Short Unit I Reflection
Wisdom Sits in Places, Chapter 1 "Quoting the Ancestors" WISDOM LANDSCAPE AND LANGUAGE AMONG THE SITS IN WESTERN APACHE PLACES KEITH H. BASSO University of New Mexico Press Albuquerque For the grandchildren efCibecue, © 1996 by the University of New Mexico Press and Gayle All rights reserved. PRINTED lN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA YEAR PRJNTTNG 20 19 18 17 16 16 17 18 19 20 ISBN-13: 978-0-8263-1724-7 ISBN-10: 0-8263-1724-3 Winner of the 2001 J. I. Sealey Prize from the School of American Research. This book has won the 1996 Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. The Western Scates Book Awards are a project of the Western States Arcs Federation. The awards are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and by Crane Duplicating Services. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Basso, Keith H., 1940- Wisdom sits in places: landscape and language among the W estem Apache/Keith H. Basso. P· cm. Includes bibliographical reference (p. 161) and index. ISBN 0-8263-1724-3 (pa) 1. Western Apache language-Etymology-Names. 2. Western Apache language-Discourse analysis. 3. Names, Geographical-Arizona. 4. Names, Apache. 5. Apache philosophy. 6. Human geography-Arizona-Philosophy. I. Title. PM2583.B37 1996 59/ .2-dc20 95-39272 CIP 8 9 Keith H. Basso Water Lies With Mud In An Open Container Early morning, late May 1979, the night's redemptive chill rapidly receding before the rising sun. Silence deep and full, a blanket upon the land. I am standing with Charles Henry and one of his cousins, Morley Cromwell, at the edge of a circular swale some forty feet across. Ringed by willows and filled with luxuriant grass, it lies near a spring-fed creek which flows southeast to the gardens and cornfields of Cibecue. The earth at our feet is marked with the tracks of deer, and from high in a cottonwood tree comes the liquid call of a raven. A chipmunk creeps to the swale, secures a nervous drink, and darts away behind a rotting log covered with patches of green and orange moss. The air is heavy and moist. A small white butterfly dances in place in a shaft of golden sunlight. Charles and Morley have brought me here at the outset of a long range project in Western Apache cultural geography. Authorized and endorsed by the White Mountain Apache Tribal Council, the project's main objective is to record on topographic maps the approximate loca tion of each and every place that bears an Apache name within a twenty- Wisdom Sits in Places r-·--· --·---_;,--·--·----1 I I I I• Flagstaff Prescotf .Tucson '----....,_ '---... ...________ ------·-· -· _J . Figure 1 LJJcation of the community efCibewe on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, Arizona. mile radius of the Cibecue community. Residents of the community have never known maps they considered their own (those in their pos session show but a handful of places with extraneous names in English and Spanish), and the work we have started, which is intended to lay the foundation for a local Apache atlas, is regarded by some as long overdue. A couple of weeks ago, before the work began, the three of us agreed - Morley, put off by my incompetence, may now decide they have 10 11 Keith H. Basso on a simple division of labor. Charles, who is in charge, will guide us from place to place, supply each place's proper name, and comment as he chooses on its past and present significance. Morley will translate as necessary (Charles speaks English reluctantly, and my own Apache is stiff and uneven at best) and offer additional insights. My job is to drive the Jeep, provide plenty of coffee and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups (Morley has a serious weakness for them), and try to get every thing down on paper and audiotapes. It seems like a sensible plan, balanced and loosely efficient, and all of us believe it will serve our purpose well. But already, on only our second day in the country together, a prob lem has come up. For the third time in as many tries, I have mispro nounced the Apache name of the boggy swale before us, and Charles, who is weary of repeating it, has a guarded look in his eyes. After botch ing the name a fourth time, I acknowledge defeat and attempt to apolo gize for my flawed linguistic performance. "I'm sorry, Charles, I can't get it. I'll work on it later, it's in the machine. It doesn't matter." "It's matter," Charles says softly to me in English. And then, turning to speak to Morley, he addresses him in Western Apache: What he's doing isn't right. It's not good. He seems