05/09/2024
Bioregionalism and the Reinhabitation of Place with Mark Gonnerman
A conversation about bioregionalism and reinhabitation with Mark Gonnerman, author of “A Sense of the Whole: Reading Gary Snyder.” Songs in this episode: “Comin’ Back to Me” by Jefferson Airplane and “Dear Mother Earth” by Canned Heat. PLEASE NOTE: In his introduction, Professor Robert Harrison misattributes the following passage to Gary Snyder: “reinhabitation means learning to […]
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[Music]
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This is entitled opinions coming to you from the studios of KZSU on the Stanford campus.
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As he descends from his mountaintop, Zarathustra arrives to a city at the edge of the forest and
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enters its marketplace. It's a modern city and that means it's all a marketplace.
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There he begins to preach to the people. I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth.
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To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing. He goes on to declare,
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"The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say, the overman shall be the meaning of
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the earth." Nietzsche's overman goes over by going under. I love those who do not know
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how to live except by going under for they are the ones who cross over. Translation,
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the meaning of the earth lies beneath our feet. The overman does not hank her after the elsewhere
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or the far off, but rediscover the ground that he stands on. The ground of our mortal
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sojourn on this wandering planet we call earth. When the poet Gary Snyder wrote,
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"The most radical thing you can do is stay home. He meant radical in the etymological sense of
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raddics, the Latin word for root. The radical is rooted." In the Wahaka region of Mexico,
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farmers and weavers today talk about the de recho de no me grad, the right not to migrate,
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the right to roots. Those inhabitants of the land, those radicals, along with all the indigenous
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peoples of America, hear the call of the overman, a call to dwell on the earth as natives and
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earthlings rather than as resident aliens. In an essay published in 1980 Edwin Folsom wrote that
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before the 20th century, our literature and our energies in America looked west and to the future.
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However, quoting Folsom, instead of looking west and to the future, like Whitman did, 20th century
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American poets, or at least some of them, have been engaging in imaginative descents
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through the various layers of what America is and has been back to the Aboriginal land.
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One of the major American poets of this kind of descent is the one I invoked a moment ago,
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Gary Snyder. Snyder advocated digging up the old ways, so as to know the ground you're on,
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his words. He called this project of regrounding ourselves the re-inhabitation of place.
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Forning Snyder, re-inhabitation means learning to live in place in an area that has been disrupted
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and injured through past exploitation. It involves becoming native to a place through becoming
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aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it. It means
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understanding activities and evolving social behavior that will enrich the life of that place.
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We've not done a very good job of re-inhabitation since Gary Snyder wrote those words,
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nor in the 140 years since there are through strip preached the meaning of the earth in the marketplace.
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We denizens of the contemporary marketplace have become ever more the exhabitants rather
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than inhabitants of the earth, and few among us would know how to give a radical answer
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to the question that Emerson asks at the beginning of his essay experience,
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which I've invoked more than once on entitled opinions, namely, where do we find ourselves?
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I'm going to ask that question of the guest who joins me today. He's a bio-regionalist and
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re-inhabitant who promotes the term "no-where." That's "no" with a "k." First, a little background,
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after attending Harvard Divinity School, my guest, Mark Conerman, completed a PhD in
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Religious Studies at Stanford with a dissertation on Gary Snyder. He has been a visiting professor
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of American literature at Hoonan University in China. He has conducted fieldwork at home
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and abroad. He's traveled the world and lived for three years on Sato inland sea near Hiroshima,
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Japan. He and his wife Mary Mitsuyoshi are now householder inhabitants of the Guadalupe River
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watershed in Santa Clara Valley, the ancestral land of the Tamien, a loni people.
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Mark Conerman's book, A Sense of the Whole, Reading Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers
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Without End, grew out of his year-long Stanford Humanities Center workshop. Mark Conerman,
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Welcome to entitled opinions. Thank you, Robert. It's great to be here.
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So I mentioned that you're a "no-where" man with a "k" and I'm curious how you might answer that
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question. Where do we find ourselves? You and I here and now. That's a great question always,
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and I'm thinking about this place right now. We're in the studios of KZSU Radio Subterranean,
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beneath the weight of Memorial Auditorium. To remember the war did from the First World War,
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we go up the stairs outside and we're close to Frost Amphitheater, another memorial,
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or John Lawrence Frost, an undergraduate who died from polio, just after graduating,
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1935. We walk further around the Stanford University campus itself,
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a memorial to Leland Stanford, Jr., who died in Florence in his teens. So there's a lot of
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remembrance and grief in this land. And events that took place in some of the places you mentioned,
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the Memorial Auditorium Martin Luther King has delivered a famous speech in the late '60s, Frost
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Theatre, one of the all-time venues for the band, "Great Full Dead," whom I hope we'll get a chance
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to talk about later in this show. So it comes with more recent memories and just the founding indeed.
