I’ve been reading Sherman Alexie lately. I started with his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and continued on with his War Dances.  I’ve read other things before, the first being Reservation Blues and of course I’ve seen Smoke Signals. I read his work, mostly enjoy it, sometimes love it, and recognize its value both in a literary and in a social sense, but I do have problems with it. I’m going to talk about those problems but first I want to introduce another book – apparently totally unrelated – which, actually, was the genesis of this post.

The book is about Nietzsche as is called Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith. There is a review article about it here; the review is how I found out about the book by Bruce Ellis Benson. I have ordered it on the strength of the review but also because the notion of not being able to leave behind religious traditions is one I have seen first hand over and over and it was this part of the review that suddenly had me thinking of Alexie.

The article (“Was Nietzsche Pious” by Stephen N. Williams) says:

The argument in this volume is that Nietzsche retained his native Pietism. He was brought up in a Pietist home and broke away from the beliefs which it housed, but he did not thereby cease to be religious or pious. He aspired to become a disciple of Dionysus, a devotee of Life, of which Dionysus is the symbol. This determination to pursue a way of life is rightly called “piety” when we observe the continuities between Nietzsche’s background Pietism and his later quest. His Pietism was a way of life rather than a set of doctrines. The form remains where the content changes.

It’s the bit “the form remains where the content changes.” That’s a critical concept I think. It’s important to know for those who seek to understand or enter into another cultural (or religious, or non-religious) way of being, another way of perceiving and categorizing the world in which we all live.

Alexie is funny and since many of my relatives are on or from the Spokane Reservation, many of the places and stories are familiar to me. The thing is that he is also really angry. Making that observation is not a comment on his right to it, nor its justifiability. The observation was made just because the way he directs his anger makes me uncomfortable: my discomfort is merely egocentric. Bottom line –  I suppose it makes me uncomfortable because I am suyapi and despite my Spokane connections and relations that is what defines me there, except for those specific people who actually know me, who have helped me and who I have helped in return. What they think about when they think of me is not my skin. It also bothers me because of all the white and mostly-white relations, the grandfathers and aunts that are white – those people who were suyapi and who helped make Alexie who he is; in those moments of rage they get dissed by association and I don’t think that is his intent.

So what has that got to do with Nietzsche? I wasn’t really thinking about N’s anger but I suppose it is a symptom of what really caught my attention. It’s the attempt to rework the world – which may suck – but the world that you have been given to live your life within. It’s the problems associated with attempting to change: what you can leave behind and what appears so much harder to ditch.

It’s the “religious” point of view, those deep, underpinning belief structures, ways and means of perceiving, attitudes and life-assessment tools that seem so deeply unconscious that they rarely get spoken about and even more rarely get changed. Apparent religious conversions are a good place to see this essential stability of belief structure in action.

It’s one thing to change from being one Christian sect to another and another thing altogether to try and dump the faith and take on another cultural point of view. Personally, I think it is more rewarding to attempt the second; you certainly have more room to learn about the actual world that you live in when you go far outside your system, but don’t kid yourself that you are going to become someone else. You aren’t.

I’ve been involved in a number of “alternative” communities over the decades of my life, and as a consequence I have seen seekers come looking to change themselves. They choose their target community for many reasons, all having to do with what they think the community has to offer them.  Of course many come offering help, but that isn’t why they are really there, at least not in the vast majority of cases. Seekers come wanting something for themselves. That’s not wrong, but what it means is that they come with a desire born out of their original community and that desire may have nothing whatsoever to do with the goals, values, desires and lifeways of the target community. So what happens is that a seeker gets there, and starts asking questions and behaving in exactly the wrong ways, and in exactly the ways he or she is probably trying to drop. It’s painful for everyone involved.

An instance: a woman who had been raised inside a deeply conservative Christian sect fell in love with witchcraft so she took on a wiccan mentor (not me). The first thing the woman did is start trying to bully the mentor into inducting her into a circle. What she wanted was to be “baptized” into the new faith, wanted the recognition that such an event provided in her erstwhile faith and she did it in exactly the same way that her male pastors had done, through protestations of faith and uncomfortable emotional force – which is what drove her out of the sect in the first place. She couldn’t help herself. Those beliefs and behaviours about what it means to be acceptable, to find comfort, to belong, they had all been crafted in the church of her youth. But of course, that is not at all what wicca (or witchcraft) is about, but she couldn’t see that, and her mentor, having come from the same background, couldn’t see the dangers of giving in. It ended badly.

An instance: a deeply compassionate and community conscious man came to the rez to sweat with the man who is the head of my family there. The compassionate man had heard of him, and been well enough connected to get himself an “invitation” to a sweat. He arrives and is deeply concerned that he behave well and appropriately so he asks questions about the “right way” to (and there was a whole long list of things he wanted to know.) Does that sound good to you? If it does, you may not understand why Alexie and his kin are often so angry. There is so much wrong with his approach, yet he did it from the best of intentions and he really is a very nice man. Some of those things? The idea of an invitation: the connotations of that word in most white societies imply a kind of hierarchy and behavioural code that simply do not apply to the situation. Not that there isn’t a “code” with regard to sweating. There is. It’s just that the code the man had worked in opposition to the code he was trying so hard to understand and to follow. It was a bit like a person who really wants to understand how to treat a fish well because he really loves fish but he does it by holding the fish out of the water so they can “commune.”

