<i>"Buried Indians: Digging Up the Past in a Midwestern Town</i> by Laurie Hovell McMillin: A Review

American society is heterogeneous and, these days, more often than not, divided. Although this is a young nation, roots go more than deep enough to impact present relationships. This book is one woman’s attempt to untangle some of these relationships in her own Mississippi-river hometown of Trempeauleau, Wisconsin.

This summer we camped about 75 miles south of Trempeauleau, at the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers. The Upper Mississippi is a beautiful, lush area, featuring bluff-top views of the river and its swampy backwaters, laced with quiet bayous that are great for canoeing. It is also rich with the histories of Native American cultures (most visibly the Ho-Chunk, formerly known as Winnebago), (largely) French fur traders, and (mostly) northern European farmers. The fur traders are gone (though it’s interesting to think about what of their culture may have survived) but the two other groups remain.

Buried Indians is both a memoir and an exploration of the issues surrounding past and present relationships among whites and Indians in Trempeauleau. The author is a member of the former group by birth, her forbears going back a couple of hundred years in that town. She is set apart, however, because she has moved away and chosen to become an anthropologist, specializing in the culture of Tibet. The theme of the academic as separate from the surrounding culture permeates her account as she attempts to negotiate not only her dueling identities, but also her sympathies, which extend not only to the undoubtedly wronged Native cultures and people whom she encounters, but also to her archaeologist colleagues and to her own white, working class/farmer father, family and compatriots.

The impetus for the book is a local controversy involving an approximately 1,000 year-old platform mound on Trempeauleau mountain, a bluff overlooking the Mississippi, within the town limits. The controversy ensues when an archaeologist from the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center indicates his intention/desire to preserve the mound as a tourist site, for possible inclusion in a regional heritage trail.

Although the state of Wisconsin and this particular area of the Upper Mississippi has been and is the site of thousands of other mounds - conical, linear, and effigy mounds - the existence of this particular mound, although surveyed and photographed during an early period of white settlement, had been largely overlooked by whites in the area. While the conical, linear and effigy mounds (many preserved at Effigy Mound National Monument) are believed to have been created for burial and other purposes by ancestors of the Ho-Chunk Indians who live in the area today, the platform mound was probably created as a ceremonial mound for sun-worship and other ceremonies by members of what is now called the Middle Mississippian culture. (As presented in this book, present-day Native groups seem to agree with the archaeologists’ assessment.) This culture was based further south, in Cahokia, Illinois, and Trempeauleau may have been an outpost of that civilization.

Buried Indians, though, becomes much more than a book about an archaeological controversy. As she pursues the topic through interviews, casual conversations, personal reflections and archival research, McMillin bumps up against many other issues.

Among them is the controversy over the town’s high school mascot. (This is, of course, an issue that surfaces intermittently on the national stage as well.) McMillin explores the paradox that, although historically whites were intent on removing Native people, they have deliberately retained the memory of Indians through mascot names (Redmen, Braves, Redskins, and so forth) and place names (there must be tens of thousands of them, including the names of states from Massachusetts to Alaska). McMillin concludes that what whites really want to obliterate at this point (now that we have killed and/or removed so many Indian people and destroyed so much of Indian culture) is not the memory of the Indians themselves, but rather the memory of the role we played in their decimation. She uncovers a paper trail of reimagined history that, for example, portrays Native people “disappearing into the mist” rather than being rounded up and shipped away on cattle cars as was actually the case in this area. Meanwhile, whites appropriated selected aspects of Indian culture, often in stereotype – i.e. the brave or savage Indian warrior - casting themselves as legitimate heirs to Native ways and, through Indian place names, to the land and its bounty.

Their feelings of remorse and guilt show up clearly in McMillin’s account, sometimes, though not always, spilling over into defensiveness. It’s clear that the whites of the town – small farmers who are proud of their hard work and survival through hard times – also feel somewhat victimized or belittled by people they view as elites from the outside, personified in this book by archaeologists, who don’t understand them and don’t know the land as they do. (Says one town father: “If there was [a mound] up there we would’ve known about it.”)

