Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 371

October 15, 2013: John Sayles’ America: Brother and Race

[I’ve already blogged quite a lot about John Sayles. A whole lot, in fact. But when it comes to the filmmaker who to my mind has most consistently engaged with AmericanStudies questions, there’s plenty more to say. So this week, I’ll AmericanStudy five more Sayles films. I’d love to hear your thoughts, on these films and others that say AmericanStudies to you!]
On a quote we would do well to collectively think about, and a film that would help us do so.As I’ve written about elsewhere, one of the difficulties of teaching courses in Ethnic American Literature is the tendency to reduce authors to representatives of overly broad ethnic categories: African American, Native American, Asian American, and so on. That tendency is of course in no way specific to classrooms or academia—most of our collective conversations about race and ethnicity depend quite precisely on our use of such categories, on the idea that everyone within them shares certain fundamental similarities. But even leaving aside the many distinct nations/heritages included in those categories, such use ignores the fact that, as scholars David Goldsteinand Aubrey Thacker note in the introduction to their wonderful edited collection Complicating Constructions: Race, Ethnicity, and Hybridity in American Texts (2007), sociologists have long argued that “diversity within categories far exceeds diversity between categories.”Unfortunately, I can think of few works of mainstream popular culture that work to present such intra-category diversity—if anything, those works that are centrally interested in complicating our narratives of race and ethnicity tend to do so by challenging our sense of the relationships between, not those within, the different categories (I’m thinking of films like Crash and Do the Right Thing , for example). Ironically, it seems to me that Tyler Perry’s films, made by an African American filmmaker and featuring largely African American casts, are more interested in presenting the diversity of identities and experiences within that one community—but the irony is that Perry’s films attract a predominantly African American audience, which means that such messages might not get to other audiences that could benefit from them as well. All of which is to say that I believe there’s a significant opening for broadly accessible films, or other pop culture texts, that focus on diversity and identity within different American communities—and I’d like to nominate one here: John Sayles’ The Brother from Another Planet (1984).In Sayles’ film, an alien (Joe Morton) who happens to look African American crashes his spaceship in New York City; as he wanders through Harlem trying to get his bearings and survive (all while chased by a couple of special agents out to capture and investigate him), he interacts with many different members of the African American community (as well as other ethnicities and communities). Because the alien cannot speak, those encounters are largely driven by the assumptions and attitudes of the other people, which certainly allows the film to depict the role that such attitudes (and the stereotypes and definitions that come with them) play in society. But Sayles’ cross-section of Harlem and African American life is just as noteworthy for its complex and multi-faceted humanity; it shouldn’t be worth pointing out when a non-African American filmmaker or artist creates such a representation of the diversity within that community, but, well, I believe it is. There would be lots of ways to think more collectively and successfully about all the diversity within each American category, but Sayles’ film is certainly one unique, funny, and effective means through which to start doing so.Next film tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other films you’d especially AmericanStudy?

