3. Centering the Periphery

"I'm attempting to center the periphery."

"You're what?" Esme turns from her work among the roses, pruning shears in hand, her straw hat pulled low over her eyes, although she doesn't need the hat. It's just another of her attempts at human normalcy. She came out to the garden to work while Jasper lay on a bench, reading. Seeing him there, she casually asked what he was doing.

Now, sitting up, he smiles. "I'm trying to understand the Other."

She tilts her head and her smile is both amused and bemused. "The other?"

"The Quileute -- well, Indians generally."

She laughs and returns to her pruning. "You could have just said you were reading about Indians, Jasper."

"That would only have told you what I was reading, not what I was doing. You asked what I was doing."

Her laugh grows. "I'd say it's 'semantics' but I'm sure I'd get a lecture on their importance."

"They are important."

She doesn't respond to that, works on the bush, looking for diseased leaves and removing them. He watches; he doesn't return to reading. "So why is reading about Indians centering a periphery?" she asks finally. He thinks she asks mostly because she knows he will enjoy explaining rather than because she really wants to know. Esme is not a thinker in the usual sense. Her intelligence is kinetic and empathic. For all he is the family empath, it is Esme who leads with her heart. He doesn't think of her has his mother, even if Alice does. He is too old. But he does admire her. She has a way of verbally cutting the Gordion Knot.

"The periphery," he says now, "involves the boundary regions. The ancient Persians, then the Greeks, then the Romans all viewed the world as a nexus of central power around which lived rings of increasingly alien Others. Scythians, Indians -- from India, I mean -- Nubians, Germans, even the mythic Hyperboreans. You can see it in the maps they drew. They are at the center, and the further a group lived from that center, the more inferior they were perceived as being." He pauses to see if Esme has followed him thus far. She nods. He goes on.

"We've inherited that view here in the West. When Europeans encountered the Other in their explorations, they attempted to categorize and cubbyhole -- but always with their categories. Let me ask this -- if you were to go to a strange town and wanted to know the history of the place, what would you do?"

She smiles. "Well, I'd find somebody who lived there and ask."

"Exactly. That's the common-sense response. But it assumes one thing -- that you respect the people you're talking to enough to listen to their answer. Europeans traveling to Africa, or India, or the Americas . . . they didn't respect the people they met. So they told, they didn't ask. They regarded the people they encountered as the Uncivilized Other living on the periphery."

Twisting in her crouch, she looks back at him. "None of us regard the Quileute as uncivilized, Jasper. We've outgrown the era of Colonization. Look at that movie, Dances With Wolves. It was the white people in that movie who were the 'bad guys.'"

He nods. "Dances With Wolves was a start. But who was the star of it?"

"What?"

"Who was the movie's star?"

"I don't remember the character's name."

"It doesn't matter. Kevin Costner was the star. Kevin Costner who's white. In a movie supposedly about Indians, the main character is a white man."

She is looking at him, her mouth a straight line. He's irritated her, which is a hard thing to do. But sometimes, like Sokrates, he enjoys playing the gadfly. "Well," she says, "most viewers who went to see it weren't Indians. They needed somebody to identify with."

Just a week ago, he would have said the same thing. "Absolutely true. But the white man tells the story, and the periphery remains the periphery. Maybe they've become a positive periphery instead of a Wild Bunch of Indians -- but they're still the periphery, you see? Still Other. It's a story about a white man getting to know Indians. It's not a story about Indians getting to know a white man." He holds up the book he's been reading. It happens to be Charles Eastman's An Indian Boyhood. "Centering the periphery means hearing the story from the Indian side. That's what I'm trying to do. This is a story about an Indian getting to know white men."

"What you're telling me," Esme says now, "is that centering the periphery means learning to listen to other people talk about their experiences?"

"Yes."

She returns to her roses. "You don't need fancy words for that, Jasper." She looks back at him again and her smile is impish. "Haven't you heard the old Indian saying, 'If you want to understand me, walk a mile in my moccasins'?"

For just a moment, he stares at her. Then he bursts out laughing.