Creative Project

Since I've seen people doing this, I thought I would like to share my story as well. 

I tried to record this story in a fashion that was the closest possible to an oral way.  Some words on the story are in Cherokee, and I did my best to verify that they were correct.

Yellow Flower and the Fox

Escuchen. Listen.

I will tell you a secret. Come closer now.

In the Botanical Gardens,

Where the path meets the water,

You can find a whispering tree.

It’s true.

Like many trees, it is asleep most of the time.

But sometimes,

Just sometimes,

When the sun wants to cool down

And decides to take a plunge into the river,

When the moon starts making its way up to the sky,

The wind rustles the leaves of this tree,

And awakes it.

When that happens, the whispering tree likes to tell stories to the wind.

These are not common whispers, mind you.

These are wordless whispers.

For words are magical things that belong only to certain creatures.

Trees have their own way of telling stories,

But this, I’m afraid, I won’t be able to explain to you.

There are only a number of things in this world that can be explained,

Which does not mean that the rest cannot be understood.

In fact, I only happen to know about the whispering tree

Because I was in the Botanical Gardens a few days ago,

And I heard one of the stories being whispered to the wind. 

It was a wonderful story, which took place many years ago.

Would you like to hear it?

Very well, listen.

Many summers ago,

When all this land belonged to the Cherokee people,

A young girl lived, called Yellow Flower.

She was beautiful and merry,

And she had a wonderful voice.

Even if she was very young,

She could sing the best songs,

And weave the best baskets.

When her tribe came here for the hunting season,

Her father told her:

“Uwetsi[1], take a clay pot with you,

And walk towards the west.

You will find a stream there.

You must bring water.”

Yellow Flower did as she was told.

She sang happily while she walked,

And soon enough she found a stream

With clear singing water.

She was about to put the pot in the stream

When she heard someone say very loudly:

“No! Leave the water alone!”

Yellow Flower looked around, confused,

And saw a red fox sitting at the other side of the river.

She had been so distracted by her own singing,

That she had failed to see him before.

“O’siyo, Tsula[2]”, the girl greeted him.

She knew that foxes could be dangerous if crossed,

So she decided to be polite.

“You must not drink the water from this stream, agiusdi[3]”,

Said Tsula, “You must not touch it even.”

Yellow Flower was not happy to hear this.

“Why ever not?”, she asked,

“My people need the water to survive.

Please, Tsula, let me get some”, she begged.

 But, once again, Tsula said she should not.

“The water on this stream is magical”, he explained,

“If you were to touch it,

You would be turned into a stone at once.”

Now, I’m not sure if you know this,

But foxes are cunning animals.

They like to cheat, and play tricks on people.

So I was not surprised when Yellow Flower asked:

“How will I know that you are not lying?

Can I be sure you are not trying to fool me?”

Tsula smiled then, and pointed to a place downstream.

“You see that rock that looks like a turtle?”, he asked.

The girl said she could.

Not too far away, there was a rock that looked,

Clearly enough, like a turtle.

Tsula spoke again:

“I tried to warn Saligugi, the mud turtle,

That she should not go into the water,

But she would not listen.

If you want good water,

You should go further north.

You will have to walk more,

But the water there is safe to drink.”

Yellow Flower smiled then.

“You have done a great service to me

And my people”, she said,

“I will not forget about it.”

She went back to the tribe,

And told everyone what had happened.

Yellow Flower’s father was so relieved

To find that his child was safe,

That he prepared a bag with the finest

Buffalo meat he had

And he handed the bag to Yellow Flower.

Then he told her:

“Give this to Tsula as a gesture of our gratitude.

But do not attempt to cross the stream.

Just throw the bag to the other side.”

So the girl went back to the stream,

Carrying the bag with her.

She soon found Tsula, sitting on the other side.

“O’siyo, Tsula”, she sang happily,

And was about to throw the bag

When a huge bear appeared from behind her.

The smell of the meat she was carrying

Had attracted the bear.

He roared loudly at Yellow Flower.

Terrified, she let go the bag and jumped forward

Towards the stream,

But before she could touch the water,

Tsula jumped beneath her.

He was immediately turned into a stone,

And Yellow Flower landed on him.

She was then able to get to the other side of the stream safely.

Yona, the bear, took the bag of meat

And went away.

“You saved my life twice”,

Yellow Flower said to the fox

Who was now a red stone in the middle of the stream,

“And my people will never forget this.”

That is the story the tree whispered to the wind.

