Reid Gómez

Emancipation Proclamation

2014-01-01T10:26:00.000-08:00

It's more than a year since I've blogged on the black blog—this work will be unlike the others. Much has passed and I'm feeling a little Jennifer Holiday—I am changing.

I spent last night with Beckett's Stories and Texts For Nothing. "I do not know where to begin nor where to end, that's the truth of the matter."

I chose today to reinstate this blogspot for several reasons. Today marks the 151st anniversary of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

According to Webster emancipate means: "to set free (a slave, etc.); release from bondage, servitude, or serfdom 2. to free from restraint or influence, as of convention 3. Law to release (a child) from parental control and supervision —SYN. see FREE.

I planned to make some new and relevant comment about Joint Resolution 65, and the fact that Navajo slaves continued to be held in bondage for 5 years after Lincoln's 1863 proclamation. If you're interested in that troll this blog, there are many such statements.

Lincoln looms large in this archive.

As I've been writing through this long December I've been remembering the many ways Americans have celebrated the birth of Christ over the years: the mass execution of the Dakota 38, and Wounded Knee among them. Good Spanish Colonial subject that I am, I look forward to the Day of the Kings and to the Man To Send Rain Clouds. For now I write.

Today is also the day I used to spend at Baba Ellegua's Bimbe in Oakland. I look toward open roads, more than freedom—aware that total freedom is a pathological concept. It's up to me, knowing I must continue to act as a person with relations. Though the last few years have left me feeling like one of Harlow's monkeys—less an experimental subject of love at goon park than someone having to navigate the ilk of domestic violence, alcoholism and drug abuse; nonetheless someone with no home to go home to.

For some that type of homelessness is the defining characteristic of the slave, the genealogical isolate—the fragmented kinship structures that are lost to something (time, colonization, extermination, slavery) that is difficult to describe, especially as it shapes our narrative strength to escape the story of our birth (metaphysical, ancestral and physical) and our journey narratives.

I already celebrated the New Year, in October, but I ask myself to pursue new beginnings today, gearing up for the lunar year (the second New Year I personally celebrate with similar intention and reverence)—and in that I choose to allow this site to transform itself into something I'm not quite sure of. I am changing—thinking of the promise of writing, that it may take you somewhere you may never return from. In light and beauty.

In Regard To Those Remaining Unclaimed

2012-08-04T06:13:00.000-07:00

144 years ago today, John Ward, obedient servant and Special Indian Agent wrote a forty five page letter regarding "The Navajo Problem."

In beautiful handwriting, with certain s-s that give the impression of f-s, agent Ward outlined several suggestions for managing the Navajo after our return from Hwéeldi.

Bind them on all sides. Enclose them within military posts. Maintain a full company of well mounted militia and employ fifteen Pueblo or "well disposed Navajo Indians" as guides for itinerants and explorers. Pay them. Arm them with proper guns and two horses.

"At least at the commencement of the scheme."

He follows with details.

Details about the 1200 Wild Indians, largely Apache.

Details about Carson's attack on da'ak'eh, requiring three hundred men most of one day to destroy the fields of the Valley de Chelly.

Details about the likelihood of conversion, his recommendation: start with our children. Turn them over to the Catholics and their imposing ceremonies—their peculiar training, and ease at secluded living gives them a certain advantage over other denominations and temperaments.

On page 37 he reaches the question of orphans. "I would here suggest, that orphan children should have the first privilege."

What is the nature of this privilege?

"Many of the captives in question, particularly the grown ones, must now be Orphans, and are perhaps without even any near relatives to take care and provide for them properly. Whilst others are unwilling to go back to the tribe."

By page 39 he's mulling over these circumstances and the fate of these children. What is to be done with them? Turn them over to the first Navajo that claims them? What if these claims are short in coming? What if the Navajo just claim random youth for their own profit and domestic needs—and turn around and enslave them?

Clearly Ward is speaking of mores and motivations he's familiar with, and to a great extent, endorses: "Besides, it is not reasonably to be expected, that any family in the country having any such captives, will be willing to give them up, upon the mere representation of a Navajo Indian; Humanity itself would prevent it."

What is reasonably to be expected?

What is the character of mere representation? By what manipulations does one leave such low and insignificant impressions upon another? Mere representations?

By what means would humanity itself prevent it? Whose humanity is he addressing?

Even if these concerns could be adequately addressed to the satisfaction of this agent, the Peace commission and the Peace commissioner Ward expresses additional concerns, for the safety of the settlers, a sort of question of homeland security. The captives, in their position as slave, would necessarily know a great deal about the families they were owned by, among this knowledge would be intimate details about the people, their style and habit of life, their herds, their preferred grazing practices and locations. This knowledge would make the captives, if returned, a great asset to the Navajo should there be another war, another war for land, or for free movement on the land. These facts, considerable as they are, needed to be addressed by the agent and by the colonial governments (state and federal).

"This question will be a troublesome one until duly settled. The Navajoes will continue to claim their people, and on the other hand, the citizens to refuse to give them up."

Ward's letter is rich and concludes with the promise to deliver the souls of "those remaining unclaimed, in possession of the agent, or unwilling to remain with their people" [if they can even be identified] to "such Christian persons as would be willing to take charge and provide for them properly."

In reading this letter today I cannot help but consider the relevance of reach and Ward's concern that the Navajo would continue to claim their people. It is clear and indisputable that "the citizens" (of New Mexico and the United States) would refuse to give those remaining unclaimed, in possession of the government, or such Christian persons taking charge of them, up for any reason or ransom. But what could alter a person, and disfigure them so completely, that they would become beyond (our) reach, beyond (our) ability to recognize them, and allow us to cut them lose, and surrender their souls to their owners.

This is one question that all natal isolates must answer. It is the same question those who retain possession of their lines must answer also. It is a question of origins. It is a question of relations, bought and sold.

excerpt from The Legacy of Navajo Slaves

2012-07-27T10:57:00.000-07:00

Taking the point of the view of the slave, manumission by the state is commonly viewed as the most complete method. State manumission seemed to granted the slave, or newly freedman, the fullest integration into society, without the consent of his master. This is what occurred with the Emancipation Proclamation issued on January 1, 1863. It is crucial to remember that this proclamation was not applied to Indian slaves, because "[t]he system of servitude prevalent in the American Southwest—peonage and Indian slavery—. . .were never regarded as involuntary servitude, as in the case of Negro slavery." (p. 178, Bailey) Union soldiers reached Galveston, Texas, on June 19th,1865, bringing with them the news that the civil war had ended and slaves were freed— this date is still celebrated as Juneteenth, "the oldest known celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the United States"—yet Indian slaves, Navajos among them, were still being held in bondage. Even after Joint Resolution No. 65 was passed on July 27, 1868, five years after the Emancipation Proclamation, giving "General William T. Sherman power/authority to use the most efficient means at his disposal to reclaim from bondage the women and children of Navajo and other tribes; then held in bondage and return them to their respective reservations." (p. 186, Bailey) New Mexicans resisted and fought, successfully, to maintain their hold, culturally and legally upon their slaves. Revealing that "[l]aw . . .is merely that complex of rules which has the coercive power of the state behind it." (p. 26, Patterson)

"For the most part, Indians carried to Rio Grande settlements and sold into slavery were lost forever to both tribe and kinsmen—as no treaty clause could induce New Mexicans to release property they had paid as high as $200 per head for." (p. 126, Bailey)

In his book, Indian Slave Trade in the Southwest, Lynn Bailey articulates one of the arguments against manumission: "Often Mexican families held second and third generation captives. They had lost their native language, customs and habits. No longer were they Indian; in all respects they were like their masters. To uproot these individuals was indeed a crime, and to send them to an Indian reservation was virtually exiling them to an alien land and people. Many Indian children, taken captive in infancy, had been adopted into Mexican families, baptized and brought up as Catholics. The protestations of New Mexicans against giving up such Indians were loud— and not without some degree of merit. To release these children into the hands of the military to be placed upon a reservation, would do them great injustice. These peons were Indian only in blood—they were Mexican in habit, speech and tradition." Bailey's argument illuminates the principal philosophy at work in the slavery program.

New Mexican families argued that Navajos didn't have the same feeling for their children as more civilized peoples, that as primitives and heathens, we wer incapable of such attachment. Their argument fails in every area. They ignore the fact that Navajo slaves and captives were mentioned in every treaty and treaty negotiation between 1846 and 1868: the Treaty of Ojo del Oso 1846 (1.5 yrs before Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, which required that Mexican slaves be returned but made no parallel demand for the return of Indian slaves held by Old or New Mexicans), the Newby Treaty 1848 (slave raids), the Treaty of 1849/Washington Treaty (first ratified by US), the Treaty of Laguna Negra 1855, the Bonneville Treaty of 1858, Canby Treaty of 1861 (slave raids/Mescaleros), and the Naaltsoos Sání of 1868 (Note to self: Also Treaty at Jemez, July 15, 1839 and the "worthless treaty at Santa Domingo "to alleviate any resentment Navajo Chieftans had against the Mexicans" on March 10, 1841). They also ignore the fact that for over 20 years Navajos sought permission to formally track down the women and children that were stolen and sold. Eventually United States investigators admitted that Navajos were not only capable of but clearly expressed love for and devotion to their children.

Bailey's words clearly reveal the colonial desire to eradicate Indigenous people and Indigenous ways, and expose the popular belief about the existence and character of an Indian race— a theory that continues to dominate popular, academic and legal minds today. This idea of an Indian race, and the particular nature of this race, is rooted in the desire to wipe this race from the earth, and nourished by a desperate and clinging certainty that Indians will ultimately disappear. The simple and widely accepted notion that you could transform Navajos into Mexicans, Mexicans into Hispanics and Hispanics into Americans shaped the backbone of this history and continues to shape relations between peoples in the southwest today. Now poof, they are gone.

This piece is excerpted from a talk I gave at the University of California at Berkeley on November 30, 2010. I offer it today to commemorate the passing of J.R. No. 65, today in 1868.

I believe we must admit that the process of creating slaves who become New Mexicans who become Americans through an immediate and irreversible deracination program is devastatingly comparable to what the United States is still engaging in today.

For What It's Worth

2012-07-12T06:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the Axe fell on the novel, and how to be a competent reader. Today it falls on Obsolescence. Though every place remembers, not every person seems to matter.

How do we attempt a dialogue where no voice is done the 'slightest violence'?

I write about us those who are loathed and detested. I have a responsibility, K'é, to support my relatives; I live inside it.

While researching obsolescence I wrote to the archivist at Yad Vashem to inquire about their database. The frozen sea presents dangers I am well aware of. Losing your way is one. Drowning, another. My search for depth forces me to attend to connection. Often we don't recognize the scope and manner of our shared experiences and shared relations. I was afraid of focusing attention on the Vad Vashem memorial without fully understanding their politics. Natalie Goldberg introduced me to the memorial as she was Writing Down the Bones. I'm obsessed with the unremembered—we do more than forget them, we throw them into a pile we decide is, for some reason, beyond our scope, irrelevant or impossible.

