by Travis Mateer
Trash sculpture? How about trash INSTALLATION? Or, going even further, at precisely 11:22am this morning, I climbed a ladder and declared my TAAAAAZ with my megaphone. It has begun.
I’ll post my journal entry tomorrow as this new step for TRASH ALCHEMY evolves. Stay tuned!
Oh, and if you can’t tell from the video, my TAAAAAZ is located at the former Sleepy Inn site at Russell and Broadway.
Thanks for all the support!
Since people have limited bandwidth and therefore very few fucks to give, getting attention for important issues is more difficult than ever. Why? Is it the deplorable state of our media? Or is it the deplorable state of our education system? Or maybe the deplorable state of our criminal justice system?
Montana Indians who think the equation to improving their communities is media attention + money are probably hopeful when they read an article like this one in the Missoulian, but should they be? From the link (emphasis mine):
The high rates of missing or murdered Indigenous people is a nationwide crisis, and experts say Montana is an epicenter. While Native Americans comprise 6.7% of Montana’s population, as of April 4, they accounted for 27.6% of the state’s missing persons population.
Lots of factors contribute to this crisis. Thanks to a patchwork of laws passed without Indigenous people or their communities in mind, Native families must navigate a complex web of legal jurisdictions. The law enforcement agency tasked with investigating a case depends on whether the crime happened on or off reservation land and whether the victim and perpetrator are Native or non-Native.
Have I been talking about jurisdictional difficulty as it relates to urban camp cleanups? Yes, I have, and yesterday I made the rounds talking to multiple agencies, like DNRC, DEQ, and MDOT. I even made a public comment, but when I went to get the clip from the city website, I discovered a significant portion of my comment has been removed. Why?
On just THIS issue of urban camps, I’ve been trying to get media attention since last spring, but local media has been AMAZING at ignoring the work I’ve been doing. When I finally did get a little media attention, it was an act of slanderous mis-reporting about someone yelling at Council, which was erroneously ascribed to ME when the video clearly shows the yelling wasn’t coming from my mouth.
Three years ago this month I wrote a letter about my concern as a former service provider regarding homeless camps and the young Native woman’s ID that I found in the garbage. Here’s a portion from that letter:
I was involved with last Friday’s clean-up and, though the clean-up part was productive, I was VERY discouraged to see how bad this area has gotten again after so many personal hours spent tactfully working to remove tons and tons of trash over the years.
One item I found in the trash was a young Native woman’s ID. This validates my concern about how areas like these can function, especially in the warmer months when seasonal transient activity increases.
I spoke about these concern in a Zoom meeting earlier this week with the Missing Indigenous Woman’s Task Force. They were very receptive about my description of homeless encampments and motels being places touched by human trafficking and meth abuse. I wonder what they would think about citizens like myself and Kevin getting lectured to by homeless advocates about our good-faith efforts to address what they are enabling?
With my decade of experience working in the non-profit sector, and my continued work as a journalist called to expose local corruption, you might think my efforts would be appreciated, but no, my efforts were definitely NOT appreciated at the MMIP fundraiser I was asked to leave because a certain Indian woman thinks Lowell Hochhalter and his enablers are going to help her people. How do you say Patty Hearst in Salish?
I wanted to find an image of Patty Hearst for this post, but instead I found an Indian connection to that historical drama. If we’re talking media attention, this Indian did a good job of riding Patty’s infamy.
From the link:
The Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA, is little known today, but it was worldwide news 40 years ago. That’s when Patty Hearst, 19, was kidnapped at gunpoint from her Berkeley apartment in February 1974, thrown into the trunk of a car, and driven away.
A few days later, a recording aired on KPFA radio in Berkeley claiming that the SLA, a radical military group, was holding Hearst as a prisoner of war. The group demanded that Patty’s father, Randolph – editor of the San Francisco Examiner – give free food to needy people as part of the conditions of his daughter’s release. The Hearst family dutifully organized a series of food distributions on their daughter’s behalf.
One group that refused to take part was the United Bay Area Council on Indian Affairs, according to Adam Fortunate Eagle, author of Scalping Columbus and Other Damn Indian Stories, who was active in Bay Area Native American issues at the time.
Fortunate Eagle (known as Adam Nordwall when he lived in San Leandro) notified the elder Hearst that their group was planning to announce their refusal to participate in the give-away on the grounds that: “We will not be co-conspirators to extortion. Many Indian people are hungry today, but we will not accept any free food until Patty Hearst is released.”
I did a little more reading up on this famous Indian and I really like his “serious joke medicine”, described in this article as a part of his infamous approach to getting attention for his fellow Indians, some of whom didn’t appreciate his antics. From the link:
He hardly resembles the dashing, short-cropped, raven-haired figure he cut in the ’60s, when he helped form the Indian movement out of his San Leandro home and partied with the likes of Black Panthers, Terence Hallinan and Willie Brown. His hair, now in braids he hasn’t cut since the ’70s, has gone entirely gray, and laugh lines are deeply carved into his face.
But there’s a glint of the “sacred clown” that endures in his grandfatherly countenance — and makes him impossible to ignore, whether it’s those who consider him a hero for raising Indian awareness or those who brand him a headline-chasing embarrassment to his own people.
“I use (humor) in a way some Indians don’t understand,” he said. “It’s called serious joke medicine.”
And to understand Nordwall past and present is to understand his clowning, whether sacred or profane — those madcap acts of political theater that made him a legend.
Am I already utilizing serious joke medicine to bring attention to the trash crisis along our river corridor? Fuck yeah I am, and here’s a clip that shows how I’m threading the humor/anger needle in my attention-seeking approach to destroying official narrative control:
Further down in the Missoulian article, the amount of media attention Indians DO NOT GET is broken down like this:
There’s also a lack of media attention. A Columbia Journalism Review tool estimates that a 21-year-old missing Native woman in Montana would receive about 35 news stories, whereas a missing white woman in her early 20s would receive at least 120 articles. News stories fuel public interest, and when the public is engaged in a particular case, law enforcement agencies often hold press conferences and release updates — prompting more news, and in turn, more public interest.
Unable to depend on law enforcement, news media or a flawed criminal justice system, members of the Blackfeet community — and tribal communities everywhere — instead turn to each other for support, healing, advocacy and action.
While I consider myself “media” and report on subjects like “urban camps”, the one thing I don’t have that Montana Indians have is the leverage of being historical victims. I also don’t have any expectations that Hollywood bestowing attention on Lily Gladstone is going to do a goddamn thing to improve the lives of people on the Rez, but maybe that’s just me being stuck in my perpetual state of butthurt.
I’ve got to wrap this up now because it’s almost time to start building my trash sculpture on the parcel of city land I’ve hinted at in my poem, which you can hear in song form at this link.
I’ve given a heads up to the relevant parties, including some local media, about my plans this morning, but the IGNORE TRAVIS campaign still seems to be in full effect. Let’s see if what I’ve got planned today changes that.
Am I going to have some fun? If I use my serious joke medicine correctly, then yes, I expect to have a little fun, especially when the police inevitably show up to assess what the heck I’m doing, so stay tuned!
And thanks for reading!