Willa's wolves

It's not hard to see how a kid like Willa Cather, 150 years ago, could have seen this painting--Sleigh with Trailing Wolves by Paul Powes--and have it and its story stick with her all the way into adulthood, especially if you know the story.  The story shows up in My Antonia, somewhat uncomfortably since the story it tells is Russian in origin and has little to do, most believe, with the story of a childhood friend of Cather's out there in the tough sod of southwest Nebraska.

Visit her hometown sometime--Red Cloud, Nebraska--and you'll find that painting in all its gory darkness hanging in the Cather museum. It's scary. It features a pack of hungry wolves soon to devour just about all of a wedding party, a legend worth retelling, maybe, on snowy nights before a roaring fire.

Two slashes rip through the old painting from sheer old age. The canvas grew so taut it pulled itself apart. But those rips don't blunt the horror of the story and the danger in the scene, even if you find it difficult, like I did, to imagine a pack of man-eating wolves devouring bride and groom and a few others.

I have no idea of the size of the Russian wolfpack, whether or not, as they did here,  the sheer number of animals nearly fell off a cliff decades ago. They did here--wolves, like bison, went nearly extinct until aggressive wildlife management pulled off the kind of magic that replenished the bald eagle. 

While I haven't forgotten the Powes painting nor Willa Cather's storytelling, that painting never kept me up at night like it must have her because I've never been any where near a pack of wolves, never heard their snarls. My Wisconsin boyhood barely mentioned them. What few there was of them were in residence a civilization away, "up north." It's likely, however, they weren't strangers around Red Cloud. Willa knew.

A little history here. The horse was introduced to America's First Nations in the 17th century, and like the Apple computer and indoor plumbing, a horse changed everything, made Indians better hunters, and increased their standard of living making trade easier and making things like pans and guns and liquor lots cheaper. 

Horses made hunting easier, a slam dunk in fact. Europe's rich and famous signed up for wagon trains or railroad trips into buffalo country. Think of it--old country gentlemen blasting away at bison while sitting in fancy English saddles or in plush passenger car luxury, never even getting their hands dirty.

Those millions of buffalo changed the way of life among wolves like those lusty killers in the Red Cloud painting. For years, white big-game hunters and Native entrepreneurs went hunting, if you call that hunting: shooting bison by the dozens then leaving meaty carcasses in the sun all over the Great Plains. Wolves went plum loco over the mountains of spoils left there to rot. Imagine, all of a sudden, filthy rich wolfpacks, fat and silly.

"Yep, Junior, those were the days," some wolf historians might tell the youngins', "--gold necklaces and dream cars, vacation homes on the Missouri, and universal health care. We had it made."

But when the buffalo went the way of the do-do bird, the good life for the American wolf went south so fast that whole packs suddenly went hungry enough to try to knock off wedding parties as if it were snowy northern Russia. 

It didn't happen, not out there in western Nebraska at least, but it could have  because out there on the Republican River, sometime earlier lived the biggest bison herds in the west. Who knows how scary those fat and ugly wolves might have grown?--and all of it, right about the time Willa Cather was a girl on the plains. 

All of that makes the story even scarier. 

Rooted music

What she told me--and what I have never forgotten--was how what she was taught affected what she was. Her parents were pure Zuni, in thought and culture and religious practice. Therefore, her going to a "Christian" school meant she had to forcibly unlearn what her Christian teachers taught her.

And that was difficult; it was traumatic, not because she had to shift priorities and allegiances (that too!), but because she simply loved her parents, who were widely acknowledged as leaders in the pueblo because they were just plain good people. They worshiped in traditional ways, danced the traditional dances, ran the races of her people; her parents were neither impure nor immoral. They were good, good people, and every one said so, said exactly that. She was blessed to have such good parents. But the Christian school in her life made it clear--chapter and verse--that her parents, despite their goodness, were flat wrong. 

And that criticism had an even greater eternal dimension because, or so she was taught, some day her parents would be forever cast out from the glory which is to come to those who believe in the white man's God. There's a Hell after all. Stakes were high. Stakes were forever.