Clearly I am a believer who does not believe everything.

"The 'enemy,' whoever they may be, are surely somehow in us all as well as out there, and whatever literal propositions they may want to offer us about our lives would not be flatly dismissed but rather heard and incorporated."
Wayne C. Booth, introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin's Problem of Dostoevsky's Poetics

We are many. Those people who have survived extermination. Those who have walked long walks to death camps. Those who had their fields scorched and burned, and their livestock slaughtered. Those who have survived deliberate and strategic starvation. We are among them. They are us: ancestors and living. I see their faces in the mirror. I see them in Egun. I see them when I walk down to Sixth Street and Market. Yet so many peoples cannot see; they refuse vision. I am deeply pained by the inability we have to recognize each other. I have felt this pain since I was young and living with domestic and sexual violence. One thing, then, was clear to me. Everything was happening, right there, in the open. It was the people who refused to see it.

Recognition takes vision and strength. You cannot recognize while speaking from wounds. You must breathe. Vision requires the perspective provided by breath.

The reply I received from Zvi Berheardt, the Reference and Information Services representative of Yad Vashem was deeply disappointing. "Yad Vashem defines the Shoah as relating only to those the Nazis saw as Jews." While it does continue, "This does not mean, in any way, that we denigrate the many other victims of Nazism." with a reference link to their working definition of The Hololcaust. I still felt denigrated. I considered my next step carefully. My entire project is about connection. I'm taken by the horrors of the second world war largely because they so completely illuminate the consequence of hate and the failure of humanity.

"No one knew what to do with the life that had been saved." (Appelfeld, Beyond Despair)

Throughout time people have been faced with the opportunity to survive and the question of what shape life might take. I read Aharon Appelfeld and David Grossman in an effort to see. What choice can be made the morning after?

"In dialogue, annihilation of the opponent also annihilates the very dialogic sphere in which discourse lives. . .this sphere is very fragile and easily destroyed (the slightest violence is sufficient, the slightest reference to authority. . ." (M. Bakhtin)

Authority: 1. a) the power or right to give commands, enforce obedience, take action or make final decisions b) the position of one having such power 3. power or influence resulting from knowledge

I am not looking for authority. Authority says I do not exist.

If we move beyond "mostly sayin', 'hooray for our side'" we might see something in ourselves, something we need as we face the choices we must make, every day, every one.

The response from Yad Vashem is important. I see us in them. I see their choices. I measure our choices by the light and shadow they cast. Shik'éí, my relatives, immediate relatives, clans: the Navajo, Pueblo, Mexican, Congolese and African American. I not only ask who can we be, but who do we want to become?

We Are Rivers Remembering Ancient Paths

2012-06-26T06:57:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 the 22nd Navajo Nation Council will make the final decision on the Navajo-Hopi Little Colorado River Water Settlement Act. We expect a no vote.

For everyone on Navajo there is still time to contact your delegate.

Sen. John Kyl still needs to formally withdraw S. 2109: Navajo-Hopi Little Colorado River Water Rights Settlement Act of 2012. You can track this bill yourself.

Next steps: Coming to consciousness about what it takes to keep your house and life running smooth.

Some details about the bill and the issues involved.

We Are Rivers Remembering Ancient Paths

"Some of us that were born and raised in the traditional way, that are still practicing our ceremonies, that still hold our water sacred, we understand what this will do to us. To destroy us."
-Ben Nuvamasa, Former Hopi Tribal Chairman, March 29, 2012

"To state the obvious: when the Europeans came to America there was a clash of civilizations, and through out history the less mature civilization always suffer."
-Senator John McCain

"A water project is a whole concept. . .all water is interconnected in the west, either physically or on paper."
"Philip L. Fradkin, A River No More

The question of water in the Colorado River Basin extends into antiquity. The United States began its exploration in1869 with John Wesley Powell's Expedition down the Green and the Colorado. He was quick to understand "whoever controlled the water and how it was used. . . determined what happened on the surrounding lands; thus its distribution should be carefully planned and carried out, preferably by an entity higher than the water users and individual states." Over 143 years later over 13,000 claims have been filed on the Little Colorado, and only Zuni has settled their rights, as they relate to this river.

United States Senator Jon Kyl [R-AZ] and his cosponsor Sen. John McCain [R-AZ] have offered a final resolution to claims on the Little Colorado: S. 2109: Navajo-Hopi Little Colorado River Water Rights Settlement Act of 2012. Their bill was introduced on February 14, 2012, its companion bill H.R. 4067: Navajo-Hopi Little Colorado River Water Rights Settlement Act of 2012, sponsored by Rep. Ben Quayle [R-AZ3], was introduced two days later.

Tribes need to clarify their water rights for innumerable reasons. We understand: Water is Life: Tó éí íína'. Our daily lives are shaped by access to water and water quality. Kyl used that fact when he introduced the bill onto the senate floor, claiming to speak from a concern for those daily needs. Navajos and Hopis, in 2012, do not have adequate access to potable water. This fact is abused by this rushed bill that will not provide those families, crops, or livestock with safe water. Hopi and Navajo have water rights, but lack the means required to move water where it is needed. Settling water rights will help us answer domestic, municipal and industrial questions.

Hopi and Navajo exercise their aboriginal rights in reply to individuals and states who desire our water as a resource for their lives and industries, or they can sign this bill. Those living away from the Hopi and Navajo homelands rely on our water for their life and for their livings. The U.S. Federal government, the states of Arizona, Nevada, and California, urban centers likes Phoenix and industries like the CAP and Peabody Coal make constant demands for more water and require us to develop long term plans to provide solutions to economic development, water banking, marketing, leasing and exchange. These plans must be shaped by the fundamental laws of Hopi and Navajo.

S. 2109: Navajo-Hopi Little Colorado River Water Rights Settlement Act of 2012 renders that impossible.

Kyl and McCain's bill moves the question of water irrevocably outside the realm of the fundamental laws of Hopi and Navajo into a completely alien and irresponsible legal and market system, declaring, via that same law (S.2109), that the legal and market system will not be accountable for what they do to the water system in the process. Under S.2109 no living creature who depends on water from the Little Colorado may seek redress.

Currently, the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe retain a claim on the Little Colorado by two authorities, one recognized by all entities (United States Federal, State and local) and another, recognized by Navajo, Hopi and the United Nations. In exchange for settling the question of these water rights, and all claims on the Little Colorado, the authors of the bill are asking the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe to relinquish these aboriginal rights and federal reserved rights. They also ask the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe to relinquish their rights (and duty) to hold parties responsible for damages to water rights and quality, in addition to their rights (and duty) to pursue additional water rights in the un-foreseeable and uncertain future. Section 105 details the waivers, releases, and retentions of claims for Navajo and repeats for Hopi. Repeated over and over, as an incantation, is the language: past, present, and future claims for water rights arising from time immemorial and, thereafter, forever, that are based on aboriginal occupancy of land both within and outside of the State by the Navajo Nation, the members of the Navajo Nation, or their predecessors. (emphasis mine)

The United States Supreme Court has consistently upheld the "reserved rights doctrine." These, Winters Rights, apply to groundwater, surface water, rivers, streams (navigable and non-navigable) that "underlie, border, traverse, or are contained within the reservation." They guarantee the tribe access to "as much water as is necessary to fulfil the purpose of the reservation once senior claims, if there are any, have taken their entitlement." The 13,000 claimants to the Little Colorado are relative newcomers to the area. None can make a claim to senior rights. Two questions, under Winters, remain. To what purpose was the reservation created and how much water is needed to full that purpose.

One acceptable definition: the purpose "all Indian Reservations are created is to serve as a permanent and economically viable home for the Indians who live there. Therefore, every reservation is at least entitled to enough water to satisfy its subsistence needs and maintain its viability."

Surrendering Winters Rights makes absolutely no sense for Hopi and Navajo. As wards of the federal government, the United States is legally responsible to protect these rights, not demand them in exchange for water. Yet, throughout our histories the United States has consistently, legislatively, worked to alter our means of subsistence, reflecting no desire to provide access to or maintain what is viable for us, in the past, present, and future arising from time immemorial and thereafter. The United States is not invested in our futures or in the health and wellbeing of our homelands. As an organization they have been successfully getting at water, coal, electricity while polluting our skies in order to create an illusion of easy living in this, the desert.

Phoenix, The Salt River Project, Central Arizona Project, The Navajo Generating Station and Peabody Coal are the entities who benefit from the water and the language of S.2109. The bill will: extend a lease with the Navajo Generating station (NGS) through December 23, 2022; allow NGS use of 34,100 acre feet a year of water; and reopen and extend a life lease to the Kayenta Mine to extract coal from Black Mesa. In order to release water to Hopi and Navajo they must renew contracts with Kayenta Mine and Peabody Coal [Sec 201 (a) (2)]. In violation of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Articles 13 (2), 15 (2), 18, 19, 27, 29 and 32.

The United States Federal Government only acknowledges Winters Rights, waving these rights leaves Hopi and Navajo with no legal footing in courts that continue to make decisions about Hopi and Navajo lands and lives. The allegiance of these courts lies with the United States, culturally, politically and in the reality of fixed systems: sewage, pluming and electricity. Yet they are the tribes representative.

In exchange S.2109 does not even guarantee funding. Congress will need to locate funding for the $233 million in promised water projects [Sec 103 (a) (4) (A), 103 (b) (4) (A), and 109 (c)]. Congressional needs are in no way aligned, sympathetic or subject to either nation, as tribes found out in 1903 with Lonewolf v. Hitchock. Yet Kyl, McCain and some Navajo Nation officials continue to use the reality of poor and inadequate water on Hopi and Navajo as the major selling point for their program.

Every American Indian is intimate with the idea that "what is the law prevails." United States Federal Law shapes every tribal council (since inception), access to sacred sites, and movement across our territories. Every action and decision runs through the sieve of Federal, State and Tribal jurisdiction. The relationship between these entities defines the possible for every Tribe/Pueblo/Nation and every tribal person. Without that understanding, or acknowledgement, there can be no meaningful conversation.

The finality of the terms of S.2109 are particularly onerous for everyone, regardless of their direct membership in the nations or the states directly named in the bill. The N-Aquifer is damaged. Sacred springs are drying up and contaminated. The Arizona Snowbowl plans to use reclaimed water on the face of our sacred mountain. If Hopi and Navajo waive all rights and every means of redress to these water claims, what then? What of the ceremonies? What of supply? What of quality?

Why decolonize and not occupy?
"The foundation of property law and federal Indian law is not the Constitution, but the idealized cognitive model of the conqueror seizing a promised land for a chosen people. The cognitive model involves not simply a historical right of conquest in the past, but an ongoing, contemporary right to conquer in the present." (emphasis mine) For many this foundation seems to be invisible—not for Hopi, Navajo or any other indigenous person within the United States territorial holdings.

