Snake handling

Seeing another reference to snake handling prompted me to scribble something. Yep, it’s a pretty strange movement. What usually gets omitted, however, is that it’s hardly a new thing.

As much as it pains me to agree with Jim Goad on about anything, I think he hit the nail right on its head when he pointed out that snake handling , speaking in tongues, and the like make White Americans much more uncomfortable when the people putting on the show are also perceived as White. His general thesis is wrong, though, in assuming that the folks involved really are White, never taking Native influences (nor our continued presence) into account.

Learning more about my heritage, I was interested to notice the geographical overlap between some areas of Hopewell and Mississippian cultures and where one finds later snake handling practices. (Those maps, too, omit certain areas, through sheer lack of study.) It’s no secret that during the Mississippian period in particular, snakes held great symbolic significance, to the point that “The main focus of Mississippian art shifted from Woodland naturalism to an emphasis on snakes, god-animal beings, and birds with warlike tendencies, resulting in unprecedented imagery with an otherworldly and power-charged essence.” (link) This came as part of a new social and religious movement, probably influenced by Mayans:

The best-known Mississippian religious movement is popularly known as the Southern Cult, although most archeologists today prefer the less evocative phrase Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. The central tenets of this cult or religion were transmitted through rituals and through the exchange of sacred objects emblazoned with symbols such as falcons, crosses, and rattlesnakes. Often the iconography depicts scenes of violence and warfare, such as warrior figures holding weapons and decapitated heads. . .
The Southern Cult was exclusive—only certain individuals and kin groups participated, thus supporting the authority of the chiefs. They alone could handle, wear, and own the most sacred symbols, which were no doubt perceived as possessing power and being too dangerous for any but the chosen few to handle.

Compare to the example of Adodaroh, ” the deeply feared and powerful shaman of the Onondagas, whose snake and cannibal [wétiko] cult had terrorized the people into submission for many years” further north, at about the same time. Also the deposed Ani Kutani among the Cherokee (also overthrown for their wétiko behavior, by most accounts). I may not be able to find any references right now, but people following this religious movement had rituals in which they handled venomous snakes. For all I know, they may have babbled and writhed around on the ground in religious ecstasy, as well. Some of those other Holiness practices appeal to modern snake handlers, and are not typical of other approaches to Christianity. It also does not surprise me that the same folks would take on different wétiko trappings, as times changed.

Interestingly, while looking for something else, I just ran across an article on “Native Spiritualism vs. Evangelical Christianity in Southeast Alaska”. It’s not too surprising that, connections to economic conditions aside, some aspects of Pentecostal movements might appeal to people with more history of participatory, possibly ecstatic (don’t know much about Alaskan traditions) non-Christian religious practices. One perception expressed in the last linked article was interesting: ““You meet white evangelicals from America, they behave like Africans. They are vibrant, everything is done with vigour.” Back home, I’m sure the far more egalitarian approach appealed to a lot of people, especially coming from a background which had at least as many female spiritual workers. (Not that the whole package has been good for women’s status, mind you.) The hierarchical chiefdom setup may not have gained much popularity in Appalachia, but other Mississippian cultural influences flowed in.* The snake handlers are a distinct ideological subgroup, still. It really looks a lot like Vodoun or Santería.

It does not seem entirely coincidental that a thousand years ago, there was a small minority who messed with snakes for religious purposes living up exactly the same hollers where you find the same thing today. AFAICT, most people considered this strange behavior back then, too. Most of the followers today probably really believe that they’re inspired more by Christianity, after better than a century of having to apply the same kind of thin veneer which brings us the Stanley Brothers’ “love for God” as a camouflaging euphemism for the more Native “balance and peace in your life”.

It’s also striking how frequently the above examples are used as indications of how deeply and truly wacked out we hillbillies must be. (Never mind that the region’s historically had the lowest church membership rate in the country.) So is West Virginia’s rather classic legal approach, of letting them behave as bizarrely as they like, so long as they don’t endanger kids or other people just not interested in messing with pit vipers. Makes perfect sense to me.

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* The seemingly hierarchical setup elsewhere may very well have been down to faulty interpretation by European observers, who were expecting to see some kind of hierarchy. That’s the kind of social system they were used to living under, and later interpretations are based on what these primary sources thought they were looking at. This is how the man Powhatan (Wahunsunacock) got to be an emperor, accompanied by his many “wives”–i.e., the women’s council for whom he was serving as diplomatic speaker, as part of his job as sachem! Note that “Much of a sachem’s leadership depended on establishing consensus”. Barbara Mann goes pretty deeply into this kind of misinterpretation based on completely clashing worldviews, in her Iroquoian Women, which I keep pushing for good reason. Here’s some discussion of “rank” in Mississippian societies: “The living Maya seems very much as a people not unlike what Wilma Mankiller describes of the Cherokee. The egalitarian, spiritual, and general cultural framework of the present day Maya does not fit well with a society that once was structured and hierarchical.” I still suspect that there were some people who got power hungry, with some limited success at trampling over others during the Mississippian period–and that some of them tried to use religion as a bludgeon, then as now.

Reconsidering some choices

A lot of other things have been going on around here lately, and I haven’t made time to write about them and their implications. But, when I was heating up some leftovers for lunch earlier, one train of thought became insistent.

