forrest borie

PICTURES I LIKE TAKING

2009-01-07T15:12:00.000-08:00

ASHES TO ASHES

2008-12-18T13:57:00.000-08:00

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.

LOOK AT MY BOOK

2008-12-12T11:13:00.001-08:00

FKLA:FDS

2008-11-09T15:01:00.000-08:00

J put his feet up and crossed his hands on his stomach, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. With the entire council and most of the staff at an EPA conference, few people felt compelled to come into the office. L would leave five hours early and I’d be left completely alone in the office to lock up. There were no Elders meetings to facilitate and without any representatives from the tribe around, I was left to design myself into a hole with the community resource guide.

The feeling of bewilderment was nothing new. I have been without an on-site supervisor for going on three months now. Never had a job without a supervisor before and those job formalities I already considered ephemeral wastes of energy now seem utterly performative without end. No one’s tracking my hours there (aside from up at my sponsoring organization) and when I submit a leave request to the tribe, I wonder where it goes exactly. Somewhere there is a ream of papers that track my year of service with the tribe, which though recorded, are done so without precision. I’m not sure if a 40 hour a week volunteer can benefit them on paper, but what feels like fruitless bureaucracy sometimes manifests in an exaggeration of my discontent: lazily written sign in sheets, leave requests left on the front desk rather than in C’s overflowing mailbox. I’m beginning to wonder why such careful and discreet tribe agreed to a full-time volunteer without the infrastructure to support his or her work or even a want to.

I’ve become a community organizer because of the need for that, but also because I exist in a bureaucracy with no place for me and one with so little structure that at times it threatens the very stability of the tribe in general. That week when everyone was out of town was like a great silence, and it was impossible to anticipate the news I would receive when I came to work the following Monday.

I wrote a long time ago about the tribe’s financial woes and how they were born from the improper reporting of a housing grant. This debt has woven a web of familial politics I can’t begin to understand, with one woman having illegally charged another rent in a home she thought she owned, though she didn’t, which put that home in the tribes hands, at which time it was found that the woman living there didn’t meet the low income requirements for housing assistance. She had to leave. Now when I hear this it makes pretty good sense.

If you are renting illegally and it gets discovered and you don’t meet the income requirements for that house you are renting, the house should be given to a family who needs it (lots of crowded houses down there). The US Department of Housing and Urban Development provides low-cost housing to tribal members, because a lot of people don’t make any money. Yet, the support to keep this woman in her home has been extraordinary and not in that charming grassroots campaign sort of way. Rather, the frustration manifested in a veracious mob wielding tire irons, baseball bats, and knives tied to the end of sticks.

Of course it’s not so simple as an ambush down a dirt trail, people getting pulled from the truck and beaten with blunt objects in the darkness, because apparently a few of the victims of this rage had been drinking and talking a lot of divisive talk. It is my belief that no amount of talk justifies the violence that left tribal members shivering on couches, throwing up blood, bruises around their neck and all, and a mob that was only broken up by the hollering of other community members.

The cops were called, and came down to a scene of men and women scattering in all directions of darkness, broken bottles, bloodied ground, tire irons and baseball bats tossed akimbo on front lawns. The police saw the inebriated state of the victims as justification for their own inaction. “Well you are drunk!” The only reason they even generated a police report was that one family member of the victims got on top of the local sheriff’s station and wouldn’t let them go. It’s much more common to let things fizzle away, both with local law enforcement and with the tribe. It was only by my encouragement that victims took photographs of their wounds. Even now, a few weeks later, I can see the memory of this situation dissipate and not because it was healed.

I visited with an Elder shortly after and she was happy to have an outside neutral party to vent to. She talked of family, the problems of welfare, teenage pregnancy, the issue of dependency, which she sees more clearly than anyone. Though her anger was born of a moment, I’m working to not let it slide away. A community is not healed by the relinquishment of power. When I look to the top of the tribe, a place that should be taking punitive actions against this violent behavior, I find a perception that the violence was provoked and because of that, it is allowable and understandable.

I was worried that this would affect the Elders group. Though there was initially talk of canceling the dinner, it faded away and at the second bingo fundraiser I watched the mother of one of the victims and the mother of two of the attackers sit side by side and call the games, collect the money, collaborate. I can’t say it was good will, as I had heard the two despised eachother prior to the incident; whether by the grit of their own teeth, the strength of their will, or if it was a question of understanding. What I see is that among the Elders there is a stronger push towards understanding, or rather, the divisions are revealed for their true illusory nature.

Where I’m from, family is nebulous, amorphous, and while genetic, it’s not a required asset for my individual wellbeing. My family name never dictated social choices that I made, never drew out a longstanding feud in which my participation was requisite. I easily have become estranged from my own brother. This is an issue of familial concern, sort of, but it’s not binding. Blood is no longer thicker than water where I come from.

While family is important down here, the basic nature of the disputes and how they prolong themselves, seemingly independent from the participants, shows that here too it is water, empty and anguished, but like water driving itself limestone. Whatever is built can be as easily eroded by a will that is guided more by impulsiveness and disenfranchisement than well-thought decision making and understanding. So too, like pavement pockmarked by rain, those marks quickly vanish and things that should be resolved are left untied, a whispered dispute between neighbors waiting for any moment of catharsis to explode.

In examining the root of this problem I see a few causes that are not rooted in what the white people did to the Indians. I see a vacuum of brave leadership. On a national level, we struggle to elect one individual who might be brave, impartial, and willing to sacrifice both his lifestyle, and that of those beneath him to accomplish great things. While Obama might be this kind of man (time will tell), how long has it been? Eighty years since FDR? Now look at a tribe of two hundred. There are only so many people there, and racked by social problems, alcoholism, the invasion of Western culture, drug use, teenage pregnancy, a lack of education; there’s no guarantee any one person fits that bill, at all. From hundreds of millions of people we are hard pressed to find and have the gaul to elect ONE. How can it be expected then that a democratic government that barely functions with such a huge population and is wracked with infighting and partisanship, how can this model possibly be applied to a community of two hundred?

More and more I’m seeing the importance of community-based organizations. While at a meeting of my parent company I discussed the pitfalls of Robert’s Rules of Orders with a superior and her eyes widened, but not with anger. I told her about a book I read about community organizations and how it said these rules can often be a massive impediment, as with the declaration of titles, or the application of a ready-made group structure. Rather, the group will determine their own structure without saying a word about it. I’ve seen this with the Elders Group. If I had delegated the leadership months ago, I don’t think the group would have lasted this long.

So too, I see a tribal government who can run a meeting in accordance with Robert’s Rules without blinking an eye, but finds themselves in internal struggles over decisions that would ultimately benefit the community. It was proposed that some of the revenue sharing from casinos be used to create a community outreach position. The idea of losing a miniscule amount of their own individual payment caused a community backlash, and when it came time to defend this proposal only one council member was present.

“That fell apart,” he said to me with his arms in the air.

ASSUAGE

2008-10-20T10:38:00.000-07:00

Some of you were concerned by the news that I got an iphone. I know it's a real image killer, but take a look at this suede and sinew case I made in order to mediate this injection of yuppie technology into an otherwise rugged existence:

DIFFICULTIES

2008-10-18T15:31:00.001-07:00

It’s been difficult to maintain momentum in my writing. When the exoticism of my experience lifted, I began to feel like there wasn’t much to say. It’s been a hard eight months. I feel like I’m in a relationship that’s winding towards its culmination and within my relationship to my present experience, I have ceased the intimate dialogues that were so pronounced when I first arrived here in the Central Valley of California.

For me, writing is a way towards understanding, but this is no longer my goal. There is no one to talk about it with as the seeker within me no longer wants for experience. I begin to wonder where this current mindstate might be directing me professionally. I thought for some time that the social services might be a good place, but having felt very discouraged it’s hard to focus on that anymore. I want to stare into a person, into a structure, but to vaunt myself into a position of authority is surreal. I’ve never received professional respect and now I find many of my suggestions taking seed in community leaders on the Rancheria. This is vivifying, but not nearly as much as it should be…

I received my first grant the other day. 1000 dollars isn’t a lot, but with the tribe lacking any non-discretionary funds, I could finally have event support, money to print a resource guide. When I presented the money before the tribal council I found out that I had broken procedure. I was so excited to get the money, because in my previous discussion with the council about opening a tribal account for non-discretionary funds I was told that everything was in place, but I needed money to open it.

In my rush I had not properly notified the council. To be fair, I was not aware of my indiscretion. My on-site training at the Rancheria consisted of C handing me a two inch thick policy binder, which isn’t really conducive to learning. When this realization struck me, surrounded by the council, I leapt into the defensive. It would be so easy for the tribe to reject even this small amount of money devoted to community organization. It is easy for them to reject most anything that requires their involvement.

There is one person who I feel often deliberately works to jeopardize many projects I try and put through. They were quick to recommend the council refuse the money. When I present them with a problem or need, they see only problems, never solutions. This stonewalling has effectively kept the calendar from being printed, despite my work to navigate through R. It is strange, I find this person to work to hinder whatever growth I am trying to foster. They have begun making offhand comments about me when I am in earshot. B told me to watch out and having seen three employees vanish without a word, no ripples or rumblings, I wonder how much power this person has. I don’t think they want me there.

This is unnerving to think about, because I hope I’ve endeared myself to enough to enough people to secure my position there. Neutrality has been an effective weapon, but at the council meeting, I saw it being stamped on. At the end of the day it does not matter that I am there purely to help the community, because many people do not want that help. While I described the grant, J nodded sarcastically. We have a jovial relationship otherwise, but whenever we enter into any kind of official exchange about what I’d like to accomplish, I find that he greets me with a grave swath of suspicion.

B watched me struggle there, trying to convince the council to help me use this money, and pursed her mouth. M took, nodded enthusiastically, but few spoke. E is a professional bedfellow of L and so he was quick to poke holes in what he could find. I was reminded why I had redirected my work away from him, of the time I worked to help define cultural projects with him but found him dismissive. Telling me what I should do, but not why or how.

The word empowerment falls mostly dull, only R seems to understand what I mean.

Perhaps these are white ideas. White solutions for displaced and beaten down minorities. Particularly with American Indians, there is such a resolve against these things, such a struggle to preserve cultural ways of living, and when those ways have been forgotten, to merely preserve that struggle that saw them last through the coming of white yahoos into the mountains. While my methodology might be more effective with an urban minority, here it is often rejected.

I finally convinced B to help me start a youth group. It’s frustrating to know that the tribe may be unable to assist me with community organization, even if I raise the money myself, but perhaps it’s for the better.

akdfsa

2008-09-25T20:38:00.001-07:00

I’ve never been so excited for a bingo game. I’ve never even been to a bingo game.

The Elders group have determined that a bingo night will be their first fundraiser. They’ve set the date and figured out all the details. I’ve worked to stress that this event is not just a way to increase capital, it is a community service.

My concern about whether or not they'd step up and take responsibility was assuaged by the almost hands off delegation I performed at the last meeting. The group is growing increasingly independent.

Individuals are beginning to address the group when they're talking, offering ideas, rather than just me. I set the table up in an even square, even still C pulled a chair to the fringes of the room and stated:

“Like sitting in the back of class.”

I encouraged her to join the group but she insisted upon staying on the fringes, effectively breaking the circle and placing me in the front of the group.

Every suggestion was phrased thusly to me:

“You should, what you need to do, etc…”

The concept of a group belonging to its members is completely alien down here. The group must belong to an outsider, someone else. I had the same problem for the first five months of relations with the tribe. Every project was my project. Even opening of an account dedicated to funding community events and programs was impossible, that fund had to be my bank account. The tribe takes care of enrollment, dispersing payments from the casinos, and everything else belonged to CIMC or another non-profit dedicated to serving Indian country.

Ironically, most of these non-profits were started by Indians who were upset with the lack of services available to their communities. R often points out that the tribe underwrote the founding of most prominent non-tribal non-profits in the state. Then he usually gripes about how that organization doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, how they don't realize that the tribe supported them.

The group belongs to someone else. The service belongs to someone else, despite the fact that the tribe is its target population. Similarly, even this Elders group is displaced from the core group at its center. Until recently, many among the membership considered this to be my group, a service I was providing to the Elders. For a community that rejects the influence of outsiders so heartily, they often depend on those same individuals to administer all their services.

But it’s beginning to fade. I hear second hand that the Elders are discussing how I’m leaving soon. I want it to feel like it’s tomorrow. There needs to be an immediacy and in those conversations, it is always in reference to the group’s need to develop independence beyond what I facilitate, and to do that soon.

I get discouraged, when people still make me the focal point of meetings, expecting me to do all the work. If this persists much longer, I don't think the group will last, but these last few meetings, the Elders have shown a degree of self-determination that is otherwise unprecedented in my work with the community.

I almost met another stopping block in getting money to the Elders. The tribe wrote for a grant and put some of that money towards the Elders, with the idea that they would administer it themselves. Even still, the hesitancy to give them a lump sum was extreme from a few people in the office, the same people that tended to derail any projects I came up with that would require money.

I am very glad R and I have an understanding about this group, because he was able to make sure the money would be given to the Elders in two lump sums (rather than be given only as a re-imbursement provided there is a receipt of purchase). The Elders will still have to account for every dollar they spend, but trusting them with this money is to support their independence and encourage self-determination among the community.

I consider things like this, money given rather than with a receipt two weeks later in a re-imbursement, to be stopping blocks for individuals and groups. When people are so beaten down, just adding a few extra steps to accessing services or planning events can throw the whole thing off.

It was like P’s grandson who was popping into my office more and more before she got fired. I’d give him my video camera, give him some basic non-restrictive rules (keep this strap around your neck and put your hand like this), and let him run with it. Where he went? No clue. What he shot? Not sure. The CIMC youth workers were aghast when they saw him sprinting out the door with my camera dangling precariously around his neck.

“You let him do that?” they asked.

“Why not?”

No reply. Trust is imperative when you’re trying to get an individual, a group, or a community on their feet.

When I left the meeting it was dark. The Elders had all already left. The lights outside the community building weren't working. It was so dark I couldn’t see my feet, my hands, the road, the sky, the trees. I dragged my feet on the ground to be sure i was still on the pavement.

Despite the crescent moon, there is little or no illumination. I think much of this is due to the absolute lack of cloud cover, but rather a void dotted by points of crystal, stars clearer than I’ve ever seen.

After fumbling with the lock I started pacing carefully towards my car, which was grey and humble within the pitch deep well black of the night. There was a relative silence. B must've been asleep, no lights coming from his trailer or his cackling. When a voice broke it I was momentarily terrified.

I looked up, no one there.

“It’s L,” the voice said, coming from the courts, the picnic table, “come over here and bullshit for a sec.”

I groped through the darkness and found L sitting on the undone hatch of his truck drinking beer. I sat and we talked for an hour, about a lot of things I won’t repeat here. They deal with other worlds, with the amazing gift his people have, of living on the land they came from, connected to the same elementally driven spiritual existence that bore their ancestors across the millenia.

He talked candidly about his personal situation, the state of permanent collapse within the tribe, the circles they all walk in, and as he grew more intoxicated, his meanderings grew more emotional and associative, his voice drew into longing, great stretches of memory: laying beneath trees, to the trek to his grandmother’s, to the web of familial connections that spread throughout everyone in the tribe.

The whole time we looked beyond the houses, the small yellow windows, at those great dark mountains rising over the reservation, the sky now bluish grey, and beyond them, ‘that’s where we come from,’ L said again and again, gesturing out there.

It was somber and cold and immediately after telling me about an incredible drunken home run his sister made in soft ball he changed directions entirely.

“Want you to know something,” he said, “the things you know, the things you’ve learned; we’ve taken you into our confidence here, but those things stay here.” He looked at me soberly: “it’s all we have left.”

He took my hand, something that doesn’t happen much down there, and shook it firmly.

I told him: “I’ll do that for you,” all the while, wondering what I’d written here and other places with the intent of helping people understand more clearly what it’s like in indian country, culturally and beyond. Have I told too much? I also wondered if he was serious or if this was the alcohol talking, the sadness of the social realities down there; that most of the traditional ways of living that governed his ancestors will soon be lost in a sea of fat women and teenagers acting like toddlers, as he said.

The reason for secrecy around these things put me off for a long time and I imagine that most readers of this blog might greet it with respect, as if for its quality of political correctness, but not for the value of it. We don’t have many sacred things if any and as such, I don't think we have the collective knowledge about how to respect them. Let's be honest, lots of us don't even believe in "sacred." We believe in "cultural experiences," but not only do we not believe them, we see them as living objects rather than methods for living.

“I don’t mean to talk bad about your people,” L said, “but you came and you took, you take things-when we want something, we ask for it.”

You won’t hear me talk much about these sorts of sacred things in here anymore. I’m beginning to realize why things stay hidden, why any projects created by the tribe need to stay within the tribe. For so long I was urgently pushing for a paradigm shift, to open things up, to teach the kids even though traditionally its the job of their parents. But when you shift a method of spiritually communicating with the land, how do you ensure that it retains its integrity.

“You look up our people in all those books, you won’t find nothing,” L said, “that’s because the Elders said and we always said, what is here stays here.”

INSTITUTIONAL DIFFERENCE

2008-09-21T14:31:00.001-07:00

I popped the hood and circled my car with a quart of oil in my hand. The sun was just above the mountains, unbearably hot, casting diffuse shadows over the broken pavement. I was looking forward to being free of it, not that there’s much escape, even inside my trailer.

Seven kids played a spontaneous game of basketball, the first time I’d seen the court in usage since I arrived down there. Every time I looked over there were more players. Five, six, eight. They were vicious despite the macadam court pocked with holes and divots. Contrary to the large frames of most of the young men, they handled the ball nimbly. The community is very proud of the athleticism of the youth.

I heard someone hollering to me, telling me to slow down. I looked up and made out L’s dark earthy skin in the distance, sitting with B in front of his trailer. There are always a few sitting out there, laughing, drinking. L’s skin stood out from the dusty golden landscape as I crossed the ground, covered in cut dry grass and marked with gopher and snake holes. A friendly pit bull greeted me despite L’s urging for it to sick.

L turned a chair and offered me a beer.

I waved my hand and said: “appreciate the sentiment.”

“Bullshit,” he laughed, “bullshit.”

Some months ago I realized that in order to be truly enmeshed with much of this community I would have to drink with them. It didn’t take much critical thought to see this as a categoric conflict of interest.

At an Elders meeting two nights before someone brought up the discouragement individual’s would face if they tried to quit drinking. They’d be told they were turning white, said it’s bullshit. Thought L meant it in good nature, I couldn’t help but feel that his treatment of my refusal was one of these socially institutionalized gestures.
I sat all the same.

There was a beehive there and dozens of leaf cutters surrounded me, nipped at my shirt and crawled on my hands. I mimicked L and B’s lack of concern. The bees crawled over everything, the bare roots of the tree shading us, the dog’s bed, the old sunbleached tires.

A car was rooted beside us, its tires surrounded by dried needles and leaves, its underbelly an ellipsed weave of cobwebs.

B cackled. His toothless mouth gaping, but such warmth in his eyes. His skin was tan and worn, as if by the elements, and every wrinkle looked a canyon, divots, depressions. His fine white hair was pulled back.

B has been at almost every Elders meeting. At first I wasn’t sure he’d want to come around, but first for the free dinner, then for the company. He makes the occasional comment but it seems above all else he comes to laugh.

L told a story about a dream he had of winning lotto ticket numbers, wherein he portioned the winnings as a trust for the community, one million for clothes for the kids, two million for college, etc. When the real life jack pot reached the one in his dream he didn’t get a ticket, only to find the numbers he dreamt of were the ones that won.

“Haven’t won nothin’ since,” he laughed.

I followed his story with one from my birthday, where a heaving intuition was calling me to the casino. Being in a constant state of finance collapse, I felt strongly that this was my way out. I walked solemnly through the slots until I reached the quarter slots, felt comfortable there, and lost all my money.

“Lost all your money!” B guffawed.

I felt uncomfortable, but couldn’t pin down why. We seem to thrive collectively on experiences of difference, yet difference draws me farther from the center of thigns.

It wasn’t the bees or the beer, the itching dog rolling over a piece of black plastic on the ground. Discomfort is always driving me away from sitting or stewing in situations different from my own. Maybe it’s why I never tromped down to the reservation when I first got in, when L would invite me to watch a fight. I exaggerate my own difference, even when that difference seems to disappear, become illusory.

There are some who never let me forget it, that I’m the only white guy down there. Despite the cordial greetings I receive from most, I’m told they snicker when I turn around and rumors are spread naming me as the culprit in the community’s most recent teenage pregnancy. L (the other one) is friendly with me, but still gives me the cockeyed look. Others seem to forget what makes me different entirely, like B, who simply laughs when she asks what radio station I listen to and I turn it to Bulgarian folk music.

This is where it all feels like an illusion. That the difference in background is contained within me. That the experiences that shaped me: a middle class liberal background, film school, and a thriving social life within art and music scenes, is something no one else is aware of but me. I realize more and more the isolation that this life builds. The regularity of experience mutes the rest of the world. At first this revelation took form in my disdain for contemporary art, the fact that it reaches only 5% of the population. I argued for an art form more grounded in a universal aesthetic (one), less abuse for the post-modern topical references that require that the viewer come from the same background in order to analyze the artistic work, and finally a greater amount of outreach by artists to under-served communities. Now I realize that it’s not just art, but it’s my way of life that doesn’t reach down here. Not just the relative affluence I was raised with, but the cultural refrains, the common knowledge.

When started my freshman year of college I encountered a difference. Having come from the suburbs, the cities, or wealthy liberal high schools, the majority of my peers were schooled in a knowledge I didn’t have. I had to learn it and it took a long time. Similarly, I couldn’t/can’t speak the language of a relationship, being illiterate with the common gestures of affection, the way that a man and woman communicate with. My childhood wasn’t spent there, surrounded by the arts. I was thinking recently that every ex-girlfriend I have came from a family steeped in high culture, and how that affected the way they are.

While I would not call my own parents uncultured, it wasn’t the opera or abstract theater that kept them stimulated. Maybe my mother read a few pieces of post-modern literature but I doubt they resonated with her. Really it was the common people for my father and the Earth for my mother. Beyond that there wasn’t much in Vermont, but those two things. My father holds a quiet disdain for hoity-toity liberals and among his closest friends, the majority are either republican or have their roots in the values-driven self-determination of the South.

I think that’s what bothered my father so much about what we call in Randolph: “the Bethany Mafia.” It wasn’t so much the support these individuals gave for each other and the children that came to their church, but the high culture veiling hypocrisy. I think of the story of one wife tearing into another at Lake Champagne (no more than a pond really), because she knew that her husband fathered the other’s daughter. It draws me to the suburban literature and film, of these same hypocrisies, but in a town of less than three thousand.

I had to gulp down a similar disdain when women I’d date would go on and on about their love of the French language and culture, something I have always felt inclines to elitism (even in Mexico French was the language spoken by the elite), and the number of plays a child went to, or the movies they saw, the bands they knew about years and years before me.

I was raised in the middle, not common, not elite, then sitting there beside the discolored trailer, stained by dust and the sun, the smell of bodies that spent the day digging holes to plant trees, the dull knocking of a basketball on a nearby court.

“You always were aware of your uniqueness,” my mother once told me, something she didn’t feel counted for everyone. I think now: and I’m the only one who knows this.

I looked at L and B, kicking back, a cold beer in L’s hand. The bees touching my knuckles, the flies, the smell, it feels more real, but still uncomfortable.

“I need to go make dinner,” I say, half wondering if this was an excuse to leave.

“All right,” L said sharply, clicking his tongue.

I shook his hand, then B’s, who smiled and looked at me with those warm moist eyes. I crossed the dry cut grass, minding the gofer holes, got in my car, and drove home.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON

2008-09-19T16:23:00.000-07:00

AND THE MOON'S NOT EVEN FULL

2008-09-12T19:07:00.000-07:00

“Heard a wicked scream last night,” R said, leaning on C’s desk.

B was leafing through files. She glanced up in surprise.

I thought R was saying that someONE was screaming, considering the spate of violent insanity that has plagued the Rancheria. Pellet guns, men stomping others with steel-toed boots, setting fire to the church, to dumpsters, then sitting wasted with their mothers in front of the doublewides, cursing out children and trying to instigate fights with anyone willing to so much as look at them.

Driving through the placid neighborhood, I was hard pressed to picture the anarchy and J there taking pictures of everything; a mother intervening with a knife shaking in her hands. This is the demon of alcohol run wild in Indian Country.

B described one of the victims of this drunken psychosis:

“Head swelled up like a watermelon.”

“We were all sittin’ there watching TV then heard it, what the hell was that,” R said about the scream. “Ain’t no home made that.”

“The little dark things?” I asked.

“They come out when stuff is bad like that,” he said.

B sneered: “the creatures.”

A few months ago R told me about a time where there were a lot of families who were all messed up, getting really hard into drugs and alcohol, and people started seeing these dark creatures everywhere, surrounding the houses, imposing particularly upon the children.

“Lots of people see them when this stuff’s happening,” R said.

I felt chilled.

The timeline I crafted of all the happenings was a broken jumble, and as B described the events more thoroughly, it felt as if it was a jumble. About how her brother and uncle got drunk, then started fighting, broke out into the street, then her brother shot out L’s window, and he got into it. Pretty soon there were four guys beating on one. Somewhere in there were four visits by the police, the brother running off the other way, and the cops doing nothing, standing around for a minute then leaving.

“They don’t do nothing,” R said.

This is true. The cops really refuse to do anything, but much of that is due to the roadblocks they experience when trying to bring anybody in. Today J was speaking about his dedication to the community and how it wasn’t even the community.

“Only about two houses I’m not related to down here.”

I thought about a week early, after the first incident of violence (just fires getting set, children being cussed out by their neighbors), and how I proposed a neighborhood watch to the council. J squinted at the cover of the pamphlet, a bunch of anthropomorphic cartoon houses with their eyes peeled. ‘Take a Stand,’ it said.

“Take a stand!” J proclaimed, giving form to the skepticism that drew everyone to silence, “Take a stand! Turn in your cousin!”

“Excited for the weekend?” I asked B later, when the office was empty.

“It’ll calm down,” she said.

I get the feeling that the Rancheria feels explosions and lulls, they look to the cops to mediate, but aren’t willing to turn in their own. It’s not so bad if the cops wrestle the offenders down, cuff them and put them in the can for a night, but at this point the cops expect the community to do everything. When the community protests, the policemen’s silent disregard speaks volumes about the lack of support they get in their own actions.

This is strange, because the same sort of thing is experienced when cops work with inner city projects. To be fair, like those areas, when someone on the Rancheria calls 911 with a medical emergency, it’s possible that the ambulance won’t even go down there.

The disconnect between the Rancheria and the outside world is institutional: older than the trees and the hills. There is a discomfort in going out there.

“We were at Sherry’s the other night, then we looked around, and realized we were the only brown folk in there, got real nervous,” L says.

It’s not paranoia though.

A hefty portion of the foothills population are descended from the pioneers, the goldrush, who massacred Indians without discretion or the veil of military action. Back then it was sanctioned by the state. The scalp of a man, woman, or child, could fetch you five dollars at government trading posts.

B and I circled the Rancheria passing out flyers. I ran down to one house and knocked. A grumble from behind it. I knocked again.

“Come in!” a man yelled impatiently.

I turned the handle and he looked at me incredulously, white man in his house!? I handed him a flyer for tutoring classes which calmed his expression.

“Thank you,” he said between his teeth.

I shut the door, but it wouldn’t stay shut. Noticed the whole doorknob apparatus was knocked out, the door kicked in.

“What house was it, with the woman cussing out your kids?” I asked B.

She pointed to the house I just came out of and laughed.

WHAT TO DO WITH HAIR

2008-09-08T11:43:00.000-07:00

“You’re the only white person in this room and have you ever thought that some of the things we say might be true?” VH asks me, her hands crossed on her thin legs.

She waits patiently while I sift through my extensive rung metaphysical experience. All I can say is: “I’ve seen enough strange stuff that I believe everything you say,” which is true.

There is an assumption that white people greet everything outside of their paradigm with a great wall of incredulity and irreverence. I wish I could say that this assumption is without foundation, but at that moment, VH looking at me with skepticism, I become aware that I experience this same wall, even among my friends.

I restrain myself from claiming that I am an exception to this because I do not want credibility. This experience has instilled in me enough humility to admit that I will never understand what is is like to have your peoples’ mythos bound to the land you live on.

I read that it is common for anthropologists to adopt the cultural practices of the people they are studying. The reason for this is believed to be the lack of substantial Anglo-American cultural values and ideas. I will admit that even the surface experience of a true visceral culture like that of the Hokuma-Mono is alluring, but at the same time, a frustrating reminder of this supposed void in my own cultural background.

As I’ve mentioned before, I believe that we have a wealth of cultural values and ideas within Westernism, and before we go around having subjective experiences with other sacred symbol sets, we ought to exhaust our own resources first. It is unfortunate that said cultural resources are buried in bullshit, but this is no excuse for our refusal to extract them.

Lately my own travels into Western culture have left me in a state of spiritual displacement. While I understand Christianity to be an internal religion, it is so infused with pagan values that it’s hard to separate this internal experience from a geographical experience.

My background is so varied (British, Dutch, French, Irish, etc.) that choosing one location from which to root out my spiritual origins would be an arbitrary decision. Though I do feel various ancestral attachments, the associations are nebulous, as if I could carry them with me in jars.

VH looks at me as if I’m appeasing her, that I will learn in my own time and perhaps she’s right.

She and the other Elders have just finished discussing the proper way to dispose of one’s hair after cutting it.

“The old timers were always so careful about that, but I guess back then there were lots of medicine men around back then,” IM said.

IM often forgets that she, and the rest of the Elders gathered around the folding tables are now the ‘old timers.’ There is a sense that these keepers of ancient knowledge that sit at the folding tables feel dwarved by their predecessors, who were generationally that much closer to an age of land subsistence. It’s baffling how much can be lost between a parent and child.

The group laughed about the importance of burying one’s hair as opposed to burning it. All a medicine man would need is one strand, and that would be enough to do something to you. VH has a leather doll with hair. Where’d that hair come from?

“It’s human hair!” she proclaims.

JR Cackled silently as she often does, her face lighting up.

“That’s some voodoo stuff,” IM says.

I think about the marionettes hanging up in my trailer, both covered in human hair, but say nothing about them.

“I’d love to see this doll,” I tell VH and she agrees to bring it to the next meeting.

I’m so happy when VH is able to come. Her presence is like a great light, even though she’s stricken to a wheelchair. Her goal of walking by 80 is warming.

My time is running out and I need to ensure the sustainability of at least this Elders Committee. It is difficult to delegate within the group; even simple tasks like making calls are seen with a sort of ‘I can’t do that’ look.

I’m frustrated with the fact that I complete all the necessary work in the few hours prior to the next meeting. If the participating Elders took the initiative, the amount of ground that could be covered is baffling. I am hesitant to even draw up the agendas, especially if this Committee is to be on its way towards 501c(3) status by the end of January.

