We are standing on the seabed looking up from deep under the waves to the rocky shore above. Now, we are in a village circle where stories and gossip commence. A flat basaltic table is used to grind seeds. Petroglyphs and pictographs tell the story of this place confirming that the people have been here since the beginning. Finally, it is the present day, our cars parked in the gravel pull out below. Highway 395 carries the occasional semi-truck and serene Lake Abert reflects the darkening January sky. Kris Norris, the Executive Director of Playa Summer Lake has taken us (four visual artists and three writers) to look at the petroglyphs scattered throughout the field of maroon-black boulders amidst the tall bleached straw grasses and sage brush. The dark boulders are covered with an iridescent iron orange lichen.
Kris is a treasure trove of local knowledge. As we travelled to the site we made stops along the way illuminating the geologic, Paleolithic, Paiute and settler histories not to mention stories of the scientists who are trying to reconstruct the stories buried in the land on the edge of the Great Basin. These histories and mental maps are essential to being in a place.
In an essay from Barry Lopez’s posthumous book Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, he recounts a trip he took when he was younger with a group of Indigenous hunters. He elucidated the differences between our noun-based, taxonomic obsessed Western thinking to the verb-filled, relational viewpoint of his companions. Our language structures shape these viewpoints. Lopez describes seeing a bear. To him at that moment, the bear is a noun. Its appearance was part of a fixed event to be pinpointed and set to a compass point of time. For the hunters, the bear is a verb. The bear is part of a series of seemingly disconnected relationships along the river. It is part of the flow of time. The bear exists in relationship to everything around it. To the modern English speaking observer one winnows the parts and examines them each in isolation.
Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony uses the form of the novel in order to reorder it and demonstrate the importance of story to understanding land. The evil unleashed over centuries of colonialism is not “white people” or even Europeans themselves in Ceremony. It comes from a mythic place where a magician unleashed the story. It’s that white people were just the dupes who fell harder for the poisonous story. The destruction of that narrative must be countered with the enactment of an older, place-based myth.
Keith H. Basso speaks to something similar in his book Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and language among the Western Apache. He quotes Apache elder Dudley Patterson: “Wisdom sits in places. It’s like water that never dries up. You need to drink water to stay alive don’t you? Well, you also need to drink from places. You must remember everything about them. You must remember their names. You must remember what happened a long time ago.” In his short, insightful book Basso demonstrates how the Apache place names hold not just stories but cultural lessons and maps. Early on his interlocutors get frustrated that he still can’t quite pronounce the place names correctly. Eventually, he gets it. This isn’t a bit of quaint romanticism, it is a model for how to live in a place deeply. To occupy a space in relation to all that is around you. Patterson’s admonition to learn the names and remember what happened a long time ago is key.
What happened here in the Great Basin edge of present day Oregon has a record in the nearby Paisley Caves. Rising up out of the plain stubbornly like a ridge of geological bone the caves were once surrounded by water. You can easily imagine the rough waves crashing against the warty outcropping and the smooth sandstone. Several years ago the skeleton of a young girl was found there in the deep deposits of a cave’s interior. Along with surrounding evidence such as cropolites or fossilized feces, chipped obsidian points and large extinct mammal bones the evidence points to someone who was living on this land 14,500 or more years ago. The sage bark sandals found nearby suggest an already deep knowledge of place and ecology when the girl died, which puts that community back even further into time. These people lived in a wetter, colder environment whose ancient shores are still present in rocky “bathtub” rings along the rims of the mountains.
The find blows apart the accepted theories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that minimized native occupation to just a few thousand years. The more recent migration postulated by earlier generations of archaeologists, anthropologists and historians is in line with a colonial story that seeks to erase Indigenous presence in favor of a triumphal European discovery. If you follow the line of inquiry put forth by Rebecca Wragg Sykes in her book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love and Art the idea of a single line of evolution and migration that inevitably puts Europeans at the apex falls apart. She queries, based on emerging evidence, that multiple hominid species could have arisen independently all over the world and they would be able to interbreed. This disallows an assumption of purity. The single line of evolution is suspiciously Judeo-Christian. In many Klamath, Modoc and Paiute stories (who can claim the girl in the Paisley Caves as ancestor) speak of a more ad-hoc creation. The Creator decides to create people for many reasons and, often with the help of Old Man Coyote, disperses the new people all over the world. Of course, like people everywhere, depending on whose telling the story they are the Creator’s favorite.
