sonora2sonoma

One morning the first week of my visit, October 6, 1981, to be exact, I was awakened to the sound of Dave’s voice proclaiming excitedly “They just shot Sadat!” He had come to my room to share this dreadful news he’d just heard on the radio—one more bit of hope dashed on the rocks of ignorance and fear!

No matter how inured we become to the actions of those who view violence as a legitimate means to redress grievance, events like this never seem to lose their shock value.

They also provide markers capable, like certain smells, of directing our attention in an instant to a former time in a different world. How many people remember, for instance, where they were and what they were doing when JFK was assassinated? Or Martin Luther King Jr.? Or when the planes took out the twin towers? Sadat’s killing was, for me, such an instant, a cause for reflection then, and even now these many years later. Will it ever end? Not likely, I fear, at least in a time any of us will live to see.

How different our world might be if people but realized the absolute truth embedded in the words of Anne Frank, penned faithfully and trustingly, despite the unspeakable horror lurking just beyond her walls,

“How lovely to think that no one need wait a moment. We can start now, start slowly, changing the world. How lovely that everyone, great and small, can make a contribution toward introducing justice straightaway. And you can always, always give something, even if it is only kindness!”

Though what Anne gave did not ultimately benefit her personally, beyond the moment, the gift of her writing continues to provide inspiration and hope to oppressed peoples everywhere.

And perhaps that’s the point!

Somewhere in my maze of misplaced memorabilia I still have the Newsweek issue commemorating Sadat’s assassination. It saddens me every time I come across it.

***

I made the acquaintance of a young Eskimo woman while in Nome. I can still recall how she pronounced her name in Inupiaq but cannot come close to spelling it out properly. Suffice to say her name translated to “Shooting Star.” I met her in a bar and she came home  with me. The next morning, she was already gone when I awoke and so was the small mini-cd/tape recorder I’d brought with me from California. I never saw either of them again.

The night before, Shooting Star had told me about her grandfather and how he’d been a shaman who’d possessed the ability to view “Eskimo Television.” The idea behind it was to fill the bottom of a bucket with water and then peer into the bucket, where a person possessing the ability to do so could view events from the past or see things that hadn’t happened yet.

Naturally, the early Christian missionaries took a dim view of such practices and sought to eliminate them from the native culture by whatever means necessary. In Shooting Star’s grandfather’s case, that meant he was forced to undergo a ritual “killing” of his old self in order that his new, “Christian” self could arise to replace it.

After her grandfather had undergone his new “transformation,” his immortal soul would be able to be “saved” when judgment day arrived. The poor man also, in the process, lost his ability to see Eskimo Television.

I’ve always found it curious how Christian Missionaries venturing into the world’s wild places for the purpose of inculcating in them the notion of “original sin” do so in order that they can then turn around, once done, and offer these poor people, after they’ve sufficiently taxed their spiritual beliefs, a remedy for what then ails them.

My own grandfather, on my mother’s side, did a stint as a Mormon missionary in New Guinea in his youth, as was expected of men of his cohort in the Mormon religion.  Somewhere I have, courtesy of my cousin, Linda, a copy of his diary describing his time there. Unfortunately, it’s more a succession of notes detailing when he did his laundry, how far he walked on such and such a day, and other such mundane bits rather than a dive into his feelings about his mission, what it meant and if he’d had any doubts about its efficacy.

Disappointingly, I never got to meet the man as he was among those who perished, at 27 years of age, in the deadly second wave of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.

Tim Konrad

(To be continued . . )