IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

Not following blogs lately, I was surprised to find how many have commented on the Ward Churchill controversy. Euro-American genocide of American Indians and questions of whether or not Churchill was a white guy masquerading as American Indian in his position as an ethnic-studies professor at the University of Colorado aren’t your everyday lunchable subjects. I expected some acknowledgement on the virtual streets but not as much as I observed. How did he suddenly blossom into the Jane Fonda of Afghanistan and Iraq? I’ve not heard anyone say it but next he’ll be addressed as “Ward Fonda!” The last I read of possible payola behind the Caplis attack was a number of days ago. My thoughts on the matter don’t gel. I would say my brain has been altered by the barrage of sound and image loops that H.o.p. immerses me in daily, brief bites rerunning concurrent that pave no here to there, dig deeper and deeper ruts in which I find my thoughts pooling, going nowhere. But in this case perhaps my thoughts on Churchill don’t gel because of the usual Montebank what pod is the pea hiding under now trick. So many “what is” balls in play but points of origin mostly hide from me behind “what appears to be”. I’ve a few thoughts on the issues, not on the people, but note that the Peltier Legal Defense Committee would appear to be supporting Churchill from the POV of the controversy being a deliberate smear campaign with falling dominos intent.

George Tinker (Osage, Professor of American Indian Cultures and Religious Traditions at Iliff School of Theology) speaks up for Churchill.

We’ve been reading a lot of Tinker around here the past couple of months.

Then suddenly there’s this picture of Churchill with a rifle and beret on the web. Flashback to Patty Hearst. And Madonna posing as Patty Hearst in American Life. There’s an echo of a rifle in those bars behind Madonna and an American kiss on her forehead. Though I think (I do) that a rifle is suggested, the beret and national symbols (again, the flag only inferred through bars and stripes) alone are understood as all that’s needed to bring to mind militants, revolution. Funny, put on a beret, toss in a star and stripe, and the brain processes, “Revolution.”

Churchill says the photo was for a student art project in 1996. I believe it. It looks like something a student and professor would do together.

I wonder if Churchill would be game for a cameo in John Waters’ next film.

Churchill mentions in his “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens”, the severed heads of Raritans kicked for sport along the streets of 1643 New Amsterdam in the shadows of the future’s WTC. So-called Kieft’s War, a history given in John Fiske’s 1902 “Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America”. Kieft’s war is also covered in a book by Russell Shorto, “The Island at the Center of the World : The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan, the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America”. An individual on a news list I’m on relates that Shorto details how colonists protested the actions of Kieft (as does Mr. Fiske above mention), his slaughter of the Wappinger Indians, and how Shorto concludes the massacre was exaggerated and things weren’t as bad as all that.

Though the outcry is over Churchill and what he had to say on 9/11, it’s curious how a number have used it as a launchpad to revisit Churchill’s assertions of Euro-American genocide of American Indians, and condemn him for these remarks as well.

While reading up on Shorto’s book names mentioned in it keep pinging my brain. Oh, yeah, Dutch. We’re talking about the Dutch here, aren’t we. I always forget the Dutch have anything to do with me. Go down one branch of my family and you hit a point where that narrow branch blossoms out into lots o’ Dutch marrying Dutch, oh yeah, right, down New Amsterdam way, names like Joris Rapalje and Catalina Trico for starters and Van Cleefs, Vanderbilts, Schenks, Covenhovens, Vanderbeeks. Rarified and exotic to my ears. Remained rarified and exotic until a friend of Marty’s, a year ago, gave him a box of mildewed books for a library fund raiser and in it was Heller’s “Picture This”. And from it I gained a bit of insight (small) into 17th century Dutch society and Dutch mercantilism, coinage and debt and profit.

I remember when, after 9/11, George Bush encouraged us all to get back out to the malls and shop again. Exercise our freedoms. Shop.

I wonder what Ward Churchill’s speaking schedule was over the past four years. Certainly he had many engagements. Why was it Hamilton College that got him busted for his views on 9/11? Why now?

5 down. The developers of this reading program H.o.p. is now doing sure knew what would grab H.o.p.. One-eyed and three-eyed Martians (creatures determined as being from outer space are always Martians to H.o.p.), robots and, tomorrow, dinosaurs! Today’s email (Lesson 5 review) informs me, that tomorrow’s reading world is in the land of the dinosaurs. “Yea!” says H.o.p. The print materials came in today and I was a little surprised with his enthusiasm over them. We’ve been using the print-out map from the website where you mark your progress through the reading worlds, and H.o.p. was all glee over the real version that was part of the package, “I have to mark my place on the map!” And ultra simple, ultra short readers for exercise in transferring skills from monitor to print.

More on Ward Churchill. Brief bio that calls to mind (for me) Lucas’ “American Grafitti”, a film that I am reminded of about once every two years at most so it’s not like my brain’s short list of synonyms equates all things 50s and 60s with Ron Howard.

H.o.p. doing his online reading program becomes mostly phys ed. He props elbows on desk, chin in left hand, and looks to levitate, one foot then two feet leaving the ground as they travel up the chair on which I’m seated behind him. A swivel chair. Knees dangle in the air, one foot on the seat pushing me back and forth and around, digging sharp toenails into the tops of my bare feet (me having regressed to a seated fetal position), the other foot kicking up toward my face. This lasts only as long as it takes to click an answer on the mouse, about two to three seconds, then he plants feet on the ground and turns, opens mouth wide and happily roars, jamming his tonsils in my face. Then turns back to the computer, elbows on desk, chin in left hand, feet again climbing the chair, the air, air dancing like Fred Astaire, toenails digging into my flesh, as he clicks the next answer then again down, turns and roars his tonsils in my face. In the meanwhile, a Flaming Lips song repeats itself endlessly, courtesy of H.o.p.

In the things I hate to love category is Bradblog’s revelation that CNN news was using photos of the same alleged nuclear facility in two different stories, one identified as Iran’s purported nuclear program and the other (several days previous) identified as North Korea’s purported nuclear program. Then there was unearthed yet another news outlet using the same photograph in a story on North Korean nukes when the photo is (Bradblog says) of the purported Iranian facility, this last mentioned news story being a March 2004 story at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. And the photo was under the filename of iraq-nuclear.jpg.

The kind of news I hate and love at the same time. Should be pinned on to the bulletin board with the twin masks of drama, Comedy and Tragedy.

Wikipedia notes that Radio Free Europe, the broadcasting arm of the National Committee for a Free Europe, founded in 1949, received its funds from the U.S. Congress via the CIA until 1971, the CIA its guide and generating daily input. The CIA’s funding wasn’t publicly revealed until 1971, at which point the organization was rechartered in Delaware as a non-profit making corporation, oversight moved to the International Broadcasting Bureau, and the budget moved to open appropriations. In 1975, RFE merged with the similar Radio Liberty (Congress-funded, founded in 1951). The mission of the International Broadcasting Bureau was transferred to the Broadcasting Board of Governors in 1994.

Free. Radio Free Europe. Powerful advertising words, that particular string. At least back in 1969 when I was 12 and a rather awkward child with frizzy hair beaten down to the sides of my head so to form flaring wings which gave me the nick of “Dogears” and being the malcontent misfit that I was I had no problem with marking myself further as a malcontent misfit by deciding at some point during that year to not pipe in with the daily Pledge of Allegiance. I trusted authority not one wit, perhaps because authority had never favored me, and for that I suppose I ought to be grateful. However, the words Radio + Free + Europe sang in my ears as they were equipped to do and conjured associated words such as brave, free, subversive, free, non-authoritarian, free. Now, any envelope in my mailbox that has “free” on it, political or commercial (difference?) goes in the trash. But back then “free” was a powerful word and the little arm hairs tingled positive not negative. Radio + Free + Europe was to me the power of words, of ideas, of free speech, profoundly elevated through the notion of stealth, hidden treasures the most precious of all, and what was more stealthy than the ultimate invisible ink of radio. All a matter of unconscious associations. No critical judgment. No questioning. Because the equation was just that right.

