origin essay

Language and

Literature from a

Pueblo Indian

Perspective

WHERE I COME from, the words most highly valued are those spoken from the heart, unpremeditated and unrehearsed. Among the Pueblo people, a written speech or statement is highly suspect because the true feelings of the speaker remain hidden as she reads words that are detached from the occa­ sion and the audience. I have intentionally not written a for­ mal paper because I want you to hear and to experience English in a structure that £9llows patterns from the oral tra­ dition. For those of you accustomed to being taken from point A to point B to point C, this presentation may be some­ what difficult to follow. Pueblo expression resembles some­ thing like a spider's web-with many little threads radiating

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE FROM A PUEBLO fNDIAN PERSPECTIVE

from the center, crisscrossing one another. As with the web, the structure emerges as it is made, and you must simply lis­ ten and trust, as the Pueblo people do, that meaning will be made.

My task is a formidable one: I ask you to set aside a number of basic approaches that you have been using and probably will continue to use, and, instead, to approach lan­ guage from the Pueblo perspective, one that embraces the whole of creation and the whole of history and time.

What changes would Pueblo writers make to English as a language for literature? I have some examples of stories in English that I will use to address this question. At the same time, I would like to explain the importance of storytelling and how it relates to a Pueblo theory of language.

So I will begin, appropriately enough, with the Pueblo Creation story, an all-inclusive story of how life began. In this story, Tse'itsi'nako, Thought Woman, by thinking of her sisters, and together with her sisters, thought of everything that is. In this way, the world was created. Everything in this world was a part of the original Creation; the people at home understwd that far away there were other human beings, also a put of this world. The Creation story even includes a propheg that describes the origin of European and African peoples ..nd also refers to Asians.

TI1s story, I think, suggests something about why the Puebk people are more concerned with story and communi­ cati01. and less concerned with a particular language. There are ac least six, possibly seven, distinct languages among the twenty pueblos of the southwestern United States, for exam­ ple, Zuiii a1d Hopi. And from mesa to mesa there are subtle differences in language. But the particular language being spoken isn't as important as what a speaker is trying to say, and this errphasis on the story itself stems, I believe, from a

Sitko, Leslie Marmon. "Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective."

Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life

Today. 1996. New York: Touchstone-Simon, 1997. 48-59.

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view of narrative particular to the Pueblo and other Native American peoples-that is, that language is story.

I will try to clarify this statement. At Laguna Pueblo, for example, many individual words have their own stories. So when one is telling a story and one is using words to tell the story, each word that one is speaking has a story of its own, too. Often the speakers, or tellers, will go into these word stories, creating an elaborate structure of stories within sto­ ries. This structure, which becomes very apparent in the ac­ tual telling of a story, informs contemporary Pueblo writing and storytelling as well as the traditional narratives. This per­ spective on narrative-of story within story, the idea that one story is only the beginning of many stories and the sense that stories never truly end-represents an important contribu­ tion of Native American cultures to the English language.

Many people think of storytelling as something that is done at bedtime, that it is something done for small children. But when I use the term storytelling, I'm talking about some­ thing much bigger than that. I'm talking about something that comes out of an experience and an understanding of that original view of Creation-that we are all part of a whole; we do not differentiate or fragment stories and experiences. In the beginning, Tse'itsi'nako, Thought Woman, thought of all things, and all of these things are held together as one holds many things together in a single thought.

So in the telling (and you will hear a few of the dimen­ sions of this telling), first of all, as mentioned earlier, the story­ telling always includes the audience, the listeners. In fact, a great deal of the story is believed to be inside the listener; the storyteller's role is to dra~ the story out of the listeners. The storytelling continues from generation to generation.

Basically, the origin story constructs our identity-with this story, we know who we are. We are the Lagunas. This is

so

LANGUAGE AND .~.A PUEBLO INDIAN PERSPECTIVE

where we come ~rom. We came this way. We came by this place. And so from the time we are very young, we hear these stories, so that when we go out into the world, when one asks who we are or where we are from, we immediately know: we are the people who came from the north. We are the people of these stories.