S.2109 is a question of law—the law of three courts: federal, state and tribal. The laws of the Hopi and Navajo people, Fundamental Laws, common laws, are not all, or equally represented in these courts. Of the twelve Hopi Villages only four are represented on the Hopi Tribe Council, President Shelly and the Navajo Nation Tribal council does not represent all, especially the most traditional. There has not been transparency. Navajo Nation is holding 7 town hall meetings , yet the rights will be waived of all Navajos regardless of chapter. Nearly every aspect of this bills inception and movement to date have violated some aspect of the UN Declaration of Indigenous Rights.

"Those people who were not raised in the traditional way, perhaps do not understand the magnitude of this bill."

Hopi and Navajo need potable water. Hopi and Navajo also need to apply the fundamental laws they were given. S.2109 is a question of land ethics.

S.2109 requires Hopi and Navajo to dismiss with prejudice all suits, currently pending, and to forfeit the right to pursue further action to protect water access or quality. This includes the pending case regarding the Arizona Snowbowl. United States federal laws are not benign and should not be blindly accepted without analyzing the concepts they are founded on, or the present day injustices they create, enable and enforce. These laws are part of a overall water project, part of an overall historical project—a project acknowledged by the international community, though not by the United States itself. When Ben Navumsa, Former Hopi Tribal Chairman, March 29, 2012, spoke to the people gathered at the Rocky Ridge Boarding School, at Hard Rock, Navajo Nation he asked everyone to become educated (to learn and know their history), to speak up and to require leaders to hold hearings and listen.
These recommendation, to actively follow S.2109, apply to everyone.

"Guaranteed climate change if America fails to do more than what is politically feasible."

It may not be politically feasible to ask everyone to turn to the Fundamental Laws of the Navajo and Hopi, but it is necessary. Minimally, Navajo and Hopi must be able to apply these laws in every arena of life. They must be able to hold people accountable for their actions on and beliefs about our homelands. Hopi and Navajo are organized by a belief in community based on responsibilities not rights. In his introduction to Navajo Courts and Navajo Common Law: A Tradition of Tribal Self-Governance, Raymond Austin reminds us: "Different perspectives are appreciated and needed. The process of using Navajo normative precepts to solve modern problems is not limited to dispute resolution and Navajo Nation governance, but touches every area of Navajo society, life and lands."

At the core of Hopi and Navajo fundamental law is a concern for environmental impact and an understanding of the intimate relationship between all creatures that share and create these, our desert homes. Water is one. These guidelines were shaped and culled from generations of indigenous experience of the land and have been retained through language and culture. Embedded in these laws is a respect for and access to power, not electricity, but power. Imperial cities, like Phoenix, want electricity and water, no matter what cost paid by human and natural powers that supply them. Hopi and Navajo fundamental laws ask us all to be conscious of our place in the world.

(for full citations email me)

jaatarats

2012-06-22T14:59:00.000-07:00

Coming Monday 25 June 2012 at http://jaatarats.blogspot.com/.

The Axe

2012-06-19T07:01:00.000-07:00

My new project, the Axe, will debut on Monday, 25 June 2012, at http://jaatarats.blogspot.com/.

The Political Author

2012-06-08T14:43:00.001-07:00

Aditya Chakrabortty's title "Why are English and American Novels Today So Gutless?" provoked me. I have been turning further and further away from contemporary American offerings for literature that matters. I read his article expecting an insight or solution to a contemporary problem in fiction: novels lacking bowels, entrails, stomachs, and intestines. The organs of digestion, absent. Grit transforms the masticated into nutrient and waste. Our bodies absorb one, and release the other. I think of the Apache and their story Shades of Shit. For the full text to this post visit the Red Room.

Technorati Claim Token

2012-06-07T16:56:00.000-07:00

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Le Fin de Summer of Stein

2011-09-25T15:40:00.000-07:00

"Writing is a means of knowing, and in literature knowledge is derived through form. New knowledge can only be obtained through new forms. Yet such a process requires distancing oneself from one's readership, not selling books and setting of on a path that Joyce exhausted years ago. The more one experiments with form the more one distances oneself from functional writing, and from the possibility of selling books. It wouldn't be much of a dilemma, however, if I hadn't presently such a need for money." Hermann Broch

"The historical position of Bach's work therefore reveals what later generations had begun to forget—that history is not necessarily a path climbing upward (toward the richer, the more cultivated), that the demands of art may be counter to the demands of the moment (of this or that modernity), and that the new (the unique, the inimitable, the previously unsaid) might lie in some direction other than the one everybody sees as progress." Kundera, Testaments Betrayed

The Nazi's interned Broch in 1938 for producing subversive work. In his cell he began the devastatingly beautiful and prophetic magnum opus The Death of Virgil.

In this symphony of language Cesar tells Virgil "The welfare of the Empire demands slaves, and they have to accommodate themselves to this fact. . . should they rebel against this. . . like Crassus I should have to let thousands of them be slain on the cross, as much a warning to the people as to divert them, and in order to make them, who are always ready for cruelty and fear, realize with fear and trembling, how impotent the individual is in comparison to the all-commanding state."

"'The literature of Hermann Broch could be understood,' wrote George Steiner, 'in view of the totality of his ideas and works, as an incessant metaphor of translation: translation of the present time into the time of the final days, of classical values into contemporary chaos.'" Eduardo Jiménez Mayo, José María Pérez Gay (trans.) Eduardo Jiménez Mayo, The Unfortunate Passions of Hermann Broch

In Testaments Betrayed Kundera discusses the nearly 70 years Europe lived "under a trial regime." He gives many examples. I mention one: "The most exquisite flower of the century, the modern art of the twenties and thirties, was even triply accused: first by the Nazi tribunal as Entartete Kunst, "degenerate art"; then by the Communist tribunal as "elitist formalist alien to the people"; and finally by the triumphant capitalist tribunal as art steeped in revolutionary illusions." I recognize this moment, these accusations, and I am particularly drawn the writers who emerged from this war and continued to create: Beckett, Kundera, Appelfeld, Broch and Stein. Over sixty years later I hear the same accusations of work I respect or am in the process of creating myself. Continuing Cesar's project of flaying slaves, gatekeepers and collectors control the discourse today.

Kundera concludes: "If we don't want to leave this century just as stupid as we entered it, we must abandon the facile moralism of the trial and think about this scandal, think it through to the bottom, even if this should lead us to question anew all our certainties about man as such."

In Beyond Despair, Aharon Appelfeld, a child survivor who fled to live in the forest writes: ". . . with the Holocaust. Everything in it already seems so thoroughly unreal, as if it no longer belongs to the experience of our generation, but to mythology. Thence comes the need to bring it down the human realm. . .to attempt to make the event speak through the individual and in his language, to rescue the suffering from huge numbers, from dreadful anonymity, and to restore the person's given and family name, to give the tortured person back his human form, which was snatched away from him."

This is the very project I've taken on with A Woman's Body Was Found There, Urban Nizhóní and my current work on the traffic in Navajo slaves and Indian Art. People often say certain subjects have been exhausted, and writers obsessed with these subjects (slavery, genocide, or the relevance of the novel) are continually forced to justify why we continue to devote ourselves to these areas of inquiry and form (oral history and written literature).

When I embarked on this summer of Stein I made a plan in my notebook to address literary ideals, the hard and fast economics of making a living as a writer (a painter and textile worker), and the professionalization of the arts (through servicing city programs and social services) controlling the grant cess pit. My identification with Stein, Beckett, Kundera, Appelfeld and Kafka seems obvious as a Navajo writer when paralleled with our recent genocide and continuing persecution. I see our recent path in these works. I see possibilities for our future, with our own relocations to strange cities outside the protection of the sacred mountains, and my fear we may experience our own metamorphosis into hateful creatures, enemy diné, for whom humanity is a distant memory.

"There was no doubt that the war dulled, distorted, and I do not hesitate to say so, corrupted the soul, but at the same time it also brought powers of dedication and self-sacrifice from the depths, and mainly archaic feelings that over the years, had been covered beneath a thick deposit of rationalism." (Appelfeld, Beyond Despair)

Last week Ms. Niki Lee and I went to see Sarah's Key to celebrate my birth.

My initial desire to see the film lay in my interest in Kristen Scott Thomas' work, especially her dual language acting. The content was a bonus. In my years of reading about the war, the Nazi persecution of artists and intellectuals, and the response of Jews before, during and after the Nazi program against them I knew little of this particular round up. I knew mainly of our own. When we left the theatre I continued to think about Julia's (Scott Thomas' character) devotion to her writing, to the questions inside, to her inability to take the place laid for her in this contemporary age. When a younger writer, who knew nothing of the round up asks, "What can we do about it now? You want to give them back their flat?" Julia answers, "Yes. Why not?" This is the same question I am asked by over three quarters of the people I interact with. Julia, the writer, makes the only choice, as a writer, that she can. This choice is an artist's choice. The same one Beckett made as a member of the resistance. The same one Kundera and Broch made as they fled. The same one Gertrude made when she remained and recorded her and Alice's life in Wars I Have Seen.

Appelfeld continues: "The naive faith that a man was free, to be judged by his intentions and acts, everything that we include under the rubric of 'humane rationalism,' crumbled and turned to dust. In the penal colony other standards were set. The mystery within you was crime and punishment at one and the same time."

Again, I arrive at Gertrude's saints and their pursuit of the mystery within. A quest artists face and grope at, sometimes with grace and at other times inelegantly, but always with a feverish perseverance incomprehensible to many. There is no way to put a figure on this pursuit, but we are, every one of us, asked to pay our way in today's world, to pay our rent, to pay our grocer, and to pay our doctor. To pay in money we must access in some way, not often compatible with our pursuit of the mystery within.

Summer of Stein

2011-08-21T12:19:00.000-07:00

Four Saints in Three Acts: An Opera Installation

I usually don't write reviews. I'm on a different time line, but we had such an amazing day (Thursday 18 August 2011), and this performance was so utterly contrary that I have to address it specifically.

We spend all our money on rent and food. We save for art (music, literature, theatre) when we feel we can't live with ourselves if we miss a particular performance. This year the one performance we thought we could not live without was Gertrude's Four Saints in Three Acts.

It's Gertrude.

During this summer of Stein my one constant obsession has been the lives of artists—especially as they relate to our ability to make a living. In a recent LA Review of Books article, FutureTense, Tom Lutz concludes with a discussion of the price of books in France, and an American complaint that they are too high.

"Yes," said the Frenchman. "We have this silly theory in France that our authors should be able to eat."

Lutz adds: "We don't know what the future of publishing is, but we know that the future for every writer requires food."

Earlier this week I made a tally of my rejections: A Woman's Body Was Found There (45), California Wasn't Good For Us (3), Urban Nizhóní (2) and The Portugal Story (7). Nearly all of my rejections spin around the axis of marketability. There are a few living writers I feel kin to: Lahiri, Silko, and Kundera. When I need refuge (nearly every night) I turn to Gertrude, Beckett, and Kafka. Their world, their language, their attention to what lingers nearby, awaiting an utterance, sometimes silence, keeps me afloat when life flows like water into the mouth a drowning man (Kafka).

