Never Give Up on Anyone

May 16, 2005 St. Paul, MN

Up in the LAX Radisson at 3AM Hawaii time. I pray, wash and stumble around to dress and repack what little I’ve taken out in the six hours I’ve been in the room. I used to say each moment is ripe with possibility, but this morning I understand some moments are overripe and drop to the ground, other moments are dry and already crumbling to dirt or ash. Some are stillborn. This morning it’s a full suitcase, a small bag for overruns, my carryon and sax bag. It’s relatively easy to checkout, catch the shuttle and run the airport security gauntlet to my gate. I felt sorry for the terminal 1 passengers. Their check-in line ran all the way to terminal 2. Must have been a security breach as the news channels were getting the story.

Time does collapse and expand. One moment I’m standing on the lanai in Honolulu , the next I’m deplaning in LAX, and soon I’m checking into the St. Paul Hotel in Minnesota. Isn’t that how we experience and know time? It becomes memory.

Along the way met Wayne Bergeron, trumpet player, an LA studio musician on his way to Grand Rapids, MI. He’s played with everyone from Paul Anka to Queen Latifa. Check out his new album, You Call This a Living? , from Wag Records, available at his website: www.waynebergeron.com. . Great horn. Sassy and elegant. Soars. Wonderful human being, too at the center of it. That isn’t always so. Great art often comes through lousy human beings. Go figure. Proves it’s beyond us.

May 17, 2005 St. Paul, MN

It’s always a question about where to start and end on these missives from the road. No sun this morning. It’s there, behind mist and clouds. The Mississippi River appears touchable from the window. It is. Where eyes alight an energy exchange occurs. It’s a reciprocal act. The Café in the hotel is new:, flat and unimaginative decor, tables and booths set down in a seminar room. The food is decent and the company even better. Sandra and I visit for the first time in a few years. She’s still as beautiful, her eyes compassionate and sharp. We’re both dragging from the travel, and we’re both dressed in black this morning. Funny how the challenge of the Iowa writing workshop urged us to our own visions of what it means to be artists. We’ve gone on to forge our visions from our community experience. And what we carry with us to the table this morning is the struggle for home, within our souls, within the writing/artistic community of America. We talk of family, community regeneration and phobias. Here we are, thirty years later, almost thirty years exactly since that sojourn in Iowa City. Today we will discuss all this with Garrison Keillor from 8-9:30 PM in the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul. I’m sure tickets are still available if you’re anywhere near this city that always reminds me of Meridel LeSueur. Otherwise, check your NPR radio station(s).

Below is a Suzan Harjo story forwarded to me by Indian Country Today. I’d heard out the re-appearance of the chvkvulv from my cousin George Coser. We are all taking note. There is a larger cultural movement in the works. It has been building in the heart of the people all this time. And the vision consists of the visions of birds, other creatures, the plants, planets and souls of the elements.


Harjo: Never give up on anyone

© Indian Country Today May 12, 2005. All Rights Reserved
Posted: May 12, 2005

by: Suzan Shown Harjo / Indian Country Today

The honorable ivory-billed woodpecker has returned from the dead and is living in a wildlife refuge in the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas. It seemed to disappear in 1944 and was long presumed extinct.

This spirit bird's reappearance 60 years later reinforces a wise instruction by Native elders: ''Never give up on anyone.''

From time immemorial, the handsome, broad-shouldered bird thrived in the bottomland forests and bayous of what is now the southeastern United States. After 50 years of developers clear-cutting old-growth trees in its habitat from North Carolina to Texas, the ivory-billed woodpecker was left with few places to live.

In recent decades, the federal government and private parties have declared certain ecosystems as Important Bird Areas. The ivory-billed woodpecker re-emerged in one of these areas, which should encourage the Bush administration - whose strong suit is not environmental protection - to establish more such safe places for the homeless.

John James Audubon painted this bird in the early 1800s, comparing its stylish chiaroscuro markings to a ''great Vandyke'' painting. Audubon described it as 21 inches long, with a 30-inch wingspan and three-inch bill, and a ''dark glossy body and tail ... large and well-defined white markings of its wings, neck, and bill, relieved by the rich carmine of the pendent crest of the male, and the brilliant yellow of its eye.''

Muscogee artists have been depicting this bird for thousands of years. A flurry of e-mail and voice messages spread the word among Muscogee people that the ivory-billed woodpecker lives.

