Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit Read online

  Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

  * * *

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR LANDSCAPES: THE PUEBLO MIGRATION STORIES

  LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE FROM A PUEBLO INDIAN PERSPECTIVE

  YELLOW WOMAN AND A BEAUTY OF THE SPIRIT

  AMERICA'S DEBT TO THE INDIAN NATIONS: ATONING FOR A SORDID PAST

  AUNTIE KIE TALKS ABOUT U.S. PRESIDENTS AND U.S. INDIAN POLICY

  THE PEOPLE AND THE LAND ARE INSEPARABLE

  TRIBAL COUNCILS: PUPPETS OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

  HUNGER STALKED THE TRIBAL PEOPLE

  FENCES AGAINST FREEDOM

  THE BORDER PATROL STATE

  FIFTH WORLD: THE RETURN OF MA AH SHRA TRUE EE, THE GIANT SERPENT

  NOTES ON ALMANAC OF THE DEAD

  TRIBAL PROPHECIES

  STONE AVENUE MURAL

  AN EXPRESSION OF PROFOUND GRATITUDE TO THE MAYA ZAPATISTAS, JANUARY 1, 1994

  BOOKS: NOTES ON MIXTEC AND MAYA SCREENFOLDS, PICTURE BOOKS OF PRECONQUEST MEXICO

  As A CHILD I LOVED TO DRAW AND CUT PAPER

  THE INDIAN WITH A CAMERA

  ON PHOTOGRAPHY

  AN ESSAY ON ROCKS

  ON NONFICTION PROSE

  OLD AND NEW AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  TO

  MARY VIRGINIA LESLIE,

  MY MOTHER

  AND

  LELAND HOWARD MARMON,

  MY FATHER

  Introduction

  IN THE EARLY 1980s, as I was beginning to write Almanac of the Dead, I began a series of short prose pieces about the desert area around my house, and about the rocks, and about the rain that is so precious to this land and to my household, which still depends on wells for all its water. In 1980 I had also begun to take photographs of the rocks in the big wash by my house; I used black-and-white and color film, and Polaroid film as well. I began collecting newspaper clippings and magazine articles about rocks that ran amok, and about meteorites that fell through roofs. I began to save articles about rain, about the El Niño weather systems that cause floods in some areas and droughts in others. I began assembling piles of notes I had made on rocks and on rain. I intended to write two long essays, one on rain and one on rocks.

  I have continued to gather and hoard piles of notes and articles for my essays. I imagined my essays as perfect pieces, and I did not want to hurry them. I set the notes and incomplete essays aside while I completed Almanac. I recall a section of the novel in which there are descriptions of the peculiar rocks in the Tucson Mountains, and another in which meteorites are a central focus.

  But in the meantime, I got requests to write essays, and sometimes, if the topic interested me, I would agree. Later, as I toiled over bland prose and argued with magazine editors, I would regret that I had ever agreed to write nonfiction, and I would swear off nonfiction prose forever. But secretly I hoped that the struggle with these other pieces of nonfiction would empower me to bring forth my essays on rain and on rocks. Instead, the writing of these other essays has had an unexpected effect on my essays about rain and about rocks, as you will see in the last section of this book.

  In my 1993 self-published book, Sacred Water, photocopies of my photographs of clouds and dry washes are integral to the text: the images are as much a part of my essay on water as are the words. The Pueblo people have always connected certain stories with certain locations; it is these places that give the narratives such resonance over the centuries. The Pueblo people and the land and the stories are inseparable. In the creation of the text itself, I see no reason to separate visual images from written words that are visual images themselves.

  As I learned more about the ancient folding books of the Maya, Aztec, and other indigenous American cultures, I began to think more about the written word as a picture of the spoken word. I began to contemplate writing an essay in which the written words depended upon visual images, or pictures, to fully express what I had to say.

