In regards to the Easter ceremonies coming up,
Yaqui Easter ceremonies, in particular
here in the city of Tucson, our guest
that evening is Felipe Molina.
And other members from the Yaqui community
will be presenting a special presentation on that ceremony,
including a videotape viewing.
In two weeks, on April 20, we'll be back
at the Center for Creative Photography
where our reader that night will be Nora Naranjo Morse.
Nora is a Santa Clara Pueblo Indian.
She's a potter and a poet.
Right now, some of her pieces of ceramics
is on exhibit at the Arizona State Museum,
which is on this main campus over by the west gate
of the university.
Both of those performances will start at 30.
The one where we go back to the center is also at 7:30.
And then our final reading will be Joy Harjo on April 27.
So I invite you all to come for all of those upcoming
performances.
Real quickly, I'd like to invite Ernie.
Are you going to--
Ernie Frost to do his commercial again.
[APPLAUSE]
I'm not moving so quick.
I had to go to the dentist this afternoon.
[LAUGHTER]
You guys ever had a root canal?
All the horror stories they tell about them are true.
The shirt.
You've all seen it.
It's a wonderful shirt.
Artist is a [? wonderful ?] person.
Buy the shirt.
OK?
I got people that are really on my case about this.
Buy the shirt.
If you can't buy the shirt, go to the table.
Give the girls $1, just because you've been
able to come here for free.
If everybody gave us $1, we could
make sure we can do this again next semester.
[APPLAUSE]
Everybody's seen this poster.
You like this poster?
They're $2.
[LAUGHTER]
But we came up with a brilliant idea.
We thought this would make a great t-shirt,
since you guys obviously don't dig this one that well.
[LAUGHTER]
If you'd be interested in getting
one of these as a t-shirt, let us know later.
And we'll see what we can do about knocking some of them
out.
But we're not going to cut you the deal we will on this one.
[LAUGHTER]
That one will cost more.
But if you can't handle the t-shirt, get the poster, $2.
Go by and see the bookstore people.
Buy their books.
Make Leslie sign the book for you.
And my tooth hurts like heck.
I ain't going to stay up here too long.
Buy the shirts.
Buy the posters.
Buy the other t-shirts.
Give us some money.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Ernie.
For those of you that have come to our series
here for the first time, we'd like
to let you know who is partially responsible
for this wonderful series.
Dr. Rudy Troike from the Department of English,
the acting chair of the English Department.
[APPLAUSE]
Dr. Joseph Stauss, the acting director American Indian
Studies Program.
[APPLAUSE]
The Inter Tribal Graduate Council, as Ernie
was their representative.
[APPLAUSE]
The University of Arizona Library, the Poetry Center,
and the Creative Photography Center.
[APPLAUSE]
We're all very grateful for their participation.
One thing that sticks in my mind,
and when I've introduced these particular sponsors,
is the fact that in particular American Indian Studies
and the English Department, you notice
that they're all acting directors or acting chairs.
So that sort of says something about our administration
here at this campus, one way or the other.
[APPLAUSE]
This evening, it's my pleasure to introduce tonight's
guest, Leslie Marmon Silko.
Today, some of us have been able to spend some time with her
as she talked about her work and her experience in coming here.
Leslie Silko is Laguna Pueblo from the New Mexico area.
However, she's been living here in Tucson for quite some time.
Leslie is a storyteller.
She is a poet.
She's a novelist, she's a filmmaker.
And she's also a muralist.
She's a very busy person, to say the least.
She was the recipient of the very prestigious MacArthur
Fellowship early in the '80s, which partially,
of course, helped her to get started with her most
current work, Almanac of the Dead.
She's perhaps one of the most important
Native American writers of this era.
She has numerous publications, including, of course,
short stories and essays, along with her poetry
and her fiction.
Leslie Silko is perhaps best known
for her novel Ceremony and her book Storyteller.
Storyteller which tells basically
of her family, herself, sort of woven within Laguna Pueblo
oral tradition.
Her current work, her much talked-about novel,
Almanac of the Dead, is truly a great piece of work.
It proves once again Leslie Silko's versatility and talent.
The work is massive.
It's a piece of work that once you read it,
it will, if you have a mind to, cause
you to sort of rethink yourself as a person,
to rethink of us as a people, and perhaps
to rethink of us and our history here in this place.
Leslie Marmon Silko, for some of us, in this particular work
shows us what we have become.
And as an almanac should, shows us what we will become.
Would you please welcome Leslie Marmon Silko.
[APPLAUSE]
Hi.
Thank you.
OK, I'm going to do this, so I don't
talk for more than an hour.
It didn't start.
Too bad.
Timepiece fails.
[LAUGHTER]
What I'd like to do tonight is just talk about, for about
an hour so that nobody gets uncomfortable--
feel free to move around.
If you get sick or you get horrified, just run out.
[LAUGHTER]
The storyteller is used to people moving around.
There's a natural flow that should be around.
And this isn't quite storytelling,
but I still believe that human comfort is the last thing that
goes before the storyteller.
We'll go ahead and make the storyteller accommodate.
But what I'd like to do is warm up
with some old favorites of mine.
They help me to feel better.
Probably people who've heard me read are sick of them.
But then, after all, we're trying
to look after the storyteller a little bit tonight.
And if I get too nervous, why, I'll really
start forgetting what I was talking about,
like I did all day.
And things will deteriorate.
[LAUGHTER]
"Prayer to the Pacific" is the first poem--
seems weird, like I can't see over this.
