Looking for a Story to Tell

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After my book, The Wind Won't Know Me: A History of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute, was published in 1993, Ella asked me if I would come back to write another book, this one about her father's life. She wanted a record of the old ways, so her grandchildren, who would not grow up on the reservation, could learn about their great-grandparents. I agreed. The new book, Beyond the Four Corners of the World, evolved into a story of Ella's own life, beginning with her childhood in the ancient world of planting, sheep herding, and religious observance, following her to government boarding school and then to a college education and the white world. The story of her difficult journey into modernity was intertwined with the narratives of her mother and father and grandparents, the echoes of her past, the North Stars of her life. I understood how loud were those echoes, how steadfast the guiding stars.

I wrote the book because she had asked me to--not an everyday occurrence for a white writer. But later, I came to understand that the writing had a much deeper significance for me. I realized that by making a compendium of her stories, I was creating a reliquary of sorts--a reliquary of stories handed down from mother to daughters--as a substitute for the collection I did not have. What were the stories of my own mother and grandmother? I hadn't heard them. I lived in a family devoid of women's stories. If I had a past or a tradition, I didn't know it.

Perhaps my predecessors' decision not to pass down their memories was an understandable reaction to the poverty and persecution they had suffered as Jews in Eastern Europe. Perhaps they wanted so desperately to fit in, to be American, that they left behind the unhappy stories of their pasts without second thoughts. There were of course stories of the new world--children sent to elite colleges, advanced degrees won, businesses started, children born. America offered a new start that they were happy to embrace.

Ella's forebears had also faced relocations, killings, and deprivations, yet they clung vigorously to their tradition. Her ancestors, however, did not leave one world for another, their world, their past, was stolen right from under them. They have every interest in preserving memories of that time, because they have not yet found their destinies in its replacement. Ella understood how much her forebears' stories informed her own, and she knew the poverty she would feel without them.

But I venture to suggest that we have the same need. Who are we without the stories of those who came before? We need to hear their voices before we can hear our own. Only through others can we see ourselves. The Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin put it this way:

'I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another. To be means to communicate... To be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself. A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary: looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another... I cannot imagine without another, I cannot become myself without another; I must find myself in another by finding another in myself.'

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