Celebrating the Elders

By

What is an elder? That's the question a close friend asked me when I told her about the Elders Christmas Dinner hosted last week by the American Indian College Fund. "It's a blessing to help serve the meal," I said. "There were over 200 Indian elders there, from dozens of different tribes." My friend lowered her head shyly and asked, "What's an elder?" Her question made me ponder how we treat elders in the dominant culture of which I am a part. She knew, of course, what an elder was but not in the context of a special event held strictly to honor our elders.

The dinner was a special affair, but not a serious one (it's hard to be too serious with 200 adults eagerly awaiting the arrival of both dinner, and Santa). "If you're over 55," said emcee John Gritts, "please have a seat and a youngster (anyone under 55) will bring you your food."

The day after the Elders Dinner, Rick Williams, president of the American Indian College Fund, sent a thank you note to those who had helped. In the note, he shared something he had written several years ago about elders, and he gave me his permission to share it here:


"Tunkashila, Grandfather, Great Spirit. It is this way that we begin our prayers in Lakota. Tunkashila also means one's own grandfather. The reason that the words are used this way is because our Grandfathers are the Elders of the Tribe and in many ways personify the sacredness of the goodness and wisdom of the Great Spirit.

"Our Elders teach us who are ancestors were. Our Elders are our connection to everything in our past. It is with their knowledge that we understand how we fit into the World. Every Grandmother and Grandfather are sacred in many special ways. It is because of this that we will always 'Respect our Elders.' Hau, Mitaku Oyasin."


I'll bet a lot of you already have special traditions for your elders. Maybe, every holiday celebration, your family also serves the elders first? Maybe your children have been taught to wait until their grandparents are seated, before seating themselves? Maybe your children read holiday stories to their grandparents? If so, wonderful!

I think I will start compiling a list of all the literary elders who have appeared in the books I love. Maybe even a list of the literary elders who have written the books I cherish. Like the old fisherman Santiago in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea? Or the aged Wang Lung and O-lan at the end of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth. The list is endless. If you have some favorites of your own, leave a comment here with their titles. We'll grow a list together!

I'll end this holiday note with blessings for the New Year, and by sharing one of my favorite photos from the 2009 River Writing and Sculpting Journey - Lorilyn celebrating on party night with her 80-year-young mother, Lorraine. You can't help but smile!

Thank you to Jaime Aguilar and the American Indian College Fund for use of the dinner photos.

Read The Denver Post article by Tina Griego.
An advisor for the Rocky Mountain Land Library and member of the International League of Conservation Writers, Page Lambert has been writing about the western landscape and leading nature retreats in the West for twenty years. Founding member of Women Writing the West, member of Wyoming Writers and Colorado Authors’ League, Lambert’s writing can be found inside monumental sculptures at the Denver Art Museum, online at Huffington Post, and inside the pages of dozens of anthologies. Page designs and teaches graduate writing courses for the University of Denver’s University College. Recent published works include “Not for Sale” (Langscape Magazine and “The Rural West,” included in Fulcrum’s new book, The Light Shines from the West. Forthcoming are 3 poems in DoveTails: Writing for Peace. Page writes All Things Literary/All Things Natural from her mountain home west of Denver.

Comments

Cinny said…
One of my favorite literary elders was Penelope Fitzgerald, an English novelist who began her career in 1977 at age 58 and over the next twenty-five years of her life she won both the Booker and the National Critics Award. Her most famous novel was "The Blue Flower" but my favorite was a quirky story about a theater school for child actors called "At Freddies."

Her books are more like novellas and no two are the same.
December 23, 2009 at 3:02 PM
Anonymous said…
Here's the beginning of my list of literary elders, Page:
1. HENRY CAMERON--elder architect, and advisor to Howard Roark, architect-hero of Ayn Rand's novel, THE FOUNTAINHEAD (called by a reviewer "the first novel of ideas by an American woman")
2. HUGH AKSTON, American philosopher in Rand's last novel, ATLAS SHRUGGED
3. YODA, eldest living Jedi knight, in George Lucas' movie, RETURN OF THE JEDI
6. MARIAH MCGONIGLE and ALBUS DUMBLEDORE, professor-mentors of J. K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER

From Eric Schneider, La Junta, CO
December 23, 2009 at 9:31 PM
Alice Liles said…
I would have to add Granma and Granpa from "The Education of Little Tree" by Forrest Carter to that list of elders. Such a deceptively simple book with so much wisdom in it. And I will always look up to Atticus Finch in "To Kill A Mockingbird."
December 29, 2009 at 10:29 AM
Melanie Mulhall said…
Page,

Thank you for this post about the elders. I'm an elder, myself, these days, but it has been those who have gone before me in life that I have come to value for their wisdom, common sense, and life lessons.

