Simon Ortiz and Buffy Sainte-Marie Explain It All For You

Speaking at ASU Heard Museum October, 2013

"No, No Keshagesh: You Can't Do That No More"

Buffy Sainte-Marie at Skagan Festival in Denmark, July 2, 2011

"Keshagesh" is a Cree(?) [yes, it's Cree, per Buffy her own self]  word which Buffy roughly translates to "greedy guts," the description of a little one (she calls it a puppy) who eats his own share and then wants everybody else's. An apt description of capitalism in all its aspects, a system run by mindless greed. Mindlessness is the key to understanding the nature of greed. When the puppy grows up, he is supposed to set aside his youthful mindlessness and behave with apparent thoughtfulness, wisdom and probity. Of course, it doesn't always work out that way. Sometimes the puppy never grows in wisdom, never has a thought but for having more, never gains enough insight for measured action. We all know that kind of adult dog.

The enduring Crisis of Capitalism has been upon us for what seems like forever now. The financial crash of 2008, preceded by varying forms of economic meltdown, has forced millions upon millions of Americans into poverty. The United States boasts the highest poverty rate in generations (and it is almost a boast, for this huge increase in poverty is due to deliberate policies). Millions have lost their employment, millions have been forced out of their homes. This is an ongoing situation. Literally nothing has been done at the governmental level to stop or reverse the impoverishment of Americans. Instead, policies have been adopted which ensure and increase the further impoverishment of Americans while a handful of greedy guts at the top of the economic pyramid have continued to flourish, to flourish at levels and in ways they never imagined were possible.

The wholesale impoverishment of Americans has had the effect of slowing, and in some respects reversing, the consumer economy on which the entire economic system was once dependent
 -- this despite the statistics that show continuing growth in income and consumption, statistics that could only be true if the small segment of Americans who are flourishing financially are somehow spending wildly which most of them aren't. For all intents and purposes, they're hoarding cash so exactly where the increases in income and consumption are coming from is something of a mystery.

For many decades now, Americans have been warned that they are overconsuming, and if they keep it up, they will consume the planet and ensure their own extinction. This idea of consuming "everything" has been around for centuries, and it has had a powerful restraining influence on some aspects of American mindlessness and greed, though obviously not all.

At one time, the mindless consumption of natural resources was incessantly warned against. The forests were vanishing, wildlife was going extinct ("like the buffalo"), pollution was fouling the waters, the seas were being emptied of fish, on and on, while starvation was stalking the suffering peoples of Africa. All of which was true enough, and people's habits changed. The rapine that had previously characterized resource extraction was mitigated in North America (while it massively expanded in South America and elsewhere) and the rate of consumption by Americans stabilized and even declined in some respects, while more and better food crops enabled the nearly complete eradication of famine -- at least for a while.

Americans learned to make do with less; their houses and cars got smaller (for a while), rising petroleum consumption was reduced, sustainable forests became more commonplace, more and more people were being fed better food from fewer and fewer farms and so forth. At the time (early 70's) the specter of the future was "Global Cooling" -- a new Ice Age.

Suddenly, that prediction was set aside, replaced with "Global Warming" due to increasing levels of atmospheric C02 caused by human activity, primarily the incessant burning of ever more fossil fuels and the raising of ever more billions of livestock animals. The devil's in the methane, you know.

As the developing world developed, the previously charming or sometimes threatening subsistence economies were replaced with more or less carbon copies of the American consumption economy,   requiring ever more resource extraction to sustain.

The endless greed and growth spiral was seemingly unbreakable.

Until the last few years as Americans have become more and more impoverished, all sorts of lifestyle changes have ensued but they don't seem to be statistically significant as yet. As more and more Americans have become impoverished, the prices they pay for basic foods and retail goods and services have increased, in some cases by double or triple what the same products and services cost before the crash.

This means that most people are paying more for less. And that may be the major source of the statistical growth in consumption we've seen during the course of the Endless Recession.

As Americans become less well off, the environmental strain of supporting the excessive lavishness of the American lifestyle is mitigated. From an environmental perspective, many Americans -- perhaps against their will, but by necessity -- are living ever lighter on the land, and it's hard to say that's a bad thing.

On the other hand, millions of Americans have seen their futures and those of their progeny stolen from them. Living with less material goods is one thing. Most people can adapt to that without too much problem. The problem is that people don't see a future for themselves or their offspring under current conditions, and that means that getting by with less has no functional purpose, especially not while some are living so high on the hog, it beggars belief and staggers the imagination.

I've referred in the past to the idea of full employment and enforced savings as the surest way out of an economic depression and pointed to the experience of WWII as an example. War is by no means the only way to accomplish that end, and it is not a desirable means in any case. No, given the global challenges of climate change and massive environmental degradation, along with the ever more fraughtful deterioration of the nation's infrastructure, it should be a straightforward matter for the public sector to put everyone to work "rebuilding the world" for as long as it takes to correct as much as we can of what's gone, but there is no political will to do it (well, outside of China.)