And so it goes in a heterogeneous, mobile society. These stories of conflict and removal – though on a much smaller and considerably less gruesome scale than the Indian removals - are apparent all over these days, from the immigration conflicts in Prince William County, Virginia, to gentrification/integration in places like Harlem. As people grouped according to various identities, we all too often place ourselves in opposition to other groups, to the ultimate detriment of all. In this regard McMillin’s sincere attempt to hear all sides of the story stands out as exemplary.

By the end of the book, the platform mound itself remains officially unpreserved, although today (in 2008) I found it listed as a federally protected mound by the group Protect Sacred Sites Indigenous People, One Nation. The author, through her investigations and her family’s involvement with them, manages to foster a slow recognition of some of these issues among her family members– including some of the older “town fathers” and a sister, a schoolteacher who ultimately incorporates some Indian history into her curriculum.

McMillin, Laurie Hovell. Buried Indians: Digging Up the Past in a Midwestern Town is part of The University of Wisconsin Press' "Wisconsin Land and Life" series. It was published in 2006.

Here's an interesting twist on this issue, a group of Sioux in North Dakota who would like to see the University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux retain its nickname. The original article is from the New York Times, December 9, 2009: In Twist, Tribe Fights for College Nickname.

And another update: Fighting Sioux Nickname Issue Remains Unsettled, this one from January 16, 2010.

A Quick Re-View of <i>The Greenlanders</i> by Jane Smiley

Author Jane Smiley has written a new novel that takes the premise of the Boccaccio's Italian Renaissance classic the Decameron and applies it to modern-day Hollywood. I haven’t read the book, called Ten Days in the Hills, but the recent Washington Post story on the subject included a mention of one of Ms. Smiley’s earlier novels, The Greenlanders.

You don’t hear much about The Greenlanders, but it is an amazing book. Dark and haunting, it is Ms. Smiley’s brilliant imagining of the final years of the Norse Greenland colony. Unlike Ten Days in the Hills, it doesn’t appropriate an earlier literary conceit and rework it with modern characters and setting. What it does do is take the current apocalyptic sensibility—whether expressed in Christian, Muslim, environmentalist, or other terms—and gives it some depth by portraying the progress of a real, historical societal extinction on an intimate human scale. In that sense, The Greenlanders has much to tell us about the terrifying nature of both human power and human impotence.

Greenland was settled by Norse colonists shortly after its exploration in the 980s by Erik the Red, Leif Eriksson’s father. (Leif, by tradition one of the Norse discoverers of America, was partly responsible for the Norse settlement in Newfoundland, at L’Anse aux Meadows.) It was Erik, a Norwegian outlaw, who gave Greenland its name, hoping to attract settlers to this largely glaciated land. Whether because of the name or some other factor, settlers did come to Greenland, and by 1300 there were probably some 2,000-5,000 people there, split between the Eastern Settlement (at Julianehåb) and the Western Settlement (at Godthåbsfjord). Settlers built turf longhouses in the fashion of those in Iceland and raised livestock, supplementing meat and dairy products with seal, fish, sea birds and their eggs, and the occasional beached whale. They depended heavily on trade with Iceland, and through Iceland, with Norway and Europe beyond. With a bishop installed at Gardar (Igaliku) from the early 12th century, the Greenlanders likely felt that their home, built with their own hands and sanctioned as it was by God and the church, was permanent.

And it was permanent for nearly 500 years, which is, after all, longer than European civilization has existed in North America. But ultimately the Norse colony disappeared: first the Western Settlement (around 1350) and then the Eastern Settlement (about a century later). A cooling climate at around this time helped to push the Greenlanders, whose survival had always been marginal, over the edge. By the time of Ms. Smiley’s story their seafaring abilities had suffered decline. Ice must have clogged their harbors for much of the year and wood for shipbuilding was not locally available. Strangely enough, though, we don’t know exactly why or how the Greenland colony disappeared. Was it famine (no stranger to these parts), an epidemic (also common), strife or assimilation with the Inuit, or pirates? Some suggest that once the population had dwindled to a certain point those remaining were transported to Iceland or elsewhere, although there is no historical record of such an occurrence. Some of the last Greenlanders, found buried in the churchyard at Herjolfnes (Ikigaat), were wearing up-to-date European-style clothing, so they must still have had some connection to the outside world.

