On Page 29 of “Tintin in America”

 

Tintin comics are both a symbol of colonialism and a pastime of francophone culture. The casual racism and stereotyping of cartoons, especially those produced in World War II—as active or passive propaganda—combined patriotic xenophobia with old-school whitewashing of colonial occupations as boy’s adventure stories. Hergé was very much of his time on this matter, as a cursory glance through Tintin in the Congo demonstrates. There was an easy morality to be found within comic books, one which placed the west (specifically, the white west of capital) in the dominant position. The boy reporter has come to the United States and made his way from Chicago to an Indian reservation. The Blackfoot tribe is tricked by a gangster into believing that Tintin is here to take their land. Chaos and violence ensue.

At the end of page 28, Tintin discovers oil and is liberated from the underground cavern he has been trapped in with his dog, Snowy, by the jet of black flood. Within moments, in panel 2 of 11 on page 29, a businessman approaches with lit cigar, contract and pen in hand. “Ok, son! Here’s the contract. Sign there! Five thousand dollars for your oil well…” The boy’s face is away from the reader. Cartoon punctuation of emotional states fills in the picture. Snowy is bewildered. Asked how he knew oil was found less than ten minutes after it blew, the businessman responds, “Unerring American know-how! Never fails!”

As with insects, where one businessman is, soon there will be others. Suited and ink-wielding, they swarm the boy reporter, going upwards of $100,000.00 for the land. Tintin grows anxious. “I’m terribly sorry, gentlemen, but that oil well isn’t mine to sell. It belongs to the Blackfoot Indians who live in this part of the country…” The businessmen change tracks. “Why didn’t you say that before?”

Panel 7 begins the half-page sweep that leaves me turning this comic book over in my mind. The first businessman stands alone, cigar in mouth but apparently unlit now. “Here, Hiawatha! Twenty-five dollars and half an hour to pack your bags and quit the territory!” The left hand points and the right hand holds out a bill. The contract is out of the equation. Looking closely at the bill, it has no value written on it, reading instead as a dollar sign ($) and a large zero (0). The money in hand has no value attributed to it; nor is there any notice that this tender is legal, for all debts, public and private. “Has Paleface gone mad?” the Chief asks. Panel 8, “An hour later…”, shows American military, armed with bayonets, moving the Indians off the land. “Two hours later…” and construction is underway. Gone are the teepees. A faceless man carries two long planks of wood that covers his head. A man with a hat and glasses gives orders, but his mouth is covered by the planks as well. “Three hours later…” and a bricklayer is building the “Cactus & Petroleum Bank, Inc.” while a doorman stands guard. (I wish to make this very clear: a doorman, in full livery, is standing guard at the entrance to an as-yet-to-be-built bank that presumably does not have money in it yet.) Everything happens with comic book speed, to the point that the final panel on the page, “The next morning…”, shows a town of the early 20^th Century, not unlike the town that Tintin had just escaped. Tintin walks into traffic—three cars and a motorcyclist held up by a traffic cop. “Hey, you!” the cop exclaims. “Don’t you know fancy dress is forbidden in town? …And keep out of the way of the traffic!… Where d’you think you are, anyway? …The Wild West or something?” Tintin is still wearing his kerchief, his flannel, and his jeans—an outfit too far behind for the busy metropolis; too early for the hipster crowd.

The schoolboy script across the top, representing the passing of time in neat, cursive letters, reminds me of the yellow letter pads we were taught to write on in elementary school. The content of the images reminds me of the stories we were told in elementary school—always cowboys and military might, adventurously heterosexual, but with a sense of decency, good raw material for the Christian fundamentalists who taught us. I’m certain I’ve read this book before, just as sure as Dick and Jane. I’ve written before about childhood and the way these images frame our approach to subjects outside ourselves. I wince when I take a look at Tintin. And yet.

“Where d’you think you are, anyway? …The Wild West or something?”

“Has Paleface gone mad?”

