Blurb Things

There is a way that violence shapes the body: Being conditioned to anticipate harm, being sensitive to signs that may be nothing, having the senses trained to news of a blow. In going to the pier every day to listen for a name, the days come to cycle around an absence. Maybe we can talk about this chemically, like a traumatic stress response, but pathology and PTSD is a discursive way of locating that violence in the body itself, as an anomaly that can be treated through greater care in the form of greater control. The settler desire to fix, improve, save, is the second half of the settler desire to kill, displace, conquer. In this way, signs of violence in the Indigenous body, as in the sick body, invite care as further incursion, and the body -- inside and out -- is brought more closely into the colonial order. Violence-and-care is a strategy of settler incursion; a transit of empire. 

So how does the settler state co-opt our healing? Neoliberalism is the key concept here.

When healing and reconciliation enter the public sphere as policy, they are re-framed to fit the neoliberal ideals that allow the settler to conceive of their society as democratic, fair, equal.

Neoliberalism is that creation of the modern liberal subject as an individual entirely self-created and self-contained. It is the abdication of any kind of belonging to or responsibility for race, gender, or larger social systems. The market is made the ideal model for all human structures; everything exists on the level of transactions between individuals.* Within this frame, the rhetoric of healing and reconciliation becomes about dialogue and equal exchange between individuals. It provides a way to ignore the larger structures of violence and control implicit in any aboriginal-settler exchange. It provides another venue for settlers to assert themselves over Native people, in the name of “mutual” healing. It vindicates the settler’s carefully cultivated sense of righteous guilt as equivalent to the burden of colonial trauma experienced by Native people, by assuring them that colonialism hurts US ALL and that healing is for US ALL “equally.”

Healing is not something that happens between Native and non-Native people. It is something that Native people undertake daily, and non-Native people must fucking stop trying to get in on.

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*[You're all thinking "Yeah, fuck those Libertarians!" But fuck YOU, my friend. Neoliberalism is the central concept of the self in our society, not some political outlier. It's how we allow ourselves to think that wealth and racism are both things resulting from individual decisions alone. Lack of wealth must indicate a lack of willpower, while lack of ill will means no racism happened, right?]

(continued next post)

The second example concerns language and cultural revitalization as a community-level healing strategy. This movement is about fighting the colonial precept that assimilation will save us. Everything from the residential schools to Loretta Saunders' death make it clear that assimilation to whiteness is an impossibility used to control us, not liberate us. Assimilation is about imposing inferiority. To heal, we assert that our language and culture are not inferior and discardable, but rich and intrinsic.

The example given during the Healing panel discussion by an audience member was about the white women who attended the revitalization workshops and classes that Native women held in their communities. This woman sadly told us how the white women would excel in the language classes while the local Native women got frustrated and dropped out. This rang true with me, as I remembered the shame and discomfort of finding how my Native language faltered and stuck on my tongue. It meant that I’d already failed at some point, was no longer Indian. The white women made mistakes and learned without feeling the echo of the violence of having their Native tongue ripped out.

In my own community, there was this friendly white homesteader-hippie woman who took some of the Anishinaabemowin classes offered at our school. She did very well, while the Native women struggled. She started teaching the language to other white people and using it in her art performances for white audiences. She probably thought she was being a good ally, promoting the culture to a sympathetic audience, spreading the language (or something). But she was actually co-opting our healing for her own personal gain.

She was stepping in front of the language teachers who had trained hard at great cost to their communities, and are the proper authority on language as Native speakers. This is silencing. She was taking the affirmation of Native identity intended to heal Native women and using it to augment her own identity and art. This is appropriation. Most of all, she was treating this healing and reconciliation effort as though it applied to her as a white woman as much as to the Native women. This is how our healing is co-opted and used to silence us.

On a different level, this white woman felt entitled to take the precious, hard-won thing she had been offered and treat it like a commodity that she bought and now owned. This takes me to the workings of neoliberalism in the colonial relationship.

