ASHES TO ASHES

Less than two months left in my VISTA service. I feel elated with the fact that I made it despite being dogged by memory and fantasy, post-traumatic stress disorder and isolation. To be honest, going into it I wasn’t entirely sure if it would work out, but there really weren’t any other options.

Despite my tendency to shift away from my physical body and into the wrench of metaphysical angst, I managed to divert myself towards an emotional and psychical state more transcendent (on my better days) and something at least manageable (during the dark weeks).

I saw the man I lived with when I first moved here the other day. He was in the library on an apple laptop, had been glancing at me for some time, his eyes wide and suspicious. When I recognized his rasta hat I nodded, mouthed his name. He nodded back with those same wide eyes, mouth parted, as if I had deeply wronged him and knew too much: two men with beef.

No doubt this is his perception of things, despite the fact that he came out 300 dollars richer when someone only lived in his house for a week. I wonder if he’d even cashed that money order which had caused so much trouble.

Spent that evening evaluating the days I spent in the double-wide. After piecing paranoia from reality, I came out unsure of what was actually happening during that time. I felt like I was hallucinating, the flood lights, the bark like bile from Snow Chief. How does a man who makes no money and have no bank account have savings? Money saved from where? What was in the master bathroom, his father’s trailer? Why’d he even put the ads up to begin with?

The land around the double-wide was vibrant and moist. Moss was a blanket over the underbrush, veiling rocks, rolling into the stream. I remember when he wanted to give me the tour of the land.

“Don’t have to if you don’t want to, bro, just thought you’d like to see the land,” he said, giving that stare.

I felt removed from myself, placed a year and a half before on a street in Green Point when, rather than thrashing, I obeyed Carlo, the half black half mexican man as he led me towards what could have easily been the maw.

But I wasn’t killed in the mountains of California.

How long would it take the tribe to realize I was gone, the time between that and when they called my supervisor, the fact that no one even knew this man or where he lived; I felt subsumed in darkness.

Took a long time to melt it, like being buried in a tupperwear of frozen gravy. The Mountain Crab Spider had me holed up in the trailer section of my house for a long time. Outside was just an apocalypse of chaos and destitution. Then the nervousness, now I don’t care that the only thing separating me from the outside is a hook latch, a house I regularly break into when I forget my keys.

Fresno, the stripmart archipelago. Painted by descriptions of rampant child prostitution and violent crime, it was hard for me to walk down any street without feeling wholly threatened.

I’ve never had to rely on myself so much. In the beginning I was calling people all the time, burying myself in them, but slowly realized this was a habit of mine since I was a child. This tendency to never face myself and my circumstances has greatly shaped my relationships into something askew and cancerous.

The pangs now, just occasional loneliness.

I do wish more friends had come up from LA, but they have their hang ups and I have mine.

Still bent out of shape about how unsupportive the tribe was. It seems no one around here can understand a man’s circumstances when they’re any different from their own, and that goes for the neighboring communities too. Give a guy a birthday card at least, he’s giving you a year of his life!


I remember when I was to head up here in just a day or two, still didn’t have a place, and the tribe I’d be volunteering with for a year hadn’t done any footwork for me. I’m not sure what they expected, but when I finally moved out of the room in the double-wide and into the trailer I live in now, they marveled at my resourcefulness.
“Most people can’t ever find a place! Scared of you!” C exclaimed.

I am resourceful, but this statement was not a testament to that. I wondered what C would have done if it hadn’t worked out. Would I have had to live in hotels on my dad’s dime for a week, two weeks, before I found something by myself?

That was the tip of the iceberg though. Beneath, a broken community.

The problems I have been dealing with since arriving have not disappeared, but they feel lighter. Soon I will be back East, out of isolation, and among friends, women, not that I even remember what women are like—been out in the woods so long.

The tribe cannot function adequately towards its ends. The council could be a nucleus of leadership, but their literal interpretation of those powers stated in the brief constitution and a vacuum of devoted community leadership cripple said constitutional powers.

No action is taken to change this (ex. a salary for council members with requisite duties and longer term limits), mostly because there is rarely full and regular participation of all council members. Even when there is, little seems to get resolved, just a lot of talking. This is not to say every member is gripped with malaise, but as a group something is not working.