October 14, 2013: John Sayles’ America: Secaucus and the ‘60s

[I’ve already blogged quite a lot about John Sayles. A whole lot, in fact. But when it comes to the filmmaker who to my mind has most consistently engaged with AmericanStudies questions, there’s plenty more to say. So this week, I’ll AmericanStudy five more Sayles films. I’d love to hear your thoughts, on these films and others that say AmericanStudies to you!]
On the truths behind, but also the limitations of, one of our prominent national narratives of the 1960s.Nearly half a century later, the 1960s continue to occupy a central place in many of our national conversations. Partly that feels particularly true these days because we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of events like the March on Washington and the “I Have a Dream” speech; but mostly it’s because of just how defining and yet how controversial the decade was and remains. One whole subset of narratives of the 60s has to do with the question of what has happened to the decade’s ideals in those five decades since, and more exactly with how the baby boomers and hippies who fought for and tried to embody those ideals have shifted away from, and in some narratives betrayed, those beliefs. Pop culture has long portrayed ex-hippies through that lens: from a single moment like the line “Out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac” in Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” (1984); to an entire film like Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill (1983), which depicts a group of 60s college friends reuniting decades later and confronting their adult lives after one of their group commits suicide.It certainly seems fair to say that as the hippies and the baby boom generation matured, they evolved, as of course any individuals and groups do; such evolution doesn’t necessarily equate to a betrayal of our earlier selves, but does require that beliefs and ideals grow and likely shift as well. The 1980s sitcom Family Ties did an excellent job engaging with those questions, examining a pair of ex-hippie parents as they navigate adult and family responsibilities (particularly in relationship to their yuppie, Reagan-idolozing son, famously played by Michael J. Fox). But it’s also fair to say that in many cases, including Kasdan’s film, complex political or social questions are largely simplified and downplayed, reduced to a backdrop of things that these characters once believed but that are no longer relevant to their contemporary lives. Given that precisely none of the broad issues with which the hippies engaged—poverty and inequality, racism and injustice, war and the military industrial complex, corporations and consumerism, the environment—have gone away in the five decades since, such reductions don’t seem accurate to how the group has evolved. And in his first film, The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), John Sayles depicts those questions with far more complexity and depth.Like Kasdan’s film (which seems to have been at least somewhat inspired by Sayles’, although Kasdan has denied having seen it), Secaucus is certainly interested in how its group of ex-hippies have evolved individually, socially, romantically, professionally, and so on in the decade and more since their 60s lives. But Sayles’ title refers to a particular political incident from that earlier decade, one in which the group were arrested for protesting; and since the film’s reunion marks the first time the group has been together since that moment, this history of activism and idealism becomes one of the recurring threads of their conversations and interactions. They come to no more of a consensus about the legacy of those actions and beliefs than they do about any aspect of their present identities; but they also acknowledge how formative those 60s moments and actions have been, and thus are significantly less dismissive of the value of their activism than many such ex-hippie characters and voices in our culture. Secaucus is far from a perfect film, but it’s well worth seeing, not least for this still largely unique complication of a dominant national narrative.Next film tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other films you’d especially AmericanStudy?

October 12-13, 2013: Crowd-sourced Falls

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), this week’s series has focused on some iconic American images of the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn. This crowd-sourced post is harvested from fellow AmericanStudier’s connections to falls, seasonal or symbolic. Add yours, pumpkin!]
Rachael McLennan also “went straight to Roth’s American Pastoral,” as I did in Tuesday’s post.Dan Sheppard follows up Wednesday’s post, writing, “Two groups of kids in literature have always represented the fall season for me, most likely because I have fond memories of exploring the neighborhood during the beginning months of school, in the fall, as a child with my friends. Coincidentally, one group of them being the kids you mentioned from The Body, the other being a similar group of boys in a much more paranormal situation in It . I think the parallels between them regarding a loss of innocence are relatively clear. The situations they encounter are wildly different, but both involve them dealing with as you put, perilous situations, not only of the physical realm, but of the mental realm. How are young people expected to cope with what they're seeing in these stories? It is a total loss of innocence, regardless of the completely unreal events of one story. So while the loss of innocence is more predominant in a literature sense, the feeling of a close knit group of friends literally reminds me of the fall months. I'm enjoying this group of postings solely based on that, it's a deep look something I always looked at so simply.”Rebecca Carpenter highlights J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, and particularly “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”Josh Eyler highlights The Wonder Years , and in particular how that show “mirrors Kevin’s life with American events” and in its duality between innocence and experience “might have been a bit ahead of its time in terms of complexity.”Joseph Fruscione agrees with Josh, and also mentions “ Huckleberry Finn —both a sense of innocence and greater sense of experience.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What images of fall would you share?

