The Forgetters
by Greg Sarris
Heyday Books, 2024
May 1, 2024
A Loving Response/Review:
I am writing this on Wappo, Southern Pomo, Coast Miwok lands (aka Sonoma County, CA) where I have been a settler for more than four decades. I acknowledge that in the last two decades I’ve shifted my (overly cognitive/academic) focus on the process of decolonization to learning what it means to fall in love with the Land; to learn how to dwell in Place. The local indigenous stories as told by Greg Sarris teach me many lessons that I need to learn and embody.
Question Woman and Answer Woman are back. In How a Mountain Was Made (Sarris, 2019), I fell in love with the two sisters, who are sometimes seen as two crows sitting on a fence on Sonoma Mountain, as they tell the creation stories of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo peoples. Through these stories, I, as a settler, have come to love these lands and make my own pilgrimages to Gravity Hill, Copeland Creek, Sonoma Mountain, Santa Rosa Avenue, Sebastopol…to thank the Land for her sacred stories that continue to live on in her peoples that also now include settlers like me.
Stories are alive as long as there are folks who remember to ask the questions and there are folks who remember the answers to them, writes Sarris. I am grateful for how these stories seep into the bone marrow when one learns to listen deeply.
Now in The Forgetters, we meet Question Woman and Answer Woman again. These are stories that feel more contemporary. The Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok peoples are living among the settlers — sometimes as ranch hands, as gardeners, as farm laborers. There are also non-Indians in these stories — Filipinos, Mexicans, Chileans, Spanish, and white folks. The Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo descendants of survivors of the California genocide, are still carrying the old stories as they move about; as they wonder about the settlers’ curious habits; as they eye the quiet ones who don’t talk much; as they ponder the dilemma of what it means to share Sonoma Mountain with all who have come to live here.
There are medicine people, tricksters, shapeshifters in these stories who offer a glimpse into the indigenous world where all the animals and the fog, fish, mountain, rain, et al are all people. These stories are portals to the imaginal realm and can be made accessible and experienced as powerful mythic stories. In these stories, Sarris offers a way for white people/settlers to Hear these Stories because they, too, are part of Creation who came to settle on Sonoma Mountain. Some of the indigenous folks have forgotten the stories as well and they, too, need to hear them again. Note that I write “hear” instead of “learn”; for me, the aural quality in reading these stories adds to the visceral effect of the stories as having landed in the bone marrow. They are not just folk tales that entertain or teach a lesson. They are Medicine.
Stories remind us of the perils of forgetting. So much has changed since the settlers came. The Land has changed. The settlers started carving out the land to make room for ranches and orchards. Where the dairy farms have shrunk, now there’s housing developments and commercial buildings; the orchards are now vineyards. How to remember the ancient stories of the Land and her indigenous peoples?
Reading these stories reminded me of how impoverished my experience of the imaginal realm had become under the regime of modern/colonial conditioning. There is a temptation to keep falling back on the definition of folk tales as somehow mere entertainment to read to kids at bedtime. But in Sarris’ stories, the indigenous imagination is so much more potent; it pokes at things that hide in the shadows and keeps you wondering if you really get it.
Animism says that everything is Sacred; all is imbued with spirit. Animism has been normative consciousness for hundreds of thousands of years and that this modern/colonial/civilized way of Being is really quite young in comparison. I feel the invitation to me, as a reader, to participate in this animate world…and that this is how the world has always been before modernity’s story of disconnection and fragmentation took hold; before the ancient stories were forgotten.
“All the animals are people.” So the Osprey, Owl, Hummingbird, Rattlesnake, Sturgeon — they all speak to the humans in these stories. Sometimes the humans also shapeshift into birds and animals or turn into rocks that folks on Sonoma Mountain today recognize as they mark the places where events have happened a long, long time ago. In one story, Isabel escapes Sebastopol at night and finds herself with three people telling ancient stories of the water bug who stole Copeland Creek at Kobe-cha and other happenings on Sonoma Mountain. After the storytelling, Isabel returns to the farm campsite so as not to be late for work the next day. The three people were Hummingbird who is married to Rattlesnake but they looked white; the Indian- looking guy is Owl. The three gave her gifts — water, night vision, wings — so she can be with them at night. Isabel realizes that she remembers pieces of the stories she is hearing and she carries them on to the future until she herself becomes part of the story that is now told by the new generation.
