Month: December 2025

Strange Briton commiserates with Lakota over imprisoned headdress

I Don't Like Politics

An indigenous rights activist recently accused my town of hoarding a stolen Lakota headdress. Headdress. It seems strange to me that that word has two “d”s in it. Headress.

How much would we really lose by dropping the second d? (Get your mind out of whichever gutter it’s currently in. Mine went to breasts [dd], then dicks [the d], then a drug [dropping the second d]. The drug is probably psychedelic and people call it “d” for slang; maybe it’s acid?).

I guess it does sound different without the second d. Normally when I say “headdress” it has two: “head-dress”. Or does it? Depends on how fast I’m talking and how badly I’m slurring (or how many ‘d’s are near my face). And fast-talking does feel like the norm these days.

Headress. Is “ress” a word? One site tried to say it’s a feminine agent noun, but I feel like that’s just “ess”, not “ress”. Well, if it hasn’t been claimed already, I guess headdress can have it. “Ress”. It sounds a bit like headrest, but not too much.

A headdress is a bit like a headrest, except the headdress is resting on you, whereas you are resting on the headrest.

Perhaps this is a discussion for another day.

“Chief Iron Tail in long bonnet” (bonnet?! That’s a headress!)

As I was saying, misleadingly, an indigenous rights activist recently tried to call my town out for imperialist thievery. I’m putting it like this because he was very lazy with his accusation and I feel like replying in the same (or a similar) churlish way. The difference is, however, that my people and culture weren’t almost brought to extinction by psychopathic imperialist invaders. I mean the Romans and the Christians invaded Britain and slowly eradicated most of its pagan culture, so much so that we don’t even really know what the words and practices were that people used. But that was ageeess ago. And it’s not like I’m called Merlin, am a pagan and have in me the blood of Britons, witches and the nomadic peoples of old. Oh wait.

So anyway, this guy’s Instragram post was not actually about me, or about Hastings as such. If it was about Hastings I figure he might’ve had a bigger problem with Grey Owl – the Sussex boy and ex-soldier who pretended to be an Apache (by the way probably a Spanish word, not an indigenous word, but still widely adopted) for much of his life. He even represented indigenous folk to Queen Victoria. A Hastings man who used to taint his white boy skin with tea. Madness.

The post was about England refusing to give back the headress (headdress?) of Lakota chief Iron Tail.

(Okay, the wording was “continues to keep…rather than returning”. I summarised it fine, right?)

Now, I don’t know if anyone’s actually asked to have the headdress ‘back’. I’m in the investigation stages of this article, so I do not know, but there’s nothing in his post to suggest that the Lakota want it or have a place for it, either in active ceremonial use or in some kind of museum or reliquary. I mean obviously there’s the context that it’s part of their history, so they’d probably want it back, but that doesn’t mean there’s anyone looking for it or anywhere to keep it.

Iron Tail was an actor. Kinda. Some Lakota were forced to attend boarding schools by the US to try and turn them into white people, and as a result, kinda out of necessity, some of them got good at acting. Among their own people, these actors/performers were referred to as ‘Oskate Wicasa’, like “showman”. I don’t know to what extent this was a profession versus something you could do as well as other things. Some sources talk about warriors being recruited to Wild West shows while on the run from the US cavalry. Some suggest everyone in the show was a primarily a performer. They’re not mutually exclusive.

However, there is apparently some confusion in professional-looking sources about which Iron Tail they’re referring to. There was also a contemporary Iron Hail, says wikipedia, who fought at Little Big Horn, whereas Iron Tail didn’t do so much fighting. And people got befuddled because you kinda just assume that the man who got his head on a coin was a great warmaster. But you don’t have to fight to be a good chief, you know? Or to be a real bastard.

Speaking of real bastards, I’m pretty sure it was Thomas Jefferson who set out the US policy of trying to destroy all indigenous cultures in his part of the ‘New World’ and make every ‘indian’ a 2nd class American. And the land of the free never gave up trying to fulfil that goal. So, if you’re a Lakota, for example, who wants to be treated slightly less like shit by everyone around you, what do you do?

