Truth and Fiction

In April I was rewriting a chapter of my new book and struggling with how to present James Walker, an early twentieth century physician for the Indian Service at Pine Ridge whose amateur ethnology of has become a key source of information for scholars of the Lakota. Walker matters to my novel in part because he replaced Charles Eastman, a Santee Dakota, when Eastman was forced out of his position as the physician for the Pine Ridge reservation. But Walker is also important in my book because he was a white man who insisted that he was the foremost authority regarding esoteric Lakota knowledge in cosmology and medicine. I had some feelings about this, but I really wanted to see how true my suspicions were. I repeatedly bump up against the limitations of my imagination. I keep discovering that the truth is much more amazing than anything I concoct.

My bullshit detector started jumping at James Walker's claim that he was "adopted" as a "Sioux medicine man" by a "secret society" of the last five traditional medicine men living and who spoke a private, hitherto unknown language. The meter jumped past ten with Walker's assertion that -- following the death of those informants -- he was now the last living Sioux medicine man. This is just the perfect white-boy fantasy. Not only can I, Mr. Caucasian, learn in a short time the knowledge that you spent a lifetime acquiring, but it is now my private and exclusive domain!

Walker's claims do not disprove themselves by their grandiosity. And the information he shared isn't necessarily false just because he overstates his authority to present it. I looked more closely in two places. One was the academic writing about Walker himself, especially by his recent editors the anthropologist Raymond DeMallie and the folklorist Elaine Jahner. The other was the lives of Walker's informants, the medicine men he says initiated him.

Of those medicine men, I was especially interested in George Sword. Walker acknowledged Sword as his most important source and as his liaison with the others. Sword asserted his credentials for this work as a traditional military and religious leader in materials he wrote for Walker. Sword wrote that he participated in many war parties and that he was a chief of war parties. He wrote that he pledged and danced the Sun Dance and that he was a counselor for Sun Dancers and for teens participating in the vision quest. He wrote that he was a recognized and sought-after practitioner of Bear Medicine. My problem with all this? Sword was a bodyguard for the Pine Ridge agent at the age of 19! He took the name "Sword" to demonstrate his allegiance to the white authorities. He was captain of the Pine Ridge police and a lay catechist for the Episcopal Church. The timeline is really suspect. Did he do all this traditional work, the work of a mature adult, before the age of 20? Or did the reservation agents somehow not realize that their police chief was out leading illegal war parties and religious ceremonies when it was his job to suppress both?


Nevertheless, DeMallie and Jahner -- along with most professionals with an interest in the field -- find both Walker's and Sword's claims credible. The only challenge they admit to the authority of Walker's books and notes is in the fieldwork of Ella Deloria. And that is why I was so interested to find the writings of Ella Deloria on Walker. Deloria was an early-twentieth century anthropologist who was herself Yankton Dakota and raised on the Standing Rock Lakota reservation. While studying at Columbia University Teacher's College, she met Professor Franz Boas, the founding father of American anthropology. Boas tasked her with authenticating Walker's notes. She was not able to. She couldn't find independent corroboration for the existence of a secret society or an esoteric language. Some of the cosmological stories Walker submitted were familiar to the people with whom she spoke, but others made them shake their heads and politely suggest that maybe they came from other tribes. Her reports convinced neither Boas nor the Walker scholars of today.

I get why they dissatisfied Boas back then and why he kept insisting that Deloria look harder. He needed good material and Walker's seemed like it. He really wanted Ella Deloria to corroborate Walker's writing, no to discredit it. I should note here that one white person's fantasy (in this case, Walker's) is more likely to look real to another white person (in this case, Boas). Those fantasies fit our presuppositions because we share our way of viewing the "other." This is probably a good place to remember that The Education of Little Tree  was widely (perhaps universally) accepted as the authentic memoir of a Cherokee raised in "the old ways" and that it was placed on multicultural reading lists for years. It was only when the author, "Forrest Carter," was outed as the white supremacist and KKK publicist Asa Carter, that white readers began to notice the fantastic elements of the forgery.

I was more puzzled by the apparent credulity of the scholars of today, who have the benefit of time and changed perceptions that should make it easier to detect the fraudulent elements in the work. That is why I followed up on Miami University Professor Sandra Garner's 2010 PhD dissertation on the Sun Dance. She wrote whole chapters on both Deloria and Sword. From my perspective, it looked as though Sword was hustling Walker, but I don't really have the standing to draw that conclusion (other than recognizing a con when I see one.) I was relieved that Professor Garner shared my skepticism. And her level of interest in Ella Deloria led me to still more interesting material. I was able to find Deloria's correspondence with Franz Boas. I was able to see how she was devalued as a scholar, precisely because of her familiarity with the language and culture of the people she was reporting on, devalued because they were her own kin.

