How do you sell a relative? Native Communities, Capitalism, and Land

Coulthard's essay can be found here.

A basic question in American Indian Studies is whether Native ways of being in the world are simply incompatible with those of the dominant American culture.

This is a difficult question to wrestle with. Answering it helps answer other questions. As students and teachers of American Indian Studies, are we trying to incorporate Native ways of being into the dominant culture? Are we trying to incorporate the dominant culture into Native ways of being? Are we working toward assimilation or resistance? Toward change or conservation? Toward cosmopolitanism or nationalism?

The answers depend upon who is asking, and many times the answer involves a complicated, ever-changing mix of the options I just mentioned. (And those are just a few of the options. There are many.)

I thought about this question of compatibility when I saw a passage from an essay by Glen Coulthard, "From Wards of the State to Subjects of Recognition: Marx, Indigenous Peoples, and the Politics of Dispossession in Dedendeh."

Although he is writing about Native communities in Canada, his point remains true south of their border. His essay discusses the ways First Nations people have tried to work with the Canadian government in securing their rights and protecting their homelands from appropriation and exploitation. It seems that working within the dominant culture's political and economic system can be a trap -- because of the difference between the fundamental assumptions of Native epistemologies and those of the dominant culture, specifically the dominant culture's practice of capitalism. If Native communities work for their rights within the dominant system, they can lose even when they think they are winning, because they then are subject to a system that operates under very different assumptions and expectations.

Coulthard later expanded on these ideas.

He writes that people from the dominant culture should not think that Native communities resist selling or losing their land simply because they "hold a strong attachment to their homelands." Many non-Native people hold such attachments, even in the dominant cultures of the United States and Canada. Instead, people should understand that land is part of a Native "ontological framework."

("Onto" is related to the Greek word for "being," and "logy" is related to the Greek word "logos" -- word.  Ontology, then, would be the way we speak about being, or the study of being.)

As an example, Coulthard cites the word for "land" in his Native community's language. This word means not only the land (as a material object) but everything on it, "people and animals, rocks and trees, lakes and rivers, and so on." Not just passively on it; these things exist on it together in a web of dynamic relationships. He writes:

"Ethically, this meant that humans held certain obligations to the land, animals, plants, and lakes in much the same way that we have obligations to other people. And if these obligations were met, then the land, animals, plants, and lakes would reciprocate and meet their obligations to humans, thus ensuring the survival and well-being of all over time."

This is where I thought about that question of incompatibility, and it is where I thought about Karl Marx.

I thought about the fundamental difference between thinking of land as a relation (as an entity with which you have a reciprocal relationship) and thinking of land as a commodity (a thing that can be bought and sold). For Marx, humans have social relationships through commodities and money, but they do not have social relationships with the commodities. This assumption, which is at the heart of the social and economic systems dominant in the United States and Canada, seems irreconcilable with the Native ontological framework that Coulthard describes.

The dominant American ontological framework includes the assumption that people are free to do as they wish with the things they own. That includes land. The limitations placed on land-use relate not to the owner's responsibility to the land but to their responsibility to other people, such as neighboring land owners. A landowner can be sued by their neighbors not because they have harmed the land but because their use of the land has negatively impacted the lives of their neighbors or the value of their property.

The Native ontological framework that Coulthard describes has commodities, too. Objects have been  traded, bought, and sold by Native people for centuries. But land is not a commodity. If you have social obligations to the land, just as you have social obligations to other people (such as your family), selling it becomes difficult. How can you sell it to someone who will value it differently? Someone who will not have a sense of obligation to it? Someone who will think of it as a commodity rather than a relative?

This is where I find another idea from Marx useful in my understanding the dilemma I mentioned at the beginning and that Coulthard considers in his essay. The concept of alienation is important to Marx's thinking about industrialization, socialism, and capitalism. There are several kinds of alienation that Marx writes about -- people being alienated from their own bodies or minds through the process of wage labor; people being alienated from the goods and services they produce (for instance, being paid to make objects you could never afford to buy on the wage you are paid to make them); and, perhaps most importantly for Marx, people being alienated from each other because of the class structure of their industrialized society.