Six hundred years ago Greenland was on the far edge of the (European) world and its existence was, sad to say, largely irrelevant. Perhaps—and again, we don’t know what actions they did or didn’t take—the Icelanders and Norwegians, the Greenlanders’ closest relations, so to speak, had more pressing matters to attend to. If that seems callous, we should remember that even in our own era—with its instant communications and live video and audio feeds from all parts of the globe—there are still people (think of the Jews and others in Europe, the Cambodians, the Bosnian Muslims, the Rwandans, the people of Darfur, etc.) who were/are largely abandoned by us, their human kin who are fortunate enough to have been born elsewhere. In this age of global climate change the Inuit people are now facing the possible extinction of their society in the Arctic, thanks to a combination of our actions and our inaction.

It must have been a combination of factors that doomed the Greenland colony. Ms. Smiley, herself a scholar of Norse language and culture, examines them all, weaving them organically into the lives of her characters in ways that are believable and chilling. One of the most relevant aspects of the novel for us now is how the countless variations on human frailty—greed, envy, fear, superstition, hatred, irrationality, closed-mindedness, conformity, etc.--can play into the demise of a society.

If we choose our actions and our leaders carefully, can we hope to avoid such a demise?

References

Arneborg, Jette and Kirsten A. Seaver “From Vikings to Norsemen” and Lynnerup, Niels “Life and Death in Norse Greenland” both in Fitzhugh, William W. and Elisabeth I. Ward. Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga. Washington and London: The Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

Graham-Campbell, James, Colleen Batey, Helen Clarke, R.I. Page and Neil S. Price. Cultural Atlas of the Viking World. (A Facts on File book). Oxfordshire, England: Andromeda Oxford Limited, 1994.

Book Review: <i>The Reindeer People</i> by Piers Vitebsky

The Siberian reindeer herders’ camp is a fairly intimate collection of perhaps a dozen people and a few small tents, surrounded by thousands of square miles of space. One might mistakenly describe the space as empty, but in fact it is manifestly full. Stands of larch, lichen, grasses, bogs and lakes adorn the mountain ranges and river systems that feed into the Arctic Ocean. Bears, wolves, marmots, and other fur-bearing mammals, as well as birds, fish and spirits live here. Graves are carefully placed in the landscape, many on platforms or stilts in an older style. Their inhabitants require offerings from passersby, and they have stories, as do many of the mountain passes and other landmarks.

There are blueberries here, and even in a dry year Emmie knows exactly where to find them. There are mushrooms here, and when the reindeer flock to them in a late-summer feeding frenzy, Kostya can retrieve his animals, spread over many miles of territory, with amazing ease. The inconceivably large Siberian taiga, though austere and even deadly, especially during the bitter winter and the treacherous spring thaw, is portrayed in this book as well-ordered and peaceful. Each herding “brigade” (to use the Soviet term) knows the land as it knows its own mother.

Within the camp all is orderly and calm, too, which is nothing short of miraculous, considering that these people pack up their things and move every few days as they shepherd their reindeer through a yearly migration cycle, making use of the best grazing land while, as much as possible, avoiding stinging, parasitic insects and hungry wolves. (These two categories of creatures seem to be the bad guys of the taiga.) Every few days the herders pack tents, gear, books, journals, clothing and bedding, as well as kitchen items from utensils and pots to provisions and even the stove itself. These items are loaded into saddlebags carried by specially trained reindeer. All that remains behind is a stack of wooden poles (for the tents) and perhaps a platform with appropriate supplies neatly tied down under a reindeer skin or tarp, ready for use when the brigade returns to this spot in a year’s time. When the herders arrive several hours later at their next location, everything must be unpacked and reassembled for immediate occupation and use.

The village of Sebyan, around which the herds in their Soviet incarnation revolve, is the foil to the open, spacious, calm, orderly taiga. It is crowded and noisy with gossip, bureaucratic paper rustling, and wheeling and dealing. The government-run village and its mandatory state school rob men of their families, women of their traditional role as partners in a family enterprise, and children of their culture, replacing them with vodka, sugar and phony folkloric performances. The State Farm bureaucracy is a purveyor of revenge on successful families and an instigator of rage, despair, murder and suicide.

