Aimless Reflection on Inclement Weather,
Longhouses, and Derelict Presidents
At the NYS Museum, down on the abominable modernist Empire Plaza with which Nelson Rockefeller desecrated Albany, there's a great exhibit of how the local indigenous folks – Mohican, Mohawk and other Iroquois groups, lived in longhouses. According to the captions on the exhibit, the longhouses could be maintained in even very cold weather with temps in the 50s. I think of that exhibit every winter, about living in that cold, smoky, and dark enclosure with 40 or 50 other human beings.
The 50s temperature itself is very survivable, but the environment must have been dramatically unhealthy, promoting lung damage and incubating various pathogens that could sweep over the entire population very quickly. I wouldn't have liked it, with all the human sounds of farts, groans, coughing, snoring, bickering, and no doubt copious copulation, because what else do you do in such an environment in the winter with no light, no magazines, no phone? I have little doubt that the birthrate in August through November was much higher than any other time of year.
Kind of reminds me of my anthropological studies of kinship systems. This topic was very interesting, but the intricacies of it and the slight differences between systems practiced by the Crow, Iroquois and Cherokee, for instance, not to mention the larger differences between those systems and the Diné system practiced by the Navajo, made the coursework some seriously difficult shit, with all that diagramming of generational descent lines. I barely eked out a B for the course, because I hate that kind of memorization and diagramming.
I was taught in one course that there were five or six major kinship systems, with some being more similar than others. But like most of them, the Iroquois were matrilineal, meaning that one traced their heriditary lineaqe through their mother's family. And like most Native Americans, youth were paired off into reproductive relationships with cousins. Some groups preferred reproduction through “double cousins,” meaning that a nephew of the father would reproduce with the niece of the mother, or vice versa. I never actually studied the Iroquois specifically, but scanning a couple of search entries just now, I don't see any immediate evidence that the Iroquois went in for double cousins.
Anyway, the notion of “atomic families” doesn't really work too well with most Indigenous American kinship systems. And with the matrilineal descent, at least in some groups the notion of strong patriarchal tribe management lost cogency as well.
So thinking about being cooped up in those cold, dark longhouses for months at a time, I started wondering if perhaps the matrilineal systems resulted in less “spouse abuse” … or abuse of women in general. My assumption is that there also was not a lot of alcohol to inspire men to violence. So maybe, just maybe, the mood was mellower and the incidence of violent conflict in the longhouses was less than would have been the case among the more barbaric, in some respects, European tribes. Still, there must have been a lot of frayed nerves over the course of a winter.
I'll never know. Or for that matter, need to know. Just something relaxing to ponder on this suckass icy President's day that the current holder of that office absolutely defiles in every possible way. What a shithead. I wish he would just ride off into the sunset and disappear forever.