Let’s have a mind and raise flowers.

Patriotism to put you in that sexy mood:

As you probably don’t know, I work for a Native American social services agency.  A few days ago I wrote this mediocre essay on the mindblowing topic of Indian Boarding Schools.  Enjoy!  If you have questions or thoughts, please post ‘em.

North American Indigenous peoples have been dealt a tough hand in our current society that has, according to 2000 Census data, placed them at and near the bottom of nearly every measurement of health and wealth.  Indigenous issues run the gamut from obesity and diabetes to alcoholism and internalized inferiority, all of which have their roots in what I believe to be misguided Western governmental policy. The following essay will discuss an issue which has touched many of my clients, co-workers and friends – forced Native American boarding schools.

Native American boarding schools were founded during President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration in 1860, and enrollment peaked in the 1970s.  A major intention of the boarding school policy was to strip Native Americans of their language, culture and religion in an effort to remove their “savageness” so they could participate in Western civilization.  Encapsulating this idea, Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, said in a speech in 1892, “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”

Students as young as five years old were forced to attend boarding schools and were violently reprimanded for speaking in their Native languages.  They were taught Christianity to replace their Native religions.  They were forced to cut their hair and to wear Western clothes.  In addition to the intended “cultural genocide” curriculum, the schools were plagued with lack of funding for health care and food, and thus many students died of disease and starvation.  Students were “leased” for hard labor during the summers to raise funds for staff salaries.   Furthermore, sexual and physical abuse was rampant.

Results from the history of forced boarding school attendance can be seen throughout Native society today.  According to a 2007 Amnesty International report, instances of sexual abuse are three and a half times more likely to occur among Native Americans than in any other ethnic group.  Alcohol, which was virtually non-existent in Native communities prior to the “Westernization” curriculum of boarding schools, quickly became abused at epidemic proportions, and the rate of alcoholism among Native Americans is currently six times the national average.

Working with Native Americans, I have personally witnessed the effects of the boarding schools.  Every single Native person in my agency that I have gotten to know – from the CEO to the Cultural Specialist to the Assistant Head Start Cook – has experienced both alcoholism and sexual abuse either directly or within their family.  I have been a part of many business meetings, talking circles, sweat lodges and spiritual events that have included an outpouring of screams and cries.   I have worked with actual students of the boarding schools as well as kids and grandchildren of boarding school attendees, and I have heard numerous horror stories of schools and witnessed their long term effects.   I have also met hundreds of Native Americans who do not know their language or their culture.  Currently, the foster care system is disproportionately filled with Native American youth.

Many of these people have described to me a feeling of incompleteness and hopelessness, a sense that society does not have a place for them.  I have heard stories and read reports that the poor parenting techniques and abuse perpetrated by boarding school attendees can be explained by their lack of decent, loving parenting models.  As a result, their children grow to parent as they were parented in a cycle of intergenerational trauma.

Yankton Chief Phil Lane Jr., the former CEO of my agency, once wrote an article comparing this episode in American and Canadian history to the question, “What if the holocaust never stopped?”  In the early 1980s, Lane created a video entitled Healing the Hurts about the Canadian Indian boarding schools.  Although initially criticized, feared and lambasted by both non-Natives and Natives alike, this video, combined with subsequent meetings of tribal elders and lobbying toward Parliament, ignited a movement that culminated in 2008 with an official apology by the Government of Canada and an agreement of financial reparations averaging close to $30,000 per boarding school attendee, with further allocations to those who were sexually abused.   The United States federal government does not appear to even admit this is a contemporary issue.

Obviously, financial reparations can help, but much more needs to be done from a social services viewpoint, including:

• An investment in language preservation and other dying cultural elements.  This will help to fill the feeling of incompleteness of Native Americans, and work to preserve their culture into the future.
• An increase in the education of Indigenous issues for social service and education practitioners.  An example of a lack of understanding of practitioners is regarding speech.  Non-Natives average a 1 second pause between turns in a conversation.  Natives average between 1.5 and 5 seconds between turns.  Often, non-Native counselors will interrupt their Native clients, rendering the clients voiceless.
• A mass education campaign should be undertaken for the public at large who have been immersed in stereotypes that Natives don’t exist anymore, that they are all lazy drunks, that all Natives are the same and without cultural diversity, and that Natives are all rich from casino money.

