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The Song of the First World
The Song of the First World
The Song of the First World
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The Song of the First World

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This book chronicles my life in northern California and the story of the discovery of an unknown form of rock art here on our coast. Beginning with my early time here living and working and supporting the culture of our local indigenous people, the Kashia Pomo, the story soon takes you on a journey of discovery and research with a deep dive into the world of jade, rock art and ancient peoples. Filled with color images of beautiful and unique examples of the stones collected by the author for over three decades, the book is a gallery of these treasured stones and the unusual petroglyphic imagery they contain.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherBookBaby
Release dateAug 8, 2019
ISBN9781543977097
The Song of the First World

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    The Song of the First World - Patrick J. Fisher

    Dedications

    I dedicate this work to the Morning Star. To the north and the south, the east and the west, to the above and below, to earth, air, fire and water, to the holy ground on which I stand. I give unending thanks and I praise the life that could lead me to this marvelously mystic moment and urge me still to climb. This endeavor, what I will call my life’s work, has taken shape over many years and I would like to try to acknowledge the important people and steps that have led me to this page. I want to try to bring it all in, so to speak, to share with you the sheer gratitude I feel for you, for all the people and events that have led me here. To those who have supported me, loved me, taught me, listened to me and endured me... to all of you, kind souls, who in some way, have contributed to who I am today, I thank you and I dedicate this work to you.

    In no particular order, I would have to begin with The Artist, whom you’ll soon meet, for without him seeing in me something and someone that he could trust, my life would have run an entirely different course, one somewhat more dry, monochromatic and desolate, I’m afraid, than the one he laid at my feet. The Artist gifted me with a life full of wonder for all things ancient. He gifted me with a life of delicious curiousity and unimagined beauty. He made it possible for me to seek out the hidden mysteries and for me to have a role in bringing some part of it back to you, back to the world. This is my effort to see that he gets a chance to tell his story.

    I want to thank in the most reverent way the Kashia Pomo people. All the prayer, the dancing, the work on the roundhouse, the travels, the ceremony and the friendships... I have so many vivid, strong and endearing memories of my family and I being welcomed so warmly into the healing culture of the Kashia Roundhouse. We’ve had the great fortune of being with some of the special people and the elders who no longer walk this earth and who I long ago dedicated this work to, but now, here, I want to formally call all you old people in with special thank yous to Lorin Smith, the yompta, Zelda Smith, Addrienne Franklin, Sylvia and Clayton Smith, all members of the Smith family who were the principal caretakers of the roundhouse and the culture of the roundhouse for many years when I started coming around there. To dear Rachel Antone and Bun Lucas, Harold (Butch) and Jenny Maruffo, Rodney Marruffo, Gary and Willard Sheard, Les and Florence Maruffo, Gladys James Gonzales, Charlotte Smith, Howie Maruffo, Gus and Stiff Maruffo and Violet Parrish... may you all rest in my gratitude, in peace and love. To those of my Kashia family who are still living who have shown me always the greatest kindness and respect and so much more... Coleen Maruffo, Otis Parrish, Dennis Barela, Reno Keoni Franklin, Lorraine Laiwa, Chester Maruffo, Lorin Jones Smith jr., Antonette, Cheri, Richie, Jewels, Karin, Katrina and Sara... all members of the Smith family; Craig, Steve and Charlie Maruffo... Lester and Billerene Pinola and dear daughter Kayla Pinola and her daughter, Laila, Lamont McCloud and Joe Pinola, Guy Pinola, Brent Carver, many of you who travelled to Aotearoa with us in 2002. I have always had the warmest glow in my heart whenever I’m thinking of Kashia and I thank you all for the special friendship and love.

    Dear Hine Wirangi Kohu Morgan, our beloved Maori sister/elder/Auntie who helped us immensely with her deep connections to the world of jade and all things ancient and indigenous. Thank you for the many years now of your firm support, wisdom, guidance and encouragement. Thank you for hosting this Kashia family, not to mention Sienna and I and our young son, Koan, on your home ground. Thank you for helping me to set a stage and play my small part for great alchemical things to unfold in all our lives. Kia Ora!

    Thank you to Bob and Ginny Bivaletz, who also richly influenced my life and that of my family in so many ways. Thank you for bringing Rutherford Loneman into our lives. Thank you for bringing prayer, song, activism, teepees and sweats and prayer meetings and vision quests into our lives. Thank you for taking me up to Kashia that first time. Thank you for all night chants, late night hunts and precious and dangerous moonlit memories of Sandino. Ya hey! Where are all the elders?

