Prof Note

A NATIVE TALKS TO COLUMBUS

IT WAS OCTOBER 12, 1992, BUT MICHAEL DORRIS—writer, adjunct professor, founder of the Native American Studies Program at Dartmouth-was looking back at a mere two decades as he addressed Native Americans at Dartmouth: "Your ancestors in this program would never have believed we would fill Cook Auditorium."

Indeed, an SRO crowd had gathered to hear Montgomery Fellows Dorris and Louise Erdrich '76 reflect on the quincentennial. "The way to remember this day," said Dorris, "is by having a conversation two people should have had but didn't." With that, he and Erdrich gave voice to Morning Girl, a 12 -year-old Native American, and to the Columbus who pulled in 500 years ago to the shores of Morning Girl's homeland. In a performance that was itself a kind of poetry, where the whole was more than the sum of its parts, Eidrich and Dorris intertwined glimpses of two vastly different worlds as they read from The Crown of Columbus and Morning Girl) Dorris's most recent book. Optimistic as her name, Morning Girl's discoveries of life's joys and disappointments led her to believe that "things would be the way they were, only better." It was she who first saw Columbus's awkward landing party, she who welcomed these strange and ill-at-ease visitors. And it was she and her relatives who gave Columbus reason to write that these people should be good and intelligent servants who would become Christians easily. Columbus took six of the islanders to Spain to learn to "speak."

Haifa millennium later, as Erdrich and Dorris unlocked words long unspoken, they posed both an answer and a question that pierce the heart of the human condition: "Our diversity as a species has always been our salvation. Why do we deny it?"