Anyway, "Prayer to the Pacific" is the first poem
that I ever wrote.
I started out writing short fiction
at the University of New Mexico.
I found that because of my background at Laguna Pueblo
with people constantly telling stories
and the whole way of interacting being built with narrative,
I just sort of took to writing short fiction pretty easily.
But poetry is a mystery.
And it still is to me.
I've not written-- it's been years
since I've written a poem.
And actually that poem was for my friend Lou Bernal.
So I don't know that I'm a poet, or still a poet,
or ever was a poet.
But I have written poems.
Poems are like gifts.
Anyway, they happen to me.
And I had been taking a creative writing class.
I think it was about in 1968 or '69.
It was in '69.
I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time
since I guess I'd seen it once when I was a child.
And I was greatly moved by the ocean.
Because suddenly, all of the stories Aunt Susie had told us,
stories about Grandfather Turtle,
stories about coral and mother of pearl and the shells
and the clouds and the rain, all of a sudden,
all of these sorts of memories came together
when I saw the ocean.
And so I wrote this.
And I didn't know it was going to be a poem.
I just felt all of these things.
And so I wrote "Prayer to the Pacific."
I traveled to the ocean, distant from my Southwest land
of Sandrock, to the moving blue water,
big as the myth of origin.
Pale, pale water and the yellow white light
of sun floating west to China, where ocean herself was born.
Clouds that blow across the sand are wet.
Squat in the wet sand and speak to the ocean.
I return to you turquoise, the red coral you sent us,
sister spirit of Earth.
Four round stones in my pocket.
I carry back the ocean to suck and to taste.
30,000 years ago, Indians came riding across the ocean,
carried by giant sea turtles.
Waves were high that day.
Great sea turtle did slowly out from the gray sundown sea.
Grandfather turtle rolled in the sand four times
and disappeared, swimming into the sun.
And so from that time immemorial,
as the old people say, rain clouds
drift from the west, gift from the ocean.
Green leaves in the wind, wet earth on my feet,
swallowing raindrops clear from China.
That was the first one.
And then the second one-- then I lose count.
The second one was something I wrote.
It's called "Indian Song: Survival."
Of course I never--
I always have trouble finding.
I think I have it right there, and I don't.
I'll have to look it up on my dear.
I think the storyteller and the writer have this ongoing--
you don't misplace story easily as you misplace--
oral stories as you misplace written things.
So let's see.
Where is "Indian Song: Survival"?
Oh, yes, here it is.
Page 35.
We went north to escape winter, climbing pale cliffs.
We pause to sleep at the river.
Cold river, river cold from the north.
I sink my body in the shallow, sink into sand and cold river
water.
You sleep in the branches of pale river willows above me.
I smell you in the silver leaves, mountain lion men.
Green willows aren't sweet enough to hide you.
I have slept with the river.
And he is warmer than any man.
At sunrise, I heard ice on the cattails.
Mountain lion with dark yellow eyes,
you nibble moon flowers while we wait.
I don't ask, why do you come on desperation journey north.
I am hunted for my feathers.
I hide in spider's web, hanging in a thin gray tree
above the river.
In the night, I hear music, song of branches,
dry leaves scraping the moon.
Green spotted frogs sing to the river.
And I know he is waiting.
Mountain lion shows me the way, path
of mountain wind climbing higher up, up to cloudy mountain.
It is only a matter of time, Indian.
You can't sleep with the river forever.
Smell winter and know.
I swallow black mountain dirt while you catch hummingbirds,
trap them with wildflowers, pollen,
and petals fallen from the Milky Way.
You lie beside me in the sunlight, warmth around us.
And you ask me if I still smell winter.
Mountain forest wind travels east.
And I answer, taste me.
I am-- touch me, I am the lean, gray deer, running
on the edge of the rainbow.
OK.
I'll just read you--
so time's sort of going slow.
There's really no such thing as clock time.
So it just sort of-- you can do whatever
with it you like, and it sort of does
whatever it likes with you.
It's not real.
[LAUGHTER]
So we'll just sort of go along.
We'll see how that clock can do.
Oh, thank you.
Storyteller, as Ophelia said in a great introduction,
really is a statement about myself
and family in relation to the imagined fiction that
is the short story, written fiction.
And also just the interplay with a sort of a history
and where one can see where humma-hah stories that Aunt
Susie told leave off and where my sort of imagination
took over.
Aunt Susie and Aunt Alice, too, always
told us lots of humma-hah stories.
And it wasn't until I'd been taking creative writing
classes for a couple of years and really
had to start thinking about the stories I'd heard
and the way people at home like to talk and gossip that--
all of a sudden, it dawned on me one day
that there was something that was--
that time, whatever that is, hadn't changed
and didn't change.
And that the old stories, they would ring so true.
And that you almost started to wonder--
the idea that the old time stories were far in the past
and couldn't possibly be here now with us,
all of a sudden, I realized that couldn't be so.
The next piece is called "Storytelling."
And I got inspired from all of the Kochininako Yellow Woman
stories.
Kochininako Yellow Woman is all women.
And Kochininako Yellow Woman does all things.
In some of the stories, she's a hunter.
In many of the stories, she's very brave.
In others of the story, she--
thanks to her love affairs, her wild love affairs,
extramarital love affairs with Buffalo Man,
Whirlwind Man, wonderful things and goodness and riches
come to the people.
So that sexual misbehavior by women
is a very positive and good force, actually.