I’m still alarmed by that, as an adult. I go to look at the Radio Free Europe website, which I have never before visited, and I remember vividly and think about kids today being raised on similar equations, naive, the power of the word “freedom” doing the majority of the work in the construction of the subliminal aesthetic backdrop that shapes opinion.

Billmon’s left sidebar shows he’s reading Robert Gellately’s “Backing Hitler, Consent & Coercion in Nazi Germany”. I would post too in side bars what I read but the things I’m most influenced by I’ve been reading for 20 years, so wouldn’t be “things I’m reading” but “here’s my flesh and bone, looks suspiciously like paper and print, dunnit…”

Rolling along to the next death bus stop, “Natural” death in Afghanistan at Body and Soul brings up again how the FBI criticized “inhumane” interrogation practices at Guantanamo Bay saying they also accomplished nothing and revealed no more than what the FBI got using simple techniques. The Justice Department, reviewing the memo for “national security secrets” before releasing it to “a civil liberties group in December, redacted the part about the intelligence information being “suspect at best” and also blocked out an assertion that the military’s interrogation practices could undermine future military trials for terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay. It did this after the Defense Dept expressed its own opinions on what parts of the letter should be redacted.

The FBI was so concerned about the interrogation practices that they went to William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s chief attorney. However, Att. General Alberto R. Gonzales, is skeptical on the reliability of the FBI’s accounts.

Sneeze, kerchoo! (Finally over winter colds and now into the damned Atlanta pollen season and no matter what I do I’m blowing my nose like crazy again but at least I had almost two weeks respite). And now returning to Billmon, he writes here on a revelation he had before the election:

And that’s when it hit me – as if, to quote Col. Kurtz, I’d been shot in the forehead with a diamond – that Kerry was almost certainly going to lose the election, that the American people really were going to ratify torture and murder as instruments of state policy, and that all the facts and all the rational arguments and all the moral outrage in the world weren’t going to persuade them otherwise.

What I finally had to confront was the fact that truth alone is impotent in the face of modern propaganda techniques – as developed, field tested, refined and deployed by Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, the think tanks, the marketing departments of major corporations, the communications departments of major research universities, etc. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the peculiar vulnerability of historical truth (which means political truth) is that it isn’t inherently more plausible than outright lies, since the facts could always have been otherwise. And in a world where the airwaves are overloaded 24/7 with the mindless babbling of complete idiots, it isn’t very hard to make inconvenient facts disappear, or create new pseudofacts that reinforce whatever bias or cultural affinity you want to cultivate – particularly if the audience is already disposed to prefer your reassuring lies to discomforting truths told by strangers..

It was depressing but Billmon eventually accepted the futility and resurrected his blog, though approaching it differently.

I read others stopping writing with that sense of overwhelming futility, and some come back and also decide to approach their writing (blogging) differently.

Futility has as way of making one rethink the relationship between action and result, endeavor and reward..

There are differences, but America is waging much the same kind of war in the Middle East that it did here with American Indian Nations and is still ongoing, unsettled. I keep wanting to quote from George Tinker”s “Spirit and Resistance’” on how deeply rooted in the expansion and dominance, the policing and bringing all to conformity (for its own good, though in accordance with western priorities) is a peculiar theological mix so taken for granted that different camps may not recognize how similar is their food and ignorant of the why of the taste for it, a theological mix often at odds but has as its driving force the notion of individual greed being what motivates individuals.

But I’m not going to go there because I’m looking at the cover of the book “Backing Hitler, Consent & Coercion in Nazi Germany”, I’m looking at Billmon’s statement of futility in the face of the knowledge that “the American people really were going to ratify torture and murder as instruments of state policy, and that all the facts and all the rational arguments and all the moral outrage in the world weren’t going to persuade them otherwise…the audience is already disposed to prefer your reassuring lies to discomforting truths told by strangers.” I am considering how many Germans responding to Hitler as Father, how many Americans responded to Reagan as the consoling Father who raised their spirits and made them proud again after what they viewed as a decade of defeat and humiliation.

And I’m reflecting on this account of the trip of some Otoe chiefs to Washington in 1873:

STAND BY: If you have a piece of land and I sell it, you would not like it.
COMMISSIONER: If you are my Agent and sell it, it is all right. You must remember there is a difference. You are the child of Government, and it must take care of you.
STANDY BY: If you have children and they want money, they have it. They do as they want to.
COMMISSIONER: No, they do not. My child does as I want to have her. If any child wants anything and I want her to have it she gets it. But if I don’t want her to have it she don’t get it and she does not turn around and ask me how I would like it if she had my money and would not let me have it.

I am thinking about modern responses to these accounts, the speeches of the politicians of the day toward the American Indians,. There are those who accept the paternalism as they see the American Indians as having been barbaric, child-like and in need of the progress their Anglo-European superiors were supposedly offering them. Then there are those who recognize the paternalism for what it is. How many recognize in this language the coercion and anticipated consent that predisposes people to hearing and accepting reassuring lies?

But of course that language wasn’t dreamt up only for coercing, in this case, the Otoe. It is a way of thinking and dealing with people that the Commissioner expected the Otoe to bow before and respect, to not question, because his general experience of it in his own society was positive and rational argument that purchased desired result. That he refers to his child here as “her” perhaps has nothing to do with his child’s actual sex but is part and parcel of his acknowledging his child as an inferior (just as women were subordinate, inferior) who has been taught not to question how the world responds to her, how authority responds to her. Americans may not like to think of themselves as living in this manner, but then when one grows up always knowing that a square house is the perfect shape for a house then one is predisposed to think of modifying domicile according to one’s needs and desires in the manner that a square teaches it may be modified. Or even subverted.

“Apocalypse Now” is about Anglo-European sensibilities in the same way that “Heart of Darkness” is about Anglo-European sensibilities.

I glance through a few pages of “Heart of Darkness” and come upon the lines where it’s acknowledged “I am not disclosing any trade secrets” that Kurtz’s methods had ruined the district, and there had been nothing profitable in them (I glance back up to the FBI saying there was nothing profitable in the investigative techniques used by the military), they only showed a lack of restraint, marked a deficiency found out early by the wilderness, and “had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion”.

The Human Rights record of the US.

I have met few people who don’t look upon the NDN Sacrifice as a necessary stepping stool to the great illustrious Free America with Equal Rights for All. Which makes no sense but that hardly matters. When pressed the reponse will eventually be a frank, “To the winner go the spoils.”

There are those who have an intimate acquaintance with America’s dismal record on human rights. And there are those who have a historical acquaintance and ethical interest. The minds of some go first to the grievous history here of African American slavery and subsequent fight for civil rights, others will think of the School of the Americas, others will remember the Phillipines, or the Japanese Interment Camps of WWII. Some minds will automatically trace all and include the war on “third world” nations by the global corporate so energetically championed by the U.S.

To the winner go the spoils. On my kitchen table sits “The Battle of the Washita”, a book that my landlord dropped by earlier this week because he knows for some reason I have an interest in NDN rights and history.

To the winner go the spoils. Below is something I wrote once, which I partly extracted from some fiction of mine, Little America, one of those things which will never see the light of day, and so I pulled from one chapter a few parts which I refigured and made into a slim and tidy essay that has been sitting in my computer files for a couple years because I don’t believe it quite works as an essay, but will publish it anyway. Will follow tomorrow with another something I wrote that is denser. Won’t make a habit it of it, I promise.

Anyway, I don’t think America’s going to get much of anything right until it faces its true record on human rights and theft. Today is nothing new. It’s the old dressed up in new faces and places.

____________________________________

As for those who get all pumped up over Darwin’s Survival of the Fiscal Fittest and respective gene pools being an automatic feather in the cap, signal of success, make ourselves badges of honor just for breathing, each individual’s flesh and bone body bag declaring expressly the might of their lineage, it might do well to reflect on the means, that heritage’s sometime food, and whether the iconic patriarchal king on the hill deserves crown to be cracked, body rolled down and into the nearest hole in the ground. As in there were some how many million American Indians–residing in what are now the 48 contiguous states of America–when Columbus arrived (a conservative estimate) in 1472 and four centuries later but two hundred and thirty-seven thousand remained for the official count. Which means–what? What does it mean?