She was Zuni and she was Christian when I spoke to her, but that doesn't mean that she'd forgotten what her education, a half century before, had taught her. That's why she told me the story. She wanted me to understand.

Last night I listened to a fine high school, 70+ piece symphonic band from Rehoboth Christian High, Gallup, NM, the school where she'd attended 70 years earlier. I've got a history there too. I wrote a book for them, stories about families who'd been part of that school's mission for more than a generation, stories like hers. 

But even before that, my Grandpa Schaap was a member of the denomination's "Heathen Mission Board" a century ago; in fact, a great uncle of mine, Grandpa Schaap's first cousin, was one of the place's earliest missionaries, Rev. Andrew Vander Wagon. 

The unintended shaming explained to me one night in her front room was something my people--my family, in fact--spread abroad in New Mexico to Navajo and Zuni alike. Last night, that fine group of young musicians shaped a presentation that included an open confession of sin, when an administrator from RHS made clear that the mission, close to 150 years old, had at times failed the people it had come to serve--and failed miserably.

But what the kids spread abroad in the concert was beauty, and what was spectacularly clear, at least to this concert-goer, was that the denomination of which I've always been a part could not be more proud of any blessed accomplishment it has done in its own 150-year old ministry than what has blossomed so dearly in the high desert of New Mexico, where Rehoboth, today, is a blessing to the people, both colonizers and Native, who live there. It took a long time to understand that the most effective ministry may be little more than a ministry of presence.

It was all in the music, the whole story, and it was beautiful. 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 121

“I lift up my eyes to the hills--

where does my help come from?” Psalm 121:1

Car-makers know something about the American public that no one else does: to wit, that we all secretly long to stretch our legs in the wide-open country of the Great Plains. Why?—I don’t know, but automobile ads very frequently seem to feature “the country”—more specifically, the rural Midwest and Great Plains.

Makes sense, I suppose. According to the U. S. Census, the states with the longest average daily commutes are New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Illinois, and California. Backed-up freeways don’t sell cars. Where is commute time least? You guessed it: South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Nebraska.

What sells cars is the mythic backroads adventure—SUVs, four-wheeling, mud-defying pickups, even though very few of us ever do any off-roading. What sells cars is the perception of escaping bottlenecks, fast food, strip malls, and wearying eight-lane metro traffic. What sells cars is the siren song of getting away.

In that sense, the psalmist is just like everybody else: he lifts up his eyes to the hills. He wants to get away. A place on the lake, maybe a river—that’ll do it. Doesn’t need to be big either, just a cabin, and I’m outta’ here.

It may well be a version of the old “grass is always greener” argument, this verse. From the day-to-day grind of our lives—same faces, same cluttered desks, same blasted lunch counters and restrooms—we simply want release.

We fantasize. I remember dreaming of living near mountains. Then, we did. But grading papers is grading papers, and we never got up there, even though those mountains were close. The only times I took note of them was on my bike, riding to work, when they seemed as much a dream as they ever had been.

Fifty years later it’s still in me, this yearning to look to the hills. Spinal stenosis has kept me from a weekly pilgrimage that had been the joy of my life for the last several years, Saturday morning country wandering. I could be in one of those ads.

God doesn’t dwell in some hand-hewn log cabin in the hills. He doesn’t even weekend there. He got a place at the lake all right but no Airstream or fifth wheel. Yosemite is as gorgeous a place as you can find on earth. Jasper, the Big Horns, Yellowstone, the Canadian Rockies—even the words get me itchy. He’s there too, but he’s not just there.

The psalmist must have felt it too because the first line of this beautiful psalm of praise and joy is a confession, I think—I lift up my eyes to the hills, as if he’s there somewhere, as if God is in residence at Custer State Park. When we get tired or bored or stymied, we all want to go somewhere we’re not.

But the hills won’t do it, and I’ve got to remind myself those little Saturday trips don’t bring me home.

My help doesn’t come from the hills. My help comes from the Lord.

