Early this fall (or late this past summer), when I found out my class of schoolchildren was to have a Founding Fathers celebration, I knew I needed to make a mop cap (some people also call them mob caps) so I could dress as a colonial woman.
I already owned a number of full skirts, and I’d purchased a corset at the recent Fantasy Faire that could be adapted to appear 17th- or 18th-century.
I found this easy sewing pattern at Patti’s Place (thanks, Patti!) by searching on Pinterest, my one-stop shop for all things artistic, creative anachronistic, self-sufficient, and conspiratorial. The pattern was so simple I could sew it by hand, which was good because I don’t own a working sewing machine.
I’m delighted with how it turned out. It can be worn with any hairstyle. If you wear the hair up, it looks rather Martha Washington. If you wear the hair in braids, or loose, underneath it, you’re looking more Madame Defarge. I think you all know where my loyalties lie.
I created a mop cap craft for the little girls in my class based upon this pattern, and they looked darling. I’ll post pictures of my costume from the event if I ever get ahold of them. You need a tight-fitting bodice, a full skirt, ruffled cuffs at the elbows, and a shawl tied low on the shoulders to complete the look.
My costume wardrobe now includes 10,000 B.C., 1550 A.D. and 1776 A.D. There’s a rather large gap in there. I’ll update you further as the occasion arises.
The following account has been brought to my attention three times in the last forty-eight hours, so I guess I’d better pay attention.
The Gadarene region was Greek, not Jewish, in culture. There were a lot of pigs. There was a lot of paganism. People understood power. They knew there were things out there beyond their control or ken.
Jesus and his disciples landed on these shores in their fishing boat. I am not sure why they made this decision. It’s possible that they were blown there by the recent storm and needed to touch land and regroup.
Almost as soon as they disembarked (“immediately,” Peter says, telling the tale to John Mark), they encounter the scariest sight any of them have ever seen: the town demoniac.
Peter gives us some background, which apparently was well-known to the people in area. This man “had an unclean spirit.” The local people had tried to “tame him,” but they couldn’t do it. With paranormal strength, he would break through any chains put on him. (Demons are quite reckless with the bodies of their human hosts.) He had it so bad that he couldn’t live around people. But he didn’t go far. Night and day, they could hear him screaming in the hills that surrounded the town and in the graveyard, his home base. He was apparently naked (because later, he is “clothed”), and he would cut himself with stones.
It breaks the imagination, what this man must have suffered.
The demons for some reason were attracted to the sight of Jesus stepping on their shores. The man runs up to Jesus, falls on his knees, and screams, “Why can’t you leave me alone, son of the most high God? Swear to God that you won’t torture me!”
Jesus, the only sane person in this story, asks a simple, human question. “What’s your name?”
He was asking the man, but the demons answer: “Legion, for we are many.” (This would later prove to be really really true.)
Jesus, unfazed, tells the demons to come out of the man. And they begin to bargain. I’m not sure why they thought this was possible. Was it because they were gods in their own country? Was it because there were so many of them? At any rate, rather than be banished from that region, the demons get Jesus to agree that they can go into a nearby herd of two thousand pigs.
There were enough of them to possess the entire herd.
The pigs, unable to handle what this poor man had been going through, panicked and “ran violently down a steep place into the sea” and drowned.
The swineherds, understandably horrified, went for help. By the time the people of the region had been summoned from their homes and fields and made their way to the beach, the formerly demon-possessed man was “sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind.” Jesus, still bringing the sanity and relief, had apparently rustled up clothing for him from somewhere. (One of His or His disciplines’ spare cloaks, perhaps, from the boat?) This man’s body no doubt still bore the scars of the harrowing life he had been leading. He was probably still fragile. Did he even remember the months or years he had lost to demon possession? We don’t know. But he was near Jesus.
The Gadarene people were freaked out. There were a bunch of dead pigs washing up on the beach. They were confronted with the disorienting sight of the madman’s face now looking sane. And, though they might not have known exactly what Jesus was, He clearly represented a dangerous power. They pleaded with Him to leave their region.