Standing there and pulling bristles out of a piece of seasoning meat I’d dry cured with the same tweezers (well washed!) I’d just employed to pluck out some of my own eyebrows, waves of cognitive dissonance hit me again. It set off a cascade of thoughts about the wétiko interconnection here, especially given my current living situation.

To offer a bit of background: since the late ’80s, I’ve gone through periods of vegetarianism–veganism, for a couple of years–and repeatedly returned to eating meat. Most of this was due to episodes of severe depression, during which I had neither the energy nor the inclination to do much shopping and cooking for myself. So, I gave in and ate what the rest of the family was eating, then spent a lot of time beating myself up over it in fits of perfectionism. I have kept eating meat since my big, mid-late ’90s crash.

My main objection to eating meat all along has been based on suffering caused by not-so-sustainable wétiko farming practices–whether I’d yet seen how it fit into a larger pattern, or no–and encouraging that by gaining benefit from it. Eating animal products “produced” through those methods is just not compatible with right livelihood, for me. (In a rather codified Buddhist version of the concept, or otherwise.) Nobody in the house had opportunity to hunt or fish respectfully anymore–and I was not well-suited to it temperamentally, even if I’d had the time and access to land–so that wasn’t a workable alternative to readily purchased animal products. We didn’t know enough people who were still raising animals responsibly to get anything other than eggs that way on a regular basis.

Earlier, I did also flirt with the popular ideas of health and, not incidentally, potential weight loss benefits (IBTP), but those were secondary considerations mostly used as further justification. Especially when explaining myself (lordy, the expected explanations!) to people who didn’t share a similar worldview; “teenage girl dotes on animals and wants to be thin” is a far more comfortable and acceptable story in modern Western society. More on the need for justification, later.

So, I’ve been going along for about ten years now, having varying levels of trouble rationalizing my purchasing and eating habits. Periodically, I have cut back on meat consumption and made a point of buying more responsibly raised stuff, which, given the price difference, makes eating more beans attractive! I also gave up dairy products for a while, due to a protein allergy and lactose intolerance (being part of the world’s majority who weren’t made to consume it). It did improve my allergy load immensely, but once again my cheese addiction pulled me back in. My last attempt at stopping smoking was not as difficult as giving up cheese, probably thanks to allergic responses!

Lately, I have been just about able to justify buying mainly RSPCA-monitored meat, even if their standards seem to be much looser than mine. The animals are still being overly confined* and treated as commodities. (Also some lamb, which is not too scarily raised.) It’s still done–no to mention sold!–according to the same basic ways of thinking, however.

This may be changing, however. Tonight I purposely planned a veggie meal, and announced to Nigel that there are many more a-coming.

Earlier the contradictions in my continuing to eat meat struck me hard in a “the personal suddenly looks very political indeed” kind of way, and so did the falseness of some of my attempts at rationalizing it. In particular, some of my feelings of insulation got stripped away, as it occurred to me that I’ve plopped myself right down in the middle of one iteration of Wétiko Central. Some of those familiar justifactions just won’t fly now, if I don’t want to catch the wétiko myself. This was one of those mini enlightenment moments which are hard/nigh impossible to do justice in words.

I also saw even more clearly how these cases of exploitation, objectification, commodification, and all that nasty stuff are all part of one big wétiko mess. I’d certainly been familiar with lines of thought tying veg*anism, feminism, anarchism, etc. together, but more closely perceiving the Horrible Wétiko Gestalt still horrified me. I’m interested in reading some of Carol Adams’ stuff, somehow having missed doing so until now. It definitely sounds like she and Jack Forbes are seeing the same type of cannibalistic society, in this interview:

Basically, I believe our culture objectifies, fragments, and then consumes women and the other animals. The consumption may be different—cultural consumption for women—but the process is one in which a being loses the right to self-determination. Our culture goes to great lengths to equate women and animals and so differentiate men, especially white men, from the objects of their violence.

I don’t kid myself that small choices will make any dent in the larger problem, when it’s essentially the whole system that’s messed up. But, this falls into the same category as most of the other small choices: I can certainly avoid doing things that I don’t think are morally/ethically right, and feeling like crap because of it. That’s what it boils down to, at least for now. Guess I’ll be waiting for my own version of the Twistylution.

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* More background: this aversion is at least partly cultural, and another of the older attitudes I managed to pick up strongly. (Worthy of another post: how I probably turned out more traditional in outlook because of my “disability”, spending a lot of time around older people.) Where I’m from, people still don’t tend to think it’s right to confine animals closely. They may have needed to do more Euro-American style small agriculture for a good long while now, but people will still talk about you horribly if you don’t give the animals more space than what is frequently presented as “free range” here in the UK. This is no doubt another reason for the decline of small farming, when people think feedlots are morally wrong.

Bruce Johansen gave a pretty good overview in the link I provided earlier–more info on the economy in general can be found in Barbara Mann’s Iroquoian Women–and that’s another thing that transfers across Nations. After the Trail of Tears, Cherokee “Livestock generally ran loose most of the year, except the saddle horse and plow animals.” (link) Interestingly, cattle and horses are grouped with deer in another reminiscence.

These days, the population density is higher, so people do have to fence in larger animals to keep them from destroying crops and the like. But, you still find an amazing number of feral chickens in Virginia’s New River and Roanoke Valleys. (And also in parts of West Virginia, apparently, as per the link. Any resemblance between said WV and reservation stereotypes are strictly coincidental. Mmm hmm.) We don’t have a bunch of feral hogs, probably because they were tearing things up too badly. Surprisingly, the introduced chickens apparently aren’t doing noticeable ecological harm.

