Mellowing with Age, but Not Slowing Down

If you ask writer, teacher and tribal chairman Greg Sarris what's different about his life now that he's 72, he'll tell you he's mellowing. He says he's learning "to bring people together, to work toward consensus." People, he has discovered, are not merely their point of view. "They're a mother, a father, a child, an aunt, an uncle," he says. "They're a human being."

The implication, shared in a recent Zoom interview, is that he has not always greeted the world with this equanimity. In fact, Sarris sometimes made enemies as well as friends in the corner of Sonoma County, California, where he leads the local tribe of Indigenous people, oversees its casino, and taught at the nearby state university.

But today, his legacy, his future, and the future of the planet are very much top of mind as he embarks on the next stage of his life, and releases a new book of stories called "The Forgetters."

Sarris grew up about an hour north of San Francisco, in the town of Santa Rosa. He was raised by foster parents and learned about his birth parents' heritage — German-Jewish and Irish on his mother's side, Filipino and Indian on his dad's, he says — in bits and pieces. Coming of age was hard; Sarris was often in trouble as a teen.

That rough upbringing provided fodder for his 1994 fiction debut "Grand Avenue," a novel in interlocking stories. Robert Redford was so impressed he signed on as executive producer of an HBO miniseries based on the book that the Los Angeles Times called "television drama at its very best."

With degrees from UCLA and Stanford, Sarris was on track for an academic career, winning tenure as a professor at UCLA in record time. But when a rival tribe began to position itself to open a casino in Northern California, Sarris quickly mobilized the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo Indians he traced his heritage to.

He was elected to leadership of his Northern California tribe in the early 1990s, and helped restore federal recognition for his people as Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria in December 2000. The tribe is in the midst of a billion-dollar expansion of the casino it owns and operates in Rohnert Park, California, a facility that came into being after a protracted and painful fight with some of its neighbors.

It may be a surprise to some of those neighbors that Sarris is approaching his next decade as a kinder, gentler figure. But there's still a sharp edge to his writing, as he sounds the alarm about the perilous state of the world in his new book of modern folk tales.

When I was living in Northern California and working across the street from Sarris's casino, I came to know him through his 2017 book of stories, "How a Mountain Was Made." In it, crows, skunks, bats, coyotes and other denizens of the landscape told stories that highlighted and amplified their human characteristics, and drew a history of the world, centered on Sonoma Mountain, the traditional home of the Coast Miwok people. Kirkus Reviews called the book a collection of "charming and wise stories, simply told, to be enjoyed by young and old alike."

This year's follow-up, "The Forgetters," is not so much for kids. "First of all, I think you can see they're pretty tightly constructed stories and there's a lot of subtext that a child or young people wouldn't necessarily get," Sarris says. The "Forgetters," who earned cameos in the earlier book but are now center stage, "are those of us who get so 'smart' we've left the mountain, and we have forgotten how to live in harmony with nature and each other," he adds.

"The danger of human consciousness always is the notion that somehow we feel separate from the stuff around us and we can act independent of those things when in fact we can't, and we'll keep getting reminded, as we are today with the climate crisis" and related challenges, Sarris explains. "We're not here by ourselves. And even though our consciousness may somehow get us to think that I'm sitting here and life is out there," that's just not true.

How do you write an authentic, modern folk tale? It's a question Sarris has faced head on, including from members of his own tribe. "They'll say, 'Well, these aren't really the old tales, are they? You're changing them.' " To which Sarris replies, "The stories and culture are always emergent. It's always changing. It's never fixed.

"Even when you have a written tradition," he continues, "the stories are dependent on a reader, just as they are on a listener . . . . What I try to keep in my stories is the ethics and aesthetics of the indigenous stories, and land, and world, as I understand it, and [write] them using some of the oral techniques, but also the Western techniques."

So, let's dig in to one of the new stories, "A Woman Meets an Owl, a Rattlesnake and a Hummingbird in Santa Rosa."

Isabel, a member of a local tribe, is picking strawberries in the Santa Rosa heat. In the magical realist tradition, which is one part of Sarris's heritage, a strawberry jumps out of Isabel's crate and takes off running. Before long, Isabel is seeking answers to mysteries the runaway strawberry has stirred up in her, and she begins to slip away at night to a clearing where she meets the animals of the story's title, who seem simultaneously to be human storytellers.

Afraid that others in the camp will follow her, she temporarily stops her nightly jaunts. But the pull of the storytelling creatures is too powerful, and she finds herself seeking them once again. As in all the stories in this collection, she has a lesson to learn. In this case, it's a lesson about how a person might overestimate her power, especially when confronted by a collective lack of wisdom. The lesson is delivered by — who else? — the owl.

"You are not all-powerful. Have you forgotten the power of humans? They are tricksters. They are clever. That is their power. They can trap anything. They can trap the water. They can trap animals and even one another," the owl says. "But they forget the limits of their power; they do not remember that they are not all-powerful, and when they do forget these things, harm and destruction comes. The water dries up. Plants and animals disappear. Isn't that what the stories we've been telling remind us?"

As the story ends . . . well, you'll just have to read it for yourself.

In this artistically fertile period for Sarris, he also signed on, with the tribe, as executive producers of a new biographical film about Joan Baez called "I Am a Noise," streaming now on Hulu.

"Joan is a longtime friend of mine," he says. When he first heard her music in the 1960s, "the spirit and the sounds of one of her tragic songs somehow caught my heart.

"But at the same time," he adds, "I so admired that she was using her voice, her talent, for world good, social justice, doing the right things. And she never compromised. She was fearless and put herself out there. She was a hero of mine, and a model.

"She was embarking on this film with [a team of] great filmmakers, and they needed some financing. And I went to the tribe and, of course, the tribe was very enthusiastic, so the tribal council said yes. She's done so many things for so many people and [she's] an icon. And she had a message, which we knew at the time, which was about much of her life that she had not revealed. And we wanted to help her get that full picture out there."

That picture included mental health struggles, something I can relate to.

"She had that beautiful voice," Sarris continues, "and she just went out there and seemed in total control of herself, of her life, of the world around her, which seemed to empower her to do so many things with Martin Luther King Jr. and others.

"But there was the message that no matter what or who we are, we're complicated and also deal with lots of problems, lots of issues," he says. "We're all human. And when you get the full picture of her and the work, she becomes even more heroic [because of] what she was going through at the time, the very human things, and the price that she paid."

As Sarris continues to garner accolades — a national leadership role here, an honorary degree there, capped off by a prestigious appointment by California's governor — he identifies as a successful person, who, like Baez, has paid a steep personal price for his accomplishments, while facing continuing opposition from some in the community.

"Working so much as I have, I've put my personal life on hold and I find myself single and older and with the opportunity now to love and maybe fall in love and sometimes there's [a voice] saying, 'Oh, you're too old, you can't, you've lost the chance.'

"But I'm going to say, Hell no! If all these other opportunities came up, why not love?"

Steve Mencher Steve Mencher lives with his wife in a 15-minute community in Baltimore. He is a writer and multimedia producer who has developed stories, films, podcasts and websites for the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Defense Department and AARP. He’s the founding producer of "Living Downstream: The Environmental Justice Podcast." Early in his career, he worked for NPR and Carnegie Hall. Read More