Virgil Thomson: "Please do not try to construe the words of this opera literally or to seek in it any abstruse symbolism. If, by means of the poet's liberties with logic and the composer's constant use of the simplest elements in our musical vernacular, something is here evoked of the childlike gaiety and mystical strength of lives devoted in common to a non-materialistic end, the authors will consider their message to have been communicated."

We'd been preparing for the play for months. Ms. Niki Lee made a new dress and I rested enough to bear life after sundown. Early that day a check arrived from IAIA: Ms. Niki Lee sold Bringing In The Dawn, her first sale in just over a year. We remembered our friend America saying "just when you can't make the rent a check arrives in the mail from IAIA." Bringing In The Dawn won't pay our rent, it barely covered the price of the tickets for the play, but we were happy nonetheless. Sometimes even the smallest thing keeps you going.

Ms. Niki Lee had read the Examiner insert written by Robyn Wise, and she was a little nervous. In my usual fashion I hadn't read past: "Thomson chose for his subject the life of the artist, and Stein embroidered the idea with religious themes, insisting that the artist's absolute commitment to art is comparable to saint-hood." The rest: "the production assembles formidable collaborators from both coasts, including composer Luciano Chessa, contemporary chamber opera group Ensemble Parallele and New York's much-in-demand video/performance artist Kalup Linzy, perhaps best known for sendups of soap opera culture."

We arrived just as they were opening the house. We sat and started to read the program. What we read was not reassuring: "I have added a more structured narrative, interconnecting several dark several dark comedic vignettes that explore some of society's irrational views regarding life and death and the contradictions that surround murder and our concept of justice."

What?

Did director and production designer Brian Staufenbiel not trust Thomson's music or Gertrude's language? Did he actually think, "I need a hook for this?" Or did he just want to write his own opera?

The curtain came up and two rows of black hooded figures walked on stage singing in parsel tongue, looking like rejects from a middle school production of Faustus.

This was A Heavenly Act, to go before the saints, commissioned by SFMOMA and Ensemble Parallelle.

Ms. Niki Lee tipped her head to me and said, "Who goes to the theatre to watch TV?" I'll refrain from attacking Mr. Linzy, who looked like a P-Funk devotee, whisper singing like Janet when the rest of the cast sung sans electric. I kept waiting for him to do something, his stage presence an annoyance, and certainly less compelling (even in disgust) than the white plastic mannequin clothed in a lace dress that took center stage in "Heaven-as-it-actually-is." Filling a theatre is decidedly different than You-Tube.

I've commented at length about the power of Thompson's original cast being all black, when black bodies were largely objectified for nonblack audience needs and fetishized epistemology, but that was then and this is now, and with all the silver paint covering the rest of production and cast faces, why did they use Mr. Linzy's body for the promotional poster—only.

Gertrude herself said, you don't have to understand it you have to enjoy it: I hated it.

As Kalup himself says: I Cried All Tears I Could Cry

I tried not to flood myself with questions: they sent to New York for this guy, they could have gone down to Esta Noche on any night of the week and found someone better, what about Vixon Noir she needs work, she's a dancer, she can sing, she commands the stage, she's hot and she lives in San Francisco.

At this point the woman next to Ms. Niki Lee lifted her right cheek about 6 inches off the seat and let one go. Which Ms. Niki Lee thought might be better than the foul smell of fabric softener she had been releasing, and which revealed, not her opinion of the opera "installation," but her own manner of "bringsy upsy."

I was hoping this mess would contain itself to the new commission.

Curtain. Four Saints in Three Acts.

Ms. Niki Lee said, "cotton candy has more substance."

Forgoing a blow by blow I will say they forced this work to conform to their own limitations.

"Novelistic thinking is purposely a-philosophic, even anti-philosophic, that is to say fiercely independent of any system of preconceived ideas; it does not judge; it does not proclaim truths; it questions, it marvels, it plumbs; its form is highly diverse: metaphoric, fanciful; and mainly it never leaves the magic circle of its characters' lives; these lives feed it and justify it." (Kundera in The Curtain)

"I have added a more structured narrative, interconnecting several dark several dark comedic vignettes that explore some of society's irrational views regarding life and death and the contradictions that surround murder and our concept of justice." (Four Saints program notes)

These were four Saints. Gertrude wasn't being allegorical. She revered these holy people and this landscape (Spain). This production was completely earthbound, without the land, a central character of the original production of 1934.

Ms. Niki Lee said, "These people think they are better than the gods."

"Unlike the original, this new production has a few dark angels. The aim: to imagine divine intervention working in reverse, and to ask if our earthly acts might transform the very landscape of heaven itself." (Four Saints program notes)

The significance of this statement hit me full on after I watched them gut the opera (literally on stage, and figuratively in practice). Not only did this production remove the beauty and exaltation from the music and the book, but they removed it from the lives of the Saints as well. There is no possibility of divinity in this production. The same divinity Saints reach toward and artists pursue, knowing that the most essential aspect of creation is to allow the work to be larger than yourself and your limitations. Not only did this production not trust Thomson or Stein, with their belief that it needed an amendment (a narrative and darkness), but they also believed that heaven (a concept of a divine, by definition above human frailty, wretchedness, above us, the waˆceh) can be, and in some way, needs transformation itself. The desire of a certain peoples to transform the landscape by our earthly actions is tragically clear to us, the indigenous; we see it in the dams and the current struggle at the Peaks.

It's easy to project your own limitations on work that is "experimental." I experience this with my own work, all the time.

"Every author of some value transgresses against 'good style,' and in that transgression lies the originality (and hence the raison d'être) of his art." (Kundera in Testaments Betrayed)

There are so few spaces for these transgressions today. They are getting stopped at the gates (MFA, Tenure Track Faculty, much-in-demand celebrities) and with bottom line thinking. I expected more, especially from the YBCA. Gate keeping is the very reason I've begun this series, the very issue I raise in all my work—the inability of people to make a living with a creative life. The professionalization of creation--the service of art for further consumption, replication and regurgitation keeps all of us in the audience at the feet of the sanctioned (funded and much-in-demand), even if they claim a different status.

And this installation is not even good. I've seen every image (scene, set, face make up, color scheme) before—nothing surprised me or moved me to reconsider. The entire visual and imaginative arena was cliché. They were trifling, each one. Aside from the necromantic narrative, and their ridicule of Gertrude's linguistic vision, the cast (aside from the marvelously voiced and very poorly dressed Eugene Brancoveanu, Heidi Moss, Jonathan Smucker, John Bischoff and a solid debut by Maya Kherani) looked like they had only began practicing a week ago, their costumes could have been (if they weren't) purchased up the street at Ross, and the choreography was lame and flaccid.

Still, the most destructive aspect of this production is what it had to say (in practice and theme) about the lives of artists today.

Summer of Stein

2011-08-06T09:39:00.000-07:00

"Imagine the Grand Canyon turned into a lake." (Up the Yangtze)

Last night we watched Up The Yangtze , the 2007 film by director Yung Chang. The film documents China's Three Gorges Dam and the relocation of young Yu Shui and her family.

It has taken four years for Ms. Niki Lee to face Chang's film—four years to prepare to endure the harrowing sorrow and despair she knew the film would provide given the obvious parallels with the Garrison Dam on the MHA Nation.

"Did you know we're going to be flooded? Did you know we're going to have to leave everything behind and we're going to be flooded?" (Waterbuster)

During the building of the Garrison Dam one fourth of the MHA Nation's lands were flooded for the creation of Lake Sakagewa—a lake named after the celebrated Shoshoni slave, and "unwed mother," who helped Lewis and Clark on their expedition, as they forged the Oregon Trail— another monument to western expansion, and the relocation and molestation of tribes in the process.

Up The Yangtze begins with the story of the Ghost City, the place were dead souls must pass before they can return to the earth as reincarnated spirits. The Three Gorges Dam floods some of that city and some of the sacred sites that relate to this spiritual point of entry. Where will the souls go on their journey now?

The Chinese need the dam for three principle reasons: electricity, water control, and navigation (water recreation). This is what they say. This is what we hear. They told the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nations similar things when they began work on the Garrison Dam in 1946, work begun as part of the Pick-Sloan Project along the Missouri River.

As we watched the land be flooded by overweight Americans, tourists, cash economies, mass produced commodities and water I kept thinking of our Nations and our own relocations (to reservations, cities, and casinos as employees).

Every night I dream this dream. I open my eyes to the end of the world; I have survived. I wander, sometimes with Ms. Niki Lee, sometimes on my way to find her. Once I fell off the face of the earth. I survived that too. Sometimes I wander for hours. No one can kill this dream, not even needles from my Chinese doctor. The dream is old; I've had it since I was a child, sans Ms. Niki Lee. Relocation is an ancient nightmare, one the ancestors remind us to survive and one we are responsible to recognize the reoccurring terrain of.

Our connection to China is not only one of commerce and mass consumption. We share the earth; we share humanity. This goes beyond my constant harping about flicking switches— turning off as much electricity as we can (lights, computers, and chargers), and my concern with the toll technology takes on our humanity and personal relations (including the mass suicides of Chinese workers confined to produce iproducts, or those Chinese whose bodies were savagely put on display for an international tour in the name of science and education).

Watching Up The Yangtze underscores the fact that the greatest war in progress today is the war against the land and against landed people—indigenous people everywhere, those that emerged from Mother Earth, those that fell to her, from stars or rain clouds, those that know first and foremost their place as relations among her children, those that seek balance.

The film is a painful reminder of all our rivers and relocations. What do we do and where to we go?

D'Arcy McNickle's 1978 Wind From An Enemy Sky begins with Bull, the tribes strongest and most respected man, walking up the mountain to see this lie he refuses to believe: the dam. In his sorrow and fear he shoots the dam with his gun.

Bull tells his grandson: "I am a big man. I have always been called so. They gave me my name, Bull, because they said I was strong even as a boy, growing up. But when we saw how the white man built that place in the rocks and stopped our water, turned it away, I was not a big man. I fired my gun—a puff of smoke. You were frightened because I could do nothing. . .After a while, you will understand it. The white man makes us forget our holy places. He makes us small."

McNickle wrote this novel to honor the MHA Nation and their experience with the Garrison Dam. He wrote a novel. He created in light of devastation and destruction. He devoted himself to his passion and purpose—to language and story.

In 1837 Geroge Sand wrote: "To destroy life is the past time of a Gentleman." Patience, in Mauprat

Kundera tells this story in "Works and Spiders" a chapter in Testaments Betrayed. He was 13. His father hired a friend, a Jewish composer, to teach his son the basics of musical composition. Kundera wasn't a gifted musician. The war was everywhere around. The composer wore the star, and people had begun to avoid any connection to him. Asking him to teach Milan was his father's show of solidarity—shared humanity. Kundera followed the man from place to place, each smaller than the last, as the man kept getting relocated throughout the ghettos. He took his lessons among strangers, strangers to both men, as the composer simply had to go where they sent him. The bustle of ghetto business surrounded them. Kundera remembers one moment in particular, this moment shaped him profoundly.

