“I feel as though I should be three pints in and yelling at you from across the table,” Oscar Villalon, grinning, said to Greg Sarris, also grinning, as they conversed in Jack Kerouac Alley. To hold a literary discussion between a bar (Vesuvio) and a bookstore (City Lights), with happy hour revelers actually enjoying pints on one end and the occasional thump of a Chinese drum on the other, takes a sense of humor. Sarris is more than game; his Native American sense of humor might only be exceeded by his sense of occasion. Book talk versus bar talk was on.
City Lights Bookstore organized July 23’s discussion of The Last Human Bear, the acclaimed author’s first novel in nearly 30 years. The book shares the story of Mary Hatcher, a Pomo from Santa Rosa looking back on her life and wondering whether or not she had the power of a tolik, or human bear, which enabled her to “poison” others. The expansive tale, hailed by Rebecca Solnit as “lush and gripping,” is mostly set in Sonoma County in the 1930s, and explores themes like place and identity with an exquisite braiding of natural setting and cultural identity.
“At the time of contact, there were approximately 20,000 of us in Northern Marin County,” Sarris said of his Native American heritage. “And today, we have just over a thousand. There were more indigenous people in this area, Central California, than anywhere else in the New World outside of the present site of Mexico City, which was the Aztec capital.”…