Welcome!
You will find a place here where you can peruse old stories and new thoughts that highlight our ancient belonging to the land–and the challenges currently facing us in this respect. It is my policy to post all original content in the posts here– rather than gathering materials from other sites.
I have been blessed to share stories with native American elders and pioneer family members throughout Oregon, Washington and Northern California. I also joined an international faculty team to teach philosophy in a Palestinian university (BirZeit) half an hour from Jerusalem.
My mother’s Czech ancestors kept alive vital oral traditions including that of my grandfather’s grandmother, a healer who obtained her power from “speaking with the earth”. I thus had the grace to be nurtured within an eco-spiritual tradition. It was from my grandfather that I first learned how the map of a man’s mind reflects the map of a particular landscape. It was through my parents that I met Lower Chehalis elder Henry Cultee, whose words appear in a number of blogs and pages on this site.
I was honored indeed when over three decades ago a Chehalis great grand-mother referred to collecting stories as my “work”.
In a different framework, there is my scholarly background. I earned my Ph.d. at the New University for Social Research and currently teach at Oregon State University. What I hope to do here is combine scholarly care and scientific perspective with the ancient wisdoms of oral traditions.
I ask that you treat the ancient words here with respect, for the knowledge of their elders reflects the enduring heart of a people. You can easily separate such knowledge from my own opinions and speculations.
My best to each of you in following your path on this earth we share. Thank you for your presence. I hope something here will be of use to you.
—————————–
Folklore is one of my first loves and I am happy to have joined the community that creates a substantial dialogue on mythology in PARABOLA:
“Light who Loves her Sister Darkness” (on the Descent of Inanna, modeling the necessity of facing what we have buried or rejected, in our societies and ourselves), “Fierce Music” (on redefining the enemy), “Help beyond the Walls” (allies, expected and unexpected), Godfather Death (the old tale that guides us through the transition), “Tracking the Trackless” (finding our way on the path of mystery), and “Wild Justice” (the natural model of reciprocity from a mythic perspective.) All of these have been or will be published in (“Wild Justice” on natural reciprocity in world folklore).
A bit more academic: “‘Making all the Crooked Ways Straight’: the Satirical Portrait of Whites in Coast Salish Folklore”; published in The Journal of American Folklore. “The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon” (published in Comparative Literature : though this is only a review, it has for some reason been making the rounds in the US and abroad. “The Realization of the Self in Chehalis Society” is a long article published in Dialectical Anthropology , written in honor of Stanley Diamond my mentor at the New University for Social Research, this looks at “primitive” (as Diamond did) as a positive term and analyzes the contrast between the sense of self in modern society which struggles for its ground as an “individual:” with the sense of self in a society in which social maturity is defined as moving out of oneself.
My article, “Re-storying the World, Reviving the Language of Life” will be out in the Australian Humanities Review November, 2009.
Some of you have met me at conferences where I gave papers and presentations. I will try to put a few of the ones you have requested up as pages when I get a chance.
Reproducing material from this site:
Thank you again for visiting this site.
The material on this cite (except for comments of course!) is copyright in my name. You are welcome to link to this material freely and/or to cite portions of it with standard attribution of its source.
If you wish to reproduce it please contact me for permission. Thank you.
P.S. This site is not affiliated with the book Our Earth,Ourselves, The Action-oriented Guide to Help you Protect and Preserve our Planet, by Ruth Caplan, chair of the Alliance for Democracy. But the alliance does great work if you want to check it out.
