escarpment

"Flutes of Fire" by Leanne Hinton

...being, An Introduction to Native California Languages.

This one stopped me in my tracks, the moment I set eye upon it. I did a quick, almost subconscious calculus... food, or book? Frybread with strawberries and cream, or text? Sating the mind's hunger pangs won out easily enough. ::chuckle::

That it was a book by Heyday Books, a publisher from Berkeley, CA and by an author who might as well be the spiritual/academic cousin of a more famous Hinton of late (Physics Nobelist of 2024 Geoffrey) sealed the deal, of course. A quick glance at the 6-part Table of Contents assured I would not be leaving the pavilion without this volume:

I was at the 15th Annual Two Spirit Powwow of the Bay Area American Indian Two Spirits organization yesterday at the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. Had found my way there via an entirely happenstance encounter with a Mojave Nation beadmaker and long-haired 2-spirit person the day before, who told me about this event.

And how convenient that the powwow was being held right in my neighborhood, at one of the old piers of the former military installation at historical Fort Mason, repurposed into what it is today, a center for the arts and culture — the piers having become pavilions for events not just for the arts but also, in fact, technology (some recent ones there being GitHub Universe and OpenAI's DevDay 2025, both in October of last year).

I'm looking forward to dwelling in Leanne Hinton's marvelous book for a while, and taking the next intuitive and logical step forward onto a linguistic path, namely: involving myself somehow in the resurfacing and preservation of the native languages of this continent, many of which are on the brink of extinction or which have actually died out.

Why? Simply because of the fact that whenever I encounter the ghosts of indigenous cultures here in the Bay Area, in landscape loci or in people, my mind always goes to the question: ...how did they speak their world alive? What were the words and grammars they used for incantations or just everyday speech? And always, too, when that question occurs to me I then half-hear something just beneath the zone of sound and I know it's more than just an hallucination.

All that, then, is to be added to the "in progress" threads that now mark the warp, woof, and weft of my remaining days.