Maidu Storytelling: A Beautiful Language, A Haunting Evening

Moki’ ka’do yapen’imaat sol’dom okau’pintitsoia (His world created with indeed singing caused to sound pretty) — from a Maidu tale

The great Maidu world of Northern California revolved around singing — singing the world into being, singing spirit and presence into the day, singing joy and happiness, singing to meet and greet others. Singing to be allowed into the roundhouse. No verb form was used more often than “sol” — sing.

The music of story certainly filled the Sierra Nevada foothills on January 26, when Maidu storyteller Farrell Cunningham visited the North Columbia Schoolhouse, one of the nation’s oldest and coolest cultural centers. For almost two hours, Farrell told traditional tales in his native Mountain Maidu tongue, and filled in a full house on the Maidu’s 150-year history of contact and interaction with white settlers and the California state government. More on that in a moment.

Farrell’s story is remarkable in itself. In a world where we’ve taken for granted the extinction of plant and animal species, we’ve almost completely swept under the rug another form of extinction — the loss of native languages. Every time we lose a language, we lose a slice of our human brethren, our essential nature as a species. We’ve lost a lot of tongues in the last century. One of the most haunting essays I’ve ever read was Gary Snyder’s experience of joining a linguist to try to get the last two elderly speakers of a Northern California native dialect, one of whom also spoke English, to come together, to record their language for history’s sake. They refused, because they hated each other. The language joined the dinosaurs. Gary’s tears practically stain the printed page on which the essay is written.

Bad news, folks: here we go again. At age 34, Farrell is carrying the torch of the Mountain Maidu language, a beautiful, rhythmic spoken-song tongue that has always revolved around singing. His soft-spoken delivery, often while looking beyond the crowd to connect with Worldmaker himself, held the feeling of sitting in a roundhouse in the dead of winter, listening to an elder talk story. Farrell told the gathering, in both Maidu and English, “Worldmaker told us from the beginning, ‘Everything in this world will have a song. If you want to make things a little better in this world, you will sing.” Later, he added, “Anyone you want to know, anything you want to know, you sing. Then you ask the other to sing. That is how you will know them.”

What a beautiful language. It moves right to the heart and soul, in 18 letters and relatively few words.

For many centuries, the Maidu tongue and other dialects in the Maiduan family filled the Sierra Nevada valleys between Lassen Peak and Sierra Valley, and in the plateaus of the high northeast near Susanville. This included the San Juan Ridge, where the North Columbia Schoolhouse sits. He’s the only lifelong Maidu speaker under age 80 — and of that older crowd, only a very few remain who speak Maidu as their first language.

During the evening, Farrell told us stories about Worldmaker’s determination to walk forward with the creation of the world and its creatures, despite the desires of the beguiling, anti-hero Coyote to either eat or mate with — and then eat — Worldmaker’s creations. While Coyote kept proclaiming that he ruled the world, Worldmaker kept moving forward, creating. But it was the priority he placed in his creation that speaks volumes of the spiritual nature of the Maidu people, the truly spiritual nature of humankind. As Farrell put it in his native tongue before translating, “Worldmaker said, ‘This is going to be a world of energies and spirit, then the humans will enter.'”

Another entertaining tale was Coyote’s desire to fly, and the threatening way in which he demanded lessons from a hummingbird — only to climb a tree branch when the hummingbird consented and fall to his death. Farrell then spoke of the ancients’ resurrection tale, striking in its modern parallels: “In the very ancient days, people would come along and, if they saw your dead body or bones lying there, would throw them into a body of water. You came back to life at the next sunrise.”

Farrell grew up the youngest of eight children, in the Genessee-Pit River Valley area, “where the birds own the creek.” He is a half-Maidu descendant of gold prospector John Davis, who entered a Maidu family whose basketweaving prowess is renowned among collectors. He learned Maidu from his grandfather’s sisters, who used to take him wherever they went. They were the last generation to speak the tongue as a first language before the U.S. government forced them into boarding schools — part of a process of driving the Maidu from their land, resettling them into 160-acre parcels, then systematically shaving off pieces of that parcel. “My family parcel was 40 acres until we ‘donated’ four acres for a septic plant,” Farrell said. His 15-minute overview of U.S. government actions since the 1850s was a tale to make any compassionate person squirm, a story the Native peoples throughout the U.S. know all too well.