Finally, the idea of cultural assimilation as the solution to the Indian “problem” still permeates society.  The issues stemming from the boarding schools negatively affect so much of contemporary Native life, and I feel it is time that America gives value to this conversation.  Our Indigenous population has so much to offer, from respect for elders and the environment to a strong sense of anti-materialism. We just need to help them heal and to give them a voice.

Heidegger’s Being-toward-death [Sein-zum-Tode] reveals masculine privileging, writes Linnell Secomb. Writing not to negate but augment his ontology of death, Secomb finds that Heidegger’s formulation omits a diversity of experiences of death, particularly those of women and betrays incongruity with Heidegger’s Mitsein. Secomb writes that Heidegger’s description of death “as the end of Dasein, is Dasein’s ownmost possibility—non-relational, certain and as such indefinite, not to be outstripped”[1] retreats to the philosophical tradition of writing of death as the end of a discrete cogito or isolative monad. The being-towards-death of Heidegger capitulates to gendered social expectation and inscribed meaning and experience as a masculinized valorization of death. By being ‘ownmost’ and ‘non-relational’, Secomb writes, there is a denial of the experience of mourning and experiencing one’s own death in the process of Being-with in the midst of death; existing in a process of dwelling with other’s deaths. There is an aspect of death being inter-relational and inter-subjective rather than isolated and atomistic.[2]

Another report of death can be revealed in the histories and stories of women whose stories avail another perspective on death; that through being-with the dying and dead bring a divergent picture of the nature of Mitsein. Secomb draws upon those to whom war has made widows and bereft of children, women who historically have outlived men, and the women in the lives of incarcerated men as illustrative of the gendered roles of women as commemorators, keepers of memory, grievers, and mourners.[3] Heidegger’s dismissal of the death of another is an affirmation of masculine experience and neglects what Secomb calls the ‘feminine death’ where Dasein is projected towards death within community and is wholly comprised of dwelling amidst the death of others and in their mourning. Secomb echoes Heidegger in that death, like all experience is second-hand but that mourning and dwelling with those who are dying mediates the relation and understanding of one’s own death. This feminine perspective says Secomb, creates an understanding of Dasein as an un-becoming.
              To Heidegger’s three distinctive modes of death: perishing, demise, and dying, Secomb adds dispatch and dwelling-with-death. Perishing, which connotes the ending of any living thing, demise an inauthentic legal pronouncement of death, and dying which stands for the way that Dasein is towards death remain incomplete in their consideration of primordial Being-with. Dispatch refers to when another is not projected towards death, but through murder, violence, and the denial of their own possibilities of being towards death, the other has death sentenced unto them. When another’s projects are so violently neglected or impinged upon, their becoming and un-becoming are perverted within the being of Dasein. Dwelling-with-death is an authentic mode of existence whereby through Dasein maintains Mitsein with the dead through memory and commemoration, bringing death into an embodied immanence. While remaining authentic in Heidegger’s sense, this mode disavows isolative or non-relational existing; where one lives with the dead and dies with others.

If you haven’t enjoyed Harper’s Index, you haven’t fully lived. This one covers the W. Bush Era.  Here are some beauts:

Year in which a political candidate first sued Palm Beach County over problems with hanging chads: 1984

Years before becoming energy secretary that Spencer Abraham cosponsored a bill to abolish the Department of Energy: 2

Number of Chevron oil tankers named after Condoleezza Rice, at the time she became foreign policy adviser: 1

Number of members of the rock band Anthrax who said they hoarded Cipro so as to avoid an “ironic death”: 1

Minimum number of times that Frederick Douglass was beaten in what is now Donald Rumsfeld’s vacation home: 25

Minimum number of pheasant hunts Dick Cheney has gone on since he shot a hunting companion in 2006: 5

You also might want to subscribe your email to the free Harper’s Weekly Review.

