Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

"Place-meant"

2001; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/aiq.2001.0014

1534-1828

Joe Watkins,

In L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy was able to return to Kansas by clicking the heels of her enchanted ruby slippers together three times and saying "There's no place like home." Conversely, Thomas Wolfe, in Look Homeward, Angel, tells us "You can never go home again." Whose observation is more correct? Now, having been to Kansas, I would tend to question why Dorothy, if she actually could, would want to go home again. But perhaps because it's not my home, I don't do Kansas justice. What is there about the concept of place and the physical environment around us that ties us to it so strongly? The relationships between American Indians and the land is multifaceted. It's not one of ownership per se, for we are owned more by the land, tied to it more strongly, than the land is owned by us. We are tied to it by obligations and responsibilities established by our ancestors in times far back, and we pass those obligations on to our children and grandchildren. Non-Indian cultures speak of the "fatherland," the "mother country," and trace much of their ancestry back to the country and the local point from where their family began their trek to America. I did not misspell the title of this paper. I intend it to carry a meaning of the importance of "place" among American Indians - what a particular "place" "meant" to our cultures. And I can rarely resist the urge to play with words - to "pun," as it were, if "pun" can be considered a verb. But "place" is more than a location in the physical sense of the word, because all of us also struggle to find our place within the metaphysical world. Miranda Warburton and Robert Begay remind us of the interconnected nature of land and culture. By discussing the importance of land to the cultures of the Middle East as well as among the Navajo, they emphasize their point. Human veneration of place in a way that ties the land to culture leads to a metaphysical attachment - a sacred thread - that does not bind the people so much as remind the people of the obligations and responsibilities carried forward [End Page 41] by the generations: that thread, like the thread of a rosary or the string around the finger of a person with a faulty memory, reminds them of their past and their future, their ancestors and their offspring, their spirit and their obligations. American Indians also share a cultural-historical relationship with the land. Their past and future is intertwined with it, as the fabric of their culture is woven of threads tied to places. The sacred locations are the foundation threads of the fabric, the warp, while the cultural connections are the weft threads. The four sacred mountains which form the boundaries of the Navajo world are the edges of the blanket, and every local landscape threads within the blanket. Thus, all individual Navajos wear a multipatterned protective blanket of their culture around them. John Welch and Ramon Riley's paper expands on the relationship between American Indians and the land as they remind us how a "deep knowledge of places thus remains essential to the maintenance of Apache society." I would extend that to all society, and pity the poor Americans who cannot accept the dominion of place over them. The White Mountain Apache Tribe, by establishing the Fort Apache Historic Park, is exerting positive dominion over a place that previously held only negative connotations. Many of you, especially those from the southwestern United States, know about whom I am talking. Every year "they" descend on the Southwest, toting and towing their "place" with them in search of their "wilderness experience," an experience tempered by level camping spaces, electrical hookups, and sanitary dump stations. The transient nature of Americans, I suppose, could be the reason for their lack...