When it finished, it went back to sleep.

I went back to the Botanical Gardens today.

I sat down and looked at the red stone in the middle of the stream

That looks like a sleeping fox.

I started to think about the story of Yellow Flower,

When suddenly…. There he was!

A red fox on the other side of the stream,

Leaning down to drink water.

“Tsula!”, I called.

He raised his head, and eyed me curiously.

“Yes?”, he asked politely.

I told him the story that I heard from the whispering tree.

“Is it true?”, I asked.

“Yes”, Tsula replied, “That was my great great grandfather”

He pointed towards the red stone with his nose.

“But”, I told him, “The water is not magical.

You can drink from it;

The children come here to play on the summer.

How can it be?”

“Ah”, Tsula nodded, “But of course not.

The water lost its power when my great great grandfather

Sacrificed himself for the little girl.

Sacrifice is powerful medicine,

Surely you know that.”

I said I did, and thanked him.

When I was about to leave, he called me back:

“Oginalii[4], let me tell you one more thing.

We foxes are the guardians of the rivers

And the streams.

Whenever you see a fox drinking water,

You will know it is a safe place to drink.”

I thanked him again.

Shortly after, I filled my bottle with the clear

Singing water of the stream.

And I came straight here to tell you this story.

---

[1] Daughter.

[2] Hello, red fox.

[3] Little woman.

[4] My friend.

Cherokee and Trickster Tales

Oh, boy. I'm ashamed of myself. I haven't blogged in a long time. I have been thinking a lot about all that I've learned, without the will and the time to write it all down. So here are my thoughts:

Cherokee
The trip to Cherokee was an interesting experience. I go back to the whole thing on my mind every once in a while, trying to decide exactly how I feel about it. It was not what I expected to find at all, even though I am not quite sure exactly what I expected to find in the reservation in the first place. But one thing I go back to, over and over in my mind, is Kituwah, the Sacred Mound. It makes me so incredibly sad to think about it. Yes, I know, it's great that it exists, that the Cherokee people can still go there and perform ceremonies. Nevertheless, it makes me really sad. So small, so empty, barely there... I try to picture in my mind what it was like, hundreds of years ago. I think of how proud it must have stood, how people came and went. I can even hear in my mind the laughter of the children, the conversations, and the noises of daily life. And now... an anonymous slope, empty and silent,  not even included in the grounds of the Reservation. How cruel it was, not to include the most sacred place for the Cherokee in their land. And that makes me sad. I believe nothing could have made me feel the depth of the trauma suffered by the native people like that small, incredibly silent piece of land.

Trickster Performance. 
I really enjoyed the trickster tales performances. I must admit it, when I first learned we had to do this, I thought it was silly. But it was definitely a great experience, both hearing the stories and telling one. It was not only fun, it was thrilling. I, for one, was truly entranced by the stories. I do feel they came to life. One can speak for hours about the functions of literature and their role on society... or one can tell a story and explain that more eloquently.
Making my bows was also fun, I have to admit. Speaking my own language! You have no idea how I missed that! It was an incredible experience.
Also, I found a nice animation of the story I told, in case anyone is interested in seeing it. I believe it's beautiful.

The turtle's broken shell

A video of Kathi Smith Littlejohn performing one of her tales. I thought it was lovely.

To Kathi Littlejohh

I’ve had the pleasure not only of reading your stories but also of hearing some of them as well. I believe you are truly gifted. I must say that for a moment, while reading or listening, I felt the wonderful fascination that we usually relate to childhood, when words have the ability to entrance us, like a powerful spell, and take us somewhere different. I guess I am, too, like the girl from the Butterfly story, always wishing for adventure, always a little bit bored with my life. Stories are hard to resist. Do you believe stories can be like those dangerous butterflies, beautiful and filled with colors, calling us with music beyond our imagination? Can stories be dangerous too, even the ones that seem most innocent? If they are, perhaps we need the elders and the storytellers, to guide us safely through them?

We live in times when people, especially children, do not seem to have the patience to sit down and listen to a story. I worked with a group of children not too long ago, and tried to tell them stories several times. I looked for funny and adventurous tales, tried to tell them in the most dynamical way, but in the matter of minutes the children were all fidgeting on their seats, looking out the window. I was thinking about all this while reading that story about the origin of legends, wondering if we have forgotten to show our children the importance of stories in our lives. And I would like to ask you: have you ever had the problem of an impatient or uncooperative audience? If so, what did you do? As a storyteller, what is the most important thing one should have to make a story come to life?