  Grandma Lily kept a tall Hopi basket full of old family snapshots. Sometimes we did not move the Hopi basket for months, but then Grandpa Hank or Grandma Lily would be talking about someone or about something that had happened a long time ago, and down came the Hopi basket, full to the top with old black-and-white and even a few sepia photographs. We children would look intently at the faces, study the clothing, and always we looked for any indication of landscape to tell us if the photograph was taken around Laguna. The hills in the background remained the same, and even as a child I was thrilled with that notion—the donkey and horses and wagons and the people dressed so oddly all had changed, but Beacon Hill and Pa'toe'che remained the same.

  When I was four years old I began to climb over the fence and leave the yard where I was supposed to stay. Our house was at the bottom of the hill, by the road everyone took to the post office and store. I watched for people to pass by and I would talk to them; the older kids would tell me all kinds of wild stories because I believed what they told me and I got so excited. I could hear the drumming from the plaza whenever there were ceremonial dances, and I always wanted to go because everyone was gathered around the plaza and the dancers were so powerful to watch.

  One day the older kids told me that there were special dancers up at the plaza, and these dancers ate wood. I still remember climbing over the fence, because it was a four-foot-high fence but the wire had good spaces to put my feet. I walked quite a distance before Marsalina Thompson saw me. In those days, everyone watched out for everyone else's children, especially the little ones. Marsalina saw me and she knew that I wasn't supposed to be marching along by myself, so she brought me home. I cried and cried and tried to tell her that I must get to the plaza to see the amazing dancers who ate wood, but she was firm.

  I was never afraid to go anywhere around Laguna when I was growing up. I was never afraid of any person unless the person was an outsider. Outsiders were white people, mostly tourists who drove up and did not stay long. But up in the sandhills and among the sandstone formations around Laguna, I did not see many Laguna people either, only people cutting wood or returning from their sheep camp. Up in the hills with the birds and animals and my horse, I felt absolutely safe; I knew outsiders and kidnappers stayed out of the hills. I spent hours and hours alone in the hills southeast of Laguna. After I got my beloved horse, Joey, and before I had to work so much at my grandpa's store, I often spent all day on my horse, riding all around old Laguna. The old folks who did not know my name would refer to me as “the little girl on the horse.” I was perfectly happy, lost in my thoughts and imagination as I rode my horse.

  Sometimes I stopped, tied up my horse, and investigated interesting petroglyphs on sandstone cliffs or searched for arrowheads in the ruins of older settlements. I preferred to be without human companions so I could give my complete attention to the hills. Of course, from the time I can remember, I preferred to play alone with my little figures of farm animals, cowboys, and Indians because I liked to make up elaborate dramas in which I whispered what each of the characters was saying; the presence of my sisters and other playmates inhibited these dramas. I was a tomboy who liked to climb cottonwood trees and wade in the river. For real adventure I used to tag along with Gary Fernandez, who was my age, and we would try to keep up with Gary's older brother Ron and his pal Mike Trujillo. The older boys would le
t us follow for a while before they ditched us.

  Because our family was such a mixture of Indian, Mexican, and white, I was acutely aware of the inherent conflicts between Indian and white, old-time beliefs and Christianity. But from the start, I had no use for Christianity because the Christians made up such terrible lies about Indian people that it was clear to me they would lie about other matters also. My beloved Grandma A'mooh was a devout Presbyterian, but I can remember, even as a little girl, listening to her read from the Bible and thinking, “I love her with all my heart, but I don't believe in the Bible.” I spent time with Aunt Susie and with Grandpa Hank, who was not a Christian. The mesas and hills loved me; the Bible meant punishment. Life at Laguna for me was a daily balancing act of Laguna beliefs and Laguna ways and the ways of the outsiders. No wonder I preferred to wander in the hills by myself, on my horse, Joey, with Bulls-eye, my dog.

  Grandma Lily took me and my sisters on walks to the river, and as we got older, she took us to hike in the mesas and sandhills as she had done with my father and his brothers when they were young. She wasn't afraid of anything in the hills; she was the horsewoman who would ride any bronco, and she wore a woman's dress and women's shoes only three times a year, to Mass on Christmas Eve and for Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday.

