Storyteller Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  STORYTELLER

  Leslie Marmon Silko is the author of the novels Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, and Gardens in the Dunes. She has also written two works of autobiography, Sacred Water and The Turquoise Ledge; a collection of essays, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit; and a book of verse, Laguna Woman. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and an NEA fellowship, Silko lives in Tucson, Arizona, on the boundary of Saguaro National Park West.

  Laguna Pueblo

  STORYTELLER

  LESLIE MARMON SILKO

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Arcade Publishing, Inc. by arrangement with Seaver Books 1981

  This edition with a new introduction published in Penguin Books 2012

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Leslie Marmon Silko, 1981, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Some of the material in this volume has appeared previously in the following publications: American Literature: Themes and Writers (third edition); Chicago Review; Fiction’s Journey: 50 Stories; Focus on America; Rocky Mountain Magazine; Series E, Macmillan English; Sight and Insight: Steps in the Writing Process; The Best American Short Stories 1975; The Ethnic American Woman: Problems, Protests, Lifestyle; The Man to Send Rain Clouds; The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature; The Third Woman; 200 Years of Great American Short Stories; Voices of the Rainbow

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Silko, Leslie Marmon, 1948–

  Storyteller / Leslie Marmon Silko.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-62191-2

  1. Indians of North America—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.I44S55 2012

  813’.54—dc23

  2012023724

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Fournier

  Designed by Ginger Legato

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON

  This book is dedicated to the storytellers as far back as memory goes and

  to the telling which continues and through which they all live and we with them.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  There is a tall Hopi basket with a single figure

  I always called her Aunt Susie

  This is the way Aunt Susie told the story

  My great-grandmother was Marie Anaya

  Storyteller

  It was a long time before

  Indian Song: Survival

  The Laguna people

  Lullaby

  Grandma Lillie was born in Los Lunas, New Mexico

  What Whirlwind Man Told Kochininako, Yellow Woman

  Yellow Woman

  Cottonwood: Parts One & Two

  The Time We Climbed Snake Mountain

  When I was thirteen I carried an old .30-30

  Two years later

  Aunt Alice told my sisters and me this story one time

  Grandpa Stagner had a wagon and team and water drilling rig

  His wife had caught them together before

  Grandma A’mooh had a worn-out little book

  Storytelling

  The Two Sisters

  Out of the Works No Good Comes From

  Saturday morning I was walking past Nora’s house

  One time

  Poem for Myself and Mei: Concerning Abortion

  Tony’s Story

  Long time ago

  Estoy-eh-muut and the Kunideeyahs

  The Go-wa-peu-zi Song

  It was summertime

  The hills and mesas around Laguna

  Up North

  The purple asters are growing

  Simon J. Ortiz is a wonderful poet

  Uncle Tony’s Goat

  How to Write a Poem About the Sky

  In Cold Storm Light

  Prayer to the Pacific

  Horses at Valley Store

  September 20, the day after Laguna Feast

  The Man to Send Rain Clouds

  Many of the Navajo people

  Deer Dance/For Your Return

  In the fall, the Laguna hunters

  Grandpa graduated from Sherman Institute

  A Hunting Story

  Grandpa Hank had grown up mostly at Paguate

  Where Mountain Lion Lay Down with Deer

  Deer Song

  At Laguna Feast time

  Preparations

  Story from Bear Country

  He was a small child

  Grandma A’mooh used to tell me stories

  A Geronimo Story

  I just fed the rooster a blackened banana (from a letter)

  But sometimes what we call “memory”

  Coyotes and the Stro’ro’ka Dancers

  When the Indian Public Health Service

  Toe’Osh: A Laguna Coyote Story

  Around Laguna Fiesta time

  Skeleton Fixer

  On Sundays Grandpa Hank liked to go driving

  The Storyteller’s Escape

  Helen’s Warning at New Oraibi

  In 1918 Franz Boas, ethnologist and linguist

  Coyote Holds a Full House in his Hand

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Nearly all of the photographs were taken by my father, Lee Marmon. He set out in 1949 to record the beauty of the elders and the beauty of the land lest they be forgotten. I want to thank him for his lifetime’s work as well as to thank him for finding the prints I needed for this new version of Storyteller. Many thanks to his wife, Kathy, who sent the digital images.