In the Creation story, Antelope says that he will help knock a hole in the Earth so that the people can come up, out into the next world. Antelope tries and tries; he uses his hooves but is unable to break through. It is then that Badger says, "Let me help you." And Badger very patiently uses his claws and digs a way through, bringing the people into the world. When the Badger clan people think of themselves, or when the Antelope people think of themselves, it is as people who are of this story, and this is our place, and we fit into die very beginning when the people first came, before we began our journey south.

Within the clans there are stories that identify the clan. One moves, then, from the idea of one's identity as a tribal person into clan identity, then to one's identity as a member of an extended family. And it is the notion of extended family that has produced a kind of story that some distinguish from other Pueblo stories, though Pueblo people do not. Anthro· pologists and ethnologists have, for a long time, differenti­ ated the types of stories the Pueblos tell. They tended to elevate the old, sacred, and traditional stories and to brush aside family stories, the family's account of itself. But in Pueblo culture, these family stories are given equal recogni­ tion. There is no definite, preset pattern for the way one will hear the stories of one's own family, but it is a very critical part of one's childhood, and the storytelling continues throughout one's life. One will hear stories of importance to the family-sometimes wonderful stories-stories about the

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time a maternal uncle got the biggest deer that was ever seen and brought it back from the mountains. And so an individ­ ual's identity will extend from the identity constructed around the family-"I am from the family of my uncle who brought in this wonderful deer, and it was a wonderful hunt."

Family accounts include negative stories, too; perhaps an uncle did something unacceptable. It is very important that one keep track of all these stories-both positive and not so positive-about one's own family and other families. Be­ cause even when there is no way around it--old Uncle Pete did do a terrible thing-by knowiqg the stories that originate in other families, one is able to deal with terrible sorts of things that might happen within one's own family. If a mem­ ber of the family does something that cannot be excused, one always knows stories about similarly inexcusable things done by a member of another family. But this knowledge is not communicated for malic~ous reasons. It is very important to understand this. Keeping track of all the stories within the community gives us all a certain distance, a useful perspec­ tive, that brings incidents down to a level we can deal with. If others have done it before, it cannot be so terrible. If others have endured, so can we.

The stories are always bringing us together, keeping this whole together, keeping this family together, keeping this clan together. "Don't go away, don't isolate yourself, but come here, because we have all had these kinds of experi­ ences." And so there is this constant pulling together to resist the tendency to run or }\ide or separate oneself during a trau­ matic emotional experie~ce. This separation not only endan­ gers the group but the individual as well--one does not recover by oneself.

Because storytelling lies at the heart of Pueblo culture, it is absurd to attempt to fix the stories in time. "When did they

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LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE fROM A PUEBLO INDIAN PERSPECTIVE

tell the stories?" or "What time of day does the storytelling take place?"-these questions are nonsensical from a Pueblo perspective, because our storytelling goes on constantly: as some old grandmother puts on the shoes of a child and tells her the story of a little girl who didn't wear her shoes, for in­ stance, or someone comes into the house for coffee to talk with a teenage boy who has just been in a lot of trouble, to reassure him that someone else's son has been in that kind of trouble, too. Storytelling is an ongoing process, working on many different levels.

Here's one story that is often told at a time of individual crisis (and I want to remind you that we make no distinctions between types of story-historical, sacred, plain gossip-be­ ca use these distinctions are not useful when discussing the Pueblo experience of language). There was a young man who, when he came back from the war in Vietnam, had saved up his army pay and bought a beautiful red Volkswa­ gen. He was very proud of it. One night he drove up to a place called the King's Bar, right across the reservation line. The. bar is notorious for many reasons, particularly for the deep arroyo located behind it. The young man ran in to pick

· up a cold six-pack, but he forgot to put on his emergency brake. And his little red Volkswagen rolled back into the ar­ royo and was all smashed up. He felt very bad about it, but within a few days everybody had come to him with stories about other people who had lost cars and family members to that arroyo, for instance, George Day's station wagon, with his mother-in-law and kids inside. So everybody was saying, "Well, at least your mother-in-law and kids weren't in the car when it rolled in," and one can't argue with that kind of story. The story of the young man and his smashed-up Volks­ wagen was now joined with all the other stories of cars that fell into that arroyo.

