Barry Lopez, who appears often in these notes, had a connection to my new home state. His name was Uncle Gordon, a man careful in his habits and attentive to his library.
Gordon was interested in the ancient peoples of Georgia, the Cherokee and the Creeks, and the peoples who came before them.
Gordon spoke of the difficulty we have today of looking at shards of pottery and other artifacts and trying to imagine a way of life — the way people thought about the world and each other. He imagined archeologists in the future thinking about what we were like.
And then in another time they will talk about us, about what we did, or what we might have believed. We make sense of ourselves as a people through history. That is why we should make no modifications in records of the past, you see, but only speculate.
I’ve been working on a piece of fiction, trying to understand the racism and religious and ethnic prejudices of earlier days. I’d like to say those attitudes and beliefs were prehistoric, but they were features of a way of life that I grew up with.
Even with good records and vivid memories, these beliefs and attitudes are hard to understand and thus hard to convey, much less explain.
It’s difficult to understand the people who lived in Georgia 1,000 years ago, and I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s difficult to understand a lot of the people I grew up with.
• Source: Barry Lopez, About This Life; New York: Vintage Books, 1998. The story about Uncle Gordon is in the essay “Theft,” pp. 262-70. The quotation is on p. 268.
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