“EULOGY”

“Black Elk,” watercolor painting by kayti sweetland rasmussen

“Eulogy” by Sherman Alexie

My mother was a dictionary,

She was one of the last fluent speakers of our tribal language.

She knew dozens of words that no one else knew.

When she died, we buried all those words with her.

My mother was a dictionary.

She knew words that have been spoken for thousands of years.

She knew words that will never be spoken again.

I wish I could build tombstones for each of those words.

Maybe this poem is a tombstone.

My mother was a dictionary.

She spoke the old language.

But she never taught me how to say those ancient words.

She always said to me “English will always be your best weapon.”

She was right, she was right, she was right.

Excerpt from commencement speech Gonzaga University
Sherman Alexie, writer, poet, film maker
Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Native

THE MOTHER TONGUE

Our expectations exceed the return in so many ways. For instance, when you step into my house, I expect you to speak English. Sometimes that doesn’t happen, but when I venture into YOUR house, I don’t speak your language either. This leads to confusion on both parts. Ours is still an English-speaking country, though I appreciate that this is hard to understand for many newcomers.

A teacher friend told me of a recent arrival from another country who was upset because her child was not being taught in their native language. I am reminded of an elderly Italian friend who came to this country at the age of 7 knowing no English, nor any English-speaking friends. She quickly learned the new language by listening and using sign language.

Some years ago I wanted to make a goose liver pate for a party, so I went to a likely looking market in Chinatown. As it turned out, no one spoke English and I spoke no Chinese, so I resorted to sign language. I pointed to the barbequed ducks hanging along a wall and flapped my elbows while loudly quacking like a duck. I wasn’t sure how to honk like a goose.

Two or three people came out of the kitchen, smiled and looked bewildered. It was the lunch hour, and soon someone came carrying trays of fried delicacies while smiling and pointing me to a plate and encouraging me to help myself. They all shook their heads when I offered to pay. I guess it was in return for the entertainment I had given them with my duck act. All of which shows that a smile can get you a free lunch. I did not get my goose liver from them however.

We live in an ethnically diversified community, and increasingly an diversified world.

For many years we hosted a backyard block party, inviting neighbors from up and down our street to come. Everyone brought a plate of food, sometimes a recipe from whatever country they had come from.

I learned a lesson on one occasion when I introduced two people from China to each other thinking they would have a common tie. They laughed and said they did not understand the language of the other. Later I discovered the same thing from members of my Tai Chi class, most of which had come from either China or Taiwan. It was a good learning experience for me. We need to understand one another in some way if only by language.

We are criticized for not welcoming newcomers to our society, but nothing is done to encourage them to adapt to our customs. New communities are being built with houses of many small rooms to accommodate families of several generations; children, working parents, and grandparents to care for the children. This is the norm in many places, tying into their comfort zone.

“Lichen” watercolor painting by kayti sweetland rasmussen

This painting of intertwined elements illustrates our society of people from all over the world. A confused mass without any connection to one another.

There is more to being a good citizen than minding your own business. Learn our language and let us learn your customs if possible.

THERE’S A WORD FOR THAT

“Bird Of Paradise” original watercolor painting by kayti sweetland rasmussen

Did you ever stop to think how arbitrary the naming of things can be? For instance: has anyone ever really seen a bird of paradise? In the rich history of the English language a word has been invented for just about everything including things we have never seen.

Now and then words go missing when we need them and then unexpectedly pop up again in the night while in the middle of a good dream. Haven’t you wished you could think of a great word to apply to someone who does things which are particularly annoying or irritating–whether online, in person, outside your bedroom window or in tedious meetings at work?

It’s fascinating for instance, to learn there’s a word for people who use overly long pretentious-sounding words. There are several I’m sure, but we can avoid getting unnecessarily sesquipedalian. Do you see how useful it could be?

Girouettism is the practice of frequently altering personal opinion to follow popular trends. It comes from a girouette another name for a weather-cock. Just as a weather-cock changes its position according to the wind, so a figurative ‘girouette’ is a fair-weather sort who changes their metaphorical position according to what’s ‘in’ at the moment. The term dates from the 1820s.

Verbomania is abnormal talkativeness. There is, however, little more to say about this one–ironically.

