Little Bighorn

            On Monday morning I translated a few more lines of "Complaint du progress" by Boris Vain.

            I almost nailed the last verse of “C’est la vie qui veut ca” by Serge Gainsbourg.            I got caught up on my journal.

            I did this week’s reading for my “Aesthetic and Decadent Movements” course. The poems are by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina Rossetti. I think that he was more creative in terms of word relationships but she was more philosophical.

            When I got to the lecture hall for my Indigenous Studies class there were three people in the room from another class. I didn’t know if they were doing something they didn’t want interrupted and so I stayed in the hall. But the middle aged female student with the motorcycle helmet didn’t think whatever they were doing was important enough to take up the whole room and so she went in, another followed and I tagged along a minute later.

            While waiting for class to start I did close reading of some of the Rossetti poems and made some notes.

            Professor White is a consistent dresser. He changes the colours of his shirts and ties but always wears a grey vest with jeans.

            He said he’s posted our lecture notes so far. Ways of Knowing still hasn’t arrived at the bookstore and so he’ll post another two chapters in pdf if he has to but he can’t post much more because of copyright laws.

            We don’t give weight to Indigenous knowledge as epistemology. There have only been fifty years of Indigenous Studies, three or four generations deep and so it’s a new field but developing fast.

            Can animals think? Indigenous people think so. I said that some animals can certainly innovate and problem-solve, such when crows make hooks to access food.

            Humans are scared of death but animals are not.

            We have different layers of stories. There is a difference between Indigenous history and indigenous histories.

            Seneca do not look at the world the way the Mohawk do.

            Reciprocity is a central theme. One student argued that reciprocity is different from equanimity but Professor White thinks they are the same. It’s about give and take but also acknowledgement. If we hunt we share. It’s about how we relate to the past and each other. It’s healthy minded thinking more so than good minded thinking. It's about ecosystems and kinship.

            We don’t even have time in a one-year course to study even one Indigenous group let alone all of those in North America.

            The professor used me as an example and asked what if he reprimanded me unfairly in front of the class. He asked if it would affect the whole class. People agreed that it would. Then he asked whether an apology would make it right. Without naming names he was indirectly referring to Prime Minister Trudeau’s recent blackface scandal.

            Canada is better at apologizing than the United States.

            Felicity Huffman got fourteen days in jail. A black woman that did the same thing got five years.  

            This class has a lot of student feedback.

            In MASH, Hawkeye’s dad’s favourite novel was Last of the Mohicans and so that's why he was nicknamed Hawkeye.

            To save the future we must think further than three generations.

            I said we have to teach the young.

            He talked of the indigenous idea of shared hunting territory being a dish with one spoon. One must only take what one needs and one should not harvest deer for profit. Leave the dish clean.

            He told us that his grandfather had to taste everybody’s food at a mal, even when everybody had the same thing. His grandmother couldn’t eat her food if someone touched it. Professor White said that when he was a child he tried to stab his grandfather’s hand with his fork when he tried to take his food. He never tried to take his food again but he still tried to taste everybody else’s.

            He said that Australia has size limits for lobster fishing but from what I could find Canada has more restrictions.

            Humans are the most forgetful animal.

            Black squirrels are mean but people tell him they taste good.

            People used to be able to drink from Lake Ontario. What has changed?

            He said that Shakespearian English is altered in the United States and assumed it is here too. Some students informed him that we read the original text her. He said that threw his whole analogy right out the window.

            He asked, “What is writing?" He said if he showed us an octagon most would see it as a stop sign even without the word "Stop" written inside.

            He explained that his slides have “Belanger" and "King" rather than Ways of Knowing and The Inconvenient Indian because the storyteller is more important.

            People become professors because they are too scared to be actors.

            Windolph came in 1870 to avoid the Prussian draft but ended up joining the cavalry and was a sergeant that got shot in the ass at Little Bighorn.

            To illustrate how we frame history he had a link to a Smithsonian Channel film about Little Bighorn but we didn’t have time to look at it. He asked us if Little Bighorn had been a battle or a massacre and told us to discuss it among ourselves. I chatted with a young guy one row behind me and a little further in. I said that I didn’t think Custer and his men had been on their way to a fishing trip. If you are prepared for battle and you lose it’s just a loss and not a massacre. A massacre is by definition a slaughter of defenseless victims. I had always heard that Little Bighorn had been an ambush of Custer but apparently Custer’s men surprised the village and the Native warriors just outmaneuvered Custer afterwards.  Custer had been looking for a fight and simply made bad choices. There were native casualties in the battle.