At a certain point, though, I started to feel like I was already familiar with Deloria's story. Had I read it before? I am more than capable of completely forgetting that I have read a book or seen a movie, only to recognize each new development as the plot unfolds. But Deloria's life, as Professor Garner recounted it, seemed to track with somebody else's: student at Columbia, work for Franz Boas, field work in one's own community, trouble with professional acceptance, a novel that was not well-received during one's life. Oh My God! Ella Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston lived the same life!

I knew the moment I had this epiphany that I could not have been the first to see it, so I immediately googled "Ella Deloria"+"Zora Neale Hurston." Up popped the book Native Speakers by University of Michigan Professor Maria Cotera. And Cotera's book ties Deloria and Hurston to a third woman contemporary of whom I had never heard, Jovita González. This was a real OMG moment for me. I got the e-book and read it the same day. Deloria was a Native woman, born 1889,  from the Dakotas who went to Teacher's College. Hurston was an African American woman, born 1891, from the South who went to Barnard. González was a Chicana, born 1904, from South Texas who went to the University of Texas. Both Deloria and Hurston studied with Franz Boas, the most important anthropologist of the time. González studied with J. Frank Dobie, one of the most important academic folklorists of the time. All three did significant fieldwork in their own communities and struggled to get that work taken seriously (González less so than the others.) All three turned their hands to writing novels. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston was published in 1937, but was poorly received and went out of print until it was re-released to great acclaim in 1978, largely due to the interest of Alice Walker. Ella Deloria wrote Waterlily around 1940. She could not find a publisher at all and it wasn't until 1988, long after her death, that it was recognized and put in print. González's Caballero, was also completed around 1940. It didn't see print until 1996, because of the interest of Professor Cotera.

All of this is too pronounced a pattern to be merely coincidence. It speaks to white supremacist and male supremacist habits of thought in the academic and literary worlds. It speaks to the parallel (though not the same!) experiences of African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans. But there is more, and I owe Professor Cotera for pointing this out. She argues that academic anthropology and folklore are finally too constricting and therefore inadequate to bring to paper the lives that these three women sought to share, the lives of their families, friends and acquaintances. She argues that Deloria, Hurston, and González turned to fiction because it offers a more complete way of revealing truth.

When I began writing the short stories that make up the collection Stones from the Creek I wanted to share some parts of US history that are too often ignored. My conscious thought was that I had more chance of getting somebody to read them as fiction than as non-fiction. My challenge was to bring my characters to life, to avoid creating one-dimensional puppets saying social-studies speeches. I worked really hard at that. I think I was partly successful. Professor Cotera made me remember something that I realized way back in high school, that fiction can be more truthful because it allows us to see people's humanity. A historical article can reduce individuals to relevant facts and it always underreports everyday people who don't leave much impact in the written record. But a short story or a novel allows us to bring those everyday people to life. My work on my follow-up novel, Though An Army Come Against Us, has been painful. But Professor Cotera's work means that I can see the value in what it may become if I do it right. It can give life to the forgotten.

Before I post this I want to thank Professors Garner and Cotera for their work. And I want to thank each of them for their swift and gracious responses to my fan letters to them. I am so grateful.

Ghéé'ye hooghéń `iłdóͅ gólíͅná'a. nDéí doobáńgólaadaná'a.

I think it was 1987 when we made that big road trip.  The idea was to focus on the stops and not try to go too far in any one day, because that’s how you miss things that you should be looking at.  Maya, Jon and I were in Lincoln County, New Mexico, looking at all the Billy the Kid stuff.  In the late afternoon we went to Lincoln National Forest to find a tent site for the night.  It was not promising.  The sites were desolate and every steel garbage can had been violently smashed. It looked to me as though some veryaggressive bears were around, and – indeed -- we found out a few days later that because of a long drought, bears were coming out of the mountains and into the city of Albuquerque.  In any case, we drove back down into Ruidoso and set up our tent at an RV park where people were staying while they went to the horse races at Ruidoso Downs.

