Wisdom Sits in Places

Being and Place Among the Tlingit

• Focuses on the indivisibility of the environment and Tlingit understanding of self
• The notion that if one was to remove the land, one would be removing the Tlingit
• The land is both physical and social, as it is inscribed with meaning
• Body and kinship terms were metaphors for toponyms
• Tlingit people as "working parts of the place" (172)

" Tlingit ritual continues to ... question... how Tlingits belong to places and how ancestral places continue to define their identity, community, and cosmos" (188)

Do you believe Basso does a good job at challenging essentialistic tendencies throughout his book, that is common in anthropological work with Indigenous people? Would you change anything?

Stalking with Stories

Essentialism

Displacement and replacement

• Essentialism in this case referring primarily to the belief of how members of a group, such as "women", have the same nature and thus share a single universal trait, such as "womanness"
• Identities are not unitary, nor do they remain the same.
• Socially constructed narratives that do not prioritize "things" as having inherent qualities
• Explores how these qualities are taught, learned, and reproduced through social interactions and relations

"American [First Nations], who settled this continent first and were the first to be displaced, understand this already (displacement) in a very pervasive way" (xvi)

• Displacement from the land through the loss of stories
• Stories replace people in the land, the reconstruction of self

Discussion

• Thornton argues that the land becomes a place of resistance and resilience, is this true in the Apache case?
• How do you normally explain a place to someone in your family? Do you use examples, maps, certain language? How would it differ from someone you do not know?

Next week, for part of the class, be ready to create stories and share them. I will send you an email on Friday to talk about what I want you to think about.

"The stories cannot be separated from geographical locations, from actual physical places within the land... and the stories are so much a part of these places that it is almost impossible for future generations to lose the stories because there are so many imposing geographical elements... you cannot live in that land without asking or looking at or noticing a boulder or rock. And there's always a story" (64)

Similar to Watt

• "It hits you like an arrow" (58)
• "You want to pull that arrow out of you... but you won't forget that story" (59)
• "The names of all these places are good. They make you remember how to live right, so you want to replace your self again" (59)
• The land is your ancestors
• "Landscape as a repository of distilled wisdom"

Do you have any stories that you have been taught using the land that you remember?

If this is your place, where are your stories?

• "White men need paper maps" ... "We have maps in our minds" (43)
• "It's name is like a picture" (46)
• The social life
• Teachings
• The three that stands alone

"To appreciate fully the significance of these relationships, as well as their influence on the lives of the Western Apache people, we must explore more thoroughly the manner in which the relationships are conceptualized. This can be accomplished through a closer examination of Apache ideas about the activity of storytelling and the acknowledge power of oral narratives, especially historical tales, to promote beneficial changes in peoples attitudes towards being a responsible member of a moral community" (57)

History

"If we settler in this country, we must be able to speak about this place and remember it clearly and well. We must give it a name" (12)

• Juniper tree stands alone (21)
• The Ancestors
• The Anglo- American history
• Language and place tied

"The past lies embedded in features of the Earth- in canyons and lakes, mountains and arroyos, rocks and vacant fields" (34)

Can you think of any places that have help construct who you are? Any places that have shaped how you see the world?

Constructing place

• Shared bodies of Local Knowledge
• Persons and communities inscribe meaning
• Possessions of particular people
• Produced and reproduced
• Importance not what, but where

"For what people make of their places is closely connected to what they make of themselves as members of society and inhabitants of the earth, and while the two activities may be separable in principle, they are deeply jointed in practice" (7)

"We are, in a sense, the place-worlds we imagine" (7)

The theater of place making

"For the place makers main objective is to speak the past into being, to summon it with words and give it dramatic form, to produce experience by forgoing ancestral worlds in which others can participate and readily loose themselves... the place maker often speaks as a witness on the scene, describing ancestral events "as they are occurring" and creating in the process a vivid sense that what happened long ago- right here, on this very spot- could be happening now" (32)

Layout

• Wisdom Sits in Places
• Main points made by Basso
• Essentialism
• Connection to "Being in place among the Tlingit"
• Discussion Questions

Wisdom Sits in Places