Chemeketa Voices

The Glorious Past:
Bill Smith

It begins with vibration.

A neuron sends a wave of electricity across the brain spurring movement of the vocal chords and a jump of the tongue to form sound, then a syllable, and finally a word.

Chemeketa Community College professor Bill Smith spends most of his time looking for the world’s original vibrations - the places where humankind’s first cultural ripples originated.

“My mission as an anthropologist is to reveal the glorious past and to encourage recognition of each culture’s glorious past. Each culture has a marvelous one and people need to know about it,” said Smith.

The history of humanity is more than the interactions of people with other people, it is formed by human experience with climate, environment, plants, and, yes, animals.

N’kisi

In some classes, Smith shows a video of an African grey parrot named N’kisi.

In the video, N’kisi is filmed in a room 55 feet apart and one level above his human companion who pulls photos out of an envelope and begins concentrating on them. What follows usually raises the hairs on the arms and backs of his students.

The human companion, Aimee Morgana, pulls out a picture of a flower.

N’kisi: Oh, what a beautiful bouquet of flowers.

Morgana pulls out a photo of a couple people on a beach.

N’kisi: (Catcalls, then) Oh, what a beautiful body.

Smith stops short of calling it conclusive proof of telepathy, but he enjoys using the video to open up students’ minds to the possibility that language – and maybe something even more extraordinary – began long before humans arrived on the scene grunting and gesturing their way through life.

Smith’s love of language started at a young age growing up in coastal L.A. He began learning Spanish in elementary school and field trips to places like museums and operas were regular occurrences.

“I still remember going to the L.A. County Museum and seeing my first mummies and mastodon skeletons,” said Smith.

His fascination with the past was heightened with trips on Route 66 from California to Arkansas where he visited with relatives.  His father, a descendant of a full-blooded Cherokee, would frequently make side trips to explore ancient Native American sites.

“We would have to wait half an hour for Navajos (Dene) herding sheep across the highway,” said Smith. “The trips exposed me to the wonderful breadth of the Native American experience.”

In the sixth grade, a teacher regaled the class with tales of her trips to Europe, those instilled Smith with an overwhelming desire to cross the pond. A developing love of poetry fanned the flames.

“I wanted to go to England and experience the people, climate, food, music and culture that had influenced Shakespeare, Keats and Shelley,” he said.

European adventurer

After graduating high school, Smith met two friends in London. For $100, he bought a custom-made bicycle and a sleeping bag and traveled much of the countryside staying in the barns and homes of people he met. He saw Shakespeare’s plays in Stratford-on-Avon, got to go behind the scenes of the Waterford crystal company in Southern Ireland, and breathed deeply of the people and their language.

“I journeyed to Western Ireland where they have such an amazing soft, Celtic lilt to their speech. I wondered how they could possibly express anger. Of course, I found out,” said Smith.

Smith’s trip eventually took him from England across Europe to Greece on a motorcycle with one of the friends, Rick.

“We’d taken a boat to the island of Crete and Rick fell ill. We ended up living on the beach and I nursed him back to health,” said Smith.

In Athens, Smith immersed himself in the Greek language, but the trip was cut short when the pair’s primary mode of transportation, a Triumph 650 motorcycle, was stolen. Smith was notified almost simultaneously that his grandmother had become terminally ill and they made plans to return home.

After the death of his grandmother in Arkansas, Smith worked for his father as a carpenter just long enough to save the money he would need to return to the West Coast. He rigged his 1951 Chevy pick-up with a camper and a wood stove with its stove pipe projecting from the top. He covered the whole thing in paisley-patterned linoleum.

“Curious cops in several states were pulling me over just to get a closer look at it,” Smith said.

A year and a half later, he returned to Greece where he met another friend who had joined the Air Force and landed an assignment in Athens. Smith quickly immersed himself in the language and began offering his services as a tour guide. When the tourist season slowed down, he took to selling original drawing and watercolors of the Greek countryside. When he wasn’t working, Smith cycled with his friend on the same bike he purchased on his trip to England.

Searching for a calling

Smith eventually returned to the States and found a job as a Greek tutor while he attended classes at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. As part of his anthropology studies, Smith began making trips to Mexico. Even then, he was amazed at how often the accomplishments of early Mexican civilizations were overlooked.