Now I want to tell you a very beautiful little story. It is a

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very old story that is sometimes told to people who suffer great family or personal loss. This story was told by my Aunt Susie. She is one of the first generation of people at Laguna who began experimenting with English-who began work­ ing to make English speak for us, that is, to speak from the heart. (I come from a family intent on getting the stories told.) As you read the story, I think you will hear that. And here and there, I think, you will also hear the influence of the Indian school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where my Aunt Susie was sent (like being sent to prison) for six years.

This scene is set partly in Acoma, partly in Laguna. Waithea was a little girl living in Acoma and one day she said, "Mother, I would like to nave some yashtoah to eat." Yashtoah is the hardened crust of corn mush that curls up. Yashtoah literally means "curled up." She said, "I would like to have some yashtoah," and her mother said, "My dear lit­ tle 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 and bring them home, 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 brought them home in a little wicker basket. First she called to her mother as she got home, "Nayah, deeni! Mother, upstairst" The Pueblo people always called "up­ stairs" because long ago their homes were two, three stories, and they entered 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 to lay out the pieces of wood, but here they were snakes. They were snakes instead of the crooked sticks

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LANGUAGE ANO LITERATURE fROM A PUEBLO INDIAN PERSl>ECTIVE

of wood. And her mother said, "Oh my dear child, you have brought snakes instead!" She said, "Go take them back and put them back just where you got them." And the little ~rl ran down the mesa again, down below to the flats. And she put those snakes back just where she got them. They were snakes instead, and she was very hurt about this, and so she said, "I'm not going home. I'm going to Kawaik, the beauti­ ful lake place Kawaik, and drown myself in that lake, byn'yah'nah [the 'west lake']. I will go there and drown my­ self."

So she started off, and as she passed by the Enchanted Mesa near Acoma, she met an old man, very aged, and he saw her running, and he said, "My dear child, where are you going?" "I'm going to Kawaik and jump into the lake there."

"Why?" "Well, because," she said, "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 every time he would try to grab her she would skip faster away from him.

The old man was coming home with some wood strapped to his back and tied with yucca. He just let that strap go 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 said, "I can't. I just came to bring you a mes­ sage. Your little daughter is running away. She is going to Kawaik to drown herself in the lake there." "Oh my dear lit­ tle girH" the mother said. So she busied herself with making the yashtoah her little girl liked so much. Corn mush curled at the top. (She must have found enough wood to boil the corn meal and make the yashtoah.)

While the mush was cooling off, she got the little girl's

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Lf.SLIE MARMON SILKO LANC.UAOE AND LITERATURE FROM A PUEBLO INDIAN PERSPECTIVE

clothing, her manta dress and buckskin moccasins and all her other garments, and put them in a bundle--probably a yucca bag. And she started down as fast as she could on the east side of Acoma. (There used to be a trail there, you know. It's gone now, but it was accessible in those days.) She saw her daughter way at a distance and she kept calling: "Stsamaku! My daughter! Come back! I've got your yashtoah for you." But the little 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 my­ self." Her mother heard her cry and said, "My little daugh­ ter, come back here!" "No," and she kept a distance away from her. And they came nearer and nearer to the lake. And she could see her daughter now, very plain. "Come back, my daughter! I have your yashtoah." But no, she kept on, and fi­ nally she reached the lake and she stood on the edge.

She had tied a little feather in her hair, which is tradi­ tional (in death they tie thi,s feather on the head). She carried a feather, the little girl did, and she tied it in her hair with a 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. She stood on the edge of the mesa and scattered her daughter's clothing, the little moccasins, the yashtoah. She scattered them to the east, to the west, to the north, to the south. And the pieces of clothing and the moccasins and yashtoah all turned into butterflies. And today they say that Acoma has more beautiful butterflies: red ones, white ones, blue ones, yellow ones. They came from this little girl's clothing.