Columbus returns in 1493 with a force of 17 ships and within three years five million Caribbean Taino were dead.

200 remained after fifty years, victims of slavery and mass-extermination, gourmand sadistic cruelties such as chronicled by contemporaneous historian, Las Casas: mass hangings, spit roastings, children hacked up for dog food.

What does it mean?

Well, you know, it was the times, the way people thought back then, can’t compare them to modern society, no way.

Son of a soldier who accompanied Columbus, Las Casas was the first priest consecrated in the colonies and was on hand to offer, just prior to Chief Hatuey’s being burned to death, hope of salvation to the Chief who had, impertinent, led opposition against the Spanish. Would Hatuey embrace Christianity? Hatuey asked were there white men in the Christian’s heaven? Yes? Then no, he would not go again to a place where he would find men so cruel. Las Casas’ witness of those cruelties led him to begin a crusade against mistreatment of the Indians such as exemplified in encomienda and repartimiento, the institutions by which lands were commended to settlers and Indians forced to work those lands. Las Casas’ efforts eventually resulted in the promulgation of the Nuevas Leyes de 1542, but the new laws, too late for five million Taino, were flouted by greedy settlers. Hell, they were probably made to be flouted by greedy settlers. A smokescreen.

Could be a folk song.

A man of his time
A man of his time
Can’t blame a man for being a man of his time
If hindsight looks too cruel
Well you can always say
He was a man of his time
Can’t blame a man for living well in soulless times.

A man of his time
A man of his time
Can’t blame a man for being a victim of his time
You know it weren’t his fault
You can always say
He was a victim of his time
Blame the time and not the laws he made.

A man of our time
A man of our time
Can’t blame a man for living well in soulless times
It’s not against the law
That’s what the good men say
And if it was then don’t you know
We’d have some new laws right away.

Don’t hear anyone much talking about Hitler being a man of his time.

There are other less heralded events of Darwinian rightenousness, not so grand in scale, no less brutal, no less harrowing. Just for an instance, there was a children’s Christmas party in Calumet, Michigan, 1913, which may only be known by the few aware of it through Woody Guthrie’s song “1913 Massacre.” The children at the Christmas party were sons and daughters of striking copper miners. Now, how do you get those striking suckers back? Shout fire. Company thugs shouted “Fire!” and seventy-three children perished in the crush at the exits, which the company thugs blocked. Those particular gene packets Darwin would consider failures, couldn’t cut it, didn’t have the strength to brand a descendant legacy with the do what it takes oomph of the victors, such as the company thugs who barricaded the doors, one supposes.

Seventy-three dead children and not a single body charred beyond recognition. And it doesn’t have to not scream the imagination, the excavation of those stairwells, seventy-three dawn of life faces cold as the December air they’d never breathe again, for a person to be a willing, righteous agent of his times.

Hell, what can you do sometimes but write a song. Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote Now That The Buffalo’s Gone. Leadbelly did Bourgeois Blues. Aunt Molly Jackson sang Ragged Hungry Blues. Woody Guthrie did Ludlow Massacre. And Sarah Ogan Gunning came right out and said, I Hate the Capitalist System (retitled I Hate the Company Bosses).

Envy, envy, envy, says the gentleman in the front row. Says that just because a corporate giant has more doesn’t mean anyone else has less. Says, “Lazy.”

To which Sarah Ogan Gunning, from the grave, still says as to the death of her mother,

I had a darlin’ mother,
For her I often cry.
But with them rotten conditions
My mother had to die.

Well, what killed your mother?
I hear those bosses say.
Dead of hard work an’ starvation,
My mother had to pay.

Well, what killed your mother?
Oh tell us if you please.
Excuse me, it was pellagry,
That starvation disease.

They call this the land of plenty,
To them I guess it’s true.
But that’s to the company bosses,
Not workers like me an’ you.

“I Hate the Capitalist System” Sarah Ogan Gunning

Preceding verses deal with the death of Sarah Ogan’s first husband, a coal miner, and a blue-eyed baby of theirs. Yeah, yeah, suppose one could say it was ornery of Sarah lording it over people the way she did. In the wallet of the Big Gun’s is Christ their lord god’s son avowal that the poor shall always be with us. And television stars say money doesn’t make a person happy, you can be poor and happy too, you just need to make a gratitude journal.

“Dear God. I want to thank you for blessing me with lots of good stuff. I must be doing something right. Am glad you saw fit to recognize my righteousness and hard work.”

I guess what nearly twelve million American Indians didn’t do right is they didn’t get guns and gunpowder until it was too late.

Guess what seventy-three Calumet, Michigan children did wrong was go to a Christmas party. Or maybe it began instead with their being born into the wrong families. They chose it, some with a Direct Line to the Big Plan would say, chose that end. Before they were born they chose those families, chose that life, chose to have their young lives smothered in a stairwell. They didn’t know this, of course. Because you don’t remember having made those choices until after you die.

There were parents who didn’t scramble with their children for the exits. Who remained upstairs, in the hall. Said there is no fire. Listened to-what? What is the death sound of a suffocated, crushed child multiplied by seventy-three? What did the children who were held upstairs hear, safe in arms?

Guess what Sarah Ogan Gunning’s husband, and millions of others didn’t do right is they didn’t get the right line of work if they had to work themselves to death in a world which broadcasts itself as ripe with riches.

As I went walking down Peacock Street
No clothes on my back,
No shoes on my feet,
I was hungry and cold,
It was late in the fall,
I knocked down some old big shot,
Took all his clothes, money and all.
O tell me how long must I wait for a job?
I don’t like to steal,
I don’t like to rob…

“Crossroad Skully” Molly Jackson

When it’s so stark, when spring is green and singing but it’s global winter, trees dark and barren not feeding the pantry shelves and icebox and spirits worn hard out and dry, body gravitating hard toward the ground from whence it came, what’s a soul to do for fuel? Convert music to muscle, to chocolate and butter, Aunt Molly Jackson singing, as Guthrie said, songs that she used to make sweethearts lose their bashfulness, the husband and the wife go back to their bed, the lonesome ones take up a new heart, and the older ones to be in body and action as quick, as funny, as limber and as wise as the younguns coming up. Pistol Packin’ Mamma, Aunt Molly Jackson.

Said John Steinbeck, “You can burn books, buy newspapers…guard against pamphlets, but you cannot prevent singing.”

A man of our time
A man of our time
Can’t blame a man for living well in soulless times
It’s not against the law
That’s what the good men say
And if it was then don’t you know
We’d have some new laws right away.

Indian massacre

Stone Bridge writes on another massacre here, The Massacre of the Washita

In my email:

Proposed Legislation Would Put an End to the Slaughter of Buffalo Crossing
Yellowstone’s Borders

In a bold effort to end the senseless slaughter of America’s last wild and genetically pure buffalo, U.S. Reps. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) and Charles Bass (R-NH) introduced legislation on May 18th to protect the Yellowstone herd. The Yellowstone Buffalo Preservation Act (H.R. 2428) would end years of seasonal hazing, capture, and killing of buffalo in and around Yellowstone National Park by federal and state agencies until specific, common sense conditions are met.

Please write a letter to your representative, http://www.firstgov.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml, asking him or her to cosponsor H.R. 2428.

More information can be found here.

In the opening of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Depp’s hellhound train passing a herd of bison, he watches in disoriented amazement as all fly to thrust rifles out the windows and gun down the bison with gluttonous, whooping glee.

It’s impossible to accurately estimate the number of buffalo populating the area west of the Mississippi at the close of the Civil War, but it’s believed there were millions and perhaps tens of millions.

In 1871, Colonel R. I. Dodge traveled along the Arkansas River through an immense herd of American bison (Bison bison). Dodge estimated that the herd was at least 25 miles across and after consulting with hunters and other travelers, concluded that it must have been at least 50 miles long.

