More Rabbit

While this is not directly related to "Little Rabbit Fights the Sun," I came across this song by folk punk band Andrew Jackson Jihad right after finishing the story. I can't imagine there are too many creative works out there about setting out to kill the sun, so I thought this worth sharing. Perhaps a hymn for Rabbit on his quest?

Little Rabbit and Mr Punch

Yet on second thought, the sheer brutality of the Little Rabbit’s exploits separate it well from the other tales contained within the American Indian tradition. I’m curious what the influence of white settlers was on these tales, because the character Little Rabbit reminds me most of is an undoubtedly anglicized one: Mr. Punch.

Mr Punch was an anarchic, sadistic clown, popular in turn of the century British puppet shows. Through the course of each puppet show, which followed a rough formula, Punch would kill his way across the power system of England, eventually slaughtering the Devil and freeing all men to "do whatever they like." This stands in contrast to Rabbit's conclusion at the end of his story that "it seems like killing is not the answer," but until that point, both stories take a similar near-glee towards death.


Mr Punch opens his story in charge of the family baby. Warned not to let it cry, he decides to preemptively bash its head against the floor. Of course, the baby lets loose a ferocious howl, so Punch continues bashing it until it is silent, finally throwing the infant onto the ground. Of course, his wife Judy appears and is horrified, so Punch bashes her to death, too. From here, a cycle of grim slapstick continues, with Punch killing a village constable, a judge, a hangman, and, in the form of a ghost, his own conscience. Finally, he kills the Devil and sets all men free.

 

The first part of a traditional Punch and Judy show.

Perhaps the only real difference between "Little Rabbit Fights the Sun" and a Mr Punch show is the target at the end. Rabbit is attempting to kill the sun, a beneficent presence in the world. However, Punch kills the Devil, a force of oppression and darkness for men. Both Punch's and Rabbit's actions result in chaotic anarchy, but the cackling Mr Punch removes oppression and social restraint rather than the light and goodness represented by the sun. On a base level, the two characters are not so dissimilar at all.

Tricksters! or, Murdering Rabbits.

Tricksters abound throughout literature and cultural tradition. Almost every group of people has had at least one central trickster figure, most being relatively nonviolent (or at least nonlethal). Brer Rabbit, for example, would frequently dupe people, but as he escaped at the end, the people he duped would still fundamentally be living. For the most part, this seems to hold true across cultures, applying fairly well to American Indian folklore as well. The stories follow a formula: a creature like Coyote decides to get something, realizes he has to trick someone to do it, successfully fools them, goes back and repeats the trick several times, and is ultimately duped himself. Occasionally, to mix things up, he recovers from the dupe and re-tricks the person who caught him, reasserting his dominance.

This is not to knock the stories present; all of them are engaging, often hilarious encounters that benefit from the episodic structure. But there’s an expectation on the reader’s part that the story will be relatively weightless—someone might burn a part of their back off, or lose a tail, but that’s the extent of the damage their mischief-making causes. That’s what makes the character of Rabbit, specifically in the story “Little Rabbit Fights the Sun,” so shocking. In the beginning of the story, Rabbit falls asleep in the sun, which burns a brown spot onto his back. Waking up, incensed by this, Rabbit decides to kill the sun. He moves throughout the world, slaughtering everything in his path in gleeful displays of trickery, leading to his final goal. The shocker in all of this? He succeeds.

Little Rabbit said: “Why did these foolish people get in my way? I am in a killing mood; I am going to fight the sun. I’ll make an end of anyone trying to stop me!”

Then he saw two men making arrowheads out of hot rocks. He watched them for a while from behind a tree. Then he went up to them, saying, “Let me help you.” …He seized them and held them down onto the red-hot stones, and they were consumed by heat and fire until only their ashes remained. “Lie there,” said Little Rabbit, “until you can get up again!” He laughed, saying: “This is good practice for fighting Sun!”

Rabbit spouts out one-liners with the regularity of a machine, all of them unnerving in their callousness towards death. And Little Rabbit keeps trucking on. As the story progresses, he comes close to death multiple times and reveals himself as an indestructible force. He’s essentially an ancient Rambo with a sense of humor and a more barbaric endgame.

After killing reams of people, Rabbit arrives at the end of the world, and waits for the sun. He bounces his magic ball into the sun, exploding it and scattering its parts throughout the whole world.

They were scattered all over the world, setting the earth on fire. The flames burned Little Rabbit’s toes, then his legs, body, and arms, until only his head was left. It rolled on all by itself until the terrible heat burst his swollen eyes, which exploded in a flood of tears that covered the whole earth and put out the fire. It took a long time until Sun and Little Rabbit had re-created themselves.

That image alone is terrifying and nightmarish. The very idea of a giant rabbit head, weeping tears out of an exploded set of eyes, sounds more at home on the cover of a metal album than in an indigenous trickster tale. Yet it fits in with the bleak almost-nihilism of the story. Even after destroying the entire world, the indefatigable Rabbit is reborn and goes on with his life.  One can picture him laughing at his exploits for years to come. Despite the death that fills it, the tale doesn't seem so different from the rest of the trickster tales, after all.