The tales you’ve written and recorded are about love, about respect, about the origins of things, about who the Cherokee people were and are. They are all about life and what means to be people. But I would like to ask you one last UNFAIR question: If you had to save one and just one story of the Cherokee people, which one would it be?

Compassion

I have heard, read and seen many stories, essays, documentaries and articles providing reasons to take care of the Earth and the living beings in it. Some are very good, others seem rather exaggerated. Nowadays we hear the apocalyptical discourse time and time again. It is everywhere: if we do not stop the devastation of our planet we are all going to die, the Earth will become a terrible place and humans, too, after much suffering, will become extinct. Fair enough, I am not going to debate that.
However, I had never heard or read anything more convincing in this topic than the "Story of the Eagle" in the Lakota ways book. It shed light in an issue I thought I knew everything about. It's not scientific reasons or convincing arguments what should move us to respect live in every form: it should be sheer compassion.
The compassion the eagle showed to the girl in the story not only saved her life, but also prevented the human race from disappearing from the Earth. And I'm thinking: would it be terribly difficult for us to repay the favor? To start feeling compassion for the eagles that are disappearing from this country by the minute, thanks to human deeds? I know, this is just a story. But I would rather believe that this really happened and start showing compassion to other living creatures than believing the apocalyptic theory and then acting out of fear. Somehow it feels more... adequate.

In Spanish (as in many romance languages) the word for compassion is com-pasión, which literally means: with passion. And passion is not only what we feel when we are in love, or when something is close to our heart. Passion, in fact, is to suffer (hence, the Passion of Christ is the suffering he endured until his death). So compassion would actually mean "to suffer with". Showing compassion for someone is to feel the pain that someone is feeling, and then acting from that pain. It is about sharing and understanding the other in such a level that you are able to feel, as if it was yours, their pain.
I have yet to meet someone in pain who would not do anything to stop it. Compassion, then, is not just about feeling sorry for someone. There is a great deal of sacrifice going on for anyone who's being compassionate. And that's the second lesson from the story of the eagle: sacrifice.
The eagle was a powerful being. He had everything he needed to survive. He could go wherever he chose to. Yet he chose to stay, to bring food and wood, and to keep company to the young woman. He sacrificed his time, his energy and ultimately who he was because he could feel the pain the girl felt of being alone and helpless. He could have easily felt sorry for her and killed her during her sleep so that she would suffer no more, but that wouldn't have being compassionate at all.
So now I wonder: would we be willing to sacrifice not only what we do but we are for others? Can we really show compassion to the world? I'm not sure. But I hope we can.

Everything

Rather than talking or writing about my learning so far, I decided to try and show you how everything is connected in my mind.

While reading The Sacred Tree many things came into my mind. First I thought of all the knowledge and the truth that could be (and hopefully will be) applied to my personal life. On a second level, I kept thinking of the people I wanted to share this book with: my family, friends, relatives, teachers… I could not help but read a certain passage and think: “Oh, my father would love this” or “ this or that friend could really use this bit of knowledge here”. I believe there are so many irrelevant or even damaging discourses in contemporary life, that when you finally stumble upon something good and important, a tiny flame of hope sparks within yourself, and you just can’t wait to share it with any person patient enough to listen. That’s me, at least. This time, however, I went beyond the point of wanting to share the teachings of The Sacred Tree with my relatives and friends.

I have been living in the United States for almost two months now, but I assure you that is not nearly long enough to forget the city and the country I left behind me. My city is one undergoing a war, it’s a city with so much hatred and so much violence, that good people have to struggle really hard every day to keep just the amount of hope necessary to continue with their lives. We avoid watching the news and reading the newspapers, we close our ears to the shootings on the streets. We pretend that we don’t care as long as our family is OK, we pretend it will soon get better. We learn how to take care of ourselves, and pretend that is enough of a fight.

Reading The Sacred Tree, and doing the bit of research on the Four Worlds Development Project, made me re-think the whole situation I’ve been living with for years. It made me realize I’m tired of pretending. No, it is not OK, and it will not be better until we change it. And there is a way of changing this, the way of the Sacred Tree. My community has the power to heal itself. Since I discovered that, I’ve been daydreaming about writing to schools, telling them of this wonderful book, incorporating its teachings on my social service with children, spreading the word.

