Compared to some others I have read on the topic his command of both his material and his imagination makes reading it an act of mental nourishment – a bit like a huge fresh seafood salad after weeks of sausage with mac and cheese. I feel like my brain has had its palate refreshed.

More on the book later, but just a little sparkly I found.  In the introduction (“The European Religious Heritage”), during a discussion of the rise of Dissenting Protestantism there was a reference to “endless cycles of religious extremism” (nice!) and a list of

social and spiritual radicalism at Munster, anabaptism in Switzerland and the Low Countries, and Familism, Fifth Monarchism, Ranterism, Muggletonianism, and Quakerism in England.

Muggletonianism! I actually giggled. I have always admired J. K. Rowling’s apparent familiarity with little bits of European esoteric history (she does have a French and Classics degree after all). I actually giggled when Nicholas and Pernelle showed up in HP. Imagine introducing actually history into a kids book! I suspect the delvings of some readers into European magical history will show up in tomorrow’s scholarship, sort of like early StarTrek technological fantasies have showed up in today’s shoulder sling bags.

I had never come across Muggletonianism before. No idea if Rowling knew about them but, even if not (and the wikipedia article suggests not), the coincidence is delightful anyway.

This from the wikipedia article linked above:

The six principles of Muggletonianism have perhaps been best set out by George Williamson

• There is no God but the glorified Man Christ Jesus.
• There is no devil but the unclean Reason of men.
• Heaven is an infinite abode of light above and beyond the stars.
• The place of Hell will be this Earth when sun, moon and stars are extinguished.
• Angels are the only beings of Pure Reason.
• The Soul dies with the body and will be raised with it.

Is this what muggles believe? No magical ability perhaps, but magical thinking seems to obviate its need.

Anyway, this is what I do with sleeplessness when I don’t have to freak out about having to spend all day at work. I can (and will) take a nap later and continue my pursuit of restedness.

Butler talks about the relationship between Christianity and occult practices and how the literate English compatriots of the Puritans turned on a regular basis to mystical writings “in the cabala to complement both their Christianity and their astrology.”

While these practices came with immigrants to North America, and certainly occult practices were no stranger to the early Americas, the last portion of the paper seeks to begin an explanation as to why these practices declined in popularity.  He gives two reasons. The first is that the literary tastes in England changed and occult reading materials became harder to get. The second was that the churches were often also the governing authority and they pushed for legal and civic penalties for practices in contravention of their particular doctrine. I mean did you know that “on the eve of the American Revolution only about 15 percent of all of the colonists probably belonged to any church.”

Cool. Too bad it didn’t last.

Anyway, it turns out Butler went into it further and wrote a book called Awash in a Sea of Faith, Christianizing the American People published in 1992. I got it today, so I am looking forward to some happy reading.

I was working at home and there was a knock. When I answered there was a nicely dressed young woman in her 20s with a little girl of about 11. The elder had a colourful tract rolled up in her hand and after she introduced herself she asked me one of the supposed-to-be-caring questions about how I feel about something happening in the world today. I stopped her and asked “Are you a Jehovah Witness?” She looked a little annoyed that I’d interupted her pitch, but answered “yes.”

I was off. I told her that I found her way of life interesting but that I was an atheist and wasn’t going to be converted to which she replied that she found my beliefs interesting (fuel to the fire), to which I responded by starting to talk about society and its history of millenarian-type organizations and how there are people who start with a desire to believe there is one true answer to all human questions and how a person like that can read any fact and weave it out of existence through the power of narrative, etc etc. I mean I used to teach this stuff to college kids so I did go on a bit. (The tract never did get unrolled.)

I was being polite because of the little girl so all of this was said with a smile and several times I spoke to her directly to reassure her that her friend’s increasing tension wasn’t a sign of danger.

The young woman responded rather well to this deluge of erudition. She smiled through it all, at least until I got to the origins of the JW faith. Hooboy.  She believes that the JW’s formed during Jesus’s time. No kidding.

