I am in Spokane, in the motel where I always stay. Asleep still are my son and one of my nieces. I have already been out to get my coffee and some bread, cheese, fruit, etc for breakfast. Apple juice for the niece, and coke for the son.

I am sore from walking yesterday, the powwow at Riverfront was being set up and I was looking for another one of my nieces. She of the Washington School of the Deaf. It turned out that she had already left for the Reservation with her dad. Nevermind. I’m going up there this morning.

Still, I was glad I walked the grounds. It’s been several years now since I lived here and so there is a an almost ethereal quality to my walking here. I went by my old apartment to gather some seeds from a kind of Lunaria that grows here. It has bigger, whiter seed pods than the kind that I’ve seen up in Vancouver so I am going to plant some at home. I was there just after dark and the stands that I went for are at the edge of a badger’s wood. There are coyotes near by too since it is within easy reach of the river. And I visited the witch’s house. Her place is always really beautiful and verdant.  But it was the powwow grounds that really seemed dense with the past and the odd thing is that I’m not much of a powwow person. Love stick game because of the songs but powwows have never been my favourite. Still this time it was different.

I suppose it is because Thyra is dead and she used to be a part of this powwow. Walking around was a bit like walking through the liminal zone where the shades and living intermingle. I kept “seeing” people that were once busy getting ready to dance, or sitting together in their camp chairs talking, and through them would hustle the current powwow workers setting up for grand entry at 7PM.

Today should be interesting because Wellpinit powwow is next weekend and Thyra’s camp is being set up today on the grounds. I’m heading up there in about an hour to exchange one niece for another. I’ll get a chance to walk around Wellpinit powwow grounds then. I’ll also go get some mugwort and buckbrush that grows near there.

I need juniper too and every morning when I burn it I suppose it will continue to keep the shades fed and therefore the memories sweet. At least I don’t use blood like Odysseus, and like Homer (I presume) I know it is a story, even if a compelling one.

Years ago I knew a woman who told me a story about a Salish woman we both knew. Briefly, the Salish woman would say “track bear” when she was pointing (or referring) to a bear track. She was a Salish speaker and the underlying sense of reality that was instilled in her early years (and was recorded in the rhythms and syntax of her first language) stayed with her. She explained (to the woman I once knew) when asked, that to say “track bear” is obvious since you see the track first and then you see the bear.

Little bits of knowledge like this are like prisms. Turned this way and that they break up what we thought was a singular modality. The relationship between what our bodies receive from the world and what we perceive, and then communicate to ourselves (let alone others) is like white light. It isn’t singular.

For humans there isn’t a case where the world is either about objects and subjects or about events. Demonstrably it is about both. The decision about what to make central (either the subject/objects or the events – the space between) is a cultural decision made in the development of a group of people in space over time. What interests me is the movement a mind can make between bear track and track bear. This is the world of the liminal, the cultural translator, the mind that slips on its own (un)certainties.

I’ve been rather sick for several days. Bad, bad headache and since my daughter is also sick, it’s been frustrating. Can’t think, but still have to operate. Can’t even read much because it ratchets up the pain after not very long. Still, I did read “The Noble Rider” which is an essay by Wallace Stevens from his collection of essays called The Necessary Angel.

I mentioned this book in the August 17 post on Phenomenology, poetry and sense when I felt a connection between the “thing” and what Stevens’ thinks about poetry, imagination and reality. Mind slippage of the sort that track bear track represents is what happens (or what enables) when the certainties of event/or/subject-object are fractured. The slivers left, the “questioning” I talk about in the last thing-post is like the rainbow the prism enables us to see. It is important to remember that the prism doesn’t create it, by the way, it just makes visible to us the constituent frequencies of what normally appears as “white.”

This is why I think that the rock is just as real as the thing-in-itself (last paragraph of that Aug 17 post). White light is not unreal. Neither are the constituent frequencies the “really real” light. They are just as much a product of our visual equipment and our resultant interpretation as is white light. What seems critical to me is that our visual equipment obviously includes eyes, nerves, cerebral processing modules as well as the world of electro-magnetic frequencies and photons: what we perceive is a result of the relationship between what we have evolved to be and what we have evolved within. What I question is where does track bear track come into it? Where does this cultural imagination – the various cultures’ certainty of correct and obvious interpretation of what is seen – obtain? I suppose it must be in the “processing” that imagination has its abode.

