HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW ?

=| Barren red sandstone hills

... of the Flaming Mountains mark the edge of the greater Tian Shan Mountain range near the northern rim of the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang, the Uighar Autonomous Region of western China. Two decades ago, east of the city of Turpan indigenous farmers unearthed an ancient boneyard. It has since revealed more than 2500 Gushi-culture tombs, among them one of a Shaman. It contained medicine bundles, including a leather bag within which was a wooden bowl holding a 789-gram pack of vegetative matter assumed to be coriander. It subsequently proved to be cannabis, and a chemical profile clearly established that it had been psychoactive. Radiocarbon dating placed its age at 2700bp. Alas, the seed material did not germinate.

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* Russo, et al. "Phytochemical and Genetic Analyses of Ancient Cannabis from Central Asia." 59 Journal of Experimental Botany 15 (2008) at 4171-4182.
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The age of such herbal cannabis, and its apparent use as a psychoactive / medicinal agent does not surprise the Chumash Ethnobotanist. "Uh huh," he nods. "Yup." The Silence is his. He can steer the discourse Upstream through his own People's ethnobotanic traditions or the Lakota, among who he has also lived, or Downstream through the mechanics of birthing his own native Farmacy and shepherding it through a DEA siege.

Instead he launches on the Value of creating Social Capital, exemplified by what has happened in California over the last decade. "These people are Heroes!" He's talking about Dennis Peron and Ed Rosenthal, among others. Many others. "They're moral exemplars, inspired by and functionally equivalent to Dr. King. What Dennis did with his motor scooters and Ed is doing with his refusal to take the path of Least Resistance .... " I'm thinking of Bob Randall and Mae Nutt.

On the low table beside where I sleep is a wood tray for preparing my medications, and upon it several small engraved glass disks. words like RISK and COURAGE and CREATE ...

Ethnobotanist's riff expands on Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone" argument that Social Networks have Value, and that Social Contacts can improve Productivity of both individuals and groups. Seamlessly stitching this to Richard Florida's 'creative classes' & 'cool cities' formulations, followed by a furious upstream digression thru Pierre Bourdieu and obligatory offerings of Vine DeLoria, both coming & going, before settling into a carefully composed plea for Localized, Green economies of Scale and Purpose and for the appropriate roles of Bands and Individuals within their own socio-political nets, it's quite a presentation for a backyard BBQ. This isn't the kind of stuff you hear from a buncha guys wearing Bears shirts ...

He is wearing an AIM shirt, and a floppy black hat with discrete banding. His dark hair flows, and the tattoo on his chin indicates his Chumash nationality, if not his Doctorate. I tap some 'shake' from a Zuni ceremonial flask and roll a tight little offering, wondering about the concentric circles of my life, of any life, well led ... how Old Truth & New Understanding are so often the same. This man is a Friend. We share similar professional backgrounds and political engagements. I know his wife, his sons (some of them), his dogs, his history (some of it).

Tis a Long Strange Trip indeed, and I suspect entering the most interesting of its Time.

Of his Chumash Ways (and of the Paiute and Dine whose Lands I also find myself moving), I Know Nothing. What I do know is that the more familiar Anishinaabeg of the Upper Great Lakes seem less constrained, more 'open-source' in their exchanges with Others. those like me from outside their cultural mainstream. Yes, there are things which are not Spoken, certain sorts of Names remain unvoiced, there is Knowledge not to be shared ... sometimes the hematite turtle I wear at my throat to honor another Friend almost burns sometimes, it seems so infused with his Mystery ... But Western aboriginals seem have more Sacred things not to be spoken of to Others, or to be dealt with only in appropriate, private contexts.

"We Know Nothing !" my 'Great Good Friend & Teacher,' an Odawa of the Turtle dodem, would shout at me, scowling, finger wagging. He didn't mean we were airheads, just that we rational scientific types ~ and as a pharmaceutical chemist, he did mean "we" ~ just weren't very good at understanding anybody else's cultural footing, much less at formulating anything approaching a Universal Truth. There is so much going on around us of which we are unaware. "We Know Nothing!" In many respects the most learned man I have ever known, the Turtle never gave me a straight answer to any question I ever asked. Never led me astray or told me anything I now know to be Not True, either. Nothing. He had a Dream Name he never revealed to anyone, far as I know; he certainly had Medicine.

