In those liminal moments, when one shifts between worlds the folded nature of time becomes clear. How can one not know that what has been deemed past is here when one sees a Kit Carson in the eyes of someone you just happen to meet?

The New York Times says:

This spring, a young woman stood up at the tribe’s annual meeting on its reservation here on Puget Sound and asked it to formally approve same-sex marriage. The response from the 300 or so people present was an enthusiastic “yes” in a voice vote. There was no audible dissent. Then, after another, smaller meeting (still no opposition) and a little work by the tribal attorney, the tribal council voted unanimously this month to approve same-sex marriage.

No court fights. No ballot measures. No billionaires behind the scenes.

“It was an important statement, but it wasn’t one that was a real struggle to make,” said Leonard Forsman, chairman of the tribe. “We really saw this as a housekeeping issue.”

What! No death threats?! No protestations of god’s ire, of impending doom, of apocalypse?! Savages. LMFAO

via Eiderad

He wrote a book called The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. It’s a young adult novel (semi autobiographical) exploring questions of identity, racism, poverty, abuse, love and what it takes to be true to one’s self and family in difficult circumstances. I read it some years ago – the tribal college where I taught had a copy which made it easy. It’s a wonderful book full of hope and determination while still being true to pain and hardship. So when I heard about it being banned I had to shake my head. Then Sherman tweeted that once they actually read the book they changed their mind. (Yep. Voted to ban without reading the sucker.)

The Tri City Herald carried the story.

On June 14, the board voted 3-2 to remove the book from the district’s reading lists. At that time, Mary Guay and Rick Donahoe joined Strickler in voting against Absolutely True…None of the board members had read Absolutely True when they first voted on it. That was the job of the Instructional Materials Committee, or IMC, established a little more than a year ago to review all books used in Richland schools.

Outstanding. Vote on a book without reading it.

At least they had the gonads to admit screwing up. Well, except for Phyllis Strickler. Apparently she still voted to ban the book. I would love to know on what basis that decision was made. I emailed her to ask.

Start this video and while Toppah and Yazzie are singing read the poem by Groulx. You’ll get a sense of how well I feel today.

Drummer's directions

They are making the sound of the rain
they are making the sound of the rain

four singers are calling across the sky

eyes closed

mouths open
they are sitting in the four ways of the wind

singing
that we will get our bearings

(by David A. Groulx)

taken by peardg

Ekvana Angulalik

I was left to die in the snow. Too bad. Lucky someone
came along and picked me up.
                                — Kuptana

Ekvana is the size of a ten-year-old, wizened
like winter berries under the snow
where she was left to die as a baby
the year the caribou failed to come.
Someone adopted her, taught the girl
to butcher caribou, scrape and chew the hide,
sew the belly fur into parkas,
foetus skin into baby's boots.

Now she sews slippers of stroud —
teal and cream and cranberry
with wolverine cuffs,
embroidered flowers on the toes.
They sit upright on her kitchen table —
little qayaks afloat on the sea.

Every stitch follows the next,
regular as the twelve children she birthed:
eleven girls, one boy.
Two died as infants, three of alcohol,
dropped from her life
like calves too weak to move on with the herd.

I want to ask her:
is losing five, five times as painful
as losing one?
Do the seven who survived make up for those
who died? What is left
when children are taken and taken again?
After the long winter
what sweet taste is left?

I mean you are just moving around through your day, the cool drizzle day of Vancouver comfort and calm and this beauty happens. What a wonderful time and place to be alive.

I get really tired of it when that someone is another woman telling me how I should respond. As long as I choose my behaviour carefully, protect myself and those who are vulnerable, what the frak is so scary about an angry woman? Really. Do you know?

Anyway, in celebration of appropriate anger here is a poem by Gregory Scofield.

Not too Polite Poetics

his diagnosis was not conclusively cutting edge
nor was the conversation charming
like was I a closet peace pipe smoker
or did I eat rabbits
with the fur still on

but what was my tee-pee creeping technique
did I make my move closing time
sneak up cruise past
make those heads tilt eyes swing
just this way, boy

or simply hang around
looking seductively stoic
like a Curtis portrait
waiting and contemplating
their move

our west I discovered
I didn't need to kiss up
to graduate head of the class
despite the prerequisite
keeping my mouth in check

not polite to stick my grudge nose
in their Native Lit class
say my piece on First Nations first voice
demand Kinsella visit Hobbema
or take a course in Cree colloquial syntax

like all First Nations writers
I must adhere to ethnic demands
make my poet's entrance
wrapped in a Pendelton blanket
sunburst geometric design

maybe a Navojo ring or two
to give me the authentic look
a ghost dance shirt
might come in handy
reflecting history bullets

when I get too mouthy
for their comfort
they want Yeats Dickinson Longfellow
a cosy chit-chat afterward

I barely pass the visiting poet's test,
answer why I'm so angry
so impolite, so defensive
is not what I want here
but the chance to speak

without backs up or a drum solo

Ethnically I am of European descent, Even if it is low-class, outsider European, it is still European and for Native Americans here that equates to white-person. And since many of my family members are Native, that makes me white. Get it?

