Coyote’s granddaughters

Years ago, I reviewed a book by Ursula Pike, an enrolled Karuk Tribal member who grew up in Oregon and California and went into the Peace Corps. The book was An Indian among los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir. One can imagine the quandaries and perplexities of a young Native American who has experienced discrimination in this country going to another country with Tribal populations and languages different from her own, with non-American Indian Peace Corps cohorts, and the normal adjustments to foods, roads, and habits of a new place. Her new place was Bolivia.

My very positive review appeared on the Peace Corps Worldwide website, and I recommend it still to people interested in the Peace Corps, in Bolivia, and in good writing. The book was published by Heyday in California, a midsize and vibrant publisher that features books on California, books by Latinx and indigenous writers, books that deal with culture and social justice. I told them about my work with Tribes and at the Josephy Library and said that I would be interested in reviewing other books.

And they recently sent me Greg Sarris’s The Forgetters for review. They didn’t know that I had once—maybe 20 years ago—invited Greg to Fishtrap, the writers’ non-profit I directed for 20 years. And I didn’t know that Greg is now the Chairman of the Board of the National Museum of the American Indian. I doubt the editors know, but am pretty sure that Greg knows that the founding board chair of the Museum was Alvin Josephy, my friend and mentor, and the namesake of the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture where I now work!

The Forgetters is a series of conversations between two of “Coyote’s granddaughter, Answer Woman and Question Woman, [who have] landed on a fence rail high atop Sonoma Mountain… a special place for Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people.” The stories all refer to places, lessons, habits and customs that have been forgotten. The Question Woman has forgotten them—but the Answer Woman can’t tell them until she gets a proper question.

Like the Coyote stories of our Plateau Tribal neighbors, Coyote’s Miwok-Pomo granddaughters, who appear to us as crows, have moral lessons in their telling. There is a man who wants worldly treasures, and follows an osprey on several journeys in his search, and eventually learns that having “enough” is enough, and sharing wealth is more important than having it. A plain but comely woman tries to make herself beautiful for a lover—maybe an imagined lover—and learns that is enough to be a “good woman.” A community grows jealous of a visitor who is a good man—and he leaves them a lesson.

And on and on. What is striking about Sarris’s stories is that they wrap the traditional around settler history and the present. People from other tribes and even other countries, people who have planted orchards and built settler houses, people and events that have transformed Sonoma Mountain are woven into stories of the old people—and remembered in the lessons they are part of.

One can argue that California Tribes were the most unfortunate as Europeans came to the Americas and the United States moved west and engulfed the continent. They were enslaved by the Spanish, converted harshly by the Franciscan Catholics, killed for bounties during the gold rush, dispersed and fragmented by the series of California governances before and through the time of US statehood. There were no treaties, only later government assigned rancherias where groups of indigenous people intermixed among themselves and with immigrants from other countries entirely.

Yet, there is no bitterness in these stories, no “what-might-have-beens” had there been no conquerors, no mass diseases, no genocidal purges. Only calls to remember old truths, to be neighborly and share the earth and its bounty, to take just enough but not too much. To do so with humor and humility.

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