It was fine for a night, but not more.  Next day we went to the Mescalero Apache reservation to look into their campground. (Which is a story for another day!)  Registration was at the tribal cultural center, so we took time to visit the museum and then to chat with the lady at the desk.  She told us that two girls were having a sunrise ceremony that night.

I had been wanting to see an Apache na'ii'ees for years. I had always heard that they were done in association with the Fourth of July fair, and I knew that we were never going to make it to New Mexico or Arizona by July 4^th. The school year in New York City doesn’t even end until June 28^th, so I had long ago given up on ever seeing this.  But now this lady was telling us about a ceremony that very night.  I still wasn’t hopeful, though. It was early August and that told me this had to be a private affair, conducted by the girls’ families, not the tribe.

I asked if that was the case.  The lady smiled and said, yes, not at the tribal fairgrounds but in a corner of the reservation away from everything else. We could get there directly from the campground, she said, but it was ten miles, and over an unmarked mountain track.  She suggested we go the long way around, about 30 miles, still unpaved, but on marked roads.

I was still stuck on the idea that this was a private affair.  I asked whether we would be welcome, showing up uninvited.  Now she looked at me as if I was stupid.  “I am inviting you,” she said.

It was kind of a magical night.  People had backed their pickups into a wide circle around a bonfire.  Grandmas sat in rocking chairs in the beds of the trucks.   School had just started back (Arizona is apparently on a very different academic calendar) and the teenaged boys near us were talking a lot of shit about who they were going to fight and which girls they liked.  The masked crown dancers were illuminated by the firelight and that felt timeless, but the interactions between the crowd and the clown stopped it being so solemn.  And then when the two girls came out it felt exactly like a Bat Mitzvah to me: a specific connection between individual young people with their own lives and a long train of tradition that bound the grandmas in their rockers with their own grandmas… and their grandmas, too. There was no band playing Hava Nagila and the people didn’t start dancing horas, but the evening was familiar to me, nevertheless.

Do I need to say that this haunted me? I have never stopped thinking about it. It is the source of the scene in my story “The Giant Believed Her.” And I kept thinking about the lady who invited us. So I should not have been surprised to discover forty years later that she was not just some random tribal employee, that she was an elder with the authority to ask strangers to a private party, that she was essential to the persistence of Mescalero -- and Chiricahua -- culture.

Researching my new book I found myself looking into a work titled Women of the Apache Nation. And there she was.  Elbys Hugar, granddaughter of Naiche, great granddaughter of Cochise, was that host at the Mescalero Apache Cultural Center. She was the one who invited us to that family na'ii'ees. She was the guardian of language and story for several generations of Chiricahuas living at Mescalero, where they had finally been allowed to relocate after decades of imprisonment with Geronimo.

Elbys Naiche Hugar

I have the habit of keeping notes of my travels. That summer they were very terse and cryptic, in part because we did so much, in part because I forgot to bring a journal and was writing in tiny letters on a paper bag. But there it is: “Day 12) Mescalero museum. Discussed coming out w/ Elbys.”

It makes sense now that a hugely-important figure in the history of the Chiricahua Apache invited us to attend that ceremony. It also makes sense to me that her importance entirely eluded me, and that when we went, I stayed pretty much on the outside, watching, but not speaking to anybody there. I can be overly reticent sometimes, afraid of intruding.

Art by Naiche

When Mrs. Hugar’s grandfather, Naiche, was given art supplies and the opportunity to draw he returned again and again to the subject of the na'ii'ees ceremony. He clearly believed that the arrival of Isdzánádleeshé, or White Painted Woman, was essential to the survival of the Chiricahua people and that this arrival recurred in the passage of every young woman as she transitioned from girl to adult.

When I was in my twenties, we believed that survival and resistance are two separate, sometimes parallel, tracks for people suffering monopoly-capitalist oppression. One of the points of my writing is that survival can itself be a form of resistance. In my collection of short stories I used the metaphor of Goliath, trying to destroy David’s people. He picked up five smooth stones from the creek to use in his sling, because that is what he had to hand and that is why my title was Stones from the Creek. It should be clear who the Giant is.

I think one reason why I continue to be haunted by that ceremony and that night is because keeping it alive in the face of a Giant that would destroy the people – and especially its young women! -- represents both survival and resistance. In the Nde song, the Giant, Ghéé'ye,is trying to devour White Painted Woman’s child. She is the one who prevails.

Easter Eggs?