(to be continued next post)

"Healing" and "reconciliation" as the basis of Aboriginal policy has failed us.

First, think of how healing and reconciliation has played out in the public sphere:

Stephen Harper's public apology to Aboriginal people, complete with a dip in the smudge for show.

The increase of police presence on reserves (because protection) and decrease in social services (because dependency).

Museum exhibits where parents bring their kids for the appropriate 30 minutes of somber reflection.

In the first case, reconciliation is confessional and absolution for the colonial mind. In the second case, it's a way for the settler State to impose its structures as protection. And in the third, it's a way to let those who perpetuate colonial violence consider themselves allies. Meanwhile, our own Aboriginal women are doing the real ground-level work of healing in their passionate, humble ways and they are mocked as sentimental, superstitious, and complicit. Healing is happening daily from within, but it is used opportunistically by outsiders.

There were two particularly poignant examples given during the NAISA 2014 conference by prominent Native intellectuals: one expressed by Audra Simpson during the Transit of Empire panel, and one brought up in discussions after Andrea Smith's Healing panel.

Simpson talked about how Loretta Saunders was mourned. She was mourned widely, visibly, by both Aboriginal and national media, in a way no other missing or murdered Aboriginal woman has been. Why? For colonial society, it's because she represented an ideal white femininity that is grievable, while other murdered women represent a femininity that is promiscuous, backward, lamentable -- but not grievable. Loretta was fair, blond, a university student, removed from the hardships of poverty and prostitution. So her death was a blow to whiteness.

Aboriginal women mourned her as well, and asked ourselves why this one hit so hard. Partly it was a pain so fully silenced being suddenly trumpeted everywhere, partly anger at the selectiveness of public outrage, and partly anger that the death of ANOTHER Aboriginal woman was being individualized ("It was an isolated altercation") or generalized ("it wasn't a race thing, it's about violence toward ALL women"). This is how our mourning is co-opted and used to silence us.

But Simpson also brought something else to the surface. Seeing that light-skinned face plastered everywhere, with the disjunction of the phrase "murdered Aboriginal woman" below it... Loretta's death drove home that there is no "passing" for any of us. There is no level of respectability, education, or even lightness that will protect us.

(continued next post)

William Jones, Fox (Mesquaki), anthropologist, 1871-1909:

Born on Stroud Sac & Fox reservation, Oklahoma, raised by Fox grandmother speaking Fox as native language

PhD in Linguistic Anthropology at Columbia under Franz Boas, 1899-1904, after leaving Harvard med school

Collected objects and oral histories among Fox, Sauk, Sioux, and Ojibwe

Field Museum collecting expedition to Philippines ended abruptly when Jones was a jerk to the wrong group of Ilongot and was killed

Ojibwa texts (part 1 and part 2) published posthumously (contain hugely important Anishinaabe oral histories)

[Reading: Sophilia Keahna (1998), "William Jones"; and Henry Rideout (1912), William Jones: Indian, Cowboy, American Scholar, and Anthropologist in the Field]

Franz Boaz, Very Important Anthropologist, 1858-1942:

Opposed orthogenesis/cultural evolution (then-dominant anthro model by Lewis Henry Morgan and co), in which all societies go through the same stages from savage to civilized, so tribal people are less evolved than Europeans. Museums at the time exhibited objects from all cultures in a progression from less to more advanced according to how they 'look'

Kwakuitl hangouts on the 1897 Jesup Expedition, got Some Ideas

Championed cultural relativism, in which you must understand objects from within their own culture

Humanities a better way to understand cultures than science: Morgan and co tried to fit objects and cultures (and races) into an evolutionary scheme as neat as the natural sciences, based on analysis of form/appearance, but Boas was all about "the ethnological specimen in its history and in its medium" -- the meaning/function of the object, specific to its culture