When she said that, I laughed and said “That is soooooooooo not true.” She got mad then. She said “Well I have read and researched our origins and I suspect you have not.” That last bit’s not actually true but, as she was in the process of taking the little girl’s hand and getting ready to make her hasty but dignified exit, I forbear from saying so.

That was fun.

I’m not a gamer mind, but there was this one word game that my kids had me play that required you to kill goats and other iconic creatures in order to be able to get new words. I liked the word-puzzle aspect of the game but every time I had to kill a goat…well, I don’t play it anymore.

At the time I thought about what kind of metaphorical creatures I would be willing to kill in order to play. The first one that popped into my head was the (then) president Mr. George Bush. That got my not-so-nice side cackling. Doubt a game like that would pass social muster because Mr Bush is in fact a real person, but this new idea of Penny Arcade’s – Wow! Is that going to raise a hullabaloo!

Can’t wait. Should be quite a ride; of which Dan Brown and Philip Pullman can only dream.

I’m so supportive, so appreciative of the effort, I’ll buy the game even if I almost certainly won’t want to play it. As I said, I’m not a gamer and those particular icons never had a life in my head so I don’t need to kill them. But for those of you who do need or want an extra rabbit hole to maximize your exit strategy’s efficacy, play on.

via Pharyngula

A little story: I was asked to catalog a small 1-room school house library so they could get back their accreditation from the state.
I knew that it was small enough that I could do it myself so I agreed without checking out the collection. When I got there, over their spring break, it was so appalling that I really had to laugh. Amongst other egregious errors, they had most science books cataloged as fiction (along with a copy of the Torah) but the Bible was in there as “non-fiction, history.” It was kind of nice putting things to rights but I know that once they had that bit of paper, it would all go back the way it was. Probably a good thing the kids didn’t learn much of anything for those years.

Thanks peardg for the link.

Have you ever seen a Chick tract?  I tend to be pretty careful about exposing myself to hate literature of any persuasion. Nevertheless, I did watch the documentary and was glad I did. It is a rather gentle exposure to the mad bad world of christians who hate and fear that which is not themselves.

If you want to get a better grip on this particular world, this is a good way in without having to swim in the pit of the particulars.

Having exposed some of my core concepts, let me tell you my favourite passage in the chapter. Benson says, “for Nietzsche, it (pity) is ultimately a disguised form of superiority: ‘To offer pity is as good as to offer contempt’. Precisely in the act of pitying, one places oneself above the one being pitied. thus, pity turns out to be a form of revenge, a way of retaliating against the other.”

The chapter is split into two sections. The first (and longest) is an articulation of Nietzsche’s interpretation of Paul. The main point seems to be to show that N is really trying to usurp Paul’s (purported) function in changing the ideological direction of the West. Benson says that

if  Nietzsche’s read of Paul is correct, then Nietzsche turns out to be a “second Paul,” whose kinship to Paul is actually constituted by their commonality.

The second part of the chapter is about why N is wrong in some of his interpretations about Paul and more generally about Christianity.  This seems to be centered on the idea (erroneous according to Benson) that Christianity is anti-life.

Nietzsche is certainly welcome to his “otherworldly” interpretation of the resurrection—and there have been plenty of theologians and believers throughout the past two millennia who have tended in that direction—but his interpretation clearly goes against orthodox Christianity. To say that the cross is the condemnation of life on earth is simply a gross misunderstanding.

(My eyes twirling in their sockets.)

Despite the “simply” – as if such a “gross misunderstanding” was beneath analytical notice – the articulation of Paul’s revenge tactics was interesting. The idea that he was fighting against doctrinal law because he could never live up to its dictates seems so delightfully Freudian, that I cannot help but feel a certain empathy (not pity) for a man caught in such a nasty moral and intellectual bear trap. The only “solution,” given two such poles, is to either bow to the authority/power, or to become the authority/power. It never seems to have occurred to dump authority/power as a goal (i.e. to dump the measuring stick and seek another less violent one). In this Nietzsche shares the intellectual confinement of Paul and so I agree with Benson that there are strong similarities between the two men and their projects.

