Wisdom Sits in Places

White Mountain Apache tribal chairman Ronnie Lupe originally asked anthropologist Keith Basso (March 15, 1940 – August 4, 2013) to begin creating a map of the area with Apache place names.   The project morphed over time into a study of how Western Apache people use those place names.  It resulted in the book Wisdom Sits in Places.

Writing in the voices I chose for Stones in the Creek involved repeated and monumental acts of chutzpah.  Even Lazar Sussman, the Jewish merchant in "One Voice, One Heart" was a reach.  He moved as a young teen from a Jewish city in Galicia to the Arizona Territory.  In my life I have lived as far as twenty-five miles from my current home in the Bronx.  And the tiny bit of Yiddish he speaks to his children forced me into a phrasebook.  Imagine what it took to imagine a voice for Alchesay, the leader of the White Mountain Apache at the turn of the twentieth century.

It's not about finding an English-Apache dictionary.  (Although I did.  The White Mountain community generated its own!)  Finding meaningful patterns of speech is even more important.  And that is where the work of Keith Basso became so interesting that I had to find ways to include it.  In his 1979 work Portraits of the Whiteman, Professor Basso discusses humorous mimicry of white people among the Western Apache.  One of the funniest things about white people is apparently our insistence on filling silence with talk, regardless of meaningless.  Another is our bullying insistence on proving our point with more and more talk.  That is why my character Alchesay has to think for so long about how to convey his ideas to the other men without a long monologue in support.

In Wisdom Sits in Places, Professor Basso describes the use of place names to represent things that have happened there.  And this is why Alchesay's critic can simply say, "It happened at the lone piñon standing above the wide line of bare rock," and all the listeners understand this to be a charge of trusting the enemy.  This is why Dayaye can be understood to be calling for reconciliation when he says, "It happened at the camp where they count on finding water."

Now, understand, I made up those places and I made up those names and I made up those stories about what "happened" there.  And, truthfully, I don't think they sound like Apache place names.  Nor do I think the stories sound much like Apache stories.  But what I did was have an exchange using place names.  And avoid a long oration that I think would have been uncharacteristic for Alchesay.  So I made a big effort to get it right.  And I made a big effort to highlight a difference.

If there is a reader out there who chooses to follow up on this sense difference, then I will feel like I got at least one thing right.