Speaking of Old Man Coyote, research shows that coyotes and their canid offspring are millions of years old. It is quite possible that jackals in Africa and several wolf species owe their mixed-race existence to coyotes. Coyote is the quintessential western animal. Coyote was revered throughout the Indigenous Americas. His name is a slightly altered Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs) word. As a figure, Coyote occupies one of the most extensive and varied literatures of the world. To westward bound Europeans he was the bane of their ranching plans. In Coyote America by Dan Flores he traces the natural history of the Coyote as well as its political history. It is not pretty. Concurrent with the maniacal push to eradicate all “impurity” and history from the land they followed the Puritanical, colonial mindset of villainizing and killing to extinction. Even today, anti-government, “rugged individualist” ranchers who occupy land procured through military force, pay little to no federal taxes while being subsidized by tax payers will hang coyotes on their fences to keep out the “invaders”. The coyotes predate even the Paleo people. Such violent performance only displays weakness.
Coyote as always has the last laugh. Far from eradicating coyotes they now happily occupy every part of the contiguous United States; cities especially. Like us, they have adapted to urban areas. They watch, they learn, they survive. I was greeted by a coyote my first day here. Hopping through the grasses he stopped and looked at me before bolting off. A welcome wagon. Since then I’ve heard the yipping and howling and see many, many paw prints criss crossing in the cracked clay of the playa. There is a wolf about too. One day there was a clear line of paw prints dashing across the playa. I’ve taken to stooping and looking at the poop along the trails: coyote, wolf or bobcat? There is no reason I can’t live like this in Portland. (Not the examining poop part. Best guess is it is a dog with an indifferent owner) Cities are ecosystems. Just as coyotes move in they remind us that cities sit on geology and land. There are older names and stories there.
This isn’t just a condition of North America. In places all over the world, old ways and their ecosystems are waiting to be courted. I think in particular of poet Alice Oswald’s book-long poem Dart. She follows the Dart river in Devon from its beginnings to the sea. By creating a chorus of the people who live along, work in and visit the river, it comes to patchwork life. Woven into that like a tule basket are the voices of the birds, fish, animals and the river itself set to the music of local myths and legends. Devon is a part of England that retains many pre-Christian place names and stories. These are the verbs of the land not the nouns. In a recent post on her Substack, The Art of Enchantment, Dr. Sharon Blackie says: Here in Ireland, the Otherworld in many senses is what French philosopher Henry Corbin called the mundus imaginalis: the world of the image, a different level of reality which lies between the empirical/physical world and the world of abstract intellect, and which communicates itself in the form of myth and symbol. So it is that the Irish landscape is a landscape steeped in stories, and those stories stalk us.”
I think about the Cinderella story, the old, old story that has roots as old as the girl who died near the Paisley Caves. Maybe she had a rotten stepmother. In its most recent incarnation, Cinderella’s stepmother throws lentils into the ashes bidding her separate them. An impossible task for sure. But Cinderella is connected to the land in a way her stepmother or stepsisters are not. She can enlist animal helpers. The ashes are her grief at the loss of her parents and the horrible situation she finds herself. She performs the task and goes to the Prince’s ball. But I suspect some of the grit of the ash remained; some bite of grief. The lentils will provide sustenance for a cooked meal and some will be seeds for future harvests. This is where we are now. In a mania to separate the ashes from the lentils: to find the pure past, a perfect story; we commit the same colonial sins. There is no wiping away history to create a clean slate to overlay an imported ideology and there is no one story of a place. One look at this folded, crumpled, tectonically heaved striated land of former sea shores, coyote poop and deep buried woven sandals tells us that no story is pure or static. To be in the land we must be verbs. We must be in relation and we must allow all the cacophonous voices to tell their rambling epic.