Source: Bisoncenter.com

Frank H. Mayer, who had lived a Buffalo Runner’s life, later had recorded via Charles Roth:

I’m often asked now what my feeling is toward myself that I helped wipe out a noble American animal by being a sort of juvenile delinquent with a high-power rifle. I always am frank in answering. I always say I am neither proud nor ashamed. At the time it seemed a proper thing to do. Looked at from a distance, however, I’m not so sure. The slaughter was perhaps a shameless, needless thing. But it was also an inevitable thing, an historical necessity.

What I mean by that is this: the buffalo served his mission, fulfilled his destiny in the history of the Indian, by furnishing him everything he needed — food, clothing, a home, traditions, even a theology. But the buffalo didn’t fit in so well with the white man’s encroaching civilization — he didn’t fit at all, in fact. He could not be controlled or domesticated. He couldn’t be corralled behind wire fences. He was a misfit. So he had to go.

And there was another reason, not so commonly known. You will understand it better when I tell you that the buffalo was hunted and killed with the connivance, yes, the cooperation, of the Government itself. That this will be denied I have little doubt. As I put my words down I weigh them.

Don’t understand that any official action was taken in Washington and directives sent out to kill all the buff on the plains. Nothing like that happened. What did happen was that army officers in charge of plains operations encouraged the slaughter of buffalo in every possible way. Part of this encouragement was of a practical nature that we runners appreciated. It consisted of ammunition, free ammunition, all you could use, all you wanted, more than you needed. All you had to do to get it was apply at any frontier army post and say you were short of ammunition, and plenty would be given you. I received thousands of rounds this way. It was in .45-70 caliber, but we broke it up, remelted the lead, and some runners used government powder. I didn’t. I was a stickler for the best, and used imported English powder which I will be describing to you in a little while. I had no trouble trading my government powder for things I wanted — tobacco, bacon, flour, and other things.

Maybe you are wondering at the theory behind this. Let me tell you. I think I won’t: I will let a high ranking officer in the plains service do it for me. One afternoon I was visiting this man in his quarters. The object of my visit you have guessed: free ammunition. I got it. Afterward we smoked and talked. He said to me:

“Mayer, there’s no two ways about it: either the buffalo or the Indian must go. Only when the Indian becomes absolutely dependent on us for his every need, will we be able to handle him. He’s too independent with the buffalo. But if we kill the buffalo we conquer the Indian. It seems a more humane thing to kill the buffalo than the Indian, so the buffalo must go,” he concluded.

It wasn’t long after I got into the game that I began to realize that the end for the buffalo was in sight. I resolved to get my share. I went into the business right. I invested every cent I owned in an outfit. I have no apologies for my participation in the slaughter. I hope that answers the question.

By 1880 there were only a few hundred remaining.

In 1902 there were 50 native bison conserved at Yellowstone. Now there are about 4000.

FROM THE Leonard Peltier Defense Committee HEADQUARTERS

CALL TO ACTION FOR LEONARD PELTIER, #89637-132

This morning, July 1, 2005, Cyrus Peltier, grandson of Leonard went to
visit his grandpa as he has for the last 13 years. He was stopped at
the visiting area and was told, “He’s gone”. Upon questioning, he was
told that Leonard was transferred and after further inquiries, finally
found out that Leonard has been moved to USP Terre Haute, Indiana. At
this time, Leonard is in the hole and is being kept there indefinitely.
NOW IS THE TIME TO ACT.

It is basic procedure to keep transferred inmates in the hole while
processing takes place, however we do not know how long that will take.
We are asking anyone and everyone to get on the phones and get out their
pens and paper. Let’s flood the telephones with calls regarding
Leonard! Let’s stuff their mailboxes with letters about Leonard! Urge
the prison to allow Leonard to contact his family as soon as possible.
Ask how he is, ask where to write, ask if he’s OK, ask about his health,
his privileges (phones, letters, visits, religious rights, ability to
paint, etc.) inquire as to his safety-anything-just keep calling and let
the prison know that the entire world is watching and is concerned about
Leonard. Please be sure to be courteous and professional, as we do not
wish to complicate Leonard’s situation.

The Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, Peltier Legal Team and Leonard’s
family are working hard to ensure Leonard’s safety and we will keep you
informed as things develop.

Mitakuye Oyasin.

LPDC, Inc

USP Terre Haute
U.S. Penitentiary
4700 Bureau Road South
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Paul Harvey. “Not dead yet!” No, not Paul Harvey, who has a 10 year, $100 million contract with Disney/ABC Radio Networks, syndicated to 1000 radio stations, with listeners of about 18,000,000. “Not dead yet!” Paul Harvey, who my guess is would be all for capital punishment for flag burners, but has probably a few times in his life gotten too cozy with his love of genocidal porn to contain himself and shot a wad on the stars and stripes. Now he’s said as much himself. Don’t look for Playboy and Hustler tucked away in the drawer of his nightstand. For Harvey, it’s photos of bar-b-qued flesh and a flag smelling juicy of shit, piss, vomit and semen. Sound of missiles blighting the skies with their payload and Harvey delivers his.

A transcript of Harvey’s June 23rd show is at The Chicago Tribune’s, Eric Zorn’s notebook:

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill said that the American people…he said, the American people, he said, and this is a direct quote, “We didn’t come this far because we are made of sugar candy.”

That was his response to the attack on Pearl Harbor. That we didn’t come this far because we are made of sugar candy.

And that reminder was taken seriously. And we proceeded to develop and deliver the bomb, even though roughly 150,000 men, women and children perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With a single blow, World War II was over.

Following New York, Sept. 11, Winston Churchill was not here to remind us that we didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy.

So, following the New York disaster, we mustered our humanity.

We gave old pals a pass, even though men and money from Saudi Arabia were largely responsible for the devastation of New York and Pennsylvania and our Pentagon.

We called Saudi Arabians our partners against terrorism and we sent men with rifles into Afghanistan and Iraq, and we kept our best weapons in our silos.

Even now we’re standing there dying, daring to do nothing decisive, because we’ve declared ourselves to be better than our terrorist enemies — more moral, more civilized.

Our image is at stake, we insist.

But we didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy.

Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and into this continent by giving small pox infected blankets to native Americans.

Yes, that was biological warfare!

And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever. And we grew prosperous.

And, yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves.

And so it goes with most nation states, which, feeling guilty about their savage pasts, eventually civilize themselves out of business and wind up invaded, and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry and up and coming who are not made of sugar candy.

Zorn notes that Harvey prefaced this frank indulgence with the warning that he’d been “choking” on something for several weeks and he was going to “get it up and get it out for what it’s worth”.

Likes his fast, savage, uncivilized, this “not made of sugar candy ” Harvey who since 1946 has been fucking eardrums ’till they bleed with his “The Other Side of the Story” patriot candy shlock. And the excruciating thing is the public has loved it. Oooh, that laughable, lovable Paul Harvey who in his plain-spoken, Tulsa way tells it like it is for everybody. We’re repeatedly assured of that. His is the Amerikan voice. This Paul Harvey.

I remember when I was a child of about 12 or so and first heard Paul Harvey.

I hated him.

He was Something Wicked This Way Comes leering from behind the closet door, gumdrops in his right pocket and a lovin’ choke-hold in his left.

I understood why so many people adored the duplicitous plain-speech of Paul Harvey.

Mike Thomas at Salon.com notes Garrison Keiller doesn’t care for Paul Harvey either.

A few years ago, in the pages of Chicago magazine, radio storyteller Garrison Keillor fondly recalled his run-in with Harvey at a “stuffed-shirt” dinner in Chicago. “When the salad plates were whisked away and the entree brought in, he leaned over toward me and said, ‘Page … 2,’ just like he does on the radio,” Keillor wrote. “In fact, Mr. Harvey was exactly as he is on the radio. He read me a number of stories from a script in his pocket, most of them about ordinary Americans and their struggle to deregulate industry and give large corporations the freedom to do good in the world, and during all of this, he sold me a tin of liver pills and a utensil that dices, slices, chops, minces and prunes.”

