Wal-Mart, McDonalds, Shell, Safeway, the highway matrix —
everyone knows these culturally significant features of our landscape. Less well known are the natural features of
the land: the hills, prairies, ponds, and streams. Our landscape watched the mammoths roam, it
watched the furious madness of civilization, and it will watch the manmade eyesores
dissolve into ancient ruins.
Waking up in the civilized world each morning is a jolt — jets,
sirens, the endless rumble of machines. Most
of us live amidst hordes of two-legged tumbleweeds, nameless strangers. We are the people from nowhere, blown out of
our ancestral homelands by the howling winds of ambition and misfortune. Our wild ancestors never lived here. Carson McCullers wrote, “To know who you are,
you have to have a place to come from.”
Pssst! Over here! I’ve found the entrance to another realm, a temporary
place of refuge, an escape from the madness.
It’s called Wisdom Sits in Places,
and it was written by Keith Basso (1940-2013), an ethnographer-linguist. In 1959, he began spending time in the Apache
village of Cibecue, in Arizona. He
discovered a culture that had deep roots in the land, and a way of living that
was far from insane.
The Apache culture also had entrances to other realms. Many places on their land had names, and many
of these named places were associated with stories, and many of these stories
had ancient roots. Everyone in Cibecue
knew the named places, and their stories.
The voices of the wild ancestors could be heard whenever the stories
were told, and their words were always conveyed in the present tense. “Now we are in for trouble!” Past and present swirled together.
The stories were a treasure of time-proven wisdom. They often provided moral messages that
taught the virtues of honorable living, and the unpleasant rewards of poor
choices. When people wandered off the good
path, stories reminded them of where this would lead. They helped people to live well. Because of the power in the stories, the
natives said, “The land looks after the people.”
Most scholars who spend time learning about other cultures were
raised in the modern world of nowhere.
These experts would study languages, ceremonies, food production,
clothing, spirituality, and so on — but they paid too little attention to the
relationship between culture and place, because this notion was absent in their
way of knowing. Often, the reports they
published were missing essential components.
From 1979 to 1984, Basso worked on a project that blew his
mind. The Anglo world had zero respect
for sacred places when there was big money to be made. But natives didn’t want their sacred places
destroyed, so they hired experts to document their culturally significant sites. Elders took Basso to see these places, and
record their stories. He created a map
that covered 45 square miles, and had 296 locations with Apache place names.
Ruth Patterson told Basso about her childhood in the 1920s
and 1930s. In those days, families spent
much time on the land, away from the village.
They herded cattle, tended crops, roasted agave, and hunted. As they moved about, parents taught their
children about the land. They pointed
out places, spoke their names, and told the stories of those places. They wanted their children to be properly
educated.
Apaches used historic stories for healing purposes. Nothing could be more impolite than directly
criticizing another person, expressing anger, or providing unrequested
advice. Instead, the elders used stories
to “shoot” healing notions. During a
conversation, they would mention the names of places having stories that would
be good for the wayward person to remember.
Then, hopefully, he or she would reflect on the stories, understand
their relevance, and make the changes needed to return to balance.
One time, three wise women sat with a woman who was too
sad. The first wise woman spoke a
sentence that mentioned a place name.
Then the second mentioned another place.
So did the third. The sad woman
recalled mental pictures of those places, and heard the ancestors’ voices speak
the stories of those places. She
reflected on their meanings, and the clouds lifted. She laughed.
This was a gentle, effective, and brilliant act of healing. They called it “speaking with names.”
One day, Dudley Patterson was talking about stories and
wisdom. Basso asked him, “What is
wisdom?” Patterson replied, “It’s in
these places. Wisdom sits in places.” In a long and beautiful passage, he told
Basso how his grandmother explained the pursuit of wisdom. Everyone is different. Some are smart, some are half-smart, but only
a few achieve wisdom. Wisdom is acquired
via a long dedicated quest; no one is born with it.
When elders become wise, people can see them change. They are calm and confident. They are not fearful, selfish, or angry. They keep promises. They pay careful attention, always listening
for the voices of the ancestors. Patterson’s
grandmother summed it up something like this:
“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 learn their
names. You must remember what happened
at them long ago. You must think about
it and keep on thinking about it. Then
your mind will become smoother and smoother.
Then you will see danger before it happens. You will walk a long way and live a long time. You will be wise. People will respect you.”
Years later, when Basso sat down to write his book, Cibecue
had changed. The road to the village had
been paved, and there was a school, supermarket, medical clinic, and many new
houses. Big screen televisions were a
new source of stories, sent from the spirit world of corporations, not
ancestors. People were spending far less
time wandering about, old trails had grown over, and the younger generations
were losing their connection to the land and its old-fashioned stories. They preferred the new and useful information
provided at school.
So, the book invites us to contemplate a society far
different from our own. It calls up ancient
memories. Everyone’s wild ancestors once
lived in a way something like the Apaches.
It’s inspiring to remember this. Observing
the world from a tribal perspective allows us to realize how far we’ve
strayed. The people from nowhere are
paying a terrible price for the frivolous wonders of modernity, and the
wreckage it leaves behind.
Basso wrote, “We are, in a sense, the place-worlds we
imagine.” Prince Charles said it a bit
differently: “In so many ways we are
what we are surrounded by, in the same way as we are what we eat.” In the traditional Apache world, the people
were surrounded by a beautiful culture that encouraged respect, caring, and
wisdom. In the modern consumer world,
we’re surrounded by a wisdom-free nightmare of hurricane-force infantile energy
reminiscent of a Godzilla movie. But all
hurricanes die. Our Dark Age will pass. Think positive!
Basso, Keith H., Wisdom
Sits in Places, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1996.
2 comments:
The story of the changes in Indian youth exposed to corporate television reminds me of Jerry Mander's seminal works, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1977) and In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations (1992).
Mander documented the change in the youth of Canadian First Nations people as soon as they were exposed to television. They not only lost their interest in their own culture, but became aggressive and hyperactive.
What Mander discovered, during the time when viewers were concerned about "subliminal messaging" allegedly embedded in TV shows, was that it was the very nature of the technology, requiring long periods of passivity, that "embedded" a change of character and behavior, and resulted in explosions of non-constructive activity later.
I got rid of my TV over 30 years ago. It’s a wonderful habit to quit. One of my favorite lines from the Archdruid is in a rant titled Twilight of Meaning:
Face it, your television will do you more good at the bottom of a dumpster than it will sitting in your living room, and the latest pirate zombie romantic mystery, with or without Jane Austen, is better off gathering cobwebs in a warehouse; you don’t need any of it, and it may well be wrecking your capacity to think clearly.
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