An Interview with Morgan Miller of the Portland Surrealist Group

Q: Can you tell me about the Skookum Nanitch project?

A: It was mainly an idea that we should refocus the activity of surrealism. Surrealism has often been taken from the perspective of trying to make people join us. Instead, by searching out where people are, we see aspects of their activity that are surrealist, and go on from there. Tribal understanding or indigenous understanding of the world holds that cultures are a reflection of their land, that they’re affected by the land, and that culture is built from the land. Whatever its manifestation, you could define it as spirit or some sort of mystical thing, or a reflection of natural conditions, and humans reacting along similar patterns. Being from a long time Oregon family I’m starting to seek out what were the patterns here in the Northwest. We’re starting to see some patterns of white settler culture in its best aspects, and that’s aspects that actually try and live and understand with the land, which fall into some patterns similar to the indigenous peoples. Skookum Nanitch was an attempt, albeit failed, to get people who identified with surrealism to make a very localized effort. It wasn’t standing instead for any artistic or plastic arts projects, but turning surrealist activity slightly askew into a pattern that I thought would be more conducive to finding surrealist activity in real life.

Q: I don’t feel your Skookum Nanitch proposal has failed to have an influence. As slow as local surrealist activities are, I do see things that are inspired by that statement.

A: I think the ideas are coming around because I think they’re correct, but I can’t say it’s been an overarching triumph.

Q: You once said, “I am most curious about the non-artistic aspects of surrealism. Surrealism in the populace isn’t just found in art brut, it is anywhere folks are poetic in creating new modes of living, cooperating, and in language.”

A: I think the old Paris surrealist group, and the Belgians, and some other groups, were so tied up with artists trying to make a living, and Breton survived by being a middleman for his friends’ paintings, that we found that surrealism has been completely centered around just in the classic bourgeois sense of what art is. I think one of the profundities that the Situationists brought up is that art is something that is very specialized within capitalism, but is a reified creative activity, and that it’s creative activity that we should be looking for.

I’ve been all over the Northwest, and I’ve seen all sorts of things: people living in tree houses, people doing all sorts of amazing projects to bring natural balance to their land and make it easier to live, gather salmon, and all sorts of things. That’s what I’m interested in. I’m not saying a painting can’t be a surrealist activity. What we have to say is, also, and more importantly, that all these activities that average people are doing might involve experimenting with new methods of living. It’s hard to come up with a more surrealist activity than that, outside of maybe resurrecting a quasi-dead language.

Q: Speaking of which, where did the phrase “Skookum Nanitch” come from?

A: It’s what in English is called Chinook Jargon. It means “powerful vision,” or “powerful sight.” Chinook Jargon is a language that still exists, or is still spoken, that is one of the unique languages in North America in that its roots cross the racial divides between indigenous and settler peoples. It’s made up of 50% tribal words, 25% French and 25% English with a sentence structure unlike other tribal or European languages. It was used as a common language in the Pacific Northwest up until about 1900. When I was growing up in the 60s you could hear bits and pieces of it, specific words that everybody knew. At one point it was estimated that a 100,000 people spoke Chinook in the region. This was in the 1880s. At the centennial of the western discovery of the Columbia River in 1890 the keynote speech was given in Chinook.

There are a number of tribes, especially in Oregon, who were forced to live together in the reservation process where Chinook became the joint language of the reservation. One of these is the Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde, who happen to have the most successful casino in Oregon. They have some money and have been putting it into Chinook Studies, into classes. They’ve just started a new class on Wednesday nights that you can drop in at for ten bucks.

Q: And you’re saying that Chinook bridged the racial divide.

A: Everybody spoke it, everybody had their first language and this was their second language. But the interesting thing is that it could very easily become a street language today, a common language on the streets in the Northwest. It has all these words in it that are words of place, words specific for natural features. Along the Columbia River there’s all these basalt pillars, like Rooster Rock. They can go several hundred feet high. Part of a cliff is sloughed off, and is left with this pillar, and there’s a term for it in Chinook called “wootlat.” There’s all these things that could give us references to what living here is.

The Grand Ronde are having issues right now because in order to get federal money to legally have school classes in Chinook they have to have names for all the colors. The Chinook Jargon doesn’t have names for all those colors. Now they have to find names from within the area, from within the region. Like the name for the color orange comes from a fruit that doesn’t grow here. They came up with “sammon olallie.” In Chinook “olallie,” like Olallie Lake in Clackamas County, means “berry.” “Sammon olallie” would mean salmon berry. Have you ever seen salmon berries? They’re bright orange.

Chinook gives us all these references that would reinforce that this place in the world, this region, is here, this isn’t just a generic capitalist place. The generic would be undermined because people would start to relate to their locality. Why aren’t we finding salmon berries in our yards? We have something in particular that is here, not just anywhere, not just generic.

Q: So how would you relate the ongoing study of the hidden and radical history of the Pacific Northwest, or Cascadia, to the Skookum Nanitch project?