The text was published as a book in 1945. It is just one of the 24 canonical Tintin adventures that took him around the world, into space, and finally into metaphysics. In Tintin in America, Hergé is both celebrating the legacy of American colonialism that would give us a land like Chicago, while summing up the callousness and craziness needed to make colonialism such a valued pastime. There’s the story of New York—rather what was to become New York—being sold for $25. There’s a legacy of military intervention and forced departure from lands—lands that the indigenous people had been forced to move to a generation before after being forced to depart other lands. There is the re-purposing and redevelopment of land in such a way that you wouldn’t even know that there had been anything else there before. All of this in five out of eleven panels on Page 29.

This is not supposed to be in children’s comics. The reality is that most of the media for children is designed by non-children and as such the representations that spring up are larger. Those who create do not exist in blank space. The history of Hergé and the books he read find their way into the Tintin landscapes. We believe that the stories of childhood were innocent or at least that the things that make them unfortunate now occurred out of an historical ignorance—one that many of us are not willing to confess to and apologize for. This even carries over, to an extent, into the biography of Hergé himself, now available as a graphic novel. There is a certain poetic symmetry in the cartooner becoming a cartoon.

In the mire of Tintin’s history, I want to find something redemptive. I want to find a moment of insight that maybe suggests that the rest isn’t so bad because I saw this character as a youth. If there is a virtue to this, it is a reminder of how quickly we move on from our history. It reminds those who read it how we selectively remember the past.

A story review: “The Ojibwe Week” By Louise Erdrich

When we began the course in January, I found myself wondering where the authors we had studied had been all my life. Now I realize that it wasn’t so much that they were in hiding as much as the fact that I wasn’t looking for them. There was something very comforting about the idea of the Canon (a fancy English term for a collection of works which have been chosen as the greatest works in the Western Tradition), particularly the fact that as a white man, much of the Canon in its traditional guise would suggest that I have some inherent value or merit which would make my literary opinions and my literary tradition more valuable than that of other people. But the reality of the Canon is that it always reflects, in a certain degree, the bias and emphasis of its age. Considering how much anti-Indigenous sentiment has been an international pastime for colonial powers—these powers which are often the ones creating the Canonical curriculum–it’s no wonder that Indigenous writers have been excluded from the Canon as long as they have, or that they experience a difficult time finding connections with the audience that makes the Canon judgement. (This second situation is not the fault of the writers themselves–it’s the fault of readers who are unwilling to walk outside of their comfort zone unless guided there by an author or a colleague they already know and respect. It’s the fault of a reader who does not want to consider that someone else’s material reality might differ radically from their own, or that Indigenous people will not fit the stereotypes which they have created in their own headspace: a headspace into which they have also been colonized.)

I began to realize that these authors—especially female authors—were in fact readily available through the same channels in which I found much of my contemporary writing. While researching back-issues of the literary magazine Granta, I discovered a short story by Louise Erdrich (author of the National Book Award Winner, The Round House and most recently, LaRose), “The Ojibwe Week.” The story was published in issue 115: The F Word, a collection of essays and stories about feminism, featuring writers from Jeanette Winterson to Eudora Welty. Erdrich’s story reflects changing ideas about gender relationships, language and the constant reminder of the colonial situation in America.

Erdrich’s story begins with a scene of a man waking up with a woman tied to his bed. “We are codependent,” he says (99). She escapes while she’s supposed to be taking a shower. The man, Klaus, goes in search of his antelope lady, Sweetheart Calico. When he’s not tying her down, he works with Richard taking old, toxic carpets out of the mall. They store the old carpet in an unused barn, even though it’s a toxic hazard. The story shifts as Rozin finds Sweetheart five days after she ran away, in the company of a small dog. When she returns to Klaus, it is he, not Sweetheart Calico, who is tied to the bed. Rozin’s twin girls, Cally and Deanna, create a fantasy world in order to remove themselves from all of this, and it seems as though Sweetheart Calico may even be trying to join them at the end of the story, “stand[ing] very still in the leaves, believing she is invisible” (113).

