Saturday, October 31, 2009
TIPI RINGS
Only a few miles north of Valier along Birch Creek which is the southern boundary of the Blackfeet Reservation, is a place called “Willow Rounds.” Via Google you can find some wonderful photos of the place because the ranch called that is currently for sale. You’ll see other info related to real estate matters. But what we are concerned with is how the place got its name: the “rounds” in question are tipi rings.
Tipi rings result from the edges of lodgeskins being weighted down with rocks. Since the glaciers carried in melon-sized and sorta melon-shaped stones from far to the north, the supply is endless and it makes more sense to find new ones than try to transport the stones from the last place. Anyway, the Blackfeet didn’t wander aimlessly: they moved through the seasons from one place to the next is a rather predictable pattern. They were in many ways migrant pickers, except that what they picked was wild. The seasons and terrain dictated what was ready for picking: camas now, berries then, and so on.
So the People came back to the same general location and often put their lodges up where they had been before. Instead of driving pickets around the edge of the lodgeskin -- which might be moved up and down in the course of a day as the need shifted from fresh air to warmth from the fire. One can find tipi rings in all sorts of likely camping spots, but rarely will there be only one by itself. The basic unit was not so much the nuclear family as the extended family growing into clan. So the tipi rings might themselves be in a big circle.
Tom Kehoe, who was the curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian and who (way back in the mists of time) was married by Bob Scriver to the woman who became the redoubtable Alice Kehoe, a noted anthropologist in Milwaukee, wrote an interesting paper about a phenomenon he found. Some tipi rings had lines of stones extending out from their edges in various directions and of various lengths. No one living could explain this. Tom’s theory was that they might have been like those signposts one sometimes sees at crossroads pointing in every direction, saying “Helsinki x miles” and “Mexico City x miles” and “Boston x miles.” The idea was that the line was code and the length of the line suggested the distance. I liked this idea so much that I put it into one of my “Twelve Blackfeet Stories.” (For you to Google would be better than for me to link, since some of these articles are only in academic databases.)
EFFIGIES
The broad and complex stone circles that seem to record sidereal events or maybe the course of the sun through equinoxes and solstices are quite well known. Some have names and regular pilgrimages. But New Age people who claim them and “own” them or create their own figures or add labyrinths and so on, are a pain in the patootie to scientists. As usual, there is tension between those who want to preserve and study, and those who want to inhabit and renew.
BUFFALO JUMP MARKERS
The v’s that mark the edges of a run leading to a buffalo jump that is several miles away can be subtle since they were not so much cairns as anchors and markers for clumps of brush meant to move in the wind or stations for people waving branches or robes or blankets enough to spook a buff. The book about “Head Smashed In” piskun which is available online from the University of Athabasca, a virtual university, is a revelation in this regard. “Imagining Head Smashed In” by Jack Brink. (http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120137)
Another little-known stone artifact discussed in that book is the chamber dug into the ground and filled with hot rocks to melt the fat and marrow out of the debris and bones left after butchering the animals killed by the fall over the cliff. The researchers have now found the “factory floor” where the animals were processed a little distance from what must have been a fairly repulsive stinking fly-ridden mess at the base.
CAIRNS
Cairns themselves, sometimes considered to be “Sun Worship Altars” in Christian terms, will likely be on the tops of ridges and hills and if there are trees nearby they will be decorated like Christmas trees with small offerings of fabric or fetishes. There's one near Starr School.
The name is Gaelic but the practice is worldwide and for some reason often related to heights or crossroads or meant to look like a person standing. Sometimes a body or ashes are interred. When some young adventurers from Babb, Montana, which is one of the tourist towns on the Blackfeet Reservation, went to Africa, they took some small stones from the top of Chief Mountain, a natural marker of the boundary between Canada and the US, and left them on Mt. Kilimanjaro. They brought back some small stones from that mountain and when the matriarch of the family died, she was buried with a stone from each “istuka” (Blackfeet for mountain) in her red patent leather purse.
BOULDER ERRATICS
The glaciers brought along with the strewn “cobblestones” the occasional massive boulder that was finally stranded on the prairie when the ice melted. These puzzled the early prairie people who told a lot of stories about them coming to life and chasing Napi as though the latter were Harrison Ford in an archeology movie.
Once they were left, the boulders functioned a lot like a tree: a place to get up high for a hawk (there are often white marks), a sun porch for a mammal (our bobcats used to love the one along Willow Creek near Parsons), and a travelers’ landmark. The one on the road from highway 89 along Birch Creek to Heart Butte has become an altar, with small offerings left on it or at the base. Some call them “buffalo stones” and indeed that’s what they look like. In the old days the buffs would appreciate a good place to rub off old dead fur and their friction would polish the sides of the boulder smooth even as their hooves cut a bit of a moat around the bottom, which held moisture so that a small variant ecology would take hold there.
EFFIGIES
Hugh Dempsey, the emeritus scholar of history in Calgary who is also a noted prolific author, tells the story of a warrior who blundered and was consequently killed and left on a hillside where his people found him. In his honor, they marked the outline of where his body fell, like a crime-scene outline. Like so many things, it has since been disturbed and overbuilt.
Use www.amazon.ca, the Canadian Amazon list, to find books by Dempsey or his son. The book with the effigy story (photo included) is “The Amazing Death of Calf Shirt” by Hugh, published by the U of Oklahoma Press. The relevant story is called “Peace with the Kootenays.”
DREAM BEDS
Another important use of stones was the “dream bed” high on the mountains where shale was either piled up New England fence-style or propped up on edge to make a wind break for a person fasting and praying for a vision. Arlo Scari in Chester, Montana, can sell you a book with photos of the “dream beds” in the Sweetgrass Hills. (http://comus.msun.edu/Hon290/SweetGrassHills.html) Proceeds go to save the hills themselves, which contain gold and are the target of cyanide heap leach miners, who want to grind up the WHOLE HILL!! Since there are many uses and stories about those hills, they could be considered “artifacts” or at least “material culture” in themselves.
