"The Walking People" is a transcription of the oral history of part of the Iroquois people. I give it a solid "+" and recommend it to anyone who can still learn to read.
By that, I mean that learning to read the book is half the fun of reading this book. Because it is an oral history, the lyric style of which has been preserved, it cannot simply be read like a novel. I made this mistake for the first 100 pages or so, and found it frustrating. I knew I should be getting more out of the book than I was. Then, like some sort of phase transition, I "clicked" and grooved into the writing style. I finally learned how to "listen" to the book-- like hearing it as an oral history-- instead of reading it. I recommend "The Walking People" just so you can have this nifty experience, but it also goes beyond that.
The Walking People-- the name they come to give themselves-- started out somewhere near central or south Asia. Their history is cloudy so far back. It's hard to estimate, but this earliest cultural memory seems to come from over 10,000 years ago. They walk across Asia and eventually settle near what is now Korea, where they remain for a very long time. (Actually, the story begins in eastern Asia, but partway along there is an embedded story of the earlier trek across the great continent).
But there is a great earthquake that kills many of the people and effectively destroys the cultural structure they have built up over countless generations. After much debate, part of the group splits off and traverses the land bridge into North America. They hike southward through the mountains, spend a brief time camped near the Pacific coast, and ultimately turn eastward again, crossing what is now the Rockies. Eventually, after several other splittings and side treks, they cross the bison-riddled Midwest, find the Atlantic Ocean, then move north to settle on the shores of Lake Huron. All of this walking takes many thousands of years.
During this time, the people gather wisdom and treasure it more highly than any physical possessions. They figure out the concepts of planting seeds to raise corn, squash, and beans. They figure out how babies are made. They figure out how to tan hides, build houses, and construct boats. They do so in a highly logical way that puts some current scientific practices to shame, and yet, they have no word for "science." Our modern, Western concept of science is but one manifestation of systematic learning.
In the beginning, The Walking People encounter few other humans. The land is mostly filled with wild creatures and the occasional small tribe, like their own. But as the book goes on, they encounter more and more people. Their acquired wisdom begins to include politics, linguistics, and sociology in addition to survival and engineering skills. By the end of the book, they can hardly find a place to make camp that has not been claimed by some resident, non-migrating people.
Above all, this is a book about organizational learning. The Walking People make a conscious choice to be open to the changing world around them, never making assumptions, always willing to learn, ever appreciative of the subtlety and majesty of the world. They choose adaptation over arrogance, listening over ego. They have a profoundly spiritual view of Nature. They encounter many people who have made other choices-- those who try to enslave weaker tribes, or those who create jealous gods in the face of countervailing physical evidence-- and they charitably characterize these people as "not a learning people." In their journey, they encounter wildly varying climates, terrain, and food sources. If they weren't open and humble, they wouldn't have survived.
Of couse, they make mistakes, some of them fatal. They have their share of bad luck. But they always look forward, "to the children's children," so that The Walking People will continue to thrive even in a changing world. It's a refreshing attitude.
No one can read this oral history and not get the impression that it has been idealized over the many tellings, so that the story coheres and the ancestors come to represent the most important tribal values. But in the end, that is always the case with history. It is not a scientific record of the past; it is a cultural tool to help people understand who they are and how they got to where they are. It is a mix of fact and fiction, cooked up together in some ratio that binds the present to the past in such a way that the future makes sense. And the Iroquois have done a fabulous job of building such a structure out of thousands of years of their people's experience.
I am most impressed with The Walking People's ability to deal rationally with the everyday exigencies of staying alive in a sometimes harsh world, while never losing sight of the long view that will sustain them into the future. It is exactly this balance that plagues modern societies-- and to us, "the long view" is a few decades! The Walking People planned for generations. The whole time scale is different.
Read this inspiring book as a pleasant antidote to the inane "commentary" of the mass media, who now represent our "oral history."
Copyright © Kim Allen 2000