[APPLAUSE]
It's so-called misbehavior.
It's just the only way to be.
[LAUGHTER]
So that's what Yellow Woman would say.
Unfortunately, during times of great crisis,
extraordinary means must be found.
And she'd find them.
So I heard these stories.
And then when I was growing up, I heard these other--
you'd hear all this gossip.
So one day, I just put it all together into "Storytelling."
You should understand the way it was back then.
Because it is the same, even now.
Long ago, it happened that her husband left to hunt deer
before dawn.
And then she got up and went to get water.
Early in the morning, she walked to the river
when the sun came over the long, red mesa.
He was waiting for her that morning
in the tamarack and willow beside the river, Buffalo Man
in buffalo leggings.
Are you here already?
Yes, he said.
He was smiling.
Because I came for you.
She looked into the shallow, clear water.
But where shall I put my water jar?
Upside down, right here, he told her.
On the riverbank.
Then there's sort of a space on the page.
You better have a--
[LAUGHTER] have a damn good story,
her husband said, about where you've
been for the past 10 months.
And how you-- [LAUGHTER] and how you explain these twin baby
boys.
[LAUGHTER]
No, that gossip isn't true.
She didn't elope.
She was kidnapped by that Mexican at Seama Feast.
You know my daughter isn't that kind of girl.
Of course, we all know about her daughter.
We all saw them together.
It was in the summer of 1967.
TV news reported a kidnapping.
Four Laguna women and three Navajo men
headed north along the Rio Puerco river in a red '56 Ford.
And the FBI and state police were hot
on their trail of wine bottles and size 42 panties
hanging in bushes and trees all along the road.
[LAUGHTER]
We couldn't escape them, he told police later.
We tried.
But there were four of them, and only three of us.
Seems like it's always happening to me, outside the dance hall
door, late Friday night in the summertime,
and those brown-eyed men from Cubero smiling.
They usually ask me, have you seen
the way the stars shine up there in the Sandhills?
And I usually say, no.
Will you show me?
[LAUGHTER]
It was that Navajo from Alamo.
You know, the tall, good-looking one?
He told me he'd kill me if I didn't go with him.
And then it rained so much.
And the roads got muddy.
That's why it took me so long to get back home.
My husband left after he heard the story
and moved back in with his mother.
It was my fault. And I don't blame him either.
I could have told the story better than I did.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thanks.
The twins that she has, of course,
are the twin brothers, the hero brothers as Aunt Alice
sometimes called them.
But the twin brothers who helped the people.
So you see, after all, it was for the best.
Always for the best.
And also I have a section in storyteller
that has the whole Buffalo story with Kochininako which
is sort of tragic.
It's very moving.
See how we're doing on--
so you know how that clock's behaving.
OK, let's see.
Maybe some sort of--
in the fall and winter, I was on book tour with Almanac.
I've been reading and reading the Almanac.
And so I sort of want to read some poetry and stuff,
so I don't have to read so much of the Almanac.
I lived with the Almanac for 10 years.
Almanac doesn't let go of you.
OK, "A Hunting Story," for my grandpa, H.C. Marmon.
You have my grandfather's feet, light brown,
smooth with the years he's been gone.
Your hands are familiar, like moonlight on December snow.
Only sometimes, I don't recognize the sandstone cliff
behind you.
All night, your eyes.
Something burns dark in old Juniper trees.
The she-owl echoes along the cliff.
The stars pull down the sky with them.
I smooth your belly with my hand, round and round.
We whisper precise, wet sand, spreading wide
down the Pacific coast.
I knelt above you that morning.
I counted the rattles, the last whistles in your throat.
I put my mouth on yours.
It might have been possible then,
except you clenched your teeth.
I could not push through with my breath or my fingers.
I saw how you would go, spilling out
between ivory [INAUDIBLE] seeping
under the tall gate where Earth sucked you in like rainwater.
I couldn't stop you.
Fragile dust, sparks of sunlight dispersing
into horses of many colors, stony gray, blue steel
dust, pink mesa stone, the yellow buckskin, leaping out
of the east.
You scattered in all directions of the winds.
Your wife and sons burned your jacket, sold your car.
They stood holding their own fingers.
There was a song you never sang to me, the same way you'd never
been to Zuni, not in all those years of Arkansas,
Santa Fe, and Colorado.
There was a dance, sweetheart.
You never came to take me home.
But when I hold fingers, they will be yours.
If I could see you clearly only once,
if I could come upon you parked in your truck
sleeping in Juniper trees by Otter Lake,
then we could [INAUDIBLE] fluttering
dark-feathered dreams before they startle,
before they fly far away.
The big star is Polaris.
And we hunt for you.
Around smokey campfires our first night,
our Navajo women feed you mutton and tell you,
you are from the mountains above fluted rock.
All night, I track sudden sounds.
All night, I track sudden sounds that crack
through moonlight thickets.
Up ahead, there was a small clearing.
When you step out into sight, I will be waiting.
I spent some time up in Navajo country teaching
at Navajo Community College in the '70s.
And the impact of that country and the people,
my friend Ben Barney and my friend Albert Henderson,
[INAUDIBLE].
It was something.
I didn't realize what an impact the two years in Navajo country
had until I went to Alaska and started writing Ceremony
and also started writing this piece.
This piece is called "Story from Bear Country."
And what I meant to do was write a piece of prose.
But when I sat down to try to write about--
actually, the piece of prose that I did end up writing is
follows later on.