           Levinas’ use of face while available to meaning of ontic ‘expression’, however is not equivalent to ‘countenance’. The straightforward physiology of face tempts the interpretation of the correlation of the Other with their representation or image. Here a phenomenology of the Other becomes challenged by the non-conformance of the Other’s appearance, context, accomplishments, and social situation. “The essentially hidden throws itself toward the light, without becoming signification.”[1] The face therefore is a challenging and unexpected means to convey that for Levinas, the Other is invisible. Levinas writes, “ethics is an optics. But it is a ‘vision’ without image, bereft of the synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision.”[2] Phenomenology as that which describes the pure appearance cannot broach the face-leaving for Levinas ethics as the means of searching out the face. Within the irreducible and insurmountable representation of the face of the Other lies vulnerability.
            The vulnerability exists in the curious fascination with the epiphany of the face and one’s ability, and proclivity, to conflate the Other with their appearance. The ontic creates an opening or invitation to one’s ego to reduce the Other in a phenomenological manner. The Other is available to observation, and analysis; as Roger Burggraeve has pointed out, the gaze unto the face is composed of language and imagery of sickness, the observation of the eye is associated with diagnosis and prognosis. The penetrating gaze is never innocent, it fixates on the ontic physical and sociological placement of the Other, and one is always vulnerable and available to this gaze. Through the Other’s vulnerable invitation to the ego’s reductionistic and manipulative observation and diagnosing, it entreats the ethical significance of the Other.
            In the ‘naked frankness’ of the Other, one finds that the reducing diagnosis that is availed must not be undertaken. The opportunity of the gaze to delimit and gain ‘knowledge’ of the other is an invitation to the ego or self interested essence of humanity. Levinas writes in Otherwise Than Being that essence is interest and is affirmed in the positive through the conatus of beings. One’s interest is in constant struggle with the Other creating the condition of “egoisms struggling with one another, each against all, in the multiplicity of allergic egoisms which are at war with one another and are thus together.”[3] The ethical imperative arising from the Other in the “temptation to murder” owes to the Other’s vulnerability and the ego’s self interest which as conatus, attempts to incorporate the Other in the egoistic project of taming or reducing; that is, ‘to kill’.
            The ethical dilemma confronted in a conatus and the face of the Other presents a responsibility to reverse the forward striving of the conatus, a pulling back of the esse that is interest. The categorical imperative of this ethical confrontation exists in the “Thou shall not kill”. To kill is the act of reduction; the Other is conflated with the face and a reduction of the Other to the Same [le Meme]. To kill is a violence, an action of power that subsumes the Other with a priori ideas and categories, neglecting the Other’s uniqueness. The ego’s knowledge, propelled by the striving conatus, through the means of observation and diagnosis strips the Other of their foreignness, their alterity and possesses the Other by reconciling unto the Same. 

            The reduction constitutive of the ‘to kill’ is involved in a myriad of violences likened to tyranny and enslavement of the Other. The Other, under subjugation to the ego, loses their freedom to act as an ‘enslaved spirit’, and more threateningly the freedom to choose. The ego’s tyranny takes forms including that of unjust discourse. The art of specialized or technical language appeals the Other with a ‘ruse’ and the “specific nature of rhetoric (of propaganda, flattery, diplomacy, etc.) consists in corrupting [their] freedom.”[4] Through what amounts to brainwashing and intimidation in discourse, the Other is robbed from the capacity to even choose to obey and the enslaved Other can only act out of ‘blind’ obedience. The Sophists’ rhetoric reduces language to its coherence to the Same to make discourse impersonal and solitary resulting in “suppressing ‘the other’ who breaks this coherence and is hence essentially irrational. A curious result: language would consist in suppressing the other, in making the other agree with the same!”[5] Once the conscious ability to choose has submitted to tyranny, there remains only a non-cognizant inclination to accept, submit, and obey. The counter to this is a disengagement from objectivity, in what Levinas calls conversation. In conversation, the other is ‘let be’ their own expression, their own language to where the Other remains foreign to the Same- “the other qua other is the Other.”[6]

[1] Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. 1969), 256.