The cultural differences there only became so obvious when an English visitor was absolutely amazed at a family of chickens ambling across a country road. Guess I’d seen enough of them not to think much of it anymore. Doesn’t everybody have road chickens?

Bullying, thinly disguised

Looking over the comments here (Texas is only 6000 years old!), I am reminded yet again of why I usually skim them, at most.

Running into yet more Texan-bashing is hardly a surprise, just disheartening. Criticizing the power-hungry lunatics responsible for this kind of tripe is one thing, seizing on any opportunity to kick the victims while they’re down is quite another. (Yeah, this doesn’t just apply to Texas.)

Let’s say that you notice that a group of people is being used and abused by one or more power-mad wingnuts of one persuasion or another, with anti-intellectualism as a favorite tool to try to keep them compliant. What is your response? Do you try to do something that might, erm, actually help the situation, or ease some of its effects? Do you take the bully’s route, and decide that these people must somehow be deserving of whatever shoddy treatment they get? Do you poke fun at them, since you could never find yourself on the wrong end of that kind of abuse of power?

No, Barbara Cargill is not in the same league as Pol Pot. That does not make the interests she represents much less scary nor potentially abusive.

I keep telling myself that most of these responses owe more to dependence on skewed mental widgets–which my brain just doesn’t seem to use, anyway–rather than to any real coldness of heart and meanness of spirit. Sometimes that just doesn’t satisfy, though. It disturbs me that this almost passes for reasonable discourse.

Different kinds of support

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I’ve been running into a slightly different set of day-to-day difficulties. Communication and most social interaction seem to have become harder, to the point that I’m looking more obviously autistic, and a lot of things depending on those skills just haven’t been getting done.

What has changed? The main thing I can identify is a change in types of support, with the big change in living situations. Before, I was living with my parents, and my mom definitely had the gift of gab. (I always wondered why we were so different in that way; now I know.) Even assuming the problem was straight bashfulness and depression, she was very willing and able to take up a lot of the social and communication slack. She helped with organizational stuff, doing business and making appointments for me over the phone, and riding herd so that I mostly got places on time. Neither one of us understood why I needed this kind of help, but it was just treated as part and parcel of the way family members help and complement one another–and, apparently, I contributed enough in other ways that things stayed in balance. We lived physically close to most of the extended family, so there was a ready support network in place.

Did I have visible problems then? You bet. I was on SSI from the time I crashed out of college until I moved here, and rarely went out of the house for several years. Nobody–including me–really understood why I was doing the full hikikomori or geilt (depending on the model you want to use) thing. It was mostly attributed to severe depression, possibly bipolar, for which I was increasingly heavily medicated for lack of better understanding of what was really going on. (It only aggravated the situation.) Only after I moved and went into a profound depression, was I able to see that these mood shifts were clearly related to what was happening in my life, and masses of PTSD. Social stuff was always hard for me, and I drove myself crazy worrying about being such a socially awkward misfit; I was also too ashamed to talk about it very much, even though I considered it one of my biggest problems in life.

At any rate, the problems I was having looked a bit different, because other people were helping me with different aspects at the time. The change in circumstances after I left home caused me to consider that I might really be somewhere on the Autistic Spectrum.

For the last five years or so, I’ve been married and living on the other side of the Atlantic. (Still not always sure how this happened, but the temporary stress was worth it.) Nigel is providing at least as much daily support, but in different ways. His understanding has helped me cope with the depression, and (along with distance) become able to recognize and deal with a continuing emotionally abusive situation in the family. Getting the knowledge and information to help me understand the situation has helped alleviate more of the depression and overt anxiety symptoms, but that leaves the less-addressed communication and social issues out in the open. Nigel just doesn’t have the gift of gab, either, and is not as well suited to filling in my social interface gaps with exuberant extroversion. OTOH, he has a much better understanding of why I have these difficulties in the first place, and that helps in its own way.

The result? I’m running into more hurdles related to the social and communications stuff, and feeling under more pressure to get things “right” interacting with other people. On a very practical level, I just haven’t been able to take care of business involving the phone–and, in a lot of cases, face to face interaction. I haven’t been to the doctor’s since I got back here in December, while being Type 2 diabetic with some other chronic health issues. (I was only able to see one while back in Virginia because a hospice nurse–concerned about my back being out–found one who would see me without insurance, and dealt with them on the phone initially.) I am not at all confident in my ability to carry on a reasonable conversation with the GP on my own, even if he doesn’t try to brush me off or bulldoze me (for extra flustering/shutdown effect). As I’ve mentioned before, poorly managed physical health problems are probably adding to the coping difficulty.

I have been feeling the social isolation more acutely, though I’ve been keeping in touch with some family members online. I like to spend fairly low-key time with other people, but have trouble initiating and keeping up contact. There are several people I am still vaguely in touch with online, but haven’t seen in years in person; I hope they haven’t taken this as a lack of interest. The trips out I can handle are somewhat limited, what with the sensory bombardment in more crowded environments than I’m used to even now, and the pressure of interaction. Interaction is also more difficult–even fairly scripted types, like in shops–since I am coming across as more awkward and peculiar. Basically running in the slipstream of an extreme extrovert, I mostly managed to make a “shy and quiet, but nice enough” impression. The difference makes me feel more awkward still, and leads me to avoid more interaction.