These are the days of the week in Ojibwe:

Giziibiigisaginge-giizhigad=Saturday=”Floor-washing Day”

Anama’e-giizhigad=Sunday=”Praying Day”

Nitam-anokii-giizhigad=Monday=”First Work Day”

Niizho-giizhigad=Tuesday=”Second Work Day”

Aabitoose=Wednesday=”Halfway”

Niiyo-giizhigad=Thursday=”Day Four”

Naano-giizhigad=Friday=”Day Five”

The narrator of the story uses these days not only as place markers, but also as a way of commenting on the way language is a tool of colonialization. The division of time into days serves obvious purposes for a ruling power, and the language used to differentiate these days reflects the desired actions to be performed. That Saturday is floor-washing day, “tells you that nobody cared what day of the week it was until the Ojibwe had floors and also that the Ojibwe wash their floors” (100). Prayer Day also holds a specific purpose and action—prayer and prayer in a particular manner. The arrival of the First Work Day, the narrator says, has proved “that the names of the days of the week are the products of colonized minds” (102). The language of the indigenous people cannot remove the traces of their colonization from their surroundings or their mouths.

As in any occupied situation, they find ways to keep themselves and their culture together. They find reminders of their past and rituals which they can graft onto the occupying structure. On Prayer Day, Klaus takes out his pipe and smokes. He holds the thunderbird feather and promises it to Sweetheart Calico if she should return willingly. He prays and makes an offering to the Creator, but not the Creator others would like.

Halfway Day acts not only as the midpoint of the story and the midpoint of the week, but also shows the characters on the road to where they would like to be, but never quite getting there. The metaphor of half-ness begins subtlely, but takes dominance in the last paragraph.

By Day Four, the motion lacking on Halfway Day occurs. Now it is Klaus who gets tied to the bed, and Sweetheart Calico who has more ability to move. Their relationship shows the complexity of a dysfunctional heterosexual coupling within the narrative—he needs her with desperation; yet they can only work as a couple if one holds explicit power over the other. Sweetheart Calico is voiceless, perhaps representing the silencing of women under colonial infection. Complicating the issue even more, she was taken away by Klaus, abducted into his van at a powwow and kept under conditions which resulted in her apparent Stockholm-syndrome attachment. The abduction and attack of indigenous womanhood comes not from the outsider, but from within the community. But left to the reader is the question: How much does Sweetheart feel for this man? She escapes—yet she comes back. And when she comes back, she holds the rope. Yet even as she holds power, we leave her standing in the leaves and pretending that she is invisible.

So if we believe the dictum that every force yields an equal and opposite one, how long until these positions reverse again? The colonized can never fully escape the colonizer—the injury always remains.

The narrator marks this clearly in their analysis of the Ojibwe days of the week. Even behind the blandness of Day Four, the narrator finds an analysis which subverts the everydayness of the word at hand:

At least Day Four is about four, the number that the Ojibwe love best of all. Every good and sustaining thing comes in fours—seasons, directions, types of people, medicines, elements. There are four layers of the earth, four layers of the sky, four push-ups to a song, four honour beats, four pauses of the great Megis on the spiritual migration to Gakahbeleong and hereabouts. (108)

There is a solace in interpretation here. Being able to reclaim a word, being able to take the emphasis and shift it so that the order and implication of the word from the power structure of the “other” can become something one associates with the thriving spirit rather than the dying present is a form of liberation on a deeply personal level. The commentary makes it clear that behind every meaning there is yet another meaning. Nothing exists within a single moment, devoid of connection. The context shifts, as do the roles, as do the carpets, as do the ropes; as do the days of the Ojibwe week.

Indigenous Ambiguities Podcast Update

Hello All,

I am still planning on having the Indigenous Ambiguities Podcast up at one episode a week. Due to unforeseen circumstances (and a change in work schedule) the second episode will probably be up either Thursday or Friday, one hopes. The writing is going on, but the script for Episode 3 is very tricky because of the subject matter.

The title of Episode 2 is “Theory.”

