Transcripts

SPEAKER: I want to present another element or dimension of the land. Land is words, as voices, as storytelling. Words have bodies and spirits. Bodies are the written parts. Spirits are the meaning that enter the ear and form the head's landscape, a landscape of understanding, meaning, feeling, thought, idea, in other words, the concepts that inform our actions.

We are made of words. The words we speak are what we are. I think landscape also has the two parts, the physicality of it, the trees, and grass and crops. But there's also a message, a meaning, an energy force, a living being that the Earth is, and we are not separate from it. In fact, according to Genesis and some of the Native American myths, we are made from it.

Why all this landscape description? My students ask in reading the novels in my Native American literature course. Let's get on with it. The plot, the conflict, the important stuff. But landscape is a person, a character in Native American literature, not just the setting. In fact, sometimes landscape actually tells the story. If you want to know what's going on in the story, read the imagery of the landscape.

We've lost so much of our connection to the land in Western culture, except for farmers who have known the fields all their lives. Now, what if the land is also made of words, since it is also a living being? Isn't it in Genesis that God spoke the world into being? If the land is made of words, couldn't you hear them if you listened?

There's also a story in the Native American tradition of how the great spirit spoke the world into being. At one time, he was lonely, you see. Because that's the way it is when you're the great spirit, without any one like yourself to talk to. So he made the elements. He said, tree, you be a tree and stand there on the land. Hill, you be a hill, and so forth.

But the great spirit was still lonely, even after all that. Because the wind could make some noise, but there was still no one to really talk to. So he made the animals. The buffalo snorted. The wolf howled. But the great spirit longed for something more. So he made man, just spoke him into being.

Because that's why the spirit made us, with free wills and minds of our own. So we could be independent agents, so we could offer him some options. Because that's what you've got to have for conversation, for being not lonely, which was the reason for our creation. So we could talk to the great spirit, be a companion, cause him a little trouble so he could use his peacemaker talents.

But the point I've been trying to get to, since we have a voice, maybe the land also has a voice. I hear the land sometimes, just as I hear my father's voice. And he's been gone 20 years. It's not a voice you hear with the ears, but in the inner self, you hear it speaking. It says to live with resilience and dignity, with variable patterns and cycles mixed at times with change and disruption. It tells me I live because it does. It also confirms a sense of life force or power. I often write from that voice.

I come from a Cherokee father and a German-English mother, whose parents farmed Kansas all their life. I think some of my writing is attempt to keep these ties to the land, to record some of the stories of the land so I don't forget my responsibility. The Earth has a voice. The Earth has a story to tell. And we had better listen.