Learning the Shoshone ways, part 1
Jun. 12th, 2007 10:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firebreath613Leela and her godmother LaNada WarJack, found me at baggage claim at the SLC airport, and greeted me with big, warm hugs, which diffused a good deal of my nervousness. SLC had a downpour right before I arrived, so the landscape on the way to Idaho was particularly breath-taking, with dark rain clouds clinging to the tops of endless mountains as the sun slowly made its way down.
Leela, who had stayed up all night working on the beadwork for her powwow outfit, slept in the back while LaNada, who is the Executive Director of the Shoshone-Bannock (united) tribes on Fort Hall Reservation, talked with me.
LaNada, a Ph.D., went to school at UC Berkeley, and she was among the first Indians to go take over Alcatraz to protest the U.S. treatment of Indians. She said they hired a tugboat driver to take them to the island, which was closed at the time. It was just a few dozen people, and they didn't even bring any supplies until the next day. She said she felt young and invincible at the time, and they were all well able to adapt to the cold and living off the land there. She even brought her baby son. They explored the whole island and stayed in the cell blocks, then the army houses. Can you imagine being able to run free on Alcatraz. Wouldn't that be cool?
At one point, she asked me, "Do you ever write about culture?" I was sort of confused by the question, so I answered of course, talking about my efforts to document the hip-hop culture in Oakland and offbeat art parties in San Francisco.
But that wasn't what she meant. She explained to me her definition of culture. She said that most societies, such as the Native Americans and the Chinese, have something that connects them to the earth and to spirituality. But the "American" culture does not. It's all about industrialization, capitalism, greed, tearing things down, moving forward, disconnecting from the past. Whereas American Indians have the white buffalo and the Chinese have the white elephant, but it's the same thing. It's about remembering the earth and what it does for us, and paying respect to the spirits of the earth.
She reminded me of my favorite guest pastor to ever speak at my parent's church in Stillwater. I believe his name was John Moore, from somewhere in the northern Midwest like Kansas or Nebraska. He had long hair and beard, and he dressed like an apostle as seen in all the Bible story paintings. His presentation involved making a clay jar, and he talked about this very thing. I was totally smitten with him, because he cracked me up, "In America, we're bad at math. Do you know what gambling is? It's a tax on people who can't do math."
And, more apropos, he said, "Most cultures, like the Native American culture, are circular. People are connected to their pasts. American culture is linear, progressive, with no connection to the past. Do you know how we destroy other cultures? We take them away from their pasts. That's how we broke the African slaves. That's how we destroyed the vibrant American Indian societies living here first."
I had to stop and think about how, as a journalist, I move from story topic to topic, interest to interest. That's my problem: I'm interested in everything. But what do I connect to? I know I take my life for granted, having air to breathe and water to drink.
LaNada went on to say that we haven't been respecting the earth, for the gifts it gives to us, and that's why it's in the state it's in, with global warming and the increase in natural disasters. Mother Earth will get rid of us, if she has to.
She explained that the Lemhi Shoshones, the Sioux, the Utes and the Comanches are all descendants of the Aztecs in Mexico. The Aztec society crumbled when it violated the laws of nature with human sacrifice, and the Aztec people scattered in all directions. They made a symbol, a reverse swastika, which is on a building at the University of Oklahoma. But it's not a swastika: It's an ancient symbol referring to the Aztec Diaspora. The Nazis stole it and made it their own.
The Aztec calendar stops at 2012. At that point, it's the end of a 52,000 year cycle, in which the earth renews itself, and possibly the end of us. LaNada is very matter-of-fact about this. But she thinks we can turn it around, if more people adopt the Indian way of thinking. She says that the HBO movie, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was a perfect opportunity to get the message out, but it failed.
She explained that the Native American Church, which is attended by Denise's husband's Comanche family in Oklahoma, too, formed at the turn of the century. They claimed to be Christian, but at the time, it was really just a way for the Indians to practice their medicine without discrimination. To them, it's all the same thing anyway. She said the prayers are a highly evolved science that Westerners don't understand. They pray toward the sun, sending out positive energy, and then the sun sends the positive energy back to the earth. She says even Indians have forgotten the Indian ways.
LaNada talked about how Indian bodies are not able to process sugar or wheat (sort of like my body!), and that's why they have so much obesity and diabetes in their community. She said that drugs and alcohol have a stronghold on so many of her people who have lost their ways. I asked her if economic disempowerment had anything to do with the drug and alcohol abuse. "It's all attrition," she said.