Indigenous Ambiguities Podcast: Episode 1

The Indigenous Ambiguities Podcast is now live on Soundcloud! Listen here.

Read the transcript here: Indigenous Ambiguities Podcast Transcript Episode One

Episode 2 should be up in about a week

Podcast goes Live tomorrow

Hello All,

Tomorrow around 5pm, the Indigenous Ambiguities Podcast will be live with Episode 1: Meanings. This is part of a four+ part series about Two Spirit communities, gender and sexuality in the Indigenous experience. Some of it has been referenced before on this blog, but I’m so excited to have it coming together. Putting together the music (as Rx Huxley) has been especially tricky after reading Philip Deloria’s “The Hills are Alive… with the Sound of Indian” in class. I’ve thought about how we mix and match different styles in music, just as I attempt to mix and match different styles in my writing work. Hopefully the music will work.

 

Terms Matter (Especially when They’re Talking About You)

It became apparent as we read these works, and as we encountered these films, that the first terms used to describe a minority are rarely chosen by the minority being described. More often than not, the terms are chosen by a majority, in order to explain the existence of a minority (an anomaly) in terms which make sense to the majority.

This can be seen quite clearly in the fact that the Indigenous peoples of this country did not seem to think in terms of their “Indian-ness” until after Columbus arrived on the scene.

For part of my final project, I’m going to discuss the idea of Two-Spirit identity and the way terms and identities have shifted over time. For this particular post, I would like to focus on how we negotiate between that term and the term it replaced.

While the term itself comes into being in the 1990s, it describes a way of being which predates written accounts. It replaces another term, berdache. As with all anthropological terminology, it has a really, really complicated history. Some might remember the discussion we had (thank you all for a fantastic discussion, as always, btw) about the quick line featuring the berdache in “Ignatia broker’s Lived Feminist: Toward a Native Women’s Theory” by Molly McGlennen, quoting in part from Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Tradtions:

“…patriarchal socialization among all Americans, Native and non-Native alike, allowed and still allows the justification of genocide, the resistance to clan-structured societies and no corporatized societies, and most imminently, the breakup of “gynecentric” systems that “distribute power evenly among men, women, and berdache a as well as among all age groups” (italics mine, 115)

The term often arrives late on the scene, to describe something already ongoing. Something happens, then you describe it. The naming does not happen in immediate conjunction with the action named. In the case of an action being described by an outsider, the action is compared with the former experiences of the person giving the description. In cases where the describer has no context for the action underway, or it is associated with a cultural taboo, the words which come to mind will probably be negative descriptions.

But of course this isn’t a post about linguistic philosophy, at least not now.

Even though Two-Spirit identity is often included in lists of LGBTQ+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, etc.) terminology, there is no entry for Two-Spirit in the Routledge Queer Studies Reader; often the term sinks in among others in what some have derisively called the “Alphabet Soup” of queer identity. This is, of course, a reflection as well of the larger issues with LGBTQ+ identity, especially in terms of which identities are privileged over others. For each identity represented in this abbreviation, there are two or three more which are marginalized through their absence.

In gathering the resources for this project, it becomes clear that there isn’t a lack of information available on Two-Spirit identity, but rather there is a deluge of material which has been produced since the 1990s. Even limiting myself to what was available in the school library, there were more books involving Two Spirit people than I originally expected, ranging from a few collections of critical theory to cornerstone texts in Indigenous Queer Studies such as Will Rosco’s The Zuni Man-Woman (reprint, 1992). These texts have been of tremendous help in my exploration of gender identity and sexuality in Indigenous communities.

The term “berdache” is troubling now because even though it was the go-to term for many years, it is a derogatory term, dated by the context of time and place. This was also not the way in which Indigenous people defined themselves. This was an identity grafted on to them by a colonizing force.

For the late transgender historian Leslie Feinberg, discovering the berdache meant that ze discovered that there were historical precedents for people like them. This would greatly inform Feinberg’s political and historical writings, including Transgender Warriors (1996), one of the first works of history to be written by and about trans people.

