A Letter to Freeman Owle

Dear Freeman Owle,

I think what I find most appealing in your stories is the throwaway details. Like the “many of you can remember, maybe not” prelude to the description of old cars coming up the mountains with Roosevelt looming in your introduction. Or the way you tell your version of the Nikwasi Mound with historical grounding that somehow adds to its sense of magic, not detracts.

You said that your parents were afraid to teach you Cherokee, under the fear you would be persecuted. My father underwent a similar thing—not Cherokee, and nowhere near as bad, but he too was prevented from learning his native tongue by his parents, who were worried he wouldn’t fit in, or would be persecuted in the 1940s and 50s America he grew up in.

And Freeman, you also talk about when the reservation was not “beyond the times of beauty.” I sometimes wonder the same thing about my curd of suburbia I grew up in, thinking and dreaming about when it was covered with trees and flora and fauna and things that weren’t sixty-year-old WASPs. I’m worried we’re living beyond the times of beauty now, and I desperately want that to change. Do you agree with that? You talked about the rise of VCRs and televisions, and in the past fourteen years, that’s only skyrocketed. Is storytelling still alive at all? I hope so.

And finally, I love the wickedly sharp epitaph you left on your story, “The Magic Lake.” After telling all about the lake that heals animals, and the beautiful befuddlement of the Cherokee boy who’s witnessing all of it; after telling about how the Great Spirit sends a message of love, and peace, and union with all of the world; after telling about the hope of resurrection and freedom from sickness we all have, you end with this sentence: “This was a belief that was ‘savage.’”

Thank you.

Jozef Lisowski

Scattered Thoughts on Prison Chants and Exploitation

I’m listening to prison chants and I’m shocked at how much they resemble American Indian rain songs and dance songs.

Below is an beautiful and heartbreaking chain gang chant, "It Makes A Long-Time Man Feel Bad," recorded by Alan Lomax in 1947 at the Mississippi Parchman Penitentiary. And then, a little bit further, is a video of an American Indian drum circle chant (tribe unknown) filmed at the San Diego Earth Day Festival in 2008.

Listen to the two performances for a bit.

Play Song

I love how there are shared musical elements between the two-- the rhythmic thumping, the almost anguished yelling and moaning. And I know they were performed for two entirely different purposes, and I know that the authenticity of both could be questioned. (Namely because the act of recording something imposes the own reality of that something upon it, a debate we see a lot in discussions of reality television. By imposing a reality, it alters the original state of performance perhaps irreparably. To rephrase, as the prisoners and the Indians knew that they were being watched, they subconsciously altered their performance, maybe even changing the original intent. This is especially a concern for the American Indian video, as it was filmed at a San Diego festival, far removed from the original tribal settings of the chant. But I digress. ) I have all of these potential objections to both of these pieces of music, but in the end, I can toss them out the window. Mainly this reminds me of the gloriously transmittable power of music. Both of these are strong, powerful songs, full of emotion and fury and sadness and possibly even guilt. Did one influence the other? Does that question even matter? 

The necessity that caused both of these things' existence, which is to say the corrupt legal system that led to the chain gang chant and the brutal exploitation of native culture that led to the drum circle chant being performed at a widely-attended festival, is horrible thing. But the fact that so much beauty and similarity was able to arise from this suffering speaks miles about the redemptive power of art and music, and the terrible beauty that such things can contain.

Truth, Life, and American Indian Lit

In class a while ago, Hobby was talking about verisimilitude-- the appearance of something containing the utmost truth. Realism is something we generally take for granted, yet to a very large degree, the American Indian literature we've read has questioned the boundaries between the real and the illusory. Even dating back to the trickster tales, characters were fooling each other nonstop, making them believe things opposite to the truth. 

I’m most immediately reminded of the beautiful story contained within our American Indian Trickster Tales anthology, “Tricking the Trickster.” The story, Sioux in origin, recounts how Iktomi the Spider-Man tricks several rabbits into letting him eat them, but then has his food stolen away from him by an equally wily group of coyotes. Of course, Iktomi ends up having the last laugh at another group of easily fooled chumps, but the flow of the story is not what I find the most rapturous about the piece. Instead, it’s the asides. There’s a gorgeous moment early in the story dealing with both truth and perception of storytelling; I’m just going to quote it below.

At one time there lived two little boys and their grandmother in the west. She is always telling them stories about Ikto, Iktomi, the smart-ass Spider-Man. They want to know whether Iktomi is a man or a spider. He is both; he is a spirit of the mind. The boys are listening to their grandmother’s voice. They say: “Things that we don’t know, we want to know.”

The first thing that grabs me about this is Iktomi’s existence as both a man and a spider, “a spirit of the mind.” The duality that the authors bring up and nearly as quickly dismiss is nothing short of gorgeous, and just as easily can apply to the stories and life we’ve experienced: is it truth? Is it lies? Perhaps it’s both, after all—Iktomi could exist not to trick us, but to cause us to realize the things we’ve been deluding ourselves with. Maybe all of life is a joke, as the Spider-Man says. To quote the other famous Spider-Man, after all: “I mock; I’m a mocker.” Laughing at things can be the only way of truly dealing with them. 

I’d just like to end with the other great thing I love about this passage—the quote at the end. As I progress further and further through this class, I’ve begun to think of it as a path towards more knowledge and a greater understanding of the world and myself. That is why the boy’s chant at the end is so invigorating and even inspiring. As I progress further through this class and even through life, delving into the great paradox of truth and our perception of it in our lives, I’ll keep repeating this phrase as a rudder to steady my progress and keep open my mind. As the boys said, after all: “things we don’t know, we want to know.”

Discussion of "The Sacred Tree"

We started off class today by discussing all of our values—what we hold important, what we consider key to human understanding and survival. I haven’t really thought about this much at all before, to be honest. This came as a shock to me, given the amount of time I spend at protests and rallies against things. Given the amount of time I spend focusing on what I dislike, I spent so little time thinking about what I did like and respect, I was somewhat repulsed. The kicker? One of the traits I settled on was “introspection.”

I don’t think this is just an individual thing, though—western society in general seems to ignore deep, introspective thought. That’s one of the things I’ve enjoyed so much about my American Indian class—while nothing we’ve read comes close to the “wise Injun” stereotype, there does seem to be a greater emphasis on mindfulness throughout the literature we’ve read and experienced. I feel that through this class, I’ve been realizing more and more about who I am as a person, what I value, and even what some of my limits are.

So what are my values? I wrote down five on a sheet of paper:
•    Creativity
•    A sense of adventure, but one tempered by
•    Moderation
•    A degree of introspection or mindfulness
•    Kindness.

Most interestingly about this, though, is the bias present in the values I hold. I believe it was Dr Hobby in class who noticed and was repulsed by how traditionally “western” his list of values was. To a very large account, I’m repulsed by that, too. Very little of the values I hold have any basis in a society outside the traditional west. For example, community, perhaps one of the most important aspects of “The Sacred Tree,” the book that sparked this discussion in class, holds little to no place in my list of values. In fact, the similarity between the things I hold important and the things Eurocentric culture holds important is dismayingly similar.

Dr Hobby was repulsed by how western his value system was. Perhaps we all should be.