to be in a hurry. Why is he in a hurry? It's disrespectful. Our ancestors made this name. They made it just as it is. They made it for a reason. They spoke it first, a long time ago! He's repeating the speech of our ancestors. He doesn't know that. Tell him he's repeating the speech of our ancestors! Charles's admonition, which Morley proceeds to translate without dulling its critical edge, leaves me unsettled and silent. That Charles has taken me for someone in a hurry comes as a surprise. Neither had I foreseen that my failure to pronounce the stubborn Apache place name would be interpreted by him as displaying a lack of respect. And never had I suspected that using Apache place-names might be heard by those who use them as repeating verbatim-actually quot ing-the speech of their early ancestors. This is a fair amount to take in at once, and as the quiet of the morning asserts itself again, I fear that my actions, which were wholly unwitting but patently offensive, may have placed in jeopardy the future of our project. Charles and Wisdom Sits in Places better things to do. Dammit! But then, unexpectedly, in one of those courteous turnabouts that Apache people employ to assuage embarrassment and salvage damaged feelings, Charles himself comes to the rescue. With a quick corrobora tive grin, he announces he is missing several teeth and that rny problem with the place-name may be attributable to his lack of dental equip ment. Sometimes, he says, he is hard to understand-his nephew Jason recently told him that and he knows he tends to speak softly. Maybe the combination of too few teeth and too little volume accounts for my falling short. Morley, on the other hand, is not so encumbered. Though shy a tooth or two, he retains the good ones for talking, and because he is not afraid to speak up-except, as everyone knows, in the presence of garrulous women-no one has trouble hearing what he says. Maybe if Morley repeated the place-name again, slowly and with ample force, I would get it right. It's worth a try. Cousin? "GOSHTL'ISH TU BIL SIK/2.NE!" Rising to the spirit of Charles's playful teasing, Morley booms out the place-name, word by constituent word, with such exuberance as to startle into flight a pair of resident robins. All of us laugh as the birds wheel away, but for me the tide has turned. Instantly, the form of the name and its meaning assume coherent shape, and I know that at last I've got it: Goshtl'ish Tu Bil Sik�ne, or Water Lies With Mud In An Open Container. Relieved and pleased, I pronounce the name slowly, then a bit more rapidly, and again as it might be spoken in normal conversation. 5 Charles listens and nods his head in approval. "Yes," he says in Apache. "That is how our ancestors made it a long time ago, just as it is to name this place." And then, keeping to his own language and speaking at times like an observer on the scene, he fashions a place-world in which the making and naming occurred. They came to this country long ago, our ancestors did. They hadn't seen it before, they knew nothing about it. Everything was unfamiliar to them. They were very poor. They had few possessions and surviving was difficult for them. They were looking for a good place to settle, a safe place without enemies. They were https://SIKJ}.NE 12 13 Keith H. Basso searching. They were traveling all over, stopping here and there, noticing everything, looking at the land. They knew nothing about it and didn't know what they would find. None of these places had names then, none of them did, and as the people went about they thought about this. "How shall we speak about this land?" they said. "How shall we speak about where we have been and where we want to go?" Now they are coming! They are walking upstream from down below. Now they are arriving here, looking all about them, noticing everything about this place. It looked to them then as it looks to us now. We know that from its name--its name gives a picture of it, just as it was a long time ago. Now they are happy. "This looks like a good place," they are saying to each other. Now they are noticing the plants that live around here. "Some of these plants are unknown to us. Maybe they are good for something. Maybe they are useful as medicines." Now they are saying, "This is a good place for hunting. Deer and turkey come here to eat and drink. We can wait for them here, hidden close by." They are saying that. They are noticing everything and talking about it together. They like what they see about this place. They are excited! Now their leader is thinking, "This place may help us