    Thank you to Rutherford Loneman. Rutherford was a roadman from the Arapaho nation, and he brought the good red road right up to the land here where we all lived and gathered round. He worked with us, built the sweat lodge with us and ran the little boys sweat, which was hot. But he cooled us, with the tenderness of a loving and wise grandfather. He showed us how to pray, how to love our children and how to love and heal ourselves. He built a teepee one night, lit a fire and invited us in. He wore his finest, dark blue shirt with ribbons that matched the ribbons that held his perfect braids falling down around his shoulders. Then, in his finery, all night long, he sang and prayed and presided over the fire and the ceremony of the most beautiful church I’ve ever known. At dawn he blew an eagle whistle to the four directions and then he was gone. 8-8-88. Never will forget you, always think of you, Rutherford.

    To Namgyal Rinpoche, the lama, to Pablo Sanchez, the journey guide, Don Mariano and the gift of the Mesa, and to the garden of Netem.

    To Susan Kennedy, my editor, advisor and dear friend, you’ve gifted me first with some much needed encouragement and you helped so much in putting a warm, wise wind to my sails. I’m so glad for our collaboration and all the more astounded by what serendipity has to offer those who are sensitive enough to know and knowing enough to act.

    To Carol and Steven, Carol and Glen, Pamela and Michael, Nancy, Rick and June, Calvin and many more, who have so faithfully, selflessly, generously and steadfastly stayed strong in supporting our Kashia family for so many long years.

    To Rhonda Ray and Robert Costello, Sylvia Murphy, Timothy Osmer, John Sikora, Marion and Daniel Schoenfeld, to Marc Nassar in Lisbon, thank you all for your long time love and unfailing support and so much more. To my dear friend, John Lievore and to Caerleon Safford, to Polly Bradley and to Paul Ehrlich.

    To my mother, Louise Donahue, for bringing me into this world and to my father, for sticking a guitar in my hands at an early age. To my aunts, Marie Nobriga, Priscilla Secco and Alvina Quintel, to cousins Ray Nobriga and Arlene Brix, to my grandmother, Maria, whom I never knew but whose presence I feel so strongly, and to my grandfather, Louis. To the late, Wynema Lester, my dear mother-in-law, and Keith, both parents of my wife. And to Gail! To Mesi and Manuel Agudo Garcia, and all my Spanish family in Pozoblanco, España. Viva!

    To my children, Yolan, Auna, Jeremy and Koan, you all, too, have made me who I am and I bow and kiss the ground in gratitude, in wonder and amazement at what I see and feel in each one of you. You each have given me gifts too numerous and too precious to list and you’ve made me enormously proud to be your father. You have made me want to do something good for you, to do something that makes you proud. This work is truly meant in some way as my gift to you! To Uli and to Temra, and to Mari Luna, with deepest love and gratitude, I’m so thankful for you, each one, that I can call family and wrap my loving arms around as a father and friend.

    To my Granddaughter, Mari, you are the apple of my eye. I am indeed more than a grandfather to you and your love fills and fulfills me! You inspire me! Grandsons, Teo, Quin and Dino, you each and every one, too, are the apple of my eye, you are all the targets of the arrows out of the quivcr of my deepest love, the arrows of my heart. May we all grow together in beauty for many long, fruitful seasons to come! Be gooooood!

    And finally, Sienna, perhaps I could’ve, should’ve started with you because you more than anyone else, has given of yourself so completely to me and to the building of this storybook life of ours and you’ve unquestionably endured the most. You are the foundation. You are the rock, the giant, living gift of love that is you, that is us, that is our children and grandchildren; all certain testimony to this sacred gift of love that we share. It’s true, I surely begin and end with you and you with me.

    Lastly, this work I sincerely want to dedicate to each and every one of you, dear readers. Thank you to all!

