Summary
What Mallea-Olaetxe does know, after recording more than 27,000 carvings over two decades, is that these are not just random scratches by men with time on their hands. Arborglyphs, as they're called, chronicle a unique and littleknown Western way of life. It's a workingclass history, "saturated with humanity," written by the people themselves without revision by rulers or powerful employers. "This is not history by some academic in an ivory tower," he says, with a wink at the irony that he, a recently retired college instructor of Basque history and language, is assembling it. "It's as democratic and down-to-earth as history can get."
Like the sheepherders he studies, Mallea-Olaetxe immigrated to America from the Basque country of Spain. Unlike them, he was not under contract to a big sheep company. "My big company was the Catholic Church," he says. Raised on a remote mountain farm, Mallea-Olaetxe was sent to a Catholic boarding school when he was 9 and entered a seminary at 16. There he clashed with the oppressive regime of [Francisco Franco], who ruled Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975. The schoolboys were forbidden to speak Basque. Every time Mallea-Olaetxe did, the teacher tightened a wire painfully wrapped around his finger. Mallea-Olaetxe's eyes still blaze with fierce Basque pride when he recalls Franco's clumsy attempts to destroy his language. It was an early sign of the activism that would define his life.In 1964, the Catholic Church sent Mallea-Olaetxe to a monastery in upstate New York to learn English so that he could become a parish priest. After he was mugged over a pizza in front of the church, though, Mallea-Olaetxe left for Elko, Nev, in 1968, where he began ministering to the Basque herders who lived in the mountains. He saw his first arborglyphs by chance, riding horseback to a sheep camp in a remote region in northeastern Nevada. "You couldn't miss them, really, because the horses took us inches from the aspen trunks." Names, dates and drawings covered the trees from their bases to as high as a man could reach. But it was the extreme loneliness of the landscape that most impressed the newcomer, not the carvings. He mentioned it to the herder, who replied, "Remote, you say? God has yet to arrive here."See the full content of this document
Extract
New World, New Canvas
Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe is on his hands and knees examining the trunk of a fallen aspen tree. Between peeling slabs of white bark the size of headstones, he points out a section carved with mysterious shapes and barely legible words. "This could be 'Urepeleko.' This guy must have written the place he is coming from - Urepele, in southwestern France," he concludes, his grin deepening the laugh lines that frame his piercing blue eyes.
Mallea-Olaetxe (his full name is pronounced HO-shey ma-YEA-a o-la-ET-...See the full content of this document
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