Haida Past Speaks To Troubled Present (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Haida Past Speaks To Troubled Present

By brian lynch and colin thomas
Publish Date: 23-Dec-2004
http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=7185

Last week, B.C. poet, historian, and linguist Robert Bringhurst's
magisterial three-volume Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers
(Douglas & McIntyre) received the Edward Sapir Book Prize, an honour
bestowed every two years by the U.S.­based Society for Linguistic
Anthropology. The award, according to the SLA's Web site, recognizes
works that make "the most significant contribution to our understanding
of language in society".

Drawing on 15 years of study in the Haida language, Bringhurst created
his English renderings of these vital epics--now widely compared in
importance to Homer's Iliad and The Epic of Gilgamesh--from phonetic
transcriptions made at the turn of the last century by an American
anthropologist who sought out the great Haida storytellers of the time.
As Bringhurst explained when reached by the Straight at his home on
Quadra Island, his immersion in this work has deepened his own sense of
the forests and ocean at the source of the stories.

"What this kind of poetry does is, in a sense, knit the human world and
the natural world together," he said. "Human beings are minor
characters in these stories. The major characters are spirits of the
landscape, plants, and animals....And after you've been soaked in those
kinds of stories for a long period of time, just the experience of
walking through the woods becomes different than it was. The stories
become really attached to the place. And I think in a sense that's what
they were always for, one of the functions that they always served: to
knit people into the place where they live."

Yet the Haida language, despite this great history of integrating mind
with environment, is itself in serious danger of unravelling, with a
mere handful of fluent speakers now remaining. Like thousands of other
indigenous tongues on the planet, Bringhurst said, it is uniquely
valuable and yet wholly vulnerable in a world where an ever-increasing
majority of livelihoods are made in a small but powerful set of
languages including English, Spanish, Arabic, and Mandarin.

"Language is a part of culture that is easier to lose than other parts,
because it doesn't translate readily into saleable objects," Bringhurst
observed. "And yet it's like brain matter. It's filled with neurons,
almost--with little threads that carry information from way back in the
past, from parts of the mind that we might not know exist."