Local secrets safe as Eileen turns to Indian tribe for tale

American born Eileen Kane first came to Ireland 44 years ago to study how the presence of factories in rural Gaeltacht areas affected local communities.

Eileen, who now lives in Killeen Arann, near Ballinderreen in South Galway, is an anthropologist, a profession which involves the study of human beings and their cultures and one which didn’t exist at the time in Ireland.

You get the feeling that if she decided to write a memoir about her early days in this country, a lot of people, especially men involved in academic life, who were middle aged att that time, would now be terrified of potential revelations.

“They thought I was a bird of paradise who would be flying away again, so they told me lots,” she laughs.

It’s easy see why they might have done that. Eileen is a bright, vivacious person with an enormous interest in the world around her. Now aged 70, this petite, elegant woman looks years younger than her age – so over four decades ago in a fairly sombre Ireland, she must have seemed completely exotic, despite her part Irish ancestry. Fortunately for those confiding Irish men, however, Eileen has turned her attention elsewhere for her new book, Trickster, a work that her publishers describe as ‘an anthropological memoir’. It was launched last weekend in Claire’s Tearoom, Clarinbridge, by novelist and playwright Jennifer Johnston.

Although Eileen has written many academic studies, this novel/memoir is her first piece of creative work.

“What got me started was a chance meeting with Frank McCourt on the steps of the old Great Southern. I congratulated him, and he told me that if I wanted to write I shouldn't leave it as late as he did,” she laughs.

Trickster tells of the months she spent living with and studying the Paiute Indians of Nevada in 1964, while studying for a PhD in anthropology. Although it’s nearly 50 years ago, the images she conjures up are as vivid as if she had been there yesterday, thanks to the copious and detailed notes she took of these people and their way of life. But it’s not just about them, it’s also about her own life and family and how people from completely different backgrounds can have so much in common.

The then twenty-three-year-old Eileen, who was an anthropology student in the University of Pittsburgh, hailed from Youngstown, a violent Mafia-run town in Ohio, where “there was nothing except mills”.

The eldest of six children, she grew up on a street with “some Irish Americans, a lot of Central Europeans and black people”.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.