Well, you learn the Christian stuff, you go to church, maybe you do a little acting for Buffalo Bill. And then you go home, talk with your friends and family about your tribal and cultural history, make sure your kids learn it by memory, keep your language and rituals alive in private where it’s pretty safe. But publicly – you make yourself look like ‘the good Indian’ or whatever.

So Iron Tail seemed to spend a long time on the road with Buffalo Bill, and got photographed a lot wearing this headress. There’s one of him trying to start a car while wearing it. Now I’m not 100% sure but I think it’s supposed to be a war headress. It either is, or that’s what all the American commentators thought it was. And Iron Tail was not so much a warrior, more of a wise adviser type as I say. You know, looking sternly into the camera, not needing to speak in order to deliver a line. And he’s wearing this warrior headress, maybe, while cranking a car engine for Buffalo Bill. As far as I’m aware, they got along. Were buddies or whatever. But damn, you know? That feels cold.

‘Lakota Chief Cranks Car for Buffalo Bill’. Buffalo Bill, if you didn’t know, got that name by killing a fuck ton of buffalo. Buffalo, in case you didn’t know, are very significant in indigenous nomadic and plains cultures, being the animal that used to give many people a way to survive and thrive. And cars… don’t get me started on cars. Cars bring roads, demand for oil, all kinds of wild and arguably very nasty infrastructure to places that used to be dominated by nature. Roads made the US what it is today. Euuugh.

I really wanna know how Americanised Iron Tail became. You know? Was he sipping margaritas with Bill at the Savoy while his kin were left abandoned back in Salford? Yeah, the Wild West show came to England, and yeah some of their oskate wickasa contingent got left behind in Salford, including a veteran called Black Elk. They did a mini European tour of their own before making it back to the US. One guy called Surrounded by the Enemy got a lung infection and died. He was 22.

Now, Iron Tail supposedly sold the headress to a Texan not long before he himself passed, and an Englishman bought it off the Texan, and through the Englishman it ended up in Hastings Museum.

‘England’ didn’t buy it. But whatever. Let’s say England bought it off Texas, which bought it off Iron Tail while he was still alive. Iron Tail was an actor, sometimes. I guess that means… Iron Tail, Texas and England stole it off the Lakota? But it’s here now. Buck stops here, n’ all that.

I’m going to try and take a supportive angle in this article, when it’s done. I emphasise it is not done yet, and do not consider this blog post to be factual, though some of it probably is. I wanna be supportive of indigenous folk and the Lakota/Dakota/Nakota Nation specifically – because they exist. I don’t know if I’m capable of being supportive, as a well-to-do imperialist, but, as I said earlier, my people got wiped out too so… maybe we can bond a little?

Can’t help being annoyed at this activist who posted the thing, but then again, I do get annoyed at activists. I am an activist and I don’t like myself some of the time. It’s just this feeling that he’s doing it for likes. As an “influencer”, eugh, you know? Not for… truth? Accuracy? And, sure, it gets the message out there, but when you’re willing to compromise on a few details for the sake of good coverage, what message are you sending? Well, I guess that England doesn’t want to repatriate items of cultural significance to the indigenous folk trying to preserve and develop their culture?

I don’t know yet whether that’s true, but I can believe it. It sounds like what we’ve done to plenty of people across the world. Also I have found a bunch of stuff about our ‘study’ of ‘Native American history’ in Hastings that seems kinda shit. Treating them like they’re either dumb monkeys or brutal savages who’re mysteriously well-attuned to nature. Neither of those is really an adequate story, and we don’t seem that interested in hearing from these indigenous people themselves to correct the record.

Except… a lot of that ‘study’ was from last century. It is being updated. Hastings is unusually interested in the indigenous folk of the Americas. We’re a mystical town. Pagan in our ways, almost Brythonic at times. Maybe we’re the dumb children trying to make a connection with our ancestry. Maybe no-one has to be the dumb children? Maybe children aren’t dumb? I mean heck, they certainly make a lot of noise.

And the museum is changing a lot right now, to the extent that it could maybe just start being a positive influence here, and really do something to promote indigenous culture, and maybe even advance their rights over in the US! You know, do some fundraisers or something. Do fundraisers help? Maybe King Charlie could recognise their nation status or something. Really fuck up everyone’s day.

