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Loved your posting Bill. Reminds me of a story I read by the poet and ecologist writer Gary Snyder, which I have excerpted below. It doesn't quite have the raw excitement of your experience, but here it is nevertheless:<div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center">The Etiquette of Freedom</p> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>One June afternoon in the early seventies I walked through the crackly gold grasses to a neat but unpainted cabin at the back of a ranch near the drainage of the South Yuba in northern California. It had no glass in the windows, no door. It was shaded by a huge black oak. The house looked abandoned and my friend, a student of native California literature and languages, walked right in. Off to the side, at a bare wooden table, with a mug of coffee sat a solid old gray-haired Indian man. He acknowledged us, greeted my friend, and gravely offered us instant coffee and canned milk. He was fine, he said, but he would never go back to a VA hospital again. From now on if he got sick he would stay where he was. He liked being home. We spoke for some time of people and places along the western slope of the northern Sierra Nevada, the territories of Concow and Nisenan people. Finally my friend broke his good news: “Louie, I have found another person who speaks Nisenan.” There was perhaps no more than three people alive speaking Nisenan at that time, and Louie was one of them. “Who?” Louie asked. He told her name. “She lives back of Oroville. I can bring her here, and you two can speak.” “I know her from way back,” Louie said. “She wouldn’t want to come over here. I don’t think I should see her. besides, her family and mine never did get along.”</div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>That took my breath away. Here was a man who would not let the mere threat of cultural extinction stand in the way of his (and her) values. To well-meaning sympathetic white people this response is almost incomprehensible. In the world of his people, never overpopulated, rich in acron, deer, salmon, and flicker feathers, to cleave to such purity, to be perfectionists about matters of family or clan, were affordable luxuries. Louie and his fellow Nisenan had more important business with each other than conversations. I think he saw it as a matter of keeping their dignity, their pride, and their own ways— regardless of what straits they had falen upon— until the end<span style="color:black">.<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:black"> <o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:black">From, Gary Snyder, 1990. <i>The Practice of the Wild.</i></span><span style="color:black"> San Francisco: North Point Press. pp 3-4.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div> <!--EndFragment--> <div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="2"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 10px;">Murray Garde</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="2"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 10px;">Australia</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="2"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 10px;"><a href="mailto:murraygarde@ozemail.com.au">murraygarde@ozemail.com.au</a></span></font></div></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br><div><div>On 17/04/2008, at 7:02 AM, William J Poser wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">A belated comment on the problem of speakers who hate each other.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I once worked in a community in which one of the best speakers</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">was someone whose name kept coming up but the people with whom</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I was working in the office turned out not only to be unwilling</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">to invite him to the sessions but were quite unhappy with the</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">idea that he might turn up on his own. They were scared of him,</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">with some reason since he actually had shot a couple of people in</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">the past.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Eventually some of my friends, who were of the opinion that the</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">people he had shot needed shooting, as they say in Texas, took me</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">to meet him one evening. The next day he took me to his territory,</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">told me the names of places, etc. He didn't try to kill me even once.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Bill</div> </blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>