Yesterday I was reading a twenty-year old article in the Mexican journal Estudios Sociológicos titled "La huelga de Cananea 1906. Una reinterpretación." Reading Spanish slows me down dramatically, so I pick up more details. This time it was about a heavily-armed posse of North Americans attempting to force their way across the border at Naco, Sonora to attack striking copper miners. The detail? The leader of the vigilantes was a man listed as C.E. Buchner, the athletic director at the Bisbee, Arizona YMCA.

My relationship with the YMCA goes back to childhood. I went to a YMCA day camp for five summers. I went to a YMCA sleep-away camp when I was eight. My brother and father and I participated in a YMCA father-and-son organization. The Y materialized in my scholarly pursuits when I did my Master's essay in US History on the Indian Peace Policy of President Grant's administration. One of the members of his Board of Indian Commissioners was William E. Dodge, a founding member of the YMCA in the United States.

Now, though, that resonates with my new work. Much of the forthcoming Though An Army Come Against Us  deals with copper miners and their unions, including the Cananea strike in Mexico, but also the 1917 Copper Queen strike in Bisbee. The Copper Queen was owned by the Phelps, Dodge Corporation. Yes, that is the same Dodge. And Bisbee, Arizona had a rather elaborate YMCA precisely because the Dodges were so committed to that organization and to its particular view of "muscular Christianity" that saw safe recreation, lodgings and worship as safeguards against gambling, alcohol, drugs, and frequenting prostitutes.

So when I saw the athletics director from Bisbee leading a racist mob to Cananea it piqued my interest. What else could I find out about Mr. C.E. Buchner? Was he still in Bisbee eleven years later for that strike? What part did he play in that?

YMCA documents can be found in Google Books. Old newspaper articles are on the Library of Congress website. Sometimes the indices of academic journals help, too. So it turns out that Buchner was active in the sale of Liberty Loans in Arizona during the First World War, perhaps because he was so familiar with the area. He seems already to have been transferred to Tulsa, Oklahoma as the head of their YMCA, where he was responsible for the construction of another very large building to house their work. And, wait... Tulsa?

Tulsa is the locus for another major plot thread in my new book, the 1921 assault on the prosperous Black community there that resulted in uncountable deaths and the arson of the entire district. What was Buchner's association with that? One thought is his leadership in the sale of Liberty Bonds. In 1917 a group of IWW's, a union that was having some success in organizing Oklahoma oil workers, was arrested for possession of antiwar literature. They were fined in court for not owning Liberty Bonds(!) then turned over by the police to a masked, hooded posse of about fifty who whipped them with heavy ropes, tarred and feather them, and threatened them with death should they ever return to the state. Leading the mob was Buchner's friend and fellow Rotarian, Tate Brady, a Tulsa businessman and also a KKK member.

I don't know if C.E. Buchner was a member of that mob. A partial answer might be in the NY State Archives in Albany, in the papers of an investigator who looked into the outrage. I really don't know whether Buchner was a Klansman, nor what his role might have been in the pogroms of 1921. I do know that it is well-documented that YMCA secretaries in other cities were leading members of the Klan. I do know that the KKK of the 20's shared the YMCA's "muscular Christianity," especially with regard to drugs, alcohol, gambling and prostitution. I do know that Buchner demonstrated his willingness to lead an armed mob against another, non-white nationality when he attempted to cross the Mexican border in 1906 and engaged in a firefight with the customs agents there.

For the purposes of fiction, I have no problem with creating a character with his name who appears in four different chapters, at four different times, and in three different places, as an antagonist to two of my protagonists. My only question is: to what purpose? How does that character advance the reader's understanding and appreciation of the plot and themes? I know for certain that including him will amuse me. I worry already that there are too many Easter eggs concealed in this manuscript that are of interest to nobody else. I need to think this through carefully, and I am hopeful that writing this blog post will help me with that.

יש לבבות ויש לבבות.

It is now almost fifty years since I visited Israel with my Jewish youth group. I sometimes feel as though I have spent all that time coming to terms with with that experience: occasionally by confronting my memories directly, often by trying to suppress them.

Yesterday Judy gave me a coffee table book with beautiful photos of Machu Picchu paired with the poems by the 1971 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pablo Neruda of Chile. It is not insignificant that Neruda was poisoned by the fascist regime of General Augusto Pinochet just days after the coup d'etat in which they overthrew Chile's democratically-elected government. It is not insignificant that this coup took place with the connivance of the United States, nor that Neruda was one of many thousands murdered by the junta.

