BOOKED FOR THE MILLENNIUM … I love books. Let’s start there. It’s not exactly the focus of young people these days, my own kids included. They resonate with podcasts, social media, reels & videos, movies & concerts. It’s a different world than the ‘50s, when I grew up. Books were the sources of knowledge, escape from the confines of family, community, religious affiliation. They opened up a couple thousand years of human experience, stretching back to Gutenberg and before …
I have a bookmark from the wonderful Larkspur Press of Kentucky that posits a Spanish proverb, “Books are a hindrance to persisting stupidity.” I resonate with that. Which is why my little home is stuffed with books like a relleno is with queso. And even in my senior years, I keep buying books. And reading them…
One of my favorite recent reads was unexpected: “In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country in 1908-09” by Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed. This first came out in 1957 but which I found in a second edition from the University of Nebraska’s Bison Books (1980)…
As a privileged white boy descended from Californios on my mother’s side who came to Monterey in the 1790s and an immigrant Italian father, a year as a Volunteer in Service to America (VISTA) back in 1965 on the Crow Indian Reservation radicalized me. When I got back to my San Francisco home, I read everything I could about the history of Indigenous people in California. The history was shocking. From the Mendocino War (or “Round Valley Settler Massacres” of 1856-59) to the 1860 Wiyot Massacre on Tuluwat Island in Humboldt Bay, the atrocities committed against Indigenous peoples of California were a textbook case of genocide…
Which is why it was so surprising to find this amazing account of two young women friends from New Jersey who were hired as part of the “field matron” program of the then-named Office of Indian Affairs to work with the Karuk people of the Klamath River country. The program was part of a multi-pronged effort to assimilate Indigenous peoples into white society. But rather than assimilation, we find two women whose perspective included a subversion of gender roles and a surprisingly open critique of American settler society. That included holding up “Karuk values as vastly superior to the ones the two women were paid to disseminate,” according to the director of Oregon State University’s School of Language, Culture and Society Dr. Susan Bernardin in her introduction. She calls the book “an astonishing hybrid text: part travelogue, part ethnography, part frontier bildungsroman, part feminist western” …
Karuk elder André Cramblit suggests in the book’s foreword that the intertwined story of Arnold & Reed and the Karuk people was one of learning: “This is more than just the culture conflict between American Indian and white people. This is about reality – the reality of two worlds coming together at a time and place where each would have to learn to live with the other … I have a personal attachment to this book. It discusses people I have heard about through the personal stories of my relatives. It describes places that I know, including my home village of Katimiin. While the book is not written by a tribal member, nor from a wholly Karuk perspective, I often recommend it to friends so they can get a basic understanding what life was for my people shortly after contact with western society. This is a rare book that presents a Native people without romancing, objectifying, and stereotyping the subject. It is not a story to be told but rather the reflections and observations of two visitors to an extraordinary new land” …
Highly recommended.
Excerpts
…here in the high mountains
it was so cool and so fresh
that we felt as though
we were walking on air…
…White people were all very well.
We were white ourselves. But
white people were dull, after
you had lived with Indians…
…The Indians are a musical people.
Their intervals are different than
ours and it is hard for them to
understand our music as it is
for us to understand theirs.
But once our music becomes
familiar to them, all the passion
and emotion of the Indian people
goes into their singing…
…When you shoot at a man, you
pay him twenty-five dollars.
When you kill a man, you pay
a hundred. But when you pay
the money to family, and they
take it, the shooting is forgotten
and you are friends, just as
you were before…
…the cabins and houses that
we passed were more shiftless
and dirty than they had been
in Indian country. We were
in the land of the saloon.
This was gold country…
SENIOR MOMENT … I’m pretty pleased with old age after healing from two cancers in the last five years. It’s the miracle of modern Western medicine that previously near-incurable diseases have become treatable. So, white boy privileged descendants of colonialists like myself get access to amazing healing modalities and live a little longer than expected …
And then if you’re a counterculture paleohippie like myself, I augmented chemo, radiation, prescriptions and an operation with a phalanx of morning and evening herbal supplements and the myco-amazing tinctures of Paul Stamet’s Host Defense and John Michellotti & Gabriela D’Elia’s Catskill Fungi…
The upshot is that I feel better than I have in decades. Been having a furious good time before the inevitable coming-soon-enough downhill slide. So, right now, let’s kick ass on, I say …
Sloganeering at 80
Drum at demonstrations
No Kings on March 28th
Donate to Dems
Grab ‘em by the mid-terms
Little bucks for a big bang
Dance with Dea the goddess
Jazz for embodiment
Read Dolores LaChapelle
Tai chi for enlightenment
Tune in to Late Night shows & let
AI cartoon memes scat litter all
over our political rocky road
Fight injustice not cancer
& kick ass sweetly
Remembering
the body loves slow
as much as the mind loves fast
