VIEWPOINTS
Friday, November 10, 2017
East Oregonian
Page 5A
Believing in the American story
E
llen Knutson asked us: “What does it
mean to be an American?”
We had gathered at Tamastslikt
Cultural Institute, which was hosting her
Oregon Humanities Conversation Project,
to explore this question. Most of us had just
seen Tamastslikt’s newly opened exhibit
“The Art of Survival:
Enduring the Turmoil of
Tule Lake” and our heads
were full of the images and
recorded voices of American
citizens held in the most
notorious of the World War
II internment camps, so it
wouldn’t be an easy question
to answer.
But at a time when
Americans are so often
described as “polarized,”
it seemed important to try.
Americans have differences
of race, ethnicity, place, religion, wealth,
language, education, and ideology, Knutson
had pointed out. So what are the things
that unite us as a nation? What is it that we
value?
As I listened to the conversation — which
kept going in the hallway, in the parking lot,
and is ongoing in my mind — I thought, this
is why stories are so important. Who are
we? What stories do we tell about ourselves?
Are our stories large enough to include all
of us?
Perhaps the only way to make sure is to
listen, and keep listening, to the stories of
our neighbors. That’s why we work so hard
to bring Northwest writers to the First Draft
Writers’ Series at Pendleton Center for the
Arts, and encourage anyone who signs up to
read at the open mic.
From Shaindel Beers we heard what it is
like to receive online death threats because
you are Jewish. Xavier
Cavazos let us imagine
ourselves as performance
poets rehearsing on the
streets of New York
City, where no one paid
any attention, then in an
abandoned warehouse
outside Ellensburg, where
police approached with
handcuffs. How does it
feel to be a Native poet
reading the want ads when
the vehicles are named for
the indigenous peoples
of America? Tiffany Midge’s satire let
us laugh but made us think, too. Imagine
searching the want ads for a peppy Scot, or a
low-mileage Belgian.
Can we envision growing up at Hanford,
sitting on our father’s shoulders to cheer
President Kennedy’s visit, growing up
to work at Hanford, then watching our
childhood best friend’s father die of
radiation-induced illness? “One box contains
my childhood,” Kathleen Flenniken wrote;
“the other contains his death / if one is true /
how can the other be true?”
After Gary Lark shared his poem “Road
What are the
things that
unite us as a
nation? What
is it we value?
Warriors” — about passing a convoy
of soldiers on their way to camp when
“Northbound on I-5, / the Iraq death count /
for my old unit / drops from the radio”— he
told us that because Oregon Senator Wayne
Morse had prevented his National Guard unit
from deploying to Vietnam he was standing
here, able to read to us. We all felt the shiver
that went through the room.
Americans come in all ages, all genders,
all ethnicities. Native American writers
have read at First Draft, and Chinese and
Japanese-American, student-American
(performance poetry aided by cell phones;
how do they do that?), gay-American,
straight-American. One National Book
Award for Lifetime Achievement-American.
From all of them we’ve learned a bit more
about who we are.
One of my favorite nights was when First
Draft hosted Oregon Poet Laureate Lawson
Inada, who was four when he left behind
his blue tricycle and his dog and went to the
Jerome and then Amache internment camps.
“We’ve lived with the experience since,”
he writes in Legends from Camp. (“I work
on campus. / I try to concentrate. / Still,
things sneak up / to remind me: / ‘This is not
Amache!’”)
“Tell your own stories!” he urged
everyone in the room. “It’s important.”
I thought of him as I walked back to
my car, and of the person in our discussion
group whose family had been sent to the
Tule Lake Camp. Of Captain Jack, who held
out in the nearby Stronghold for such a long
B ette H usted
FROM HERE TO ANYWHERE
time. And of the challenges that face us now,
as Americans. Which stories do we believe?
The next First Draft is Thursday, Nov. 16
at 7 p.m. It’s free. I hope you’ll come.
■
Bette Husted is a writer and a student of
T’ai Chi and the natural world. She lives in
Pendleton.
Quick takes There’s wild game, then there’s game behind a fence
Hunter kills wolf in Starkey
area, questions arise
Only in Oregon, would the government
let a species that was eradicated for a good
reason be allowed to flourish again.
— John D. Barnedt Sr.
Question everything. That’s how you
find the truth.
— Jim Brawski
Will run within 6-8 feet before turning?
Close enough (to shoot)!
— Pat Keely
We used to have fish stories, now we
have wolf stories. Geesh.
— Laurie Thompson
700-plus Oregonians choose
third gender on ID cards
I wish someone would get a group of
people together to come up with a new
pronoun. Using a pronoun that already exists
and means more than one person — they
— is confusing and adds to the resistance of
mainstream America adapting to it.
—Kim Gibson
When my son was in junior high they
had a question male\female. He answered
none. Guess he got confused. He thought
they wanted to know if he had sex.
— Becky Flory
Old Rodeo City Inn remains
derelict, dangerous
They need to go ahead and knock the
building down before something bad
happens. As it stands now it’s a haven for
drug users, homeless people and criminals.
It needs to go.
E
arlier this month I was
easily through captive populations,
fortunate enough to kill a
but it also makes its way into the
nice blacktail buck. I had
wild, spreading both through contact,
been hunting off and on through
when wild animals touch game
deer season, and I saw lots of
animals “through the fence,” and
does every time I went out. With
through domestic animals that escape.
a little patience I knew I would
The problem has been clear for a
finally cross paths with a good
while, and many groups are working
buck and have a chance to punch
to find ways to stop the spread of the
Brian
my tag. I was feeling good about
disease.