Last night I was discussing the culture of dependency with my mother. I said that I always believed it existed, as every progressive does. The tyranny of welfare, for it gives an individual just enough to survive. Even in my first months in Indian Country, I proclaimed this same problem, further embellished with the fact that those individuals administering this government aid don’t encourage their client’s to achieve their personal and professional goals. If anything, social workers often enable dependency by allowing their client’s slip through the cracks in terms of what is required of them (ex. 20 hrs a week of job searching). Marry this with the tragic geographic isolation of this and every other reservation, and you have a “culture of dependency,” a situation where individual’s rely almost entirely on others to supply their basic needs. The affects of this are individual proclamations that someone else should do (X) for them, whether that (X) = organizing cultural events, submitting forms, or taking the initiative to ensure that all available services are being administered properly. The hardest part about explicating this condition is ensuring that the reader understands that the individual is at no fault. In such a bootstrap society we assume everyone has a pair to yank, but particularly among Native Americans, whom I’ve come to believe are the most utterly forgotten minority, they were never given a pair in the first place. No only were they refused enfranchisement, they refused it themselves. Much like the war between the North and South, which was never truly settled (as proven by the crippling bipartisanship that has wracked this country ever since), so too our indigenous populations are still suffering occupation, still suffering the infinite loss of displacement and the untenable affects of post-colonialism. Keep in mind that the colonies of North America were overthrown, but by the colonists.

So Native Americans are still suffering colonialism. During the RNC the police raided a few anarchist co-ops in the neighborhood of one of the founders of the American Indian Movement. These were the Indians who occupied Alcatraz, Catalina, and a state building in DC. His pronouncements in the interview were revolutionary but broken. Their impact was dulled further by the interviewer, a devout leftist who seemed to view this man, one of the last native american revolutionaries, as a mouthpiece. He said those things that are always said, things I said above, about occupation, etc. but with the power of capitalist assimilation, within a few generations these pronouncements will be void. I argued to my mother that we are at a point of self-awareness where we can make moral choices and this just isn’t right.

Both Canada and Australia have made symbolic apologies to their indigenous peoples, something that the Indians are still waiting on here. Is this another watermark of dependency? That’s really hard to say, but it certainly couldn’t hurt.

HEFTY WEEK

2008-09-03T16:55:00.001-07:00

I apologize for yet another long break.

Last week was absolutely insane. My father, stepmother, and little sister were all visiting from Thursday to Sunday. Monday I drove up to Sacramento. Stayed there until Wednesday. Then I plowed down the inane stretch of I-5 and arrived in Long Beach at around eleven. Three days later I’d be on the biggest stage I’ve ever played in a near meltdown of nervousness.

Will the emotional exertion that had my body quaking allow me to play out regularly once I move to LA? I watched one video of my performance and watched my face contort and mis-shape itself, my brow furrow at the simplest chords and my tongue undulate in my mouth as if working to escape through my nose.

The family and I went to Yosemite last Friday. On the way in, I wondered if this flagship of America’s National Park System was actually just a glorified chunk of the Sierra Nevadas. These are beautiful mountains, there is no doubt, and on the long road to Monument Valley, we passed a few profound valleys, but I wasn’t in awe until we bored through the belly of a mountain and spewed out alongside two dozen European tourists overlooking monument valley.

The monolithic nature of the rocks bordering the broad flat valley was numbing. There was half dome, like a broken relic of a lost civilization of giants. So too, El Capitan stood like it once supported a vast bridge across the valley. Thousands of pine trees, all uniform in height, carpeted the valley, wrapping around the half dome and vanishing as if they were themselves the river. Here are some pictures I took:

From yosemite

My father was especially excited to see the Sequoias. I was confused by the common East Coast idea that Redwoods are the biggest trees. They’re big, but not as big as these things. It’s hard to communicate the profundity in picture, but to think that these freestanding living things are 3500 years old, predating most modern civilizations and almost entirely undisturbed. Those that have fallen don’t decay due to the density of the Tannins. The root structures were magnificent but I’ll put those pictures at the end of this entry to focus on enormity rather than my preoccupation with the profane:

From yosemite

I wonder if the experience of seeing Monument Valley, like some beautiful tumor in the landscape, would have been lessened had we gone the next day. The congestion of Yosemite is often parodied. Traffic rivaling Los Angeles, except for the entire towering walls of stained granite and misting falls two thousand feet up thing. I can understand how the utter glut of tourists could really dumb down what is otherwise an incredibly spiritual experience.

The presence of family made it a little hard. I wish it was just my father and I. While I am fond of my stepmother and half-sister, I experience a neurotic mindmeld with my father when they’re around. Women, the bane of our joint existence. It’s startling to see all my female issues manifest in a man over twice my age; cheers to psychological inheritance.

To my father’s credit, he has given me very precise criteria of what makes a good woman, which I easily ignored. Being the person I am, I often wonder if I will ever be able to find such a vision of perfection (good parents, mentally healthy, great sex, you love her, etc…) who would conversely be able to understand and accept me. I wonder if a woman could come from such supportive circumstances with complexity intact. I’m sure it’s possible, but so often when I meet people from great and unbroken families and I feel like Montezuma or some crazed prophet off in the margins. I think it would be very hard for a real upstanding young woman from a great family to accept that her boyfriend you know, sees ghosts all the time, lives at the whims of divine archetypes, and has an unhealthy affection for whales. Sometimes this is hard for my friend’s to accept.

When I was in Los Angeles my buddy Dave said something rather hilarious. I mentioned my abduction offhand and he said:

“You know, I was talking to James about this, how people are always saying ‘the universe is out to get me today.’ Well, I actually think it’s out to get you.”

I certainly was given a bizarre wrung of karma I’m still unraveling. It’s a life waiting for the other foot to drop.

Sacramento was interesting. The staff meeting was abbreviated. I came out with no greater knowledge of the inner workings of my parent company, but my supervisor and friend did help me assemble eighty copies of my demo CD! I met a few fellow VISTAs and in particular, Kim, who is a tribal member of the tribe she’s serving with offered a great glint of hope for the project down where I work. I am coming to wonder if many of the blocks I am seeing are really tied to my color and my outsider nature. I have resolved to recruit my VISTA replacement from the tribe, seeing that an Indian would be able to make such great headway having already gained the trust of the community. The only issue will be finding someone who is neutral.

R and I were discussing the youth committee, and as we broke down a potential core group, he was referring to neutrality among children. It is so bizarre to think there could be issues of factions even among the very young. It’s as if the banding and grouping of indigenous peoples begins at birth and it is no wonder so many of the traditional practices were tied to binding the individual to the set way of doing things and to respect.

I was also able to see an old buddy from mine in Sacramento. To briefly return to that sitting cross-legged and drinking beer in a park and not giving a fuck kind of lifestyle, culminating with my being brought home by a woman, an experience that I’ll qualify as not physically satisfying, but emotionally cleansing in a really sad way.

Leaving the next morning, after a night of incredible darkness, crooked dreams, and fear, I felt as if I was leaving behind something bad for me and it was hard to muster the sympathy I used to. My guilt was tied to that. The lack of physical presence on my part still has me baffled, but I realize I used to be dependent on the unhealthy women to keep me going. I feel as if I am experienced a paradigm shift in my overall personality and sexual nature and I wonder how it will play out once I get down to LA, what kind of women I will find.

Mark, my dream analyst, really scolded me for having done that, gone home with a girl, but I am really so much happier in relinquishing myself to pure experience without seeking it out nor evading it. This has led me to some dark places, but the knowledge I emerge with is always invaluable.

It was a long drive down 5 to Long Beach, but I was lucky to catch the second to last day of DNC coverage. Bill Clinton’s speech was profound. By the time Biden was speaking I was in the heart of Christian country and the station was fading. It was as if I were receiving the station and its echo, for it all layered in a sea of static and the mournful wail of a smooth jazz saxophone beneath it. I was raised a democrat and I feel like I may have forgotten that for a minute.

While I do retain hope for the spontaneous methods of human organization, ie anarchy, I am very frustrated by the extreme left’s cynical response to Obama, a 45 year old community organizer from a bi-racial family who attended the black church! I mean, Jesus Christ! I was all about voting Green to help that party get it’s five percent, but then I heard an interview with the vice presidential nominee, Rosa Clemente, and it’s stupid but I just didn’t like the way she talked. It was all slam poetry and I mean come on, but I guess she’s part of what they call “the Hip Hop Generation.” Call me old fashioned but oratory is very important to me. I like Cynthia McKinney a lot (green party presidential nominee), good talker, not this girl, so cynical, so harsh. We’ve been talking for so damn long it’s a shame to see it so simplified.

I don’t know, people talk a lot of revolution but it doesn’t really work that way. I was listening to some coverage of RNC protests and the chant was saying: “give us revolution now.” Give you?

People need to watch the John Adams miniseries and also realize the South won, you know what I mean?

Baby steps or fucking go for it. Start a god damn congress or something.

The next few days were entirely band practice oriented, absolutely exhausting, but the songs were slowly coming together. Many of the concerns I had stirred up into a frenzy back up in Prather dissolved. The only problem was the building hype. I opened an issue of the LA Weekly only to see a blurb about me. I wish I could use it as publicity, but unfortunately it discussed my volunteer work in a way that would not be appreciated up here.

We also got bumped up to the biggest venue, and loading in, jesus. For you Boston people, think the middle east downstairs X 2. We soundchecked (whoa, sound!) then went to run some quick errands. The line already went down the block. Dave and I jointly realized that we were at least six years older than all these kids. We discussed it later and realized we were once those kids, that’s the audience…still feels strange…26.

Show went amazing for the most part. We all had our little flubs, but we practiced four times! The reaction was incredible and a few people came up to get CDs after the show, offered me money even though I said free. I left some on the merch table and apparently there was a little money pile beneath them for a while, no doubt pocketed, used to buy beer, for the night it was, I wouldn’t have had it any other way (unless it was in my pocket that is).

Playing was incredibly difficult. It’s such a strenuous effort for me and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because it was my seventh live performance ever, for the other guys were relatively effortless, bouncing around, or kneeling in a sea of feedback. I had trouble willing my hand to strum, to control my distance from the microphone. By the end I was so exhausted I couldn’t even play. My arm stopped working, just lightly brushing the strings, and when Sean, the organizer of the festival said I should play acoustic on the patio, I couldn’t even remember what my songs were.

I was falling asleep on my feet after dinner and it was only when I met my friend Veronica that I came back alive. Love that girl.

Here are some pictures and a video:

From graham forest live

here are some crucial roots:

From yosemite

A BIT ABOUT THE LAND

2008-08-19T19:28:00.001-07:00

Malaise dampened the affects of this sprawling mountainous ecology. As my depression passes, where I live has again become strikingly beautiful. I find myself nearly colliding with automobiles as I crane my neck to watch the massive hills literally roll upwards from a flattened landscape.

It has not rained in over five months. The sweeping green fields shifted to a golden pallor almost overnight and then it was all bland and tan. Despite the dessication, everything felt rigid.

Perhaps because it is so dehydrated, the landscape has shifted again. The grassy vegetation is now so delicate that it is more like beds of covered in millions of strands of amber glass. It does not fall, rot, perhaps because there’s not enough moisture to. Rather it stands firmly, but looks as if it might all shatter if you ran your hand through it.

Whatever moisture that remains is held firmly by deep rooted trees. These stocky and brambly leafed trees, their branches as thick and hard as steel, maintain color despite the utter lack of rainfall. The undulous hills are defined by their dusty greenery, which lights up from the blanket of amber beneath it.

There is a rusty red in perfect compliment with the ambrous undergrowth. The parched shrubbery which stretches across long ridges, or patches in enclaves in the otherwise impossibly steep hills, blots a perceptual mid-point from the amber to the dusty green and as such, these three colors: amber, dusty green, and rust red make up a sinuous palette.

I have never seen such a clear harmony of color.

The hills were once uniform in being soggy and green and those colors were so tenuous that I often remarked that the landscape looked much more diorama than terra firma. It’s strange for as striking as this was, I feel the peak of its dryness, when the climate could not become anymore violent to the propagation of life, is when it is at its most striking.

HERE

2008-08-18T10:35:00.000-07:00

It has been some time since my last entry, which was also preceded by a silence. It was a breathing silence however. I’m a little over halfway through my service out here and this hump has been a mountain. I do feel bewildered by the height, deprived of the people that give me life, the freedom that nurtures my creativity. I wrote an entry a week or so ago that I chose not to post, for it was written in the midst of a heavy depression, more so even than the last entry where I described the fog that envelopes me. There have been numerous reasons for the condensation, the confusion.

I won’t deny that I am very lonely. Initially this isolation was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. After a very painful betrayal from a friend and lover, it gave me time to recuperate, wring my hands around independence. I felt better than I ever had. The weekends were difficult. I had no friends to wind down with, but I filled these days with projects. When this loneliness spilled into my weeknights, I slathered them too with productivity and got a kitten. Mercury was incredibly demanding when he was a baby and it drove me off the deep end. I was one inch from taking him to the shelter, but I resisted and am happy for it (best cat). Now the affects of my cats have worn off. It’s as if some piece of my mind once considered them human, but now realizes that though animated by the same force that drives me, they aren’t exactly real company. I’ve tried to make friends down in Fresno, but have found the city to be one of the least friendly places I have ever been. While people are cordial, they are not accommodating to new faces. Perhaps I need to be more forward, but that is a very difficult thing when those opportunities are relegated to a few interactions; the weight of every interaction dilates to the point that I evade them altogether. When I’m in LA or SF, it is the opposite, but I am among friends, so my outgoing nature is amplified. I’ve realized that I am highly introverted. The many years I spent as an embittered loner, all throughout high school, have informed my character. Though this might be debilitating in my current situation, I have resolved to see things through. I think this is good for me.

So many times I’ve encountered challenging circumstances that offered no tenable growth, and each time I turned tail and moved on. If this required changing my geography, I did it. It wasn’t so much running from myself, but cringing at the thought of confronting the socially unpleasant.

I feel I retain so many aspects of a child, though not in a bad way. I do not understand the workings about us. I do not think they make sense. I more than profess this, it exists at my very core. Until this year, I was wholly unable to communicate with bureaucracy. I despised it so much I muted myself and refused to participate. It was a very “punk” attitude but was not inflected by a sort of false tribalism.

I attribute my incompatibility with the trappings of American life to the multiple traumas I have experienced in recent years. I have been assaulted by the very things that bouy us and make this country function, and so they are not just gaseous bodies that vaguely inform my decision of whether or not to buy an expensive pair of jeans. I feel they impede us from actually living.

These conditions are especially pronounced now. VISTA pays me 105% percent of the poverty level for Fresno County. The definition of poverty in the United States is based solely off food. If you do not have enough to feed yourself and your family, you are in poverty. You then qualify for benefits, such as foodstamps, cash aid, employment assistance. These services all seek to remedy a situation that was drawn out in the late 1950s. In today’s world of high energy bills, cellular phones, increased suburbanization, and the decline of work in rural centers, for those that need to commute to work every day, there is no service to alleviate their car insurance or gas prices. Section 8 sought to eliminate the congested poverty of projects and poor neighborhoods by providing poor people with housing vouchers. This often did no more than disseminate tight knit communities of poor people, a support system, as ridden with crime as it may have been, and isolated those individuals in neighborhoods that they did not understand and did not understand them. When I was looking for housing in Chicago, I ran across countless listings that refused to accept Section 8 due to cost of paying someone to do all that paperwork. One realtor told me she often ran across studios for 300 dollars (an unheard of rate), but did not list them because of the deluge of Section 8 requests she would inevitably receive.

What this tells me is that individuals of the lowest means of our society have not taken care of. Well yeah, you say, but I wonder, if like myself before my service, you say that in a purely semantic way.

I pay a lot of attention to politics, though I rarely talk about it with anyone but my father. Now I don’t like John McCain. I used to, but he sold out to the Republican machine. In reference to the time immediately after 9/11, he criticized Bush for encouraging people to go shopping, saying rather individuals should have been encouraged to volunteer for a cause larger than themselves. Peacecorps service should have exploded, as with domestic programs like the one I work for.

I did some research and found out that in his first term, Bush cut the rewards VISTA and other Americorps members receive in half. This when he strived to place volunteerism at the core of his platform. The only good thing he did do was reach out to religious organizations and offer them federal funding. This was heavily criticized by many liberal factions (I once count myself among their numbers), but I do not think they really understood. In many ways this move offered a shift in Christianity from being a platform from which to lobby for the legislation of millenia old moral values, to something more close to its origins, that of charity. This shift, seen in many young evangelicals is the reason why Obama is reaching out to that side of things. The idea of conservatism trumpeted between the fifties and nineties will be dead within one generation.

Back to my service however, I am not paid enough to survive. If it were not for the generosity of my family and friends, there are numerous economic binds I would not have made it out of. I would’ve had to quit my service if say, my parents had not helped me purchase a new car when I found out my old one had dangerous electrical problems. In this way I have realized that Americorps seems to cater much to the middle-class and upper-middle-class. While I do not oppose this, as it is us liberal Americans that could really use an eye-opener if you ask me, I do not appreciate a government program that asks me to volunteer, offers to pay me enough to survive, but ensures I will end my service in massive massive amounts of debt.

This frustration gnaws at my bones, but it is something I am seeking to alleviate. I have opened and etsy store (leatherandtwine.etsy.com) and am keeping an eye closer to my many trips into Fresno in attempt to make friends.

I do not think I will, so I will be scaling that back.

One of my goals when I came out here was to use the relative isolation in order to grow spiritually. Depression and spirituality are not necessary compatible in practice. It is only when spirituality reaches out to you and offers a way out.

I recently dreamt an old woman gave me an envelope full of money. In the dream I was in Chicago. It was before I was so painfully dumped, and when I got home with this money, I looked at it and realized the old woman gave it to me because she realized I was going to go through some hard times soon. All that followed has been difficult, but here is a reservoir of support that preceded every moment of my life, its beginnings in my very origination of being.

Similarly I dreamt a nerdy yet curvaceous and attractive girl wanted me to go to the opposite side of this house I often dream about. It required that we swim through a very tight passage and I was afraid I would get stuck. There, in the dark, the girl swimming before me, I did get stuck and it was only when I relaxed that my body slipped through the claustrophobic tunnel and I ascended into the light.

I know these are the times of mainstream atheism but bear with me. These functions are at the core of all of us. In a time where individuality reigns we feel it is our decision whether or not we have core spiritual values. As if a few years of post-modernism can erase something that has been with us since the birth of human consciousness.

I look at these things as a resource that I can draw from in dark times. I have many dark times, as my close friends know. It often seems that bad karma swirls about me like a swarm of flies. For me however, dark times are a moist and unconscious place where gestates incredible personal growth.

I am certainly seeing them now and there have been many times in the past few weeks where I have not been myself. Work has also taken a huge turn. I realized that I will not be doing a bunch of interesting cultural projects, because to do so would be selfish. I equated these projects in a grant I wrote to dust in the wind. The community is arid here, not much grows for long. So I will be doing community organization in order to pave the way for the next VISTA. My supervisor recently told me that this work I’ve been doing has helped her realize that this project is about empowerment and that is the most important thing.

This is a culture of dependency down here. The administration is funded entirely by federal grants, which often lapse, throwing the entire system off and threatening aspects of the Rancheria’s social and environmental stratum. There is a staggering unemployment rate that I won’t list for the sake of privacy, which necessitates that many families subsist entirely off government aid. The tribal administration relies on non-tribal organizations to supply services from health, to job counseling, to cultural programming, and the administrative failings of these organizations guarantee that many of these services will not be sufficient. So residents are dependent on organizations to develop community programming and know they won’t follow through.

I wrote in an early draft of one grant:

“There is only one road leading in and out of the CSR. This road crests a mountain before descending into a deep pit in the otherwise hilly topography. Community members refer to this hot and windless depression as “the Hole,” for there are more than just geographical obstacles keeping an individual from extricating him or herself. The Sycamore Creek once overflowed its banks every year and covered a nearby floodplain dubbed “the Mud Pit,” but has since been restricted to a trickle that only flows in the winter months.”

More than anything, this community needs empowerment. I picked up a book called “Building Powerful Community Organizations” and so far it is quite good! If anyone has any other recommendations for reading about community organization I would very much be interested.

Ok enough.

KILLER HEAT, MAN

2008-08-05T18:02:00.000-07:00

My exotic experience has been compromised by the act of experiencing. Now my commute is just a commute, though it leads through the crevices in massive dusty mountains; the vegetation sparse and dull, hazy green to the golden grey texture of the land.

The fact that I’m the only caucasian walking on this vast cultural territory is unremarkable; motivating native youth to map an ancient cemetery and facilitating an Elders Association working with the USDA to plant a garden of traditional plants.

My home has turned lackluster, the bedrock covered in piles of dried grass, puffy with spiderwebs, the dry rose bush reaching out and grabbing my knotted hair, the hawks roosting overhead and the burial ground beyond the stream.

It’s strange to think that isolation breeds what feels like superficiality and that it is this hollowness that brings depression. For me, happiness develops through my ability to differentiate myself in thoughts and actions. As such it’s hard to keep momentum. This life, which seemed like an escape from the malaise and rigidity that so succinctly defined my previous life has become just that, a life. My present from the past, as distant as one might be from the other, feel like one life.

The heat is overbearing and breezeless. I’ve never had so much appreciation for shade. With the sun undiffused, shadows are drawn with precise angularity on the ground. The contrast is infinitely more profound than the humid climates I’m used to, where one can only discern the harsh difference between shade and sun from 30,000 feet. From the ground I know shade to be great sweeps of amorphous darkness.

It is the complete lack of clouds; naught but congested bundles of trapped moisture. When I see a cloud I look dumbly, wondering how it got so far down. Despite the short distance between the summit and the hills, millions of gallons of water are held in cold lakes and it is twenty degrees colder.

LB called where I lived the hot side of the mountain, and as the temperature elevates, I believe him. I despise air conditioning, but in order to keep my place in the mid to high eighties I have to use it. My electricity bill has skyrocketed well beyond what I was paying in the winter and my cats pant, exhausted on the linoleum floor of the kitchen.

I think it might just be the abrasiveness of summer here and to be so engulfed in the land. Our perception is diffused by the city. Though we still feel the temperature and humidity with utter clarity, the lack of defined shape over the territory makes that weather anonymous, wearing the same clothing no matter where it is. Of course, these west coast cities are somewhat different as the topography dictates the layout of that city and in LA, houses are build as tightly together on the 40 degree grade conical slopes as they would on the ground.

I was down there this past weekend to practice with the band I’ll be playing with at the Fuck Yeah Fest in late august. The sound was noticeably louder and heavier. It was exactly as I had heard it in my head when I recorded the series of spare, light, demos you might have heard. It’s good to add some more triumph to my life.

Not sure if I made an announcement about that on here, but if you live in California I’d love to see you there! August 30th. I’m slated to play in the Jensen Rec Center in Echo Park, but that could change. It should be a pretty big time deal and I’m really looking forward to it as I rarely play live.

A THOUSAND MILLION CLARIFICATIONS

2008-07-27T14:15:00.000-07:00

For those of you who did not read my posts on the Adventure School’s website, I summarized many of the ideas explored on this blog. I used the guestblog to inform people about the intricate culture of the Hokoma-Mono band of the California Indians, as well as Indigenous peoples in general.

For us young people breathing the cutting edge of conceptual art, Indigenous cultures are often-times neat-looking/sounding vat from which to appropriate images, symbols, and sounds. We rarely seek to understand this symbol beyond the semantic (ex. this dreamcatcher catches our bad dreams). I do not believe this appropriation is actively disrespectful, but I was hoping to encourage my audience to consider the root of the aesthetic before slapping the head dress on. If you appropriate, know your source. If someone asks, don’t just say “some African field recording” of “an Indian store.” For more assimilated objects, like moccasins, this is less important.

I say all this because I believe artistic appropriation may support the preservation of tribal cultures, but if this appropriation is not grounded in an understanding of the object, there goes the integrity. Suddenly, what we do amounts to an absolute dilution of an already universalized nationalistic Indian culture. When considering those individual tribal cultures facing extermination (and there are many), our appropriation is like buying from a tomato Walmart rather than a farmers market, but vehemently claiming solidarity with the localized food movement.

Obviously a lot has happened since I last posted in here. I’ve closed in on specific project ideas down on the Rancheria. Sustainability has become my soul focus, leaving behind those dreams I had of a library of oral tradition etc…unless I can mobilize the community behind such a project.

As there is little in the way of institutionalized cultural infrastructure, I am forming three committees.

The Elders Committee is going strong with attendance increasing every meeting. I am cautiously approaching the creation of a Youth Committee. Due to inherent suspicions, I feel that I need to be as uninvolved in its implementation of this committee as possible. I am working closely with Tribal Administration in the creation of a Cultural Committee as I hope it will be a core support of the eventual creation of a Cultural Resources Department.

I am still working to open up an account in which I can hold funds. I am on my third memo clarifying the accounts purpose. It is now called the “Traditional Ways Preservation Account” as many find the word “culture” to be reductive and inherently occidental.

I have partnered with L and G to help them start up an educational group on the Rancheria. Their want was to start a class exploring the true history of this region. One educated about past and present relations with the Anglo-American population, tribal members will not be as likely to make the same mistakes that compromise the tribes economic and cultural footing time and time again.

L and I later sat down and turned this idea into a historical society, drawing out its mission statement, values, and objectives. L wants this society to be specific to the Hokoma band of Mono Indians, but I am worried this might isolate many of those on the Rancheria who do not have ancestry in this band. However, I am so happy that L is now interested in engaging with youth, and other interested tribal members, that I’m willing to wholly support this venture. I believe the presence of G will help mediate those things that some perceive to be abrasive about L. These things are really rooted more in misunderstanding than any fundamental issues of character.

Lately a lot of friends have mentioned disputes they’ve had with others about issues relating to Native Americans. Being young, educated, privileged, and liberal it’s only natural that we work to verbally support under-served minority populations. There has been some confusion about how to approach Native American populations beyond hollow and automatic statements like: we really fucked them over. Well, it really is that simple, but what’s important to remember is that we fucked them over, but much of that was to do with the inability between these two parties to communicate. As we westerners are naturally imperialistic, the relationship easily tilted towards us as the oppressors. This kind of relationship is still prevalent today, as as treaties were constantly signed and broken, so too, legal agreements are ratified and then ignored by Anglo-Americans.

It is both simple and very complicated. Even after six months I am unable to pinpoint the source of the miscommunication, but there is no doubt in my mind that it is at the root of most, if not all, disputes between Anglo-American and Indigenous peoples.

This does not however absolve Anglo-Americans of their extraordinary corrupt methods for dealing with Indigenous peoples. It is still our, yes, we collective Americans’, protocol to assimilate Indians rather than fully appreciating their culture. Instead of encouraging a way of life tailored to their culturally embedded ways of perceiving things, we would so much like them to enter the middle-class American fold, hanging on to their traditions for diversity’s sake. This goal is not relegated to conservative ideology, but is as embedded in liberal thought.

We want minorities to succeed, but their success is not drawn in terms specific to their culture, but to own own. While I can’t say this with any kind of credibility, I would not be surprised if this kind of encouraged assimilation is at the root of the conflict between White America and a great majority of minority populations.

So when you say “we really fucked them over,” in reference to the Native Americans, or any other group of Indigenous peoples afflicted by the Western blight, correct that statement by putting it in the present tense. We didn’t simply do something terrible and have since been making amends. I have seen first hand as the tribe I work with is marginalized, refused federal funds, ignored by corporations with capital interests in their sacred territories, and passed over by the forest service when petitioning for a return of traditional lands (instead seeing those lands awarded to the boy scouts).

Typically when I tell people what I’m doing, they first mention casinos, before anything else. I have to qualify my work by stating that my tribe does not have a casino. This makes the job of establishing credibility easier for me, as if I were working with a casino tribe, even one whose casino is in extraordinary disrepair and does little to economically support the tribe, I would struggle to establish a need there. So, hear this, not every tribe has a casino. Some who have casinos do not make much money off that casino. Those that do have successful casinos often dismiss tribal members in order to increase the pot of distributed money. Wealth is often a source of corruption.

However, before building a casino, a tribe might have been living in cardboard houses with no running water or electricity; up until very very recently.

While we have visible disdain for the presence of unsanctioned gambling, if it were legalized, entrepreneurs would line our highways with slot machines and I can guarantee the profits would not be benefitting the most under-served of all minority populations.

As you can see, the “casino issue” is very complex.

Now political correctness. My use of the term “Indian” offends white people much more than it does “Native Americans.” I find the latter term to be, well it just makes me feel gross. The indigenous peoples of this continent were well established here long before the arrival of Europeans or the declaration of Independence. To state that they are “native” to our country implies a sort of ownership, forcing their participation in a government that up until very recently was wholly bent on eliminating them all together.

“Indian,” while based in Columbus’ geographical confusion, has been appropriated by Indigenous peoples in much the same way that gay people appropriated “Queer” and black people appropriated “Nigger.” Even typing those words makes me feel uncomfortable, but considering I work for a non-profit called The California INDIAN Manpower Consortium, run almost entirely by Indians, it becomes clear that this term need not be handled with such sensitivity. In my day to day, I prefer the word “indigenous,” but honestly, I use it interchangeably along with “Indian” and “Native American,” really, whatever comes out.

So our common notions of political correctness really go out the window when it comes to Indians. Here are things that culturally sensitive individuals should be more careful about. There is no “religion.” This implies a separation of spirituality and daily life, something entirely European. “Culture” too, as I mentioned earlier, is a word that reduces a “Way of Living” to something that can be easily codified. In reference to our own lives, culture typically means: the arts, music, theater, while when we use it about people from different cultural backgrounds, we use it to describe their whole being.

“Culture” is a hard word to get around as its so crucial when communicating the needs of Indigenous peoples.

I had a funny discussion with a fellow VISTA serving with a tribe on the other side of the Nevadas from where I am. She expressed upset with being referred to as white so often and wondered if it would be off-base for her to ask her co-workers to refer to her as Anglo instead.

I feel anecdote accurately illustrates our extraordinary sensitivity to terminology, which really does no more than signify. The word “Indian” signifies a “Native American” as much as “Native American” signifies an “Indigenous Person.” The fact that our minds automatically drift towards stereotypes (mohawks, teepees, and casinos) is much more of a problem than our use of terminology that liberal fascism deems “not PC.”

So anyway, don’t sweat it too much is the point.

BAG

2008-06-25T19:13:00.000-07:00

GUEST BLOGGING

2008-06-20T12:26:00.000-07:00

I've been asked to be a guest blogger for The Adventure School. Very cool event planning company that creates immersive adventure environments (intense). Also amazing website.

I'll be posting there from today, June 30th (Summer Solstice) until July 30th. Because of this load, and how busy I've been with work, postings here will be less frequent on this blog. So between now and then, check that place out. I'll be blogging about the usual, a little shorter in form. I'll notify you all if I update here.

Thanks!

PTSD part 1

2008-06-15T18:23:00.001-07:00

It was dark by the time I got on CA-168 and as windy as the road is, I don’t recall that about my first trip up. I remember a straight road, dark on all sides, and then up a hill. I had secured a room with a man in his late thirties named R.