Now this is a story anthropologists would consider very

old. The version I have given you is just as Aunt Susie tells it. You can occasionally hear some English she picked up at Carlisle--words like precipitous. You will also notice that there is a great deal of repetition, and a little reminder about yashtoah and how it is made. There is a remark about the cliff trail at Acoma-that it was once there but is there no longer. This story may be told at a time of sadness or loss, but within this story many other elements are brought together. Things are not separated out and categorized; all things are brought together, so that the reminder about the yashtoah is valuable information that is repeated-a recipe, if you will. The information about the old trail at Acoma reveals that stories are, in a sense, maps, since even to this day there is lit­ tle information or material about trails that is passed around with writing. In the structure of this story the repetitions are, of course, designed to help you remember. It is repeated again and again, and then it moves on.

There are a great many parallels between. Pueblo expe.d­ ences and those of African and Caribbean peoples-on~ is that we have all had the conqueror's language imposed on ~. But our experience with English has been somewhat differen\ in that the Bureau of Indian Affairs schools were not inter­ ested in teaching us the canon of Western classics. For in­ stance, we never heard of Shakespeare. We were given Dick and Jane, and I can remember reading that the robins were heading south for the winter. It took me a long time to figure out what was going on. I worried for quite a while about our robins in Laguna because they didn't leave in the winter, until I finally realized that all the big textbook companies are up in Boston and their robins do go south in the winter. But in a way, this dreadful formal education freed us by encouraging us to maintain our narratives. Whatever literature we were exposed to at school (which was damn little), at home the

I t

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LESLIE MARMON S1LKO LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE FROM A PUEBLO INDIAN PERSPECTIVE

storytelling, the special regard for telling and bringing to­ gether through the telling, was going on constantly.

And as the old people say, "If you can remember the stories, you will be all right. Just remember the stories." When I returned to Laguna Pueblo after attending college, I wondered how the storytelling was continuing (anthropolo­ gists say that Laguna Pueblo is one of the more acculturated

.. pueblos), so I visited an English class at Laguna-Acoma High School. I knew the students had cassette tape recorders in their lockers and stereos at home, and that they listened to Kiss and Led Zeppelin and were well informed about culture in general. I had with me an anthology of short stories by Native American writers, The Man to Send Rain Clouds. One story in the book is about the killing of a state police­ man in New Mexico by t~ree Acoma Pueblo men in the early 1950s. I asked the students how many had heard this story and steeled myself for the possibility that the anthropologists were right, that the old traditions were indeed dying out and the students would be ignorant of the story. But instead, all but one or two raised their hands-they had heard the story, just.1 as I had heard it when I was young, some in English, some in Laguna.

One of the other advantages that we Pueblos have en­ joyed is that we have always been able to stay with the land. Our stories cannot be separated from their geographical lo­ cations, from actual physical places on the land. We were not relocated like so many Native American groups who were torn away from their ancestral land. And our stories are so much a part of these places that it is almost impossible for fu­ ture generations to lose them-there is a story connected with every place, every object in the landscape.

Dennis Brutus has talked about the "'yet unborn" as well as "those from the past," and how we are still all in this

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place, and language-the storytelling-is our way of passing through or being with them, of being together again. When Aunt Susie told her stories, she would tell a younger child to go open the door so that our esteemed predecessors might bring their gifts to us. "They are out there," Aunt Susie would say. "Let them come in. They're here, they're here with us within the stories."

A few years ago, when Aunt Susie was 106, I paid her a visit, and while I was there she said, "Well, I'll be leaving here soon. I think I'll be leaving here next week, and I will be going over to the Cliff House." She said, "It's going to be real good to get back over there." I was listening, and I was thinking that she must be talking about her house at Paguate village, just north of Laguna. And she went on, "Well, my mother's sister {and she gave her Indian name] will be there. She has been living there. She will be there and we will be over there, and I will get a chance to write down these stories I've been telling you." Now you must understand, of course, that Aunt Susie's mother's sister, a great storyteller herself, has long since passed over into the land of the dead. But then I realized, too, that Aunt Susie wasn't talking about death the way most of us do. She was talking about "going over" as a iourney, a journey that perhaps we can only begin to under­ stand through an appreciation for the boundless capacity of language that, through storytelling, brings us together, de­ spite great distances between cultures, despite great distances in time.

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