Yet it could be started tomorrow, and within literally months, and few of them, the Endless Recession would be over. And nothing like it need ever come back.

There is, of course, no political will to do any such thing, however.

So the American People are mired in a downward spiral from which there appears to be no escape.

"Keshagesh" will continue to eat his own share and everyone else's until there is nothing left for anyone, including "Greedy Guts."

And then what?

"She Rocks Harder..."

Undated photo of Buffy Sainte-Marie from her MySpace page

Saw Buffy Sainte-Marie at the KiMo in Albuquerque August 13, 2012.

"She rocks harder at 70 than she ever did..." is how she was introduced, and it is no exaggeration. She's been on tour for her latest CD, "Running for the Drum," released in 2008 or 2009 (not sure, views differ) since 2010, and her show in Albuquerque last night was a reprise of her "¡Globalquerque!" appearance last year at New Mexico's premiere World Music festival. Her band consists of members of the award-winning Canadian Indigenous rock band Gathering of Flies.

They call much of the music on "Running for the Drum," Buffy's most recent CD, Pow Wow Rock. Compared to what she was doing Back In the Day, it's a big step, and I was wondering last night when she started doing the "Indun Stuff." There was nothing like this before, at least not when I was more attuned to the whole music scene in which Buffy's genre was rather rigidly categorized as Folk. Not Folk Rock. Folk.

And quirky Folk at that. There wasn't anything quite like it in those days, but there was. She was a unique talent, and yet her music seemed always familiar somehow. Her catalogue of folk hits and award-winning commercial-movie type music is extensive.

Most Anglos are never exposed to the Pow Wow culture that is so appreciated among Indians, they never hear Indian music -- either the traditional style or the contemporary -- and something like Pow Wow Rock can come as a real surprise, especially when presented by someone with such an extensive repertoire in completely different genres.

"She rocks harder...than she ever did." See for yourself.

The music on her "Running for the Drums" CD is tame compared to her live show, in part because her band of Indians from Winnepeg is so strong, and they don't appear to be part of her CD. She herself is no slacker, but her band, members of Gathering of Flies, are the musical driving force, and that is in some measure due to drummer Mike Bruyere ("Ojibway, Ojibway, Ojibway" as she says when introducing him) -- a big measure of the driving force though he himself is rather diminutive.

The drum is the heartbeat of the Earth and is the central factor of Indian music. Bruyere manages to impart the spirit of that heartbeat while rocking as hard as anyone onstage if not harder.

The audience, of course, was made up largely of geezers and coots like me. One fellow said to me after the show that it was one of the first times in a long time he'd been in a room -- as he put it -- with so many of his contemporaries "in time and in space." Indeed.

I was in the front row so it was sometimes difficult to get a bead on the rest of the audience, but the "room" appeared full, the audience was probably seventy percent my age or older, not a few of them with their canes and walkers and wheel chairs, and ever so many of them with stories to tell of forty years ago -- or whenever -- and they last saw Buffy or bought her album, or in my case, were in a movie that featured Buffy's music heavily in the sound track. "Forty years ago" figured heavily in the night's festivities, and yet in some ways, many of us were allowed to forget, or if not forget, at least allowed put in perspective the vision of "forty years ago" -- and maybe let go.

For many of my generation, of course, that's not going to happen. But Buffy has largely moved on -- and at the same time stayed true to yesteryear.

When I watched the DVD that came with "Running for the Drum" this morning, it occurred to me how little I really knew about her. I had no idea she'd been adopted out of the Cree Reserve, she didn't actually know when she was born (1940, 41, something like that). Her (adoptive) mother was part Micmac but she was not raised among her people or in Indian culture. Her awareness grew with time. She was raised White. Well, sort of. She was "tan in a sea of white" and yet there was always something drawing her to Native Peoples from her earliest days, and at the same time offering her so many of the advantages and inducements that accompany being White in North America. (No matter what else she is, she is very Canadian!)

And I realized how she came to do Indian music, or at least her version of it, and why it has taken her so long to get there. The only way I can put it is this: unless it comes naturally, you can't very well do it at all, and she had to live long enough for it to come naturally to her before she could do it. Getting to that point was a process that took time and belief and courage.

The Pow Wow rock segments of the show were the ones that got these old geezers in the audience on their feet clapping and stomping and shouting, and there were enough Indians in the audience that they could accompany the music from the stage with their own calls and chants in a kind of circle of sound and life that is so much a part of the pow wow. It was a thrill to see it and hear it happening spontaneously the way it should be.

It's not everyday something like this happens.

Buffy Sainte-Marie is a legend -- a very self-aware legend, let it be said -- but she isn't stuck in The Back Then, rehashing her Old Hits one or two more times before she dies. Oh no, she's well beyond that.

And for that, I'm grateful. She was also very pleasant for a PhD! (/s)