The delivered man, for obvious reasons, wanted to go with Jesus. But Jesus told him to go back and “tell your friends the great things the Lord has done for you.” Perhaps, during the time it took the swineherds to bring the townspeople, Jesus had been interviewing the man, finding out about relationships he had before disaster befell him fully. And this man was not a Jew, and would find it difficult to live on the west side of the sea. Going back to his old life might be hard, but going anywhere else would be a lot harder. He followed Jesus’ instructions.
This story would have been a very different horror story had Jesus not been present.
Explanation: On Thursday night, we attended a community dance where we danced the Jitterbug, the Foxtrot, a polka and the Virginia Reel. By Saturday morning, we found ourselves standing at the edge of a field, praying over the grave of my son’s pet rabbit who had escaped his hutch and mysteriously perished without a mark on him.
For those in the back seats, Gobekli Tepe is an archaeological site in Turkey that I love for many reasons. It clearly partakes of the ancient megalithic culture that seems to have been worldwide (why? and how???). It has been dated to about 9000 B.C., which we must take with the usual grain of salt, but according to the people dating it, this was before the discovery of agriculture, the wheel, etc. Yet it employs circles, equilateral triangles, and other such evidence of having been built by mathematically capable people. For those new to Out of Babel Books, we frequently post about how wrong conventional archaeology appears to be about when and how civilization arose among human beings. If you click through to this article, you will see them struggling with that a bit.
The article also has some entertaining turns of phrase, for example: “In the end, searching for answers concerning motives and reasons from such an ancient time involves a great deal of speculation, since we cannot go back in time and probe the perpetrators.” Yes, that does sound like an unpleasant process for everyone involved.
The main reason I’ve included this link is the new-to-me information that Gobekli Tepe means “potbelly hill,” which I find charming. And it turns out the hill had a “belly button,” which was actually a sign that the hill was not natural, but had this temple buried below. Which I find creepy, like the whole site is creepy.
Besides “have we been completely wrong about the history of agriculture?,” the other question this article raises is “Why was Gobekli Tepe apparently deliberately buried?”
Why does one bury a thing? Particularly, why does one bury a statue, an idol, a god?
While acknowledging that we don’t know, the article references other instances of “de-sacralizing,” such as when an altar is no longer in use and we don’t want to pose a danger to anyone who might blunder upon it. They also reference the defaced and buried giant heads found in the Olmec region. If a statue is defaced, such as those heads are, we can reasonably guess that it, or its people, got conquered or overthrown by someone else, who wanted to humiliate the statue and rob it of its power. There are cases in the Old Testament where a king or someone else leading a reform not only defaces the pagan altars but defiles them (e.g., turning them into public toilets), so that no more honor may go to that god or goddess.
I don’t know whether the large stones at Gobekli Tepe were defaced. In every photograph I’ve seen of them, they appear to be not only intact, but still standing, as if they were buried so as to preserve them. But it’s possible that the archaeologists are the ones who set them upright again. Still, it’s customary when destroying an enemy’s temple to “leave no stone upon another.” So, unless a lot more reconstruction than I realized has been done under Potbelly Hill, I’m thinking the temple was buried for some other reason. I’m with the authors of the article on this one: We can’t tell what went down, but we can infer that it was probably not good.
You may notice that I have a large tag in my tag cloud called Native Americana. I’ve always been a sucker for American Indians. The second two books in my trilogy are a speculative exploration of what their distant ancestor’s lives might have been like.
This subject comes up every year because of the efforts to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day. I’m not in favor of this, but I do love all things American Indian. (Traditional things, that is. I’m not a fan of the cultural disintegration brought about by enforced socialism on the rez. For more on this, see the book review below.) Anyway, this is the time of year when I find myself annoyed yet again by Matt Walsh.
