The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel

by Leslie Marmon Silko

  WILSON WEASEL TAIL, POET LAWYER

  NO COP TROUBLES, no shootings, nothing was going to keep Lecha away from the International Holistic Healers Convention in Tucson that week. Newspaper ads for the convention had headlined native healers from all the continents, including medicine men from Siberia and Africa, and an Eskimo woman who might be her old acquaintance Rose. Lecha also did not want to miss the spectacle of Wilson Weasel Tail, who was on the convention program.

  Lecha had met Wilson Weasel Tail on a cable-television talk show originating in Atlanta years before. Weasel Tail had gone out of control on the talk show; from the pockets of his powder-blue polyester suit, Wilson had taken a handful of index cards covered with the illegible scribbles of his “statement” in poem form. Studio technicians behind glass doors and behind the cameras had scurried and gestured frantically as blue, yellow, and red lights blinked. One of the Indians on the guest panel had seized the microphone! The talk show hostess had opened and shut her pink mouth like a beached fish, but no words came out. No one and nothing stopped Weasel Tail. His mission had come to him by virtue of where he had been born. Weasel Tail was Lakota, raised on a small, poor ranch forty miles from the Wounded Knee massacre site. Weasel Tail had dropped out of his third year at UCLA Law School to devote himself to poetry. The people didn’t need more lawyers, the lawyers were the disease not the cure. The law served the rich. The people needed poetry; poetry would set the people free; poetry would speak to the dreams and to the spirits, and the people would understand what they must do.

  Lecha had never forgot the success of Weasel Tail’s rampage that afternoon on cable television. As soon as the producers realized they had another harmless nut case reading off greasy note cards, they had signaled security to stand by. The talk show hostess and studio audience were given reassuring messages on studio monitors and teleprompters. Privately the assistant producers had probably congratulated themselves for their shrewd choice of a militant Sioux Indian lawyer-poet for the guest panel. A crazed Indian who commandeered the talk show was exactly the true-life drama the home viewers endlessly craved.

  Weasel Tail had introduced his poetry by explaining he had abandoned law school because the deck was stacked, and the dice were loaded, in the white man’s law. The law crushed and cheated the poor whatever color they were. “All that is left is the power of poetry,” Weasel Tail had intoned, clearing his throat nervously.

  Only a bastard government

  Occupies stolen land!

  Hey, you barbarian invaders!

  How much longer?

  You think colonialism lasts forever?

  Res ipsa loquitur!

  Cloud on title

  Unmerchantable title

  Doubtful title

  Defective title

  Unquiet title

  Unclear title

  Adverse title

  Adverse possession

  Wrongful possession

  Unlawful possession!

  Cable television was an enormous beast consuming twenty-four hours a day; but even live television had to be choreographed. An assistant producer guided two huge blond women in security uniforms through the tangle of cables in the direction of Weasel Tail. Weasel Tail saw they were women cops with their revolvers drawn, so he could not resist blurting out, “There will be no happiness to pursue; there will be no peace or justice until you settle up the debt, the money owed for the stolen land, and for all the stolen lives the U.S. empire rests on!” A whole squad of cops had swarmed over the television studio but the studio audience had refused to be evacuated from their $50 seats and miss the drama and any violence. Still, Weasel Tail knew he would have to hurry if he was going to read the full text of his indictment against the United States of America and all other colonials.

  We say, “Adios, white man,” to

  Five hundred years of

  Criminals and pretenders

  Illicit and unlawful governments,

  Res accedent lumina rebus,

  One thing throws light on another.

  Worchester v. Georgia!

  Ex parte Crow Dog!

  Winters v. United States!

  Williams v. Lee!

  Lonewolf v. Hitchcock!

  Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe v. Morton!

  Village of Kake, Alaska v. Egan!