October 11, 2013: Legends of the Fall: American Pie

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American images of the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn. Add your thoughts on falls, seasonal or symbolic, for me to harvest for the weekend post!]
On the straightforward and more subtle sides to a beloved ballad about individual and cultural losses of innocence.Like I imagine many teenage boys in the four decades since its release, I memorized the lyrics to Don McLean’s “American Pie” (1971) during my high school years. Partly that had to do with one very particular moment in the song, and just how much every teenage boy can associate with watching that certain someone dance with a certain someone else in the gym and “know[ing] that you’re in love with him”—and how much we thus all felt at times like “a lonely teenage bronckin’ buck.” But partly it seems to me that McLean’s song captures and allegorizes a more general part of teenage life, the life and death significance that we place on music, relationships, friendships, social status, all those potentially fleeting things we care about and worry about and love and hate with such force.As this piece on McLean’s official website indicates, McLean intended the song as a tribute both to his own turbulent teenage years and to the even more turbulent American moment with which they coincided—a moment that began (for McLean and in the song) with the February 1959 death of Buddy Holly (among other popular artists) in a plane crash and would conclude a decade or so later with American society and culture in one of our most fractured states. His song thus became an anthem for two seemingly unrelated but often conjoined narratives: “The Day the Music Died,” the story of one of the most tragic days in American cultural history; and the decade-long loss of innocence that is often associated with the 1960s and all the decade’s tragedies and fissions. These aspects of McLean’s song are contained in every section: the February 1959-set introduction, the increasingly allegorical verses, and the far more straightforward chorus.But there’s another, and to my mind far more ambiguous, side to that chorus and to McLean’s song. The question, to boil it down, is this: why do the chorus and song focus so fully on Buddy Holly, rather than (for example) on his fallen peer Ritchie Valens? Holly is generally cited as far more influential in rock and roll history, but at the time of the crash he had only been prominent for a year and a half (since his first single, “That’ll be the Day” [1957]); Valens, while five years younger, was on a very similar trajectory, having recorded his first few hits in the year before the crash. Moreover, while Holly’s sound paralleled that of contemporaries such as Bill Haley, Valens’ Latino American additions distinguished him from his rock and roll peers. So it’s difficult not to think that an Anglo-centric vision of America has something to do with McLean’s association of “Miss American Pie” and “good old boys” with Holly rather than Valens—an association that, aided no doubt by McLean’s song (if complicated a bit by the hit film La Bamba [1987]), American narratives too often continue to make.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share for that post?

October 10, 2013: Legends of the Fall: Presumed Innocent

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American images of the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn. Add your thoughts on falls, seasonal or symbolic, for me to harvest for the weekend post!]
On the multiple layers of revelations built into the best mystery fiction (major SPOILER ALERT for those who haven’t read Scott Turow’s novel or seen the Harrison Ford film, and might at some point).I’ve blogged frequently enough about mysteryfiction (and films) to illustrate just how seriously I take the genre as art well worth our analytical time. There are lots of reasons why, but a prominent one would have to be just how much the genre, by its very nature, can teach us about society. That is, the detective’s job, or at least a necessary corollary to his or her job, is to learn about the world around him or her, whether specific (as in Agatha Christie’s town of St. Mary Mead or Ross MacDonald’s California) or broad (as in the mysteries of human nature with which Sherlock Holmes seems so frequently to grapple). And while it’s not impossible for those deductive revelations to include inspiring lessons (about love or courage in the face of threats, for example), the genre’s nature likewise means that most of the time the lessons entail literal falls from innocence, recognitions of the guilt not only in those who commit crimes but (much of the time) in the world as a whole.I know of few mystery novels that better exemplify those multi-layered, sobering revelations about the world than Scott Turow’s legal thriller Presumed Innocent (1987). Turow’s first-person narrator, prosecutor Rusty Sabich, stands accused of killing the woman with whom he was having an extra-marital affair; the evidence against Rusty is overwhelming, and although he is eventually acquitted, the cause is simply another level of guilt: Rusty and his lawyer discover that the case’s judge has been taking bribes, and use the information as leverage to force an acquittal. Moreover, virtually every other character in the novel is guilty of something significant as well; the cop who first investigates the case, for example, is a longtime friend of Rusty’s and illegally disposes of evidence in an (unsuccessful) attempt to shield Rusty from suspicion. Rusty’s story and world are so choked with guilt, so driven by it from start to finish, in fact, that the title begins to feel less like a legal concept and more like a sardonic social commentary.Moreover (double SPOILER ALERT for this paragraph!), the novel’s final revelation adds two intimate and even more compelling falls from innocence to the mix. In the closing pages, Rusty discovers evidence that makes clear that the murderer was his wife, who had uncovered the affair, confronted and killed the mistress, and then tried to frame Rusty for the crime instead (going so far as to plant his semen at the scene of the crime). Even on its own terms, this fall from innocence, connected as it is to the woman with whom he has spent his life and has a family, is the novel’s most shocking and damning. But Rusty chooses not to turn his wife in, and the reason is his recognition of the story’s fundamental layer of guilt, its original sin, the fall from innocence that started it all: his affair. Which is to say, the book’s ultimate revelation is that its first-person narrator, its voice and perspective, and (as in almost any first-person book) its most intimate connection to its audience, is the most guilty party of all.Next fall tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?