I am still trying to come to grips with not being able to do paid work right now. Once some of the other factors are dealt with, I should be able to get that pet care business up and running. In the meantime, kicking myself over it will not help. Not surprisingly, I was almost relieved to get a clear physical injury at the last job, offering an understandable reason to get out of there. Awkward interaction also made it hard for me to effectively say, “No, I can’t do this without hurting myself”; after getting brushed off while stressed already, it was easier just to sling around 25kg sacks of potatoes, past the point of injury. This kind of pattern is frustrating, and makes me feel stupid, but has kept happening all the same. Now I at least have some idea why.

Not surprisingly, the difference in types of support became more painfully obvious after my mother died, and I realized how much things had changed permanently. Yeah, I anticipated some of this last year, after she first collapsed, but you don’t really feel all the implications until someone is really gone. At least I have not fallen out of touch with the rest of the family, as I was afraid. The “waah, what will I do?” reaction has left me feeling more than a tad selfish, but that seems to be the largest part of grief anyway.

I have also worried some about not seeing many options, should something go wrong. Before, I always knew there was somewhere I could go and be welcome and somewhat understood (at least two places, before my Nana died). Now, I’m not so sure about that, and would have serious trouble working and living on my own. It’s not easy to admit to myself that I really am that thoroughly disabled. This will require some more thought, and not of the “poor poor pitiful me” variety.

In short, some basic needs are not getting met, and I need to figure out how to fix this.

The best I can tell, I would do well to find some other ways of dealing with some of these things, probably with support from some unconsidered places. It’s hard to figure out how and where, though. Therein lies the rub. Being depressed from another wave of grief doesn’t make thing look clearer, right now.

In a way, it was more comfortable when I actually believed that these difficulties were the result of Not Trying Hard Enough. Now I need to figure out how to stop bashing my head against that particular wall, and find some ways around it. Sorry this has been kind of choppy, but disability shame still makes some of the practical difficulties hard to talk about!

Disability, and becoming a Housewife By Default

Not too surprisingly, this topic has been on my mind a lot lately. Since the depression has lifted somewhat, I have been trying desperately to play catch-up around the house–and it’s even more bleedingly obvious that I’m just not suited to the task.

To sum up the situation: I am not doing paid work because of multiple disabilities–some of which directly make housekeeping very difficult indeed–so am a Housewife By Default. Not having enough work credits in the U.K., I am not eligible for disability benefits, so am down on paper as a housewife rather than as a disabled person.

To some extent, I’m glad for this bit of gender role madness. Though it does seem to be rather class-dependent, being a housewife (”homemaker” is an inappropriately neutered euphemism, the vast majority of the time) or SAHM is still a much more viable option here than it is back home. Making it on one income is just about possible, and we’ve been squeaking by OK. Dealing with higher income people, I have gotten the distinct impression that the assumption that I must be lazy and unmotivated–and possibly not very bright–is alive and well, but we live in a more working class area where I’m hardly an anomaly.

Mostly, though, that’s a slightly comfortable social ghetto in which nobody should have to live. The really scary part is, I’m hardly an anomaly. Every time I go out, I run into women who seem to be in similar situations–and those are mainly the ones with not-so-invisible physical disabilities. The woman next door is a SAHM largely because her (recognized as an adult) dyslexia got in the way of her education, and how many more are in similar boats?

Unfortunately, with the value placed on certain kinds of work, housekeeping is usually considered the soft option. Unless you’ve got some pretty serious physical impairments (or, possibly, a Y chromosome), you should be able to keep a house in order. After all, it doesn’t require much in the way of skills, intelligence, motivation, or Real Work.

I hope we all know how conveniently skewed that prevailing attitude is, I really do.

Having concluded that my best option otherwise is to get my own pet care business up and running again, I’m still having too many physical difficulties to do this kind of paid work yet, nor do I have enough energy left over to do the required organizing. So, I remain a HBD, officially “economically inactive”, and close to going mad from working myself into the ground. Some of these physical problems (e.g. the creeping vitamin deficiencies which got to the point of messing with my vision) are a direct result of not being able to take care of myself while overworked at tasks which suck most of the skills and energy required for basic health maintenance.

Why are things so difficult? Besides some pretty serious chronic pain (strenuously repetitive tasks around the house really help with this), I’ve got executive function problems to the point that, growing up, people assumed I had ADHD From Hell. (No mean feat, considering that “hyperactivity” was rarely recognized in girls back then. I was diagnosed about ‘77. I wasn’t rocking in the corner–at least not while the doctor was looking–so I wasn’t autistic then.) A lot of the tedious tasks which abound around the house honestly do take me at least four times as long as most people to complete, when I manage to keep track of what I’m doing. It’s mentally and physically exhausting, just to try. In order to keep track of what I’m doing, I have to turn down offered help in the middle of a job, or I lose where I am in the steps necessary to get that job–and the ones depending on it–done. This has hurt Nigel’s feelings–also making him less keen on volunteering assistance–and I was way too frazzled to put together a decent explanation of why help doesn’t always help. Just switching tracks to listen to the offer can leave me blinking like an owl, with no idea what I was doing or what I need to do next. When caught up in something, it doesn’t occur to me to ask for help doing something else, besides having been thoroughly conditioned not to ask for help with things.