  I have always felt safer alone in the hills than I feel when I am around people. Humans are the most dangerous of all animals, that's what my mother said. She was fearless with snakes and picked up rattlesnakes with ease. Most of my life I have lived in small settlements or I have lived outside of town, as I do now, in the hills outside of Tucson, where the nearest house is a quarter mile away. I still trust the land—the rocks, the shrubs, the cactus, the rattlesnakes, and mountain lions—far more than I trust human beings. I never feel lonely when I walk alone in the hills: I am surrounded with living beings, with these sandstone ridges and lava rock hills full of life. Luckily I enjoy danger, so I find human beings irresistible; humans are natural forces, just like flash floods or blizzards.

  I was only five or six years old when my father was elected tribal treasurer. During his term, the Pueblo of Laguna filed a big lawsuit against the state of New Mexico for six million acres of land the state wrongfully took. The land had been granted by the king of Spain to the Pueblo hundreds of years before the United States even existed, let alone the state of New Mexico. The lawyer hired by Pueblo of Laguna and the expert witnesses, archaeologists, used to meet at our house to prepare to testify in court.

  What made the strongest impression on me, though, were the old folks who also were expert witnesses. For months the old folks and Aunt Susie met twice a week after supper at our house to go over the testimony. Many of them were so aged they could hardly get around; Aunt Susie seemed spry compared to them. She interpreted English for the old folks because she knew them very well; in her own studies of Laguna history she had talked with them many times. Now she helped them prepare their testimony, that from time immemorial the Kawakemeh, the people of the Pueblo of Laguna, had been sustained from hunting and planting on this land stolen by the state of New Mexico. It was explained to me that the old folks testified with stories—stories of childhood outings with adults to gather piñons or to haul wood, stories they had heard as children. The old folks were going up against the state of New Mexico with only the stories.

  The land claims lawsuit made a great and lasting impression on me. I heard the old folks cry as they talked about the land and how it had been taken from them. To them the land was as dear as a child, and as I listened, I felt the loss and the anger too, as if it all had happened only yesterday.

  When I was a sophomore in high school I decided law school was the place to seek justice. I majored in English at the University of New Mexico only because I loved to read and write about what I'd read. Sure, I wrote short stories and I'd received a little discovery grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, but my destination was law school, where I planned to learn how to obtain justice. I should have paid more attention to the lesson of the Laguna Pueblo land claims lawsuit from my childhood: The lawsuit was not settled until I was in law school. The U.S. Court of Indian Claims found in favor of the Pueblo of Laguna, but the Indian Claims Court never gives back land wrongfully taken; the court only pays tribes for the land. The amount paid is computed without interest according to the value of the land at the time it was taken. The Laguna people wanted the land they cherished; instead, they got twenty-five cents for each of the six million acres stolen by the state. The lawsuit had lasted twenty years, so the lawyers' fees amounted to nearly $2 million.

  I completed three semesters in the American Indian Law School Fellowship Program before I realized that injustice is built into the Anglo-American legal system. Professor Jerome Walden taught our first-year law class the history of the Anglo-American legal system. He assigned Dickens's Bleak House as one of our texts, but long before Dickens's greedy lawyers consumed the entire estate of the Jarndyce family, I could read between the lines: the feudal lord with all the money and all the power who doles out justice to his serfs and vassals is the model for our modern-day judges. The Anglo-American legal system was designed by and for the feudal lords; to this day, money and power deliver “justice” only to the rich and powerful; it cannot do otherwise.

  But I continued in law school until our criminal law class read an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the execution of a retarded black man convicted of strangling a white librarian in Washington, D.C., in 1949. The majority on the court refused to stop the execution, though it was clear that the man was so retarded that he had no comprehension of his crime. That case was the breaking point for me. I wanted nothing to do with such a barbaric legal system.