But this first attempt to write about a phenomenon, which
I had discussed with my friend Ben Barney, about how Navajo
people see bears and relate to bears as
compared to the Pueblo people--
the first time I tried to work with it,
it just turned into this piece.
Pueblo people and Navajo people don't fear that bears--
because bears will eat them or tear them to pieces.
We are taught to respect bear country where the bears are,
because the bears are able to seduce human beings.
And there are many stories both in the Pueblo way
and the Navajo way of small children wandering away from
picnics or piñon picking.
And the children don't die.
They are adopted by the bear people.
And they're raised by the bear people.
And they are sighted from a distance.
And sometimes adult human beings have been sighted on all fours.
And so the reason you stay away from bear country
is not because of death at all, but something
far more complicated.
And I was trying to figure that out.
And I'd been talking with Ben Barney.
And so I wanted--
the way I figure out things is to write.
And I meant, like I said, to write prose.
But it came out like this.
And it was very startling.
"Story from Bear Country."
You will know when you walk in bear country
by the silence flowing swiftly between the trees,
by the sundown colors of sandrock all around you.
You may smell damp earth scratched away
from yucca roots.
You may hear snorts and growls, slow and massive sounds
from caves in the cliffs high above you.
It is difficult to explain how they call you.
All but a few who went to them left
behind families, grandparents, and sons, a good life.
The problem is, you will never want to return.
Their beauty will overcome your memory,
like winter sun melting ice shadows from snow.
And you will remain with them, locked forever inside yourself.
Your eyes will see you, dark, shaggy, and thick.
We can send bear priests loping after you, their medicine
bags bouncing against their chests,
naked legs painted black, bear claw necklaces
rattling against their capes of blue spruce.
They will follow your trail into the narrow canyon
through the blue gray mountain sage to the clearing, where
you stopped to looked back and saw only bear
tracks behind you.
When they call, faint memories will writhe around your heart
and startle you with their distance.
But the others will listen, because bear priests
sing beautiful songs.
They must, if they are ever to call you back.
They will try to bring you, step by step,
back to the place you stopped and found only bear
prints in the sand where your feet had been.
Whose voice is this?
You may wonder hearing this story.
When after all, you are alone hiking in these canyons
and hills while your wife and sons are waiting back
at the car for you.
But you have been listening to me for some time
now, from the very beginning, in fact.
And you are alone in this canyon of stillness.
Not [INAUDIBLE] birds flutter.
See, the sun is going down now.
The sandrock is washed in its colors.
Don't be afraid.
We love you.
We've been calling you all this time.
Go ahead.
Turn around.
See the shape of your footprints in the sand.
So that's how they do it.
[APPLAUSE]
OK.
Well.
Maybe we'll start reading in the Almanac.
I guess sooner or later, the Almanac.
I've told the story of the Almanac so many times.
And I have to tell it differently every time.
And I'm not sure that it improves when I try--when I
tell the story of what happened.
But basically, this book wanted to be written.
And the narratives were like--
all of the narratives and stories
that I think that I've ever heard,
they all demanded to be put together.
They wanted to be together.
And I was sort of working in the dark as to--
I thought I was writing a simple cops and robbers
novel about Tucson.
And then realized that all the reading
I had been doing about fragments of Aztec and Mayan almanacs,
that I really had somehow fallen under the spell of the notion
of symbolizing or notating or knowing time
through narrative, not through numbers
or through calculations, necessarily.
Though for just giving [INAUDIBLE] the way
we use the clock.
It's not that we really believe that time is like that.
But just to sort of find our way.
And so I got really intrigued with--
there's just fragments of these books that escaped destruction
in the holocaust of the invasion 500 years ago.
But now that it's all over with, and I've come up
with this thing, I realize that the timing and everything--
that there's something too uncanny.
And I did feel very used by the narratives, forced
to write this book.
And it wasn't a controlled or conscious kind of thing.
And so now I realize that these narratives, like I've always
said, have a separate life.
In the oral tradition, the storyteller is often anonymous.
The storyteller is not important.
What's important is the story.
It's the story that lives on.
Stories always stay alive long after the tellers
are gone, just like ideas.
And they can't be killed.
Anyway, the section I want to read to you
is called "From the Ancient Almanac."
It has an account in there of the trials and tribulations
of Lecha, my almanac keeper.
But what happened, as the novelist,
I think I always start out-- novelists do--
feeling very much in control and somehow
calling the shots and very powerful and all-controlling.
But of course, this is illusory.
And novelists delude themselves in many ways
in order to get launched into something.
Because if you really knew what it
means in terms of turning yourself inside out,
I think we would all want to stop.
But I believed I could keep control over all of this.
And yet, I created my character Lecha
in here, who at some point-- she's
dealing with the fragments of all of the old stories
are all mixed together.
Well, strangely enough, in the editorial process
of this novel, it sort of got all mixed together too.
And so I had to live out, in a sense,
and had to deal with some of the challenges.
So I like this part.
And it also contains some sort of fragmentary supposed pieces
that have been saved.
And then another story that I really like.
So this is from part five, "The Fifth
World," book one, "The Foes," from the ancient almanac.
Excuse me.
Lecha could read the old notebooks and scraps
of newspaper clippings for hours and forget all about the pain.
The first time Lecha opened the notebooks,
she had recognized here was the real thing.
Despite all of Yoeme's lying and boasting,
the almanac was truly a great legacy.
Yoeme and others believe the almanac had living power
within it, a power [INAUDIBLE] all
the tribal people of the Americas
together to retake the land.