I arrived to deep barks from the three pit bulls. The motion activated light carved out a hollow in the darkness. The mud caked my shoes as I strolled beside the square concrete step stones. I could discern the vibrant green moss clinging to the exposed boulders and the trees, leafless but heavy and wet. There was something about this place that activated a terrible fear in me.

Within one day I was giving family and friends my physical address. I was worried I would disappear and with no friends in the area, no one would come looking. I’d slip into the long darkness trailing behind the double-wide, maybe into the abyssal stomach of Snow Chief, the scarred and sun blistered pit-bull with an infection where the barbed choke collar mauled his neck. R, with his pot belly and heavy upper-torso, the delicately sculpted chin-strap and miniature ponytail, he’d feed me to the animal.

R showed me a photograph he took of Snow Chief out on the property while he was smoking weed. Before the foaming stream, surrounded by moss, the gnarled beast with his thin white hair and pink skin; muted, his head downward and vulnerable. A lens flare broke above him like some lantern over a religious icon.

I knew this dog had killed, as R had told me, saying it was really put on Snow Chief. He was forced into the situation R said, but once a pit bull killed well, that was that. The list I tabulated in my head of the animals the dog killed went on and on, other dogs and goats. My hopes of getting a dog for myself were squashed.

R described beating Snow Chief with a two-by-four, the dog’s mouth a vice around a weaker female.

There was an acute sexual energy seething from R’s shabby doublewide. I couldn’t pinpoint its origin, but fought off an extraordinarily powerful demon enlivened by the perverse essence of that place. I would’ve run out of there sooner but for my inability to distinguish whether or not the immanent threat I perceived was elemental and imaginary.

As three hour long panic attacks became a nightly occurrence, my mother was desperate for me to persevere. My father offered the unslanted support that has become his m.o. I asked Mark, my dream analyst and he told me to trust my instincts, even if the threat wasn’t real.

Though my adverseness to potent masculine energy would have to be dealt with, I did not have to deal with it through this man and his blistered pit bull.

I don’t think I was being entirely delusional.

There was a base distrust between R and I. I grew more unnerved the deeper I delved into R’s history and personality.

Three estranged sons, time in prison for fire arms, no job, just boxer shorts sitting on a single bed by the television, corresponding with women on craigslist using his iphone. Supposed savings bouy’ed him and with the double-wide paid for, my rent was taking care of his car payment.

He talked about an illegitimate son and how he’d desperately tried to establish his paternity, but the mother refused. R acted clueless about it, but his aloofness towards self-implication drew a portentous picture.

I wondered what R’s father was like. Java Joe loved him and would engage me about Mr. G every time I stopped in, but as a role-play developed between R and I, of me the aloof son and he the controlling father, I wondered if Mr. G was just a wiser version of R.

The smell of marijuana was overpowering. Discarded stems sat in a pile beside a murky bong on the shaky table R kept against his knees. It wasn’t medicinal because the clubs got too expensive, R said. He never mentioned his dealer, or from what I observed, made a pick up.

Boxes were stacked to the ceiling. R said they contained his mother’s estate, as if the whole of it were recently dropped on him, but this clutter had been there for some time. There was no movement. R claimed the reason he didn’t have a job was that he didn’t have his resume as an attachment on his iphone. I suggested he go to the library, but he dismissed it due to the limited amount of time you could spend on a terminal.

It was all very depressing.

R was full of discouragement for me when I ventured out of the house in those initial days. Either the roads were undriveable due to the flurry the night before or the trip was too long.

When I expressed interest in buying a space heater he retorted that if I didn’t shut my door at night I wouldn’t lose so much heat. I felt cornered and without privacy.

Ever since my abduction in Brooklyn I had been habitually drawing escape routes out of wherever I happened to be: workplaces, stairwells, bedrooms, department stores. I also plotted my own death, constantly, and it came everywhere. It was sexually perverse, strung up by my hands in a barn and humiliated.

With no clear escape route through the towers of cardboard boxes and stacked furniture in R’s house, my paranoid state escalated. I considered the windows, blocked by cardboard to keep the cold out, but there was Snow Chief. Let off the chain he would tear me to pieces.

R threw the money order I had given him for rent back at me, saying he wouldn’t pay the fifteen dollars Western Union would charge him to cash it. I offered him the fifteen dollars and he refused, saying it was my problem.

The clerk took his social when R cashed the money order (‘that little fuck’). I realized it was R’s paranoia that inhibited him from returning to the check cashing facility. He was terrified of his personal information leaking out, but why?

After six days he openly described the meth lab that his brother-in-law operated out of the master bathroom before he kicked him out. His brother-in-law is one that textured the walls in my bedroom but never painted them. The texture was gritty and dusty, it’d been a long time.

I offered to cash the money order myself, but R simply squinted his eyes at me. The only option was to return it for a bank check, for which the fee was fifteen dollars and we’d still be in the same boat. I pressed him to open a checking account, but R was diverted when the bank wouldn’t take the tags of his automobile as a form of ID.

I curled up on a roll out futon, lonely and terrified, cocooned in a blanket.

I told R I wanted a lock on my door, just so I could feel more secure, and he said: ‘I don’t care, I’d break it down if I needed to.’

I went to sleep, reggae music making the walls vibrate, and wondered when it would come. Would they ever find my body or would I be wholly injested, just dog shit fertilizing the soggy wintry land, the vibrant moss. My belongings added to the stacks of cardboard boxes and my car a dam in the stream bed.

How would they find me?

Probably the post office. I had given them my physical right…but how long would it be before my parents got nervous, wondered why the hadn’t heard for a while. Things seemed slack on the Rancheria. If I stopped showing up, how long would it be before C tried to track me down?

The non-chalance of my friends and family was maddening. I understood why a person could simply disappear, like a void was astride us all the time. To simply slip away…I returned to that time, meandering aimlessly with Carlo in Brooklyn, flanking me with a swagger defined by his low belt-line, stooping to rub smudges of dirt off his white shoes, the knife palmed in his hand.

I began to realize I lived in that moment, in the same way divine symbolism is perpetually occurring. I’m going back there in writing about it. I become nervous about everyone and every thing. I trust nothing.

This is what PTSD feels like, but I’ll write more about that another day.

WHITE WHALE AND BAGS I MADE

2008-06-10T17:23:00.000-07:00

Here's a shot from my friend's film 'White Whale,' for which I did some leatherwork.

ENTHUSIASM

2008-06-10T11:21:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to find quiet moments.

Work was never breakneck; always sort of floated by. I was keeping busy, but never faced a deadline. I approached the development of a Cultural Preservation Program in a leisurely fashion. ‘No rush’ was an easy addendum to any request and there was no reason to pressure my co-workers to help me with any projects or events since those two things were few or respectively non-existant.

Now it’s all happening at once. In reflecting on the past week, I think the Elders Committee meeting was the catalyst. Nicky suggested I start one down on the Rancheria and gave me a few forms, questionnaires. I figured that if I started an Elders Committee, it would be formation of a great ally. There was no requirement that I do it, but as I struck month after month off my calendar, it was becoming apparent that the Elders were not going to come to me.

It’s hard for me to gauge community enthusiasm down here. People are so used to either no projects/classes/events or maybe one with the intent of more, but nothing follows. Sustainability is a very new idea in terms of cultural programs on the Rancheria.

As such, I’m hesitant in just scheduling events with the hope that people will come. My Cultural Round Table turned into a nightmare and made it apparent that an open-ended brainstorming session simply complemented an oblong, divided, yet highly mutable social structure, with an equally unrestricted model.

With the benefit of retrospect, I can see why the meeting imploded and won’t be holding one of those again. Rather, I’ll be assembling a Cultural Resources Committee, but back to the Elders.

About three weeks ago an old portly man in a straw hat with a thick white beard knocked on my door. His complexion leaned more towards caucasian, but for the slight color one might have mistaken him for a white man. He was vulnerable, despite how he dwarfed me in stature. His eyes darted circles around my faces as he asked if I might schedule an Elders meeting, a way to get organized.

He stated no goals, made no abstract statements like: “you have to help the Elders,” which only leave me wondering how I do that exactly. I told him I would schedule a meeting. He thanked me and slipped out of the offices.

I made a flyer, got the usual response in the office, and then things were quiet. With the initial questions already determined by CIMC, I didn’t need to do much preparation. Things went back to being slow. I went back to my moneyless program that couldn’t even generate enough funds to purchase an vegetable platter.

To be fair I wanted to achieve a lot of things but was seeing internal resistance. Even with the CIMC Summer Youth program, for which R asked me to design some cultural work activities, I wouldn’t be able to be a supervisor and with the restrictions that were put in place by the previous tribal council (requiring background checks for anyone supervising), I wasn’t counting on it actually happening for those restrictions, while justified, were never followed up on.

Simply opening a Cultural Resources Account was proving to be a massive hurdle. R was treating the issue as if I wanted to open a personal back account in the tribe’s name.

The attitude is not necessarily fatalistic, because in a lot of ways, these people have already lost, or that’s how it feels sometimes. There’s a palpable air of defeat and when I talk about you know, large cultural community programs, people cock an eyebrow as if to wish me luck in my implausible venture.

There are much bigger things on the table right now, like basic fiscal sustainability of the tribe overall! Why worry about cultural programs when the EPA head just got laid off.

I chided myself by saying that if nothing happened now, it would down the line. I had to build trust with those people whose help I wanted.

I once thought trust grew from a foundation of friendship, which is what I experienced elsewhere, in a white man’s world I guess you could say. Even when I had achieved friendship with the most guarded individuals, they still didn’t believe I would do a god damn thing. With so little going on, I wondered why people weren’t throwing their support my way.

It felt like the staff of the offices was just waiting for me to break and accept say, a full-time supervisor position with the CIMC summer youth program, despite the fact that it was well outside the scope of my program. If I did that, it would be a sure fire sign of defeat; that no, a Cultural Preservation Program would not survive on the Rancheria and so I was wasting my time.

I stood firm and had to re-iterate my inability to do this many times, because even if others don’t believe I can start a Program, I do.

It’s only in writing this that I’m realizing that their skepticism was relegated towards professional ventures I was proposing, whereas they’d heartily joke with me the rest of the time. In a community as tight knit as that of the Rancheria, with self-governance in the mix, it seems that people have to get used to their friends failing them professionally.

I hear the name of the previous chair of the tribal council, T, and know he really blew it, but no one ever slanders his character. It’s as if individuals are expected to make messes that will then have to be cleaned up by their friends and family members, messes that don’t just affect one life, but two hundred! Those individuals are not ‘marked’ for their trespasses. In navigating such a delicate and complex issue as self-governance, corruption is as expected as a lack of community involvement.

So in the past few weeks I was spreading my program wide: grant proposals cultural classes, the cultural account, and the Elders Committee. By accruing a lot of different results across the cultural bandwidth, it is my hope that people begin to buy this idea of sustainability.

While these classes are all well and good, sustainability is really the main goal of my putting them together. I refuse to plan a class when it feels merely charitable, like I am doing it on my own expense for the good of the people I’m working for. While altruism is at the core of my job, so is the goal of getting the community to pick up the program after, or even before, I’m gone.

I understand that with some people struggling to maintain their families under the portentous weight of poverty, dependent on a government allowance, still paying back for the way their ancestors were treated. When a family is struggling to keep its hands away from the bottle and off of each other, cultural preservation seems to be one of the least important. It’s the casino tribes that can afford to throw money into that kind of venture, which is sad, because in their affluence, they live much less like Indians than the poorest tribes.

My program isn’t attacking this basic needs issue, which is huge down there, so it’s hard for me to convince those who might support me that creative needs are just as important as say, dietary needs. When people can’t afford to feed their kids properly, how do you get them out to build moccasins, or moreso, how do you get them out to plan a program to raise the money to buy the leather with with to make moccasins on their own?

Though dressed up in a scenario, this is the fundamental question I am facing. How do you motivate the beaten down? How do you convince the wise to share their wisdom with an irreverent culture? Where does the hope come from that helps one feel assured that a Cultural Preservation Program would actually raise the esteem of a people often destitute and depressed?

I never really expected an Elders Committee to pose a potential solution to these quandaries, but as I ran through the questions and kept the discussion on track, I began to see that there was a lot of want down there, for cultural activities, transportation to ancient gathering areas to college sour-berries or black oak acorns, filling entire sacks of what falls on the ground. I thought that the Elders would be the last place I’d find such enthusiasm as I saw them even less than the youth.

Two days later I presented the notes before the Tribal Council and found that they too were interested. R suggested a council member attend every meeting and report back, J chimed in to elaborate on the sparse notes I took as he had briefly attended the meeting. The cultural account was approved, pending my raising money to open it. The cultural and dancing and regalia classes were approved. The subject turned towards the formation of a cultural committee and for the first time the tribe pledged not only moral support but financial support and manpower to help me achieve this! I was overwhelmed.

Then the subject turned to how they might help me raise money to open the cultural account, rather than having someone come down from CIMC to help me do it. Though C was a little loopy with a severe inner ear infection, she threw her support my way and so did everyone else. This was so surreal as I’ve gotten very little in the way of project support down here and what support I have received was hard to squeeze out of the tribe. Even personal support is rare, which is equally as discouraging as I’m all alone out here.

“Thank you for having me,” I said as I left the meeting, despite the fact that the council members are all my friends. E, who would slowly dissect all my goals, show them to be hollow or impossible, who I can never QUITE communicate with, patted me on the shoulder and said:

“no, it’s us who should be thanking you for starting an Elders Committee.”

TWINE JEWELRY

2008-06-10T09:49:00.000-07:00

NEW JEWELRY

2008-06-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

PICTURES OF CATS

2008-06-04T09:36:00.001-07:00

LAID OFF

2008-05-31T13:48:00.000-07:00

In my writings I have referred to L more than any other person on the Rancheria. This reflects the amount of influence he has had over my actions, past, present, and intended. It is my belief that this influence was a primary goal in our initial interactions. Not only was I to be working in cultural preservation, but I was an outsider and free of the biases that lock down the Rancheria and divide it into a handful of ineffective factions.

With no formal training from CIMC, my first few weeks were spent getting toted around by L and E, to Balch Camp, to the mudhole, to water towers and wells. He pointed out the names of current council members written in graffiti on the tin water tower. E was quiet and there would be L telling long stories. He spoke assuredly and with such activism, which helped me in understanding the structure of Indian Country and the issues that face it today.

L’s anger with the community laid the foundation for later revelations about why a polarizing nature like his can paralyze a modern Indian community, which has helped me identify the others who have a similar nature and see where they can benefit someone in my position and where they can serve as a detriment.

Hopping out of his grey Chevy S10 to pluck some wild sage from the side of the road, speaking for a long time to the plant, his hands in his pockets, chin gesturing out at the hills and the eagle feather tethered to the cap of his ball-cap wavering in the wind.

L poignantly outlined concepts that others were resistant to share, about having to teach himself to look people in the eye when speaking or being spoken to (something you don’t do when you’re an Indian) and about the imperative to do things the right way when it comes to traditional practices. More so than any other individual, L shaped the way I relate to the environment down on the Rancheria.

He would wrest me from an office full of women and give me large doses of masculinity bordering on verbal misogyny. I’d hesitantly swap stories with him about female conquests and extraordinary amounts of alcohol once consumed back in the day while sipping on a soda from the 30-rack in the backseat.

Our friendship was only tempered by his volatility within the community: when he drove away my cultural round table or began to outwardly reject proposed community projects. There was a period of a few weeks when I was hesitant to tag along, to gather long strips of bark and poles for a traditional housing structure, and this was done honestly out of personal protest.

For the complexity of my relationship with L, the greatest role he served for me was friendship. It’s hard being the white man in a sea of Indians, and intending to deal in culture! When I was so stricken by my outsider nature, L was the first person willing to open up to me, receptive to the fact that I wasn’t there to be didactic and naive.

The distance I had been imposing over our relationship made the events of Thursday all the more pronounced. It was in the afternoon. I was fiddling with a proposal for a video project I’ll outline in a future post when he knocked on the door.

“Hey Forrest, just want to let you know I won’t be around no more. So you won’t be seeing me around here. So, see you later.”

“Are you joking?” I asked, not out of disbelief but people joke a lot down here.

“Nope.”

I shook his hand but then stood, held on to his hand and he led me outside. There was no delaying his route to the truck and I spoke to him through a crack in the window, leaning on the hood to delay his departure.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Remember all that EPA stuff was goin’ on?”

“Yeah,” I said.

There had been a lot of talk of the EPA lately, but having no place in the administration, none of it filtered down to me.

“They wouldn’t renew our grant,” he said.

The hard and terse last word, everything bearing on an application.

“Stupid,” I muttered.

“Yeah so, you won’t be seeing me around here no more,” L said.

“What are you gonna do?”

“Collect unemployment, get wasted,” he said with no ounce of enthusiasm, a sobering neutrality in his tone.

I puckered my lips. How do you respond to that?

“Well I’m gonna need your help,” I said, “I’ll come by some time after work.”

“Bring beer,” he said very seriously and put the truck in gear.

I lifted my hands from the hood.

“Ok,” I said, my voice muted by vernal fungus I knew grew around booze down there.

I shifted my feet in the empty parking lot, only the sounds of the cheering male pheasants, the dippy tear drop feather wavering on top of their heads.

“Is this for real?” I asked C, pointing over my shoulder as if my interaction with L still resonated in the space behind my head.

“Yes.”

I started realizing the silence around this inevitable happening. L is C’s brother and lives with their father and their younger brother, a strange and clownish man with a long mullet and drooping face, who shows me no emotion but to occasionally scream on his bike when I drive by.

“What happened.”

“Well the EPA was running on 06/07 funding and when we told them we didn’t have anymore money, they said we had plenty. So, yeah.”

“That’s stupid,” I said.

C's face was flat. Her expression seemed to say: it might be stupid but it happens a lot.

There was no fanfare, no great protest. I just returned to my office and went back to fiddling with the grant, now shadowed by a great sadness.

Collect unemployment, get wasted.

About an hour later I heard L come into the office. Poking my head around the doorway I saw his wraparound sunglasses, his face looser, less terse. He didn’t even glance into the office.

“Just seein’ about my check,” he said.

I started packing up my stuff. I listened closely to the swill of conversations floating about the office. L was explaining to C about what E had to do the next morning, something to do with water quality. “Hell I’ll do it, it’s easy,” he said.

By the time I was getting my food from the kitchen L was gone. I got in my car, still somber, listening to the latest news about a primary stale as the air. Cresting the hill over the intersection of Borough Valley with Borough Valley North I found myself behind L’s white truck. I trailed behind him at some distance, wondering where he was going. Adjacent to the elementary school, he turned down Tollhouse Rd. towards the liquor store.

Mercury wasn’t hollering so much when I got home. I acquired a friend for him. Guadalupe the calico (pictures to follow—soon as I get a new USB cable for my digital camera), though for the first few days Mercury used Guadalupe solely as target practice. The air was lifting around L’s getting laid off.

He’s always been the cultural go-to man, the closest there is to a medicine man down there that I’m aware of. He’s the protector of a vast reservoir of sacred knowledge where things that can’t be spoken, only practiced. There’s a sea of it just behind his eyes, but this great unconscious library is, for the most part inaccessible in any way that might benefit my project, or it had been anyway. With L out of the offices and E upgraded to water quality specialist, it will be much easier for me to work towards community engagement in cultural projects. I had found myself blocked by L many times in this, but his departure, coupled with the discovery that there’s not a Cultural Resources Account on the Rancheria and the closure of the EPA, the only place for cultural funds, allows the Cultural Preservation Program to act more sinuously.

The plans I’ve had for a long time, of a slow community re-introduction to simplified cultural activities; the intent being that these activities grow more complex in the future, more tied to the gathering of supplies and the proper methods of doing things.

I feel this will be much more effective than the ‘all or nothing’ approach. This approach remains the goal, but for these initial proposals, it only complicated the organization of cultural activities. It didn’t help that the people who know the proper methods of doing things and are so fervent about the ‘all or nothing’ approach aren’t interested in community activities.

As per my discussion with C, I’m aligning myself with the Tribal Council. The current members are all my friends (R my sometimes good-natured foe) and, if the election goes the way I hope it does, both E and B, the receptionist will join the council. While I have not mentioned B very often, she is my closest friend in the Tribal offices. Our close-proximity in age allows us to, well, pal around.

She has also really opened my eyes to the responsibilities that can be accrued by people younger than me. B is only 23, but has two little girls and here I am 26 and can’t even imagine having kids, let alone a wife. For her, her little girls were not the detrimental side effect of a sex life. She is a good and frank mother.

The father, who it seems like is in and out of trouble with the law, is removed. When B has to speak with him about something she says it’s his parole officer on the line. Animosity is garnished with good natured jokes that themselves are garnished by hostility.

We are so focused on abolishing teenage pregnancy. As if every girl who ever gets pregnant under the age of twenty slashes at her wrists and spends the first few months balling in the bathroom! I think it is our centeredness on the middle-class, where children take a long time to grow up (I’m 26 and still rambling!) and don’t deal well with actual stressors.

The middle-class invents stressors, many of them things that happen in impoverished communities that those people don’t find as stressful. We work so hard against abstinence, pushing protective measures, things we call preventative, but as impoverished communities aren’t going to spontaneously spring into the middle class, I wonder if more emphasis should be put into those programs that seek to help young mothers after the fact: parenting classes, free daycare, free babysitters, etc…It wasn’t their getting pregnant that bred a neglected child, who’ll later follow similar patterns to his or her mother, but it was those early years.

I don’t know, just thoughts.

MY NEW ALBUM ONLINE

2008-05-28T14:52:00.000-07:00

GRAFFITITEEN

REPRIMAND

2008-05-28T14:49:00.000-07:00

I’ve been fiddling with this entry for over a week now, itching to publish it. Previous drafts documented my frustration with my inability to get any projects off the ground on the Reservation. I found that I am often blocked by people I perceive to be my allies. The impediments they set in place do not intimate malevolence towards my status as an outsider, but rather the rigidity and structure of Indian identity, which due to the historical weight on their shoulders, has a knee-jerk reaction towards any sort of cultural or organizational infringement.

In a meeting to C, we likened the social stratum to a mine field.

“You’re from this community,” I said, “and you can say there’s a mine there, one there, but I’m just tip toeing.”

I clowned my gentle steps over such culturally sensitive territory with my fingers, like massaging a back covered in delicate sores.

C and I were meeting because the previous Friday we had had a, well, I would call it a conflict. She reprimanded me pretty hard with R.

It was very unexpected, around 4:50 on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. That week had been extremely productive. I had crafted two mini-grant proposals: one for a series of Cultural Activities and one for Traditional Dancing and Regalia Classes.

These proposals were tied directly to perceived and surveyed community needs. I worked closely with P and with S, the new enrollment officers, compiling lists of supplies, lesson plans, etc…the writing was my own. I felt my formalistic style improving and on Friday morning, was confident enough in the proposals to pass them along to C for approval.

I never put anything out without first consulting her, at least in a cursory manner.

Especially now, the tension of financial disaster clots the air in the office. It’s hard to breath, like the thick and hot moisture in a closed shower. While the problems with HUD (Housing and Urban Development), which I’ve mentioned in past entries, are naturally completely out of my hands (thank god!), the outcomes could affect my project.

If the Tribal Council and C are unable to resolve the fiscal deficit, the community might take it in their hands to replace the current Tribal Council, rehire the positions in the office, and start fresh. This happens with some frequently, but rarely in a way that is beneficial to the Rancheria.

There’s nothing Darwinian about the evolution of Tribal Politics. I think Ayn Rand would find her objectivism befuddled by what a detriment self-interest can have over a single Native American community.

First it was the selfishness of white people that pushed Indian communities into such a state of poverty and now and they find themselves internally threatened.

With all this looming financial disaster I didn’t give much thought to how C would react to my proposals. I was anticipating a few post-its, a handful of minor corrections. I’ve never gotten anything more, even in less stressful times.

When I popped into the office to pick up C’s corrections I found myself in a whirlwind of hostility. C and R simultaneously scolded me for breaking a protocol I knew nothing about, they tore me up for certain language I had used in the proposals (such as putting “Cold Springs” in the title and naming ICWA [Indian Child Welfare Act] as a source of organizational support). These seemed to me to be technicalities, things that I could easily remove; not a big deal.

But it was a big deal!

C and R spoke as if they had been in the dark about these proposals. While no, I hadn’t given them a lengthy rundown of the proposed activities, I had mentioned them on multiple occasions to both parties, garnering tacit approval.

With the great portentous swill of fiscal disaster, I hadn’t seen it necessary to make these proposals a central issue in the Tribal Offices. As I work myself away from self-interest, I find that scrambling for absolute attention does no more than distract me from the overall goals of the project, which will be achieved on a grassroots and altruistic level—or so I thought.

My brain was lost in a great fog of upset while they pointed fingers.

P came in and attempted to divert some of the blame onto herself, for she had guided a lot of the language in the grant that I was being implicated for, but the rush of anger focused solely on me that P left the room in discomfort. G, a Tribal Council member sitting in the periphery of the room slipped out, unnoticed by C, R, or myself.

I was extremely angry. You do not reprimand an employee in front of others and you definitely don’t do that to a volunteer!

C stressed that I should have brought this before the Tribal Council, as if it were an incredibly sensitive issue.

I left the room in a haze, shut my blinds, packed up my computer, and got the hell out of the office. I’m volunteering there full time god damn it. I drive an hour a day to work there, and for pittance. I can barely get the staff in the Tribal Offices to attend my events!

It was hard not to carry that sinking shit feeling along with me.

I have plenty of friends, a few very close ones, but out here: nobody. I didn’t have a buddy to go get a beer with to wind down, just an incredibly active kitten named Mercury who loves to gnaw on my bare ankles.

The next day, laundering every single piece of linen I own and exhausted from a cold night spent sleeping under a towel on a bare mattress pad (Mercury is in the habit of peeing on me while I’m sleeping), I considered dumping my little kitten friend. With so much stress at work, coming home to that ball of pure baby energy was too much.

Sunday brought a degree of respite with my bi-weekly dream analysis. By Memorial Day I had lifted myself from the depression, but was no more enthusiastic about work. I felt drained of it, already things had changed in ways that lessened my excitement with the program.

The first big block was when I realized I had no place in dealing with the Mono’s traditional way of doing things, the most threatened aspect, and so had to fall back into the Nationalistic Indian culture, which while not heavily available through activities, tends to be quite healthy overall.

Now I was being treated as if the Tribe were doing ME a favor! I felt a strange disconnect from the social parallels I had developed in my friendships and working relationships. My whole mind quieted while Mercury wriggled in my hands and nursed on my fingers.

I was suddenly feeling very white, is the best way to describe it. Without that tenable connection to a cultural so different from my own I was awash by the blandness of my own, the spiritual bankruptcy I have to struggle against as a Christian say…I thought of the decimated Anglo-Saxon cultures, places I might’ve once retreated to, but was left with the dark existential slate, clean and primed for me to paint my own destiny upon it. Never before had I so clearly felt the atheistic pathos that drives post-modernism.

Tuesday morning I had to wretch myself from bed. Mercury howled behind my bedroom door and chewed on my achilles tendon while I shaved and brushed my teeth.

While driving I felt that same dread I had felt when everyone had walked out on my Cultural Round Table, when I had thought I had said something very wrong. If I were less committed to this job I would’ve quit plain and simple, moved probably. Less severe reprimands had propelled me out a cities in the past.

No C.

She wouldn’t be in until the next day. I made the minor changes to my proposal that she had suggested and killed time researching audio recorders. I want to get a few of these:

It records directly onto CD.

The next day I caught C when she came in and gave her forewarning that I would need to meet with her. I withdrew into my office for another hour, when a general council member came in blazing and drunk.

“They got those eighth graders up there at the graveyard,” she yelled.

At first I thought she was referring kids on dirtbikes riding through there.

“They go up there. It’s been botherin’ me ten years and I know I’m drunk but it’s been botherin’ me ten years. They’re up there, that’s our Elders! That’s the real Elders! Our ancestors! You know they take a test on that! I want to go up there and holler and I’m gonna tell Forrest, with the Elders, that’s what he does.”

I braced myself, making notes in preparation, for she hurried into my office. Her eyes vacillated between sadness and anger, her face contorting sometimes mid-sentence.

“It just tears me up,” she said, “you get your video camera, you put down the music, I’ll give you a movie, we’ll make one hell of a movie come on!”

“I don’t have my camera, unfortunately,” I said.

“You don’t!?” she was in disbelief, “I’d give you one hell of a movie, take you up there and tell you what’s what up there. Those kids, those are the real Elders up there! My husband, he’s up there! They take tests about that!”

Her face became softer. She looked at me at once like a mother looks at her child and then bent down and embraced me, pressing my head against her bust, and fled.

I took advantage of the brief lull to go talk to C, but when I sat own, the woman stepped in, saw the doors shutting.

“No you’re not about me are you?” she said in concern.

“No no no, it’s not that,” I said.

“No no, it’s not,” C said and the woman bent to her, putting C’s head in the crook of her neck.

I realized C already knew I was going to talk to her.

“We used to tear it up didn’t we. Shoot guns at em, using real bullets didn’t we.”

Hard liquor stained the air and the woman left. The mood grew serious.

“I wanted to talk to you about Friday,” I said, “I felt like I was getting reprimanded.”

“I knew it,” C said, “I told R the minute you left, boy we just confused the hell out of him. I saw you, doing this:” she fingered the tip of her nose, “this:” she rubbed her chin, “and this:” she tapped her lips. “I know when it is that you’re confused.”

C gave me the whole rundown, why now, more than any time since I’ve been here, it is an imperative that I go to the Tribal Council first. She explained their core role in attaining the sustainability I desire for the ICPP and how they’re the ones that could make things happen with a Cultural Department. She told me about the long-term plan of creating a full cultural department in the EPA. When I expressed my concern with the isolationist method of cultural preservation over there, slightly veiled, C picked up on it immediately and said they were pushing towards more community involvement.

In terms of TANF, she explained the multiple fiascos that made the tribe hesitant to even get money from them, let alone partner with them. She laid down the intense animosity between these two entities. When I explained my neutrality and goal of co-ercing the office into a more cooperative relationship with the tribe, she didn’t seem entirely opposed to it.

The solution C and I reached was my doing weekly presentations before the Tribal Council, starting this Friday when I will present the two proposals I’m submitting to TANF and my general goals for the next year.

Coming out of C’s office I immediately felt that the hostility had been rooted in a miscommunication, that is, a lack there of. I had not had a sit down with her in some time. Part of that is the intimidation factor. Her office always has four or five people in it, discussing some issue or plan, and while I feel wholly accepted here in the offices, I can’t help but feel that I am infringing by sitting there, leaning on a table, eating some chips and listening.

Perhaps this was the very thing that kept me so enthusiastic to begin with. When I began to feel that I had no business performing the function I was assigned with and as such was a sort of illusory person down her (as per my discussion with R) I had misjudged how embedded I am here. While I am not an Indian, I am accepted as an outsider.

