>La Grande Observer | Union and Wallowa Counties' News Leader

Bette Husted ().

Poetry open mike to follow reading at Wee Mama's

Ursula Le Guin gave Bette Lynch Husted's collection of memoir-essays, "Above the Clearwater: Living on Stolen Land" (OSU Press, 2004) such a lovely blurb that the editors put it on the front cover:

"Like the river of its name, Bette Husted's book runs with clarity and passion," Le Guin writes. "Complex, harsh and tender, never taking the easy way out, this memoir is beautiful in its honesty. I never read anything truer to the Western land and people."

The Eastern Oregon Review Quarterly is sponsoring a reading by Husted at Wee Mama's Sandwich Shoppe Saturday at 5 p.m. to be followed by an open mike for local poets.

Husted's stories, poems and essays have been published in Northwest Review, Northern Lights, Fourth Genre and other journals. Her poetry chapbook "After Fire" was published by Pudding House Press in 2002.

One of the essays in "Above the Clearwater" was named a notable essay in Best Essays 2000, and another is included in the University of Oregon Press's Best Essays Northwest (2003).

Husted taught in high schools and Blue Mountain Community College and now lives in Pendleton.

The back cover of "Above the Clearwater" gives insight into what the book is all about.

"Like her father before her, Bette Husted grew up on stolen land. The benchland above the Clearwater River in north-central Idaho had been a home for the Nez Perce Indians until the Dawes Act opened their reservation to settlement in 1895. As a child on the family homestead, Husted felt the presence of the Nez Perce:

‘But they were always just out of sight, like a smoky shadow behind me that I couldn't quite turn around quickly enough to catch.'

"Above the Clearwater chronicles her family's history on the land, revealing their joys and sorrows, their triumphs and tragedies.

‘Trying to tell the truth, ask the questions even though you aren't sure of the answers'

Q: Tell me a bit about your childhood and how the book came about?

Husted: I have always been grateful for growing up in the Clearwater country and have spent my life teaching (high school and community college) in the rural Northwest. The book began as a series of essays trying to make sense of my family's life experiences on the (formerly Ni Mii Pu) land my grandfather had homesteaded after the Allotment Act.

Although these experiences included much love and joy, they also seemed to run the gamut of typical Western issues: quarrels over land and water, suicide (the more rural the area the higher the rate, it sometimes seems), the isolation of women, the secrets of mental illness, and the way that issues of class and race and gender affected not only my family but the community.

Underlying all these Western issues, it had seemed to me from childhood, were the Nez Perce, Indians in general. What kind of relationship could we have to the land, this land, this earth, and each other on land taken in this way from its inhabitants? Not just homesteading after the Allotment Act, though that's an obvious example: living on a continent taken from people we have been conditioned not to see, even now. Or to see only peripherally: a "heritage of rich history," that sort of thing. (At best!) Of course it is a question much bigger than one poor rural family, or even the West, or America: how does colonization affect us all? (Colonization on how many continents?)

Pondering these questions gave me the courage to look at my own family, tell some of our truths: my ancesters', my own —as a child, a mother, a teacher.

How did Fishtrap contribute to your success as a writer?

Fishtrap writing workshops and gatherings contributed hugely to my insights, and my courage to try to tell these stories. I took workshops from Naomi Shihab Nye in 1988, in Fishtrap's first year, and every summer from 1991 to 1994, when I was a fellow. I'm grateful, and it was wonderful to come "home" to Wallowa County, where I taught English in Joseph High School from 1977 to 1988.

(The school district's) budget decisions led to my own departure from the Wallowa Valley in 1988, and I spent 1989-2002 teaching American lit, Native lit, and Northwest lit as well as the writing courses at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton. Alas, those courses aren't offered any more and the English faculty has been cut from seven to two. More budget decisions, alas. (And maybe another book?)

What do you think about coming to read in La Grande and Enterprise?

I'm looking forward to reading and meeting the folks there who are keeping the lights burning, spreading the words. (One of Pendleton's residents recently spoke about why he didn't want the theater program cut in the next round of budget decisions: "It's all we have to hold back the darkness."

I liked that. Trying to tell the truth, ask the questions even though you aren't sure of the answers, talk to your neighbors — I hope "Above the Clearwater" will play at least a small part in this.

–Jeff Petersen