For hundreds of years, guardians of the almanac notebooks
had made clumsy attempts to repair torn pages.
Some sections had been splashed with wine,
others with water or blood.
Only fragments of the original pages
remained, carefully placed between blank pages.
Those of ancient paper had yellowed.
But the red and black painted glyphs had still been clear.
The outline of the giant plumed serpent
could be made out in pale blue on the largest fragment.
The pages of ancient paper had been
found between the pages of horse gut parchment,
carried by the fugitive Indian slaves,
the children who had fled north to escape European slavery.
Lecha speculated that some keepers of the old almanac
had been illiterate, but had not bothered to hire someone
to read the pages for them.
If they had any curiosity about the writing,
than their fear, which was greater, had prevailed.
What they had feared [INAUDIBLE] spirits
described in the writing and the glyphs on the pages.
There was evidence that substantial portions
of the old manuscript had been lost or condensed
into odd narratives, which operated like codes.
The great deal of what had accumulated with the almanac
fragments had been debris, gathered here and there
by agent keepers of the almanac after they had gone crazy.
A few of the keepers had fallen victim to delusions of sorts.
Here and there were scribbles and scratches.
Lecha found pages where old Yoeme had scribbled arguments
in margins with the remarks and vulgar humor
Lecha and Zeta had enjoyed so many times
with their grandmother.
Whole sections had been stolen from other books
and from the proliferation of farmer's almanacs
published by patent drug companies and medicine
shows that gave away the almanacs as advertisements.
Not even the parchment pages or fragments of ancient paper
could be trusted.
They might have been clever forgeries,
recopied, drawn, and colored painstakingly.
Europeans called it coincidence.
But the Almanacs had prophesied the appearance of Cortes
to the day.
All Native American tribes had similar prophecies
about the appearance, conflict with,
and eventual disappearance of things European.
The almanacs had warned the people hundreds of years
before the Europeans arrived.
The people living in large towns were told to scatter,
to disperse to make the murderous work of the invaders
more difficult. Without the almanacs,
the people would not be able to recognize the days and months
yet to come, days and months that would
see the people retake the land.
Yoeme alleged the Aztecs ignored the prophecies and warnings
about the approach of the Europeans,
because Montezuma and his allies had been sorcerers
who had called or even invented the European invaders
with their sorcery.
Those who worshipped destruction and blood secretly
knew one another.
Hundreds of years earlier, the people
who hated sorcery and bloodshed had
fled north to escape the cataclysm
prophesied when the blood worshipers of Europe
met the blood worshippers of the Americas.
Montezuma and Cortes had been meant for one another.
Yoeme always said sorcery had been the undoing of people here
and everywhere in the world.
Fragments from the ancient notebooks.
The month was created first, before the world.
Then the month began to walk himself.
And his grandmothers and aunt and his sister-in-law
said, what do we say when we see a man in the road?
There were no humans yet, so they
discussed what they would say as they walked along.
They found footprints when they arrived in the East.
Who passed by here?
Look at these footprints.
Measure them with your foot.
The mother creator said this to the month,
who measured the footprint.
The footprint belonged to Lord God.
That was the beginning for month,
because he had to measure the whole world by walking it off,
day by day.
Month made sure his feet were even before he began the count.
Month spoke day's name when day had no name.
So the month was created.
Then the day, as it was called, was created.
And the rain stairway to Earth, the rocks and the trees,
all creatures of the sea and land were created.
And then there's some kind of little drawing separation
thing on the page.
Death dog traveled to the land of the dead,
where the god of death gave him the bone the human race was
created with.
Scorpion uses his tail as a noose to lasso deer.
Scorpion is a good hunter.
He has a net bag in which he carries his fire driller
and fire sticks.
The sign of the human hand equals
two, the hand that holds the hilt of the dagger
is plunged into the lower body of the deer.
Those cursed with the anguish and the despairs
all were born during the five nameless days.
On the five nameless days, people stay in bed
and then confess sins.
Those cursed with the [INAUDIBLE] black zip
whistles a warning.
He is the deer god.
In the year 10 sky, the principal ruler is Venus.
Big star's a drunkard, a deformed dog
with the head of a jaguar and the hind end
of a dog with a purple dick.
He staggers like rabbit, who is also a drunkard.
Nasty, arrogant liar, troublemaker and experimental
in mutual hate and torture.
Venus, color red, direction east,
herald of the dawn and measurer of night.
Envious rivaled.
Sin in his face and in his talk.
He had no virtue in him.
He is without understanding.
He had no virtue in him.
Mighty carnivorous teeth and a body withered like a rabbit.
Deities return.
Better get to know them.
Venus of the celestial dragon with eight heads.
Each head hurls shafts of affliction down on mankind.
Europeans call [INAUDIBLE] for the bright one
who fell from grace long ago.
Venus resides in darkness until he
rises as morning star, dog face partially blackened,
a fish in his headdress.
He swims up from the dark underworld.
I'm not going to read through the whole-- these
are the fragments.
But when Yoeme gets through all of the fragments,
she comes to some pages that-- when
Lecha finishes with this whole section of fragments,
she comes to pages that old Yoeme has
added in just on her own.
And this section is called the Great influenza of 1918.
And these are pages that old Yoeme,
who has been a revolutionary and a freedom fighter
among the Yaqui people, resisting
the Mexican government, fighting for the land--
Yoeme puts this story in here about something that happened
when she was a younger woman.