[2] Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. 1969), 23.

[3] Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. 1998), 4.
 

[4] Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. 1969), 70.

[5] Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. 1969), 73.

[6] Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. 1969), 71.

There is a bioterror threat on American soil.
Is this the wet dream of convervative hawks, the validation they so much
long for in the ‘war against terror’?
Well, not really. Seems like there’s not all that much of a stir about it, as
a January 12th google search couldn’t find much national media coverage.

How can this be?
How can a bioterrorism threat in America be uninteresting?

Well, the threat has to be made against the sexually marginalized homosexual community.

On January 7th, the Seattle Times reported that on January 6th 2009, eleven Seattle gay bars were given anonymous threats in writing stating that they were targets in a scheme to poison people with ricin.
Ricin is a poison for which there is no antidote, although a vaccine has been developed and supportive treatments are available. Survivors experience long-term organ damage. It can be inhaled, ingested, or injected. Its pretty serious stuff.

A ricin threat, however dubious of origin would probably gain national attention if made to any other community, but when the targets include a group already vilified and marginalized-it garners a big “meh”.

Here’s some articles on the threats:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008597989_ricinthreat07m.html
http://www.silobreaker.com/DocumentClusterReader.aspx?Item=16_946622987&Focus=11_1886
http://www.samesame.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=6527

(Of course, as always and everywhere, one must watch their drinks, don’t accept drinks from strangers, be attentive and watch out for each other. But watching out for each other is what the LGBTQ communities do best. They’re communities that’s been through hell and back and have become strong and supporting networks.)

And one must wonder-why is it that America is resting on its laurels when
its own citizens are under threat?
My guess is that homophobia, transphobia, mysogyny, sex negative, and ignorant views are still very prevalent in the U.S.
Heteronormativity’s social control of our bodies, sexualities, and gender categories still has a heavy influence-but the good news is that its waning. The narrow margin win of Prop 8 in California is witness to the bulwarks cracking, but the myths and ignorant views on sexuality persist in America and I would suggest, find their strong allies in some churches.

When I say ‘some churches’, take me seriously on that. There are many wonderful churches, faith communities, temples, and mosques here in the states that are finding real ways to articulate love and justice in mindful and considerate ways. And then there are those who are stuck playing the same old power games that have always bred us/them thinking.

The people of faith over at Soul Force and the Equality Riders
(check them out at http://www.soulforce.org/)
have got the right idea. They understand that churches supporting corrupted power, hegemonies of essence (by sex, gender, sexual expression, race, etc) are the training grounds and propaganda mills for bigotry, intolerance, absolutism, extremism, and ultimately (I would suggest) provoke violences.

When someone hears week after week that there is “an Other” that they are better than, superior to, and divinely chosen over, what happens to that person’s thinking? When someone is drilled into thinking that “Those People” are commiting crimes against their God merely by their existence, what happens?

The violences supported by these misguided churches are not always easily visible. Its sometimes just the violence to a person’s psyche, social, and emotional health that keeps them from being who they are, hating themselves, or spurring suicidal thoughts. Its drives people to live double lives in dishonesty to themselves and others, short circuiting a life of joyous service to God.

Some pastors belittle and deride homosexuals and women at the same time.
Mark Driscoll, a Seattle pastor recently likened progressive or liberal churches and their teachings to having a Jesus who is a “wuss..a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ.” What does this statement support? What does it say about women? Femininity? Men?
Christ by this portrayal is “a man’s man.” Men act like men. Women act like women. Jesus was a man, acted like a man, and the ‘effete’ have nothing to do the Gospel or Jesus.
This same pastor calls some Christians’ Jesus “neutured and limp-wristed.”
The patriarchal power in statements like this act to demean women and support stereotypes of homosexual men. All in all, its ignorant, mean spirited, and as I stated before, can act as the seed which grows into more and more violences.