  My time in law school was not wasted: I had gained invaluable insights into the power structure of mainstream society, and I continue to follow developments in the law to calculate prevailing political winds. It seems to me there is no better way to uncover the deepest values of a culture than to observe the operation of that culture's system of justice.

  I decided the only way to seek justice was through the power of the stories. I left law school and enrolled in a beginning photography class and a couple of graduate courses in the English department. I was already thinking about how one might combine text and photographs so that on the page there is a coherent whole, rather than two competing entities. One of the classes I took examined the interrelationship between William Blake's texts and the illuminated pages they appear on. But I wanted to make these texts, not just study them, so I dropped the class. I was happy to leave the university, in 1971, to go live and teach on the Navajo reservation at Chinle. I first had seen the mighty sandstone cliffs of Canyon de Chelly and Canyon del Muerto when I was fourteen, and it was wonderful to be there. I learned a great deal from my students and from my neighbors in Chinle and Many Farms, as I realized later on when I wrote my novel Ceremony. I made a makeshift darkroom in the bathroom and I kept taking pictures; someday I was going to make a text with my words and my pictures.

  THIS BOOK OF essays is structured like a spider's web. It begins with the land; think of the land, the earth, as the center of a spider's web. Human identity, imagination and storytelling were inextricably linked to the land, to Mother Earth, just as the strands of the spider's web radiate from the center of the web.

  From the spoken word, or storytelling, comes the written word, as well as the visual image. The next part of this book is caught up with representation and visualization of narrative, of storytelling; Mayan folding books, murals, and finally photography with narrative are explored. The rich visual languages of the Aztec and Maya codices, or folding books, are closely related to the great frescoes, or mural paintings, of the Maya and Aztec pyramids. Similar massive frescoes are found on the walls of kivas in ancient Pueblo towns.

  Except for a few fragments, the magnificent folding books of the Maya and Aztec people were destroyed in 1540 by Bishop Landa, who burned the great libraries of the Americ
as. Europeans were anxious to be rid of all evidence that Native American cultures were intellectually equal to European cultures; they could then argue to the pope that these indigenous inhabitants were not fully human and that Europeans were therefore free to do with them and their land as they pleased.

  The books were destroyed and the people who knew how to make the books were destroyed. Soon the only books of Native American life were written and made by non-Indians, who continued to portray indigenous people as subhumans. The U.S. government used books in their campaign of cultural genocide. Thus the representation or portrayal of Native Americans was politicized from the very beginning and, to this day, remains an explosive political issue.

  The final section of this book is my favorite, because here is the “Black Rock” section excerpted from my new work in progress, “An Essay on Rocks.” Here the text and photographs create a slightly different syntax for the page.

  Around 1975, the Chicago Review published an issue that had no text at all, only photographs that narrated a story about a lovely old farm house, two women and two men, and the ghost of a nude woman. The notion of using only photographs to tell a short story was just what I had been thinking about; the only problem with the Chicago Review's experiment had been the weak story they had chosen to tell.

  In 1976, living back at Laguna, I bought a wonderful Toyo field camera designed for easy backpacking into the hills. I loved the meditative mood I was in by the time I had completed the painstaking setup of the tripod and camera. This process seemed to me a ritual, a sort of prayer to the horizon or mountains I loved and desired in my photography.

  After I moved to Tucson in 1978, I felt a need for change. I bought an autofocus 35mm camera for $99; I didn't want to have to think about aperture and shutter speeds or even focusing, because those technical details made me self-conscious and my photographs had no spontaneity. This camera was perfect because I didn't have to think about what I was doing; I had only to point this little camera and snap whenever something caught my eye. I wanted my subconscious self to take the pictures. I was curious to see what, if anything, my subconscious could do with a camera. I shot the first roll of thirty-six as rapidly as I could over two or three days. I didn't think my experiment was working, because all I could remember was pointing and shooting at odd, unrelated subjects: a black sedan parked in the wash below my house, a giant spider's web glistening over desert weeds, and a strange pile of rocks.