I suppose given the exposure of my native rage in recent days, it is not surprising that I should find a chapter on revenge in Christian and Western philosophical history interesting. I did find that the comparison between Paul and Nietzsche useful in thinking about N’s slave morality thing. Benson quotes N:

The beginning of the Bible contains the whole psychology of the priest…” man must be made unhappy”—this was the logic of the priest in every age. It will now be clear what was introduced into the world for the first time, in accordance with this logic: “sin.” The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole “moral world order,” was invented against science, against the emancipation of man from the priest. Man shall not look outside, he shall look into himself. … And he shall suffer in such a way that he has need of the priest at all time. Away with physicians! A Savior is needed.

This quote seems to me to explain a great deal about the overall idea behind a slave morality, and thus of course, its opposite, the idea of a non-slave, or great man. But that’s the thing: a great man is really just the inversion of a slave. It doesn’t uproot the cognitive and conceptual system, it just inverts it. Which is what Benson says, and with which I agree.

What I disagree with is the fact that the overall system can be related in any meaningful way to the idea of truth. Certainly assumptions of identity equations like god = truth cannot be sustained without simple faith.

(“simple” — My eyes are now crinkled at the corners because I am grinning.)

In the last section of this chapter Benson asks to what extent the analysis of Paul is really a display of Nietzsche’s own psychology, because, according to Benson, it certainly isn’t about Paul. My question is — to what extent is this book and its core assumptions and consequent argument really about Benson?  That’s why I like the passage I opened with. Because what Benson seems to do is pity (and dismiss) those who, with Nietzsche, see the focus on non-earthly resurrection as a mark of anti-life sentiment. Now I don’t think Benson intends, as did N, to reorient the whole of the Western world. I just think he did rather hope to reorient his bit of it, that is, of Nietzschean studies.

Having followed the chain from Paul to Nietzsche to Benson, perhaps N is right, that it is about power and its uses. But what is the content of that “it?” Who is included in that “it?”  Most people seem to read that and assume that the “it” includes all people, but I rather think that the people included in that “it” is a rather small subset of the set that is “all people.” I think it’s a bit like the statement “all people are created equal.”  I rather think the original coiners of that phrase didn’t really mean all people – or what they meant by people didn’t include all those included in the term Homo sapiens.

Oh dear, it seems I have continued to diss the book. Never mind. I did read most of it, even if I couldn’t finish it, and perhaps that a mark of it’s overall power. I do wonder, however, if Benson is aware that his book has positioned himself as the third member of a triad. I also wonder if he realizes that the world that he posits with his arguments, is a minority world, and not a map of the whole of it.

Yes that’s right. Silence.  I did not throw it. It did not hit the wall. Nevertheless, I will not be able to finish it.

Chapter 10 (the last chapter):

Nietzsche admits to being pious. Even though he calls himself a ‘godless anti-metaphysician’ (a phrase that truns out to be ironic precisely because Nietzsche is not godless), he still believes in truth, which has for millennia been equated with the divine.

That’s the passage that made me put the book down.

The first part of the sentence seems to me to be what the book  (Pious Nietzsche) is about empirically.  That is Benson wants to argue that Nietzsche didn’t become less pious in his life so much as he moved his piety from Christian to Dionysian content while “the form remains virtually unchanged.” The author argues that Nietzsche saw the Christian Pietism of his youth as having fallen “out of rhythm with life” (i.e. into decadence) and his quest, via music, was to get back into this rhythmical state. This quest results is N’s Dionysian content. Hence, the author’s basic argument is that the forms associated with Christian Pietism did not change, that Nietzsche retains those forms, and therefore, N remains pious.