I think the community is beginning to realize that I’m not here to impose some kind of invented subjectivity onto every interaction, as it so often is in the whiter world, each of us being so bland that we cling to whatever issue or facet of identity we can get our hands on. A community as culturally unique and as undeserved as this one has a great appreciation of those people who won’t immediately judge and/or dismiss.

I’ve definitely said things that could be construed as offensive in the past, but people recognize that i am trying. But I’ve begun to be too careful I think.

Slowly the values of my program had become my values. I’ve grown less sinuous.

I remember being especially frustrated with the bark house. L and E built it while on the job, but it was as if it was only for them.

L talked about moving his office into the bark house. While I love the idea of this, he and E put up this bark house as a part of their cultural day activities. Therefore, using the bark house as one’s office seemed out of line with the community oriented design behind its construction, especially when the community wasn’t invited to assist.

Perhaps no one else would care, as L and E told me. They’re probably right.

But still, when Nicky suggested I merge my Cultural Resources Account with those funds set aside for cultural activities at the EPA I said no. I see a community so disenfranchised from itself as to never leave the house, to find cultural activities as just that, activities. It’s not the way it used to be, they say.

The ICPP doesn’t work well with these more isolationist principles and as such, I’m finding myself restricted by it (the ICPP), but also beginning to understand why what few goals it has are in place.

But what kind of man is it creating? I’ve begun isolating those people who stand as teh most knowledgeable. I feel a project percolating in my brain though. A meeting with the publisher about putting together a tribal history got me going. I realized then that you can’t box a community into a template and that the traditional project structure is very unintuitive for indigenous communities. The alternative is something very radical I’ll write more about in the coming weeks.

Culture can’t be shared, but in order for it to persevere, it must be dispersed. Practices must be practices, and in that sense, documenting them does not ensure their subjective survival, only the survival of those esoteric ideas that govern them.

Where’s the way out?

I'M A PRETTY BIG DEAL

2008-05-22T10:38:00.001-07:00

RIFTS

2008-05-22T09:25:00.001-07:00

I apologize for the hefty delay between this entry and my last, which was already post-dated itself by a few days. In addition to accommodating a handful of guests, I took a trip to Joshua Tree for a friend’s film, and then heaping onto a typically serene existence, I found out my car requires 2800 dollars worth of electrical work (paypal donations accepted). So don’t worry, I’m not slowly tapering off so I can finally post something like: “my heart’s just not in it anymore.”

First it was Michael Reich. The video I posted a few entries ago is one he made. We went to college together, met in a comedy troupe. When he graduated I found it difficult to motivate myself in the troupe, which grew more conventional. Weird man out. Short story: I quit. We reconnected when I was in LA, before coming up to Prather.

Mike was writing a screenplay in my house. He stayed there pretty much 24 hours a day, unless I urged him down into Fresno. It was nice to see my trailer being utilized as a mountain getaway, a creative retreat. As my job grows more stressful and demanding, I find less time and energy to engage in creative endeavors myself, so if not me, let the weirdos flood my one bedroom trailer.

There was a weeks repose and then my mother arrived. I honestly can’t recall much about that week. It’s left beneath a haze as the dynamic of my work-life slowly shifts. The revelations I documented in past entries (about the differences between sacred tribal cultural and nationalistic Indian culture) have really informed my behavior at work as well as my goals for the project.

While I was more than happy to be a passenger earlier, toted around by L and E to all sorts of spots of cultural interest, I began to wonder why it was just me in the backseat of the truck sandwiched between 30 racks of Coca Cola. Shouldn’t a youth be in my place?

While I love these trips for their ethnographic value, to so closely touch a subjective experience so far removed from the universal upper-middle class caucasian lifestyle and way of thinking that has been embedded in my psyche, I’ve begun to see them as a slight conflict of interest with my purpose on the Rancheria.

It is wonderful that L and E have been so open with me about cultural issues, but I’ve begun to feel that much of this is due to the fact that I’m virgin territory, so to speak. When L and E began collecting long slats of bark for a traditional dwelling they’re constructing behind the EPA, I was too busy working on mini-grants to tag along. I posed the idea of a “barkhouse raising,” a community effort. I’d publicize the event and secure refreshments for volunteers who help in the project.

“They won’t come,” L said, “they don’t like us. We work to much.”

I pressed him. If he and E are putting it up anyway, might as well use it as a chance for cultural education. While the slow construction of a bark dwelling wouldn’t be the most exciting thing for a kid, a moderate engagement would be enough to plant a seed of experience, something that will grow with time into a defining memory. For Elders too, who feel the younger generations have such a cultural disconnect, it would be nice to see this effort in plain.

Truth is, the community isn’t so unified, which is why I spoke of myself as “virgin territory.” Without decades of bias against certain individuals, no feelings of long-past betrayal or anger. For such a small community, there are so many divisions. The different groups are laid out by housing clusters.

There are are the two story houses up to the left, that’s one group, then coyote drive, apparently they don’t spend time with anyone off that short circle drive, and then the double-wides down by the mud hole. Such stark divisions prohibit any amount of greater community interaction; one might even call these different groups factions.

Some weeks ago E had described this as the greatest problem in terms of community mobilization. It makes me wonder if these houses were more closely grouped would there be more community unification? Do people already isolated, dilate even the minutest distances into great divides in ways of thinking.

We think different than those people a quarter mile down the road.

This is especially strange since fundamentally the community wants the same things, pretty much anyway. A consistent bed of economic support, a healthy environment…well of course it’s not so cut and dry, especially when something like a healthy environment can often be perceived as a weakness.

R once expressed to me that he felt separated from the others in his age group because he wouldn’t drink with them. Not being a big drinker appears to be somewhat of a rarity.

I don’t want to make any huge claims about alcoholism, don’t want to dredge up statistics to back anything up, but as prevalent as it is across the social strata, alcoholism is particularly pronounced with those in poverty and again moreso in Native American populations.

The same genetic make up that turned sugar into poison makes an Indian susceptible to alcoholism, which has more and more been proven to be a genetic pre-disposition and even a disease. In my research I have read numerous reports about the first introduction of booze to Indian communities. Men drank until they went mad. They would kill each other, for no reason whatsoever. Women and children ran and hid, for the ones they loved had become inhuman monsters.

The very thing that contributed to the wholesale destruction of the Indian culture becomes a bedrock on which the remainder stands.

(gasp)

Therefore, as I am unable to establish any sort of project order over the Mono way of doing things and inept to mobilize the community around a singular effort, or even just a handful of people for that matter!, I am turning to the organization of activities more honed to nationalistic Indian culture, with certain things practiced by the Mono, such as basketry, made the central exercise.

It is my hope that what are called The Cold Springs Cultural Days will increase native pride. There hasn’t been much in the way of consistent cultural activities down here for some time.

Often people have made attempts, but they’ve been blocked either by lethargy or the organizational difficulties with event planning. I can tell you that event planning is not one of my favorite things down here. It feels so singular and as such, a gamble if you’re trying to accomplish anything serious.

Again, aside from pow wows, events, projects, and programs are completely unintuitive for Indian culture (I spoke earlier about the almost vaudevillian bureaucracy that encompasses many Indian-run non-profits). It feels at once a compromise and a disease, but in a country with paper trails twirling around the planet, the only thing keeping Indian communities afloat is their ability to keep up and more so, to appropriate cultural values and ideas: the casino.

Another thing on my plate: a summer youth employment program that is banking partially on my project to keep these kids occupied. My plan is to have an Indian Taco Sale (fry bread, taco toppings—delicious), a standard reservation fundraiser, and to purchase a few digital recorders with the money I raise. I’m going to send these kids out to collect stories from parents, grandparents, relatives, neighbors. Then I’m going to have these kids transcribe the recordings, to be used later on in a larger-scale oral history book project.

In this way I can work to preserve those more sacred aspects of Mono culture, while simultaneously engaging the youth with things they may not have ever heard about. While documentation is not practice, it can be a source of education. When I listen to the Hodgson Recordings, there is a great distance between my subjective experience and that of the Indians interviewed on those cassettes. Conversely, the Mono youth on the Rancheria are bound by blood and by association.

It will be a rocky road, supervising these projects with the youth. I haven’t felt anything but ambivalence and disdain from the youth on the Rancheria. Only very young kids have warmed up to me and even then it took time. Employment can often be the ultimate way to force people to confront these assumptions, so hopefully, while engaging the youth culturally (and hands free on my part I might add), I will help them understand the place of outsiders in their community. What works and what doesn’t.

I suppose I should mention something about Joshua Tree. The flies are louder than the wind! I’ve said this so many times, but that portentous sound impregnated my mind with all sorts of apocalyptic associations. I suppose it is only right then that that’s why I was down there, to visit the set of a post-apocalyptic feature a good friend of mine wrote and is directing.

I made those bags for it. White Whale. It was a great weekend. Slept in packed sweaty tents, hung out with friends I hadn’t seen in years, made new friends, and made myself bare before that brutal desert. Everything is sharp! I’m still pulling the organic barbs from my socks.

Pictures of Joshua Tree:

And here is my new room-mate, Mercury:

POST DATED POST

2008-05-13T13:43:00.001-07:00

When will the tumultuous days stop? Wednesday was exhausting. At work for a few hours in the morning before driving to Fresno for a workshop about non-profit sustainability. As it was with the VISTA PSO (pre-service orientation), it was difficult for me to fit advice designed for non-profits into the box of Indian country. Things work fundamentally different down there and social services have to be tailored for this specific population.

One thing the workshop stressed was the need for a non-profit to become as financially independent as possible, that is, no longer reliant on grant funds, which are restrictive, short-lived, and a mess to navigate.

There are few options for a non-profit in terms of increasing profit (which in turn will be kneaded back into the organization), and those that do exist such as contractual work for for-profit companies, are not as feasible in Indian country.

Nonetheless I did learn a thing or two that I’ll weave into my project plan for whomever picks it up when I’m done here.

Picked up some pizza, a vegetable dipping platter, soda and headed back to the Rancheria.

I was determined to be more prepared for my Round Table and Cultural Night than I was for the Elders and Youth Dinner, which was positive chaos: fun but hard to evaluate. Evaluation is important I’m learning.

So I had all my copies made, a long sign-in sheet, agendas (abbreviated and elaborated), and examples of book projects. I set up the room differently than I’d ever seen it. Usually the tables are lined up. Event attendees crowd their chairs directly by the door as if to make escape much easier. I arranged the tables in a semblance of a circle, with small tables for children at both ends.

I put paper with pencils on the children’s tables so that they could be included in the discussion, but have a distraction. I wanted them in on the dialogue.

Then I waited. My co-workers arrived. A handful of kids set up a battle between the safari animals on a far table. I sat with them, discussing the hierarchies of their armies.

“My general is the gorilla,” the little girl said, then turned him around, “look at his butt!” she exclaiming when revealing the bare ass of a plastic gorilla.

No one else was coming in. I sat down at the table, passed the pizza around, and twenty minutes after the determined start time opened the meeting.

I began going through those questions I posted in my last entry, one by one. Organization was paying off. The discussion was productive. The kids were participating. I could ask them directly what they knew about their language or their history and what they’d like to know more about.

It was a nice barometer for the cultural needs of these children. They will be the ones sustaining the cultural heritage of those on Cold Springs soon enough.

The adults present were very open. When we questioned which aspects of culture were the most threatened, the answers fell across the board. It was all threatened.

We started on language and L began chiming in. For all his boisterousness and humor, when it comes to discussing the way of living, as I’ll call it, he becomes solemn, speaks slowly. I grew nervous as he was speaking to the kids and their attention spans hung on by a thread.

L began speaking their language to them, but without explanation, it was forceful. One of the boys watched intently, trying to follow along, but the context was delivered so briefly I came out having learned very little.

“Let’s make headbands,” one of the boys said, tugging my shirt while L was talking.

This was such a bizarre attitude. About this time two people left because their dog kept coming in. The conversation continued, but the kids were lost, screaming and chasing each other around the periphery of the room.

We moved onto methods for preserving those more sensitive and sacred aspects of culture. The discussion fell into the clan system, something I had heard mentioned.

It is an integral part of life. Your clan is determined by the father’s side. Your clan then determines your role. L described how if there were a sweat each clan would have its own place and its own ways of preparing. The medicine man would tell each where they were to sit, because he knew. The clans have their own ways of practicing the spiritual side of life and also the practical side.

I am very interested in learning more about this and will pass it along when I do. For now, I can’t determine what function the clan system performs societally, but I will never say that a lack of obvious functionality is indicative of something that is purely surface. There must be an integral part of society that the clan structure serves.

Along with everything else though, the clan system is passing away. I asked the people left what their clans were and one declared hers unsurely.

“Eagle, I think, that’s what my grandma told me,” she said.

I gestured to the children.

“Do they know?”

Everyone shook their heads.

I asked if there was a way to increase the education about this clan system, to track down the lineage of individual children so they could be brought up knowing the responsibilities of say, a member of the Coyote Clan.

P, my neighbor in the office shut down. Her face tensed. Her lips extended in stress and she stood up and left. The kids trickled away behind her and with just R and I, sitting side by side, L ran his hand through his hair and said:

“I gotta get going here.”

We shook hands and he left. The exodus took about two minutes. What did I do wrong?

R laid out some common ways to offend people down on the Rancheria.

“Never call it ‘religion,’ he said, because it’s not that, you do it all the time,” he said, though I hadn’t breathed the word. “Some people don’t even like culture.”

That I do say a lot. I found myself returning to those days in Liberal Arts school, navigating the toothpick labyrinth of political correctness. It all seems like vaudeville now.

With so many of us living outside the rigidity of tradition, more and more with every generation, we claim what little identity we have as being just as valuable.

I’m beginning to question if say, the clan of women’s rights, the clan of men’s rights, the clan of environmentalists, the clan of queer-rights should identify so strongly with their cause, confusing it with individuation, as the pride we all feel is like a residue of what we possessed before the American melting pot homogenized and the colors began to fade.

While I am Irish, French, and British, I carry nothing from those traditions with me. The only Anglo-saxon belief structure I abide by is Christianity, and even so much of that religion’s early roots have vanished. Mysteries were suppressed to increase the faith’s marketability and if not suppressed they were simply forgotten, traditions never transcribed.

I think about the Celtic religion, which saw a great re-surgence in the past few centuries. The structure of the rituals had to be completely reinvented. These religions of Western and Central Europe were wholly destroyed by the Romans. One of JRR Tolkein’s primary reasons for the creation of Middle Earth was to infuse his British Isles with the mythology they completely lack.

Can you forcibly resurrect something dead for thousands of years into a world so completely out of context with that religion’s beginnings? As R said to me, never say the world religion. Spirituality here is just another piece of a holistic life. It is not something that is done on Sundays and forgotten about the rest of the week. I wonder what that would’ve been like…to live that kind of way…

Now you have long haired women spinning in white robes, uttering chants about the paling sun before an Autumnal Equinox. You watch briefly before picking up a sandwich from the catering table set up at the foot of Stonehenge.

Post-modernism preaches that we can invent new traditions, new ways of doing things, but with such irreverence, both intentional and unintentional, many of these created traditions are like flat soda that’s been sitting in the car for a few days. Spirituality cannot be created. It must create itself.

I often think how the fate of the world was governed by the emergence of Christianity as the state religion in Rome. What an unstoppable power, one of the great imperial societies trumpeting the cause of idol-breaking, of monotheism. Where would we be today if this had never happened and monotheism had remained just a rogue sect in a sea of polytheism, paganism? The geography of the entire planet would have been completely different, either that or we would live like Persians.

Here I am, witnessing the struggle of one of the last living cultures as it tries to sustain itself, constantly threatened by compromise and the occidental disease. With the rigidity so enmeshed, a true way of living, not cafeteria tribalism, I guess you could say, how do you preserve that? So far I am seeing that you really can’t, or rather I can’t. It is up to those members of the Mono tribe to maintain this much, but interest varies from feverish to non-existent. L has no wife and no children, to think that all he knows could slip away, leaving behind just pieces for future generations to re-assemble.

A tribe down in Southern California lost their language. They hired a linguist to reconstruct it, picking from the different regional dialects, studying anthropological notes.

“You know we got dancers down here,” R said, “we have dancers who do the plains dance, but we’re not from the plains.”

He and I cleaned up the community building and had a long discussion about what my place was down here. He admitted to being very apprehensive about having an outsider on Cold Springs to administer cultural preservation, due to the rigidity of a way of living and the firm stance the tribe takes with maintaining their traditional practices in the right way.

As I’ve said before, R has very few illusions, and I took nothing he said personally. If anything, his candid discussion with me about how I really have no place even seeing much of their traditional way of living, helped me more clearly understand my place on Cold Springs.

It didn’t help to curb the depression I felt though: driving home early, sure I had offended all of the attendants to the round table, but completely oblivious to how. It wasn’t the re-affirmation of my position of outsider that beat me down so much, it was the fact that I had hurt people.

The next morning I wanted to call in sick. I recalled my group facilitator at my Americorps training:

“Just keep showing up,” she had said.

Easy for her to say. I got in my car and drove to work. I immediately went to P’s office and apologized.

“Oh you didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, “I was someone else, someone who thinks he knows a lot and does know a lot, but he said some things that weren’t right and I didn’t want to holler at him in front of the kids.”

“Oh good,” I said, “I mean bad. Good and bad.”

“Good it wasn’t you?” she laughed.

LOOK AT ME

2008-05-13T08:20:00.000-07:00

VIDEO THING

COMPENSATION

2008-05-06T20:01:00.000-07:00

Despite the frustrated confusion I documented in my previous entry I was not being fatalistic. My life tends to be horrifying one moment and blissfully unified the next. It’s not emotional polarity but lucidity: an unconscious reaction or compensation towards real circumstances.

I’m out here trumpeting the cause of great personal enhancement. While it’s not my intent to trumpet it for anyone but myself, I hope others are listening my call for a re-affirmation of those Anglo-specific cultural traits and I’m not talking about imperialism. That is a manifesto for another day.

I am working towards altruism, but also professional growth and personal understanding. I delve so deeply into my psyche that I occasionally become fully aware of how differently I function from those I work with. This creates a sea of tension and my goals for the cultural preservation project are forced into a state of near-constant undulation. With both my sympathy and understanding having to operate so buoyantly, my mood is often schizophrenic and in those times all I can do is resign.

Everything would be different if I had a supervisor to direct my efforts, but as it is, I’m bossless mapping my way through a foreign and culturally sensitive territory completely on my own. This “way,” I suppose you could call it, is like nothing I’ve ever practiced and in getting my bearings I have to look for those cues that the practitioners of this culture might notice, but that I would normally ignore.

I try to anticipate cultural problems before they occur. As with any rites of initiation, one rule is blindness. I get closer to the roots of the culture, I can smell the acrid and profane air and touch the delicate but overpowering walls, like great funguses edged on collapse. Rot accompanies any truth and even Jesus said vultures only eat the dead.

I wrote out an agenda for my round table discussion and feel myself slipping into the common aversions taken by Westerners to deal fairly with indigenous cultures. I’ll post a link to this agenda at the end of this entry as I think some of you might find it interesting.

As an example of the methods I use to deal with cultural and communicative differences, note where I state: “If outsiders/specialists/artists are needed to assist with projects and/or research, what precautions should be taken in regards to their involvement?”

This is a direct reference to myself.

A Westerner should never pledge competence in any indigenous (or any cultural) practice not his or her own. As a spiritual man I can appreciate the integrity of a spiritual experience, but if I claimed to understand the symbolic language surrounding an experience not derived from Western culture I would be guilty of that arrogance that precedes` a culturally fatal miscommunication.

My round table meeting and cultural night are tomorrow. I’m a bit concerned about both of them, but remain confident that the form I’ve designed will be conducive to a productive discussion I will not monopolize. Every day I realize that I am here as a facilitator. As much as I’d like to build a bark house with my bare hands, if I made up two thirds of the manpower for such a project, it would be a failure.

FRUSTRATION

2008-05-04T17:30:00.001-07:00

“Here’s a true story,” L said, “A ways back an an old medicine man set up a sweatlodge. This was around here. At that time most of the people who wanted to get healed by the ‘Indian spirits’ were young white women. So they came into the sweathouse and disrobed. The medicine man told them: ‘in about twenty minutes you’ll feel the spirits so don’t be afraid, they’ll be touching you—but don’t be afraid.’

‘The medicine man danced around and sang, did whatever it was he was doing, hit the rocks with the water, and then sunk into the steam. The steam rose up, clouded, you couldn’t see anything. Twenty minutes go by and the medicine man says: ‘I feel them coming in now, don’t be afraid.’ Time passed and then one of the white women whispered: ‘no medicine man, no…’”

It was R, L, E, and myself gathered on folding chairs surrounding C’s large desk. We all laughed. L’s rendition of a poor woman being taken advantage of was something else—like the tin man whimpering and paralyzed in the Wizard of Oz. This was a light moment in an otherwise heavy meeting covering possible cultural activities those youth who receive summer employment.

R and I had met the previous day and came up with a hefty list of possible activities for the summer youth employment program: trail clean up, making a sign for the Rancheria, building enclosed bus stops, painting murals, building sweatlodges. When I had informally presented some of these ideas to C, the tribal administrator, she grew solemn and shook her head to most of them. If it wasn’t the strict youth labor laws barring and kid from so much as holding a paint brush, the barriers were cultural.

For the past few months I have been in a state of passive observation. Every moment has been a learning experience. I have been identifying the rythym, the folkways and morays, the culture and the history. I felt that when I came to where I am now, the prep stages for large scale cultural projects and activities, I would just cash in my patience and knowledge.

But now that I’ve finally reached the project planning stage, as opposed to what I was doing in my “downtime:” designing the calendar and community resource guide, editing video, and so forth, I am suddenly over my head.

“Everything we do is significant,” L said into his hands, palm up in a cup shape on his lap, “you know—you build a sweat lodge it’s so much more than that. There are months of things that have to be done before and afterward, things that have to be done years later to make sure, to protect yourself from spirits and things you wake up.”

He looked up at me. I was baffled, but not in opposition to what he was saying.

In previous discussions sweatlodges were treated casually. It was a place of healing, as he told me when he plucked fragrant leaves from a tree beside the road in Balch Camp, but it was something that was erected. You “put one up.” You “had a sweat.” Oh, such and such are putting up a sweat, he’d say.

I had come to think of the sweatlodge as a casual cultural experience. But within the inner sanctum of the Mono’s cultural experience it becomes clear that the casual context was no more than a drape over something very sacred, a colloquial method used to deliver something profane to the uninitiated, the culturally removed.

“Even me telling you this, is significant,” L said, I’m doing it because—well, the word, I don’t know what it is.”

“Sacred?” I asked.

“No it’s much deeper than that. It’s…” he trailed off, his eyes seemed to travel around the walls of the room, a physical world that boxed him in from effectively communicating non-verbal concepts.

“Profane?” I mumbled, but I felt myself growing more distant from experience.

After the meeting my project ideas were more confused than when I had gone in. I found myself wishing I was still in my place of passive observation.

When I talked to E on the phone later, hoping to sort things out, I mentioned the cultural night I have coming up and activities I was thinking about doing.

“Oh fake culture?” he laughed.

I feel a little deceived. Not in a negative way though.

I was first introduced to Nationalistic Indian culture. Indian tacos, mocassins, beading, honoring the circle and so forth. This was a fairly safe place to begin as what applied to one Indian community probably applied to another. It was a way of speaking, I guess you could say, throwing feathers onto a flyer to signify a respect for aboriginal culture. These were things entirely Indian. “Traditional.”

The long: ehhhhhhs. The boisterous laughter and humor applied to serious situations as a method of lightening emotional burden in a convoluted Western world.

Now I’m whipped back to where I actually am. As there is this nationalistic Indian culture, so is there a Mono culture.

While other tribes have wholly adopted the nationalistic culture, often with no other options, it is important to those on the Rancheria that their traditional ways of living are specifically Mono. Perhaps this is how it is elsewhere and I've only now gotten deep enough to see it.

“Everything we do is significant,” L said.

All this couldn’t have come at a worse time. I was putting in thirteen hour days all that week. After I got home I’d eat dinner and immediately sit down to sew leather. I’d be up much later than usual, eleven thirty or twelve, and when I got to work it was as if I were silk worn down by the ocean. At work I was sensitive, my eyes closing automatically, and the large reclining office chair did nothing to push me harder. I found myself being intolerant, if not outwardly then inwardly.

Desperate to solve this problem, if you can call it that, before the weekend, I drove over to the EPA office. E and I had a long discussion. I wanted to identify possible no to low cost activities for my cultural night, but it was a struggle. E was talking about how I might motivate the community around a larger project.

I only wanted to clarify what I could do for my cultural night. No matter what direction I shifted the discussion in I didn’t feel like E and I were communicating. I grew gruff and frustrated and headed back to my office, before my shitty mood seeped through the placidity I was struggling to maintain.

Back at the offices there was so much laughter. Normally I enjoy it, but now I felt like I was wearing a bucket on my head and someone was throwing stones at it. I shut the door and meditated.

Just before quitting time I met quickly with C. I asked her what activities I could do at my cultural night and she suggested that L tell a story, then have the participants break up into groups and come up with their own story, either invented or something passed down. Once each group had selected a story they would decide a way to present it.

The idea was so simple, but the great angry cloud that was interfering with my most basic functions lifted.

I mentioned it to L and he said he might not be able to come. “What am I supposed to do then?” I asked.

“Tell that story about your grandfather,” he said, “that’s a good one.”

This is such a complicated and sensitive situation to write about...

This was the most frustrating day I had had yet on the Rancheria. Driving home I was picturing the scene at my cultural night. There I am, skinny white guy, trying to guide a cultural activity about a tribe he has no solid knowledge about, only anecdotal ideas, the true way of learning. Not only that, but he’s skinny and white, not Indian.

I went to bed early. Sleep was like a great haze. I dreamt of a world contorted, or catastrophe, of alternate versions of the same event: eggs cooked themselves in a giant skillet on my stove and I found out my house was once occupied by a child-killer. I had a daughter in the dream.

THE HODGSON RECORDINGS

2008-05-01T11:33:00.001-07:00

I’m sitting in a small bright room behind a child’s desk. On both sides of me are the drab grey file cabinets filled with anthropological notes and geological survey maps. Scattered around the room are display boards of Indian artifacts, old photographs of women carrying baskets mounted on their heads, and arrowheads mounted like butterflies in wooden cases.

The door that leads to the California Indian Library Collection (CILC) might as well be invisible. Aside from my friend Jeff, no one has so much as looked in here all day. I could probably spend the night here and no one would know.

I am digitizing the Hodgson Recordings, one piece of the audio recordings included in the CILC. I’ve been working to cut the bureaucratic tape around these recordings for months. Last week I finally got the ok from the Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley. This project has been almost entirely self-motivated. Honestly, I felt a little discouraged because no one on the Rancheria was very enthusiastic about it. Only after I’ve been describing my process of actually obtaining these recordings, not just talking about doing so, have I felt more enthusiasm.

Underserved community. I get the feeling that those on the Rancheria hear a lot of talk about solving problems, but see little in the way of action.

By my estimate, the Hodgson Recordings will take 18 hours of manpower to digitize. The subsequent segmenting and cleanup of these recordings hopefully won’t take as long, maybe an additional six hours. Each recording session is fairly steady in terms of its own individually abysmal quality.

These recordings were made in 1989. It’s hard to say how much of their poor quality can be blamed on poor recording practices and how much can be put on the many generations of dubbing that led to the tapes I am now listening to.

There is very little high end (except when the recording peaks) and very little low end. The recordings inhabit a middle world in the great frequency bandwidth, which gives them an aquatic dream-like quality; of highly personal and vanishing causes.

They make me think about memory.

As I took my lunch in the park, the sweet scent of the grass, something quite strange in this dry climate, evoked the recreation field in Randolph, VT and from that grass I pulled out the acrid smell of chlorine. I could almost feel the jagged edges of the poorly cast chainlink fence surrounding the pool, the curling barbed wire above it.

Listening to these recordings evokes the bruised and broken video cassettes about lost civilizations and bizarre paranormal molestations that lined the shelves in the living room where I grew up. The overused and cheap black tape stretched and wound, my fingers never leaving the tracking knob as I robotically tweaked it this way or that, automatically adjusting myself to the chiastic shifting of the image.

I feel as if I am witnessing something secret and lost, like all the Indians featured on these tapes vanished one morning with no explanation. These recordings sound as if they were made by concerned relatives who have been consistently ignored by the mainstream media and the police.

The interviewer is so terribly white. His neutral accent and deep baritone, his repetitive and sometimes unintuitive line of questioning attempting to reach a common life among all the Elders he interviewed, a common string that will soon cross-fade with a new trend, one that is right now seeing itself dwindling. As this recording has degraded through many generations of duplication, of the generational loss between an actual spoken word and how it is threaded on to an audio cassette, so too the culture is changing.

Much of this impression is tied to my relationship with media. What is interesting is how this perception relates to indigenous cultures.

Here is Emma Cheepo, who speaks only broken English. 91 at the time of the recording, her niece relates Hodgson’s questions in Mono shrieks and snaps. They drift and bob about in time as they attempt to reach the truth of Emma’s origins, of her father the Chief and spiritual physician, of the Chinamen, and the day her brother caught an Eagle.

Here is Jeff Marvin, interviewed in a nursing home; his niece patiently re-iterates the questions hollered by Bill Hodgson, his deep baritone resounding over the trebly whispers of this old man.

“Did you serve army?!” Bill hollers.

Jeff glances around, confused.

“The army,” his niece gently repeats, “did you go to war.”

“Ohhhhh, no no no,” Jeff says.

Most of his answers come in yeses or nos, except when the conversations strikes his interest. He becomes solemn, I can feel his brow fall and his lower lip tighten up.

“Logging just came naturally to us,” he says.

I have to be honest that these recordings have the effect of a gentle tranquilizer and I find myself dozing, an earbud in one ear and leaning against the file cabinet.

A man who looks so familiar comes in to sort through the geological survey maps. He is doing research as well, but as I only know this from the bits of conversation I’ve caught, I don’t know about what.

Anne, the head librarian, sifts through the piles of sharply printed maps.

“Nope, no Jacob’s Peak,” she says, “most of these were donated so not many are local.”

The man goes through them anyway, contorting around the child’s desk, which I contort behind myself, twisting it out of his path but trying to keep my cables connected, worried I’ll break the recording.

“I have a special treat for you,” a woman whispers, “I’m going to sing you one of the songs my Aunt translated into Mono.”

She begins to sing. Her voice is child-like, but hauntingly old. As she sings she begins to cry, but does not lose her pitch or her rhythm and by the end of it she is sobbing and weeping. I can feel Bill Hodgson’s hand on her shoulder.

“You began to cry during that song. That was very emotional for you, wasn’t it?” Bill whispers to the woman, his voice soft like a therapist.

“It was, it really…” the woman whispers.

“Now you said the word Jesus in that song. Is that one of the religious songs that your Aunt would sing in the church—what you were telling me about earlier.”

“It was.”

“It came straight from the heart, didn’t it?”

