The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir

by Leslie Marmon Silko

  Why do people choose not to teach their children their mother tongues—something unthinkable under normal circumstances?

  “Because the occupying powers have outlawed the indigenous language, to speak it is to be placed at a socio-economic disadvantage” (Marwan Hassan, Velocities of Zero). That’s the short answer. The longer more complex answer for me begins like this:

  I spent a great deal of time with my great grandmother A’mooh when I was a baby and small child. Very early I understood what she said to me in Indian. My name for her, A’mooh, came from the exclamation she made in Laguna each time she saw me. “A’mooh” is a term of endearment for a girl. She spoke Laguna to me when I was a baby and small child, but after I started kindergarten, she spoke only English to me.

  I didn’t recall this until I started preparing the keynote address and got to thinking about who might have taught me Laguna. Why did she stop talking Indian to me? She was the family matriarch, so I know nobody dared tell her to stop talking Indian to me, she made the decision herself. My great grandmother was a great believer in education and she must have been concerned about us children speaking English at school.

  But there must have been something else at work too. My great grandmother was a staunch convert to the Presbyterian Church. She used to read to my sisters and me—Bible stories, and Brownie the Bear. She told us a great deal of local history and family history, but she would not tell us the hummah-hah stories, the traditional Laguna stories, because the hummah-hah stories reveal the Laguna spiritual outlook toward animals, plants and spirit beings, one which was at odds with the Presbyterian view of the world.

  By not teaching us children to speak Laguna, my great grandmother made it less likely that we would find our way into the traditional Laguna religion and ceremonies. She was the lone Presbyterian in her house; her husband, my great grandfather from Ohio, was a Quaker, so he didn’t go to the Presbyterian church. None of her children or grandchildren went to church either. So my great grandmother did what she thought was best for us great grandchildren. To no avail of course. My father started taking me to the ka’tsina dances at the village plaza before I could walk. I heard the hummah-hah stories from Aunt Alice and Aunt Susie. My sisters and I were never baptized in any church.

  Grandma Lillie grew up at Los Lunas where they spoke both English and Spanish in the house. Why didn’t she learn to talk Indian after she married Grandpa Hank? Was it because her family in Los Lunas was uneasy about her marriage outside the Church to a Laguna Pueblo man? For Grandma Lillie to learn to speak Laguna would have caused a stir among the wealthier Los Lunas relatives who fancied themselves too good to associate with Indians. After all, our Los Lunas relations had been merchants of everything at one time, including Indian slaves.

  Grandma Lillie spoke Spanish to her mother, Great Grandma Helen, and to her Los Lunas relations, but she did not teach Spanish to my father or his brothers, just as Grandpa Hank did not teach my father and his brothers to speak Laguna.

  Over the years, whenever I tried to learn a language, all the ghosts of the past reappeared—the anxiety and sense of guilt and inadequacy and the loss. Whenever I try to speak, I go into a slow panic and my hearing becomes scrambled by anxiety. Years ago when I taught at Diné College I tried to learn a few Diné greetings and phrases but I couldn’t do it. How could I learn Diné when I never learned Laguna?

  CHAPTER 9

  I never felt alone or afraid up there in the hills. The hummah-hah stories described the conversations coyotes, crows and buzzards used to have with human beings. I was fascinated with the notion that long ago humans and animals used to freely converse. As I got older, I realized the clouds and winds and rivers also have their ways of communication; I became interested in what these entities had to say. My imagination became engaged in discovering what can be known without words.

  Stories themselves have spirit and being, and they have a way of communicating on different levels. The story itself communicates with us regardless of what language it is told in. Of course stories are always funnier and more vivid when they are told in their original language by a good storyteller. But what I love about stories is they can survive and continue in some form or other resembling themselves regardless of how good or how bad the storyteller is, no matter what language they are told or written in. This is because the human brain favors stories or the narrative form as a primary means of organizing and relating human experience. Stories contain large amounts of valuable information even when the storyteller forgets or invents new details.

