The Noble Savage

            On Monday morning I had at least a third of  “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian memorized.

            I finished working out the chords to “La noyée” by Serge Gainsbourg and started posting it on my Christian’s Translations blog.

            I had time to do the dishes before heading out to Indigenous Studies class.

            There was no class ahead of ours and so I sat reading “Hertha” by Algernon Charles Swinburne and “Les petites vieilles” (The text we were given translates it as “The Little Old Women” but I think “The Little Crones” fits better both aesthetically and meaningfully). The problem is that this translator doesn’t rhyme most of the Baudelaire poems and I think that castrates the work to an extreme degree and insults not only the poet but also poetry itself. I tried to work out a rhyming translation in my head and made some progress but I need to tackle it with a combination of online resources and dictionaries that I have at home to achieve something solid.

            Professor White started by telling us that our Finding Places assignment should be more than a list and we should both upload it and hand in a hard copy.

            How do we understand land acknowledgement? We have to put it in a chronological context. Land that was occupied by one group was later occupied by another.

            He introduced an assignment of answering a few short questions online after class about what we got from the lecture. I decided I would do it when I got home because I’m not that comfortable with using my phone as an internet tool.

            He told us that starting today we would be marked by our TAs for active participation in the tutorials. He stressed that our points couldn’t be just a repeat of what another student says.

            Reflection paper A is due at the end of the fall term.

            He said that a Cherokee relief pitcher for the St Louis Cardinals has just made a public statement that he’s offended by the “tomahawk chop” of the Atlanta Braves.

            Who are the good guys when we play or watch fights between cowboys and Indians. He said that he always wanted to be the Indian because of his light skin. Sports mascots are connected to film stereotypes.

            The United States has an annual Thanksgiving tradition of a game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Redskins.

            Indigenous people are erased with gimmickry.

            He said that his people, the Haudenosaunee, were badass but they tended to only cut off a finger or the tip of the nose rather than kill their enemies.

            Stories require good guys and bad guys. What would Star Wars be without Darth Vader?

            The professor went with an indigenous group on a trip to New Zealand. He said that the Maori flipped the script on them during a re-enactment of the battle of Rangiriri in 1863. 14,000 British troops advanced on Waikato territory. After several hours of fighting the Maori raised a white flag, expecting to talk terms, but when the British came forward they took all of them prisoner and confiscated 1.3 million acres of land.

            In the re-enactment the guest portrayed the soldiers and since they never saw themselves as colonists they just surrendered when they saw the Maori come over the hill. He said it was a pivotal moment in understanding the process.

            What does one do in moments of grief and anger? It’s too simple to just get over it.

            The Last of the Mohicans movie, based on James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel, had its tenth film adaptation in 1992 starring Daniel Day Lewis. He ends up with a dark haired woman but in the book she was blonde. The professor said they got some of the material down in the last film. Now they are making a television series.

He asked us why they are doing a remake. I suggested that maybe they are stumbling towards getting it right.

The message behind Last of the Mohicans is that the best Indian is a white guy raised by Indians. Hawkeye is a white guy with royal blood like Tarzan. The professor added that it is a poorly written novel. Mark Twain agreed with that assessment.

            The professor says that he loves Disney films but that he’s a purist. He doesn’t want to see the new versions of Aladdin and the Lion King.

            History is a story. Would we make it if it were about someone invading your home?

            The Sons of Anarchy is loosely based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

            In the United States there are a lot of documentaries about Indians on television throughout November because November is Native American heritage month.

            The common view is that Natives are reactionaries but the reality is that they often drove policies.

            King Philip’s War is the bloodiest in colonial American history. “King Philip" was Metacomet, the Wampanoag chief who took the name Philip. Philip’s father Massasoit had negotiated peace with the Pilgrims with a three-day feast that became the very first Thanksgiving. Philip succeeded him after his older brother Wamsutta died. Philip initiated the first multi-tribal alliance. After being shot and killed by a Christian Indian named John Alderman, Philip’s body was drawn and quartered and his head was displayed on a pike for twenty years.

            Black Friday is the antithesis of Thanksgiving and therefore of Indigenous thinking.

            The French and Indian War was really between the French and the British with the Indians caught in between. They were fighting over Indian land. The British made up the thirteen colonies south of the Great Lakes and north of Florida. Then came the revolution and Last of the Mohicans.

            Professor White asked us what the difference is between the British and the Americans from an Indigenous perspective. Several people had answers that were all wrong, including me until I finally said there is no difference.

            The Appellation Mountain Trail Range from Nova Scotia to Georgia became the boundary line with the English on the east side and Indigenous people on the west. Andrew Jackson later moved the line further west. A little later the line was moved to the Rocky Mountains. Sherman Alexie wrote, “Then we moved to the moon but old Neil Armstrong shows up and kicks us off into space.”

            The professor said that there was a Star Trek episode with a similar scenario.

            He started drawing on the blackboard and warned us, “If you make fun of my map of the United States I will fail you!” He showed the Appellation dividing line and then showed how settlers would cross the line to set up satellite villages for hunting. Indians would attack the satellite villages and so the cavalry would come to protect the satellite villages.

            He recommended a book called 1491 by Charles C. Mann.

            The strategy became to displace culture first and then to take the land.

            The conquistadors read the Papal Bull to the Indians in Spanish and took their obvious inability to speak Spanish as a breach of the Papal Bull.

            George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin all wrote about ways of taking land from Indians.

            The main reason that the beaver trade was so lucrative is that the fine inner fur of a beaver is waterproof and England is a cold, wet place. The Haudenosaunee traded beaver pelts for muskets but for every musket they needed a two metre high pile of pelts. Ammunition cost extra. 1.6 million pelts a year were traded. The beaver trade altered Indigenous culture. Alcohol unsettled communities.

