You gotta know when to hold 'em

Sorry about the Kenny Rogers reference but I came across the story of Nanaboozho and the Evil Gambler and now that song is stuck in my head. This story doesn't come from the Jones archive, I came across it while looking for information on the Foolish Maidens who feature in seven of the stories Jones documented and we'll come back to them because they are an interesting pair who we met briefly when Nanaboozho became a woman to deal with an arrogant man. The archetype of the evil gambler isn't unique to the Ojibwe and variations have found their way into everything. In Supernatural's The Curious Case of Dean Winchester we meet a 900 year old Irish witch who achieves immortality by inviting people to gamble with years of their lives. And although not strictly an "evil gambler," XFiles gave us Burt Reynolds as a God figure who uses games to communicate and control in Improbable. At the moment I'm wondering if the book of Job might be an evil gambler story, what with God and the accuser playing dice with the lives of a family. I know Einstein famously said that God does not play dice with the universe but I'm not so sure. And of course, we often talk about politicians gambling with people's lives although in that instance I don't think it's gambling as much as a willingness to sacrifice those who simply don't matter in their calculus. The US embraced eugenics back in the 20s and it has never fully let go. Perhaps because there's a reason it took root there so easiliy.

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This week's story about the Evil Gambler begins Gerald Vizenor's book The People Named Chippewa but I haven't come across it in my other books of Ojibwe stories. Bone Game is a novel by Louis Owens that tells an evil gambler story from the Oholone people in contemporary California and is the first book by a native writer that I read deliberately and intentionally years ago, recommended by my trickster friend so it was fun to revisit that with all this new knowledge in my head. I also found info about this story in Minjimendaamowinon Anishinaabe: Reading and Righting All Our Relations in Written English by Janice Acoose and ”The Game Never Ends”: Gerald Vizenor’s Gamble with Language and Structure in Summer in the Spring by Janice McNeil.

As always, these are just personal reflections, they are not meant to be seen as an authoritative statement on what these stories mean, as if there was a singular meaning. Which there isn't. I reflect on these stories to put them into conversation with your own, not to try and convert you to the religion of the Anishinaabe.

We begin with Nanaboozho's question to his Nokomis, am I alone? That question also provoked Nanaboozho's confrontation with Hewer of Shins and there are some similarities in these two stories but they are not different versions of the same thing. Hewer of Shins is not the Evil Gambler and sometimes this story takes place after Nanaboozho gets back from this and decides to travel the world a second time now that wiin has dealt with the things that needed dealing with. The story that Vizenor tells is set before Nanaboozho confronts father and brother.

But don't get too hung up on the order of things. Vizenor and others warn us that these stories are oral traditions, which means they are themes rather than some kind of historic chronology. Creation happens in layers and in different ways in different places. The book of Genesis, the very heartland of creation as chronological history, gives us two very different creation stories. Storytellers put things in an order to make a point, not a rigid canon. Other storytellers may put them in a different order to make a different point. I think about this in the context of my new book coming out in September, Bad Indians Book Club, because the order I put things in when I created the podcast didn't make sense anymore when I was turning it into a book. Other priorities had emerged, so I reorganized the stories, collapsing some and expanding others in addition to re-ordering. I see this in the Jones archive where there are sections where stories are repeated in a different order, expanded, contracted, or sometimes simply not present in favour of other stories.

Vizenor says that when Nanaboozho asked Nokomis about wiin's birth, she tells the story and says that the north wind spirited wiin's mother away, so Nanaboozho decides to go look for her. Again, Nokomis warns her impetuous grandchild of the dangers that await wiin on this quest. She beseeches wiin not to go on this dangerous journey.

[She tells Nanaboozho] that the distant land wiin intends to visit was infested with hideous humans "evil spirits and the followers of those who eat human flesh. No one who has ever been within their power has ever been known to return," she told her grandson. "First, these evil spirits charm their victims by the sweetness of their songs, then they strangle and devour them, but your principal enemy will be the great gambler who has never been beaten in his game and who lives beyond the realm of darkness ..."

