I wanted to keep to my self-imposed renewal of a goal to post a writing exercise each Monday, and additionally I wanted to post on Indigenous People’s Day. Clearly, I’ve missed my own deadline.
I do hope you spent time on Monday thinking about those who lived in the places we now inhabit long before their ancestors had ever imagined any humans who had white skin like mine existed. I live in a place where a substantial percentage of people are outright pissed at the change from Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day and a majority see the change as nothing more than political correctness. Both perspectives display a disarming ignorance of history and a dismissal of genocide (a use of the term that is certainly in alignment with the legal definition of genocide under the UN Genocide Convention, which includes acts intended to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group). We live in a kind of communal denial, defending what was historically argued as our manifest destiny to inhabit what is now the United States. We’re forgetful. Or worse, for often we live up to what the line from Jamie Ford’s simultaneously historical and dystopian futuristic novel The Many Daughters of Afong Moy: “In America, a lie becomes the truth with sufficient repetition.” There is the cruel irony generally that so many American national holidays focus on the dead—Memorial Day, Veteran’s Day, dead presidents, a dead civil rights leader—and equally ironic that many fail to remember the origins of such holidays and focus instead on the freedom and fun associated with a paid day off. Such is the nature of holidays, I suppose. Of course, those holidays are intended to honor and remember people, similar to the intention that Indigenous People’s Day is to celebrate and honor Indigenous American peoples and commemorate their histories and cultures. (The image below is from a t-shirt, the sort that tickles my brand of humor while stating a clear truth.)
While I find formal land acknowledgments largely a public mea culpa that lets white people like me think we have proven ourselves respectful without actually asking anything of ourselves or doing anything meaningful for others, I do believe a first step towards celebrating and honoring Indigenous peoples is to recognize the art, cultural, and philosophical contributions made by them and to assume ownership of the inhumane actions taken by our ancestors through murder, land seizures, forced relocations, broken treaties, and “reeducation” via boarding schools, to name just some of the injustices. Chris La Tray, Montana’s poet laureate and a member of the Little Shell Tribe of the Chippewa has, appropriately, disparaged land acknowledgements in his own Substack newsletter, An Irritable Métis, arguing that words can placate guilt but seldom spark action or change. Well-intentioned, land acknowledgements feel something like “the least we can do.” Still, I suppose they are a starting point if 1) they are truly sincere and thoughtful, and 2) they jumpstart our education on Indigenous peoples’ realities, and 3) they spark us to take meaningful actions and support Native peoples in direct ways. I spoke with praise for Bryce Andrews in this space last week, and Bryce, a writer and rancher who lives on the Flathead Reservation, showed what is clearly sincere respect in the note that opens his book reckoning with his own experience of the West’s myths and values, writing:
This note reminds the reader that Native people have lived for millennia in what we now call the West. Despite recent centuries of injustice, Indigenous communities still thrive here. The book you hold is set in western and central Montana, in the ancestral territories of the Séliš, QÍispé, and Ksanka peoples—Salish, Kalispel, and Kootenai in English translation. It is jarring and necessary to compare those ancestral homelands with the tribes’ current reservations.—from Holding Fire
If you are looking for a book to expand your vision and education, the aforementioned Chris La Tray released a new book some eight weeks ago: Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home. His book is in my TBR stack. Soon to be added will be one of my favorite writers, Louis Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa) with her new novel The Mighty Red, published October 1. I’m currently about two thirds of the way through reading and greatly enjoying A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power (Standing Rock Sioux).
These kinds of books and these kinds of thoughts were heavy on my mind last week. We were in the Coachella Valley for a conference, specifically in Indian Wells, although that’s hard to tell given the way one valley city blends continuously into the next in an endless, wide swath of asphalt. Running early in the morning to avoid the triple digit heat along Highway 111, I stopped to stretch at a tiny historical marker sandwiched between two golf resorts. In five short plaques attached to a line of boulders and beneath a small sign shaped like an artist’s easel that used to advertise the studio of Carl Bray. Like so many historical markers, these were essentially an homage to dead people and dead ways of living. The first plaque explained that the origin of the Indian Wells name comes from a deep spiral-ramped, now extinct well dug by the Cahuilla Tribe to access spring water in the arid valley. Only a tiny remnant of Cahuilla territory is preserved in the valley, a reservation of some forty-nine square miles. At the Indian Wells site, what had been a thriving village scattered with the arrival of the California gold rush, then by date palm plantations, and now by golf resorts and walled, wealthy, overwhelmingly white retirement communities. The plaques continue the tales of those wishing to grow rich from natural resources until they arrive at the story of Carl Bray, a self-taught painter who helped draw many other artists and other creatives to the valley in the latter half of the 20th Century. The final plaque tells of a short-lived attempt to preserve his by then neglected studio as a historical structure, an attempt that failed, the studio razed, and the land on which it sat incorporated into a resort property. Of course, all history is the story of dead people, but ho-hum descriptions on this historical marker makes the bookends of the Indigenous people who once thrived in the place and the artist who tried to capture its landscapes seem like little more than afterthoughts, which they are, of course, to the tens of thousands of drivers that pass by each day intent on getting to their latte date or their tee-time. While many rave about the wealth of Palm Springs and surrounding communities and the tanned, toned, desperate-to-be-seen flock to its annual music festival, I found the Coachella Valley a desolate, desperate place of identical strip malls, chain businesses, and pretentious people, all which could be dismantled and moved to any California suburb without anyone noticing the difference. In such a suburban-scape, it’s nearly impossible to imagine an age prior to European settlement. My “revealing moment” of being stopped at a traffic light on highway 111 behind a Ferrari was shattered when I returned home to my little Montana village only to see another Ferrari pass down our two-block main street, its driver dressed as if he had stepped right out of a bad action movie set in California. (When the Ferraris begin to dominate the now-ubiquitous Mercedes Sprinter vans in our neck of the woods, I’ll know the end days are here. Already the gym parking lot this morning was filled with Porsches, BMWs, and Audis—the times they are a changin’.)
When our time comes for eradication, we will have left behind a “culture” that will not be deserving of any holiday remembrances.
PSA
My PSA of the day: please VOTE. We are three weeks away from election day. In Montana, mail-in ballots have already arrived. I encourage you to seek out non-partisan voting guides to help educate yourself on lesser-known offices and ballot initiative. Or if you are simply seeking a good laugh at the extremists’ positions, read the rebuttals on arguments likely found in voter guides put out by your state Secretary’s Office. (And because I just wrote the words “extremists’ positions,” I can’t pass up my incredulousness at those in the belief that humans have the magical abilities to fabricate hurricanes; I mean, seriously, how dumb have we become as a species?)
Character Exercise
Choose a character who is foremost in you mind in something you are writing at present. Create something in their lives—an event, a person, a milestone—that they have building up in their minds. Then give them a harsh dose of disappointment, one where the imagined version they have developed cannot possibly meet reality. Lastly, write a situation where your character tries to deny the disconnect between fantasy and actuality, only to be called out by someone who is close to them.
Musical Moment
I’ve been on the road, on editorial deadline, and even flight time was focused on reading manuscripts, so I’ve not been in my usual music-saturated work environment. But one song this week, an obvious choice for the artist because of its popularity (although you can’t go wrong with nearly any of his work) and because as this week’s post reveals, it fits my current pessimistic mood:
Office Hours:
I’m headed on the road again and will have long, international flights…a perfect time to try and answer any writing questions on stuff that fixates me while avoiding other work. Have one, leave it in the comments.