Greg Sarris must own a closetful of hats. Author, teacher, tribal leader, historian, eco-warrior, cultural eminence, film producer, professor (now UC Regent), policy adviser, Native American spokesperson, business and community magnate—the man can also discuss California’s topographic and agricultural histories as intimately as he can the histories of the state’s Indigenous and immigrant human inhabitants.
But first and last, Sarris writes—and he remains, both in person and on the page, a sparkling storyteller. Santa Rosa–born, of mixed heritage including Native American, Sarris investigates notions of identity and belonging in his oeuvre. Previous books focused intensely upon contemporary, Indigenous lives. They include Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream, a biography of a redoubtable Pomo elder (1994); the story collection Grand Avenue (1994, produced with the late Robert Redford as a TV movie in 1996); and the novel Watermelon Nights (1998). Later, collections like How a Mountain Was Made and The Forgetters reimagined Indigenous creation stories.
Now we have Sarris’s The Last Human Bear, a sprawling bildungsroman, complex and intricate. Its fierce protagonist, a Pomo girl called Mary Hatcher, begins her life’s narrative in a strikingly Dickensian voice: “It started with my mother, the way they buried her, at twelve noon in a downpour, in mud and cold.” But Mary’s voice quickly proves sui generis: a unique patois blending rural and Native American diction with an incisive, internal sophistication. Conveying her blazing, nuanced interiority, Mary’s voice also reveals to the reader the landscape’s stories. “I didn’t know my mother, but I seen her…working in the crops on Benedict’s Rancheria,” she says. “That’s where most of the tribe lived, that is, those who survived the ordeal that was our history.… Never mind you was Wappo, Coast Miwok, or some other kind of Pomo.”
Mary’s mother’s death, by apparent suicide, is the linchpin of this saga, which commences in 1930s Santa Rosa—then a small town surrounded by pristine countryside, farms, and orchards. White ranchers hired Native Americans and Mexicans to pick fruit; workers lived in camps, often moving with the work. Mary is raised by the Coast Miwok woman she calls her stepmother, Saturnina, in a shack donated to them by a priest. Life’s hardscrabble: The women pick fruit for wages; they glean food; Saturnina weaves “fine-made baskets” to sell to collectors so as to buy a goat and hens. As Mary rhetorically asks, “What Indian kid back then had milk and eggs every day?”
She recounts a life lived close to the ground—amid cycling rhythms of weather, crops, animals, and the stoic generations of laborers tending them. Sarris’s descriptions, alive to all senses, surge with a near-mythological feel. “Peaches and apricots. Pears. Plums. Prunes. Hops. Apples and then more apples. Them hand-staining walnuts. Grapes and then more grapes.… Dusty earth and a waning sun…still warm, and the grape leaves and poison oak display a most gorgeous red in the light at the end of the day; but the warmth and bright colors spell change, forecast the inevitable winter, and folks knowed the social life they shared…distinct from their lives in a small cabin…was to end, for better or worse.”
Against this ravishing, atmospheric backdrop, young Mary comes of age, observing with an adolescent’s restless yearning, “Nothing was distinct, exceptional, past my view of it: families pathetic; kids stupid and doomed; Saturnina pitiful, tragic even, that is, if I had any sense of what tragic was back then.”
Confused by the murky history of her vanished father—a wealthy ranch scion—and her mother’s fatal humiliation over the pregnancy, Mary is further bewildered by Saturnina’s hints about a storied entity called a Human Bear (or tolik), someone with special powers passed down from the long-ago wearing of a bearskin. “People would blame Human Bears for all kinds of wickedness,” Mary learns, but Human Bears “could also…use their power for good.” Alas, “if you knowed who a tolik was, you could hire them to kill someone.… Folks who lived alone was suspect.”
Is Saturnina a Human Bear? She swears “she had only worn the bearskin…once. She would never wear it again.” Yet Saturnina knows mysterious things. She sings sacred songs, teaches Mary to name plants and animals. “Call all of them. If you don’t speak their names, they will forget us, dry up.” Is Saturnina training Mary to inherit the role, and powers, of a Human Bear? Does that constitute a curse? The uncertainty haunts Mary and prompts community suspicion.
But Mary’s resolve to make a better life for herself overrules any doubts she has about her ability to do so. She strikes out boldly, taking a job as a servant for the wealthy Benedict Rancheria family, pushed by “an urgency, born of the first unanswered question that plagued me.… Something like a test I was living, to see how far I could go, to see what was over the next hill. Out of my way!”
Worlds bloom and fade, as do friendships and lovers—starting with John, the blind younger Benedict son; later including Louis, an earnest Italian businessman who never ceases to love Mary. In the meantime: “The Depression. World War II.… Electricity. The radio. The telephone.… Time is the utmost thief.” In fact, time itself—together with race, sex, class, socioeconomics, place, and eras—infiltrates and oversees Human Bear as a monumental character. (Indians were once not allowed to walk on the sidewalk; Mary first uses a real toilet at age 18—a startling milestone of her improved living conditions.) Alongside Mary, a vivid ensemble of men and women live (and die) during the inevitable: accelerating modernization; raw land developed; old cultures lost. Tried and thwarted in sometimes shocking ways—vilified, shunned, at one point accused of murder and fearing for her life—Mary survives by anticipating change. In a recent California Book Club interview, Sarris reflected, “When you don’t know where you belong…you’re paying attention very closely to where…you might feel safe.” To which he might well have added, “Or you invent your own provisional safety.” The aged, deeply seasoned Mary Hatcher speaking at book’s end has, line for line, earned ownership of her astonishing story—often beyond our wildest imagining.•
THE LAST HUMAN BEAR, BY GREG SARRIS
Joan Frank’s latest books are Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading and Juniper Street: A Novel. Her recent novella, Troldhaugen, appears in the online literary zine Failbetter.