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That's right, and if we keep walking, we're in the San Francisco Creek watershed,
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the ancestral land of the Rami Tush O'loni people. And this watershed is set in the larger
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Santa Clara Valley trough, which goes all the way from San Francisco to Hollister, which is 90 miles,
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and it's about 15 miles wide all the way down and braced on one side by the Diablo range,
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and on the other side by the Santa Cruz Mountains that meet south of Hollister. And if you take the
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K off of nowhere, you get the word "now" here. And now here we're in the mind space of entering
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into a conversation, the kind of conversation that one hears on entitled opinions.
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Yeah, and I know that you value the space of public conversation because you found it and directed the
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Aurora Forum at Stanford for a good many years, and that was a forum of very much of a mind space
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with a lot of dialogue with thinkers, writers, poets, and ecologists, conservationists,
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and it brought together a lot of people in interesting creative ways. And do you want to say a word about
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forum before we move on? Sure, yes. I talk about the forum as a place where we have conversations with
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people who turn vision into action or positive social change. And when you talk about descending
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and inhabiting the earth, one of my very first guests was Julia Butterfly Hill, who sat in a tree,
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a redwood tree, a thousand year old redwood tree, 200 feet up for two years to prevent it from being
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cut down by the Pacific lumber company that tree up in Humboldt County. So she was a magnificent guest.
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I know that among all the people you had, you never really had Gary Snyder as part of the
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Aurora Forum. You had written your dissertation on the designer. So you knew him, but he was never
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actually a participant, right? No, he was never a guest at the Aurora Forum, though the forum was very
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much informed by his vision because it has informed my vision of vision into action. Yeah, that's
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right. Yeah, and how to live on this earth. Gary was on campus often during my mountains and
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rivers workshop at the humanities center. I was fortunate also to live with him up at the
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Tom setting hit Kid Dizzy for a summer. Right. Gary Snyder is well known for renaming the continent
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on which we find ourselves. That's right. In 1974, this is the 50th anniversary. He published a collection
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of poems called Turtle Island, the new old name for North America. He had spent many years in a
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Zen monastery in Kyoto after growing up in the Pacific Northwest, where he got to know a lot of
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indigenous people, especially the Salishan Indians. And he went to read college and met
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anthropologist named David French, who had been studying anthropology at Columbia University with
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Franz Boaz. And professor French understood that Gary had a great knowledge that was very valuable
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and encouraged Gary to really develop that. So he did, he studied anthropology and English literature.
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And after he finished a read, hitchhiked out to Indiana University to study folklore with
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Stiff Thompson and Native American languages. Well, there unfortunately, Professor Thompson was
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off on leave that year. And Gary came back to California before heading off to Japan.
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He is one of the ideators of what we call bio regionalism. Am I correct about that? That's
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right. So we speak about bio regionalism. His name is at least closely associated with this
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attempt to rethink the nature of place. That's right. When he was in Japan, he was thinking a lot about
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how he would live when he came back to the west coast, came back to California. And this idea of
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re-inhabitation was connected to ecological thinkers and people who were realizing that we need
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to understand better the land where we live so that we can be more actively engaged in taking
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care of it. So Gary was certainly a pioneer, Turtle Island, the collection of poems had a lot to do
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with launching the bio regional movement because the poem, the publication itself contains four essays
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called Four Changes, which are things we need to pay attention to in order to be able to have
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long-term sustainability on this land. There were others as well, Ray Dosman, a University of
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California ecologist had written the book in 1963 called The Destruction of California,
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also in San Francisco, Peter Berg, founded the Planet Drum Foundation. And of course, Earth Day
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happened in 1970, which brought all of this together and people were starting to pay attention.
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The collection, Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, the same year Annie Dillard
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received it for pilgrimage, Tinker Creek. She was 29, Gary was 45. And that coming after the start of
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Earth Day and growing ecological awareness was an indication that people were waking up to what the
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poets and writers were talking about. Yeah, I don't recall now what those four things that
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want us to take into account when it comes to place. But I think that the cultural history of
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places, if not equally important, at least almost as important as knowing the geographical
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liniumments and aspects of the place you're in. I completely agree that the bi-regional movement
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is at once an appreciation for physical geography, but also it's an exercise of imagination
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as a way of understanding knowing where we are. But beginning by knowing the land by walking
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on it with your feet. Yeah. And here, I want to quote Folsom, I mentioned to my intro, but here's a
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quote of his, which I think is, you know, quite telling of what this bi-regional descent entails.