These artifacts are not so collectible as arrowheads, nor so attractive. One must take a photo, though the defenders of Indian artifacts will object even to photos of Chief Mountain or the Sweetgrass Hills on grounds that they are sacred and photos profane them, lowering them to the status of tourist items. Actually they are in the most danger from developers, careless uses, and contemporary blindness and ignorance. Those forces have long since obliterated the gardens going on without the gardeners that Tim haunted in his youth. Still, there are seed-savers who can re-plant.
Only a few miles north of Valier along Birch Creek which is the southern boundary of the Blackfeet Reservation, is a place called “Willow Rounds.” Via Google you can find some wonderful photos of the place because the ranch called that is currently for sale. You’ll see other info related to real estate matters. But what we are concerned with is how the place got its name: the “rounds” in question are tipi rings.
Tipi rings result from the edges of lodgeskins being weighted down with rocks. Since the glaciers carried in melon-sized and sorta melon-shaped stones from far to the north, the supply is endless and it makes more sense to find new ones than try to transport the stones from the last place. Anyway, the Blackfeet didn’t wander aimlessly: they moved through the seasons from one place to the next is a rather predictable pattern. They were in many ways migrant pickers, except that what they picked was wild. The seasons and terrain dictated what was ready for picking: camas now, berries then, and so on.
So the People came back to the same general location and often put their lodges up where they had been before. Instead of driving pickets around the edge of the lodgeskin -- which might be moved up and down in the course of a day as the need shifted from fresh air to warmth from the fire. One can find tipi rings in all sorts of likely camping spots, but rarely will there be only one by itself. The basic unit was not so much the nuclear family as the extended family growing into clan. So the tipi rings might themselves be in a big circle.
Tom Kehoe, who was the curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian and who (way back in the mists of time) was married by Bob Scriver to the woman who became the redoubtable Alice Kehoe, a noted anthropologist in Milwaukee, wrote an interesting paper about a phenomenon he found. Some tipi rings had lines of stones extending out from their edges in various directions and of various lengths. No one living could explain this. Tom’s theory was that they might have been like those signposts one sometimes sees at crossroads pointing in every direction, saying “Helsinki x miles” and “Mexico City x miles” and “Boston x miles.” The idea was that the line was code and the length of the line suggested the distance. I liked this idea so much that I put it into one of my “Twelve Blackfeet Stories.” (For you to Google would be better than for me to link, since some of these articles are only in academic databases.)
EFFIGIES
The broad and complex stone circles that seem to record sidereal events or maybe the course of the sun through equinoxes and solstices are quite well known. Some have names and regular pilgrimages. But New Age people who claim them and “own” them or create their own figures or add labyrinths and so on, are a pain in the patootie to scientists. As usual, there is tension between those who want to preserve and study, and those who want to inhabit and renew.
BUFFALO JUMP MARKERS
The v’s that mark the edges of a run leading to a buffalo jump that is several miles away can be subtle since they were not so much cairns as anchors and markers for clumps of brush meant to move in the wind or stations for people waving branches or robes or blankets enough to spook a buff. The book about “Head Smashed In” piskun which is available online from the University of Athabasca, a virtual university, is a revelation in this regard. “Imagining Head Smashed In” by Jack Brink. (http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120137)
Another little-known stone artifact discussed in that book is the chamber dug into the ground and filled with hot rocks to melt the fat and marrow out of the debris and bones left after butchering the animals killed by the fall over the cliff. The researchers have now found the “factory floor” where the animals were processed a little distance from what must have been a fairly repulsive stinking fly-ridden mess at the base.
CAIRNS
Cairns themselves, sometimes considered to be “Sun Worship Altars” in Christian terms, will likely be on the tops of ridges and hills and if there are trees nearby they will be decorated like Christmas trees with small offerings of fabric or fetishes. There's one near Starr School.
The name is Gaelic but the practice is worldwide and for some reason often related to heights or crossroads or meant to look like a person standing. Sometimes a body or ashes are interred. When some young adventurers from Babb, Montana, which is one of the tourist towns on the Blackfeet Reservation, went to Africa, they took some small stones from the top of Chief Mountain, a natural marker of the boundary between Canada and the US, and left them on Mt. Kilimanjaro. They brought back some small stones from that mountain and when the matriarch of the family died, she was buried with a stone from each “istuka” (Blackfeet for mountain) in her red patent leather purse.
BOULDER ERRATICS
The glaciers brought along with the strewn “cobblestones” the occasional massive boulder that was finally stranded on the prairie when the ice melted. These puzzled the early prairie people who told a lot of stories about them coming to life and chasing Napi as though the latter were Harrison Ford in an archeology movie.
Once they were left, the boulders functioned a lot like a tree: a place to get up high for a hawk (there are often white marks), a sun porch for a mammal (our bobcats used to love the one along Willow Creek near Parsons), and a travelers’ landmark. The one on the road from highway 89 along Birch Creek to Heart Butte has become an altar, with small offerings left on it or at the base. Some call them “buffalo stones” and indeed that’s what they look like. In the old days the buffs would appreciate a good place to rub off old dead fur and their friction would polish the sides of the boulder smooth even as their hooves cut a bit of a moat around the bottom, which held moisture so that a small variant ecology would take hold there.
EFFIGIES
Hugh Dempsey, the emeritus scholar of history in Calgary who is also a noted prolific author, tells the story of a warrior who blundered and was consequently killed and left on a hillside where his people found him. In his honor, they marked the outline of where his body fell, like a crime-scene outline. Like so many things, it has since been disturbed and overbuilt.