After one of his lessons the composer walked him out and stood by the door. For no reason Kundera could recognize he said: "There are many surprisingly weak passages in Beethoven. But it is the weak passages that bring out the strong ones. It's like a lawn—if it weren't there, we couldn't enjoy the beautiful tree growing on it."

Kundera continues: "But dearer to me than the remark in itself is the image of a man who, a while before his hideous journey, stood thinking aloud, in front of a child, about the problem of composing a work of art."

I have been reading story after story of escapes made by people fleeing the Nazis and the Gestapo. Every artist carried their work with them, no matter how cumbersome: Beckett, Benjamin, Man Ray and Gertrude's long time collaborator Virgil Thomson.

Man Ray and Thomson fled Paris together by train. Man Ray took one loaded camera and Thomson brought 14 pieces of luggage, including 6 trunks of scores he planned to debut in the states once he returned. The Spanish border guard thought the scores might be military code and refused them entry. Thomson would have to go on without them. Thomson refused and offered this explanation: they were Mozart sonatas. The guard replied, "Ah, Mozart!" and let them pass.

The artist devotes her life to creation, not destruction. Elzéard Bouffier plants trees. I write. Ms. Niki Lee sews.

"This is how walls have fallen." (Those Who Thunder, Linda Hogan)

Summer of Stein

2011-07-20T18:53:00.000-07:00

"There was a woman who used to wash the clothes for the enemy in a kind of way she was an enemy herself, not an enemy who could frighten one but just an enemy and she said the enemies would win because they had wonderful weapons that no one had ever seen, all the enemies had wonderful weapons that no one had ever seen."

-Gertrude Stein, Wars I have Seen

We started this week's visit to the Steins Collect with a quick trip up to see Matisse and Cezanne. The place was flooded with docents so we made a quick exit down two floors to visit the Klee exhibit. The National Socialists declared Klee's art "degenerate" in 1933, upon which he returned to his birth land.

Und schamt sich nicht (Am not Ashamed)

I have been reading about the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) and Varian Fry's work in rescuing degenerate artists from Europe during the Nazi terror. According to my New World Dictionary a degenerate person is "one who is morally depraved or sexually perverted." One who has become "debased morally or culturally."

Hermann Broch, began his masterpiece, The Death of Virgil, while incarcerated in a German Concentration camp. In it he writes of Virgil on his death bead. Virgil's thoughts: "nothing availed the poet, he could right no wrongs; he is heeded only if he extols the world, never if he portrays it as it is. Only falsehood wins renown, not understanding."

The ERC started with a list of names compiled by friends and colleagues who had recently escaped Europe. After the Vichy government agreed to hand over any German (any anti-Nazi) on the Nazi's list. The Americans sent Fry, in August 1940, to evacuate as many of the people on his own list that he could find. He set about his task, and recorded his experiences in a 1945 book titled Surrender on Demand.

Gertrude and Alice were not among those who received his aid. Like Matisse they chose to wait it out. Their experiences are detailed in Wars I Have Seen, one of the most profound of Stein's writings (along with Three Lives). Her humanity is revealed in her attention to the daily details of survival—especially as two women, alone, in a Vichy France. She doesn't complain or even name the difficulties of being a Jew and a Lesbian at that time–for Gertrude, I believe, that is facile. What Gertrude and Alice demonstrate is the undertaking of daily life, there, and anywhere, for two women, where allegiances are not always clear and art shapes every breath. During this time, like all of the artists I've read about, or read themselves, Gertrude wrote. She created. Alice cooked. Together they found that "you never can tell who is going to help you, that is a fact. . . It always is funny that way, the ones that naturally should offer do not, and those who have no reason to offer it do, you never know you never do know where your good-fortune is to come from. The most experienced person can never tell, never never never."

Fry is one such man who helped for no reason. There are many more and there are many that were not saved. Walter Benjamin, travelling with his manuscript in hand, being only one death by suicide that we all know.

"The one thing that is sure and certain is that history does not teach, that is to say, it always says let it be a lesson to you but it is not at all because circumstances always alter cases and so although history does repeat itself it is only because the repetition is soothing that any one believes it, nobody nobody wants to learn either by their own or anybody else's experiences, nobody does, no they say they do but no body does, nobody does. Yes nobody does." (Wars I Have Seen)

One of the most powerful aspects of Gertrude and Alice's lives, for me and Ms. Niki Lee, is that every night Gertrude wrote and every day Alice typed, sewed and kept the house. Together they devoted each day to art and to artists. Today most of what I hear is that you can't make a living writing, speaking your own language, cooking and growing your own food, raising your flock, sewing your own clothes, being open— in any way— to something larger than making and spending money. The madness of art appears when the artist opens him, or her, self to something greater, something beyond what is seen, even by themselves. There is fellowship among those who attempt to live this out, especially today with the wonderful weapons of hate, apathy and greed.

Many of Klee's paintings, those left in Germany, were confiscated during the great destruction of art committed by the Nazis. At this moment, these particular pieces hang on the second floor at the SF Moma. In honor of combat Veteran Jeff Hillier, master of the reflection in photography, you will find me and Ms. Niki Lee in each photo.

Summer of Stein

2011-07-12T09:13:00.000-07:00

"There is a price exacted from those who live in a place where they are rejected and openly hated by their neighbors: loss of confidence in one's identity and its corollary, the unending need for self-reinvention."

The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head. Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay by Louis Begley

Before even entering 5 Stories I stopped to look at the guest book. Scrawled across the right side of the page was: Gertrude Stein saved two Jews during the war—herself and Alice. It rubbed me the wrong way. I read only two Jews, and I read it as criticism. Ms. Niki Lee asked, "What was she supposed to do, join the resistance like Beckett?" I said, I didn't know and the question has lingered for weeks.

I keep reliving a conversation we had a year ago in our kitchen. Some how Kafka came up. I can't remember the details, all I remember was my friend saying, "The self hating Jew." I was quiet. Ms. Niki Lee asked him, "Have you read him?" Knowing the place Kafka takes in my intellectual and spiritual practice. Without apology he said, "No." I took my cue and spoke briefly in reference to his work, his patronage and documentation of the Jewish theatre, the context of Prague, and the more I spoke the less he was interested. Ms. Niki Lee checked her cookies (she's like the Oracle in the Matrix), and he chimed in, "They're brown around the edges, they're done." We left it at that.

This memory kneaded the knot lingering beneath the guest book affirmation; I now believe the author of the quote wrote to confirm the power of saving one life, even if it is only your own.

It is easy to stand outside of a moment and understand what should have been done differently—supposedly, better. Gertrude and Alice were Jews, they were Lesbians, they were women without a man (and all that he brings with him). Everyone has an analysis of what they might have or could have done different.

I believe it is best to start with the work: Wars I Have Seen.

"We should take the story for what it is—the author's desperately brave attempt to work through nightmares from which he could not awake—" (The Tremendous World. . .)

Klee Benally sings, "We know this nightmare, because it repeats."

I am interested in survival—specifically the consequence of surviving extermination.

I agree with Blackfire, relocation is genocide. We have considerable shared experiences with many. I acknowledge relations. I don't rent ruptures or fester disconnections.

Gertrude, Alice, and Kafka: examining the intimacies our lives share is just as relevant as Baldwin's point: "I still believe that the unexamined life is not worth living: and I know that self-delusion, in the service of no matter what small or lofty cause, is a price no writer can afford. His subject is himself and the world and it requires every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are."

Everyone has moments in their own history they have difficultly comprehending.

These are mine: I live among people who would throw sewer water in my church, and spread human waste products on the face of my Gods' house, knowing, without doubt, that their acts will destroy my people, my children, my future. I endure the people's journey on the Long Walk, in both directions, knowing we lived and died together and alone. I know the loss caused by my ancestors' position as slaves in the south western slave trade, and I face the brutal reality that substance abuse and domestic violence have become accepted and part of my oral tradition.

Understanding a person within the context of their times, and within the context of their own lives (their opportunities, their position, their resources and their spiritual and ideological fortitude) requires a considerable amount of introspection—quiet, attentive, intimate introspection. Understanding also requires time alone with language—Language is life; we all live inside it.

Summer of Stein

2011-07-04T19:28:00.000-07:00

It took us three visits to get to the end of The Steins Collect exhibit at the MOMA. It is true: the fact that the MOMA got all these paintings from varied collections to show at this one time and location is a monumental accomplishment--a coup of great social and political import. Seeing this collection assembled in a set of rooms you can wander aimlessly through (provided you forgo the ear bud propaganda) is an experience that can help you imagine the experience and power of having original art in your home. Art you chose because you felt something resonate between the two of you: yourself and the picture, recalling Alice's insight, "you don't know a painting until you've dusted it."

But when you snake through the exhibit, careful to avoid overhearing the docents, you arrive at the last exhibit room: the propaganda kiosk. I took note of this room on our first visit to the exhibit. They had Alice's cookbook, The Making Of Americans (I assume to coincide with SPT's day long reading.), Gertrude's Picasso, and a bunch of adult and children's books about Matisse, Picasso and Paris. You could hardly comprehend that Ms. Stein was a writer. I believe the MOMA prides itself on leading the pack, visually and culturally: I though they'd foreground Ms. Stein's literary accomplishments and her role as collaborator, mentor and patron. I lost my decorum when I saw the black t-shirt with the white lettering: You can either buy clothes or buy pictures.

This line appears in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast (which I'm surprised they didn't have on stock), from the chapter "Miss Stein Instructs." At this point in the chapter Hemingway is recounting the afternoon Ms. Stein "told [them], too, how to buy pictures."

"You can either buy clothes or buy pictures," she said. "It's that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode, and buy your clothes for comfort and durability, and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures."

"But even if I never bought anymore clothing ever," I said, "I wouldn't have enough money to buy the Picasso's I want."

"No. He's out of your range. You have to buy the people of your own age. . .There are always good new serious painters."

Given their (SF MOMA) fascination with Matthew Barney I don't think irony is their strong point. The point of the t-shirts, the posters, the Print On Demand photocopies misses the significance and importance of the nexus created by the Steins.

If you want to see Henri Matisse go to the MOMA. If you're looking for a more nuanced discussion of this nexus head out the door, up the street and over to the Contemporary Jewish Museum where the emphasis is on seeing Ms. Stein and Ms. Toklas.

"The premise is that material objects, whether fine art, household artifacts, or curious possessions, highbrow or lowbrow, that belonged to Stein and Toklas could, if read closely, yield fresh insights about them and their universe."

The Contemporary Jewish museum presents Five Stories: Picturing Gertrude, Domestic Stein, Art of Friendship, Celebrity Stein and Legacies. This exhibit looks at Stein, her home, her body, her image, her artistic process, her creative relationships and her lover.

Gertrude: patron, husband, writer and friend.