"Though like causes have like effects, like effects have not like causes" -- This knife looks like that other knife but they might have NOT A DAMN THING in common, so you might actually have to talk to someone from the culture it was made in (this was actually a major shift in the field)

Made life groups, museum displays (dioramas!) that showed cultural context (specific tribes USING and WEARING their own objects) instead of the evolutionary model of display

Got on the nerves of Otis T. Mason and everyone at the AMNH museum over cultural evolution

Said "screw museums" and went to teach at Columbia where his students included Margaret Mead and Edward Sapir, helped found AAA, was generally a Big Deal

[Reading: Ira Jacknis (1985) "Franz Boas and Museums" in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, edited by George Stocking; and Franz Boas (1887) "The Occurance of Similar Inventions in Areas Widely Apart," Science 9 (224): 534-35.]

Do Not Buy Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art, For the Love of GOD: A Blurb About the Carl Hoffman Book Debuting Tomorrow

by me.

If you go to the Metropolitan in New York and take a look around the sections devoted to the AOAs (arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, formerly known as the Primitive Arts) you'll notice is how much of the scant text is devoted to the name Rockefeller: Nelson Rockefeller, former governor of New York, collector and donor of "Primitive Art", and his son Michael Rockefeller, also a collector of Primitive Art but most well-known for giving back to the community by (totally) getting cannibalized in New Guinea in 1961. This was a huge deal at the time. Carl Hoffman has decided that the time is right to once again send out the racist batsignal by mounting to the top of the Rockefellers' Google results and screaming "CANNIBALS!"

The Rockefeller family, of course, distance themselves from this sensationalist version of events. But this brand of morbid White fascination with savagery is the entire cultural background to the popularity of "Primitive Art" among Western collectors. It's not the Rockefellers that the word savage hurts. Though Nelson Rockefeller spent his collecting career supposedly elevating primitive cultures to the status of Art (hence the spare design and brief texts in the Met), he's only ever benefited from the exotic suggestion of the savage in his lofty Primitive Art.

Siegfried Kracauer, "General History and the Aesthetic Approach" in History: The Last Things before the Last (1969).

Things that happen simultaneously don't necessarily happen in sync.

Scholars invent categories (ages or periods) of historical time like 'Renaissance' and 'Modernity' and then get hung up on assuming everything that happened in that same period being causally related but no

Things belong to lots of different spheres/webs of influence which sometimes intersect, but their boundaries are fuzzy and artificial. It can be said that there are different streams of asynchronous time which must be considered individually in writing history.

Also:

Classification is cutting apart; violence

Time has cataracts

So on

Bonus points: He doesn't mention colonialism but it's useful for thinking about colonization as the imposition not just of spatial structures of control (borders, railways, reservations) but of temporal structures of control! Standard time instead of seasonal time. The workweek, the residential school year, and other time-based systems for making productive citizens.

Jack Goody, "Memory in Oral Tradition," in The Power of the Written Tradition (2000).

Cultures without writing [1], or oral cultures, are not hung up on word for word memorization because context works just fine face to face.

Cultures with writing really like word for word memorizing because written language makes exactness seem like realness.

Academics are all about writing and then try to write about cultures without writing and *siiigh*

Verbatim recall -- remembering word for word -- and verbal mnemonic devices (rhyming, alliteration) are a thing you do when you're familiar with writing. Cultures without writing use visual mnemonics (like wampum belts!), and they use them to communicate ideas, not specific words. Because the oral-only traditions must be transmitted face to face, their content is context-specific and fluid. It shifts with each telling according to changes in audience and context; it hides and reveals and adapts as appropriate. And the whole of it cannot be contained in words alone. Cultures with writing use oral tradition as a way to memorize ritually important texts, like mass or the national anthem. Reciting specific words, especially in unison with others, is a way of feeling like you're directly and authentically experiencing something from the past. Like, you're speaking the words of Christ or whatever.

Goody is a British anthropologist who writes about writing!

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