[L-I] Flicks and Floods and Written Works in East Idaho [Fahrenheit 9-11 and Bear River Massacre]

Flicks and Floods and Written Works in East Idaho [Fahrenheit 9-11 and Bear
River Massacre]

[Broadly posted on seventeen lists.]

Yesterday evening, Josie [our youngest] and Cameron journeyed up
to Idaho Falls -- 50 miles or so, where Teton Basin country begins --
to see Fahrenheit 9-11.  Idaho Falls, incidentally the site of one of the
reaching-toward-sixty impressive Mormon Temples found in the world
as a whole -- very special buildings -- is one of only two towns in the
Gem State where the movie is presently [I say presently] available.
The other two locales are in the capital city of Boise.

On the last day of this last June, I had made this post on a relaxed
and eminently pleasant  little List with which I'm deeply affiliated:

"Today's paper [morning], the Idaho State Journal, carried the banner
headline that "Controversial film skips Pocatello."  Poky ain't all that
unusual since Fahrenheit 9/11 is skipping  the Gem State almost in total at
this point:  only two film houses in Boise and one in Idaho Falls are
presently showing it.  As the paper put it, "the controversial film may be
too hot for Idaho as a whole."  However, this could change damn fast as soon
as box office receipt news from Boise and Idaho Falls starts spreading to
Sand Point in the far northwest and to Lava Hot Springs south of here.
These may be hard political times but this is not a Salt of the Earth
situation in the mid and late '50s [and beyond.]"  [Hunter Bear]

Idaho Falls and Pocatello are the major towns in heavily LDS Eastern
Idaho and both are traditionally strong union labor citadels.  Why one
features the film and not the other may swing simply on the character of
film house ownership.  Very reliable reports to us here at Poky indicate
that LOTS of folks -- and very much younger people -- are angered and
upset by the present unavailability of the movie in this town.

In any event, our two travelers returned with an all around enthusiastic
report:  full house in the big theatre and, at the end, most of the audience
standing and clapping.  I think people will be standing and clapping in
Pocatello before too long at all.  Money has been money in Idaho ever since
John Hays Hammond et al launched the huge Bunker Hill mine in the Coeur d'
Alenes which started about 1881 and ran its sanguinary course for almost
a century. [My maternal grandfather was employed there and in its subsidiary
towns as a well trained mining engineer starting more than a hundred years
ago.]

Eldri and I hope to see Fahrenheit 9-11 before long.
It probably won't join my super-favorite flicks [e.g., Shane, Salt of the
Earth, the old Inherit the Wind, Reds -- and, much more recently, the
pervasively and deep deep chilling Conspiracy [Holocaust planning] -- but
it's obviously a major and -- by the lights of most of us -- Good Happening.

As Josie and Cameron left Idaho Falls, drenching rain was falling.  By the
time they arrived back here at Pocatello, flood warnings were out for our
Snake River and its tributaries.

Far from expressing displeasure about Fahrenheit 9-11, it's obvious the
Creator has taken this opportunity to really end the hideous drought in
these parts.

And that's how we Indians see things.

And now a little more:

We continue to boost Kass Fleisher's fine new book, The Bear River Massacre
and the Making of History.  This is a recent post of mine:

"And Monday saw the most welcome arrival of Kass Fleisher's
very fine and just out book:  The Bear River Massacre and the Making of
History [Albany:  State University of New York Press, 2004.]  Kass is a
former [excellent] student of mine and now a long-time and very productive
English prof in her own right.  This important book deals with the massacre
of almost 300 Northwestern Shoshoni Indians at the hands of essentially
Union troops on January 29  1863 on the southeastern Idaho border region
adjoining Utah.  She has done a splendid job of not only resurrecting this
atrocity -- which ranks on the sanguinary scale with Sand Creek [eastern
Colorado, 1864] and Wounded Knee [South Dakota, 1890] -- but also in
pursuing the many significant, but until now often shadowy ramifications and
implications of the terrible affair.

And it's extremely well written.

I was privileged indeed to be one of a handful of readers selected by SUNY
Press at the beginning of the process and a statement from my glowing report
is one of four carried on the back cover:

"The most intriguing dimension is the thrust, from a fascinating variety of
viewpoints, to achieve redemption -- a great and signal effort encompassing
and, however awkwardly, transcending race and ethnicity, religion and
non-religion, tribal generations and tribal factions and, very basically,
the skeletal hand of History." [Hunter Bear]

Get it and read it well.

Yours for the Red Dawn [just now coming over the mountains to the east.]

HUNTER GRAY  [HUNTER BEAR]   Micmac /St. Francis Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk
www.hunterbear.org
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'

In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the
game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the
high windy ridges -- and they dance from within the very essence of our own
inner being. They do this especially when the bright night moon shines down
on the clean white snow that covers the valley and its surroundings.  Then
it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious and
remembering way. [Hunter Bear]















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