Betrayal, Rejuvenation, and the History of a People

In 2004, Oregon’s Siletz Tribe asked Charles Wilkinson to write its tribal history. Wilkinson (distinguished legal scholar and lifelong student of the American West) took on the task, and six years later we have The People Are Dancing Again: The History of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon.

Frank Pommershein (author of Broken Landscape: Indians, Indian Tribes, and the Constitution) writes: “Charles Wilkinson captures the Siletz people’s long journey of betrayal and rejuvenation with such warmth, insight, and engagement that a reader feels privileged to share in it.”

For more on the Siletz people, and Charles Wilkinson’s latest book, please take a look at this excellent clip!

Charles Wilkinson’s books on the complex history of the American West are among the most indispensable volumes on the Land Library’s shelves. Here’s just a few:

Blood Struggle: The Rise of the Modern Indian Nation, Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest

Messages from Frank’s Landing: A Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian Way, Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West, The Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West, and The Fourth West (the 2009 Wallace Stegner Lecture)

The Rocky Mountain Land Series will be hosting both Charles Wilkinson and author & attorney Walter Echo-Hawk on Saturday, December 4th. For more details on this FREE event, click here. And for more information on Walter Echo-Hawk’s book, In the Courts of the Conqueror: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided, you can scan our earlier post!

We hope you can make this special Land Series event. In the meantime, we’d like to share one of our favorite passages from The People Are Dancing Again. Here’s Charles Wilkinson on the home of the Siletz people:

“Their traditional homeland was literally the most productive, in terms of mammals, fish, and other seafood, of anywhere in western North America; western Oregon Indians understandably revered these ‘landscapes that fed their people.’ Their environment was so mild in climate — often rain- and windswept to be sure, but ultimately so easy on a person. The land was physically magnificent, with its green ridges and mists and changing coastlines and endless sea. Everyone was buried there, from way back, and all the stories were told there. This was where it began. The reverence for their homeland, for duh-neh, their place, is so complete, so profound, that their religion has no heaven separate from earth. When people pass on, they remain here, in their paradise.”

Read Full Post »

A Sheepwagon Full of Books

This post is part of an ongoing series inspired by the University of Colorado School of Architecture’s design work for Buffalo Peaks Ranch, the future home of the Rocky Mountain Land Library (and hopefully a sheepwagon or two).

In 2001, a wonderful Wyoming publisher, High Plains Press, published one of the Land Library’s favorite books, Sheepwagon: Home on the Range. Author Nancy Weidel offered one crisp, concise reason for our admiration: “The sheepwagon is a marvel of practicality and efficiency.”

But there’s more reasons to love this book, with its stories, photographs, and sensitive appreciation for hard lives lived in a starkly beautiful land. This book makes clear that the sheepwagon provided both a bit of warmth, and a touch of home. Weidel: “Designed to provide shelter and heat, mobility, and storage, the sheepwagon was the ideal home for the herder….It could easily be moved by two horses, a most important feature.”

Yes, as you can see, every inch counted, but space also needed to be found for the unexpected. Some sheepwagons had side boxes that “came in handy during lambing, when a weak newborn might be placed there overnight to be revived by the heat of the wagon stove.”

Given Buffalo Peaks Ranch’s tradition of sheep ranching, we would love to see at least a few sheepwagons return to South Park. Of course, being the impractical book people that we are, we immediately lose the point of the story and wonder, what books can we fit in this tiny space? When life is pared to its essentials, don’t we still need at least a small shelf of books? Here’s a few we would pick:

Two classic memoirs of the American West: This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind by Ivan Doig, and The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich, along with a book that provides a vocabulary for all you can see from a sheepwagon’s steps: Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney, and most definitely this classic Basque story of sheepherding in the American West, and the long lost homeland of the Pyrenees: Sweet Promised Land by Robert Laxalt.

from Western Wagon Wheels by Lambert Florin

And of course there’s this classic memoir from the Land Library’s shelves — Archer Gilfillan’s Sheep: Life on the South Dakota Range(1929). Here’s Gilfillan writing simply and eloquently about little known lives:

“One of the popular misconceptions about herding is that it is a monotonous job; or as a friend of mine puts it, ‘Herding is all right if you don’t have an active mind.” But there is really little monotony in it. The sheep rarely act the same two days in succession. If they run one day, they are apt to be quiet the next. They herd differently in a high wind from what they do in a gentle breeze. They travel with a cold wind and against a warm one. They are apt to graze contentedly where feed is plenty and to string out and run where the pickings are poor. Herding at one season is so different from herding at another as almost to constitute a different job.”

