Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (35 page)

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
The Seine runs under the Pont Mirabeau
Et nos amours
And our love
Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne
The river must remember me
La joie venait toujours après la peine

Joy always came after sorrow

Aloysius made several outline drawings of each bridge in a notebook. He usually painted at the scenes, the actual portrayals of inspiration, but the blue ravens and the bridges were imagined and painted later. The notes
were impressions, creative configurations, and pictures of the architecture and the many moods of the river. My brother traced and set the bridges afloat several times but could not decide how to create the scenes of ravens and the river.

Later that week he imagined the blue bridges afloat with mighty ravens on the curve of waves. The bridges were unmoored, and moved with the river and ravens. The memorial bridges were portrayed in natural motion, a tribute to the actual traces, totemic reflections, and impressions overnight in the River Seine.

Nathan was delighted, of course, with the description of the new abstract bridge paintings, and he was eager to schedule an exhibition of the new series. The earlier blue ravens were the first contemporary native art to be presented with traditional, ceremonial and native ledger art at the Galerie Crémieux.

Marie Vassilieff invited us to dinner a few days later at Le Chemin du Montparnasse. Since our first visit three years earlier she had created fantastic terracotta figurines, rough dolls dressed with motley, untidy material, an artistic counteraction of classical images and sculpture. The faces of the figures were handsome, some with huge eyes, more spirited than models of the ordinary. The figurines might have been the ancestors of every culture. Marie was moved when my brother told the story that our grandmother had made similar rough figures decorated with feathers and leather for the children on the White Earth Reservation.

Aloysius was eager to start the stories over dinner with an episode about the nasty federal agent with a nose for the scent of wine, the prohibition of alcohol, and politics of white pine on the reservation. I continued with stories about labor unions and our work as stagehands at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis.

Marie was a revolutionary and honored labor unions over the bourgeoisie, of course, and raised her voice to salute the mere mention of unions, and yet she was hesitant to favor the obscure communiqués of the communists, and would never stand with the fanatics or extremists of the Parti Communiste Français.

Marie assumed that we had been active in communist labor movements and the Industrial Workers of the World, and anticipated our stories of the obvious proletarian maneuvers of natives on federal reservations. Naturally
she was enthusiastic about native traditions and liberty, but not as
au courant
with the colonies and reservations as she was with political revolutions, visionary literature, and the great innovative artists of Paris.

I described the situation of labor and radical movements on federal treaty reservations. Native politics and parties emerged from cultural bloodlines, not from the abstract ideologies of nationalism, and the sources of resistance were natural, personal, and complete. The seasons, a severe winter, could have been more serious than the revenge of an enemy.

Honoré, our father, was a lumberjack, and we hawked the
Tomahawk
at the train station in the summer, but labor unions were never established on reservations. Augustus, our uncle, was an entrepreneur and publisher, Odysseus was a trader, Misaabe was a healer, and John Leecy was a hotel proprietor, neither laborers nor the bourgeoisie. Marie realized at once that natives and others were excluded because of culture and politics from many jobs and labor unions. She was agitated by the general discussions of natives and trade unions and denounced discrimination, bigotry, and the hatred of Jews in the country and in the Communist Party.

Aloysius mentioned that he had once carried a banner and marched with the union outside of a movie theater in Minneapolis. He paused, smiled, and then revealed the ironic exaggeration that his protest against the unfair theater owner lasted only about an hour on a cold and windy day. I carried on the union stories that night and asked why communist men, dressed in dark bourgeois suits, ties, and fedoras, touted tiny bouquets of wild flowers at the entrances to the Paris Métro.

Marie laughed and explained that the flowers were picked near Chaville, a commune southwest of Paris. Nathan had never thought much about the politics of flower vendors. So, the fierce communists and critics of the bourgeoisie were steady hawkers of primroses and violets, an irony of labor history.