  So I found myself left with English and some Spanish but only a meager number of words in the language of Ka’waik, the Beautiful Lake place. When I started to write short stories in creative writing class at the beginning of my second year at the University of New Mexico the challenge for me was to make English express or evoke the experiences of hearing the stories told when I was a child.

  My sense of narrative structure, of how a story needs to be told, all this came to me from the stories Aunt Alice, Aunt Susie and Grandpa Hank told me. They carefully chose the English words that best evoked the stories as they heard them told in the Laguna language when they were children, before they learned English.

  Linguistic diversity is integral to the cultural diversity that ensures some humans will survive in the event of one of the periodic global catastrophes. Local indigenous languages hold the keys to survival because they contain the nouns, the names of the plants, insects, birds and mammals important locally to human survival.

  As important as the nouns are the verbs that denote the actions, the activities, the states of being or consciousness that are important to human survival locally. Indigenous languages contain this knowledge; the survival information is encoded in the grammar of the language.

  A language determines whether or not you pay attention to an experience or object; if you have a term or syntactical construction that denotes a relationship or an experience, then you look out for it and are able to see it or hear it. My old friend, the artist Aaron Yava who left us some years ago, made a wonderful line drawing of an old man who walked in a distinctive manner, in which the muscles of his back seemed to work themselves independently as he walked along. Aaron wrote this was “chickish muggee”—someone who exercises his back as he walks along. I never forgot that term, and years later I did see a man walking like that, “chickish muggee,” his back was moving this way and that way as he went along.

  In a lecture I gave in 2008 at West Virginia University I happened to mention that five hundred years from now, throughout the Americas, Nahuatl and related Uto-Aztecan languages will be spoken, not Spanish or English or even Chinese. Later, CC at West Virginia U sent me an e-mail with this newspaper article: “The mayor of Mexico City, Marcelo Ebrard, wants all city employees to learn to speak the Aztec language, Nahuatl. A possible presidential candidate in 2012, Ebrard presented his government’s development plan this week translated for the first time into Nahuatl. He calls it a first step toward establishing the use of Nahuatl in the government. Translators who speak Nahuatl already work in hospitals and courtrooms, but now desk workers will learn the basics of Nahuatl from classroom sessions and online courses.”

  I realize now that from the time I was very small, I focused my attention more on non-verbal communication between people, between animals and between other beings. I used to trail along behind my great grandmother without a word, absorbing from her all the waves of experience and being in shared proximity. I helped her pick “graahdunt,” cilantro, from her garden; I helped her carry the coal bucket and I pulled the hose along while she watered the cosmos and hollyhocks. She and the others of her generation happily existed without concern for clocks, were never in a hurry, never impatient with anyone. There was always time for everything as long as the sun was up.

  I learned the world of the clock and calendar when I started school, but I’ve never lost my sense of being alive without reference to clocks or calendars. My great grandm
other didn’t know exactly when she was born; none of her generation did. Calendar age wasn’t important. Time was very much present time; even the way the old folks talked about the ancestors and their time was located in the present. Those who passed on to join our beloved ancestors at Cliff House remained close by; Cliff House wasn’t far away.

  I learned adults would tolerate my presence if I kept quiet and didn’t touch things. I used to go looking for adults at work in their yards, chopping wood or hanging wet laundry on the clothesline. I watched Aunt Alice rake up trash and weeds down at the dump (so they didn’t blow into her yard, she said). She had a mania for order and for saving things. Her yard was spotless, swept clean every day with a broom. Her house was in complete order, so she cleaned the dump.

  Aunt Alice saved every penny, so she wasn’t poor. She had a pension from years as a Government nurse. My mother was the postmaster at Laguna when the U.S. Treasury Department sent a postal inspector to find out what happened to all the checks they’d sent Alice Marmon Little; none of her pension checks had been cashed. The postal inspector discovered Aunt Alice had a big stack of turquoise blue U.S. Treasury checks she was saving. The inspector explained she should cash the checks and then save the money.

