Autumn is upon us, bringing a sea-level chill.
October has arrived in western Oregon, that magical time of
the year when intermittent drizzle and falling leaves are
churned together, underfoot, into a damp and pungent brown
paste. But in Oregon’s high mountains it already feels like
winter. Snow starts to fall there and I hasten my pace. You
see: the remote, backcountry portions of the Northwest’s most
mountainous lands have always been, and continue to be,
essential to the lives of native tribes. It is a place far away
from the mundane world. And in the last century and a half, it
has been a place pleasantly distant from the world of whites.
Some of these people go to the mountains for religious
reasons, visiting sites from creation tales, seeking visions.
Some of these people go to the mountains for hunting, berry
gathering, the collection of distinctively alpine medicinal
plants. Some of these people go to the mountains to dispose
of grandpa’s ashes.
The places they go to do this have been visited and
revisited by their ancestors for perhaps thousands of years.
And federal agencies now find themselves with a strong
mandate to accommodate (read “not drive a damned bulldozer
through”) the many culturally important sites associated with
each of these practices that stand on the West’s vast federal
lands. Recently, I have been asked by an Agency of Our
Federal Government to consult them on these matters, lest
they bulldoze something they shouldn’t. (It is hoped that the
documentation of these practices will be of enduring value to
the Tribes, themselves, both conserving their sites and
conserving the knowledge of their collective past.) So I have
been up in the high mountain backcountry, trying to see what I
can see before the snow begins to pile up in deep white drifts.
And I have been seeing rocks. Lots of rocks, piled up
this way and that. Throughout much of Oregon, native peoples
used to pile rocks as part of their most sacred ceremonies.
Building them to mark the sites of their vision quests.
Building them to mark sacred places. Building them to cover
the ashes of their family and friends, so that the person might
always sit, spiritually or symbolically, in that spot. Even here
on the soggy coast, people used to pile up rocks for these
purposes. Our coastal rock piles toppled long ago, though,
tom apart by misguided artifact collectors, liquored-up
vandals with time on their hands, and - far more often - by the
workaday collateral damage brought by the loggers and their
machines.
In a few rare and spectacular cases, though, this rock
piling practice never really ceased. Today, some traditionally
minded tribal peoples still climb to the last wild places,
awesomely inaccessible, isolated and wind-whipped cold.
There they undergo vision quests and other religious rites.
Often they choose those sites where one can glimpse the
landmarks that stand prominent within their tribe’s creation
tales. There they might meditate: on the moral lessons of the
tale associated with the landmarks before them, or on the
elders who once sat, viewing these landmarks from the same
general spot. As they do this, some will still stack up rocks on
or around the site.
And there these rocks sit, in circles, in stacks, in
pyramids, in piles. And they appear in other forms that 1
attempt to sketch, crudely, in my field notebook: an
impressive rock figure in the form of an animal, for example, a
prayer circle in the center of its belly, all oriented to a nearby
sacred peak. Sites documented a year or two ago have been
much rearranged in the course of regular use. Grieving
relatives may still entomb human ashes there. The practice
persists. This fall, it draws me to the backwaters, to clamber
over the cliffs and through the woods. When winter snows
conceal the rocks, I will be back in the valleys, indoors,
meeting the people who stack them. Mapping these things out
plainly lest the bulldozers find them first.
But this is a sensitive business. These are not mere
rock piles, but repositories of heartfelt sentiment, power, and
the abiding attachment of a people for a particular place. If
ever you see a curious pile of rocks in the remote backcountry,
leave it alone. There are never artifacts in them, but the odds
are fair-to-middling that the rock pile you find may conceal
charred human remains. Not only is it illegal to disturb these
sites, but it is just plain wrong, the moral equivalent of digging
up a grave or burning down a church. And if the builders are
nearby, it’s a pretty good bet that they will not be amused. We
should only take away that thrill that comes from brushing up
against a side of the human experience seldom seen, a side
almost forgotten by the late 20th century world.
Ultimately, piles of rocks are piles of rocks. Rock
piles are inert referential vehicles: to each of us, they mean
what we want them to mean. Rocks were stacked for religious
purposes by many of our ancestors, and rocks are stacked for
expressive ends by some of our contemporary, professional
artists. Amateur archaeologists have gone giddy over piles of
local rocks, thinking them sacred cairns, never learning that
the piles were built as survey markers a decade or two before.
Today, in our own backyard, we see the emergence
of a new type of rock stacker, placing piles in north coast
forests and on north coast shores. Some of our modem rock
stackers see their creations as artistic achievements, the
working of a subtle aesthetic, human imprints manifested in
the media of the natural world. Others, a goodly contingent,
see our Anglo-nouveau rock piles as an invasive inscription of
a human ego onto the unsullied land, shrines to the self,
pretentious eco-graffiti marking up those very places to which
one retreats to not see the imprint of human hands.
Meanwhile, religious rock-stackers may view this new
practice as trivializing. These new rock piles are toppled, both
by the vacuous vandal and by thoughtful hikers with an
ideological axe to grind. Yet some of my most esteemed
neighbors are closet rock-stackers, habitually reveling in the
simplicity and rawness of the rocks; it is an art form for the
masses, no cost nor credentials required, memorializing highly
personal moments in an inspirational place. Perhaps, in these
agnostic times, a heartfelt tradition does not require a thousand
years to warrant respect or the gloss of legitimacy. These are
contested stones, no doubt about it.
While they are just piles of rocks, they mean different
things, often big things, to different people. And this is how
humans are - it the nature of the species to ascribe something'
to everything, even if that something differs dramatically from
person to person, from culture to culture. As you build piles
up, or tear piles down, do bear this is mind. No mark on the
land is neutral. One man’s rubble heap is another man’s
monument. O f course, it is only a pile of rocks. But to
someone else, it may mean the world.
OCTOBER 11 1996
M oby
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TR Y M E D IA T IO N
P A C IF IC M E D IA T IO N A S S O C IA T E S
«
• P A C IF IC M E D IA T IO N
D is p u te s ? C o n flic ts ?
C o m m u n ic a tio n P ro b le m s ?
One of the most enlightening studies of Native American
views of, and attachments to the land is Keith Basso’s Wisdom
Sits In Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western
Apache. (1996, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press). When it comes to understanding how this all works,
it’s hard to beat Basso; unfortunately, in his writings, he
doesn’t seem all that interested in stacks of rocks. No-one’s
perfect.
(503) 543-2000
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