The next morning was indeed, as Annick had promised, different. We parked on the south rim of Canyon de Chelly and hiked down over looming thousand-foot cliffs to the White House. With plastic sacks over our shoes, we waded sandbar to sandbar across a creek in ankle-deep water. (On a later trip Annick was crippling along on a healing ankle and I had to carry her across the creek on my back, an occasion she regards as hilarious in memory.) We listened to winds breathing over the enormous face of water-stained rock above us. Annick said she heard bells, maybe Navajo sheep, or eternity resonating. She voted in favor of eternity.
The White House, a few decaying mud-brick rooms on a rocky shelf, must have been a stunning place to live. Parked at the overlook we encountered a young couple deep into all-the-way lovemaking in the seat of a Chevy pickup truck. I took their devotions as a message about the value of primordial glory.
But still I wonder at the difficulty involved in living at the White House. And I wondered why those people left. Did life under those cliffs remind them too insistently of mortality? Or what? Who were their enemies? Did they just get tired of hauling water?
Each brick, shaped down by the creek, had to be brought up ladders and toe-and handholds to the shelf. They must have been deeply fearful to consider living on that cliffside, where children were in constant danger of falling off.
At what costs has social order been maintained by Southwestern tribes? How have their cultures survived inside our relentlessly invasive national society? To what degree are they alike?
For openers they’ve inherited a system of complex ongoing rituals in which every person has a responsible role. Rituals embody religion, and are performed to ensure individual and societal well-being. Taking part in religious and practical efforts of your people to survive, giving away both time and effort, is understood as normal behavior.
Elaborate communal rituals sanctify vital relationships between communities and the natural world, communities and other communities, between clans, moieties, and families, and between individuals. All relationships.
Alfonso Ortiz, a University of New Mexico anthropologist who grew up at San Juan Pueblo, wrote in “Ritual Drama and the Pueblo World View” that the “undulating rhythms of nature govern their whole existence, from the timing and order of ritual dramas to the planning of economic activities.” He goes on to say that “everything in the cosmos is knowable and being knowable, controllable” by “letter-perfect attention to detail and performance, thus the Pueblo emphasis on formulas, ritual, and the repetition revealed in ritual drama.”
In “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination,” Leslie Marmon Silko, a poet, novelist, and MacArthur Fellow from Laguna Pueblo, says “Survival depended on harmony and cooperation not only among human beings, but among all things.” Silko says Pueblo peoples saw themselves “as part of an ancient continuous story composed of innumerable bundles of other stories.
“They instinctively sorted events and details into a loose narrative structure. Everything became a story.” Traditionally everyone, from the youngest child to the oldest person, was expected to listen and to be able to recall or tell a portion, if only a small detail, from a narrative account or story. Thus the remembering and retelling were a communal process.
“The ancient Pueblo people sought a communal truth, not an absolute.” Which is appealing these days, truth in absolute forms being increasingly suspect. We might settle for stories that bring us together in order that, as Silko says, “the terror of facing the world alone is extinguished.”
Native cultures in the Southwest have historically been profoundly conservative, fearing change for social and religious reasons. Rituals enacted at Zuni or Taos or Hopi or among the Navajo and Apache would be recognizable to men and women who’ve been dead for generations. They have been tested over and over and slowly evolved. These days men and women talk on cell phones as they prepare for seasonal rituals; they clearly understand these rituals to be the sacred basis for the survival of their people, as did their ancestors.
One travel fantasy goes this way—buy an Airstream trailer, hook it up behind a heavy-duty four-wheel-drive pickup truck. Home would be trailing behind, the world before you each day.
But I’ve never seriously considered going deep into hock for an Airstream. Annick and I hum along in my Honda. Over years we’ve learned to eat in village cafés and talk to barmaids in roadside taverns, walk under cottonwood trees on riverbanks and lie us down to sleep in plywood motels. We find our way, we’re together, and often manage to be very pleased with what we’re doing.