Word-grubber was eighteenth-century slang for someone who used unnecessarily long and complicated words in conversation, unlike the words such a person is likely to use. Many years ago I was annoyed with my father and wrote him a long pedantic and complaining letter. He immediately dashed one off to me using words I never thought he knew. It is universal to believe that we are far more brilliant than our parent, until we are once again proven wrong.

A Buttinsky is a person who constantly interrupts or butts in; it was coined by George Ade in his 1902 novel The Girl Proposition. Ade, by the way was the one who provides us with the first recorded use of the word “bad” to mean “good”, in his 1897 book Pink Marsh. So you see, when someone says another person or musical group is “bad-ass” and means they’re good, it’s really “old-hat”.

Humdudgeon is an imaginary illness or pain, or a loud complaint about nothing. One of its root words is “humbug” or a hoax. You’re in high dudgeon about a humbug. So don’t complain too loudly or people may call you a “humdudgeon”.

One of the great words featured in Samuel Johnson’s eighteenth century Dictionary is bed-presser which Johnson defines as ‘a heavy lazy fellow’.

There must be other annoying words–or rather, perfectly nice words that describe things people do–or things which get your goat.

We borrow from other languages, invent new words, combine words, and still wonder why the rest of the world doesn’t understand us.

DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS

“PORTUGUESE FISHERMAN” Antonio Rodrigues by KSR

What brings us our endless fascination with the sea? Perhaps it is that we can never be quite sure what lies underneath that watery surface. Men have plowed the seas for countless millennia in all kinds of weather and in all kinds of boats. Vikings sailed to England, France and Russia for plunder, liked what they found and stayed to build new societies. The Danes made themselves at home in England, The Norwegians in France and the Swedes took a swipe at Russia. Native peoples fished and fought in small boats, large sailing ships traversed the navigable globe exploring new lands, and now we have gigantic floating hotels cruising the seven seas, (and sometimes getting stuck on reefs or clogging their plumbing). Last year alone Carnival Cruise line made unwelcome news a number of times. Maybe these monster ships are just too big. Man can’t seem to quench his wanderlust thirst while floating atop the water, and I must admit to doing it a great number of times, but I didn’t need a GPS to find my way to the dining room.

I have a long term fellowship with the sea, covering several generations of family association, most recently with my father, and my husband. When I was encouraged to find employment upon my high school graduation, I found it at the Matson Line for a whopping $95 per month. My Great-uncle and cousin held positions of some importance there and in a sad display of nepotism I was hired as a mailgirl. I didn’t see much of the sea in that position, but there were other perks, among which were introductions to some cute pursers at the end of a cruise while collecting their mail.

SS LURLINE

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Fishermen of the world face other dangers helping to feed our overpopulated planet. In the mostly bygone days of cod fishing the Portuguese doryman lived a lonely life in his tiny boat along the Grand Banks separated from his home 3,000 miles away for six months out of the year. He left the mothership in his little dory and fought currents, FOG, freezing cold and rough seas while setting his gear with rudimentary equipment. If he became lost and drifted away, he was mostly on his own, usually not speaking another language if he should be rescued by someone other than his own people. Though he had a compass, it would have been relatively useless that close to the North Pole. As the saying goes, “He was up a creek without a paddle”. The 1960’s saw the end of the great cod fishing era. Fortunately for we fish and chip lovers, there is still enough codfish for a few more years.

Small Dory

Mothership

HOME IS THE SAILOR

Home is the sailor, home from sea;
Her far-borne canvas furled
The ship pours shining on the quay
The plunder of the world.

Home is the hunter from the hill.
Fast in the boundless snare
All flesh lies taken at his will
And every fowl of air.

‘Tis evening on the moorland free,
The starlit wave is still;
Home is the sailor from the sea,
The hunter from the hill.

A.E. Houseman

NAVAJO CODE TALKERS

“How The Navajos Got The Blanket” watercolor painting by Kayti Sweetland Rasmussen
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The reservation is a private world, a world of beauty, of great silences, of contemplation. They are a people steeped in myth and mystery. In that beauty and silence one’s whole world and way of looking at the world would be changed.

Many miles from the peaceful reservation, World War II erupted in the Pacific with the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. Along with young men all over America, Navajo boys rushed to the nearest recruiting office. I know of one underage boy who walked 25 miles from his remote home to enlist, only to be turned down because of a lack of a birth certificate. (Many babies born at home in those days did not have birth certificates.) This boy returned to the recruiting office the next day, and through the use of a forged cetificate of some sort, suddenly became 18.