Of course Nanaboozho goes anyway. And I suspect that Nokomis knew that wiin would and that her speech was more about preparation than trying to talk wiin out of it, because other times that she does this she also gives advice on how to do the very thing she seems to be trying to talk wiin out of. It is in response to this question of wiin's birth that Nokomis tells Nanaboozho that she had raised wiin because she knew that wiin would be a great changemaker, that Nanaboozho would participate in creation itself by bringing in a new order of things. So perhaps that is why she knows she cannot disuade wiin from these actions. These quests are why she raised wiin.

Hold that sentence in your mind, Nanaboozho was raised to be an instrument whereby a new order of things should come to pass. It's always significant, but it feels significantly significant to this story.

Of course, one does not simply walk into Mordor. Nanaboozho, for example, takes a birchbark canoe, and while wiin doesn't exactly have a fellowship of Hobbits with arrows, swords, and axes in solidarity, there are animals and other spirits that provide counsel and support along the way. We never enter the darkness alone, even though it may feel that way. There are gifts procured and offered in exchange for this counsel, and because Nanaboozho is heading directly into the darkness at the edges where worlds come together the owl lends his eyes and a firefly agrees to light the way.

When there is nowhere left to paddle, Nanaboozho pulls the canoe onto the beach and takes a path through swamps and mountains. Wiin goes through the valley of the shadow of death where gleaming eyes watch and stare while the groans and hisses of the evil beings Nokomis warned about gloated over their victims. But Nanaboozho has learned not to be distracted and keeps going, recognizing this silent hill as the place where the evil gambler abandons those who lost the game.

The wigwam is a horror of trophies. A mat of scalps covers the entry, hands and and ears are strung around the inside. All of this of course serving to intimidate those who come to seek their fortune. It's hard to keep your hands from shaking while surrounded by the sights and smells of those who failed before you. The gambler prides himself on not seeking out victims, just sitting here waiting for them to come to him, thinking they can beat the unbeatable one before becoming another trophy, food for the gambler's friends.

This is the game of the four ages of man. There are four figures, representing the four ages, standing in a dish. The player shakes the dish four times and if the figures remain standing after each shake, the player wins. If they fall, then the opponent wins. Nanaboozho agrees and reminds the Gambler that it is customary for the one who is challenged to have the last play. The Gambler agrees to this and begins the game, striking the dish to the ground. Three times the Gambler does this and each time the figures remain standing.

Nanaboozho is a manitou, which changes the dynamics of the game. Wiin is a mixed blood really, part manitou and part .. whatever wiin's mother and Nokomis are. Part human? I'm honestly not sure because the explanations are so varied, but it helps to remember that many of these things did not happen in the world that we know. We don't exist there, in a place that might be what the Apache know as the reflecting world because of the interconnections between here and there. So there are beings who may look human, but aren't because humans are here, not there and we don't have the language to imagine what they might be. But they are like us, maybe tethered to us. Nanaboozho's actions there ripple here and of course, Nanaboozho does show up here as well. It's all very everything, everywhere, all at once. Regardless, I want us to remember that wiin is a mixed blood so all those purity people can just sit down. Our cultural hero is a mixed blood.

Both Nanaboozho and the Gambler understood these ripples, that this particular playing of the game is winner take all and it is our lives that are at stake in this moment. Vizenor makes that clear. Should the figures of the four ages of man remain standing in the final throw we are all consigned to the darkness and the monsters of ice and greed. When the Gambler brings the dish down for the final time Nanaboozho whistles to the wind and all four pieces fall in the darkness. The gambler shivers and seems to harden, his flesh appearing to break into small pieces.

Then Nanaboozho smiles. The Anishinaabe will not lose their spirits to this land of darkness, but it isn't over. Now it is Nanaboozho's turn, and the gambler is the one risking his life. Should I win, Nanaboozho says, should all the four ages of man stand in the dish then you will lose your life. And with that, Nanaboozho cracked the dish on the earth.

