Indigenous Poetics in Canada

7. On Reading Basso

7 On Reading Basso David Newhouse Wisdom sits in places. It is like water that never dries up. You need to drink water to stay alive, don’t you? Well, you also need to drink from places. You must remember everything about them. You must learn their names. You must remember what happened at them long ago. You must think about it and keep on thinking about it. Then your mind will become smoother and smoother. Then you will see danger before it happens. You will walk a long way and live a long time. You will be wise. People will respect you. —Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places Reading does not consist merely of decoding the written word or language; rather it is preceded by and intertwined with knowledge of the world. Language and reality are dynamically interconnected. The understanding attained by critical reading of a text implies perceiving the relationship between text and context. —Paulo Freire and Donald Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world...this movement from the word to the world is always present; even the spoken word flows from our reading of the world. —Paul Freire and Donald Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World Poetics—and particularly Indigenous poetics—has not been a part of my formal education, which has been primarily in the sciences and social sciences . I am more comfortable with the knowledge paradigms and truth traditions embedded in them than I am with the interpretative and hermeneutic underpinnings of the humanities. My comfort was challenged a 73 74 D AV I D N E W H O U S E decade ago when a former colleague here at Trent remarked that “anything can be a text.” I realized, in that moment, the limitations of my own education and how narrow it had been. While I had been reading for more than five decades, much of my reading had been confined to the written text. I had not given much thought to how this reading might be extended even though I argued in academic fora for the need to give academic credence to Indigenous oral texts and had taken courses on narrative argumentation at Bard College in upstate New York. My colleagues in the Trent Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies remarked that they knew an Indigenous student had prepared an M.A. thesis without even looking at the name. When queried about this, they spoke of the narrative structure of the argument and the grounding in personal experience; beyond these two characteristics, they spoke of the “feel” of the text. Their reading involved memory, both individual and collective, as well as expectation. Their reading was shaped by the poetics of our lives and the universe: that mishmash of culture, memory, landscape, and experience. Indigenous poetics is a way of speaking about Indigenous reading, as well as speaking about this mishmash. Indigenous poetics is an inquiry into the nature of the Indigenous universe. A few years ago, I encountered Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading and was struck by the absence of any reference to Indigenous peoples. As I read, I realized that the traditional community I grew up in at the Six Nations of the Grand River had a long history of reading: a tradition in which Speakers read the strings of wampum to recite the Gayanasogowa or Great Binding Law. In fact, I discovered that I was part of a large multigenerational effort to translate the Gayanasogowa and other documents in Haudenosaunee languages into English. This effort, initiated by my greatgrandfather Seth Newhouse, was highly controversial and continued in my family until my father, who insisted that the knowledge contained within the documents should be transmitted only in their original languages, stopped it. He would tell us that if we did not know our languages, we would not be able to hear the Creator calling us when we died (apparently the Creator spoke to us only in our original languages, a premise that I found difficult to accept even as a young man) and so would miss our invitation to heaven. I remain convinced that Creation loves a good reading and so perhaps this small piece may proffer an invitation even though it’s offered in English. Every year, I travel along the Mohawk Valley in upper New York state on my way to New York City, the...