Ethnobotanist has at Dream Name as well, which I do know, but remains His to divulge. The fact he told me his Dream Name at all was something of a shock. I was in the Coastals among his friends & family that afternoon, moving about with a camera as we ate and talked and made music in his walled yard. Late in the day we drove a short distance to a stable around the other side of a citrus grove. There, moving comfortably among almost thirty fine Arabians in corrals he had helped build, we talked earnestly, privately, about business matters. I mentioned something ethnic, quite esoteric, regarding a small piece of remote nDn Country far from California, not even near a road. He knew the place I described; it was where he had been given his Dream Name, which he then revealed and explained to me. It makes perfect sense of the context of his Life, as I know it.


Convergences of the sort suggest what Turtle called the "Great Mystery." Such things - Revelations, Crossings, the Obvious Becoming Evident, the Relevance of Lessons brought to us ~ are done for Purposes however imperfectly understood. There really is no such 'thing' as Coincidence, Really, there isn't, except in the most literal of meanings ~ certainly not in the idiomatic sense, the way we bandy the word about.

Fellow humanists and others of the modern, euro-centric worldview can say what they want about such things, about what Turtle introduced to me as 'thinking in Indian.' Rationalists might translate aboriginal sacred-privacy norms as equivalent to a modern hybrid of our so-called "medical ethics" and a traditional church (pick one) liturgy. Close enough, clearly, to be honored ... and I'm really tired of fucking up. Forgive me, my Dine friends especially.

To explain as best I can, Ethnobotanist's Dream Name indicates that his life's Mission ought best be to expressed as service as the 'vessel' through which Spirit may be expressed. I hear this sort of credo expressed by a lot of people from the Arts, or from spiritually-motivated christians to whom it means and entirely different sort of thing, far more metaphoric.

I have no reason to doubt this is so. Why would anyone?

He is Singing his Song.

I gotta go for it.


= 22 Nov 08

O-BA-MA !

=| Yes !

Verrry interesting evening, I must admit, although it entails letting a cat out of my bag, so to speak. Not that it matters much ...

I'm a Labor guy and a Yellow-Dog Democrat from way back. Deep down, I am a small-s socialist ~ some of my (human) Best Buds even call me a "godless communist" ~ a real 'Power to the People' guy. Always have been. Do you mind ? Do I care !

There never was much doubt what candidate I preferred. Got on Obama wagon after Iowa ~ yes, he can! ~ and did my part in organized Labor's canvasses to reel in Joe & Josie Sixpax who had insufficiently transmitted their intention to stand square for the Endorsee of their Brothers & Sisterhood ... twas not at all a "vote for Obama or we break your legs" sort of thing, just a simple love-tap in the name of Solidarity with a message that we cared.

Hey, you can laugh, but the return of Human Contact to presidential politix is one of the blessings of this election cycle. When Howard Dean went to the Democratic National Committee he was the guy who caught nothing but crap about (re)building party infrastructure in all fifty states, which had a lot to do with winning, didn't it ? The political infrastructure is shifting, and its new forms are going to have a lot to do with governing. Getting out & about and engaging people about your candidate and your issues, well ... better get with it.