Use www.amazon.ca, the Canadian Amazon list, to find books by Dempsey or his son. The book with the effigy story (photo included) is “The Amazing Death of Calf Shirt” by Hugh, published by the U of Oklahoma Press. The relevant story is called “Peace with the Kootenays.”
DREAM BEDS
Another important use of stones was the “dream bed” high on the mountains where shale was either piled up New England fence-style or propped up on edge to make a wind break for a person fasting and praying for a vision. Arlo Scari in Chester, Montana, can sell you a book with photos of the “dream beds” in the Sweetgrass Hills. (http://comus.msun.edu/Hon290/SweetGrassHills.html) Proceeds go to save the hills themselves, which contain gold and are the target of cyanide heap leach miners, who want to grind up the WHOLE HILL!! Since there are many uses and stories about those hills, they could be considered “artifacts” or at least “material culture” in themselves.
These artifacts are not so collectible as arrowheads, nor so attractive. One must take a photo, though the defenders of Indian artifacts will object even to photos of Chief Mountain or the Sweetgrass Hills on grounds that they are sacred and photos profane them, lowering them to the status of tourist items. Actually they are in the most danger from developers, careless uses, and contemporary blindness and ignorance. Those forces have long since obliterated the gardens going on without the gardeners that Tim haunted in his youth. Still, there are seed-savers who can re-plant.
Friday, October 30, 2009
LITHIC OBJECTS
“Lith” means stone. Sometimes American indigenous people are called “stone age people,” though we used to kid each other in the foundry that the Blackfeet present were now up to the “bronze age.” The truth is that much of the early material culture must have been organic: hide, bone, wood, ivory. For the most part, such things go back to where they came from unless circumstances were unusual. There is, for instance, a bog on the west coast of Chile where meat was found preserved with a rope around it made from vine. The vine did not grow there: it was knotted. The date is VERY early. I’m thinking way before the usual ten thousand year horizon. It was always thought that the glacier over the northern half of the continent prevented access to the Americas, but that doesn’t consider the “boat hoppers” in kayaks or more elaborate designs that probably probed along the coasts and up the rivers in search of food.
ARROWHEADS AND POTS
Stone objects endure seemingly “forever.” Mauls, mortar & pestles, rollers, flat surfaces with rolling pins for making flour, heads of hammers or weapons with grooves chipped in them so they can be mounted on handles or spear shafts -- in some places they are easily found. And then the sharp edges of obsidian (really glass), they say sharp enough to perform surgery, and handheld blades for flensing hides.
The most familiar of the stone artifacts is the arrowhead, iconic in our thinking about Indians because arrowheads mean bows and arrows. The design of arrowheads, the source of the stone, and means of attachment to arrow shafts -- all these subtleties have meaning. They are hunter/gatherer basics. If you go to the top of a high ridge and look in the grass, you’re likely to find arrowheads, discarded products of flint-knapping gone wrong, and the tiny flakes pressed off the edges of the stone. Someone on lookout up there filled up the time by working on his arrowhead supply.
I’m not enough of an expert to explain all about arrowheads. The point is that they are so ubiquitous, so many people have carefully arranged collections of beautiful arrowheads under glass in their studies and playrooms, and arrowheads are so easily picked up on a walk and carried in a pocket, that they are a kind of “everybody’s artifacts.” Other “made” objects, like pots, when fragmented, become to most people’s minds very much like arrowheads. The scientific information that could have been derived from them is not perceptible to the casual person who picks up a shard. They are not as “pretty” as an elegant arrowhead. To many people they are debris.
Every time and place has its own style of making a pot, baking it, decorating it. I once read a study by a scientist who made a string grid over a former village site so that it was divided into squares, carefully mapped every tiny piece of pottery and its period, put it all in the computer, and produced what was essentially a map of the development of the village. It took enormous patience. No one is going to do that at every site. But at some sites it may be crucially important.
This seems innocent enough but can become very troubling when, like so many things, the collecting of arrowheads and potsherds becomes industrialized. It’s bad enough when archeologists mark off squares and dig up the area, sifting the dirt through screens to find everything. It’s entirely over the top when a backhoe comes in to move huge amounts of dirt in search of something valuable. (Even apart from the likelihood that they’ll leave the hole unfilled.)
FOSSILS
Another class of “lithic” material is fossils, which are not manmade, but sometimes slightly modified. The “people’s fossil” is what the Blackfeet called Buffalo Stones, Iniskum. The accompanying manmade story is about a low-status wife (Sits by the Door) who finds a buffalo stone and is able to call buffalo for her starving village. They are actually the remains of the mud inside the sequential and graduated chambers of a sea creature called a baculite, which once grew in great numbers in the shallow inland sea that once covered the prairie.
There is a protocol that goes with iniskim. They are rubbed with fat and red earth until they are shiny, wrapped in a bit of buffalo fur, and kept in a bundle -- sometimes they are added to a pre-existing bundle. Sometimes the baculites have the original mother of pearl lining from the little creature, which makes them prettier but then they don’t break apart into the sequence of little “buffalos.” When they do have the mother of pearl, they are said to be “fat,” because fat can be shiny and rainbowy like that. Those are luckier. Pom-iniskim, supposed to bring prosperity! Easy enough to buy at a rock shop. Maybe sixty bucks for one to hold in your hand.
The trouble with something like an iniskim as a “found object” is that unless you’re Blackfeet, they have to be explained. Unless you know the story, even if you see the stones in a ancient bundle, they don’t mean much. If you’re looking for one, they are even less obvious. Mine looks like a handful of cement, squeezed when still wet. Yet they’re quite common and in some places where there used to be colonies of the creatures and where the topsoil has eroded back to expose them, they are thick underfoot.
