Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

I was a little kid, youngest of the family. We always went up to the Napa Valley in June as soon as school was out. My parents had bought a forty-acre ranch there for two thousand dollars. We settled in and set up the packed-dirt croquet court, and Juan—a killer croquet player—always got there in time for his birthday.

I was amazed to learn that Juan Dolores, a grown-up, actually didn’t know what day he was born on. Birthdays were important. Mine and my brothers’ and my parents’ were celebrated with cake and ice cream and candles and ribbons and presents, and it was a matter of great moment that one was now seven. How could it not matter to a person? In pondering this first discovery of the difference between Western time and Indian time, I was perhaps composting the soil from which the cultural relativism of my fictions would grow and flourish. But Juan (we kids called him Wahn, we didn’t know Spanish Hwahn)—Juan had to have a birth date in order to fill out the papers for his social security or his pension from the university or something; bureaucrats, like me, believe in birthdays. So he and my father chose him a birthday. Now, that was nifty, sitting around and deciding when you wanted to be born. They picked St. John’s Eve, Midsummer Night. And thereafter, Juan’s birthday was celebrated with cake, candles, and all the rest: a festival of this small tribe, celebrated soon after their annual migration sixty miles to the north, marking both the summer solstice and the ritual visit of the Papago.

The Papago stayed for a month or longer. The top front bedroom of the old house in the Valley is still called Juan’s Room by the elders of the tribe. During those visits he and my father may have worked together. I paid no attention to that. All I remember about Juan’s visits is using him. The use of grown-ups by children is one of the numerous exceptions to my absolute rule that people should not use other people. Weaker people, of course, get to use stronger ones; they have to. But the limits of use are best set by the strong, not by the weak. Juan was not very good at setting limits, at least when it came to children. He let us get away with murder. We got him to make a drum for us, and as I recall we insisted that it be a Plains Indian drum, because that was a real Indian drum, no matter that he was a real non–Plains Indian. In any case he made a marvelous drum, and we beat on it for years.

We picked up phrases like “Lo! the poor Indian!” and, from some magazine article, a title, “The Vanishing Red Man.” With what is called the cruelty of children, we used these phrases; we called Juan Lo, the Vanishing Papago. Hello, Lo! You haven’t vanished yet! I think he thought it was funny too; I think if he hadn’t, we’d have known it, and shut up. I hope so. We weren’t cruel, we were ignorant, foolish. Children are ignorant and foolish. But they learn. If they are given a chance to learn.

There’s a lot of poison oak in those hills, and we were all covered with calamine lotion all the time. Juan boasted that Indians never got poison oak. My brothers challenged him—Indians don’t ever get poison oak? Never? Prove it! Dare you!—Juan went down on a hundred-degree day into a twelve-foot thicket of poison oak by the creek and cut it all down with a machete. We have a tiny Kodak picture: a sea of poison oak, one small, bald, dark head just visible in it, shining with sweat. He got tired, but he didn’t get poison oak. Decades later when I read in Sarah Winnemucca’s autobiography how she nearly died as a child from her first exposure, I modified Juan’s claim: some Indians never get poison oak. It may have been that he was determined not to.

He was, I think, a strong, determined man; the intellectual work he did is proof of it; which makes his endless patience with us kids even more beautiful. This memory is not my own but of my mother’s telling: Juan’s first summer visit, long before he had a birthday, was the summer I learned to walk, 1931 I suppose. This infant would stagger over to Juan and say “Go-go?” And whatever he was doing, writing or reading or talking or working, Juan would excuse himself and gravely accompany me across the yard and up the driveway on a great journey of a hundred yards or so, I holding on to him firmly by one finger. Now that part I do seem to remember; perhaps it’s just my mother’s vivid telling; but I know which finger it was, the first of his left hand, a strong, thick, dark finger that entirely and warmly filled my hand.

In the forties when he was living in Oakland, Juan was mugged, robbed, and badly beaten. When he came for a visit at our Berkeley house after he got out of the hospital, I was afraid to come downstairs. I had heard that “his head was broken,” and imagined horrors. I finally was ordered down, and said hello, and sneaked a look. He wasn’t horrible. He was tired, and old, and sad. I was too ashamed and shy to show him my affection. I didn’t know I loved him. Children brought up in great security, tribal or familial, aren’t very aware of love, as I suppose fish aren’t very aware of water. That’s the way it ought to be, love as air, love as the human element. But I see Juan now, a gentle, intellectual man, living in exile and poverty, licensed by bigotry to be a prey of bullies—the world was full of such people in the 1940s. It is full of such people now. I wish I had had the sense to take his hand.

The first time Robert Spott came to stay with us in the Valley, his major problem must have been getting enough to eat. My memory of Yurok table manners is that if anybody speaks during a meal, everybody puts down their fork or soupspoon or whatever, swallows, and stops eating till the conversation is done. Only when speech is over does eating resume. Such a custom might arise among a rather formal people who had plenty to eat and plenty of time to eat it in. (With that idea in mind, as a novelist, I once invented some people living on an Ice Age planet where food, warmth, and leisure were often hard to come by: to them it was extremely bad manners to speak at all during a meal. Eat now, talk later—first things first. This is probably far too logical for a real custom.) And I may well have misunderstood or misremembered; my brother Karl’s recollection of correct Yurok table manners is that having taken a bite, one puts one’s spoon or hand down on the table until quite done chewing; and that also, when the host stops eating, the guest stops. In any case, there was Robert, and us four kids and Aunt Betsy and my parents and probably some other odd relatives or ethnologists or refugees around the dinner table, and we were a talkative and discursive and argumentative lot, with the kids encouraged to take a responsible part in the conversation. So every time anybody said anything, which was constantly, poor Robert laid down his fork, swallowed, and looked up with courteous and undivided attention, while we gobbled and babbled on. And as my father ate with extreme, neat rapidity, Robert must have had to stop eating before he had had anything much to eat at all. I believe he learned eventually to imitate our uncouthness.

I often felt uncouth around Robert Spott. He had tremendous personal dignity and authority. I believed for years that he was a—what my linguistic nephew informs me is now pronounced shawman, but which I continue to pronounce shayman, since my father did, and it doesn’t sound so New Agey. My brother Ted’s memory, more enlightened than mine by six years, is that Robert’s mother was the shaman, and that she and perhaps other women of his people trained him, not specifically as a shaman or doctor but in the knowledge of tribal and religious customs. They demanded this learning of him, a heavy and lifelong commitment, because there was no other fit candidate and the knowledge would die with them if he did not accept it. I have it in my head that Robert accepted the burden only with reluctance. Ted tells me that Robert served as an advocate for his people in Sacramento, taking on the then seemingly hopeless struggle to preserve Yurok culture and values against white contempt and exploitation—a task that might daunt anyone. At the time, I understood nothing of that grim political work, and may have romanticised it by mythologising Robert as an unwilling shaman. A girl does tend to spin romances about a handsome, stately, stern, dark man who doesn’t say much.