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Forrest Borie is reporting live from underneath the Califonian sun. “RM, the tribal chairman, is clear with me that I have no business assembling cultural preservation projects on this Rancheria. His sentiment is shared by those community members who ask me: “Oh, you’ve come here to teach me about my culture?” I spent the first five months of my service battling an assumption that blocked me from organizing cultural projects about the ways of living of the Mono Indians. It is an assumption with roots, however, both physical and psychic. Pre-colonial California was comprised of small tribes living in close proximity, but maintaining such a degree of cultural solidarity that there would often be five spoken languages within twenty-five miles. This highly-specialized cultural ecology was decimated by two waves of Europeans. First, came the Spanish missionaries with their monotheism and smallpox, then came the gold rush of rednecks who received five dollars from the California government for every Indian scalp. Three hundred tribes were reduced to just over a hundred. There is a marked depreciation in traditional knowledge between generations of California Indians. One tribe hired a linguist to reconstruct their language by utilizing pieces of the various regional linguistic roots. Other tribes rely upon members to practice those traditional ways of living and pass them on to children, an exchange that is often mediated by poverty and alcoholism. Some, like the tribe I work with, found the only way to preserve their culture was to guard its integrity with secrecy and rigidity. Despite the fact that Mono practices are traditionally passed down by family members, I felt that a change in cultural hierarchy would be fortuitous if these practices were to survive past one generation and suggested a series of cultural classes. This suggestion was rejected because those subjects we might explore cannot be transplanted from practice onto the blackboard. Those first five months were stagnant. I had, in fact, attempted to put a box around a sinuous and lucid culture, and this action marked me. But as much as my actions determined my status in the community, so did the ingrained and highly justified apprehension towards white people. The recent movement in my organization of cultural preservation projects (which is often-times overpowering) is a reaction to the fact that I accepted my status as a didactic Westerner. The roles I can fill in cultural preservation for the Mono Indians are severely limited by who I am. In the end, all I can do is facilitate cultural programming with a blindfold on. Five months ago, I would have been resistant to such limited job freedom, but now I realize that by building resources for community members to use in the preservation of their culture I will make a greater impact than if I actively worked to preserve their culture for them. The romantic notion I had of going out with an audio recorder and collecting old stories is not practical. A single man cannot infer the correct answer over the tried methods of an entire people. My intellectual stimulation will not save a culture. This is a mistake I made in the shadow of my own ancestors. We Westerners are a people that are thirsty for knowledge, but so psychically empirical that we have trouble understanding each other, let alone the elemental underpinnings of the California Indians”. Leave a Reply |