“It did, it really did.”

I come out of my digitization session exhausted and distant. I feel like I just witnessed something secret, an examination, an experiment. I can still hear the voice of Bill Hodgson, his cordial disconnect, but his absolute good intentions.

I feel sad now, thinking about all this. Why is this experience so soaked with pathos—a true feeling? I have witnessed something so private, so sincere, as if I’ve stumbled upon a desperate love letter that will never be sent.

Bleary-eyed, is how I put it to the staff of the library.

“I was just telling the rest of them that your new haircut makes you look mean,” Laurie laughs.

“That’s what I was looking for, an edge,” I say as I knock over the container of bookmarks and muss up the neatly piled flyers, including one for my own talk.

Back at the Rancheria things are as tense as always. I must’ve landed in a period of downtime, like the lazy depths before a great sweeping rapid in a river. An election board is posted outside, listing all the nominees for council members and for vice chairman. I recognize most of the names.

Every so often B, C, or another office employee will go outside with a fat permanent marker and strike out a name or two.

“Are they getting eliminated?” I laugh.

“No, they withdrew their nomination,” she says.

With the elections approaching and the budgetary crisis I have been more independent than usual. It’s been difficult to find my footing.

Yesterday R came in and we had a quick informal meeting about the summer youth employment program.

“I just don’t want them (the kids) hanging around the office.”

We discussed many cultural projects that we assign them: a bus stop with a mural on it, a sign for the Rancheria, cleaning up the ancient trails that snake around the Rancheria, designing signs that document plants and their traditional uses, sweat lodges, etc…

“As I told you before,” C said, “you have to be careful what you say.”

“Can’t do it,” L mirrors her.

I had mentioned the construction of sweat lodges.

“We have certain ways of doing things. They can only be done at this certain time or year, or medicinal men have to guide them.”

When I first got here my impulse would’ve been to label this: cultural red tape. It’s only as I’ve gotten more comfortable in the way of life and the way that the Indians view their traditional ways of living and their heritage that I understand why the restrictions are so important.

Integrity.

SKINHEAD

2008-04-26T13:57:00.000-07:00

TO

So I shaved my head. Holli told me about how she went to get a perm, no big deal, and I picked up my beard-trimmer. It hummed, massaging my palm while I fingered the shadows in my dusty brown hair.

The only light came from the LED lantern my landlord gave me because there are only two working lights and one working outlet in my house.

I ran the trimmer up the well-lit side of my head and there was my pale scalp, just above my ear. No hiding that. I panicked and ran amok in my house. It was like some terrible nightmare where all your front teeth fall out and you’re desperately gumming at them.

I’ve had patchy holes in my hair just above my right ear for years. Women, right? One terrible relationship back when I had a lip ring and there went the integrity of an otherwise thick head of hair. I remember after getting out out of the shower I’d be picking dozens of strands off my chest, my back, my shoulders. I even asked my dad about hair loss treatment.

When will I ever learn?

But this was bald spot was a nightmare. I was so rigid. “Ducks in a line,” as my ex put it. When did I become such a fascist? As I buzzed up and up, the hair peeled away and the beard-trimmer squealed with exertion as I pushed it to the very boundary of utility.

Looking down into the sink filled with clippings, my mind drifting to how I might use these in leatherwork, there were the last threads of a desperately frustrated persona.

Did I mention I’m doing twenty pushups a day? Up to fifteen sit ups. I want to get some nice trail-running shoes.

What’s happening to me?

The next morning I left my house in a hooded sweatshirt. With the hood up it was impossible to see what I’d done to my head. I was terribly ashamed, but it’s not in my comedic nature to obscure this kind of life-mistake.

“The proverbial whipping boy,” is what my AP English teacher called me in a letter of recommendation.

I let the hood fall before B, the receptionist, and she cupped her mouth. When I turned around, she screamed. So did the new enrollment officer.

“Forrest the dork,” B said.

Apparently I didn’t do a very good job of shaving the back of my own head. Big surprise.

B rushed me to her car, like a gored body wrapped in a blanket. I had no idea where she was taking me. We drove around the reservation, past the row houses and up her driveway. Her boyfriend was waiting with a proper electric shaver and while B’s daughter watched nervously from a blanket on the couch, cartoons on the television, B’s boyfriend cleaned me up.

“Hey get in here!” he hollered to his nephew.

“No!” the gruff adolescent drawl replied.

Work has been hard these past few days. I’m struggling to get “it” back after having to work from home for a week and then the stomach flu the week after that. I don’t feel as limber as I used to in the office. I feel uncomfortable, awkward.

It’s how different it is down there from the social norms and folkways I normally rely upon. This isn’t a bad thing of course.

I’ll take down there over the constipated yuppie culture that dominates Anglo-American society.

Here’s a woman screaming at the vice chair of the tribal council about how the Rancheria’s breaking all sorts of BIA regulations and then she’s laughing the next. You can tell that the fault for whatever problem she’s having is dispersed to so many parties, among which she can probably be counted.

When B came into my office and saw I had my headphones on she exclaimed: “why do you have those things in! You’re missing it!”

Verbally shaking me by the shoulders.

But I heard plenty and J, unable to deflect the rigor with which the woman was accusing him, just shoved her off as a brother might a sister with a justifiable complaint. The woman’s departure rang through the offices like a door slamming in the house we all have to live in.

Self-governance imposes co-habitation on a grander scale. Not only do you share the houses, but you share the money, you share the jobs, you share in government, you share the land, you share the values, and you share your blood too!

I met E’s brother and what a spitting image. It seems that everyone is related in one way or another to everyone else and if they aren’t, they have the closeness of siblings, “cousins” as they say.

When I told P about my adopted half-sister she hollered:

“That’s your sister. That’s what I tell all my grandchildren. It doesn’t matter where they come from or if they’re related, they’re family, that’s your sister there.”

When R saw my haircut:

“VISTA sent us a skinhead. A skinhead on a reservation!”

We laughed. Thankfully that was the only remark like that because I was worried about the denotations of an incredibly pale white man with such a close buzz working among Indians. If anything though, this haircut made me feel more comfortable in my appearance. Not sure why being bald would make a white guy fit in more with a Native American culture.

Perhaps there’s a degree of structure to being so cleanly shaven, rather than the ratty mop I would tend with the scissors on a red swiss army knife my father gave me.

When I was a child I had ways like a child, but now that I’m a man, I’m trying to put away childish things.

To think that imagination is typically lumped with childish things!

Though I am openly accepting adulthood, I am doing so as stubborn pioneer exploring the viability of having such a lucid relationship to the unconscious in a society dominated to the point of neuroses by the left brain.

I watched Werner Herzog’s The Invincible last night. I’m a big fan of his work but hadn’t watched this one because of the incredibly terrible reviews I got from friends.

I will say the child actor was miserably directed (who let that accent slip by?) as was Tim Roth who is first billed, yet plays the antagonist: a closet Jew and clairvoyant/showman who predicted Hitler’s rise to power in order to muscle forward in politics.

As oafish as he was, I really liked the naive and unpracticed performance by real life strongman Jouko Ahola who was the film’s true lead.

Despite Herzog’s artistry in rendering his dream sequences of crabs on a train track, the flying, these sequences screamed of the anecdotal part they played in the greater history of Zishe Breitbart, strongman hero to the Jews before the Holocaust.

I know however that Herzog understands the important role the unconscious plays the fate of men, so far as to supplant traditional plot development to include scenes as diversionary as these.

I can’t imagine the jewish mysticism that reared up in the beginning of the film’s third act was as prominent then, or the Rabbi’s determination that Zishe was chosen by God to be an unspoken martyr of the Jews.

Perhaps the film was not good. The direction really was terrible overall…but the story is remarkable as is Juoko Ahola, for all his awkwardness on screen. I will watch it again later.

Enough.

POINT ARENA (BACKPACK PICTURES AT BOTTOM)

2008-04-24T13:48:00.000-07:00

The previous entry was very long so I gave time for digestion. I’ve been sick, some sort of buggy fluish thing. It’s kept me out of work for a few days. This is disheartening. For once in my life I actually like my job. I’m not supporting consumerism.

I felt this stomach thing coming as I packed up my camping supplies for a trip up North. I popped a ginger cube in my mouth and drove the three and a half hours up to San Francisco. I had brunch there and was back in the car for seven more hours, plunging deep into Northern California’s Inland territories, a place I had never been before.

Unlike the plains of the Central Valley, which splay out immediately from the foot of the Sierras, this country undulated in great waves beneath shimmering golden grass. It reckoned back to the to the warbling topography of Vermont; a great sprawl of endless hills, none rising substantially higher than the others.

I was glad to see proper leafy trees. I left behind the skeletal shrub-like desert tress that deposit their seeds in little puffs that stick despairingly to my car every morning.

The streams pouring through this country, growing more and more green as we escaped the arid grape-vine, and went up into the hills, well it really took me home.

I was in the backseat the whole way up. It was me and three women. I didn’t say much. The conversation was mostly about by the lives of people I didn’t know and the intricacies of a social structure I had no personal context for. I busied myself with thinking and bird-spotting, because I try not to think about people too much anymore when I’m not on the job.

There were hawks and herons. Tiny birds, like little fluttering leaves in the air, nipping and pecking at hawks and ravens that infringed on their nesting sites. The much larger birds of prey would retreat as if in respect of such gusto.

I began to notice the anthropomorphic appearance of a hawk: two great arms and feathers descending. A small head like a feathery cap on my head. The hawk’s method of flight is, with all the precision, full of lazy sweeps and glacial aerial acrobatics, often with no intent but to simply fly for fun; to kill time.

We stopped in a town called Boonsville. We were only thirty miles from our destination: the coastal town of Point Arena so we sat down for dinner. It was a casual meal. The food wasn’t spectacular, but we’ve all been spoiled by the quality and variety of eateries in the city food. Out in the country you are lucky to have more than one choice.

By the time we got back in the car we only had an hour before we were set to arrive in Point Arena.

None of us knew about the vast mountain range dividing us from our destination, so we went serendipitously took an alternate route selected by our waiter. It was a windy mountain road through a great standing pine forest. Though the grade was much steeper than in my home country, I was again brought back to the North East as I phenomenally plunged into a darkness so specific to thick forests, a mix of evergreen and leafed trees; the denseness of foliage and needles that dissipate what little moonlight might illume their interiors.

We began telling ghost stories. Everybody has a few and they’re always incredible. I have been interested in them since I was a young boy and have dozens of Time Life volumes to prove it. I think this interest is due to my having grown up in a very haunted house and being the only one aware of this; also the fact that my personality and psyche is very haunted.

I connect immediately with the phenomenal, the unknown, and no matter how outlandish the physical properties of a ghost story, from entire refrigerators moving to houses shaking to their foundations, I am inclined to believe it. If I don’t believe I feel hollow, insubstantial, like a human with nothing real to them.

After running over a raccoon, which I insensitively implied might have been a house cat and in which case we had better go back and find its owner, we were in Point Arena. Murals of whales, tiny theaters, and art galleries. It looked like a great little town, even at night. I could smell the ocean and feel the thickness in the air. We unpacked and headed to the theater.

The music festival was no more than two shows: one on Friday and one of Saturday, eight bands performing. We missed the band we came for and the others playing, with the exception of the last band: the OCs, didn’t really get me going.

To me, live music can be so arrogant and disconnected. The stage, the audience, the performance, the pretentiousness of performers. With a few exceptions, I honestly prefer recordings.

That said, I always support my friends who are musicians. I listen to everything they record, see as many shows as I can, but there’s no disconnect there. After the show I throw my arm around them and we have a beer.

I had three more beers at this show than I usually have, which is zero. I slipped into such a wonderful drunk. There were no depressive effects and though my co-ordination toddled, it was pleasant to feel so thrown off.

I spend so much time in such a sober state. I am always pushing myself to more balance in my emotions and thoughts. Because of this I find the drunken state to be so much fun; not alone of course, but when I’m accompanied by friends, which doesn’t happen much out where I am. There is something very Dionysisian about it, whereas I used to maintain a more Apollonian mental state even while drinking, and when I return to civilization, I intend to not be so hard on myself about it.

I stumbled out of the theater, not sure where I was going. My path was blocked by a familiar face. It was an old friend from college whom I had not seen her in five years! I embraced her and tried to maintain myself, reminding her how drunk I was. I turned around and there was another friend I hadn’t seen in five years, and beside her, another, and behind me, again another. Before I knew it I was surrounded by six or seven old female friends from college. I didn’t know what to say and one by one I asked what everyone was doing, then reassured them about how drunk I was. I felt like a nucleus among an atom of beautiful women and before I knew it they were all gone. I blame the alcohol for having diminished the clarity of thought I wish I had had at that time, for as it was, I was wholly unable to communicate clearly with anyone.

After the show was over my friends and I drove out to a farm where there was going to be an after-party. We went down the long dirt farming road. Again, brought back to Vermont. We reached the parking lot, sawdust and hay on a vast muddy clearing. I excitedly hopped out of the car and found another one of my friends. The girls though weren’t moving. They were standing in a line toeing the ground and gritting their teeth at the darkened cabins beyond us. Two of them hadn’t drank at all and the other is settled enough socially that she didn’t see any need to go into some dingy cabin and watch musicians injest copious amounts of stimulants and kegged beer. Normally I wouldn’t blame her but I’m so isolated out in the Sierras that I need these sorts of situations. It’s so nice to have people I know around and to have more around them who I don’t know, but have social connectivity with.

This is the problem I’m having making friends out here: connectivity. Without that you have to develop a friendship from nothing at all.

But my friends got back in the car and my rational mind set in. No Forrest, you don’t want to stay up all night on a dirty couch watching people get wasted. After an hour or so I would want to go home and if my ride was gone, that wouldn’t be an option.

I was upset by the whole thing and grumbled on the ride home then belligerently cocooned myself in a blanket and fell asleep while the girls took showers and discussed how they suddenly were not so sleepy.

Everything was spinning. Haven’t felt this in a while, I thought, as I tried unsuccessfully to will the room to a halt.

There were a few months in college, just after my year off, when this spinning was like the arms of my mother rocking me to sleep. If I didn’t have it, I would grow anxious an upset. This is called alcoholism. There were naturally many reasons for why I was alcoholic for that brief period of time, but due to their highly stigmatic and personal nature I’m not about to divulge them publicly over the internet. If you know me well you know what they are and no, they have nothing to do with women.

During the night I was suddenly alone. I sat up, reached for another pillow for I needed so much to remove it, yet it would not move and slowly that pillow grew an ear and then eyes and a nose and suddenly it was my friend’s face in profile. I rolled back into bed. Apparently I did this one more time and the next morning I was reprimanded for the groping I had given her.

I was up before anyone else. I got coffee at a general store and talked whales with the people working there. The cashier told me about being in a boat when a blue whale surfaced not ten feet away. It was at least a hundred feet long he said. He didn’t look so fondly on the memory, because if the whale had dived it could’ve taken them with it. God, to see something like that…

I got back to the room, but the girls were still asleep, so I took a walk. After a mile on the coastal access road the shoulder disappeared and it was getting late so I turned around, picking up Spanish moss from the side of the road and admiring the tall thin trees.

We had breakfast at a small cafe. I talked to a chicken farmer and pilot about his reasons for not using a GPS. The girls discussed how this man is exactly what they’d want their husband to look like: the strong scruffy chin, the prominent brow, the long grey pony-tail. I admired him too, but for different reasons.

On the ride home I was overcome by my hangover and impending sickness. It didn’t help that I was in the backseat again and that we took 1, a winding coastal road. There was something else too, a hostility among the women towards me.

Was this perceived? Was it real? It was only after I got home that I began to piece together the anger I had been feeling.

I was reminded of being younger. I always had mostly female friends. I hated men when I was younger, hated them. I thought they were despicable and always hurting girls’ feelings.

This projection was an effective method of avoiding confronting my neuroses. But back then, women were always like this to me, the way I was perceiving them that is; all the way back to my equestrian days. Was it that I was not strong? Am I still weak like I was?

I want to so badly to be vigorous, to feel potency surge through my limbs and mind. I should be able to among many women without feeling so limp and angry. When we got back to San Francisco I took a walk alone. I was awash with such sadness.

Was it the wind in my eyes that made me feel like I was crying? Even buying two books wouldn’t cure me and when I got back to my friend’s dark and empty apartment, my phone was dead. I stewed on the couch.

The next morning I reconciled with my friend by buying her eggs. We hadn’t gotten one on one time and that’s how I like things. She’s got her life laid right out and it is a good life.

When I related my plans I realized I had told her all this already, a month ago. I was repeating myself. While I was on the drive home I was thinking about this, wondering why I hadn’t made any more headway. I realized that this is the first time in my life when my plans are stable and unchanging, when I feel ok with where I am and with where I am going, so much so that I will repeat myself to friends.

It will be grad school in anthropology with a Ph.D. track. I’m not sure what branch of anthropology. I want to be Dr. Borie like my father. I want to attend UPENN, where six generations of Bories went before the family lost its way. My life will begin in reasserting the Bories’ disjointed familial karma. When I repeat these things to myself, I feel a rush of truth. This path is the righteous path and it will lead me to where I need to be.

Back in the hills I’ve had three solid days of stomach flu. No puking, but I rarely throw up. Mostly the other end and pains, dizziness. I’ve eaten a lot of ginger, watched a lot of movies (Babe, man, what a good movie), and sewed. I know I haven’t posted pictures of my work in some time but that is because I’ve been slaving over a backpack for my friend’s film. It has only started coming together in the past few days.

I only need to add the flap:

backpack

THE HARD WORLD: BALCH CAMP REVISITED PART TWO

2008-04-16T14:12:00.001-07:00

It was Thursday evening. Four kids sat on a makeshift bench built from two cinderblocks and a board. One played electric guitar from an amplifier, an extension cord snaking down the street and through the front door of one of the dozen or so doublewides crowded on a circle.

“Watch for Pepper, he’ll nip ya’,” L said as he led me into his house.

The stout speckled black and white dog eyed me suspiciously.

I put down my bags beside the loveseat. The cushions smelled of animal, no particular animal, and not urine, but of an anonymous musk. I was sleeping here tonight. We were leaving early the following morning for Balch Camp.

L, his father, and I watched a movie. I was distracted by a hand-woven basket the size of a tractor tire on the coffee table (inset with anthropomorphic designs), the many obsidian clubs hanging from the walls, and the eagle tail feathers hanged from the edges of pictures frames, to be worn on one’s back during traditional dances at pow wows.

Family photographs too, like those on the walls in the house I grew up in, but bookended by these artifacts, both decorative and utilitarian. L slapped a sturdy piece of wood with a railroad spike driven through its head on his hand.

“These are the clubs we use. That’s an old railroad spike. Use this when I’m huntin’, save the bullet,” L said, miming the collision of club to the head of a downed deer.

Looking again at the family photographs, what I saw initially as normalcy was re-contextualized. This was something very foreign to me and the model of an American family couldn’t be super-imposed over this one.

I asked L about the regalia he would be wearing at the pow wow that weekend and he excitedly rushed to his room. He returned promptly with a great circle ringed with bald eagle tail feathers, all rising at a perfect thirty degree angle. He showed me his hand-beaded headband and mocassins; both made of tiny seed beads all turqois. I was thrown off by the velcro on the front of the headband.

“What’s that?” I asked.

He pulled a bicycle mirror ringed with eagle and flicker feathers from beside him and attached it to the velcro on the headband.

“What’s the mirror for?” I asked him.

“Bad things can’t stand to look at themselves. When we leave, after dancing, we turn the mirrors behind us to keep anything bad from following.”

A European item appropriated for a indigenous spiritual purpose. It reminded me of the Kachina dolls with bandanas around their faces, wearing denim overalls, that I saw in a gift show beside Casey Jones’ house.

In some ways there is no hesitancy regarding cultural appropriation among Indians. Whether a face is veiled by hide or by woven cotton, it is still veiled.

There was a general council meeting at seven. Not including members of the tribal council, the tribal administrator, and the EPA, there were six people in attendance out of the one hundred and thirty members of the Rancheria.

This was a fair turnout.

The fact that more employees of the tribes various administrative branches were in attendance than tribal members struck me as awkward, but it was treated with a sense of somber regularity.

The floor squealed as members of the general council pulled chairs away from the neatly organized table set up. They pulled the chairs into a group on the periphery of the room, leaving a great vacancy in the audience.

After I screened the Balch Camp documentary, R, the chairman of the tribal council laid out the tribe’s plans regarding Balch Camp:

“It’s really how far you all want this to go. I mean, we could take it all the way, declare the land a sacred site so they’d have to leave or we could just rebury the body,” adjusting his glasses he said very formally: “I think taking it all the way makes the most sense, step by step.”

Uprooting the entire camp is the most logical solution? When one takes into account hundreds of years of regular desecration by the hands of PG & E, it does. If Balch Camp were owned by the tribe the emotional and physical efforts they constantly have to expend on behalf of those ancestors that keep getting “accidentily” unearthed.

One woman spoke up.

“Who’s holding them accountable for all this?” she asked.

“That’s what we’re doing here,” R said.

“But I mean who’s making sure this happens…”

After a hundred years of continual desecration, there is naturally a decline in fervor, a de-sensitization, among the General Council. After all, they keep going up there, they keep having the same discussions, and nothing changes.

The Forest Services is an ineffective mediator because they collect a check from PG & E. The Balch Camp lease is a secure source of revenue for an otherwise economically beleaguered national forest.

The only difference between this dispute and the historical relationship between the Native Americans and colonial powers is that the capitalist system has been institutionalized and tribes have been able to maintain some degree of sovereignty and cultural integrity.

The tribes are used to cultural infringement. They are highly skeptical of offered solutions (we’ll just dig more carefully next time we need to put in a sewage line) and have some sense of how to navigate a Western bureaucratic structure so divergent from the social order that governed their ancestors.

As the tribe prepares to uproot the entire camp there is a surreal docility, as if a storm won’t be wash Balch Camp away, but that a fog will roll in and when it recesses up to Black Rock, nothing will remain of the things the white man put there.

Among most tribal members there is an equal amount of interest in both the physical resources and the cultural resources that a re-appropiation of Balch Camp would provide the tribe.

If the tribe is able to re-affirm its water rights, which guarantee land astride a stream that runs all year round (theirs doesn’t), it could extend the Rancheria deep into the Sierra National Forest all the way up to Balch Camp and Black Rock. At the meeting there was chatter about cattle ranches, crops, produce stands, stores, and other sources of both employment and revenue. Not once did anyone mention: casino.

This Rancheria and its sect of the Mono are silent and unappreciated stalwarts against both violent government policy and corrupting free market ideology. In the tribal offices, perpetual fiscal apocalypse is like a dark shadow over the tribal council, but it is always treated carefully and rationally, watched over and taken care of if something changes. No one walks away. There is a legitimate desire to solve those problems left for this tribal council by those that came before them.

I think it was this same sort of sobriety that kept the Rancheria from getting terminated (divied up into equal portions of taxable land under the auspices of the federal and state government). Apparently the Mono never signed the Rancheria agreement at all and the order that gave them Tribal sovereignty was from the executive branch, that is the federal government, not the state of California who gifted isolated and desolate portions of their state forest for use by these “landless indians.”

C realized this during the meeting.

“Gotta call them about that,” she said, referring to the formal transformation of the Rancheria into a full blown Reservation.

All this is well and great. Balch Camp’s promise of abundance is tantalizing, but all could be easily derailed by the inaction that might follow such an acquisition, or negligence about turning in the right paperwork at the right time. Showing up, you could say, to the white man’s world.

How prepared are the members of the Mono tribe to start working regularly, earning additional income? Are many people so set in the cycle of poverty that they feel no desire to escape it?

On-Rancheria jobs are highly desired. This is reason why there was so much contention about a white woman working in enrollment. That job could be boosting the income of one of the many struggling INDIAN families.

There is also a work ethic that sounds almost like a myth as many people are unemployed. Some used to log and others used to fight fires. A few found their way up to Yosemite and worked in cultural education. It is only with the strengthening of environmental legislation and strong wave of budget cuts that most jobs were lost.

Every person has a sad story. Barely able to walk, turned down for disability. Seventy years old and without social security.

Work would promise to pull people up from alcoholism and self-demeaning mindsets. It might bring a nationalistic boost, rather than the greed suffered by many casino tribes.

But as the torch of governance is passed from one Indian hand to another, the quality of stewardship can take a one eighty. We see this on a macrocosmic level in our own federal or state government. Imagine our roller coaster of economic policy, health policy, and social policy, but among one hundred and thirty people. With so little oversight, corruption is often the rule of law.

Marty Strange, a friend from Vermont who lived with the Winnebagos for twenty years told me this.

Even when an effective council is elected, there’s no guarantee that bitterness, familial disagreements, and greed won’t see them voted out of office in two years. Or say something unfortunate comes up during their time of service that may have been the fault of a past council…

R passed around a packet of information detailing why exactly the tribe is four million dollars in debt.

The few people present at this emergency meeting of the general council were suddenly uproarious. How did this all happen and who is responsible; surface ruminations. The general council knows why and how this sort of thing happens.

C described nine years of forged signatures, white out on formal letters to change dates, and a nine years worth of warnings that went unheeded by every tribal council prior to this one. Everyone wanted a turn to talk, bringing up the facts that their accountant designs the tribe’s budget and the ignorance at the HUD office.

The tribe has to make good, so to speak, on a grant that was awarded them almost a decade ago. The minutiae of land, housing, and related items, it all needs to be itemized, broken down, and reported so that the grantor does not feel the victim of fraud in the amount of four point five million.

“You gotta go out and tell everyone this! Put one of these on every door!” one woman exclaimed, realizing that in order to pay this kind of back, the Rancheria would have to sell all the land it has acquired in the past nine years and sell all those houses that sit there.

People needed to know about this! They needed to stand up and support the correction!

Families will be torn from the ground, passed between relatives!

“We have to tell everyone!” the woman exclaimed.

R smirked.

“I used to get things like this on my door,” he said, holding up the packet, “and it would be a good starter for my woodstove, I never read this stuff.”

R holds very few illusions about the state of things. As such, it is very hard for me to convince him that a greater sense of cultural identity might curb some of the social problems on the Rancheria. R can see that, sure, but he also knows about the irregularity of those kinds of events, or a persons tendency to make a promise and not follow through.

He feels these problems might as easily be solved by a new basketball court or rec center. I’m not going to say I’m correct, because hell, he’s probably right. R certainly knows the territory better than I do. He grew up here. It’s just often difficult for me to get his verbal support on my work as my position’s only concern is culture and not the purchase of recreational equipment, as direly as a new basketball court is needed.

“People are going to be held accountable for this too,” he said, “if we can’t pay it back and it goes to the attorney general’s office, they’re going to find out who did it and I don’t know…maybe throw them in jail.”

E finally spoke up. He’s a very soft-spoken man, but when he does say something it is intelligent and calculated.

“You know you guys say you’re gonna do this but if you can’t fix it. Pretty soon everyone will get all up and angry about this money here and you’ll have another tribal council!”

There was a wave of gentle nodding in the room.

“Is this the vicious cycle,” I whispered to E.

He nodded. I looked at the tribal council, the EPA, the tribal administrator…if something went wrong, they could all be terminated.

Between a couch only half my height and the perpetual barking of the neighbor’s dog, I did not get much sleep. My rest was broken by a spirit, one of the most powerful ones I have ever encountered.

“Hey forrest hey forrest!” he hollered as he attempted to pull me into a dialogue.

He seemed to be passing through. He was walking.

I didn’t sense malevolence, but I am so used to rolling away from spiritual communion that I automatically escaped…it was also his strength, such intensity was terrifying itself, even if it was benign.

He tried one more time to engage me, this time reaching me from a dream and making me realize his power and urgency. I wish very much now that I had received his message more openly rather than impulsively refusing it.

“They always come around this time of year,” L said the next morning, “Our old trail goes through here. Things are always getting knocked over or that clock that came flying off the wall there. Anu,” he said, “Anu.”

I told him about the sleep paralysis.

“When you feel that pulling that’s you pulling your spirit back into your body, it’s not a spirit pulling you. Nobody ever told you that?”

L cooked up some bacon and potatoes. In between sifting the pan he told me about a redheaded witch that once came to him. She was a woman from an ancient rival tribe. The next morning his father asked him what all the banging around was on the walls. L had been laying squarely in his bed the whole time, standing only to quickly smudge the corners and doors, the ceiling and the windows.

L and I picked up R and headed over to the parking lot beside the administrative building. J, the vice chairman of the tribal council was already waiting with E. J hopped in L’s truck with us, R hopped in E’s and we were off.

It was good to have someone like J to fill the coffee-deprived silence that slipped over me. He talked a long time about his work in the forest service as a fireman, either fighting blazes all over the country, or chopping fire line in state and national forest to keep those blazes from passing. He also worked as an engineer but fell off a bridge and badly injured his legs and his wrist.

During his recovery he gained weight and lost mobility in his legs and in his wrist. When he returned to the forest service they canned him.

J has not worked since and he does not view his unemployment as an advantage.

I was noticing different things on my second trip out to Balch camp. The King’s river is the name of the river relegated to its own bank and the dam for it is built in Wishon. The power station in Balch Camp feeds off a lake up at Black rock and pours into the Dinkee at its North Fork.

L gestured to all the old Mono campsites he had found along this river.

“We’re not stupid,” he said, pointing to a state forest campground, “there it’s flat, by water, lots of pounding stones down there. There’s probably a lot more, have to come out here some day and find them all.”

Locations of topographical advantage for one culture are typically advantageous for another culture as well, but perhaps for different reasons. The site that I live on too: close proximity to water, lots of flat rocks. There must be at least fifteen or twenty mortar holes on my property, burial grounds on the other side of the fence, the west side of the creek.

L seemed to be taking his time. It wasn’t that he was not looking forward to the interaction with PG & E, he was eyeing it with anger and resolve, but in his words: “I feel like I’m home here, like I’ve just been gone a long time and I’m coming home…”

He let out long meditative sighs.

J viewed the landscape from behind his lens of experience in the forest service. He re-iterated a few times that he was never able to properly explore the area when he worked here. He’d see things though and much of it he built.

“I built those bathrooms there.”

or

“I built that fence there. They never paid me for it. That’s how I knew about those pounding rocks there.”

Finally the road wound into Balch Camp.

The mood of the members of the Cold Springs Rancheria changed. Hostility draped over everyone and there was an abject refusal to meet any terms that might seem logical from PG & E’s perspective. Half an hour after the decided meeting time the Forest Service pulled up and the head, D, chuckled about how the PG & E representatives were waiting back at the office. Makes sense. The Rancheria reps don’t care though and why should they?

It was some time before I realized that D was an Indian, from another Rancheria, but a Mono. He did not share those mannerisms that are decidedly Native American. In fact, I had thought he was just tan. He certainly talked Anglo-Saxon.

It was his job to mediate between corporate interests and cultural interests, so its no wonder that he may had to leave some of his cultural identity behind.

D was pretty notorious. I had heard about him before and it was usually regarding his backdealings and backpedaling. C had once said:

“That’s why we go through his boss, we don’t talk to D.”