My friend Rob Trepp, a Muscogee researcher, sent three images of the bird that Muscogee artists etched on shell and in clay over 2,000 years ago. He says the bird ''is found in many iconographic settings, sometimes pictured alone, wings spread; other times pictured in fours, heads only, at the four cardinal points around an inner image.''

I had lots of questions about this important bird. Rob checked with Muscogee cultural experts George Cosar, John Fixico and Ed LaGrone; and I asked my dad, Freeland Douglas, who's always my first call on Muscogee language and cultural matters.

Here are their consensus answers about the ivory-billed woodpecker.

Woodpeckers - toski in the Muscogee language - are medicine birds, respected for their persistence and power to ''pull things out.'' Singers of toski songs ''take on the power'' and gain the ''ability to pull things out of their patients.''

The largest and strongest of the toski is cvkvlv, the ivory-billed woodpecker. Traditional Muscogee medicine practitioners still use ''songs about cvkvlv.'' Its own song was recorded only once, in 1935. Prior to the release in April of video footage from one year ago, the last documented sighting of cvkvlv was in 1987 in Cuba.

Cvkvlv is pronounced CHUH kuh luh - ''kind of like chocolate, if you need a mnemonic,'' wrote Trepp. The word is a ''progressive contraction'' that references the ''fine feathers at the back and the color of the bill.'' Cvkvlv is preserved in a Muscogee/Cherokee family name, Chuckluck or Chuculate.

Cvkvlv is called a rather rude name by scientists: Campephilus principalis, which is Latin for grub-eater. Audubon observed that its main food consists of beetles, larvae and large grubs, but it eats ripe forest grapes ''with great avidity,'' along with persimmons and hagberries.

He also noted that the ''ivory-bill is never seen attacking the corn.'' I think this respect for sofkee (corn) must have further endeared cvkvlv to Muscogee people.

I never met cvkvlv, but I feel as if an ancient, beloved friend has come home after a long absence.

I had a similar feeling 10 years ago, about a butterfly. I had checked into a conference hotel and turned on CNN to see what news I'd missed during the flight from D.C. to Albuquerque.

The news anchor was saying that scientists in northern California were elated at the re-emergence of the formerly extinct teal blue-tailed butterfly that disappeared from the Plains in the late 1800s.

This caught my attention for several reasons, not the least of which was the phrase ''formerly extinct.'' Now that is news.

But the big news to me was that the teal blue butterfly was real. During my first Sun Dance in South Dakota, the ceremonial leader told me to listen carefully to the messages of the blue butterfly. I looked for blue butterflies for years and finally decided they were magic beings, and maybe I'd see them and maybe not.

Hearing that they vanished for a century made me imagine that the blue butterflies saw what was happening to the Indians and the buffalo on the Plains and said, ''We're outta here.''

The news that they traveled to the West Coast and were presenting themselves to elated scientists made me laugh and cry at the same time. I felt as if I were greeting a familiar stranger with an important message. I could hear my respected elders saying, ''See why you should never give up on anyone.''

Then and now, I think how Native peoples have been pushed out of our natural homelands and how long we have lived at the edge of extinction. The Native population hemisphere-wide was over 100 million in 1491. By 1900, it was under 1 million.

In the U.S. at the turn of last century, there were fewer than 240,000 Native people. The good news is that there were 2 million American Indians by 2000 and that Native populations are increasing in every country.

It is a miracle of survivance that there are Native people alive in sufficient numbers to assure a future as Native people.

It still is touch-and-go for Native heritage languages, traditional religions, sacred places, salmon and myriad other precious treasures, but no one should count them out.

Native people are revitalizing heritage languages as fast as humanly possible, even some that have been pronounced extinct for 150 years.

More and more Native young people are living within traditional religions, one ceremony at a time.

Native sacred places and salmon remain viable, despite the best efforts of government and developers to destroy them.

So, hail, cvkvlv. Hail, blue butterflies. Hail, all the formerly extinct living beings that refuse to die and stay dead. Never give up on anyone.

Suzan Shown Harjo, Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee, is president of the Morning Star Institute in Washington, D.C., and a columnist for Indian Country Today.

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So wherever you are on this day, know that what matters, what has meaning will continue to emerge when we need it.

JH on-the-road