Kundera writes about Bach:

These words could have been said about Gertrude and Alice, about the Steins and their collections; I will revisit them during the course of this series.

In the current arena of buying and selling (aka, get the rake, the artist is dead): the Picasso circle jerk at the deYoung in the name of membership and cultural hegemony (including their decision to limit tickets for members, a change in policy members only learn about, after renewals), the bottom lines decision makers, and the proliferation of giclée prints and fine oil arts available at Aaron Brothers, very few people own original art they can dust. Part of the problem resides in the fact that "people want art ( or an immediate return on investment), but they don't want artists." (Niki Lee) Gertrude and Alice's apartments and lives reveal a bit of the historical and artistic significance of artists supporting artists—financially as well as artistically. Their lives (and this exhibit) demonstrate the intricacies, difficulties and absurdities necessary to survive "the wars I've seen," those foreign and domestic.

What does it mean to be a writer, an artist, a homemaker and a homo, then and now—in the day to day and over a lifetime, even those subject to revision for a SKU and a kiosk.

Summer of Stein

2011-06-25T18:13:00.000-07:00

A few years ago the SF Opera hosted a traveling minstrel, Porgy and Bess. Now, my woman has been dragging me to the opera for 12 years, back when I was healthy enough to hold onto the railing at SRO. We've never seen many folks, but she loves it nonetheless.

For Gershwin we got sit down tickets and swam in the sea of black to brown. I've never seen a haughtier sea, and we certainly were as unwelcomed in it as we are in the pink sea we normally swim in. Now—we didn't read the synopsis. Nina loves Porgy so we figured we'd love Porgy too.

In the beginning, there is Summertime.

As the show went on I kept thinking we gotta get out of here. This reminds me of the book someone gave a friend of mine for their child, the one where an Indian chops himself into bits, and can't even feel it. Needless to say the book went to Eshu.

As I sat I could not believe all these folks paid money to sit here and watch this. I can't believe we sat among them.

I can't accept this. I can't embrace the language as mine. I refuse the narrative that claims that we (women, coloreds, poor people) when given the choice choose violence, poverty and isolation.

I was telling this to my cousin and she said, "you won't even give us, the fish is jumpin and the cottin is high."

I shot her back an uncompromising no. I won't buy it, in another ticket, or another moment. Especially if the fish is jumpin. To bless this baby, our most precious of beings, those who come to us with the sole responsibility to grow into an elder, those who come to watch us and take from us those lessons on how to make choices. What does this blessing do, but fatten the goat for the slaughter. I won't offer myself to that. I won't patronize artists and businesses that do.

I believe: "The ethical imperative for linguistic and all other social behavior: one should address others with a presumption that they are capable of responding meaningfully, responsibly, and above all, unexpectedly." (Gary Saul Morson in Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work)

Nothing in this minstrel show is unexpected. It's a dime store novel backed by money and power.

Give me Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh's Porgy, the one Nina sings at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, on the evening of June 30:

"I got my man now. I got Porgy. My baby understands now. I got my Porgy. I'm through with byways. His way is my way. Forevermore.

Lord when I feel his arms around me. Knowing he can't go on without me. I wants to beg for a chance to camp at his door.

Say he's not much for looking. Say he's lazy and no count as he can be. He's got the kind of love for me.

So I'm changing my style, my way of living. Glad I've stopped taking and started giving. I got my man. Got my Porgy. Now."

Give me Gertrude and Virgil. Even Gershwin thought their opera was "refreshing as a new dessert." He was so influenced by it (Four Saints) he used the same director Thomson (Virgil) used in his production of Porgy and Bess, an entire year later. An entire year later.

In my own ignorance I had always believed (and heard) that Porgy and Bess was the first NY opera with an all black cast; I know Duke lamented his own failure in that arena, but Gertrude and Virgil premiered their "perfect masterpiece" a year earlier. Few people have even heard of it (Four Saints).

Their choice of material, four saints and a landscape.

Thomson has said that he and Gertrude envisioned saints as "a parallel to the life we were leading, in which consecrated artists were practicing their art. . .needing to learn the terrible disciplines of truth and spontaneity, of channeling their skills without loss of inspiration."

Artists' choice: truth and spontaneity. The lives of artists: the relationship between land and spirit.

"Art that has religious reverence carries with it harshness and discipline; the anarchic and the arbitrarily subjective are sometimes the enemy that destroys art from within. When I say religious attitude, I mean the belief that inside every person, landscape, and still life, there is hidden a noble beauty." (Aharon Appelfeld in A Table for One)

This winter I watched The Secrets. That film left me with same sickening feeling Gershwin did. The writer and director forced the characters into an ending I could not believe. I still don't believe it, and I still can't shake the violation I felt as I watched this film, twice, trying to make myself accept the end he offered me. Was it me or was it the movie.

"I have always, deeply, violently, detested those who look for a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality." (Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed)

I know Naomi and Michal--I don't believe their double white wedding, to men and to healing through self sacrifice.

"An event as we imagine it hasn't much to do with the same event as it is when it happens."

I know when I am being manipulated. I hate it. Even when I can't form words, the feeling is impossible to ignore, it chokes me. I am smothered inside it. The lie, the lack of spontaneity, the failure "to learn the terrible disciplines of truth and spontaneity, of channeling their skills without loss of inspiration."

This is the summer of Stein, devoted to artists and patrons, saints and landscapes, choices and vision.

K'é: Running Naked

2010-08-08T11:13:00.000-07:00

"Imagine me. I was born to die. I know that. If I could have found what I needed at thirteen, I would not have lost so much of my life chasing vindication or death. Give some child, some thirteen-year-old, the hope of the remade life. Tell the truth. Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked for me, I'll be naked for you. It will be our covenant." Dorothy Allison, In "Survival Is the Least of My Desires" originally given as the keynote address at OutWrite Lesbian and Gay Writers conference in 1992

Dorothy Allison delivered these words a lifetime ago. 16 years. Some of us do not live to see a 17th or 18th birthday.

In Native America, suicide is the second largest leading cause of death for people between 10 and 34. The Navajo Times reports that the Thoreau Chapter lost a 14 year old last weekend.

Last week on Navajo we had a fever of activity. We held primaries for our Presidential elections, the Navajo Commission on Emergency Management and President Shirley declared a state of emergency due to the monsoons and flooding, and we saw a tornado touch Many Farms and Chinle. Many spoke about prophecy. Some looked for rabbit brush, to make sure it was still growing, here in this world we walk upon.

On the 29th, in Winslow, 12 of the candidates met to discuss the youth.

The, our, problems:

2 out of 5 children have experienced domestic violence.

Addiction and public drunkenness.

Suicide (several youth have taken their lives in just the last few months).

In a special to the Navajo Times Bill Donovan reported on the meeting. http://www.navajotimes.com/politics/election2010/072910forum.php

I was particularly affected by two of the responses:

"We have to look at what is going on in our family that triggers this kind of action [addiction]."

and

"Many of our children's hearts are empty. . .We need to fill them with our faith."

I come from a broken family, and I am an alcoholic. The summer of my freshman year in high school I laid on my bed singing to Al Jarreau's "Just Believe" in my own personal effort not to kill myself. I continue to struggle today and still listen to Al.

My heart, then, was not empty. It was full, full of self hate, full of terror, full of debilitating pain I did not think I could survive. Thirty years later I can start speaking, writing, articulating the fact that, for me, wanting it—that fullness inside—to go away was what I searched for in those moments when death presents itself as the only answer.

These are shameful words I was taught to never share. I am a notoriously private person. Information trafficking was, and continues to be, a wanton practice of great emotional and spiritual violation in my life. I speak now in the hopes that admitting these truths before you, shi diné, and all my people, we can together acknowledge some things no matter how ugly.

During the Winslow forum on youth many people concluded that solutions should and could begin with parents (greater involvement, education and as role models) but I kept wanting someone to admit that not all parents love their children (many do not even love themselves).

The legacy of absence and/or rejection by one's parents is something no one wants to discuss, at least not openly.

People freely and eloquently talk about the importance of our cords and the places where they are buried. Fighting for access to these, our own bodies, in western hospitals and taking great pain and effort to fly, drive, ride cords back to Navajo for a proper burial site and ceremony. Devastatingly for many, the corresponding bond between mother and child, when broken, is not acknowledged—our lives silenced.

This silence can fill a person and smother their soul.

In Tiana Bighorse's book, Bighorse The Warrior, she writes: "In Navajo, a warrior is the one who can use words so everyone knows they are part of the same family."

Looking to parents may be worse than inadequate. Telling a child, like myself then, and now, to look home only left me more isolated, terrorized and hopeless.

We, as people, have always balanced the need for individual autonomy with our responsibilities to each other and to the earth. Somehow it has become taboo to speak or reach into these places that exist in that balance—the public and the private. Our homes have never been characterized by closed doors and thick walls.

Like every Navajo, I hate to be told what to do, but in this moment I am only asking to be seen.

Domestic violence, suicide, alcoholism and addiction are not easy to hide, and we are not a stupid or unaware people. I know how shame and propriety work to enable violence and despair—this is a legacy we pass down, a response to the wars of extermination and coerced conversions. Seeing and being seen are awkward and painful; I believe we must begin there.

"It will be our covenant."

Red Ink 15.02

2010-03-20T19:48:00.000-07:00

I have a new short story (soon to be a play) published in the latest issue of Red Ink (15.02).

The issue is available at http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/red-ink-1502/8516252

Please support this journal with your béeso!

ííníssin

2010-03-12T14:00:00.000-08:00

My Grandpa Knew That

2009-12-01T07:35:00.000-08:00

"FACING THE FACTS

If there are energy shortages, individuals will have water problems.
If there is ecological damage, individuals will have water problems.
If there are economic crisis, individuals will have water problems.
If there are computer glitches, individuals will have water problems.
If there is political turmoil, individuals will have water problems.
If there is war, individuals will have water problems.

Almost anything that happens in the future can result in questionable availability of fresh water. This is not just an environmental problem. The continued pollution of the atmosphere, the surface and subsurface of the earth is not the only cause for alarm about availability of fresh water. Water availability to individuals is dependent on every other social system being in place, stable, healthy and at peace. It is inevitable that we will experience failure of one or more of these systems at some point in the future."
-from the Garbage Warrior's website: www.earthship.net

On Wednesday, the 18th of Nilch'ih Ts'ósí, we went to a class at our local nursery. We signed up for a Rain Barrel class; it was renamed "Winter Tasks: Water and Lighting." The class leader, from the Urban Farmer Store, introduced the theme reminding us that winter requires us to alter our behaviors: our plants need less water and we have more dark, less light, daily. We are entering our rain season: November to March.

Most rain is directed off roofs directly into sewage drains which empty into the bay and the ocean. The city of San Francisco has begun a program to encourage people to divert their drains into rainwater harvesting systems. They are even offering rebates. We received handouts and a very brief demonstration. It's really quite simple. In San Francisco (and many municipalities) we water with potable water that comes pressurized, with energy added to it. Every drop of rain water saved, reused or diverted back into the aquifer reduces the water, energy and chemicals used to treat stormwater, and transport potable water from the reservoirs. Keeping this relatively clean (rain) water out of the sewer system is easy. San Francisco only gets a one inch rain twenty times a year. Every 1,000 square foot home, during a one inch rain, could store 620 gallons of rainwater.