The problem is, both public and private schools are now afraid of touching the spiritual aspect in the classrooms. They ignore the emotional and spiritual parts of the human being under the flag of freedom of thought and belief. They would never agree to teach a book that states that we have many gifts, bestowed upon us since our birth by the Creator. Well, I believe it is the deliberated exclusion from this aspect what makes communities sick with hate and violence. Our emotional and spiritual self must be nurtured and guided, so that we can learn about love, kindness, generosity and compassion, and so that we understand that we are connected to everyone and everything in this life. This has nothing to do with religious affiliations, or with the freedom of our thoughts, this is about ourselves developing as complete, balanced human beings. If and when we can do that, I am absolutely sure things will get better, not only in my country, but everywhere.

The Four Worlds Development Project

The back cover of The Sacred Tree explains that the book was created by the Four Worlds Development Project as a handbook of Native Spirituality for Native American people. I grew curious over that fact, since that means we are not only reading a book about indigenous people and tradition, but also directly addressed to them. When I realized that, I immediately started asking questions. How was this book written? Who are the people involved in writing it? What is this project all about? What are it's goals and how are they intending to achieve them? And most importantly: who is they? Who is running the organization?

Well, I did not find answers to all the questions, but I did find some answers and I would like to share them here.

"Four Worlds International Institute for Human and Community Development" was born as a result of a gathering of native elders and community leaders held on the Blood Indian Reservation in Alberta, in 1982. In this gathering, forty leaders of North American tribes deliberated about the social devastation of the tribes caused by alcohol, drug abuse, poverty and a sense or powerlessness, and strived to find a solution for all this.

The elders came up with a plan to restore tribal communities to health and strength through four simple principles:
1. Development Comes from Within - the driving force for change, healing, learning, growth and progress must come from within the indigenous communities.
2. No vision, no development - if people cannot visualize health, it will be hard indeed to create it.
3. Individual and community transformations must go hand in hand.
4. Wholistic learning is the key to deep and lasting change - learning is at the heart of sustainable human change processes and human beings are multidimensional (physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual and volitional).

I think these principles show us why we should learn to listen to our elders. It seems to me that we no longer appreciate the voice of the old, caught as we are in the frenzy to move forward. But there is a lot of wisdom in those four points, not only for Native American communities, but for any community of the world.

Besides the four principles that became the pillars of Four Worlds, the elders proposed a strategy of action, based on their spiritual and cultural knowledge system. This world-view included the beliefs that:
- The spiritual and the material are inseparable and interdependent.
- Everything is related to everything.
- Healing depends on our capacity to understand ourselves.
- Human beings already have within themselves, as a gift from the Creator, the power to transform and heal.

With these beliefs, Four Worlds started to work creating projects and programs to support tribal healing and development.
These initiatives include:
1. The Four Worlds International Institute of Indigenous Sciences - which includes research, training and education and development.
2. The Four Worlds College of Human and Community Development (and this reminded me of the discussion we had last Thursday).
This program is supposed to be: community based, with practical orientation, fully accredited (bachelor, masters and Ph.D levels), interdisciplinary, culturally appropriate and value driven. About values, I found they have a very interesting approach: "The Four Worlds College is founded on the belief that education is not neutral. We believe that learning for sustainable living into the twenty first century must be connected to processes of spiritual and moral renewal, oriented to developing healthy relationships between human beings and the natural world and must be connected in a hands-on-way with real life human struggles for personal, organizational, community and global well being."
3. The Four Worlds Elderhealth Program - created to solve the crisis on Native American Communities on the death of many elders and the subsequent loss of valuable knowledge.
4. The Four Worlds Centre for Development Learning - located in Canada, it concentrates on working with communities, organizations, agencies and governments to solve critical social and economic problems.





The one thing I liked the most about all this, which by the way sounds fantastic to me, is the fact that it comes from within the Native American community. Phil Lane, one of the authors of The Sacred Tree, is the President of Four Directions International and the International Coordinator for the Four Worlds International Institute. He is member of the Yankton Dakota and Chickasaw tribes.

I cannot help but feel, after reading about Four Worlds and Phil Lane, and the beautiful projects going on, that there is, after all, hope for this world to be healed. It is a wonderful sense of hope.



