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urocyonOh yes, I forgot to mention earlier that Sugar seems to be feeling much better now, has for a couple of days now. Healthier fish are good! I'm continuing with a full course of the Kanamycin food, just to be safe. There should be another course left in the freezer, just in case somebody needs it again.
Yesterday, I got in some books I'd ordered a while back. It's been good weather to devote time to reading, so I've finished all except Beginning Cherokee (and another I stopped reading, which will soon be explained.)
Sorry for some strange line breaks from pasting, further on. I am too tired right now to go through and fix the ones I missed.
Two of them I was a little hesitant to get, in spite of recommendations, but saw enough convincing reviews that they seemed worth a look: Medicine of the Cherokee: The Way of Right Relationship and The Cherokee Full Circle, both by J.T. and Michael Tlanusta Garrett. The authors also seemed to check
out, at least to the point of actually being Eastern Band. (It says rather a lot that even half-assed background checks are a good idea, venturing into this type of subject matter.) The Garretts don't seem
just to be making up fluffy crap, which is a frequent suspicion. They're pretty honest about what they are working in from elsewhere.
At any rate, I found Medicine of the Cherokee more personally useful than The Cherokee Full Circle. Neither one was bad; the first one just came closer to what I'm interested in ATM. It would not be a bad philosophical introduction at all for someone without previous experience, and I needed some points reiterated. I'm hoping that Michael Garrett goes into some areas a little more deeply in another followup
book I am tempted to try.
I suspect that the slight lack of depth is down to several factors: it is a first book, it's intended for a rather general audience which needs more introduction, and the authors were probably still feeling their way along concerning what kind of stuff was not only relevant but OK to include for a general audience. I caught whiffs of that last factor more than once, and would most likely run into similar concerns myself. (I do
online, sometimes.)
The structure of both books was fairly interesting. The authors wove parts into a coherent whole, from going around subjects related to the directions. They did pretty well with it. I'm one type of spatial thinker, and the way the Garretts laid things out made sense to me. YMMV, of course.
J.T. Garrett did go into some pretty strange speculations about the future of health care, but he's in health administration, and is clear about this being a personal interest. I figured some of the incongruous fluffiness of this might put off people with low fluff tolerance, such as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vatine, however. I had to skim those sections, in spite of a slightly higher fluff-sorting limit.
One point I appreciated seeing reiterated--what with the amount I've been having to consider similar themes of late--is what they're referring to as the Principle of Noninterference, and how that relates to respect, honor, and control. (Acceptance also ties in.) This interlocking complex of ideas is also addressed in The Cherokee Full Circle, with a more specific aim of trying to comb out some of the snakes arising from these things, including some of the things other people have managed to put on you.
Michael Garrett expresses this pretty well, in Part Two which he wrote, to the point that I ended up quoting more than intended:
That's within a framework of interconnection, and really should not be mistaken for some peculiar "rugged individualism" thing. The Garretts do a fairly good job of describing a kind of worldview which
seems to confuse a lot of people from other cultures, which requires both the firm connections and the independence for things to work. It's also not snagged from Buddhist philosophy, though the two systems seem to work well together in many cases.
J.T. Garrett does a good job expressing the closely related idea of acceptance, which again requires a fairly long quote:
This was another concept I had trouble understanding, from older relatives, who were no doubt as exasperated in their own way as I was at the time. :) Seeing it stated very clearly and expanded upon was helpful. Getting another perspective on how these concepts fit together was even more helpful.
The Cherokee Full Circle, OTOH, has a heavy emphasis on group work; in particular, a "bridging the gap" approach the Garretts have been using. It draws a lot from their take on psychology, which is not entirely surprising, considering the authors' backgrounds. Unlike a lot of self-help type approaches, this is firmly based in one's connections with the rest of the world, and does not come across as nearly as selfish. There is an emphasis on helping others. It's still not quite what I have the most interest in right now.
One point that it made me consider, though, is how I have been turned off the idea of group belonging, to great extent. I've had reason to be suspicious of group dynamics, as they tend to work in the dominant
culture. Reading this made me consider, more than I had before, that this was not always the case for me. When I was a kid, I actually liked group activities, as long as the potential for overload was taken into account. Not surpringly, this seems to have had a lot to do with the type of group dynamics, and now I have a better
understanding of the options there--along with why people have behaved in some very disrespectful ways. This kind of thing--in other words, more PTSD reactions--does explain a lot of my tendency toward isolating myself. I would probably do well to work on some of the lingering distrust and out-of-place-and-time expectations of rejection.
