Page 39 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

an instant, his shield was on his arm and his bow drawn. He commanded the
cloud to come nearer, “that he might draw down its contents upon the heads
and the corn-fields of the Mandans!” (1:156). Finally, with the black clouds
lowering, he fired an arrow into the sky, exclaiming to the assembled throng,
“My friends, it is done! Wak-a-dah-ha-hee’s arrow has entered that black
cloud, and the Mandans will be wet with the water of the skies!” (1:156–157).
The ensuing deluge, which continued until midnight, saved the corn crop
while proving the power and the efficacy of his medicine. It identified him
as a man of great and powerful influence and entitled him to a life of honor
and homage.
Catlin draws two lessons from this story. First, “when the Mandans undertake
to make it rain, they never fail to succeed, for their ceremonies never stop until
rain begins to fall” (1:157). Second, the Mandan rainmaker, once successful, never
tries it again. His medicine is undoubted. During future droughts, he defers to
younger braves seeking to prove themselves. Unlike Western, technological rain-
making, in Mandan culture the rain chooses the rainmaker.

leavers and takers

In his imaginative book Ishmael (1992), Daniel Quinn draws a basic distinc-
tion between two major streams in human culture: the Takers (the heirs of the
agricultural revolution) and the Leavers (or traditional societies). As he tells it,
ten thousand years ago, the Takers exempted themselves from the evolution-
ary process. They saw the world as having been made for them and belonging
to them, so they sought to manipulate and control it. Since then, they have
systematically expanded their own food resources and their population at the
expense of other species. Their quest for control seemingly knows no bounds.
It extends from the control of pests, both micro- and macroscopic (from bac-
teria to browsing deer), to the attempted control of the sky. Guided by the
tacit but ubiquitous voice of Mother Culture, the assumed nurturer of Taker
human societies and lifestyles, they have come to see themselves as special
and superior beings who possess the knowledge of good and evil. This allows
them to decide, in god-like fashion, who shall live and who shall die. The
world for them is a human life-support system, a machine designed to produce
and sustain human life. When the elements or other species defy him, man
declares war on nature and sees it as his destiny to conquer and rule it with
complete control:

22 | StorieS of Control