Here is the Four Worlds web site, in case you want more information: http://www.4worlds.org/

Not enough words

When the Europeans arrived to the shores of the New World, the people living there were surprised, sometimes even afraid, because nothing like that had even happened before. The things they saw were so strange that in most cases they didn’t have words to describe them. In the text of Josiah Jeremy we learn that the Micmac people one day saw “a singular little island, as they supposed, which had drifted near to the land, and become stationary there”. The singular little island was, of course, a ship, but Indians had never seen ships before. The concept of a ship was incomprehensible for them, and so they struggled to describe what they saw as best as they could. In the text of John Heckewelder on the arrival of the Dutch, it is said that the some of the people thought the ships to be a very large animal (probably a fish) while others considered it was a very large floating house. In Mexico, the great aztec emperor Motecuhzoma received news that there was a mount or a big hill drifting in the sea, not quite reaching the shore.

 

When the Indians finally saw the European people in their shores, they found they could not understand that either. The newcomers had different clothing, language, skin color, hair color (and they had a lot of that one) and eating and living habits. They were far too different from them. And so, in some places they were thought to be gods. The Micmac at Manhattan, according to John Heckewelder, believed that the captain of the Dutch ship was Mannitto, the Great Being, that had come to visit them: “They are lost in admiration, both as to the color of the skin (or these whites) as also to their manner of dress, yet most as to the habit of him who wore the red clothes, which shone with something they could not account for. He must be Mannitto, they think, but why should he have a white skin?”

The Aztecs in the valley of Mexico also believed at first that the Spanish were gods. They had the legend of Quetzalcoatl, a god sometimes represented with white skin, who had gone away through the sea with the promise to return again someday. So when Hernan Cortez found his way through the mexica empire, Motecuhzoma obviously thought he was Quetzalcoatl.

Too late did the Indians realize these were not the gods they waited for, but only people with an amazing destructive power.

Montaigne and Brant

So, when I started working upon this post, I was determined to identify all the similarities between Montaigne’s essay “Des Cannibales” and Joseph Brant’s response to the question about indian vs. white civilization. I have never been happier to announce that I utterly failed. Well, to be quite truthful it was not an utter failure, I was just wrong in my approach. You see, there are some arguments that are indeed very similar in both texts, however, there is one consideration I failed to make. Whereas Montaigne had only heard about the New World and its people, Brant had actually lived in both worlds, and so he can sometimes give a more accurate perspective on the same topic. 

So I would like to do here, instead of just accusing Brant of stealing a white man’s essay, is to point some of the similarities and differences that I found between these texts. The first one is about the application of the “laws of nature”, which are deemed more perfect, than those of white civilization:  

“The laws of nature, however, govern them still, not as yet much vitiated with any mixture of ours.”  - Montaigne.

“(…) and will only observe, that among us, we have no law but that written on the heart of every rational creature by the immediate finger of the great Spirit of the universe himself” - Brant. 

As we can see, Brant is writing about these “natural laws” that Montaigne mentions. However, while Montaigne is taking a merely natural (biological?) viewpoint, the indian perspective is not only related to the natural but also to the supernatural. It is the “great Spirit of the universe” who wrote those laws on rational creatures, and that has a clear spiritual connotation. Here Nature and Spirit are linked in a way that Western civilization could never completely understand. 

Then, let us consider this second set of quotes. (The first one is Montaigne’s, the second comes from Brant). 

“I should tell Plato, that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those of leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine; the very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard of.”

“We have no prisons - we have no pompous parade of courts; and yet judges are highly esteemed among us, as they are among you, and their decisions as highly revered; property, to say the least, is as well guarded, and crimes are impartially punished. We have among us no splendid villains, above the control of that law, which influences our decisions; in a word, we have no robbery under the color of law” 

I will agree there is only a vaguely similarity (if there is one at all) between this two fragments. But I wanted to compare them precisely for that reason. Montaigne’s view is idealized and what he’s describing is pretty much an utopia. Some parts of it are true, others seem quite exaggerated. Brant, on the other hand, has a more centered position. Though still idealizing Indian society, he talks about judges, property and crimes. Its is not a perfect society, and its not as “primitive” as Montaigne would like to think, it’s just a better one. Of course, it would be only fair to mention here (though it may appear somewhat obvious) that Montaigne and Brant are not talking about the same people (for Mohawks, as far as I know, were not cannibals), nor are they speaking from the same century. Still, their point seems to be more or less the same. 

Both texts have also the claim about cruelty, which I will not quote, for it is fat too lengthy. But while Montaigne boldly says that its is far less barbarian to eat a dead roasted man that eating one that’s alive (making a reference to the cruel methods of punishment in Western society), Brant affirms that Indian torture is never as painful as the horrors of white men’s prisons.  The french man is talking from an intellectual and moral perspective, the indian is talking from experience, but they both seem to agree that at the end, cruelty is a matter of perspective.  

