Mine lovely Durango! I’m leaving you. Your mountains are marvelous, your people friendly, but my bones ache for adventure. Damn straight, I’ll visit, but for now I’m strutting into other sunsets.
I wanted to let y’all know how thankful I am that I got to unstrap my boots and sit here a while. I’m a better writer, heck, a better person, having met all of you. Further skipping stones on the waters of reflection, I’ve talked to a f-ton of you fabulous folks. Here’s a gathering of some, certainly not all, of my favorite quotes from a year of eclectic inkslinging.
Culture“To me, I think tradition is a living thing just like culture. Tradition changes every generation. When I go back to the reservation, traditional ceremonial food for the elders is Wonderbread and baloney. They eat baloney sandwiches at ceremony. That’s tradition. It wasn’t for their grandparents or the grandparents before them, but that’s what’s traditional food now. I think tradition is a colonial construct. In a way, I would call my work traditional because as a Native person it’s mine. I made it. It must be. It can’t be anything else. It’s a reflection of myself and what’s going on around me.
Neal Ambrose Smith, artist
“[Marian Diamond] is the first person ever to publish a study on Einstein’s brain. When I say that, there is a ‘Yeah, duh’ factor. Like of course! If you are a brain scientist, of course you would want to study Einstein’s brain. But the fact of the matter is that that happened 26 years after his death. No one else had thought to do that before Marian Diamond.”
Gary Weimberg, co-creator of the documentary “My Love Affair with the Brain: The Life and Science of Dr. Marian Diamond”“It isn’t just publishing comic books and graphic novels for the sake of it. We are putting stories out there that represent Native young people. Those are stories that haven’t been told before. We want an identity for Native folks and the ability to see themselves in a story. Also, so other folks can come in and see the really cool stories that are being presented.”
Lee Francis, founder of Native Realities Pres s“Within all of us and our styles, there is a ‘Howard the Duck.’ [Laughs] I always go back to that. When people worry that they made something that doesn’t work, it’s like, ‘Well, it’s your ‘Howard the Duck.’ It was seen as a film that was completely misguided, but it’s a great movie.”
Greg McLean, director of “Jungle” and “Wolf Creek”
Life“People are still freaked out of trans people because of not knowing us. Come to a training event to get your own personal thermometer down so you’ll do better with folks rather than be nervous. Even good-hearted people will be afraid to talk about it for the thought that they might say the wrong thing. It’s not that they feel gross toward trans people, it’s just that they don’t know how to talk about them so they don’t talk about or to them at all.”
Adrien Lawyer, co-founder of the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico“Another common ‘should’ in this culture is ‘I should be productive,’ that you should be working all the time, that you are wasting time if you are just sitting. I have clients – and myself sometimes – (I) feel weird when I am just hanging out because I could be using this time differently. I should be using this time productively. I have a lot of clients who have a hard time relaxing because they’ve been taught that they’re worth lies in their production.”
Kris Abrams, psychotherapist and shamanic practitionerMusic“If you let things coast along, then look at what you get? That, I think, is the reason why we’ve called the album ‘Daylight.’ We wanted to shine some daylight on it. Here we are in this roaring daylight of all the things that are going on that people say, ‘Well, we can’t do anything about it’ but I think we can do something about them. We can certainly do something about the inequities in society and if any of our songs move any people to question those kinds of things like, ‘Why is there this inequity?’ and recognize that we can make that better for people, that we need cultural and political change, then we’ve done our job.”
Pauline Black, lead singer of The Selecter“I find that there are things you can joke about. I joke about my own music. It doesn’t mean I take it insincerely. This is my heart and my soul. I recognize that in other people. Art that is honest. Art that is made for sharing and is there to offer something new to the world, I think is sacred. I think human creation, human expression is sacred.”
Ronan Harris, lead singer of VNV Nation“I’ve heard the phrase the ‘ancient tones’ in what’s referred to as modal music. It has a certain psycho-acoustic effect that reaches back into people’s subconscious. I think that’s why when people hear bluegrass, the banjo, old time music or Delta blues or certain types of traditional music from different parts of the world, there is this sense that you’ve heard it before. It speaks to this other part of you that you don’t have access to in a linear way.”
Danny Barnes, banjo player “When I worked at Wax Trax!, I had my little shipping world all to myself. It was just me and I was away from the label and I would blast the radio on my boombox all day long and Taylor Dayne was one of my favorites. That song, ‘Tell It To My Heart’ – I loved it. I’d be playing pop music on full blast and everyone at the record label would be like, ‘Why is he listening to pop music?’ or ‘Shouldn’t he be listening to Laibach?’”
Buzz McCoy, co-founder of My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult “When I get onstage, I look at people and they’re so beautiful. You look at faces and see all the humanity in front of you … I’ll look at the crowd and see a face and it’s like seeing a painting. “That face, right there, that’s it! That’s the perfect face.” It’s so valuable. I’m happy and grateful that I’m in this life where that’s a part of my workday. I’ve had some shitty jobs in my life but that right there is part of my workday. The more you run into that the more you go, ‘Life is good.’”
Murry Hammond, bass player of Old 97’s“Not only do I battle the inner critic on a daily basis, but I believe the inner critic is absolutely crucial to anyone who is any type of creative person. I mean, you have to have confidence in what you do, but if you’re overconfident and you think that everything you’re doing is great and wonderful and you never edit yourself, you don’t have any objectivity about what you’re doing. No one is perfect. Everyone can improve on what they do.
I feel like I am definitely overly-critical, and everything I write, Dave is like, ‘That’s amazing! That’s brilliant! That’s great!’ and everything I write I’m like, ‘It’s terrible.’ We kind of balance each other out, which is good.”
Jade Puget, guitarist of AFIBeautifully random “I’ve had a few people in disbelief, but you either connect with the message or you don’t. I’m not a party favor and I say things to help. If it doesn’t help, I don’t talk about it. I don’t advertise it, ever. It’s all word of mouth. One of the reasons why I don’t advertise is that I’m booked eight weeks out. It’s a long list and I’m very grateful. Just like my dad told me, the universe will send me people that I’m supposed to help in some way. He always used to say that the gift was on loan. I was given a gift so I could use it.”
Trena Kirkland, Durango medium“Do you see this framing here? [points to the left side of the car] There used to be a sliding service door, right here. The conductor comes in, he sees these guys on the floor. He grabs the guy on top, trying to break it up, but the conductor’s adrenaline is flowing and the train is moving and he throws the man on top of the pile off the train, in the middle of the night, through that service door, right there.
Meanwhile, the fireman is on the floor. He’s been stabbed. He’s bleeding out.”
Jeff Ellingson, curator of the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum
“Hey Cathy [walks from conference table to coroner’s office door], come tell her about your teratoma. [Walks back to conference table]
Seibel: It was an encasing, almost like a uterus.
Smith: It wasn’t very big.
Siebel: It was about yea big [makes a softball size with her hands]. It was up behind the sternum, behind the organs. I looked at that and was like, ‘What in the world is that?’ And (the forensic pathologist) said, ‘We got ourselves a teratoma.’ I said, ‘A tera-what?’ He explained that you usually see them on the tail-end of a person. They are a hard shell and can have an underdeveloped fetus in them sometimes, or bone, hair, eyes, teeth.”
Jann Smith, La Plata County coroner Patty Templeton
