San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Tribal leader, author enchants in memoir
The late, lauded conservationist Aldo Leopold famously wrote: “We can only be ethical in relation to something we can see, understand, feel, love, or otherwise have faith in.”
That creed drives Bay Area author, teacher and tribal leader Greg Sarris’ explorations of his Northern California home and its complex history in his pensive, lyrical new essay collection “Becoming Story: A Journey Among Seasons, Places, Trees, and Ancestors.” (Sarris is chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, formerly known as the Federated Coast Miwok.)
Grouped into the four sections of its subtitle, these pieces open with a cinematic memory: Sarris at age 7 feeding cows on a freezing morning, longing for a cow of his own: “... [their] hooves planted in the frost-covered earth, nostrils blowing steam above an unfastened bale of alfalfa ...”
Grounding readers in the concrete lets us trust Sarris as he reimagines Indigenous creation stories with their vibrant casts of animal-gods: “Coyote’s devious whisperings; Blue Jay’s shrill admonishments; Frog’s old man rasp; Quail, the most beautiful of all … her gentle-as-brook-water songs.”
Sarris gathers from gossip, myth, dreams and science to investigate the imperishable power of story itself and how it helps us locate and claim a sense of home. Hiking familiar countryside, revisiting key locations (particularly the Marin/Sonoma areas), he describes their ghosts, cultural and ecological legacies and his own growing up there — elements
that reach into him: “[T]he place remembered me. … I was standing in the earth’s enormous hand.”
Delicious characters people his remembering — like the above cows’ owner (from whom Sarris would acquire his first cow), a one-armed house painter with a special gift: “[N]o one could mix color like Tommy Baca.”
Such irresistible authority extends to historic conjecture. “For Coast Miwok people [Sarris’ ancestors], like all indigenous peoples of central California, the landscape was … a richly layered text, a sacred book; each ocean cove, even the smallest … rock or tract of open grassland … was a mnemonic peg on which individuals could see a story connected to other stories and thus … find themselves home.”
Under titles like “Osprey Talks to Me One Day” or “The Last Woman From Petaluma,” Sarris hands us wondrous moments: “There was a woman who wanted to teach me love medicine.” Its most powerful ingredient? “[T]he golden red pitch from a redwood tree … principally because … it contains a longer memory of the forest.” And: “I see in that chance meeting of an adopted boy and a one-armed house painter the miraculous web that is all of time, nothing more, nothing less, all-inclusive.”
Always, the terrible fragility of our remaining natural and cultural resources haunts him. “[T]hose Indians had millenniums to learn; we don’t. The oceans rise. Glaciers … are completely gone. Deserts grow. Forests shrink . ... We’ve learned to hope.”
In clean, thoughtful prose with jewellike detail — whether pondering Yosemite, his childhood babysitter, a secret cave or the oak tree outside his house — these meditations enchant. “There will be a thousand more stories, some told with the pencil in my old man’s hand, stories about Coyote and Frog Woman ... a medicine man who walks with the grace of a hummingbird, a gold-toothed girl who casts a demon from her body ... stories and more stories, until the sun returns to the mountain again and there are new leaves on the trees ... quail in the lavender and bluebelly lizards on my rock wall.”