"... So out there in this pristine, shall we say, land where everybody wants to go and see and be for a little while, that's the beauty of a place and sometimes, there's people there who are so unintrusive that you don't even see them. They've acclimated to the place. They live there with it as part of it. And that's the people who have a knowledge."
-- Faithkeeper Oren Lyons, Onondaga Nation; Interview with Bill Moyers; 1991.
When we moved into this house in 1995, some of the few nearby neighbors stopped over to welcome us. I learned that another, who lived across the road, had lived in the house some seventy years earlier. His name was Fred, though my four year old daughter called him "Old Fred," convinced he was the character from the Beatles movie "Yellow Submarine." As Fred was in his early 90s, I don't think he minded.
I rarely saw Fred outside, and when I did, he was usually walking home after spending time at the waterfalls. A c0-worker at the mental health clinic had grown up in the neighborhood, and so I asked her about him. She said she knew his children from school, but could only remember seeing him a couple of times. "He's a hermit, you know," she said. "And he has been for a long time.
Soon, I began taking produce from my garden to Fred's door -- not frequently enough to be a pest, but to use those opportunities to ask him about local history. Eventually, he became comfortable answering my questions. I remember one winter's day, after a significant snow storm, he and I were shoveling out our mailboxes, along with a couple neighbors' which were next to our's. When he took a break -- being in his 90's! -- he explained that as a young man, he learned local history from the old men, born after the Civil War. In turn, he said, they had learned from the old men before them.
Fred remained a hermit for his remaining years, but seemed to enjoy talking to me and granted full access for us to swim at his waterfalls across the road. His only request was that we leave no trash, something we would never have done anyhow. He told me how he used to camp out next to the falls when he was young, because he loved the sound of the flowing water.
This reminds me of conversations that I had over the years with another elder when we sat near creeks and streams. Onondaga Chief Paul Waterman told me about how, as a kid, he liked to sit on a hillside and drink spring water as it gurgled from the ground. That was something my late brother and I did as kids, when we took breaks from clearing stones from the hillside pasture -- after clearing brush.
One night, Paul's daughter told me that he had suffered a stroke, and that I should visit him in the hospital the following day. I was expecting the worst as I made my way to his hospital room, but was happily surprised that he was awake and talking to several nurses. As we talked, I thought I'd do an interview with him for a newspaper I wrote for. I wanted people to learn from another point of view not often even mentioned in the mainstream media. In time, I would do four interviews for publication that I thought were pretty darned good. More, my supervisor at work -- a former English teacher -- said that they represented the best record of a past era that the current society needed to read and understand. I will include a few things Paul said that may relate to these troubling times.
In the first interview, keeping in mind the quote from Oren, I asked how long the Onondaga had lived here? "The first words spoken by my people were the names of the alligator and of the turtle. How old are these animals? And how long have they lived here, on this land? We have ceremonies with dances where these animals are involved. Think about that, and you'll understand how old the Onondaga are, and how long we've lived here."
As the year 2000 approached, a lot of people were concerned that Y2K would cause wide-spread computer failures, resulting in a global crisis. I asked Paul about this? "Listen: if the Creator wants to bring dinosaurs back, they'll be on your front lawn tomorrow. And if he wants to end the world, he will."
At a time when many religious people were praying for divine intervention, I asked Paul what he thought? "Be a good neighbor. If my garden is ready before yours, we should share mine now, and yours later. Too many people don't understand the power of sharing. You have to rememmber that all of the earth is the Creator's garden, and he shares it with us. That's why I say that sharing is divine intervention."
The last question of the final interview was about what message he had for readers? "Live. Don't be afraid to live. We can live through this.
"I did reburials at the Penn Site. Germ warfare killed them. At the Bloody Hill Site, it was small pox. Some of the burials were of parents and their children. They were holding hands. That seems to happen when germ warfare kills families.
"But we are here today. It's our turn to live now. And if you're reading this, it's your turn as well. Make the most of it. Enjoy your family."
Since a number
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