I can imagine some of the volunteers in and around Hastings Museum putting the work in to find a good home for this headress and other artefacts, among the Lakota and any other groups we might’ve acquired them from. I can imagine these items being used to revitalise, rebuild and evolve their culture in their own terms, to keep up the fight against centuries of attempts to see it wiped off the face of the earth.

Yeah there’s anger here, sure, there’s people insulting eachother, crimes against humanity are involved. But really, what this headress matter boils down to, is one of the most deprived towns in England, and a (now) small nation that the US refused to acknowledge as existing. Why wouldn’t we get along?

Beyond reality is the terrifyingly real

Notes

So I was thinking, somewhat loftily, that Metaphysics is consistent, but debates about it, the language around it, aren’t. Metaphysics is really just a more readily accessible and somewhat clairvoyant restatement of physics – I mean it can predict some of physics’ conclusions, but without the mathematical proofs, and so without the detail required for substantial action. Nonetheless it can provide an excellent groundwork or framework of understanding.

It’s funny though. That a field basically called “beyond reality” is all about discussing what’s real. It probably should just be called physics. Maybe the ‘meta’ is about having that emotional distance from something that lets you understand it better? But even there, physics seems to be better at that, certainly these days. Maybe more in terms of distance inward, rather than distance outward, but it’s still distance of a kind. Hmm, could be about proximity rather than distance? Being emotionally immersed. Filled to the brim with spirit and intuition.

Ah right, apparently it was only called metaphysics because ‘Arry Stotle’s editor named the metaphysics books literally chronologically “after” the physics books. Or maybe “beyond”. Also suggesting that the metaphysics had different topics than the basic study of the natural world. I guess subsequent philosophers just took that and really ran with it. Heck, I wanted to believe in a weird alternate world on top of our world too. But you can have alternate worlds within physics now, within what we understand of the natural world, so the distinction seems to have pretty substantially broken down.

Just call it physics maybe. Start teaching philosophy (and religion?) alongside algebraic formulae. Might make it tolerable for the ‘non-scientists’.

Maybe one day I’ll get on to the reason why ‘regular’ physics being so completely wild is pretty terrifying (and inspiring).

Since 2019… language traps, accidental ethics and being a good doggy

Counting the Days
Dog at Rest
Gerrit Dou (Dutch, 1613–1675)
1650
Oil on panel
* Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection
* Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

I haven’t written on here since 2019 so, I prompted myself to get started again by editing an old draft for a post (well, just a little thought-note really) and scheduling it to go out next week, which quickly become tomorrow, and while I was writing this, tomorrow became today.

The logic being, if I know suddenly, out of the blue, I’m posting a weird little note about metaphysics (that’s what the other piece is almost about), then it’s not going to make sense. I’m going to have to write something now, tonight, today, as a prelude to overshadow it: the real ‘return to the stage’. Not because anyone’s watching but I mean… I dunno, it takes a lot of integrity and self-confidence to stand up on stage in an empty room, rant for a full ten minutes and then disappear. What if someone saw? Every minute ticking by up there makes it more likely that you’ll have a witness, right, and if you have a witness, you have an audience. And if you’re on stage and you have an audience, well then you goddamn better entertain them.

Apparently – I can’t let a sleeping dog lie. Like the empty theatre. I struggle, sometimes, to embrace the emptiness and just roll with it. For example, I hate using phrases like “let sleeping dogs lie”, uh, just let me check on a search engine… idioms! I think that’s what they’re called.

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about how a lot of the Nazis were boring in their evil. Well, not boring, but banal. The point being, you don’t need to be Space Hitler, you can just be an unsatisfied painter and ex-solider with PTSD, personality issues and a hardcore painkiller addiction. Evil happens in that kind of environment – a real world environment. You don’t need literal Satan or a Sith Emperor. Sometimes that grandiose image of evil even distracts from the real evil going on around you, maybe to the point where you aren’t ready for it or just don’t see it.

