The Threads Between My Books: Klamath Basin, Memory, and the American West

The same country, different angles

I live near Crater Lake, in the Klamath Basin, which is the homeland of the Klamath and Modoc people. I am an enrolled member of the Klamath Confederated Tribes, with Modoc ancestry, and that location is not incidental to the writing. Every book I have made or am making comes back to this ground, to the particular history that formed in and around the Basin, and to the question of what it means to carry that history forward as a writer who is also a descendant.

The books look different from the outside. Captain Jack & The Original Renegades is a novel of the 1872–73 Modoc War and the man at its center, Kintpuash. The Spirals of Kemush gathers twelve Modoc origin stories into a cycle, with an app that lets readers move through the myths in a different kind of order. Enos: Witness to the American West is forthcoming — a novel set in 1846, on the Frémont expedition through the Pacific Northwest, in the years before the Modoc War began. And Yellow Bird, also forthcoming, moves east from this country to follow John Rollin Ridge, the Cherokee writer who is sometimes called the first Native American novelist, and whose life ran through the violence and displacement of the nineteenth century in a different register than Kintpuash's, but through the same American machinery.

What connects them is not a series structure or a shared cast. It is something underneath the story in each case, a set of recurring questions about memory, inheritance, return, and the gap between what the record says happened and what it cost the people it happened to.

Memory and the weight it carries

The Modoc War did not end in 1873. What I mean is that the war as an event ended, but what it placed in Modoc and Klamath families did not. There is a particular quality to inherited memory, when you grow up knowing the names and the general shape of a catastrophe that came before you, but without the full picture. You absorb a posture toward it before you can examine it. You know something about loss before you know the specific losses. Writing toward that history is one way of filling in the picture, which is also a way of sitting with the people who lived it more honestly than you can at a distance.

Captain Jack & The Original Renegades was my first attempt to do that directly. EagleSpeaker published it, and the companion site at kintpuash.com carries a record page where I put primary sources in front of readers unmediated — military telegrams, trial transcripts, documents that show the machinery of what happened in plain sight. My rule in writing the novel was to never invent words for Kintpuash. His voice in the record is already filtered through translation and transcription and the priorities of Army clerks, and I was not going to add another layer of invention on top of that. What I could do was write toward him from the outside, following what the well-established record shows and being honest about what it cannot.

Going deeper into the ground: The Spirals

The Spirals of Kemush, published by Basalt Sea Press, moves to a different layer of the same ground. If the Kintpuash novel works at the level of documented history, the Spirals works at the level of cosmology — the origin stories that explain who the Maklaks are and where the world came from before there was a history to document. The two projects are not unrelated. The Modoc War makes a different kind of sense when you understand something about the people who fought it, about how they understood the land they were being removed from, about the world the origin stories describe.

Kemush, the figure who moves through the cycle at spiralsofkemush.com, is the witness and the mediator in those stories. He is present in a world still finding its shapes, watching, standing between forces, carrying a kind of attention through the making of things. Getting that figure right — keeping him from becoming a commanding deity in the English-language mold that readers arrive with — was the discipline the whole project rested on. Witness is a more accurate word than creator, and it changes what the stories do when you read them.

Pulling the frame wider: Enos and the 1846 moment

Enos: Witness to the American West goes back to 1846, to the Frémont expedition moving through the Pacific Northwest toward the coast. By the time the Modoc War breaks out, a generation has passed since that expedition, but the encounter of 1846 is part of what set the conditions. The American West that the expedition was mapping was not empty. The people already living there had to absorb what it meant to be mapped, to be encountered by men moving through with an agenda that had nothing to do with the world as it already existed.

I am drawn to that earlier moment because it shows you the American machinery before it reaches full speed. The collision between the expedition and the people in its path has a particular quality of not-yet, of forces in motion that have not finished arriving at their conclusions. The site is at renegadeenos.com, and the novel is the companion to Captain Jack & The Original Renegades in the sense that it stands in the same country, two decades earlier, with a different set of eyes on the same ongoing encounter.

John Rollin Ridge and the longer American story

Yellow Bird, my novel on John Rollin Ridge, takes the frame wider still, into a life that moves through Cherokee removal and the Gold Rush and the California press and the question of what a Native American writer can do, and does, with the English novel form in the middle of the nineteenth century. Ridge was the son of a man killed in the internal Cherokee violence that followed the Trail of Tears, and he came to California carrying that alongside his talent and his ambitions, and wrote his way through the contradictions of his situation in a way that still repays serious attention.

He is the Cherokee connection to a body of work that is otherwise rooted in Klamath Basin country. What pulls him into the same orbit is the question his life poses: what does a Native writer do with a literary form built by the culture that is dismantling his? How do you use the tools of a civilization that is working against your people without losing yourself inside those tools? That question belongs to Ridge in his time and it belongs to me in mine. The site is at johnrollinridge.com.

Return as the common thread

The word that keeps coming back to me when I think about all of this is return. Not nostalgia, which is something else — a softening of what was hard. Return as in the act of going back to a place or a record or a tradition and looking at it again with more of what you now know. The Spirals go back to the origin. The Kintpuash novel goes back to the war. Enos goes back to the years before the war. Yellow Bird goes back to a writer whose work has not gotten the sustained attention it deserves. All of it is a form of return to things that were set aside or buried or only half-told, with the intention of telling them more fully and more honestly than they have been.

I do not think of the books as a series in any commercial sense. They do not share characters. They do not have to be read in order. But they share a set of underlying commitments: to primary sources and living tradition over invention, to the people these histories belong to, to the honesty of saying what a record can carry and what it cannot, and to writing from inside a connection rather than across a distance. If you read one of these books and come away feeling like the ground under the American West is more complicated and more inhabited than the standard version suggests, I have done most of what I set out to do.