Even as this information gave Feinberg (and others) the opportunity to discover the historical lineage of which they were a part, there is still the problem of how we address resources written from the perspective of the colonizing force and the historical whitewashing which often occurs then. In the case of Indigenous peoples, we can ask them how they would like to be referred to: Indigenous, Indian, NDN, Native American, American Indian, etc. One of the things that I’ve had reinforced by this course is the importance of asking. In some cases, however, we only have information on the historical record which reflects the perspectives of the colonizer, including terms which misrepresent the reality of the people described.

We have to keep this in mind when we read the historical record. Especially when we try to connect previous gender expressions and sexual identities in non-western societies with contemporary, westernized (or western-influenced) societies. Representations of what was termed “berdache” do not automatically relate to contemporary Two Spirit or Queer identity, even though there may be some overlap. The ways in which we think of gender identity now are so far removed from the way we thought about gender identity in the 1950s, much less before 1492; we cannot expect things to match up perfectly.  In my research for my final project I have come to realize that explaining the history of any LGBTQ+ identified person or group is so much more complex then just describing today’s practices. When we talk about these issues, especially when they involve a group which we do not belong to, we have to ask the group how they view themselves and how they define themselves if we are going to be able to place them within a larger picture.

In other words, respect the terms of others as you would have them respect yours.

An Appreciation of L. Frank

In the reading I’ve done towards my final project on Two Spirit identity, I came to realize that there was a Two Spirit person that we had seen in class and whose work we had discussed without acknowledging that they are Two-Spirit. Artist and language recovery activist L. Frank (also known as L. Frank Manriquez) appeared in the short documentary on Indigenous languages we watched in class at the beginning of the semester.

https://vimeo.com/41890958

 

L. Frank has spent many years piecing together languages, works of art and cultural objects, in order to take back the history which has been lost and give it to the people. Throughout her work, she has put a focus on the ways in which we can return our research to the community under research (or at least our communities outside academe. In an article about language recovery published in News From Native California, Spring 2013, for example, she writes about the creation of Breath of Life, Silent No More, a project which helps linguists and Indigenous communities in California come together in order to reconstruct languages which no longer have fluent speakers. “Having no speakers, we were trying to read and understand diacritical marks, working alone day in and night out. We were looking for language understanding, knowing that in the language we would find our people.”

In the introduction to a collection of her drawings, Acorn Soup, L. Frank writes about the way in which for her the past and the present intersect and are permanently linked. This link grows stronger with the work of recovery.

“Trying to make string to hold the rattle together, I gathered Indian hemp from a field in Sonoma County, and I learned how to make string, and then we went to court to try to keep a developer from cutting down the hemp. Then I got into astronomy, and then I made some stone bowls—the first stone bowls of the Tongva people in over two hundred years—with soapstone mined from Catalina Island.

Sometimes when I’m working with soapstone, I can hear the. Voices of the ancestors. Once I made a bowl that was so perfect, so flawless, I knew it was the ancestors who had made it. And once I was weaving a basket, in my brother’s back yard in Orange County, and over the fence I could hear a lot of women talking, joking about a man they knew. Then I realized they were not speaking English; I was hearing the voices of the people who used to live there.” (11)

In Acorn Soup, L. Frank presents a vision of myths and stories from creation to contemporary California. The images are often simple, and the captions appear in a reversed handwriting. These comics occupy multiple spaces, spaces of satire and theory, commentary and recovery. They retell old stories and invent new ones. My personal favorite is a series of images featuring Coyote as an artist at the end of the 20th century. Another series of images, features the recurring caption “No greater love hath any Coyote for his father,” shows pictures within the picture, drawn by Coyote, of Coyote chasing after and consuming a bird. Another image shows Coyote dressed as a magician, with “Culture Revival Act” on his placard, advertising his mission. In the Appendix, L. Frank describes the meaning of the drawing as follows:

