Category Archives: native american

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sun tides

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The rise and fall of tides across the desert . . . not from the moon but the sun
. . . make waves of light, not water

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. . . agape at the colors inside the hoop of horizon, my eyes do all the breathing

IMG_0005-001IMG_9601The Havasupai people who have been the guardians of the Grand Canyon for almost a thousand years are said to have left without a fight when the white man told them their home was too beautiful to keep to themselves.IMG_9617IMG_0005IMG_0034

. . . yeah, I seriously doubt that.

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IMG_9642He told me a better story . . . about novice-hiking too far in to get out until the next day and needing to spoon with his brothers to keep warm that night.IMG_9665They weren’t afraid . . . spent the night laughing at their plight and then at the feeling of laughter shivering and bumping into itself . . . contagious . . . I imagined the sound of them moving on a wind wavelet through canyons . . . still.IMG_9678

 

 

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the wonderings

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My lens felt every curve of Hazdistazí, the Lower Antelope Canyon, as the earth spooned the light.

 

Every angle so intimate . . . sandstone is surely the love slave of wind and water. How could anything so animated be this still?

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I could feel it all . . . hear all of it swirling in silence. It doesn’t matter if a picture has been taken a million times by photographers far worthier than I in the same way it doesn’t matter if I love a certain song . . . and so do a million other people.

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What has this Woman in the Wind been facing head-on for ten thousand years?

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What did the Navajo think of this jaggedy slot in the canyon roof before some gringo called it a seahorse?

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And what did the old woman said say to her granddaughter in Diné after I didn’t buy the dreamcatcher?

me

 

The wonderings never cease . . .

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I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands . . .

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IMG_3600I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. IMG_3686We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. IMG_3558The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn’t stand it one more time.

So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace.

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Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey.

And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.
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   I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn.
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I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn’t; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south.

 

And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.
– Joy Harjo, US Poet Laureate
(photos from the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi, Pow Wow 6/24/19)
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melting pot

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frybreads

In a prosperous country, we are more prosperous than most; in an urban country, more urban than most; in a gadget-happy country, more addicted to gadgets; in a tasteless country, more tasteless; in a creative country, more energetically creative; in an optimistic society, more optimistic; in an anxious society, more anxious. Contribute regionally to the national culture? We are the national culture, at its most energetic end.

~ Wallace Stegner on California

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mermade

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Moon Water Woman (the name given in her Coming-of-Age Ceremony by a Cherokee Water-Carrier woman) came back from the PCT with eyes more knowing than before.

I wonder when it happens . . . the precise moment that triggers the pendulum’s high arc into discovery back to the unknowing of even things that were once a given.

And then back again . . . the wide tick . . . tock . . . of the tides.
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how many women ago?

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The native woman, a Shah-mah’ tsah’nih—the grandmother, who made some of these blankets walked away from the market more tired than dirt. A hot wind blew across the gravel parking lot to the mesa and the mountains beyond, her gray hair reaching wildly after it.

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She was bent sideways but shuffled forward.  She looked off-kilter by design . . . like a samara . . . a thing not designed to have an upright position.  I sensed sixty years of klagetoh bearing down on her left shoulder, and six thousand more years of it in her DNA.

How many women ago did our ancestral mothers sit together in an ice cave or a tent made of animal hides . . . Mary, Maria, Mariposa, Miriam, Margit, Марыя, Мэри, 메리, মেরি . . . a quill needle and red thread resting between thumb and fore-fingerprint of the same sedulous language?

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September 2014 © Liana, excerpted from Shall We Break (Fry) Bread Together on Our Knees

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the land of enchantment

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Not that’d I could forget even for a moment, but this is Nuevo Mexico–the land of enchantment. Here the light is different. Brown is coral with copper and slate with pearl in bronze with smokey specs of silvery cerulean. My college friend Dan once said no one knows what is really happening inside brown until he’s gone to the desert.

Of course, it doesn’t stop there. New Mexico also blends blue and green in a thousand ways . . . even the swimming pool water is turquoise. It’s like the lens I’m seeing everything through has also altered the function of color . . . color is not just what it looks like but what it feels like here.

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Yesterday, my friend gifted me with a 90-min massage with a shamanic man I’ll call Merlin. It hurt so bad I cried . . . I mean he wasn’t going to stop pressing his point until I cried, and once I started, I couldn’t stop even when I tried. It wasn’t even about physical pain any more. He put his hand over my eyes and I saw those bright lights that happen in false darkness. Then Merlin traced my tears with his fingers across my forehead and up into my hair. Next, he cupped his palm over my eyes and said see the vision now. That’s when his hand became a night sky . . . a coyote started howling out of my own voice. I was both in that room and somewhere out in the desert under a dark cloth of stars and I wasn’t me.

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This is, after all, the land of enchantment . . . it’s not like they try to keep that a secret in New Mexico. Says so right on the license plates.

 

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Nightbird at Blood Moon

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Nightbird at Blood Moon

Last night, Kit and I went to the Full Moon Drumming, which was particularly wonderful during this, the Blood Moon. There was a big turnout. Instruments of all kinds were spread out on the ground for any newbies (like us) to borrow—fully engaged participation is the unspoken expectation. Interspersed were various art supplies that had presumably been used to put up promotional posters about the event, at least that’s what we figured the markers, scissors, etc., were beside the tambourines and maracas. Yet there was a tin can, fly swatter, knitting needles, and a knife sharpener, so who could be sure?

I’m not a musician but I can keep a beat, at least I thought I could. Then the tattooed guys with pony tails started beating rhythms out of the congas, snares, steel pans and African drums that were powerful and primal. Everything I tried to sync to that skewed highchair-baby-with-spoon. As soon as the first session winded down, I switched to cow bell and spent the next session trying to keep Will Farrell/SNL images out of my mind.

Maybe the fourth or fifth “drum conversation” in, I was finally getting the hang of it. I had settled at last on the triangle because…well, I just didn’t think you could mess up on the triangle. It always sounds nice. After a while, Kit gave me a look that inferred otherwise.

“Play something different,” she hissed.
“This is the only song I know on the triangle,” I replied.
“No, I mean a different instrument…anything…maybe that skein of yarn.”

She looked around desperately then handed me a glitter-glue stick, but I just tuned her out.