A sweat is not a club or an mini-excursion or travel destination, but a way of living. I mean do you need an invitation to go listen to the birds or to go pay attention to how the clouds move around the mountain closest to you? The idea seems absurd doesn’t it? When a person gets an invitation he or she covets, there is a sense of winning something, of warfare and victory. The man must have had all those things when he came with his invite to sweat. But, if you are the kind of person who wants to know the way the world is for birds then you just go listen to the birds, you don’t have a sense of victory like the one associated with an invitation, that you can go outside and listen. You just go and one day you see one kind of bird, some days you may see nothing, other days you luck on some bit of understanding. If you want to understand what it means to be a bird, do you think you can just go birdwatching once or twice and get it? Probably not. If you want to understand what it means to be a bird, do you think there is one correct bird to follow? Silly, I know.

The thing is there is no right way and no invitations and no way in. That’s because it isn’t a place to go, not a destination, but a way of thinking and perceiving. You know how when you want to get a new something or other, and how that something or other suddenly seems to be everywhere? It’s a bit like that. What you don’t realize is that whereever you are from, regardless of whether you like it or not, that is your current something or other. It’s what you see. What you don’t see is what is actually there.

That’s what Benson seems to be saying Nietzsche did by dropping the content of his form of Christian Pietism but keeping the belief structures. I have no idea of whether Nietzsche was aware of doing so, but I have no trouble believing that he did it.

It’s also what Alexie has done. It explains his humor and his anger both. Not that I am suggesting he wants to be something other than Indian but if you read his stuff, especially his The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian he does want to change the content of what it means to be Indian, at least to some degree. And of course he is going to face exactly the same problems as did Nietzsche, because to a very large extent, the underlying belief structure is going to dictate what kind of content will fit within. And unfortunately or otherwise that structure has been deeply effected by the last 200+ years (the horse came over the Palouse in about 1730 and that changed everything). The Spokane of 1810 were nothing like their relations of the 1400s and today’s Spokane is nothing like his cousin of 1810. Just is that way with people.  This is not about relative value. The Spokane living today is as much an Indian as was the cousin in 1810 or the one in 1400. But the Spokane living today, whether in Wellpinit or Seattle, has different values than did the cousin of earlier time, and different belief structures, because today’s Spokane has a deep and traumatic history of European influence.

The question is what change can come that does not come at genocidal costs but can accomplish successful adaption and a reduction of pain and an increase in joy? Can it be as simple as taking on someone else’s ways?

Here was an attempt at that: Nietzsche did the whole classical Greek religion thing with Dionysus. The problem is that Dionysus is a god that fits into an overall cultural package. He doesn’t make sense without Apollo and Athena, without Venus and Mars, without Hephaestus and Neptune and he doesn’t make sense without Greek history, and Greek ideas about what it means to be a human being. All those things function as a system. The problem for N. was that Pietism didn’t allow for the Venus’ and the Neptune’s – and it certainly didn’t allow for Greek ideas about what it means to be a human being. So what came out of N’s pen my have had the name Dionysus but it wasn’t really Dionysus.

The same thing is true when people wander into the sweat (lodge) and then wander out again. Whatever happened to them, whatever help they got, it wasn’t a “sweat” in the same way that the head of my family “sweats.” It just cannot be.

You cannot become someone else like this. You can’t simply take on someone else’s life. This is because you must start from where you are; you do not have the other’s history, or mind, or even perceptions. But it is not so bleak, what you can do is change direction. That is you can start from where you are and go in another way. Still, it is much harder than it seems because the first step is to become conscious of all those things which you have been trained to keep unconscious. You must first stop and look at where you actually are. That is very, very hard to do and it is very, very painful, even for those happy with their lives. And, worse, you have to do the looking yourself, because if anyone points it out to you it is just going to feel like an attack and that will shut you down.

And anger? I’m a big believer in anger. Have a lot of it myself, but you have to be conscious of its sources and where you direct it. Otherwise it’s using you and not the other way around. Anger is usually attached to one of those deeply unconscious belief structures. And anger at whites is a big thing on the rez: at the all the funerals, and the diabetes, and the lousy medical care, and the lack of educational opportunities, and the lack of support for disabled Indian kids, the hunger and poverty and suicide rate and drug addiction – anyway, you get the idea. So change is called for, and anger can be a good motivational tool, but how to use it? And perhaps even more importantly, what is the anger tied to that might be working against the change you want to see?

One way to look at the “how” is to look at what Dionysus brought to Nietzsche and his followers and how they affected the rest of us. Because they did. It may not be the Dionysus of Greece but it was a new emphasis on a vaguely Dionysian-like “hook” Nietzsche found in Pietism. The same thing is true for non-Indians who come to Indian Country looking for their own Dionysus. What they take home probably has little to no relation to what they were given, but what of it? So they can’t tell the difference, what does that matter?

I think part of it might be that no one in Indian Country wants to go the road of Classical Greece, that is, they don’t want to be an extinct civilization contributing antiquities to someone else’s revitalization. I think this might the be the true source of the anger, and that to which it is connected, the fear that they are dying despite protestations to the contrary. And here, in this fear, is one place where the white-side relations are ever present. White schools teach about the “vanishing” Native American, teachers, museum staff and librarians speak about my relatives in the past tense without being conscious of it. And when reminded (I did that to an unfortunate museum guide at an exhibit where one of my relations had a couple of things she had made on display – I said “actually she isn’t a past tense, she’s sitting right over there), they get upset and even aggressive.

So that mess is my “problem” with Alexie’s work. It’s the vanishing idea; it seems to fuel the deep fear and anger that shows up like knapweed. But I suppose it only bothers me because I share it to some extent, and because I am identified as being a part of the problem, not that Alexie knows me personally, he doesn’t. And there’s another – the expectation to be taken as an individual and to be judged as a singular person rather than to be judged as a member of a “tribe.” How deeply buried is that, how hard to eradicate? That’s why I am suyapi. I think like one. I believe like one. But then so does Sherman, at least some of the time. Hence, the problem.

So the question stands: how to change when what you want to change is so deeply resistant to simple awareness let along manifest alteration?