A survey of recent titles that explore native art and culture, local birds and resident whales, mountaineering and the mycorrhizosphere, and other topics both relevant and esoteric.
Reviews by Christian Martin
In the pages of Douglas H. Chadwick's
The Grandest of Lives: Eye to Eye with Whales (Sierra Club Books), the Whitefish, MT-based author of *True Grizz* turns his attention to the coast and delivers an insightful and impassioned exploration of humpback, northern bottlenose, orca, minke and blue whales. A mixture of natural history, personal travels and the latest scientific information, Chadwick writes clearly and convincingly, his enthusiasm for cetaceans keeping the narrative aloft. Journeying through the Puget Sound, the author describes an afternoon spent with orcas as providing "…a few hours that raise enough questions to last months or years, partial glimpses of a thousand possibilities, notes penciled on to data sheets, and, almost always, a glimmer of magic in between the lines."
Natural history comes alive in
Birdsongs of the Pacific Northwest (The Mountaineers Books), which combines field guide information with a CD of recorded birdsong. Stephen R. Whitney and Elizabeth Briars Hart created the detailed drawings and assembled the identification data, while Martyn Stewart did the admirable work of producing excellent field recordings of dozens of birds found in the Northwest. Stewart's was daunting task: he collected birdsongs for four years to produce this CD, battling the ambient noise pollution of everyday clatter like leaf blowers and auto traffic, often recording for twelve hours in order to capture a quality 20-second recording. Whereas previous offerings of the sounds of birds found in our area were actually recordings from the eastern United States, Stewart is proud to have recorded Pacific Northwest birds singing in their unique Pacific Northwest dialects.
There is also a wealth of natural history in Jon R. Luoma's
The Hidden Forest: The Biography of an Ecosystem (Oregon State University Press). As the title suggests, this is a deep profile of a forest, from the mycorrhizosphere to the crown and all points in between. The place is called the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest – 16,000 acres of old-growth in Central Oregon's Cascade mountains – and serves as a living laboratory from which countless discoveries about the ecology of Pacific Northwest primeval forest have been uncovered. Legendary University of Washington forestry professor Jerry Franklin is the main dramatic character here, and *Audubon* magazine editor Luoma does an excellent job serving as interpreter of science and nature.
Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (Trinity Press) is a volume that likewise seeks to better interpret and understand the landscape, and it revels in the diversity of the lexicon with which Americans have used to describe the physical features of our country. Edited by Oregonians Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney, *Homeground* is an unusual reference book that collects and presents distinctively American vocabulary that have grown out of distinctive American land- and water forms. Do you know what a bogmat, desire path, cowbelly or nunatak are? How about a pingo, viewshed, riprap, oxbow lake or hueco? Each term is an indigenous expression for a particular natural feature, and in order to preserve these homegrown linguistics, Lopez and Gwartney assigned 45 different writers from all around the country 20 terms to research and define, resulting in 850 unique definitions. So, the reader gets Robert Michael Pyle on "stream sink," Barbara Kingsolver on "karst," Patiann Rogers on "panhandle," Jon Krakauer on "gendarme," Terry Tempest Williams on "chaco," plus contributions from Gretel Ehrlich, Charles Frazier, Bill McKibben, Linda Hogan, Kim Stafford, Robert Hass and many other gifted wordsmiths. The resulting text is oddly fascinating, hypnotic even, thanks to the wide range of writing styles and voices.
While not the kind of book you'll want to curl up with for a relaxing winter evening of pleasure reading,
Haida Gwaii: Human History and the Environment from the Time of the Loon to the Time of the Iron People (University of British Columbia Press/University of Washington Press) does seem to me to be an indispensable book for those interested in the lifeways and culture of local native peoples. Reading the book itself is dense and humorless – I much prefer scientific writing that is "literary" while remaining factual – but regardless of the monotone prose, there is a wealth of new information in these pages of the old ways of the civilization in what are now called the Queen Charlotte Islands: the evolution of black bear, three-spined stickleback, caribou, cedar and ferns in relationship to Haida Gwaii people, ice age impacts and a trove of traditional stories, like young boys turning in to ducks, Foam Woman creating floods and the arrangement of all beings by Raven. "Science is coming of age," writes Haida elder Guujaaq in the Foreword," and while there is a convergence and a reconciliation of science with our histories, scientists may have to take our word on certain facts."
Oregon State University also published a book that illuminates the dimmer corners of ancient Pacific Northwest History, and Katherine Barber's
Death of Cellilo Falls (UW Press) is a fine biography of the Dalles area of the Columbia River, a place that attracted indigenous people for 11,000 years. At the height of the Cellilo era, over 10,000 Indians gathered there for the spring and fall salmon runs, arriving from all corners of the Northwest to fish, harvest, socialize and trade. Pipestone, buffalo meat and horses arrived from the east, blankets and beads from the north, obsidian and slaves from the south and wappato from the west – and everybody left with tons of salmon jerky. Barber's book travels from these times of plenty through to the building of the Dalles dam and the irreplaceable loss of this hub of native Northwest civilization.