Walsh has done yeoman’s work fighting the forces of evil in our culture, but he just doesn’t know very much about American Indians. He’ll portray pre-conquest America as an extremely backwards place, full of “stone-age” people, who “hadn’t even invented the wheel.” This annoys me. There actually had been civilizations in the Americas (howbeit, without wheels), including astronomically aligned earthworks and pyramids, even in North America. The Americas suffered a population collapse about a hundred years before Columbus arrived, as documented by Nathaniel Jeansen of Answers in Genesis and in his book Traced. So, what the Europeans found were the scattered remains of civilizations. (Except Cortez. He found the real thing, and it was terrible to behold.)
Now granted, the American civilizations had not yet been Christianized, so they resembled Ancient Near Eastern pagan theo-states rather than European medieval kingdoms. It was probably this, in fact, that gave the Europeans the intellectual edge and enabled them to conquer the continents. Other things being equal, paganism tends to make people more passive. Fatalism, you know.
So Walsh is right that the Europeans conquered the Americans fair and square, as it were. Just like everywhere else throughout history. Now, the conquerors celebrating and romanticizing those they have conquered is a tradition that goes way back. See Homer writing sympathetically about the Trojans. See the beautiful Roman statue, The Dying Gaul. See the Romans commemorating the abduction of the Sabine women, but also celebrating Romulus and Remus, whose story is enough to curl you hair. So I am all for celebrating indigenous peoples (because I love ’em), but also Columbus (because there is no call to demonize your own culture).
That said, let’s not let sympathy turn into damaging infantilization. That’s what the United States government has done with the American Indians, as documented in the book below.
Book Review: The New Trail of Tears by Naomi Schaefer Riley
Life is very bad on our American Indian reservations.
People on the reservations experience rates of corruption, unemployment, depression, drug addiction, sexual assault and child abuse that are as high or higher than any other place in the nation.
But why?
Those with overly simplistic views of American Indians tend to oversimplify in one of two ways: your average American Indian is seen either as Wise Noble Victim, or Worthless Lazy Drunk. My instincts have always put me in the Wise Noble Victim camp, but I recognize that neither of these oversimplifications explains conditions on the rez. American Indians are people, which means they are sinful but not worthless. As Schaefer Riley puts it, “Indians, just like all people, respond to the economic incentives and political conditions around them” (page 178).
I have occasionally spoken with people who seem to resent all that American Indians receive from the government. Tribal governments are “sovereign.” Tribes have the right to operate casinos on their land (in most states no one else can), and in many cases, tribal governments or even individuals receive direct payments of federal dollars. None of this is false, but what has been the effect of it? It has not led to a cushy life for tribe members; quite the opposite.
The Incentives
Here’s my quick summary of the “economic incentives and political conditions” created by the way the federal government has handled the tribes:
Law enforcement on the rez is a nightmare. Since Indians are not considered as being under the jurisdiction of the state in which they live, if there is a serious crime, it is considered a federal crime, and you could have three or four agencies involved. “He became especially concerned ‘with the lack of coordination between the tribal police and the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the FBI and the Justice Department.'” (page 164) Often, other law enforcement agencies defer to the tribal police, who often, because of nepotism, don’t prosecute. This creates a lawless situation on the rez, with high crime. It gives victims the impression that nothing will be done.
It is difficult for Indians to own land; or, if they happen to own some, to develop or sell it. Most land is not individually owned, but belongs to the tribe. A combination of tribal politics, environmental concerns, and federal red tape tends to block any attempts at development. This means that it is very hard to create or find jobs on the reservation … except jobs in tribal government.
While casinos provide some jobs, the linking of the casinos with tribal membership has introduced all kinds of corruption. Some tribal governments run their casinos essentially as cartels. The effect is that tribal membership is “commodified.” A common political move against a rival would be to get them declared no longer a member of the tribe.