Paul Harvey is at heart a blogger commentator:

“I don’t think of myself as a profound journalist,” he told Larry King. “I think of myself as a professional parade watcher who can’t wait to get out of bed every morning and rush down to the teletypes and pan for gold.” Introspecting further, he declared, seasoned pro to seasoned pro, “I think all of us, if we’re worth our salt, we’re for certain things and we’re against certain things. And it seems more honest to me to call it ‘Paul Harvey News and Comment’ and just let it all hang out. Because each of us expresses comment if only by what we read and what we toss in the wastebasket.”

Thing is, Paul Harvey is for once telling it like it is. At 86 years-of-age he apparently decided it was time for a little honesty. That the prosperity of War Lord Amerika and corporate giants and Sam Walton and his family comes at a steep price. One that people like Paul Harvey are unflinchingly ready to make everyone else pay, as are I suspect most Amerikans, deep in their prosperity-hungry, warlord hearts.

Amerika, a nation of warlords. You’d never guess it, the way they heart middle-class family values. July 4th picnic offerings on the red-checked tablecloth: mom, the flag, apple pie, pro-life, anti-social support. “You’ll have to pry my dime out of my red-knuckled hands unless you have a slavery-made Wal-mart worthless holiday knick-knack for the old curio shelf” Amerika.

Amerika loves its Sam Waltons for their ruthless drive. Winner gets all is the way Amerika works. Because they love a greedy head-banging warlord. The strength to do what it takes at the price of whomever must bite the dust along the way. It is a fundamental truth about the majority of Amerikans.

And if they tsk-tsk over Paul Harvey’s honest, ruthless, “I love genocide” commentary, it will only be because he laid the cards out straight in a culture where honesty may be lauded but do-what-it-takes two-faced slyness is the expected and what’s respected. Say one thing, do another.

Paul Harvey, in his broadcast, speaks with a thinner voice than he used to. The fading voice of one who’s lived nearly nine decades. But when he speaks of the use of pox-infected blankets and nuclear weapons his voice is not one of reflective regret of years, and compassion for the nameless, faceless humanity buried by power, instead it is one of resolution. The determination that whatever may get in the way of your commercial sponsors, you fuck-em-over, and you fuck-em-over good, for once and for all with as much collateral damage as possible.

Push a nuclear button to clear the plate. That’s “Wipe out”, Paul Harvey style.

* * * * *

The Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting people remind us that Disney refused to distribute Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 911″, their excuse being, “Disney caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore’s film…could alienate many.” They recommend that one writes Disney to ask “why it finds Paul Harvey’s nostalgia for slavery and genocide and his calls for nuclear war acceptable, but deemed Michael Moore’s film unacceptable.”

The Ayn Rand Institute bills itself as “the center for the advancement of objectivism”, seeking to advance the principles of reason, rational self-interest, individual rights and free-market capitalism, spearheading a “cultural renaissance” that will reverse the anti-reason, anti-individualism, anti-freedom, anti-capitalist trends in today’s culture. The major battleground in this fight for reason and capitalism is the educational institutions—high schools, and above all, the universities, where students learn the ideas that shape their lives.

Objective standing from where? In the eyes of the Ayn Rand institute, “civilization” equals European.

No Apology to Indians
Monday, June 27, 2005
By: Thomas Bowden

Dear Editor:

The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs is debating whether the United
States should formally apologize to Indians for a “long history of
official depredations and ill-conceived policies.” This proposal should be
rejected.

Before Europeans arrived, the scattered tribes occupying North America
lived in abject poverty, ignorance, and superstition–not due to any
racial inferiority, but because that is how all mankind starts out
(Europeans included). The transfer of Western civilization to this
continent was one of the great cultural gifts in recorded history,
affording Indians almost effortless access to centuries of European
accomplishments in philosophy, science, technology, and government. As a
result, today’s Indians enjoy a capacity for generating health, wealth,
and happiness that their Stone Age ancestors could never have conceived.

From a historical perspective, the proper response to such a gift is not
resentment but gratitude. America’s policies toward the Indians were
generally benign, aimed at protecting them from undeserved harm while
providing significant material support and encouragement to become
civilized. When those policies erred, it was usually by treating Indians
collectively, as “nations” entitled to permanent occupancy of
semi-sovereign reservations. Instead, Indians should have been treated as
individuals deserving full and equal American citizenship in exchange for
embracing individual rights, including private ownership of land.

If the United States government were demanding that Indians apologize for
the frontier terrorism of their ancestors, as if living members of a
particular race could be guilty of their forebears’ misdeeds, the demand
would (properly) be rejected as racist. For the same reason, American
Indians should refuse to be regarded as a race of helpless victims
entitled to a collective apology from their fellow citizens.

Thomas A. Bowden
Ayn Rand Institute

Even a modicum of research would have dispelled these “stone age colored peoples lived in poverty and superstitious ignorance” myths.

For a different perspective, try this on for size. Ioway tribal representatives made a visit to Europe 1841-1845 and were not overly impressed by what they saw.

Certain sights shocked Ioway sensibilities. Among them were the coal mines, where they saw women and children used as beasts of burden to pull carts on their hands and knees through tunnels. Crowded prisons horrified and alarmed them. The grandeur of York Cathedral represented the greatness of civilization, but the poverty of many London, Birmingham and York inhabitants began to distress them seriously. When they questioned Catlin about the reasons for so many poor people, the subject of taxes and debts arose. The latter was understood, but not the result, the incarceration of debtors in prison for nonpayment. They reasoned that such a punishment only deprived the mother and children of a man to supply food and shelter, and they could see no reason for it. The poorhouses were explained as a means of taking care of such indigents, but the Ioways merely shook their heads.”

The Ioway, Washkamonya, kept an anthropological diary during the trip, studying the English and French.

Jim’s (Washkamonya) notebook now contained a sizable list of figures that argued against the benefits of civilization. He had compiled figures on the annual consumption of spirits. His numbers, carefully copied from his daily “London Times”, said that 29,200,000 gallons were sold annually in Great Britain and Ireland and that 24,000,000 pounds were spent to buy that amount. He then added a note that 50,000 drunkards died each year, and one-half of the insanity, two-thirds of the pauperism, and three-fourths of the crime were the consequences of its use.

“This,” Jim said, “was one of the best things he had for his notebook,” thinking of the missionaries at home as well as those who visited the Ioways in London. He said, “those blackcoats were always talking so much about the Indians getting drunk, that it would be a good thing for him to have these figures to show, and that he intended to have Catlin write these figures at the end of the tour, that fourteen Ioway Indians were one year in England and never drank any of this firewater, and were never drink in that time…

Washkamonya took note of how the Queen was being asked to promote laws to protect the daughters of the poor against being induced to prostitution. Washkamonya procured an article which he entered into his notebook for the purpose of taking home and showing the “black coats” who “extolled the innate virtue of white women and decried the lack of it in their red-skinned sisters. Side by side in Jim’s book were the number of churches, the number of ministers, and the number of crimes of all types that were committed in the country.”

The Ioway were more impressed with the French, though alarmed at the amount of attention paid to dogs over children.

A visit to the Foundling Hospital opened Jim’s notebook again, and he added that, of 26,000 children born in Paris during the past year, 9,000 were illegitimate. The knowledge that there was no one, not even a distant uncle, who cared enough to provide for even one little one, put more black marks on the growing list of French frailties. At this point the doctor asked why the thousands of ladies in Paris, who cared so much for little dogs, could not be induced to care for these little children. At this, the comparative gap between the English and French societies grew slim indeed. Catlin declared at this time that Jim’s notebook would soon be filled with information to ‘teach to the cruel and relentless Indians” the benefits of civilization.

The Ayn Rand Institute above states, “The transfer of Western civilization to this continent was one of the great cultural gifts in recorded history, affording Indians almost effortless access to centuries of European accomplishments in philosophy, science, technology, and government. As a result, today’s Indians enjoy a capacity for generating health, wealth, and happiness that their Stone Age ancestors could never have conceived.”

What? Millions killed. Millions dead of smallpox and disease. Even the “Adams’ Family Values” movie has it over the Ayn Rand Institute, when Wednesday, asked to portray a convivial Pocahontas, turns to the audience and makes a speech on how the whites live as opposed to American Indians forced onto reservations, living in trailer homes, lists a litany of ills forced on the American Indian nations by Euro-Americans and finishes with, “And for all these reasons, I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground”, and proceeds to torch the Thanksgiving theater of the pilgrims.