So, just maybe, part of my initial dismissal of this book had to do with some things hitting a little too close to home.
The third book was Theda Perdue's Cherokee Women. I wasn't necessarily expecting it to be interesting and informative on multiple levels as Barbara Mann's Iroquoian Women; but, neither did I expect to have to put it down halfway through, before my head exploded, and flames consumed the house.
This one probably would have been less disturbing had Perdue consistently taken primary sources, and their writers' interpretations of what they were seeing, at face value. That's annoying, but all too familiar by now. Helen Roundtree's The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture falls into this category; it may as well have been written by the same folks turning out most textbooks.
Perdue just doesn't understand the culture in question, but seems to think she does, leading to some truly cringeworthy inconsistencies. The weird collection of contradictions was half of what made me stop reading. It was difficult even to sort through and put my own interpretations on the sources. I did try.
One repeatedly cited source, with very little critical reading, was James Adair, an 18th Century trader. From the text itself, one gathers that the man (a) was convinced he was dealing with descendents of the
Lost Tribes of Israel, (b) did not even notice/want to entertain the possibility that he had married into a matrilineal/matrifocal/matrilocal culture, and (c) was unable/unwilling to distinguish rape from consensual sex (yeah, that one stuck in my craw); one assumes that his outward behavior did not follow his "hur hur" writings, or he wouldn't have lived that long. Adair also coined the derisive term "petticoat government", in reference to the Cherokee. Perdue knew a little better, but apparently not enough to see how many dodgy interpretations this "primary source" was placing on things, based on just these factors (never mind
other ones). She takes a lot of his observations at face value, then bases other conclusions on them. Adair is just one source who readily springs to mind.
In this author's universe, the culture is not coherent--never mind gender construction within the culture. It just makes no sense, and one is left with the impression that it's no wonder a lot of these folks died off. I certainly wouldn't choose to spend time around people who behaved the way she describes, and might not be sorry to think they weren't around anymore. Possibly worse, I don't think this was intentional. The purposeful genocidal propagandists are easy to spot, and still far too common. Perdue just makes such an apparently unintentional mess of things, I hate to think of the readers--possibly in Women's or Native Studies programs--who don't know enough to sort things out. This would be an unfortunate introduction to Cherokee society. *shudder*
Among the truly bizarre (and dehumanizing) assertions is that women and men led separate enough lives--based on some odd, rigid interpretations of roles--that they rarely even saw one another. Apparently, Perdue assumes that men would just prefer to avoid the houses owned by, and full of, women; they would also avoid having to socialize with men from different kinship groups, also living in said houses. Even though they'd have grown up expecting this to be the case, they couldn't be civil. Apparently, she pictures them hunkering around in the woods all day--presumably with bags of food they'd liberated during the night, to avoid going back to the house for meals--until it got dark. Then the polygamy and bedhopping began, without the men and women getting to know one another otherwise. Never do we even see a suggestion of people sitting around the fire and talking, and, erm, working together other than the women in the fields. Lots of things are interpreted as very rigid, not just gender roles.
Oh yeah, and the men were assumed to really be behaving like lazy aristocrats, as in so many European misinterpretations of American and African cultures. It's hard to imagine why the ones who were doing all the work and owned everything would let those parasites into the houses at night! As far as I read, Perdue did not raise this question.
Yes, I wish I were making all of this up. It would be less brain-breaking than trying to follow a lot of the "logic" involved.
Oh yes, and Perdue concludes--based on one observer's iffy statement about abortion and contraception being "frowned upon" (probably by him), and also on another observer's impression that there weren't many
deformed children around--that infanticide by exposure in the woods was the only accepted form of "population control"! Never mind that, in reality, you'd get an awful lot of people carrying home abandoned babies and talking about the apparent mothers and their whole families who let this happen worse than dogs--at the very least--Perdue does not even offer into evidence any biased account of infanticide having happened. She just assumes this must have happened.