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He says, the image becomes clear. We are part of an immense palimpsest. The USA is but a
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superficial layer, the most recent and damaging inscription over a series of earlier texts.
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Whitman may have found the United States themselves to be essentially the greatest poem,
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quote from Whitman, but post-Whitman poets have found them to be a poem that was violently
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scratched over earlier poems imposed on and obliterating native texts, native ways,
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native themselves to descend in the palimpsest then to learn what meanings life reserved in the
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lower layers to rediscover ways of existing on the land without destroying it. This is the
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basis for the American poets desire for descent, but descent become increasingly difficult for our layer,
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the texts of the American present has been a violent inscription one that continues to tear
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into the continental tablet itself, quote, something is always eating at the American heart
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like acid Snyder says, it is the knowledge of what we have done to our continent and to the American
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Indian. And when you talked about Hill spending two years in that redwood a thousand years old,
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the Pacific lumber company was about to tear that tree down in a kind of endless reenactment of
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this same sort of assault on the land. That's right. And here you've you've evoked the American
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unconscious at some level. We know that this has been a rapacious violence in habitation,
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which calls for reenhabitation conscious awareness of what has happened in the past so that we can
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rework our way of residing here and recognize the slaughter of so many innocent people who were
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living responsibly on and with the land and with each other in their small scale communities here in
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this valley and all over the United States. So this awareness is a great part of the work of reenhabitation.
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How much of an importance does recovering native knowledge as well and rituals and even languages,
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how much of a role does that play in reenhabitation? Well, I mentioned earlier that Gary studied
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in the Boazian tradition of cultural anthropology. Franz Boaz came from Prussia in the 1890s
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to Canada to the Pacific Northwest to study the Quaguidal Clingit and Haidah people.
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He then went to Columbia University to establish a department of anthropology and he had students
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such as Alfred Krober who came to California, the University of California at Berkeley to establish
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an anthropology program and had graduate students who went out to do fieldwork to gather
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the languages, the lifeways, recipes, maps, everything they could pull together about the people
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they were meeting on the land. These volumes were issued by the United States government,
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a great use of taxpayer money, called Bureau of American Ethnology Reports. And one after another
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was preserving the languages, preserving the knowledge of native people because they thought those people
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were vanishing and they were. Those populations were under extreme duress. But they didn't
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vanish completely and now these days native peoples are able to use these volumes to recover their
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cultures, to recover their languages. Krober is a name that's a little bit
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polemical or controversial in this area. If only because I mentioned at the beginning the
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aloney, yes, American Indigenous people of this area. And you were telling me off air that Krober
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had come to the conclusion that the aloney tribe or nation had essentially didn't really constitute
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a tribe anymore and that therefore they were denied government subsidies and land and other things.
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Can you tell us a little bit about Krober and what happened to the aloney Indians here?
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We're still with us at least. Yes, it was a tragic mistake and especially tragic because
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Krober had done so much to bring attention to and support native people. He loved native people
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and he was their champion and he wrote a book called the Handbook of Native Californians, 1924-25.
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And in that book it's a huge volume. There were 500 different tribes in California speaking
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hundreds of languages of which there were 300 dialects and Krober was especially working here in
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Northern California. And he made a comment one sentence saying that for all practical purposes
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the aloney are extinct. And the federal government caught that and consequently has not recognized
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the aloney people and a federally recognized tribe has access to resources that the people
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in this valley haven't been able to get access to. However, there are good political actions happening
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now and the aloney are quite optimistic that they will be recognized. Now there is an aloney
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Indian woman named Emory Sayers who fought throughout the 1970s to get her ancestral land recognized
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by the federal government. So now Indian Canyon, which is near Hollister, is a place that she has
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opened up for native peoples to come and conduct ceremony. And it is the only federally recognized
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Indian land between San Francisco and Santa Barbara at this time. So have they received their own
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designation from the federal government? Not yet. Not yet. For the aloney. But they are
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optimistic. You said that Sayers has said that she feels more optimistic now than since first contact.
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Yes, this is, she says this is the best time to be a native person since first contact.
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Partly is recovery of culture and language and also a political action and also more and more people
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are understanding the harm that has been done and want to address that. Yeah, I'm looking at my
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notes here, which generously provided by you that there are as many Native Americans in reservations
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on Turtle Island these days as the population of San Jose at about one million. Yeah, that's correct.
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Those who are federally recognized constitute sovereign nations within the United States.