  Gila River Apache Tribe v. Arizona!

  breach of close

  breach of conscience

  breach of contract

  breach of convenant

  breach of decency

  breach of duty

  breach of faith

  breach of fiduciary responsibility

  breach of promise

  breach of peace

  breach of trust

  breach of trust with fraudulent intent!

  Breach of the Treaty of the Sacred Black Hills!

  Breach of the Treaty of the Sacred Blue Lake!

  Breach of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo!

  Res judicata!

  We are at war.

  “You of the turpis causa! Unlawful, unelected regimes! We the indigenous people of the world demand justice!” Just as Wilson Weasel Tail was saying “justice” four large male cops had lifted him off the studio floor, two on each side, and had carried him away. Wilson Weasel Tail had disappeared after his arrest on cable television, and now, years later in Tucson, he had reappeared, but this time not as a lawyer-poet. This time Wilson Weasel Tail had billed himself as “a Lakota healer and visionary.” Lecha wanted to hear what Weasel Tail had to say this time; as far as Lecha knew, Weasel Tail had no training of any kind in healing, Lakota or otherwise. Weasel Tail had sworn to take back stolen tribal land; he was a political animal, not a healer. Lecha wondered what new angle, what new scheme, Wilson Weasel Tail had up his sleeve. She wondered what someone from the Northern Plains was doing so close to the Mexican border.

  • • •

  Lecha wandered through a maze of dingy, carpeted hotel corridors that were lined with long Formica-top tables where hundreds of “the new age of spiritualism” converts displayed their services and wares for sale. Lecha had always tried to avoid “spiritualists” in the past; old Yoeme had taught them ninety-five percent of spiritual practitioners were frauds. Lecha was looking for Zeta or the little Asian who worked for her. Zeta claimed Awa Gee had intercepted coded fax messages from radical eco-terrorists who were planning to appear at the convention. Lecha had not asked what interest Zeta or Awa Gee had in the eco-terrorists or why the eco-terrorists wanted to address a world convention of natural healers.

  MEDICINE MAKERS—CURES OF ALL KINDS

  LECHA COULD ONLY shake her head in wonder. She had never seen German root doctors or Celtic leech handlers before. But most of the new-age spiritualists were whites from the United States, many who claimed to have been trained by 110-year-old Huichol Indians. Lecha searched the schedule of conference events for familiar names. Scheduled in the main ballroom that morning had been the following lectures:

  • • •

  Tilly Shay, colonic irrigation therapist, editor of the Clean Colon Newsletter, discusses the link between chronic constipation in the Anglo-Saxon male and the propensity for violence

  The cosmic Oneness of Red Antler and White Dove (adopted members of the Abanaki Tribe). “Feel the nothingness of being through the emanating light of the sacred crystal”

  George Armstrong—Intuitive Training and Meditation Power Sites

  Jill Purcee—Tibetan Chanting

  Frank Calfer—Universal Experiential Shamanism

  Lee Locke—Women’s Spirituality

  Himalayan Bells—A Rare Concert at 2 P.M., Poolside, Donations

  Soundscape, Rainbow Moods, Cosmic Connection, and the New Age: Where Next for Healing? 8 P.M., Tennis Courts

  • • •

  It would have been difficult to overlook Wilson Weasel Tail’s portion of the program schedule because it filled half the page. Lecha had to laugh; Weasel Tail really knew how to get peo
ple’s attention:

  Stop time!

  Have no fear of aging, illness, or death!

  Secrets of ancient Native American healing

  Hopi, Lakota, Yaqui, others

  Kill or cripple enemies without detection

  Summon up armies of warriors’ ghosts!