I'm with Eric where Yoda is concerned. Also, an elder written about by Mehl-Madrona who I'm blessed to call sister and from whom I have learn much is Marilyn Youngbird.

All the best in 2010!

Melanie Mulhall
http://www.melaniemulhall.wordpress.com
December 29, 2009 at 11:15 AM
Connecting People with Nature, and Writers with Words said…
Cinny, thank you for the reminder about Penelope Fitzgerald's literary legacy. I haven't read THE BLUE FLOWER, but will!
December 29, 2009 at 11:48 AM
Connecting People with Nature, and Writers with Words said…
Alice, despite the controversy occasionally surrounding THE EDUCATION OF LITTLE TREE, it is one of my favorites.
December 29, 2009 at 11:49 AM
Connecting People with Nature, and Writers with Words said…
Eric, thank you for this great list! And for including Yoda!
December 29, 2009 at 11:53 AM
Page Lambert said…
Melanie, I was familiar with Marilyn Youngbird but not with the work of Mehl-Madrona. Thanks for adding them to the list.
December 29, 2009 at 11:56 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Celtic Blood, Cherokee Blood, and Nature's Earthly Spirits

By
Image
Helen Terry Dunton c. 1912 When I asked my redheaded Great Aunt Violet, who died many years ago but in whose western saddle I still ride, to tell me what she remembered about my paternal grandmother, she said, "Well, besides being a crack shot with a rifle, Helen was part Irish, and part Cherokee , and that wasn't a very good thing to be back then."   Auntie Vi was from the Dunton clan, my father's clan. "We have Scots blood," was the pronouncement, and I took it to mean that Scots blood was somehow superior to the Irish blood my grandfather had married into.  The Cherokee blood was rarely mentioned, and never with "princess" lineage claims. I continue to research this claim but have found no direct lineage tying me to enrolled ancestors, only the names of distant cousins and ties to Cherokee communities in Oklahoma such as Wauhillau and Stillwell. Beyond the American Pale In David M. Emmons book, Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in t...
READ MORE »

The Moral Dilemma of My Mother's Mink: Earning Our Place in the World

By
Image
My mother’s mink stole and two fur collars, one sable, one white, have been hanging in the back of my closet since she died five years ago.  I remember how beautiful she looked to me as a child when she wore her mink—how the soft fur graced her bare sloping shoulders and showed off her own mother’s strand of pearls—how proud my father looked as he offered my mother his arm. The mink stole symbolized to my father his ability and desire to provide for my mother (not unlike what his grandfather must have felt when he dragged a deer back to his waiting wife). Old Fugate Sawmill, Stringtown, OK read essay My grandmother never wore a mink stole, though.  She had been born in Indian Territory—the child of a laboring, mixed-blood family that logged for the railroad companies as they laid track from Arkansas and Kentucky and Oklahoma west to Washington.  Judging from old family photos, they ate a lot of deer meat—and rabbit.  Members of the weasel family, no doubt, provi...
READ MORE »

The Grand Design of Our Lives: Connecting the Synchronistic Dots

By
Image
SYNCHRONISTIC MOMENTS  - seemingly unrelated events that connect in unplanned ways.  How often do they occur?  How often do we fail to "connect the dots" that tie these moments together?  What do they tell us about the Grand Design of our lives ?  When the old man in John Steinbeck's collection The Pastures of Heaven stared down into the valley where he had lived his life, tears came to his eyes and he beat his hands helplessly against his hip. "I’ve never had time to think," he said.  "I’ve been too busy with troubles ever to think anything out. If I could go down there and live down there for a little while—why, I’d think over all the things that ever happened to me, and maybe I could make something out of them, something all in one piece that had a meaning, instead of all these trailing ends.” All those trailing ends--the threads of our lives that we long to weave into something whole and meaningful.  But how do we begin the...
READ MORE »