  Many thanks to Mike Kelly at the University of New Mexico’s Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, who helped us obtain the images of the Lee Marmon prints in the New Mexico Digital Collections. The Lee Marmon collection can be viewed at http://econtent.unm.edu.

  INTRODUCTION

  All human languages have words and tones of voice we use when we want to impart information. If you think about it, nearly everything of consequence
that we tell one another involves narration or story.

  When we explain ourselves or our reasoning in a situation, when we describe what we remember of an experience, we organize the experience into a narrative structure to communicate the information. The narrative may begin anywhere—at the conclusion of the incident with the result, then backtracking to the actions that led to the results. Or one may start at the beginning and proceed in a linear manner, step by step leading to the action and finally the conclusion. Often there are stories about other stories and differing versions of the same events.

  The human capacity for language and storytelling go hand in hand. Neither precedes the other; rather, the urge to share our experience, to tell our stories to another human is so strong that humans invented languages—sign languages and spoken languages but also dance, music, and painting in order to communicate the full range of our experiences. Sign languages are highly sophisticated and involve “body language,” which may reveal far more than the spoken word. Sign languages must have served our ancient ancestors well on the African plains when they were stalking game and any sound would stampede the prey; sign language also served humans when danger threatened, and silence was essential.

  “Help!” might have been one of the first words in human language, along with “run!” Or “hide!” But once the danger had passed, the urge to tell and the need to know what had happened would have been paramount. This exchange of information through stories about what had just happened was a primary factor in the survival of human species in a world in which nearly all creatures were either bigger, stronger, or faster than human beings. So I imagine that at first humans exchanged stories to acquire knowledge as a survival strategy, to learn to anticipate the many threats and dangers in their world. Considerable details and vivid descriptions were essential to the telling; the most important actions in a story might be repeated to make sure the listeners remembered what to do to survive in a similar situation. I like to imagine that the listeners took solace but also pleasure in hearing these stories told by survivors—amazing stories with happy endings. These stories gave them the heart to face danger with the hope that if they did exactly what the survivor had done then they too might survive. So they paid close attention to the survivor’s story, and thus stories rich in detail and description became the most pleasurable because they gave the listeners the most information. The association of knowledge with power begins here.

  Storytelling also gave expression to fears and dreams and to faith and belief. Religious ceremonies came out of certain sacred stories that described the relationship between humans and the spirit world or gods.

  Storytelling among the family and clan members served as a group rehearsal of survival strategies that had worked for the Pueblo people for thousands of years. This was the case among the Pueblo people of the southwest and at Laguna Pueblo, where I am from.

  The entire culture, all the knowledge, experience, and beliefs, were kept in the human memory of the Pueblo people in the form of narratives that were told and retold from generation to generation. The people perceived themselves in the world as part of an ancient continuous story composed of innumerable bundles of other stories.

  The impulse of the old-time Pueblo people was to leave nothing out—they were not prudish about subject matter because valuable experience and knowledge are found in all levels of human activity. As I wrote in my essay on story and landscape:

  Accounts of the appearance of the first Europeans in Pueblo country or the tragic encounters between Pueblo people and Apache raiders were no more and no less important than stories about the biggest mule deer ever taken or adulterous couples surprised in cornfields and chicken coops. Whatever happened, the Pueblo people instinctively sorted events and details into a loose narrative structure. Everything became story.

  Stories most often told are not “made-up” or “fictional” stories, but narrative accounts of incidents that the teller has experienced or heard about. Storytelling was not a formal event but rather an exchange of stories—usually village gossip or family affairs. There were no “official storytellers”; everyone could tell stories, and everyone felt responsible for remembering stories and retelling them accurately. Humorous incidents are favorite topics of such local gossip and village history because everyone enjoys laughter. For the Pueblo people, a collective truth resides somewhere within the web of differing versions, disputes over minor points, outright contradictions tangled with old feuds, and village rivalries; thus the ongoing story or history of the Pueblo people continues endlessly.

  Location or place plays a central role in Pueblo narratives. Stories are most frequently recalled as people are passing a specific geographical feature or the exact location where a story took place. Often the turning point in a story depended upon a peculiarity or special quality of a rock or tree, found only at that place. Often it is impossible to determine which came first: the incident or the geographical feature that stirs the imagination.