A: Well, I would think that it would be pivotal to that. The Northwest has always been a place where people came to hide out. It was always so scarcely populated that people had to get along with each other, and there was a great deal of tolerance. In areas north of the Columbia River up to Alaska natives, until 1900 or so, made up a good percentage of the working class. So you had a lot of cross contact amongst peoples, and people traveling around. There’s the famous story of John Day in central eastern Oregon, a ranching and mining area that’s like the middle of nowhere, where the only doctor was a Chinese doctor, and so everybody in that area had acupuncture and Chinese herbs. Obviously, Chinese doctors set bones and things like that, but he was the only doctor for the area for like 50 years and was highly regarded. There’s a fascinating book about that, about all the ranchers’ daughters throwing themselves at him, all these things that you wouldn’t think of happening. He was a pillar of the community and in the 30s started the first auto dealership in that area, and all sorts of bizarre things. So there’s all these hidden stories like the stories of the utopian colonies along the Puget Sound. Also, Oregon being settled first got all sorts of Christian mystic communistic societies such as Aurora, which is a fairly large town south of Oregon City. It’s a huge German, Hutterite, Christian communist settlement. I think at points it was in the top ten cities in population in Oregon, and was highly regarded. Everything was held in common.

Q: How about the Home colony?

A: It’s one of a number of utopian and anarchist colonies off the Puget Sound, which I think got up to 400-500 people. It was large enough that it merited its own ferry from Tacoma being that ferries were the only thing that could get you around in those days on the Sound. They had their own ferry, which shows how large it was. From the late 1880s into the 1920s until it collapsed under its own weight, basically from skinny dipping. People started fighting over property rights and things like that.

Q: Any thoughts on the “Potlatch” from Chinook Jargon?

A: “Potlatch” is a Chinook word; it’s not a tribal word. Potlatch means “to give.” Potlatches were ritual celebrations primarily among the Salish people in the northern Puget Sound up into the north end of Vancouver Island, and maybe into the panhandle of Alaska. I’m not sure how far north the Potlatch ceremony happened. I’m pretty sure it didn’t take place among the Chinook tribe proper.

Q: What could you say about the IWWs relationship to the different tribes?

A: There’s not a lot written about that. We do know that the first chartered branch of the IWW in Canada was a longshore branch in Vancouver, BC, which was all made of tribal members, indigenous people being an important portion of the working class of the area. So we know there were several hundred IWWs in Vancouver who were tribal members. Many tribal people are trying to stay away from being integrated into wage labor. The IWW is trying to extract settler people from out of wage labor. From what I can see from what indigenous people have written they get the IWW and they like the concept of the IWW. There’s Frank Little, famous IWW organizer and speaker who was reportedly half-native. He would tell people at the executive board meetings that he’s the only real red there. I think there’s a lot of natives who went on strike on the famous Frazer River Valley strike on the Canadian-Pacific Railroad where Joe Hill first became famous for writing songs. There’s four Joe Hill songs that we don’t have, and one more which is only a fragment which is “Skookum Ryan, the walking boss”—“skookum” being a good Chinook Jargon word, the most popular that got into the working class vocabulary. It’s still really common up in British Columbia as working class slang—skookum being “powerful, big.” Another Chinook word used in English is “muckymuck” which is a working class slang term for “boss” or “powerful person” in a derogatory or negative sense.

Q: 241 SW Couch, 1917. There was a raid on the IWW headquarters. The hall was seized and membership records were taken.

A: Somebody just found a lot of those membership records down at the city hall. A guy named Mike Monk. In 1922 there was the funniest story. During the big strike, the longshore strike, the Mayor sent police and raided the IWW hall. This was during prohibition, and Portland was an extremely corrupt city up until the 50s and 60s. The IWW started picketing all the speakeasies with signs that said “Mayor Baker, illegal hooch must go.” The Mayor was on the take of all the bootleggers, right. And so they picketed it and everybody started laughing. The Oregonian ran an editorial and said this is hilarious, this is the best thing the IWWs ever done. The mayor called them in and announced strict neutrality throughout the rest of the strike, that he wasn’t going to take sides whether for the shippers or the strikers, and didn’t do anything more for the rest of the strike because of that little action.

Q: We’ve heard about the Seattle General Strike of 1919. Do you have any thoughts on that in relation to what we’ve discussed?

