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INTRODUCTION: NAMING THE NORTHWEST

The Kwakiutl people of the Northwest coast had a habit in their naming. For them, a name was a story. We say “Vancouver,” naming an island for a captain; we say “Victoria,” naming a village for a queen. For them, a place-name would not be something that is, but something that happens. They called one patch of ocean “Where Salmon Gather.” They called one bend in the river “Insufficient Canoe.” They called a certain meadow “Blind Women Steaming Clover Roots Become Ducks.” They called a point near Knight Inlet “Hollow of the Northwest Wind.”

Even as they divided an island into garden plots, the people would not use their own possessive names on the place. One patch they called “Small Round Beach.” Another, “Having Long Cinquefoil Roots.” Another, “Having Wind.” Another, “Place of Homesickness.” When the tide went out, two islands were sometimes joined: “Two Round Things Meeting Now and Then.”

When Franz Boas recorded these and other place-names in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the first white settlers were just moving into Kwakiutl territory among the maze of channels and rivers at the north end of Vancouver Island. Reading the book Boas made, Geographical Names of the Kwakiutl Indians, it is a shock to follow the active native names along the beach near Alert Bay—“Tree Standing on Flat Beach,” “Having Coho Salmon,” “Sound of Dripping Water,” “Having Brant Geese”—and then to come to the names of the new white tribe: “Cannery,” “Court House,” “Cemetery,” “House of White People.”

I want to fight my way back in time, where the new names have not yet pruned away stories with a chainsaw. I want to find new stories, and graft them living to the earth I love. I want to inhabit the Kwakiutl “Place Where Someone Grows Up.” I want to camp at the inlet they called “To Decline to Answer.” I would survive the place named “Where Dz′noq!wa Cried Out Oh!” I would rest by the river pool “Eating Straight Down.”

But names on the charts have changed. In coastal sailing guides, directions for crossing shoals to safe water often carry the refrain, “Local knowledge is advised.” Local knowledge is that story and place called “Insufficient Canoe.” The alternative to local knowledge is shipwreck. There are old ways, and pleasant ways, to avoid this—for the solitary traveler, and for the planet.

If they personified the landscape, the Kwakiutl also naturalized society. The word “Kwakiutl” itself is supposed to mean “beach at the north side of the river.” A Kwakiutl band took the name of an ancestral creature which had broken out through the ground at a particular place, taken off its animal mask, and become human. For the first two months of life, infants took the names of the places they were born. As they grew, they took many changing names. Adults took the names of wild creatures, and of events in the natural world. We know this from the famous in other tribes: Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse of the Sioux, and Thunder Rolling in the Mountains of the Nez Perce. We know this from the list of players which appeared in a Toronto newspaper for a sporting match of the 1890s:

LACROSSE!

TWELVE CANADIAN GENTLEMEN

VS. TWELVE IROQUOIS INDIANS:

Blue Spotted

Hickory Wood Split

Pick the Feather

Hole in the Sky

Flying Name

The Loon

Deer House

Crossing the River

Outside the Multitude

Scattered Branches

Great Arm

Wild Wind

ON HER MAJESTY’S CRICKET GREEN.

But the adoption of identity from nature did not stop with individual names. The social groups of the Kwakiutl and other original cultures of the north Pacific coast were organized into clans called by such names as Raven, Wolf, Eagle, Frog. A child of the Frog clan walking alone at night might find a real frog’s utterance comforting, familial, not only because a frog is a disguised human, but also because people imitate by turns the seasonal lethargy and quickness of frogs. The imported proverb calls this “a two-way street,” but that is too thin a way to say it. In native custom and its stories, one life is shared by a mountain named “Elder Brother,” a supernatural ancestor named “Made to Have Daylight,” a man named “Great Moon,” and a killer whale who dances beside grizzly bear in the winter ceremonial. If the Kwakiutl habits of naming were childlike, naive, they were also utterly mature. Their language shows connections where we have made separations.

I want to live in that place by water the Kwakiutl call, in the Boas transcription, h′lad. They called a meadow at the mouth of the Nimpkish River h′lad. Another meadow, a few miles east from the confluence of the Adam and Eve Rivers, was also called h’lad. This name means “Having Everything Right.” It is a place where people gather abundant berries and make good life. From that gathering, they gain time at ts!Etslä′qEɛwas, “Place of Meeting One Another in Winter,” to dance and trade stories. Berries by summer, stories by winter, round and round. “Having Everything Right” is a portable name, an expandable place. It could be what we call Earth. But it will not, unless we sift from our habits the nourishing ways: listening, remembering, telling, weaving a rooted companionship with home ground. I have to make my place upriver deserve that name. This is the vocation called “Everything I Do.” How can I follow it? Schools trained me to read books, and then to teach subjects. I would rather read the world, and then teach, or tell—but tell what?

When Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to read the West, to cross the primitive half of the continent, he sent with them a word-list he had composed so they might record a sampling of the Indian languages they encountered. But something went wrong. If they did record Indian vocabularies, their notes were lost after they returned east to St. Louis. In the Reuben Gold Thwaites edition of Lewis and Clark’s Original Journals, we have only Jefferson’s list in English. Here is the list’s flavor in four passages:

The list haunts me two ways. First—because Jefferson’s list is a thoughtful one—it speaks for elemental life on Earth. It names the essences and relations of creature, time, generation, event. “To kill” and “to dance” are adjacent not by alphabetical coincidence or legal code or logical necessity. They are adjacent because life requires it. “Yesterday/today/tomorrow” is the configuration of both casual conversation and sacred myth. “Yes” and “no” are two sides of one door.

Second—because Jefferson’s list is in English only—it summons the inarticulate, the secret, the old, the lost names for place, custom, and story.

Once, in North Carolina, after an afternoon conversation about Captain John Smith and the colonies, about the Revolutionary War and the Tuscarora Indians all long gone to their tiny reservation in New York state, my kind hostess rattled her glass of iced tea.

“I can’t help thinking,” she said, “how we look upon the Roanoke River every day, and savor our three-hundred-year history. It must be strange to live out West, where history is only a hundred years old, and stories only a hundred years deep.” I was chilled by a westerner’s homesick knowing: a century is a veil almost thin enough to brush aside.

This book travels for place, custom, and story. As water is pilgrim, I know the urge: to visit all the places I was healed. Water travels as local inhabitant, as essence of tree, of capillary stone, of sunlight pillar in a meadow ablaze with grasshoppers. By that pilgrim’s urge, I listen to my family stories, one long generation from the primitive. By that urge, I seek out the speaking places of my own country: Montana battlefield, Oregon fallen barn, North California coastal midden, Idaho eccentric’s hut. I listen for the way stories would name our country. This book is the listening. The task of naming I would share with you, for the naming is the active part. I want to learn place, custom, and story for my home. I want to name it in my own tongue, “Having Everything Right.”