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And that's another reason you want federal recognition. You become a sovereign nation so you can
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determine your own destiny as a community. So Mark, we live in California, California has
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any number of place names. And there's something about these place names that indeed
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descend into a palimpsest of sorts. A lot of our place names certainly in the Bay Area and
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Southern California are Spanish and many of them Catholic and San Francisco, Santa Barbara. These are
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all Saint names from the history of Christianity, but there are also a great many Indigenous names
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that are still current among us. Yeah, I think one of the best ways to develop an awareness
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of Indigenous people on Turtle Island is to look at place names and know that we're still saying
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the names that the Native people use in the places we live. And in California, approximately 20%
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of the county names are Native American names such as Inyo County named after a Monocheaf or
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Marin County. Don't Marin is an integer. It's the name of a coastal mewalk chief.
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Modoc County named after the Modoc people, I mentioned Monoc County, which means those from the Sierra
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Nevada, Napa County from the word Napa meaning home, for example. So we have Mount Tamal Pius,
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Mount Tamal Pius is a mewalk word meaning Bay Mountain. And in fact here in Santa Clara Valley
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where I live, the Guadalupe River watershed, we can look up and see Mount Ammonum, which is the
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Poloni word for the place for the hummingbird rests. And we can also look and see Mount Hamilton,
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which is named after a Presbyterian minister. And I'm trying to find the Native name and it would be a
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great project for us to join together and rename that mountain. And we have Mount Diablo at the
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head of the Diablo range, which means devil's mountain sadly because there are several native words
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for that mountain. And they mean the place of our origins that we came out of this mountain.
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And it would be wonderful to get those names in the minds of the people who live here.
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Right. Yeah, of course place names naming that's also become intensely political. And I think there's
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a building named after Krober at the University of Berkeley. And as usual, there's a kind of movement
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to kind of rename it. And yeah, well sadly, it's been decided to rename it without even consulting
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members of the Department of Anthropology there who know the story, know the history,
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know how much Krober meant to native Californians. The best solution so far has been proposed
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by a member of that faculty that have been renamed Krober, hyphen ishi hall. Ishi was a California
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Indian who came out of hiding after his people had been slaughtered in 1911. And Elphor Krober took
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him in and took care of him to learn as much as he could from him. And he, she was a dear friend
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of his. Unfortunately, when he, she died in 1916, Krober was away in Washington DC. And
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there should not have been an autopsy performed. And that was a great offense to the people.
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And Krober was away and he was so distraught. And some have blamed Krober for that, but it was not
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prober's doing. I think Krober was such a champion of native California's and has really done the
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most work of anyone to allow native people to recover their knowledge of themselves and their
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longer story. So I think it's a great idea that the Hallby name, prober ishi hall.
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You all hear that out there? No. And take note, let's hope that happens. Let's hope.
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I think sometimes that names are destiny. Proids at anatomy is destiny. I think auto rank had a theory
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that people were destined to play out the meanings of their names, their last names, especially
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so that I don't know how empirically corrected is, but that Mr. Grosses tend to have, you know,
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big egos, Mr. Clines, which means small in German inferiority complex. When it comes to
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place names in this area, I've always felt that St. Francis, the spirit of St. Francis permeates
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the culture of the big area and a lot of its cultural manifestations and also its intense ecological
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sympathies and activism. Hill, I don't remember a first name, Julia Butterfly, Julia Butterfly,
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climbing a redwood for two years. You know, St. Francis wrote these beautiful poems in which
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all of the creatures, both those who fly, those who crawl and the plants themselves,
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they were all brothers and sisters. A mechanical of brothers, a mechanical move.
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Exactly. And I'm thinking even the way in which
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Francis would call death his sister, Swara Morte, and express gratitude to death for the role that it
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| 00:26:08.000 |
plays, you know, in human destiny. And I'm sure the grateful dead, a local ban, part of the history
|
| 00:26:16.480 |
of this place, did not have St. Francis in mind, but this covert way in which the spirit of a word,
|
| 00:26:22.800 |
of a place name like San Francisco can permeate even the ban name. I think the grateful
|
| 00:26:28.160 |
dead is something that St. Francis would understand intuitively as correlating with his gratitude.
|
| 00:26:36.960 |
Oh, I do too. Death plays. Do we know where the grateful dead got their name?
|
| 00:26:41.600 |
Well, it's a good story going back to St. Francis. Yes, isn't our work to become friends with death.
|
| 00:26:48.880 |
And the grateful dead name here in the region of San Francisco for St. Francis the hippie saint.