Barbed wire

 

Used to be iconic--maybe it still is. Used to be that wherever you look there you'd see it--barbed wire. It got brought to the Plains states in the mid-to-late 19th century, and caused at least one war (Johnson County War) when the cattleman, accustomed to unfettered drives, suddenly ran into the new resident homesteaders. Whoops. Trouble.

In most cases, the homesteaders won the day, much, I suppose, as they had won the day against the Lakota from the Missouri River--and before that from the Big Sioux--west. Good fences make good neighbors wasn't a song sung only by Robert Frost. Thusly, up went fences. And barbed wire, most all of it, today, in lousy shape.

Our fourth

 

I'm going, Saturday, and I'm not even leaving town. This will be our fourth actually, two in Sioux City, but also a real stunner right here in Sioux Center, Iowa, amidst a populace that ranks among the most Republican in the state and the country. If there are more marchers on Main on Saturday, the place to look would be the cemetery; there'll be a tsunami. 

And I'll tell you why we're going--because this morning's six o'clock rant on Truth Social takes on NATO once again, his least favorite organization--now, today, because they're not getting on the Don's bandwagon to help him with his troubles in the Straight of Homuz. Surprise, surprise. He's done nothing but bad mouth NATO since he came down the golden elevator. Besides, what we're up to is not a war, right?--it's an "excursion." It was his decision alone to start up the horror. Didn't ask the people or the people's reps in Congress. Didn't gather our long-time friends, just decided himself--along with his trusted cronies--that we'd take an excursion into Iran, annihilate whoever got in the way, pummel the heck out of their world, then leave with dozens of oil tankers in our/his back pocket--oh yeah, and on the way out leave behind a half dozen Trumpian beach resorts for the rich and famous. 

He wants to be king. 

And then there's this. Yesterday in Minnesota, the state pressed a lawsuit to force ICE to release materials pertinent to the deaths of two people who got in the way of the ICE. Why? Because Don's government has refused to do that--and refused to do the necessary investigation themselves. Why? Ask Don.

He wants to be king. Period.

And then there's publicly and brutally penning another zinger when Robert Mueller died, the man who ran the government appointed special prosecutor's office looking into Russia's involvement into the 2016 election. That the Don didn't like him is understandable, but for a man who prates about religion to say what he did ("I'm glad he's dead"), for the leader of the free world to be what he is, never stops being chilling. 

Here's David Brooks: "The selfish tyrant attaches himself to only those others who share his selfishness, who are eager to wear the mask of perpetual lying."

All of this is predicated on the lie about the 2020 election, which the Don --and his disciples--will never admit: that he lost. Sixty-some court rulings said clearly that he did.

He wants to be king. Let me count the ways.

No, I'll quit. 

It'll be our fourth--and our second in Sioux Center. 

See you at the cemetery. 

Reservations Lessons ii

(Continued from yesterday--an old essay originally written for and published in the Seattle Pacific University magazine.)         

Then I asked his wife if she too was changed that morning, the morning her husband came home and cried and claimed to be. Her eyes rose just for a moment, she looked at me, and simply she shook her head. The detailed story he'd just recited led me to believe that what had happened that night was a Damascus Road thing—once and forever. It wasn’t. I simply didn't realize there would be more stories, but there were.

I liked the man; he’d led the worship upstairs not long before. His eyes were fervent and honest, full of repentance. But those eyes must have been seemed just as trustworthy before, when, certainly, he was neither fervent nor honest—nor trustworthy.

Some of those who fall--most of them, I imagine, if they know the truth--know very well what they're doing. They understand that what they do will affect those who love them. This man had been reared in the home of a wonderful mother, a faithful believer, the real subject of the interview, the woman whose story I was assigned to write—and another of the women who sat beside him that night.

She was the matriarch. Navajo people tell me their families are deeply matriarchal. If that’s so, she was every bit the queen. With eleven children of her own and dozens of grandchildren, she told me that today, nearly seventy, she spends lots of her day in prayer, prayer she’d learned from parents who’d come to know the Lord by way of a mission with its own deeply flawed past.

