by Travis Mateer
There was no contract involved when I tentatively platformed a woman who I met after making and showing my documentary about Tax Increment Financing, titled Engen’s Missoula. My former podcast co-host, Tim, hadn’t worked out, so I was eager to find someone to share the hosting duties with, and this person had a legal background and alleged passion for victim advocacy, which seemed like a good fit at the time.
Since this person attended the same church as my family, along with a small women’s group that included my own mother, I wasn’t as on-guard as I should have been. With my own personal life descending into utter turmoil as my marriage fell apart, I found myself alone for the first time in 25 years, but not for long. Thanks to the Rebekah Barsotti case, and this person’s supposed unique knowledge of what supposedly happened to her, I trauma-bonded hard and fell into a fatalistic existence that I soon felt completely trapped by. My close friends and supporters agreed.
I invested more than just money when I left the non-profit sector in Missoula after a decade of leaving my mark, primarily as the Homeless Outreach Coordinator of the Poverello Center from 2010-2016. I had a great reputation among service providers, I gave informative power point presentations to college-level nursing students, and even law enforcement had warmed to my presence on the streets, since I helped them identify killers like Kevin Lino.
Doing this impossible social work with “chronically homeless” street people fucked me up good, so after watching the local uprising against Nick Checota’s planned use of millions of dollars in public TIF money to build a Convention Center, I decided to follow my dream of doing something more in-line with the degree I got from the University of Montana in literature and creative writing, so I rented a studio at the ZACC and got to work biting the hand that now feeds, or starves, local musical talent, musical talent like Cara Schulz.
Cara Schulz is the incredibly talented musician fronting Florabelle, a band that was put together after the Cancel Culture Cult deemed WAR PONY cultural appropriation. A recent article from The Pulp—a local news platform with some journalists who should be very familiar with what it means to be cancelled themselves—highlights what a creative person experiences as their creative lifeblood is taken away from them:
She says she feels like a pariah and doesn’t feel safe in public in Missoula.
…
The hardest part of this ordeal, Schulz says, is that in the days since the ZACC announcement, other venues canceled Florabelle bookings, including a Wilma gig opening for the Bozeman-based jamgrass band Kitchen Dwellers on Jan. 18 that would have been a big opportunity.
“You’ve taken my shows away, and you can’t do anything worse to me than take my shows away,” she says.
In classic NO ACCOUNTABILITY style, the sad Native who got this cancel campaign started is now disavowing the cancel train as it chugs along, doing it’s thing.
Schulz believes that Running Crane sought to have her removed from these concerts, which Running Crane flatly denies.
“I did not ask for Cara to be removed from any other bill,” Running Crane says. “I sought to protect the community center that I love, and I did that.”
Running Crane says she doesn’t want to see a local act permanently “canceled,” but hopes Schulz and her band put in meaningful work to understand the extent of Indigenous peoples’ mistreatment and marginalization in this country, and how cultural appropriation only continues that legacy.
“Anybody that’s put in that position of being asked to reassess how they compartmentalize and justify harmful behavior has two choices: One being to revert back to life before this conflict — which is comfortable, the path of least resistance — and the other is to go on an extremely uncomfortable journey of growing and learning,” Running Crane says.
Before continuing, let me suggest to Dylan Running Crane that NO ONE can say what another person’s life is truly like, behind the scenes, especially the lives of artists who choose to make their personal pain more visible by creating art out of it. And please fucking spare me that LOVE THE ZACC bullshit. I know of a Native dude who had his flute concert there cancelled this summer, and NOT by cultural purists, but by THE ZACC ITSELF. Why? Because they weren’t going to make enough money off ticket sales, that’s why.
Ok, back to my publicly visible lived experience of being targeted by a weaponized protection order.
Before my politically-connected ex-girlfriend followed through on her threat to destroy me in every way she possibly could, she made a long list of demands, and one of those demands was that I remove podcast episodes that she had participated in, including my in-depth coverage of the Lee Nelson murder trial, a homeless man I knew personally from my years working at the homeless shelter.
Needless to say, I refused.
Almost universally, artists tend to develop their crafts and talents early in life, and usually as coping mechanisms to deal with childhood bullshit, which can run the gamut from overt abuse to more covert parental deficiencies. Me, I’m a writer, and I’ve been writing publicly since 2010, 6 years before leaving my job at the shelter. I wrote about this community, sometimes unsparingly, and I continued to do so despite clear hints from ladder climbers, like Eran Pehan, that my writing was impacting my career path.
Both the Wilma and the ZACC are controlled by the Checotas, which means Cara Schulz is learning the hard lesson I started learning when my documentary got suppressed by their financial/social flexing: when you fuck with money you better be prepared to pay a VERY HIGH price.
Cara might come away from this with a critical understanding about WHY this is happening to her, and to help with that, I’m going to provide MY opinion about why I think this is happening to her, and it’s pretty simple: she has the REAL spark of a real artist, the spark others want and therefore seek to control when they realize they don’t have it.
I say this having seen only one performance, the recent performance at Free Cycles, but that was all I needed to see to know. What I saw that night was a talented artist compel a room full of screen-distracted, IPA swilling youngsters to ALL SHUT UP at the same time, sit down on the floor, and listen to a song. That is more than just a spark, it’s a quality of talent that some in power see as a threat, which is why so much money is spent to produce so much garbage musical output.
Ellen Buchanan, the shadow Mayor of Missoula, understands the critical need to control artists, thus narratives, which is why her signature event is the River City Roots Festival. When you can’t control artists, then it’s important to control the methods of silencing them. One method is to own the venues where artists perform. Checotas, check. But what about pesky PUBLIC artists, like the loose collective who performed nearly EVERY Friday night at the XXXX’s?
In THAT case, lawfare by law enforcement ensued, but thanks to the effort of Councilman, Daniel Carlino, our local constabulary couldn’t exploit the obscure law they had gotten an authoritarian hard-on over. Darn!
In my case, my podcast died a long time ago, but slowly I’ve had to be taught all the new geographic locations barred to me and my NEED to identify what’s going on in the community my kids are growing up in, a need one of those city officials (Eran Pehan) rightfully identified as “a calling” before I chose to retire my Homeless Outreach Coordinator title to lesser quality people who had that one important skill I lacked: the proper submissive response to the invisible leash of petty local power.
Now that I’ve gained new “lived experiences” about the challenges of vehicular living, and all the fun criminal acts you get to enjoy, like theft and vandalism, I’m onto the many phases of legal lawfare that scored my adversaries a big win last week. I suspect Cara and I both need to better understand that it’s not just our reputations and ability to monetize our talents they want to stomp, it’s the spark, and they want to snuff it out as completely as they can if they fear you have one of those pesky sparks that REALLY doesn’t like to be told how to sparkle by less talented people.
To wrap this up, below is a link to the song that started playing as I was writing this post. Is synchronicity more the result of a pattern-seeking information sickness than an objective phenomenon of metaphysical insight? Maybe somewhere in the hundreds and hundreds of pages I wrote last year there’s an answer to that heady question, but for now, just marvel at what “shuffle” on my iPod selected for me.
And thanks for reading.