Given the complete lack of affection, warmth, and love in family groups that the author implies--wasn't that a common 18th-19th Century allegation by the openly genocidal?--I guess infanticide as the only form of family planning is not that amazing a leap. *headdesk* That is just about where I stopped reading. It's been years since I've laid down a book without finishing it, not intending to return to it later, but this one sure did warrant it.
Yesterday, I got in some books I'd ordered a while back. It's been good weather to devote time to reading, so I've finished all except Beginning Cherokee (and another I stopped reading, which will soon be explained.)
Sorry for some strange line breaks from pasting, further on. I am too tired right now to go through and fix the ones I missed.
Two of them I was a little hesitant to get, in spite of recommendations, but saw enough convincing reviews that they seemed worth a look: Medicine of the Cherokee: The Way of Right Relationship and The Cherokee Full Circle, both by J.T. and Michael Tlanusta Garrett. The authors also seemed to check
out, at least to the point of actually being Eastern Band. (It says rather a lot that even half-assed background checks are a good idea, venturing into this type of subject matter.) The Garretts don't seem
just to be making up fluffy crap, which is a frequent suspicion. They're pretty honest about what they are working in from elsewhere.
At any rate, I found Medicine of the Cherokee more personally useful than The Cherokee Full Circle. Neither one was bad; the first one just came closer to what I'm interested in ATM. It would not be a bad philosophical introduction at all for someone without previous experience, and I needed some points reiterated. I'm hoping that Michael Garrett goes into some areas a little more deeply in another followup
book I am tempted to try.
I suspect that the slight lack of depth is down to several factors: it is a first book, it's intended for a rather general audience which needs more introduction, and the authors were probably still feeling their way along concerning what kind of stuff was not only relevant but OK to include for a general audience. I caught whiffs of that last factor more than once, and would most likely run into similar concerns myself. (I do
online, sometimes.)
The structure of both books was fairly interesting. The authors wove parts into a coherent whole, from going around subjects related to the directions. They did pretty well with it. I'm one type of spatial thinker, and the way the Garretts laid things out made sense to me. YMMV, of course.
J.T. Garrett did go into some pretty strange speculations about the future of health care, but he's in health administration, and is clear about this being a personal interest. I figured some of the incongruous fluffiness of this might put off people with low fluff tolerance, such as
vatine, however. I had to skim those sections, in spite of a slightly higher fluff-sorting limit.One point I appreciated seeing reiterated--what with the amount I've been having to consider similar themes of late--is what they're referring to as the Principle of Noninterference, and how that relates to respect, honor, and control. (Acceptance also ties in.) This interlocking complex of ideas is also addressed in The Cherokee Full Circle, with a more specific aim of trying to comb out some of the snakes arising from these things, including some of the things other people have managed to put on you.
Michael Garrett expresses this pretty well, in Part Two which he wrote, to the point that I ended up quoting more than intended:
The highest form of respect for another person is respecting his or her natural right to be self-determining. This means not interfering with another person's ability to choose, even when it is to
keep that person from doing something foolish or dangerous. Every experience holds a valuable lesson--even in death, there is valuable learning that the spirit carries forth. Noninterference means caring in a respectful way. And it is the way of "right relationship."
Interfering with the activity of others, by way of aggression, for example, cannot and should not be encouraged or tolerated. This is not only disrespectful, but it violates the natural order of harmony and balance in which each being has to learn and experience life in his or her own way. Each person, each living being on Mother Earth, has his or her own Medicine that should not be disrupted or changed without that
person choosing it. . .
"Pain" is really nothing more than the difference between what is and what we want it to be. To be respectful of all things, we often must sacrifice expectation. This is the real beauty of noninterference. It gives us the ability to release some of the things that would otherwise bind us or weigh us down and disrupt our own natural flow...Besides, what others choose is none of our business, and we should never assume that it is. This shows lack of wisdom and respect. It also shows a lack of trust in others' ability to choose, to experience, to learn.
That's within a framework of interconnection, and really should not be mistaken for some peculiar "rugged individualism" thing. The Garretts do a fairly good job of describing a kind of worldview which
seems to confuse a lot of people from other cultures, which requires both the firm connections and the independence for things to work. It's also not snagged from Buddhist philosophy, though the two systems seem to work well together in many cases.