But going alone! Crossing pale deserts and ascending red-rock canyons into the juniper-green foothills, distant piney mountains lying blue in the distances, is another matter. I’ve spent decades trying to get it right.
Punching nervously at the radio, I listen to distant Navajo voices, salsa music from the border towns, and ultra right-wing nitwit talk-show gurus. I play Beethoven’s sublime “Archduke Trio” and bluegrass on the CD deck but don’t really listen, then stop in taverns to make lonely guy-talk with bartenders. But that’s a pathetic game, so I keep moving.
Stop, I tell myself, walk out into the countryside, leave your automobile and the highway entirely out of sight, and study the varieties of cactus, small birds as they nest, listen to the silences. But I don’t. Existential spooks are too much with me. This isolation, they whisper, is what’s real. Get used to it. But I flee.
On a Sunday morning, just lately, I had another encounter with reeducation. In Santa Fe, the writer Frederick Turner and his wife, Alise, told me to contact a Navajo woman they admired, Gloria Emerson, and I did. Gloria offered to take me to meet a Navajo medicine man named Mister Jim, to talk about mountain gods. Southwestern native cultures, after centuries of exposure to Christianity, go on resolutely believing in gods who inhabit mountaintops.
Gloria and I drove past the volcanic extrusion called Shiprock—rising seventeen hundred feet above the flats, it can be thought of as resembling a sailing ship—and into Arizona. South from the highway we followed a gravel road, which led us through scatters of juniper into foothills.
“He’s very busy,” Gloria said. “He can only talk to you for a half hour.” Mister Jim, it seemed, spent his Sundays on curing ceremonies. I am not a mystical man, and my skepticism was blooming.
What we came to, amid the juniper, was a blue-gray Navajo hogan, doorway as always facing east, to the sunrise. A four-wheel-drive minivan was parked before the hogan. Gloria told me to park alongside, precisely parallel to the minivan. She sat with her eyes downcast, her hands folded in her lap. “We’ll wait,” she said.
Eventually two long-haired, unshaven men came out. “Don’t look,” Gloria said. “Don’t meet their eyes.” I wondered if they were dangerous until they got in the minivan and drove away. Then a young couple in a dusty Plymouth pulled in beside us. They didn’t look at us. These transactions did not seem so much dangerous as polite. A man came out of the hogan. He gestured to Gloria.
“Now,” she said, “we can go in.” The couple in the dusty Plymouth was destined to wait. We didn’t look at them.
The interior of the dirt-floored hogan was almost empty—without decoration, rugs folded along the walls, a plastic chair for anyone not comfortable sitting on the rugs. (I sat on the chair, Gloria on a rug.)
Mister Jim was calm and deliberate, in his middle years, and he sat in his traditional place, on the folded rugs, his back against the wall directly across from the door that opened to the east. “What do you want?” he asked.
I said I wasn’t sure, and Gloria explained that I was interested in the Navajo relationship to their land, that I had asked her how people managed to embrace the isolations involve in herding sheep month after month, winter after winter, spending their nights in a hogan lost in the midst of the mostly uninhabited deserts and hills.
What he knows, Gloria said, speaking of me, is what he’s seen from the highway, and in photographs, and what he’s read. He see
s lost harmonies and denuded lives. (Gloria said something to that effect; no notetaking or tape recording was permitted.)
Mister Jim ignored us in a moment of silence, then spoke for twenty minutes. Navajo belief, he told me, centers around four sacred mountains, north, south, east, and west. An elaborate set of mythological teaching stories proceeds from those mountains. Stories connected to the western mountain, for instance, instruct the Navajo in ways to live a proper social life. They are about marriage and children, and how to live in family and in community and in the entire Navajo Nation, with dignity and love and forbearance. Sacred stories connected to gods on their specific mountains, he said, tell us these things. The land tells us these things. Stories, he said, help us know who we are, and how to conduct and sustain ourselves.