The introduction to the book of photos and poems was written by the novelist Isabel Allende. It is not insignificant that she is the cousin of Dr. Salvador Allende, the social democratic President of Chile, whose second election in 1973 was the reason for that fascist coup. It is not insignificant that years of violence followed the overthrow of Dr. Allende.

In her opening lines, about Machu Picchu itself, Allende wrote:

Hay ciertos lugares donde viven los espíritus atrapado entre piedras. Esos lugares, construidos por hombres antiguos y hoy abandonados, fueron tan sagrados, que su energía continúa vibrando durante siglos. Es casi imposible pisar esas piedras si sentir el clamor del pasado y la tremenda fuerza allí concentrada.

The translator offers us this

There are places where spirits live trapped among stones. Those places, constructed by ancient man and today abandoned, were so sacred that their energy continues to vibrate through the centuries. It is impossible to walk on those stones and not sense the clamor of the past and the enormous force concentrated there.

I read those words and was immediately put in mind of a reading our group leaders offered us that summer long ago, when our group first visited Ha-Kotel Ha-Ma'arvi, the Western Wall, for Friday evening prayers. In Hebrew it reads:

.יש לבבות ויש לבבות. יש לבבות אדם, ויש לבבות אבנים.  

.ויש אבנים ויש אבנים. יש אבני דומה, ויש אבנים-לבבות

A serviceable translation is: 

There are hearts and there are hearts. There are human hearts and there are hearts of stone. There are stones and there are stones. There are silent stones and there are stones which are hearts. 

I should say right here that — at the time, that very night — I didn’t find what they described. In my journal I read 17-year old me reporting that I found only stones, an object, a retaining wall. But the passage had its impact. The me of today remembered that poetry and not my reaction to it. I had to pull that old journal down from the shelf to be reminded that I didn’t find hearts or souls in those stones.

But even rereading that journal entry, the me of today was curious. Who wrote those powerful words about hearts and stones?

I found that they come from an essay by Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook, written in 1937, and called “Behind Our Wall.” That title is from a line in the Biblical Song of Songs (2:9) which reads: 

“My beloved is like a gazelle, or a fawn. There he is, standing behind our wall, looking through the windows and peering through the lattice.” 

The imagery suggests a veil between us and what we look at, unable to touch. And that date means that it was written before partition, when Jews still had access to the Wall. When I visited, that access

was newly restored by the conquests of the Six-Day War. So the spiritual significance of praying at the foot of the Temple Mount was strongly overlain with a secular triumphalism. Photos of heavily-armed Israeli soldiers praying at the Wall in tallis and tefillin were popular among American Jews at the time. I remember those images in coffee-table books.

So who was Rav Kook? Why he was the spiritual leader of Gush Emunim, the settler movement. He was an affiliate of the Brooklyn racist, Meir Kahane. Kahane’s Israeli political party, Kach, advocated the complete ethnic cleansing of the State of Israel. It was banned by the Israeli government as being too racist. Rav Kook's yeshiva became a center for the most intolerant, land-grabbing, anti-Arab elements in religious Judaism.

I suppose I could conclude that people can be more than one thing. But I go back to Rav Kook’s own words: “There are hearts that are like stones.” So I conclude, instead, that he was — however unintentionally — describing himself. And that the same "spirits" that murdered Pablo Neruda along with Chilean democracy are destroying homes, olive groves and lives in the occupied West Bank. That the same "heart" that inhabits the Western Wall of Rav Kook's imagination, inhabits the 400+ mile barrier that the Israelis have built to imprison the Palestinians of the West Bank. It is a heart -- and a wall -- of stone.

Èpater le Bourgeois

The other day I saw this photo of an acoustic band rehearsing posted on Facebook. It is from 1969 or 1970 and I am the fellow in the white t-shirt with the banjo. I was 17 or 18.

I saw it because some of the others in the photo, still friends, began reminiscing fondly about this band and our performances. I had a different reaction.

I am proud of some things I did as a teen. I am proud of protesting the Viet Nam War. I am proud of organizing some of those protests. I am proud of having run for the Board of Education in the town where I lived and went to school. I am proud of helping organize an unauthorized student meeting in our high school which led to a walkout.  I am proud of participating in that walkout. I am proud that a member of the school administration told me that the other participants would be suspended, but that I would be expelled. I am proud of working to convince the 800 or so suspended students to simply ignore the suspension and return to school.