  Lecha glanced at a clock: there was half an hour before Weasel Tail spoke. Lecha had felt her heart beat faster when she read the last line in Weasel Tail’s program about summoning armies of ghosts. Who had spiritual possession of the Americas? Not the Christians. Lecha remembered their mother had forbidden old Yoeme to slander Christianity in their presence, but of course that had not stopped Yoeme from telling Lecha and Zeta anything she wanted when their mother wasn’t around. According to old Yoeme, the Catholic Church had been finished, a dead thing, even before the Spanish ships had arrived in the Americas. Yoeme had delighted in describing tortures and executions performed in the name of Jesus during the Inquisition. In a crude catechism book Yoeme had even showed them pictures, wood-block prints of churchmen burning “heretics” and breaking Jews on the wheel. Yoeme said the mask had slipped at that time, and all over Europe, ordinary people had understood in their hearts the “Mother Church” was a cannibal monster. Since the Europeans had no other gods or beliefs left, they had to continue the Church rituals and worship; but they knew the truth.

  Yoeme said even idiots can understand a church that tortures and kills is a church that can no longer heal; thus the Europeans had arrived in the New World in precarious spiritual health. Christianity might work on other continents and with other human beings; Yoeme did not dispute those possibilities. But from the beginning in the Americas, the outsiders had sensed their Christianity was somehow inadequate in the face of the immensely powerful and splendid spirit beings who inhabited the vastness of the Americas. The Europeans had not been able to sleep soundly on the American continents, not even with a full military guard. They had suffered from nightmares and frequently claimed to see devils and ghosts. Cortés’s men had feared the medicine and the procedures they had brought with them from Europe might lack power on New World soil; almost immediately, the wounded Europeans had begun to dress their wounds in the fat of slain Indians.

  Lecha had not appreciated Yoeme’s diagnosis of Christianity until she had worked a while as a psychic. Lecha had seen people who claimed to be devout believers with rosary beads in their hands, yet they were terrified. Affluent, educated white people, upstanding Church members, sought out Lecha in secret. They all had come to her with a deep sense that something had been lost. They all had given the loss different names: the stock market crash, lost lottery tickets, worthless junk bonds or lost loved ones; but Lecha knew the loss was their connection with the earth. They all feared illness and physical change; since life led to death, consciousness terrified them, and they had sought to control death by becoming killers themselves.

  Once the earth had been blasted open and brutally exploited, it was only logical the earth’s offspring, all the earth’s beings, would similarly be destroyed. The international convention had been called by natural and indigenous healers to discuss the earth’s crisis. As the prophecies had warned, the earth’s weather was in chaos; the rain clouds had disappeared while terrible winds and freezing had followed burning, dry summers. Old Yoeme had always said the earth would go on, the earth would outlast anything man did to it, including the atomic bomb. Yoeme used to laugh at the numbers, the thousands of years before the earth would be purified, but eventually even the radiation from a nuclear war would fade out. The earth would have its ups and downs; but humans had been raping and killing their own nestlings at such a rate Yoeme said humans might not survive. The humans would not be a great loss to the earth. The energy or “electricity” of a being’s spirit was not extinguished by death; it was set free from the flesh. Dust to dust or as a meal for pack rats, the energy of the spirit was never lost. Out of the dust grew the plants; the plants were consumed and became muscle and bone; and all the time, the energy had only been changing form, nothing had been lost or destroyed.

  Lecha had to laugh to herself. The earth must truly be in crisis for both Zeta and Calabazas to be attending this convention. Calabazas must be getting old because he had been listening to his loco lieutenant, Mosca, who had wild stories about a barefooted Hopi with radical schemes, and new reports about the spirit macaws carried by the twin brothers on a sacred journey north accompanied by thousands of the faithful.

