Aural history programs

Certainly, everyone differs in ability. Some people are bigger, stronger; some are smarter; some are more clever with their hands; others are more clever with their brains. Just by virtue of being alive, we deserve to be respected as individuals. Furthermore, that respect for the value of each human being should be extended to each living thing on the planet.

And developing that way, extend our ability to love to include plant life. A tree, a shrub, a blade of grass deserves respect and sympathy as fellow living things. I think you can go even beyond that to respect the rocks, the air, the water. It was after I produced this thirteen-part series of half-hour programs that I asked Ed to critique them. He listened to the entire series twice, and then said that the interviews should be compiled into a book. He introduced me to the folks at Harbinger House Press in Tucson, and thus my first book, Headed Upstream: Interviews With Iconoclasts was published in , shortly after Abbey perished at the age of sixty-two years and forty-five days.

I think of Headed Upstream as a book of friends, because almost everyone in that book was indeed a friend, some of whom are still with us. John Nichols landed hard on capitalism.

Gary Snyder addressed the concept of bioregionalism. John Fife revealed why he started the Sanctuary Movement for political refugees from Central America. Dave Foreman talked of Earth First! Stewart Udall addressed the ethical considerations he had faced as secretary of the interior.

Creating this book firmly placed me on course as an aural historian, one that provided me with a means of following my fascinations. I loaded my recording equipment and camping gear into the camper on the back of my old Chevy pickup truck and headed out. I was on the road for four months and travelled throughout the American West interviewing American Indians of many tribes. Mylie Lawyer, a Nez Perce matriarch living in Lapwai, Idaho, told me this story: When her grandfather was a boy, he and his friend were out playing when they saw what they first thought was a buffalo herd coming toward them from the east.

Sharon Dick, a Nez Perce fisherwoman who caught salmon in the traditional fashion from her vantage on the Columbia River, worried that with the coming of dams, the salmon would one day cease to run and thus deprive her people of their spiritual sustenance.

Ed Edmo, a Warm Springs Indian who lived in The Dalles, Oregon, told me how he had watched the waters of the mighty Columbia be stoppered by the dam that resulted in the flooding over of a meeting ground where members of many tribes had traditionally gathered annually for countless generations. A California Indian basket-weaver who wished to remain anonymous told me that she was thwarted by a forest ranger as she gathered those grasses specific to the type of baskets that her family had woven for many generations, a practice now forbidden by some rule or regulation.

She rued the fact that the ranger had no understanding of the intrinsic nature of this habitat. He told me part of the creation story of how the Hopi people first emerged into this world through the Sipapuni near the confluence of the Little Colorado and Colorado Rivers. They wandered about the dry desert until they arrived in what was to become their homeland, after consulting with Massau, a spiritual being who provided them with seeds of corn, a gourd of water, and a digging stick.

Thus the Hopis affiliated with their homeland on the three southern promontories of Black Mesa. Their village of Old Oraibi is regarded as the oldest continuously inhabited village in the coterminous United States. In , my friend Craig Newbill, then the director of the New Mexico Humanities Council, introduced me to members of the humanities councils of the seven states that withdrew waters from the Colorado River.

This was for me the equivalent of going after a graduate degree in water law in the arid West. I travelled throughout the Colorado River Watershed, visiting the headwaters of the Green, San Juan and Colorado Rivers, and even paddled a rented canoe near the Colorado River delta in the Sea of Cortez where river water now rarely flows. I interviewed 75 people, including Native people, various agency bureaucrats, environmentalists, farmers, ranchers, politicians, water lawyers, and two former secretaries of the interior.

I interviewed another close friend, William deBuys, a fine writer and scholar who provided me with an excellent overview of the enormous significance of the many issues that comprise the bigger picture of what the Colorado River represents in Western American culture.

Bill went on to write A Great Aridness , a provocative book that introduces us to the profound consequences of global warming and climate instability due to ever-rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. By now, I have engaged in far more aural history projects than I can recount here.

But each one has contributed to my greater understanding over this last half-century. The North American Southwest is my homeland through which I continue to range to thus learn what I can. As chance would have it, I was soon in Santa Barbara, where he lived, and I interviewed him. My point being that we must not create a global commons, however well-intentioned we are.

Instead, it is better to continue a system based on private property, which in this instance means national property—nations being the only large organizations that can enforce their own laws—to continue to consider the globe as divided into numerous nations. Each nation has to take care of its own property. These resources are held in common, not owned privately. This continues to rankle even thirty-five years after our interview.

Later on, I had to stay in the house to help my mother. I was full of resentment and quarrelsome remarks, particularly when she used that voice of shuddering, even thrilled, conviction. The wages of sin is death. My mother would go to the barn to tell on me, to my father. This was not an uncommon punishment at the time. We survived. My father fixed up the house. We got a bathroom, and the big dining room with the open stairway changed into a regular room with enclosed stairs The change comforted me in some unexamined way.

Several times, she told me a story about a crazy old woman named Mrs. Netterfield, which featured me and took place around our house. My father was away and my mother was doing some clothes-washing at the sink. Why did my mother decide to leave her washing to look at the driveway?

Instead, she saw the old woman, Mrs. Now she was running out the kitchen door to grab me out of my baby carriage. She stayed with me in her arms in a corner where she could not be seen.

There must have been a difference in the walk, a determination. No decent knock on the door. Just Mrs. Netterfield walking around the house, taking her time, pressing her face and hands against every pane of glass. I remember asking if my mother knew what had become of the woman. I was her interpreter. I was full of misery when I had to repeat elaborate phrases or what she thought were jokes.

I could see that the nice people who stopped to talk were dying to get away. After I married and moved to Vancouver, I still got the weekly paper from the town where I grew up.

Often I barely looked at it, but one time, I saw the name Netterfield. This woman had written a poem about her childhood there. I once made up some poems myself, though they were lost now, and maybe had never been written down. I know a grassy hillside About the River clear A place of peace and pleasure A memory very dear—. The same river flats that I had thought belonged to me.

I believe she was remembering it wrong. The sun upon the river With ceaseless sparkles play And over on the other bank Are blossoms wild and gay. She left out the manure. Is it possible that my mother never knew this, never knew that our house was where the Netterfield family had lived, and that the old woman was looking in the windows of what had been her own home? Who was it who came and took the old woman away? Perhaps it was her daughter, the same woman who wrote poems.

The one she was looking for in the baby carriage, Just after my mother grabbed me up, as she said, for dear life. I had two small children and nobody to leave them with. But we do. We do it all the time. Piano Concerto no. The Piano Concerto no. They have taken it to numerous stages around the world including London, Warsaw and Lille and future performances are planned for Amsterdam, Liverpool, and Birmingham.

The U. Canada, too, had its own tradition that was distinct from the Columbia model. Unlike in Europe, where oral history developed as a grass roots phenomenon largely outside of universities and archives, in Canada like in the United States oral history was dominated by archivists and archival concerns. Yet, while U. A Guide to Aural History Research , written by Langlois and others, was an influential manual during the s.

His program also published the quarterly journal Sound Heritage. The focus on aurality, however, did not last.