The American Way

Thinking about our discussion today about how both the American Indian and Jewish immigrants essentially had their pasts forced away from them, I came across this article, starting on page 133 (link opens in new window). While it is about the treatment of Chinese immigrants, not native American Indians, there were some surprising similarities between the two. What compels America to seemingly attempt to remove the past histories and cultural identities of all of its minorities?

The Occupy Movement and the American Indian (Pt 2)

The ties between my trip to Washington and American Indians didn’t stop there, however. As soon as we pulled into the camp where the protesters were spending the night, a homeless man came up to greet us. His name was Zed, and he was half American Indian. He didn’t specify which tribe.

Zed walked us around the camp, telling us about life in D.C. and his day-to-day struggles. One of his eyes was always pointed to the left and, combined with his hunched-over gait, lent the illusion of a constant bug-eyed vigilance over the area. Zed suffered from mental issues, he said. Zed had been homeless almost his whole life, and was regularly antagonized by the police. Zed was born a while after the Little Big Horn incident, and while he condemned the movement’s violence, wished he could have been a part of it nonetheless. I’ve always found “incident” to be such a brutally clinical name for the Little Big Horn struggle, incidentally. “Incident” carries the implications of operating rooms and gauze and bureaucracy—perhaps the aftermath of the occupation, but certainly not the heart of it.

Despite his American Indian heritage, Zed was very much immersed in modern white American culture. He grew up in D.C. during the heyday of hardcore punk, and was a professed fan of Slayer. He threatened to go ballistic if anyone removed the battered Iggy Pop button from its perch on his jacket. As he balanced his way between tents, I could see myself, projected fifteen years into the future. 

The next morning, our group trekked to the Smithsonian, and visited, in short succession, the Museum of American History and the American Indian museum. I don’t think Samuel Beckett could have come up with a more ironic juxtaposition.

While at the American History museum, we learned that only several hundred thousand natives existed in America before settlement (modern estimates put the number closer to several million) and that the Spanish were the first colonizers of the region (Asians arrived via land bridge several thousand years earlier, and the Scandinavians had been ferrying back and forth for several hundred years). At the Museum for the American Indian, we saw videos of groups of flabby white people trying to learn indigenous dances and an exhibit on the American Indian presence in the “Twilight” book and film franchise. Despite the efforts of the curators of the American Indian museum, it was clear that both buildings were attempting to appeal to a mainly (if not exclusively) white audience.

Still, the most representative moment for our trip occurred at the Museum of American History. In the exhibit on post-Revolutionary War issues, there was a display for the debate on voting rights. Three different segments of the population were illustrated, and a giant wheel was below each one, listing popular opinions why or why not the group should be allowed to vote. The segments for “women” and “African-Americans” displayed beaming sketch portraits above an ebullient multicolored wheel. The segment for “Native Americans” featured a sad-looking sketch of a native. Where his wheel should have been, there was only a gaping hole, the wheel itself having been stolen several months prior.

The Occupy Movement and the American Indian

Over the previous weekend and part of the week, I was in Washington, D.C., participating in the Occupy Congress protest. While at the protest, which incidentally became the first to successfully take the steps of the Supreme Court, I couldn't help but think about the earlier protests American Indians conducted, especially the occupation of Wounded Knee.

In the 1970s, a group of American Indians, frustrated with impotent reservation management and callous government treatment, stormed into Wounded Knee. Site of the infamously brutish 1890 Lakota massacre, Wounded Knee still stands as a towering pillar of shame for our nation. The American Indian Movement saw this only conflagrated by the current treatment of the American Indian, and in 1973, began occupying the location. Sound familiar?

Yet despite the basic similarities, the occupation of Wounded Knee and modern, capital-O Occupying are different in several key ways. Most substantially is the level of violence between the two. The AIM had come prepared for confrontation, and was loaded up with what I can only imagine as an all-you-can-eat restaurant of weaponry. Of course, with the arrival of the FBI, the opposition was well-armed as well. Gradually, the two groups drifted together, circling around one other like ants slowly spiraling down a drain. Things came to a head, and bullets were soon in the air. After 70 days of trading bullets with each other, the two forces declared a stand-off.

Occupy has shown no violent proclivities at all, of course. One of the main goals of the protest is nonviolent action. Yet the philosophical goal of the movement-- taking areas that epitomize the corruption and immortality of the government and occupying them-- is the very same as that of the AIM. I can't help but think that, if not for the AIM, Occupy Congress would have never happened.

On the Navajo Night Chant

In class several days ago, we performed a reading of the Night Chant, a traditional Navajo song. It was a beautiful experience, frankly. The lines of the song reverberated through the class, and the actual structure of the song seemed to have little in common with either traditional western poetry or song.

Except that doesn't seem to be entirely true. Rather, "Night Chant" seems almost a precursor to modernist literature. The repeated lines, the propelling rhythm, and the mixture of optimism and deep-set melancholy present in the song are all heavily reminiscent of the works of poets and authors like James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Even the invocation of the gods and presence of the supernatural is in alignment with modernist authors.

T.S. Eliot famously said, defending modernism, "Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art." Yet American Indians had been using the "mystical method," and making art through it, far before the Western world. I'd like to close with a line from Night Chant that reminds me heavily of another famous literary chant, T.S. Eliot's "This is how the world ends" koan from The Hollow Men. The Night Chant line is similarly preoccupied with endings, but in a more hopeful and upbeat fashion:

"In beauty it is finished.

In beauty it is finished."