Eichmann is the banal Nazi I’m reminded of currently. I remember Arendt writing that – in his trial – Eichmann seemed to only speak in idioms and justified all his actions through a kind of dumb reliance on orders and supposed ‘common sense’. This wasn’t a shitty attempt at hiding mastermind villainy – which is what my mind immediately wanted it to be. Eichmann was an average man, using his boring mind to commit a bunch of heinous acts on numerous people, regardless of whether they were interesting or boring. He just liked that he’d become important, I guess. No grand agenda, as such. I imagine him as a local council official given way too much power, probably specifically because he wouldn’t think out of the box. [dammit, another idiom]

So now, when I hear myself using a string of idioms (or, it seems, just one idiom) I compulsively retch in my mind over how I’m drifting into the Eichmann zone of thought. Just keep repeating the common phrases, do what you’re told, and be exceedingly evil when you’re pretty confident you can get away with it, ‘and you’ll be fine’.

I don’t like it. Ick.

And this little aside proves, maybe, that I can’t let a sleeping dog lie, because I retched at the idiom and then I really wanted to explain myself to you rather than just trotting past it like nothing happened.

Imagine I’m doing this (or resisting doing this) in regular conversation, and not in a – possibly – conceited bit of online self-reflection. Because that’s what it’s like for me a lot of the time. My mind is cuddling or poking or panicking at sleeping dogs all the time. Maybe yours does the same thing. I don’t literally poke sleeping dogs though. I do tend to very gently pat them if I think it’s not going to disturb them too much, but probably not if they’re really far asleep. It’s not often that dogs do seem to be in a deep sleep, so I wanna let them have that moment to themselves.

I just read a snippet of a summary of the banality of evil and Eichmann stuff (I searched it up to make doubly sure I’m not going insane and had remembered enough of the details correctly) and the AI search assist that had made the summary concluded, “This idea suggests that evil can arise from thoughtlessness and conformity rather than from a monstrous nature.”

I kinda think thoughtless conformity is a monstrous nature. I mean isn’t that what predators are supposed to be doing all the time? Thoughtlessly killing to conform to their nature, because they don’t know any better? Or, is the point here that it’s not about a monstrous nature at all?

A leopard scavenges a corpse to feed itself and maybe its folks – is that a monstrous nature? Another week, the same leopard ambushes and kills a gazelle, still to feed. A dead tree rotting is home and food to hundreds of plants and creatures, but if humans cut down a forest to build a town, there won’t be any dead trees rotting for them to live in. No forest, no plants and creatures, that’s less food, less medicine, less pretty things. Suddenly the town that was built doesn’t look so homely anymore.

We’re getting into what could be a hardcore ethics chat here, but to my mind there is no monstrous nature, there’s just nature (forget whether it’s human or not, ethical inclinations or biology, I’m talking about it all) which can be a real fucker sometimes, for sure. There’s a black hole out there that can eat a sun. And, I dunno, that just feels rude. But I’d be hard pressed to say that black hole has a monstrous nature. Pretty sure it’s as much a reason why we’re here as a bunch of other stuff, including our sun – which would also be a bit of a fucker if it wasn’t for our unique atmosphere. If you wanted to get fanciful you could say it’s trying to burn us alive, but then again you could say it provides us with food, power, and we’re made out of bits and pieces of its aunts and uncles.

I guess, the fact that we can get emotionally scarred, to me, doesn’t mean that the things which scar us are intrinsically evil. It just means they feel that way a lot of the time.

Making every search engine use involve an “AI” programme that may be draining a town’s water supply, putting thousands of people out of work (maybe including me), and it still doesn’t do a better job of summarising a thing or answering my enquiry than any of the standard, somewhat less damaging listings just below it… isn’t that quite mundanely evil? I mean it seems almost machiavellian in one way – you can hardly notice the swap from ‘Wild Wild West internet’ to ‘tool of greedhead oppression internet’, just like with America itself perhaps. But DuckDuckGo are (probably) just using AI because everyone else does it. Boring, dumb, lemminging ourselves off the cliff of eternity because we forgot the option to live a life was there all along.

At some point in this piece, I’m going to explain that I’ve been working voluntarily as an editor or equivalent in local small town newspapers (two) for the last seven or eight years. I don’t have any other go-to on my “CV” to prove I can edit a body of writing. Reading this, you might think, “no wonder it’s a small town paper”. I’ve always had a tendency, okay, to link things in my mind. First I see something new, it’s strange, it’s terrifying. I see other things around it that give it a context. And if the new thing doesn’t kill me, I start to learn about it and its relations to the things around it. Suddenly I find that the strange new thing has become completely familiar and I’m flitting about it with reckless abandon, jumping from one part to the other as if it was all the same ultimately coherent whole.