It's her great escape.
Great influenza of 1918.
Old Yoeme herself had added a number of pages to the almanac.
Lecha could easily recognize the handwriting.
Late in the summer, the pigs chew corncobs.
And I wait for execution in the Alamo's jail.
I have been convicted of sedition and high treason
against the federal government.
They hate me because I'm an Indian woman who kicked dirt
in the faces of the police and army.
They stand outside my cell and gloat over my death.
Soon I must die, because I had already lived too long.
I have blemished their honor.
Me, the short, square-shouldered woman with deadly aim.
That's my title.
In twos and threes they come to stare at me.
They relish the words they repeat again and again,
their daydreams of my hanging and dismemberment.
My execution is delayed by their needs for pageantry.
Elected officials from [? other jurisdictions ?]
arrive.
I am on display, an example to all who dare defy authority.
Postponement is due to the governor's busy schedule.
They don't miss a day outside my cell.
The police chief carries a paper with days crossed off
in charcoal.
Count them, he tells me in low tones.
He is outraged, because an Indian can read and write,
while he, a white man, cannot.
I laugh and call him barbarian in my language.
You will die.
That is certain.
All the others of my kind have already been sent to hell,
he says.
My death is certain.
I am not afraid to die.
I am sorry to leave the people I love when the struggle is only
beginning.
I pray to God for justice for myself and all our people.
I pray for the success of the revolution.
The day before my execution, the news reaches town.
At first, the officials refused to believe the reports
of so many sick and dead.
Influenza travels with the moist, warm winds
off the coast.
Influenza infects the governor and all the others.
The police chief burns to death from fever.
The jailer leaves bucket of water
and a bowl of parched corn.
The authorities want to keep you alive,
he says, until they recover enough to hang you.
The jailer has bloodshot eyes.
He says entire households have the dead lying
next to the living, who are too ill to drag corpses outside.
I laugh out loud, but the jailer reacts slowly.
Someone will come to hang you, he reassures me.
But when I ask who, the jailer shakes his head.
He is tired this morning, or he would kill me himself.
The town is silent.
Church bells no longer ring the angelus.
And I listen with all my strength
for the footsteps of my executioners.
I could hear the big buzzards and smell
what they ate with such relish.
I was still locked up.
Human scavengers followed.
And I heard the sounds of looting.
I did not think anyone would come.
But then they came to loot the jails' guns and ammunition.
The scavengers were afraid to open my cell,
because they saw my legs and wrists were shackled.
But I told them the blessed virgin of the Indians
had just worked me a miracle.
I had been saved by the hand of God.
And they must set me free.
[APPLAUSE]
I always wanted--
I studied up on the great influenza of 1918.
And they estimate between 20 and 40 million people died
in the great influenza of 1918.
Even if you take 25 million or 30 million,
it's the greatest single natural disaster, because, of course,
viruses and bacteria are natural things.
And it was one of the greatest natural disasters ever.
And I just knew that somewhere, somebody
got saved during that time, unlike what happened last night
in the Arizona gas chamber.
People wonder why there's so much--
among young males especially, so much suicide.
[INAUDIBLE] sort of television is like death television.
There's a great deal of death around.
And as long as you have cold blooded,
there's nothing colder than state executions.
And there is nothing-- if you want--
people ask me, well, what [INAUDIBLE] I just don't know,
read a detailed description of a state execution.
That's pornography.
[APPLAUSE]
That piece that I just read, I think
that we should all at some time or another imagine ourselves.
I think it's a good spiritual exercise to imagine yourself
into that position, really.
And so I work to do that.
One of the other things that has sort of emerged--
I'll just say this before I go ahead
and read this last section--
that emerged from my work is that--
with the Almanac is, as long as the killing
that serial murders, people that freak out and shoot up
cafeterias, that all of these things are connected.
That being surrounded with death,
with the images of death, with the kind of worshiping
of mass death, sudden mass death like you had with Desert Storm,
that all of these things impinge upon human beings.
But the most important connection-- and this
is I want to talk about, talk especially
to people concerned about rape and child molestation and child
murder.
If we don't stop murdering the Earth
and tearing the Earth open and destroying owls and squirrels
and fish, you can't expect that the destruction and the tearing
to pieces of our children and ourselves, our female bodies,
that all of these things are tied together.
And so when you talk about a series like this--
I came into the class today and said, every breath you take
is political, just literally because of how much air
there might be left to breathe.
But in terms of violence and women, our women and children,
we've finally become a culture in which you can't safely
nurture and raise the little ones.
It's gotten too strange.
And even when you don't tell the kids,
while you run outside in the front yard all the time
and get like this when you don't see them--
you don't tell them that the destroyers,
that these creatures that destroy living growing things,
cut them down.
And of course, the University of Arizona
likes to cut down trees wherever they find them.
I think they've been cutting down trees again
in the neighborhoods nearby.
There's not really might say what to do.
But I think that the University of Arizona I hear
has lots of buildings but no money
for teachers or for utilities or things like that.
I mean, I-- [APPLAUSE] like I said in Almanac,
you don't have to do anything.
At the very end, I mean, you can just sit.
And it's already in motion.
It's already happening.
And so in a sense, once things are set into motion,
it's not to call out and say that people
have to run out and throw themselves
in front of bulldozers.
But since there aren't any teachers,
and there's not any electricity, pretty soon
I think people will find their way to doing what's right.
