This next thing that I want to read to you
is based on some of these very old time kinds of stories.
There's a series of legends, myths involving a woman.
They call her Yellow Woman.
Kochininako.
And she appears in different kinds of stories.
She seems to take on different personalities
depending on the stories.
But when I was a little kid, we used to hear these stories.
And I think what comes through the stories
is this easy attitude towards these certain things.
This piece is called "Storytelling."
And this is the prologue.
"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.
Part Two.
You better have a damn good story,
her husband said, about where you've
been for the past 10 months and how you explain these twin baby
boys.
Part Three.
[LAUGHTER]
No, that gossip isn't true.
She didn't elope.
She was kidnapped by that Mexican at Se Ama feast.
You know my daughter isn't that kind of girl.
Four.
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 the state police were hot
on their trail of wine bottles and size 42 panties
hanging in bushes and trees all along the road.
We couldn't escape them, he told police later.
We tried, but there were four of them and only three of us.
[LAUGHTER]
Five.
It 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]
Part Six.
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 so long to get back home.
My husband left after he heard the story.
Moved back in with his mother.
I don't blame him either.
I could have told the story better than I did."
[LAUGHTER]
OK.