Gatherings brought voices offering blessings and truths

Last week art, ceremony and truth telling were ongoing in our little town. Significant voices spoke on both sides of the Swinomish Channel. On the Reservation Thursday the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community welcomed everyone to a luncheon feast and then their Canoe Family, elders and four chosen youth led the gathering down to the water for the Blessing of the Fleet and the First Salmon Ceremony.

In Maple Hall, students and audiences gathered Thursday through Saturday as poets seeped into La Conner’s reality. Friday it was students in workshops with poets. During a 30-minute open mic lunch, students had a bit of their own ceremony, several bravely sharing their pain, the harm done to them by parents, family members and the world. They were listened to, applauded, and cheered by their peers. Truths were heard as well as told.

Saturday afternoon, Matika Wilbur, a Swinomish and Tulalip member and an artist of photography, spoke to 80, primarily Shelter Bay residents at their clubhouse. While she laughed often, as her audience did too, she insisted on truth telling throughout. Those 80 absorbed her words as well as her pictures.

The Christian tradition has it that in the beginning was the Word. That’s John, a Gospel, a primarily mid-Eastern, European narrative. Psalms come from poems.

The Swinomish always had the Word too, though theirs are oral. They choose specific people, connected to their events and activities in specific ways, and ask them to serve as witnesses with the responsibility of remembering and passing on the history.

For “us” Europeans, the dominant culture, sensitive people self-select as artists, poets. They often bear witness, tell uncomfortable truths, but mostly from the margins, largely ignored or barely heard. We get beauty from poets, but truth, too. And the truth is often painful, whether we’re told we have lettuce between our teeth, have feet of clay, are domestic abusers or war mongers.

Poets are seldom leaders, even if listened to. Every once in a while they are prophets. Too late, then, almost by definition, we look back and wonder why we didn’t hear that soft, though sometimes shrill, voice.

It is worth paying attention to those in the margins. From that territory comes perspective and truth.

Poets and witnesses observe, record and remember for a reason. Sometimes they are hard to understand, almost as if they are speaking in code or another language. We listen and consider the messages they deliver for our own good.