Writing My People's Origin Stories: On The Spirals of Kemush

Why I had standing to do this at all

I am an enrolled member of the Klamath Tribes, with Modoc ancestry, and I want to start there because it matters to how this book got made. The Maklaks are the Klamath and Modoc people of the high country in southern Oregon and northern California. When I set out to write the origin stories of the Maklaks, I was not reaching across into someone else's tradition. I was reaching back into my own, which is a different thing, though it carries its own kind of weight and its own ways of going wrong.

The Spirals of Kemush gathers twelve origin stories into one cycle. People sometimes ask me whether I invented them. I did not. These are stories that belong to the Maklaks, that have been told and recorded and carried in pieces across a long time. What I did was the work of a writer and a keeper. I gathered them, I listened to how they fit together, and I gave them a form that one person could hold from one end to the other. That is the part I can claim. The stories themselves are older than any claim I could make on them.

Kemush as witness, not god

The figure who moves through the cycle is Kemush. It would be easy, and wrong, to file him under the word deity and move on. Kemush is the witness and the mediator. He moves through a world that is still settling into its shapes, and his job is to see, to stand between forces, to carry a kind of attention through the making of things. He is not commanding the world into being from above it. He is inside it, watching, brokering, present.

Holding that distinction took real discipline in the writing. The shape of the English language, and the shape of the books most readers have grown up with, pulls hard toward a creator who issues and a creation that obeys. Every time a sentence started to lift Kemush up onto a throne, I had to pull it back down to the ground where he belongs. Witness is a humbler and more accurate word, and the whole cycle reads differently when you keep him in that role.

The responsibility of gathering

Gathering is not a neutral act. The minute you decide which twelve stories go together, and in what order, and where one ends and the next begins, you are making choices that the oral tradition never had to make in that way. A teller in a room does not need a table of contents. A book does. So I was constantly aware that the form I was building was mine, even when the contents were not, and that I could do harm by setting things in an order that implied a meaning the stories never carried.

What kept me honest was staying close to what the stories were actually doing rather than what I wanted them to do. When a story resisted sitting next to another one, I listened to the resistance instead of forcing the join. I tried not to smooth the seams so much that the cycle started to feel like a single invented narrative with a tidy arc. These are distinct stories. They rhyme with each other, they answer each other, but they are not chapters of a novel, and pretending otherwise would have flattened them.

What I would not do

There were lines I set early and did not cross. I would not put words in the mouth of a figure to make a point I wanted to land. I would not borrow the language of religion to make the cycle sound grander. And I would not treat anything sacred as raw material to be spent for effect. When the Modoc song sometimes called the Last Song came into the project, the one Celia Langell-Jefferson sang, I used it sparingly and on purpose, because a thing like that does not need me to amplify it, and it can be damaged by being asked to carry too much.

I want to be plain about one more thing, because the question comes up. No machine wrote these stories, and no machine wrote this book. The Spirals of Kemush is the work of a Maklak writer sitting with his own people's tradition and trying to set it down without breaking it. The tools I used to build the project around the book are just tools. The stories came through people, across generations, and through me, and I am only the latest set of hands they have passed through.

Why I keep doing it

I write these stories because they are mine to carry and because they are still alive. A tradition that only lives in archives is halfway to gone. Putting the cycle into a book that a Maklak kid could pick up, or that a stranger could read and come away understanding something true about who we are, feels like the right use of whatever craft I have. I do not get it all right. But this is the work I was given, and I would rather do it carefully and out loud than leave it for someone with less reason to be careful.