I am one of those people who don't mind being spoiled by the ending of a story, and I am not above flipping to the end or looking at IMDB to find out for myself. It's an anxiety thing, if I know what's going to happen then I can calm down and enjoy the story. It isn't something I do all the time, just with stories that have a lot of tension. I need to know that it resolves so I can enjoy the story of how it resolves. This story does not offer us a resolution. In some ways it is like a Japanese horror in which the ghost just stays mad. In western ghost stories you can appease the ghost, right the wrong they are haunting you about, but Japanese ghost stories generally don't work that way. They are full of unresolved emotions rather than wrongs that need to be made right, so it doesn't matter what you do. There is no resolution or ultimate victory which is what we are so deeply conditioned towards. There's a whole lot of sitting with the feelings of others without trying to fix them, which we are most definitely not conditioned towards.

The first time I read this story I thought that I must have missed a page somehow, that it was incomplete, but I've found it in various sources and it always ends the same way. Without resolution. The simplest answer is that somewhere the game is ongoing, that we are in the midst of it right now. In that episode of Supernatural that I mentioned, the story is resolved. The Irish witch is defeated and Dean gets his years back. In XFiles it isn't resolved, we are left to wonder who the Burt Reynolds character really is. So many of the stories in XFiles are unresolved, which is ok because whenever they do try to resolve them people just get mad because they don't like the resolution. In Bone Game it is also left unresolved, our hero comes out of the crisis but he simply leaves the state and the gambler behind which is perhaps a kind of win, but the game is ongoing.

In first century Greece, Ovid described four ages as Golden (before agriculture), Silver (after agriculture), Bronze (warfare), and Iron (the rise of nations). A few centuries earlier Hesiod had a fifth age in between Bronze and Iron, the Heroic age which Ovid seems to have ignored. Two thousand years later, William Butler Yeats offers us a poem that includes these four ages of man:

He with body waged a fight,
But body won; it walks upright.

Then he struggled with the heart,
Innocence and peace depart.

Then he struggled with the mind;
His proud heart he left behind.

Now his wars on God begin,
At stroke of midnight God shall win.

If you look at the medicine wheel, a Lakota teaching that has spread across Indian country because of its usefulness, there are four stages: child, youth, adult, elder. Yeats seems to see these ages as internal stages as well, but also perhaps as broad ages of humanity itself subject to whatever game God is playing. The Greeks are clearly on about ages as being broad and historical. The Quechua and Hopi see history as epochs in which various beings are ascendant and others take a more subordinate role, the age of men being one of many ages kind of like Lord of the Rings. So I'm not sure what to make of these four ages, if they are the stages we go through as individuals or broad epochs. There's two sets of four in this version of the game. Four ages of man and four cracks of the dish. So maybe it is both.

Why not both?

In the Bone Game the game of chance is different. This is a game played up and down the Pacific coast in which opposing teams have to choose which hand is holding the correctly painted bone. It's a lot of fun, unless you are playing with an eternal spirit and the stakes are higher than you may know. The point of the game does, of course, ultimately rest with your opponent and the power they hold. The outcome depends on knowing your opponent and their patterns, which hand are they more likely to use for the correct piece, what have they done in the time leading up to the moment of choice? Cole, in Bone Game, chooses correctly but others have not and the game goes on.

So a few things. If the game is ongoing, then it is not difficult at all to see the consequences of each crack of the dish. Taking Ovid's four ages of man as a loose framework, each crack is a change.

Humanity emerges

CRACK: The neolithic revolution.

CRACK: Warfare.

CRACK: The rise of nations.

CRACK: and the pieces fall.

Now Nanaboozho has the dish. Wiin is bringing in a new order of things. I told you to remember that.

So what does that mean for our current state of affairs? It means that whatever may have have come after the rise of nations has been blocked. We are in the midst of the game, between players, where there is no resolution and we don't know what the outcome will be. Nanaboozho is holding evil at bay while we, all of us together with Nananboozho, bring in a new order. And it means that we are, perhaps, currently in that state of chaos that Gramsci writes about: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

Which is all very well and good but what do we do with that knowledge? What do we do about the monsters?