Shapeshifting is what happens under trance states. And sometimes there is a trickster in the story, too. An Indian man in “Man Follows an Osprey” has heard that the Russians left and buried a treasure after the fur trade. Thinking that the osprey would lead him to this treasure, the man observes the bird so keenly day and night until one day, he did become an osprey in flight and comes upon what turns out not to be a treasure box but a simple box with two osprey feathers, abalone pendant, and acorn pendant.
In another story, shapeshifting does happen although no one self-proclaims as a walepu. In Marshall, there is a village called Mitco circa late 1800. The women often work as housekeepers or domestic workers for white people. There are no jobs for Indian men. As an Indian hunts in “A Man Shoots His Stepfather” he shoots a deer who, as it turns out, is his stepfather as he sees his mother pulling out the buckshot from his backside.
In “Dissenters Find a Stranger”, a stranger is taken in by Mary and she teaches him how to help around the village. The stranger learns how to build a kotcha, learns their songs, learns to hunt…and soon is doing all these tasks for the villagers that they themselves eventually learn to forget. When they realize the stranger has taken all that is valuable to them, they ask the stranger to leave and is sent on his way to San Rafael.
In one of the stories, a Chilean man is taken in by Mexicans and Filipinos and lives with them, learning all kinds of chores to help around the village. He eventually becomes a caller/announcer at the Roundhouse festival and learns the stories of the famous medicine man Tom Smith’s family. However, he overstays his welcome and is eventually told to leave. You can still see him in those rocks.
The stories remind me of an “ethic of caring” in indigenous cultures. The measure of justice is always the restoration of balance and harmony with the Land/Sonoma Mountain. Even when people are always trying to guess what is going on, who did what to whom, or trying to make sense of the new arrival or someone who got lost on their way to somewhere — these stories offer a way for the reader to imagine differently. How to live on Sonoma Mountain together. Can the Mountain hold all the different stories together?
Sarris plays with Time in these stories where the past, present, and future co-mingle and mess with our concept of time as linear. Even the reader becomes a part of the Story in this wide and deep expanse of Time. In the modern construction of binary and linear time, there are cracks and abysses that create stories of bifurcation and resistance. Not so in the indigenous framing of Time where the ancient stories are still remembered. When the stories are forgotten, there are consequences that cause suffering…which then challenge us to re-member again. This circularity feels like a liberation from the traps of limiting epistemologies of the modern mind.
For example, in the story “A Girl Sees a Giant Sturgeon” there is a deep psychological insight into trauma which can only be healed by a story that reconnects to the living world of sturgeon. The eyes through which we see ourselves in the other — to see yourself in the eye of a sturgeon when the water between Marin and San Francisco was as wide as the ocean, not yet a peninsula…where sturgeon got stuck and is no longer able to get home. What is the medicine of the sturgeon…that connects to the history of the Land and the Waters over the vast expanse of Time?
History also interrupts the flow of ancient stories. In “A Man Learns to Smell Flowers”, Kaloopis (his name means hummingbird) works for the white landowner, Mrs Luft, in the garden. Catfish gets jealous and wants to know how Kaloopis came to be chosen to work next to the landlady. So Catfish asks permission to work with them in the garden and he also becomes more and more curious about the habits of Kaloopis. He sees that Kaloopis disappears every night after he tells stories to the kids and so Catfish follows him but he gets lost along the way. When Catfish does find him, he sees that Kaloopis entertains a man so he gossips that he’s gay. With this gossip, other rumors spread until the community forbids their kids to listen to his stories anymore. As the villagers have become Catholics they have become afraid of walepus and they begin to invent stories that make them abandon Kaloopis and eventually the land that Mrs. Luft promised she would bequeath to them. Did their conversion to christianity and the abandonment of their kin lead them down the path of their own undoing?
I feel as if these stories have put me in a trance and I keep re-reading them. This collection of stories really penetrates the bone marrow and provides medicine for all of us who live on this land–and other places where colonization has distorted our relationship with the Land and her Stories. The Forgetters is an invitation to linger awhile under the spell of indigenous Storytelling; to dive deep into that corner of our Heart that is seeking Medicine. For me, the experience of feeling the sensory gates of my mind begin to melt in order to make room for the wondrous magic of timeless Story has been a precious gift.
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