October 9, 2013: Legends of the Fall: The Body and Stand By Me

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American images of the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn. Add your thoughts on falls, seasonal or symbolic, for me to harvest for the weekend post!]
On the novella that’s explicitly about the “fall from innocence,” and the film adaptation that’s less so.In 1982, frustrated by his inability to publish works that weren’t part of the horror genre in which he had risen to fame, Steven King decided to release four such novellas as one collection, Different Seasons , with each novella linked to one of the four seasons. The most famous, thanks to its cult classic film adaptation, is almost certainly the collection’s first piece, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (seasonal subtitle: Hope Springs Eternal). But nearly as well-known, thanks in large measure to its own popular film adaptation Stand By Me (1986), is the collection’s third piece, The Body (seasonal subtitle: Fall from Innocence). (The collection’s summer novella, Apt Pupil: Summer of Corruption , has also been made into a recent film, and is, in its portrayal of a teenage boy corrupted by a former Nazi war criminal, a candidate for this week’s series in its own right.)On the surface, The Body and Stand By Me are almost identical: in each forty-something novelist Gordie Lachance narrates the story of a teenage adventure with his three best friends, a trip that the four boys take after hearing about a dead body out in the woods near their hometown. Moreover, each ends with (among other things) Gordie informing the audience that his best best friend, Chris Chambers, worked his way out of a poor and violent upbringing to reach college and law school, only to die in a random and tragic stabbing, a detail that certainly symbolizes the loss of childhood innocence as the protagonists move into the often brutal and cold adult world. Yet the change in title from the novella to the film illustrates a broader thematic shift: Rob Reiner’s movie is far more centrally concerned with the camaraderie and joys of teenage friendship (its last line is “I never had any friends like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”, which appears in the middle of King’s book and is thus emphasized far more in the film); while King’s novella depicts the world’s brutalities much more consistently, including a savage beating that all four boys receive at the hands of an older brother and his friends.Which is to say, at the risk of oversimplifying the two works, Reiner’s film is ultimately pretty nostalgic about the world of childhood, while King’s novella complicates and to my mind ultimately rejects that kind of nostalgia. Concurrently, the two could be read as depicting the loss of innocence in very different ways: Reiner’s film portraying it as a moment of genuine shift, from one kind of life and world to another; and King’s as more of a realization about the darkness of the world we have always inhabited, even as young people. I think there’s a place in our narratives and images for both stories, and that they complement each other nicely; but I also think that King’s story is a bit truer to the world of young adulthood, which while certainly free of various adult responsibilities and pressures can still be (as the Knowles and Cormier books from Monday’s post illustrate) as fraught and perilous as the darkest realities of adult life.Next fall tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?

