Mourning, and Giving Thanks
Plus Two Items that Caught My Eye
Stewart
The day before Thanksgiving, I buried Stewart. He had been a wonderful, loyal, and loving companion for nearly 24 years here at Thyme Hill.
He was born on January 3, 1994, and came to me on June 4, 1999. Since that time, we have taken care of each other.
On this coming January 1st he would have been 30 (Thoroughbred system) and on January 3rd, by human counting, 29 years old.
In this season of Giving Thanks, I am so very grateful for all the magical times we had together over the years, and that he was an important part of my life for so long.
I have written extensively about Stewart in the past, and I will likely write a fuller tribute when I can collect my thoughts and feelings.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to know more about him (and us), here is one story I told: http://www.mfw.us/blog/2017/10/09/a-5-mile-ride-through-the-alford-valley/
I also gave some information about him 10 years ago, in this post: http://www.mfw.us/blog/2013/11/04/stewarts-background/ which includes a link to his racing credentials (he won two races in his short career).
Other Things to Share
I offer comments on two recent articles:
David Treuer’s review of Pekka Hämäläinen’s new book, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America1
Attu’s Lost Village in the American Indian magazine2
Book Review
David Treuer is a professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is the author of several books and articles. His most recent book is The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present. In that book, he picks up the story told in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown, which covers the period 1860 to 1890.
In his New Yorker essay3, Treuer gives his rationale for writing The Heartbeat :
I readily accepted the version of history promoted by Brown’s book: that Native American history was a litany of abuses (disease, slavery, warfare, dispossession, forced removal, the near-extermination of the American bison, land grabs, forced assimilation) that had erased our way of life. And yet my culture and civilization didn’t feel gone. When I looked westward and back in time, I couldn’t help think that Brown’s historical record was incomplete—that the announcement of our collective death was rather premature.
He gives Hämäläinen’s new book (Indigenous Continent) a mixed review, starting on a positive note:
Pekka Hämäläinen’s “Indigenous Continent” (Liveright) boldly sets out a counternarrative. … Instead of a foreordained story of decline and victimization, Hämäläinen wants us to see a parade of contingencies, with Native nations regularly giving as good as they got, or even better. The result, he promises, will be a North American history recentered on Native people and their own “overwhelming and persisting” power.
Treuer quickly makes it clear that he believes Hämäläinen has gone too far. He advocates for a middle ground (which is, presumably, a nod to his own book), and he points out some other problems with Hämäläinen’s narrative. He concludes, for example, that the focus is on just a portion of North America.
What we get is less an “Indigenous continent” than a Native United States.
Treuer’s essay is worth reading in its own right; it is an interesting commentary on the book, from a different point of view.
There were, for me, at least a couple of puzzling aspects of the review: Treuer used the label “Iroquois” instead of the more widely-used name “Haudenosaunee” — perhaps that is what was used in the book.
Also, he appears to repeat some misinformation found in the book when he talks about the demise of Cahokia.
As temperatures dropped during the Little Ice Age, in the fourteenth century, Hämäläinen writes, “everything had to be smaller.” Cahokia’s society fractured into more mobile, less hierarchical groups, with hunting replacing farming as the dominant mode of living, and something similar happened in other dense Mississippian settlements. “Across the eastern half of the continent, people seem to have rejected the domineering priestly class for more collective and egalitarian social arrangements,” he concludes.
The description of the breakup is shared by (and was perhaps taken from) the 2021 book The Dawn of Everything4. The cause, however, could not have been the Little Ice Age, since that did not occur until the sixteenth century (and, in turn, was caused by the European diseases that led to the depopulation of the Americas). It may be that Cahokia's end came as the result of self-inflicted environmental disasters, or perhaps it was that the population dispersed for other reasons, such as the description just given of a lack of tolerance for top-down governance.
All in all, Treuer presents an engaging discussion of the book’s issues. If this topic is of interest, you would do well to read his review to help you decide whether to read the book.
ATTU
The article on Attu’s Lost Village caught my attention, partly because it’s an interesting story about which I knew very little, but mostly because of its association with my late friend Gene, who passed away last year, at the age of 95.
Gene Talbot came to Stockbridge (where I spent the first 17 years of my life) in the early 1950’s. He was an up and coming psychologist, but his career had hit a dead end in California, when he refused to sign the McCarthy-era loyalty oath. Gene was an admirer of Erik Erikson, whose career had come up against the same roadblock.
When Gene learned that Erikson had accepted a position at the Austen Riggs Center5 in Stockbridge, a psychiatric hospital (as it was called in those days — it is now known as a mental health treatment center), he applied for, and secured, a job there as well.
Here is a short summary of Gene’s storied career, taken from a 2009 article in the Berkshire Eagle6
Talbot, originally from the Bronx, and his wife, Shirley, have been living in Stockbridge since 1954.
After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Talbot earned his degrees in psychology, master's through doctorate, at UCLA. During the McCarthy era in 1950, Talbot was fired from his teaching position at UCLA for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. Soon after, a friend and colleague got him to join the Austen Riggs Center, the residential psychotherapeutic treatment center in Stockbridge.
In 1969, Talbot left Austen Riggs to be Williams College's director of psychological counseling services, and later helped launch a program of free psychological services for Stockbridge residents.
In addition, Talbot found the time to be active in the Laurel Hill Association, the Stockbridge Democratic Town Committee, the Conservation Committee, the Stockbridge Regional School Planning Committee, the Peter Pan Nursery School and group therapy sessions at the Berkshire County House of Corrections.
Gene was about ten years younger than my parents, and almost exactly twenty years older than I. The oldest of his offspring, JoAnn, was the same age as the younger of my two brothers. In a small town, one gets to know, or know of, just about everyone else who lives there. I knew of Gene, but never had any direct contact with him until a little more than eight years ago, when a mutual friend, Fred Panitz, asked me to join their weekly poker game.
In the interval since then, I spent a lot of time with Gene. Not just at the poker table; also during our frequent rides together to and from the games, and I would often stop by his house for a cup of coffee and long conversations. We became good friends.
One time, I stopped to pick him up for a ride to the poker game, and he came out of the house wearing a new baseball cap. The front of the hat was emblazoned with the capital letters “ATTU” — I was mystified. Gene had told me of his service in the Navy during World War II, before I was born, so he was not yet 20. But I didn’t know that Attu was the name of the ship to which he was assigned. It was an escort carrier7, and its final mission was aborted when the Japanese surrendered.
Naturally, once we arrived at the game, the other players wanted to know the meaning of the letters on the hat. So we began to call Gene “The Admiral” — reading the article about the island itself evoked many fond memories of my times with Gene.