            The Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890 was one of the last battles but it was a massacre in which mostly Lakota women and children were killed.

            The professor said we need both accounts of Little Bighorn.

            Indigenous history has been written by outsiders. Many stories were extracted during the salvage ethnography. Intellectual knowledge and what should be shared is complex.

            I headed down the street to my tutorial. I’m used to taking a siesta at that time of day and so I was feeling sleepy.

            Safia asked if we had any questions about the readings and I said I was curious about a note that had appeared at the end of the preface of Ways of Knowing. Someone had predicted in 1992 that in ten years there would only be three languages left. Yes they are still endangered but they are still alive and so I wondered if the person had just been wrong or if there had been some reason in 1992 for that kind of fatalism. One attractive Native woman with the blackest hair I’ve ever seen suggested that it was because the last residential school was still in operation in 1992. It only closed two years later.

            Safia drew a circle to illustrate the indigenous worldview being cyclical and non-linear. In the indigenous worldview people are less important than their environment. There is relatedness, reciprocity, and wealth is for the community. For indigenous people the land is sacred. For Indigenous people there are many truths. She drew a straight line to indicate the European worldview, in which there is comfort in achievement, humans are more important than their environment and wealth is for individuals. Europeans need proof of the truth.

            I said that at some point and in some place in history every one of our ancestors was indigenous. I added that the cyclical worldview is at the root of everybody’s history and that to say "the European world view" ignores the indigenous past of Europe such as the Druidic traditions, which seems to have had a worldview similar to that of Native Americans. Safia explained she was talking specifically about the European colonial worldview.

            She told us about land grabs in Africa, which they call the resource curse.

            In Africa time is also non-linear and in some places they measure time by droughts. Droughts have names.

            We broke up into three groups to discuss three questions. I was in a group with all of the Indigenous women. Our question was “What was the main message of chapter one of The Inconvenient Indian?" The problem was that most of my group hadn't read it yet and I was the only one that had the book. I brought up some of the main points and we discussed them. We concluded that the first chapter shows that history is a matter of interpretation.

            Safia mentioned the phrase “terra nullius" and said it had appeared in the Thomas King book. I told her I hadn't seen it there so far. It means “nobody’s land” and was a justification in international law for colonization. A story was told to justify colonization.

            Columbus had a papal bull. The papal bull gave most of North and South America to Spain while the area that is now Brazil was granted to Portugal.

            I suggested that Columbus had gotten into trouble for his treatment of Indigenous people but didn’t have the facts at hand. What I’ve found is that Columbus was made governor of the Indies but after seven he was accused of tyranny and torture and so the queen had him removed. He and his two brothers were investigated and when they returned to Spain they were arrested and imprisoned, but only for six weeks. Then they were freed, had their wealth returned to them and Spain funded their fourth voyage. He wasn’t allowed to govern again. Later Columbus wrote a book in which he claimed that his achievements were the fulfillment of a Biblical prophecy. He demanded a tenth of the profits from the New World but never won his claim.

            I was the last one to leave the tutorial. Safia said that we should have an hour and a half rather than an hour.

            When I got home I had a piece of roast beef for lunch and took a siesta.

            When I got up I did some exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish is upset that Sapphire has run into an old boyfriend who his sent her candy after their meeting. He learns that Floyd, who has a wax mustache, is quite a ladies man. Kingfish decides the only way to save his marriage is to get Sapphire a job to keep her too busy to think of other men. He gets her a job at the Red Cross but it turns out that the first aid instructor there is Floyd.

            I had a potato, squash, three ribs and some gravy for dinner watching the 1954 Studio One production of “Twelve Angry Men". Another version was a major motion picture in 1957. This story involves a jury deciding the fate of a man in his late teens who has been accused of murdering his father. The jury enters the room to deliberate and votes right away. There are eleven votes of “guilty" but one of innocent. The one juror, played by Robert Cummings is not sure. He proceeds to argue until he gradually puts a reasonable doubt in everyone’s minds. The young accused man is of an undisclosed ethnic minority and poor. Some of the jurors argue that, "They are all like that". Bob Cummings put in a great performance.