“I have considered,” said Walks the River, “and I have dreamed.” For a moment, he could feel the hope that filled the lodge, the expectation that he was going to throw in with the rest and make the opinion unanimous and harmonious at last.
“The Ukdena are growing fewer because there are fewer priests to master them and hold them to the earth. Yes, the Ukdena are dangerous, but under the control of the Principal People they are dangerous only to our enemies.”
The disappointment filled the room like bad air.
“All right,” said the second priest. His job was to manage the discussion, and he was allowed no opinion of his own. “Let us consider again the nature of the Ukdena.”
“We all know their nature,” said Holds the Corn Up, Beloved Man of the Long Hair clan. “They are anger and fear. That is their energy.”
“They are the unmastered anger and fear of all the world’s people,” said Walks the River. “And why does this energy come here, to the Principal People, if not to be guided by us? Why are we together, Tsalagi and Ukdena, in the same place, the middle of the world, if not so that the Principal People might direct those energies safely? We must hold in trust all the powers that attach to us.”
“I have had a dream,” said the Paint clan’s Beloved Man. “In my dream, I saw the Great Bear dancing, stomping.”
Everyone had that dream sooner or later, and everyone understood what it meant. The Great Bear was stamping out fear and ignorance from the world.
“I think,” the man continued, “that the Ukdena are the very thing that the Great Bear is trying to drive out of the earth with his dancing.”
“No power is all good or all bad,” said Walks the River. “In my dreams, I have seen the Ukdena, and they are beautiful.”
The secondary priest said, “The man who has not mastered himself looks at the Ukdena and sees demons. But the man who knows his heart and masters clear thought will see angels instead. The Ukdena are the same Ukdena.” This was not opinion, but simply a review of the facts.
“It’s just a question of one priest,” Red Fox reminded everyone.
“Ours is the Very Middle village,” said Walks the River, “in the middle of the world. We are at the center of many circles. Already, the science that communicates with the Ukdena and guides them for us is in decline. Our decision may travel from the center like a stone in still water. If we will not maintain the Ukdena, how do we know anyone will? I think that if we make the wrong decision, the Principal People will forget how to master the Ukdena. I can imagine a time when the Ukdena pass out of this world with hardly any notice by our people. What if we call to them and they are no longer here to answer us?”
“Why should we call to them?” said Woods Burning. “Why should we bring down fear and anger to the earth? When is fear good? When is anger good?”
“A man without fear cannot be brave,” said Walks the River. “As for anger, it is needed for passion. For justice.”
“For justice, we have the law,” said Woods Burning. “If the Shaawanwaaki raid our village and kill five people, then we will kill five Shaawanwaaki. If a Blue clan man murders someone in the Long Hair clan, then the killer or someone else in his clan must die. The law maintains harmony. Nothing else is needed.”
“Walks the River imagines a time without Ukdena,” said the Paint clan’s Beloved Man. “I imagine instead a time of abundant Ukdena. If there are too many of these beings held here by our medicine, then no one will be able to contain them. They will range farther and farther from the middle of the world. Other people do not train themselves as we do. Who knows what the wandering Ukdena might do in the lands of people who do not see as clearly as we must see?”
“Neither thing has happened,” said Red Fox. “We have always held the Ukdena here in harmony.”
“The Ukdena grow fewer,” said Walks the River. “That is certain. Who knows what turn the future will take?”
“Is the future singular,” said the Beloved Man of the Blue clan, “or is it multiple? Is there one future, or many?”
“The future shall unfold according to prophecy,” said Holds the Corn.
“Yes,” agreed Woods Burning, “but many paths possible to the same point in prophecy.”
The principal priest said, “In the matter of the Ukdena and a third priest, how are we resolved?”
Again, the Beloved Men of the majority clans spoke their positions. Nothing had changed. Walks the River looked at his bony hands and bit his lip. What else was there to do? All of his arguments had been repeated many times. He had not moved any of the others, and he had not himself been moved to join them.
Politeness dictated that he should withdraw now. He and all of his clan should leave the council house so that the decision could be made unanimously in their absence. That was not what he wanted to do, but how could he stay and still believe himself a reasonable man?
Clearly he must withdraw.
But he waited. He thought of what the Blue clan speaker had just said. Was there one future, or many? Perhaps he was now at the place where the futures divided like channels of a river moving around a great stone. He was the great stone. If he leaned one way, this channel would be the greater. Lean the other way, and the other channel would determine how prophecy would be fulfilled.
And what prophecy was it that was flowing around him? What futures might depend on him?
The Ukdena were beautiful. The Ukdena were terrible. Harmony was beautiful and holy, but was it better preserved by defending the Ukdena or by letting the matter drop?
Continue or withdraw? Each choice seemed both right and wrong.
“We will not be moved,” he said for his clan.
People in the Council House shifted around, as if feeling for the first time the stiffness of sitting for many days. The Beloved Men of the other clans looked over their shoulders to read the eyes of their people.