October 8, 2013: Legends of the Fall: American Pastoral

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American images of the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn. Add your thoughts on falls, seasonal or symbolic, for me to harvest for the weekend post!]
On a novel with over-the-top moments that practically scream “loss of innocence,” and the quieter scene that much more potently captures it.To follow up the main idea from yesterday’s post, I experienced a very different kind of teenage literary loss of innocence when I decided to read Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) for pleasure in early high school (what can I say, I was a nerd and the son of an English professor to boot). I can still quite distinctly remember arriving at Chapter 2, “Whacking Off,” and encountering for the first time just exactly how far Roth is willing to go—how obscene, how graphic, how flagrantly over-the-top. For reasons not quite known to me, in my second semester at Fitchburg State I chose to put Portnoy on the syllabus of a junior-level seminar on “Major American Authors of the 20th Century,” and got to see 25 undergrads—24 women, by chance—having their own such encounters with Roth, the novel, and that chapter in particular. Let’s just say it wasn’t just me.Roth’s late masterpiece American Pastoral (1997) is a far more realistic and restrained work than Portnoy, but nonetheless Roth includes a couple of distinctly Roth-ian over-the-top scenes, both symbolizing quite overtly his novel’s overall themes of the loss of innocence that accompanied the late 60s and early 70s in American culture and society. In the first, the novel’s now middle-aged protagonist, Swede Levov, meets with a seemingly innocent young women to try to learn the whereabouts of his missing daughter Merry; the woman turns out instead to be a brazen and cynical 60s radical, and she meets the Swede naked, graphically exposing and probing herself in front of him (while daring him to, in essence, rape her). In the second, the tour-de-force set piece with which Roth concludes the novel, a family dinner full of shocking revelations and betrayals is set against the backdrop of the televised Watergate hearings, and culminates with a crazy drunken woman stabbing an elderly man in the head with her fork.These scenes are as surprising and shocking as intended, and I suppose in that way they make Roth’s point. But if he intends the theme of the loss of innocence to be tragic as well as disturbing and comic (which those two scenes are, respectively), then I would point a far quieter and to my mind far more potent scene. In it, the Swede finally finds Merry and sees her again, for the only time between her teenage disappearance (after she bombs a local post office in political protest and kills an innocent bystander) and his own later death. He asks a few questions, but mostly what he does is listen (to her stories of all the horrors she has experienced in the years since the bombing) and observe (her literally fading life as a converted Jainist, one for whom any contact with the world is destructive and so self-deprivation and -starvation comprises the only meaningful future). As a parent, I can imagine nothing more shattering hearing and seeing such things from one of my children—and in the Swede’s quiet horror and sadness, Roth captures a far more powerful and chilling loss of innocence.Next fall tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?

October 7, 2013: Legends of the Fall: Young Adult Lit

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American images of the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn. Add your thoughts on falls, seasonal or symbolic, for me to harvest for the weekend post!]
On two iconic YA novels that fractured my innocence right alongside that of their characters.The early teenage years—those of late middle school into the beginning of high school—seem to resonate particularly well with the idea of a loss of innocence. I’m sure that kids who grow up in far more difficult situations than I did, or who have to deal with loss at a young age, or otherwise are confronted with the world’s darker realities experience the shift from innocence to experience, naivete to maturity, earlier. But even those of us who make it through childhood unscathed are going to come up against the harsher sides to life at some point, and ages 12-15 seems like a pretty common such milestone. I say that partly as a kid who was badly hazed by his cross country teammates during his freshman year of high school—but also partly the one who read John Knowles’ A Separate Peace (1959) and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974) and Beyond the Chocolate War (1985) in 8th grade.I’d be lying if I said I remember much at all of the three books—that’s about 25 years, and a whole lot of books, under the bridge. But what I do remember are a couple of specific and very dark moments, of literal and symbolic falls: the seemingly accidental fall that Knowles’ protagonist Gene purposefully causes his friend Finny to take, a fall that eventually leads to Finny’s death (among other destructive effects); and a profoundly disturbing suicide scene in Cormier’s sequel, one that locates readers in the perspective of a young student leaping to his death after being ostracized and abused for his homosexuality by his peers and even a teacher. Obviously those weren’t the first literary deaths I had encountered—in 6th grade English I read Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None (1939), for crying out loud!—but they might have been the first in which kids my own age were killed, at least in such purposeful and brutal ways (ie, not the accidental drowning in Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia [1977], traumatic as that was for this young reader).Perhaps it was that sense of proximity and (in a way) threat to myself that led these particular moments, and the novels in which they occur, to hit me as hard as they did. Perhaps it was that all three books are deeply concerned with what it means to be a teenage boy, in some of the better but (I would argue) mostly some of the worst senses. And perhaps it’s a tribute to their interesting and almost entirely implicit engagement with the wars during which they’re set—Knowles does have his characters engage with World War II toward the end of his novel; I don’t believe Cormier mentions Vietnam at all, certainly not at length, but his titular war certainly gestures in that direction. War, after all, has long been one of the most overt and catastrophic ways in which young men—and their societies—lose their innocence; in my reading of these young adult novels and their effects on me, I was led to feel such effects far more intimately than might otherwise have been the case.Next fall tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?

