Coming of Age

The Brave Hearts Women's Society Coming of Age Ceremony

On Monday, I turned 18. Which is to say, I came of age.
 

Resources about American Indian coming of age ceremonies are scarce on the internet. Of course, there’s the ridiculously co-opted idea of a “vision quest,” but Googling that results in a smattering of pages for painfully white dojos and holistic medicine clinics—ironically, themselves things we have also stolen from foreign cultures. Regardless of how much they’ve grown to dominate the white imagination, however, vision quests did exist first in Native American cultures. Yellow-Wolf: His Own Story, a compassionate anthropological study of the Nez Pierce Indians published in the 1940s, touches on this coming of age ceremony piquantly. According to Yellow Wolf, the ceremony grants a certain type of invincibility. His words are beautiful and poignant, and the whole book is worth reading, available for free online. But I digress:

You know our schooling. Young people sent out into wild, night places without anything, their hands empty. I did that! Often stayed from home three, maybe five, suns and nights. Because my father died when I was young, no living man had sympathy for me. Your father's spirit outside somewhere might recognize you and come to you.

My father had a Power, but a soft body. Bullets entered his body but he did not die. Scars, many scars, on different parts of his body. All these showed his bravery in war.

The life in trees, in grass, might compose your Power. It is impossible to explain. It is against orders of your Wyakin to explain, if you could. This is all impossible to be understood by whites. I believe if I now went to war I would be killed by gas. My Power is not against that, only against arrows and bullets.  

In a less violent tradition, I recently read an NPR article about the growing trend of sending Indian girls, mainly Sioux, to the grassy banks of the rez to learn to erect tepees, harvest food, and live the way their ancestors did before being persecuted into standard American homogeny (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129611281). I just find this a wonderfully beautiful idea. Considering how American Indian culture has been near-exterminated, revisiting it seems not just a nice gesture but necessary. This isn’t to imply that the ceremony is entirely grounded in the past, however. The dark realities of the present tend to slink in, as well. From the article:

“At times, we have a nutritionist come in and talk to them about eating right and not just drinking Gatorade, about not being afraid of doctors and having to get a check-up,” Brook Spotted Eagle says. “Sexual abuse and incest can pose a huge problem within families. There's no easy way to talk about these issues, so you just have to get them out there.”

Combining modern advice and ingrained tradition is a necessary idea, and one that has its basis in many other cultures, as well. It is also a grim shadow of the American imperialism and dominance that lead to these traditions originally disappearing. Immigrant colonists introduced Gatorade as much as they did alcohol to the Indians, after all. 

As for my birthday, what did I do? Sat on a couch and watched some movies with friends, honestly. Not the most culturally minded activity by a long shot, certainly. Still, I hope I can change.  With this much beauty in the world around me and the ceremonies performed by these people I've read about, I desperately hope I can change. 

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The Business of Fancydancing

I’ve been reading my classmates’ blogs on The Business of Fancydancing in place of writing my own.

I know, I know, it’s a lazy way to get inspiration to write about the film. I realize my ideas will be tinged with the thoughts of my classmates, perhaps to an uncomfortable degree. Perhaps I’m even obfuscating my thinking process.

But I can’t help it. The film (or, more accurately, the 80% of the film I saw) resounded on such a giant level with me, I’m still not sure what to say about it. It was terribly sad, that’s for sure. There were interludes of humor, but they were nearly pitch-black, shocking as much as they amused. Mouse films himself huffing gas as an inspirational video of sorts, Aristotle brutally beats up a white attempted hitchhiker, and I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.

This emotional confusion seems to be a common response across the blogs, and even the mainstream media. I looked up the film on Rotten Tomatoes, and found critics were almost completely mixed on the movie. (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/business_of_fancydancing/) I suspect this was because, at least to an extent, the movie is so unusual and—dare I say—even confusing, almost.

Despite this emotional confusion, I still don’t regret seeing The Business of Fancydancing. The parts I did see resonated deeply with me, even standing as an outsider to both the American Indian and the LGBT cultures depicted in the film. I’m still going to have to think long and hard about what it meant to me, however.

Sherman Alexie's Website

David's blog a few days ago sent me to Sherman Alexie's website, and there I found some really interesting things. Alexie's web presence, www.shermanalexie.com, is even more self-deprecating, it would seem, than his produced works, but there are still fantastic bits of humor and pathos through the whole page.

