whole world of ideas and the life of the mind. (Remember, what the white man sees as the life of the mind is not the life of the spirit.) The first personal thing Ron ever said to me was that I should major inAnthro and not Indian Studies, which for me would be a free ride. That’s how I became an anthropology major in college.
It was Bradley and Ron who, without any particular intention, set me to thinking like a white man big-time. One night right before fall practice started we went to see Straw Dogs , a Sam Peckinpah movie that Bradley and I loved and Ron hated. We stayed up half the night drinking beer and talking about the movie, and the other half playing blues and talking about life. That night we added considerably to the decor—Bradley and I were ornamenting my apartment with the world’s largest collections of beer cans, stacked floor to ceiling in the living room, all Budweiser for looks. Eventually it got so I had just a corridor to the sofa, TV, and coffee table—the rest was red, white, and blue aluminum.
Peckinpah’s movie was said to be based on some books by Robert Ardrey, African Genesis and Territorial Imperative , which in turn were based on the work of anthropologist Raymond Dart. We went up and down and across, conversationally, about what they meant, these anthropologists’ discoveries about the origin of mankind—Dart’s evidence that human beings millions of years ago were meat eaters. The discoveries of the Leakeys at the Olduvai Gorge and Koobi Fora that proved humankind is much older than previously thought, and the implications of that for our notions of our human ancestry. We debated the Peckinpah-Ardrey notion of violence as a fundamental of human nature against the position that human beings were ancestrally vegetarians and cooperative, rather than competitive.
O, ye intellectuals, divining the nature of man! While denying the divine, of course.
It was exhilarating—the world of intellectual speculation was new to me, and I could hardly sleep for excitement after Ron left close to dawn.
The very next week, Intro to Anthropology class, we talked about the creation stories of indigenous peoples. Ron explained the basic kinds of creation in the U.S., Stacked World storiesand Earth Diver stories, and he told a couple—how Earth was all water and Duck dove down to the bottom and brought up the first earth, and the world was made out of that, a classic Earth Diver story.
After class I went and talked to him, and we switched from “Professor Sternberg” and “Mr. Blue Crow” to “Ron” and “Blue.”
“Ron, I don’t see much in talking about creation stories, analyzing and classifying them in this way. I mean, the magic and mystery is taken out of them, the meaning is taken out of them.”
Ron grinned. “I agree. So why don’t you tell us a story, not analyze, and give us the poetry of it.”
I’d trapped myself.
Nervously, I said I’d be ready at the next meeting. Hell, I remembered a lot of old stories, but I was no expert, and I didn’t know what you would call a comprehensive Creation Story like a Stacked World or Earth Diver story.
That night I found a big book on Lakota mythology in the library and got a story out of it. It involved creation, but really it was the story of how Evil came into the world. And it was a hodgepodge—even the author admitted the stories were never told in this way. Still, it was made out of old, traditional materials, and I decided to go for it.
When the class was settled in, Ron nodded at me. “Ready, Mr. Blue Crow?”
“Come to the front or stay here?”
“As you like.”
I took a deep breath, walked to the front of the room, carrying my sheets of paper. I turned and faced the white people. These were the people I’d been envying all my life. They had money, relative to me, who grew up without electricity. They had the power of knowledge—they’d made everything that ran their world, right down to the fancy building we
It was Bradley and Ron who, without any particular intention, set me to thinking like a white man big-time. One night right before fall practice started we went to see Straw Dogs , a Sam Peckinpah movie that Bradley and I loved and Ron hated. We stayed up half the night drinking beer and talking about the movie, and the other half playing blues and talking about life. That night we added considerably to the decor—Bradley and I were ornamenting my apartment with the world’s largest collections of beer cans, stacked floor to ceiling in the living room, all Budweiser for looks. Eventually it got so I had just a corridor to the sofa, TV, and coffee table—the rest was red, white, and blue aluminum.
Peckinpah’s movie was said to be based on some books by Robert Ardrey, African Genesis and Territorial Imperative , which in turn were based on the work of anthropologist Raymond Dart. We went up and down and across, conversationally, about what they meant, these anthropologists’ discoveries about the origin of mankind—Dart’s evidence that human beings millions of years ago were meat eaters. The discoveries of the Leakeys at the Olduvai Gorge and Koobi Fora that proved humankind is much older than previously thought, and the implications of that for our notions of our human ancestry. We debated the Peckinpah-Ardrey notion of violence as a fundamental of human nature against the position that human beings were ancestrally vegetarians and cooperative, rather than competitive.
O, ye intellectuals, divining the nature of man! While denying the divine, of course.
It was exhilarating—the world of intellectual speculation was new to me, and I could hardly sleep for excitement after Ron left close to dawn.
The very next week, Intro to Anthropology class, we talked about the creation stories of indigenous peoples. Ron explained the basic kinds of creation in the U.S., Stacked World storiesand Earth Diver stories, and he told a couple—how Earth was all water and Duck dove down to the bottom and brought up the first earth, and the world was made out of that, a classic Earth Diver story.
After class I went and talked to him, and we switched from “Professor Sternberg” and “Mr. Blue Crow” to “Ron” and “Blue.”
“Ron, I don’t see much in talking about creation stories, analyzing and classifying them in this way. I mean, the magic and mystery is taken out of them, the meaning is taken out of them.”
Ron grinned. “I agree. So why don’t you tell us a story, not analyze, and give us the poetry of it.”
I’d trapped myself.
Nervously, I said I’d be ready at the next meeting. Hell, I remembered a lot of old stories, but I was no expert, and I didn’t know what you would call a comprehensive Creation Story like a Stacked World or Earth Diver story.
That night I found a big book on Lakota mythology in the library and got a story out of it. It involved creation, but really it was the story of how Evil came into the world. And it was a hodgepodge—even the author admitted the stories were never told in this way. Still, it was made out of old, traditional materials, and I decided to go for it.
When the class was settled in, Ron nodded at me. “Ready, Mr. Blue Crow?”
“Come to the front or stay here?”
“As you like.”
I took a deep breath, walked to the front of the room, carrying my sheets of paper. I turned and faced the white people. These were the people I’d been envying all my life. They had money, relative to me, who grew up without electricity. They had the power of knowledge—they’d made everything that ran their world, right down to the fancy building we
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