I don't know.

I mean. We aren't the ones playing are we. That's Nanaboozho. So do we then just sit back and hope for the best, unable to turn to the final page to find out how it all ends? Growing up evangelical I learned about the end times when God was going to come storming back and kill everybody who didn't accept his authority and there's some comfort in that belief, if you land on the right side of things I mean. I understand why it appeals to so many people. That's the point of apocalyptic literature. It's the story people turn towards so they can be confident that it resolves so they can relax and enjoy the story of how it resolves. Apocalyptic literature is meant to reveal the ending, reassure terrified people that everything is going to be ok and that the bad guys are going to get theirs. Much of that teaching was rooted in a kind of nihlistic idea that the final outcome is out of our hands and that we just do our best until God brings the dish down for the last time and we see what happens.

But that's not how Anishinaabe thought works, and this is not apocalyptic literature. The Anishinaabe are concerned with balance, and overcoming evil is part of that. But not in the sense of eradicating completely, because that would throw things out of balance. Nanaboozho does kill brothers and other beings, sometimes to good ends and other times not. Always transforming their existence, transforming the relationships between things which sometimes throws things out of balance and other times restores it. There are ripples that extend to connected worlds. But most importantly is the knowledge that balance is a process, it is something we are always working towards but not achieving because if you achieve balance you are left with binaries, and binaries are not helpful. I mean, they are helpful if you want to categorize things but remember what I said about stories shifting in order according to new priorities and a need to emphasize something different. Balance is like that. The world is always shifting so what looked like balance in one instance is imbalance in another.

Back to that question. What do we do with this. Because I think I have a better idea now that I've thought about balance.

"Remember what you always said about evil?" Hoey replied. "How you can't kill it, and it's the white man's way to try? That all we can do is be conscious of it?"
Bone Game, p 154.

We stay conscious of evil, and work towards balance. We look around us to see what is out of balance, and then find a way to work towards balancing it. And that can look an awful lot of ways. Jewish-Puerto Rican author Aurora Levins Morales writes about balancing the books on behalf of our ancestors; looking at the harms they did that we benefit from and then taking steps to address that. She is the descendant of slave owners, among other things, and sees her abolition work as a way to do that. That requires being conscious of evil, the evil that was done for us and by us, the evil that we benefit from.

We are conscious of evil and work towards balance when we look at the rooms we are in for who is missing and then figure out why, and how we can adjust the room so that it is a place they will want to be in. That requires being conscious of evil, conscious of why they are not in those rooms helps us to understand why simply inviting them isn't good enough. Too often we develop myths of innocence, like calling that concentration camp in Florida Alligator Auschwitz, as if there aren't myriad examples of this kind of race-based detention in US history. Hitler was inspired by the US after all, it isn't the other way around.

It is not possible to work towards balance if we are unwilling to be conscious of the evil around us. This is my beef with so much liberal or progressive organizing. It refuses to reckon with stolen labour and stolen land, so at best it is working towards a kinder more inclusive settler colonialism. That's not balance.

When you look at Nanaboozho's journey on the way to the gambler, there are clues there too about how to live well in this world between worlds. Wiin's relationship with all the other beings who advised and counseled, the gifts procured and offered. The courage to walk through dark places with the eyes and light of those who understand how to move in the darkness. Nanaboozho shows us single-mindedness and compassion. Others had gone before wiin and failed, perhaps out of their own hubris and perhaps because they had simply underestimated the gambler.

Nanaboozho is playing the game, doing what wiin can to keep evil at bay while we, in our awareness of the evil around us, work towards balance knowing that it is in fact a journey and not a destination.

"Bad Indians Book Club is a thought provoking and layered exploration of Indigenous storytelling, literature, and survival. Patty Krawec brings together a wide array of books, essays, and personal reflections to challenge colonial narratives and highlight the urgent need to centre Indigenous perspectives ..." excerpt from Wren's review at GoodReads

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