Coming Home | Wisdom and Words of an Indigenous Pomo Elder. This item is unavailable.Coming Home | Wisdom and Words of an Indigenous Pomo Elder

Coming Home is meant to tell some of the history of my tribe, the Kashaya Pomo, from the perspective of my own experience as the son of a very powerful and important shaman, my mother, Essie Parrish, and my father, Sidney Parrish. The rich cultural life that was my childhood growing up on the Kashaya Reservation on the Northwest Coast of California influenced me in so many unique ways and now my story is one that also sees through the eyes of my professional career as an anthropologist, an historian and a linguist, and now as an elder of my tribe. As I reach these later years of my life, I have come to this one inescapable conclusion: I need to act now for the benefit of my people. I can see that the cultural landscapes around me are changing fast and I find that I'm longing to leave something more of myself, more signposts of my own to mark these fast disappearing trails. I want to act, so that others, both within my tribe and even those outside it in the wider world, might see through the broad experience of these things I've lived, that I carry now as an elder, as a tribal person, as a living link yet to the rich past of my people. I see more than ever that the echoes from our ancestral past must somehow not only be preserved and kept alive, but, I believe, in some way, we must regenerate our connections with the stories of our past to ensure that our culture has a chance to live and flourish again.