But iniskim are minor. The big law-suit provoking items are dinosaur fossils, which the Blackfeet mythology identify as coming from Water Bulls and Thunder Birds. The stories here are about terrible battles between water and air creatures. The Blackfeet idea was to leave them alone, but until a few years back there was a company on the rez that bought dino fossils from locals and sold them to the “trade,” however that works. For a while a casting of “Leonardo,” a particularly striking and detailed fossil of a young dino, was displayed at the Blackfeet Heritage Center. One tribal enthusiast went so far as to suggest throwing out all the old materials from the Museum of the Plains Indians and devoting the whole place to dinosaurs instead.
It’s true enough that dinosaurs can be worth a lot of money but it is only a geological accident that they are here. Like baculites (which were much earlier), dinosaurs once found conditions very favorable along here and after their bones and eggs were deposited, covered in volcanic dust and glacial debris, they lay hidden until now when the wind and water are reversing themselves, taking away from the fossils what they once laid on top of the bones, now mineralized. The Blackfeet benefit from them in the way they benefit from oil or coal deposits, but they are not created by indigenous people and have nothing to do with their culture except as stories. Still, it is illegal to remove fossils from the reservation without permission.
(to be continued)
“Lith” means stone. Sometimes American indigenous people are called “stone age people,” though we used to kid each other in the foundry that the Blackfeet present were now up to the “bronze age.” The truth is that much of the early material culture must have been organic: hide, bone, wood, ivory. For the most part, such things go back to where they came from unless circumstances were unusual. There is, for instance, a bog on the west coast of Chile where meat was found preserved with a rope around it made from vine. The vine did not grow there: it was knotted. The date is VERY early. I’m thinking way before the usual ten thousand year horizon. It was always thought that the glacier over the northern half of the continent prevented access to the Americas, but that doesn’t consider the “boat hoppers” in kayaks or more elaborate designs that probably probed along the coasts and up the rivers in search of food.
ARROWHEADS AND POTS
Stone objects endure seemingly “forever.” Mauls, mortar & pestles, rollers, flat surfaces with rolling pins for making flour, heads of hammers or weapons with grooves chipped in them so they can be mounted on handles or spear shafts -- in some places they are easily found. And then the sharp edges of obsidian (really glass), they say sharp enough to perform surgery, and handheld blades for flensing hides.
The most familiar of the stone artifacts is the arrowhead, iconic in our thinking about Indians because arrowheads mean bows and arrows. The design of arrowheads, the source of the stone, and means of attachment to arrow shafts -- all these subtleties have meaning. They are hunter/gatherer basics. If you go to the top of a high ridge and look in the grass, you’re likely to find arrowheads, discarded products of flint-knapping gone wrong, and the tiny flakes pressed off the edges of the stone. Someone on lookout up there filled up the time by working on his arrowhead supply.
I’m not enough of an expert to explain all about arrowheads. The point is that they are so ubiquitous, so many people have carefully arranged collections of beautiful arrowheads under glass in their studies and playrooms, and arrowheads are so easily picked up on a walk and carried in a pocket, that they are a kind of “everybody’s artifacts.” Other “made” objects, like pots, when fragmented, become to most people’s minds very much like arrowheads. The scientific information that could have been derived from them is not perceptible to the casual person who picks up a shard. They are not as “pretty” as an elegant arrowhead. To many people they are debris.
Every time and place has its own style of making a pot, baking it, decorating it. I once read a study by a scientist who made a string grid over a former village site so that it was divided into squares, carefully mapped every tiny piece of pottery and its period, put it all in the computer, and produced what was essentially a map of the development of the village. It took enormous patience. No one is going to do that at every site. But at some sites it may be crucially important.
This seems innocent enough but can become very troubling when, like so many things, the collecting of arrowheads and potsherds becomes industrialized. It’s bad enough when archeologists mark off squares and dig up the area, sifting the dirt through screens to find everything. It’s entirely over the top when a backhoe comes in to move huge amounts of dirt in search of something valuable. (Even apart from the likelihood that they’ll leave the hole unfilled.)
FOSSILS
Another class of “lithic” material is fossils, which are not manmade, but sometimes slightly modified. The “people’s fossil” is what the Blackfeet called Buffalo Stones, Iniskum. The accompanying manmade story is about a low-status wife (Sits by the Door) who finds a buffalo stone and is able to call buffalo for her starving village. They are actually the remains of the mud inside the sequential and graduated chambers of a sea creature called a baculite, which once grew in great numbers in the shallow inland sea that once covered the prairie.
There is a protocol that goes with iniskim. They are rubbed with fat and red earth until they are shiny, wrapped in a bit of buffalo fur, and kept in a bundle -- sometimes they are added to a pre-existing bundle. Sometimes the baculites have the original mother of pearl lining from the little creature, which makes them prettier but then they don’t break apart into the sequence of little “buffalos.” When they do have the mother of pearl, they are said to be “fat,” because fat can be shiny and rainbowy like that. Those are luckier. Pom-iniskim, supposed to bring prosperity! Easy enough to buy at a rock shop. Maybe sixty bucks for one to hold in your hand.
The trouble with something like an iniskim as a “found object” is that unless you’re Blackfeet, they have to be explained. Unless you know the story, even if you see the stones in a ancient bundle, they don’t mean much. If you’re looking for one, they are even less obvious. Mine looks like a handful of cement, squeezed when still wet. Yet they’re quite common and in some places where there used to be colonies of the creatures and where the topsoil has eroded back to expose them, they are thick underfoot.