October 5-6, 2013: What’s Next for NEASA

[This past weekend, the New England American Studies Association held its annual conference. This week, I have followed up some of the most inspiring aspects of the conference and some of the many great talks I heard there. Now it’s time to look ahead to what 2014 has in store, and how you can be part of it (whether you’re regional or not)!]
1)      The Council: Okay, for this one you do have to be regional. But if you are a New England AmericanStudier—in or out of academia—there are few better ways I know of to get more involved with the region’s conversations and communities than to run for the NEASA Council. Council members get to help plan the year’s fall conference, the spring colloquium, our evolving web presence, and a lot more—as well as to figure out what might be next for NEASA that we haven’t even imagined yet. If you’re interested, send me an email!2)      The Conference: As of this writing, few details about next year’s conference are set in stone, but a few things are definite: the 2014 President, Jeffrey Meriwether, will do a great job organizing it; our co-Presidents Ex Officio, Elif Armbrusterand Akeia Benard, will advise him well; and the conference is likely to be held at Rhode Island’s Roger Williams University, where Jeffrey and fellow Council member Laura D’Amore teach. But when it comes to the conference theme, to possibilities for special speakers or events, for community connections, for sites in Rhode Island to which we should connect—to all the specifics, basically—there’s still plenty of room for suggestions (for which you don’t have to be regional at all). So what do you think next year’s conference should include?3)      The Colloquium: From relatively humble beginnings in 2011, the annual spring colloquium has really taken off, with each of the last two years’ offering something quite distinct: 2012’s at Salem’s House of the Seven Gables focused on a particular theme; while 2013’s at Suffolk University focused on defining AmericanStudies questions and practices. That means that 2014’s colloquium is particularly open-ended: we can pick a site like the House and focus on relevant themes; we can hold it at any site and focus on continuing the defining and practical conversations; or we can do something new once again, and expand the roster of possibilities even further. What do you think? What kind of informal, conversational, collegial AmericanStudies colloquium would you like to attend?Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Questions or thoughts on NEASA or these kinds of events overall? Want to get involved? You know what to do!

October 4, 2013: NEASA Conference Follow Ups: Plenary

[This past weekend, the New England American Studies Association held its annual conference. This week, I’ll follow up some of the most inspiring aspects of the conference and some of the many great talks I heard there. If you were part of it, or if you have your own thoughts on any of these topics, please chime in!]
For reasons that I won’t get into here, I didn’t get to attend most of Saturday’s Keynote speech, delivered by the wonderful Native American Studies scholar Mark Rifkin. If anyone reading this was able to be there, please share some of what he had to say, and your own thoughts of course, in comments! I was however able to be at Friday’s Plenary Panel, and so wanted to highlight briefly each of the three impressive speakers and a bit of what he or she had to say:1)      Linda Coombs: Wampanoag elder, historian, and educator Linda Coombs got the plenary started on a fiery and impressive note, situating the ongoing plans for the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival in Plymouth within the parallel American traditions of violence toward and silencing of Native Americans. Linda’s one of the most inspiring Americans I’ve had the chance to meet in person, and she sure didn’t disappoint here.2)      Timothy Ives: Former NEASA Council colleague and current Rhode Island State Archaeologist Tim Ives shifted things up, highlighting some much more positive ongoing developments between the Narragansett tribe, other Rhode Island interests, and his office. As Tim’s work proves, better remembering and preserving our collective past has present and political stakes as well, and it’s nice to know we’ve got folks like Tim fighting for those goals.3)      Steve Stonearrow: Lakota medicine man and healer Steve Stonearrowended the plenary with an evocative reminder of the power of words, stories, songs, and belief—within one community, across all Native American communities, and for all Americans and humans. We can be educated and inspired by histories and ideas (as Linda reminds us) and by work (as Tim does)—but also, and just as powerfully, by lives and voices (as all three speakers do).A highlight among many at this great conference! This weekend, a post on what’s next for NEASA,BenPS. What do you think?