All this has led me to question imagination. What is it? I mean there are the Romantics who are sure they know, and Stevens (and other poets/artists of course) has things to say about its relationship to reality and to the mind, as do the Philosophers and Cognitive Scientists. So that’s what I’m exploring.

For me, all of it is still tethered to the idea of “thing”/”thing-in-itself” and in my head “thing”/”thing-in-itself” and “imagination” relate, but how? No idea yet. Just a feeling. It’s a bit like a Tarot card I’m not quite sure where to place relative to others already chosen, and if you read symbols of any sort, you know that position is critical. A new card can seriously derange what one thought was (finally) understood.

In late October of 1885 Johannes Brahms, in a town in central Germany, introduced his deeply allusive Symphony No. 4 to the world for the first time. At the same time, the Mayor of Tacoma, Jacob Robert Weisbach, his police force, and the Noble and Holy Knights of Labor decided that all the Chinese in town had to go. These European immigrants (the mayor had recently immigrated from Germany, according to The Ledger) said “the Chinese must go.”

So there I was, driving south late on this rainy Friday night. I was about 8 miles north of Tacoma when, flipping the radio, Brahms’ 3rd movement of his 4th symphony comes belting out. My head slipped sideways; the juxtaposition of what was here that fall of 1885 and what Brahms was trying to do with his 4th set off a sort of interior historical image and sensation slide that feels a bit like having multiple theaters running different films simultaneously from inside my head. I know where I am, but when is here exactly?

Of course part of my response was because I was really pretty tired my then and my imaginative filters begin to degrade under certain circumstances. It was dark, and the river of red light running up ahead of me felt, in that moment, as if it were organic, a huge powerful living thing – living in such a way that my requiem might be sung sooner than planned.

I don’t suppose a river of receding cars counts as a mob but I suppose it could feel that way if your life was threated by the power of its current and I did feel threatened. I was tired enough to know I had to stop driving soon. I wonder what the Chinese of late fall 1885 felt being herded out and forced to leave for Portland?  (And what the people in Portland felt upon receiving them.) There was talk of just killing them and thereby ending “the Chinese problem” and I suppose there were many unsolved Chinese murders during those years.

I found myself wandering through the historical and cultural landscapes so oddly intertwined by the advent of Brahms on the road past Tacoma. I was wondering if the Mayor had ever heard Brahms. Perhaps seen him at the market one day?  Did he come from the same region in Germany? Wasn’t Albert Einstein  already born then? Do beauty and civilized behaviour ever join hands? Wasn’t that the time Germany was colonizing Africa? How many people in Arizona want to end “the Mexican problem”? Did the anyone in Tacoma get the irony that their expulsion of unwanted immigrants came only a few years after the then president decided to deal with the “Indian problem” by the Indian Appropriations Act? Did they ever get that they were uninvited, unwanted immigrants? Is Starbucks still open?

Then there was this bad accident, slow traffic and Brahms ended. Starbucks was not open, my head returned to more or less normal-tired, and once past the accident scene, I drove the last 15 minutes to my friend’s house, and, in just a few minutes, will crash on her couch.

Night.

The last two days in the archives have furnished me with several treasures. One of them is a book published in 1930 called Red Heroines of the Northwest by Byron Defenbach. The second of three parts is dedicated to “The Dorion Woman.” Otherwise known as Marie Dorion, she was a 25 year old woman that traveled with 2 children from Oklahoma  to Missouri to northern Wyoming all the way to the Pacific. Along the way she had another child – he died 2 days into his life. Madame Dorion ended up near Salem Oregon where she died in 1850 at the age of about 67.

If you read about this woman on the net and in the texts produced about her, what you get is often the bones of the Astoria trek to the mouth of the Columbia, and a lot about her apparently abusive husband, and the stuff about her bearing her third son on the trail, but mostly what you get is the author’s view of what all this means. “Marie” makes a perfect canvas for our views about women and the qualities we assign them because so little is known about who she, in fact, was. I mean we don’t even know her actual name. She is called Dorion Woman because her husband’s paternal name was “Dorion” and she was his woman.