And I also think that it's really suspicious
that the Vatican, the great destroyer
of Native American religions and the Catholic church
that always has been so prominent
and burned so that there's only fragments of almanacs--
that the Vatican's ugly snout should
rear into this whole thing.
And that I think that [APPLAUSE] there's
something highly suspect about this Mount Graham site.
I think that we all know that there's secret
money, secret money that the Pentagon gets to use.
And I really think that there's something
suspicious about the behavior of the Circuit Court of Appeals.
There must be something when it's a super secret thing
that the CIA and the Pentagon are funding,
they must have a little black thing
that they slide under the door to the judges or something.
But I really think that people need
to question why at a time like this with a budget--
with things shaking down here, why
that there's something so inexorable about this.
And it makes me think that it must
be part of secretly-- they're not telling
anybody-- part of Star Wars.
And the thing that's disturbing about Star Wars
is they can aim those things at anybody.
They can point telescopes in any direction.
And so anyway.
But all of the things that need to happen--
I have a great faith that there's already
things set in motion so that the tide will definitely
be turning.
OK.
All right.
[APPLAUSE]
Yeah.
OK.
The last section that I want to read to you
is a section that's really important to me.
It's because I was able to make in a really important way
a connection with something that I'd known for a long time.
And that was about black Indians,
the great African-Native American connection.
So important, and yet played down so much.
And of course, in working through Almanac
I finally realized that the greatest fear, the greatest
fear that the slave masters have always had,
was that you would have these coalitions and a joining
together of forces.
In the list of dates that I threw in here,
I chose to put American slave rebellions
in which Native Americans rose up with Africans.
Because that was the thing that terrified
the slave keepers the most.
And the way that I work into this
is with this character, my character Clinton.
Clinton was the black veteran with one foot.
But he wore the best, the top of the line, the best
kind of prosthetic foot you could buy.
Clinton had to wear his full Green Beret uniform every day,
otherwise there would just be trouble for him,
because Clinton didn't bow and scrape to no Arizona honky
trash crackers.
[LAUGHTER]
Clinton had grown up outside of Houston
where the cops and Texas Rangers really
hated African-American folks.
Clinton lives alone in a Sears garden
shed he bought for himself.
Roy hears rumors Clinton has relatives in Tucson,
but Roy doesn't ask questions, because that sets off
something in Clinton.
Roy is also ramble.
This is from the homeless section in my novel.
Sort of spooky.
The other day I picked up the paper
and saw that the homeless people have a camp.
The homeless Vietnam veterans put a camp right
where the camp was put in my novel, which was really weird.
But anyway, these are my two characters there.
Some days, Clinton says he's OK.
Other days, he warns you ahead of time you better steer clear.
Roy is not afraid of Clint's bad days.
On Clint's bad days, Roy is free to wild talk right back
at that crazy black fucker.
They don't talk to one another.
They talk at each other.
And neither one of them bothers to listen to the other.
What is important is Clinton's outrage,
Clinton's pure, pure contempt for any authority but his own.
Clinton reads books when he goes to wash up
at the downtown branch of the public library.
What he can't get off his mind is
what man does to man over and over again.
A slave was the first thing any man thought of,
someone to do the dirty work.
Clinton thought women were correct about being enslaved
by men, otherwise Clinton had no use for bitches,
because what had at one time had been so good in them had been
ruined by their enslavement.
Clinton's paranoia knows no boundaries.
He has cousins and step brothers in the army.
And the word gets around among the brothers and the sisters.
The army has to have lab technicians.
There are security guards.
There must be cleaning crews.
The word leaks out.
Clinton always prefaces his remarks.
He says, no black American would ever betray his country.
But a black man's country was different from the white man's
country, no matter they both called it the same thing,
United States of America.
Clinton says the AIDS virus was developed
in a bio-warfare laboratory by the US government
and was stolen by military personnel
sympathetic to white supremacists in South Africa.
Naturally, they had been careful to set
AIDS loose in the African-controlled states.
Whites in South Africa would never
have risked setting loose the virus
on their valuable labor force.
Still, the growth of populations in all African states
had to be stopped.
Somewhere the men who had paid for the stolen virus
sat around a conference tent storming.
Mad scientists, Roy tried to interject.
But Clinton had waved away Roy's remarks.
White man's words were always being shoved
in the black man's mouth.
Mad scientists, mad generals, mad church of god preachers.
All of them want to see black folks disappear,
but sort of gradually, you know?
Clinton says J. Edgar Hoover ordered the assassination
of Martin Luther King.
Right there, Hoover's clips got winged.
The old faggot was crazy.
Assassination wasn't gradual.
And assassination had a way of creating folk myths and heroes.
A secret bipartisan congressional panel
had hastily concluded only a cover-up
would save US cities from burning
and the outbreak of a race war.
Clinton said J. Edgar had first practiced assassination
on John F. Kennedy, because Hoover hated the Kennedys.
Kennedy supported civil rights, but John Kennedy
hadn't been the big fish.
Hell no, Clinton said.
All you whites can think about is white.
John Kennedy couldn't lead no one.
He couldn't even lead the US Congress.
Clinton had warmed up good on this topic.
Later Clinton told Roy he was the first white man ever
to listen through the whole rap to every last word
Clinton said.
Roy could see why Clinton pissed people off,
even some black people.
Because Clinton said Kennedy had only
been used for target practice.
J. Edgar's dress rehearsal.
Martin Luther King had been dangerous,
because he was a leader.
He could lead all different kinds of people.
More and more white people had listened to and followed King.
