The east arm of the Wintu

I learned from her article "Men Explain Things to Me" (see earlier post) that Rebecca Solnit is the author of numerous books, but I have read only one: A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which I picked up in the DeYoung Museum shop a few years ago, simply because I was intrigued by its title. I enjoyed the book but found the introduction, a rambling essay called "Open Door," to be the most thought-provoking part of it.

Solnit is a promiscuous reader—a quality I admire—and her essays draw on a surprisingly varied array of source material. Readers are invited along on her literary (and literate) excursions through art, philosophy, history, anthropology, ecology and more. One of the passages I underlined in Lost contains an idea I still think about from time to time:

Malcolm, apropos of nothing at all, brought up the Wintu in north-central California, who don't use the words left and right to describe their own bodies but use the cardinal directions. I was enraptured by this description of a language and behind it a cultural imagination in which the self only exists in reference to the rest of the world, no you without the mountains, without sun, without sky. As Dorothy Lee wrote, "When the Wintu goes up the river, the hills are to the west, the river to the east; and a mosquito bites him on the west arm. When he returns, the hills are still to the west, but, when he scratches his mosquito bite, he scratches his east arm." In that language, the self is never lost the way so many contemporary people who get lost in the wild are lost, without knowing the directions, without tracking their relationship not just to the trail but to the horizon and the light and the stars, but such a speaker would be lost without a world to connect to, lost in the modern limbos of subways and department stores. In Wintu, it's the world that's stable, yourself that's contingent, that's nothing apart from its surroundings. (p. 17)

Solnit goes on to muse further about the ways the nearly extinct Wintu language embeds the speaker into her environment and what happens when that environment changes or disappears, or when people are displaced from it. I'm intrigued by the idea that in the Wintu worldview the self is not "the autonomous entity we think we are when we carry our rights and lefts with us" (pp. 17-18). Instead, even to imagine her own body, a Wintu must understand her relationship to where she is. The task of orienting oneself to a new environment becomes a literal process of learning to identify one's east arm.

When I looked up a map of the Wintu tribal territory, I was surprised to realize that it is adjacent to the part of the Trinity Alps where my family spent many summer vacations. It's odd to think that I actually know something about what it might mean to be lost in the Wintu neck of the woods—and how easy it is to get disoriented when you have only your rights and lefts to guide you.

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