I am proud of working on a lawsuit against our school superintendent to defend students' rights to print and distribute independent, non-school-sponsored publications. I am proud to have written first drafts of briefs for our attorney. I am proud of printing and distributing an independent, non-school-sponsored publication. I am proud that we won that suit.

I am proud of leading people in public song during rallies. I am proud of leading people in public song during synagogue worship. Singing together is breathing together is bringing people together. This band was often the opposite.

Our most important performance, the one that sticks in the memory of everybody commenting on Facebook, was at a Battle of the Bands at our high school. Battles of the Bands privileged volume, shredding guitar solos, driving beats, and -- generally speaking -- hard rock. We came out with washboard, washtub bass and acoustic instruments. We had a crowd of ethereal dancers. We had grossly-offensive original songs which finally drove a large part of the audience, particularly the young women, to simply leave the auditorium. The most important part of that performance was our desire to outrage convention. I am not proud of that.

I would love to excuse myself by saying that I was young. But so were the people who walked out on us. I have spent a lifetime raising teens to be adults, as a high school teacher and principal. Would I have been proud of my students for publicly performing original material that was designed primarily to disgust their classmates (and that was, in fact, disgusting)? Or would I have been proud of them for publicly signaling their disapproval?

I look at that photo and I see a group of highly-privileged young people. I know that all of us were more than one thing, more than just people who took that privilege for granted, more than just people who engaged in outrage for the sake of outrage. But my memories of that photo conjure more shame than pride. I have taught hundreds of teens. I am proud of so many of them, for so many things. I would not be proud for any of them to see video of that performance at the Battle of the Bands.

Harvey Weinstein, Savannah Greywind, Donald Trump, Pocahontas

On November 25, 1960, the women known as the Mariposas - Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa Mirabal - were stopped on a mountain road and assassinated  by leading officers in the Dominican secret police on orders from the dictator, Rafael Trujillo. The sisters had been unable to end Trujillo’s murderous regime in life, but their deaths were too much for the nation and only six months later Trujillo himself was ambushed and killed. Since 1999, that anniversary has been recognized by the United Nations as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

This fall the #MeToo hashtag spread widely after charges emerged of serial sexual harassment and rape by Miramax Films executive Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein was fired. Other offenders were named, including comedian Louis C.K., Senator Al Franken, TV anchor Matt Lauer, philosopher Tariq Ramadan, writer Leon Wieseltier, journalist Charlie Rose, and many, many others including President Donald Trump who famously boasted of being able to get away with sexual assaults.

But those are all famous people. What about violence against women who are not well known? What about violence against women by men who are not well known? What about the hugely disproportionate levels of violence against Native American women?

This fall, North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp introduced S. 1942, also known as Savannah’s Act to provide protection for missing and murdered Native women. The bill is named for Savannah Greywind, a 22-year old Ojibwe woman who was kidnapped, murdered, and had her fetus stolen this summer by a white couple.

On some reservations the murder rate against women is TEN TIMES the national average. In North Dakota alone, there have been HUNDREDS of disappearances of Native women. The rapes, kidnappings and murders are fed by callous disregard for Native women and by racist sexual fantasies. It is protected by jurisdictional problems preventing Native police departments and courts from arresting and convicting white people for crimes on the reservation or against Native people. And it is multiplied by the presence of man camps serving extractive industries.

In the North Dakota petrostate, tens of thousands of out-of-state men live away from their families in barracks, working in the pipeline and fracking industries. These unconnected men are paid well enough to support flourishing organized crime in narcotics, gambling and prostitution. Prostitution means sex trafficking. Some kidnapped Native women are held by criminals who charge other men to rape them. Other Native women are kidnapped and murdered by men from the camps.

Senator Heitkamp makes none of these connections. She is a prominent supporter of extractive industries, especially oil. She served as a board member for the Dakota Gasification Company, which transforms lignite coal into synthetic natural gas. She supports the Keystone XL pipeline. She describes opposition to fracking as “junk science.” And she was one of only two Democratic senators to support Scott Pruitt, long-time enemy of the EPA, as Administrator for the EPA!

Senator Heitkamp’s connections to the energy industry mean that it doesn’t matter how serious she may be about her commitment “to combat crime, violence & human trafficking in Indian Country” and to the #NotInvisible hashtag. She can denounce violence against women, but cannot even see the man camps that incubate that violence. Nor can she see the underlying, toxic ideology that links extractive industry with rape culture: violence against Mother Earth and violence against women and girls are all features of toxic misogyny.