She brought up Indian filmmaker Sherman Alexie, as someone who has lost their ways. She doesn't approve of his movies, which, according to her, push a gay agenda. She says that being gay goes against nature, and therefore, it something to be tolerated, but not celebrated. "You have the earth, which is female, and the sun, which is male. The wind is female and the water is male. When male water touches female earth, you get crops growing." This is one way Indian ways seem very conservative.
We stopped in Pocatelo, Idaho, which is a very cute place. With a population of 50,000, it reminds me of my hometown, Stillwater. It has a university and an adorable Old West downtown that still has ma-and-pa stores. And it's surrounded by mountains. I thought it seemed like a nice place to live, except for the fact you can only get four kinds of food: American, Mexican, Italian and Chinese.
One really weird thing about Pocatelo: We were listening to a "hits of the '80s and '90s" station, and they advertised, with much to-do, that Live and Collective Soul were playing a big concert soon. I felt perplexed and I told LaNada, "These songs were popular when I was in college." She said, "Pocatelo is a little behind the times."
LaNada showed me all the white-owned farm houses that are pushing their way on to the reservation, just outside town. She said, "You'll know when you see an Indian house." When I asked Leela about the reservation, she seemed shocked I couldn't get my brain around it. She asked me if I'd ever been to a reservation before. I've been to Taos, and the Cherokee reservation outside Tahlequah. But seeing the reservation, mostly a casino surrounded by farm land, I know I've been through at least 10 in Oklahoma. In fact, you drive through the Creek reservation every time you travel from Stillwater to Tulsa.
Fort Hall the town reminds of the tiny places my mom teaches in, like Carney, Oklahoma, where there's a convenience store, a grocery store, a school, a post office, a restaurant and a few houses "in town." Fort Hall also has a couple lodges, the casino, of course, a Shoshone-Bannock museum with two buffalo in a fence outside, fort-like reservation buildings and small HUD homes. Leela described the place as kind of flat and unattractive. While it's definitely short on trees – more of a sage brush kind of area – you can still see the mountains everywhere.
While I'm from Oklahoma, I'm not from the country. I was born in Tulsa, and I grew up in a subdivision in a college town. I mean, we lived briefly outside city limits, in a weird section of tract housing next to the projects and the home for mentality ill. But either way, I was always 60 miles from Tulsa and Oklahoma City. And as much as those places seem like cow-towns, they are big cities with skyscrapers, ghettos, homeless, suburban sprawl, arts districts, progressive newspapers that go against the conservative grain. And then we were only five hours from Dallas, three when I moved to Norman. Idaho is very weird to me in that it lacks cities. It has cute little towns, yes, but no cities. And I thought I came from a remote place.
I did spend time in the country, though. My grandma's sister and brother-in-law own a farm near Tahlequah that raises turkeys for Louis Rich. Their children lived down the gravel road and maintained ponies that they showed in Ponies of America contests, sort of like rodeos, without the bulls and clowns. (Did you know that ponies are not baby horses? They're different breeds from horses called "horses," and about a foot shorter, so five feet tall instead of six feet.) I loved going to the country to see them because they always made chocolate gravy (like runny pudding) and took us to the swimming hole at a cold-water spring. And of course, they let us run the ponies through the pastures. They, too, had a lot of prejudice toward the Cherokees in the area. I didn't entirely understand it, since Grandma and Aunt Josie are clearly part Cherokee.
So Leela's house reminded me of being at my cousin's in the country. Her aunt lived down the way. They have to drive everywhere. They don't have to regard certain laws about license and registration on the rez. The big difference is, Leela and her family are not farmers; they just live in the country.
LaNada explained that because the Indians get their land through the Bureau of Indian Affairs trust, they can't really farm it or sell it. Meanwhile, Mormon farmers have finagled a bargain through the U.S. government so that they can farm the reservation land, with low lease rates. While many of the potatoes we eat come from Fort Hall, the Shoshone-Bannock tribe doesn't see a dime of that money. The U.S. also let miners come in and dug up a bunch of phosphate mines, taking the resource, and leaving the mess for the tribe to clean up. Not far away, there's a nuclear power plant and research facility. It was built on an aquifer and a fault line. Also: I had about two mugs full of water before I learned that it's polluted with nitrates and not so safe to drink. Ho boy!
Pictures, and more stories to come!