Now, Farrell is teaching the Maidu language out of the California gold rush town of Nevada City, which features a corner lot with a Maidu timber tipi on it. Since language is the expression of human life, here’s hoping that he reaches enough people to keep one of the most beautiful languages on earth alive — and continues to pass its musical richness into every heart and soul he touches.

From “Morning Tea with Gary Snyder”

While inhaling the brisk, pine-sharpened air of the surrounding Animin Forest along the San Juan Ridge, high above the South Yuba River, I consider the facets of Gary Snyder: poetics, ecology, Native American myth and literature, the value of work, the greatest defender of the Sierra Nevada since John Muir, his translation and knowledge of Japanese and Chinese poetry. The San Francisco Beat movement. The latter ignited on an October night in 1955 when Gary joined Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia and their non-reading guest, Jack Kerouac, at the “remarkable collection of angels,” the Six Gallery Reading. Ginsberg debuted and immortalized “Howl.” Snyder, then 25, read his first poem publicly, “A Berry Feast,” now a classic. The Six Gallery remains the seminal poetry event in recent U.S. history — and for which, amazingly, no photograph or tape recording exists. Why? No one thought it was a big deal. They didn’t see what was coming. Except for the lookout, the erstwhile Cascade Mountain ranger and U.C. Berkeley graduate student, Snyder. “I think it will be a poetical bombshell,” he told Whalen. In a journal, he wrote, “Poetry will get a kick in the arse around this town.”

All of them became famous.

A few nights before, while having dinner, Gary and I talked about Kerouac. After the Six Gallery reading, and before heading to Japan for 12 years of study, Snyder took Kerouac up North Arete, a.k.a. the Sierra Matterhorn, a difficult six-hour climb just west of California’s Mt. Whitney. The two held a common devotion for Buddhism, but were otherwise as different as the West and East coasts from which they came. Not to mention that Kerouac wrote prose that sometimes rambled like an endless river (one particular sentence in his benzedrine-fueled novel, The Subterraneans, stretched more than 1,200 words). Conversely, Snyder lives and breathes punctuality, his work crisp and clear as cold, pine-scented air. In 1959, their Sierra Matterhorn climb appeared in Kerouac’s great novel, The Dharma Bums — along with a wise, resourceful protagonist virtually every reader before and since wanted to know like a next-door neighbor: Japhy Ryder.

Gary Snyder.

“That was interesting to see how he wrote about our trip, the things we did together,” Gary said. “He had a tough time getting up the Matterhorn, but he did it.”

“What’s it like becoming the protagonist of a novel?”

Gary looked at me, eyes sharpening to the point he was about to make. His next bite of food clung to his fork like a spacewalker. “I was the model for a fictional character. I’m no more Japhy Ryder than the next guy. He used a lot of what we did, and I liked the way he wrote the book very much — I think it’s Kerouac’s finest novel — but Japhy is fictional and I’m right here. I was just a model.”

An intriguing comment I read about Kerouac’s work came to mind, something relevant in this era of memoirs, exposes, autobiographical novels, what’s true in novels and what’s fictitious in so-called memoirs. “Do you think that if Kerouac were alive today, his thirteen novels — On The Road, Dharma Bums, Big Sur, Tales of Duluoz and the others — would be considered memoirs?” I asked.

Gary thought about it for a moment, leaving the food marooned. He shook the fork slightly. “That’s a very good question. But…no. He fictionalized quite a bit, changed some names, changed the sequence of events, made a couple of things up; it’s not true memoir. You could call it autobiographical fiction. But why not just call it fiction and enjoy it?”

Out rolled the raucous laugh, the fun-lover’s laugh, his eyes jovial as leprechauns — the side of Gary Snyder we all seem to forget while he’s reading his works and discoursing on everything from the dearth of deep thought in everyday life to instilling more arts into public education to conserving his beloved Sierra Nevada.