Chickadee-y Allegory

I am opting not to comment on the Harris reading, as my post would most likely digress into an angry rant, of sorts. Instead, I'm going to discuss "A Different Kind of Courage", or at least what the brief New York Times review had to say about it. While rereading the review of "A Different Kind of Courage" (after having read “Conceptual Blending” and the Zohar), I was struck by how easily Plenty Coups' actions can be related to conceptual blending or allegory.

When Plenty Coups and the rest of his Crow tribe were relocated to reservations, he took initiative by using traditional practices and blending them into the Crows’ new, foreign situation. He used the ancestral custom of going into nature to seek revelation through dreams to convey to his people what they needed to do. Plenty Coups' "dream" told of the end of the old Crow way of life, but also promised a sort of survival, provided they could listen "like the chickadee". The chickadee "had an established position in traditional Crow life", so the blending of this traditional symbol and practice (of seeking revelation through dreams) with the message to cooperate enabled other Crow to accept Plenty Coups’ proposal without a lot of difficulty.

Plenty Coups found courage as a "mean between cowardice and rashness", in how he coped with the situation. He proposed a policy of "wary and vigilant cooperation" with the U.S., rather than complete non-cooperation, which is what Sitting Bull sanctioned. Courage is another example of an allegory that, when translated into their new life situation, helped the Crow adapt to their new culture. “Courage had a very definite sense in the traditional culture, but this is now inapplicable, and so it is no longer clear what courage involves”. There needed to be a complete redefinition of the term, and in his actions, Plenty Coups exemplified this new definition. One could adapt the Crow’s specific definition of courage from “the military virtue of facing clearly identified danger steadfastly and without irresponsible rashness” to “courage, one might say, of lucid action, rather than indulging various kinds of consoling illusion or succumbing to blind but powerful emotional responses”. This revamped definition now applies to all cultural situations, rather than a specific few.

There were many other terms that needed redefining for their new cultural situation, but through Plenty Coups' use of conceptual blending and allegory, the Crow were able to pull some sort of a life back together. The human ability for this complex process of transferring well-known practices to completely foreign situations is essential in a situation like that which the Crow were thrown into. Without it, “nothing” might have continued to happen for them.