I’m listening to Southern Cree in the background so I thought I’d post some pictures of the not so nice side of our Olympic event.  As with the 1986 Expo, many people lost their home territory to the rebuild that led up to these Olympic games. Many, many of them are Native people. Who says the Indian problem has gone? In fact who decided it was the Indians that were the problem?

Photographer, James Mouat

A legal observer, trained to monitor the actions of both police and demonstrators during the games, looks on during demonstration for low income housing.

I like what’s known as ledger art. It represents a period of American Indian history, specifically on the plains and primarily between the years of 1860 and 1930. What they mostly document is the large scale arrival of Europeans, their soldiers, the life ways of those tribes who produced the artists, and the contact between the two. Probably the most famous ledger books come from the Indian prisoners that were held at Fort Marion in St Augustine, Florida. Captain Pratt, their supervisor, gave them the paper, colored pencils and paints and presumably, retained at least some of the completed books. The Indians, having time on their hands, used their own experience with art (tanned hide, mineral and fat based paints, representational topics of note in Indian Country) and translated them into the new medium made available by Pratt.

There’s a contemporary collectors market for ledger books and some of them are available to the public through places like the Smithsonian and the Nebraska State Historical Society. I came across this picture on the net, which had an attached provenance.

The provenance reads:

Keeling Ledger Book, Nebraska State Historical Society (11310-55), is from the collection of William Henry Keeling of Falls City, NE. Major Keeling served with the Army in Montana in the 1860s. It is likely that the ledger book was collected at Camp Cooke, Montana in 1866-67. The William H. Keeling was received by the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission staff at Arbor Lodge in 1925. The inventory entry appears as “Book of Indian Drawings, history of the Nez Perces Indians”.

“collected at Camp Cooke, Montana in 1866-67…”

“collected…”

Sort of like Lord Elgin “collected” the loose stones at the Parthenon?

Camp Cooke was the first permanent military base in Montana.  It was deemed necessary because in 1862 gold was discovered at Bannack in what was then Idaho territory but is now Montana. By 1863 President Lincoln had appointed Sidney Edgerton as the Chief Justice of the Territory. He arrived with his wife and kids. She and her husband’s niece set up a school.  He tried to deal with the increasing violence that sudden wealth so often seems to inspire.

And of course there was the Indian problem. Prior to the discovery of gold there weren’t so many whites as far out as the Idaho Territory. In the two years following the announcement at Bannack there were some 16,000 of the suckers and because of that things began moving along. Montana Territory was created in 1864 out of the eastern part of Idaho Territory. Edgerton was its first governor. By 1866 there were numerous Indian raids against the influx of white settlers. Indians burned white-owned buildings, ran off stock, and occasionally killed people. Edgerton, and then later Thomas Meagher, were tasked with getting up a local response. It didn’t work that well, and to a large degree, the policies, historical accidents, and attitudes generated during those years ended up being the genesis of the militia mindset that still pervades the region.

As winter burned itself out during those years between 1862 and 1866, the rumors of Indian attacks would predictably surface sort of like the black-boogey men stories white parents told their kids in South Africa before the end of apartheid. There’s a particularly funny Indian War of 1867 in which an attack (as it turned out by four or so Indian men) was anticipated and met with a million dollar military response. The thing is that the rumor mill of the time, the conspiracy theorists who predicted an uber-Indian alliance against the whites, had, in their late-winter by-the-fire-stories, 11,000 warriors pounding at white doors come one dark spring night. One of the things that makes this so funny is that the fact that it turned out to be four dudes didn’t stop the rumor mills any more than continual human and societal survival stops apocalyptic religions.

But I get ahead of the story here. The year before this happened this ledger book was “collected” by Major Keeling at Camp Cooke. So now what do you think “collected” means given the tenor of the times?

I don’t know much about Major Keeling. There is a newspaper mention of him in The Washington Critic dated December 3 1885. It describes him as the “post-trader” at Fort Leavenworth. So he survived the 1860s and ended up running the trading post? I wonder, all those years later, if he sold stuff to the Indian from whom he’d collected the ledger?

There’s another mention of Keeling in a text that recounts the history of the churches and schools in Fort Leavenworth. In recounting the somewhat meager situation of Father Kinsella as he tried to minister to a rather large area, the report has him taking up a room (when not otherwise occupied) in the hotel/military residence managed by Major Keeling. This is sometime around or after 1884. Keeling provided the Father board at $15 a month. The room, though, turned out to be a brief reprise from Kinsella’s homelessness because pretty soon there were so many young military trainees on the frontier that there just weren’t empty rooms in which the Father could kip.

Anyway, all these years later, the Keeling Ledger is taken care of by the Nebraska State Historical Society. It looks like Keeling’s family presented it to the Nebraska Parks and Game Commission in 1925, although I could be wrong about that.

