slightly antiseptic

Chance pulled the church door open and a wave of stale air reached out at them. More sterile, than stale, Fiona thought as she followed Chance and Strep into the building, but old as well. The church smelled like its elderly congregants, gray and worn and slightly antiseptic. Tired, she thought. The building is tired of all this praising and mourning and joy. The building wants to sleep, she thought. 

They just want to sleep peacefully

why squatch

what is coming thru

A dream is just a doorway, right?

They open something up and we can walk through them.

Most of the time we don’t walk too far through them, though; we tend to stop when we find what we think is the key to the dream, and the key is usually, perhaps always, about ourselves: I see a swamp in my dream and wonder why until I connect it to the murky water of my own muddy life. Then I get it; I see what the dream means and come back out the doorway.

But when a dream is a doorway, something might come through from the other side as well; we tend to forget that given our egocentric ways. But this is what’s recently been happening to me. Something has come through that door and is writing strange words in back of my eyelids and speaking to me in a differing, but still recognizable, version of zhaaganaashiimong, the language I live in—English.

You need to know that I have been obsessed with Bugwayjinini since I was a kid. Bugwayjinini, for those of you who don’t know his Ojibwe name, is more familiar to you, perhaps, as Bigfoot or Sasquatch. I call him squatch for short—though it’s funny to call someone so tall something “for short.” And now I know why I have been so interested in him for so long. 

wun, too?

About a month ago he stepped through that dream doorway and wrote a strange word behind my eyelids. All I saw of him was a giant hairy hand, index finger extended and as he moved it up and down, he traced out the letters “W-U-N:” One, I realized when I sounded it out. The  letters glowed there in the space in back of my eyelids as if he had written them with a lit sparkler. They glowed brightly there for a moment, then fizzled out. Once it was dark, he spoke.

A few nights later he visited again. This time he traced the letters “T-O-O”—two I realized—and, again, when the word fizzled out, he spoke.

Last night, he came again. This time he wrote “T-H-U-R-D.” One, two, third made sense I realized for someone for whom English is a foreign language.

I don't know why Bugwayjinini speaks this way to me. I know he  comes to people when they're lost in the murk and mud of the deep woods (or their lives). Holler that!

maa'iingan

You may have missed the March 13, 2012 edition of the New York Times “Science Times” section in which the proposed law legalizing the hunting of wolves in the state of Wisconsin was discussed. The article by James Gorman appeared under the headline “Before Wolves May Be Hunted, Science, Faith and Politics Clash.”

The article is an admirable discussion of a proposed bill (and it subsequently passed if I heard correctly) in the Wisconsin legislature allowing for a “wolf harvesting” season (bureaucratese courtesy of the authors of the bill) to run from mid-October every year until the end of February. I find the idea of a wolf hunt repulsive: the only reason to hunt a wolf is for a trophy—and if the amendment allowing for the hunting of wolf by dog pack passed one has to wonder what kind of shape the trophy would be in following “harvest.” I find it both morally reprehensible and befuddlingly absurd.

What interests me about the article is not the question of the hunt itself, but rather the fact that it gives extensive space to Anishinaabe testimony opposing the hunt. While this aspect is admirable, the other part of the article that interests me is the phrasing of the headline. Where the part featuring Anishinaabe testimony heartens me, the headline disheartens me, as it is rooted in notions of that science and faith are two different worlds and that when brought into dialogue (through politics) they must “clash.” The article simultaneously legitimizes Anishinaabe knowledge and delegitimizes it as “faith,” not science. Native knowledge is not real (the way science is), it is a matter of belief, of—dare we say it—superstition. This American cultural trope of Native superstition is the all-too-obvious foundation of the headline.

Three Anishinaabe men are given voice in the article, while only one majority culture scientist is. The majority culture scientist, a professor of Environmental Studies at UW-Madison, discusses the matter of the wolf hunt in, not surprisingly, strictly materialistic terms, focusing on demography and the ability of the environment to support wolves. He feels that the woodland of northern Wisconsin can carry a capacity of 1000 wolves. The implication is that an annual “harvest” will keep the wolf population below 1000 and so save the wolves from catastrophic die-offs if their numbers grow too high. Harvest is seen as responsible wildlife management and, perhaps, it can be seen that way.

The Anishinaabe men consulted in the article feel otherwise. All three men are professionals, one is a retired professor, another is the executive administrator of GLIFWC, and the last is a scientist, a conservation biologist who also works for GLIFWC. All three men discuss the importance of the wolf in Anishinaabe sacred history. James Zorn, GLIFWC’s executive administrator points out in written testimony presented to the legislators “that Ma’iingan (wolf) is a brother to Original man” in the Anishinaabe creation story. The author of the headline chooses to read “creation story” as religion, as faith (and thus by implication, I think, as “superstition”).

