Like wildflowers, Sonoma’s long wet winter has produced another pleasant summer surprise, an unusual and captivating new collection of short tales from award winning author, educator and nationally recognized community leader Greg Sarris, now in his 16th year as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria.
Sarris’ latest book, “The Forgetters,” published by Heyday Books, is immediately engaging, a revealing glimpse into the lives, places and heritage of our region’s Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok people, and provocative because, with rich detail and lyrical craft, Sarris calls on us to remember the essential way all humans actually come to understand and value our lives.
At its heart, the book is about stories: the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell about each other, and the global stories that, when stitched together, shape our view of the world and how we treat everything within it.
Stories were how we stored and conveyed what was essential to know: what plants grew where and how to identify them, the occurrence of floods and fires, the habits of prey and predators, the lengths and signs of seasons, and human relationships: the good and bad of people, how to live with each other, and the histories of all things.
So what happens, Sarris asks, when we stop remembering, and forget our own vital stories?
That’s the backdrop to the colorful short tales Sarris weaves. In them, he intermixes common human foibles with unexpected turns.
We meet a troubled boy who attracts attention when he learns to open the cloud doors that let loose the coastal winds; a nervous thin secretive man who may see through the eyes of a flying osprey; a hired gardener who polarizes his suspicious neighbors when he’s suspected of affection for another man; a devoted lonely woman who raises seven siblings and imagines a lover, who may or not be real.
Most don’t resolve to neat endings. But along the way each reflects some of the grit and hope, love, joy and loss of a people who were brutally disconnected from their ancestral place, and nearly every trace of their former lives.
As Sarris noted, the entire membership of Graton Rancheria today are descended from only 14 survivors.
But the stories remain.
Rooted in traditional knowledge
All the tales are set amid the real features and landscapes of west Sonoma County, stone monoliths and waterways that were intimately familiar, and sacred, to those who lived here for more than 8,000 years before contact.
In the book, Sarris connects these local places and their associated stories with characters trying to repair the rifts in their lives. He links the Beginning Time, before the original people dispersed from Sonoma Mountain and transformed into the peoples and animals we know today, through European contact and white settlement, down to the modern day.
Each story, Sarris says, is rooted in traditional knowledge from stories he heard from his people’s elders.
Throughout, Sarris never ventures from the Native American perspective, or history. In the stories, Native American, Mexicans, and whites occupy a fixed hierarchy of position and power, and like the tides or seasons, this order creates inescapable boundaries, and inexorably drives hardship, decisions, longing and movement. The reader is left to wonder whether the old stories, recalled by the characters, are avenues of escape, or paths to repair. Probably both.
On one level, “The Forgetters” speaks to the collective memory of the Indigenous community. But it also serves to remind others of a yet unresolved chapter. Slavery ended,and immigrants have assimilated, but how does the American conscience square with the Indigenous experience?
For example, Sarris explains, there were no Pomo or Miwok.
“Those are not the names the people gave themselves, those are not the names of the roughly 20,000 people who were living locally pre-contact. They were names attached by others, according to language similarities they recorded,” he said.
Never forget the important lessons
Sarris believes the stories we tell are the key to resolution, and that their most valuable use is to remind us how we are all connected, both to each other, and to the natural world.
Most of the book’s dramas revolve around what happens to those who lose touch with the old vital stories, and those who are subsequently reconnected. His protagonists all get into trouble when they forget the important lessons: kindness, relatedness, connectedness.
“When we forget, we become separated, and that disconnection can grow and feed on itself,” Sarris said. “When we’re dislocated from nature, from place, we become vulnerable, become scared, and then we tend to tell the wrong stories, ones that are not relevant.”
For example, California’s natives once skillfully used fire and regular burning to live safely within a completely flammable landscape.
“The Spaniards thought the stories they carried were the right ones. But one of the first laws they passed was to ban burning by Indians here,” Sarris said..
Tribal leader, university professor, playwright, producer and award-winning author, Sarris sees this latest book as another active component of his long commitment to environmental stewardship, and projects to protect the natural world and promote sustainability.
‘We can tell stories’
Then and now, the stories we tell ourselves have consequences, Sarris said.
“The only gift we have is language,” Sarris said. “As a species, we can’t run fast like deer, or fly, but we can tell stories,” Sarris said. “Stories can be used for things that are destructive — like kill 6 million — or to remind us that we’re not the center of the universe.”
In “The Forgetters,” Sarris said, he wanted to offer stories about healing, and insights to address many of the problems we’re facing today; in particular, ways to form a sustainable future for all.
“Stories connect us literally,” Sarris said, “and that’s why they are important to our survival — being connected is integral to every decision we make.”
Entertaining in their own right, at their most powerful Sarris’ stories give us different ways to see the world, and both ask and answer vital questions about how we should go about living.
“The Forgetters,” Sarris writes, “killed all of the bears and the elk and the pronghorn. They cut down trees … They forgot the stories. They forgot we are all one People, and the animals, indeed the entire Mountain, began to suffer. Now we must all try to learn to live together. We must remember the stories again.”