J.T. Garrett does a good job expressing the closely related idea of acceptance, which again requires a fairly long quote:
It was also difficult for me to live the traditional Medicine, then put on the suit and tie and be a hospital administrator in the white man's way. My first mistake was to present myself the way I was told to do. It broke the Native American way of presenting myself as a helper. I overheard a tribal member say, "He is going to be like the rest," and I knew that she was talking about control. The
Native American person accepts you as you want to be. However, they respect you for how you are with others. Humility and the Rule of Acceptance helped me to cope with criticisms...One of the important lessons for me to learn was having the negative energy move around me, instead of internalizing and reacting to criticisms. The Rule of Acceptance is the ability to accept anything said or done with the realization that it is what another says or does, not what we say or do. In this case, an action does not necessarily require a reaction, but an
interaction. This interaction may be with the person or persons creating the action, or it can be with someone else to clarify or resolve a state of nonacceptance. As a student and apprentice, I was to accept everything and learn to listen. This can be very difficult in an environment where we are taught to be assertive, to analyze, critique, and "take charge."
This was another concept I had trouble understanding, from older relatives, who were no doubt as exasperated in their own way as I was at the time. :) Seeing it stated very clearly and expanded upon was helpful. Getting another perspective on how these concepts fit together was even more helpful.
The Cherokee Full Circle, OTOH, has a heavy emphasis on group work; in particular, a "bridging the gap" approach the Garretts have been using. It draws a lot from their take on psychology, which is not entirely surprising, considering the authors' backgrounds. Unlike a lot of self-help type approaches, this is firmly based in one's connections with the rest of the world, and does not come across as nearly as selfish. There is an emphasis on helping others. It's still not quite what I have the most interest in right now.
One point that it made me consider, though, is how I have been turned off the idea of group belonging, to great extent. I've had reason to be suspicious of group dynamics, as they tend to work in the dominant
culture. Reading this made me consider, more than I had before, that this was not always the case for me. When I was a kid, I actually liked group activities, as long as the potential for overload was taken into account. Not surpringly, this seems to have had a lot to do with the type of group dynamics, and now I have a better
understanding of the options there--along with why people have behaved in some very disrespectful ways. This kind of thing--in other words, more PTSD reactions--does explain a lot of my tendency toward isolating myself. I would probably do well to work on some of the lingering distrust and out-of-place-and-time expectations of rejection.
So, just maybe, part of my initial dismissal of this book had to do with some things hitting a little too close to home.
The third book was Theda Perdue's Cherokee Women. I wasn't necessarily expecting it to be interesting and informative on multiple levels as Barbara Mann's Iroquoian Women; but, neither did I expect to have to put it down halfway through, before my head exploded, and flames consumed the house.
This one probably would have been less disturbing had Perdue consistently taken primary sources, and their writers' interpretations of what they were seeing, at face value. That's annoying, but all too familiar by now. Helen Roundtree's The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture falls into this category; it may as well have been written by the same folks turning out most textbooks.
Perdue just doesn't understand the culture in question, but seems to think she does, leading to some truly cringeworthy inconsistencies. The weird collection of contradictions was half of what made me stop reading. It was difficult even to sort through and put my own interpretations on the sources. I did try.
One repeatedly cited source, with very little critical reading, was James Adair, an 18th Century trader. From the text itself, one gathers that the man (a) was convinced he was dealing with descendents of the
Lost Tribes of Israel, (b) did not even notice/want to entertain the possibility that he had married into a matrilineal/matrifocal/matrilocal culture, and (c) was unable/unwilling to distinguish rape from consensual sex (yeah, that one stuck in my craw); one assumes that his outward behavior did not follow his "hur hur" writings, or he wouldn't have lived that long. Adair also coined the derisive term "petticoat government", in reference to the Cherokee. Perdue knew a little better, but apparently not enough to see how many dodgy interpretations this "primary source" was placing on things, based on just these factors (never mind
other ones). She takes a lot of his observations at face value, then bases other conclusions on them. Adair is just one source who readily springs to mind.
