And I always asked them first to describe something of their full, rich, living present present so that they could learn to describe a sparse and selected past. I m a writer. Let me read something right off my pen. This is an afterword to essays by young writers on first peoples histories. I am picking up the notion that there is no Before and After in culture.
Culture is always Now, in-between, in process.
In the spirit of what I am about to say, let me first protest that there are no afterwords anymore than there are beforewords. Words hold their future, their present and their past within them. They swallow time like black holes. In words, both memory and identity are fluent. Our words, crude and few, say well what we are.