We know this, at least in part, because of Washington Irving and his “Tragical Story Told by the Squaw of Pierre Dorion.” Much emphasis is given in Irving’s account to her “presence of mind and force of character” and certainly her survival seems, from the story, due in part to her attention to her household duties. This is why, for example, she had all the supplies that she would need in the near future if she and her children were to survive the winter. The story she tells, and that Irving would relay, about the fate of the Astoria party is what made her memorable to the public but no one, it seems, thought to ask her name.

Time tells much about women’s interpretors. Irving published his story in 1836. Defenbach published his in 1929 0r 30.  Both accounts pay attention to Pierre Dorion, Irving calling him the “hybrid interpretor” as a way of describing his bi-racial heritage. Irving doesn’t mention the drunkenness as far as I know. There is a section when he is describing the French boatmen and how they lift their flagging spirits – by song, nary a drop of spirit is mentioned. But at that time alcohol might have been seen as a problem with respect to trading with Indians (their abode being the destination of the boatmen, trade goods being the cargo) and granted as a necessity to those water-haulers whose spirits needed lifting, but no one had come up with the idea of denying it to civilized white folk yet.

But by Defenbach’s time prohibition and its ideas had taken its toll on the interpretive mind of writers. In his story much attention is paid to Pierre Dorion’s use of alcohol.  However, there is still a touch of admiration: “When sober,” Defenbach says “the stalwart young half-breed was a fellow of recognized ability as a trapper and trader. He had worked for Choteau and other Americans who were beginning to resist the monopoly of the fur trade by the Hudson’s Bay and other British concerns.”  A drunk, yes, but he could hunt, trap, shoot and, on top of that, was on the right side politically. But when it comes to Marie…

(Pierre’s) proved himself faithful and serviceable. His occupation called for almost constant travel up and down the Big River, and in these journeyings he usually dragged the squaw with him. Nor was this his only encumbrance. The couple’s first son, the sturdy Baptiste, was born in 1806, and two or thee years later another lad arrived at the tepee. This latter was a frailer type of boy, with snake-like eyes and a mouth that extended from ear to ear; they named him “Paul.”

To these two children the Woman clung with the savage devotion of a mother-wolf, bringing them up after the Indian fashion. There was no discipline, the few instructions given having to do only with the children’s physical requirements. The only virtues inculcated were those of fortitude and courage, and even these traits were warped into ferocity and thirst for blood. Such ideals as those of morality, gratitude, truthfulness, unselfishness and honesty were not sought to be conveyed by the Woman to her children, primarily because she had no such ideals herself or any conception of them. The first precepts she instilled into those young hearts were those of cruelty, murder, and rapine.

Jeez.

Shortly after this little exploration of the Woman’s character and moral rectitude (compare Irving’s and Defenbach’s ideas about the ideal woman), he talks about Pierre’s accidnetal fall into the trip to the Pacific, which he would not survive but his wife and children would. This fall, the story leads us to believe, came because of alcohol.

The processes of evolution have never produced anything more averse to solitude than is whiskey, even a quart of it…Pierre found himself surrounded by, or perhaps one might better say surrounding, a whole flock of quarts. He passed through alternating stages of hilarity, amiability, deep melancholy, and extreme irritability. Several days and nights passed in the enjoyment or suffering of these various emotions.

(Aside: the use of the word “evolution” adds a nice little sparkle from the conceptual bounty that is Social Darwinism – also something alive and well during Defenbach’s time. I wonder if he was a eugenicist?)

What follows is a rendition of what Defenbach thinks happened when a drunk, angry and now without the salary due him by the Spaniard, Manuel Lisa, and includes an almost jovial boxing match between husband and wife. The outcome is that Pierre Dorion finds himself working for Lisa and having to cart his wife and two sons along for the ride.