If space is telling in The Reindeer People, so, too, is time, underpinning the entire story. There are the thousands of years during which, in symbiosis with the reindeer, the Eveny culture was crafted; the scant generations since the Soviets tortured it into a mundane system of post-capitalist production; and the relatively few years since perestroika introduced its own set of difficulties. There is also the time spent by Dr. Vitebsky and his Eveny hosts: quiet time, hour upon hour invested in building the personal relationships that give this study its depth. Also described here is the elegant yearly cycle of migration, traced over and over on the vast landscape of the Russian Arctic, which lies underneath the multitude of stomping, crunching reindeer hooves like a living, calendrical carpet. In this way of life, the movement through space is a concrete representation of the movement through time.

Since the retreat of the glaciers after the last Ice Age, reindeer have lived in the northernmost reaches of Siberia, moving through the river systems and mountain ranges. The Eveny are just one group among several who live with these partly wild, partly domesticated animals, managing them with techniques taken from psychology as well as animal husbandry. Over thousands of years the Eveny and their kin created a home in the coldest place on earth—a culture that is physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and socially sustaining. In The Reindeer People, Dr. Vitebsky’s experiences illuminate for us the interrelated beliefs, habits, dreams, and turns of tongue that deepen the many meetings and farewells, arrivals and departures of this still (for the herders) essentially nomadic life. Dr. Vitebsky provides fascinating background and history, and, I think, to his credit, he acknowledges his place as a participant on the ground (his wife and children even join him and Brigade 7 one summer) and as an anthropologist trying to make sense of it all, but to a large extent he lets the herders tell their own stories.

Before the Soviets, the yearly migration cycles were apparently augmented by other, longer travels over thousands of miles, made possible by the reindeer who, when winter snow and ice blanket uneven or boggy terrain, can virtually fly. There is also reference to a traditional midsummer ritual which symbolized the flight of each person to the sun on the back of a winged reindeer. Before the Soviets exterminated them, Eveny shamans also flew to the realm of spirits on missions of healing. (And the platform graves, are these a form of flight as well?) The centralized Soviet system disallowed these earlier forms of flying; its introduction of helicopters to move people and supplies, ironically but predictably, fostered dependence rather than healing or transcendence. This condition has been exacerbated by the post-Soviet reduction of transportation and other support.

Change is inevitable, both in natural systems (how will climate change impact this land and its inhabitants?) and in human affairs. There will always be a conquering people, a natural disaster, political discord, religious missions or schisms, new technologies or some other eventuality to catalyze cultural change, whether gradual or abrupt, violent or peaceful. The unrecoverable loss that results is acute and painful—in this case it is traumatic. Certainly, as I read this book, I mourned the loss of self-determination and freedom, the destruction of culture and tradition, the irradiation of the environment and its people, the breakup of families, and the impersonal cruelty of a morally bankrupt system that encourages treachery and death.

As Lidia, one of the herder’s wives, explains to Dr. Vitebsky, it is difficult for a herder to adjust to the village, because his soul is open from living in the taiga. I hope that the thousands of years of Eveny culture can ultimately transcend the destruction of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, and that the people can, in some fashion, metaphorically or actually, return to the well-ordered space which they created and which is rightfully theirs. Dr. Vitebsky’s friend Tolya (Anatoly Alekseyev), an Eveny anthropologist, is perhaps the pivotal person in this story, if not in the book itself. As Dr. Vitebsky points out, Tolya, in his use of aviation to contact otherworldly beings, is like a modern shaman, flying from the taiga to the world of scholars and activists on a mission of healing for his people. I wish him all the best on his journey.

The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia is a winner of the Kiriyama Prize for Nonfiction and a recipient of the Victor Turner Prize Honorable Mention.

Piers Vitebsky is the head of anthropology and Russian northern studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. He was the first Westerner to live with Siberian reindeer people since the Russian Revolution.

CD Review: Grovt och grant/Rough and Shiny by Alicia Björnsdotter Abrams and Emma Reid

I’ve only once been fortunate enough to hear these two young women perform, and, ever since, I’ve been keen to get a recording of them. I must say, it’s been worth the wait. I listened to it, candles burning, while I did all my Christmas baking, and I am still enjoying it in January.