            Professor White said beavers are scary. He was walking his dog in his hometown in upstate New York. The river was running too fast for the beaver and so one of them was taking the sidewalk. It was half the size of his dog but it scared the shit out of his pet anyway.

            Beaver pelts were also traded for copper pots, which are durable but clay heats evenly. Metal pots heat faster on the bottom and so one has to stir to keep the contents at the bottom from burning.

He said something about the nuclear family but I didn’t get it because I was distracted by the fact that he pronounced it “nookyoulure”.

            In The Descent of Man Darwin suggests that Caucasians are superior to other races, particularly Africans and Aboriginal Australians. On humanitarian grounds he opposed application of his ideas toward racist purposes.

            Craniometry was used to measure the craniums of different races to try to find out which race was superior. The professor says that it backfired because they found that Indigenous Americans had the biggest craniums. I can’t find a study that corroborates that.

            George Catlin was a painter who claimed to be capturing the spirit of Native Americans but he made images that fit his own idea of Native Americans. He staged tepees. Edward Curtis did the same thing with photography.  There were never any smiling Indians. But I don’t think there are very many photos of anyone smiling in 19^th Century photos because the long exposures required people to hold one expression for twenty minutes until the 1850s. But then Curtis was born after Daguerreotype so the exposures would have been less than a minute. Maybe his subjects had rotten teeth and he didn’t think their smiles would make a good photograph.

            Native comedy troupe The 1491s” did an “Ode to Edward Curtis” showing nothing but images of Native people smiling.

            Sherman Alexie wrote the screenplay for a film called “Smoke Signals” that was entirely made by Indigenous Americans.

            Professor White showed us the image of “The End of the Trail”. It’s a statue by James Earle Fraser of a defeated Indian on a defeated horse from the 1880s. He said he hasn’t found an Indian home in the state of New York that doesn’t have a copy. It’s been adapted by indigenous people as a form of resistance.

            He said that Wild West Indian event re-enactors are often more knowledgeable than academics.

            He wanted to know if “Walker Texas Ranger” was on in Canada. We confirmed that it was. The character of Walker was part Cherokee but the Texas Rangers started out as vigilantes with the purpose of purging Texas of Indians. That seems to be true.

            Someone at the back claimed that the RCMP was started for the same purpose. Despite all the atrocious things that the Mounties have done I don’t think a comparison can be made. The founder of the Texas Rangers, Stephen Austin had an agenda of killing as many Indians as possible while the RCMP never had such a mandate.

            The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was initially not signed by the places with the largest indigenous populations: Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Canada later accepted it.

            Wampum belts were used to acknowledge land treaties but not governance.

            There are rights in the constitution but no responsibility for those rights. What if we were all made to own the words we speak? On social media there is no ownership of words.

            A village of 5000 Seneca produced 1.6 million bushels or 40,641,876 kilos of corn.

            Rivers were highways.

           

            In tutorial Safia assured us that Professor White would catch his lectures up to the syllabus soon. I threw her off balance by asking, “Wanna bet?” I said there is no way he can do it with his rambling lecture style. I don't really care since I doubt if we will be tested on anything he doesn't lecture about but he will have to cut things out to catch up.

She told us the great law of peace among the Haudenosaunee that bound the six nations was written on wampum belts. She said that the United States Constitution was based on the wampum belt. Some scholars say it is and others argue it isn’t.

            We divided into two groups and our group’s question was, “Does ecological context have contemporary significance?” I said it’s significant for everybody and that all cultures form around their environment. Two Native women said the question should just be applied to Indigenous people. The young Native woman with the pink hair and the false eye lashes talked about all Native groups being nomadic but I pointed out that west coast tribes like the Haida stayed in one home base. She said that was only because they were forced to by white people.  But the Haida were headquartered on Haida Gwai long before colonists came.

            The pink haired woman said that the professor talks too much about the Haudenosaunee and declared, “This is Ojibway territory!”

            Our group was much more animated in our discussions.

            The Native woman on my left was snacking on strong smelling dried fish out of a baggy. I was surprised to hear that she paid almost $130. I told her that I paid $96 at the same place. She half joked, “I must’ve got the Nish price”, meaning they upped the cost of the book because she’s Anishinaabe. I'd asked my cashier if my book was second hand when he charged me less than I'd expected. He said it was new but sometimes the prices change. It certainly seems unfair that students would pay different prices for the same book.

            On my way home I stopped at Freshco to buy a jar of honey.

            I had a slice of ham for lunch.

            After taking a siesta there was no time to do exercises because I had lots of writing to do.

            I had a potato, two drumsticks and gravy for dinner while watching an episode of Wanted Dead or Alive starring Steve McQueen.

            In this story Josh meets with a man about investing in a gold mine. He shows him a nugget and then invites him to come and see the mine. They ride near a place called Pothole and then Josh reveals that he knows the man's real name is Penfold Crane and that he is wanted for murder in Pothole. Josh brings Crane in for the reward but finds out that the town is run by a hanging judge named Chute Wilson, who uses his saloon as a courthouse and inebriates the jury. Josh and a priest try to intervene in what is clearly an unfair trial but Josh gets both beaten and fined for contempt of court. Josh rigs the scaffold so it doesn’t open and uses his gun to save Crane. The priest makes a speech and convinces the people not to follow Chute. The final surprise is that Josh takes Crane to the nearest town to be charged with another murder that he's found evidence that he did commit. He just wants him to be tried in a fair court.