Schools on the rez tend to be as bad as the worst inner-city schools. Schaefer Riley profiles a few schools that have bucked this trend, at least for a few years. One is a Catholic school. There are also Teach for American volunteers who are very motivated to give Indian kids a better education. But these people are usually met with mistrust and actively undermined or driven out because they are outsiders and because of the bad experiences that the older generation had with residential schools trying to forcibly assimilate them.
While it is important for Indian kids to learn about their traditional language and culture, “this is not a good first step.” Schaefer Riley points out that those tribes that have done the most to preserve their language and culture are those that have done the best economically. When no longer just struggling to survive, they use the money and the energy they now have to create museums and cultural centers.
In short, massive amounts of government money and regulations have had the same effects on the Indian reservations that they always have elsewhere. The red tape is at least tripled compared to the red tape faced by other Americans, which pretty much brings any kind of enterprise to a grinding halt. The infusion of government money through the tribal government incentivizes corruption. The lack of private property and actual employment makes people depressed. The white guilt (and the red tape) have made a lost cause of law enforcement.
Possible Solutions
Schaefer Riley ends with a call for American Indians to be treated like all other American citizens. She points out that American Indians have had very high rates of serving in the military.
Indeed, despite centuries of broken promises from the federal government, despite the bitterness that often pervades Indian communities, and despite years of being told by their own leaders and by Washington’s that they must remain a people apart, American Indians largely see themselves as Americans.
pp. 175 – 176
There has to be a way to ensure that Indian crime victims have the same rights under law as other crime victims … that Indians can own land and start businesses as individuals, not just as members of the tribe … that Indian families have access to a choice of schools that will prepare their kids to succeed. It has been suggested that the larger reservations be made into their own states. Then the people who live there would be considered full citizens who happen to reside in that state. This might not be feasible politically (although I think it would be really cool), but there are a few bands in Canada who are trying to get their tribal lands incorporated as cities. This would allow them to do development that they can’t do now, and the tribal leaders would be like city governments. Failing all this, a good step would be to drastically reform (or, ideally, eliminate) the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is known for being the one of the most corrupt and inefficient government agencies in a field where the competition is stiff.
I sincerely hope that Schaefer Riley’s book catalyzes a move in this direction. It should, of course, be read by anyone with the slightest interest in American Indians’ living conditions in these modern times. But it should also be read by anyone who is concerned about the effect of government micromanaging of citizens’ lives.
A Cautionary Tale
I see at least three ways in which the federal government’s treatment of Indians serves as a sample of what it would like to do with all citizens:
It’s coming from good – or at least utopian – intentions. In the case of the Indians, many people feel that the government owes them lots and lots of money and special rights because of the ways that same government mistreated them in the past. (Turns out, the money and “rights” are a new kind of mistreatment.) There is also an assumption that less development is better, because we don’t want to impact the environment at all. In the same way, there is a strong movement to put all citizens in the same position: “You will own nothing, and you will be happy.” Putting the most charitable interpretation on it, the idealists believe that this would bring about a utopia in which everyone has a high (but more importantly, “equal”) standard of living … there is no family loyalty or private property to cause conflicts … and everyone’s lifestyle is perfectly “green.”
It features forced assimilation. Schaefer Riley points out that Indians are in fact assimilating culturally to the United States, but forced assimilation is a very different story. A few generations ago, Indian children were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools where they were not allowed to speak their own language. This idea that, if the parents don’t share the government’s value system, the government has a right to separate children from their parents and re-educate them, has not died away. The idealists have not yet gained enough power to practice forced assimilation on all American children, but they are trying.
It is collectivist. The degree to which Indians have been denied private property and individual initiative is the exact degree to which they have been brought to poverty and despair. In their case, this has been brought about partly from a sort of Rousseauian “noble-savage” myth about the way the Indians lived before Columbus (spoiler: they weren’t collectivists then either). In the case of other Americans, there has been an attempt to demonize private property, small business, and intact families as the problem with humanity. In fact, these things are key to human flourishing. Sin certainly shows up in them, but that is because it is present in human nature and shows up in whatever humans do.
Out of Babel Books 