Nathan was hesitant to discuss political movements, and we had never heard him criticize a person or organization, but that night he denounced the fascist sentiments that promoted the primacy of the primitive, and the myths of peasants and savages. He respected our sense of native traditions and native aesthetics, and would never designate our creative work as primitive.

Nathan was particularly critical of the political philosopher Georges
Sorel for his pronouncement that science was a fiction, and for his crusade of the primitive, the proletariat, and the virtues of political violence. Sorel denounced the war and
l'union sacrée
, the sacred union, the necessary political truce and patriotic support of the French government in the course of the First World War.

I entered the discussion and declared that traditional native stories, creative literature, aesthetics, natural reason, and artistic portrayals have always been reduced by romantic arguments and political assessments of savagism. Explorers and priests concocted the savage and primitivism as cultural entertainment. Nathan was convinced that natives had always been modernists, and the only savages were those who created the fascist models and categories of the primitive.

Nathan had always demonstrated his critical and aesthetic appreciation of the native ledger artists, the sense of blue horses in natural motion, and he never consigned any native traditional or creative art or story to the romance of the primitive. We trusted his vision of native art at the very start, even before we met, because his father was a respected trader, and known by our friend Odysseus.

Marie was an innovative painter and active in radical politics, and she was troubled by the
chemins détrempés
of fascism. Yes, she used the words mushy paths, in translation, for the first time that night to describe the ruses of racists, and the swampy machinations of the new fascists since the end of the war.

Marie was easily provoked by the critics and nationalists who exploited the distinction of
École de Paris
, the brilliant and worldly cubist, abstract, and expressionist artists in Paris, with the new fascist notion of the
École Française
artists, a nasty political and racist cut and separation of creative artists and communities. The fascists censured avant-garde and abstract visual art and tried to elevate the secure pastoral scenes in portrayals.

Marie delivered that passionate critique on art and politics as she served roasted chickens with vegetables. Naturally she had engaged in many serious and intense political discussions during the war at La Cantine des Artistes. The cheap meals attracted many hungry abstract artists, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

The Pernod anise apéritif reminded me of the banquets at the Hotel Leecy. Nathan remembered my story about the precious and prohibited
absinthe on the reservation and raised his glass to honor the trader Odysseus. We had already consumed two bottles of white wine with the entrée of pâté, sliced sausage, ham, and tiny pieces of toast, during the hearty discussions of art and politics. Marie served with the roasted chickens a special reserve of Pavillon Blanc, Château Margaux, from Bordeaux.

I waited for the suitable moment and then related a traditional practice of native storiers. My story was a preamble to the necessary revision of the memorable Banquet Français at the Hotel Leecy. The warriors and traders on the trail once named a native in the morning to be the storier that night around the fire. In that way the nominated native could imagine and rehearse the best stories in silence on the trail, and the stories that night would be enhanced to amuse and astonish the other natives, and with an adept sense of irony. That, in fact, was my practice that night at dinner with Marie and Nathan.

Aloysius presented ironic variations of the stories about the Banquet Français. We decided not to reveal the marvelous menu in celebration of native veterans that night at the Hotel Leecy. Instead we created stories of a traditional native menu because any abstract description of the actual French cuisine that Messy prepared would have been unbelievable on a reservation and a discourteous story in the company of our new friends. Our native stories that night about the dinner were double ironies.

My reservation banquet stories mimicked the fantastic stories that Nathan had created in the alley three years earlier at Le Chemin du Montparnasse. John Leecy could have been Erik Satie, and Foamy the dopey agent could have been the pesky Amedeo Modigliani, but only in the artsy banquet game stories. Odysseus could have been Pablo Picasso, Misaabe could have been Fernand Léger, Doctor Mendor could have been Blaise Cendrars, Catherine Heady could have been Béatrice Hastings, and Messy could have been Marie Vassilieff at the banquet table in my stories that night.