I find the concept of alienation useful in understanding many aspects of modern life. I think about what the word means. To alienate means to make something alien, to make it a stranger, to place it outside regular social obligations. Marx apparently used the German word for "estrangement" in this sense. To make something strange. When I looked up alienation in the Oxford English Dictionary, I saw that in its Latin origins "alienate" meant to transfer ownership of something. That seems especially relevant for this discussion about land.

To sell something, then, means to separate it from you. In a sense, to make it a stranger to you. In American capitalism, it seems everything is for sale. Objects, animals, land, services, your time (in the form of your labor). All of these things can be purchased by another person. All of these things can be alienated from you. Even our own bodies can be sold, figuratively and literally. It may be illegal, but you can sell your organs. Everything can be alienated. Everything can be made a stranger for a price.

This ability to sell anything leads people to sell everything, to seek new things to sell, and always to sell them for as much as possible. American capitalism is built upon the desire for immediate maximized profit.

The notion that some of these commodities are due social obligations is, in a real sense, inconceivable to American capitalism. The idea that humans can and should have reciprocal relationships with these commodities seems impossible.

"Immediate maximized profit" and "mutual social obligations" seem incompatible to me.

Perhaps this can change. Wikipedia tells me there is a concept called "environmental personhood," This bestows legal rights onto elements of the environment, such as rivers. For example, the Yurok Nation in California recently recognized the legal rights of the Klamath River. (Rivers in other countries, such as India and New Zealand, have been awarded similar status.) The Yurok Tribal Council stated its desires for the Klamath River as an act of reciprocation, as Coulthard discussed: “This resolution provides another powerful tool to protect our river, which has sustained the Yurok people since time began."And the Council described its desires for the Klamath River in very human terms: "to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve."

That sounds kind of like "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," doesn't it?

I do not expect environmental personhood to become very popular in the United States any time soon -- although the personhood of corporations is the law of the land -- because that idea limits the ability of people to exploit something for profit, and that seems unAmerican.

As Native nations and the federal governments of the United States and Canada continue to work out their vexed relationships, I do not expect them to ever resolve their fundamentally different relationships to the lands they live on. I think everyone involved would be healthier if they worked toward the Native ontological framework that Coulthard discusses. In my classes I encourage students to at least understand this Native ontological framework, or perhaps even consider incorporating some of it to their ways of being in the world.

I like big books... sometimes

I do not dislike long novels. By long I mean 400 pages and more.

Some of my favorite novels are long. For instance, China Mieville's The Scar is more than 600 pages long.

I dislike novels that are unnecessarily long, that could be just as good, if not better, if they lost some pages. For instance, China Mieville's Perdido Street Station is about 700 pages long, but it needs to be about half of that.

And it seems like many novels in recent years are too long. This is particularly frustrating for me because I teach literature courses at a university. I teach a course on 20th Century American novels, and I like to end the semester with a recent novel. Even though that means reading something NOT written in the 20th Century, I like to give students an impression of what is happening in American Letters now, so they can compare that with what came before it.

But sometimes finding a recent novel less than 400 pages can be hard. And many students cannot or will not read a novel of that length in one week -- plus, by the end of the semester academic fatigue has set in. Students have readings for other classes, and most of my students work part-time or even full-time. Many of them have families that require their time and attention. Good, shorter novels are very useful in this setting.

For instance, this semester I was hoping to find something with a protagonist about the age of my students, so I read The Idiot by Elif Batuman. It was a Pulitzer Prize finalist last year, and its narrator is a first-year college student facing the dilemmass they could easily relate to: living away from home for the first time; coping with kooky roommates; choosing college classes; searching for significance in all of the strange things authority figures tell her; discovering romance, etc.


I like the protagonist. I like her roommates. I like her observations about college life. She is funny. She is interesting. But does her story need to be 423 pages long? Do I need a third anecdote about her unspoken affections for Ivan? And a fourth? And a fifth? Do I need to know all of the details I am given about other events?

I find myself asking similar questions of many recent novels: Why are you telling me all of this?