|
| 00:26:57.520 |
Came about here in Palo Alto. The band had begun to form with Jerry Garcia,
|
| 00:27:06.800 |
Rod McCurnnon, Pigpen, Bobby Weir, as a jug band, plane folk music here in Palo Alto,
|
| 00:27:17.520 |
Menelow Park more than Palo Alto. Well, the jug band was playing in Palo Alto at a place
|
| 00:27:24.480 |
called the, what was the name, just a little club. And someone there from KZSU went to record them
|
| 00:27:32.320 |
in 1964 called the tangent. They went in 1964 and recorded them. And we have the tapes from this
|
| 00:27:40.240 |
little band that was the first three members of the quintet that was the grateful dead once,
|
| 00:27:46.640 |
well, first it was the warlocks once Phil Lesh and Bill Kreitzman joined.
|
| 00:27:54.320 |
So did KZSU air? Yes, recordings. They were the first to broadcast. It all comes back right here.
|
| 00:28:00.560 |
No, right. Where we are, Centuranian KZSU,
|
| 00:28:03.360 |
playing these tapes. And there is a CD out of more tapes were discovered in later years from that
|
| 00:28:10.720 |
little trio. They were called the warlocks, but they realized when they were about to sign with
|
| 00:28:16.960 |
Warner Brothers records that there was also a band in New York City called the warlocks. And that
|
| 00:28:22.000 |
became the velvet underground. Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh were sitting in Phil's apartment on high
|
| 00:28:29.920 |
street in Palo Alto. Well, named 1965. And Phil had on his bookshelf a funk and wagnles
|
| 00:28:40.000 |
encyclopedic dictionary. And as Jerry tells the story, he opened it up in the only two words he
|
| 00:28:47.840 |
saw on one page amidst all the others were the words, grateful dad. And he said, that's it.
|
| 00:28:55.840 |
That's the name. Not everyone liked it right away, but it's stuck. And I'm glad it did.
|
| 00:29:00.000 |
Well, again, thanks to you, I have the entry to that grateful dead. And it says that
|
| 00:29:08.320 |
the motif of a cycle of folk tales, which begin with the heroes coming upon a group of people,
|
| 00:29:15.360 |
ill-treating or refusing to bury the corpse of a man who had died without paying his debts.
|
| 00:29:21.200 |
He gives his last penny either to pay the man's debts or to give him a decent burial.
|
| 00:29:26.960 |
Within a few hours, he meets with a traveling companion who aids him in some impossible task.
|
| 00:29:32.880 |
Gets him a fortune, saves his life, etc. The story ends with the companion disclosing himself
|
| 00:29:39.920 |
as the man whose corpse the other had befriended. So now we're returning once again to burial,
|
| 00:29:46.960 |
the descent into the ground, the sacrality of the land for the indigenous people where their ancestors
|
| 00:29:56.320 |
were buried, the offensive doing an autopsy, all these things come together under the rubric of this
|
| 00:30:02.960 |
band's name, the grateful dead. And yes, people need to understand that the offense of digging up
|
| 00:30:10.000 |
Indian graves is that the body is put back into the earth as part of a natural cycle. And once you
|
| 00:30:18.720 |
disrupt that cycle, it cannot be repaired. So here at Stanford, when the Stanford shopping center was
|
| 00:30:25.520 |
built, graves were uncovered. And this creates a great anguish among the people who are descended
|
| 00:30:34.720 |
from the people who were buried in that land. And it's all over America, wherever they are
|
| 00:30:41.680 |
exhuming remains of the indigenous Indians. Yeah, there's this pain, this very palpable pain that
|
| 00:30:48.800 |
goes throughout the whole community. That's right. Yeah. So the project of descent that's involved
|
| 00:30:54.880 |
in re-inhabitation is a kind of going down into the ground, but not in the violating way.
|
| 00:31:02.080 |
Returning, uncovering and exposing, but rather call it the grateful dead way. Yes. In other words,
|
| 00:31:10.560 |
with a certain piety towards the fact that the land holds more than just memories, it holds the
|
| 00:31:18.720 |
actual legacies and the genealogical histories of great many people. All the earth is a grave.
|
| 00:31:25.920 |
And you know, it's not only the indigenous people for whom burial sites are sacred. There's plenty of
|
| 00:31:32.000 |
stories of trauma in our own Western culture. I wrote a whole book on this weather. That's
|
| 00:31:36.320 |
a very dominion of the dead about what happens when you don't have the remains of a loved one to
|
| 00:31:44.640 |
bury. And the site where it's buried, where there are charisma, accrues around the grave and the
|
| 00:31:52.720 |
tombstone and so forth. Yeah. I like that grateful dead origin story because it is about kinship.