But iniskim are minor. The big law-suit provoking items are dinosaur fossils, which the Blackfeet mythology identify as coming from Water Bulls and Thunder Birds. The stories here are about terrible battles between water and air creatures. The Blackfeet idea was to leave them alone, but until a few years back there was a company on the rez that bought dino fossils from locals and sold them to the “trade,” however that works. For a while a casting of “Leonardo,” a particularly striking and detailed fossil of a young dino, was displayed at the Blackfeet Heritage Center. One tribal enthusiast went so far as to suggest throwing out all the old materials from the Museum of the Plains Indians and devoting the whole place to dinosaurs instead.
It’s true enough that dinosaurs can be worth a lot of money but it is only a geological accident that they are here. Like baculites (which were much earlier), dinosaurs once found conditions very favorable along here and after their bones and eggs were deposited, covered in volcanic dust and glacial debris, they lay hidden until now when the wind and water are reversing themselves, taking away from the fossils what they once laid on top of the bones, now mineralized. The Blackfeet benefit from them in the way they benefit from oil or coal deposits, but they are not created by indigenous people and have nothing to do with their culture except as stories. Still, it is illegal to remove fossils from the reservation without permission.
(to be continued)
Thursday, October 29, 2009
ALL OUR BONES
Back to the bones.
We are constantly digging up things, including skeletons. Some on purpose, like paleontologists searching in Africa and finding the remains of eohumans that are six million years old, and others accidentally (possibly homicide victims) when making highway cuts or excavating for basements. When rationalizing their study of skeletons, scientists have proposed the idea that there is a difference between the ancient and the merely historical, but where do you draw that line? The day Columbus hit the Americas? The day the United States made itself into a nation? The day the glaciers began to withdraw from North America? The day they crucified Jesus?
The Kennewick Man, found in Washington state along the Columbia River, created a huge furor. He was older than our conventional notion of first white contact but he had characteristics that were suggestive of a Caucasian. (The characteristics recorded by scientists are expressed in percentages -- or bell curves -- but people forget that. Some Indians have skulls like Caucasians. Some Caucasians have skulls like Indians.) The local indigenous people made a claim based on religion, so some Caucasians immediately invented a religion to make a parallel claim. I attended a public meeting where the tribal spokesman asked all those present who approved of organ transplants to raise their hands. Only the white people raised their hands.
So it is not just disrespect to skeletons that is in question. American indigenous people feel that their flesh and blood is being co-opted, that the right to be one’s own body is violated by transplants, or even DNA databases from cheek scrapings. And yet there is a small contingent that demands the newest medical miracles, including stem-cell and bone marrow transplants. None among them refuses blood transfusions.
The elevation of indigenous peoples to a state transcending nobility and approaching the supernatural is so pervasive that the people themselves feel that they are carrying something special enough to be magic. It’s really being “Other” all over again, but this time elevated instead of denigrated. Recently a boy in Minnesota with cancer rejected chemotherapy and resorted to what he and his family thought were “healing” ceremonies provided (for a price) by a tribal member. And why should that person go uncompensated, any more than a formal physician should do his work for free? This is partly what it operating in the “plastic shaman” phenomenon. (And the “Indian as Super Lover” parallel. Ruth Beebe Hill’s “Hanta Yo” Ayn Rand-type perfect lover.)
Back to skeletons. Early indigenous peoples were not above using the bones of “other” humans for necklaces and the like. Esp. “found” bones rather than -- let’s say, “created bones,” that is, murdering someone to get his finger bones or ribs. Murder to get a scalp is the whole idea, since the scalping was originally evidence of death, like the ears of a wolf or the tails of gophers. Whole heads (“bring me the head of whomever”) are bulky for a walking people, but a scalp could be attached to clothing or shields. Imitation scalps abound, mostly horsetails, on fancy buckskin shirts. (It is possible to take a scalp from a person who continues to live, but that party will probably want to keep his or her hat on, particularly in cold weather.) I have never seen a blonde or redhead scalp that I can recall. Maybe I don’t want to.
I’ve run across several stories in which someone failed to stay dead, but if the bones were filleted out of the flesh and the separated parts were thrown in a river, that person DID stay dead. This story of this an artifact, though it isn’t physical.
But you can’t generalize about bones -- or any other artifacts. Objects must be related to place, to situation, to specifics. Not just for scientific purposes, but in order to understand where they came from and what they mean: context. If you read Louis Owens’ novels (a good Halloween project) you will not forget the tribal practice of a people in the hot, wet, bug-ridden south. The body of one’s brother is put in a tree. In a year one returns, takes down what is left and cleans the bones with a fingernail grown out long specifically to scrape out the crevices. Then the bones are gathered into a bundle.
[ Here are the novels, all available through the University of Oklahoma Press: Dark River, Nightland, Wolf Song, Bone Game, The Sharpest Sight. Owens is worth Googling. He was a major Steinbeck scholar as well as working on Native American literature.]
SKULLS
Skulls are a special case. When they are perfectly clean (and some of the ones I’ve seen are neatly numbered with India ink because they were part of collections), they attract people. Quasi-humans, they acquire names. Along with skeletons, skulls have become iconic, somehow transcending death with a universalized face of holes and grins. In catacombs (common in Europe) and the bones of genocide excavations, the skulls get lined up on shelves or in stacked piles since they are relatively uniform. They seem made of ceramic, “bone china,” mugs. Wherever there are adolescents, skulls abound along with daggers, pouring blood, snakes, lightning and other punk icons meant to suggest the power of horror. Skulls became fetishes in some South American tribes, adorned with rows of colored tile. Movies these days are full of realistic decapitations.
Prairie indigenous people were persuaded not to leave their dead in coffins on the ground where they could be knocked about by large animals and invaded by small animals. They built “dead houses,” frail wooden mausoleums with no doors, and put the coffins inside. I have seen them. The coffins had been opened and the heads were all missing, even the heads of a mother with her baby in her arms, though these were not clean skulls. These were faces and hair, even recognizable, with living descendants who knew them. Few would defend disturbing them. Those houses are gone now. The people were put into the ground and the houses were burned.