  Aunt Alice searched the dump for things that still had some good or some use left in them. Right away I sensed the excitement of a sort of treasure hunt. I remember her finding a broken kettle with a hole in the bottom, and a frying pan with a broken handle, both of which she carried home and washed and saved. In the early twentieth century, in rural New Mexico, the people saved glass containers and tin cans; they straightened nails and hinges for reuse, and they kept piles of remnant 2×4s and pieces of galvanized steel roofing. At Laguna the people were accustomed to reusing stones from fallen down walls or buildings.

  Aunt Alice saved everything. All of her wedding gifts had been opened but then were carefully repacked in their boxes, labeled and put in order on the shelves that reached from floor to ceiling in her back room. As a child I loved to go back into the cool dim room that smelled of adobe clay and cedar wood. Aunt Alice didn’t have a flush toilet, but she had something far more fascinating: a commode. Behind a curtain hung from the ceiling up on a wooden platform was a big wooden chair with a skirt around the bottom of it to hide the slop jar that had to be carried to the outhouse and dumped followed by a scoop of old stove ashes.

  After Aunt Alice died, Grandma Lillie went to help Uncle Mike go through her things and they found boxes neatly packed with catsup bottles that she’d washed, balls of string and pieces of used aluminum foil she saved.

  Aunt Alice had no children. She was always very kind to us. She often babysat when my parents drove to Albuquerque in the evening to see a movie. Aunt Alice was at her best when she was telling us girls the old-time, hummah-hah stories. The stories about Kochininako, Yellow Woman, being abducted by strange men who turned out to be supernatural beings were Aunt Alice’s favorites.

  My mother thought Aunt Alice was sexually repressed and the racy Yellow Woman stories that she told were her outlet. (My mother thought this because Aunt Alice only saw her husband twice a year: for eight weeks in the summer, and for a week at Christmas. Uncle Mike who was Mescalero Apache worked on the Santa Fe Railroad and lived in Richmond, California. This seemed to suit each of them just fine. They were entirely devoted to one another.)

  Aunt Alice was my grandpa Hank’s first cousin; Alice’s mother, Margaret, from Paguate village, was married to Walter Gunn Marmon. My grandfather recalled when he was a young boy, he and the other children were afraid to walk past the yard if they saw Alice’s mother outdoors.

  Margaret apparently suffered a nervous breakdown sometime before 1900. Aunt Alice would have been a young child at that time too. Grandpa Hank said Margaret used to scream at him and the other young children and threw rocks at them when they walked through the large yard and garden area the families of the two Marmon brothers shared.

  My great grandmother, who seldom had anything negative to say about anyone, told my mother a strange story. John Gunn, not Walter Gunn Marmon, was Aunt Alice’s biological father. John Gunn and Walter G. Marmon were first cousins, and John Gunn came to Laguna with Robert G. Marmon, my great grandfather, in 1875.

  Great Grandma said Margaret had a saddle horse she liked to ride very fast around the Laguna-Acoma area. While Walter G. Marmon was gone on months-long survey and map-making excursions, his wife saddled up her horse and galloped off for liaisons with John Gunn.

  Grandma A’mooh said Alice’s mother became so sexually active with white men that some people got together and stopped her out in the hills where she was riding her horse. They confronted her about her behavior and then they partially scalped her.

  For me this story never quite added up. My great grandma was a stern Presbyterian who never lied about anything. She was very fond of my mother so why would she tell her such a story if it was untrue? But Grandma A’mooh must have left something important out of the story. The violence of the confrontation points in the direction of something else.

  Marital infidelity was not a crime among the Pueblos. Plenty of women had extramarital affairs just as the men did. Not a few women had affairs with white men, even with the Catholic priests. If this bloody confrontation took place as my great grandmother said, it would have occurred before 1900 and might account for Margaret’s odd behavior or breakdown which Grandpa Hank recalled.