Leela, who had stayed up all night working on the beadwork for her powwow outfit, slept in the back while LaNada, who is the Executive Director of the Shoshone-Bannock (united) tribes on Fort Hall Reservation, talked with me.
LaNada, a Ph.D., went to school at UC Berkeley, and she was among the first Indians to go take over Alcatraz to protest the U.S. treatment of Indians. She said they hired a tugboat driver to take them to the island, which was closed at the time. It was just a few dozen people, and they didn't even bring any supplies until the next day. She said she felt young and invincible at the time, and they were all well able to adapt to the cold and living off the land there. She even brought her baby son. They explored the whole island and stayed in the cell blocks, then the army houses. Can you imagine being able to run free on Alcatraz. Wouldn't that be cool?
At one point, she asked me, "Do you ever write about culture?" I was sort of confused by the question, so I answered of course, talking about my efforts to document the hip-hop culture in Oakland and offbeat art parties in San Francisco.
But that wasn't what she meant. She explained to me her definition of culture. She said that most societies, such as the Native Americans and the Chinese, have something that connects them to the earth and to spirituality. But the "American" culture does not. It's all about industrialization, capitalism, greed, tearing things down, moving forward, disconnecting from the past. Whereas American Indians have the white buffalo and the Chinese have the white elephant, but it's the same thing. It's about remembering the earth and what it does for us, and paying respect to the spirits of the earth.
She reminded me of my favorite guest pastor to ever speak at my parent's church in Stillwater. I believe his name was John Moore, from somewhere in the northern Midwest like Kansas or Nebraska. He had long hair and beard, and he dressed like an apostle as seen in all the Bible story paintings. His presentation involved making a clay jar, and he talked about this very thing. I was totally smitten with him, because he cracked me up, "In America, we're bad at math. Do you know what gambling is? It's a tax on people who can't do math."
And, more apropos, he said, "Most cultures, like the Native American culture, are circular. People are connected to their pasts. American culture is linear, progressive, with no connection to the past. Do you know how we destroy other cultures? We take them away from their pasts. That's how we broke the African slaves. That's how we destroyed the vibrant American Indian societies living here first."
I had to stop and think about how, as a journalist, I move from story topic to topic, interest to interest. That's my problem: I'm interested in everything. But what do I connect to? I know I take my life for granted, having air to breathe and water to drink.
LaNada went on to say that we haven't been respecting the earth, for the gifts it gives to us, and that's why it's in the state it's in, with global warming and the increase in natural disasters. Mother Earth will get rid of us, if she has to.
She explained that the Lemhi Shoshones, the Sioux, the Utes and the Comanches are all descendants of the Aztecs in Mexico. The Aztec society crumbled when it violated the laws of nature with human sacrifice, and the Aztec people scattered in all directions. They made a symbol, a reverse swastika, which is on a building at the University of Oklahoma. But it's not a swastika: It's an ancient symbol referring to the Aztec Diaspora. The Nazis stole it and made it their own.
The Aztec calendar stops at 2012. At that point, it's the end of a 52,000 year cycle, in which the earth renews itself, and possibly the end of us. LaNada is very matter-of-fact about this. But she thinks we can turn it around, if more people adopt the Indian way of thinking. She says that the HBO movie, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was a perfect opportunity to get the message out, but it failed.
She explained that the Native American Church, which is attended by Denise's husband's Comanche family in Oklahoma, too, formed at the turn of the century. They claimed to be Christian, but at the time, it was really just a way for the Indians to practice their medicine without discrimination. To them, it's all the same thing anyway. She said the prayers are a highly evolved science that Westerners don't understand. They pray toward the sun, sending out positive energy, and then the sun sends the positive energy back to the earth. She says even Indians have forgotten the Indian ways.
LaNada talked about how Indian bodies are not able to process sugar or wheat (sort of like my body!), and that's why they have so much obesity and diabetes in their community. She said that drugs and alcohol have a stronghold on so many of her people who have lost their ways. I asked her if economic disempowerment had anything to do with the drug and alcohol abuse. "It's all attrition," she said.
She brought up Indian filmmaker Sherman Alexie, as someone who has lost their ways. She doesn't approve of his movies, which, according to her, push a gay agenda. She says that being gay goes against nature, and therefore, it something to be tolerated, but not celebrated. "You have the earth, which is female, and the sun, which is male. The wind is female and the water is male. When male water touches female earth, you get crops growing." This is one way Indian ways seem very conservative.
