Greg Sarris on Writing to Remember Our Responsibility To Each Other

Greg Sarris’s gritty, dramatic, and innovative novel-in-stories, Grand Avenue, follows the exploits of members of an urban Native American community in Santa Rosa, Northern California, (as does the HBO miniseries based on the book, which he wrote and executive produced with Robert Redford). Watermelon Nights, his next book of fiction, is the multigenerational tale of the survivors of a small California tribe– almost extinct by the beginning of the twentieth century–who struggle to reclaim federal recognition in the 1990s.

Both Grand Avenue and Watermelon Nights, “chronicles of survival,” as he has called them, are based on Sarris’s own complicated lineage and gradually emerging life mission. While restoring his tribe and serving as their leader (for sixteen terms so far), Sarris continues to weave storytelling into his complicated set of responsibilities and scholarly work. He recently retired as a professor at Sonoma State University, after three-plus decades teaching there and at UCLA, Loyola Marymount and Stanford, where he received his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature, and is the author of multiple scholarly books, including Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream.

How a Mountain Was Made, Sarris’s inventive story cycle drawing up on ancient Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok tales, was published in 2017. Becoming Story, a kaleidoscopic marvel of a memoir, came out last year. His new book, The Forgetters, follows a cue from How a Mountain Was Made: “The Forgetters,” he writes, “killed all of the bears and the elk and the pronghorn. They cut down trees. You see, they forgot the stories. They forgot we are all one People, and the animals, indeed the entire Mountain, began to suffer. Now we must all try to learn to live together. We must remember the stories again.”

These new, intricately spun stories narrated by twin Crow Sisters are parables passed down through generations, re-envisioned for a 21st-century world fraught with unnatural dangers. They offer all of us the possibility of healing, connection, even love. Our email conversation spanned Sonoma Mountain from top to bottom during a rainy week in which the frogs were singing in the next season, Spring.

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Jane Ciabattari: How have your life and work gone during recent years of pandemic and tumult? How was the writing and launch of The Forgetters affected?

Greg Sarris: So much of my other work—meaning the Tribe and overseeing the daily operations of the casino resort—became more and more complicated. The casino resort had to close for three and a half months in 2020, and it felt like a ghost casino with no guests there. I had to figure out a way to make sure that the 2,200 team members could keep their benefits and pay during this time. It was an effort, but I was able to do so, thankfully. Much of the world situation and the political and social strife during this period has made me reflect in multiple ways on what it means to be a writer and what is important to write.

I didn’t really start working on The Forgetters until more recently, closer to the end of the pandemic. I wanted to tell important stories that would entertain and work in whatever way possible to offer healing and insight into many of the problems that we face today. I wanted to use traditional knowledge from my elders in the stories that I have heard to create these stories.

JC: You are engaged in many roles—as a tribal leader, as board chair of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, as a member of the UC California board of regents, and, until recently as a professor, to name a few time-consuming roles. How do you find time to write?

GS: Writing and reading saved me as a kid on the streets. It has sustained me through my adult life. I must find time to read and write, so I squeeze it in with my multiple other jobs. I remember once asking the great Kashaya Pomo prophet Essie Parrish how she did all the things she did. She was the spiritual leader of the Kashaya Pomo tribe, she wove baskets, beautiful baskets that are in the Smithsonian, she raised thirteen children, she was a manager at the local cannery, she played seven musical instruments, and all of these things with just a second-grade education. I said to her, “Aunty” (she was my grandmother’s cousin), “how do you do all of these things?” She answered, “Ain’t no such a thing as can’t.” Well, I don’t have all the gifts that she had but she was a great role model for me, as was Mabel McKay, the Cache Creek Pomo medicine woman and basket weaver who, like Essie Parrish, worked in the apple cannery, wove beautiful baskets, and traveled near and far to doctor the sick.

JC: You were born and raised in Sonoma County, adopted as an infant. You didn’t learn of your heritage—Jewish on your mother’s side, Native American (Southern Pomo/Coast Miwok) and Filipino on your father’s—until you were an adult. How did you learn the archival stories from the tribal traditions you use as a basis for The Forgetters and How a Mountain Was Made?

GS: I grew up among the Indian people, many of whom were my relatives, as well as among the Latino community. I met Mabel McKay when I was quite young, and she would often tell me many stories and much of the tradition. I believed at that time that I was Mexican, or half Mexican, as my original birth certificate noted that my father was “non-white,” with a narrative that he was likely of Mexican-American heritage. It was easy enough in those days for doctors and others to assume that somebody with a Latino last name would be Mexican. They couldn’t have imagined a person being American Indian or Filipino.

Many of the Indian kids I grew up and hung around with would take me in the summer up to the Kashaya reservation and there I witnessed many of the dances and heard many of the stories. But I must be honest, even while I was exposed to many of these stories and traditions as a young person, I was mostly going up to the reservation and hanging out with Indian kids for the reasons kids hang around together. We partied, got into trouble, and had fun.