|
| 00:31:58.800 |
It's about friendship. It's about connection. And the re-inhabitation movement is about
|
| 00:32:05.680 |
ecological awareness, which means seeing yourself within the systems that sustain our lives.
|
| 00:32:11.280 |
We're not separate from the earth. We inhabit. Mark, can we talk a little bit about the literary
|
| 00:32:19.360 |
dimensions of bio regionalism? For example, I think one of the archetypes of the way in which
|
| 00:32:24.960 |
literature and place accommodate or welcome one another would be for me, Walden, for example,
|
| 00:32:34.480 |
where Walden is a place where the row resided, a place that he inhabited. It's also the name of a
|
| 00:32:45.040 |
book that he wrote, if not entirely while at Walden, certainly Walden, the place inhabits the book,
|
| 00:32:54.000 |
Walden by Henry David Thoreau. And the book has enabled its readers, would you agree that
|
| 00:33:03.840 |
if you read Walden with a certain amount of care and attention that the literature has the power to
|
| 00:33:13.200 |
enable you in some way to inhabit also the place Walden in its spirit, if not in its body.
|
| 00:33:21.680 |
I would agree with that. It brings you into the place and it brings you into realizing
|
| 00:33:29.040 |
our emplacement wherever we are. And I think people go looking after reading the row for their own
|
| 00:33:38.240 |
Walden. And that's a very powerful consequence of entering into bio regional literature.
|
| 00:33:44.960 |
So places have a transitivity. They can migrate into literature and literature can also extract the
|
| 00:33:52.240 |
spirit of place or if not extract at least metabolize. And that's an important consideration,
|
| 00:33:59.920 |
because literature is made of words and we were speaking about place names and also,
|
| 00:34:03.760 |
I think that you make a really interesting recommendation for people who, okay, so we have
|
| 00:34:09.200 |
listeners say, well, what do I have to do? What's the first thing I should do if I want to
|
| 00:34:12.880 |
re-inhabit the place where I'm residing? And your suggestion is try to identify
|
| 00:34:21.120 |
where you are without reference to human markers of the place, but to the way you identified
|
| 00:34:31.040 |
where we are in terms of the watershed and the valley and the natural geographic indicators.
|
| 00:34:40.640 |
Yes, to enter into this experiment of bio regional thinking and awareness, the first thing to do
|
| 00:34:46.080 |
is to find out what your watershed is, which watershed do you live in? And there are tremendous
|
| 00:34:51.920 |
resources and maps from the US Geological Survey, USGS, if you go online, it's easy to find out
|
| 00:34:58.320 |
what your watershed is. But then the next step is to imagine sitting down with a friend
|
| 00:35:05.600 |
and explaining to them where you live without, as Robert said, any reference to human-made landmarks.
|
| 00:35:12.880 |
And once you start to figure that out, it's a good step to be more aware of the land and the waters
|
| 00:35:21.280 |
and the actual place you reside. Hence, I am in the Guadalupe River watershed at the confluence
|
| 00:35:29.280 |
of Lascato's Creek and the Guadalupe River, as Robert said earlier in the introduction.
|
| 00:35:35.920 |
And then you can go from there and start to follow the creeks and you'll see how the watershed works
|
| 00:35:40.480 |
and how it flows, everything flows to the sea. And that's a really fun experiment. And then you can
|
| 00:35:47.520 |
start to meet people from other watersheds. We're in the Shasta Bio Region here from Mount Shasta,
|
| 00:35:53.680 |
all the way down to Monterey Bay. And then that contains many other eco zones that,
|
| 00:36:02.480 |
and especially here in Santa Clara Valley, there's a great amount of ecological diversity.
|
| 00:36:06.720 |
It's, once you start down this road, it's just an endless path of exploration and discovery.
|
| 00:36:13.200 |
So the SaaSHA to Bio Region is not the same as Cascadia, right? Cascadia is further north. Cascadia
|
| 00:36:22.240 |
goes from what we call, this is a Vancouver Island, that area that Franz Boaz explored,
|
| 00:36:30.480 |
the Pacific Northwest, water culture. All the way touches northern Oregon and goes east into Idaho.
|
| 00:36:38.640 |
Cascadia is the most evolved Bio Region in terms of people living there, understanding
|
| 00:36:45.920 |
their Bio Region and it has produced really great resources, including an incredible map made by
|
| 00:36:52.320 |
a professor at Seattle University. So even when we're identifying places
|
| 00:36:59.040 |
geographically rather than with human landmarks, we do have place names that are human. And again,
|
| 00:37:06.480 |
we're going back to the question of how place and names, place and words can inhabit one another.