All this brings us back to President Donald Trump, the Racist/Rapist-in-Chief. This week he chose to wrap up Native Heritage Month by “honoring” Native code talkers in front of a portrait of Andrew Jackson, notorious for his murders of Creeks, Seminoles, Cherokees, Choctaws and Chickasaws! Then he chose the occasion again mock Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas.” The historical Pocahontas was a teen victim of kidnap and rape by British colonists in Virginia. The imagined Pocahontas of US mythology was a beautiful young “princess”, the original model for the sex fantasy that continues today, FOUR HUNDRED YEARS after her abduction.

#EndViolenceAgainstWomenAndGirls has to be more than a  severely-underfunded day on the calendar of the United Nations. It has to be every day. #MeToo has to be more than a campaign exposing celebrity predators in the news and entertainment industries. It has to protect all women in their homes and in their workplaces and on the streets. #NotInvisible has to be more than a way to call attention to the disproportionate levels of violence against Native women. It has to identify the sources of that violence in rape culture, in racism, and in extractive industry. We owe these things to our mothers.  We owe these things to all women.

זיכרונו לברכה

Four weeks ago my mom phoned from her nursing home to tell me that my dad was refusing to eat. I think she wanted me to call him and tell him that he must have his lunch, but -- given his compromised hearing -- I couldn't see any chance of that happening at all, and there had to be a reason for his refusal anyway.  Prophet and I got in the car and drove to New Jersey to see what was going on.

When we got to his room, we found my dad asleep in his chair. He was in the most uncomfortable position imaginable, but I didn't want to awaken him just because I happened to walk in, so I sat down to see what would happen. Prophet had no such qualms. He immediately leaped into my dad's lap and began kissing him, licking his face enthusiastically. You might think that a 90+ pound dog would not be welcome in the lap of a frail 91-year old man. But if you thought that, you didn't know my dad. He woke up with a smile and then began laughing in enjoyment. After Prophet climbed back down, we had a nice visit. My mom came in a minute later and was happy to see his good mood. My dad tried to eat some soup (without much success) and then he went to the gym with the physical therapist.

The next day the home informed my sister that it was time for my dad to move from assisted living to the nursing care floor. We began arranging for him to be my mom's roommate. Before that could happen, though, they determined that he needed an emergency room visit. He was transported by ambulance to the hospital and admitted as an in-patient. He was kind of happy about that. He felt that the doctors could figure out what was wrong with him and make him better. He was joking with the nurses and asking questions about the wiring of his hospital room. That's right. He engineered that entire wing of the hospital.

By Saturday he wasn't speaking. His eyes would open halfway, he would pick up his head as if to say something, then close his eyes and put his head back down.  I held his hand and told him that we had everything under control. I told him he had done everything right, that we were all okay, and that we would take care of my mom. It didn't seem to reassure him. He remained agitated, as if he had something important to say, but that he could get it out.

Sunday he was no longer opening his eyes. It looked to me now as though he was just trying to get a breath of air. It looked as though he was drowning. It occurred to me that this was what was happening the day before, too. My daughter sat with him for hours, telling him what was going on with her and with her family. The hospital staff acknowledged that their treatment was not making him better, only more uncomfortable. They asked if we wanted to switch to "compassionate" care, meaning they would try to ease his discomfort. We agreed.

He left us the next morning. I had asked the rabbi of their synagogue to visit my mom. The rabbi got the word of the changed purpose of his visit just before going into my mom's room. She really appreciated his presence and his words. She was not happy that my dad left before her.

I remember that day as a flurry of minutiae. Phoning the funeral home to figure out if he had prearranged. (He had not.) Phoning multiple cemeteries to figure out the reference to burial plots in his will. Arranging communication between the hospital, undertaker, cemetery and rabbi. In between, though, I had time to look through the autobiographical writing my dad had been busy with the last
few years and sorting through old photos.  I put up a post or two on Facebook to let people know.

Meeting with the rabbi was a kind of catharsis. My brother, my sister, my wife, and I all got to share some reminiscences. This rabbi arrived at my parents' synagogue around the time they were no longer strong enough to go to Shabbat service every week, so he didn't really know them (or us) He had heard my mom's reputation as a pillar of the shul, leading the bikkur holim committee and the interracial justice committee,  as well as running the Meals on Wheels program for the entire town. (Which she continued doing until she was older than most of the elderly recipients.) My dad, though, was a stranger to him. We explained that dad - who was never bar mitzvahed - had served for years on the synagogue's ritual committee, probably so that he could be an usher and not have to sit down!
We told him about dad doing the electrical engineering for Newark Airport, the lower level of the George Washington Bridge, the third tube of the Lincoln Tunnel, and the B&O lift bridge over the Arthur Kill. And we told him that dad designed the wiring for the room he died in at St. Barnabas Hospital.