Given the dyscalculia, keeping track of finances is very difficult. Being very good with theoretical maths does not help with running herd over a checking account nor trying to keep a running tally of the shopping. Also, my large motor skills leave a lot to be desired, so I have to keep most movements under conscious control to avoid falling over and breaking things a lot (yeah, it still happens, and we need a lot of replacement dishes). That’s mentally exhausting, especially given the number of other things I have to juggle in conscious thought. The slowly-improving thiamine deficiency, in particular, has given me nerve damage which has made me even clumsier and left my eyes not tracking properly, requiring more conscious control. Throwing all this together, a trip out to do shopping or similar–especially by bus–wears me completely out, and I can’t make more than one such trip out per day.

Between the autism and CAPD–and the PTSD partly resulting from shoddy treatment because of these–I have trouble dealing with other people in ways that are expected if you’re home during the day. I have serious trouble using the phone, some with speaking to people face to face, and have become wary of answering the door at all. (Letting in one creepy pervy meter reader, who struck me as only not assaulting me because I was obviously stronger than he was, did not help with this.) It’s hard to understand what people are saying and formulate responses, and this interferes with a lot of expected tasks. I’ve also been conditioned to be ashamed to let people in when the house is such a mess.

Those are just some illustrations. There are plenty more.

The upshot? I spend all day flapping, with little forward motion. It’s grueling. The only real free time I’ve been getting is after Nigel goes to bed, with the built-in excuse that crashing around the house will disturb him and the sleeping neighbors. This leads to staying up later than intended, trying to wind down enough to sleep, so I can get up and buzz like a hummingbird again, with a cluttered house full of allergens to show for it. One of the reasons I’ve been so keen on giving Max a long afternoon run in one park or another is also that it gives me a “good” excuse for a little leisure time. It’s also a little break in the social isolation, since people talk to us with enough context that I am not as stressed out trying to carry on a conversation about dogs.

At the moment, I’m fighting feeling guilty about taking enough of a break to write this. I have not been able to spend much time on doing things I actually enjoy, and which help me decompress some. That’s why I haven’t been in front of the computer much; I’ve also been too worn out to string words together when I do sit down. I have neither energy nor aesthetic sense left by the time I sit down and try to do beadwork or make jewelry, so haven’t been turning out and selling any crafty stuff.

Yeah, I realize intellectually that this is not sustainable nor healthy. I need more downtime to stay even marginally functional. I try to tell myself that I can’t keep doing this, and mean it at the time. I dread getting depressed again, and having the situation become worse.

The social programming is strong enough that I have a hard time seeing alternatives, however, and feel guilty for not getting more visibly accomplished. Falling into the HBD role has hurt me, and I’m sure it hurts a lot of other women.

At least I am aware now that I do have some disabilities, helping keep me where I am. Turning into an HBD no doubt keeps a lot of other women feeling like vaguely dippy, unstable, not-so-bright people who don’t even have Real Problems as an excuse. I’ve seen it happen, and have been put on the psych meds myself, ostensibly to cope better with being “just not right”. I’ve seen obvious physical problems get put off this way (my mom’s among others), and suspect that large numbers of autistic and otherwise neurodivergent women–mostly undiagnosed–are circling this particular black hole. Where are the female adult auties? Look around the supermarket.

Having kids, and disappointment

The Punkin kitty needs to go to the vet, and I am having a hard time making it happen. Getting her there requires calling them for an appointment, catching her and putting her in the carrier, and two separate phone calls for cabs to get there and back (also the risk of chatty drivers there). Even animal medical settings give me a serious case of the willies. Today, I’m not-so-secretly glad that she’s too smart for her own good, and has decided to hole up somewhere for the afternoon; she also pulled the same number yesterday, after Nigel called the vet’s. He will probably have to work from home tomorrow, and take her. It will be easier for me to go too, if he uses the phone and acts as the cabbie interface.

I’m feeling more than a little guilty, because the poor girl is having surely uncomfortable bowel problems, and really needs to have that seen about. Worrying about it is making me less able to function today. I’m also fighting the idea that I’m Just Not Trying Hard Enough, and feeling extra guilty because I’m not the main one being affected by my difficulties. But, the fact remains that the autism and medical-related PTSD do get in the way sometimes, and all the guilt in the world will only aggravate the problem.

This situation is upsetting enough on its own, but it has also gotten me thinking about one truly uncomfortable realization which hit me a couple of months ago: now that my mom is gone, so is most of my hope that I can have kids.

I hadn’t been hesitant to have them because I thought I’d make a bad parent, but because I knew it would require more support than is available here. The two are very different things. My coping abilities have been stretched as it is, trying to go about my daily business and run a nuclear family household–and there’s so much more per capita work to be done, with fewer people in the house! Trying to take care of children without more practical and emotional support would be madness.

In the back of my mind, I’d been hoping to eventually move back home to have kids, with a decent support network in place. (This would help me, even without kids in the picture.) Living close enough to my parents to have some semblance of an extended family setup would have been ideal. Now, that’s not an option, and I have no idea where to look for a similar safety net–or if one is even feasible. Given the trouble I have building a social support network on my own, it’s a good thing I was born into one! It’s doubtful that I’d find such enthusiastic help anywhere else than from my mom. Other relatives who would otherwise gladly help are busy with grandkids already. It may not take a whole village to raise a child well, but it sure does take more than two adults.

