Storyteller Read online

  Because of this history of suppression and punishment, my great grandmother spoke only English to me with the best of intentions. She as well as my parents and grandparents placed great value on education, and they wanted to spare me the punishment in the school principal’s office for speaking Laguna. They knew from experience that non-Indian people often viewed a native speaker in a less positive light even if the native speaker also spoke English perfectly. So I never learned to speak Laguna with my classmates, though I remember baby talk in the Laguna language and a number of other Laguna words and phrases.

  Fortunately, my Grandpa Hank, Aunt Alice, and Aunt Susie never stopped telling my sisters and me all kinds of stories from their youth, including the humma-hah stories and other stories about the old days. They told the stories mostly in English, but certain parts, important statements and the songs, were always in the Laguna language. So from the time I was five years old, the stories were my link, my lifeline with the Laguna language and culture. The English that they spoke was a particular form of English—it was their second language, but they’d studied it and they’d choose just the English words and phrases to tell the story as it should be told. They were careful to make the English of their storytelling express the true feeling and the heart of the old story.

  Grandpa Hank used to tell me the old stories he’d heard as a child. I remember a wonderful story he told me when I was eleven or twelve and making lunch for him while Grandma Lillie was away. The story he remembered was about a lunch that a young hunter from Laguna took along with him when he went hunting. Grandpa didn’t say his name was Estoyehmuut, Arrow Boy, but I knew it was him because the young hunter appears in many humma-hah stories. Estoyehmuut took along a small cloth sack with his lunch as he hunted rabbits and deer to bring home. Around lunchtime, the young hunter found a nice big cottonwood near a water hole and climbed up the tree to a strong branch where he ate his lunch. No matter how many tamales, or how many tortillas, or how much venison jerky he ate, there was always more food when he reached into the lunch sack. The cloth sack belongs to the magical realm of old Spider Woman in which small spaces actually contain large expanses of space within them and an endless supply of food! How wonderful!

  When I put together Storyteller in the early months of 1978, I wanted to acknowledge the continuity of storytelling and the storytellers “from time immemorial,” as Aunt Susie used to say. I wanted to pay tribute to the stories and storytellers of my early life. So I included stories I remembered hearing from Aunt Alice Marmon Little and Aunt Susie Reyes Marmon alongside the short stories that came from my imagination so the reader might get a sense of the influences that the storytellers had on my writing as it developed over the years. I wanted readers to have a feeling of the landscape and the context of the Pueblo villages where the stories take place, so I included photographs, most of them taken by my father, Lee H. Marmon, a photographer in the Laguna-Acoma area for more than sixty years.

  I wanted readers to have a sense of the family I came from, so I included family snapshots, too. The shape of Storyteller was unusual because I wanted to give plenty of space to the poems I’d written on paper turned sideways for increased width. I experimented with using space on the page, with indentations and various line spacings to convey time and distance and the feeling of the story as it was told aloud. I was interested in giving the words of the poems plenty of space, which the horizontally oriented book provided. That was the format of Storyteller for thirty years, from 1981 to 2011.

  While the overall size of this new edition of Storyteller is identical to the old edition, 9 inches by 7 inches, the new layout has a vertical orientation. Thus the page width is slightly reduced, but there is still enough space to give the “wide poems” the space they need. I decided to replace a few of the horizontally oriented photographs because I thought they’d have to be cropped too much or printed too small. I took the opportunity to add some old family snapshots that I recently found; among them is a photograph of Aunt Alice Marmon Little, who told me so many humma-hah stories.

  Dawaa’eh—it is a good thing to have Storyteller back in print. Old stories and new stories are essential: They tell us who we are, and they enable us to survive. We thank all the ancestors, and we thank all those people who keep on telling stories generation after generation, because if you don’t have the stories, you don’t have anything.

  STORYTELLER

  There is a tall Hopi basket with a single figure

  woven into it which might be a Grasshopper or

  a Hummingbird Man. Inside the basket are hundreds

  of photographs taken since the 1890’s around Laguna.

  My grandpa Hank first had a camera when he returned

  from Indian School, and years later, my father learned

  photography in the Army.

  Photographs have always had special significance

  with the people of my family and the people at Laguna.

  A photograph is serious business and many people

  still do not trust just anyone to take their picture.