Which is what we did last night. Small group, all Democrats, mostly female, mostly dark-skinned ... we watched the Democratic tide roll westward as the clock rolled around to 8:00-PM PST. When the West Coast polls closed and the inevitable was confirmed, such dancing & screaming ! The cackle of cell phones going out all over the world ... "You watching?" "We did it!" There was an AfrAm woman here old enough to Remember the signs of segregation in Petersburg, Virginia. She called home. "Can you believe ... "

I was pretty calm about it. This Old Boy can't dance anyway, doctors orders. No jumping around or any of that stuff for me, thanks. Am an Observer by temperament, tend to sit still while world is bouncing around about me. Useful trait for historians, ethnologists, sports officials ... had also been watching polls closely all month, especially at Pollster.com where the Man Behind the URL is MB, a Running Dawg colleague from Meesh-ee-gan. He was half the Brain Trust behind the Gary Hart insurgency not quite 25 years ago. It was crystal clear from Pollster that Obama wasn't just going to win, he was going to win Big in terms of electoral votes. Thus I was just watching the clock, doing the math, computing time & distance until the Big Hand pointed up enough times.

There was another vote that had started to come in about the time McCain started to dust off the Concession Speech, in local issue in Michigan that didn't attract as much attention as it might. I had every reason to expect it to win, but it represented the Political Hope of my adult lifetime and I was extraordinarily nervous about it. The Marijuana Policy Project underwrote a ballot initiative to allow medical use of cannabis in Michigan, dropping about $1.3m into paying the costs of qualifying properly and perhaps $300,000 more when the Loyal Opposition made a belated, lunatic appearance in the last month.

September polls had been in the mid 60% range in support, but Proposal One may have slipped a few points in October ~ hard to tell compare results where questions are phrased differently, and variance in results hovering near the margin of error. Last poll I heard had started to trend up again, but there was no telling what might/could happen with a Marijuana Question at the end of a long ballot in a year such as this. In an election year of real economic calamity, I heard nothing of the economics of cannabis in the mainstream press, electronic or otherwise. Watching CNN has become like reading a comic book.

Vox populi indeed. It was just up to Us, for better or worse.

~

First numbers were 63% Yes with just 18% of precincts reporting. I kept wandering back to one of the computers to refresh. The Buddhist offered a bowl of Maui Wowie and I watched slack-jawed as precincts came rolling in ... the percentage remained unchanged. Raw votes rose in tandem, and when I get gbetter numbers from another source I could see what was in was from the more rural and conservative parts of the state ~ holy shit, campus and urban zones hadn't as yet been tabulated !?! Good lord ... this thing wasn't just going to pass, it was going to blow the fuckin' doors in.

The percentage never changed.The numbers rose in lockstep until Yes had 3,008,980 of 4,801,850 votes cast. Carried every county in the state, every legislative district. There were more votes cast in the Presidential selection [5,006,550], of course, but Obama's 2,875,308 was less than the number cast for medpot. Nothing, not No Body, ever got 3,000,000 votes in a Michigan election before. The Marginalized Minority, my beloved Lunatic Fringe, is now the Michigan Majority.

Vox populi !

I've since picked myself up, dusted off, and still having trouble letting the Reality sink in. Now I've lived long enough to see us elect Obama on his own merit, and to anticipate the date I will no longer be an Outlaw in my state ~ somewhere around 4 December, by crude calculation. New law takes effect ten days after certification of result later this month. Will be checking in with physician shortly about getting in line even before I return to Michigan, in the heart of the Upper Great Lakes.

Far Out, indeed.



= 05 Nov 08

HOW'S YOUR TAGALOG ?

=| Not a 'real Californian.'

Not yet. I only live here part of the year, and that hasn't been going on all that long. I wasn't native to the Upper Great Lakes either, but have been there long enough to have learned of the Land and its Peoples, and the stories people spin about their long relationship.

There are pictographs in rock shelters near Ventura venerated by the Chumash. Are they two thousand years old? Five thousand? Does it matter ... it was not 500 years ago that the Europeans first arrived in the form of Cabrillo, a Spaniard. He sailed the Santa Barbara Channel, enjoyed Chumash hospitality, stayed among them and died here. This seems to have established a Pattern still in play.

More Spaniards followed and built a string of missions to save the heathen Chumash souls who welcomed them. Both the missions and the Chumash polity were gone within a century, each the other's victim. In the vacuum emerged the Mexicans, who took over and lived a Good Life as well ~ but not for long. Come the Americans ~ a trickle at first, then a great wave of them, coming for the gold washing down the slopes and back toward the sea from which it had traveled. Steady migrant streams have come ever since for land, fame, fortune, freedom, reformatting ...