(Check out the New York Times article on Seattle’s Mark Driscoll at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11punk-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
and my comedic remix response at:
http://mindflowers.net/2009/01/11/mark-driscoll-of-mars-hill-is-absolutely-fabulous/)

To suggest that one be open minded, non-judgmental, compassionate, and begin understanding the lives and stories of others has been interpreted by some religious extremists I’ve talked to as being “Watered down Christianity”, “heretical”, or “relativizing morality. Everything is okay and permissable.”
Not so. One may worship their God, even Jesus as savior and God incarnate in a real way without relying on the bigotries of centuries past.

My hat goes off to Soul Force and the Equality Riders for bringing people of faith together from all over to stand against the messages of some churches whose messages and pastors fan the flames of violence and ignorance.

As the work of justice continues, maybe we’ll soon hear of all churches in the Seattle area and throughout America standing together against the type of threat currently experienced by the LGBTQ communities in Seattle.
P.S. Big ups to the Seattle Gay community-we are with you.
P.P.S. for more on how some Christians are getting it right, check out:
http://www.mccseattle.org/

Ryan McGivern

Vanity Fair published 20 of their commissioned portraits of George W.  Here is my favorite:

In related news, check this video for the song Cookie Jar by Gym Class Heroes:

************
The post that had been here has been redacted out of the worry that
my bad sense of humor could lead to more hurt or insult than I ever intended.

Mindflowers and I care deeply about the people of Seattle-all of them.

I believe that the comment thread below contains the original spirit of the post without having to weed through the sarcasm.

I may also redirect you to my other post here:
http://mindflowers.net/2009/01/12/when-us-domestic-bioterror-became-uninteresting-the-targeting-of-seattles-gay-community/

Thank you readers and apologies to Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill.

Ryan McGivern
www.myspace.com/mckibbon

NEW YORK (Mindflowers)– A giant Crestacean-like cretin named George W. Bush caught the attention of onlookers recently at a New York seafood restaurant  and will be returned this month to its Texas ranch cesspool, according to a statement from the People’s Foundation for Inhuman Assholery (PFUA) .

George has been a “sort of mascot” for the Crabs A’Plenty restaurant in New York and to fundamentalist, extremist Christians.

The PFIA’s released statement did not say exactly how the immense depth of assholery was allowed to get so big, but restaurant manager Keith Walton told Mindflowers that sometimes brine-smelling muck-dwellers can grow increasingly arrogant, fear-mongering, bigoted, war-loving, and actually insane over time, if given the right conditions. “This thing must have somehow been fed the pyschic energies of millions of bigots over at least eight years. It was oozing toxic ignorance.” Said Walton. 

He said the creature had been “sitting in the restaurant’s tank and acting as a sort of mascot, you know: telling funny stories like a crazy old senile person, starting wars, lying about said wars, illegally spying on people, combatting against reason and sense through appealing to people’s base nature, lying about environmental devastation, playing with its tiny genitals while thinking about Abu Ghraib, that kind of stuff.” but when PFIA got involved and requested it be released back to its cesspool, it “seemed like the right thing to do.”

PFIA President Shayna Newkirk said in a statement, “We can’t believe the assholery present in this feeble and despicable creature. Surely this is a bottom feeder who found a wealth of homophobic, anti-science, racist, war loving Neandrathals to be a source of its soul vampirism. ”

Plans have been made for the creature to shed the tight confines of his old restaurant display tank. On January 20th, George W. Bush will be driven to Texas by PFIA members and returned to his natural habitat on the bottom of a cesspool, the organization said.

Reported by Ryan McGivern

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/01/10/maine.lobster.liberated/
http://www.bushlies.net/
http://bushcrimes.net/
http://www.rense.com/general73/warcrim.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster

              Myth granting sense and meaning as a carrier of cultural belief often places humanity in finite time replete with a pre-established origin story and a telos which one is projected towards. Haraway particularly critiques the Western humanist myth of originary unity and wholeness. This origin myth identifies with the unity of sameness and the unification with nature as ‘phallic Mother’. From sameness, difference must be wrested, individuation and freedom reliant on the construction of boundaries of difference. Labor and differentiation begin to tame the Mother Earth and the feminine associated with the origins of sameness resulting in a “drama of escalating domination of woman/nature.”[1] Psychoanalytic personal development, Marxist formulations of history, and the contemporary recalling of icons such as the Androgyne of Plato’s Symposium owe to this larger Western humanist mythos described by Haraway.