One of the best American novels ever is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it manages its greatness in fewer than 200 pages. Some of its greatness probably is the result of that compression. In my American novels class I teach Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, which I also consider one of the greatest American novels, and she tells her story in fewer than 250 pages.

Can I not experience a young woman's first year of university in fewer than 300 pages -- and yet have more intensity and more enjoyment than the same experience narrated in more than 400 pages? Sometimes less is more.

I know epics are by definition big -- they contain many characters, many events, many locations. And the reader expects this. So again, I am not complaining that some novels are long. Some novels need to be long to create their full impact on the reader. But length alone is not a virtue. Only the inclusion of necessary elements is the virtue, and an epic happens to need that length.

However, having just said that about epics, when I see George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones novels, which are thick as bricks, I think to myself, "How good can they be? He hasn't made any choices."

I wonder if this impulse to include everything is similar to a phenomenon some of us know from creative writing workshops. Sometimes creative writing students tell their colleague that a story is too long, that some scenes do not have the desired effect, etc. That author will defend the story's current form by claiming it is based on actual experience. "But that's the way it happened!"

That does not matter. What matters is whether the story works as well as it can.

I think some writers make a similar defense of a story not based on actual events. In this instance, when told to cut something or re-arrange or compress events, they might say, "But this is the way I imagined it!"

That does not matter. Imagining a story is only the beginning of telling it. A novel is a work of art; it is an object, not an event. As an object, it must be shaped. It must be cut and altered. Its pieces must be arranged with the goal of their impact on the reader, not with their fealty to the imaginative experience of the writer.

Trump: The Bullshit Candidate

I have decided the perfect emblem for Donald Trump's presidential campaign is a plastic bottle.

A bottle of Trump Ice Natural Spring Water.

The one small object captures the lies that characterize his general behavior and his campaign in particular.

According to a website for the Trump Organization, Trump Natural Spring Water "is one of the purest natural spring waters bottled in the world." The water is monitored constantly for purity, the site states.

That sounds good. Except if anyone is doing the monitoring, it isn't the Trump Organization. You see, the water is bottled by Village Springs Spring Water in Willington, Conn. Like so much of the Trump Empire, things that bear his name are made by others. The Trump promise of exclusive access to quality and status is merely a matter of branding rather than authentic quality or the product of his own efforts.

Perhaps the water from Village Springs is good, but this is nothing Trump was involved with, and it is nothing that is exclusive to him. In fact, anyone can have the same water bottled for their birthday party, bar mitzvah, or doggie wedding. Also, according to the Village Springs website, the company bottles water for private labels at convenience stores and grocery stores. Tres chic!

I have no reason to doubt that Village Springs water tastes fine and is healthy to drink. But the company's website offers no mention of their water being one of the purest in the world, and Trump offers no evidence for how this judgement was made.

Trump Ice Natural Spring Water, like so much in his presidential campaign, requires his audience to connect their vague associations of his name with quality and competence with the product being sold to them. It requires them to hear but not test the rhetoric. It requires them to forget that Trump is a marketer and not a maker; he will say whatever is required to sell something, regardless of the truth. And many times the promises have little relation to what is actually delivered (such as the "hand-picked" faculty members at Trump University).

Trump recently paraded his water bottles in a press conference. The presentation was an attempt to counter Mitt Romney's attempt to portray Trump as a business failure rather than a business success (transcript here). Romney cited his failed endeavors, such as Trump Magazine, Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, Trump Steaks, and Trump "University." (I was disappointed in Romney's takedown because it mostly rehashed points made better by John Oliver's Last Week Tonight on HBO.)

In order to refute Romney's claims, Trump brought out an array of merchandise, as if to suggest that the failures Romney cited were instead successes. But like so many of the claims in his campaign, his remarks consisted mostly of lies and misrepresentations (see Mashable's story). The steaks, it turned out, were not Trump Steaks at all, but were made by Bush Brothers. There was no Trump Vodka for him to show, so he showed Trump Wine -- which he doesn't bottle; his son does. The Trump Magazine he held up was an issue of a quarterly publication distributed at his resorts, not the monthly lifestyle magazine that failed in the 1990s. Romney did not mention bottled water, but he brought that, even though, as I have said, he does not make it and it is not in any way an exclusive product.

