It is less than half what the the NCAI requested, but RedClout continues to feel hope over news that the the Senate is including in the $819 billion economic stimulus package already passed by the House $2.8 billion for tribes, for housing, health care, education, and infrastructure, among other categories. More here.
AJA
Douglas Miles, subject of our previous post, wil be exhbiting his work at the Dada Contemporary gallery in Tucson, AZ, 439 N. 6th Avenue, opening reception this coming Saturday February 7 from 6-8 p.m. The Apache Skateboard Team will perform.
AJA
Douglas Miles is Apache. He is an artist. He is an entrepreneur. He is a skateboard crew leader. He is an activist and “community organizer,” of a kind.
Douglas Miles, with members of Apache Skateboards
(Photos by Brendan Moore: www.BrendanMoorePhoto.com)
Can he be any one of those things alone? Or, for most people, must every role he takes on be encountered only as a function, a representation, of his identity as an Apache? What is his identity as an Apache, for him, for others?
What is it to be an Apache, a Native American, in the twenty-first century – or at any time after the end of the nineteenth, to make a finer point? Is it living out the life of a victim, both personally and culturally, historically bound – for Apaches, themselves, as well as for non-Natives – to the conqueror’s crime, a crime that can be reenacted with every shamed recollection of it, the victim victim again with each new fall in remembrance?
We are, are we not, a sum of what has happened to us as well as of what we do? Conceive of Jewishness in the modern world without the Diaspora, without the Holocaust, without life lived – even in the will to deny it so – always in the knowledge of them.
Does being a Native American mean living in hatred and resentment of the conqueror, the conqueror in whose midst Native peoples are condemned to live – everywhere surrounding and overwhelming them as the ongoing, invisible repetition of the crime – and who, let it be clear, has little sense of the wrong committed, little consciousness, even, of the conquered people’s presence or predicament?
Is it dreaming of an undoing – of the act of conquest itself, by reversing it, that victimhood should be only a moment in time, however long the moment, and not an immemorial condition? Is it falling into despair at the futility of such a hope?
Is it seeking to reconnect to what was taken and what was lost, to overcome the years that intervened
between what Native Americans once were on their land and what they are now: the years that might be thought a break in the natural evolution of Native life, and to try in some way to mend the break?
Or is it to choose to be modern? To acknowledge the current world for what it unmistakably is and dare to be of it, not apart from it, in a Native way?
For Douglas Miles, the choice among all these alternatives is the last. And having made that choice, there are choices still, in deciding what it means, in varied terms, for an Apache to be modern, yet still Apache, amid all the non-native influence on American modernity, in resistance to the general culture’s long-held, guilty desire for Natives to assimilate.
Miles lives on the San Carlos Apache Reservation in eastern Arizona, one of several Apache reservations in the Southwest, and along with the White Mountain Reservation to the north – location of the famed Fort Apache – one of the two largest. It was, for short periods, unhappy home to Geronimo. It was, in its origins, a concentration camp.
“Since I can remember,” says Miles, “I have always made some kind of drawing or art. Cardboard boxes and paper bags were my early childhood canvas. Crayons, ballpoint pens and pencils were my only palette. Today a lot of my work is based on stenciled techniques and figures. It’s a way to distill my work to a rawer purer form and essence.”
Miles traces his artistic influences to “the older works of the Santa Fe, Dorothy Dunn 30′s-40′s school. Called ‘Bambi art’ because of its flat two-dimensional figures and technique,” the tradition “had an enormous impact, even on my current work today.”
In recent years, Miles’s art has often been joined to skateboard culture. He painted a an Apache warrior in his
son, Doug Jr.’s “deck,” or board, and it was a hit with the other young Apaches boarders. Miles contracted for a hundred silk screened boards, and he organized the crew Apache Skateboards. The team competes, gives exhibitions, and just recently “was filmed and worked on a [SAG] commercial for a national anti-meth campaign.”
The work with Apache Skateboards joins Miles’s artistic sensibilities with his interest in influencing the lives of young Apaches, and through them the categories by which Apache culture and identity are understood.
“We ‘natives’ have become ‘frozen in time’ in the eyes of the mainstream,” he says. “The constructs that ‘make us Indian’ are often created and developed from an anthropological and archeological point of view. This has reduced us to a mere subject matter – a romantic-artifact devoid of human aspects other than those nice categories we’re told we were once so nobly a part of: hunter-gatherer, nomadic, agrarian, etc.
“Indian people cannot shape our own views of ourselves for what reason? Does knowledge of all tradition makes me more pure or authentic? If I rebel against these categories does it make me more or less Indian?