|
| 00:37:16.240 |
Words are little houses. I mean, Haidgir has that phrase, language is the house of being
|
| 00:37:24.240 |
kind of typically portentious Haidgir statement, but nevertheless, there is something about the way
|
| 00:37:29.360 |
in which language houses, many things apart from just concepts. And of course, when words become
|
| 00:37:37.840 |
particularly creative in poetry and other forms of literary expression, then we find that you can
|
| 00:37:44.960 |
have imaginations of places that don't quite exist or may exist in the future. And I know that
|
| 00:37:55.200 |
you're particularly fond of Warsaw de Lagoins book always coming home, which is, would you call it
|
| 00:38:04.480 |
a novel or something else? It's novelistic. I call it fictional anthropology. And it does have to do
|
| 00:38:11.920 |
with place or reimagining the nature of place in a future moment. Very much so. I love the first
|
| 00:38:18.320 |
sentence of always coming home. The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long
|
| 00:38:25.600 |
time ago in northern California. Ursula Kay Le Guin, the Kay is for Crowber. She was the daughter of
|
| 00:38:33.040 |
Elford Crowber. She's a contemporary of Yuri Snyder born a year before him, 1929 that she died in
|
| 00:38:39.920 |
2018. And in 1985, she published this unique work of literature about the Keshe people
|
| 00:38:52.240 |
who live way in the future. In fact, so far in the future that they aren't really clear
|
| 00:39:01.280 |
on what happened in the apocalypse. Much of the west coast is underwater. They have their place
|
| 00:39:07.360 |
in Napa County region, which is where the Crowbers had a cabin where Ursula would go as a young girl.
|
| 00:39:17.120 |
And then she got older. She began to explore more and more, not just that particular place,
|
| 00:39:22.640 |
but also was learning from these Bureau of American Ethnology reports. So she was steeped
|
| 00:39:30.240 |
in the lore of Native California and being herself a tremendous researcher and writer, mostly of what
|
| 00:39:41.040 |
we would call science fiction, she enters back into this place of her childhood and uses that as
|
| 00:39:48.000 |
the foundation to tell the story of the Keshe people. It's an incredible book to read. It's somewhat
|
| 00:39:55.760 |
encyclopedic and she's recreated this entire world of these people, including their music.
|
| 00:40:02.320 |
And she partnered with a composer named Todd Barton who wrote the music of the Keshe.
|
| 00:40:07.680 |
And so you can hear that online, the original boxed set book included the cassette tape.
|
| 00:40:15.360 |
And it's so convincing that the marketing people at Harper and Row who first published it
|
| 00:40:22.560 |
were concerned about copyright for the music and all of these things, assuming that she had been
|
| 00:40:29.680 |
pulling from other creators, original creators.
|
| 00:40:33.520 |
And so I highly recommend if you want to read something that gets you into the spirit of
|
| 00:40:40.640 |
bi-original awareness and inquiry, Ursula K. Le Guin's always coming home. I'm going back to it all
|
| 00:40:47.040 |
the time, depending on the time. So I haven't read it Mark, but if I were to read it, would I develop a
|
| 00:40:52.480 |
more intimate connection with the place where I am now or is it merely a utopian imagination?
|
| 00:40:59.440 |
No, I think you would start to be aware of all kinds of details in the more than human world
|
| 00:41:08.400 |
and in culture, tools, ways of doing work that are still here. Thought we don't think about that so much.
|
| 00:41:18.400 |
I mean, we don't think about people who still work with their hands to make things, but they're
|
| 00:41:22.480 |
all around us. And so it opens up more room to explore.
|
| 00:41:28.880 |
But I have two questions related to conclude our conversation. One is always coming home.
|
| 00:41:36.320 |
Would Ursula Le Guin have been able to write that book had she not been a native of her bio region?
|
| 00:41:46.240 |
And at the same time, would the grateful dead have ever become the band that we know as the
|
| 00:41:52.720 |
grateful dead if they were, if they didn't originate and live in the Bay area? I don't know if I'm
|
| 00:41:59.840 |
putting you under too much pressure with these two questions, but it's a salvo. It's a great question.
|
| 00:42:05.280 |
Well, you can become native to a place, but it certainly isn't advantage to have in your
|
| 00:42:13.600 |
mind and your imagination that landscape you were in when you were nine or 10 years old.
|
| 00:42:20.160 |
Studies show that that's the landscape that we feel most at home throughout our lives.