We stopped in Pocatelo, Idaho, which is a very cute place. With a population of 50,000, it reminds me of my hometown, Stillwater. It has a university and an adorable Old West downtown that still has ma-and-pa stores. And it's surrounded by mountains. I thought it seemed like a nice place to live, except for the fact you can only get four kinds of food: American, Mexican, Italian and Chinese.
One really weird thing about Pocatelo: We were listening to a "hits of the '80s and '90s" station, and they advertised, with much to-do, that Live and Collective Soul were playing a big concert soon. I felt perplexed and I told LaNada, "These songs were popular when I was in college." She said, "Pocatelo is a little behind the times."
LaNada showed me all the white-owned farm houses that are pushing their way on to the reservation, just outside town. She said, "You'll know when you see an Indian house." When I asked Leela about the reservation, she seemed shocked I couldn't get my brain around it. She asked me if I'd ever been to a reservation before. I've been to Taos, and the Cherokee reservation outside Tahlequah. But seeing the reservation, mostly a casino surrounded by farm land, I know I've been through at least 10 in Oklahoma. In fact, you drive through the Creek reservation every time you travel from Stillwater to Tulsa.
Fort Hall the town reminds of the tiny places my mom teaches in, like Carney, Oklahoma, where there's a convenience store, a grocery store, a school, a post office, a restaurant and a few houses "in town." Fort Hall also has a couple lodges, the casino, of course, a Shoshone-Bannock museum with two buffalo in a fence outside, fort-like reservation buildings and small HUD homes. Leela described the place as kind of flat and unattractive. While it's definitely short on trees – more of a sage brush kind of area – you can still see the mountains everywhere.
While I'm from Oklahoma, I'm not from the country. I was born in Tulsa, and I grew up in a subdivision in a college town. I mean, we lived briefly outside city limits, in a weird section of tract housing next to the projects and the home for mentality ill. But either way, I was always 60 miles from Tulsa and Oklahoma City. And as much as those places seem like cow-towns, they are big cities with skyscrapers, ghettos, homeless, suburban sprawl, arts districts, progressive newspapers that go against the conservative grain. And then we were only five hours from Dallas, three when I moved to Norman. Idaho is very weird to me in that it lacks cities. It has cute little towns, yes, but no cities. And I thought I came from a remote place.
I did spend time in the country, though. My grandma's sister and brother-in-law own a farm near Tahlequah that raises turkeys for Louis Rich. Their children lived down the gravel road and maintained ponies that they showed in Ponies of America contests, sort of like rodeos, without the bulls and clowns. (Did you know that ponies are not baby horses? They're different breeds from horses called "horses," and about a foot shorter, so five feet tall instead of six feet.) I loved going to the country to see them because they always made chocolate gravy (like runny pudding) and took us to the swimming hole at a cold-water spring. And of course, they let us run the ponies through the pastures. They, too, had a lot of prejudice toward the Cherokees in the area. I didn't entirely understand it, since Grandma and Aunt Josie are clearly part Cherokee.
So Leela's house reminded me of being at my cousin's in the country. Her aunt lived down the way. They have to drive everywhere. They don't have to regard certain laws about license and registration on the rez. The big difference is, Leela and her family are not farmers; they just live in the country.
LaNada explained that because the Indians get their land through the Bureau of Indian Affairs trust, they can't really farm it or sell it. Meanwhile, Mormon farmers have finagled a bargain through the U.S. government so that they can farm the reservation land, with low lease rates. While many of the potatoes we eat come from Fort Hall, the Shoshone-Bannock tribe doesn't see a dime of that money. The U.S. also let miners come in and dug up a bunch of phosphate mines, taking the resource, and leaving the mess for the tribe to clean up. Not far away, there's a nuclear power plant and research facility. It was built on an aquifer and a fault line. Also: I had about two mugs full of water before I learned that it's polluted with nitrates and not so safe to drink. Ho boy!
Pictures, and more stories to come!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 06:41 pm (UTC)"They made a symbol, a reverse swastika, which is on a building at the University of Oklahoma. But it's not a swastika: It's an ancient symbol referring to the Aztec Diaspora. The Nazis stole it and made it their own."
I thought the Nazis stole the swastika from Buddhism?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
Though that article does say it exists in Native American cultures too. Stupid Nazis and their co-opting ancient benign symbols :(
no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 06:55 pm (UTC)Yeah, Nazis screw everything up. Bastards.