After a time the speaker for the Wolf clan turned to face the priests and the sacred fire. “It is the sixth day,” he said. “For six days, the Wild Potato clan has not moved. Nothing moves them, and they do not turn aside. Walks the River is a thoughtful and well-mannered man. He bears a lot and does not anger. This begins to change our hearts. We say there shall be a third priest, and he shall learn to master the Ukdena.”
That was how the tide turned, but politics flow slowly. It was not until late in the next day that the Blue clan and Deer clan supported the training of a new priest.
“Think of the Great Bear, stamping on the ground,” the Paint clan’s Beloved Man argued, though the flow had clearly shifted against him. “Fear and ignorance, that’s what he tramples down. Let the Ukdena decline. We don’t need them. We do not need a third priest.”
But it was after this speech that Holds the Corn had brought the Long Hair clan to the other side, in favor of maintaining an additional priest. Woods Burning felt his own clan shift beneath him, and whatever his own feelings, he had to speak for his people. “Let there be a third priest,” he said.
The Paint clan held their ground until the end of that seventh day. Their Beloved Man argued about the risks of crowding the skies with Ukdena, but too many Ukdena seemed a less plausible future than a future where the last Ukdena had vibrated itself out of this world. Everyone had already agreed that the Ukdena were in decline.
In the end, the Paint clan could not agree with the majority, but they left the Council House and let the village make a unanimous decision in their absence.
“In the matter of the Ukdena and a third priest,” said the principal priest, “how are we resolved?”
“That there shall be a third priest so that we may remember how to hold the Ukdena to the earth,” said Red Fox. “That is the decision of all the people.”
If any Tsalagi were angry over the outcome, they turned their anger aside and it did not show. The village held the form of harmony, and the sacred fire was extinguished. The last year of the eleventh heaven was over. The priests kindled a new fire in the C
ouncil House, and women carried embers from it into each home. The people carried their new clothes to the river, and then they bathed, letting the current carry away their old clothing and the old year with it. When they stepped ashore to dress in new garments, they were themselves renewed. It was the twelfth heaven, seven generations before the first hell of the Fifth World.
Walks the River did not dream of the Ukdena again, and in the year that followed, he died in his sleep. Many Beloved Men died in that year, but they had lived long enough, at least, to see the twelfth heaven.
♦ ♦ ♦
The keynote speaker said, “The extent to which Ukdena-mind became prevalent on Turtle Island is evident in the report of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a sailor in Hernando de Soto’s ‘discovery’ voyage, who wrote that the crew saw ‘dragons’ in the air above Cuba. Some researchers have even speculated that a forgotten earlier explorer, a Genoan called Cristobal Colón, made landfall in the Americas fifty years ahead of de Soto. Ukdena-mind, and the fear and suspicion it often generates if unchecked, could explain what happened to this Colón. As was the case for de Soto, it’s almost certain that the Caribs would have welcomed him with arrows. De Soto himself narrowly escaped the destruction of his fleet on his first voyage. But this earlier landfall and contact would explain the arrival of smallpox on the continent two generations before the first significant wave of European invaders. Our history might have been very different if, without two generations of previous exposure to the disease, the native peoples had been forced to contend simultaneously with aggressive invaders and a virulent disease to which they had no time to build immune resistance.”
Almost with the speed of Ukdena,
the sickness crossed the water between islands,
entered the low country of the Apalachee
rose into the mountains of the Tsalagi.
From the Tsalagi homeland
in the middle of the world
the disease spread
in all directions.
People died.
Young and old
they died.
Potawatomi and Kansa
Kiowa and Paiute
Shuswap and Shoshoni
Chiricahua and Azteca
they died.
That was during the first hell
of the Fifth World.
So many people died
That Turtle Island seemed empty.
But the ones who survived,
they were the strong human beings,
the ones the sickness couldn’t easily kill,
and their children were also strong.
The disease kept coming back,
but every time
the people were stronger
and the disease could not kill
so easily.
“As opposed to Africa,” the speaker said, “development of cultural exchange took a very different turn in the ‘new’ world, thanks to this pattern of successful resistance. Rather than cultural conquest or even cultural hegemony, the North American continent experienced something like a cultural marriage and an exchange between equals. Some of what was traded was tangible, as in the exchange of maize for wheat. Other trades were more subtle. Europeans learned how to hold the Forms of Peace. The Turtle Island Nations were introduced to the concept of the Nation State. It was this more subtle trade that effected the greatest change in both cultures. Europeans gradually stopped thinking of themselves as clever for accepting more gifts than they gave. There may be an objective sense in which it’s true that, as the Ukdena priests say, this continent is built on the energies of Ukdena-mind.”
The river of prophecy
is one river.
The current weaves and divides,
but water always flows
downhill.
Perhaps there is more
than one reality.
Spiral mind is wide enough
to contain another universe.