His display of "successful" products are like the promises he has made on the campaign. The wall he promises to build, the tariffs he promises to impose on products made in China (which would include his own line of clothing), the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants he promises... Trump cannot be trusted to deliver on anything that he says, because everything he is says consists, more rather than less, of bullshit.

This is why I am so perplexed by people who say they support him because of his honesty. For example, in a Salon article describing her turnaround on Trump's candidacy, Camille Paglia praised his "fearless candor."

Candor is another word for honesty, integrity, and truthfulness. How can someone whose every statement is steeped in lies, misrepresentations, and fabrications be praised for "candor"?

If he is being honest, then he must be stupid, since so many of his "facts" are wrong. So perhaps he does have "candor," just little common sense and less knowledge. For a list of recent lies and misrepresentations, check out this article from Politico, "Trump's Week of Errors, Exaggerations, and Flat-out Falsehoods."

I prefer to think of him as more dishonest than uninformed, though he may be both. A list such as Politico's is why I find the word that best applies to Trump is "bullshit."

In his slim volume On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt associates bullshit with an absence of knowledge on a subject. He writes, "Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic" (63). Review Trump's many errors of fact in the Politco article, and you can see Frankfurt's point illustrated. All numbers are exaggerated according to Trump's biases and his immediate rhetorical needs -- his poll numbers, the size of the trade deficit with China, etc.

In his book, Frankfurt tries to distinguish between regular lying and bullshitting. One distinction, he writes, is craft. The liar can be careful and nuanced; they practice sophistry with more skill and attention, so that the lies or misrepresentations are hard to discover (most presidential candidates are practiced at this). Meanwhile, bullshit is "produced in a careless or self-indulgent manner" (21). Carefully crafted lies and misrepresentations require discipline. "It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim" (22). Trump's remarks at his political rallies are famous for their rambling, unscripted nature, he seems unconcerned when he contradicts earlier statements, and he is reluctant to be held accountable for what he has said at any particular moment in the past.

Perhaps the most relevant quality of bullshit for my discussion is the attitude of the speaker. In many ways the bullshitter is more brazen than the liar, because the bullshitter is less concerned about the truth in the first place. The liar is concerned about being caught; hence the careful effort to disguise the lie as the truth. The bullshitter does not seem to care.

According to Frankfurt, the bullshitter "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are"(61).

This seems to describe Trump's press conference about his many successful products. The Bush Brothers label on the steaks he displayed was in clear view. He did not attempt to hide it. The liar would have. The bullshitter does not care. The magazine he held up was clearly NOT the Trump Magazine that had been ridiculed by Romney and Oliver. Trump Wine is not only not Trump Vodka, it isn't made by the same Trump. But he didn't care.

The bottle of Trump Ice Natural Spring Water? The liar would have failed to list the actual bottler. Instead, the truth behind Trump's bullshit is brazenly listed on the bottle itself. There is no attempt to hide the falsehood. Trump's presidential campaign is proving that the truth is irrelevant. The seductive quality of the bullshit is all that matters.

A Memorial to Forgetting

"Fernando"

Recently, I saw this statue in the courtyard of the Van Nuys Civic Center. The native man depicted is named Fernando, and he reminded me of Ogden Nash.

Ogden who?

Ogden Nash had one of the best jobs in the world. He was famous for writing silly poems (although he also co-wrote a couple of Broadway musicals). He was born in 1902 and died in 1971. The Nash poem most likely for you to have heard before is this:

I think I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, 
I'll never see a tree at all.

However, the Nash poem that I thought of when I saw Fernando was a much-less famous poem, "The Unselfish Husband." In it, the husband tries to prove his love to his wife by climbing the highest mountain in the world and naming it after her. The lines that came to mind were these:

But she didn't give him a look of love, she gave him a

Ogden Nash

look of laughter,
And not only a look of laughter but a look of menace,
Because he named it after his wife by naming it Mt.
Mrs. Orlando Tregennis.