Poverty and starvation were the gifts to the First Nations from Anglo-American civilization.

Now, for a fun treat, compare Washkamonya’s anthropological surveys with those of progressive bloggers. Washkamonya paid strenuous attention to what he observed and recorded it all with the intention of pointing out to the “blackcoats” their hypocrisy. To no avail. The Ioway, returning home, began to awake fully to how non-negotiable their situation was.

Progressive, liberal, Democrat bloggers dash about recording the hypocrisy of the Neocons, the Dominionists. I know, I do it as well. We do as Washkamonya did. We take our findings back to the “blackcoats” and we say, “See, see, I have the figures here. What you’re saying is wrong. Look to your own way of doing things for corruption and destitution of spirit. You are forcing upon us a way of doing things we do not want. It does not work, we see that. And it won’t work for us. Stop. We don’t want it.”

But the blackcoats won’t listen. They weren’t listening in 1845. They won’t listen now.

There is no reasoning with blackcoats.

Happy July 4th.

And now we’re dancing here. “Song for Turtle Island” by Eagle and Hawk opening the 16 July 2005 Native Voices Show. I start it up and H.o.p., drawing, gets this excited, huge grin on his face. “What is that?!” he exults. “I love it! Put it in my favorites!”

I found the following audio via its airing on the Native Voices program. It’s from the Smithsonian, National Museum of the American Indian Radio Broadcasts, the “Living Voices” series, “produced in collaboration with NMAI’s Film and Video office”, featuring audio profiles of Native individuals from across the Americas.

I would just put in a link to the program but the problem with that is search engines can’t search audio files for important ideas. Important facts. Which is why I transcribed the following.

Rebecca Adamson is of Cherokee and Swedish descent and founded the First Nations Development Institute to support Native enterprises based on community needs and traditional values.

You can find and listen to the broadcast here. I don’t know anything about the First Nations Development Institute but what Adamson says about the difference between indigenous economies and neocolonial free market economy is important, and choices between those differences will mark out future survival or failure for humankind in general.

Because, quite simply, neocolonial western free market economy doesn’t work but for a very few, and because it doesn’t work but for a very few it ultimately works out for no one.

Sovereignty isn’t a federal program, sovereignty is our own self-expression, it’s who we are as a people, and we need to have economic independence to be free to do that. First Nations is an American Indian development institute. We really wanted to look at the fact that our culture is our strength and that we could develop successfully if we were developing our culture, so we really specialize in culturally-appropriate development.

I think people that go and work on reservations many times are very deaf to the creativity and innovation of the entrepreneurs. They’re looking for something that is much more of a western model of economic development or education or health care. We’ve had a completely different economic system.

I teach a course in Indigenous Economics which really looks at a comparative analysis between an indigenous economy, which would be more like your subsistence economy, and what is your neocolonial western free market economy, and the values are fundamentally different.

Economics 101, no matter what course you take, anywhere, they’re going to tell you the two fundamental economic truths are scarcity of resources and individual, insatiable appetites, which drives the whole economic myth, and that you’ve got to get yours before the next guy gets theirs, so it’s the basis of accumulation and competition.

When you look at an indigenous economy it’s been built on the fundamental belief of prosperity of creation and kinship based enoughness, so they’re looking at reciprocity and sharing and they pay much more attention in that economic system to the redistribution and the circulation of wealth. Extremely sophisticated redistribution of wealth vehicles exist in indigenous economies.

The world views are so fundamentally different that the very goal within the western economy of profit for the sake of profit is not a goal that drives most native american people in their communities. In a practical sense they come into a small business training program or a small loan fund with a statement that, “My community needs a laundromat”, or “A lot of people get a flat tire between here and Kadoka, we need to have a gas pump with air pump there”. They come in with a real need for that community. Whereas in the other economic development programs they’ll come in and say, “I want to make a lot of money, and I want to grow, grow, grow.” You just see two fundamental, different value systems at play there.

What’s fascinating is I have not seen a traditional teaching yet that doesn’t emphasize vibrant initiative or personal responsibility or sort of a can-do-it-ness, it’s in all of our traditional teachings to think for ourselves and do for others. And so when you’re looking at culturally appropriate development you’re really building on a foundation of values of people that can do things.

I think there’s a real trap to being a victim and we buy into this victimization and all of it is true, what happened to us in the past has been horrible. But it’s equally true that we’re the only ones that can change it. It’s that simple.

I was going to make a post. I had made a post. But it is all screwed up in IE so I have to figure out tonight what’s going on in IE means starting over from scratch on this template and rebuilding it again and seeing what’s going on. In the meanwhile I’m going to listen to Wabanog. Go to 46:59 of the Native Voices June 18 2005 show if you want to hear what’s going to be soothing my spirit into the wee hours of the mornings. I ordered the CD at CDBaby and let them know I’d heard about them through Native Voices.

A great show is the May 14 2005 one, which I listened to all last night while working. Featured the music of American Warriors: Songs for Indian Veterans, Plains Chippewa/Metis Music from Turtle Mountain CD, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Creation’s Journey, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Native American Traditions, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Custer Died for Your Sins album, Red Crow Productions, Joanne Shenandoah, Canyon Records, Red Thunder, Makoce Wakan, album, Eagle Thunder Records, Bill Miller, The Red Road, Warner Brothers Records, Keith Secola and the Wild Band of Indians.

(Lots of pics in this post, below the fold.)

From St. Louis, we drove to the Ioway Fall Encampment at White Cloud, Kansas on Friday evening. We would have gotten in a little earlier than we did but we stopped at a Wal-Mart (yes, a Wal-Mart) along the way as it occurred to me a big straw hat would be a good thing to have that weekend. The Wal-Mart we stopped at was in St. Joseph and I confused two clerks in the men’s department no end when I asked if they had men’s straw hats. They found it difficult to parse, apparently, a woman in the men’s department looking for a straw hat and looked at each other, looked at me, looked at each other, had to ask me twice what I was looking for and then asked several times whether I wanted the men’s or women’s department. And all this for me only to be finally told that there were no straw hats. Which I found hard to imagine. That there were no men’s straw hats at a Kansas Wal-Mart. But it was true. So we then looked for a small soft cooler to store drinks in for the encampment as it was supposed to be roasting hot that weekend. The people in the sports department had quicker wits and feet, and even sought out another person who might be able to answer my question, who also could walk and talk at the same time and located the cooler. My husband, meanwhile, stood looking at folding, portable chairs. We’ve been to several Intertribal powwows over the years and lots of people use them rather than sitting on bleachers or the grass. I don’t mind sitting on bleachers or the grass. We didn’t know if there would be bleachers and my husband really really wanted to get a couple of chairs as he doesn’t care for sitting on the grass. I talked him out of it as I didn’t see how we’d have enough room to carry them in the trunk.

We didn’t camp out at the encampment. Though we have a tent and sleeping bags, there wasn’t going to be room for porting them in the small car we’d rented, conserving fuel rather than using our big old musician’s van which wouldn’t have made it out there anyway.

We’d made reservations at the Hiawatha Inn in Hiawatha. We unpacked and asked for directions to the encampment. They weren’t able to tell us where it was but were able to give us directions to the Ioway Reserve, which wass approached by picturesque back roads still lined with green. As it turned dusk, I spied a small sign that read “Powwow” with an arrow pointing that-a-way.

I asked around at the encampment, looking for one of the people I was supposed to meet. I was located and directed to him when he arrived.

Did we want to eat? We were taken to the small building where there was still a huge pot of chili and hot dogs. And hot coffee. In the dark, we ate at a covered picnic table, talking. Mainly, I listened. The food was wonderful. I’d decided to not pack a jacket as the temps were supposed to be hot, but as we talked those temps dropped, and dropped some more. It was cold. People put on jackets. I was offered a jacket but I really felt like I didn’t need one, and then when I realized I really did need one I just wrapped myself in a blanket for sitting on that we were carrying.