In order for many natives to revive their cultures they must navigate the quagmire of teh many disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, astronomy, and ethno-this and ethno-that. And find dollars to support the rivival. Native people are proficient magicians. (63)

I’m currently reading another text by L. Frank, First Families: Portraits of Indigenous Californians, written in collaboration with Kim Hogeland. This large book presents a history of Californians from an Indigenous perspective, using family memories and photographs for historical record. Piecing the images together, we see one by one different modes of life, shifting relations with Americans, differing traditions. California, it seems, was always the real melting pot of this land. These photographs could be the photographs of our great grandparents or grandparents, showing the many-fold experiences of Indigenous people on Turtle Island. These snapshots are so overwhelming to me as a viewer and reader because for so many Indigenous peoples in this country, they exist only in a distant past. To see a past that still lingers on in our grandparents’ faces, and to know that it is only by accident of birth that we are not the lanky teenager or small babe in this photograph is to bring a commonality to these images, wherein differences seem not so large after all.

Interview about Two Spirit

“The L. Frank Project”

“L. Frank Manriquez #nosainthood4serra (2015)”

“From The California Museum’s 2011 exhibit, ‘California Indians: Making a Difference'”

 

On J. K. Rowling, the Place of an Artist, and a Literary Mission

After the shout-down I experienced when I merely toyed with the idea of defending J. K. Rowling in light of the recent American additions to the Harry Potter canon, I was tempted not to write about it here, just because the volume of the response was frankly unnecessarily loud and deeply frustrating, especially in relationship to what I was saying. But some time has passed, and I hope everyone will stick with me through to the end.

Perhaps I should state now that not everything I write is strictly my full, honest, 100% opinion 100% of the time, and that from time to time I enjoy arguing the other side, playing devil’s advocate or engaging in thought experiments.

As a fiction writer, I hesitate to say that a writer can or cannot do something. After all, my favorite writers (the ones I admire and light candles for and pray over–one of the few spiritual activities I engage in) are the ones who wrote books which theoretically could not be written due to style constraints or subject matter: James Joyce, William S. Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany, Nawal El Saadawi, Helen DeWitt, Virginia Woolf, etc. Part of me says that to say an author cannot do something means that one is laying down a line which every writer worth their salt will cross with greater style than the original line maker could ever conjure up. As an activist against censorship, I also feel that to say what you can or can’t do in writing is also problematic. The “slippery slope” argument has more validity than some people realize, and I have had experiences where limiting one idea ends up turning into an avalanche which removes the ability for expression from all participants.

But honestly, the lack of respect shown of indigenous cultures (especially spiritual beliefs) was downright pathetic and continued the erasure by white people which has been responsible for so much destruction.

The key issue at hand was described in a National Geographic piece: “Native Americans to J.K. Rowling: We’re not Magical.” There’s a difference which many writers, particularly white writers, have overlooked when they write about indigenous people: spiritual is not the same thing as magical. Taking another culture’s spiritual tradition and refitting it within your own is nothing new (just look at the history of Christianity). But to ignore the context of the spiritual tradition and the rules within which it functions in order to use it for your own ends is called appropriation.

Part of me also imagines the number of people who would be flipping out if the stories involved discovering that Christian saints were, in fact, wizards and witches. I feel the outrage would be on a level touching The Da Vinci Code.

I admit that this is something which I feel I can only speak a certain amount about. I am not an indigenous person and not even a particularly loyal fan of Harry Potter, though I do think Rowling is an admirable writer.

The Rowling fury points to a larger problem about how non-indigenous people relate to indigenous stories. The problem being, most white people don’t know that indigenous people can tell their own stories, and that these stories have tremendous power. I’m loathe to suggest that it is the responsibility of a minority to constantly school the majority about the way to tell stories; yet it’s clear that what is needed is a reading list.

There are so many indigenous storytellers out there, and there are so many who have written across so many genres. Why is it that searching for indigenous literature always seems to return three or four major writers; then silence? There should be an effort made by reading nerds around the world to recommend works (fiction and nonfiction) which demonstrate the history/theology/contemporary lives of indigenous peoples while being respectful to their humanity and rights.