He supposedly intends to honor his wife, but instead he erases her, in a sense. Her name, her individuality, disappears, and she is memorialized only by her relationship to him.

Something similar happened to Fernando. Although the plaque at his feet says "Fernando is a symbol of the first inhabitants of the San Fernando Valley," the statue is an honor that erases more than it illuminates (a little history of it is here). You see, not only does the plaque fail to name the original inhabitants of the Valley -- the native people in this region never disappeared; they still call themselves the Tataviam, the Chumash, and the Tongva -- it also fails to call its lone figure by a native name. That is, an actual original inhabitant of the Valley would not have had a Spanish name. He would have had a name in his own language.

Fernando would have been assigned this name by a priest from the nearby Catholic mission of San Fernando after the Spanish invaded California. Just as Mr. Orlando Tregennis erases his wife's name by overwriting hers with his, the Americans memorialize an original inhabitant of the Valley by erasing signs of his language and naming him only in relationship to the Catholic Church and the Spanish government who dispossessed him.

Such are the dynamics of what we call settler colonialism.

Most people may be familiar with colonialism. That is the process by which one country takes over another and transforms it into an extension of the dominant country. The conquered population may even become citizens of a kind in the dominant country -- though probably never citizens of status equal to residents of the dominant country.

However, most people are less familiar with settler colonialism, which functions differently. In it, the dominant country seeks to replace the citizens of the conquered country. That is where the "settler" part comes in. When we think of settlers, we think of families building farms and communities in a landscape that has no other people in it; we think of settlers being the first people in a location. And that is the way members of a settler colonial society like to imagine themselves or their ancestors. They prefer to forget that the land had inhabitants before them, and they prefer to forget the violence that was required to get those people out of their way. The United States is a settler colonial nation.

Henry Van Wolf

This willful forgetting tends to be ubiquitous in a settler colonial society. It happens in ways members of that society do not realize -- it wouldn't be successful forgetting if it was obvious to them. So the irony of giving a symbol of the Valley's "first inhabitants" a name from the people who violently dispossessed them was probably lost on sculptor Henry Van Wolf and the people who commissioned the statue. After all, many elementary school students in California still learn about the Spanish mission as if they were playgrounds for happy Indians and Spaniards -- and not the instruments of genocide; I can only imagine how that subject was taught in 1968 when the statue was erected.

P.S. -- The statue at the Van Nuys Civic Center is a bigger version of the Fernando Awards, an honor given to a San Fernando Valley resident for his/her volunteerism and philanthropy. Their work for others is a fine thing, and my thoughts here are not meant to suggest they or the people who select the winners are not wonderful people.

This Is A Story About The Plains

Fall 2014 Issue

I call this piece a "prose lyric," and it appeared in the Fall 2014 issue of Yellow Medicine Review. Its editor, Judy Wilson, generously selected it as one of her nominations for the Pushcart Prizes.  (I have made minor tweaks in a couple of sentences, so it differs very slightly from the printed version.)

This is a story about the Plains, so there must be a pick-up truck in it. So let us say I am driving a pick-up. Let us say it is an older pick-up. Its bed is a little out of kilter. Perhaps I drove through a ditch in the truck, and that vehicular adventure bent the bed a little to the side, so that if you are driving behind me you can see all four of my tires. Or perhaps the bed was bent when the truck got hit from the side by someone pulling out of a parking space in front of Dillon’s Feed Store. Or maybe it already was bent when I bought the truck secondhand from Mr. Tollefesen or maybe Leonard Two Bulls. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that this is a story about the Plains, and therefore it needs to have a pick-up truck in it. And the bent truck bed just communicates that the truck is indigenous to the Plains.

This is a story about the Plains, so there must be a stretch of road in it. It could be the road I am driving on now. Let us say that it is a two-lane highway that runs flat and straight, with the mountains in the distance and a strong wind blowing all the time. It is a road so straight and undecorated that it becomes a metaphor for truth and honesty. Or maybe it serves as a metaphor for life, for the life of some person driving down this stretch of road, a life that stretches out from this point to the horizon. And that horizon itself can be a metaphor, for a future that never arrives but is always arriving. Or perhaps this highway can be a metaphor for anticipation, that time and space that stands between us and something we look forward to. Or perhaps this long, straight highway is a symbol of some inevitability, some unavoidable doom or calamity. Perhaps it is all of these things at once. Perhaps it just depends upon which driver is looking at it. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that this is a story about the Plains, and so we need a long stretch of road that runs straight and true across the land.