The funeral home was less happy. Most of that visit had to do with reviewing the contract and paying. Somebody had to check my father's body (to see if it was really him?) so my wife and I did that. When I was a boy my dad was six-feet and imposing. Over the last twenty years, he has grown shorter and weaker. In his coffin, he looked smaller than ever. But he didn't show as much pain in his face as he had the last two times I saw him.

Riding in a limousine is not something my family does. We never did it for the funerals of any of my grandparents. My siblings and I never went to a prom. But it occurred to me that transporting my mom from her nursing home to a cemetery in one of our cars was probably a bad idea. So we all drove to the nursing home and then rode down to the cemetery for the graveside service in a limousine with my mom.

The ground was wet. We stayed a distance away while the workers pumped water out of the grave.
During the funeral, the workers kept a carpet suspended over the grave's floor so we wouldn't see it filling back up with water. When my dad was in his seventies, he frequently served in an honor guard for funerals of veterans. Apparently the armed forces were stretched so thin that they couldn't provide active-duty servicemen for the wave of departing World War 2 vets. The US Navy provided an honor guard for dad, though. They read a proclamation, played taps, took the flag from the coffin, and presented it to my mom.

The rabbi's eulogy was thoughtful, reassuring, and showed that he really listened. He told stories about my dad's care for my mom, love of us, professional reputation, and skeptical mind. And he framed these within a story about the questions each of us will be asked when we appear before the Throne. And, of course, he sang El Malei Rahamim.

The crazy part of that day was that we ran back to the Bronx after dropping off my mom and then back out to New Jersey again. Prophet was in his crate all day because a crew of tradespeople were doing work in our house, so we wanted to let him out and feed him before returning to have dinner with friends who couldn't make it to the funeral, and then going to the nightly minyan at my parents' synagogue. Under different circumstances, people come to the home of the mourners to visit, and pray minchah and maariv.  I was certain that my mom would be too tired for all that. But I also knew she would feel better if we - her children - said Kaddish. So my brother, my sister, my brother's wife, Kaddish-sayers. Several of them knew my parents, so that was nice. The service itself? Not so much. Loud-mouthed mavens insisted on racing ahead of the person who they themselves had asked to lead.
my sister's boyfriend, my wife, and I all went to pray with the regular

The next day we had invited people to my mom's room at the nursing home to pay their respects and the rabbi came and led minchah. That was a much better experience. And I wrote the rabbi thanking him for everything:

I may not be able to express my gratitude as clearly as I would like, but I think it’s better if I try while everything is still fresh in my mind:  

You listened to us so carefully and heard us so clearly. You summarized the most important points and folded them by means of stories into the framework of another story about the questions we will be asked before the throne. You understood and conveyed - subtly - the differences between my mother’s commitment to belief and to observance and my father’s. You included everybody. You drew in a secondary motif about the prophetic voice, my father’s name, and the name of our dog.

All this is qualitatively different than my experience with graveside rabbinical talk in my youth. But it is also orders of magnitude deeper and richer than my experience of graveside rabbinical talk today.

I also want to thank you for the suggestion that we attend the regular minyan last night at Temple Beth Shalom. Jon, Hilde, Zaydah, Doug, Judith and I all went.  I think it was reassuring to my mom.

Each time I have made a request of you, you responded immediately. I appreciate that more than I can say.

 We skipped Friday and Saturday in observance of the Sabbath. Sunday the room stayed full with family and with friends of my mother, brother and sister. I led the minchah, which I think went okay. My mom was happy, anyway. She said she was glad I still remembered how to do it.

Several of my friends expressed some disappointment that we hadn't invited them to the funeral or the wake. Explaining how we did things seemed beside the point, so we invited people to our home
the following Thursday. A good number of people showed up, too, including people who traveled from Brooklyn, Manhattan and parts of the Bronx that are inconvenient by bus and train.

I keep looking at old photos that remind me of my dad when he was younger and stronger and a giant to me. I keep reading his self-deprecating stories. I keep discovering myself in tears without any apparent external trigger. I guess this will last a good long time.