Unlocking the secret sounds of language

[David Gene Lewis]

Hi Richard, 
I am enjoying your prose and perspectives. I understand your feeling
about anthropologists and their ilk. However please be aware that many
people, such as myself, are trained anthropologists, linguists, and
now part of the ilk. And even so we still work locally, within our
tribal context, as well as in the surrounding American context. There
is really a sea change in the way anthropologists are doing their
work. It is a generational thing. Each new generation appears to be 
more aware that native people exist as rational, thinking and feeling
humans. And so while I understand the "native" perspectives on the
"anthropologists", and truly validate those feeling in my writing, and
teaching,  In my mind I can no longer generalize about "them" all. 

 As many times, "They" are "Us".

Thanks again Richard, 
David Lewis
Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde
University of Oregon

-------------------
> I don¹t know why people do what they do
> But obviously I wonder a lot...
> After leaving the Santa Fe area
> And moving here in Oklahoma
> on the very gut bulge above the bible belt
> I see people existing
> A kind of automated living
> Who sell out for very little
> Life slashed half/price
> 
> One can live and die here
> Leaving only garbage in the woods
> And its acceptable patriotic living.
> Human beings reduced
> to herds of mall clones
> happy littering churchgoers
> the inevitable walmart shopper
> 
> Its no wonder why a few americans
> All of a sudden want to leave it all
> To pack up and head for the jungles,the reservations
> To become a missionary to ³save² the poor ndns
> Or to become an archaeologist to study coprolites
> Escaping to go study some OTHER people
> as anthropologists, as an anywhere-but-here-ist
> Far AWAY from this seducing pull towards sameness
> This relentless drive towards standardizing the humanbeing
> To get out of this sink hole sucking after our souls
> 
> And because there seems to be no cure
> For this standardizing of the humanrace
> Alarmed, people escape to any distant holdouts
> Places where soul-beings still exist freely
> But at what price?
> What we have called the march of civilization
> Isn¹t it truthfully a form of cultural-domestication?
>  We need to look carefully at what¹s become of our animal relatives.
> A living traditional sensory sharpened human-being
> Is reduced to ³data for study, conversion or betterment²
> Once domesticated a species no longer retains sharp senses
> To detect actual threats to its survival,
> And instead usually develops weird phobias of all kinds
> Ripe for mass definition and control
> And eventually and inevitably becomes
> The educated and true world class citizen
> Where culture is expressed on the tee-shirt
> And not from the heart
> The perfect walmart shopper
> 
> Richard Zane Smith
> 
David Lewis
University of Oregon
Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde