Juni Fisher will be in town this weekend, singing her heart out to us on Valentine’s Day at the Lindsay Community Theater. I’m grateful I’m still here to hear her, and grateful she’s still willing to come home and share her gift with her people.
She makes my heart sing with her songs about people and horses, about intimacy between these two species that has few words, but a huge vocabulary in body language. I suspect that we humans would all communicate better if we comprehended the importance of touch and gestures.
But last year she brought us a different song folded in between the horse-people songs like a foxtail woven into a saddle blanket or a slicker tied on behind the seat. It’s on her album Listen … to the horse (2013), titled “Still There.” It’s all about Western attitudes to land and how they affect our behavior toward each other.
Here’s how the song got born. Waddie Mitchell, the cowboy poet from Nevada, called Juni one day to read her a poem he’d just written. “When he finished, I had to sit down. It was that stunning,” she wrote in the liner notes. “The melody came easily, because he had written the words in such a perfectly lyrical way. I love when that happens.” I love that it happened, and think the Great Spirit had a hand in its birth. This song is telling us about some adjustments we need to make in our lives here and now.
“The
Iroquois and Blackfoot, the Seminole and Crow/
Were there as we discounted
where they live and what they know,” the song
opens, then continues:
“Staked claim to plain and
mountain range/
Spread weeds of ways to suit and change /
The pallet and the
pantry full of all we would not share /
We did not care / That they’d been
there."
We
know this story, this black shadow of our history in this place. The song reminds us that we keep it in the
shadows, where it does its black work. Rising to the light on the back of a song
helps. Let us say Amen to that history,
and begin to work with its meaning.
But
the bridge of the song brings us to the present.
“They’re still there / And for all the
selfish choices that we made /
They paid a debt they never should have paid”
it starts boldly, then ends
“Who are we to think that we could have
their souls? /
They’re in the places where the grass grows through their bones
/
Their spirits ride the air / And they’re still there.”
I
was telling our new pastor, Mark Smith, about this song. Mark serves both the Lindsay and Exeter
Methodist Churches, which is wonderful because he grew up in Tulare County amidst
our land-people relations. He’d just
mentioned that one of his grandfathers was part Yaqui, and that the family
still knows the story of his land loss as the Americans took over
California. It struck me that the grass
may be growing through his grandfather’s bones, but the part of Mark that is
part Yaqui is still here, like the parts in his parents, siblings and all their
children. Still here.
And
while we are sitting in the theater Saturday night having our hearts challenged
and mended all at the same time, another experiment in being still here will be
going on at Quaker Oaks Farm just north of Farmersville. Darlene and Lalo Franco, with other members
of the Wukchumni tribe who have been meeting on that land for almost 3 decades,
will be helping to host a camp-out for youth (of all ages.) They hope to share the meaning of that land
with the newcomers, to pass on what it means to be attached, to know yourself
as part of a place. Still here.
They’re
still here. We’re still here. Maybe we can learn more about what that
means. Thank you, Juni, for delivering
the message so beautifully, and for still being part of this place. Thank you, Darlene and Lalo, for telling your
story. May we all have major heart
breakouts this weekend.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Trudy Wischemann is a land advocate who writes and sings. You can send her your family land stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
No comments:
Post a Comment