Too many people would say, “If you can’t take care of them on your own, you shouldn’t have kids at all.” Nuclear family living isn’t good for kids, IME, even if neither parent is aware of having some special needs. We can all use some help, and it’s so much better if the other people love us and want to help. It’s a good thing that I am aware that I go into sensory overload easily, and don’t deal well with sleep deprivation, for example. Parents who have this to a lesser extent–as most do–are still going to be much happier if there is someone to come along and take the kids out somewhere while they recuperate. It’s a win-win situation all around. The kids get lots of affection, and have the opportunity to learn from more adults, while the parents don’t constantly have to be “on”.

Growing up, we lived close enough to my maternal grandparents and my uncle and his wife that I spent a lot of time at both houses, and it helped immensely. It helped my parents, especially when my mom had to work herself half to death to keep us going: there was somewhere I was very welcome to stay, and a nice cooked meal available when Mom got home. The relatives enjoyed spending time with me, I learned a wide variety of things from different people, and there were multiple places to go when people were not getting along at home. The setup was good for everybody involved.

Come to think of it, it is not at all surprising that child abuse rates around home seem to have increased as people have been pushed into nuclear family setups (setting other forced assimilation aside for the moment). Before, hitting children just was not tolerated–AFAICT, nobody in North America thought that using violence against kids was OK.* There are fewer release valves in place now, and you see harried parents smacking their kids. I occasionally got smacked by harried, frustrated relatives who had run out of mental options, but still had not convinced themselves that it was right. You see more of it now than when I was growing up, even. So much better if neither parent nor child were under so much pressure in the first place.

Adopting an adult dog (10 years old, if a young 10) almost a month ago also helped bring the necessity of more support home to me. If taking care of an older dog during the difficult time when he was getting settled in left me absolutely exhausted and functioning poorly from lost sleep, I’d really better not try to take care of a human baby without more help! If I need help to get myself to the doctor and the cats to the vet, a baby would require the same kind of assistance.

This has disappointed me badly, and I have been fighting some depression from the realization. I always thought I’d have the luxury of waiting for a good time to have kids, but that it would eventually happen. Now that’s unlikely.

Perhaps we’ll be able to foster and/or adopt an older child one of these days. I think I could handle that better, and there are certainly a lot who need decent homes.

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* Chief Hicks of the Texas Cherokee gave a good summary of older Tsalagi approaches to “domestic violence” (such a hideous euphemism!), in some cultural notes; Barbara Mann offers a lot more information from a related culture in Iroquoian Women. This definitely jibes with my experience. Only the more assimilated think it’s actually OK to hit other people (or animals), much less kids.

No man or woman gave children corporal punishment. The only punishment given was ridicule by the children’s peers and any adult in the town. The anidawehi were the only ones empowered to give any type of physical punishment. Using a fish bone scratcher on them if he broke any religious or tribal laws, or he could be doused with cold water in front of the town’s people.

Additionally, as has been trying to turn into at least one other post for a while now:

A man never raised his hand in anger to a woman for any reason. Death was the only acceptable punishment for a man who physically injured a woman. If a woman hit a man, he was either to stand or flee from the violence. A Tsalagi warrior could kill a woman warrior in combat, but no woman was to be molested or injured after the battle. There is no record in history of a Tsalagi warrior raping a woman. A Tsalagi warrior would kill his own father, brother, uncle or son before he would let him commit such a vile act. . .
No man would physically abuse a woman for any reason. To do so meant his death, either by her brothers or by the men in her clan. Her brothers belonged to her clan. If a woman became angered at her husband or any other man, he was to stand and take the beating without injuring her, only raising his hands in personal defense. If she was stronger or as strong as he, the man had better hope that he could out run her and stay out of her way until she cooled off.
Rape of any woman, in their own tribe or that of an enemy, meant a man’s death. There was no question asked, there was no repsonse given. It would be done.

Behaving abusively would get a person put down like a mad dog, because he was screwed up enough to pose a real danger to other people, and likely to continue dangerous behavior even with counseling. I might add that men who behaved abusively were at least as likely to get killed by the women involved, who certainly had not been brought up to believe that they needed to put up with that kind of crap. Intervention by relatives was mainly necessary when the woman had been very badly injured or killed.

A few thoughts

I ran across an excellent quote from Paula Gunn Allen, here. It’s from Genocide of the Mind, but I don’t remember reading this essay before.

On the face of it, given the level of American misapprehension of the actual bases of various spiritual systems, this sentence may sound perfectly lucid. However, it is exactly wrong when placed withing the context of Native thought. No Native who has given much thought to tribal spiritual systems — in all their aspects and multiplicity —would agree that life is all a dream. We think that life is all real — all of it. The personal, the spiritual, the supernatural, the “cosmic,” the political, the economic, the sacred, the profane, the tragic, the comic, the ordinary, the boring, the annoying, the infuriating. Our tradition tells us that when someone meets a supernatural on the road (or in the kitchen), that is real. And when someone meets a BIA official at a meeting, that is real. We are neither dreaming it nor making it up. Nor is the numinous (or the Great Mystery) a psychic territory peopled by split-off fragments of our unconscious, a split occasioned by represion, failure to mature in a timely fashion, or massive trauma. (Now “trauma” does mean dream!)

To Native thinkers, the mythic is not a trick of the human mind but a pulsating fact of existence as real as a village, a trailer court, a horse, a spouse, or a tradition is real. Native people of the Americas are aware, as were pre-Renaissance peoples of the British Isles and on the Continent (and as are many of their modern descendants) that the numinous may be different from the “mundane,” separated from it by a kind of penetrable psychic barrier, but it is no less real for all that.