  It wasn’t until I began this book

  that I realized that the photographs in the Hopi basket

  have a special relationship to the stories as I remember them.

  The photographs are here because they are part of many of the stories

  and because many of the stories can be traced in the photographs.

  Robert G. Marmon with Marie Anaya Marmon, my great-grandparents, holding my grandpa Hank. He was named Henry Anaya Marmon, but years later changed his middle name to the initial “C.” because at school the kids had teased him for the way his initials spelled out H.A.M.

  I always called her Aunt Susie

  because she was my father’s aunt

  and that’s what he called her.

  She was married to Walter K. Marmon,

  my grandpa Hank’s brother.

  Her family was the Reyes family from Paguate

  the village north of Old Laguna.

  Around 1896

  when she was a young woman

  she had been sent away to Carlisle Indian School

  in Pennsylvania.

  After she finished at the Indian School

  she attended Dickinson College in Carlisle.

  When she returned to Laguna

  she continued her studies

  particularly of history

  even as she raised her family

  and helped Uncle Walter run their small cattle ranch.

  In the 1920’s she taught school

  in a one-room building at Old Laguna

  where my father remembers he misbehaved

  while Aunt Susie had her back turned.

  From the time that I can remember her

  she worked on her kitchen table

  with her books and papers spread over the oil cloth.

  She wrote beautiful long hand script

  but her eyesight was not good

  and so she wrote very slowly.

  She was already in her mid-sixties

  when I discovered that she would listen to me

  to all my questions and speculations.

  I was only seven or eight years old then

  but I remember she would put down her fountain pen

  and lift her glasses to wipe her eyes with her handkerchief

  before she spoke.

  It seems extraordinary now

  that she took time from her studies and writing

  to answer my questions

  and to tell me all that she knew on a subject,

  but she did.

  She had come to believe very much in books

  and in schooling.

  She was of a generation,

  the last generation here at Laguna,

  that passed down an entire culture

  by word of mouth

  an entire history

  an entire vision of the world

  which depended upon memory

  and r
etelling by subsequent generations.

  She must have realized

  that the atmosphere and conditions

  which had maintained this oral tradition in Laguna culture

  had been irrevocably altered by the European intrusion—

  principally by the practice of taking the children

  away from Laguna to Indian schools,

  taking the children away from the tellers who had

  in all past generations

  told the children

  an entire culture, an entire identity of a people.

  When I was a little girl Aunt Susie spent a good deal of time at the Marmon Ranch, south of Laguna. At branding time in the summer we used to visit Aunt Susie and Uncle Walter, and my father would take pictures of the cattle they rounded up. Aunt Susie used to cook all morning long for the big meal at noontime.

  And yet her writing went painfully slow

  because of her failing eyesight

  and because of her considerable family duties.

  What she is leaving with us—

  the stories and remembered accounts—

  is primarily what she was able to tell

  and what we are able to remember.

  As with any generation

  the oral tradition depends upon each person

  listening and remembering a portion

  and it is together—

  all of us remembering what we have heard together—

  that creates the whole story

  the long story of the people.

  I remember only a small part.

  But this is what I remember.

  This is the way Aunt Susie told the story.

  She had certain phrases, certain distinctive words

  she used in her telling.

  I write when I still hear

  her voice as she tells the story.

  People are sometimes surprised

  at her vocabulary, but she was

  a brilliant woman, a scholar

  of her own making

  who cherished the Laguna stories

  all her life.

  This is the way I remember

  she told this one story

  about the little girl who ran away.

  The scene is laid partly in old Acoma, and Laguna.

  Waithea was a little girl living in Acoma and

  one day she said

  “Mother, I would like to have

  some yashtoah to eat.”

  “Yashtoah” is the hardened crust on corn meal mush

  that curls up.

  The very name “yashtoah” means

  it’s sort of curled-up, you know, dried,

  just as mush dries on top.

  She said

  “I would like to have some yashtoah,”

  and her mother said

  “My dear little girl,

  I can’t make you any yashtoah

  because we haven’t any wood,

  but if you will go down off the mesa

  down below

  and pick up some pieces of wood

  bring them home

  and I will make you some yashtoah.”

  So Waithea was glad and ran down the precipitous cliff

  of Acoma mesa.

  Down below

  just as her mother had told her

  there were pieces of wood,

  some curled, some crooked in shape,

  that she was to pick up and take home.