“It makes me neither. It makes me human. It makes me part of a larger worldview that demands I be looked at with respect to my art, expression, accomplishments, and merits.
“I am not an artifact but I do make art, and that’s a fact.”
AJA
But my vanity is fairer than yours.
When I canceled my subscription to Vanity Fair a couple of years ago, some months after I stopped reading my monthly subscription issue, it was because, slow as I am, it had finally occurred to me that despite the
high end gloss – or, rather, actually, because of it – VF was really just an aspirant’s People Magazine. Oh, sure, it had, in recent years, Christopher Hitchens to provide intellectual and literate heft, and a share of good journalism, like the article this month by William Langewiesche on the midair collision of a commercial jetliner and private jet over the Amazon back in 2007. (If you ever want to fly again, you might avoid this detailed account.) But all of this is akin to the interviews in Playboy. At least back in my days of “reading” that magazine, the interviews were in-depth explorations of which to be proud, and could achieve national significance. Still, the publication was what it was; the interviews didn’t change that.
So even though editor Graydon Carter tried to don an air of seriousness over the past five years with all of those high and easy fungo lobs he gave himself, including this last chance, with anti-Bush editorial upon A-B-E to bat out of the park – take a daring stand why don’t ya – the magazine is what it is. Lent to me from last month for the Tina Fey cover story, I made it my stationary bicycle reading at the Globe gym. So, yes, it is still primarily about celebrity, but instead of People pablum – “Dominck Dunne on life after O.J.: ‘I’m starting to live again!” – we get (oh, my God!) Maureen Dowd and Annie Leibovitz. That’ll extract a little of the guilt from our guilty pleasure. Fey – the sexy Sarah Palin – is talented and seems a nice (yes, nice) person, but off screen she had me conjuring sticks and mud and asses. Also this month, “The Things Yves Loved,” a piece about Yves Saint Laurent’s extraordinary collection of art and oject de, and as the title tells us the interest is not in the art but in its thinginess - the collecting and, “couldn’t you die,” display of it in his Paris apartment, and its soon to occur, “can you imagine what it’ll go for,” auctioning off. Then there’s the desecration of the Plaza Hotel by the Israeli developer (have you bought your nonpareil Central Park view apartment sight unseen yet for, say, 20 mil?) and, vying for my favorite, “Profiles in Panic.” Asks the table of contents blurb about that piece:
How are all those high-rolling Wall Streeters and their pampered wives holding up as the pink slips multiply and portfolios evaporate? From the returns counters at high-end stores to the reservation desks on St. Barts, Michael Shnayerson surveys the financial and social wreckage of a gilded age.
Clean yourself up and I’ll go on. It’s at least comforting to know that no one reading Vanity Fair is or would want to be one of those high rollers or “pampered” wives, but if conjuring that return counter at Bergdorf’s or canceled reservations in St. Bart doesn’t ply your tear ducts, the account of the Greenwich, Connecticut wives driven to the use of supermarket coupons will. (“I saw her using them, I tell you. Gloria? Yes, Gloria. I can’t believe it – it’s all going to hell.”)
Carter apparently knows where his ideal reader’s present or imaginative sense of identification and sympathy lies – not with the millions of unemployed and foreclosed upon who didn’t rape the economy, nor those who don’t need an economic collapse to be in real dire straits all of the time. Throw in a distancing adjective like “pampered,” to pretend you don’t endorse this way of life – you’re just reporting – and an A-B-E – and, hey, you’re not a sycophant in Louis’ court.
Co-finalist is Bob Colacello’s paean to William F. and Patricia Buckley’s “grand old romance.” Well, good for them, I truly and sincerely say. I always disdained Buckley’s politics while I appreciated him as a person, but I’m not sure author and editor realize that it is the love, but not the individuals – for anyone not to start in thrall to the high altitude – that is well-served in the piece. The Mr. in his will is a totally dismissive Catholic shit to his illegitimate grand-child, and the Mrs. is to be taken for one of the good rich and mighty because she won’t stand for shitting on waiters in the dining retreats of the privileged. But the detail that keeps hanging my nail is that, we are informed, at the buffet for the couple’s 50th anniversary, the party dined on
“barbecued pork and whole lobsters.” Swell. How edifying. I must tell you, though, that my parents enjoyed a 50th anniversary catered affair – a memorable occasion not least because my Aunt Goldie managed to stick her head into the frame of nearly every photo taken – but neither I nor, I would wager all of the Buckley estate, anyone else present will recall what we ate that day. I would wager even more if the estate had it that you wouldn’t care to know even if I did. And with the Buckleys? Well, there is the succulent indulgence of the “lobster” – too bad there was not Beluga or foie gras – and maybe, just maybe, there is just a little more vividly enlivened in the reader the sense that – ah, if only – one might have been there.
