The language of being: Prompt Post 8

"As a preschooler, Lisa Yellow Horse knew only one language, Lakota. Now a grown woman on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, she embodies what many in her generation feel: a paralyzing fear to speak a language she is no longer fluent in and confusion about how to pass it down before it disappears.

The regret is hard to swallow."

A year-long series on the Lakota language and culture has been featured in the Rapid City (SD) Journal, and today's stories focused on the loss of language and the generational gaps that helped contribute to this loss as much as colonialism has (Yes, I do realize this disinterest was fostered by colonialism, as is pointed out in the series).

As I read this story, I was reminded my own small self, the only "brown" kid I knew, the only one who could speak another language. As I got older and my friends found plenty of things about my mom and her culture that were "wrong," I grew less and less curious in learning about that culture myself. Now, I feel ashamed only of the fact that I didn't take the time to appreciate my mom's culture more, as a child. Sure, today I take the time to visit relative in Colombia, and I'm genuinely interested in my heritage, but I don't feel like I'm "Colombian" anymore than I am "White." In action, manner and culture, I'm definitely White, north American. But this morning, as my mom rambled on and on and on about some story over breakfast (Colombian hot chocolate and a very America slice of cold, leftover pizza), I realized that in the way I tell stories, I am very much the Colombiana of my ancestry.

My aunts tell stories like my mom, loong, complicated rambling things that veer off in this direction for a while, then that one, then loop back around again and finally (or not) begin to make some sense. My grandma was the same way, and even my uncles tell stories full of stories, heaping one idea upon the next upon the next.

As I chewed and nodded, feigning in interest in her 7 a.m. nonsense, the work of Bruce Chatwin came to mind. A storyteller himself, Chatwin shared the work of the Australian Aborigines and their Songlines and Dreamtime stories, the stories by which all of Australia is mapped, plotted and held together by story. It seems like all cultures are held together by an intricate web of words, and for the Lakota people to lose that web is to lose their system of navigation.

Having spent a semester getting into the history of a place that I once knew intimately, I've found that my ideas of nature are as conflicted as I am. I'm a country girl who'd rather live in the city, but I have found that I want that city to have some of the pace and culture of my childhood landscapes. I still tell people that I left Chicago this semester because being in "nature" for a nature writing course made more sense than being in Chicago, so I guess I don't really think of Chicago as nature, although I know it does have it's own natural elements. This awareness is also conflicted, because I think of cities as places of learning, learned people,people who want more than a life toiling in the dirt. Cities are full of knowledge, and they have shaped the adult I am. They provided the education I received in college.

And yet there is a certain kind of knowledge to be found among the rural. The knowledge of cloud patterns and storms, the way plants grow, and animals; the simple understanding of the seasons and where food comes from.. all that is more a rural education than a concrete and book-learned one. Throughout the semester we've focused on the duality of this genre in the authors we've encountered, and even those who live in cities, or less rural places have a reverence for the natural land (land not paved or developed, in this case) that doesn't seem to have been bred of the city.

At the beginning of the course I felt that nature writing was the wild, lyric, expressive rambling and storytelling that a writer writes because he has to, is compelled from somewhere inside to create and honor with the gift of words and sentences. Environmental writing seemed to be the more scientific, book-learned stuff, and as the course ends, I feel mostly the same way. I know that there are cross-overs, as there should be in all good nonfiction writing; even in the fiction within the genre we see that the author hopes to inform as much as entertain. We see that as much care must be given to language as to the story itself, the story we tell in our existence on the land.


As I read the stories of the young women in this article, and then the story of a Philadelphian who came to the Rez to learn and then teach the Lakota language, I felt like I've spent a whole semester not just learning how to connect to nature and consider it, but how to speak to it, and about it, on its own terms, in its own language. What we need is a bridge over our failed communications, a means of spanning not just generations, but cultures and people and ideas. We need to close the gap between "nature" and "wild" as bad things, and develop a sense of understanding and fluency in our relationships toward all things. I'm just not sure how to go about getting at that fluency, other than writing. And exploring. And being.

Spring shed: Place Post No. 8

Wind is blowing in from the Southwest when I get to the lake. Not a cold wind, but strong, the force pours into my ear as I clear paint chips from a picnic table and view my surroundings.
Ducks on the water are invisible except for the slender, black tubes of neck and curves of head. I can hear them, however, fart-like noises and squeaks reach across the water's edge. A robin, clinging to the branch above me, yells at the wind and flaps its wings, remaining if not steady, attached to its wooden landing. even though the winter wheat is a green, shimmer carpet beyond the boundaries of the area, the bird's rusty orange breast is the only brightness I see in this drab surrounding, and I am thankful for it.