Things broke up and we returned to the motel. In the morning I hooked up at the Hiawatha dining room another person I was supposed to meet and then went out to the Encampment.

I’m not an Ioway Nation member. I am descended from Ioway.

Above is my great-great grandad G. W. Jr., whose mother was Ioway, and his wife, Belle. When George’s mother died, his sister Addie was boarded out to a white family because, she said, her father wanted her to grow up knowing white ways. What I know about the family is from Addie, who lived into the 1950s, and Addie said their childhood was lived among the Indians, with no fixed household, and that her mother died when they were going down to Oklahoma Indian Territory. She married into the family into which she was boarded, which constructed houses for Indians, a number of which married Osage, as did descendants of Addie, and they lived in Pawhuska. She said her husband didn’t permit her to practice Indian ways and by the 1920 census she gives herself as widowed but her husband was actually alive and they were living apart. G.W. and Belle lived in Chautauqua County, Kansas, on the border of the Osage Reserve, after first being around the Ponca City area. G.W. and Addie were close all their lives. They had siblings, several of whom disappeared, I’ve no knowledge of them and if they died young or went to live with others. Another sibling died at the time their mother died, and another moved to Illinois and married a German then went to California.

Above is my great-grandad and his wife. She was a Crockett who was supposedly part Cherokee. I’ve not found any linkage yet. They lived in Chautauqua County, Kansas.

The lineup above is my dad’s brother, G.W. Jr. (now quite old), an unknown man, my father (the boy in the middle), my great-grandfather’s second wife, my great grandfather, my grandfather and my grandmother, all on my dad’s side. The picture would have been taken in Chautauqua County or Ponca City. My dad’s family, at the time, was living in Ponca City.

Like I said, I’m not an Ioway tribal member but I am descended Ioway, and since it’s several generations removed its importance to me may be wondered at, why. Perhaps one reason is that up until 1920, members of family were always living a household or two away from Ioway or other Ioway-related families. I figure the families were close to have always located near other that way from Iowa down into Ponca City, Oklahoma, and Chautauqua County, Kansas. I figure some things filter down one way or another. And I don’t look at those tumultuous times as being that far removed. Addie died in the late 1950s. G.W. died in the late 1940s. Their history is my history and that history is also a part of the Ioway Nation as well, I figure, what happened to some of its people. The Ioway were a small nation at the time of their removal, still are, and the last full-blooded Ioway died, if I remember correctly, in the 1920s. The story of G.W.’s family, I figure, is a little side note to the history of the people. Just a little. In the manner of any one so descended. And their story will eventually inform my son. He will have a different knowledge of America than is generally taught in schools. It won’t have the same meaning for him as a child who is Ioway Nation and grown up Ioway. But his comprehension will also not be the same as a child with no Indian heritage.

When I was ten years old and living with my father’s parents, I wrote down the little genealogy he could give me and I kind of became the family’s keeper of it. The one who wanted to know. I rode with my grandfather on his drives and he talked about the countryside and people. He told stories. There was a lot he didn’t know. I wanted to learn about it what I could.

And eventually, several years after finding an Ioway website, I was at the 2005 Ioway Fall Encampment and meeting some people I wouldn’t have come to know if not for the internet. It would be my first time to meet them in person. It was good to go knowing people. I’d been invited and without the invitation I don’t know if I would have ever had made the trek out to an Encampment or not.

The Powwow was on the Ioway Reserve on land adjacent to James White Cloud’s old house.

Below people are lining up for the Grand Entry on Saturday.

Saturday and Sunday were blistering hot. It takes some endurance dancing in heavy regalia.

A lot of stunning regalia was present, and it’s a shame that my photos of all of it are blurred. Wish I had a better pic of the below dancer. Incredible color.

Some of the women stately dancing.

Can see the treatment of the back of the hair here on some of the young women.

Beautiful vest on this man.

I like this little girl shawl dancing around outside the circle.

I divorced myself entirely from the internet while on vacation. I really had no choice. But I now regret that I don’t and didn’t have a laptop. Had I laptop and a connection I’d have been able to upload my digital pics on Saturday and see what they weren’t capturing, which wasn’t anything. I have two cameras, a small one and a larger one my father gave me, which is a far better camera. I was using the small one as I simply didn’t want to be too obtrusive and was having difficulties, the camera alerting me to blurred pics, one after another, but had I been able to look at the day’s photos that evening I’d have found that almost all of them were blurred, ones the camera didn’t alert me to, and would have opted to use the larger, better camera on Sunday. Plus my smaller camera has a long delay and that was problematic. Point, shoot, and miss your shot because of the delay and then a longer delay after that waiting for the camera to be ready to shoot again. Anyway, I have loads of pics which could have been good, but aren’t. They’re slightly blurred and useless.

The White Cloud Singers were selling a CD. I should have gotten one. One of those things where it was on Sunday that I thought about getting one but I was running around after H.o.p. and forgot. We did get several of the Ioway t-shirts. Marty purchased some nice sounding gourd rattles for himself and some percussionist friends.

There were a number of vendors. A lot of beaded items and jewelry, some bonafide and some not. There were moccasins and beaded cradle boards and cedar boxes and sweetgrass and sage. H.o.p. fell in love with a little buffalo skull that was all of 75 cents. And these neat things called dinosaur eggs that are magnets. They come in pairs and when you throw them together they make a queer sound like crickets chirping. They were a popular item and by Sunday they were lying here and there around the encampment, lost by their owners. Another popular item was a little, hand-held, battery-powered fan with lights on one of its blades that went for about two dollars. The fan and dinosaur eggs were at a booth that had a lot of children’s novelties and seemed pretty popular.

There were food vendors. I had the perfect fried bread taco. Couldn’t possibly have been better. H.o.p. nibbled on snow cone after snow cone.

H.o.p., usually cheerful, is shy, like his mom, and it takes him a little time to get comfortable around people. I thought he’d love the music and the goings on, but he was too overwhelmed. And it was hot hot on Saturday and Sunday and not being used to the heat he wilted. Pics before and after show him cheerful and hamming it up for the camera. Pics at the encampment show him droopy, sweaty and his eyes fairly rolling back in his head. His social IQ tends to also be like mine, iffy, and we turn particularly irrelevant and maybe even confusing when disoriented. And lots of stimulus disorients. I once did a radio interview for a play of mine and I said I was nervous and they said I’d get over it and I didn’t and they realized finally I wasn’t going to say a word. At a workshop question and answer session after a play of mine, after my sense of humor flopped, I ended up saying nothing. People asked questions and I would start to respond, say two words, and then pausing for the third word I’d get caught up in thinking of everything I could reply and after a lengthy silence I’d decide hell so long has passed since I started to answer I may as well not answer at all. After that, it was arranged that if there had to be a workshop, someone else would sit in for me to do the question and answer part.

And my social IQ at the encampment was the pits, worse than usual. I went monosyllabic. I wanted pics (and needed them really, wanting to record designs and their colors). But I didn’t want to get in the way. I was worried about H.o.p. because he was overwhelmed. The spider bite was starting to demand its due and I’d begun breaking out in hives that would be in the hundreds by Monday. The welt on my hand was getting bigger and I was itchy. Had H.o.p. not been so overwhelmed I might have been able to orient myself to listen and see in focus, whereas it was instead like a kaleidoscope. Or maybe not. I had a lot of emotions going on, was distracted by them and words that I wanted to soak in kept flying over my head and I forgot how to converse. But that’s par for the course with me. I don’t converse well until the 3rd or 4th time I’m around people.

The most focused I felt was Saturday night in the dance circle with H.o.p. And that was when H.o.p. was able to focus as well. Man, I loved having him in there with me. Having my son in the dance circle with me. And he smiled, calm, throughout, loving it, finally joyful, eyes sparkling.

One friend I made was Pud. She came up to me on the bleachers Saturday night to talk to me and sang me a few cartoon songs. She found us again on Sunday and we spent a while talking and playing and she played with the dinosaur eggs with H.o.p. , trying them out on every metal surface.

I asked if I could take her picture and she said yes.