Just earlier today, I was thinking about the similarities and differences between Buddhist philosophy–at least as it has mostly developed–and Native ways of thinking. Allen’s quote sums up a major perceived difference, from what I’ve seen.

I refer to the way Buddhist thought has developed, because once you get to the base of things–as discussed in Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs, getting past some of that book’s Western interpretations–the ways of thinking work together fairly well. Siddhartha Gautama seems to have been most concerned with seeing what’s really there, and what actually works. Recognizing how you’re getting in your own way and actively harming yourself with the illusions you’ve thrown up out of your own mind is difficult, but necessary if you want any kind of peace or balance. You need to be able to see what’s real.

Which leads me to a point which is not so popular with some Western rationalists: deciding what you can possibly be seeing or experiencing, based on necessarily limited information, is leaning on yet another illusion. These assumptions should also be examined. Yep, that can be as painful as looking at anything else you prefer to believe. But, if you really want to be honest with yourself and the reality that surrounds you, that process never ends.

I don’t mean to sound sanctimonious there. It just continues to amaze me!

Moving back to Allen’s piece–and at the risk of verging on postmodernism–things which need to be examined include cultural bias and tendencies toward projection. As Barbara Mann aptly put it in Iroquoian Women:

Combing is not just an academic chore; it is a nasty challenge to the ego as well. Few are up to the ordeal. On a personal level, most folks are reluctant to recognize that cultural bias is precisely the stuff that feels so doggone comfy when they snuggle up to it. Discovering that their mattress stuffing is really a web of lies means that, to correct the situation, the stuffing must be knocked out of their comfort zone. An honest examination requires them to endure the personal discomfort of living without a buffer, while their new cultural mattress is on order.

This serves to underpin a lot of Western projection. It also causes an enormous amount of grief, on a more personal level.

I’m not claiming that I’m exempt. But, I have apparently learned to function without as much of a buffer, for various reasons. Still, some of the things that I find lurking in a mattress I thought was empty can be truly amazing!

More charity

Also crossposted.

It niggled at me, and I finally tracked down one particularly bizarre and confusing passage in Theda Purdue’s Cherokee Women:

Women did not seem to internalize basic assumptions about commerce as completely as did men. In her memoir, a Carolina colonist recalled that a Cherokee woman warned backcountry settlers of an impending attack because she “disliked very much to think that the white women who had been so good to her in giving her clothes and bread and butter in trading parties would be killed.”29 This “giving” was almost certainly trade, as Carolinians defined trade, and not charity. The white woman who recorded the incident, however, had spent several of her teenage years as a captive, and her wording genuinely reflects the Cherokee woman’s attitude about the exchange–it was gift giving, not trade.

This is the kind of mess you get when the writer does not understand the conflicting concepts of “charity” and “gadugi”, not to mention gifting as trade–as the Cherokee defined trade.

Not a bad illustration of some earlier points.

I have neither time nor energy to go into some of the other weird and willfully ignorant interpretations Perdue put on this one, right now. *shakes head* At the very least, she ignored the carefully considered (and intentionally ironic) wording employed as part of the woman’s peacemaking duties.

“Gadugi” and “charity”

Crossposted to LJ.

The concept of gadugi came up in a comment I just left, with the observation that I’ve been glad to find a word for it, rather than a necessarily clumsy English description. It’s harder to get the point across in English. The best summary I’ve seen so far: “At the heart of this principle is a built-in spirit of community comradery. This means that whatever issues/concerns arising in collective living have to be addressed in a unitary way and that no one is left alone to climb out of a life endeavour; it reflects a collective community base.”

This concept does not only come from the Cherokee. Among other things, it’s echoed in the name of the old Iroquoian (women’s) agricultural organization, which translates as “Good Rule: They Assist One Another”.

Not too surprisingly, that got me thinking about the differences between “charity” and gadugi. At least in practice, they have very little in common–and I understand better now why older relatives push gadugi as a way of life, but would rather gnaw off a limb than accept charity.* I would group some of the connotation differences in “generosity” here, too.

As Ed Fields described it in the online language course, the gadugi concept encompasses a few related ones: detsadasalidihesdi, we raise one another up; detsadatliyvsesdi, we hang on to one another unconditionally; and detsadalvquodes, we’re stingy with one another (hold on tightly), which is about the only context in which being stingy is a good thing. This gibed with what I’d picked up, but, again, it’s good to have words for these ideas.

Gadugi has this type of underpinning, though it usually does come out in concrete acts of helping people, as demonstrated by the more organized Day of Caring in Qualla Boundary. You may get a work group together to help an older or disabled person take care of their garden or fix their roof, or notice that somebody is having a hard time financially and drop “extra” food by on your own. (While trying not to embarrass the person needing help, or make them feel beholden.) Or, as in one of Ed’s anecdotes, if kids are out playing and one of them gets attacked by a half-wild dog, the other kids don’t just scamper out of harm’s way. “Raising each other up” doesn’t just apply to overt physical help, though.

Picking up on one note there, this does have a lot to do with the perceived “burden” of disability. Abolutely everybody needs help with something, and it’s reciprocal. I can’t help but be reminded of one of Barbara Mann’s examples, in which out of one group of several thousand (can’t locate the exact reference right now) Removed Seneca, there was only one man who was recorded as not being able to work at all. In the dominant culture, this is amazing–especially considering that these folks had been through genocidal wars and a death march, and most of them would get written off as physical and emotional lost causes, these days. Still, only one man was unable to provide some sort of substantially useful and helpful services, and the community was keeping him going–apparently without open resentment.