And every time he turned his back there would be sideways glances among those from the Rancheria.

Finally the PG & E representatives arrived: two old white men of course. I shook hands with both and both shrugged off my extended greeting for one of simple formality.

No wonder I often shake hands with someone down on the Rancheria only to meet a watery grip. These handshakes are symbolic of those surface agreements, invisible promises and honestly, just because I shake someone’s hand it doesn’t mean I will remember their name.

“Ok great, we can get started here. Now we’re gonna take a tour around the camp here so we can see exactly what we need to do. Before we begin,” D turned to the PG & E reps, “do you guys have any projects coming up?”

The rep with a bristly mustache and crew cut swaggered forward, kicking the dust with his Justin boots and gripping his beltloops. He seemed to be swallowing a great stone as he began:

“Well we gotta sewage main that blew and—”

I couldn’t isolate his words from the sadness they were spoken with. Was it actual understanding of how a burial site might be infringed?Clearly, as the Rancheria reps shuffled in circles, even leaving to sit on rocks twenty feet away, this was not an honest concern. If it was, it would not hold. If it was, PG & E would leave.

“We always do this,” L said, “we’ve had this conversation ten times already. We just want to know where the accountability is.”

“Terrible to be here talking about digging up my grandfather’s grave,” J said, “how would you feel if we went and dug up your grandmother’s grave?”

“Well, not good not good,” the crewcut said.

“Yeah and we’d get years in prison for that, nothing happening here,” J hissed.

D sensed the tension, but was above it, either by complete disconnect or obliviousness.

“Well that’s what we’re here to do, to make sure none of this happens. We’re going to get an action plan together and—”

“We did that before,” L said, “and nothing happened. Thrown to the wind.”

“How long would it take to get all this stuff out of here?” J asked, gesturing not to say, the cars, but to the houses, the buildings.

None of the PG & E reps were prepared for this kind of answer.

“The houses there or the power station?”

“All of it,” J said.

L walked far ahead of D and the crewcut. I trailed behind, collecting video. By the time I’d crossed the long pastures and reached the rocky shoulder of the river, L was already leaving behind the two dozen mortar holes for another site. D was in stride with him, as if trying to communicate his understanding and his willingness to take every step L saw necessary, even as it led us almost half a mile down the river.

The crewcut kicked the dust and waited for me.

“Real shame that back then they did all this stuff, didn’t think about it at all and now we’re living on top of it,” he said.

“Yeah they really didn’t think,” I said, at a loss for any words beyond those.

“It’s such a beautiful place,” I said.

Guilt welled up in my chest watching this very legitimate mountain man admire the creek he might one day have to abandon. How much time spent on a land legitimizes ownership?

During my work beneath Jeff Talman I wrote an essay about the ownership of space. It was meant to be contextual material for the wake installation I was putting up in Emerson College’s last brownstone, a building that would soon become a condo. This building had been held for over a hundred years and it made me sick to think about it turning over to someone who only saw a financial investment in it.

The grain of the wood would be removed, the floors torn up and replaced, the marble, well so chipped and cracked it would be lucky to survive. Depending on the quality of the architect and decorator, this building could easily turn from regal academia into whitewashed high-ticket Ikea.

Now this land, watching the crewcut admire the river, the mountains.

“Get a shot of those,” he said and I pointed my camera upwards to Black Rock, the megalith that overlooked the entire camp.

His people have been here for a hundred years, I thought. You can’t simply uproot him can you, when he cares so deeply for the land?

Aside from the issues of burial grounds, ceremonial sites, and the corporate monsters that don’t care about such human things, which INDIVIDUALS have more emotional capital invested here? The colonial powers that saw this location as a good business boost or the ancient cultures that drank from this river for over ninety-five percent of their existence here in the Americas? And what about the contemporary individuals?

Would members of the Mono tribe come out here to live in the old ways or would they relegate themselves for that basin dug for them, the hole as they call it, that isolated Rancheria?

Such parallels can be drawn between the re-structuring of land (the building of dams and roads) and the re-structuring of societies.

But if the metaphorical dams were lifted from the Mono, would they spill back into their original form, would they overflow the banks with such unceasing power and compensation as to tear houses from their foundations and an Anglo-Saxon ideology from their brains or has a capitalist society acted like climate change, drying up those very values that once drove them onward and leaving behind only a few, like those at Balch Camp the other day?

“There is more than one kind of genocide,” C said to me in the middle of a discussion about geo-political issues, “you look at the cultural genocide here in the states, what people are doing to the Native Americans.”

As we toured the bank of the river L approached his own breaking point. It was all so mundane and repetitive, the same thing over and over again and you could tell by his eyes he knew how fruitless these discussions were. They were promises upon promises upon promises, none of which hold water.

Even if they drew up hard-cut agreements with PG & E and the forest service, in one year, two years, it might all go out the door if PG & E needs to dig and will lose money if it doesn’t start immediately.

“I’m not a woman, I don’t know how they did it…” L said into my camera, his eyes down and upset.

Before him was a ceremonial rock. A series of holes ground in the rock, descending, almost like chakras. This was a place where girls became women.

“How about that,” D said, sitting beside the holes and admiring the sweeping foliage over him. “Get a shot of this, Forrest.”

I recalled the day before when E said:

“How much do we actually want to share.”

L’s path led us back up to the houses. HE knew this land better than its caretakers. In moments we were upon the site where the body was unearthed. L marched up to a flat overlooking the site and gestured to the rocks.

“This is where they left her, out in the open for weeks, you know, you dig there, you find all these things…they were saying arrowheads were falling out of the walls; the fact that you’d be surprised when you found the body.”

L turned away in anger and rushed down to the site. The crewcut was incredibly apologetic, wholeheartedly admitting to the negligence,.
Does he realize what’s at stake here, I wondered.

I could sense that on and individual level PG & E wanted to work with the tribe, but on a corporate level things are not always so simple.

Part of me grew upset though, with how hardwalled the Rancheria reps were towards the actions of PG & E and the Forest Service. It was hard to believe that what they were saying was a bunch of lies. R, who had remained ominously quiet the entire time finally said:

“You’ve said all this before though.”

“But this time we’re really doing it,” D said.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” R replied.

Going up to the midden soil removed from the trench, before a great tube descending the hillside, a dispute broke out. I didn’t hear what D and the PG & E reps said, but E broke out with:

“This isn’t a consultation. We’re not approving anything here. This is informational.”

“That’s right that’s right,” D said, “we’re not making any decisions now. That will be later we’ll all sit down and—”

Back in the truck L said: “you just watch them, they’re going to say we had a consultation, they’re going to dig.”

As we followed PG & E to another construction site L suddenly stopped the car and turned around. R and E were already on their way out of Balch Camp.

The Rancheria reps conferred at an ancient Mono campsite. Such distrust! Where does it come from?

It’s only as I dig deeper into post-Columbian Indian history that I realize this paranoia is ingrained, so much so that it has turned into utter disdain and not without reason. This is the only way the Indians can evade the corporate interests that would tear their land out from under them.

The fact that the Rancheria was never terminated is a source of internal pride. Termination was a process in California wherein a Rancheria would be divvied up into equal portions of taxable land. Naturally it wouldn’t be long before the impoverished and under-served population buckled under the costs, sold the land, and became what they were before the Rancheria system was instigated in California, a landless indian.

The ride back from Balch Camp was nauseating. Once the anger subsided all I had left to focus on was the curvature of the road. When I got back to my office I could barely stand. I sat in the bathroom for twenty minutes, waiting for the world to stop spinning. In less than an hour I had to give a presentation before the Tribal Council.

There was a woman from an Native American Services non-profit in Fresno presenting before me. What was supposed to be a formal introduction of those services provided by her organization became an intervention as she pressed one member of the Tribal Council to attend AA. Now I’m no stranger to the program. Both the problems it was designed for and the empirical solution it provides are woven into my veins. For a long time I was a little angry about it’s Christian-derived approach to curing alcoholism, but when I started reading a lot of Jung I realized that some problems can only be cured by a spiritual rebirth.

I’m experiencing this on a personal level as we speak. It’s why I think atheism is so scary because it makes the secular dogmatic and we as humans can’t always handle everything. Everything is a lot for some of us here and we do need SOMETHING. I’ve encountered a lot of cynicism from my friends who see my recent exploration of Christianity. Some how things would all be different if it were say…Buddhism.

Oh you’re buddhist Forrest? That’s so great.

When I try to explain the esoteric underpinnings of my exploration well, they look at me like I’m speaking Greek. An atheistic mind sees only memology and traffic lights in the study of symbols.

Anyway, after the intervention, when the council member who I won’t even initial here had gotten very somber it was my turn.

Honestly, I thought this was going to be fluffy. Push through the presentation and get on with my life. I was expecting terse responses, simple nods, something from C certainly, but silence from everyone else.

I’d been feeling a little down about work in the past few weeks. With no idea how to reach the youth and the Elders I began to wish I had had more outreach experience, because here I am fully able to communicate with other non-profits or interested parties, but unable to speak to those people I’m serving, unable to understand their needs.

The project ideas I had started to feel as if they were simply for me. The library, who would use it? A media computer, who would use it? Tech-oriented solutions to cultural issues began to feel somewhat irrelevant on a reservation where the youth list sports as their primary interest.

Certainly there’s lacrosse and other sports that originated with indigenous populations, but I’m looking for a cultural perspective that might re-contextualize an entire life, not just a recreational activity. A majority of the respondents on both the Elder and the youth survey felt a return to traditional ways of living would encourage community wellness, but how do you move that into something living.

I carried my absolute loss over how to achieve these goals into the presentation. I was therefore quite taken aback when I got to the question: “how often are you engaged in either verbal or physical violence.” Very few individuals listed never as their response and the majority listed always.

I didn’t have to say a thing and the council erupted into the problems with the youth:

disregard for their Elders

disregard for everyone else too

demeaning speech, inserted even into compliments

violence (just two weeks before two youth beat and stabbed a man and robbed his house, on their own Rancheria!)

disrespect for community well-being

callous disinterest in culture

callous disinterest in leaving the Rancheria and getting educated

L slipped into a fatalistic state I had not seen before. No matter what solution I offered he rebuffed it because it wouldn’t even be a shadow of the traditional way of dealing with youth. Even a coming of age ceremony would pale in comparison to what he did: camping on a mountain alone for days, realizing that when you’re up there you’re no longer at the top of the food chain. When the subject turned to language L referred to what his Elders had told him:

“In the eighties a couple of kids were talking in Mono in school and they told them they couldn’t do that. Now they called me a couple years ago asking if I would teach it. My father and other Elders had said what’s the point, you don’t learn by getting told. Then those kids they’d just be translating English in their heads and then speaking our language. ‘What’s the point?’ my Elders asked and in respect of my Elders that’s what I asked the high school: ‘what’s the point?’”

I was again reminded of that E had said the day before: they need to be careful with what they share.

As much as L and E talk about soil integrity, you can tell a native community is as concerned with cultural integrity. If a cultural practice is going to be passed on, it needs to be in its original form. There is a set way of doing things.

Mutations in things practices like beading or cooking might accept evolution or even assimilation, but ceremonial practices and the language, in that tribe, needs to remain whole if it is to survive. If it is not treated holistically, it dies with the bearer.

A strange compromise is a language lab. Somewhere a youth or elder or anyone could go listen and learn the language by themselves. Then they would congregate and speak it.

Of course I wonder if the youth would use it. Tools are wonderful but can they effect personal change.

I brought up the pyramid of needs. At the bottom is food and then there is shelter, etc…at the top is self-actualization, identity. It seems strange that the popular perception of poverty does not think identity will come along until an individual has sustained themselves.

Being at that apex myself and seeing others in the same position, I really wonder if there is any more identity up here than there is at the bottom. I think it is more likely that a capitalist culture is very violent towards those highly specialized cultural identities. If it’s not lower, middle, or upper class, it threatens revenues.

My group facilitator at the VISTA PSO brought up this question: shouldn’t we be turning this pyramid upside-down?

Self-actualization first, then you have the confidence and clarity to get whatever else you actually need. Rather than having the “free” market dictate your needs and, you are what you eat, so the market also designs the identity that will pop out on top.

Anyway, this is enough for now. Big movement.

THE HARD WORLD: BALCH CAMP REVISITED

2008-04-10T09:16:00.000-07:00

Balch Camp is no more than a few dumpy houses, a pool and tennis court combo, and a electrical substation. There’s one road in and one road out. From the Rancheria, which is already a half an hour from the nearest town, it’s two more hours to Balch Camp.

For those two hours you see nothing but empty cattle pastures and rugged untended campsites; the brown ring that marks a once massive river now relegated to its own riverbed, a shallow and sinuous ribbon of calm water force to retread that great fissure it carved in the Earth in better days.

It’s both strange and apparent to think that beneath the spot where Dinkee Creek splits from Big Creek and Rodgers Ridge defiantly splits the Sierras, is a cultural battleground.

There’s something very American gothic about it all (I’ve written about Balch Camp before): the massive Indian burial site that was upturned, the bones that were ground up and mixed in with the concrete in the foundations of said dumpy houses. Then there’s the fact that dozens of Elders had to congregate beside the new rubbery turf of a tennis court to dance and rebury their ancestors.

“Don’t dig over there, that’s a graveyard,” one said, pointing to the West side of the Dinkee.

Behind them, a shifty chain link fence surrounds a boulder standing vertical, as if dropped directly from the sky. A red petroglyph depicts two men surrounded by fire. This honorarium to two brave Mono, used to spread out over the whole monument rock until PG & E let their sprinkler hit it and the picture has since faded away.

Red flecks of painted stone are scattered at the base of the rock, like paint chips from a wall.

L, E, and I sat in my now re-arranged office in a circle of chairs. L was back-lit, his already dark complexion even darker before the window. Beside him, the long manzanita branches I tried to whittle until I saw how badly they’d split once their skin was removed.

L passed around a bag of beef jerky and with our mouths full and lips smacking he, E and I discussed the recent movements in the Balch Camp saga.

As I don’t know much about legality, the many things that were said, agreed to, and subsequently broken as is the case with most Indian affairs, all I could offer was the necessity to be concrete and meticulous with these “white people.”

“When you say that whole hill is a burial site,” I said, sweeping my hand towards the mountains over the Rancheria, “that doesn’t register with them. They want individual sites, marked, this one, this one, this one…”

Part of me felt detached. I agreed wholeheartedly that PG & E should pay for their mis-steps, past and present, but the whole picture became more clear as a misunderstanding between cultural methods of communication.

L and E told me that an archaeologist had done a survey of all sites of interest in and around Balch Camp in the 90s. He sent the GPS locations of individual sites to the Forest Service, who then sent them to PG & E. This archaeologist no longer had copies for himself. Strangely enough, both PG & E and the Forest Service seem to have misplaced this data.

As the body that PG & E illegally unearthed was pulled from the west side of Dinkee Creek, which as you remember from my earlier post is a bank apparently bereft of any archaeological sites in an otherwise rich area, this data would’ve been a smoking gun.

Their statements of being ignorant to the wealth of grave sites on the West side of the Dinkee would be void. As L said in the Balch Camp documentary:

“What are they saying. That we came down to the river and stopped, that we didn’t cross that river?”

This is in fact PG & E’s argument. But the European way to determine a site requires something profound, like a body. The mass dispersal of arrowheads, pounding stones, pestals, and obsidian that originates in only in Oregon and Mexico only implies to them that the pre-Columbian Mono used this place as a garbage dump.

Soil that’s rife with the ceremonial artifacts, burnt bone and baskets, burnt food, the rich black midden soil that implies a vast amount of use, both utilitarian and ceremonial, is nothing to us white people if it doesn’t contain a body.

Even if it does contain a body, it was only recently that we began to realize this was like a grave in a cemetery. What a revelation! It wasn’t a site to documented, filed, the remains, put in a box, and left to accumulate dust in the back vault of the back vault of a museum. No, this is like you walking to visit the grave of your grandfather or if you’re from a aberrantly familial anglo-family, that of your great grandfather, or great great.

This entire Balch Camp melodrama is really a tale of two mindsets, but a misunderstanding so long unmitigated speaks poorly of the future of Balch Camp for one party or for the other.

PG & E’s utter disregard for the Mono people’s cultural heritage has been on-going since the early 1900’s. The power station and camp have been there that long and I’m sure those initial men bravely hiking the distance of the river to give power to those people too isolated to turn on a light switch, was something else. PG & E is in fact trying to register their Balch Camp as a historic landmark.

This is not entirely unjustified, but there is never one intent, one wholly honest motive in Western thinking.

If PG & E’s Balch Camp were a historic landmark, the Mono site beneath it would be null and void. PG & E would have to maintain its tennis court, change the water in its pool regularly, and keep solid the bland facades of those houses they built on a massive burial ground. They would not have a single ounce of responsibility to that culture that has existed in this area for not 100 years, but over 10,000. All that would remain of the Mono way of life, that they once lived there and met there, that tribes from across the impassable Sierra Nevadas came there, this all would be no more than chips of human bone glinting in the immaculately maintained foundations.

I’m bearing witness to a Tribal mobilization that hasn’t occurred to such a degree since the 80s, that I’m aware of. Piles and piles of paper surround L and E in the EPA office.

Each holds a large packet in his hands, verbally sifting through the legal jargon, looking for artifacts of truth, broken promises, and symbolic promises that might’ve swung twenty years ago but in a more populist America (? right) need to have some integrity.

Oh NAGRPA, you great spear lodged in the side of PG & E, the lumbering and obese energy giant. Oh NAGPRA, you’re almost as bad as that Central Valley Energy Co-op or all those rocous folks in Auberry who just can’t stomach the idea of forty foot towers plodding like elephants across their once clean and wild pastures.

But PG & E, pay heed to NAGPRA. Pay heed to 106.

The Rancheria is looking to completely dig up Balch Camp, the power station that is. The rest they want returned to where it was. While other tribes might accept moving the remains of their ancestors oh, just a mile that way to accommodate a shopping mall, this Rancheria wants everything where it was.

I’m just biting my tongue because I heard stories today about Mono burial…here, this culture they said had nothing. I learned how they buried themselves…but I can’t share it because L and E both looked at me hard and said:

“We just don’t know how much we want to expose about these sorts of things to them.”

I was shocked on two levels. One, I’m no longer one of them and two, they were so right. While I want so badly to record to document every ounce of their culture, terrified myself that it might slip away like ash in wind, I realize too that sacred things need to be respected, symbols are to be cherished and never spoken of verbally.

For L and E, and the rest of the Mono people, to explain to PG & E what went on on this land, what REALLY went on, would require such a disclosure.

Like pearl tossed in the depths of the ocean.

If not becoming culturally nude before people who don’t really care, how then can the Rancheria uproot a power station.

L referred to an incident down South where a power company had to completely disassemble a facility because it rested on such historically rich territory. C is always the mediator of wild masculine ideas. What a valuable person to have around, for otherwise we might be waving our hands in the maniacally and slowly slipping into complete verbal abstraction.

Even still, I don’t know if uprooting PG & E will be so easy, but I can say thing: they are definitely not expecting it.

L and E want all the land beyond the Rancheria, meeting up to Balch Camp and then rising to Black Rock, Wishon, to be theirs again. They don’t just want to rebury a body where it was found, certainly that is the catalyst though.

L’s great grandfather participated in the final ghost dance, where men whirled in rage, for days and days until some even died from exhaustion. They were calling into the Earth for their ancestors to rise back up and defend them from a power they were inept before.

Even if they are not successful, this is exactly what this woman, 10,000 years young, is doing.

Naturally in my position, I think about how we can bring the youth into the fold. In ten years, they might be the ones in this position. Will they roll over for a couple thousand dollars? Maybe. But maybe not too, and that’s a lot up to that intangible passage of culture.

I’m going along with L and E to Balch Camp on Friday. Though I’m technically there to shoot additional footage for the Balch Camp documentary, I will be sure to bear witness to the discussions that will take place.

PG & E and the Forest Service already met, breaching agreements for all parties to be present during any pertinent discussions. We know two organizations that will have their stories straight.

I’m curious to see what L and E will have to say, if they’ll stand on the laws and the ground that the white man built beneath them. Or will we all just fall back into ruthless abstraction, the place where culture lives. With teeth and nails we bind ourselves to the hard world.

BAGS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

2008-04-09T11:44:00.000-07:00

30 MINUTE TALK

2008-04-08T16:54:00.001-07:00

PIECE

2008-04-07T13:28:00.000-07:00

Here's a thing I made that's going to be included in an art book that my good friend Ben Sisto is publishing:

The book is called Honeywell Pulldown.

THE FRESNO ART MUSEUM

2008-04-06T16:04:00.002-07:00

I stood outside the Fresno Art Museum gulping down gas station coffee. Two latino kids were clambering on a jagged and unwelcoming sculpture. One screamed abusively, and though it was in Spanish, I could understand the tragedy of space travel and the re-entry forces that were no-doubtedly tearing at his jowls. If only his brother would save him.

It’s incredible that this museum is even here, I thought. The neighborhood didn’t seem to be the best, not terrible though. Rumbling undertones weren’t shaking the fillings from my teeth and most homes didn’t have bars on the windows. It’s these depressed Southwestern cities, always a decrepit facade.

The museum building was modest, nothing overwhelming or abstract. Once inside, light poured through the vertical skylights adjoined with the angular ceiling. It felt at once very art museumy, but it was also the uncluttered use of space and the floating circular desk.

In the lobby/gallery were a series of wooden sculptures. The literature said they were inspired by a granite quarry in Vermont, and though the interweaving scaffold of balsa wood evoked the tattered structures that might wrap around a granite’s basin, it felt more rube goldberg that geological modernity.

The others, freestanding stacks of building blocks felt like filled vessels, but the minutiae of spaces and jagged edges kept their forms from abstracting and becoming negative space in the empty gallery. On the walls hung wheels. They reminded me of sun wheels and alchemical symbols so I had an immediate affinity. I went from one to the next, admiring its form and construction (what woodworking!), but slowly my mind made the immediate association to biking. I saw the influence of tire treading and spokes. It was hard to divide myself from this impression and it clouded what could’ve been excellent forms. It reminded me of the obsessive bike culture permeating the subcultures of many cities I lived in and I wondered if this artist too spent more time tinkering away on a fixed gear than he did in formal study.

I’m sure I’m wrong, it was a personal and cynical impression.

In the gallery to the left were a series of drawings and prints by Terry Allen. I liked the lewd forms woven into the drawings and the faux-screenplay with its Lynchian time deformations and twists was, well at first intriguing, but at the same time derailed by the conceptual pieces like pillows pressed between mountains or graves dug in beds. The lithograph of Chinese symbols with translations…was it a joke? I couldn’t tell.

Strength. Abounding Wisdom. Absolution. The only hint that it might’ve been a joke was tucked in the corner: Youthful Folly.

I doubt it though as it was slowly broken down into its pieces: a silhouette of monolithic southwestern mountains, haze, and there, those symbols.

Next door was a gallery of pre-columbian Mexican work. As I expected this was my favorite and I patiently read through the descriptions and admired the pieces for archetypal and symbolic value. It’s hard though, when these forms are presented with historical and aesthetic data, to enter into a meditative commune with the form; always broken by the chain of data, of possible symbols and otherwise, things that if I read them years and years ago would float by as sort of impossibilities, foolish methods for explaining the delicate workings of life.

As per usual, the divine symbols were delivered with secular implications.

“Are these toys or something?” one patron asked, glancing briefly at the minute sculptures of women.

The thing that excited me the most on a pure aesthetic level were the remnants of pre-Columbian Incan tapestries. I have read a lot about their work in textiles. It was their metallurgy you could say. When the Conquistadors arrived they abandoned their oppressive steel armor for the nearly impenetrable cotton armor worn by the Incan military.

While this kind of practicality was not imbued in the fragments, it was amazing to see the way they wove, and so long ago.

The William Saroyan tribute in the adjacent gallery was, well I just didn’t like it. I could see the shrine motifs and all that business, but the use of text was really jarring and uncomfortable, not to mention the artist turned prose into poetry, breaking lines and turning what were powerful SENTENCES into cheesy poems.

A retrospective of a lesser-known minimalist, Theodora Varnay Jones, looks much better photographed. In real life the nick-knack shelves filled with layers of transparent complimentary colors were not striking. I think it might have been the use of light, or rather, the non-use of light that hampered the exhibits affect. Anyway, in and out of that gallery.

Upon realizing that the large scale portraits of youthful war protesters were tapestries I immediately thought: what a colossal waste of time…again my cynicism eeking in. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the sentiment of activism, but the subjects were so bland and the slogans naive. While gigantic (each tapestry was easily thirteen feet tall) these works in textile will not last like those in the Incan wing. While I understand this is something of a no-brainer, I was just stricken by the boring use of subject and the liberal-arts-poli-sci-marxism artist statement. Probably I’m bringing too much of my own stigma to the table here.

Relegated to the hallway gallery was the work of an ex-employee. It was vague, kind of convoluted, but I thought the video was funny; the way it pulled sound from Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day and used it to soundtrack a video about Neo-Imperialism since World War II.

The best use of negative space was in the children’s art room. I don’t know who Webster is, but man, he loves drawing outlines of things then coloring in the backgrounds. I can picture him saying: “I like the backgrounds,” disappointed by the intricate difficulties of figuration. Still, remarkable.

Another gallery hosted a sort of activism art, but it was more subtle in its approach. If it weren’t for the descriptions plainly drawing the emotional and subjective intent of the pieces, I would not have known the small figurative drawings by Stephanie Wilde were exploring the AIDS crisis in Africa. I tried to separate the literal, because the sequential imagery was in a few cases very successful and reminded me of fairy tale artwork, particularly the pieces attempting to parallel the European Elite’s reaction to the bubonic plague and the American government’s reaction to the AIDS crisis. While I could really do without that kind of parallel, as I don’t see the intrinsic relationship. Though we live in a global economy, we do not think with a sort of global nationalism. While the European Elite had a responsibility to their people, our relation to Africa is one of Altruism and the greatest share of post-colonial strife does not belong to us. This isn’t to say that I don’t support a whole-hearted support, I just didn’t see such a literal parallel and thought the piece would’ve been more communicative if it hadn’t had such literal things implied over it.

Nice pieces though.

Finally the sculpture garden. The first piece “Welcome Wall.” Well, that’s funny, I thought, wondering if the joke was intentional.

It was all pretty, you know, outdoor sculpture, except for the marble one. At first I thought it was just an oblong and contorted block, but the I saw the anatomy in there, all twisted around in a cloud of stone: children, penises, arms, legs, all proper and very classical but swarmed into a Prima Materia. I liked that one.

That was all though.

Incredible that this museum is here and surviving. While it wasn’t packed, there were a surprising number of people roaming the galleries, and a variety too. There were elderly couples and Mexican families, middle-aged women in pairs touring the galleries that, while not filled with lewd artwork, did have traces of obscene anatomy, and it was nice to know that these things weren’t outwardly discouraged.

I doubt the Fresno Art Museum curates for shock, but that can be a strength

WHITE WHALE BAG

2008-04-04T16:57:00.000-07:00

Thought I'd put up a few pictures of my work in progress work for David Paige's post-apocalyptic feature film:

MY ENEMY'S ENEMY IS A FRIEND WHO I HAPPEN TO HAVE A POST TRAUMATIC REACTION TO

2008-04-04T13:36:00.000-07:00

I have been thrust into the greatest challenge I have yet encountered among these isolated hills, pastures, and a culture that is so alien to me. This challenge has less to do with the difficulty of social immersion than it does with a complicated biome. Living in a lower elevation in the foothills puts me in a point of ecological marriage, wherein those flora and fauna from the flat fertile lands of the central valley mingle with those who live in the Sierra Nevadas.

Coming from the Northeast I’m used to my fauna being timid, small, and for the most part adverse to living alongside humans. Things are a little more wild out here.

There are many dangerous species from mountain lion, to black widow, to rattle snake. These creatures don’t so much scare me as fascinate me. The mountain lion in particular is like a thing of myth in the Northeast. There are sightings regularly and though there is no reason for any wild animal to obey the US/Canada border, mountain lions are considered extinct in the Northeast.

When someone declares they spotted one they might as well be claiming they saw the great sweeping tail of Champ, Vermont’s answer to the Lock Ness monster, undulating beneath the dark algal waters of Lake Champlain.

Tarantulas too, that massive spider beast that decries all natural reason for where I’m from. How could an arachnid get to be that big, even over a millennia. Did the niche filled by such animals as fisher-cats and rats open up, allowing those eight slender legs to grow muscular and hairy, the jaws to engorge with blood and the eyes expand; creating something so alien from the ecology I know.

Mr. Tarantula is not the only arachnid that expanded its size to improve its chances of survival, as I discovered yesterday morning.

It’s strange how something so glaringly different from your environment can blend in. I can go about my morning routine, brushing my teeth, washing the dishes, packing up lunch, and not notice the wood spider flat against my window, so big as to cover a quarter of the screen.

When I think about it, it’s hard to not draw almost sexual associations; between its legs and a phallus, its inoracular shape and appearance, so unintuitive looking, and the more profane aspects of human anatomy. It certainly took my breath away and threw me into an immense panic. It is so emasculating to admit it, but I have severe and psychically embedded arachnophobia.

There’s no rational explanation for it. The only origin I can pinpoint is a spider genocide I went on with a friend as a child, leaving a wake of dozens of large spider carcasses. I proudly told my mother when she got home and she broke down crying. I remember her there over the kitchen table, her elbows on the deep finish, her hands wrapped in her black hair. My words have escaped me because they were almost performative; inside a deep wound was opening.

This is something I’ve dealt with for a long time so I’ve learned some tricks to avoid confrontation. Even the site of one can give me nightmares, never-mind moving a spider or killing it. Even the thought gives me such visceral psychic pain; the only thing I can associate it with was that desperate hounding panic I experienced in the months after getting dumped.

So I left Mrs. Giant Wood Spider to her own devices. She doesn’t want to live in my house. She wants to live outside. I went to work shaken and it took half a day to get back to some sense of normalcy. After work I made my regular pit stop at the Auberry Public Library.

With such loneliness it’s important for me to have a daily dose of humans outside the workplace. I’ve become friendly with the library staff and am in fact giving a half an hour talk there next month. I told Anne, the head librarian about my problem and she made a phone call to her co-worker, Deb, whose husband is an etymologist.

“Deb, hi, it’s Anne. Am I interrupting? Oh your sons birthday—well it’s really quick. I have a patron here, a regular patron, you must have seen him before, Forrest, anyway, he’s here right now afraid to go home because he’s got a huge wood spider in his house.”

I glanced down to the woman working behind the counter.

“Emasculating, isn’t it?”

She broke out laughing.

“Well yeah, here I’ll put him on,” Anne handed me the phone.

I arranged for Deb and her husband Jim to come by my house to dispose of the wood spider. I got home, terrified, looking in every window. It was hard to will myself onto the front porch. I made puckering noises with my mouth until one of the half dozen cats who live around my house came out.

It was the black and white longhair. She’s friendly, awkward, and from the look of it, about ready to pop out another half dozen cats. I urged her into my house and together black and white longhair made a thorough pass.