As Aunt Goldie would precisely have said, “Feh.”
AJA
In the February Harvard Magazine, Craig Lambert’s “From Daguerreotype to Photoshop” offers a primer on on the tension between the image as pictorial artifact and mirror of reality. The issues are many, but here is one brought to mind, Robert Doisneau’s iconic Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville. As Wikipedia explains
The identity of the couple [kissing] was a mystery until 1993, when Denise and Jean-Louis Lavergne took Doisneau to court for taking the picture without their knowledge. This action forced Doisneau to prove that he actually posed the shot in 1950 using actor/models Françoise Bornet and her then-boyfriend Jacques Carteaud.
AJA
Imagine a former deputy assistant and White House liaison to the American Indian community in the Clinton administration who in her 60s takes a job as a low paid security guard at one of Phoenix’s best high schools in order to enable her grandchildren to attend. Imagine she discovers physical abuse and terrible educational neglect of the school’s few Native American students, from the Gila River Indian Community.
Imagine she tries to help them and is fired.
It’s an amazing story of the last overlooked crime of educational discrimination – against Native Americans – often in communities and school systems nearest Indian reservations. The superbly reported account, by Jana Bommersbach, is in the February Phoenix Magazine.
Thanks to San Carlos Apache artist and “community organizer” Douglas Miles (about whom watch for my post in the coming days) for calling it to my attention.
AJA
Perhaps only Washington, Lincoln, and FDR came into office with more people placing more of their hope in them than comes Barack Obama. Probably only Washington assumed the presidency with greater expectations of actual greatness from him. Among all the remarkable features of the Obama story, this is one – that a man of distinction who has nonetheless not yet in his career done great things has inspired so many to believe deeply that he will. His personal demeanor, his rhetoric and professed beliefs, his human interactions, the historical moment, and the always indefinable factor in the aura of an individual all converge to raise this hope in Americans.
Of course, it has been said enough that the range and complexity of the problems Obama faces are perhaps unprecedented, and given the many that seem so urgent – the economy, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, energy and the environment – it would be easy enough to allow a host of long-neglected and seemingly less urgent issues continue to go unaddressed, especially when there is not vocal or powerful constituency in advocacy. It is a matter, then, of just how great Obama aspires to be, which is a function of how great he can be.
One of the more fun moments of today’s inauguration was the African-American civil rights icon, Reverend Joseph Lowry’s closing benediction, which ended with this Black ministerial rhyme rouser, the plea to “help us work for that day when black will not be asked to give back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.” It got a smile from Obama, but what is worth noting beyond the word play is that in one instance the phrase is meaningless and in all the others but one quite arguably already so. The “but one” is the rhyme about the “red man.”
And you know it will completely be forgotten by nearly everyone.
Will it be forgotten by Obama?
In all the rightful and powerfully moving acknowledgement and then celebration, all these months, and today, of the significance of Obama’s ascent, little attention, as usual, has been paid to an equal and even more original injustice, and it has always been so. Even at the nation’s founding, there were those, like Benjamin Franklin, who tried to prevent African slavery from forming a part of the new nation’s heritage. There were the greatly impassioned abolitionists before the Civil War. The civil rights movement of the fifties and Sixties captured the moral imaginations of millions of white Americans. However, there has never been mass support among the general populace for the cause of Native Americans. My consideration of the reasons, “Aboriginal Sin,” appeared in Tikkun last spring.
President Obama has made the right gestures. Last May, while running for the Democratic nomination, he made a rare appearance, among politicians, traveling to the Crow reservation in Montana, where he was adopted into the tribe. “Few have been ignored by Washington for as long as Native Americans, the first Americans,” Obama said. “That will change when I am president of the United States.” Obama appointed Ken Salazar, Democratic Senator from Colorado, as Secretary of the Interior, the department which supervises the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a move that has been greeted positively by many Native leaders. Addressing the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in the lead up to the inauguration, Salazar said, “We have to make sure that never again — like has happened in the last eight years — that the Native American community in the United States of America is left out of the tent.”