JC: Like How a Mountain Was Made, The Forgetters is narrated by two humorous, cantankerous, squawking, bickering women, Coyote’s twin granddaughters, Question Woman and Answer Woman. What is the story behind these Crow Sisters? Why do you use them, and their specific interlocking need for each other?

GS: I have always paid attention to the crows and in my tradition, animals talk to one another and can communicate with human beings.  The Crow Sisters, being Coyote’s twin daughters, are a kind of carryover from that time when Coyote created the world – a time when all the animals were people, that ancient time before this one. There is also the matter of shapeshifting. As I write, the crow sisters might not simply be two crows, but two human sisters.  Question Woman cannot remember a single story she’s been told unless she asks her sister, Answer Woman, a question and hears them again. Answer Woman can tell all the stories, but she cannot think of them unless she is asked by her sister, Question Woman. In their exchange, they represent what is crucial in this world, a necessary interdependency. They need each other to tell the stories, just all of life is interdependent for its survival.

JC: Who are the Forgetters? What inspired this theme in your new book?

GS: The Forgetters are all of us. More specifically, The Forgetters are those people who in human form left Sonoma Mountain here in Sonoma County where they were created and traveled and populated the world, as our story goes. So many of us have forgotten the important lessons that were taught during these ancient times and given in stories for the people to remember those important lessons. The world is in much trouble today because people have forgotten the important lessons. So, the stories cover a broad period of time—past, present, future—with a variety of characters who have forgotten the lessons and find themselves in a predicament as a result.

JC: You begin the book at Kalhuci, a village near the ocean north of Salmon Creek, along the Sonoma Coast, where people settled in the late 1860s after the white people came (“A Boy Opens Clouds”). You end the story cycle with “The Storytelling Contest,” held on Sonoma Mountain at a time in the future when the waters are rising and the people need to find the best stories to tell anyone they might meet on Mount Tamalpais if they need to escape there by boat. What set that timeline for you?

GS: I thought it was important to show that regardless of the mistakes we have made in the past, that would cause radical climate change, that it seems to be human nature to keep forgetting. I wanted a story in the future to show the people just by our tendencies for greed or whatever, we are put in a place where we forget what we have need to learn over and over again and will need to continue to learn and remember. As it turns out, in “The Storytelling Contest”—spoiler alert—the best story is the story of The Forgetters.

JC: Each story in The Forgetters connects to a specific real place in Sonoma County. For instance, you have shown me Gravity Hill, the place on Sonoma Mountain where the Crow Sisters perch. Which comes first, the place or the story?

GS: The landscape has always been sacred text for Indigenous people. Each feature of the landscape is associated with a story, which serves to remind us of important lessons and who we are as a people on this earth.  When I see places, I think of stories that I remember from these places.  They both come at the same time. Mostly, the place suggests a story. So much of this book, and all of my work, is an attempt to re-story the landscape so that we can know our place in it and our responsibility to it.

JC: You also set stories in a village called Kobe-cha, below the hills east of Santa Rosa (“A Woman Meets an Owl, A Rattlesnake and a Hummingbird in Santa Rosa”); in Mitca, the remains of an old Indian village on Bodega Bay (“A Man Shoots His Stepfather”), and in the town of Novato (“A Girl Sees a Giant Sturgeon”). How did these locations inspire the stories? And can we still see them today? If not, why not?

GS: These places still exist today, but in many cases they are covered under concrete or actually, partially, or completely destroyed by housing projects. A couple of the rocks in Kobe-cha have ended up in somebody’s front yard, others removed for a swimming pool. In the story “A Man Shoots His Stepfather,” there is not much left but a bare stretch of land. Regarding “A Girl Sees a Sturgeon,” much of that water and area has been contained by dikes to prevent water from going over Highway 101 and looks very different but the water is still there, and it rises—it rises like the stories that I see and remember.

JC: How did you decide on the order of these stories?

GS: I just began with wanting to tell stories and mark the landscape with stories. But as the stories continued and grew, I saw a repetition of the various themes that I have been interested in writing about—our connection to place and our responsibility to place and our tendency to forget our connections and responsibilities—which brought me ultimately to the last story, that in the future where we still needed to be reminded of these essential values in ways to live.

JC: What are you working on now/next? And what is its inspiration?

GS: I am working on the next set of these forgetter stories, but they are love stories exploring what we forget and what gets in the way of our ability to truly love and care for one another. I also have completed a novel that I’d like to get out entitled The Last Human Bear and Her True-Life Story. The story is about a Pomo woman who is haunted by the traditional inheritance—shapeshifting into a human bear—by a stepmother who raised her. This Pomo woman navigates love and life through nine decades in 20th-century Sonoma County, California. During this time and despite her multiple experiences as a 20th-century woman, she cannot escape and must deal with this tradition that has been passed down to her from her stepmother. I am also in the early stages of working on a teleplay regarding a large California Indian casino—which God knows, I know a lot about. I did a screenplay about an Indian casino many years ago for Showtime which never did get developed, but honestly, I have learned so much more about Indian casinos: the guests, the management, the Indian people who own the casino—it’s unbelievable. So many stories!

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The Forgetters by Greg Sarris is available from Heyday Books.