But far the most intriguing way to absorb local native history would be Gerta Moray's
Uncommon Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr (UBC Press/UW Press), a coffee table-sized book that leavens academic essays with archival photographs, sketch book drawings and watercolors, maps and dozens of color plates – a kaleidoscope of artistic outpourings from Emily Carr, one of the premier painters of the west coast of North America. Moray's scholarship explores the interactions between early British Columbian settlers and the First Nation people of the Vancouver Island region, and finds in Carr's life and work a complex attempt at interracial contact that was respectful, sensitive and gifted, though still obviously colored. Her paintings of longhouses, totem poles, village scenes, portraits and environment tell their own fascinating stories about coastal native life, and Moray helps by teasing out the cultural and imperial history embedded in Carr's expressive art.
On the topic of intercultural interactions, the photographs of Edward Curtis are artistic artifacts that are routinely praised and criticized. His vast thirty-year documentation of Native Americans, in distinctive and somber sepia tones, contains both accuracies and exaggerations, and his critics charge that his work was culturally exploitative. But the editors of
The Many Faces of Edward Sherriff Curtis: Portraits and Stories from Native North America (Gilcrease Museum/UW Press) believe the "richness and texture as well as its beauty and its flaws" of his record outweigh the controversies, and they put forth 80 of his finest portraits to prove their point. One truth becomes the obvious: the dignity, hope and deep emotional affect emanating from the faces of these original people are moving beyond words and across time.
Combining many of the topics that arise in the previous titles – native traditions, natural history, art criticism, interracial encounters – Aldona Jonaitis's
Art of the Northwest Coast (Douglas & McIntyre/UW Press) serves as a highly accessible survey of the big picture of indigenous art of Cascadia, a panoramic view that stands on the shoulders of pioneering scholars Bill Holm, Robin Wright and Steve Brown. Jonaitis attempts to answer the question of how "so much art, so finely made, developed here, in this strop of land from Puget Sound to Yakutat in Alaska," and she does so with an engaging storyteller's voice and a sumptuous wealth of illustrations of everything from a wooden shaman's rattle to red cedar bark hats and baskets to argillite pipes to a gallery of supernatural masks.
Offering one more perspective on Northwest native art,
Raven Traveling (Douglas & McIntyre/UW Press) hones in on the art of Haida Gwaii, including over 100 vivid photographs of masks, sculpture, screens, paintings, jewelry and an array of useful everyday tools. Produced to coincide with the 75-year anniversary of the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Raven Traveling" exhibition, these pages are laden with poems and myths, prayers and interviews, all of which help to create a living portrait of a living culture that has survived for untold centuries.
Galen Rowell was an archetypal American adventure photographer, the kind of artist who traveled to remote spots, scaled sheer mountain walls and plunged down raging rivers in order to capture the high energy and excitement of mountaineering and other backcountry pursuits. Though he died in a plane wreck in 2002, his legacy has been preserved in
Galen Rowell: A Retrospective (Sierra Club Books), which showcases 175 of his iconic images from California's Sierra Nevadas, Tibet's Himalayas, Chile's Patagonia and beyond. Unlike much of the mountaineering culture, Rowell's output was never the typical adrenaline-fueled fare of "extreme sports." Intimacy and reverence animate his photographs, and he frequently turned his lens to wildlife, foreign culture and the textured details of the planet's landscapes. This book is an awe-inspiring celebration of the diversity of life and land on earth, created by a man who went the extra distance to pursue his passions.
Passion for the wild likewise guided the life and work of Edward Abbey, the legendary author who is routinely marginalized as a "nature writer." In reality, Abbey was novelist, philosophizer, polemicist, essayist, poet, part-time misanthrope and world-class crank. What unites his diverse bibliography is an unceasing and vehement concern for America's wilderness and the values that wild places bestow upon our fledgling culture, as well as a love of argument and debate, a gift for clever usage of the English language, a politically-incorrect sense of humor and a heartfelt dedication to the deserts of the Southwest. All of these qualities can be found in raging abundance in
Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast (Milkweed Editions), a collection of his correspondences to Annie Dillard, Jim Harrison, Barry Lopez, Cormac McCarthy and a wide range of periodicals, government agencies and book publishers. At turns wrathful, sarcastic, generous, hilarious, moving and angry, the sheer brilliance and entertainment to be found in Abbey's prodigious output of letters makes me rue the loss of handwritten letters and postcards in our digital age.