I felt relieved. My technique of non-confrontion worked. The spider had moved on to better places.

Deb and Jim came by anyway and I exuberantly engaged them in conversation. It was nice to have people around! I told them she was gone and though they were skeptical they said:

“Allllllright.”

I went on with my night. I ate my dinner, put on a movie, and sat down to sew. Shortly after I began, as I was pressing and stretching a piece of leather into place, my long fingers nimbly holding it, their jittery movement and then impenetrable stillness, I saw a parallel motion out of my peripheral vision.

There, from beneath my stationary holder, were long slender legs rolling. I leapt up and ran outside with my lantern. I called Deb and she said she was on her way. I couldn’t go back inside, just couldn’t so I turned out my lantern and listened to the crickets. All the nighttime sounds I never hear so vividly…a loud flapping from above. I watched the massive silhouette of a bird land in a tree. What is it? It was no hawk, too big, and it had the slouch of a vulture, but the beak…it was long and slender. The bird stretched, its thin snake-like neck contorted and it let out a hollow bellow, nowhere near a song, closer to a yawn.

It reared and then bent down. Two loud taps. The bird was tapping on its eggs. But what was it. Before I could get a proper identification Deb pulled up. We went inside and I pointed where the spider had been, but she was gone. Deb sifted through the clutter on my table, but she wasn’t anywhere to be found. She offered to leave her collecting container and paintbrush.

“No no no,” I said, “she must be close.”

We checked the windows, the blinds, the bar that holds the blinds. I backed up against the stairs, a terrible well in my gut and then I saw those same legs, thin like fingers rolling about in the molding above my table. Deb collected her and she let out a great billow of thick web. She frantically crawled up and about in the container.

“Where do you want her?” Deb asked.

“Well outside,” I said, “she won’t come back in.”

“Not necessarily.”

Can the world be so cruel? A massive spider that doesn’t mind co-habitating with humans?

“Well let’s take her far away,” I said.

“You don’t want her in your shrubbery?” Deb asked.

“No no no no,” I said, “you can have her.”

Deb cradled the container and I guided her up the hill to her car. Something changed in that spider, to see it treated with such love and sympathy. There was a marriage there, an individual connected to the land about her and pitying the spider who found an unwelcome home. Though I was glad my friend the monster wood spider was gone there was a sadness there too and I felt guilty.

Strange how a phobia can have such a clear tie to the past, a psychological point of origination and as such, the web still holds that form. I do not fear getting bitten, I do not fear their nature, in fact I think they are brilliant creatures, I fear their primal being, their symbolic form. I remember, back before I realized this, my dad had me write an essay about my arachnophobia. Though he is acrophobic he simply could not accept that arachnophobia had as much credence.

I wrote about their shape, their hairy build, their jaws, but it all felt like a lie.

To see one for me is to re-experience that darkness of origination, that terrifying period before I was. That pre-beginning, the anteroom of life, is more unsure than the autumn of the soul. To kill a spider is for me such a trauma, like killing a piece of myself. I long ago promised I would never kill one again, hoping to right the bad spider karma embedded in my psyche. While my problems have been less pronounced than when I was younger (my mother would actually observe spiders being drawn to me), they are now re-emerging.

This morning I woke up glad for a spider free day. I took a quick look around the house. I didn’t see anything, but then, there on the ceiling, another wood spider. It was a smaller male, pressed in that same awkward way as the female was against the screen, like a soldier avoiding gunshots over his head.

I was paralyzed. There was nothing I could do but shut the door and hope I’d have the will to take care of him later.

God…this is a challenge on the level of living with PTSD in the ghetto of Mission Hill following my abduction by the crackhead.

I can’t afford to move. That’s all I know.

PARTICIPATORY RACISM

2008-04-02T13:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday while I was sorting through interest surveys my cellphone, which was plugged into the wall, beeped. The airy drone of the copy machine wound down and the slight ambient glow cast by the hallway light diminished.

The Administrative offices on the Rancheria are the hub of all activity, including maintenance activity, so I am used to occasional power outages and blown fuses.

“Everybody go home!” J laughed.

This wasn’t outlandish. We are occasionally sent home early for power issues.

I leaned in the doorway beside the B, the receptionist in the offices. Nobody was running any power tools off of a 25 foot extension cord. There was a PG & E truck parked in the lot.

I walked into the lot and intercepted the middle aged man with deeply tanned skin and buzzed white hair.

“Your power go off in there?” he asked snidely.

“It did,” I said.

“Didn’t pay your bill,” he grumbled.

I walked inside and told B. She called C and was cackling on the phone for at least six minutes. C, the Tribal Administrator, thought that this was an April Fools Joke.

“No, it’s true, didn’t pay the bill,” I laughed into the phone.

“Not you too!” she screamed, “Forrest, don’t you get in on this too!”

It took me at least five minutes to convince C that this was not in fact an April Fools joke. I fetched the PG and E man before he left so he could talk to C. The man walked into the office with me, two thin white men, and leaned in the doorway while B cackled in laughter on the phone with C.

I could tell immediately that the PG and E man did not understand why a serious issue as non-payment would be handled so jovially. Where was the graveness, the wrinkles carving deeper beside the eyes, the down-turned lips of upset that graced his own face?

He spoke briefly with C. I went back to sorting in my office.

“That guy still here,” I heard, assuming the PG and E man wanted J, the maintenance man, but no, he knocked on my door. “Come out here,” he said as if he were about to teach me a lesson.

I followed him up behind the white stucco church.

“I hate comin’ down here,” he said, “when she pays the bill you just…” he grumbled as he struggled to open the fuse box, “that’s your main breaker.”

He turned it on and then off.

“I just would hate having to come back down here. I’m down here all the time,” he said, walking back to his truck.

“It’s a real poor area,” I said.

“Oh, I understand that,” he replied, hopping in the cab of his truck.

It wasn’t until I was sitting back in my office chair that I realized my whiteness some how made me the neutral party in this situation. I had been given the job as one finger of PG and E, to keep the Indians powerless until they properly paid their bill. I’m not sure why my skin color was a badge of such trustworthiness. I look like an emaciated Quaker.

I told the chair of the Tribal Council as soon as he walked through the door and together we went back up behind the church.

“He didn’t even shut the power off,” R said as he flipped the breaker and watched the wheel inside the meter immediately begin whirling.

“This is in your hands,” I said.

There was no indication that the bill had been taken care of by this point and not being a responsible party for utilities in the Administrative Offices, I returned to my sorting. R flipped the switch.

About two hours later, R and B had sorted through backlogs of files upon files and found that the bill had been paid (thank god for the fiscal officer, I would’ve hated to see her in trouble).

The phone rang. It’s not often for me, but it was this time.

“Hey, you can go turn that breaker back on,” the voice said.

“Already did,” I replied.

There was an upset silence.

“When,” the voice sighed.

“When we got a call from C, the tribal administrator,” I lied.

“Ok then,” he said and hung up.

I can honestly say that this is the first instance of cut and dry racism I’ve participated in. I guess it’s because I come from such a white land, and in a liberal college, race was like a badge that often afforded great academic respect.

Sure there were times out with L and E and someone might holler: “Injun,” but really this was the first.

What baffled me was again how quickly I was trusted, how I was somehow immediately reliable. Stereotypes rose like figures from the ground about me: of the lazy indian, the lying indian, and again, when B was laughing with C on the phone, the indian unwilling to take their life seriously.

While I’m not one to shake the oppressor, slap him aside the face and holler: open your god damn eyes, I am surprised by how embedded we are in our various racial gradations.

You think good humor would make even the most brazen and conservative man crack a grin, but nothing could penetrate the cold european seriousness. Those wrap around orb glasses and mustache like a hard bristled horse brush. In what ways am I looking in the mirror? Which things are mine and what can be left aside.

I told my supervisor that the reason I felt so quickly acclimated was that I did a life evaluation and determined what behaviors and beliefs were absolutely core to me and what I could leave behind. I try to blend with people; this is something I’ve always done. It’s why I can be so socially successful I think.

There are times though when I feel what can only be called a whiteness, like ink bleeding through paper. I feel self-conscious, being the only Anglo here, and as I project onto myself, so others assist in that projection. It typically happens towards the end of the day, when there’s no pot of coffee on stand by and I’m exhausted by my own laziness.

Things that normally don’t bother me drive me insane. It’s those the petty cultural differences, the ways that different people handle things like sending out e-mails, or making copies; how things are handled without worry or care.

I’ll say those things that feel so white bread and awkward, so “oh gee” of me. People will reply with those blank stares.

I wasn’t listening!

I hurry out the door so that this won’t be my expected behavior. It’s a hard feeling on the drive home, like my skin is tougher yet I’d like to tear it off.

Is it whiteness not to listen?

When I see this ignorant whiteness in other people I get so upset that I want to shake them by the shoulders. It’s really me wanting to shake myself.

But what of race do I take with me and what can be left at the door. The last thing I’d ever want to be is someone I’m not and that includes the color of my skin.

I have blue blood and am deeply proud of my ancestors. My triple great grandfather was a Civil War hero and a few years before his death was awarded the medal of honor. I want so badly to embody that bravery, a trait that feels so close in karmic heritage. Even my other triple great grandfather who was secretary of the Navy under Ulysses S. Grant. He took dozens of ships with Native American themed names and changed their names to those from antiquity.

The Mohawk became the Argonaut.

That’s about all he did do before moving on after four months. Though I don’t advertise this piece of Borie family history out here it belongs to me.

I don’t think there are any easy answers to this question.

I will say this though. I am from a Western background and so I intend to be a great Western man. I want to be a container for all Western traditions and values that are great. I will never turn my back on these origins, they will be cement in the bottom of my shoes, and as I am grounded, so it shall be Western ideas that ground me.

But the whiteness, that oppressive deafness, is cast out along with everything it complements.

GAMBLING LOSSES

2008-04-01T18:04:00.001-07:00

In driving around to see collapsed bridges, dams, and lakes, to reach 99 en route to San Francisco or Sacramento, I have passed the Table Mountain Casino at least a dozen times. Despite it’s somewhat isolated location, the Casino parking lot is near capacity at all times, be it Sunday morning at eight AM or Tuesday night at midnight. That same density of cars persists, despite holiday, workaday, or any other factor that might inhibit gambling traffic.

Across the street from the casino is a broad stretch of planned mansions. There are a lot of these pseudo-suburban minus the congestion developments on the edge of the foothills. I would not be surprised however if the difference between this planned community and others is in ethnicity. Table Mountain, its broad deep chambers of slot machines, high roller card tables, performance center with ultimate fighting championships, and cars suspended from the ceiling is the possession of the Table Mountain Rancheria. The Mono Indians who run the casino are cousins with many I work with, but bet their destitute Rancheria on the gambling industry, and came out on top with incredible wealth.

Big Sandy Rancheria, which I’ve mentioned in previous entries was not so lucky. The Mono Winds Casino stays afloat but doesn’t turn anywhere near the profit. When picking up and dropping off my friend Amanda at the train station I was reminded twice of this. The Table Mountain Rancheria was able to purchase an entire trauma wing for a hospital in Fresno, pasting its casino marquee on the side of the building.

Having passed the Table Mountain Casino a hand full of times my curiosity was growing. On the day after my birthday Amanda and I parked the car on the far end of the lot, crossed the bridge over the pitiful stream, birds fraily chirping above “Red Red Wine” by UB40. We stepped onto the escalator that rose less than ten feet, depositing us before the sliding glass doors. The short and emaciated security guard eyed us and the hostess greeted us enthusiastically, tipping her glittery bowler. When did we walk out of the foothills and into Vegas?

Once inside the casino I was sure that the walls were mirrored; a trick often used to make small spaces look bigger. From the outside Table Mountain looks no bigger than a small one story warehouse. As we wound deeper and deeper into the maze of one armed bandits it became apparent that there was no need to extend the perceived end of the Casino. It stretched well beyond my expectations.

I had no idea there was such a variety of slot machines. Different minimum bets, different themes, all stared at with the same sort of vacancy by a vast array of individuals, representing all walks of life, most of them tethered to the machine by a spiral wound plastic umbilical cord that was attached to their breast. Their cash card was inside the glowing slot I had mistaken for a place to deposit my measly quarter.

I was quickly convinced by the constant chiming of machines and the persistent losses of the two dollars I had laid on the line, to put in five more. It took me five minutes to work through it. I had a few leaps in money.

“Are you gonna cash out?” Amanda would ask.

No no, I wanted my five back at least. But it wasn’t in the cards. I walked into the casino gift store down seven dollars. There was nothing I was primed to buy. The only attractive items were sequestered to the corner of the store, where there was a rack of native american greeting cards and fringed suede Pendleton jackets. The rest was all zen wind chimes and resin animal teeth.

“Satisfied?” Amanda asked as we rode the escalator back down the ten feet to the sidewalk.

“I guess,” I said.

Truth is I had been drawn to the casino by “intuition.” Perhaps it was more the allure of gambling and that ever-persistent possibility of stumbling with one quarter into incredible wealth. As poor as I am, with no expendable income to say, buy a leather sewing machine, this possibility is more attractive than ever. Naturally when saying this I think about the countless times when I was more well off, in a convenience store for a cup of watery coffee but stuck waiting behind an impoverished man or woman throwing down forty dollars on lottery tickets.

“Nine sixes, three twos…no no that one!”

Is it our brain that guides us towards these sorts of chances. Incredible losses seem so pitiful when compared to the potential earnings, earnings the impoverished need so terribly. Was my intuition then just a sort of tunnel vision on these potentials. As every person deserves to be provided for, myself included, a thousand dollars no strings attached when you’re down and out doesn’t seem unreasonable. Even when you’re paying out of the ass to get it.

BIRTHDAY

2008-03-31T17:09:00.000-07:00

Well I’m a year older. Twenty six now. I hope this year will be a proactive and that I won’t be cleaning up the splattery mess the severance of twenty five left behind. A necessary severance from a life and perspective, but really messy all the same.

My birthday went well. My friend Amanda came into town from Santa Barbara and my friend Dave made a pit stop on his way from SF to LA. We drove out to the collapsed bridge with the intent of getting a better look at it, just as apocalyptic as before, only with lots of people fishing in the waters around the hulking triangles of tattoed concrete.

Dave had to depart early the next day so after seeing him off Amanda and I went looking for a hike. While the country around me is so open it’s very restricted. It’s hard to find an open piece that isn’t slathered in no trespassing signs. Makes the mouth wet, looking out at those sparsely forested flats that rise to the ridges, their great brown stony caps like the edges of rusting knives against the horizon.

While I live in the Sierra National Forest, most of it is used for ranches. Amanda posed the good question of how these ranchers make money and you know, I really don’t know. It is apparent when driving down 168 that these ranches are slowly getting sold off and luxury homes are taking their places.

There may come a time when one won’t hear the distant bellowing of cows. Even the hike we did find, through the San Joaquin River Valley Basin, was on a working ranch and there were many gates that we had to open and close behind us. On the road down, bulls watched us with wary laziness while their cows stood crookedly on the shoulder of the road like locals confused by the presence of outsiders.

The trail was a dirt path snaking through those sparsely forested flats I often wish I could tramp through. It is nice to know that there is a place I can go, only fifteen minutes from my house, where there will be no threat of getting shot at.

Spring is gaining momentum. Birds frantically gathered nests. Butterflies chased each other about before us while other moths simply hovered, one over the other, the male hypnotizing the female into some sort of mountable trance.

The river was incredible; the catastrophe in the rocks surrounding it. Great fissures ripped the hillside in half, a wound cast long after the winding river had carved its basin.

On the opposite side stood a gigantic power station, proof that eminent domain can lay claim to even the most pristine places. The power-lines crossing every view we had was an additional reminder of this.

Amanda and I weren’t sure how far the trail went. Our estimations ran anywhere from half a mile to four miles. We eventually turned around at five miles when the path was leading us up onto yet another ridge. The river was silent and missing by then, the land was drier save those tiny streams trickling their way down the hillside. Fat black bees buzzed around us and matte black beetles crawled across the path. Vultures hanged overhead, their massive wings collapsing with such fluidity as they perched on high branches, their gnarled pink faces like shriveled fruit around two yellow eyes.

I was surprised by my athletic performance. I did not get horribly dehydrated, nor did my legs get sore towards the end of the hike. I exited the park feeling a bit tired and hungry, but refreshed.

Here are some of the bags I’ve made lately. The first is for my friend Dave’s post-apocalyptic feature film White Whale . I’m making him a bunch more.

I also recorded three new songs. They can be found on my music myspace or virb, which I’ve linked to in earlier posts and you know, no html right now. I’m a bit sleepy and have a big bag full of feathers and leather remnants to sort through.

EVENTS

2008-03-28T19:08:00.000-07:00

The installation was built on a frame of metal piping. From this frame were draped four types of balloons. On top were the round balloons we all think of when we hear the word balloon. On the side facing the house there were those highly reflective plastic balloons in the shape of stars. On the wall opposite were two dozen water balloons and on the other two walls were draped the long snaky phallic balloons. Neil, a guy I recognized from way back when I lived in LA myself, tied those snaky balloons into bowties. A small television played a looping video of bizarre shapes and movements. A plastic horse, giraffe, and ox watched this video beside us.

Decrying the precision and universality I look for in art, either in concept or practice, this metal cube filled with balloons looked like a child playing. While I don’t have any problem with children playing or adults playing as children, I have a problem when the creator ascribes lofty high art meaning to this play or insists that one day they’ll make a life out of it.

Not to sound callous, but I think that play can tell the individual much more about themselves. Not only does this ascription compromise the value of playing, but it imposes on you, having witnessed this play, a feeling of being forcibly taught.

There was also the fact that a tall skinny gay man hopped into the room. He had glitter on his face like David Bowie and slender striped bellbottoms with suspenders. He was traveling with a young girl whose face I didn’t get much of a look at because she was on a great deal of mushrooms and MDMA and I did not want to engage with her. Already, she was rolling on the floor beside me squealing about the visceral nature of plastic and showing me her ID.

“This is me!” she exclaimed, as if she couldn’t believe it herself.

I became so so so so so aware of the duality my life is playing in.

I work on an Indian Reservation. While the people I work with are not uncultured, they are not of this culture. I’m not going to be bias here and outwardly state my preference, I’m sure you can pick it up, but on the Rancheria I might observe a man sorting the stems of a sour berry bush by length so the elder women can weave baby baskets out of them.

Walking around this massive party I observed the end result of processes: a large geodesic dome built from cardboard, fixed with bolts, and filled by the eye-watering yet savory aroma of marijuana smoke. I sat in this geodesic dome. There were holes poked in the roof that gave the feeling of a starry night. I enjoyed the rough and dirty ground under my fingers. In LA, a desert so endlessly bathed in deafening light, it was calming to be so enveloped in darkness for a moment. The walls were not thick enough to mute the party.

In the house there was the techno music, the drunken rambling dancing, though some girls could hold their own. In the spirit of releasing myself from worry, I laughed at the nest installation someone had hung from the ceiling and the two people rocking in it. Deep down I wondered: will the roof beams hold.

When the party filled up I was suddenly unable to talk to anyone. There were so many potential friendships and sexual encounters, but so much causality and chance in entering into those friendships or sexual encounters.

I was drawn to a woman, big eyed, thin, voluptuous, but I gave myself space to think about our interaction. I am fixated only on her nice breasts, shapely butt, large eyes, and sweeping curly hair. While you all should know that I am no feminist, is this any pretense for beginning an interaction with anyone, especially when I’m trying to grow up? How many times have I fervently chased a woman only to despise her once I had sexually conquered her, sometimes before?

Mark, my archetypal dream analyst has told me to not project Anima onto women. Anima is the perfect female archetype. Almost a year ago I had a series of dreams with her that were so pure and filling, such extraordinary love, that I almost broke up with my ex six months before our eventual relationship collapse. Instead, petrified by PTSD, I told her I couldn’t be emotionally committed, whatever that means.

Now I struggle to find a woman’s place beneath such an extraordinary archetype. Mark calls the woman I need a valkyrie. Others have said that his marriage works because he has the Animus and his wife has God. When I went on a dreamwork retreat some time ago there was great group upheaval because not one, but two marriages among clients of Mark had collapsed. In my group people talked about feeling that “the work didn’t work.” Naturally, after some time it became clear that, as we all know, some partnerships can’t be saved, even by God.

Back at the party, the shots of gin I had drank did not work, nor did the vodka, or the gin I drank after the vodka. I was really trying to let my hair down, but it was as if I were being cursed with clarity. I could only look at these women, admire their shapes and their physical beauty, but fully realize how unprepared I am to meet one.

I could only maintain this kind of emotional clarity for so long and while I had an arm around the knees of a girl while she wretched out of the car, my mind wandered. I grew sad and detached. Is all the disinterest I feel just a defense mechanism? When I made the decision to drive everyone home I still did not believe that I was sober and I walked up and down the center line of the road as if it were a tight rope.

“Only a drunk person would give themselves tests to see if they can drive,” my friend Susie grumbled from the back seat as I put my friend’s mother’s car into gear.

Our trip back North could be plotted by the occasional plastic bag filled with water that smelled of bile and strawberries. Though most of us felt better, Nicole was still weathered. She was on the verge of chipper at breakfast, but once in the car was consistently reminded of how hung over she was.

Myself, I was a jerk. I became mean that morning. I don’t know if I was overloaded by personal interaction or if I still felt a bit unhappy with the sleeping arrangements the night before (me with the pukey ones in the living room). When Kasey asked me to give another dollar for a meal I became possessed, my head fell, I lost all awareness and I hissed:

“I can’t.”

It had such an impact for only a few words. Maybe it was the inner collapse that was beneath those two words.

I wish I understood it all.

The next few days didn’t offer an ounce of clarity. My car was still in the shop. The gas tank had almost fallen off. Well, I would’ve blown up, I was happy to get it fixed, but to be stranded in my spaceship trailer for four days. I couldn’t get to work, I had to be so self-motivating, and it worked somewhat. There were a few lapses, but I tried.

However, in my scatterbrained personal space there were about ten thousand things I did not think of. On Thursday afternoon, while I was taping large paper sheets to the wall of the community building at Cold Springs, I became aware of how unprepared I was for my introduction to the youth and Elders. There was G asking when the drummers were performing. There was my supervisor and her supervisor anxiously awaiting my leadership and I felt personally remote. After accidentally lifting a drum stick to admire the sinew and leather (a no no) I became nervous of saying a thing. Luckily there had been so many events at the Rancheria that many things ran on automatic.

The children delivered plated meals to the elders. The children were given pizza. Sodas were thrown out and many coffee pots filled and then emptied. I barely ate, listening to my supervisor talk about my program while gauging the reaction of the crowd. What an echo chamber…whispers became screams and screams became deafening wails. My voice reached musical theater levels as I fought to subvert the chatter so I could show them all pictures of my family.

The silence only arrived when the Balch Camp documentary was screened. What impact…that felt good. Afterwards the Elders exclaimed their want to make documentaries about acorn-gathering. I pitched my idea for a library of oral tradition and though the interest surveys that were completed earlier that night, I feel my context may have made the idea more plausible on a personal level.

It was not entirely unlike directing a film. You can’t control every aspect. You can’t make anybody do anything they don’t want to. Rather, you need to focus on individual relationships and give people the benefit of trust. The scene was as chaotic and positive as films I had worked on. The drum: BOOM BOOM BOOM beneath it all.

Traditional drumming has no fills, no flares, no jazz timing. Just the pounding, like the pounding of the heart and god what a sound.

“Do you want me to stop them?” G asked and I shook my head, only on her insistence of the volume of the drum asking her to.

When the kids corralled around it during my speech I had no desire to stop them. I loved that hollow pounding behind me. The pace was set, and though all the youth and the adults struggled to keep their eyes on me, the Elders were attentive and nodding in affirmation with things I said.

The raffle was absolutely hilarious. The children clamoured to be allowed to pick the ticket, and when they did, their eyes rolled up into their heads as if they were trying to achieve a psychic synthesis between hand, bowl, and raffle number. There was such incredible disappointment when they didn’t draw their own ticket and there went the I Am Legend DVD and then the Matchbox cars. What was left? A my little pony. Oh the emasculation of it all when Wade was forced to pick a froofy pink charm bracelet, but god, anything but the puzzle.

Despite the inherent lack of oh, you know, structure, organization, my first event was something of a hit. I would estimate fifty, maybe sixty attendees, including a few teenagers, which was very surprising. I definitely wouldn’t have gone to this if I was sixteen, especially when the organizer tucks his shirt into his tight pants and polishes his oxfords.

I look forward to other events. We’re getting a test print of the calendar early next week, all bound up and pretty. I spent a long time tweaking it and am very happy with how it looks, on a computer screen at least.

While stranded at home I wrote and recorded three new songs. I am a little concerned by how weird they are and the myspace silence regarding them is penetrating…did I gamble creatively when I pushed my usually regal baritone to its limits and squeaked out one lead vocal, or the dad-folk gospel song about my abduction…too personal? Only time will tell. It felt nice to write it and the chorus really resonated with me for some reason…oh here I am talking about intuition.

NEW MUSIC

CULTURAL PLAGUE

2008-03-21T13:27:00.000-07:00

I still feel dissociative after having a guest around for almost a week. It must be due to how deeply I live inside my head. To have someone embedded in my life for an extended period of time makes me feel a compromise on my very identity. Of course, this is the phenomenal nature of my perception and nothing permanent. I’ve come to realize that it’s something I have to learn to deal with because people are around and I like people, I’d like them to come around.

The rest of my friend’s visit was good, but after the weekend I was working so it wasn’t very visity. It was more like coming home to my wife, her hands buried in the dishes, the house tidied, me all exhausted and ornery preparing dinner and half-grumbling into the collar of my shirt.

I dropped my car off at the shop this morning. For so long I’ve associated auto mechanics with a sort of rural dillapitude, piles of rusting cars, the lower class housing crowding in on the smelly oily shop.

Dave’s Auto in Tollhouse however could not be more picturesque. I don’t imagine it’s too difficult for them to step out of their garage and see this in front of them:

The Contour, well she’s a little sick. Twice I’ve fully stalled out on the massive hill that takes me out of Cold Springs. If my tank gets below a quarter, she’s un-drivable. I’m just praying it’s not too expensive.

Work has been good, but tedious. My arms are elbow deep in photoshop. Dumont Printing is acquiring a high quality digital printer, which we’ll be using for this calendar, so I thought I’d go in and tweak this calendar a big, give it some more life, less anonymity. I am cleaning up images for inclusion in the calendar.

There must be an easier way to do this, but I don’t know it, so here I am, my tiny eraser and tiny paintbrush meticulously shaping the leaves of deer grass. I have an acorn, a feather, and a woven basket to look forward to after this. I’m going to replace the simple strikes in my calendar with these.

It feels good to give this calendar more life. I was being careful before, but after making my flyer, well-designed text and line, P said:

“Why doncha ya’ throw some feathers in there?”

One method for cultural survival for the Native Americans has been to unify into a singular cultural nation. I was worried about offending regional traditions, which I’ve found still remain. Each tribe still has its own ways of doing things, ways of speaking, ways of greeting, and ways of living, but with nationalism there is a safety blanket above them all that keeping out the more violent incursions of Western culture.

Ly picked me up from the mechanic and took me to work. She was born on the nearby Rancheria. I mentioned that I see a lot of the Indians who live up there when I check my Post Office Box.

“Oh yeah,” she said, “most people have boxes now. They used to have mailboxes and all that but things are going wrong up there. There’s a lot of vandalism and violence, domestic abuse. My uncle, he’s around seventy and he’s thinking about moving out of there. A lot of domestic abuse, old woman slaps her man around, or he does it to her. I don’t understand it but you know with every generation…things get worse and worse. When people hear I’m from this family they cock an eye but I say: ‘no no, the older ones.’ All the young people into drugs and all that, woooo…”

This Rancheria was recently at the center of a lot of gossip. The police raided a house looking for a fugitive. He wasn’t there though, but the windows were shattered and the door kicked in. Down here on Cold Springs there was a lot of discussion about the injustice of it all. I mentioned this to Ly and she said:

“Oh they raided another house the other day looking for a fugitive. Boy, all my relatives, they’re all in prison or otherwise…”

Cold Springs isn’t like this from what I can tell. When I went around posting flyers on all the doors everyone I ran into was very friendly, despite this skinny white guy dressed like a mormon at their front door. I suppose one never knows what goes on behind closed doors, but I do not feel that kind of criminality. I feel poverty, that’s for sure. I feel the cycles of poverty, the floating downward spiral, and though people talk about drinking and smoking weed, the lawns aren’t littered with beer bottles.

But it is all in the generations. It’s a sad thing…how do you keep the free market from interfering? You can’t. Though the people work with are Indian in identity, they naturally have certain American traits, not the least of which that they speak English. To have your country embedded in a sick nation, well, you can’t keep that plague out for long. I think I’ve expressed before how dazzled I am with the fact that it has been kept out for so long.

L was telling me yesterday that he was taught by his grandmother to greet every tribe in the way specific to that tribe. He gestured in all directions naming Dunlap, Table Mountain, and spoke in those dialects.

“Same words different language,” he said, “my grandma you know, she taught herself how to read and write just by looking at the paper. That’s how their memories were back then. She knew five languages, from tribes all around here. You know when I was a kid and they said something I didn’t know, I’d say (Mono language) and she’d tell me what it meant. Just once, that’s all you get.”

He popped his cheek then pointed out at the hills.

“You know when we were kids that’s where we’d be. Walk out there, look up at a mountain and we’d say, check it out. Head over there, day’s walk. Do some fishin’, come on back. That’d be a weekend. Then all the white people started movin’ in you know. So we’d be walking and BANG BANG, just warning shots, but when the dust around our feet hit the air we’d take off runnin’. So we’d go back there with rifles, not loaded, and we’d holler at them. They’d come off after us but we’d be in the bushes. When they were right on top of us…”

He held his hands in the air, as if holding a rifle.

“Click click click, from all around them. They’d chase us down and a mile up the trail, again, click click click from the bushes. We’d get some ways away from em and yell ‘Next time they’ll be real!’ and they left us alone after that.

“I remember town…we never went to town ‘cept once a month maybe an Elder would go in. I remember my Aunt she got a black boyfriend. I remember these things, the first time I saw a black man, these are in my memory and me and my brothers would run up and touch him, laugh and run away, taste our fingers. ‘is that chocolate in there?’ I remember these things.

“When I was, ah, twenty-three maybe they tried to get me into an arranged marriage. These Elders from over there, they’d come, bring me a few bags of groceries. My mom would say: ‘those are yours, they’re from these people, but they’re yours to deal with.’”

There was more than that. I often wish I had a tiny tape recorder with me at all times. The things I hear are incredible and to think I can drive half an hour and there I am in the heart of Fresno.

Brief note on Fresno. It’s all right. It’s not some cultural mecca. It’s not Brooklyn, hell, it’s not Portland, but it’s all right.