Maybe it was the light-headed high of being on the brink of departure or J’s sarcastic nodding as I described what I’d been doing (ie trying to help), but at a recent council meeting I really laid it all out with fatalistic abandon.

I pointed out that I had heard from numerous people that the Elders’ monthly bingo nights represent the first time in TEN YEARS the community has had a regularly scheduled gathering. Before this time, it could be months (years?) between gatherings and what events there were would polarize the community due to their leadership. When I first arrived, the tribe begrudged the non-profit agencies that served them. It’s their job to put on regular events for our community, we shouldn’t have to ask them! Then the audacity of feeling like these events aren’t necessarily to community health!

To drive home the need for community organization I pointed out that the bingo nights have been attended by different people every time, with relatively stable numbers. I added that the Elders consider the bingo nights a community service first and a fundraising effort second. G’s face turned somber as he listened. He may be busy with school, a family, and multiple sports leagues, but he understands how hard this is. Throughout his youth there was nothing. NOTHING.

It’s not long before the expectation of nothing becomes institutional, a barrier against individuals organizing or even participating when there IS something, leaders encouraging their constituents to get involved in ongoing community problems. Hell, sometimes its hard for community leaders to get community leaders involved!

Take the ongoing Balch Camp dilemma. In the past month, the Elders Association has been petitioned by two people with a long history with Balch Camp. The former was so immediately discouraged by tribal politics he deferred my queries about the status what we’d planned (Elders attending meetings with the Forest Service, Elders pressuring council to take certain steps), he deferred me to the council chair. Not only is it not my job to organize this, it’s not my community!

The chair, without being prompted, then came before the Elders to plead for administrative help. According to him the council is not willing to do the necessary administrative work to build a legal case. R attributes a lot of this to the two year term limit for council members, which has new members flowing in and out every year.

How do you adequately re-explain something so complicated, both historically and legally, and in a way that rouses anger in that individual. L has been giving the same speech for the past four years and is getting tired of it. Many community members are starting to think of him as a wind bag. This does not bode well for any kind of great legal retribution against an incredibly powerful and influential electric company.

Before presenting before the council I overheard them discussing the grant I received almost two months ago in terms that were two months old. I’m beginning to doubt that it will be used.

The inflexibility of financial procedures coupled with a consensus that over half the proposal is unnecessary sets the grant up for failure, even if it is finally deposited in a tribal account. Combine this with the wrung of serious financial problems and I become hesitant to place an audit time bomb in their lap.

At the core of it, the grant I wrote is ineffective if the community leadership does not think the community needs organization.

I don’t want to say I failed to convince them of this. I have driven the point home every god damn day I came down to this office, but I am disappointed in how disenfranchised our society makes the poor, how much poverty cuts a person out of every loop, Indian or not.

When discussing the successes of the Elders Group, a sort of pilot committee, I mentioned that one Elder saw two girls out playing bingo and said she had not seen those girls in daylight since they were toddlers. If you could see the size of this community and the proximity of the houses, you would be baffled. You might as well pick the houses up and scatter them on a city block for the amount of direct and regular connections between many of the people down here. As community organization dissolves, so too does tribal identity.

After all that L sat with me for a long time and talked. Neither of us had much to do. I had asked him to support the Elders group, maybe help them get together an acorn gathering trip and again he saw organization as counter-intuitive to traditional belief structures.

I restated the plea as one for moral support for the group. He encouraged the idea that the support comes from inside oneself. I see this little light kindling in every Elder who regularly attends meetings, but I was more concerned about the negativity that might come from the outside and to counter-act this. Even the most self-assured individual needs encouragement from time to time, if only to counter-act the negative reinforcement that is in such great supply.

During the preparations for a dinner one Elder said:

“You should plug in that tree there,” as if it were my event. When it dawned on her that it was in fact her event, she said: “I don’t know why I told you that! I could’ve done it myself!”

These moments of dawning always seem so small and inconsequential, to me, they are like great waves eroding a bank.

It is strange to think that as I seek to rely only on myself for moral support, so I will be encouraging a group of people to do the same, only collectively. I will be telling them to ignore what community members (and some other Elders) say, to trust themselves.