When skeletons are returned by museums, the oldest people were wary about having anything to do with them for fear their spirits would be angry and make bad things happen. So the next generation down took over and invented ceremonies of grief and appeasement. The bones were interred in the ground with Pendleton blankets, sweetgrass, other assorted objects and many salty tears. Some of the grief might have been a little dramatic, but in the end it was a true catharsis and cleaning of old wounds. It was dignified and the blankets even made it seem a bit luxurious. The bones were not in metal coffins, but in short wooden boxes, sturdy and clean.
There are still thousands of skeletons in museums public and private, in personal collections, in forgotten cabinets. We had a skull ourselves. It was a clean one. I don’t know where it came from and I don’t know where it went, but at the beginning of the Sixties it gazed out among our books. We had two skeletons: a real one from Turtox biological supply company, which was probably a person who died in the street in India and which we returned, and a plastic one cast from the skeleton of a robust German man who died long ago.
I include all sort of thoughts here because I think that in the end no legal rule or moral principle can tell us what to do about human remains. Each case must be a delicate negotiation among the facts, the emotions, the times, the politics, the individuals, the resources, the possibilities, the implications. This not just about autochthonous peoples of America or even about only autochthonous people. It is about ALL human beings.
We are constantly digging up things, including skeletons. Some on purpose, like paleontologists searching in Africa and finding the remains of eohumans that are six million years old, and others accidentally (possibly homicide victims) when making highway cuts or excavating for basements. When rationalizing their study of skeletons, scientists have proposed the idea that there is a difference between the ancient and the merely historical, but where do you draw that line? The day Columbus hit the Americas? The day the United States made itself into a nation? The day the glaciers began to withdraw from North America? The day they crucified Jesus?
The Kennewick Man, found in Washington state along the Columbia River, created a huge furor. He was older than our conventional notion of first white contact but he had characteristics that were suggestive of a Caucasian. (The characteristics recorded by scientists are expressed in percentages -- or bell curves -- but people forget that. Some Indians have skulls like Caucasians. Some Caucasians have skulls like Indians.) The local indigenous people made a claim based on religion, so some Caucasians immediately invented a religion to make a parallel claim. I attended a public meeting where the tribal spokesman asked all those present who approved of organ transplants to raise their hands. Only the white people raised their hands.
So it is not just disrespect to skeletons that is in question. American indigenous people feel that their flesh and blood is being co-opted, that the right to be one’s own body is violated by transplants, or even DNA databases from cheek scrapings. And yet there is a small contingent that demands the newest medical miracles, including stem-cell and bone marrow transplants. None among them refuses blood transfusions.
The elevation of indigenous peoples to a state transcending nobility and approaching the supernatural is so pervasive that the people themselves feel that they are carrying something special enough to be magic. It’s really being “Other” all over again, but this time elevated instead of denigrated. Recently a boy in Minnesota with cancer rejected chemotherapy and resorted to what he and his family thought were “healing” ceremonies provided (for a price) by a tribal member. And why should that person go uncompensated, any more than a formal physician should do his work for free? This is partly what it operating in the “plastic shaman” phenomenon. (And the “Indian as Super Lover” parallel. Ruth Beebe Hill’s “Hanta Yo” Ayn Rand-type perfect lover.)
Back to skeletons. Early indigenous peoples were not above using the bones of “other” humans for necklaces and the like. Esp. “found” bones rather than -- let’s say, “created bones,” that is, murdering someone to get his finger bones or ribs. Murder to get a scalp is the whole idea, since the scalping was originally evidence of death, like the ears of a wolf or the tails of gophers. Whole heads (“bring me the head of whomever”) are bulky for a walking people, but a scalp could be attached to clothing or shields. Imitation scalps abound, mostly horsetails, on fancy buckskin shirts. (It is possible to take a scalp from a person who continues to live, but that party will probably want to keep his or her hat on, particularly in cold weather.) I have never seen a blonde or redhead scalp that I can recall. Maybe I don’t want to.
I’ve run across several stories in which someone failed to stay dead, but if the bones were filleted out of the flesh and the separated parts were thrown in a river, that person DID stay dead. This story of this an artifact, though it isn’t physical.
But you can’t generalize about bones -- or any other artifacts. Objects must be related to place, to situation, to specifics. Not just for scientific purposes, but in order to understand where they came from and what they mean: context. If you read Louis Owens’ novels (a good Halloween project) you will not forget the tribal practice of a people in the hot, wet, bug-ridden south. The body of one’s brother is put in a tree. In a year one returns, takes down what is left and cleans the bones with a fingernail grown out long specifically to scrape out the crevices. Then the bones are gathered into a bundle.
[ Here are the novels, all available through the University of Oklahoma Press: Dark River, Nightland, Wolf Song, Bone Game, The Sharpest Sight. Owens is worth Googling. He was a major Steinbeck scholar as well as working on Native American literature.]
SKULLS
Skulls are a special case. When they are perfectly clean (and some of the ones I’ve seen are neatly numbered with India ink because they were part of collections), they attract people. Quasi-humans, they acquire names. Along with skeletons, skulls have become iconic, somehow transcending death with a universalized face of holes and grins. In catacombs (common in Europe) and the bones of genocide excavations, the skulls get lined up on shelves or in stacked piles since they are relatively uniform. They seem made of ceramic, “bone china,” mugs. Wherever there are adolescents, skulls abound along with daggers, pouring blood, snakes, lightning and other punk icons meant to suggest the power of horror. Skulls became fetishes in some South American tribes, adorned with rows of colored tile. Movies these days are full of realistic decapitations.
