A Notable Chunk of Those Disaffected Consumers
Seem to be sticking to their guns
Boozhoo, indinawemaaganidog! Aaniin! That is to say hello, all of my relatives! Welcome to another edition of An Irritable Métis. I have been spending a lot of time behind the wheel again traveling all over Montana and beyond and it’s not slowing down anytime soon. It’s been (mostly) wonderful and I’m here to remind everyone that for all the mayhem and cruelty in the world, there remain a multitude of folks out there worth making time to share a moment or two with1, even if it’s just a smile and fist raised in solidarity. Just look at these protests! It feels like something is shifting and here’s hoping we can keep up the momentum and make some progress beyond the ends of our own noses. It really comes down to doing what you can and realizing you are likely capable of more than you think. We all are exceedingly capable, and all the little things add up. I am cautiously optimistic.
I know things are tight for many people out there and fear is in the air. I’m talking to a lot of people – hundreds, if not thousands, this year alone – and if anything I want to remind people that nothing is over until it’s over, and we are far away from that. Your continued support keeps me out taking it to the people, particularly as challenges present themselves, as you’ll see in the following. You have no idea how much the support I get from this newsletter via paid subscriptions means to me. If you’ve got a spare $50 to throw this way for the next year, or can even scrape off $5/month, it is eminently helpful and appreciated.
On the afternoon of Thursday, April 3, I had just arrived back in Missoula from a (weird) gig in Big Sky when I opened my ipad to check my email2 and it all but exploded. I was in the parking lot of the UC at the University of Montana, as I had a speaking engagement looming there. The bulk of correspondence centered on this email from my friend John Knight, the Program Director at the mighty Humanities Montana:
Dear Humanities Montana Speakers,
Humanities Montana received notice late last night that our general operating grant from the NEH was canceled. The general operating grant pays for all of our programs, grants, staff salaries and other expenses. You can find out more information regarding the cancelation of the general operating grant through this communication from the Federation of State Humanities Councils.
As a result of this news and effective with this email, Humanities Montana is canceling all Montana Conversations, Speakers in the Schools and Poet Laureate programs, including presentations that are booked and scheduled. It was our expectation that funds appropriated by congress for this fiscal year would continue to be available. Unfortunately, with the cancelation of the grant, funds are no longer available. Humanities Montana can no longer able to pay honoraria and travel reimbursements for upcoming program presentations. I am very sorry to deliver this news. I will begin to reach out to all of program events sites today, notifying them of program cancelations. I ask that you also share the news with any program sites that you expect to travel to in the next few months. If you decide to still travel and present, Humanities Montana cannot pay or reimburse you for your efforts.
I already had an email request from my friend Keila at the Daily Montanan for an interview about this turn of events, which I did over the phone from the parking lot. In these tumultuous days since, I’ve done a couple other interviews. Mostly recently, my buddy Cory “The Pride of Alaska” Walsh wrote an excellent and comprehensive article about this change’s effects on the state for the Missoulian, called “Cuts to Humanities Montana budget will be felt in rural areas”, graciously reposted HERE for your non-paywalled reading experience.
I’m quoted pretty heavily in Cory’s piece so I don’t have much more to say about this recent assault on everyday people by people who were born into wealth and privilege. I intend to deal with that a little in a different piece in the next week or so anyway. But I do want to give a shout out to the important work that Humanities does3. Is this loss of funding a blow to me personally? Certainly. Of the various ways I make my living as a writer, the money I make from Humanities is a piece of it, though a small one. If I never got paid again by Humanities it wouldn’t be a huge difference; the main difference they make is the covering of expenses, when they can, to keep me out on the road without entirely draining my resources. Montana is a big place. A trip to Ekalaka, for example, is a 1200 mile round trip. And that’s just one town. The real loss here is to the communities that Humanities serves, as Cory writes about. It is a huge loss and one that cannot be taken without vigorous and voiciferous response!
I will say this though: this turn of events has turned my days upside down since, though. Because I am committed to NOT canceling all the events I had scheduled and I’ve even taken on more. This is the message I sent out to all of my contacts I’d been working with:
Boon matayn, friends, good morning,
If you are reading this message, you are someone I have been working with to schedule an event with through Humanities Montana, whether as poet laureate or to provide a program related to the Little Shell. As you have no doubt been informed, on Wednesday, April 2, Humanities Montana received notice that its general operating grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities was canceled. The general operating grant pays for many of its programs, including the ones I have been doing through this magnificent organization for years. Because of this, Humanities sent a message out to everyone that their events are cancelled. However:
Please consider our program to be going ahead full steam, as scheduled, regardless of whether it is funded or not.
I have other avenues I’m exploring but will do it for free if that is what it takes to keep the wheels rolling. I'm not going to let some petty wannabe despot and his moronic billionaire lackey get in the way of what we are doing. If the protests this past weekend are any indication, this situation isn't going to last ... and even if it does, it won’t be forever, and together we're going to figure out a way to keep the essential work happening where we can. And this is one of those arenas where I believe we can make it work. So let’s do it.