Ultimately, Defenbach (nor Irving for that matter) doesn’t say much about Marie Dorion but what he inadvertently says about how he sees the world is enormous. Apart from the idea of what women are, there is the purchase place for blame. It’s not surprising that in the late 1920s when Defenbach was probably writing this text, that alcohol got much of it. Poor old Pierre, a noble sort with his rustic trade, but reduced to dragging his baggage around, getting hobbled by a treacherous Spaniard, a snake-eyed son and by that morally bankrupt Woman. Think what he could have made of himself if wasn’t for that demon rum!

meh

Would that there was someone who would haunt Oregon’s historical archives for a more accurate view of the woman. I haven’t had time for that yet, so perhaps it already exists. I’ll have to check into it.

I am out of here for six whole days. Heading out early, early to be on the road back to the Rez. Wahooooooooooooooooooooo!

Talk at you from the way.

Two of my godkids from about a decade ago.

One of the many drums I made nearly 20 years ago.

A detail from the hem of one of my wingdresses.

The toes of my favourite pair of moccassins

A bit of my really early beadwork (nasty isn't it)

and yes, I bought a scanner today.

This weekend is the Coeur d’Alene Stickgame Tournament at Worley. I want to go but I am so tired after the last couple of weeks that I am just going to stay home and sleep. It’s a long drive from here. Maybe I’ll go a little later in the year to some of the public games. I don’t gamble, but the songs are wonderful. I find myself missing them deeply.

I have been thinking of you and your little partner. Then there I was surfing and I found her doing her thing. May she let you use her legs one day. Maybe Tony can build her a gym in the side pasture? Remember the peanuts.

Love

Mary

photographer, peardg

Woke up at 3AM again. Being an efficient woman, I decided to do some chores and so went out to retrieve my laundry. And came face to face with a skunk. Luckily for me the skunk decided to play nice and gave me safe passage. So I was able to deal with my clothes and come back into the house with just the normal human stink.

My heart rate is more-or-less back to normal but I am oh-so wide awake now, hence the computer browsing and blog posting. In the process of having a look-see I found this new photo posted on peardg’s flickr page. The first thing I thought was “oh cool that’s the turn to home.” Bleh.

The photo represents one of the turns close to the edge of the reservation where I have recently been for Thyra’s funeral services and where she is now buried.  Work has been terribly busy of late, and as of yesterday, got even busier. I actually had my head in my hands at the end of the day feeling as I did the long long hours to come if I’m to keep up with the pile. I haven’t really thought about Rez and family things much and I’ve been doing pretty well I thought.

The weather in Vancouver has been absolutely gorgeous. Yesterday peardg and I (she works in the same office as I do, at least for the next couple of weeks) walked over to the art museum and had hot chocolate and tabouli (odd combo huh) sitting outside in the sun. We had a really great waitress which made things even nicer. It was delightful bit of time and despite the hullabaloo at work, I went back with a sense that I could survive. But the picture has set off a wave of “can I run away” questions.

I don’t like being pulled to places I cannot go.  I mean I really don’t want to live on the Rez again despite missing the people there. I’m not sure there is a good solution to it, but perhaps I do need to visit more – more than the weddings and funerals that another sister gently chastised me for when I got there this last time. Perhpas it is as simple as that.

For now, skunk fear somewhat abated, perhaps a hot bath with lavender? Then a bit more sleep.

Here’s another thing I’m having a hard time getting out of my head. These two pictures represent a single bag. The first is a pattern created by weaving the inner leaves of corn husks. The colors are probably yarn wrapped along the threads. The second image is the reverse side of the bag and is made of beads.

The bag is for sale for $2100.00 which I find both amusing and deeply distressing. According to the sale site the bag is from the late 1800s.  It’s Nez Perce. I cannot but help think of the hands that made it, that killed the deer, that tanned the hide, that traded for the beads, the needles, the thread, that sat for months wrapping and weaving the corn husks. And it is so very beautiful. I wonder if the person who buys it will go to a dance, will carry it on the floor and use it to bring themselves and their family good fortune, or if it will go in a locked collection somewhere. And I wonder what family created it – which one of the families still in Nez Perce country are the descendants of the hands that made this possible.

The thing that is amusing is that there was a point when this stuff was considered worthless, at best a token of a vanishing race. Anyway, enough gloom. What really catches me is its beauty. That’s the thing that really sticks.