The Poignancy and Power of the Place We Call Home

My great-grandfather caused the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It was in a contest of power with another shaman or, as we say, Indian doctor near the town of Bodega, about 50 miles north of the big city. He was a Coast Miwok, known to the local nonnative community simply as an old Indian named Tom Smith.

About the earthquake, fact or fiction? Depends on whom you ask. California native peoples produced--and clearly continue to produce--stories as wondrous and complex as the landscape itself. And it was this landscape of redwood forests, foothills and wide-open plains, deserts and ocean shores that was home to one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse peoples in the world, indeed a home that was the most densely populated in North America at the time of first European contact.

Most Californians know little more than what they learned in fourth grade about the state’s indigenous peoples: that the Indians were in the missions. Although scholars, most often linguists and anthropologists, recorded and translated an abundance of stories and songs from various California Indian tribes, most of the work has remained on wax cylinders and tapes locked away in university basements or serving as reference material for dissertations. The small amount of material available to the general public has usually been as significantly rewritten stories for children or anthologized stories devoid of information about the culture and storyteller from which the tale comes.

Without cultural context, the stories often seem flat, at best confusing. Translations, even by the most sensitive scholars, can jar an English reader’s sensibility. Seemingly meaningless repetition, for example, or language that is forever elliptical and allusive can be maddening, keeping the reader from any understanding of the text that might transgress his or her culturally biased beliefs.

The task, then, in presenting a book of California Indian stories and songs to the general public in a meaningful way is daunting. Yet Herbert W. Luthin has managed to assemble a sampling of California’s native oral literatures in translation so that we can not only appreciate the richness and complexity of the texts but, as a result, can also see and understand, in a way so many of us haven’t before, the place we call home.

Luthin divides the selection of stories and songs according to four geographic regions: northwestern, north-central, south-central and southern. The cartographic approach, though arbitrary in that a geographic region doesn’t necessarily delineate distinct cultures and languages, lends a shared landscape to the texts, if nothing else. And it is the particular features of that landscape that figure so prominently in the stories and songs. A mountain range, an outcropping of rocks, a small spring may serve as mnemonic pegs on which legend and tradition hang.

Luthin prefaces each of his 27 selections with an introductory essay, anticipating “confusions and [to] fill in some of the cultural gaps.” Each selection contains a single tale or a series of songs. He also provides readers with suggestions for more reading with each selection in case “problems nag or an interest is kindled.”

The introductory essays prove particularly helpful, explaining within specific cultural contexts those textual features--such as repetitions and elliptical and allusive language--that might otherwise stump the reader. Linguist Robert Oswalt, introducing the Southern Pomo tale “The Trials of Young Hawk,” as narrated by the late elder Annie Burke, not only gives a concise history of the Southern Pomo in Sonoma County and a description of their culture, but also writes about ritual numbers, personal names and kinship terms pertinent to the tale.

Many of the heavyweights in the field of California Indian languages and cultures--William Bright, Catherine Callaghan, Dorothy Demetracopoulou, Leanne Hinton, Oswalt and William Shipley--also contribute essays. The giants of anthropology are here, too: J.P. Harrington, Dell Hymes and Alfred Kroeber. Yet Luthin doesn’t use the so-called experts to explain “Indian culture.” In footnotes to the introductions and elsewhere, he often comments on methods used for the translation of the respective tale and notes antiquated attitudes toward native people that the scientists, though well-meaning, may have held, say, at the early part of the 20th century.

Further, Luthin often uses native scholars and storytellers to introduce stories and songs from their cultures, allowing them the opportunity to comment on the effectiveness of the translations and so forth. Julian Lang, noted Karuk scholar and storyteller, writes about how “the awesome power and energy of the Ikxareeyav, the spirit inhabitants of myth-time, was unleashed with the telling [of mythical tales]” for the Karuk people and then comments on the story “Coyote and Old Woman Bullhead,” told to an anthropologist 70 years ago. Loren Bommelyn tells his story in his native Tolowa and translates it into English.

Yet the introductions, however helpful, can only heighten our sense of what is, for the most part, already apparent about these stories and songs: their poignancy, humor and sheer beauty. In “Creation” by Eastern Pomo narrator William Ralganal Benson, you find that the present world is accounted for not only by a single Creator, or God, but as a result of action and dialogue between two God-like spirits, Marumda and his elder brother, Kuksu, both of whom mature as characters as they create Earth and its people.

In “The Contest Between Men and Women,” a Tubatulabal tale from the state’s south-central part that accounts for gender roles played out in the tribe, you can’t miss the bawdy humor when a mythical woman who hasn’t seen men feels their presence, noting, “the edge of my vagina is shaking.” Nor can you miss the provocative power of a love song, as when Wintu singer Harry Marsh chants:

Hinini, hinini

Hinini, hinini

Where he walks about, where he walks about,

Pushing the deer decoy away from his face,

Right there in front of him

May I come gliding down and fall!

Hinini, Hinini

Hinini, Hinini

or the grace and beauty of the song from which Luthin takes the title of the book, “Chalaawaat Song,” sung by the late Luiseno elder Villiana Calac Hyde, of the Rincon Reservation in San Diego county:

I suppose I’ve survived the first little month

I suppose I’ve survived the first big month

Oh, I am surviving through the days

I am surviving through the days.

In an informative essay on Native California oral literatures at the end of the book, Luthin relates that “estimates of the pre-Contact Native population range from a conservative 310,000 to nearly a million. By the end of the nineteenth century, that population had fallen to 20,000 or even less--even at the most conservative estimate, a loss of more than 90 percent .... Genocide is a hard word but the only right one for what took place.” Yet despite the brutal history Native Californians experienced with the Spanish, Mexican and early American invasions, they indeed survive the days, and it is to Luthin’s credit that he gratefully acknowledges so many of the Native storytellers and singers who worked with the linguists and anthropologists to keep their traditions alive, among them Benson, Mabel McKay, Grace McKibbin, Hanc’ibyjim, Lucy Thompson, Mary Yee and, yes, Ishi.

This collection is more than testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit, as if that were not enough. The stories teach and heal. Imagine what it meant--and might yet mean--to live in a world where people with different languages and cultures got along with one another for more than 10,000 years, where bilingualism--even trilingualism--was the rule, not the exception, where the world was a garden, where there was very little physical warfare and where respect was considered the highest virtue. Darryl Babe Wilson, in his Atsugewi Creation tale “Kwaw Labors to Form a World,” reminds us that all of the myths, tales and songs herein are “lesson-legends” and that “not long ago there was great magic in the land of my people.” Linda Yamane, a Rumsien Ohlone from the San Francisco Bay Area, says “the stories help non-Indians feel more connected to the place where they live [which] gives them a better understanding--not just a mental understanding but an emotional understanding.”

And speaking of Yamane, I wonder what she’d think about my great-grandfather’s causing all that shaking in her tribal land. Had she heard about Tom Smith? And what stories does she have for me? Oh, how we keep talking. And how fortunate that so many now have the opportunity to listen with Luthin’s spectacular new reader.