Kuto'yisa, Kuto'yisa, the dogs are eating your bones!
Indians held by the United States and its inferior administrative entities generally are not allowed to exercise religious practices, such as possessing tobacco or prayer pipes, or growing long hair, or have access to traditional religious leaders or ceremonies.
In Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1988), the Supreme Court narrowly defined the federal government's responsibility to protect religious freedom. The court allowed for the U.S. Forest Service to construct a road on USFS Indian land, despite recognizing that construction through the cemetery would "destroy the...Indians' ability to practice their religion."
The core of Rehnquist's Oliphant is the inferiority of Indian religion.
In California's Juvenile and Dependency process, notice to Tribal Courts of their jurisdictional claim on ICWA eligible children is no better now than it was two decades ago.
Freedom of religion does not apply to Indians. Disparagement of Indian people's individual faith is so banal as to be remarkable only in its absence. The intention to malign Indian faiths has been a constant in American public culture.
The pretense that two feminist women could do anything that would rise to the level of the sea of vicious Euro-centric crap American deists wallow in is ... as absurd as confusing a blog with the authorship and execution of the policies of finger-printing the poor and the destruction of TANF and the rest of the neo-NAZI inhmanity of the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996."
The academic reading of Kuto'yis never seemed correct to me, it misses the material culture, the distribution of backfat and hunger, of greed as the only real monster, culminating in the man-eater, and the beauty of inspiring the not-yet-dead trapped inside the man-eater to get up and perform the ghost dance and singing the ghost song and being the very stone knife to cut the Aisino'okoki's heart. It also misses who's blood Kuto'yis is a mere clot of. It always sweeps me up -- more than the Naapi cycle, or the other great stories -- it is in the present.
Armed monsters who eat human flesh are the order of the day, every day. Not slapping staff. Not for cultural heros.
Comments
The academic reading of Kuto'yis never seemed correct to me, it misses the material culture, the distribution of backfat and hunger, of greed as the only real monster, culminating in the man-eater
I've felt the same about the dances performed during Hamatsa society potlatches. I haven't seen any writing making the same explicit parallels between, say, Baxwbakwalanuxwsiwe and modern greed as the Cannibal-at-the-North-End-of-the-World.
Posted by: spark | February 10, 2007 01:56 AM