Mendofleur

I met the late Mary Austin in a college English class. I had never heard of her until the book was assigned as required reading. Years later I met her again on the book shelves at the ranger station in Lone Pine while registering for a climb up to Mt. Whitney. When I arrived home I took this book off the shelf and re-read the parts I had underlined. I was reminded of Ms. Austin’s spare, but exquisite use of language and the vividness of her stories and the sensitivity of her subject matter.

If one mentions her name to someone who knows her, what might be recalled are four main things: She was an American nature-writer. She was a leading feminist theorist. She was an expert on Native American culture. She was largely forgotten after her death in 1934.

Her life had been difficult, but she surmounted the adversity and found her voice through writing. Her marriage was one of incompatibility and ended in divorce. She had only one child that had been born with some mental handicaps and she finally, but reluctantly, had her institutionalized. Her father had died at ten, and she had never resolved the painful and tense relationship with her mother. In 1903, at the age of 35 she published her first book The Land of Little Rain, a book about the Mojave Desert and the Native Americans who lived there. It became a classic and is one of her best known works.

One of my favorite pieces in this book is about the basket maker, Seyavi, a Paiute Indian. Through Austin, one learns of this Indian woman’s rich culture and her deep sense of the land and her movement and existence in this realm. She raises a son on her own. Most of her race is dying, but she finds a way to survive and care for him. “Seyavi made baskets for love and sold them for money, in a generation that preferred iron pots for utility. Every Indian woman is an artist,–sees, feels, creates, but does not philosophize about her processes. Seyavi’s bowls are wonders of technical precision, inside and out, the palm finds no fault with them, but the subtlest appeal is in the sense that warns us of humanness in the way the design spreads into the flare of the bowl.” Austin continues, “The weaver and the warp lived next to the earth and were saturated with the same elements.”

Clearly Austin has an innate sense of Native Americans, the spiritual realms, the connectedness to the earth and the seasons, the rhythm of life without the need of time pieces, the love of craft and the meaning that comes from a basket made and molded by hands that knew the materials and the process, the value of making something with love, but selling it for money because one had to survive. Mary Austin has so much to offer our lives today that tend to be weighed down with complexity and material things. This little book is a good beginning, slight in size but large in thought.