Prairie indigenous people were persuaded not to leave their dead in coffins on the ground where they could be knocked about by large animals and invaded by small animals. They built “dead houses,” frail wooden mausoleums with no doors, and put the coffins inside. I have seen them. The coffins had been opened and the heads were all missing, even the heads of a mother with her baby in her arms, though these were not clean skulls. These were faces and hair, even recognizable, with living descendants who knew them. Few would defend disturbing them. Those houses are gone now. The people were put into the ground and the houses were burned.
When skeletons are returned by museums, the oldest people were wary about having anything to do with them for fear their spirits would be angry and make bad things happen. So the next generation down took over and invented ceremonies of grief and appeasement. The bones were interred in the ground with Pendleton blankets, sweetgrass, other assorted objects and many salty tears. Some of the grief might have been a little dramatic, but in the end it was a true catharsis and cleaning of old wounds. It was dignified and the blankets even made it seem a bit luxurious. The bones were not in metal coffins, but in short wooden boxes, sturdy and clean.
There are still thousands of skeletons in museums public and private, in personal collections, in forgotten cabinets. We had a skull ourselves. It was a clean one. I don’t know where it came from and I don’t know where it went, but at the beginning of the Sixties it gazed out among our books. We had two skeletons: a real one from Turtox biological supply company, which was probably a person who died in the street in India and which we returned, and a plastic one cast from the skeleton of a robust German man who died long ago.
I include all sort of thoughts here because I think that in the end no legal rule or moral principle can tell us what to do about human remains. Each case must be a delicate negotiation among the facts, the emotions, the times, the politics, the individuals, the resources, the possibilities, the implications. This not just about autochthonous peoples of America or even about only autochthonous people. It is about ALL human beings.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
ARTIFACTS: A SERIES
The ever on-going discussion and actual events around Native American artifacts have gotten tragically heated, resulting in arrests, jail terms, suicides and rented trucks carrying away literal tons of materials. Most people either have nearly violent opinions or can’t figure out what the heck to think.
In the past I’ve tried to sort through the issues according the points of view of the people involved: innocent whites, conniving whites, earnest Indians, scheming Indians -- like that. But it ends up with a lot of name-calling, so I thought I’d try a new approach: discussion according to the type of artifact. The items lumped into the category really are quite different.
1. Skeletons
The very fact that indigenous skeletons are considered collectible is a key to the problem. I remember vividly my undergrad biology lab class where a skeleton hung. While we waited for our instructor one wintry day we decided to warm up the bones by putting hat, muffler and mittens on it. When the young handsome teacher came, he was indignant. “This was SOMEONE,” he scolded us. “You’re treating this person like an object, a hat rack, a toy. If you are handling human remains, you must do so with deep respect!”
No other artifact is actual human remains except maybe scalps with skin attached. When we treat human remains with disrespect, we are saying they are like animals, whose bones everyone treats like the meat once attached. Useful, discardable, of no deep importance.
The funerary practice of prairie tribes was to leave the wrapped body in a high place, like a tree or a shallow cave on a cliff or just on a high ridge. The body was usually wrapped in a buffalo robe and the person’s belongings were left with it. This was practical because there were no metal shovels for digging into the ground, the ultraviolet light of high elevations (Browning is at about 5,000 feet) was an effective disinfectant, the belongings were mostly organic, and the constant dry winds and temperature extremes also tended to mummify. Most deaths probably happened in the winter when the ground was so hard that even now, for a backhoe to cut into the ground, a fire is necessary. (Used to be burning tires -- in Browning in the Sixties when you saw a column of black smoke from the cemetary, you knew someone needed to be buried -- now more likely to be a propane heater in a tent.) In early white communities winter deaths were often stored in an out-building until spring. The point is that bodies were ubiquitous, accessible, and not concentrated into a burial ground near a settlement until many decades after white presence.
The 19th century was of a magpie mind about anything collectible and bones were not spared. Much of the collecting was in the name of science, which still wanted to gather many many specimens in the interest of sorting them into categories and scrutinizing them for clues over such puzzles as “races” and “evolution” as well as evidence of what had happened to the original person. The notion of local history was coming powerfully alive because on the Western frontier it was so close, at least the history of the white displacers -- maybe because they were trying to figure out why they were there, whether it was a good thing to have done, what should happen next.
Scientific collection meant that museums and universities soon had drawers and drawers of bones, sometimes skulls long separated from bodies and sometimes entire. Gradually the scientists became able to distinguish between male and female; Caucasian and Asian and African; young or old; and various forensic features like violence or disease. As time goes on, things like nutritional status and radioisotope identification of elements have become detectable.
This has been extremely valuable, to the point that today’s CSI scientists are actually willing to put corpses out in the woods and document their decay. Not just pigs. A recent example in a story was an eight-year-old boy. It was unclear where he came from. He was not alive and suffering, of course, but this sort of cold-blooded treatment of human remains in the interest of science is particularly chilling to indigenous prairie people -- not just because of the disrespect to a “soul” in the Christian sense though many are practicing and believing Christians, but also because in the old days one did not hang around a body lest whatever killed that individual also reach out to grab YOU. Some expressed this as the fear that the spirit of the dead person would be very angry and take it out on you for not saving them or for provoking them while they were alive.
Today we have situations like the morticians who were not cremating bodies but simply dumping them in the woods, giving the relatives ashes from any source, or more recently the cemetery keepers who were digging up old graves, dumping the contents and re-selling the spaces to new families. The shock of these acts strike everyone as far more than a commercial transaction based on deception. Sacrilege is a intense experience even in a desacralized society. As Mary Roach describes in “Stiff,” we are losing that distinction, partly due to the constant closeup knowledge of bodies on TV and partly due to family doctors going to conferences where they alternate playing golf with taking surgery lessons on parts of humans that arrive in coolers: arms, internal organs, and sexual parts. On a reservation few know that. It is a very upper-class privileged sort of phenomenon.