The New York Times
These are good things to say, but it needs to be said, too, that the original inhabitants of the continent were not the first Americans – they were the first people. That will, unfortunately, strike many as tiresome PC rhetoric, and that is part of the problem. But the Natives of the Western Hemisphere were here before it was called America, and they did not seek, but were compelled, to become part of the nation that the people who conquered them chose to call the United States of America. Since there is no other home to “go home” to, they are citizens of the U.S. by practical necessity. They were not granted citizenship until 1924, and many still had no voting rights until 1948. That is a history a little different from what the term “First Americans” suggests, however honorific and inclusive its intent. It is also the case, as all this indicates, that the issues requiring attention in the varied Native communities are far older and more profound than eight years, merely, of Bush administration neglect.
These hopeful signs suggest that practical matters such as Indian health care and resolution of trust fund disputes may be sincerely approached. However, the issues are profounder still, and it may be that any true correction of the past, and amelioration of the abiding conditions that are the consequence of that past, will require frank acknowledgment of the wrong committed. That was so for African-Americans. Why would it be any less so for Native Americans?
Even should it come to pass that, as the NCAI has requested, President Obama designates a mere $5.4 billion of the $775 billion economic stimulus package for stimulus on the reservations – a very unlikely event – the fundamental problem will remain. On the day after the November election, Adam Nagourney, a notable and thoughtful journalist, writing for the New York Times, stated the following: “Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.” The “last racial barrier.” How invisible can a people be?
If not Obama, who? How many more years, decades, longer?
The conscience that over long struggle brought Barack Obama to his unique place in history needs to be summoned again, by an American citizenry committed to push him toward his greatness, willing, finally, to right the original and lasting wrong.
AJA
Traveling among the rural reaches and small towns in an RV (with, supposedly, work to be done) can make film-going an uncommon occurrence. We’ve seen only three since leaving Los Angeles in early November.
(My college self disdains me.) We are currently seventy-five miles from the nearest movie theater, in Safford. Back in Banning, California we saw Quantum of Solace, in which Daniel Craig reaffirms his place, with Connery, in the two-member class of finest Bonds, with Craig, in fact, by far the closest to the fictional Bond. Quantum, though, is more one-note in its hyperkinetic action than was Casino Royale, and it lacks the dramatic variety and range of situational color that is characteristic of the best Bonds, including Casino.
Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino is fun if preposterous and most notable for its valedictory quality and the
elegiac note of its theme song, of the same title, which seems destined to become a jazz standard. However, the next time a director is tempted – even the great Eastwood – to place a dead body in a Christ-like pose, he should be asked if he might rather instead hammer a symbol into his head.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button manages to promise much and deliver little, which is an achievement of a kind. The romantic premise, of two lovers aging in different directions, is almost ineffably sad, taking the natural melancholy of mortality and loss and ratcheting up the level of their ultimate disconnection and
loneliness. But the screenplay, in part, is by Eric Roth, who foisted the votimable Forrest Gump upon the world, and there is no dramatic situation from which he cannot drain the genuine and meaningful. Thus, the empty framing device of Hurricane Katrina is cheapened further by a closing refrain of odd-character descriptions, as if, a la Gump, the mere recitation of human peculiarity is an ascent into profundity. In the end, then, nothing.
But there appears much promising stuff out there – in the land where movie theaters reside and people go to them. Maybe in New Mexico we’ll see something truly good.
AJA
On December 30, 2008 members of the San Carlos Apache community, accompanied by leaders and members of the Mescalero and Jicarilla Apache Tribes, who had traveled to San Carlos for the occasion, took part in a blessing ceremony at the site of Old San Carlos, the original Agency (Bureau of Indian Affairs) settlement on the reservation, beside the Gila and San Carlos Rivers. The purpose of the ceremony was to prepare the land for the installation of a memorial to be unveiled on February 17, 2009, the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Geronimo, who died in captivity, a prisoner of war, finally, for 23 years, at Fort Sills, Oklahoma, where he is buried.
After the San Carlos reservation was established in December of 1872, the U.S. government proceeded to close various Apache reservations, in violation of the treaties establishing them, and compel their tribal inhabitants to relocate to San Carlos. At times these relocations were smaller versions of the famed “trail of tears” of the 1830s that saw the forced relocation of the Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Cherokee nations from their homelands in the South to what was then termed Indian Country – present day Oklahoma. On San Carlos, the original Aravaipa and Pinal Apache populations were joined by Tonto Apaches, Yavapais, Chiricahua, and others in a policy of Apache concentration.