    Table of Contents

    An Introduction

    Weya Dreams

    The Dream of The Rockmaker

    The Pomo Jade

    A Treasure of the First World

    But It’s Something More a than Green Stone

    The Stones of the First World

    These are the Eyes of an Ancient World

    A Classic Profile

    Chipped Stones

    The Language of Stones

    A Sacred Axe Stone

    The World Tree

    A God Stone

    A Crystal World

    The Seeds of a Motherland

    A Bear Doctor

    The Elegant Emissary

    A Dream of Eagles

    An Epilogue

    Bibliography

    An Introduction

    Here where we live on this far left, western edge of the North American continent we like to call the Kashia Coast, there is an admittedly strange and convoluted story that I’ll toil a while to tell. It is a difficult story from the outset for a variety of reasons mostly having to do with its outright unbelievability. But in fact, it couldn’t be a more perfect, more unbelievable, more left coast kind of a story to tell because it promises to bend your beliefs and strain your imagination in ways that you’ve probably not dreamed of yet, even out of the now well-established legacy of our legendary, radical and visionary past. There’s no doubt that it will stretch and strain my credibility well beyond its legal limits, which is quite easy to do since I’ve no letters after my name, no certificates of learning framed on my wall, and quite literally nothing at all to certify any of the things that I will say to you and show you in the coming pages. But be that as it may, this is perhaps what makes me the perfect messenger for this unusual task because I’ve no reputation whatsoever to uphold or build upon, no standing in any academic community to protect or defend, no professional or public pedestal on which to stake my reputation. My resume is that of an artist and a carpenter, a farmer, a husband, a father, a grandfather, a musician and a poet. I’m merely telling this story here because I can and, for reasons that I really can’t explain, I must.

    This story promises to be so much bigger than anything that I can write or say about it in these pages but please consider that I am merely trying to lay a little groundwork for what I’ll predict will be a future full of studies when this story is ultimately seen and heard and understood for what it is. It very well may take awhile but one day this story will stand and rise up on its own for a very long time. Soon, I hope you will see quite clearly that this promises to reveal so much more than these small, beginning, first steps can even attempt or pretend to do. But in these first steps I will promise, if you’ll allow me, to give you the first glimpse of an ancient unknown world that lives, unbeknownst to any of us here, in our very midst. Unseen, unheard and unrecognized and now, uncovered. This is the story of a magnificent stone art of an ancient, unknown people, that is showing up right here on the shores of the Pacific coast of California.

    The views expressed herein about Kashia Pomo culture, shamanism, the culture of the Roundhouse or the spiritual culture of the Kashia, (or the Maya, the Chinese or anyone else, for that matter) are my own. These are the words of an outsider looking in. I cannot claim to represent accurately any of the things that I’ve seen or experienced or that I’ve interpreted in regards to this culture or their spirituality, but it is my intention here to share my experiences and my thoughts with you and point to the many ways I may have been influenced in my life. We really must look to the Kashia themselves for deeper insights into their culture.

    The Roundhouse represents the universe. It is always built in a circle with a flat, conical roof. The dug out portion symbolizes the underworld, a place of quiet, peace, and renewal; the walled portion above it represents the Earth and the roofed portion, the heavens. The centerpole symbolizes the Tree of Life. Here it is that a man casts off his body. Kuksu sprinkles him with healing waters of resurrection, and gives him new garments of spirituality. Thus in entering the roundhouse in a humble and reverent spirit, the Pomo allies himself with all the great creative forces of the universe. ¹

    An excerpt from Pomo Indian Myths


    1. Clark and Williams, p.102.

    Weya

    Dreams

    An old-timer once told me that I lived in God’s country and time has only shown me the deeper meaning living in his words.

    I live in the land of the Southwestern Pomo, the Kashia Pomo, to be exact. It’s a rugged, coastal mountain zone of heavy redwood and fir timbered forests that is interspersed with oak woodlands, deep gaping canyons and rolling grassy meadows, all of it logged over and burned in multiple waves over the last hundred and fifty years or so. It’s still beautiful and green, albeit a bit scarred. There are still many clear running streams streaking down off the coastal hills and pouring into the major rivers, the Russian and the Gualala, that wind their way out to the western sea. It’s steep and stark, it’s rustic and rough. It’s beautiful and it’s still home to the Kashia Pomo people along with a somewhat evenly dispersed, rural population of loggers, sheep ranchers turned vintners, and more recent settlers like myself, who’ve inhabited these hills since those vaunted, halcyon days of the late 1960s and early 70s.