            The myth of origin that Haraway describes she associates with goddess is both pejorative and nevertheless necessary in the history and continuance of feminisms and is bound to cyborg thought in a ‘spiral dance’. The goddess motif which has been retrieved by feminisms past and present uncovers two symptoms of a phallogocentrist history making and enframing. Firstly, as Chicana Feminist Cherrie Moraga and others have explicated, the pristine garden of unity and purity before writing privilege dominant colonizing languages, dispelling the salience of marginalized cultures. Mestiza stories, histories and languages, Haraway writes, point towards the spliced chimeric nature of the cyborg; and also that the indelible and subversive act of writing alone “affirms Sister Outsider not the Woman-before-the Fall-into-Writing”[2] that is associated with Derrida’s critique of privileged speech.

            Secondly is the phallic vested interest in descent. With the myth of initial unity in ‘the garden’ of idyllic sameness, phylum, class, and order emerge terms of difference which is tamed, known, and seen. The taxonomic control aligns with that which subdues nature. This cultural technoscientific myth solidifies women’s identities, banishing ambiguity. This is, as Susan Suleiman identifies, a matter of rectifying alterity.  However, while the Western humanistic myth idolizes the one, Suleiman states that feminisms propel past the two of oppositional alterity. Anne Balsamo writes that there is no recourse to an essential unity to grant fixed sense to “woman, feminine identity, lesbian identity, black identity, or even cyborg identity…Identity can only be studied as it shifts, skips, and stutters in different utterances or evocations.”[3] Alterity, through the integration, liminality, be-coming, and overlap of ‘natural’ and ‘technological’, ‘individual’ and ‘social’, associated with Cyborg Feminism becomes a vision of ‘the other’ that is increasingly ambiguous and arbitrary.

            Andreas Huyssen states in Mapping the Postmodern that Modernism’s pivotal exigency is the problematic of alterity. The hybridization of the cyborg troubles formulations of the Other and keeps a strong vision of corporeality and bodies that are the medium for the expression of power in difference. If alterity is the shortcoming of modernity, as Huyssen states; the weakness of postmodernism, says Balsamo, is the loss bodies in consideration. The cyborg, short for cybernetic organism, recalls that it is bodies that are being inscribed upon and constitute the informational and social networks of the cybernetic system. In opposition to the masking, illusory, and oppressive Machenshaft possible in Heidegger’s technological mode, the cyborg unveils the body, its humanness, and the apparatus of gender. In correlative effect, when technology is lifted from the misrepresentation of being solely the physical machinations of gear-works and internet ether and found that it “also fundamentally embodies a culture or set of social relations made up of certain sorts of knowledge, beliefs, desires, and practices”[4] people are extricated from abstraction and revealed in their embodied existence. As bodies have been covered over in postmodernism, writes Balsamo, so has gender been obscured from discourse and thus the technologies that construct gendered bodies.  

            Susan Suleiman and several contemporary feminists have identified and created projects out of the elision of the body and the means and effects of gender inscription. Through in part Elizabeth Grosz’ corporeal feminism, Teresa se Lauretis’ ‘technologies of gender’, feminists have demonstrated how the discursive construction of the body is preeminently directed by the apparatus of gender. The representation and imagination surrounding the feminine as eros, death, and the Other are revealed as ideologies expressing the management of and dominion over women’s bodies. One example of women’s bodies experiencing a lacuna postmodern thought identified by Francis Bartkowski and others is that of the critical theory of Foucault. By his treatment of gender as a ‘natural’ occurrence in bodies, Foucault avoids granting gender as a ‘truth effect’ or constructed apparatus of control or biopower. That is, gender escaped Foucault’s analysis of systems of differentiation, power relations, and forms of institutionalization.[5]