He was an old Indian. His face was weather beaten, but his eyes were still bright. I never knew what tribe he was from, though I could guess. Yet others from the tribe whom I talked to later had never heard his story. We had been talking of the visions of the young men. He sat for a long time, looking out across the Yellowstone Valley through the pouring rain, before he spoke. "They are beginning to come back," he said.
This is recorded in a book of fragmentary tales gathered in Yellowstone in the early twentieth century. It was the last time this tale was ever told in a ten thousand year unbroken chain of retellings. Once, elders had sat around winter campfires, their fingers weaving illustrations with their fingers. Fathers were chipping spear points out of flint and obsidian. Mothers sewed skins into clothing. Children sat, entranced, as stories already as old as the trees and the seas spilled from cracked lips.
But tales have an ending, not only in the telling but in the retelling. Someday, all tales die with the last man who knows them. Writing them down will delay it, for awhile, but if no one reads the book does the tale still live? No, it is only in the telling from mouth to ear that a tale lives. It is only when it seeps into the brain, poured through the ears over and over until it becomes the eternal bubbling thought deep in the life of the brain.
So this old Indian's tale died on his lips. He was recounting the memories of his people, but his people had died. The skulls of the bison they ate were piled in the wheat fields of Kansas and Nebraska. Their treaties were broken, their sacred fires doused, their dances forgotten forever. He was the last, last of his memories, last of his language, last of his people. In all the world, no one knew his stories.
One day, our stories will be forgotten. The stories of nationalism and capitalism, God and Satan, Starbucks and LuluLemon will die on the tongue of some old man huddling in the national park of an alien culture.
Will we die with dignity?