A lot of my less favorable impressions of “charity” come from how it’s too frequently implemented. (”Cold as charity”, anyone?) There’s more behind that concept, too. Still, at much past the agape level of cultural accretion, there are pretty big differences.

One of the most basic ones that keeps standing out at me is how these concepts are tied up in very different social systems. Gadugi is what you apply to prevent the social and related financial inequalities addressed by charity from arising in the first place. It does not just accept that these inequalities will inevitably exist, but tries to level the field.

In spite of good intentions, similar is unlikely to happen in a society which still–to greater extent than a lot prefer to think–has stratification built in from the ground up. It’s not so long, in the scheme of things, since larger numbers of “masterless men” were perceived as a symptom of “the world turned upside down” in Britain. The U.S. got some of the worst, expansionist versions of this one, which are still duking it out with more Native ideas of individual freedom rooted in cooperation–just look at the ongoing messy jumble which is the Constitution.

Cultural differences in power dynamics, and the necessity/desirability of such, still abound. Not completely incidentally, this has had a lot to do with various well-intended attempts at more egalitarian/communal systems not working out so well, grafted onto societies which aren’t built on that from the ground up. Power dynamics involved in giving and taking play a deceptively big role, as well. I wrote something about this here a while back, about 75% of the way down.

At any rate, some of the conceptual differences are much clearer to me these days. I’m trying to work out some of the myriad implications.
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* This extended to the point that, after one of Sid’s medical crises, my Papaw–exaggerating to make a point–suggested that my mom would be better off robbing convenience stores than signing up for food stamps. (Which he perceived to be in the “dehumanizing charity” category, rather than returned tax revenue when one really needed it. Well-earned distrust of government agencies no doubt also played in.) They were making sure we had a lot of necessities, and I’d imagine he also took it as a poor reflection on their gadugi. I was 9 or 10, and did not fully understand why he got so worked up at the time.

I used to feel very ugly indeed: a photo essay

I’ve been considering writing a piece on this subject for a while, and was finally prompted to do so by yesterday’s post. But, this time, I’m going to see just how many words a picture is worth, instead of just illustrating with some as planned.

These are some I cobbled together this afternoon with GIMP. They don’t even pretend to be smoothly done.

Even knowing where it’s coming from now, I have to admit that some of these photos still make me cringe. I had to fall back pretty heavily on wedding pics, since I still tend to avoid cameras whenever possible.

Thayendanegea (a.k.a. Joseph Brant), and me.

With the right face shape and sufficiently crappy portraiture, you too can look like Mr. Potato Head with a squashed nose, squinchy eyes, and weak jawline. Yep, I really felt bad about my low nose and eye folds, worse the more I heard about how ugly they were.

The same applies to the physique. Looking unacceptably large by most standards of the dominant culture is very easy to do, with the proper build, as demonstrated by one of the guys from The Warriors of AniKituhwa and me 40 lbs. heavier.

Is either one of us ever going to look willowy? I doubt it. Svelte is better than strong, or so one keeps hearing.

Here is another example, with a couple of the other AniKituhwa dancers, beside my mom and me. The reception probably would have been more interesting if they had been performing. *g*

So much for the idea that women must be more gracile than men of the same ethnic group. It makes no sense. Amusingly, Bo Taylor, on the left, is some sort of cousin on my mom’s side. Not surprisingly, he used to play football. Most women I know with this kind of build have just gotten made fun of a lot for being big in a beefy way–and it helps me get honest-to-goodness stared at on the street and “sirred”, here in Greater London.

More perceived-as-unflattering close ups, with other people for reference. Playing around, this worked about equally well with Thayendanegea and the first AniKituhwa fellow. Yep, my mom and I both had about half our original allotment of eyebrows, because dark bushy eyebrows are definitely a femininity drag no-no.


Apologies to my stepdad, whose shoulders are still in the photo.

The past few years, I have not been happy to have started noticing some of the same pseudojowls developing on me, as the ones shown here on my mom and Graham Greene. They were not really playing Scrabble together at the reception, with Kaintwakon looking on.

Kaintwakon does not yet have the perceived-as-fat pseudojowls in this portrait, but that’s just the right kind of face shape to get them later!

This also works with the (mostly Iroquoian) paternal side of my family–whom I more closely resemble–and yet another of Thayendanegea. Note the foxy little chins and short necks, another combo which is frequently perceived as fat by people not built that way. Now I’m actually underweight, and still have the “double chin” from the right angle. This great-great-great grandfather opted for a beard you could hide a turkey in.

Judging by life portraits, Thayendanegea was also pretty low on melanin, as has always been common in the East. Barbara Mann, from a Grey Eyes Wyandot/Seneca lineage, has had plenty to say on this. Charles Willson Peale clearly depicted Thayendanegea’s pinkish skin and grey-blue eye color, very much like mine. (Here is a blond Onondaga kid who looks almost eerily like I did at that age, for that matter.) It helped a lot of our folks stay put, but is now considered prime evidence that we can’t be NDN at all.

Could some of the deluge of negative comments, which led me to actively despise my appearance for years, have been racially motivated? Hmm.