His clan, Mister Jim told me, included the stars in their patterns, the mountains and their gods, the quiet around in the deserts, and this his sacred homeplace, the shrine out in the juniper where he held ceremonies, this hogan and the house where he lived with his family, his fields where corn grew, his horses and his cattle and sheep out on the deserts, grazing. It’s all sacred and it’s alive. This hogan, he said, is alive. People have lived here since time immemorial, and things go on changing because they’re alive. But they also go on as they always have, through death, rebirth, spring, and winter.
Mister Jim was forthright and patient in his explanations. There could be no possible profit for him in taking this time with me, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying as other than mysticism until Gloria and I left and had driven higher up into the Carrizo Mountains. We parked amid ragged stands of juniper and stood gazing down as patterns of clouds and sunlight drifted over the deserts toward Monument Valley, which was just beyond the western horizon.
Gloria must have sensed that I was baffled. “Think of the mountains as books,” she said. “They tell us things, just as books instruct people.” Listening to ringing silence as patterns of light flowed out before me, I thought maybe this listening was the beginning of what Mister Jim meant by talking to gods.
Maybe the gods would tell me that mirroring systems, what physicists call fractals, from stars to our lives, are what is, and that they are, as alive as anything; and that I can thus never be all the way alone and that this is as far as solace goes. But actually, I was hearing my own thoughts.
A couple of days later, in Santa Fe, Fred Turner gave me an essay he’d written about a French vintner, Alain Querre, who practiced his art in the Bordeaux region. Querre said that a vintner “must above all know and live his soil.” Fred wrote that “the tending of vines had something of the sacred about it” and went on to say, “It was a matter of understanding, in the moment of holding your glass, the whole complex process: the microclimate of the soil that grew the grapes, the varietals planted there, the sort of care these required, the attitudes of the men and women who harvested them, the whole ancient tradition of producing fine wines.” He concludes by saying that drinking a glass of that wine is “a sort of sacrament.”
What did I take from Gloria and Mister Jim? Maybe this: There are Bordeaux wine gods and gods at Chaco Canyon and star gods in those lavender velvet night skies over the American Southwest, red-rock gods and hummingbird gods flitting among the gray-white sycamore along Cave Creek in the Chiricahua Mountains, gods of the Mexican wolf and the puma, gods of cooking and sheep herding and fixing fence and irrigating corn, gods of tradition and decorum and taking care all around. Mountain gods, gods of mescal and hot peppers and intimacy, gods and gods and gods, all whispering the simple message, “The world is alive to us if we can love it.” Which is what I find myself thinking.
Having bought some ears of variously colored corn, for kitchen decorations in Montana, and a brilliantly patterned red sash, Annick and I walked among ancient houses at Old Orabi, the oldest Hopi village. I wondered why a simple life like this (an inherently stupid thought, there are no simple lives) couldn’t be enough. The reason was obvious—because I believe in the need to constantly reinvent ourselves, in the usefulness of staying up on our toes, the need for incessant rethinking of our purposes and strategies. But there can be too much staying up on our toes. It can lead to fretful, aimless, and frenetic social hopping and bopping, driven by a fear of what might happen if we ever slowed down. What if we went to sleep at the switch, or at the wheel, and fell behind, or crashed? Or simply noticed that we weren’t up to much beyond staying on our toes?
The Hopi, on the other hand, believe in repetitions and order. I recalled a story from Native American Testimony edited by Peter Nabokov, told by Peter Nuvamsa, Sr. Confronting hippies who had taken to hanging around the Hopi mesas, Nuvamsa asked, “Why are you here? Why do you behave this way, doing anything that comes into your head? We do not like the way you are behaving. It’s not our way. It’s improper.”
They said, “What’s wrong with what we’re doing? We are here because we’re on your side. You have been put down by the establishment, and we are against the establishment.” I told them, “No, you are not on our side. You don’t behave well. Whatever you want, you take it. Whatever you want to do, you do it. There are rules in the world. You can’t be just anything you want.”