The Urban Farmer Store has manufactured rain barrels from reused olive barrels. They are available for purchase. With the city rebate it's quite inexpensive to install barrels at home. You will need a little sweat equity. Other sleeker and larger barrels are available from other manufactures, at a higher cost, but the point is how easy and inexpensive a basic system is to set up. If you can't use your harvested water (you have no garden, or your architecture makes it impossible), you can at least let it drain slowly (soak in) and replenish the aquifer.

San Francisco has very few permeable surfaces, even less than Manhattan.

After a discussion of permeable pavers and rain gardens one of the participants asked, "When will I make my money back?"

The leader responded: "That's like listening to music and asking when am I going to get my return on this purchase?"

Nothing will allow a people to go beyond a third or fourth year drought; as they enter the fifth and sixth year, they will give up their hope for rain.

During this last "storm" (Friday, the 20th) I heard many complaints about the rain. The best one being that it would interrupt someone's granddaughter's soccer game. When this grandma was told that the storm was fast moving and would surely be gone by Saturday she was relieved, briefly, until she realized it would probably make the field soggy. That doesn't top my favorite complaint: I can't wear flip flops. (But that leads to an entirely different discussion of shoes and why the very population that forced hard soled footwear on us now refuses to wear them.)

Many thinkers are blaming our current environmental problems on an idea that humans "just couldn't handle the transition from being hunter-gathers to high technology."

Scholars have tended to view us (American Indians) as a people who lack technology and architecture. But Daniel Wildcat, a Yuchi of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma and co-director of the Haskell Environmental Research Studies Center, offers a more nuanced understanding of our relationship to technology.

In Power and Place he writes: "It appears natural selection has not selected us for a particular niche or place on the planet, but has selected traits that have allowed human beings, with the use of technology, to adapt to different places and environments on our Mother Earth.

Central among those traits is our sociability or social nature. . .our physiological awkwardness dictates a necessity for toolmaking and manipulation absent among other animal species. This is less a sign of human superiority than a sign of biological difference. In my mind this explains why in our traditional indigenous ways of speaking and praying we so often describe ourselves as pitiful beings. Humans depend on many good relations and relatives to live and survive in this world—hardly superstition, just ecological fact. Nature, nurture, and technology are intimately connected."

As we enter this yearly ritual of excessive consumption (Thanksgiving till Christmas) I want to highlight the fact that our (world) economy is based on severed relations. Simply ask yourself where your electricity or water come from, who sewed your underwear, or where your last apple was grown and what was the name of the individual who picked it.

In Slow Money, Tasch writes: "By prioritizing markets over households, community, place and land, the modern economy does violence to the relationships that underpin health and that give life-sustaining meaning—family relationships, community relationships, relationships between consumers and producers and between investors and the enterprises in which they invest, relationships between companies and the places in which they do business, relationships to the land and in the soil. Such relationships are attenuated, or in the extreme, deracinated, by the modern, global economy."

We can start simply by shaping our lives to the patterns of the earth not "the market." Detailed knowledge of the earth's patterns is precisely what we find in the oral tradition and tribal languages of indigenous peoples; this knowledge has been handed down for generations. For many, though, this will mean a new beginning, shaping daily life, including the care and construction of home, first by addressing how they are using and treating dirt, water, human waste, sun and wind.

Michael Reynolds, the Garbage Warrior, creator of the Earthship calls for "direct living," building the mechanism for "taking responsibility for what happens beyond the reach of our fingertips. Light switches and faucets" into each home he builds whether it is on Pine Ridge, Nogales, or Andaman Island India.

The land has a rhythm, if we step in time. We can be dancing in a house of beauty.

K'é: It Begins Here, In the Thin Winds

2009-11-15T15:29:00.000-08:00

We have just celebrated the "top of the year". The month when we store and prepare our corn. We pick piñon, leaving those that received rain for the deer. If we have had the first frost we happily begin telling our winter stories. We gather medicine; it will be used to heal the family during the cold winter. We, the earth surface people, and the animals, each begin our preparations to move to our winter homes.

It begins here, our year, in October.

During the month of Slender Winds (Nílch'ih Ts'ósí) we continue our preparations: grinding corn, cooking and storing our harvest. We hunt. Meat is preserved. The winter story season is in motion, and our children sit inside it. At night adults play stick and moccasin games and children play with string. We attend ourselves and our winter homes, and the animals attend to theirs, many going into hibernation. We have a late sunrise and an early sunset. And as our language tells us, Nílch'ih Ts'ósí blows.

Anthropologists are keen on explanations, noting "the calendar of an agricultural people concerned with season, weather, and crops naturally varies from calendars determined by hunters and warriors." As do calendars determined by the market and apostolic conversions. Aside from the mistaken belief that agricultural people are a people without hunters and warriors, this accounting of where a people place their attention fails to acknowledge how a life rooted in the environment cuts through the false notion that agriculture, technology, hunting and gathering are unrelated and disparate ways of understanding and interacting with the world.

During these months of winter stories, children, parents, aunts, uncles, and grandchildren are called together, to play and listen. We are called together to give our attention over to skills and knowledge we've learned through a devotion to story and storytelling. These dark and rainy day moments ask us to attend to language. They require us to speak across the generations, back through the ages, following the migrations of our ancestors and those we joined, left and met along the way. They require from us, at every age, to communicate across experience: First Man and First Woman, Changing Woman, the Warrior Twins, old Coyote, Bat Woman, Butterfly and Reared Within the Mountains.

I was raised by my Grandmother. She was raised to believe the only good Indian was a Christian who spoke unaccented English. Last Thursday we saw the film, The Only Good Indian, at the Palace of Fine Arts, thanks to the 34th American Indian Film Festival. The Only Good Indian told the story of a young Kickapoo abducted on the Kansas plains and taken to boarding school. In one scene he is forced to eat soap, for his refusal to answer in English. When I was four I was forced to eat soap myself. Our familial obsession with cleanliness, not talking backwards and Catholicism carries over into everything I write and every word I speak (properly or not).

It begins here, with the willingness to face the pain and shame involved in relearning our languages, and the willingness to face the ridicule and social discomfort of devoting our time, resources and money to them, and to each other. I often joke and say we, the learners, are providing community service by giving people something to laugh about, as we talk like children. Children grow into the adults we help shape them into. Our gods knew this, and so they gave us words. They set us tasks. They told us to remember, to live, this way, now. Each morning we rise into the same now our ancestors rose to—the opportunity to live, good, in this way.

Many people believe the oral tradition is more fragile and less reliable than the written tradition. Many believe it is also less advanced.

Alfred Morsette, paatúh kananuuninó, Not Afraid of the Enemy (Sahnish)

Began recording with Douglas Parks, linguist, on July 1976 in Twin Buttes and completed his recordings in October 1979 in Bismark. They always met during winter (roughly October through March), following the "old custom" of telling stories only during that time. When they would meet Alfred would tell 2 to 5 stories. In the end he told 61. He'd tell stories for three hours, first in Sahnish, then he would tell the same story in English. He'd take a break at 10:30 for "a little lunch." And in the morning he would rise and sing Arikara songs till breakfast.

He had a phenomenal memory for songs. After he heard a song once he retained it. At the turn of the century the Pawnee brought 20 songs to the Arikara, he was the only one to still remember them. In one week he recorded the old grass dance songs (one set from Crow Ghost and a second set from Red Star). In the end he recorded over 200 songs and then "told the story behind each one."

In his introduction to Myths and Traditions of the Arikara Indians Parks describes working with Alfred: "I would turn on the tape recorder when he was ready, and then he would proceed to narrate, frequently closing his eyes and folding his arms as he recited from memory the details of the story, told, as he would say, exactly as he had heard it. Some stories he had been told only once or twice while a child or youth; others were accounts he had heard later in his life. He had repeated many of the stories to his own children when they were growing up, but many had not been related to anyone since he heard them originally, so the latter required thoughtful preparation before recording."

The Advocates for California Indigenous Language Survival recommend creating an immersion situation for yourself, one where the sounds that surround you can confirm your world. Language carries everything: prayers, recipes, k'é, skills and philosophy. Deb Murillo, at the Breath of Life workshop, spoke about devoting 3 hours a day to language. She is faced with the heartbreaking task of reviving a language where there are no living speakers. The Advocates live by the simple truth that it is never to late. Three hours listening and speaking words to yourself, to your family, to the ancestors; they are listening.

Portrait of Alfred Morsette, paatúh kananuuninó, Not Afraid of the Enemy by Niki Lee

My Grandpa Knew That

2009-10-01T17:23:00.000-07:00

Never Forget.

I received an email, announcing the arrival of 700 Marines in New York on November seventh, from my cousin. Her son is a Marine; he has served two tours of duty in Iraq, and she is proud.

We have a long history of fighting for our homelands. My uncles escaped service because, like their father, both were alcoholics and color blind; but my cousins served: Cipriano Montes (World War II), Gilbert Tamayo, Bobby Tamayo, and Frank "Babe" Rodriquez (Vietnam).

My cousins' email proudly announced, in blue boldface size 16 font: It was built with 24 tons of scrap steel from the World Trade Center. It is the fifth in a new class of warship—designed for missions that include special operations against terrorists. It will carry a crew of 360 sailors and 700 combat-ready Marines to be delivered ashore by helicopters and assault craft.

Steel from the World Trade Center was melted down in a foundry in Amite, LA to cast the ship's bow section. When it was poured into the molds on Sept. 9, 2003, "those big rough steelworkers treated it with total reverence," recalled Navy Capt. Kevin Wensing, who was there. "It was a spiritual moment for everybody there."

Junior Chavers, foundry operations manager, said that when the trade center steel first arrived, he touched it with his hand and the "hair on my neck stood up. It had big meaning to it for all of us, " he said. "They knocked us down. They can't keep us down. We're going to be back."

The email concluded with this request: Please keep this going so everyone can see what we are made of in this country! Blessed are those who have one hand held by God and the other held by a friend!

I keep asking myself who could think of this.

Never Forget.

The official US Navy sight says the Commissioning Ceremony of PCU New York (scheduled for November 7th, 2009 at the Intrepid Museum Pier 88 South, Pier 86 North NYC, NY), "is the occasion when the ship will 'Come Alive" and the New York becomes USS New York.

When the ship was Christened, on the first of March, 2008, in Avondale LA, Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England offered the follow "remarks:" "These three ships (USS Arlington, USS Somerset, the USS New York) stand for 'life, liberty. . . and the pursuit of all who threaten it' and will ensure that we never forget. . . 11 September 2001."

