The wisdom of justice may have grown a little

Hopefully, the justices of the Washington State Supreme Court came to our community to learn a thing or two, because they probably did, whether they realize it or not.

It’s the kind of knowledge that sneaks into your mind quietly, the kind that lets you look back on your former self and realize what has changed in you, that somehow the formerly obvious truth has slipped away in humble retreat before a rising inspiration that is just as true.

Those nine already very wise men and women may someday look back to a conversation they had with a different kind of intellect, a different spirit that understands the world equally well but with a quiet grasp quite foreign to bookish learning.

Such is the influence of cultures thrown together like sand and gravel mixed in the mud that becomes concrete and stronger than either, moldable as mud about to be sculpted into a solid future.

Ben Dupris sees the community he grew up in as such a place, where two worlds come together. At the base of where Coyote broke the ice dam, now at the end of the bridge just past the concrete edifice he rents from the town of Coulee Dam. A place that will become more than a theater where the community’s youth can come together to hone their art, their ability to take part in life no matter what place society may have chosen for them. A bridge to the future and the art of the eternally present, the promise of what is to come and the solidity of what has always been.

Dupris spoke to people gathered at the Coulee Art House as a reception last week for the justices and a party for his mother, Anita Dupris, the chief judge of the Colville Tribal Court. The justices came to her territory to hear arcane arguments from another place about whether a woman’s right not to incriminate herself had been violated. With their minds steeped in law and its hidebound logic, they may not have recognized the niggling influence that crept in the side entrance from those who tap another kind of wisdom. But we who live in the lands of two cultures should hope it did.

Scott Hunter

editor and publishe