|
| 00:42:24.960 |
She was very fortunate that she was exploring the place that she wrote about and she wrote it
|
| 00:42:30.480 |
in order to know it better. And that's also an important part of the work of writing and the work
|
| 00:42:35.520 |
of bio regional research is to put down the words and the awareness that comes through the
|
| 00:42:41.600 |
act of writing is enhanced that way. The grateful dead, as I think about them,
|
| 00:42:49.280 |
being from this place are an ecological band. And what I mean by that is, I think I mentioned earlier,
|
| 00:42:56.800 |
to think ecologically is to see yourself as within the place, to see the systems you are in.
|
| 00:43:03.360 |
And the amazing thing about the grateful dead to me is how they created a system for making
|
| 00:43:08.960 |
new music by being so interconnected themselves.
|
| 00:43:14.400 |
And with their audience, amazing interconnects. Exactly. It was so open and free and
|
| 00:43:21.280 |
entrepreneurial in the sense of being on the edge of constantly making new here on the very edge of
|
| 00:43:30.000 |
Turtle Island that I think this place has a lot of resonance through their music with the sound of
|
| 00:43:38.000 |
people coming together and share their love for one another and the sounds and the feeling and the
|
| 00:43:46.640 |
climate of this place. Their music was also very improvisational and it also belongs to a larger bay
|
| 00:43:56.480 |
area kind of psychedelic rock. If you want to use that moniker, but there are many
|
| 00:44:03.040 |
bay area bands of that era which have something distinctly in common, you can hear the bay area
|
| 00:44:09.920 |
palpitating through bands. We're talking about Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver messenger.
|
| 00:44:16.080 |
It's a beautiful day. Moby grape, grateful dead. There's a Lucy Guzy kind of feel there and it would be
|
| 00:44:23.440 |
for me very difficult to imagine the kind of music grateful dead have given us coming out of New York.
|
| 00:44:30.400 |
Almost impossible. Yes. Yes. The spirit of place seeps into the poem. It seeps into the music. It
|
| 00:44:37.680 |
seeps into the mentalities and even into the ecological activism that this area is so well known for.
|
| 00:44:46.160 |
That's right. Want to remind our listeners we've been speaking with Mark Gonerman here about
|
| 00:44:52.320 |
re-inhabitation and it's been a fascinating discussion Mark. I hope we can get you back.
|
| 00:44:57.200 |
I'd really enjoy that. I really value entitled opinions and thank you so much for everything you've done
|
| 00:45:02.800 |
here at Stanford. Yes. Well, thank you. And we're going to leave our listeners with a song
|
| 00:45:07.440 |
by canned heat, another band that is in that Lucy Guzy. If you want to use that term, it's called
|
| 00:45:15.040 |
Dear Mother Earth.
|
| 00:45:27.040 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:45:29.620 |
♪ Dear mother ♪
|
| 00:45:43.280 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:45:45.800 |
♪ Dear mother ♪
|
| 00:45:50.800 |
♪ Dear mother ♪
|
| 00:45:58.240 |
♪ Dear mother ♪
|
| 00:46:00.040 |
♪ Dear mother ♪
|
| 00:46:01.840 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:46:04.580 |
♪ Dear mother ♪
|
| 00:46:13.100 |
♪ Dear mother ♪
|
| 00:46:18.100 |
♪ Dear mother ♪
|
| 00:46:21.100 |
♪ Dear mother ♪
|
| 00:46:26.100 |
♪ Like can we understand ♪
|
| 00:46:31.100 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:46:33.680 |
♪ Dear mother ♪
|
| 00:46:41.100 |
♪ Like can we understand ♪
|
| 00:46:46.100 |
♪ We got the same water ♪
|
| 00:46:54.740 |
♪ We got the same love ♪
|
| 00:47:00.540 |
♪ Dear mother ♪
|
| 00:47:03.620 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:47:07.200 |
♪ Dear mother ♪
|
| 00:47:10.200 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:47:12.800 |
♪ Dear mother ♪
|
| 00:47:24.880 |
♪ Dear mother ♪
|
| 00:47:27.880 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:47:30.460 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:47:33.040 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:47:35.460 |
♪ Dear mother ♪
|
| 00:47:39.060 |
♪ Dear mother ♪
|
| 00:47:41.460 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:47:44.040 |
♪ We got the same love ♪
|
| 00:47:53.740 |
♪ We got the same love ♪
|
| 00:47:58.740 |
♪ Dear mother ♪
|
| 00:48:00.740 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:48:03.320 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:48:05.900 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:48:08.480 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:48:13.480 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:48:18.480 |
(upbeat music)
|
| 00:48:20.480 |
(upbeat music)
|