Pete Catches

Pete Catches

Pete Catches was my dad’s “blood brother” (hunka).

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  • 10 Sacred Native American Places (Feb 27, 2017), at Youtube.com, visited Aug. 8, 2019. From the Grand Canyon, to the little known eerie Black Hills, these are 10 Sacred Native American Places !
  • Art In Motion presents Lakota Medicine Man Pete Catches: “Walks With Fire” (Sep 28, 2017), at Youtube.com, visited Aug. 8, 2019. I met the late Medicine Man, Pete Catches in Moscow, as part of the American contingent at the 7th Generation Conference, and then interviewed him in Philadelphia, although he lived on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Of all the “Holy people” I’ve ever met, Pete was the only one I ever believed could speak with the Almighty.
  • Pete Catches (Aug 5, 2009), at Youtube.com, visited Aug. 8, 2019. Medicine man Pete Catches sits down with Art In Motion. This 36 second spot is only a glimpse into the culture and life of Pete Catches.
  • Peter Catches sharing vision of Oceti Wakan (Aug 24, 2010), at Youtube.com, visited Aug. 8, 2019. Peter Catches (Jr.) sharing his vision of Oceti Wakan, a healing/educational center on the Pine Ridge Reservation for the Lakota people.
  • Sacred Buffalo People (Feb 26, 2009), at Youtube.com, visited Aug. 8, 2019. Pete Catches, Sr. tells a traditional story: how the bison and the Lakota came to be related.
Utah Accent

Utah Accent

For Pioneer Day, some quick examples of the Utah Accent, also called a Mormon Accent or a Pioneer Accent. It’s a little different from a standard American Midwest Accent. I don’t know why linguists so often ignore it. If you know how to hear it, you’ll find it in Utah, eastern Nevada, southern Idaho, southwestern Wyoming, south Idaho, and western Colorado:

  • When the letter T comes in the middle of word replace it with a glottal stop. For example, mountain is pronounced mou’uhn and kitten is ki’uhn. But sometimes a word needs a T at the end. Across is pronounced acrosst.
  • The letter R gets removed if it’s inconvenient. Library is pronounced lie-berry, and February is Febee-ary. An R can also be moved. Prescription is pronounced per-scription. And, an R can be added if needed. Wash is pronounced wahrsh, but water might or might not be wahrter.
  • And not just Rs. Sometimes other difficult consonants can be eliminated. Picture is pronounced pitcher.
  • The ending -ing becomes either -in’ or -ink. (I spend a lot of time workin’ on Geni.)
  • Diphthongs become single vowels. For example, sale and sail are pronounced sell, and real is pronounced rill.
  • Middle vowels are eliminated. Mirror is pronounced mirr, caramel is kar-muhl, and family is famlee.
  • Labor-intensive vowels get flattened. Miracle is muhr-kuhl or muhr-a-kuhl, creek is crick, milk is melk, pillow is pelluh, and well is wuhl. Then the classics: to is pronounced ta, for is pronounced fur, and your and you’re are pronounced yur.
  • But some vowels are just different. For example, the days of the week are Sundee, Mondee, Tuesdee, etc., and measure is pronounced mayzhure,
  • In some rural areas, OR and AR get switched. Barn is pronounced born, and born in pronounced barn. (This one is said to be the influence of Danish pioneers.)
  • And lots of unique phrases. The classic one is “Oh my heck.”

When I was little we visited my cousins quite regularly. But still it took some time for us kids to understand what they were saying through their thick accent. Nowadays I live in Colorado. I’d swear I can hear a Utah accent a block away. And it always brings a smile, even when it’s me I hear.

Edited Sept. 8, 2019 to add YouTube links.

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Society for Creative Anachronism

Society for Creative Anachronism

Ken Mondschein at Medievalists.net is saying good things about the SCA. No objections here, but it has me wondering how many medievalists have belonged to the Society of Creative Anachronism at some point. I did. Kind of. Maybe it would be more accurate to say I stopped by from time to time.

I don’t think I can pin down a start date. Probably 1982 or 1983 in Shire of Loch Salaan (Salt Lake City). I can’t remember now whether I saw a notice at Cosmic Airplane, or whether we were just driving by the park (which park?) and happened to see them. Which park? Wasn’t Liberty Park. Had to be Sugar House. What I remember more clearly is that I struggled to come up with an appropriate costume. My early attempts were an ongoing annoyance to a certain woman, who nevertheless continued to believe I would be interested in her constant stream of trivia about weaving in the Middle Ages.

Then on and off through the years. Never very far but neither very close. The last serious bit was about 1997 or 1998 in the Kingdom of the Outlands, with a last cursory bit about 2005 in the Canton of Hawks Hollow, when I finally registered my name as Juste de Beauharnais, a persona I had nurtured for some time. (I would have said it was 2002 but I looked it up and it’s 2005.)

There was another persona before that but I’m not remembering. Jamie Hamilton? Maybe. Probably. And a persona, something to do with Orkney, but that one is so far distant I doubt there’re any traces anywhere inside my skull.

I think of SCA as a path not taken. About 20 years start to finish, although saying “20 years” might give the wrong impression. It was all duration and very little depth.

I went for a more clearly academic path. No matter how much I might in principle like the idea of a medievalism that is both popular and accessible, in practice most of it drove me nuts. Too pretentious. And by that, I mean even more pretentious than academia.

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Edited to removed broken links.

