula. He said the Voo Doo leaders were smarter "than you might expect, even though they don't have an education." Who might expect? Academics? The presumed white American audience of the History Channel? What kind of education?
He revealed his own racism. He expected the rural Haitians to be ignorant and unsophisticated, and had gotten hoodwinked by them, with his Ivy League credentials providing no protection.
Despite having to view Haitian culture through the racist commentary of others, it was still good to see it. Maybe better programming is still to come.
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Posted by kevin thompson at
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I'm not saying that blood quantums have no legitimacy in determining "Indian-ness," but blood quantums lead to the ultimate disappearance of any Indigenous community that adopt them as the sole means of community identification. Put it simply, U.S. federal law allows Indian individuals to identify with only one Indian tribe at a time. That means if an Indian person has children by even an Indian person of another nation then her children will only be "half" Indian!
That leaves Indian people with a peculiar problem---marry only your cousins and inbreed your people into idiocy, or marry outside and lose your federally-recognized nationhood. Some Indian nations have wisely seen the genocidal/suicidal goal behind blood quantum politics and discarded them. The Lumbee people of North Carolina have never been subjected to blood quantums and are growing fast in numbers, economic and political power, all without federal interference into how they define membership.
Long before any Indians were enrolled, before even the documents that created the United States were written, the people of this land adopted outsiders to enlarge their numbers. Indian cultures did such a thorough job of assimilating newcomers that Eurowestern society feared the appeal Indian societies had for "civilized" whites and enslaved blacks. Despite the outright propoganda dramas (popular until the 1920s as silent movies) of half-white, half-Indian tragic misfits doomed to lifelong loneliness and lovelessness, frontier governments dreaded the ability of Indian cultures to raise half-whites and full-whites to full acceptance. How sovereign is any nation if it can not even claim its own descendants and therefore guarantee its own future?
This fear played out after the final stages of conquest of the Plains and Southwestern peoples, when the boarding school system worked overtime to de-culturalize the children of our cultures. It seems the prevailing powers feared the "vanishing" Indian still represented a serious threat despite relatively low official numbers compared to the "white" ( and therefore "inevitable") inheritors of the Continent.
INDIAN UNDERCOUNT:
At the start of the 1900s, the number of Indian people undercounted is difficult to estimate. Eastern Indian people and their white descendants who research their own families often find their ancestors listed as "mulattoes" or "free colored." Sometimes this surprise even comes out when seeing, for the first time, the birth certificates of their own parents! These individuals may have lived their whole lives in Indian communities, and never realized they were so classified. Some Indian people allowed themselves to be classified as "mulatto,' so as to avoid being forced off their land during the removal era.
Two severe blows, in rapid succession, hit the count of Indian people east of the Mississippi. In 1920, the U.S. census stopped listing anyone as Mulatto (a category which allowed them to remain racially distinct), and instead listed them as "black," or "white" (if they were light enough). Then in 1921, a fire swept through the building in Washington DC that contained all the census records since 1790. Coincidence?
How many mixed-blood and other Indian people were eliminated from the historical record by these two drastic changes?
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I recently read Being Lakota, a collaboration between Melda Redbear Trejo, her late husband Lupe Trejo and a Euro-Canadian academic, Larissa Petrillo. I actually met Lupe and Melda (Which is how they asked to be addressed) a year before Petrillo, so the book held a special place for me. In the course of the book, Lupe and Melda recount their life stories, how they met and how they came to sponsor a Sun Dance on Red Bear land on the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation.
Melda is Lakota, born on Pine Ridge. Lupe was a Texas-born Aztec. Both of their families of origin worked as migrant farm laborers in various western states, and they continued the practice after their marriage and while raising ten children. In the late 1980s, they returned to the house and land where Melda had been born and raised, and started holding a Sun Dance. Much of Being Lakota is transcribed conversations of the couple's descriptions of their upbringing and subsequent life as active participants in various expressions of Lakota spirtuality. Interspersed are Larissa Petrillo's comments from an academic perspective. (Her jacket bio identifies her as an instructor of interdisciplinary studies at the University of British Columbia.)
Reading the Trejos' own accounts is like getting another chance to sit under a tree and just hear them tell their stories, a way to still absorb their wisdom, all the more poignant because I never got the chance to return to them and Lupe has since walked on, along with other members of their family who befriended me that summer. It was a powerful experience, a spiritual experience that still affects me. I won't even call it mystical, because Lupe and Melda talked to me in the same plain down-home language that Petrillo records in Being Lakota. It is entirely accessible to one with an open mind and open heart. I am a better person for having experienced their hospitality.