Read Full Post »

The Story of a Boulder & a few favorite passages

A rock is a book, according to one of our favorite authors, John McPhee. True enough, rocks have layers of meaning like pages in a book. Maybe it’s because we love the written word, or maybe it’s because we always wished we had grown up to be a field geologist chipping away at sedimentary strata — either way, here are a few passages that have always appealed to our naturalist/explorer bent:

This boulder seemed like a curious volume, regularly paged, with a few extracts from older works. Bacon tells us that ‘some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.’ Of the last honour I think the boulder fully worthy.
— Sir Archibald Geikie
The Story of a Boulder, or Gleanings from the Notebook of a Field Geologist (1858)

Rocks are records of events that took place at the time they were formed. They are books. They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them. — John McPhee

For a billion years the patient earth amassed documents and inscribed them with signs and pictures which lay unnoticed and unused. Today, at last, they are waking up, because man has come to rouse them. Stones have begun to speak, because an ear is there to hear them. — Hans Cloos
Conversation with the Earth (1954)

Image above: A postage stamp issued jointly by Greenland and Finland (October 2008), in honor of Nordic explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiold and his expeditions to Greenland (1870-1883). The stamp was designed and engraved by Norwegian artist Martin Morck.

The Grand Canyon at the Foot of the Toroweap, Looking East by William Henry Holmes, 1882

Read Full Post »

Small Blueprints for a Brighter Future

This is the fourth post in a series inspired by the University of Colorado School of Architecture’s ongoing design work for Buffalo Peaks Ranch — the future home of the Rocky Mountain Land Library.

The Rocky Mountain Land Library will definitely be a unique place — a residential library, where people can come and stay, use the books, work and explore at their own pace, and gain inspiration and solace from South Park’s high mountain landscape. The accommodations will be simple, comfortable, and as green as possible.

As we work with the University of Colorado’s graduate School of Architecture, here are some of the books we like to keep close by. Compact Cabins: Simple Living in 1,000 Square Feet or Less by Gerald Rowan is packed with innovative designs, including over sixty floorplans. We especially like the micro clerestory cabin with a footprint of 256 square feet!

Shay Salomon’s Little House on a Small Planet (also pictured above) has become another favorite, especially for its series of interviews with people who seem to thrive with less stuff in smaller places.

Here’s a few more excellent titles from the Land Library’s shelves on sustainable building!

Mini House by Alejandro Bahamon, Simple Shelters: Yurts, Domes, and Other Ancient Homes by Jonathan Horning, Circle Houses: Yurts, Tipis and Benders by David Pearson

The Steppes of Mongolia, home of the yurt (ger), Yurts: Living in the Round by Becky Kemery

lithograph of Russian yurt interior

Read Full Post »

The Accumulated Wisdom of Anonymous Builders

The third post in a series inspired by the University of Colorado School of Architecture’s ongoing design work for the future home of the Rocky Mountain Land Library.

Among our favorite books at the Land Library are those devoted to traditional architecture across the globe — so often simple and elegant structures built with the natural elements at hand. Yoshio Komatsu has devoted the last twenty-five years to photographing the wide diversity of homemade shelters. Built by Hand: Vernacular Buildings Across the World (with text by Bill & Athena Steen and Eiko Komatsu) is a hefty omnibus of Yoshio’s work. It’s hard to improve on the authors’ own words as they describe their book:

Built by Hand is a celebration of what is so uniquely diverse and yet similar in the buildings of different cultures around the world. Beginning with the basic ways that human beings have sought shelter — beneath the trees and stars, under protection of a rock cliff or cave — this book traces the transformation of materials such as earth, stone, wood or bamboo, into shelter.”

What Yoshio Komatsu has captured with his camera, John Taylor has equaled with his pen-and-ink drawings. A Shelter Sketchbook: Timeless Building Solutions (also pictured above) contains more than 600 elegantly simple and practical structures — the accumulated wisdom of anonymous builders, all responsive to their immediate environment and the available resources.

Here’s a few more fun books from the Land Library’s shelves:

Wonderful Houses Around the World by Yoshio Komatsu (a young adult version of Komatsu’s work, housed at our Waterton Canyon Kids Library), and our latest addition to our vernacular architecture section: Buildings Without Architects: A Global Guide to Everyday Architecture by John May.

And, here’s a true classic. We love this book so much that we have more than a few copies on hand:

Shelter, edited by Lloyd Kahn. With the oversize shape of a road atlas, Shelter is as infomation-packed as the Whole Earth Catalog, with over 1,250 illustrations. A true sourcebook of invention and inspiration.

Read Full Post »