President Bush, the born again, inspired the ship's motto "Strength forged through sacrifice. Never Forget." when he visited the Pentagon on September 12, the day after the towers were struck down. He told those at the meeting, "I will never forget." And he continued by going around the room, looking at each person, his eye to theirs repeating, "never forget."

During the ship's Christening England went on to say, "Ultimately what will win the war on terror—like the cold war—are the choices people make, whether the terrorists' path of violence, or the far better path of Peace, Democracy, and Development."

Never forget language.

Never forget the way we live matters.

I still cannot fully comprehend this Frankenstein project: transforming the refuse of the Twin Towers into a war ship, Christening this weapon, and then bringing it to life in a public ceremony.

Everyone knows the Marine's motto: When it absolutely has to be destroyed over night.

Never forget our genocide is not complete.

The earth is our mother. She sustains us and any livelihood founded on her destruction is unequivocally self annihilating. Contemporary society is very pleased with itself, extolling the superiority of its skill set and the victory of technology over hunting, gathering and agrarian lives.

Deloria and Wildcat remind us that our ancestors judged their spiritual and intellectual development when "people could recognize an imbalance and address it as a society of interrelated people."

The attack on the Twin Towers clearly reflected an imbalance.

In his book Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered, Woody Tasch asks his readers to commit to a few basic ideological truths: "We need to discover ways of thinking and speaking that can put economics in its place. . . In our devotion to money, market, and machine, we are destroying not only the fertility of the soil, but the fertility of our imaginations."

Slow Money as a philosophy offers a redress to our current imbalances by non violent action. These non violent acts are a greater threat to this nation than any weapon yet manufactured by the US Military because they place the relationships between people, plants and animals at the center of all thought and all activity.

Tasch continues: "Advocacy revolving around agrarianism and around appropriate scale and appropriate technology. . . are part of the broader historical movement toward the possibility that one day, non-violence might trump violence as an organizing principle for the affairs of man."

Never forget: We are children of earth. Who are they?

My Grandpa Knew That

2009-09-01T11:12:00.000-07:00

Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, in his first book, Banker to the Poor, writes, "Like navigation markings in unknown waters, definitions of poverty need to be distinctive and unambiguous. A definition that is not precise is as bad as no definition at all."

Poverty is often thought of only in terms of cold hard cash, or in recent times, the quicksand of credit. But I grew up with Dolly and her coat of many colors, and "I knew I was rich." It is precisely this wealth, of spirit and dissent, that has and continues to inform my work (as a wife and as a writer) today. My greatest failing, as a writer, has been my inability to offer a distinctive and unambiguous explanation of my understanding of poverty and wealth.

I am beginning this series for that sole purpose.

In July I came across Christopher Ketcham's Article on Daniel Suelo, the sadhus who has lived without money for the last 10 years, residing just north of Monument Valley, in the caves outside of Moab. My first feeling on reading this article was "this is what they want you to believe" that you've got to live in a cave if you want to live outside this economy. I thought it was nothing more than a propaganda leaflet in the "you can't ignore the economic realities" machine. The same machine that ignores the environmental and colonial realities so intimately shaped by said economy. As the web leads you to click on and click off, I did.

I have been reading Yunus's work, after it was introduced to me by Woody Tasch, the author of Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered. Reading Tasch's book is what made me decide to quit writing For Future Reference in favor of My Grandpa Knew That; at least once on each page I would hear myself screaming "Shicheii, bil bééhózín." (More on Slow Money coming.)

Working through K'é and For Future Reference I have tried to unravel the negative feedback system many of us (land based people) find ourselves in: we are rich, in knowledge, but this knowledge has become worthless in what is known as The Market, and more perniciously, it is becoming worthless to many of us, in what we know of ourselves and our minds. Many American Indian political and educational professionals are responding to the abject poverty in both reservation and urban communities in ways that leave the heart of our nations (our knowledge and expertise) behind.

There are economic realities and we cannot ignore them. But these realities do not form or result from an isolated universe, as a sort of Merry-Go-Round we either have a ticket to ride, or not.

I reread Ketcham's article on Suelo and want to point out this passage: "In 1987, after several years as an assistant lab technician in Colorado hospitals, he joined the Peace Corps and was posted to an Ecuadoran village high in the Andes. He was charged with monitoring the health of tribes people in the area, teaching first aid and nutrition, and handing out medicine where needed; his proudest achievement was delivering three babies. The tribe had been getting richer for a decade, and during the two years he was there he watched as the villagers began to adopt the economics of modernity. They sold the food from their fields—quinoa, potatoes, corn, lentils—for cash, which they used to purchase things they didn't need, as Suelo describes it. They bought soda and white flour and refined sugar and noodles and big bags of MSG to flavor the starchy meals. They bought TVs. The more they spent, says Suelo, the more their health declined. He could measure the deterioration on his charts. 'It looked,' he says, 'like money was impoverishing them.'"

The idea that money could be impoverishing is significant. We must take it seriously without being flip or ignorant about homelessness, nutrition and health care.

"The economy" is a cultural framework with undeniable consequences on our daily lives, but it is also a fabrication. We do not need to accept the rules as they are laid down for us.

Yunus writes:

"Experts on poverty alleviation insist that training is absolutely vital for the poor to move up the economic ladder. But if you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital that gives people the power to rise out of poverty."

I do not believe that keeping our focus on moving up the economic ladder is the best approach, but his point about "retaining the returns of our labor" is clearly true. If we can refocus our attention to the land, and land based communities, consequently redefining capital, and the control of capital, we might be able to make some of the many changes essential for our survival.

Deloria and Wildcat, in Power and Place: Indian Education in America, describe an Indian Metaphysics, offering it as a way of approaching solutions to our contemporary problems. This metaphysics uses an indigenous knowledge base as its point of origin: dirt, water, people, plants, animals and the relationships between these beings as recorded in our languages, ceremonies, games and material culture.

I begin here, in the dirt, with the people.

The title for this series is inspired by Duane BigEagle's poem, My Grandfather Was A Quantum Physicist.

K'é: 'ólta': Formal Education

2009-08-15T17:14:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year, back to school. I would be just getting home from my Grandfather's sister's homes. They would take me in, and shuffle me about, to insure my head would be good, after my Grandfather's passing. I'd be stuffed with recipes for tségha'nilchi', white corn, blue corn and yellow corn bread-tamales-soups and mutton. The Body of Christ was the last place I wanted to be, but in San Francisco it was my only option.

My grandma believed an education would solve all our problems.

T'áá hó 'ájít'éego t'éiyá.

Diné Bizaad: Bínáhoo'aah (Rediscovering the Navajo Langauge, ©2007, Salina Bookshelf, Inc.) gives a rough translation of this statement: "success is up to you, achievement is up to you, perseverance is up to you, the amount of self-effort that you exert is up to you, it (success) is up to you, it (success) is all in your own strength."

Shimá Sání dóó Shicheii, dóó Shimá for all their disagreements agreed on that truth: T'áá hó 'ájít'éego t'éiyá.

With my mind, organization/plans, and their instruction I could be successful. I was already cooking, making toys from the dump, sewing, planting and raising seeds, caring for livestock and I could sing and dance to the complete songbooks of Cabaret, Glenn Campbell, Neil Diamond and Johnny Mathis.

Words and language develop a strong sense of self. One of the essential gifts of my home schooling was the difference of their opinions coupled with the passion they (My Grandma, Grandpa and Mother) each held for their theories.

Chief Manuelito said education is a ladder. Article 6 of the Navajo-US Treaty of 1868 mandates "formal education" of the People's children—If knowledge is a ladder, I ask, to where?

In his diaries Kafka repeats: "When I think about it, I must say that my education has done me great harm in some respects. . .Often I think it over and then I always have to say that my education has done me great harm in some ways. . .Often I think it over and give my thoughts free rein, without interfering, and always, no matter how I turn or twist it, I come to the conclusion that in some respects my education has done me terrible harm. . .Often I think it over and give my thoughts free rein, without interfering, but I always come to the conclusion that my education has spoiled me more than I can understand. . . I often think it over and give my thoughts free rein without interfering, but I always come to the same conclusion: that my education has spoiled me more than all the people I know and more than I can conceive."

At Corpus Christi I learnt, that like my mother, I talked backwards and pronounced English wrong. I also learnt we were heathens, a fact my mother and I argued about long into high school. I was good at school as long as I didn't let it leak into the house. I was even better at home, as long as I kept everything there hidden from school.

Often school is a place that takes our children away from us, from our beliefs and from our values.

Diné Bizaad: Bínáhoo'aah's chapter on 'ólta' stresses the centrality of thoughts and knowledge to traditional Navajo culture. Paying attention was the key to success at home. Watching, I learned everything, especially the things I rely on most today: how to budget my money, how to cook food, how to grow plants from seed, how to pray and how to laugh. Words flew like songbirds out of Bat Woman's basket and I made a home for them, each one, inside myself.

My Grandmother died when I was entering fourth grade, and my Grandfather died when I was entering eighth. From them I know what is closest to my soul.

I was taught that knowledge is a shield and we walk behind it. My entire oeuvre asserts: We must root ourselves, firmly, in the teachings of our ancestors. Tradition responds to a changing world. That is the precise nature of its power: to provide answers to life's questions and to offer responses to daily experiences.

Our daily decisions and activities provide us movement and are infused with direction. It is vital we know this and remember that, as we send our children off to "day schools" and as we say our farewells to good friends.

This column is about keeping good relations.

Living within the structure provided by our system of K'é helps us face each other, our near relations as well as those, "not strangers, but only lacking the knowing."

I met Sonny Tuttle at Santa Fe Indian Market, two years ago. He had a booth near ours, and made the rounds, looking for pretty women and talking good story. He was a most wonderful talker. He was the most positive person I've ever met. So full of light and energy. There was no one who could keep up with him, save ma'ii, maybe. He was there in the morning, setting up before we were, and he closed down the clubs at night. At 75, 76, he put us all to shame, with our coffees and early bedtimes. In his finery of crisp jeans, red wool wrapped braids and tall cowboy hat he looked good.

He ran the circuit: pow wows and Indian Markets. The summer time circuit that gives us all an excuse to drop everything, jump in the truck and stay up all night singing, dancing, talking, and making babies. This year he placed fifth in the Men's Golden Age dance category at the 111th Annual Arlee 4th of July Celebration.

Growing up it was the summers I loved most, for they gave me time with my family, time to learn what it meant to be, human.

With deep sadness I learned that Sonny died in a car accident near Hungry Horse on Saturday, July 25th. His memorial was held on the Flathead reservation in the St. Ignatius Longhouse. I will always remember Sonny dancing on the tables at the La Fonda. He told us that he held court there, every Saturday, every Indian Market. I see him, now, dancing. May he dance, always in beauty.

I dedicate this month's K'é to my dear friend, Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson, mother of Ivy and Gemma, and the late Mr. Sonny Tuttle, father, artist, and traditional dancer.

For Future Reference is retired.

2009-08-01T21:00:00.000-07:00

For Future Reference is retired.

My Grandpa Knew That will debut on September 1, 2009.