I have on my desk, Kate of Broken Window’s “Sky/Map, an Earth Work Diary”.

It is on Indian Burial Mounds. Beautifully presented and filled with beautiful photographs. The entry below the first photograph reads,

The birth of the universe was slow and arduous. The sky swelled and swelled over decades and centuries, as stars were born and died, and born again. Eventually it burst, but not with a loud noise or giant spectacle.

The universe was born slowly, as the sky’s swollen belly let it out with the patience of a rock’s erosion by gentle waves at the bottom of a river.

I’ve not have an opportunity to delve deep into it yet, just having returned from vacation, but I look forward to reading it, which obviously will be a pleasure.

Thanks, Kate. This is special.

(Pics below the fold.)

What I then did on my summer vacation.

My dad had driven up to Cottonwood and spent three days with us there, touring around. Then on Saturday we went down to Phoenix for three days.

When we were getting close, cactus began appearing everywhere.

There were palm trees. Lots of palm trees.

Lots of different kinds of palm trees and cactus.

I’ve decided I adore palm trees and cactus.

At night, I sat on my dad’s comfy back patio that looks over a small garden with a pond and cactus and two palm trees that are now two stories high but were seedlings when H.o.p. was born, and I stared up at the stars, amazed how many one could see in the city of Phoenix, when you can’t see any in Atlanta. On our drive returning from the Grand Canyon, mile after mile I had watched the first evening star in the sky, having not seen anything like it in quite some while, looking often so bright and so close that it seemed it stood over the top of the nearest hill.

On Sunday we went to the Heard Museum at my dad’s suggestion.

It has an indoors that’s almost outdoors.

And an outdoors in its indoors. A courtyard where I now wish I was drinking iced coffee.

I turned over my backpack at the welcome counter. I saw a sign that said photography was permitted. Bowled over by these kachinas, first I took this picture.

Then I took this picture.

Which is when a woman tapped me on the shoulder and said “No flash!” in a brusque voice like I had made too much noise in the lunch line and she was going to pinch me by the ear and drag me to the principal’s office. She startled me as I was already far away in the land of design. I’d forgotten about flash not being usually allowed in museums and felt busted and tagged as bad when I was the kid in the proverbial candy store. Museums freak me out anyway when there’s so much to absorb and I know I can’t get it all in and I begin to panic because worlds and worlds of imagination and archetype and talent and blood and sweat and tears and hope and love and joy and the breadth and length and depth of human experience is there which must be given its due and it’s impossible to give it the meditation it deserves to absorb all that it is and is saying because there isn’t the time. And being already elated and distraught, I was primed to be freaked by someone tapping me on the shoulder and barking at me. If I had known I wasn’t supposed to use flash I wouldn’t have. If the sign said, “No flash!” I didn’t notice it. Neither did Marty. Thus I went nuts trying to figure out how to switch off the flash on my little camera, which is a recent replacement for one that broke during the warranty period and its programming is slightly different because it had been replaced with the next model up and turning off the flash was not the same procedure as on the former camera. Marty went on the tour with my dad while I entertained H.o.p. in the children’s section. I took lots of pictures. My camera kept informing me they were blurred and I kept retaking and retaking and retaking and retaking, sometimes taking 5 shots of an exhibit before giving up or supposedly getting it. I needn’t have bothered. I got home and all the images were blurred with the exception of a couple. And I was real sorry about this because here I was rushing through the Heard in an afternoon whith a child who thought a quick glance at anything was all that was needed when one could easily spend a year at the Heard. There are cases that would demand a week’s worth of study or two weeks or a month.

Though the Heard is devoted to the art of the southwest Indian Nations, they had the below in the children’s area. I took a photo of H.o.p. in front of the Pacific Northwest exhibit but it didn’t come out either.

In the children’s area they also had a few Objibwa and other woodlands bandolier bags, and a table where you could sort-of not-at-all make your own by punching holes in a prepared white bag and tying yarn through them and a ribbon for the shoulder band at the top.

I had a major case of deja vu in the children’s section when I was photographing an Otoe blanket and turned to face, from the Otoe blanket exhibit, the Ojibwa bandolier bag exhibit across the room. One of those feelings where you step into a time and place where you’ve already been. I haven’t had one of those in a while.

Upstairs there was an exhibit on the boarding schools. H.o.p. was freaked out by a barber’s chair with hunks of hair beside it. It really disturbed him.

Though blurred, I’m including here a portion of the mural that’s painted around the top of the wall in the children’s area.

I’m still broken up over all my photos not coming out.

When leaving we stopped by the store. Well, Marty stopped by the store but I stayed outside as I assumed they would want my knapsack (a sign said they would) and I was by then too tired to deal with it so I sat outside. For some reason, it just seemed like too much effort to check my knapsack again and I was already feeling fairly intimidated by seeing other people tapped by what I’m assuming to have been docents for doing this or that which were no-no’s at the Heard but they didn’t know it. Though the guides were great. One guide had approached and talked a bit to me where an exhibit of modern paintings and sculpture was (wonderful) and said she was glad the exhibit had been very well received. And then there was the Hopi woman who was giving a tour of the Barry Goldwater collection of kachinas, who was relating the nature of kachinas, speaking of their being spirits, and a woman said, “But they’re really people dressed up, aren’t they?” and the Hopi woman said no, they were spirits, and the woman said, “But they’re really people just dressed up, aren’t they?”, to which the Hopi woman said, no, they were spirits who coming down from the mountains assumed human form, that this is what she truly believed, and the woman turned and said to the person behind her, “They’re people dressed up in costumes.” There must be a stress relief room in there somewhere for the guides, where they can go in and bang their heads on soft padded walls. H.o.p. has a thing for pretty girls and he may not have cared for the kachina tour as there was “a lot of talking” but he was drawn like a magnet to iron when he saw the Hopi woman and stood at her feet in rapt appreciation, gazing up with adoring eyes.

Anyway, back to the gift shop. I was already feeling pretty intimidated as I was saying, aided and abetted by the fact that museums always make me nervous as there is always so much to see and so little time to see it in. I know that I haven’t the opportunity to take in but a portion, that the rest will be lost, I’ll forget it, I’ve not the time to give it the due it’s worth. Such as even the modern paintings. I could have sat in there a day at least gazing and meditating. So I was already zonked-out over-stimulated and just couldn’t handle anything else. In the meanwhile, a man was shuffled out of the gift shop with his knapsack and the knapsack of his wife by security. He apparently didn’t want to turn them over and so he’d been ushered outside and sat and fumed. Then Marty came and got me and said I had to come in to look at the bracelets. “No,” I said, “I don’t want to deal with the knapsack.” Marty said they wouldn’t care. I said they would, that they’d just turned out one man. He said they wouldn’t care and to come in. Tired and nervous I went in and went to the jewelry counter. He owes me a coral and turquoise bracelet, has owed me one for about fifteen years, and he wanted me to look at the ones there. For some reason no one asked me for my knapsack, they ignored it. I looked at bracelets and they were nice but of course they were very expensive, which one would expect with the quality items you’ll find at the Heard. The woman waiting on me acted like I was going to buy one even though I’d said no don’t believe so. She ignored my raging case of hives. I zeroed in eventually on a bracelet with petrified wood and turquoise. I liked it but not enough to buy it. The woman asked me wouldn’t I like to try it on anyway and I said no, thanks. She offered again and wasn’t being pushy, seeming more like she felt these bracelets needed to be worn and wanting to see them on someone’s wrist. I didn’t buy a bracelet but because of it I looked for a book to buy and found one and got that.

We then went to Papago park. It was near sunset. I didn’t have a chance to get photos so here is a website that already has a lot of pics of Papago park.

I kept trying to decide whether I liked Phoenix better or Jerome better. In a way I like Phoenix better but I decided on jJerome as I like putting on a coat in the winter and because I’d be situated midway some amazing places and because if I was in a place like Arizona I’d want to be an easy distance from wandering the open desert and sheltering canyons.

You just about had it with all the pics and the fifth grade level of reporting on my summer vacation? Sorry but we’ve still got a few days to go. The next installment is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West.