    But long before we got here, when all was said and done, the Kashia Pomo people themselves were left with only a tiny forty-acre rancheria in the most remote, most unusable and most forgettable corner of the county anyone could even conceive. It’s timberland and it’s beautiful and they’re extremely grateful for it, too, but to know and to see the daily manifestations of the effects of this history on the people themselves, and to compare it to the splendor of the Wine Country that the region boasts, is sobering, at best. To tell the truth about it is to say that it’s an ongoing outrage that has seen the complete confiscation of all of their traditional homelands and now has squeezed them onto this one little parcel of land, while the rest of the world just marches on by. As in every other American region across this broad land, the markers for the ancient presence of these people are all around us here, and it remains hard for many people like myself to ignore or to reconcile.

    Bob and Ginny are friends of ours who used to live about a half hour drive from our home in a neighboring community that’s about five miles away, as the crow flies. Both of them transplants from New Jersey by way of Bolinas, they ended up carving out their own version of the back-to-the-land movement in a log cabin a couple of ridges over from us. We hung around them quite a bit for a lot of years and we had many memorable adventures together that I won’t soon forget but I’m going to tell you about just one of them here to give you a little background for the beginning of our journey.

    Bob was the one who first introduced me to the Kashia, our Pomo neighbors up there at the Rez (It’s not really a rez at all; it’s a rancheria, whatever that is... the Kashia Rancheria. But everyone refers to it as the Rez, anyway). One day, around 1980, give or take a year, out of the blue, he asked me if I wanted to go with him to meet the shaman. I really had no idea what he was talking about or that he knew any shaman, let alone one in our own neighborhood, and I was kind of stunned, to say the least.

    Really? You know him? I asked.

    Well, a little bit. I met him once, but he’s really more of a friend of a friend of mine. Come on, Patrick, let’s go see if he’s home.

    So off we went one afternoon in his Volkswagen van driving out through the backroad backwater of forgotten forests and wildland vistas that stretch out past our home into the remotest corner of the county where they stuck the Kashia. Clearly, many other tribes in California haven’t even fared this well, but this is like the last little corner of nothing and nowhere that these forsaken people were finally shoved in the bitter end. Forty acres! It’s shameful. It’s also very much like pulling up at any other reservation in the U.S. or the world, for that matter, as this manner of dealing with indigenous peoples is not in any way unique to our own state or country, and many of us are somehow gloriously unaware of things like this.

    Bob told me about his first visit to the roundhouse as we drove out the winding road that day. Oddly enough, he said that it actually all began with a dream actually, before he knew anything about the Kashia. He said that he’d attended a workshop that was led by an Native American medicine man named, Harley Swift Deer and during a meditation participants were asked to find a tree to sit with. The instructions were to ask four questions in each of the four directions as they positioned themselves around the tree. Bob said he only remembered one question from that day at the base of the big tree, Who am I? he told me. But I heard this voice in that very instant, that whispered something real quiet, yet real clear to me... Kashia! I’m telling you, Patrick, I’d never heard that word before in my life and it had no meaning for me whatsoever at that time.

    Soon after that, though, he went on, I met a guy who made it all come clear, because he told me that Kashia was the name of the Pomo people in the land right where we lived and this friend, Alan’s his name, just happened to know Lorin, the Yompta," the spiritual leader of the Roundhouse.

    Bob told me that they’d been to a dance at the Roundhouse just a couple months ago and he said that they were made to feel very welcome and warm. They were even asked to join in the dancing circle for a couple of the songs, he said, and they didn’t hesitate to get up and join in.

    So we’re all standing in the circle and as the song began, I looked at the dancing of the others and did my best to mimic their every move. Somehow I didn’t really notice that I was the only male dancer in the circle, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered if I did.

    The dance began with the first notes of this beautiful Kashia song and the circle of dancers begins to slowly move around the fire, he said, and everything is always going in a counterclockwise direction in there. You’ll have to remember that when we go in, he emphasized. "So, we all circled around the fire four times and it all went really good! But when the song was over I leaned over to the guy who’s sitting near me on the bench, his name was Mac, Lorin’s brother, and I had to ask him, ‘Hey Mac, how’d I do?’

    Mac just smiled and giggled a little to himself and then he said, ‘You did real good, Bob.’ and added, ‘But only thing is, you were dancing the woman’s dance!!’ He was chuckling good now. He really got a kick outa that!

    I knew Bob well enough to know that he was always more than okay with being the brunt of a little added entertainment, especially from Indian folks. In fact, he’s usually the instigator if there’s any fun to be poked or had.

