Totem Poles

It's Saturday morning and I would imagine many people are still asleep. I have decided to feature totem poles today. This is not going to include a real academic examination of totem pole history. Briefly, the totem was the image of some animal or being thought to be related to the tribal history of indigenous peoples, and the pole was a brightly painted piece of carved wood showing the importance of each image to the hierarchy of the tribe. The poles can still be seen, especially along the northwest coast of North America and on up into Alaska. Without someone to interpret the symbols and tell us their story, the poles are useless. I think the same is true of our own history. We have pictures and paintings, but as the years go by and people fail to pass on the oral history attached to the photographs and the times they represent, we also lose the spirit of the people they represent. Then our history becomes whatever the academics and social engineers can piece together. Unfortunately it also comes with a heavy dose of their own bias. That bias is then passed on as fact and we lose the face of our real history. I wrote the following poem while on a trip to Alaska to address the problem.

Stake Your Totem

Chop the tree.
Carve the wood.
Tell the story of your clan.

Stake your totem
on the seashore
hoping all the world will see.

Who will be left
when others pass
to pass the epic on?

Unlock the past
without a key?

Learned men
will cogitate,
extrapolate, pontificate,
but in the end they speculate.

But, alas, what will our offspring think? You are not an academic how do you know how those people felt? Uh, because we knew them? I am sure I left the same impression on those trying to instruct me. I also saw some whales during the Alaskan adventure and I was impressed to write the following poem to illustrate the point I was just trying to make. Balderdash, all is balderdash.

Old Whale

Didn’t speak much,
just spouted off.