Sexton
my chances after the weather in
Technically, a deer or elk in the
Comment
Oregon’s Coast Range turned wet
wild is the same
and cold in October, so I headed
as an animal
out to public land near the town of Cave
raised in a pen. But
Junction.
the actual differences
By noon, the buck was dressed, skinned
are immense. Imagine
and hung out to cool and dry in my wood
a wild turkey that
shed. My wife, Suzanne, needed to make
scratches out a living
a trip into Grants Pass so I took over the
in the forest, surviving
supervising of our young daughters. Worn
on bugs and berries. It
out from the morning’s work, I decided that has no white meat to
a little TV time was in order, and within
speak of; its meat is dark
minutes a commercial ran for Arby’s new
from the vascularization
“venison sandwich.”
of well-developed
My 5-year-old asked, “Daddy, what’s
muscles. Compare that
venison?” I explained that venison is deer
to the Thanksgiving
or elk meat. “Oh,” she said, “just like our
birds we buy from the
deer?” Well, no, not exactly, I replied. In
supermarket — monstrosities that are raised
fact, it’s not even close.
to boost their fat and juiciness content.
An entire industry based on raising
Factory-farmed turkeys sport giant white
and harvesting traditional game meats has
breasts with pathetic wings that have never
evolved over the past several decades. There moved. Fenced elk also differ from their
are thousands of game farms in the country, farm-raised kin. You can tell by their antlers:
and hundreds of them in the West. Arizona,
They are white in game-farm animals
California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington,
because they are never used, but in the wild
Idaho, Montana, Utah, Texas and Wyoming they’re black, because the elk sharpen them
— all provide venison to restaurants and
on trees, the better to fight other elk.
grocery stores. But rather than roaming
Wild game is unique, and the experience
wild, these animals are raised behind tall
of hunting an animal and bringing it home
fences as if they were domestic cattle or
for meat makes it something that transcends
sheep, and they are butchered, packaged and “meal prep.” Call me a snob, but I have
sold in much the same manner.
to take a deep breath every time I hear
We know that these game farms help
someone say, “Oh, you hunt, I just love
spread the disease known as chronic
elk. I had it at a restaurant in Montana.”
wasting disease, or CWD, to herds of wild
I guarantee that the elk that diner tasted,
game. This deadly disease spreads most
while probably delicious, was an inherently
different beast from the animal my wife
and I packed out of Nevada’s Jarbidge
Wilderness last year.
What Arby’s is selling is a fantasy of
wild animals running free until they are
hunted down and turned into dinner. Arby’s
is also selling the idea that its sandwiches
connect ordinary people to someone like
the charismatic hunter Steven Rinella,
who has his own television show, without
requiring any of the hard work it takes to
kill, butcher and process
a large animal. Arby’s
might put a piece of
meat between two
pieces of bread and call
it venison, but I don’t
think that piece of meat
deserves the name.
At least Arby’s
venison is said to come
from domestic red
stag in New Zealand,
so the company is not
supporting an industry
that spreads disease
to wild deer and elk
here in America. But it is normalizing the
consumption of game meat in a national ad
campaign without acknowledging any of
the potential dangers involved in the game
farming industry. Before they saw Arby’s
TV ads, how many people even knew that
they could buy venison?
It will be interesting to check whether
the sales of game meat from online vendors
flourish as a result of this ad campaign. Why
knows: Maybe McDonald’s will get on
board and offer us a special “Big Moose.”
■
Brian Sexton is a contributor to Writers
on the Range, the opinion service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He manages a
medical clinic in Grants Pass and also
volunteers for Backcountry Hunters and
Anglers.
What Arby’s
is selling is the
fantasy of wild
animals running
free until they are
hunted down and
turned into dinner.
— Nicholas Lee
Clean the Edwards Building up, too. It's
an eyesore.
— Emily Sparhawk
OSP donates a robot to
Umatilla robotics
My son is on the robotics team and came
home so proud they were tasked with taking
care of it. The Umatilla High Robotics is a
very proud group of kids and they are very
deserving of this.
— Michell Lowrance
One of the great lessons of the Twitter age is
that much can be summed up in just a few words.
Here are some of this week’s takes. Tweet yours
@Tim_Trainor or email editor@eastoregonian.
com, and keep them to 140 characters.
CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES
U.S. PRESIDENT
Donald Trump
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Comments: 202-456-1111
Switchboard: 202-456-1414
www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
U.S. SENATORS
Ron Wyden
221 Dirksen Senate Office Bldg.
Washington, DC 20510
202-224-5244
La Grande office: 541-962-7691
Jeff Merkley
313 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
202-224-3753
Pendleton office: 541-278-1129
U.S. REPRESENTATIVE
Greg Walden
185 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
202-225-6730
La Grande office: 541-624-2400
GOVERNOR
Kate Brown
160 State Capitol
900 Court Street
Salem, OR 97301-4047
503-378-4582
REPRESENTATIVES
Greg Barreto, District 58
900 Court St. NE, H-38
Salem, OR 97301
503-986-1458
Rep.GregBarreto@state.or.us
Greg Smith, District 57
900 Court St. NE, H-482
Salem, OR 97301
503-986-1457
Rep.GregSmith@state.or.us
SENATOR
Bill Hansell, District 29
900 Court St. NE, S-423
Salem, OR 97301
503-986-1729
Sen.BillHansell@state.or.us