The above is a comic Sherman Alexie made and posted on his website. What I love most about this is the sense of the ridiculousness present in it. While the strip starts off with a sad reminder of the violent past of Indians, with "White people are a fad" Leon Short Sight, by the end it has lurched firmly into the absurd. Who could dislike Henry Partially Invisible or even the beaming, starry-cheeked Dave? Not I, certainly.


Of course, most of his posts aren't quite this exuberantly silly. Instead, Alexie posts semi-frequently on real-world events, activist causes, and, of course, American Indian life. "If I had an awesome Indian name, like Sherman Charging Elk," Alexie writes, "I'd probably still live on the rez." Throughout all of his posts, there is a subversive wit running through. This links straight to my favorite Alexie moment I've discovered, via his twitter feed:

I'd like to leave with one more piece of content, this interview he did on his manner of performing at book and poetry readings. While more on the craft of writing and performing rather than Indian life, it still highlights the wonderful sense of humor, love of life, and intensity of thought that Alexie possesses.

When Literature Meets Stand Up

Drinking, Comedy, & Tragedy

Near the middle of "The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn't Flash Red Anymore," the narrator makes a bitterly funny observation.

It's hard to be optimistic on the reservation. When a glass sits on a table here, people don't wonder if it's half filled or half empty. They just hope it's good beer.

This sense of deep dread and emptiness is prevalent in the collection-- all of Alexie's work traffics in a sort of booze-soaked comic misery. It is perhaps the passage that immediately follows this one that drives home Alexie's point, however. Indians, Alexie writes, have a way of surviving, but not in the way you'd expect.

But it's almost like Indians can easily survive the big stuff. Mass murder, loss of language and land rights. It's the small things that hurt the most. The white waitress who won't take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins.

Life on the rez is not a massive, outrageous injustice. Instead, it is a barrage of smaller injustices, eventually suffocating the Indians. This pops up throughout Alexie's book. Indians drink and sleep and really don't do much else. The only way to deal with this cripplingly sad situation is through comedy. This juxtaposition between comedy and tragedy is Sherman Alexie's calling card. His characters encounter small injustices and tragedies every second and in response turn to their drinks, hoping at least, as Alexie writes, that it's good beer.

Will write and think about this more later. 

DJs and Indians

“Look at that f---er!” Gabe spits out the words like bullets, and turns to me with squinted eyes. “What’s even going through his mind?”

We’re all sitting in the dusty corner of a downtown sandwich shop. We originally went down to check out a spray-paint gallery a local artist had set up, but the gallery was more a cupboard than anything else. It’s now the DJ who holds our attention. Specifically, the painfully white DJ wearing an enormous Plains Indian war bonnet.

It may very well have been the most offensive thing any of us have seen since coming to Asheville.

Of course, I’m sure that the DJ didn’t realize the offensiveness of his attire. He was staring fixedly at his Macbook, stirring up an abomination of club music and ambient noise. Every now and then he’d bump up the levels on his mixing console with a bone-colored hand and push the sound further into the treble. He was bobbing up and down like a culturally inconsiderate worm. The headdress, I swear, glistened in the neon lights.

Appropriation of a native culture by the people that tried to exterminate that culture is nothing new. Blackface and redface acts have been around for virtually as long as we’ve known about the races we were mocking. In the 60s, the hippies wore American Indian clothes in an attempt to capture the Indians’ “free spirit,” a hideously incorrect though well-intentioned belief.

But the war bonnet seemed different. Maybe it was the oblivious smirk the DJ wore. Maybe it was the fact that the bonnet was perched on top of his head so innocuously. But Gabe and I were in agreement: there was something seriously annoying about this person wearing another culture’s heritage so blatantly. 

I'm realizing now, though, that this attitude has permeated our culture. We as children still grow up playing Cowboys & Indians. The Atlanta Braves and the Cleveland Indians still compete every year. American Spirit, despite being founded in the post-redface 80s, prominently features an war bonnet-wearing warrior smoking on the cover of the pack. Surrounded by so much blatant appropriation, could I even fault the DJ that much?

Thinking back on it, I might have figured out what we found so offensive about the DJ's outfit: the banality of it. With both the redface troupes and the hippies, the intent in donning Indian clothing was to become something other than themselves. The redface performer would become a parody of an Indian. The hippy would become the same thing, without realizing it. Despite this, though, they still fundamentally realized that they were transforming themselves into something other than themselves. The DJ only realized he was transforming himself into a DJ with a headdress. Perhaps that is what our culture has become: an assimilation of elements from other cultures, destroying them by making them our own. The idea of the American mixing pot suddenly doesn't sound so good after all.