23 August 2004: Where the Buffalo Roam

I've been busy.

Thursday was the first day of the Fall semester. Early in the morning I went to my Interpersonal Communications Skills class, which looks like it will be interesting and reasonably enjoyable. In the afternoon, I went to my Intro to Biology class, which looks like it will be extremely demanding and time-consuming. Today, I'll be going to the first session of my Native American History & Culture class. It's the heaviest courseload I've yet taken on, and given that I'll be doing it all concurrently with my usual aikido teaching and yoga regimen, and also concurrently with the upcoming "Song as Vehicle" Paratheatrical Ritual Lab, which starts in about three weeks and ends two days after my last final exam, I expect that for the rest of this year I won't be producing more than a couple of journal entries a month, and I probably won't be doing much socializing, sleeping, or anything else, either.

I bought all my textbooks a couple of weeks ago, and decided to get a head start on them. I have very little ability to retain information when it's presented as dry expository textbook writing, so it never does me much good to read ahead in standard textbooks. But the books for the Native American History & Culture class aren't standard textbooks, they're actual history books, which means they tend more toward narrative than dry exposition. I retain information very well when it's presented in narrative form. So I figured that the most efficient way to get a head start on the semester was to dive right into those Native American History books, and that's just what I did. In the past two weeks, I've read just over 900 pages on Native American History. Some of it is downright fascinating, and nearly all of it is horribly tragic, and the recurring motifs are so consistent over five centuries of history that it’s pretty well summed up by this great quote from Native American rights activist Vine Deloria Junior:

“Indian Affairs is comparable to a Grade B movie. You can go to sleep and miss a long sequence of action, but every time you look at the screen it’s the same group of guys chasing the other guys around the same rock.”

The same motifs that recur throughout post-Columbian Native American history have been cropping up everywhere I look, in that “God is showing me something” kind of way. For instance, in the past two weeks I’ve ended up seeing three widely diverse movies that all involve the theme of Dispossessed Peoples: Farenheit 9/11, Star Trek: Insurrection, and Casablanca (the last being the only one of the three that I’d seen before). And this past weekend I began reading Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy aloud to Dragon Lady (who’s never read it before), not remembering, until I began reading it, that it opens with the same theme: the little guy fighting to save his home from the bulldozers.

My intuition tells me that the Embodied Voice lab will also involve, for me, some themes of dispossession – which makes sense, since there’s probably going to be a good deal of work around ancestral themes, and dispossession is definitely a major ancestral theme for me (and one that my father, never one to miss out on a good coincidence chain, obliquely referred to in the first paragraph of his journal entry for this past Thursday).

Sometime during the days that I was reading about the mass extermination of the great buffalo herds, Dragon Lady and I, as part of our celebration of our second anniversary as a couple, spent a day romping around San Francisco, and we passed by the little buffalo preserve in Golden Gate Park (it’s the preserve that’s little; the buffalo themselves are huge).

The last time I stumbled upon this area of the park was almost a decade ago, during Ace’s first visit to the Bay Area, when he and I hiked through the park on our quest to touch the waters of the Pacific Ocean. Ace had his camera with him, and he took several shots of the buffalo. When the photos were developed, the buffalo were invisible. The photos clearly showed the exact spots where various buffalo had been standing, and the tree stumps that the buffalo had been scratching themselves against the entire time, but no buffalo. It was the darndest thing.

Ace sent me copies of the photos, complete with captions like: “California’s new secret weapon: the amazing Stealth Bison.” We were utterly baffled, and eventually concluded that in the moment the photos were snapped, the buffalo had all managed to dive behind the tree stumps.

This time around, I had my digital camera with me, and resolved to set matters to right. Knowing how sneaky these buffalo were, I did some sneaking myself, and managed to get really, really close to them and catch them by surprise before they could all crowd themselves behind those stumps.

So here they are, Ace: the amazing Stealth Bison, captured on film at last. We are vindicated! No longer shall they laugh at us and call us mad!

Well, actually, I’m fairly certain that they’ll always laugh at us and call us mad... but now we can laugh back, and triumphantly brandish our bison at them.

The following day, Dragon Lady and I drove up to the North Bay to visit some giant redwoods, which were dignified and old and magnificent, and which were, alas, also being visited by great mobs of chattering tourists, whose behavior disgusted me and Dragon Lady and left us wishing that the redwoods would wake up and restore the silence by busting out some Entish Kung-Fu moves.

That night, I had what proved to be the first in a series of still-recurring dreams, in which the buffalo reappear in America en masse and form an alliance with the trees. Under the terms of the alliance, the trees agree to become the buffaloes’ legs. With gigantic trees for legs, the buffalo, now hundreds of feet tall, roam the country with enormous strides, unstoppable, taking back their land.