Healthcare and Stories Beyond the Story

In the reporting that I’ve seen on Indigenous people in the past few months, I’ve noticed that there’s a recurring theme: the throwaway story. The throwaway story is a line in a news article, a sentence in a radio piece, a shot in a film clip. In all of these cases, a second story, often more complex than the first and begging for a great deal more context and space, is lurking. It’s one of the things that irks me most about American journalism: there is not enough in-depth reporting. Instead, there’s a lot of headlines, followed by reams of opinion and very little reality.

I was struck by the photographs attached to this recent story on NPR: “South Dakota Indians Find Getting Health Care can be a Struggle.” Edie Hoff, subject of several of the photographs, picks up prescriptions for residents of the reservation who live over 100 miles away. The road is long and for many stretches unpaved. I wonder how she took on this position. I wonder if she gets reimbursed for gas and the wear and tear on her vehicle. Another nurse, Jami Larson, visits patients outside of her workplace at the Urban Indian Health Programs in order to “make sure they’re on track or going food shopping with some to help them get food that will keep them as healthy as possible.” I wonder if this time spent is paid, or if, like many female caregivers, she’s doing a fair amount of care-giving on her own time and her own dime.

I think what jumped out even more than the unexplored stories of Edie Hoff and Jami Larson was the fact that less money on average is spent on Indigenous health care than is spent on prisoner health care in this country. Given that I had just spent the weekend at the PYC conference in Philadelphia, and that there had been a primary focus at this year’s conference on transgender individuals in the prison-industrial complex, this sent a chill through my very being. The treatment of prisoners in this country is big business, and that should concern us. In reading Angela Davis, in working with Black And Pink’s prisoner support programs, I’ve seen how the desire to cut the cost of keeping prisoners alive has resulted in cuts to health services, including a lack of basic medical treatments. In an interview, Alan Berkman explains the reality of prison medical care. These images came back to mind as I read the NPR story again:

In 2013, Indian Health Service spending for patient health services was $2,849 a person, compared with $7,717 for health care spending nationally, according to a report from the National Congress of American Indians. That despite the fact that Native Americans typically have more serious health problems than the general public, including higher rates of diabetes, liver disease and unintentional injuries.

 

Of course, I also made the mistake of reading the comments. There’s a special kind of vitriol reserved for news pieces about racial minorities; especially when they involve people who are reaching for a step up to the same playing field everyone else starts at. There’s a lot of tough talk about independence and self-determination from people who clearly do not grasp the concept of systematic inequality, the cyclical nature of poverty, the recent crash of the economy, the inheritance of disease, etc. Another, Vern Wells, says:

Or they could build their own towns and cities on those reservations to have better access to the services they need and want. That’s what everyone else in developed economies did. Manhattan Island was a stark wilderness when Europeans first started settling it. But I guess if these Native Americans really don’t want hospitals and clinics a five minute drive down the street from where they live, that’s their choice.

I shake my head. Minorities building their own towns, developing their own economies and so forth has not ended well if we look at historical examples: mostly because white people came in and took over, or just burned it to the ground. Also, it’s hard to develop a thriving economy when the majority of people living in a place are below the poverty line. And as Indigenous people, it’s not like they have a reason to believe that any promise about respecting the land, the air, or the people would actually be kept.

I shake my head. I feel as though there needs to be a brief overview of the last several hundred years of colonialism before every single news story about Indigenous people before the actual news story begins, because apparently the historical context for today’s events would still be news to so many people.

Smoking/No Smoking (2)

[Editorial note: This is a continuation of an earlier post exploring the relationship between Indigenous cultures and representation and tobacco. Part one can be found here.]