I spoke with one of the Elders about the dinner they had this past weekend. Only about twelve people out of a possible forty came and they were disappointed.

I told her that this community isn’t used to regularity, but that next time, there would be more. She nodded, saying her husband (who doesn’t attend meetings or events) said the same thing.

I remain confident that I have in fact created something sustainable. This is enlivening as it’s the purpose of VISTA and not exactly compatible with Indian country. How does a anglo outsider design sustainable cultural preservation programming without either allying with a faction or angling for the generalized North American Indian culture.

Those were two things I refused to do. When I began scheduling cultural classes I found all the teachers coming from one faction. None of them were even from down here (one Sioux, one Lakota). Then I realized that the subjects of the classes would not relate to traditional tribal culture. For better or worse I stopped it.

Combined, these two factors would’ve pared down the participants to just the children of families involved, maybe a few more.

Also, should cultural education be in a way a miseducation? Many people down here call things like dream catchers “fake culture.” Is that rigidity just one more wall between the children and cultural identification.

Was I right to not endorse teaching these children an ethnic identity rather than a tribal identity? This is a hard question, but in terms of tribal education, I see no more movement towards a paradigm shift in how tribal culture is viewed and passed along.

In regards to Balch Camp, one Elder stood up taller than the others in his wanting for responsibility.

“Well, to me,” he said in his quick and stuttery speech, “an Indian is an Indian. Just because it wasn’t my people up there doesn’t mean I should keep my hands out of it!”

Similarly, when an issue was addressed relating to a non-tribal elder being honored by the tribe, the consensus was that an Elder is an Elder. If they live in the community, they are part of that community. This took R off guard, who had brought it up.

I think had already dawned on the Elders that the individual who complained about it as some sort of highly offensive affront (I was in the office for it), was not an active community member, nor someone who spoke for anyone but herself.

The only thing I said regarding this issue (which is a volatile one), was that when non-tribal Elders were excluded from the trip to the basket-weavers gathering people were just as upset, maybe more.

Did this shine a light on how some people polarize simply to polarize? I’m not sure. This was my intent.

I see down the pike, when I’m gone, that the Elders Association will have to stand on their own when these kind of issues pour into the valley like a wildfire. They will have to enact quick positive verbal reinforcement when it does happen. They will have to find a place of neutrality, moral high ground, for if they are successful in staying together, it won’t be long before their opinion is scrutinized.

While respect for Elders has dwindled to remarkably low levels in recent generations, the word is still an institution. Though the individual Elders might be horribly disrespected, assaulted, verbally abused, the word itself is still sacred. This will inevitably be the source of their collective strength and I have begun describing it to them as “clout.”

In this group I have also found a rational beacon of support. I recently assembled a children’s picture/workbook using old photographs of Indians in the area. I did not provide information about these pictures, and rather attached captions asking what they are of. The goal is to get children to use their imaginations and ask questions regarding their traditional tribal culture. I found that I cannot organize cultural events, but if cultural leaders in the community were to be approached by even two or three youth regarding these issues, the necessary paradigm shift would no longer be easy to ignore.

The Elders were very enthusiastic about it. They did not think it was pertinent WHO exactly the pictures were of (like a kid would care?). It’s more what they represent, what they’re doing.

As I listened to L’s long strung soliloquy about how things are different, how they lost indians in the last generation, etc. I began thinking about how if this paradigm shift does not take effect, he will be one of the last “captains” as they call medicine men, in this tribe. He may be the last one who has even anecdotal knowledge about these old times.

One of the Elders calls me up if she misses a meeting to find out what happened, but more often than not, my brief update is transformed into a long ramble into her memory.

There she lays out long stretches of time, grouped beautifully by subject, from the magic of animals to the supernatural creatures that once thickly populated the area. She talks wistfully of her forebears, of when the coyotes were yelping around that light pole a long way back that her mother knew sorrow was coming. To think that she once questioned her own Eldership…

Without people like her, it’s hard to look optimistically at the survival of tribal culture, something that could so easily perish within the rigid framework that once protected it. But perhaps that’s the way things should go, like spirits into the night that birthed them. I hold no delusions that the numinous nature of these beliefs can be squelched, despite the abandon with which Western culture attacks all things untenable. So they die here, let they be born again somewhere else. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.