Which brings me to the effect the Trejos had on Larissa Petrillo, who admits that she originally intended the project to record the life of a Lakota woman, and from her perspective, that meant Melda's life should be recounted and assessed in isolation from that of her husband of forty-plus years. Petrillo regarded Lupe as an intruder onto her first conversations, in part because he was male, and in part because he was not "really" Lakota. Later she realizes that Melda's life can not be understood as separate from that of her husband. This may seem obvious for anyone who met Melda and Lupe, or any other reasonably happy couple of many decades duration, but it seemed clear that Petrillo ( whose surname seems Italian, but like many Western academics chooses not to identify her own ethnicity.) is burdened with a hard feminist ideology that insists "woman" must be understood separately from "man."
Several times Petrillo mentions how she has to cast off this academic feminism if she is to truly understand Melda at all. Petrillo also learns that to truly understand what it means to be Lakota, she must appreciate that the Lakota have always adopted outsiders, married non-Lakota, and made them into allies. "Allies pray together," is how its described. Far from being a dilution of her Lakota identity, Melda's marriage to Mexican Lupe is an enhancement of it. They are a hard-working team who raise ten children ( and some number of their 29 grandchildren) in Lakota tradition.
Perhaps I missed it, but Petrillo does not fully critique her acceptance of Euro-Western feminist ideology, by connecting it to her white-skin privilege in Canada. She clearly rejects her prior particular feminist view, but does not acknowledge how even supposedly liberating feminist ideology, like any other ideology, can be used as a weapon when wielded by white (and powerful) women.
Nonetheless, I credit Petrillo for her many references to Indigenous academics. She cites Lakota scholars Vine Deloria, Jr., Delphine Red Shirt, Black Elk, Severt Young Bear, and many others. She has rejected the old model of an anthropologist who studies "informants," and instead seeks a more equal collaboration with the Indigenous people she is describing. She has clearly learned from Native writers, and she has learned from Melda, too that Indigenous people have our own understanding of ourselves, even despite the well-meaning categorization of outsiders.
Being Lakota is truly a great book, a real gem, a quick read and re-read, and worth every second spent reading it.
P.S. I can not criticize Petrillo's scant mention of her own origins without mentioning mine. I am a mixture of African, Creek Indian and a little Southern White. The Trejo sons recognized my blackness as both obvious and irrelevant, and one of them even knicknamed me "Mandinka Warrior," (coming from a tribal person, referencing the 1977 TV series Roots I took this as a compliment) for my hard work in helping build the arbor. I was encouraged to participate in the life of the community without hesitation.
What really separated me from the Trejo-Red Bears, and from most other Pine Ridge residents, was my relative material privilege. I was on break from grad school, had been raised middle-class by college-educated parents, and had little fear of ever experiencing the material deprivation I saw around me at Pine Ridge. To remain, or return to, Pine Ridge, was to give up even many modest economic opportunities available off the reservation. To stay there requires a special kind of courage.
Surprisingly, one aspect of the Trejo-Red Bear family's experience overlapped that of my family: they picked cotton. Lupe told me at one early point in their marriage, he and Melda had picked cotton in Arizona. One of my Creek uncles had also picked cotton (as an old man, no less) in Arizona, and my grandmother and numerous other relatives (many of them still living in the early 1990s) had picked cotton as part of sharecropping families in Mississippi. Though cotton-picking is seen as a the quintessential Negro experience, the last branch of my family to leave the cotton fields was the branch with the most White and Native ancestry. How's that for confounding stereotypes?
SOURCE:
Petrillo, Larissa;in collaboration with Melda Red Bear Trejo and Lupe Trejo, Being Lakota: identity and tradition on Pine Ridge Reservation, Universtiy of Nebraska Press, 2007.
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Posted by kevin thompson at
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A big chunk of Antarctic ice has just broken off, highlighting the changing climate or our planet. Experts say that even if we eliminated our carbon dioxide emissions right now, the warming cycle would continue. And even the most promising technologies take years to implement, I mean how easy is it for every motorist to trade in her or his internal combustion vehicle for an electric model?
But this solution is easy to implement: the four-day work week.
1. Instead of working five 8-hour days, you work four 10-hour days. That's four 3-day weekends per month. That's one-day less of commuting, and one day less of gasoline being burned.
2. Some businesses and government agencies are already allowing employees to give up a few hours of their own labor, and those work-hours are given to another employee who would otherwise be laid off. A version of this could let workers give up their work-hours and work only four days.
3. A workplace that typically operates from Monday through Friday might still do so, but with fewer staff on Monday and Friday.