In this author's universe, the culture is not coherent--never mind gender construction within the culture. It just makes no sense, and one is left with the impression that it's no wonder a lot of these folks died off. I certainly wouldn't choose to spend time around people who behaved the way she describes, and might not be sorry to think they weren't around anymore. Possibly worse, I don't think this was intentional. The purposeful genocidal propagandists are easy to spot, and still far too common. Perdue just makes such an apparently unintentional mess of things, I hate to think of the readers--possibly in Women's or Native Studies programs--who don't know enough to sort things out. This would be an unfortunate introduction to Cherokee society. *shudder*
Among the truly bizarre (and dehumanizing) assertions is that women and men led separate enough lives--based on some odd, rigid interpretations of roles--that they rarely even saw one another. Apparently, Perdue assumes that men would just prefer to avoid the houses owned by, and full of, women; they would also avoid having to socialize with men from different kinship groups, also living in said houses. Even though they'd have grown up expecting this to be the case, they couldn't be civil. Apparently, she pictures them hunkering around in the woods all day--presumably with bags of food they'd liberated during the night, to avoid going back to the house for meals--until it got dark. Then the polygamy and bedhopping began, without the men and women getting to know one another otherwise. Never do we even see a suggestion of people sitting around the fire and talking, and, erm, working together other than the women in the fields. Lots of things are interpreted as very rigid, not just gender roles.
Oh yeah, and the men were assumed to really be behaving like lazy aristocrats, as in so many European misinterpretations of American and African cultures. It's hard to imagine why the ones who were doing all the work and owned everything would let those parasites into the houses at night! As far as I read, Perdue did not raise this question.
Yes, I wish I were making all of this up. It would be less brain-breaking than trying to follow a lot of the "logic" involved.
Oh yes, and Perdue concludes--based on one observer's iffy statement about abortion and contraception being "frowned upon" (probably by him), and also on another observer's impression that there weren't many
deformed children around--that infanticide by exposure in the woods was the only accepted form of "population control"! Never mind that, in reality, you'd get an awful lot of people carrying home abandoned babies and talking about the apparent mothers and their whole families who let this happen worse than dogs--at the very least--Perdue does not even offer into evidence any biased account of infanticide having happened. She just assumes this must have happened.
Given the complete lack of affection, warmth, and love in family groups that the author implies--wasn't that a common 18th-19th Century allegation by the openly genocidal?--I guess infanticide as the only form of family planning is not that amazing a leap. *headdesk* That is just about where I stopped reading. It's been years since I've laid down a book without finishing it, not intending to return to it later, but this one sure did warrant it.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 05:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-04 12:23 am (UTC)I didn't realize that getting sent out in the woods or down to the creek, once I got old enough to be trusted out of the sight of adults, with one or more of Nana's dogs was supposed to be a combination of education and babysitting--it was more fun that way, too. :) Instead of screeching about its being too dangerous with all the snakes up there, I got taught to watch out for them, and one or more experienced snake dogs went along. I actually thought it was a lucky coincidence when one of them narrowly prevented a startled rattlesnake I hadn't spotted from getting me. Now I would probably consider taking a similar approach. It keeps the kid fairly safe, without as much restriction.
Learning through observation is still stressed, IME. Watching other people, and getting feedback on one's behavior from a wide range of community members (positive and negative) are good ways of learning how to behave. I'm still not sure how kids out and about here are supposed to learn what's acceptable behavior without that kind of feedback. Some basics got summed up pretty well in a little info (http://cherokeemuseum.org/education-info.htm) pdf turned out by the Museum in Cherokee, which I ran across:
Yeah, that applies to related cultures, as well, and that description clicked as a good part of the shock value for me once I got into a rather different educational environment! A pretty familiar pattern to me is not getting called on something straight off (if it's not immediately dangerous or too horribly rude), and not getting singled out in a humiliating way, but getting to hear a story later that obviously pertains to the point. That works a lot better than flying off the handle and yelling, at least IME. *g* Got a little too much of that from less patient relatives, as well.
Yeah, I have seen noncoercive approaches used that just didn't work with kids at all. Their not learning that running around yelling and making scenes in public is unacceptable may be annoying, but I have gotten concerned about the physical safety of more than one. Frequent use of coercion is one thing, teaching limits of acceptable behavior quite another. Some parents seem to have trouble with that distinction.
I may end up getting more practical experience with this kind of thing than I'd expected. I get the impression that taking in older kids at some point is something I'm supposed to do. It's still a pretty intimidating idea.
Oh my, yet another novel. :/