Days Of The Dead

The dead surround the living. The living are the core of the dead. In this core are the dimensions of time and space. What surrounds the core is timelessness. … The living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.
— John Berger

To understand living we imagine those who once lived.  We see things, grasp feelings, search language for words, titles.  Ghost.  Spirit.  Spectre.  Apparition.  Soul.
We search, we dream, we wonder if they search for us. We, the imagined living.  We conjure, invite or bury for good. Light candles. Enter a procession.  
We may watch the cemetery closely, place flowers, listen for cautionary whispers, blame or thanks. Graves forgotten, watch the bones slide into the river. Escape in flame as atmosphere. Breath. Dust.

We paint.

 

 NOTES
— John Berger, from Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead (1994) collected in Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (2007) With gratitude for his deep insight and caring.

— To understand living (above), a cycle by DB, with gratitude to the ancestors, wherever they may be.

—  Photos:  Street Art, Eugene, DB. With gratitude to the artists for enlivening public places. (Click to enlarge)
— Traci Brimhall, The New World from her collection Our Lady of The Ruins (2012) With gratitude for her lucid vision.

 

The New World

We see mountains first. the earth in conflict
with itself. Land of juggernauts, of mummies held
timeless in honey. We make circles around the clouds'

shadows on the ground, careless as wildflowers, reciting
minor revelations and the names of trees we've never seen.
A man builds a theater of snow and ruins it with salt.

A wild girl blunders out of the woods but returns
tearing at her dress and warbling the strange language
of foxes. Hallowed be this squandered country.

Even when we find pyrite in the streams we remain
faithful. Even when the shy wolverines come down
from the hills and carry away the paper birds,

pinned and spinning, above our beds. Still, the dark
forgives the sun its eagerness. The boy forgives the bull
that gored him. We believe because the night after

the birds were stolen, we woke up singing. We heal
whether we want to or not. Whenever we raise
our hands to the sky, they are filled with light.

Sarah Winnemucca, Northern Paiute

 

In recognition of the Northern Paiutes on Indigenous Peoples Day, October 9, 2023

Sarah Winnemucca "memorial" sign placed on US Highway 95 as it crosses the Old I.O.N. Road near Rome, Oregon.

 

Sarah Winnemucca(1844-1891) is … a controversial figure, and herein lies some of her historical interest. … Similarly, her own people, the Northern Paiute, are of mixed opinions about her.  … Neither written history nor oral tradition provides fully satisfactory answers to all aspects of Sarah Winnemucca's life. She was an extraordinary person. She was also a very complex person living in complex times and making complex decisions. She was of two worlds, and perhaps sadly, at home in neither.
— Catherine S. Fowler, from "Foreword" to Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims by Sarah Winnemucca. U Nevada Press, 1994.  
 

Recommended:
— Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins originally published 1883.
— “ ‘An Educated Paiute woman,’ 1870”  in Oregon Indians: voices from two centuries, edited by Stephen Dow Beckham. OSU Press, 2006.  This includes a brief overview by Beckham and a letter written by Sarah Winnemucca from Camp McDermitt, Nevada, in 1870.
— All photos (click to enlarge) from road trip several years ago after a journey to Map Rock on the Snake River on a 102-degree day. (Yep, jumped in for a cooling dip.)
 

Note
Sacajawea is the most famous Native American in Oregon history. So it is a thought provoking confluence, that her son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau (1805-1866), who traveled with her on Lewis & Clark expedition, is buried a very few desert miles northeast of the Sarah Winnemucca memorial sign, near remote Danner, Oregon.