  Aunt Alice proudly displayed a large photograph of her father in his Union Army uniform, but she had no photographs of her mother. Even as a child I took note of this absence of photographs of Aunt Alice’s mother. I imagined her as one of those old-time people who disliked cameras and hid her face rather than be photographed.

  Later my great grandfather Robert G. Marmon moved his family to the two-story adobe house (with the cellar that flooded) across the railroad tracks from his brother’s house. From time to time my great grandparents took in guests who got off the train to spend a few days sight-seeing in the Laguna-Acoma area. They kept a guest book that was signed by the likes of Edward Curtis, John D. Rockefeller and Franz Boaz.

  By 1917, Margaret Marmon apparently had recovered because she worked as an informant about Laguna ceremonial practices with the Harvard-trained anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons in 1917 and 1918. Parsons described her fieldwork thus:

  “…I lived not in the pueblo, but about three miles away in the house of Mr. E. F. Eckerman near the railway station. In this detachment there were both advantages and disadvantages. Observation of the general life of the pueblo was necessarily limited and my circle of acquaintances was restricted. On the other hand, interrogation was unhandicapped [sic] by embarrassing visitors and the disposition of the informants was rendered comparatively frank and responsive. My chief informants were the mother and the aunt of Mrs. Eckerman….”

  Parsons footnoted “the mother”:

  “Mrs. Marmon, a native born Laguna woman, was the widow of W. G. Marmon, one of the early white settlers in the westward movement. Mrs. Marmon remained unsophisticated and uncontaminated by American shoddiness. She was a strong, gentle and very lovable person. She died in 1918.”

  In her “Notes on Ceremonialism at Laguna,” published in Volume XIX of Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History in 1919, Parsons noted that all the Laguna people who worked as informants for her the two previous summers had died—two by influenza, and one by lightning strike, but that no one at Laguna linked the deaths to their work with her. Parsons fooled herself if she believed this; such links would have been made at once because it was well known that anyone who dared to reveal ceremonial secrets risked severe reprisals from the supernatural world.

  Parsons also commented that my great grandfather and his wife were “indifferent” to the traditional rituals and were of no use in her ethnological research.

  The stories about her mother, Margaret, explain a great deal about Aunt Alice; she might have been eccentric, but I spent
many happy hours with her. I internalized her peacefulness during our blissful silent meanderings among the old bottles and broken tea kettles at the abandoned dump by the river. Even now I wander the trails of the Tucson Mountains looking for odd pebbles and colorful rocks for hours on end in the same blissful consciousness I learned from my days with her. She taught me her love of solitude and self-reliance which have served me well.

  As a child I spent hours alone with my dogs down at the river playing with the minnows and toads. After I got my first horse I was able to roam farther into the sandy hills and up to the sandstone canyons along the piñon-covered ridges where I saw no one for hours, and then maybe only a pick-up truck with someone from Laguna on their way to sheep camp with supplies.

  CHAPTER 10

  When I was five years old Aunt Alice came to babysit us early one morning while my parents went to hunt deer on Mount Taylor. I was crying because I wanted to go with my parents and they’d almost agreed to take me along, but then decided no.

  To humor me that morning, Aunt Alice told my sisters and me the story about the Estrucuyu, the big headed monster, and Kochininako, Yellow Woman, who was a fine hunter even when she was a girl. Aunt Alice wanted me to know there had been a brave and clever girl who hunted rabbits to feed her sisters and mother but who also outwitted the Estrucuyu, and stalled the monster long enough for the Twin Brothers to arrive and slay him.

  When Aunt Alice told the story about Kochininako cornered in the cave by the dreadful Estrucuyu, she took a great deal of care to describe how the monster demanded the poor girl remove her clothing, piece by piece. Later I understood how the Yellow Woman stories allowed her to express a facet of herself that otherwise was muted. When Aunt Alice got involved in telling a Yellow Woman story she got carried away into her secret self. I will always love her for the indomitable spirit she had, for her love of the old stories and the way she told them to us; and of course, I love her for her gentle eccentricities which I appreciate all the more now that I have a few of my own.