  She found just such wood as these.

  She went home

  and she had them

  in a little wicker basket-like bag.

  First she called her mother

  as she got home.

  She said

  “Nayah, deeni!

  mother, upstairs!”

  The pueblo people always called “upstairs”

  because long ago their homes were two, three stories high

  and that was their entrance

  from the top.

  She said

  “Deeni!

  UPSTAIRS!”

  and her mother came.

  The little girl said

  “I have brought the wood

  you wanted me to bring.”

  And she opened

  her little wicker basket

  and laid them out

  and here they were snakes

  instead of the crooked sticks of wood.

  And her mother says

  “Oh my dear child,

  you have brought snakes instead!”

  She says

  “Go take them back and put them back

  just where you got them.”

  And the little girl

  ran down the mesa again

  down below in the flats

  and she put those sticks back

  just where she got them.

  They were snakes instead

  and she was very much hurt about this

  and so she said

  “I’m not going home.

  I’m going to Kawaik,

  the beautiful lake place, Kawaik

  and drown myself

  in that lake, bun’yah’nah.

  That means the “west lake.”

  I’ll go there and drown myself.”

  So she started off,

  and as she came by the Enchanted Mesa

  near Acoma

  she met an old man very aged

  and he saw her running and he says

  “My dear child,

  where are you going?”

  She says

  “I’m going to Kawaik

  and jump into the lake there.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because,”

  she says

  “my mother didn’t want to make any yashtoah

  for me.”

  The old man said “Oh no!

  You must not go my child.

  Come with me

  and I will take you home.”

  He tried to catch her

  but she was very light

  and skipped along.

  And everytime he would try

  to grab her

  she would skip faster

  away from him.

  So he was coming home with some wood

  on his back,

  strapped to his back

  and tied with yucca thongs.

  That’s the way they did

  in those days, with a strap

  across their forehead.

  And so he just took that strap

  and let the wood drop.

  He went as fast as he could

  up the cliff

  to the little girl’s home.

  When he got to the place

  where she lived

  he called to her mother

  “Deeni!”

  “Come on up!”

  And he says

  “I can’t.

  I just came to bring you a message.

  Your little daughter is running away,

  she’s going to Kawaik to drown herself

  in the lake there.”

  “Oh my dear little girl!”

  the mother said.

  So she busied herself around

  and made the yashtoah for her

  which she liked so much.

  Corn mush curled at the top.

  She must have found enough wood

  to boil the corn meal

  to make the “yashtoah”

  And while the mush was cooling off

  she got the little girl’s clothing

  she got her little manta dress,

  you know,

  and all her other garments,

  her little buckskin moccasins that she had

  and put them in a bundle too,

  probably a yucca bag,

  and started down as fast as she could on the east side of Acoma.

  There used to be a trail there, you know, it is gone now, but

  it was accessible in those days
.

  And she followed

  and she saw her way at a distance,

  saw the daughter way at a distance.

  She kept calling

  “Stsamaku! My daughter! Come back!

  I’ve got your yashtoah for you.”

  But the girl would not turn

  she kept on ahead and she cried

  “My mother, my mother.

  She didn’t want me to have any yashtoah

  so now I’m going to Kawaik

  and drown myself.”

  Her mother heard her cry

  and says

  “My little daughter

  come back here!”

  No, she kept a distance away from her

  and they came nearer and nearer

  to the lake that was here.

  And she could see her daughter now

  very plain.

  “Come back my daughter!

  I have your yashtoah!”

  And no

  she kept on

  and finally she reached the lake

  and she stood on the edge.

  She had carried a little feather

  which is traditional.

  In death they put this feather

  on the dead in the hair.

  She carried a feather

  the little girl did

  and she tied it in her hair

  with a little piece of string

  right on top of her head

  she put the feather.

  Just as her mother was about

  to reach her

  she jumped

  into the lake.

  The little feather was whirling

  around and around in the depths below.

  Of course the mother was very sad.

  She went, grieved back to Acoma

  and climbed her mesa home.

  And the little clothing,

  the little moccasins

  that she’s brought

  and the yashtoah,

  she stood on the edge

  of the high mesa

  and scattered them out.

  She scattered them to the east

  to the west

  to the north and to the south—

  in all directions—

  and here every one of the little clothing—

  the little manta dresses and shawls