Removed, in most cases from their traditional lands and denied their traditional nomadic freedom of movement and methods of sustenance, the San Carlos Apaches, provided with numbers and/or new European names, were dependent on the U.S. government, through the Agency, for survival. But food rations, firewood for warmth, and other essentials, were often inadequate, and Agency workers notoriously corrupt. Britton Davis, a U.S. Cavalry officer and leader of Apache scouts, and one of the handful of men who participated in the final capture of Geronimo, gave this account of conditions at Old San Carlos in his memoir The Truth About Geronimo:
A gravelly flat in the confluence of the two rivers rose some thirty feet or so above the river bottoms and was dotted here and there by the drab adobe buildings of the Agency. Scrawny, dejected lines of scattered cottonwoods, shrunken, almost leafless, marked the course of the streams. Rain was so infrequent that it took on the semblance of a phenomenon when it came at all. Almost continuously dry, hot, dust and gravel-laden winds swept the plain. Everywhere the naked, hungry, dirty, frightened little Indian children, darting behind bushes or into wikiup at sight of you. Everywhere the sullen, stolid, hopeless, suspicious faces of the older Indians challenging you. You felt the challenge in your very marrow-that unspoken challenge to prove yourself anything else than one more liar and thief, differing but little from the procession of liars and thieves who had proceeded you.
With the completion of the Coolidge Dam on the Gila River in 1928, Old San Carlos, along with its burial ground, became submerged under San Carlos Lake. The town of San Carlos was moved several miles away, to its present location north of the river. Today, many San Carlos Apache, particularly the young, have little knowledge of Old San Carlos or of exactly what transpired there.
Old San Carlos, 1880 © Time Inc.
Though Geronimo, a Chiricahua Apache, was considered a vicious killer and an enemy even by some of the other Apache Tribes, he remains for many a symbol of courage, independence, and resistance. Current San Carlos Tribal Chairman Wendsler Nosie believes that what psychologist Eduardo Duran has called the Native American “soul wound” of postcolonial intergenerational trauma and internalized oppression requires reconnection to a spiritual and honored cultural past. For Nosie, the purpose of the ceremonies and monument is not simply to honor Geronimo, but to serve as a symbolic unification in renewal of all Apache Tribes. In preparation, Nosie traveled to all of the existing Apache reservations, including to Fort Sill, to seek the support of the other Tribal leaders.
On December 29, a local medicine man began a recitation of 32 songs, which were sung through the night until morning, when the blessing ceremony was completed before an assemblage of about 50 people on a rise above the lake. After, visiting medicine men from the other tribes performed blessings on individuals who sought them, and those present were led by Chairman Nosie’s assistant, Robert Howard, to view the outlines and configuration of the monuments currently being sculpted in Washington State. This was followed by a meal that had been prepared and transported to the site.
Photographs of the ceremony were not permitted, though Julia was allowed to photograph the activities afterward. We hope to obtain permission soon to post them. It is Chairman Nosie’s hope that on February 17, when the more public commemoration takes place, leaders of every Apache Tribe will have assembled for the first time since the 1870s.
AJA
The Shores of the World
Where the seam of the sky and the open sea meet
the mind’s long gaze, and the tide tugs all along the earth’s vast sands –
the edge of the world held out into space like a gift on a palm –
the weight of the infinite day rests on canvass bags and coolers.
Children dig for China, and chair-borne historians
toes tunneling in the white heat for the cool and damp
consider once more who lost it.
Volleyball nets sag under the competing sun.
The spiraling pass is never caught.
Long-legged birds, stalks in the ripples
litter the air with squawks amid the ocean squalls.
Canvass bodies stretch beneath the coloring sun.
Easy, darting feet stroll the tide pools, tease from the surf
a simple heaven of play.
In the deep roar of the ocean’s open shell
ancient odysseys moan, screaming sirens fade
from the only possible world.
In the broad glow of afternoon, when what is
is with so much kindness and joy, it is hard to imagine
an end to the pleasurable day, the final shore
where all the odysseys are ancient and every siren screams
when time fatigues the will and sickness steals the heart
the mind bending toward some wider sea, deep
in coralline forgetfulness. Drifting, then, on waves of illness
sinking from the white crests that bore us once, will we
regret the loss of beaches, remember water shouts and cloudless skies
or push off weakly, letting go, letting go
the pitch of life, content, in new ways, not to care, unconcerned
we are not there, that the day abides without us? Far shores
become nearer shores, become currents that bear us by the booming surf
the crash and cymbal of living time, the calls, the cries – the striving gesture
the grasping mouth, raiment of the selves we wore like crowns – and passing
silent on a stormless sea, hear whispers of the luring tide, the lulling leeward bearing
see shadows of the rayless sun, feel only the winter flight of birds in the
wake of all that was and makes a wish, awash, a wave, away.
AJA