A: In many ways the Seattle General Strike has become such a big myth. Obviously it was important, and there are aspects that are interesting, but basically it was a strike about wages. It was important because of the union structures. It was an AFL strike. They took over much of the day-to-day operations of the city of Seattle. You know, delivering milk and things like that. There were a lot of highbred ideas that were coming out of the Northwest and floating around western Canada and the western United States at the time. For example, there was a movement called the One Big Union movement that came out Western Canada, British Columbia especially, that influenced the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. They sent people down to talk to Seattle people. There were One Big Union branches organized up and down the American west coast. I’m still trying to find out about this, but I believe most of the construction trades in the San Francisco bay area disaffiliated with the AFL and affiliated with the One Big Union movement. All of the longshore locals in the American west voted to join the One Big Union movement, which was, as obvious by its name, influenced by the IWW but was also somewhat different. It was formed by members of a party called the Socialist Party of Canada out of Vancouver that was close in perspective to the Socialist Party of Great Britain, the World Socialist Movement. They had this very clear libertarian Marxist sense. It was a real Marxist party instead of a Leninist party, or some kind of permutation of social democratic garbage. They had real clear and consistent principles and views of what socialism might be. That spread the One Big Union movement a long long ways, and doesn’t get as much credit for influencing the Seattle or Winnipeg General Strikes. There were other things in Calgary and Edmonton. There was a huge longshore strike in Portland that basically shut down shipping along the Columbia River for more than six months in 1922. Once again, the IWW longshoremen were working with the ILA, the International Longshore Association, who later became the ILWU. The ILA branch of Portland voted to affiliate with the One Big Union movement. There was all this mish-mash of a lot of working class radicalism at that time, the time of the General Strike. It wasn’t just isolated to Seattle it was going on all over the region. There were all these groupings that had very consistent concepts. Both the IWW and the Socialist Party of Canada had a very consistent, very libertarian view: abolish the wage system, and stuff like that. This is at the same time of the Bolshevik Revolution and you had people wanting to jump onto the bandwagon of the Bolsheviks. For the most part the IWW and the One Big Union movement and the Socialist Party of Canada had a very clear and consistent view of the Bolshevik revolution not being socialist.

Q: Was there a view that from the beginning it was not socialist?

A: Yeah, from 1917. At least the SPC. They categorized it as a state capitalist revolution, because that’s what they wound up administrating. I mean, Lenin said it, so…

Q: It was overall a state capitalist revolution?

A: They said that something had happened, but it was isolated from everything else. They refused to identify what came out of it. They said socialism never existed there, that it wasn’t going to be built there either, which is the exact opposite of what the communists were saying, that they were building socialism there and then. You have to put it in the context of the times. It was very important where you stood on this, because the communists quite often were trying to limit working class struggles to either toe the line of what was best for the Soviet Union, or to what the party line was at the time. What they did was stifle a lot of independent working class action. Quite often this is very contradictory, because in the late 20s there were a lot of very brilliant, very amazing strikes led by communists, but that was kind of a strange anomaly, about two or three years, which not even they write about, because it doesn’t go along with the general course of their ideology.

Q: I recall Lenin and Trotsky’s talk about introducing Taylorism and other kinds of militarization of the labor force, keeping the supervisory positions, etcetera.

A: Of course, the CNT did that in Spain too, because they had to administrate the capitalist system, and that’s what the capitalist system is all about. There’s a good book called Workers Against Work. It’s about the workers’ resistance to the CNT in Spain. You know during the glorious factory committee days, and all the rest of that. The CNT shooting people, executing people for not working and things like that. Which somehow gets left out of a lot of anarchist discussions.

Q: There was some criticism of the CNT in Stuart Christie’s We, the Anarchists! which is about the FAI. What about the activities and outlook of Benjamin Péret related to the factory committees?

A: I think in general it makes some sense especially in a Spanish/French situation, because that’s how traditionally the working class is organized in those areas. I think one of the ongoing problems is that you find—especially among people advocating an anti-union stand, an anti-union revolutionary perspective, or a more spontaneous version of revolution—there’s no ongoing body of working class resistance, and so we lose that day-to-day contact. We lose that spirit of working with people, understanding that you have to build up a constant culture. The problem is that unions can give a framework for that, but they can also take it away. But they provide communication networks and common vision. Factory committees don’t do that necessarily. You can’t build them up. You’re forced to rebuild them anew every time. It’s a rather inefficient way of building a revolutionary model. The problem is finding some sort of intermediate way that isn’t outside and against the unions but isn’t inside them for them either.

There are a number of aspects of Péret’s ideas that make them somewhat dated. I’m not saying that they’re bad ideas, but the historical context has been rapidly superseded. One of the assumptions in those is that you don’t have a rapidly migrating population of working class communities with tight-knit working class identifications and common aspirations which you saw in all the major industrialized countries up until right after the second world war when a consumer economy was developed, especially in the United States, as a weapon against the working class and any working class community very conscious of itself. You can say let’s build up workplace councils or whatever, but there’s not that sense of commonality, of solidarity, there’s just not the sort of things that made them work as there existed back when he was writing about it in the 40s or 50s in France. So things have changed a hell of a lot, and instead of saying “here’s the magic form that will make everything better,” we need to say, “here’s the limitations, here’s what we do know that works” and not say that “it’s got to be right here right now.” It’s going to come under all sorts of flags, all sorts of names.

Q: You once said someone in a café had a demeaning attitude towards you because you were waiting a table. They asked what your life’s ambition was, and you said, “to have a perversion named after me.” Is this still your overriding motivation?

A: Always.

This interview took place in March of 2005, and was conducted by MK Shibek and Anthony from Communcating Vessels.