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Adventure Guest Blog: Forrest Borie is the Best!

Sadly, today is the last word for now from our far-flung and thoroughly thoughtful correspondent, the indomitable Forrest Borie. We here at Adventure Headquarters in Seattle have been lucky to have him on the team and we give you his last Adventure Guest Blog (we encourage you to check out his various web presences and pay attention to this up and coming – artist, adventurer and scholar), “This being my final entry, I’d like to thank the Adventure School for inviting me to blog for a month and for those of you who have followed my posts. If you’d like to read more about what I do out here in the Sierra Nevadas and more of my ruminations on the bridges between our psychic and physical selves, visit forrestborie.blogspot.com, which I will be updating regularly in a more long-winded form. I would also like to discuss something I haven’t really touched upon in any of my previous entries, that is, why exactly I’m working with the Mono Indians.

I am volunteering full time with
Americorps*VISTA, a sort of domestic Peacecorps, a highly caffeinated version of the Americorps you all may be immediately familiar with (RE: red jackets working with urban youth). VISTA engages skilled individuals with the development of sustainable programs, that is, projects or services that will remain long after I am gone. While I had never postured myself to be a volunteer or administrator, at least not in any typical fashion, I took the opportunity given by our burgeoning job market and my mid-twenties ennui to actually do something worthwhile.

The program I am working to start is called the Intergenerational Cultural Preservation Program, though this name may change. This program is a response to generational depreciation in traditional knowledge among California Indians. The causes of this depreciation are varied, ranging from the viral invasiveness of Western culture to the esteem-busting power of poverty and dependence on government aid.

This generational depreciation is particularly pronounced in California due to the incredible number and diversity of the tribes (108 in total) and their small populations. It is my hope that a greater engagement by youth, adults, and Elders in their traditional ways of living will increase cultural esteem, and so encourage individuals to seek out individual economic sustainability, rather than remaining dependent on government assistance or profit-sharing from casino tribes. It’s a multi-pronged approach to a multi-pronged problem.

The Rancheria I am working on has little in the way of dedicated cultural programming, so I am working to construct the infrastructure of cultural preservation programming. I am opening accounts, forming committees, and accumulating resources that will exist within the Tribe’s administrative and community structure long after I am gone. In addition to resource and infrastructure building, I have dreams of commissioning a flash-based Mono language lab and the community-based production of a documentary about the history of this Rancheria.

If you are interested in learning more about this program, my experiences in building it, or how you might help (I am definitely looking for creative people skilled in the digital media arts), please do not feel shy e-mailing me: forrest.borie@gmail.com.

Thank you for reading!”

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