That was what had driven J. Edgar, the old butt-fucker,
over the edge.
Clinton understood the cover-up, the whitewash.
Clinton said young blacks would have
burned down the United States that summer
if the truth had come out.
Clinton understood the need to be practical.
He will be the only black unit leader.
But he won't have an all-black unit.
Roy wants integrated units in this new army.
They're planning an army of the homeless.
They have more whites than blacks anyway.
What Roy does not say for now is that it is better
to have whites outnumber blacks in integrated units.
Otherwise, [INAUDIBLE] uneasy.
Roy and Clinton get along, because neither man tries
to argue good or bad, right or wrong, only what is necessary.
Clinton likes to test Roy's reactions.
What if I get me an all-black unit?
Roy shrugs.
None of them are fortune tellers, are they?
For all they know, they may end up on opposite sides,
battling one another.
Neither man rules out a race war.
But both tend to agree.
Battle lines will be drawn according to color--
green, the color of money, the only color that ever mattered.
The richest, whatever their color, had always escaped.
Clinton had read about the wealth
and the greed of slave-dealing African tribes.
Some of the richest Jews had escaped Hitler's ovens.
Only poor Jews had died.
Roy said he didn't know if Clinton was right about that.
Clinton nodded his head.
The rich got the news.
Then the rich had the money to get away.
OK, I'm just going to skip over to Clinton's prayer, his--
Clinton plans a series of radio broadcasts
for after the takeover.
And he prepares them on tapes.
Clinton's first broadcast in the reborn United States
was going to be dedicated to the children born
to escaped African slaves who married Carib Indian survivors.
The first broadcast would be dedicated
to them, the first African Native Americans.
Clinton talked about the tapes he
was making for radio stations, but he never
let Roy hear any of them.
Clinton said he could describe all the tapes,
and Roy would have a better idea if he just let Clinton talk.
And so in one of them Clinton--
before he left, the old women in his family
gave him a knife that saved his life.
He had a shrine.
So I'll read that part before the prayer.
Clinton's shrine held the knife, or the blade of a knife,
and what remained of a handle, a skeleton of metal.
Clinton had kept the blade razor sharp.
He had carried the knife in combat,
because it had never failed him in the dangerous alleys
and streets at home.
Clinton's people, women and men alike, all carried knives.
Clinton had been hit by flying shrapnel
that killed three men nearby.
The handle of the knife had been shattered by shrapnel.
But miraculously, Clinton had escaped with minor injuries.
Clinton woke up and learned the medic had sent the knife along.
Because anyone could see the knife had saved Clinton's life.
The knife had power all its own.
Clinton felt this power long before he studied
African religions in Black Studies
and realized his family's regard for knives
was a remnant of old African religion.
Clinton had carried the blade wrapped
in a piece of red velvet he had cut from the draperies
in a whore's room in Manila.
When he was not wearing the knife sheath
on his combat belt, Clinton kept the knife on a shrine.
He had bought the local incense to burn
for the shrine, which, of course, worked
to cover the odor--
this is in Vietnam-- the odor of opium or reefer.
He bought tiny Japanese porcelain dishes
he put in front of the red Velvet bundle, surrounded
by small candles burning in glasses.
Clinton put pinches of food on the tiny dishes
and sprinkled rum on the blade each time
he unwrapped the red velvet.
Roy had pointed out that people might not
want someone burning candles and spilling rum,
because it might cause a fire.
Typical white man thinking.
Clinton had learned to expect even the best of them,
such as Roy, sometimes just didn't see.
Candles, rum, and incense didn't necessarily mean a fire.
The white man would stop everything before it started.
The white man would pretend to know
all the answers ahead of time.
But of course, really, the white man didn't have a clue.
The white man had made some monumental errors in the 500
years Europeans had disrupted Africa, China,
and the Americas.
The Chinese and Africans had broken free.
Now it was only a matter of time before all captive people
on the Earth would rise up.
Clinton talked to the blade when he poured the rum over it.
The cutting metal edge of [INAUDIBLE] Ogou's
favorite dwelling.
In Africa, metalworkers were Ogou's priests.
Clinton's people all revered the knife.
Clinton offered this prayer.
Ogou, warrior and metal maker.
Ogou wages war every day.
Ogou, we suffer a great deal in this battle
with our oppressors.
Ogou protects those who serve him.
Ogou is watchful.
Ogou has boundless energy.
Ogou is powered by anger.
Ogou Feray, you magnet power.
Pull iron fragments together.
Gather the loss to your chest.
Ogou, your father love heals them.
All the scattered fragments.
Ancestor spirits gathered.
Ogou Feray, you lead them to war for the sake
of us, their descendants.
Ogou Feray, commander of the army of the lost is found.
Ogou fires the cannon to announce the uprising.
Rage, blind rage, destroys all in reach.
Mad dog warrior Ogou.
The shrine had made people, even the other blacks,
afraid of Clinton, because Americans
had swallowed all that Hollywood bullshit
about voodoo and the devil.
Some guys even objected to the apples
Clinton left out for the spirits.
Clinton did not blame the people for their ignorance.
But at some point, a man had to teach himself or learn
something.
He explained the apples had to be left to rot,
so the ancestor spirits could eat them.
OK, well, I think everybody's been sitting on the hard floor
and sitting so quietly and been such a great audience that
in appreciation for that that you
should be allowed your freedom.
So I thank you so much for coming tonight.
[APPLAUSE]
You were a great group.
Thank you.