The reason I’m telling you this is because of something really fascinating that happened because I am white. I’ll tell you about that in just a minute, but first I want to say that in all the various situations/cultures that I’ve spent any time within, there is a separate women’s communication style that seems to have some pretty strong similarities no matter what culture the women call home.

For one thing there are kitchen table rules. In the core of the domestic world there are rules by which strangers or distant family are made a part of things. You may not be given a family name, but there will be something – a glance, a cup of coffee slid your way, a teasing joke – that will let you know you are part of the kitchen table group, even if its just for that moment. This inclusivity functions for women in a way that supports the often labour-intensive lives women sometimes need to share.

Anyway this whiteness of mine and my femaleness came together at the grocery store.

I was sitting by myself at a table outside the store waiting for my children to finish the shopping. It is a table for 4 and when 2 Asian women (one Japanese, one Korean) came out needing a table to re-arrange their groceries, they glanced at me enquiringly and of course I waved my hand, smiled and said “of course.”

They sat and started to talk about the groceries they just purchased. They were in their early 20s I think. They talked about how this particular store had better prices on meat and vegetables; they talked about where other things can be purchased for good prices. The Korean woman congratulated the Japanese woman on the carefulness of her selection. She said “you shop really well.” The Japanese woman ducked her head and politely demurred, discomfited by the compliment and, I think, feeling undeserving of such high praise. And of course efficiency and money savvy is high praise amongst women in this particular sphere of experience.

One thing that was of great interest to me in this time is that they carefully kept their bodies partially facing me and although they didn’t address me directly, each woman glanced at me out of the corner of her eye at least once. Partly this special politeness had to do with age. I’m 54 and definitely grey and I tend to trigger respect in younger women.

Then the Korean woman started saying that she wasn’t as good a shopper as her friend, and that (starting on another example of her weakness as a traditional woman in her cultural context) she liked to cook for just herself and, in a slightly louder voice and in a different tone she said, “I’m so white.”

They both did that corner-of-the-eye glance and lifted the muscles around their mouths. It was a praise statement meant to include me. The odd thing is that it was exactly the same kind of kitchen table inclusion that I have experienced in other cultural situations, including my family on the Reservation. Women’s talk.

In that moment I realized that for them, being “white” was a symbolic end-point in the scale of strong female behaviours. Becoming “white” for her contrasts to the group-ethic of her traditional role as a Korean woman. Becoming “white” means taking on (temporarily, and in the right context) the identity of an individualist, that of a woman on her own who knows how to take care of herself.  In a sense she was claiming bi-cultural status and skills. She was claiming kinship with me around our version of the kitchen table.

I nodded very slightly toward them. Smiled enough that they could see the lift beside my eyes.

I was surprised  though, because claiming “whiteness” (or accusing someone of “whiteness”) is not a positive thing in any Indian culture I know and that is where I have spent most of my cross-cultural time in the last decades. One time a niece was told I was white by a family member and she was so upset she came to me and wanted me to deny the charge. And it was a charge. I don’t think she could quite get her head around what she knew of my behaviour with what she knew of the symbolic content of whiteness.

Anyway, don’t you find that really interesting? One of the things I really liked about the encounter is the realization that people today are much more comfortable with multiple identities. She is really OK with being white sometimes and Korean other times, and that occurs regardless of what she looks like. I so love that this is true for her.

Thinking idly about a definition just presented to me in the text, one that defines the idea of “real”, the date 1750 and Mandan get horses seemed somehow apropos. Not sure why exactly, but it was enough of a poke to get me to read the rest of the card.

1750 Mandan get horses←from Kiowa and Pawnee←who got them in 1720 from the Comanchee. The Assiniboine (1770) and Cree (1750) get them from the Mandan.

It’s from a project all about trade routes, and the things (horses and disease, for example) that move between the human worlds that exist in the Americas of the 1700s. That last bit, the Mandan world to the Assiniboine and the Cree, that horse path was also one path by which small pox spread once it had been brought into Mandan country on fur-trader river boats. I can’t help but think about the changes these things wrought in the idea of what is “real.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever lived where what you own you have to carry, and can therefore imagine what it means to have a horse as well as a dog, but it is hard to over-estimate the change the horse brought. Changes of this magnitude must alter forever what is considered real. The power the extra physical possibility brings broadens everything—what you can carry, what you can own, how much land is yours to hunt, what you can expect your neighbor to bring to the next camp. In it’s own way, a horse enables Indian consumerism I suppose. Even if it is in the form of painted lodge skins and multiple iron pots.

I wonder what it would look like to keep a running thought-log in two wildly different circumstances? I’ve lived with children where I had to pull my 2-year-old half way up the mountain to the cabin in February. Then go back for the rest.  I’ve also lived where I can ring a bell and have tea brought to me. The things you think about are not the same and I suspect, what conceptual forms I currently utilize, carry the echo of those two lives and how I’ve had to live them. It seems a simple thing the manner of living effecting the manner of one’s concepts, but this idea of embodied realism is much more radical than it first appears.