I related actual and imagined scenes. Messy raised a cleaver and chased the federal agent out of the hotel kitchen. Foamy had tracked down the scent of wine, and he was obsessed with another scent, the rose and linen aroma of the coy schoolteacher Catherine Heady. I pointed at chairs around the table and named the diners that night at the Hotel Leecy. Messy was indeed a famous chef and the dinner was underway in my imagination.

Foamy rushed back to the hotel with his pistol drawn, shouted out his love for the schoolteacher, and then aimed at Doctor Mendor. Catherine ducked under the table, and took cover between the legs of the doctor. Odysseus disarmed the covetous lecher, and hogtied him in the corner of the room. Messy poured sweet birch bark moonshine on the agent, and then continued the dinner service.

Messy prepared a traditional native feast of game, fish, and commodity fare, fatty and salty, to celebrate the native veterans who had returned from the war. We praised the heroic combat service of Lawrence Vizenor and honored the memory of our cousin Ignatius Vizenor. My creative and equivocal description of the cuisine that night was an unusual concoction of wild game and
ashandiwin
, or commodity rations, delivered by the federal government.

The first course of the traditional meal was
giigoonhwaabo
, a hearty fish soup with heads, eyes, and bones of sunfish, crappies, and northern pike. Messy prepared blue chicken,
miinan baaka aakwenh
, or chicken baked with blueberries, a signature main course, mashed pumpkin, rose hip wine, and pinch bean coffee. Baked potatoes were served with mounds of commodity peanut butter, and fatty salt pork was delivered in a wooden barrel. Salt pork was a manly meal, and some natives were convinced the grease healed wounds. Traditional healers once used bear fat, but hardly salty pork grease.

I quickly turned from the meal stories to the intrigue of politics and lovers because the overstated commodity fare was not healthy or edible enough to hold an audience. Messy had her eye on Misaabe, and Catherine Heady, the schoolteacher, gulped white lightning and swooned over Doctor Mendor. Foamy the aloof federal agent was smitten with the schoolteacher.

Father Aloysius turned down the invitation to the raucous banquet because he had declared in a recent sermon that commodity food was an extermination cuisine. More natives had vanished on a commodity diet of federal fat, salt, and sugar than by love, politics, war, weather, or any other cause. Fry bread was the most pernicious eradication fare on the reservation, a nasty concoction of bleached white flour, processed white animal fat, white salt, and white sugar, and the greasy doughnut of death was promoted as a native tradition at ceremonies.

Marie was moved and pained by the perception of native death by federal
doughnuts, and the commodity warrant encouraged me to continue the double ironies of a rations revolution. I raised my voice and declared that the first radical act of a native revolutionary on the reservation was to change diets, and then to capture and serve fry bread to the romantics and federal agents, the same extermination fare that had endangered the health of natives. The second act was total sedition, a just and ironic reversal of the reservation. Close the borders of the reservation and establish a new frontier minstrel, a vaudeville show of federal agents and elected politicians with rouge face paint. Yes, the Funny Federal Minstrel of the Wild West.

My dinner stories were a union of sentiments, characters and cuisine, and the stories brought together the contradictions and ironies of radical politics and aesthetics between the White Earth Reservation and Le Chemin du Montparnasse in Paris.

Aloysius rescued my satirical scenes of doughnut death with descriptive stories about his outlines of blue ravens and bridges over the River Seine. Nathan was certain the paintings would be viewed as a new native school of art,
École Indienne
, and once again he promised to arrange a major exhibition of the series at the Galerie Crémieux.

Marie was ecstatic about the new series of blue ravens, and loaned my brother an extraordinary book of original art from her library,
Les Trente-Six Vues de la Tour Eiffel
, or
Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower
, by the painter Henri Rivière. The handcrafted book was printed in a limited edition of five hundred copies, and signed by the artist in 1902. The color lithographs were thirty-six marvelous views of the Eiffel Tower, and the obvious inspiration was
Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji
by Katsushika Hokusai.