There is no sun today, so even though the day is in the low 60s and imaginatively warm, I want tome color to my surroundings. Yes, thin stabs of grass poke up through the dead leaves and grasses around me, and the wheat fields to the north and south beckon with luxurious industry, but what I am feeling is a lack of color—in mind and physical presence. I feel shadowed and dark, as if the melanin under my skin reflected only "bruise" as a color.

The ducks take off, and I watch the water "settle" after them. Its ripples flow and bounce like static on a television: jittery lines that move up and down, and up and down again, then across the gray surface in a haphazard pattern. I am mesmerized by the movement, much as I am when settled (reluctantly) in front of a noise box that must be plugged in. Television transports the viewer to other places; here at the lake, I too disappear, but only to the landscape within. My semester is almost over, and I feel that I've come to see the wildness of the lake in a way I never had before. The flora and fauna were just sticks and grasses and animals..and they still are, but I feel like I'm seeing them with an awareness that others who sit at these picnic tables might not notice. I don't really feel that way about those human others—I don't feel any more connected to the people I went to school with or sit with at the bar when I rarely go to town. I don't feel any more interested in the history of my home county than I did before. I feel settled here only in the temporary way I felt settled here when it was "home:" as if it were a place to be, for a moment. Like a sun-dappled bit of grass that invites an afternoon of reading in the summer.
I have just returned from Denver, from the annual AWP conference and bookfair, and even though I went to sessions on the Nebraska writer, or the importance of place and home and habitat, instead of the rosy color of promise, my heart is shadowed like the water before me. The conference connected me to authors and ideas, and hearing the words of authors I've read all semester float above a crowd in person was wonderful. The words of Leslie Mormon Silko, and David Gessner—words in favor of ancient rootedness or of seeking it until one is connected to a new place, respectively—stick with me, but the words of Debra Marquart have probably done more for me, because she took the stagnation of small town life and wrote about it, honestly, Compassionately. But as part of her past.

The air swills around me, traces whorls in my hair and marks my skin with invisible patterns, as I walk to the edge of the water and settle on a smooth, white stump. I run my hand along the arch of thick branches, marvel at the smoothness where the tree has shed its bark. Parts of this felled giant feel like the soft, curved back of a lover, the sturdiness of shoulder blade and bone and muscle, wrapped up and protected by a porous, peach cover that sometimes shivers with resistance. The smoothness of the tree is a second skin, and I think about the many times I've talked of "skin" when referring to the frozen water. That cover is gone now, the one before me is active, fluid. Moving water.
Moving.

As I stand up to leave, I look behind me an notice a dead fish, (a huge bass? wallye?), eye sunken in and horrid, a muddy scab of brown. Two ants crawl from its gill and march across their scaly, silver territory; I squat and look at its distended belly, the yellow opening of its mouth. Dad would have loved to catch a fish this big (maybe four pounds) at Walgren, so I wonder what happened to him, how he washed up to the shore, and if he drowned in the heavy absence of vital water. He's brittle and dry, so there's no stench of rotting fish—I probably would have smelled him before now, if there had been—and for this, too, I am thankful. The air today smells light and beautiful, like spring rains and cottonwood down. It's sweet, and sticks to me, but is not sweet and sticky like some smoke, clogging the air with a resinous, wet blanket. No, it's sweet and sticky in the way pine gum is when it covers pores on your hand and lingers in the air with a movement of fingers.

I walk back to my car, across foot-deep ruts of peeling mud that puncture the road's surface, and again, I think of the skins we are shedding, always, everyone of us. After this coursework, all of it, I will never come back to the lake and look at it the same way, nor will I be able to write of the natural world without a need for deeper connection and understanding. We might spend seven years shedding our skins—a time that seems like forever—or see new elements of the world with the dawning of new seasons, but in every moment, sun-dappled or crusted with snow and ice, our own landscapes are transforming.

"The inherent emotional risks of creativity"

a short video on creativity and staying sane as a creative person. I try to stay away from Gilbert (haven't read EPL yet) becuase she's soooo over-hyped, but she's super-funny in this clip. And her message is worthwhile. While creativity isn't necessarily birds and trees and bugs, I do believe there is a natural sort of pool from which creativity comes.

At any rate, I hope this clip entertains and spurs some thought.