You can buy a limited reproduction of ledger pages for between $250 and $5000 a pop.

I went to the museum in Victoria yesterday and I had a bit of a shock.

I’ve lived here for nearly four years now and this is the first time I’ve gone. Partly that’s because I’ve been to severally really great museums and so now I tend to measure all new museums against their measure and that is really not very fair.  I spent, for example, a lot of time as a child in one of the Carnegie-Mellon museums, and in the British Museum and to tell the truth they’re pretty hard to measure up to.  And while the Royal BC Museum is really wonderful in many ways, it is not a museum with anywhere near the breadth of the C-MM or the BM.

Still, I liked what was there. They represent, for example, various parts of BC history and environment in permanent dioramas that do a really good job of giving a visual sense of what they variously represent.  There is also, on another floor, a First Nations exhibit (also permanent) that provides story, examples of art, culture, etc.  Now I find exhibits of First Nations a bit difficult.  There’s the history for one thing  – imagine Turks staging historical displays of the Armenians, or the Taliban leadership building a loving memorial to women, or a Nazi museum to all things Jewish.  That may seem a bit harsh, but there you go, that’s feeling for you. But for the shock…
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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:
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This post started out to be about two things. The first is a book by Louis Owens called Bone Game and the second is a documentary called Genghis Blues.  I’ve known about Owens for a long time, and love his books. I rarely re-read but there are a few books that have comforts for me that reach so deep that re-reading seems mandatory. I have also known about Tuvan throatsingers for some years and have some CDs. There is even an article about it in Scientific American. I had, however, never heard of Paul Pena (horrifying I know) and never seen the movie Genghis Blues.  There was something about it, something that so strongly made me think of Owens that I dreamed about them last night and so here I am, figuring it out at the keyboard.
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Coming home from class there was a seriously beautiful crescent moon setting in the south west. Its upper tip looked like it was embedded in cloud and so it appeared to hang there, a pendulous yellow sliver hung from a cloud.

The air felt wet but the rain clouds had broken up during the 4 hours of class. The roads and fields were still sodden and it was warm so earth smells carried high and clear. Running home was like swimming through a light scented sea. Odd way to put it, but true to the experience.

I really like the class. Partly this is because the material is of deep personal interest, but partly it is because the way in which analytical philosophers disarticulate the body of any theory is so alien to me, it feels as if I am an anthropologist in an alien world – and I love that. It is really hard and takes a lot of work to learn to see in this new way, to predict how the next step of the argument for or against any position will go, or to, more generally, see the body of an argument as an articulated thing that can be dis-membered and re-membered.
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In the May 29-June 3 2009 The Pacific Northwest Inlander there was an article called “Saving Salish.” It’s the language (well actually the name of the group of languages) native to my relations.

The excerpt reads:

Salish isn’t just a language of words and grammar. It’s a bridge between generations – a link to culture and identity – and for the Kalispel, it’s dangerously close to being lost forever.

I am used to hearing Salish spoken at ritual events, and I know some of the people involved in the attempt to rescue the language at the Spokane. But here in my apartment in Vancouver, reading the Inlander, the thing that really gets to me is imagining losing my ability to read Shakespeare or Chaucer or any of the other seminal writers that express what it is to be who we are as English speakers.

Imagine that. Imagine losing the ability to reach out into our past, losing Shakespeare. Arguably, we would lose ourselves. To whom would we then belong?

OK so someone tells me that part 1 of this post contradicts the post called “Talk to plants and proud of it; some of them even answer back.” Here’s my analysis:
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I bought Olive Kitteridge some weeks ago now, but have only just started reading it. Normally I read non-fiction, but I will read fiction if it catches me. When I hear about a work of fiction that I might want to read, I get a copy, open it randomly and read. If those few paragraphs reach out of the page and get me then I buy the book. If they don’t I put it back. Harsh I suppose but there it is.

However, in this case I didn’t do any of that. I bought the book based on the recommendation of a friend. I ordered it from my local bookstore along with two or three others. When they came in, I went to pick them up but since I was in the middle of several bits of non-fiction, the novels went on the shelf for “later.”
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I am in a hotel room. It’s civil twilight, just before dawn. The day of the wedding, the air is cool coming in the open windows, the sky as it lightens looks clear. This morning at 10 we will drive up to the reservation to start the visiting process.

When I crossed the Columbia yesterday and pulled off the road at the horse monument (yesterday’s posted photo) I could smell the sage brush. It’s a smell I find incredibly welcoming; I felt welcomed, like by a relative. It’s exactly the same feeling I get when I run across a friend I haven’t seen in ages, that quick glad burst of happiness, the sense of familiarity, belonging, family.
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