It's really not a Happy Story. Kevin Starr's seven-volume "America and the California Dream" series is apparently the the definitive cultural history of the state. I'm slogging my way through his literary pastiche of state significa, trying my best to sop it all up. I'm both Stranger and Minority here, another Newcomer. The voices not-speaking-English that I hear most near my California home are Hispanic. The bottleshop where I get my NYT, the bakery, and the fruteria I visit most days, the people in the grocery, the gas station, and the theater ... they're Mexicans, most of them. Some of their families were were before the Americans. Long-time Japanese population here too, at least until their internment.

It has paled in this election year, but some of the things I've heard here about Immigrants and Immigration are as ugly as some of the things I heard in Mississippi about dark-skinned Peoples. The only people who think 'it' has gone away are those who never saw it in the first place.

In the home, I hear Tagalog. An older relative requires 24/7 care-taking, performed by a team of Filipina nurses. Yes it is expensive but health care isn't cheap, is it. They're also Really Good. C'est la vie. It's an extended family ~ two sisters and an in-law with an extended network of kindred emigre workers sharing rides, food, jobs, money, all kinds of mutual support. The center of the neural net is Erlinda. Not quite five feet tall, she's my #1, and it is she who runs the household. Ah-tay (Elder Sister) and she are from a northern island. They remember riding barefoot on the backs of water buffalo as young girls, and tales of the Japanese occupation. Their grandfather, and mine, built roads.

There's a lot of eating with your hands around here. Rice, crisp mango dipped in patis (fish sauce), whole boiled okra, papaya salad ... these Pinays don't like spicy food, but you better move fast for a fried tilapia fresh from their market which deep-frys their purchase. The heads, especially, go fast. The brain is sweet, and the cheeks lovely little pieces of meat, not a lot different from the crayfish of our southeastern bayous which find themselves spread on newspapers over tabletops crowded with Pearl and Dixie longnecks ... Adobo, however, requires a utensil, either a fork or spoon depending on how you want to serve it. Its a traditional sweet vinegar BBQ-stew that Old Men stand over on Sunday afternoons as their family swirls around. Northerners are among the Philipines earlier residents, I'm told, although not aboriginal. "We're Brown," says Erlinda. "Not Red, Not Black, not Yellow. We're Brown." And she is. Not American either, but certainly Californian.

Had they been born in this country, I suspect Erlinda would be running some kind of ship-shape care facility in some little patch of Good Earth. Ah-tay, on the other hand, would probably be nudging aside Jeffrey Immelt at GE (already told you they were Really Good, remember?). Erlinda came here after 30+ years of hospital work to earn enough to educate her kids because American dollars go a long,long way in the Philipines. "You could have four wives," she teases. "Maybe six." She got here within a week of 9-11. So did the Cambodian couple who run a nearby coffee shop.

Welcome to the real New Age America ~ tis a hell of a cultural exchange program we've got here.

So far Erlinda has chalked up an electrical engineer and a teacher. Her youngest is just starting college, a Navy wife married to Bett's son, Mark ~ he's got a beautiful wife, a nasty moon-walk, and is currently on the flight deck crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt [CVN-71] in the Persian Gulf. He's turns twenty-three today.

Happy Birthday, Mark !
Come home safely ~ ASAP

~

Weekends, especially, the house is awash in cooking aromas and a constant barrage of really crappy cell-phone ringtones. Interspersed with bursts of rapid-fire Tagalog, it sounds like a diner sometimes. English is the 'language of instruction' in the Philippines, and the resulting Philippinglish is certainly Good Enough, but default is Tagalog. Tis a mystery to me ~ I have no linguistic skills beyond my spoken language. I understand a handful of phrases, sort of, and can recognize some Food terms, but beyond that its all just pleasant background noise.

Probably just as well.



00:42 10/27/2008