  The hotel conference rooms and lobby areas were swarming with people of all ages and origins. Lecha could sense their urgency and desperation as they milled around ushers who collected ten dollars at the entrance of the ballroom where Wilson Weasel Tail was scheduled to speak. Lecha saw a hotel conference room full of women chanting over and over, “I am goddess, I am goddess.” In the next room freshly cut evergreen trees were tenderly arranged in a circle by white men wearing robes; it looked as if tree worship was making a comeback in northern Europe. In the corridors there were white-haired old hippies selling cheap crystals and little plastic bags of homegrown chamomile. There were white men from California in expensive new buckskins, beads, and feathers who had called themselves “Thunder-roll” and “Buffalo Horn.” African medicine men seven feet tall stood next to half-pint Incas and Mayas selling dry stalks of weeds wrapped in strips of dirty rag. Lecha watched for a while; she had watched the hands. The hands had gripped the cash feverishly as they waited for their turn; old Yoeme used to brag that she could make white people believe in anything and do anything she told them because the whites were so desperate. Money was changing hands rapidly; fifties and hundreds seemed to drop effortlessly from the white hands into the brown and the black hands. Some bought only the herbs or teas, but others had bought private consultations which cost hundreds of dollars.

  Lecha had not been able to get close enough to the Incas or the Mayas to hear what they were saying. Two interpreters appeared to be attempting to translate for the crowd, but they had momentarily been involved in disagreement over the translation of a word. Lecha could not help noticing a short, wide Maya woman who seemed to be studying the crowd; suddenly the Maya woman had turned and looked Lecha right in the eye. Yoeme used to warn them about traveling medicine people, because witches and sorcerers often found it necessary to go to distant towns where their identities were not known. Lecha turned and saw a woman holding a walrus tusk, surrounded by spellbound listeners. Lecha’s heart beat faster and she felt a big smile on her face; she would have recognized that Eskimo anywhere!

  Rose had talked to Lecha as if the crowd of spectators had not been there. The more Rose seemed to ignore the people, the more quiet and intense the crowd had become as they sought to hear each word between the two short, dark women. Rose had begun talking about the years since Lecha had abandoned the dogsled racer for warmer country and faster men.

  Rose had learned to talk to her beloved little sisters and brothers who were ghosts in blue flames running along the river. Of course Rose did not speak to them the way she was talking to Lecha now. The blue flames burned with a loud blowtorch sound that would have made words impossible to understand even if her sweet ones could have talked. But no sounds came from their throats; when they opened their mouths, Rose saw the words written in flames—not even complete words, but Rose could understand everything they had to say.

  Lecha had felt the crowd press closer, but at that instant, Rose stood up and caused the spectators to step back quickly and respectfully. Rose pointed at a big suitcase near Lecha’s feet. Rose lifted the lid; inside, all Lecha saw were white river pebbles and small gray river stones. Rose nodded at the rocks and then at the well-dressed young white people lining up obediently to buy whatever the Yupik Eskimo medicine woman had to sell. “Some of us are getting together later in my room,” Rose said, “after Weasel Tail and the Hopi speak. Room twelve twelve.”

  THE RETURN OF THE BUFFALO

  WILSON WEASEL TAIL strode up to the podiu
m and whipped out two sheets of paper. Weasel Tail had abandoned his polyester leisure suits for army camouflage fatigues; he wore his hair in long braids carefully wrapped in red satin ribbon. Weasel Tail’s voice boomed throughout the main ballroom. Today he wanted to begin his lecture by reading two fragments of famous Native American documents. “First, I read to you from Pontiac’s manuscript:

  “ ‘You cry the white man has stolen everything, killed all your animals and food. But where were you when the people first discussed the Europeans? Tell the truth. You forgot everything you were ever told. You forgot the stories with warnings. You took what was easy to swallow, what you never had to chew. You were like a baby suddenly helpless in the white man’s hands because the white man feeds your greed until it swells up your belly and chest to your head. You steal from your neighbors. You can’t be trusted!’ ”

  Weasel Tail had paused dramatically and gazed at the audience before he continued:

  “Treachery has turned back upon itself. Brother has betrayed brother. Step back from envy, from sorcery and poisoning. Reclaim these continents which belong to us.”

  Weasel Tail paused, took a deep breath, and read the Paiute prophet Wovoka’s letter to President Grant:

  You are hated

  You are not wanted here

  Go away,

  Go back where you came from.