Grandma’s Religion

Grandma’s Religion

Grandma had this thing she’d say when someone asked about her religion. She was a very proper lady, which in her day meant it wasn’t polite to talk about politics or religion. This was her own particular way of saying “none of your business”.

She would say, “My father was a Mormon. My mother was a Baptist. I went to an Episcopal girls’ school, then married a Lutheran in a Methodist church. What religion do you think I should be?

I smile when I think about this, because it brings Grandma into my mind exactly as she was, right down to the gotcha in that question at the end. Unless your own manners were as polished, you might miss the irony there. (If you’re going to cross the line by asking such a question, maybe you want to go further and start telling me your opinion about my religion.)

I know what her children think. They think she was a Methodist. Her obituary says she was a Methodist.

But she wasn’t, I don’t think. I spent many hours with her, listening to her stories and asking questions. I’d swear she thought of herself as an Episcopalian. Kind of. Sort of. At least, that’s what she would be if she ever joined a church. Which is not something she would do, because that would just be silly.

Grandma thought of religion as a social label. It’s a group you join because you want to socialize with those people. Nothing to do with anything you believe because then it would be science not religion. She spent her time on things like Psychology Today. She wasn’t baptized. Didn’t think it was important. Her mother used to give them Bible lessons on Sundays. Of course. You need to know those things in order to be culturally literate. As an adult she and Grandpa contributed to the local churches but didn’t belong to any of them. They sent the kids to Bible school in the summers but not to Sunday school. The kids, they thought, would grow up and choose their own religion.

This is the story as I heard it but I wonder just a little in places. Was she really not baptized? One of these days I’m going to check. Her parents were founding members of St. John’s Episcopal in Big Piney. Say about 1914, when Grandma was about 13. And this was just before Grandma went off to an Episcopal girls’ school in Denver. It’s a bit hard to believe Grandma and her brothers didn’t get snookered into being baptized.

(The story is larger than this, but I’ll have tell it in detail another time. This is also about the time the different ex-Mormon ranching families in the area were choosing up sides in the newer churches. Great grandpa Luce’s ex-wife Dorothy (Tarter) Luce became a Catholic. Thereafter she’s often mentioned in connection with Catholicism and Salt Lake City, while Great grandpa is mentioned in connection with the Episcopalians and Denver. Someone should tell that story.)

I have other quibbles, as well. Grandma’s story says her father was a Mormon and her mother was a Baptist. That’s not inaccurate but it’s a simplification.

Grandma’s father was a disaffected former Mormon (or PostMo, as we say now). We have several stories about his reasons but the bottom line is that the church demanded sacrifices from his parents then failed to protect them when the going got rough. (Bad, bad Mormons. We will never forgive.)

And Grandma’s mother does seem to have been a Baptist as a child in Illinois, but Grandma’s Grandma Wilson was already a Methodist by the time Grandma was born. Or maybe just a tiny bit later.

Is this where we got the idea Grandma was a Methodist? I don’t think so. I think it comes from Grandma attending the Methodist church occasionally when she was working at the hospital in Rock Springs. But that was because it was convenient to nurses’ quarters. And she did get married in a Methodist church but that was just the way it fell out when they were looking for someone to marry them that day.

And finally, my last quibble is about Grandpa being a Lutheran. Grandpa was an atheist. Everyone seems to have a story about how much he believed in reading and thinking analytically, and how that did not involve invisible friends in the sky.

But going behind that story, was Grandpa raised Lutheran? No, I don’t think so. His family was Swedish, and Swedes back then were nominally Lutheran, but Grandpa’s parents were actually Mission Covenant. Pacifists. Very liberal, but also very fundamentalist. The Mission Covenant church was tied then and now to the Salvation Army. And in fact, Grandpa’s mother was the foster daughter and sister of people who were prominent in the Salvation Army in Europe. Grandpa was baptized at the Stotler Mission Church in Burlingame (Kansas).

So that’s it. I wanted to preserve Grandma’s saying about her religion because I think her descendants might enjoy hearing it. And I also wanted to push beneath the surface as well, because there is always more to the story, and I want future generations to know that as well.

More Information

  • Marie A. Olson, “Swedish Settlement at Stotler” in Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains, Vol. 4, No. 2 (May 1935), pp. 155-63. Marie Olson was Grandpa Swanstrom’s 2nd cousin. Her father E. E. Olson was Grandpa’s godfather, and her father’s half-brother Peter Persson was the minister who baptized Grandpa.

Revised April 30, 2019.

Lazy Man’s Guide

Lazy Man’s Guide

I wonder how many people remember Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment? I think I bought my first copy when it was brand new, at the head shop on North Avenue in Grand Junction. I would have been 16. Over the years I’ve bought and given away so many copies I’ve lost track.

This passage has been particularly influential over the years in keeping me from turning myself into a spiritual teacher like so many of my friends.

Every person who allows others to treat him as a spiritual leader has the responsibility to ask himself: Out of all the perceptions available to me in the universe, why am I emphasizing the ignorance of my brothers? What am I doing in a role where this is real? What kind of standards am I conceiving, in which so many people are seen to be in suffering, while I am the enlightened one?

This approach is a necessary corollary of two main ideas. One, “We are equal beings.” And two, “There is nothing you need to do first in order to be enlightened.” Put the two ideas together, and it’s easy to see, “The state of mind that most needs enlightenment is the one that sees human beings as needing to be guided or enlightened.

  • The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment, by Thaddeus Golas (1971).