Ploughing Through the Ragged Sky

IN THIS MISSIVE:

• I’M THINKING ABOUT: SoCal, my heart.
• I’M LISTENING TO: This country music playlist
• I’M READING: Lone Women & The Hunger
• I’M WATCHING: Outer Range
• I LOVE: Cherokee Silversmith Kassie Kussman and First Nation Suffragists

I’M THINKING ABOUT So Cal 🖤

I see an image of the iconic Hollywood sign in flames on Instagram. It is convincing—it looks real and is presented as news. It elicits the response intended by whoever made it—panic and grief. Los Angeles was once a home to me. Only after I surf around a bit more do I see people who have taken this image to task, calling it out as a fake.

Sometimes I think about relinquishing my American citizenship, as if it were a vestigial appendage from some remote and incomplete evolution.

I watch Los Angeles County burn in the little images on my phone. Glamorous locales I once traipsed around with other art students are gone. My father was fascinated by the shiny wealth of Malibu—though he would never admit it. He loved to get an eyeful. Perhaps he wanted me to share some obscure aspiration of his; I’ll never know and now those places we dreamed together are levelled.

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Before the fires, I was thinking about the place of my birth, the American Midwest, a region full of red states, now totally alien to me and monstrous.

All the mythology told to me as a credulous child ended West.

The place where I was born is also Turtle Mountain, the First Nation name for America. But the world I inhabited was different, a world built by white colonisers. These broken ancestors were often fleeing their own exiles and bringing that trauma with them, seeding it into the land as they practiced genocide.

Sometimes I think about relinquishing my American citizenship, as if it were a vestigial appendage from some remote and incomplete evolution. Some parts of my being will always remain American, like my belief in making one’s own luck, a naive conviction that work, skill and talent can always overcome a lack of privilege. These beliefs are hard wired into me despite Britain proving them wrong over and over again.

The sound of the American Midwest still shapes my voice. Yet what does that really mean?

British people used to ask me ‘where is home?’ HERE is home, where I am—Scotland. I have had many homes, often driven from one to another because of gentrification. (This feels a lot like what is happening to our online communities right now, but that is a subject for another post.)

I moved West as an adolescent—to California or Aztlán of the Chicano people, the part of America stolen from Mexico. Aztlán is more than lost geography or the ancestral home of the Aztecs—it is a dream place of ancestry and possibility.

I am also from unceded land belonging to the Council of the Three Fires--the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations--as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo, and Illinois Nations.

The sound of the American Midwest still shapes my voice. Yet what does that really mean? British people sometimes tell me what it means to them: Americans are loud, entitled, ignorant. That opinion is based in reality; often the people who have money to tour the UK are entitled and obnoxious in their wilful ignorance. And yet visionary Americans, decent folk, champions of justice and truth, outnumber those who you might see on a group tour in Kirkwall. We outnumber those who are temporarily in power, and the story of our resistance isn’t finished.

I watched Beyonce’s NFL half time show on Xmas Day in Houston and got all homesick. She talks back to genre in ways that interest me—that feel very relevant to me as a writer constantly crossing genres. She reminds me that there are other voices shaping the country beyond blue and red to rich violet—something as yet unseen.

It seems a crying shame no Goth band has ever covered the classic “I Never Go Around Mirrors.”

LISTENING TO: This Country Music Playlist

Country music was reviled by my family, but in those songs quickly passed over on the AM radio dial, I heard the illicit sound of my people. That nasal twang of the northwest Kentucky border was our sound and our story was inextricably tied to the spectacle of the Old West: tall tales of tracks of land ‘we’ once owned, lost in a card game. I knew that land must’ve been got somehow, from someone else who was there first, right? Even as I child I suspected this, though the stories of First Nation people were suppressed and distorted in my state education.

Any goth worth their black eyeliner should love country music. There, I said it. It seems a crying shame no goth band has ever covered the classic “I Never Go Around Mirrors.” Some of the tracks I’ve included here aren’t exactly country & western but covers of old classics in the genre.

I migrated West with my father in his yellow Datsun. The car didn’t have a tape deck, so I cradled a portable stereo in my lap playing mixed tapes I’d made full of Bob f*cking Dylan—stuff I thought my Dad wouldn’t hate or make fun of. We put the miles behind us, through the desert, buoyed by the road itself. Here is a better playlist, a mixed tape for that teen self, trailing fearlessly into her future.