This recording is a joy and a treasure. Most of these tunes are from masters of the Swedish fiddle, tradition-bearers who lived late and long enough to be recorded or even to participate in the folk revival of the 1970s. As in other such cases, it is remarkable good fortune to have these gems performed with such love and respect by younger players.

It is also a pleasure to hear these musicians build on the tradition in their own compositions (such as Alicia’s lovely Gröttschottis, track 7) and in their interplay with other traditions (Road to Poynton/Paul and Jenny’s Wedding, track 13 and Vals/Ville de Quebec, track 5.

Most of this recording, though, is devoted to the peculiarly Swedish polska. The polska is a dance said to have developed from Polish influences that arrived in Sweden around the end of the sixteenth century when the two countries were briefly united under one king. As it has evolved over the centuries, the polska is a dance in triple meter, although, unlike the waltz, its three beats are asymmetric—they are not organized around a stressed first beat and may even be of different lengths. Melodically, these tunes have been described as employing “blue notes,” but perhaps what we hear is better understood as either unusual (to our ears) modes or melodies that developed independently of the tempered scale. Be that as it may, it is well worth opening your ears, because this music really swings!

According to the brief liner notes, grovt och grant (rough and shiny) refers to the technique of playing in octaves, one fiddle above the other, in order to incorporate both the high, “shiny” voice of the fiddle and the lower, “rough/coarse” foot-stomping voice. (These are dance tunes, after all.) You can hear a lot of this octave-doubling work in Gumas Polska (track 4). But the reality is that these two fiddles saunter, swing, turn, and glide past each other not only at the octave, but at many different intervals, now closer, now farther apart, now intersecting in a passing unison. This Swedish art of stämma—creating a second part that shadows and engages the first—is richly realized here. A beautiful example of this is Trollpolskan (track 6), which the album notes describe as småpratande (small-talking or chatting). The countermelody work here is truly thrilling; it speaks its own mind quite independently, yet somehow manages to achieve unison with the melody as each phrase tapers to a close. I can see the chatting ladies, sitting forward in their chairs, coffee cups clinking, but this intricacy also brings to mind the ever-twining wood carvings at Urnes or the pattern on a tablet-woven ribbon—the ones that grace the hem or cuff of a Scandinavian folk costume.

This music is extremely evocative of landscape and of the feelings of being immersed in nature. But there is also the presence of human beings. There is Auld Swaara (track 14), a lament from the Shetlands, in a darker, more mournful version than I’ve previously heard. The Skänklåt (track 11) and Gamla Rådasin (track 3), are both weighty and declarative; the latter is paired with a lively polska that has more than a hint of the baroque in its countermelody. And are those cow horns I hear in Hedningspolska (track 6) and the Anders Södersten polska (track 4)?

I wish I knew more about Uppland fiddler Viksta Lasse (1897-1983)--I adore these versions of his tunes: the utterly gorgeous, twirling, breathing, thinking-out-loud Polska til Wik (track 9) and likewise Vendelspolskan (track 10), which recalls the strathspey with its sharp, rhythmic push-and-pull, although the melody is so Swedish!

Grovt och grant begins and ends with journeys. For me, the Himmelfärd (heaven-journey, track 1) is over the hard, glinting sea, the fiddle bow mimicking the rocking of the wave-tossed boat. Längs gamla stigar och färdevägar (track 17) takes us along winding roads through sunny pastures, cool woods, and marshy bogs, all punctuated with boulders left by glaciers--or trolls, take your pick! But however you see it, both journeys will take you, unequivocally, to Sweden.

The Swedish homeland, like the grovt och grant title, may be a place of contrast--the cold, dark winter followed by the bright flowering of summer--but this record reconciles the two, bringing to mind the shifting contrasts of shade and sunlight through fluttering birch leaves. The rough and shiny are always there, as are, always, the dark and the light, but the whole is as graceful and lively as dancers as they step, bob, and twirl around each other, balancing on an unbreaking line between two extremes.

Alicia Björnsdotter and Emma Reid will appear in an interview on WFMU Transpacific Sound Paradise. It will air (via the internet) Saturday January 27, 2007, starting around 7pm EST, and I am told it will be archived for later listening.

Grovt och grant/Rough and Shiny is available from CD Baby.