According to a handout from the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids from November 2015, American Indians “have the highest prevalence of smoking” at 29.2 percent of the AI population. The percentage of smokers varies tribe to tribe: “14 percent of Southwest tribal members were smokers compared to a 50 percent smoking rate among Northern Plains tribal members.” At first I thought that this high rate was due to the use of tobacco in traditional ceremonies, having seen so many images of the peace pipe. This did not turn out to be the case: “A 2010 study found that, despite a lack of tobacco-related tribal traditions, cigarette use was four times higher among Alaska Natives than American Indians in the Southwest United States.” It seems as though smoking has taken hold once more in a community which experiences the heightened stress of minority status in the United States as well as the stress which comes with living under near-universally recognized occupation.

Even in light of the damaging effects of tobacco and the general success of anti-smoking activism in this country there is still the fact that tobacco holds a particular relevance to indigenous people. But it is clear that traditional tobacco use differs from contemporary recreational use, not only in terms of the actual substance being smoked (tobacco with vs tobacco without additives) but also in terms of philosophic perspectives on tobacco use.

The final piece in Tobacco Use by Native North Americans (ed. Winter) is by Lawrence A Shorty. It’s a story called “Tricky Tokes, Those Coyote Smokes.” The Editor’s Introduction places the tale within the context of Indigenous history and religious practice, as well as our current moment, and helps to clarify the difference:

This story is told to Native American children to help them understand the difference between the positive effects of traditional tobacco use for prayers and ceremonies and the terrible health effects of tobacco when it is used as a recreational drug. […] The story is based on the Navajo understanding that everything has its place and should have hozho—it should be in balance. Each of the different animals, as well as humans, was given its own special tobacco smoke medicine, which helps to define who and what it is. What may be good for one group in a particular situation can be very bad for another. (382)

In this particular Coyote legend, Coyote wants to find out why Mountain Sheep is so adept at leaping from the peak of one mountain to another. Coyote sends Red Ant to spy on Mountain Sheep and report back. Red Ant says that he “saw Mountain Sheep pick a plant, drop an offering, make a prayer and then role a smoke in a corn-husk cigarette” (383). Coyote runs off pick plants, any plant, without prayer or offering, and uses magic to grow an unnaturally large corn stalk. Coyote smokes a huge cigarette and becomes filled with energy—energy which leads to him losing his balance and falling off of a peak and shattering into many pieces. He resurrects himself, as he has done many times before, but finds that his lungs are “too worn and holey to be of any use to him” (385). Red Ant and the other animals help Coyote find balance again in order to create new lungs for him, and the Coyote returns to his tricky ways. Whether or not he understood what happened is intentionally ambiguous. It is because Coyote has abused the sacred plant, without offerings, without prayers or respect, that Coyote is poisoned by this plant which gave so much strength to others. The connection with today is quite clear: out of hand use of tobacco as a recreational substance leads only to despair.

Coyote was able to revive himself. He is like a cat with multiple lives. People, however, are not able to do that so easily. Remember the lesson Coyote learned about tobacco. Unless you acknowledge its power, it’s sacredness, the plant can never become “real.” It will only cause harm. Learn the name of your sacred plant. (385)

Tobacco isn’t simply this generic thing, “Tobacco,” any more than a sunflower is just a flower. There are differences between plants and the effects they have. Like many allegorical tales, it ends with a call to action:

As native people we must change our environment and what we do within it. We are beginning to understand that commercial tobacco is very harmful. We understand that there are risks associated with smoking cigarettes. But do we acknowledge that learning occurs through example? Then why do people smoke in front of their children? By doing so, we are teaching them how to smoke. How else would nonsmokers know how to smoke if it wasn’t taught by others? What you do affects others. For native people, the stories need to be remembered and shared. A Navajo belief is that to undo an illness, one must return to the beginning. The beginning means going back to the era of creation to relearn what was not understood the first time. It is through this process that our well-being—our physical, emotional and spiritual health—can be preserved. (385)

It is a call for Indigenous people to unlearn the attitudes of disrespecting nature and to learn respect for not only one’s own bodily integrity but also an awareness of the impact it has on others—a lesson which could universally be learned. It is about realizing that medicine, no matter how good, can become poison when used in excess or taken outside of the proper guidelines.