I switch to present tense here on purpose, as a way of suggesting that the indigenous language of the Puget Sound, described often as coming literally from the land, is still there. That a white/anglo linguistic reality has been superimposed over this space, and it doesn’t completely fit. English lacks the capacity to describe and make real the Puget Sound environment, and the American environment, even to colonizer-Americans, who seem to be ever-longing for their roots.
Take Jack Kerouac, in his hotel room, drunk, finding nothing of himself in Bretagne. Listening to the same tones of wind, pulsing as they do now, down the rue Victor Hugo.
I also notice on the map that the sites of settlements of the Suquamish on Bainbridge, are now public beaches. Places that I went often alone growing up. Places I return to when I am back home now. I got to these places because I find it easy to do a few things while at them: To play music, to write poetry, and to clear my head, by listening. Tom Waits says “A song is just something interesting to do with the air.” I think the air on those beaches is the kind of air that wants to be made interesting.
The map points to the location of one such settlement in what is now called Eagle Harbor, where the Bainbridge / Seattle ferry comes. A memory comes to me. I walked down to that beach once, and put a stone in my mouth. I sucked on it, desiring for the stone to tell me something about the way my mother had lived on the island, the way my grandparents had lived on the island, and back and back. I did it simply because I felt like I didn’t know enough about the place I grew up. I wasn’t stoned or anything, I just had the literal feeling that I could access a new sense of how to understand, by putting the rock in my mouth. Sort of like learning a new word.
I enter cautiously into my research of Salish languages. As I do in Bretagne, I feel like I am a visitor to these websites. What I want to know is how language revival looks for the tribes whose land I grew up on. I am aware that I have never made an effort to consider this before. Bretagne points me toward the investigation of the place I am from, and the language that is indigenous to that place.
I learn many things online.
I learn that the indigenous language of the Salish people is alive, evolving, and being taught. The Puyallup Language Program is a very active group of people working for the language. Their mission statement is straightforward: "Our goal is to revitalize the Twulshootseed Language. The method we find most effective is to just speak the language."
One of the practices for described for implementing dxʷləšucid into daily life is to create “a language nest”, or a designated place in the house where only dxʷləšucid is be spoken. In this way, learning a language, and making it part of your life, becomes an act of performance art, according to Zalmai Zahir, who “may be the most fluent dxʷləšucid speaker now alive”.
Concurrent with state-sanctioned efforts to mute Breton language in school and public places, was a similar, but more violent effort to do the same in America with indigenous tongues. To reverse this, the making-daily of language has to be somewhat forced. Institutions like the Diwan schools in Bretagne are an example of how designating a space for a language to live, is how a place can teach a language back to its listeners.
I suggest that grunge, droning rock n’ roll in Kitsap county community halls, circle-pits, square dances, vocalizations of Pike Place buskers, are a version of authentic oral patrimony of the Pacific Northwest. That these music forms are repetitions and reactions and impressions of sounds made by ferries docking, rigging hitting metal, trees shaking, rain falling, sewer grates clogging with pine needles, the gathering of sap underneath bark, the collapse and crunch of the cement and rebar of the viaduct being torn-down.
As I watch instructional Youtube videos about the dxʷləšucid / Twulshootseed language, I think of how generations of my Bainbridge Island family have both been deaf to, and have accidentally heard this language over more than a century.
In Port Madison bay, dxʷləšucid is not lost, or dead, but rather is in the process of being concealed by a history of real estate proceedings, architectural marvels, overfishing, yachts. My family, the Johnsens, possess a text of dock, bulkhead, basement, hot tub, elevated porch, and living room, where in a few days my family will spend Christmas together. There is a language of Nat King Cole, and a language of gift paper unwrapping. How can activity of my family’s settlement at the head of the bay be interpreted as music, and a music which allows for the vocalization of dxʷləšucid?
The other night I went to sleep asking my Puget Sound ancestors, both related to me by blood and not, to let me know what I needed to understand to be a writer, artist-musician, and active-ator-ist of “the traditional”.
In my dream I was on a windy outcropping by the raging sea, in the rain, in Bretagne. It could have been a Puget Sound place too. There were many large tents designated for music making. I had to help take them down so that they wind wouldn’t blow them away. As I did this, I saw another, smaller tent, made for camping. There was blood pooling out of the back of it, where a head might be laying inside. I said to aloud, What is that, the death of a language?
I woke up to the sense that my room was full of people, who were all making the glottal stop in unison, a sound I’d practiced that night when repeating the sounds of the dxʷləšucid alphabet, from an online video.
I opened my eyes and looked around for these people, but my room was dark and empty. Outside the wind howled through Brest. The way a dream leaves you with an idea you are absolutely sure of. For example I knew then that wind taught people to create both language and song. That the hitting of something rhythmically on my window was a potential origin of the glottal stop.
To hear dxʷləšucid, I listen to the storytelling of Vi Hilbert, watch videos made by the Puyallup Tribal Language Program, and watch Zalmai Zahir narrate the process of frying an egg. I listen to an episode of the All My Relations Podcast on the importance of activating native language use in North America, where I learn that a person who is able to tell their creation story in their tribal language, is much less likely to commit suicide than someone who can't.
Words are the foundations of poems and lyrics, through and with them, meaning, time, and physical space, act.