During the early months in the Pacific, Japanese intelligence experts broke every code the United States devised for combat messages. In any war situation, the rapid and accurate transmission of messages is essential. Japan was learning in advance, the time, place and direction the American attack forces would be deployed. Something had to be done to enable the American forces to communicate freely and secretly in the Pacific.

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, a group of twenty-nine volunteers left the tranquil canyons and mesas of their Navajo homeland. Little did they know of the crucial role they were about to play in the U.S. war effort.

These twenty-nine volunteers were the direct result of an idea presented to the Marines by Philip Johnston. His idea, born from his childhood days as a missionary’s son living on the Navajo Reservation, was ingenious.

The idea was to devise a code utilizing the complex unwritten language of the Navajo. Knowing the complicated syntax and intricate tonal qualities of the language, he convinced the Marines it would baffle the best of cryptographers. This language sounds different to the Anglo ear. Through the years I used to hear it, I called it “twisted tongue”; impossible for an Anglo to pronounce unless he had been raised around it. Johnston said the language could be used as the basis for a code to transmit vital information and battle plans.

With the help of the twenty-nine Navajo volunteers the task of creating code terms was underway. Words from their native tongue were selected to describe complex military equipment and operations. Instead of changing at a scheduled period of time, the code was changed constantly, often several times a day.

At full strength there were about 400 Navajos who were “Code Talkers”. These men were considered so valuable each had been assigned a personal body guard. The Navajo Code Talkers were so effective the Japanese were completely baffled and their master cryptographers never broke the code. In the words of Major Howard Conner, signal officer of the Fifth Marine Division at Iwo Jima, “during the irst 48 hours, while we were landing and consolidating our shore position s, I had six Navajo radio networks operating around the clock. In that period alone, they sent and received over 800 messages without an error”. Conner went on to say that “were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima”.

THINKING AND READING

I’m in awe of the people who translate from one language to another. Granted that some things which are interesting in one language lose much nuance of story in the hands of the translator. But still we feel the essence of the story.

The California School of the Deaf is in our community, and we often see groups of people communicating in a lovely ballet of hands, making me feel again that I need to learn ASL. When there is a hearing impaired person in the classroom, a translator comes if necessary.

Thinking and reading are thrilling experiences. Reading about interesting real subjects can be inspirational as well as entertaining. My great-aunt and uncle had a small library, and since I went to stay often with them, I became familiar with most of the books in it. It was heavy with old-time children’s books, and shaped a steady reading habit which has lasted all my life.

Reading requires that you must think, but when you are in an anti-acquisitive mode, words are just words. If the mind becomes burdened with outside thoughts, you may be reading words, but you aren’t thinking.

My grandson in the painting below is studying his family’s photo album, sorting out where he fits in the stream. His ancestors are mere shadows in the background.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be continually part of unanimity.

“Tyler Reading” watercolor painting by kayti sweetland rasmussen

RICH TRADITIONS OF STORYTELLING

Stories, either written or oral, are the base of our civilization Stories are limitless, and connect people from all walks of life. Cultures who had no written language had storytellers.

At a lecture by F. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa Indian, he stated that at some time in everyone’s life, he must know from where he came. The Native American has no such problem, because he has been taught the legends of his people over and over his entire life. He can recite his family tree for generations back, and can also remember and tell stories about ancestors long dead.

Stories are painted and carved on rocks throughout the world. Reminders to us that we are not unique, and that those who have gone before us left their legacies for us to interpret.

The time honored Indian pueblo pottery tradition of working with clay and telling stories has merged into a modern art form of “storyteller” pottery dolls. The art of making clay effigies is as ancient as the Anasazi peoples who inhabited the deserts of New Mexico many centuries ago. In recent history, it is the Cochiti pueblo potters who are knlown for clay effigies depicting many different aspects of their everyday life.

Helen Cordero of the Cochiti pueblo created her first ‘storyteller’ figure. Cordero’s storyteller mode was her grandfather, who gathered his grandchildren around him to play the drum, sing them songs, and tell stories of their Indian heritage and traditions.