4. Air quality in big cities is noticeably cleaner on holidays when many people are off work, out of school or out of town. If the four-day work week was adopted on a worldwide basis, the results should be immediate.
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Don't blame author Truman Capote for the racist flaw made from his short 1957 novel Breakfast at Tiffany's. In the book, the upstairs neighbor, Mr. Yunioshi, is a California-born photographer of Japanese descent, an adventurer who travels to remote parts of the world. His part in the novel is small, mainly because he is away travelling most of the time. In the 1961 movie, Yunioshi has been emasculated into a shuffling, buck-toothed, broken-English-speaking buffoon with the personality of a dottering old woman, played by Irish American actor Mickey Rooney (barely recognizable) with thick glasses and fake buck teeth. He is an object of comic "relief."
I don't know why director Blake Edwards saw the need for an ethnic buffoon, when in 1961, shuffling Negro buffoons had already been pushed aside for dignified black actors like Sidney Poitier. (Edwards later said he regretted the decision to create the stereotyped Japanese character.) To his credit, Edwards includes some noticeable black people in the on-location New York street scenes, which was not a given in Hollywood motion pictures of the day. So why be relatively progressive when including black people while degrading East Asian manhood?
Don't get me wrong. Aside from Mickey Rooney in yellowface, I like the film Breakfast at Tiffany's, and I felt guilty liking it because of the yellowface character. So I checked the book out of the library and read it.
To my pleasant surprise, Truman Capote's book was remarkably non-racist, written by a Southern Gay White man who was very aware that he (and other White people) actually shared the planet with myriad peoples of color. His 1958 book includes frank discussions of lesbianism and interracial sex that would hardly have passed Hollywood censors (in movies or TV) until the late 1970s. The heroine, Holly Golightly, is a former runaway child bride** from rural Texas who has remade herself into a French-speaking urban sophisticate. She is a mixture of the racist and the racially curious, reflecting both her small town origins and growing worldliness.
At one point she dismisses the first-person narrarator's short stories as rubbish about "brats and n***ers." At another she describes her delight at the well-dressed "colored children" who accompany their mothers to visit incarcerated relatives. Later still, she considers marriage to a rich Brazilian who she says has a touch of le negre, and that is would be nice to have a "coony baby with bright green beautiful eyes." She reports flirting under the table with a Cuban of Chinese and African descent. There is a rumor that she has shacked up for a few weeks with an African wood-carver deep in the bush. Of course, none of Holly's racial statements, positive or negative, make it into the movie. (In the book, Holly also maintains an avid interest in horses while in New York, relecting her rural roots.)
Audrey Hepburn, who played Holly Golightly in the movie, in real life devoted her later years to famine relief, helping hungry chidlren in Africa. Though she was descended from European nobility, she experienced hunger during World War 2. Her casting in the movie Gigi , was approved by Colette, the author of the book on which Gigi was based, in the autobiographical part. Colette, the French author, clearly states in her autobiography that she is of Haitian Creole descent. In the version of Breakfast at Tiffany's, that I borrowed from the library, there were two short stories of Capote's also included. One of them, House of Flowers, was set in Haiti.
By the way, the novel, Breakfast at Tiffany's has a different ending than the movie. As much as I liked the movie, including its touching theme song Moon River, the different ending of the book makes more sense, and is more consistent with the character of Holly Golightly.
**It is my sincere belief that Buddy Ebsen's portrayal of country veterinarian Dr. Golightly was part of the inspiration for his casting in the TV series The Beverly Hillbillies.
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Posted by kevin thompson at
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We call it "paper and pencil" genocide, the attempted erasure of our identities in official records. Several years ago I came across the entire 1832 census of the Creek Nation in Alabama. At least one-third of the people were listed as "mulatto." Anyone doing genealogical research knows that "mulatto" was a vague term, often meaning various kinds of ethnic mixture (black-white, white-Indian, black-Indian). Nonetheless, several thousand free "mulatto" people lived in the Creek nation (right alongside the slaveholding, cotton-growing South that was slowly overcoming it.)
Despite this complexity of the old Creek Nation, recent forces found it necessary to "cull" all names from the 1832 census that were "mulatto," and also those names which were Anglo names. Two racist assumptions dominated: one that any "mulatto" was not really a Creek Indian, and that anyone with an English name was not any Indian either. So both of these categories of Creek citizens have been erased from the historical record.
CHANGE OF ETHNIC IDENTITY OF INDIVIDUALS:
While poring over the census records of my own relatives, one household identified itself as Creek, but the 1880 census taker chose to list both parents and all of their children as "MU" (mulatto). One married daughter lived in the household with her husband. She was listed as MU, and her husband as "B", for black.