Abiding faith lends a visible glow to what otherwise might be plain old stoicism, a glow of hope rooted in destiny. It seems to me that men and women of real faith convey a gravitas that strengthens all of us. In that way too, she was a queen. I was privileged to sit beside her.

That night, the stories had been real, heartfelt, no pretension. The hard fought lessons of faith had been a blessing.

Still, it was dark when I left the church and its people behind. It was dark, and I felt my own foreignness, and maybe just a bit of the hurtful legacy of what my people have done to those with whom I’d just been sitting.

Just a few miles down the road, up on the ridge to the west, flashing lights streamed through the darkness, signaling something painful still a mile away. When I came closer, smoke wafted across the four-lane highway. Something was burning.

Reservation homesteads have a certain consistent appearance. The Navajos carve out homesteads somewhat distanced from each other, even though they live in extended family clusters. Often there are trailers or pre-fab homes, sometimes a kind of contemporary hogan and even

So great is our need of a Savior. All we, like the sheep of the reservation, have gone astray.

It's a painful lesson in smoke and darkness and emergency lights, a lesson once again--once again--once again, especially for those of us who are repeat offenders. It’s nothing more than a basic lesson in sin and forgiveness.

Somehow all of that, or so it seems to me now, is a story in the tight weave of a tattered Navajo blanket, my grandfather’s, that hangs here on my wall, miles from the reservation.

Reservation Lessons - i

It wasn’t terribly late, but it was dark over the reservation that night, scattered lights here and there where Navajo homesteads glitter against the vast reaches of the uncluttered desert landscape. A ridge of mountains to the west was barely visible, and, I'll admit it, for a white man somewhat unsure of himself in Indian territory, I wasn’t feeling totally at home.

I was returning from an old church basement, where I'd been sitting with a half-dozen members of a large Navajo family, listening to them--mostly Grandma--tell her story, a story rich with love and grace.  I was on assignment: write stories about elderly Navajo Christians and their relationship to a century-old mission boarding school, Rehoboth, just east of Gallup.  And I’d been listening.

What Anglo Christians like me are discovering these days is that the story of any North American Indian boarding school, no matter how righteous in intent, cannot be told in triumph or joy.  Those histories are heavily burdened with real pain.  One prominent Navajo leader, a Rehoboth graduate, told me that the attempt to teach Native people a new way of life, as all boarding schools once intended, carried an unmistakable corollary.  Indian kids learned, even if it were never stated, that their culture of origin, in this case, the Navajo way of life, had to be left behind.  Kids learned, he said, that the values with which they were reared, and the families that taught those values, were essentially worthless.  That lesson was criminal, a sin.  Today, we call it a kind of abuse, cultural abuse.

My own grandfather was on the “Heathen Mission Board” of the denomination he served and of which I am still a member, the Christian Reformed Church in North America.  For thirty years in the early 20th century, the Rev. John C. Schaap, a deeply pious man of God, supervised the operation of the Rehoboth boarding school, a school that has—as do all Indian boarding schools—a deeply troubled past.  Here in my study hangs an ancient and tattered Navajo rug, a gift to him, years ago, for his long service on that Board.  I too am part of this story.  But then, it seems to me that all of us are.

    That Sunday night, I’d worshipped in an old church, the very first my denomination had built on the reservation, almost a century ago.  With twenty people or so, we’d brought praise and thanksgiving to God, prayed and sung old gospel hymns—in English and Navajo.  Then, along with just a few of the folks, we’d retired to the cool of the basement, where for three hours or so, I asked questions and listened to stories.

I don't know that I've ever heard a man's confession of adultery before and then turned to look at his faithful wife, who, it seemed, wouldn't address me or him or even what he'd just confessed with her eyes.  It was a moment I won't forget.  He’d told me a long and tearful story about coming to terms, a few years back, with what he’d become—too much drink, too many drugs, too much unfaithfulness.  It was an immensely moving testimony. . . . .

(finish tomorrow)