Due to the decline of the number of speakers of native languages in various parts of the world, oral storytelling has become less common. In recent years many of the stories are written down, though many people argue that the telling of the story is just as important as the words within. Story telling, once confined to people in our own community, due to the virtue of the internet, allows us to tell our stories to people around the world.

Language is the archives of history. Ralph Waldo Emerson

OUR VANISHING VOICES

I Am Home sculpture by kayti Sweetland Rasmussen
“One language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly one half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on earth will disappear as communities abandon native tongues in favor of Enlish, Mandarin or Spanish”.
As one Native American in Parker, Arizona, who is one of the last speakers of his Chemehuevi language says “It’s like a bird losing feathers. You see one float by and there it goes—another word.”
Many people around the world speak dialects, and broken languages (those whose country ajoins another often collect words from their neighbor and add to their own, thus contaminating the original language.)
When languages disappear, they take along with them the legends, customs, etc. of the people. It takes away knowledge.
Language identifies us. The Seri people are an idigenous group of the Mexican state of Sonora. The Seri language is distinct from all others in the region and is considered to be a linguistic isolate.
The people say “Everyone has a flower inside, and inside the flower is a word.” The petals from the Seri flower are dropping rapidly, and with a population of slightly below l.000, it won’t be long before the petals are gone from their flower.

When governments attempt to destroy a native language, much as the United States did to the Native American, the language in its pure form loses much of its flow. In the sculpture above, the returning child is enveloped by his mother’s robe which is embellished with the stories of his people. A familiar story told in another language, never achieves the original tempo.
I found it interesting to read that the three languages proposed to substitute the remaining languages are said to be “English, Mandarin or Spanish”. In California alone, those three languages are readily apparent.

NUDE vs. NAKED

The English language is very confusing.  There are so many words that mean exactly the same thing.  For example, nude and naked, or house and home.  I’m sure there are numerous others, but what I really wanted to write about was nude and naked, so we don’t need to waste time looking up the others.

In the context of art, an unclothed figure is a nude, thereby encouraging genteel voyeurism.  No art catalogue would describe a painting as being of a lovely naked person, though the naked body was a constant in the paintings of the old Masters, who approached each of their nudes in the terms dictated by that moment.

In contrast however, are “naked”  people.  The Bay to Breakers is a race run each year in San Francisco, and frequently enthusiastic participants  doff their clothes after the beginning, and complete the race sans attire.    One such group from San Diego call themselves the “Camping Bares”, and when asked why they came all the way to run in San Francisco, they said they would probably be arrested if they did it in San Diego.   They are in actuality, naked not nude.  You see what I’m getting at?

In teaching art and sculpture classes, the models  I hired from the agency were frequently rather rotund, or old, or at least had less than run of the mill bodies which made them more interesting to draw or sculpt.  One such girl,  Katie,  probably weighed in at 300 or so pounds, every pound of it well-distributed.  Though young, she was a terrific model, and posed for us often.  I moved away for a few years, and when I returned, I tried to hire her once again.  The agency said she was still working, but we may be surprised at her transformation.  She had fallen in love, and  had lost at least 100 pounds!   Still a good model, her curves were no longer in the same places and she sagged in places she used to be nicely stuffed.

Another time we needed a male model so I contacted the agency and they sent a “no longer young but thought he still was”  fellow over to the school.  It was an early morning class of adult  students, both male and female.. The model quietly slipped into the classroom wearing a long vivid red velvet robe tied loosely around his middle with a chartreuse sash.  His hair was of an indescribable  color ranging from a wild pink with occasional streaks of purple throughout,  and he was barefoot.  He confidently stepped forward approaching the modeling stand in the middle of the room.  A seductive smirk crossed his face as he picked up speed, and he  proceeded to run .  Somehow I knew what he had in mind, and it is exactly what he did before I could shout a word of warning.  Throwing off the robe he leaped upon the stand off center, and it and he, flipped up in the air landing on his naked backside beside the upturned modeling stand.   Meanwhile, the velvet robe sailed gracefully down and settled on the floor behind him.

Mercifully, the room was as silent as if it were empty.  The male model gathered his dignity together and resumed his job.

Now we could say that Katie was nude, and Harry (we’ll call him Harry for lack of a better name) was naked.

Out of the Woods

KSR

(She is “naked” not “nude”)