Monday 9:00 a.m.
The president of Southwestern Minnesota State University opened this festival, this celebration of rural writers and rural writing, with a few words on the importance of using words carefully.
The festival director, Judy Wilson, noted that it was "unbelieveable how many of you writers went to Alaska last summer when I was trying to get hold of you."
Wilson introduced the keynote speaker, Kimberly Blaeser, by noting two of the poet's characteristics: she is generous of heart and has a strong mind, Wilson said. Blaeser is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe who grew up on the White Earth Reservation. She has published Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, Trailing You, and Absentee Indians and Other Poems and edited the anthologies Stories Migrating Home and Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone.
Blaeser's talk was entitled: "Wisdom Sits in Places: Translating the Storied Landscape."
A visitor was told that the tribe's council fire was the center of the universe, Blaeser told us. The visitor met with a second tribe, and was told that its fire was the center of the universe, and members of the first tribe were nodding in agreement. How could both statements be true? "We were there then - that was the center," the visitor was told. "Now we're here - this is the center."
"Cultural centers are contingent, alive, mobile," Blaeser said.
Rural areas are often considered "the backwaters of culture," she noted. But if the storied landscape is culture, then rural America can be the center of a culture.
It made this Wisconsinite's heart leap to hear Blaeser mention both Aldo Leopold and Lorine Niedecker; and she quoted Leopold on the deep history of Sand County.
"We wear ourselves differently when we know," Blaeser said. There is wisdom in reciprocal engagement with landscape. We need to find the right balance between self and earth. We need to have "tenure in the land;" we need to make an investment in place. Physical and imaginative planes of vision need to be used when translating the storied landscape. (Doesn't "the storied landscape" sound a lot like my notion of "ghosts on the land?") We need reciprocity in our relationship with the earth, the land.
Blaeser quoted Linda Hogan: "We are nearly stone...." Hogan's is "a journey towards kinship, an investment in community, in a great cycle of life." Hogan writes of "land that will always own us."
There is appropirate and inappropriate behavior in relation to the earth, Blaeser said.
We need to imaginatively render the beauty and wisdom of the world to the task of saving life, she said.
The center shifts, she noted; "we create and adapt metaphors to serve our needs; and significance shifts with the perspective of the viewer."
Blaeser told Gerald Vizenor's story of the tribal elder who was in court. The white judge told the man he could not quote precedent from the Indian oral traditions. The elder looked at all the law books on the shelves and said "Why should I believe what those dead white men said when you won't believe John Squirrel?" The judge said, "You've got me there."
Blaeser spoke of "the privelege and gift of place," of "the need and responsibility to hold onto the stories of place."
Wisdom sits in places, she told us, quoting Basso. It is like water that never dries up. We can draw insight from site-specific experiences, can gain spiritual knowledge from physical places. She noted that Barry Lopez has suggested "the mind is shaped by place."
"The eye ranges differently here on the prairie," she observed.
"Our very vocabulary arises from places," she said. "And our stories have a base in place."
There is "the mythology, history, and ceremony of place," she said. "It is the wisdom of endurance which sits in places."
The essence of experience is translated into the traces of language that feed us, she said.
We need "simple silence for a long time" in a place. We long to know with our intellect what we already know with our body.
Landscape stories endure because they gesture beyond the particulars of place. Blaeser spoke of "the rising, rushing sound of souls passing, the falling away of words...."
"We are always finding our place in the great sphere of creation," she said. We need to "know and belong, while the spell holds, and to learn to hold it longer each time."
"The rocks in my path crack open to grasshoppers," she said.
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