LONG WEEKEND

2008-03-18T12:34:00.000-07:00

It’s bizarre to have a guest staying at my house. In the past, having anyone in my domestic head space for over a day was enough to put me on a bus straight to assholetown. The personal work I’ve been doing over the past few months is paying off. I’m surprisingly ok with things that would’ve felt invasive in the past. Certainly, I’m not one hundred percent, but I am feeling the fruits of a lot of my labor.

Sharing a bed was hard to get used to. I don’t have enough blankets and pillows to make it feasible to put anyone up on the couch. The bed is big, so space isn’t much of an issue. It’s more about the warm body being there, especially with this being the first warm body I’ve shared a bed with since my ex.

I caught my body assuming it was my ex there rather than my guest, the little hump of her back against mine.

The night before last I had a surreal experience within the frame of these associative troubles. I woke up and the bed was empty. There was something wrong though, and then slowly, my guest unrolled from the blankets and I awoke where I had been kneeling, pressing over her.

I was acting in the unconscious world when a foreign aspect from the conscious world appeared, much like a supernatural shock. It was a very upsetting experience and reminded me of years ago, shortly after a break up, when I would feel the my ex-girlfriend beside me in bed, all her curves, the knots of her feet and her soft pillowy thighs, but when I reached for her face I found the body to be headless before it dissolved entirely.

Longing has a funny way.

What’s been nice is being able to share my landscape and life with someone else for the first time. I feel like everyone thinks I live in Fresno, or five minutes from Fresno, and no matter how many times I re-iterate how rural the area is it doesn’t stick. Granted, Prather, CA isn’t exactly on everyone’s map, but even in saying the Sierra Nevadas I find people put off. By associating where I live with rugged strip mall urbanity, people very much miss how beautiful it is.

We drove out to Millerton lake and walked down the launching platform for boats. It’s funny, the drought has gone on so long here that now the launching platform leads to a field that the ecology is in the process of reclaiming.

The shrubbery is hard and rugged, working through the soil and the pond that remains is shallow. Frogs bobbed in the mud, their eyes like a figure eight on top of their heads.

Wildflowers bloomed tremendously, almost like beautiful blemishes senselessly rising from the otherwise soft green hills. Two vultures circled overhead, their graceful bodies and ugly decrepit looking faces.

We went on to the Friant Dam. Millerton Lake was made by this dam and I guess it’s one of the largest in the area.

Along with Hoover Dam, no one is allowed near it for fear of terrorism. I was hoping to climb on the remains of a long ago collapsed bridge.

The bridge looks to be from times before the dam was built, but there, even on the opposite side of the road from the dam there was a shiny fence.

We walked down to the water and mulled around for some time. A man and his daughter were restling through the ragged edge of the river, trying to reach the steps back up to the parking lot. His daughter clamored up the steps while he washed dog-shit off his dusty brown boots.

“Dad hurry up!” his son yelled.

“I’m comin’!” the dad replied, then took three long swigs from a bottle of whiskey.

That night my guest helped me in recording a new song of mine. It can be listened to here:

THE LIVING LIKE US

I’m back at work now after the long weekend. Not much new here, just working on the presentation I’ll be giving at the end of the month. I talked with P, whom I’m organizing the event with, and when I asked how long my speech could be she said:

“Oh, two three minutes.”

“How much can I get away with?” I asked.

“Five, maybe?”

There goes my epic oral history of the Cobbs and the Bories. There goes the elaborate description of Randolph, Vermont and the foliage. There goes a full break down of my family tree.

I’ve debated included these things in a supplemental packet, to show how a book we make together might look, but that does seem a little self-centered. I am working to displace the mythologizing from myself and onto my ancestors, but it might not translate as such. If I am unable to present those sections I’ll include them in here. I am proud of my little pieces about my cabin boy, turned red coat, turned revolutionary soldier, turned awol ancestor and of the heroism of William Joyce Sewell, a civil war hero whose daughter married the Borie architect.

Too bad too bad…

SLOW DAYS SPENT PHONE SHMOOZING

2008-03-12T10:24:00.000-07:00

These past few days have been pretty slow down here on the Rancheria. Every afternoon I make a to-do list for the next day and that’s helped to alleviate the boredom a little. I need to keep my mind tethered to work or else it drifts towards great negative lodestones, like bedrock, those pathologies and neuroses I know I can rely on (unfortunately).

Yesterday I was on the phone with the head of the Ethnic Studies Library at Berkeley. Many entries ago I mentioned the California Indian Libraries Collection. To recap, in order to make it easier for those Indians looking to find anthropological, linguistic, or other scholarly materials about their tribe, Berkeley divided its resources about Native Californians into thirteen regional collections. Each collections hosts resources only covering those tribes represented in that area. One of these collections happens to be in the Auberry Public Library, my favorite watering hole.

One of the goals of the Intergenerational Cultural Preservation Program, which I am administering here on the Cold Springs Rancheria, is the creation of a cultural library. With Cold Springs being isolated, I thought it would be nice to seed the library with those resources relating to the Mono tribe. That way, lack of motivation would no longer be such a prevalent factor in the under-utilization of these resources. Think of it this way: would you be more liable to use a genealogy library if it were in your backyard and covered only your particular lines of descent?

So J, the man I spoke to at the Ethnic Studies Library said he’d give me permission to digitize all those audio resources registered under the CILC (California Indian Library Collection). Unfortunately, a good deal of those audio resources are registered under the Linguistics department at Berkeley, of the Pheobe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology (I mentioned earlier that they aren’t looked on too kindly by California tribes).

Today I’m going up to the Auberry Public Library to make a list of those audio resources I want to digitize, which I will then forward up to J for approval. In addition to the copies I burn for the Rancheria, I will be making copies for both the Auberry Public Library and the Ethnic Studies Library. When A, the head librarian at the public library asked that I do that I was not surprised. I was a bit more taken aback when J requested the same thing. He told me that all the cassette tapes were gone, not sure where; given out or sold.

It’s going to be a big project, that’s for sure.

Yesterday I went around with J, unrelated to the previous J, and handed out the flyers for the event I’m hosting at the end of the month (see flyer in previous entry). It was my first opportunity to go from house to house. While I didn’t hand deliver the majority of them, as every door has a clip on it with the specific purpose of holding flyers, I did get to see a few people. Everyone was very friendly, though I can’t say the same of the dogs. I’m glad J took me out, otherwise I would’ve been liable to waltz onto front lawns, only to be torn apart by a wild pack of lawn mutts. I got my first taste of what it might be like to be a mail man.

It was also nice to see how the houses are laid out. Though I’ve been here in the offices for over a month now, I had not yet had a proper tour of the community. The houses look, for the most part, very nice. The lawns are often cluttered with scraps and old rusty cars up on cinderblocks. Long clothes lines, piles of washing machines, and yards strewn with lawn equipment make me enter a reverie about Vermont.

The houses remind me of those built in the seventies in Vermont. That slightly modern family friendly design. I imagine the interiors being filled with lofts, balconies overlooking small living rooms, and short stairwells bridging the rooms; but the driveways are more ragged than anything I’ve ever seen. Rarely paved and filled with fissures, as if the house had fallen out the sky.

The closest thing to a neighborhood lies in the lower res, where a grouping on one story houses touch lawns and neighbors cross over fluidly from one yard to the next. A long circle drive leads out there and then ends. It is as if a suburban community was planned, but only one finger was finished.

On the personal front, last night I began sewing a new tarot card case as the one my mother crocheted me has stretched out too much. I really love sewing those scraps of leather and fur together, though my fingers are really beginning to feel the wear. Once I get my guitar there will be no turning back.

I also watched Walkabout with the commentary. Wow, even in 96 Nicholas Roeg was really seeing the end of coherence. What a rambly mess. However, a man so practiced in the filmic arts, who has probably explained his experimental sympathies thousands of times, well he probably just didn’t have the juice left to go through it one more time. Amazing movie though…

Here's a lizard:

MY FIRST EVENT

2008-03-10T16:36:00.000-07:00

MARATHON WEEKEND

2008-03-10T08:24:00.000-07:00

Button on the front. Still need to sew the edges of the flap.

It fits a dvd about, in terms of volume.

The strap will be attached as soon as I get a good measurement from my client (haha).

My fingers are very sore, but I'm beginning to get the hang of sewing leather. It's all about jerking that need hard when you're pulling it. The thread I used is for real leather thread (a step up). It's waxy and malleable in terms of thin-ness. The little loop that wraps around the button is made of this same thread.

8 hours.

LEATHERWORK STEP UP

2008-03-09T13:51:00.000-07:00

WORK IN PROGRESS:

This bag is for my friend Ruthie's friend. I made Ruthie a bag years ago and she still uses it. It's become coveted in her circle, so I'm making more. They're a little different now. Less flat, more FLAIR.

Here's the progress I've made in puppetworld:

He's coming right along. I definitely got lazy a few times and I'm going to pay for it later, but so far, he's going to be much easier to operate than my first 9-string.

A few packed days of handwork have left me with many wounds like this one:

MY TERRAIN

2008-03-09T13:31:00.000-07:00

For all those hundreds of pictures I took while driving across the country, I have taken none of the land that I live on. It's very perilous, see. I threw caution to the wind yesterday afternoon as I was driving home from the Tower District.

Fresno is on a biiiiig flat between two rivers. This makes fertile the land that should be arid. In the distance you can see the Sierras. I live somewhere among them.

As you get closer to the mountains, large hills rise sinuously from the grasslands.

The land itself begins to warp.

Shrubbery accounts for the majority of the vegetation in this warbly hilly landscape.

It's as if someone begins turning up the contrast on the differentiation between highest and lowest elevation. There's something very unstable about this land. It was the victim of the cosmic trauma of mountains breaking upwards like waves, now frozen. These could be seen as the ripples still speaking of that trauma.

168 gets a little more dangerous here, as it now has to bob and weave to avoid climbing these hills.

It's hard to determine if this landscape was a victim of clear-cutting, for though it looks natural and smooth, like a felt blanket laid over rocks, it is relatively barren of larger and more tangled trees like this one.

This land is not without moments of placidity. Most of this area is used up by ranches, cattle and horse. There are a few musk oxes, some deer, llamas, and pygmy goats too scattered behind the old wooden fences.

Just before the head of my driveway, where there is a little coach house with a white horse on top of it. I don't work in this land, nor do I spend most of my time here. The Sierra Foothills are all about the sudden changes in elevation, because it changes everything. I've gone outside on a warm day and seen cars blazing down 168, three feet of snow dissolving from their roofs.

I'll get pictures of my ride to work another day when I'm feeling exceptionally brave.

FOOTPRINTS OF A GOD AND MANZANITA BRANCHES

2008-03-08T12:27:00.000-08:00

My house was still warm with the smell of bacon when L and a few other guys came by. The intention was to strip the manzanitas we had collected the day before, but a six pack of Heinekin easily diverted us to my couch. In between some very lewd conversations that I won’t recount here, L mentioned a footprint he found.

“‘Bout this long,” he said with his hands a foot apart, “toes like this,” he sssed his teeth as he spread out his own fingers like toes.

I turned to E and D and they both nodded.

“Still there, down at the mud hole.”

“Did you make a cast?” I asked.

“Can’t take no picture.”

“Hell, I’ll bring my camera down tomorrow,” I said, slapping my knee.

“Can’t afford no camera, got my rich friends to do that for me,” he laughed.

“Got sasquatch down here!?” I laughed, assuming that was the direction we’d take.

Things can only stay serious for so long before laughter comes in to compensate. It’s bizarre how in the Western mindset I can stay serious for hours, discussing world problems and spiritual issues, without stopping to laugh once. Bigfoot was no laughing matter.

“Hell yeah we do,” L said, “he helped our people a long time ago.

“They say our people lived in a canyon and a big flood was comin’. He came out of the woods and guided us to His cave where we lived like ants. There were other animals, every animal, deer, mountain lion, bobcat, all in the cave with us. Like that story of Noah. We all lived there together for a long time and when the flood receded we came out. He saved us.”

I still don’t know what to say about all this.

L continued:

“People go out there trying to catch him, kill him, prove he exists…”

“But he doesn’t work on that level,” I commented.

“Hell no. You’ll find prints, and they’ll go some ways, then (wshhhh). Gone, just like that. They say he becomes a rainbow. You’ll find a rainbow there where his footprints stop and he’ll move on to somewhere else.

“There was a guy up in Yosemite, when I was workin’ up there…

(L worked for a while in Yosemite as a teacher. He would show tourists the traditional ways of making arrowheads, bows, and otherwise. He joked that he used to use Elmer’s glue to keep the feathers on the arrows and would tell the tourists that it was soap root.)

“He was a little nuts right, so everyone stayed away from him, but I talked to him. He said he saw him, right out there in the woods and that’s what he said. A rainbow appeared when He disappeared. And so I brought him to our Elders and he told them too.”

I couldn't help but think about the paranoiac Jung spoke of. He was squinting at the sun and shaking his head at the sun. When Jung asked him what he was doing, the paranoiac urged him to do the same because it would immediately be clear. Jung squinted his eyes, shook his head, but saw nothing. The paranoiac exclaimed:

"What, you can't see the sun's penis!?"

Many years later, Jung was going through some old alchemical prints and found one in which the holy spirit was figured as a phallus extending from the sun, which was a representation of god. The phallus was depositing Jesus in the womb.

I won’t comment further on this story, because as L said, we go out there to try and hunt, kill the wild man, the bigfoot, the huge ape so that we can prove he exists, but he doesn’t live in that place. He lives some place far from there.

“You think about it too long, it’ll make you crazy,” L said conclusively.

That's that.

—

“Big Arc site here,” E said, admiring the probably twenty or thirty mortar holes beside my house.

L bent down and rubbed his finger around the ring of a deeper hole.

“You can feel it, the oils from the acorns here. See, real smooth.”

I rubbed it myself. The rock was exceptionally smooth, and not all from wearing. There was a slickness to it, almost a waxy lubrication.

“My grandma used ones like these. She’d start in there, pushin’ down,” L pointed to a smaller more shallow hole, “then she’d push into the deep one, once it was worked through a bit. Yup, there’re some graves out there I heard.”

L gestured to the vast and empty cattle pasture beyond.

It’s strange how infrequently I hear the cows. I’ve never actually even seen them, just heard them bellowing at night. Those low forced moans, like pushing sound through a hole not designed for it. These bellows sound very similar to the moans and calls of whales when heard from above water. From below, their shape changes entirely, becoming something graceful and slow, ancient and alien, but above, more-cow-like.

—

“This is one of the marionettes I’m making,” I turned the fool around to show L.

“Wow, wow, that’s crazy. Got a dead person’s head on there and now you’re building a body.”

Later, his feet up on my coffee table, L snatched one of the marionette-building books I have.

“Who made these, Russians, all them…”

“Czechs,” I said.

“Czechs, that’s right. See our people, to us this stuff is evil, but you Europeans, well, that’s how it goes, from way over the pond there.”

—

The day before I hopped in the backseat of L’s truck, expecting it to be Eric in the front seat.

“Forrest, this is my dad S,” L said.

I shook his hand. The ride was different at first, quieter. I’m used to L and E’s banter about women and getting into trouble, here it was slower. L would point out a place.

“Old Bob, remember him, that’s his new truck right there…”

We went up through Tollhouse, up the side of a mountain and came out on 168. We were going to a place called Blue Canyon to collect manzanita branches. I’m going to whittle them into walking sticks to give to the Elders.

We had breakfast in Shaver Lake, a resort area that lights up in the summer but is as rustic as the rest of the foothills in the Winter.

Then we went back around, down along one lane paved roads grazing the sides of the mountain.

“People live out here!?” I gasped as we passed dozens of houses.

Then there came the manzanitas, tangly yet graceful trees, like over-sized shrubs, their bark crimson as blood. We couldn’t take branches from a live tree so we made note of every one that had fallen, or was starting to turn grey. It’s a spectacular thing to see half of one branch that purplish red and the other half grey and brittle, broken and split like old bone.

L brought out his chain-saw and hacked limbs off a manzanita that been uprooted by erosion and was now slipping off the bank. I brought out my leather-man and sawed clean through. When I showered that evening my hands stung from the dozens of nicks and cuts.

Going up and down in elevation, L pointed out where we shifted our biomes.

“See here, it’s all pine now.”

“Black oaks start here.”

There’s a mud flat on the Rancheria, where L found the footprint. There, six different biomes are represented in an area no bigger than a football field.

“See I want to take people up here, show them how special that area is so they’ll stop cutting it down, burning their trash there.”

S didn’t say much. He just sat and watched, came out of the car to observe L and I’s differing methods of taking branches off the manzanita, leaning on his own manzanita cane, a wild twisted stick varnished to a shine.

BABY'S FIRST GRANT PROPOSAL

2008-03-04T10:17:00.000-08:00

With the grant tucked in its manilla envelope I walked out to my car with the Chair of the Tribal Council. We drove the quarter mile to the office of workforce development and I handed the secretary my proposal.

I sat reading Popular Mechanics. There was a spirited discussion in the other room. I thought about leaving, but the Chair had a pile of stuff on my passenger seat.

On the way back there was a sense of unease…it’s hard to talk about what was said because it’s politics. This is a sensitive subject to begin with. Among my extended family, the topic is divisive and avoided entirely. but that’s because of bi-partisanship. I mean, really, a two party system is fairly cut and dry and unless you’re a politician yourself you have no direct involvement with that party aside from casting a vote. Here, politics deal with family, inter-office relations, and blood.

By no ill move of my own I’m enmeshed in a dispute between the tribal offices and the workforce development offices and I’m not sure where my place is.

I returned to the Tribal Offices and took a breath. That grant had taken a lot out of me and it was nice to relax for a moment. It wasn't long before I got a call from the workforce development office and they wanted to have another round table about my grant, during which time I was handed a pile of papers half-hazardly taped to each other and corrected in illegible hand-writing. Much of what was cut out was what I was told to put back in. The ordering of my topics was questioned, then agreed upon.

I’d never given much thought to this “partnership development.” You have a project that’s mutually beneficial, you bring other parties into it through sponsorship or aid. In the world of non-profits everybody wins, right? Well not necessarily, especially in Indian Country, a place stricken with ineffective bureaucracies.

I mentioned in a previous post that like a presidency, a Tribal Council is only as effective as its ranks. The same goes for other positions as well. This is a no brainer but something that never really occurred to me before.

I’ve certainly heard a lot of talk on the Rancheria, which I won’t disclose here, implicating all sorts of people of not doing their jobs. Granted, it could all be heresy, but I do get suspicious about those members of the administrative and support staff who I have not yet met after a month. Conversely, I’ve spent time with people who radiate forthright rebelliousness that I’m sure ruffles a lot of feathers.

From what I’m gathering, employment in the tribal and support offices is often anything but a meritocracy. While right now things seem to be stable and the staff effective, I’ve heard of nepotism being a problem in the past.

The enrollment coordinator is the only caucasian working in the Tribal Offices. She determines whose paperwork is complete and who can join the tribe. Though there were numerous internal candidates for this position, each was turned away citing a lack of job experience. At a General Council meeting I attended some weeks ago this was one of the huge issues because any available jobs should be going to Indians, right?

I get the feeling that having an impartial enrollment coordinator was the real imperative. If it were another council, this appointment may not have been made. Instead there would be a partial community member, loaded with alliances and enemies; he or she would bring in every cousin and kick out that guy who ran over her dog a year ago, because from what I understand, very few people even have complete paperwork.

It takes a lot of paper to be a real Indian. You need a birth certificate, family tree, and numerous other government documents all declaring that you have X amount of blood in X federally recognized tribe. There are so many pieces to the puzzle that it’s not often that an Indian has them all assembled at any one time.

Anyway, politics.

There’s bad blood and I’m getting special treatment for it. I turned in the third revision (following the cut and paste collage—I may just photograph it so you all can understand how bizarre it all was) and when I did it was taken with skepticism. I was also told that it would be reviewed by the head of the office, out of Bishop or some where like that, when the amount of funds I was requesting could be approved by the local branch.

I couldn’t help but smirk as I watched the secretary use an electronic stamping machine on every one of the 32 pages of my proposal, attachments and all. There’s something very comical about it all and it was worth laughing about how many loops they were making me jump through. How many more could there even be?

I think I mentioned in a previous entry that I had a chance to look at other proposals that had been accepted by the same office, all at least half as lengthy as mine was initially, before the expansion. This is not by account of my brevity (which should be obvious by now) as I really pare things down when I’m doing technical writing.

There’s a lot of talk in the Tribal Offices about this ping pong match I’m playing with the office of workforce development. People are surprised too that I’m taking the beating. But it’s due to my inexperience and my character. One month in I’m not about to make enemies with a social services agency that helps over half the families on the Rancheria.

But I haven’t committed to this partnership (UPDATE ON THAT AT THE END OF THIS ENTRY). Knowing what I know, if I have to go into that office one more time I’m going to say that this event probably isn't mutually beneficial. This possibility doesn’t seem to phase them as they are the ones giving me money. Unfortunately, the ICP program will be very much in their realm of interest once it takes off and with a bad taste in my mouth I might not be make much room for them when they actually WANT to give me money.

Oh relationships. It’s not always a pleasant thing interacting with other humans be it in a professional setting or a romantic one. In my personal life I’m right now spewing out a lot of garbage, all directed at one person. This feels wrong, but I’m not sure how to abate the flow when it was so unwelcome back when it might have been dammed. Now it’s like the panama canal; thank god for all the elements in the universe working against it. It shouldn’t be long before the whole flow is expunged and I can return to what normalcy I have.

UPDATE:

I broke off the partnership with the office of workforce development. Having read my grant three times now, they asked me how this proposal meets the specific goals of their organization. I stated, as it is stated in the grant, and had been stated since the first draft, that a sustainable Intergenerational Cultural Preservation program would bring together youth and elders (many kids are already raised by grandparents) and a return to traditional values would impact the maintenance of two parent households (a goal of this office). This wasn’t enough. There had to be curriculum included.

The event was becoming something becoming something it was not intended to be. This is a dinner to bring the youth and the elders together so they can learn about the ICP and meet me, not a platform to disseminate literature related to the maintenance of two parent households.

Seeing this partnership as no longer being mutually beneficial (at least in terms of what both parties want) I have decided to work with my neighbor in the office who works with the youth on the Rancheria. This feels much more appropriate and human. All that paperwork and requirements, a full curriculum for an event a month before; it all felt very constraining for me on my first time through this.

Now I can be more free to get acorn mush if I want to. I can whittle some walking sticks without having to notate in-kind how much my whittling is worth! The event can become something about the youth and the elders, which by the way had to be changed to adults in my proposal.

Anyway. It’s done. Here’s a new piece of jewelry. It’s reversible!

there's like no front or back!

OLD PICTURES

2008-03-02T13:46:00.000-08:00

I realized I had not posted any of the pictures from my excursion into the heart of the Sierra Nevadas last month. While these aren't necesarilly representative of the topography and environment where I live, which has a higher contrast in elevations and less dense wilderness, they will give you a general FLAVOR.

This is mistle toe. It's an invasive Asian species that travels by spore and eats trees alive.

This is Black Rock. This photo is deceiving in its placidity because we were at the top of a mountain!

Pretty ridiculous huh? Those bald rocks you see, sometimes with a light frosting of snowy trees, I see those, from from thousands of feet below. I described them in a letter as bone breaking through papery skin.

THE TOWER DISTRICT

2008-03-02T13:28:00.000-08:00

After the Tribal Council meeting on Saturday morning I went into Fresno’s Tower District. Now I had long thought that Fresno was but a dangerous wasteland of crack heads and teenage prostitutes. I had spoken with many people about Fresno, looking to hear a single positive thing about the town, and from descriptions like “asshole of the world” to “Fresnothanks” disdain was universal among Californians and non-Californians alike.

Now I’m sure a fair share of these impressions were grounded in my own projections. Having gotten a little too close to these decrepit and terrifying aspects of poverty on a few occasions, the mere mention of violent people fills me with apprehension. This was much the case with my first domicile in the Auberry/Prather area. Though the man I was renting a room from wanted nothing but to listen to reggae and smoke medicinal marijuana, there were aspects of his character and history that triggered the paranoiac inside of me.

It took four weekends for me to be utterly desperate for Fresno to not be the “asshole of the world.” It can be so isolating up here, and though I am fairly reclusive my nature, man do I need people. I need to talk with them, sit beside them, put my hand on their shoulder, look into their eyes…But in desperation, do I turn to Fresno? Is there anything in that ill-begotten city at all?

During my research for a community resource guide for the rancheria I had heard wind of this “Tower District,” although at the time I imagined it to be truly “up-and-coming,” that is, simultaneously a haven for the worst crimes and the best art. My mental state as it is, I wasn’t jumping on the pony and kicking myself into this place and honestly, if there were any social outlets whatsoever in the foothills, I probably would not have, but utter thirst for friendship forced me to do some research.

The Revue Cafe was to be the epicenter of my visit. A review I read about it said it was a “scene-based” place, i.e. frequented by the same group of pretentious pseudo-intellectuals. While this is not what I’m looking for, it seemed like it could be a good entry point into a more substantial Fresno culture.

Going West on Morgan Canyon/168 I passed all the familiar landmarks, the tell-tale signs of urban decrepitude and that terribly portentous street: “Blackstone.” Before that was “Temperance,” a street that gives me a warm feeling in my belly.

I got off and things were starting to look a little less dangerous. There were fewer gangbangers a’glaring about. I passed a used bookstore. But wait, I had read there was only one independent bookstore in Fresno. A left on Olive and there’s another used bookstore! The lies people tell…

I parked in front of the Tower Theatre. It’s not spectacular or anything. I assume at night the tall phallic tower, the theatre’s namesake, is lit up and similar to the penis torpedos that bookend the streets of Boy’s Town in Chicago. I walked towards the bookstore, went in, naturally came out with something: two anthropological case studies. Going towards the Revue Cafe I began seeing a lot of black contrast wear, black jeans, black shirts, black hair with white streaks, facial piercings. The punks were alive. So too was the long string of Harley Davidsons and the rambunctious bikers hee hawing and screaming in every business on the street with an outdoor smoking section.

When I came to the punk haven I was a little surprised to see that it was a Starbucks, yet there they were, hollering and having a good time; twenty-five year olds with their thirteen year old girlfriends bouncing on their knees.

There is a goth clothing store, a “vintage” clothing store, a few restaurants, including one that serves get this: donuts, hamburgers, and chinese food. When I got to the review cafe it was pretty much empty, aside from a few older men and the barista behind the counter with his designer eye-wear and trying mustache. I got a cup of coffee and sat down to BLOG for a while.

Not all that much happened, not many people came in or went out. Two men sat beside me. One of them was yelling about a few recently avoiding physical fights over things like whether or not a fence post was level or having the wrong style luggage rack installed on his car. When he went to demand a new cup of coffee because he was talking so much his last one god cold, the barista politely refused him.

“Don’t you get an attitude, I’m the one who’s supposed to have a bad attitude here!” the man yelled.

I really liked this even though his voice muted all other noises or conversations in the coffee shop.

Then a girl came in with long curly red hair and a fair face. She was wearing an ankle length skirt with an apron built into it. She had a little vest laced up with ribbon and a high collar shirt. She was not very feminine in body, which led me to be confused about her exact age, but I shrugged off the worry that I was attracted to a teenager. Honestly, it didn’t really matter and after all she was dressed like she just came home from Colonial Williamsburg and I certainly could not refuse that!

She came in a few more times. I didn’t talk to her, or anyone, I just stayed where I was.

How do you break into this? How do you talk to someone you don’t even know when you’re not intrinsically an enthusiastic person. I’ve never had that skill wherein one finds surface similarities between themselves and another person and amplifies them as if they are a kinship. I’m very good with people, but I need a buffer person to give me a comfort bubble.

Feeling very lost I left the cafe and moved my car. I then went into Louisa’s, which seems to be the local hotspot eatery. It was packed, including a dozen bikers outside. The way they are, always hollering like they’re hollering at someone made me feel like I was getting hollered at even though I wasn’t.

“Just you today?” the waiter asked.

Yeah, today and forever.

He sat me in a small booth. There was a girl in an adjacent booth, also alone. She smiled at me from behind the thick eyeliner and straight bangs. I ordered a hamburger with bacon and avocado and it was pretty bland. A young man wearing pajama pants, a paige boy cap, and carrying a cane walked in. He was seated, fidgeted with some newspapers, lit up the stub of a cigarette.

A girl came back from the bathroom. She had on a long draping top and was a little heavier set below the waist. Her face was boyish and her hair was cut asymmetrically with a mullet in the back. She sat with the other girl and they talked, but I couldn’t really hear them.

Around this point I started getting a little sad. I decided I would go explore another street. So I took Wishon South and came to a bizarre alleyway with a few bars and businesses. There is a performance art festival going on right now, so there were lines for that and fold-out tables set up for the volunteers. I went into a store called the Unicorn (something). The girl behind the counter had her red hair in pig tails.

“What are you looking for, can I help you!?” she asked exuberantly as if it were fate that had carried me in, like a bubble in the wind.

“Just browsing,” I muttered.

Somehow we got talking.

“Did you hear those four booms, you know, like this, the other night, BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM,” she asked.

“No,” I said, “but I hear jets a lot.”

There is an airforce base near by.

“Sonic booms?” she asked.

“Yeah sure.”

“But that’s just one. Just one BOOM. This was four: BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM.”

“Well maybe they were jets in formation?”

“Maybe…something’s going on,” she said, getting very nervous, “they’re poisoning the mountains. A lot of people are going to get hurt…”

I cocked an eyebrow. Hello Forrest circa 2004. I made the mistake of mentioning contrails, and after being pushed towards it, used the magic word: chemtrails.

“Yeah yeah, chemicals! They’re bombing those old farm and it’s stirring up the DDT and—oh jeez, I really should be working,” she said, though the store was completely empty.

I wandered into the next room and glanced behind to see her, standing in her parachute pants.

“Were you looking for something did you have any questions!?” she asked, her eyes huge and wanting.

I pointed at the spiritual candles.

“Are those scented?” I asked.

After leaving the new age store I decided I would sit in the cafe for one more spot, then go for good. So I did, not much happened, again. I drank a hot chocolate, watched the tweens in tiny white shorts and uggs hurrying up and down the street. There was a gallery there where a band of teenagers was playing before, now it was emptying, so I ventured inside. There were a lot of good photographs, though most of them I would’ve plucked out if it were my show so people could focus on the best ones.

The head of the performance art festival attempted to recruit me as a volunteer, but I refused. It would’ve been too spontaneous for me…sad to say. Naturally, on the drive home, the sun setting beautifully behind me, I regretted not volunteering. I’m going back tomorrow. Though I volunteer full time, I mean hell, what’s another five hours on a weekend to keep my mind off itself.

While the Tower District is not the peak of high culture, it is something more than I have right now. I think a lot about resources at work, and here on the weekend, I think about social resources, things to occupy my nervous hands.

At my VISTA training my “facilitator” talked a lot about how if people don’t accept you at work you should just keep showing up. I’m going to adopt this stance towards the Tower District. I will keep showing up until something happens. I mean, even if I’m alone in a cafe, at least there are PEOPLE around me. Not that I dislike my puppet company, not at all, but it’d be nice to talk to someone sometimes.