Elder Speaker issues

[M Garde]

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:

The Etiquette of Freedom

             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.”
             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.

From, Gary Snyder, 1990. The Practice of the Wild. San Francisco:  
North Point Press. pp 3-4.

Murray Garde
Australia
murraygarde at ozemail.com.au



On 17/04/2008, at 7:02 AM, William J Poser wrote:

> A belated comment on the problem of speakers who hate each other.
> I once worked in a community in which one of the best speakers
> was someone whose name kept coming up but the people with whom
> I was working in the office turned out not only to be unwilling
> to invite him to the sessions but were quite unhappy with the
> idea that he might turn up on his own. They were scared of him,
> with some reason since he actually had shot a couple of people in
> the past.
>
> Eventually some of my friends, who were of the opinion that the
> people he had shot needed shooting, as they say in Texas, took me
> to meet him one evening. The next day he took me to his territory,
> told me the names of places, etc. He didn't try to kill me even once.
>
> Bill

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