It’s a good story, but it is not demonstrably true (the way, say, an environment’s projected carrying capacity for wolf populations might be). It’s interesting, as we Midwesterners say when we try to dodge the bullet of something so (seemingly) strange that we risk misunderstanding it (the way sushi is “interesting” to a hotdish grandma, or eating rough fish is “interesting” to the catch-and-release fly fisherperson).

Yet this “interestingness” of the spiritual faith in Native creation stories, ignores the knowledge—demonstrable historically, perhaps even statistically, in the best tradition of material scientism—that Zorn’s statement goes on to provide. He writes, “The health and survival of the Anishinaabe people is tied to that of Ma’iingan.”

This simple statement contains a wealth of historical reflection, tying Anishinaabe experience to the experience of the wolf in the United States. Hunted, trapped, chased from environments in which they provided very responsible wildlife management, wolves were driven to the edge of extinction by American culture and policy at both federal and state levels. Only when they were on the edge of extinction did the feds intervene and create policies to help wolf populations recover and grow.

Likewise, the same generations of Americans that encouraged wolf decimation, also encouraged the “killing of the Indian to save the man” (as Richard Pratt, architect of the Indian boarding school program, put it). Anishinaabe people saw their protected lands whittled away in these generations, saw programs initiated to “help” them assimilate to (superior, non-superstitious) American ways, and watched as their language was driven nearly to extinction here in the United States. In recent generations though Anishinaabe populations have grown and the revitalization of cultural practices, including a revitalization of language education, is spreading.

Wolf recovery and Anishinaabe cultural revitalization are coincidental from the rational perspective of Western science, but from the perspective of Anishinaabe science—of knowledge gained from ongoing experiential observation and of thorough knowledge of sacred histories of creation stories and the secular histories of the recent past—the recovery and revitalization of the wolf and the Anishinaabe in their woodland homelands are implicated in one another. Implication is a demonstrable connection: for instance, our lives as humans are implicated in the lives of the trees. We inhale what the trees exhale. It is not a matter of faith. It is a matter of fact.

The Anishinaabe resistance to the wolf hunt is not a matter of faith, but a matter of fact. What happens to the wolf happens to the Anishinaabe, history demonstrates as much. Debate about the wisdom of hunting might imply a clash, but let’s not be so foolish as to believe it’s a clash between “faith” and “science.” Let’s not let newspapers like the Times fall prey to cultural tropes about the religious superstitions of Native people that I see this headline engaging. Let’s think about ways to discuss knowledge. Let’s call Anishinaabe insight knowledge, not faith.

notes for a story

Tell a story about: Trees, flame, dreams, smoke.

Tell another story about: Trees, smoke, trout, the Aurora Borealis

Tell a story about: Strange lights, crackling sounds above the trees, the flash of a fish in

clear running water

Tell another story about: Dreams of light fish flashing through the northern sky

Tell a story about: Catching a fish

Tell another story about: Putting out the light

santorum: a virgin on the whore

And we stopped in Bethlehem—

They made the answers here

But there weren’t so many questions then

~The Drones, “Jezebel”

Admission: Late to the party as usual, but Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum’s statements on the 19 February 2012 episode of Face the Nation about “man” and the Earth and “phony theology” deserve a bit more reflection. The implication that man and Earth are distinct, not invested in one another, is phony—perhaps not (pre-Vatican II?) theologically, but by most other measures of semi-reasonable observation. What’s at stake here is unmasking pervasive attitudes that forgive earth injury in the name of…what? God? Power? Manifest Destiny?

injured, a world

Pedaling my bike to work this morning (yes, I’m that kind of radical—either that, or I’m just too cheap to pay for parking, or maybe I do it because of its manifold health benefits—I’ll let you decide), the Drones popped up on my earPod music device and my ride was quickened by eight minutes of their brilliant howl against the pain caused by all the idiocy of “man’s” attempts to exert control over other nations, theologies, and nature—“another bomb for every atom you injure” runs one line. Notice that the atom (the building block of life, earth, nature, and humanity, as I interpret the lyric) is the injured party and notice that the “bomb”—the power to destroy—is what you gain when you injure life.

The consequences of nuclear testing in the form of radiation entering the foodstream starts the song and from there the verses comment acidly on misadventures in the Middle East, war, terrorism, and the deals that “we” (the West, terrorists, suicide bombers: all are equally condemned) make with the Devil in seeking dominion over others. What the apocalyptic “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” meant to an earlier generation, “Jezebel” should mean to a post-punk, post-9/11, and post-Bush generation; in the song the Drones attempt to understand this post-rational world rooted in spectacles of fear mongering and death-dealing. “Bombproof the embassy,” lead singer Gareth Liddiard implores. “Give infanticide a cemetery.” Diplomacy and innocence (you can’t get much more innocent than infants) are dead in this world. “Uranium tips [and] night vision cruise missiles,” the lyrics suggest, are the only means that "we" now use to understand this world.

The “Jezebel” in the title of the song is never identified. I doubt the band literally means the Biblical queen of Israel; rather, I take the band to mean Jezebel in its contemporary popular sense of a sexually promiscuous woman. A sinner, a whore, who tempts a man to indulge his sensual passions, his desire for power in the case of the song, and ignore his more significant relations. Earth is the Jezebel man desires in the song; complete dominion over our mother and all her children—even if dominion means killing them, her children, us. “I’m gonna lose my skin,” the singer laments. “And I ain’t gonna see you again.”

The work I bicycle to on mornings such as this is in the American Indian Studies Department at the University of Minnesota where I teach courses on Native literature and the Drones’ song got me to thinking about the contrast between indigenous worldviews (as embodied in the literature I teach) and those kind of worldviews stunted by fundamentalist monotheisms that see man (never woman) as the center of the world (which the Drones brilliantly crucify—yes, I said it—in the song).

In class in recent days we’ve been discussing a phrase that one of the characters in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water repeats again and again (and which other characters begin to use as the book unfolds). The character, Norma, the main character’s auntie, a woman—an elder to be heeded—continually appeals to those around her to “Mind your relations.”

Norma’s statement is so simple that it could mean anything from “Listen to your family” to the more broadly philosophical turf of “Think about how you relate to others”—and “others” here must be understood as other people, other nations (including those of the animals and plants), as well as others in the grander cosmological sense of the sun, the moon, and the stars; it needs to be thought about as other times and places (physical and spiritual); it is intergenerational and transdimensional. Mind these things as relations, think with them as you think about yourself, step outside egocentric indulgences and consider your place in the broader community of family and history, environment and the Earth. Mind these things as equals, as invested in you as you are in them. You may be small and insignificant compared to a star but in your relations you are a giant. Mind your relations because you are them. The Earth is the mother that pushes you into this matrix of relations, and you are always connected with them. The Earth of minded relations is no Jezebel; her breast feeds, it does not mislead.

i could eat you,
but then gingivitis
would ruin my life

Such an insight is not unique to Native literature. In class we’ve discussed scientific theories of symbiosis that explore the way animals and environments evolve together to their mutual benefit and talked about how this kind of cooperative relationship is actually evident in the ongoing fact of life on earth--whether that life dates back billions of years or a mere six or seven millennia as creationist theologies propose. The environments that sustain our lives are manifestations of the wisdom of the teaching contained in the phrase “Mind your relations.”

Having the Drones pounding through my earphones as I think about minding my relations, candidate Santorum’s words last Sunday came winging (or might that be whinging, in the British sense of the word) back to me.

As he tried to explain to Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer what he meant in calling President Obama’s a “phony theology,” Santorum revealed the limits of his theology and his inability to mind his relations. He explained that "radical environmentalists" have “this idea that-- that man is-- is not-- is here to serve the Earth as opposed to husband its resources and be good stewards of the Earth. And I think that is a-- a-- is a phony ideal.” In an attempt to clarify what “man” “is” or “is not” to do, Santorum continued, “man is here to-- to use the resources and use them wisely, to care for the Earth, to be a steward of the Earth. But we're not here to serve the Earth. The Earth is not the objective. Man is the objective.”

Man’s needs, the Earth’s resources, are the objective. Man is here to care for the Earth, even if his “objective” needs threaten Earth’s ability to sustain us. The object it seems is to penetrate the Earth, what with the way she titillates us with her resources, and “steward” her, lead her back to the path of righteousness, but only once we’ve “used [her] wisely”. Indulge yourself man, the Earth is not the objective; she is the object, the Jezebel who serves man’s desires, yet needs his guidance. Dominion is the objective, a shattering of relations the consequence.

what else pops out?
why those knowing smiles?

With his gee-whiz overbite and throwback sweater vests, Santorum reminds me of a character from a fifties television sitcom—of those days back when all the moms wore dresses, all the dads dispensed easily digested platitudes, and all the teens were virgins. Sticking straws through the mouths of pop bottles at the soda fountain was as close to sexual expression as those TV kids dared to get. This virginal fantasy, while (perhaps) entertaining to watch, should not be mistaken for critical insight—nor should Santorum’s words. The idea that Obama and "radical" environmentalists want man to serve the Earth, to kneel before the Jezebel, the way a masochist kneels before a dominatrix, is the kind of post-rational political rhetoric that seeks to destroy our ability to think about, and with, our relations.