I hope that by sharing the Breton world I witness, I can use language to make verbal, to make into verbs, the words that stand-still, like nouns! Folk (ing) Volks (ing) People (ing).
By preferring verbs, can I use language to help in the decolonizing of regions affected by the destructive migration of people who have had the same skin color, facial structures, light eyes, as me?
As a white person, as an English listener/speaker, as a scholar, as a writer, can I accept what I do not understand, without imposing English on what I witness? Can I listen to Chet Baker’s Almost Blue and not hear the words as words but only as raw sound? I almost do this in my living room one night, and it's sort of like when you repeat a word over and over until you forget what it means.
If you are not bi-lingual or poly-lingual, I can only encourage you to let yourself enter the space of not understanding a language, of being confused by it, willingly. Knowing not knowing as an alternate wisdom.
There is enough that has already by agreed upon and rationalized.
The internet provides many opportunities to get lost. I impose confusion on myself by listening to a Breton language radio station for a day. Or to the Sicilian songs sung by Matilde Politi. To music made by the Ainu people of Japan. I have no idea what the words mean, and yet, I have ideas about what they might imply, which I let pass through me like small tempests.
There is still so much I don’t know about in Breton life, and probably never will. I take account of the things I witness, I put them down in an order according to the way my brain makes meaning of experiences.
The most intricate dance in Bretagne is called The Fisel. I watch a video of a Fisel competition. Even though this is a public event, and individuals are scored, I notice how the dance relies on being passed around the circle, from person to person. One cannot do it alone.
I meet a person in a bar who is young and organizes the Festival Fisel. He is wearing a baseball cap that says Folklore, and says Folklore is like his sports team, because he doesn’t play like soccer or baseball. This hat is created by a French Canadian musician with incredible red hair whom I have met at Fiddle Tunes.
I play Irish music with my friend in Brest, who has learned tenor banjo through youtube videos. He makes a recording of me singing John Prine’s Paradise, and saying phrases about saving the environment. He puts these recordings of me to electronic beats in his apartment. This is regional music in Brest in the sense it is music created in Brest.
Yann Tiersen, the composer of the soundtrack for 2002’s Amélie, is from also from Brest (Brestois) and recently performed at a free concert for Diwan Schools, which I attended. I noticed how his compositions, particularly one for the violin, rely on what I understand as a drone in modal music. He recently released an album which was recorded on the most Northwestern island in Europe, Bretagne’s Ouessant, where he now lives.
The droning violin song is call Introductory Movement. I find it on Youtube. The recording features the use of heavy guitar, played by Stephen O’Malley, one half of drone-metal band Sunn O))). O’Malley and his band hail from Seattle, Washington.
The weather here is familiar to me, in the sense it is like Seattle’s. Rain and Grey skies abound. I hear the calls of seagulls in the morning. What I am not used to though, is the wind.
The wind sweeps away weather like a sponge over a counter-top. The wind comes from all directions at once, and transforms the day I thought I was having in the morning, to a completely different kind of day by afternoon. I am still. The lyrics of E Kreiz an Noz, speak of the phenomenon of these winds, blowing through a concentrated center. E Kreiz an Noz means, In the Middle of the Night.
“It’s weird that you like this song,” said one of the musicians in Sterenn’s living room, the night of Yauoank. “No, like, it’s weird because of the fact you’re American.”
I’m still trying to figure out what was meant by this.
I get a Breton/French dictionary from the library.
The song’s first four verses talk about four winds. A wind from the East- a metaphor for the influence coming from Paris, or the centralized French government which suppresses Breton language / culture, I think. A wind from the West, or America, where Gwernig immigrates to find employment, and also meets Jack Kerouac. Jack Kerouac, the saint of wanderers, Sûr la Route, On the Road. A third wind that comes from the sea, and a fourth wind that comes from the earth itself.
Each of these winds arrive in the middle of the night, and blow over the place where Youenn, or any Breton person, lives. House as is Chez as in Pays as in home-country as in father-land. The fifth and final verse says, It doesn’t matter from which direction the winds come, because every kind of wind carries both the desire to live with, and the potential of having already acquired, liberty in Bretagne.
The noun Kreiz, middle/center, sounds like the verb that follows it in the chorus, c’hwezit, meaning blowing.
The still middle can resemble an active blowing. A woman in a bar (yes another bar) asks me if I have ever stood in the middle of the bridge Recouvrance, which spans the Penfeld River dividing Brest in half, during a windstorm.
“The other night,” she says, “I stood at the midpoint of the bridge while the wind was blowing furiously. And I tell you, the bridge was singing.”
Wind as song maker, wind as storyteller. Wind as original musician playing the material of the earth.
I take the Breton word for “wind”, avel, and put it into Dastum’s search engine. Dastum is another miraculous Breton website, where the entire recorded archives of Breton music, called the “oral patrimony”, are available online. Following the word avel, I listen to a snippet of an old woman singing, a conversation in Breton, and a beautiful melody.
A singer in town tells me she uses the Dastum resource often to learn new songs, which she then teaches her students, by ear, by call and response. Word of mouth, literally mouth to ear, or bouche à l’orielle.
Are we not better equipped to be singing, living, and creating new traditional music today, having the company of so many ghosts?
These traces of musicians, remaining through recordings, are not limited to Bretagne. The American website, slippery-hill, has a similar archive of field recordings of fiddle tunes. Including very recently made “field recordings”.