Listen to the playlist on Spotify

My father and I approximated the same route as the Donner Party. Make of this what you will.

WHAT I’M READING

All the mythology told to me as a credulous child ended West. A great grandfather went out West to strike gold, abandoning his wife and children—one of whom was my grandmother. My Great Grandmother took grandmother and her siblings out to find him. Out West she ran out of—what? Money? Gumption? As the story goes, my Great-Great Grandmother had to follow and rescue her. They never saw my great grandfather again.

I migrated hot on her tail over a hundred years later, ending up in California. My father and I approximated the same route as the Donner Party. Make of this what you will.

Horses hooves, gunshots and war cries haunt me: the sound effects of teevee Westerns. Gunsmoke, Bonanza, How the West Was Won. (I also drank up genre variants like Kung Fu, Little House on the Prairie, and The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams.) They embroidered the holes in my family story with more fictions. The Western genre was the first story I watched where the landscape was a character, the country being the ever-present persona of the genre.

Tell me you don’t see it, too: the tumbleweeds, clap-board towns and painted vistas? Is it not beautiful? This idea of the living land would follow me everywhere and would define me as a writer.

At its worst, the Western genre is white propaganda, the whitewashing of the genocide of First Nation Peoples into some heroic male story of Manifest Destiny. And yet—this distorted mirror of American identity has been reworked in myriad exciting ways. Here are examples of reinvention I’ve recently relished in this genre, retold through the eyes and voices of those vilified or simply left out of the story all together.

LONE WOMEN, Victor Lavalle

This book turns the Western genre on its head. It is a genuinely disturbing horror novel focusing on women’s bonds as friends, lovers and sisters. This is the kind of book you’ve been hankering for and you just didn’t know it. This is Beloved meets Lovecraftian horror in Montana.

THE HUNGER, Alma Katsu

I can’t get enough of Alma Katsu. This is her fictionalised version of the Donner Party, a wagon train of settlers doomed to cannibalism by chicanery, bad weather and poor planning. This novel is a grim masterpiece. Be warned—here lies basically ALL THE TRIGGERS. While reading, I thought this was an allegory for the hubris of ‘Manifest Destiny’, the death-trap of the white European settler’s mentality. Those who believe they are entitled to the earth will eventually eat their own. I thought I projected this onto the book, but Katsu spells this out in the historical notes. In her words the book is a ‘cautionary tale’—of a people who ‘let themselves be fooled by businessmen who valued personal profit over human lives. They selected the wrong man to be their leader and refused to listen to people who knew better.’ The Hunger was published during T#^*!’s 1st term as US President.

I’M WATCHING Outer Range

I enjoyed this Western cosmic horror soap opera. The first season really hooked me in. The second season’s baroque storytelling not so much, but worth it for every episode that belongs to the character of Joy Hawk, played by Tamara Podemski. We need more stories with Joy Hawks in them. The episodes where she goes back in time are pure medicine.

I LOVE:

MEAN RIGHT HOOK DESIGNS

I love Cherokee silversmith Kassie Kussman and her company, Mean Right Hook. Her work is tender and visceral, deeply satisfying.

(Over twenty years ago, I was an avid collector of ‘old pawn’ silver—this is what vintage Indigenous jewellery is called in the US. It means it was jewellery used as collateral on a loan within the pawning system of the tribe. It separates Fred Harvey style mass produced jewellery, often made for tourists, which I also collected. I could write a whole post about the poetry of First Nation smithing…)

Zitkala-Sa, a Yankton Sioux, was Renaissance woman—an activist, composer and writer as well as a leader in the suffrage movement. She reminded white women that even after they had won the right to vote in 1920, First Nation women still did not share that right. White suffragists owe many a debt to First Nation women—some white suffragists saw the equal power in the Iroquois, the leadership of Clan of the Mothers, as a living example of feminism in action. In all my Feminist education (I was a Women Studies Major at SFSU) why was I not taught this history? This lack fills me with fury. These two portraits strike me not only with their timeless beauty, but with the role decoration plays in elevating both women, embellishing their power.

Suffragist Marie L. Baldwin (Métis Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians)

Missives from the Verge with Allyson Shaw is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.