Hearing Many Voices
by Andrew Peterson

"While I was raised around a lot of spiritual people, growing up Indian for me wasn't chasing spirits through the woods," says Pomo writer and educator Greg Sarris. "It was fighting, anger and stuff like that."

 Sarris spent his early childhood in a series of foster homes in and around the northern California town of Santa Roses. "I was angry and frightened," he says of that time. "In many ways I was homeless."

 But he says he learned something important in the process of surviving those years. "Because I was a mixed blood and really had no home," he says, "I had an incredible ability to see the whole picture. I learned to adjust to a million different situations, to hear and read different voices and find myself a home in that place, which in the long run becomes a great asset for a writer."

 By the time Sarris went to college, he found himself struggling against more subtle barriers. "I remember taking an American Indian literature course where the teacher had us sitting around in circles, smoking a pipe and doing all of this kind of crap," he says. "And of course I was frightened because where I come from you don't smoke pipes. They belong to sacred people. You don't fool with that stuff."

 He went along with it at the time, but experiences like these forced Sarris to think about the ways that his voice was being excluded from classroom dialogue. The resulting insights came to shape the way he lives, writes and teaches today.

 "My approach to a piece of literature is to see it always as an instance of 'culture contact' where the purpose of reading is not just to decipher it but to start a dialogue with it," he says.

 As a professor at UCLA, Sarris has an extraordinary number of academic publications, presentations and honors to his name. A collection of essays entitled Keeping Slug Woman Alive: Essays Toward a Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts will be published next fall. A book of short stories will follow. He's also writing a screenplay for one of his stories, to be filmed by the American Playhouse Theater.

 He says he's delighted that most Native American readers respond positively to his fiction, although he acknowledges that a few have a hard time facing his realistic, sometimes brutal depictions of Indian life in Santa Rosa.

 "A lot of the older people feel ashamed," Sarris says, "and they would like those Black Elk-type images of us to persist, because it's safe. But until we look at the pain, until we start to doctor the pain in our real life and see who and what we are, we're going to be in trouble. And I see that not just with Indians but with all of us."

 Sarris describes his writing process as an act of hearing voices. "The world is always alive with speaking voices in my mind," he says. "I work very carefully to try to represent the voices, to catch them on paper, because you
won't have a person's sense of the world until you have their language."

 He keeps close ties with the Pomo community, traveling north regularly to participate in ceremonies. He says that just as his stories must carry the real world within them, songs and ceremonies must take place within a real world context.

 "The culture is living," he says. "Me songs are living. And if they're going to live they can't just live in the woods or in ceremonies anymore. If they're going to truly become part of your life, then they have to become part of all your life."

 He acknowledges his responsibility in what he describes as the continuous reinvention of Pomo culture. "Having grown up around the old people, I have legacies, I have stories. And I have to do those things right. I have to live up to my duties and do them the best I can, to leach and to heal," he says. "I'm not a medicine person, but I have to be a doctor in my own right."