    Indian reservations all seem to have their own style of crazy little, pot-holed, dusty or muddy dirt roads, depending on the season, that threaten to swallow your car if you go looking for someone out there, especially uninvited. They can all seem to lead nowhere as you circle aimlessly around the trailers and shacks scattered here and there throughout the Rez with the same dogs barking in the background, same junk cars melting into the land, and the same, little brown-eyed, black-haired kids playing ball in the middle of the road. This is life on the Rez. This is modern day indigenosity. This is poverty.

    That day we pulled the car right up next to the beautiful old round shingled building I had actually been driving by and dreaming about from a distance for a long time by then, the Roundhouse. I worked out there at the time doing ranch work and operating a portable sawmill with another fellow out in the woods and everyday I would drive by the Rez in the early morning and again at the end of the day. I noticed the Roundhouse from the road and I knew that it was referred to by some as the new Roundhouse; the other, older, closed down Roundhouse had fallen out of use a number of years ago and could also be seen, but it was tucked off into a quieter corner of the community. It’s closing was due to the passing of one of the most well known and beloved of the Kashia’s spiritual leaders, Essie Parrish, and though the story is much more complicated than I can describe here for a variety of reasons, the closing of the old roundhouse meant that for some of the people there on the Rez, the new Roundhouse served as the last remaining flickering light of their spiritual culture and it was very important to them.

    As we got near I could see that even though the building did look sort of new with the conspicuous plywood walls under that huge, round, peaked, shingled roof, it seemed like we’d slipped through some unseen time curtain, a portal to another dimension. It was as if we’d pulled up in a time machine, really, sudden and strange visitors from afar. I remember those moments so well because as the two of us climbed out of the van and looked over toward the roundhouse, beyond the dogs and kids gathering around us, we could see a group of guys all sitting in a car parked off to the side. Something looked out of kilter, though, it wasn’t quite right. The whole scene was a little off for some reason that we couldn’t quite determine just yet. Looking back now, I can see that this was a classic Indian scene. Big car, big like an all-American gas-guzzling Buick or an Olds, kind of white, not new at all, in fact a bit of a Beater... and big guys filling it up with laughter. There were at least five guys sitting in it, two in the front and three in the back. The doors were closed, the windows were all rolled down and it looked like they were getting ready to go to town, only it was obvious now that they weren’t really going anywhere because the car was up on blocks and looked to have only one good wheel to its name. We watched them watching us as we wandered over to where we could hear them all laughing and giggling raucously inside. When we got close to them Bob tipped his cap back a little and leaned in the window like a cop and said, Hey you fellas were going kind of fast there, any of you boys got a license to drive this thing?

    There was another shot of laughter and someone inside the car turned on a high-pitched voice and said, It was those white Indians, officer, pointing over at our car as more muffled laughter came out of the back of the big, broken down car. See that hippy box over there with the feathers hangin off the mirror? There’s some white guys wanderin around here somewhere, officers. They did it! Then the laughter really broke out in earnest. We all laughed together uncontrollably for a little while there.

    When Bob finally regained a little composure he managed to ask them with a fading chuckle, Hey-hey, do any of you guys know Zip?

    Oh, no, we don’t know Zip. Ain’t no Zip around here, they said, chortling again.

    To tell you the truth, he zipped right outa here when he saw you guys comin. Now we were all roaring again.

    Well, that’s not quite true, one of them finally said through the laughter, I’m Zip. How do you dooo...officers...? he said as he held his hand out the front passenger window, chuckling still with a sideways smile and deep, brown, sparkling eyes.

    Hi Zip, I’m Bob. I was here a couple months back at a dance with my friend, Alan, and my wife Ginny. We really enjoyed the dancing that night. It’s a pleasure to meet you again, he said giggling. This here’s Patrick and we’re not really cops. We just came over to say hi to you fellas today, see what kind of trouble we could get into with you. We live over in Cazadero.

    Well if you guys want to go for a ride with us, Zip said to us with a smile, I think we could fit you two skinny guys in between these three big injuns in the back. They were all hootin again in the back.

    Nah, that’s alright, we just got out of the car from a long drive. But if you guys are going somewhere don’t let us hold you up, Bob poked back. We all laughed some more as Zip climbed out of the car and came round to shake our hands and greet us properly. He introduced us to his brother, Mac (the driver), to Gary, Howie and Willard.

    I’m Lorin, he said, giving us his real name along with his gentle hand. It’s good to meet you guys!

    "We brought

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