This is a story about the Plains, so there must be Indian people and white people in it, for the Plains are a place where they met to work out their differences, one could say. And they are still working them out. Or you could say the Plains are where the white people came to work out something they had within themselves. They had been so unhappy in their first home that they moved away and never went back. But, as some say, you cannot run away from your problems, so they brought those with them. And they attempted to work out some of those problems on the Indians. Regardless. The white folks and the Indians met here. At one time on horseback, in ambushes, in massacres, in circled wagons, in burning cabins, in acres of dead buffalo. And now they work it out in alleys, in jail cells, in dark parking lots, outside liquor stores, in casinos. But in marriages, too. In churches and in schools. In friendships and yearbooks. At the feedstore and in the Wal-Mart. There was a time when Indian and white was all we needed to tell a story about the Plains. That is not true anymore. Now we need more actors for our play. We need Mexicans and African Americans. We need people from India to run the motel and the gas station, so now we have Indians and other Indians. We need Salvadorans. We need some Russians. The Plains are different now. This is a story of the Plains, so there must be constant change in it.

This is a story about the Plains, so there must be a lonely house in it. Let us say it sits off the road a ways, down an unused driveway. Let us say I drive by it every day and think about it. So do you. The driveway could be made of dirt or gravel. Let us say the driveway has been unused so long that a tree has taken root in the middle of it. The tree stands there, in the driveway, in front of the house, like some child waiting on a Mother or a Father to come home. There is no glass in the house’s windows and the paint is nearly gone from the wooden sides, peeled away by seasons of snow and rain and sun and wind and wind and wind and always the wind. The wind is slowly, patiently taking the house back, carrying it off one molecule at a time, like the careful, ancient erosion of the hills themselves. This is a story about the Plains, which are flat because the ocean was here to press them down. And now the wind is the ocean’s cousin, doing its work of keeping the land wide and smooth. This is a story about the Plains, and so the hand of time is seen everywhere.

This is a story about the Plains, and so there must be another lonely house in it. A house with people, but still it is lonely. But not really a house. A trailer home. It could even be a double-wide. But it will be at the end of a driveway, either dirt or gravel. Its lights are on at all hours of the night and people come go at strange intervals. This is a story about the Plains, and so some people feel that no one can see them, even though everyone can. And some people feel that no one cares, because no one asks. But everyone watches. And the sun and the moon see everything. The wind learns it all and carries the news up to the mountains and down to the rivers. In the house meth is cooked. And a corrosive dream eats the skin and teeth of its lovers. Then one night the trailer will burn down and the ghosts that had lived there will blow away. This is a story about the Plains, so there must be heartache and folly in it. 

This is a story about the Plains, so there must be happy houses in it. Yours and mine, we will say. I am headed to one now, on this straight road, in this crooked pick-up truck. And when the houses are not yours nor mine, we will beep the truck’s horn or wave our hand once, just once, off the steering wheel, when we drive past and see folks on the porches of those houses fat with children and grandparents and dogs and cats. Yes, let us say that. Yards covered with cars and trucks, some that run and some that don’t. Each one has a story to tell. This is a story about the Plains, so there must be basketball hoops in it. Let us say the hoop stands beneath a powerful lamp, like a streetlight from town. And children bounce a ball on the rough gravel (or dirt) of the driveway, until the ball is smooth and the same color as the gravel (or dirt). The children laugh and chase the ball, and the dogs bark, and the cats curl themselves around the legs of parents and grandparents. Yes, let us say that. Those are good things. Let us tell stories of good things. The children dream of high school championships and the parents dream of college for them. This is a story about the Plains, and so there must be laughter and dreams in it. The wind carries those too, up to the mountains and down to the rivers.