In the 1900 census, the "black" son-in-law is listed as the head of household, and his Indian wife has magically been transformed into a "black' as well, along with some of her unmarried siblings. The irony is that this family lost their official Creek identity while residing on land inherited from their Indian ancestors! (Creek was still being spoken in the household long after that.)
THE PROCESS CONTINUES:
Recently, a married Indian couple I know had a baby. When filling out the application for the child's birth certificate, they listed their ethnicity as "Native American." When the birth certificate came back, the mother's date of birth was incorrect by one day. They sent it back demanding a correction, and also sending an original of the mother's own birth certificate to prove her correct date of birth (recorded by the same city agency as mother and son were born in the same city).
At first, the agency refused, then demanded the couple pay for the city's mistake. Finally, the city relented ( and kept the money) and provided a corrected birth certificate for the child, with one catch----the "new" birth certificate still showed the incorrect date of birth for the mother, with a line drawn through the incorrect date and the correct birthdate handwritten above it!
This created the appearance that someone had tampered with the birth certificate to alter the mother's date of birth, when in actuality, the handwritten date was the true date of birth.
The wife smelled a rat, suspecting that the reason for all the confusion was that they dared to declare themselves and their newborn to be Native American. The sloppy-looking corrected birth certificate might be enough to question the family's genealogy and therefore any future claims of Native American identity. Fortunately, this couple is immersing their child in Creek culture so there will be much more on which to base an Indian identity.
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Posted by kevin thompson at
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For those of you who think I must be a socialist because I advocate some reduction in consumption--think again. I have far too much confidence in American ingenuity to ever place my faith in Maxist solutions. I grew up in a small-town/small-city America, where industrial innovation was a big part of our economy, along with manufacturing. The de-industrialization of many American small towns has resulted in most young people leaving them as soon as they finish high school. A higher proportion than ever of our population now resides in major metropolitan areas, many swelling from heavy traffic and rapidly spreading sprawl.
Mindless Consumption Undermines our Independence:
A certain ethic of mindless consumption now threatens our way of life. Americans once produced appliances, so it made sense for us to consume them. Now others produce them, and we consume them beyond our means of payment. The result is personal debt bondage. Our national obsession with bigger and bigger houses, and the absurd idea that real estate can increase in "value" indefinitely, has resulted in the collapse of our economic system. And beccause so much of the world depended on the American economy, the global economy is suffering, too.
America as a Creative Force:
The United States is still one of the most inventive societies in the world. Many of the inventions that define modern life---automobiles, telegraphs, telephones, television, jet travel, motion pictures and music industries, the Internet, etc.---were invented in the U.S. or developed here in a big way. We think of the U.S. as a young nation, but our government is actually one of the oldest in existence. Most of the kingdoms that existed in 1776, when the U.S. was born, no longer exist. Our constitution has never been overthrown or re-written, as have many others.**
Oddly enough, though the U.S. sets the example for government stability, most emerging democracies choose parliamentary systems. Very few other nations (Canada and Mexico being exceptions) trust the de-centralized federal system we employ in the United States. Personally, I believe that our de-centralized federal system allows for more creativity and innovation than the unitary systems in place in much of the world, including Europe. In France, the local equivalent of a school superintendent is appointed from the capital, Paris. If the brain trust in a Paris makes a bad choice, the whole country suffers. But our president can not even appoint the school board in Virginia, just across the Potomac from D.C., much less in more distant states. This, I believe, is a good thing.
Overcentralization:
The political right is quick to blame the left for increasing the power of the federal government at the expense of the states. Not to debate this, but the right wing conveniently forgets that capitalism has caused equally dangerous centralization of the U.S. economy. This centralization of the U.S. economy has been increasing for decades. Why is such a huge portion of the U.S. food supply grown in California, on land irrigated by federally-subsidized aqueducts when family farmers in the rain-watered east fail because of a lack of government support? (Is the U.S. even food self-sufficient anymore?) Why did New York State (or the United States as a whole), which once had a thriving manufacturing base, come to depend totally on Wall Street for its economy?
The collapse of our centralized financial system has resulted in even more centralization via bank mergers. With government bailouts in late 2008, the Republicans presided over the greatest centralization and nationalization of the U.S. economy in history. Right-wing approval of reckless banking has brought us closer than ever to socialism, and now the Right accuses the current president of advocating a socialist agenda, when it was the Right who handed him a socialist economy in the first place.