Religious defense of bodies is weak now. It waxes and wanes over the centuries. The more dead there are, the more they are not “us,” the thinner the consciousness.
Parallel to the scientific advances that invent more and more subtle tests of bone and ways to learn from them, political opposition from the indigenous people has grown stronger, not just the desire to protect one’s own from indecency, but also as a protest against the constant tendency to make whole sets of living people into lesser beings, deserving of less respect than the “ruling classes” (prosperous, high-status men -- these days of any race), who can properly be “studied” like guinea pigs.
This tendency to indulge in de-humanizing study is strong in sophisticated academic circles. People come to the reservation to study the indigenous people, take their statistics and findings back to the academy, analyze them in sophisticated ways, publish findings that may affect things like funding, and never bother to send copies back to the original people who were studied any more than they would send copies of a study of cattle to the cows themselves.
In the past I’ve tried to sort through the issues according the points of view of the people involved: innocent whites, conniving whites, earnest Indians, scheming Indians -- like that. But it ends up with a lot of name-calling, so I thought I’d try a new approach: discussion according to the type of artifact. The items lumped into the category really are quite different.
1. Skeletons
The very fact that indigenous skeletons are considered collectible is a key to the problem. I remember vividly my undergrad biology lab class where a skeleton hung. While we waited for our instructor one wintry day we decided to warm up the bones by putting hat, muffler and mittens on it. When the young handsome teacher came, he was indignant. “This was SOMEONE,” he scolded us. “You’re treating this person like an object, a hat rack, a toy. If you are handling human remains, you must do so with deep respect!”
No other artifact is actual human remains except maybe scalps with skin attached. When we treat human remains with disrespect, we are saying they are like animals, whose bones everyone treats like the meat once attached. Useful, discardable, of no deep importance.
The funerary practice of prairie tribes was to leave the wrapped body in a high place, like a tree or a shallow cave on a cliff or just on a high ridge. The body was usually wrapped in a buffalo robe and the person’s belongings were left with it. This was practical because there were no metal shovels for digging into the ground, the ultraviolet light of high elevations (Browning is at about 5,000 feet) was an effective disinfectant, the belongings were mostly organic, and the constant dry winds and temperature extremes also tended to mummify. Most deaths probably happened in the winter when the ground was so hard that even now, for a backhoe to cut into the ground, a fire is necessary. (Used to be burning tires -- in Browning in the Sixties when you saw a column of black smoke from the cemetary, you knew someone needed to be buried -- now more likely to be a propane heater in a tent.) In early white communities winter deaths were often stored in an out-building until spring. The point is that bodies were ubiquitous, accessible, and not concentrated into a burial ground near a settlement until many decades after white presence.
The 19th century was of a magpie mind about anything collectible and bones were not spared. Much of the collecting was in the name of science, which still wanted to gather many many specimens in the interest of sorting them into categories and scrutinizing them for clues over such puzzles as “races” and “evolution” as well as evidence of what had happened to the original person. The notion of local history was coming powerfully alive because on the Western frontier it was so close, at least the history of the white displacers -- maybe because they were trying to figure out why they were there, whether it was a good thing to have done, what should happen next.
Scientific collection meant that museums and universities soon had drawers and drawers of bones, sometimes skulls long separated from bodies and sometimes entire. Gradually the scientists became able to distinguish between male and female; Caucasian and Asian and African; young or old; and various forensic features like violence or disease. As time goes on, things like nutritional status and radioisotope identification of elements have become detectable.
This has been extremely valuable, to the point that today’s CSI scientists are actually willing to put corpses out in the woods and document their decay. Not just pigs. A recent example in a story was an eight-year-old boy. It was unclear where he came from. He was not alive and suffering, of course, but this sort of cold-blooded treatment of human remains in the interest of science is particularly chilling to indigenous prairie people -- not just because of the disrespect to a “soul” in the Christian sense though many are practicing and believing Christians, but also because in the old days one did not hang around a body lest whatever killed that individual also reach out to grab YOU. Some expressed this as the fear that the spirit of the dead person would be very angry and take it out on you for not saving them or for provoking them while they were alive.
Today we have situations like the morticians who were not cremating bodies but simply dumping them in the woods, giving the relatives ashes from any source, or more recently the cemetery keepers who were digging up old graves, dumping the contents and re-selling the spaces to new families. The shock of these acts strike everyone as far more than a commercial transaction based on deception. Sacrilege is a intense experience even in a desacralized society. As Mary Roach describes in “Stiff,” we are losing that distinction, partly due to the constant closeup knowledge of bodies on TV and partly due to family doctors going to conferences where they alternate playing golf with taking surgery lessons on parts of humans that arrive in coolers: arms, internal organs, and sexual parts. On a reservation few know that. It is a very upper-class privileged sort of phenomenon.
Religious defense of bodies is weak now. It waxes and wanes over the centuries. The more dead there are, the more they are not “us,” the thinner the consciousness.
Parallel to the scientific advances that invent more and more subtle tests of bone and ways to learn from them, political opposition from the indigenous people has grown stronger, not just the desire to protect one’s own from indecency, but also as a protest against the constant tendency to make whole sets of living people into lesser beings, deserving of less respect than the “ruling classes” (prosperous, high-status men -- these days of any race), who can properly be “studied” like guinea pigs.
This tendency to indulge in de-humanizing study is strong in sophisticated academic circles. People come to the reservation to study the indigenous people, take their statistics and findings back to the academy, analyze them in sophisticated ways, publish findings that may affect things like funding, and never bother to send copies back to the original people who were studied any more than they would send copies of a study of cattle to the cows themselves.
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