In other words, Benson equates the form he sees in Pietism with religiosity. And here is where it connects with the second part of the sentence that had me put the book down.  In that there seems to be another identity equation – god=truth. This seems to me to be at the heart of what the book is really about metaphysically.

If the form = religiosity then these terms hold identical content. The problem is that I think Benson is mistaking the general structure of having a belief system with the structure of a specific kind of belief system. All human beings have belief systems. This does not equate to any specific kind of belief system, that is, to have a belief system does not necessitate religiosity.  Nevertheless, when Benson discusses Nietzsche’s “obsession” with human salvation, he is, I think, saying something of importance. This is, for me, what the book actually says – that the conceptual structures of one’s life, deeply embedded by culture and childhood training, are not easily left behind. That humans need saving, for example, is a core concept of some belief systems, and it seems truly difficult for those person, so afflicted, to dump. So Nietzsche, seeing Christianity as incapable of the job of this salvation, turned, via music, to a system (Dionysia) that he thought could save us.

Well some of us. And this is another similarity in the basic concepts which structure the Christian world view, which carried over to Nietzsche’s Dionysian solution. These basic structuring concepts seem to be what Benson means by form. These are the thoughts which almost never get exposed to daylight when people are trying to make a change in their world view. Instead what they do is pare down the narrative that connects the bones and redress the supports. This makes the world look new, but it is just a new dress, not a new world.  For a new world, each bone, each concept needs to exposed, disarticulated and some need to be broken, discarded, and all need to be rearranged. I think Benson is quite right that Nietzsche didn’t do that.

Granted N thought we needed saving and Christians think we need saving, but is this kind of equation enough to conflate the two belief systems? I mean I think evolution explains the diversity of life, and many Christians also think that evolution explains the diversity of life, but this doesn’t make Christians atheists. This kind of false equation and the reliance on historical tradition as evidence for the existence of something (e.g. “truth, which has for millennia been equated with the divine”) is the reason I put the book down. I didn’t throw it at the wall, despite this somewhat egregious intellectual misstep, because the basic idea, that conceptual frameworks are difficult to shed, made what effort I put into the earlier parts of the book worth it.

Still, the core concepts of the author, and therefore the book, show through in his identity equations.  These are what the book is about metaphysically and since I don’t share them, I cannot go to the place Benson intended. I did manage to go somewhere though, and for that I am glad. I like learning, especially in places where I least expect it.

It’s also dark, but since it is late November most of the shops have already hung their lights and so it’s a bit like having a seat at a light show. The coffee shop on the corner is particularly good. It has a big tree and ribbons of small white lights hanging in all the windows. When I went in a few minutes ago to get my hot chocolate, they have decorated the tables with small red tartan flannel tablecloths. It looks surprising nice – surprising because I don’t much like Christmas and most of the decorations that come with this time of the year are either horribly sentimental or give me the heeby-jeebies.

Despite not liking the holiday, I do like the attention to light in this uncomfortably dark time of year. Of course winter light festivals are a really old practice in human history, since light to a diurnal species is bound to become a symbol when that species becomes able to have symbols.

I’m not really going anywhere with this except to say that I am still thinking about the moth and its instincts – instincts that become problematic in an artificially lighted environment. I wonder what killing the dark does to those moths and humans who live their lives in cities where the real-dark rarely penetrates? Having taught in a variety of wilderness camps, one thing I do know is that people unused to the dark have trouble adjusting to the difference between day and night and that this seems to make them deeply afraid of the world around them — and that fear can cause them to do pretty silly things. I wonder how different that is from what the moth does?

I respect the dark and, depending on where I am, I actually relish it. Still, the lights call out to me and come the shortest day, burning a candle all night reminds me that as much as I may think of my self as something special given that I belong to one of the species (I presume that somewhere in the universe there is another) that can symbolize, what I symbolize makes me remember that I am still very much the human animal evolved in the caverns of deep history.

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?