Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 16, 1995 TAG: 9507170001
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY JUSTIN ASKINS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
There is much to praise in "Mohawk Blood," a moving account of Michael Baughman's coming to terms with his part-Mohawk ancestry. While tracing that history back to the famous Mohawk war chief Joseph Brant, Baughman focuses more on his great-grandfather John Brant and what he taught the youngster.
There are no striking revelations or idealistic musings here, no guiding shamans or vision quests, though one chapter hints toward the latter. Instead, the volume centers on some practical advice that John Brant gives the young Mikey: "Joseph Brant understood it all a long time ago. He understood that some modern things from the whites were good, but that the Mohawks should try to keep some of their old ways, too. Some of their wild ways. How do you keep wild ways in a world full of people and machines? That was the problem. It still is. It's a bigger problem than ever today."
That question concerns Baughman throughout his life, and as the book unfolds each chapter subtly but powerfully shows a man trying to keep some of the wild ways alive. For instance, in "Ancient Pursuit," Baughman tells of one experience he had involving the ancient hunting technique of running a deer. In the past, the quest was for meat - and Baughman is a skillful hunter and fisherman - but this time the grueling event ends differently: "I walked slowly up and touched his warm, sweaty flank." The deer walks off and Baughman remembers, "I could still feel his lovely wildness on my hand where I had touched him."
Perhaps the most insightful and problematic section of the work is "Isolation." Here Baughman comes closest to embracing the sacred rite of the vision quest. He decides "to spend a week alone in remote country," in this case a distant area in the Cascade Mountains. Traditionally, Baughman would have been prepared for the event by a shaman or elder - and certainly would have brought no weapons along - but he decides to head off on his own, dressed lightly but with a shotgun, hunting knife and hatchet. At first Baughman is "vaguely frightened" but he settles in, fishing and hunting, with his only real concern drying out after he falls into a deep pool.
But there is a greater problem.
After he finishes drying out and cooking his hard-earned trout, Baughman begins to worry about meeting a cougar. He admits that cougars are "shy animals, but even the remote possibility of an encounter scared me." Instead of embracing the possibility of seeing one - like Gary Snyder does in "Piute Creek" - Baughman loads and cocks his shotgun even though "he felt like a fool again." And a half hour after he finally falls off to sleep, he wakes "terrified, my stomach turning over, my heart pounding in my ears. Twenty or thirty yards behind me, something large was moving through the trees. ... In an instant, I was on my knees, facing that way, gun in my hands and hammer cocked."
Though Baughman realizes that it "must have been a deer" he "stayed there gripping the cocked gun until it was well out of hearing range." What could have been a frightening but revelatory experience - as a vision quest well might have - turns out to be one simply of unwarranted fear.
"Mohawk Blood" concludes with a reference to the 1993 movie "The Broken Chain," loosely based on the life of Joseph Brant: "The movie's obvious message was that Joseph Brant was 'too white'. ... Perhaps he was 'too white,' and perhaps I have been too, in my own life, but I prefer to believe that both of us, and John Brant along with us, were merely facing obvious and inevitable truths." Baughman is most probably right. I just hope not.
Justin Askins teaches at Radford University.
by CNB