“The pre-Columbian people in Mexico built two pyramids as big as the largest one in Egypt. They were the ones who first developed and domesticated cotton, corn, chocolate, tomatoes, vanilla and cashews,” said Smith.

In 1974, Smith and a photographer friend encountered a giant rattlesnake while exploring the ruins of Kabah in the jungles of Western Yucatan. The pair was in awe of the reptile’s size, but thought little else of it as they called it a day and packed up their Volkswagen.

“Ten minutes after we left the site a huge vulture swooped down out of the sky and completely shattered the windshield of the car, but we never found any carcass or blood,” said Smith.

He told locals about the damage to their car and the encounter with the rattlesnake.

“They told me that the snake had taken interest in us and arranged for the encounter with the vulture,” Smith said.

Superstition or not, Smith was hooked and returned to Mexico/Central America every winter to explore more of the culture. He learned a significant part of Mayan language and produced paper and ink copies of Mayan glyphs.

He’d finished his bachelor’s degree in anthropology and was working as an adjunct faculty member at Evergreen State when he joined the St. Martin Abbey in Lacey, Wash.  He lived at the St. Martin’s monastery and practiced fasting and celibacy, but was drawn away from the monastic life by opportunities in the field of naturopathic medicine.

Smith started as an intern and later worked as an assistant to some of the most prominent names in the naturopathic field.  He eventually became a lecturer for Nature’s Way. He had just returned from a lecturing trip in Puerto Rico when his parents were killed in a car accident.

There’s an Eastern saying, said Smith, that “if your parents are still alive, then you don’t need any other gods.”

I had watched my parents separate as a teenager, then get back together as an adult, and finally die together. It was a difficult time for my family.”

He was already thinking about changing careers at the time of the accident, but his parents’ deaths sealed the deal. He quit and dove into his art, which he sold to make a living.

The path to Chemeketa

Smith emerged from a fugue state that followed the fatal accident with a desire to return to school. The master’s program coordinators at Oregon State University invited him to study there and he earned his degree in a little more than a year.

He was traveling back and forth between his property in Arkansas and his home in Corvallis when he was struck with a need to apply for a job teaching at Pima Community College in Tuscon, Ariz.

“I dropped off my application and master’s thesis on the way to Arkansas and got a call asking me to come teach linguistic anthropology while I was on my way back home to Corvallis,” Smith said.

Studying and teaching in the southwest, in some areas he’d traveled as a boy with his family, was something of a dream come true.

“I learned to craft turquoise, shell and jet jewelry with a master of the craft using the oldest lapidary techniques known,” he said.

He returned to Oregon when he was offered a job at Chemeketa and started doctorate work at the University of Oregon a year later.

Smith remains a popular professor on the Chemeketa campus. As quickly as he can create new courses, students sign up to take them. His favorite courses explore the areas of the world he fell in love with in his travels, Greece and Mexico/Central America.

At a gangly 6-foot-3, a possible result of his days as a raw fruitarian, Smith is the epitome of the eccentric anthropology professor. His long arms accentuate his broad gestures and make his storytelling all the more rapturous. He uses every method at his disposal to capture his students’ attention.

Smith can transfer from lecturing, blackboard drawings, to videos, to Powerpoint presentations at the drop of a hat and his props are equally as fascinating. He passes around pottery shards dating back centuries as well as natural and cultural items from the places he’s visited.

“Through these real artifacts I want them to see, hear and touch these places. I want them to experience everything that I have and appreciate diversity in the world through archaeology,” said Smith.

To his mind, it’s the least he can do for the students who constantly refresh his world view.

“Getting old isn’t awful, but becoming too set in my ways is. The students help me see things in diverse ways that I might not have noticed,” he said.

Smith still searches for humankind’s original vibrations by exploring archaeologic sites and absorbing and appreciating the customs and languages of those who surround him.

“I’m always interested in what the first people in an area chose to call things. The phonetics people choose when describing something tells us about their worldview,” said Smith. “Put your hand on your head next time you’re singing with joy then do it the next time you’re angry. You’re vibrating at different frequencies in each instance, now how do those vibrations affect the world around you differentially?”

Smith reiterated his greatest joy is to facilitate and encourage others to recognize and appreciate cultural diversity in all forms.

Welcome to the world of anthropology.

By Eric A. Howald. Have a great Chemeketa story? Send us an e-mail.

Updated February 12, 2008 by Marketing and Student Recruitment.