And that is me writing an article. Or reading one, I think. That’s how I first found out that this might be a weird way of interacting with text – I read a poem at school when I was about 15, just as part of a normal English class, and it created a completely different world in me than it did in anyone else, apparently. Certainly my English teacher didn’t like my interpretation. I could back it up with the text, but then she threw the book at me [fuck!]. I mean, she just told me all this other stuff that wasn’t covered in class which proved that I was wrong. Or, at least, proved that I was not presenting the most usual interpretation of this text. Since I’ve unlocked internet search powers, people normally don’t get to do that anymore. I have infinite possible contexts to call upon mwahahahaha! Also I’ve relaxed a lot these days. Also people don’t really care half the time.

From an editorial perspective it’s interesting, because I’m very cautious on the first read, and then the text keeps expanding (whether I’m reading it, or writing it, actually) perhaps to infinity. I tend to cut it off – more or less arbitrarily – after a while. Sometimes it’s a good, coherent text by then. And sometimes I’m just too familiar with it to see its flaws. Where possible I leave it and sit on it for a few days, to refresh my perspective. With this right now, I stopped writing most of it at 1am this morning, and I’m editing it now at 2pm, as I’m writing this paragraph about editing.

A lot of the people (not all of them, far from it, but a lot of the people) I work with do not like the “let’s wait a bit” part of the process. Back at the last paper, I even got into the habit of skim-reading a quick proof rather than actually editing (or rather than taking the proof reading seriously), because everyone wanted it done quickly… until it went wrong, and then they wanted to have done it slower. I was listening to something recently that said the unfulfilled wishes of the past haunt the people of the future. I can probably get on board with that.

I struggle not to explain myself and overjustify everything. I also struggle, when I know something well, to remember that I need to explain it at all. I sometimes struggle in either or both of these ways to the point it causes chaos and (emotional) destruction around me. Usually that only happens when I’ve stopped being aware that I’m doing it, but not always. And believe me, it is horrifying to realise that you’re the dickhead but then carry on anyway. Almost scarring, really, because after that moment where it seemed so essential to keep being a shit, you have a bunch of emotional baggage to carry for… who knows how long. I still remember winning an argument by knowingly lying when I was 11 or 12. It still scares me, because it wasn’t an important argument – I just wanted to be right, even though I knew I was wrong.

The pain of understanding that what you’re doing to reach something has actually pushed you so far away from it, you won’t be getting it back.

From time to time I think of these interruptions, these justifications and observations as me narrating or fourth-wall-breaking my own life. Or maybe I just also narrate some things to myself or have this part of my self that sits on my shoulder looking at what I’m doing. I haven’t completely worked out what role this narration or segment of self plays in my overall being. Am I practising for something, like talking to people or explaining myself? Am I reviewing things that have happened, but now in more detail or with a different lens? Probably some yes to each of those. And am I scared that I’m the only other person who can really see and understand me… well, that sounds like something that might be the case.

I’m missing out a lot of background here, and I don’t know if I want to keep digging this hole. I’m on the “hate myself” side of the arrogance spectrum, and in life I have a tendency to put others first to the point where I’m utterly devoid of all vitality and lash out mindlessly at my surroundings to try and recapture some rumour of whatever essence I seem to have given away. You can’t go it alone, either as a ruler or as a slave. Both extremes are unhappy in their extremity, lack of balance, and probably their lack of community.

The buddhists are probably onto something, with all that balance stuff. And I’m fairly sure it’s not just the buddhists either. I mean, I’m an anarchist hedge wizard of sorts, and I seem to be onto something myself. Or possibly just on something. But the other anarchists and pagans seem to get it, and they don’t all draw it from buddhist texts passed around in the 60s; the ideas of balance, peace and community have somehow survived many attempts at their destruction in ‘Western’ thought. We don’t like to admit it, but we are capable of not being ignorant, intolerant, greedy pig-fuckers. Someone should pat themselves on the back. Maybe you.