Here are some logistics and ways you can assist if you are in a position to do so:
1 - Humanities pays me $250 for a program, with $50/ea for each additional program in the same day. So, for example, if you are a school bringing me in to work with three classes, my payment would be $350. I mention this because if you are an organization with any kind of budget, whatever you can provide will be helpful. If you don't have one though, we aren't going to let that stop us.
2 - Speaking of schools, if you are a school with any IEFA money left, we can use that to fund my appearance. I can help you with these logistics and your reporting if that is the route you want to take. Keep in mind this is an option for other Humanities programs featuring Native presenters as well. This is important! I’m happy to help you work with them too if necessary.
3 - I have a line on getting my expenses covered, at least for the next few coming months. If/when that dries up, I'll figure something else out. Again, if you are an organization that can help with this when it comes to funding my program yourself, great. But don't worry too much about it.
4 - Feel free to forward this to anyone in your network who lost Humanities programs, or any colleagues who might not be affected but can assist somehow.
Meanwhile, here is more information about the situation from the Federation of State Humanities Councils website. Also, please reach out to the good people at Humanities Montana and let them know they have your support. These are the times when, as a community, we need to stand together against such affronts to what is clearly meaningful to us.
These next few months, if not couple years, will define this period in our shared history. Let’s make sure we showed these people our mettle! I assure you our ancestors are watching, and our descendants are waiting, to see how we do.
I think this covers everything for now. If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. If you’ve decided you don’t want to move forward, I understand … but please let me know. Miigwech!
In solidarity,
Chris
So that’s that. I’ve been under a deluge of email, as you can imagine, generally with giant-hearted people figuring out ways to make all this work. It’s not a small undertaking as essentially every program needs to be re-addressed and re-figured out. But they are all happening and I’m happy about that. If also pretty stressed-out and mildly overwrought.
“Anyone with any degree of mental toughness ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least.”
— Georgia O’Keefe
In closing, it sucks that these bastards can so easily hit us where it hurts and take things away at a whim. And this is just one thing while many other things are happening at the same time. How do we fight back against it? I wish we could galvanize ourselves into real action. Protests are nice and an excellent way to show common cause and inspire people, but I don’t know how much the jackasses we are protesting against really care. Not without bricks and burning buildings and other general mayhem and I’m not advocating for that.4 But what else?
What if we all logged off for a few months? Disabled our social media. Closed our Netflix and Spotify and Amazon Prime and Apple this and that and all of those things. Stopped going to Target and Lowe’s and Starbuck’s and all those other corporate bootlickers of the current administration. Would billions of dollars in lost subscriptions and shopping income and etc. send a message to the people really pulling the strings? Maybe. We don’t have a lot of recourse (and in some communities where Wal Mart is the only game in town, for example, such commitments are unavailable to folks) but those of us who can really might consider doing so. We need to use every tool available to us. And don’t forget:
Other Stuff
Learn Crow Beading with Lark Real Bird
Curious about learning to bead from someone legit? No one is more legit than my friend Lark Real Bird. If I had the time I’d take this myself. Don’t sleep on this one, my friends. Register HERE!
Also, *sigh*, Next Week in Missoula
To sweeten the pot for having you come out and endure more of my blathering in Missoula, I’ve invited my friend Sapphire Jetty to join me and play a few Métis tunes on her magical fiddle, and she said yes. This will make things much more special….
More info HERE.
Don’t Forget that August is IndigiPalooza MT!
The event of the summer is barely more than three months away and things are unfolding nicely. If you haven’t signed up for updates yet, you may do so at this page. I’ve been threatening an update for a couple weeks now but we’ve since solidified the line-up and sent out some contracts and things are heating up. Meanwhile, this Irritable Community has been incredibly generous with donations too but we still have a ways to go. You may donate HERE; just select IndigiPalooza from the dropdown menu. I’ll probably do a big funding push again in May as we enter the home stretch, but why wait to be hassled then when you can contribute now? Miigwech!
Miigwech, as always, my friends. I’m grateful as ever for your time and attention.
You know what? I’m going to share just a few of these in my next newsletter because why not? I also intend to share, and soon, a bunch of poems written by some poets I shared a couple days with in Utah last month or so, since it IS poetry month or whatever….
I go to great lengths to shield myself from bad news which tends to arrive via email so I don’t keep email on my phone and only check it when I’m in a place to be prepared for whatever is lurking there.
Cory’s piece says I started with Humanities in 2023 with my appointment as poet laureate. That is incorrect. I’m pretty sure I started working with them during Covid, or immediately after. So it’s been several years and many, many programs prior to the MTPFL thing.
*cough*
I have a little extra this month and I’d like to donate to your travel fund so you can keep providing your communities with events. How can I do so?
upgrading my subscription now to "paid." As a retired community college teacher and "working" poet, I appreciate your response to the tyrannical idiodacy in d.c. we need our poets storytellers shamans troubadours now more than ever--somebody's gotta keep the truth alive!