  The humma-hah stories that I loved to listen to were usually told after a meal with relatives and neighbors; they were for the children, but people of all ages listened. The humma-hah stories are traditional Pueblo stories that have been told continuously for thousands of years about a time when amazing things were possible, when the plants and animals and even rocks and stars used to converse with human beings. The humma-hah stories describe the various supernatural beings and other worlds and other times that still exist right beside the present world and present time.

  The storytelling went on in a relaxed manner and people might get up or move around respectfully. We children listened quietly, but from time to time an adult in the audience might wait for the person telling the story to pause and then ask a question or contribute another version of the story being told. The audiences particularly enjoyed hearing different versions of the same story because it gave them the opportunity to make wisecracks and jokes about the motives for and the origins of these differing or even conflicting versions. Everyone grew up hearing the old stories, and they loved to listen to stories but also to tell stories, so that when old storytellers got forgetful, the audience members gently joined in so that the process was self-correcting and inclusive.

  There are still formal ceremonial recitations of the ancient stories with designated elders who recite them in the Laguna language. One such recitation occurs around winter solstice when there is a four-day ritual retelling of the stories about the Migration and how Ka’waik, the Beautiful Lake Place, became our home.

  I was fortunate to be born in 1948 when a great many of the old folks were still alive and happy to recall stories they’d heard as children, stories that their grandparents had heard when they were children, and so on. In the early 1950s most of the Laguna people still worked at farming and raising sheep and cattle. Clocks and calendars were not important—the sun, the stars, and the seasons told the people all they needed to know about time. There was always plenty of time, endless time, for answering a child’s questions with stories to illustrate what had happened to others.

  My great grandmother Marie Anaya was born at Paguate village, north of Laguna. “Grandma A’mooh” as I called her, used to tell my sisters and me stories about her family and the local history during the Spanish and Mexican governments and of course the arrival of the U.S. military forces in New Mexico in 1848 to seize Mexican territory. She told us about her uncle and cousins who were killed on the west side of a tall mesa above the Rio San Jose gorge near Swah-nee; she told us about the Laguna search party that overtook some Navajos with a stolen herd of Laguna sheep. She was proud the Lagunas did not harm the Navajos but gave them four sheep to take with them to feed their hungry families. She told us a great deal of history, but she would not tell us humma-hah stories, which were my favorites. She had been converted by Presbyterian missionaries when she was away at the Indian Boarding School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where the teachers urged the Indian students not “to go back to the blanket” after they ret
urned home. They were drilled by government teachers to abjure Indian clothes and to avoid all contact with the “pagan” beliefs of their Indian communities.

  By the time I was three or four years old I’d already heard the humma-hah stories from Aunt Alice Marmon Little and Aunt Susie; those stories were my favorites because the animals talked to humans and magical things happened. I must have asked my great grandma A’mooh to tell me a story about Coyote because she did not refuse me or fail to acknowledge my request for a story; instead she picked up the worn copy of Brownie the Bear to read to my sisters and me. She read us this story many times, and we loved it. She read us the stories of Jonah and the whale and Daniel in the lions’ den from a Bible with dramatic Dore engravings of the lions and the whale.

  To her the humma-hah stories even when told in English were a dangerous exposure to beliefs and ideas that were strictly forbidden to Presbyterian converts. As a child, such prohibitions always intrigued me, so I sought out elders who would tell me the old-time stories. The Presbyterianism ended with my great grandma. My great grandfather, her husband, was a Quaker from Ohio who was tolerant and peace-loving; perhaps he shielded his children from the Presbyterians because his son, my Grandpa Hank, wasn’t a Christian.

  As soon as I started kindergarten at Laguna Day School, a Bureau of Indian Affairs school where the speaking of the Laguna language was punished, my beloved A’mooh stopped speaking Laguna to me and used only English.

  In the early twentieth century the Pueblo men and boys who were caught participating in the religious activities of the kiva or ceremonial dances were arrested and imprisoned by the authorities. The women and children left back at the pueblos faced great hardships without the help of the men and boys to care for the gardens and to help with the hunting and gathering of food. During those times, many of the very young and the elderly died of starvation. That terrorism conducted by the U.S. authorities and missionaries on the indigenous communities was very effective. I realize that Great Grandma stopped speaking Laguna to me to protect me from harm by the authorities. Her reasoning was that if I could not speak Laguna, I would not be initiated into the traditional Pueblo religion.