Possible alternatives:
During my childhood, my parents purchased two homes. Both of those mortgages were held by local banks until they sold the homes. In other words, the lending banks did not "bundle" up their mortgages and sell them to distant corporations. This was all in my hometown in the Southern Tier of New York State. Because the banks were local, and intended to keep the mortgages of local properties, they were more careful and ethical about how and to whom them lent money. The local banks did not want their properties devalued by reckless or predatory lending. The result: one of the lowest local home foreclosure rates in the nation.
Home prices remained reasonable because real estate was based on actual residential needs as opposed to rampant speculation. This small-town economic common sense protected my home town from the ravages of speculation-driven finance that is killing real estate markets in Nevada and California.
Reality Bites Back:
Our banking system is based on a "fractional" banking, which allows banks to "make up" money based on a percentage of actual cash on deposit. The Federal Reserve (the Fed) controls the actual percentage. Former Fed chirman Allen Greenspan apologized before congress for encouraging the reckless mortgage bundling and sub-prime lending that has caused this current economic mess. Greenspan was a personal friend and follower of the late Ayn Rand, whose philosophy of Objectivism scorned religious faith and instead placed all its faith in the power of the individualized capitalism to give meaning to human life.
Greenspan's faith in imaginary money (which he created), has proven a failed ideology, and I was personally surprised that he made a public apology. He mas more personal integrity than I would have imagined.
Where to look for Answers:
I don't have the one answer to all of our problems. If I did, then you would be right in suspecting me of trying to create a religion around me. I don't believe any one ideology can pull us out of this economic mess. I have more faith in decentralized human ingenuity than in centralized decision making, which worked so badly for the old Soviet Union. Nonetheless, Some government action must originate from Washington, because the federal government is now the part-owner of several large banks, due to bailouts. Somewhere out there some small town is solving its own problems based on pragmatism as opposed to ideology, and those examples should be looked at as possible models.
Some examples:
1. The local food movement: the emphasis is on produce grown within a region. Buying from local growers keeps money within one's community, keeps local food producers in business and helps a region attain more food-self-sufficiency. This also reduces the need for fuel to ship food long distances. Oddly enough, this idea is thriving in New York City, where weekly green markets offer food grown in the region.
2. Reduce the bundling and selling mortgages to distant banks and encourage local banks to hold the mortgages on properties in their region. The banks will be more careful about their lending practices, and will maintain a vested interest in keeping local foreclosures at a minumum.
3. Preserve farmland. Ensure that property taxes on farmers do not force them to sell out to real estate developers. This is crucial for farmers sitting on the edge of expanding suburbia.
4. Farmer-sportsmen-conservation partnerships. Many farmers have already converted some of their property into hunting preserves. This keeps land out of speculative development, preserves watersheds, and generates state revenues from hunting and fishing licenses, and tourism.
5. Allow more circulation of precious metals: the federal government has held over the American people the threat of confiscating personal holdings of gold and silver. This should stop, because it penalized the poor more than the rich (who shipped boatloads of gold coins overseas when FDR confiscated gold in the 1930s.) More gold and silver should be circulating, and the U.S. should issue a separate track of currency notes with backing of precious metals, and in small denominations for easy access to the middle and lower classes. People could then choose to conduct business in dollars or the new gold and silver notes, whichever both parties agreed upon.
6. Offer government bonds in smaller denominations: This would allow middle and lower class savers, and not just the rich, to invest in their country. Considering how much cash Candidate Obama raised from small donors, this may be a viable new course of saving (for individuals) and revenue (for governments). State, county and local governments should also be more aggressive offering smaller bonds with quick maturities to encourage people to invest locally. Short terms of maturity would also force governments to be honest and pay back quickly.
7. Landfills as energy producers: A small town in Geogia is already supplying all of its natural gas needs from its landfill, and selling the surplus to surrounding industries. Because all landfills produce gas, there is no reason this resource should go untapped.
Those are just some ideas, and I dare anyone to say that list is entirely an idea of the right or left. Many could be tested on the state or local level, before Washington tried to impose them on the whole country.
**I also suspect that the federal system that governs the U.S. has also allowed this country to absorb more dissent without having constant coups and also wild political swings in any direction. Unlike a unitary system, where one political ideology can easily rise to the top and try to change everything, our de-centralized power structure puts the brakes on such steamrollers. Our political stability and peaceful transition of presidents is part of what (until recently) has made the U.S. such an attractive place to invest.
***I defended Sarah Palin as a small-town candidate when I detected an urban- media prejudice against rural folk. (See my article "Sarah Palin on Indigenous Issues," 11/17/08) This does not mean I supported most of her policies, but I understood her way of life and was annoyed by the media attacking her origins.
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Posted by kevin thompson at
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