CPR - Tokens of Remembrance: Linda Hussa by Sonny Williams

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Surprise Valley is hidden on the east side of the jagged Warner Mountains, tucked away in the remote sagebrush corner of northeastern California and northwestern Nevada. On the western edge of the Great Basin, it is literally a surprise, a fertile oasis springing from the desolate but beautiful High Desert. The region has endured a 3,000-year drought, and it is a lesson in isolation.

If you look east from the Hussa homestead in Cedarville, it is 200 miles to the nearest town, Winnemucca; south, 180 miles to Reno; west, 180 miles to Redding. The Modoc County population is around 15,000 souls. Only sturdy folks search out this place of quiet, but austere, horizons. It is here the Northern Paiute people lived and adapted to the arid land, subsisting on rabbits, tubers, and Lahontan Cutthroat trout, before devastating changes were brought by the white migration during the 1840s.

It is also here that John Hussa and his family have been ranching for close to one hundred years. His grandfather came from Kansas, by ship around the Horn to San Francisco. In the butcher shop where he worked, he heard men talking about the opportunity in the good grass country of Surprise Valley, beyond the mountains. After marrying, he and his young wife crossed those mountains by stagecoach in 1911.

A third-generation rancher, John has lived in Surprise Valley all his life. After marrying Linda in 1971, the couple has continued in the cow-calf business, concentrating on breeding quarter horses, adding Navajo-Churro sheep to their ranching enterprise in 1989. On arrival, Linda fell in love with the landscape, the people, and their history, and she has written numerous books about all of them, including a biography on Nevada buckaroo Lige Langston with Lige Langston: Sweet Iron; three books of poetry, such as Where the Wind Lives: Poems from the Great Basin; and in collaboration, with Sharing Fencelines: Three Friends Write from Nevada’s Sagebrush Corner, and others.

Linda Hussa’s latest book, Tokens in an Indian Graveyard, published by Black Rock Press of the University of Nevada, Reno, is focused on the Northern Paiute people, who have eked out a living in this valley for centuries, and the conflicts and abuses suffered at the hands of Anglo-Europeans, as well as some friendships and kindnesses. Through a combination of poems, stories, and lyrical and historical essays, Hussa pays tribute to the Paiutes, having embraced and internalized the Paiute traditions and culture, becoming close friends with many of them. However, she does so without cloying sentimentality. Rather, Tokens is a collection of memories, painful, tender, and sometimes humorous, of Paiutes and Anglos attempting to co-exist, created in an effort to not forget.

Many of the poems are infused by American Indian legend, as in “In the Beginning,” told in the form of a Native American parable, and in this case, in the tradition of a creation story. The First People are making the world when the mischievous Coyote comes to help. He is handed a pouch of juniper berries and told to plant the seeds far away from the other trees, for junipers are greedy and will suck up all the water and so the other trees will die. Of course, being a trickster, he carelessly takes the juniper berries given to him and spits them everywhere, and “That is why / young juniper trees / are scattered / all over the desert.” In “Native Myth,” it is explained that The Serpent carved the valley with his tail, “and when there is a dark moon / I listen for heavy dragging / of a black and ivory tail / scraping against the gravel bar.” A spiritual wisdom pervades many of these poems, in which an eagle “who touches / the beyond and the here” and “The coyote / hangs / still as sunlight,” so that the people, the animals, and the landscape are inextricably bound together, and some of the poems, such as “Wild Plum Seedling” and “In the Desert Grove,” have a haiku-like quality—quiet, subdued, and attentive:

Wild Plum Seedling

Small round hands

work up

through tangled grass

to touch the word

Sun.

Along with such poems, a number of pieces disclose the cruelty and kindness that are experienced, as in the essay and poems about the Fort Bidwell Indian School, where Paiute and other Indians were forced to attend the government-created institution. The children at once suffered severe and painful punishments, while also experiencing moments of levity and humor, as when the children first encounter Santa Claus in a red suit and black cowboy boots: “Jimmy Washoe was our first Santa. / We thought he was only a buckaroo.”

Hussa writes in a nimble free verse, which, in her hands, enables her to subtly modulate between lyrical tenderness, suspense, and humor. Her language is clear and spare, calm and unassuming, while simultaneously dramatic. Though I wouldn’t describe her poems as mournful, they maintain a slow, considerate, elegiac cadence that extends beyond the mere personal and connects to an entire community.

Though the collection as a whole is concerned with the clash and blending of cultures, the book is also a commixture of genres and aesthetics. Hussa has no difficulty moving from short, imagist poems to longer narratives, and her skills as a poet are matched by her skills as a storyteller. Some of the narrative poems are quite tender, as in “Drawing Names,” which recounts the making of buckskin gloves, given as a Christmas present by a crippled Paiute girl named Maxine to John Hussa when they were children. Others are terribly tragic, as in the ironically titled “The Only Good Indian,” one of the strongest poems in the book, set in the early 1800s, when “wagons began to crawl / across the deserts of the Great Basin / on shimmering heat / like a string of ants following a deadly sweet trail.” As the story continues, Paiutes had settled on one side of a hill and white settlers on the other. A cavalry patrol rides into the white settler’s camp with newly issued repeating rifles, and the officer asks the wagon boss, “Now, / what if that rag-tag bunch across the way / was fixin’ to launch an attack against you?” The tension is excruciating as the inevitable is about to happen. The officer proceeds to aim his rifle at the Paiute camp and shoots an old man carrying wood. Subsequently, all the soldiers begin firing and massacre the Paiutes.

One of Hussa’s supreme talents is her gift for description and lyrical phrasing, even in the midst of such suffering and bloodshed. In the short story “The Story They Tell Is This,” a young Paiute buckaroo who has a special relationship with horses comes to Fish Springs Canyon to gather the cattle and brand the calves. He encounters a nameless, racist, and brutal range rider who mistreats people as well as horses, so much so that “Blood splattered the rowels of his spurs, up the cuff of his pants, and layered thick on the lash of his quirt.” Even as the boy endures the man’s cruelties, the boy enjoys a moment of respite as he lies in the pasture waiting for the muffled approach of the horse band at twilight: “They found him, snuffled at his blankets, his hair, his bare arms above the blanket, and slept standing near him or lay in their own constellations under the night sky.”

Thomas McGuane, writer, Montana rancher, and cutting horse enthusiast, once told me, “Writing brings people to life.” Hussa opens up the private memory of the Paiutes and brings these people to life, offering these memories and connections to the people and this unique landscape as tokens. But the tokens Hussa offers here are not ones of guilt or even regret, but ones of understanding and forgiveness. For tokens guide us and keep us from getting lost, or breaking the strand that binds all of us to the earth. As she writes in the story “Night Talking Women,” “For all the sorrow there has been between our people, we are human beings after all, and we will watch out for each other.”