“I can sum up Indian history in the United States of America in very few words,” said the keynoter at a conference in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capitol. “The Trail of Tears. Sand Creek. Wounded Knee. We can imagine how things might have been different, but we’re confronted nonetheless with how things were, and are. But I also want you to consider this. Where did the people of this continent go? They did not all die in the American genocide, though nine-tenths of them did. Their descendants are not all living on reservations, though many are, trapped there as a matter of public policy. But where are the rest?
“Let me frame it in another way. No conqueror is left unaffected by the conquest. Consider that in the United States of America today we have people who look like Europeans who will chain themselves to a tree and risk death for the sake of an owl. I’m talking about a process that goes both ways, of course. There are also people who look like Indians who will lease their tribal lands to strip miners. Who, then, is more Indian? Who is more white? Where are the Indians now? Where are the Europeans?”
Some would say that the effect of all those secret grandmothers, Indian women giving birth to and raising children in families that were designated “black” or “white,” has been the Indianization of the majority culture. In this view, a lot of secret wisdom was passed down along with that secret blood. Proponents of this notion point out that the very attributes considered by the Europeans to be marks of savagery sound like a portrait of the still-evolving American culture: permissive child rearing; the habit of bathing more often than “necessary”; suspicion of “authority”; passionate pride; acceptance and empowerment of women and of more than one sexual norm; fluid class distinctions, or no such distinctions at all.
On Turtle Island
Arrow Mind and Spiral Mind
twine and twist
together.
It is one mind now.
In any version of the story,
it is one mind.
Introduction to
“Twas the Night Before Global Economic Integration”
The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas L. Friedman is a very thoughtful look at the effects of globalization. Who knew that it would inspire a story about Santa Claus?
Twas the Night Before Global Economic Integration
Niles, the lead elf in the wooden toy division and union president, couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “You’re canning us? And on the day before Christmas?”
Santa Claus sighed sympathetically. “I had hoped to do this through attrition, Niles, but it’s been six hundred years since an elf retired. And things had to change.”
“Had to change? What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about globalization,” Santa said. “It’s a fast world these days. If you can’t adapt, you go under. That’s how it is.” He patted Niles on the head. “I’m sorry. We’ve been operating at a loss.”
The elf batted Santa’s hand away. “Are you crazy? We’ve always operated at a loss.”
“Yes, on finite resources. It couldn’t go on forever.”
“Without elves, who’s going to make the toys? Who’s going to take care of the reindeer?”
“The reindeer are already gone, air-freighted to a retirement pasture in Lapland. As for making the toys, the same subcontractor who is streamlining the transportation division will be handling that.”
“Subcontractor?”
Santa pointed out the window toward the warehouse. Niles put his hands on the sill and looked out. Standing next to the warehouse was a building on stilts. Stilts that shivered in the cold. No, they weren’t stilts at all. They were chicken legs. It was a little house standing on enormous chicken legs.
Niles said, “Gross. What is that? It wasn’t there when I came in.”
“It moves with absolute silence, even quieter than the sleigh. And as for capacity, well, you can see that I’ll need to make far fewer trips.”
“What is it?”
“The hut of Baba Yaga, the Russian witch.”
“A witch? You’re
replacing us with a witch?”
“I know it seems an unlikely alliance,” Santa said as he sat down behind his desk, “but she backed up her proposal with some attractive numbers. If you take a look at this spreadsheet…”
“You know where you can put that spreadsheet,” Niles said. “You may have timed this so we can’t go on strike, but that doesn’t mean that we’ll take this lying down!”
Santa pressed a button on his desk. “I’m sorry you feel that way.” The office door opened and two security guards came inside. “These gentlemen will escort you off the grounds.”
Santa watched the elf go. Other pairs of guards were escorting other elves. Santa shook his head and sighed. Was he making a mistake? He looked at the spreadsheet numbers. No, this was how it had to be. It was a fast world now. If you couldn’t adapt, you’d go under. He sat behind his desk thinking, then got up to warm his hands by the fire. Then he paced.
Perhaps he’d feel better if he went to Baba Yaga’s hut for some tea. He needed to discuss the night’s work schedule with her, anyway. He stepped outside, closed the door behind him, and found, when he looked up, that the hut of Baba Yaga was gone. And it wasn’t just somewhere else on the grounds. He checked the elves’ dormitory courtyard. He looked behind the empty reindeer stables. The hut had vanished.
Worse, the toy warehouse was empty. There was no positive interpretation that Santa could give this situation. Baba Yaga wasn’t just taking a load of toys for a test run. It would have taken multiple trips to empty the warehouse. Santa had been ripped off. Without reindeer, he had no way to pursue the witch.
“I’m ruined,” he groaned. He put his head in his hands. He wept. And he heard…sleigh bells.
Santa looked up. A troika drawn by three black horses approached. A man in a blue coat trimmed with fur held the reins. There was a beautiful young woman on the seat beside him, and a man in a black business suit next to her. “Ho, ho, ho!” the driver said. His beard was as long and white as Santa’s. A bag of presents lay in the back of the troika. “Having little bit of trouble?” the driver said. He gave the reins to the girl and stepped down. “You need help, da?”
Thirteen Ways to Water Page 14