The Hopi, in short, as I get it, do not think of themselves as a counterculture. They believe in responsibility. They believe droughts and epidemics are the predictable result of conduct on the part of Hopi leaders and Hopi society. They live in a coherent, practical one-to-one trade-off relationship with sacredness, and still they are certainly among the most religious people in the world.
The Hopi focus on encouraging rain for the corn. Without rain there is no corn, and soon, no Hopi. That, most basically, is how they understand transactions with their Rain Gods. In Legends of the American Desert, Alex Shoumatoff says, “The scant rainfall on which their survival depends will only come through prayer, through everybody’s heart being right.
“The Hopi believe…that when they die they become benevolent beings known as kachinas and eventually take the form of clouds, becoming Cloud People, whose substance, or navala, is liquid and is manifested as rain. As Cloud People who send down their life-giving fluid to their kin, the dead continue to play a vital role in the order of things. Their kin must perform certain ceremonies and smoke pipes known as cloud-blowers before they plant their corn. They must summon the Cloud People and beseech them to release their navala.” Shoumatoff says he learned these things from books. Hopi people, even when asked directly, are seriously disinclined to tell white outsiders much about sacred matters.
Down the road a few miles at the Hopi Cultural Center, I bought a mudhead clown kachina with erect penis blooming from his forehead. It sounds obscene and ugly, but I took it to be in the spirit of mudheads, unflinchingly ironic. “Life,” I said to the Hopi carver, thinking to connect. “Yeah,” he said, smiling as he took my Visa card.
Old photographs of Southwestern native villages can be beguiling because they seem to reveal a precisely realized dream. Alex Shoumatoff on the other hand says the Hopi villages remind him of Tibet—the wrinkled faces of very old women, snowy peaks on the faint horizons, nothing much to see, not much going on but a life which is none of our business.
The Hopi are among the few precontact cultures surviving in the United States. Their society evolved through more than four hundred years of precontact isolation and the four hundred and fifty years since. Their struggle to survive lead them to develop intricate ceremonies and rituals in which everything is secondary to that main duty—beseeching, praying to, entreating, haranguing the rain gods.
After first contact with the Spanish in 1541 they survived unspeakable brutalities, hands and feet cut off and deaths as a result of whippings by white authorities. But most extraordinarily they survived the smallpox epidemics which took their population from around 7,500 in 1775 to 798 five years later.
Hopi culture is, obviously, enormously resilient, a toughness which to a great degree derives from their stabilizing relig
ious life. The Hopi villages, while keeping to a culture-wide model, organize their own ceremonies. Their ceremonies—more than one a month—cycle through two periods.
The masked cycle, featuring elaborately costumed kachinas, runs from late winter to July, when the last of the corn has been planted. An unmasked cycle then lasts until the most important ceremony of all, Soyal, the winter solstice when the sun turns back toward the Hopi and the pueblo is cleansed of past misfortune and seed corn is sanctified in the kivas, and a new cycle of prayer begins.
Here, a bibliographic note: The religions of the Southwestern tribes are oftentimes profoundly interesting, and their ceremonies are usually emotionally resonant to any even mildly responsive witness, but there are dozens and dozens of kachinas, and literally thousands of ceremonial gestures, too many for me to explain if I could (and I can’t). Anyone hoping to thoroughly understand the native cultures of the Southwest, not to speak of developing an empathetic relationship to any of them, might begin with the Smithsonian Institution’s Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 9: Southwest, which also treats, among others, the Zuni and Rio Grande pueblos. The Navajo and Apache are considered in volume 10, also called Southwest.
In an essay called “Hopi World View,” Louis A. Hieb tells us that the Hopi understand that “life and death, day and night, summer and winter are seen not simply as opposed but as involved in a system of alternation and continuity—indeed in a fundamental consubstantiality. Death is ‘birth’ into a new world.”
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