Finally, we find the sentence about which culture has earned the most being called “savage”. Not surprisingly, the verdict is the same: 

“We may then call these people barbarous, in respect to the rules of reason: but not in respect to ourselves, who in all sorts of barbarity exceed them.” - Montaigne

“Cease to call other nations savage, when you are tenfold more the children of cruelty, than they.” - Brant. 

In my opinion, even if Brant’s speech is conventional, even if some of the arguments are very much like Montaigne’s, his text also provides some new insights on the topic. The audience Joseph Brant is addressing is clearly white, and he needs to abide to the formal and thematic conventions of his time. So, the way I see it now, it is not that we are not hearing an “authentic indian voice” (whatever that may mean) as much as that we are encountering an Indian man striving to meet us half way, so that we may understand all this a little better. 

Alexie, reading.

             Sherman Alexie reading and talking. I enjoyed this enormously. Hope you will, too.

Healing Humor

I knew The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven had definitely made it to my top-ten books after I finished reading the first story. I find myself drawn to this book over and over again. I think I must have read the introduction at least five times. And I’ve laughed every single one of them.

This collection of stories has some sort of powerful magic, indian magic. It touches places within me that no book had ever touched before. Yet it is not one of those dreadful books Kafka talked about, the kind that “wound and stab us”, that “affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide”. This is not one of those books. Or, now that I think about it, maybe it is. Maybe it does wound me, maybe it wounds me terribly, with unparalleled force. But at the same time, it offers what none has ever offered before, something both ordinary and extraordinary, even magical: humor. Healing humor.

Now, now… there’s hundreds of thousands of books that offer nothing but humor. Surely I cannot mean that this one is the first one, the only one. I don’t, and I do. Alexie’s humor is not merely satirical or parodical. It does not convey the truth, it does not exaggerate reality, it does not wish to hide the pain. Perhaps it does, but it goes beyond all that.

In Alexie’s words, “Humor was an antiseptic that cleaned the deepest of personal wounds”. Oh, I love that metaphor. I love it because it implies that even the best sense of humor in the world is not strong enough to ease the pain accumulated by millions of people for hundreds of years. It won’t stop the pain, and it won’t stop the devastation of the land, of the culture, of the soul. But it can save us all by allowing us to heal, by offering just enough time to sit down and begin to forgive. The mere possibility of forgiveness is already enough of a gift, because it allows one to hope in situations where there’s no room for hope anymore.

The pain will not go away, but the wound will not be infected. Perhaps the wounds will remain open for hundreds, for thousands of years, forever. But they will not be infected. And we’ll survive them all. If that’s not powerful magic, I don’t know what it could be. And I don’t think Kafka was so lucky as to ever encounter a book like this one.

The Renaissance of Lying

Being who I am, this week my irresponsability took the form of a book I should not be reading. In a way I don’t care to describe, I happened to stumble upon a dialogue piece, written by Oscar Wilde in 1891. It is The Decay of Lying, and it discusses the nature and prerequisites of Art (with a capital A), and criticizes Realism as a formal and thematic movement. I was so fascinated by Wilde’s witty and familiar rhetoric - with the power to convince me of just about anything - that I could not put the book down for a long time. And while I was reading, it startled me just how much of what Wilde was saying reminded me of Sherman Alexie.

In The Decay of Lying, Wilde writes: “Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar.”

Well, I see in Sherman Alexie that cultured, and fascinating liar whose aim is “simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure.” In the Introduction to The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Alexie gives us, I think, a beautiful example of the nature of the literature liar:

“Junior”, she said, “People are going to think that really happened.”

“But it did really happen, Auntie. At least the mouse part. It’s a true story.”

Sherman Alexie is writing about his own life. He is taking his experience as a major source for his stories, and yet, at the same time, he is lying about everything. He is a trickster, a great liar, capable of turning a fistfight on a party into a devastating hurricane. He is both wise and silly, truthful and deceiving. He understands - perhaps even better that Wilde was ever able to - just how greatly we need lies in literature… and in life. After all, Wilde knew nothing about being “a poor Indian boy growing up in an alcoholic family on an alcoholic Reservation”.

And, for that matter, neither do I; but I cherish Alexie’s lies nevertheless. His stories and his characters are more real to me than the real Alexie, with his real alcoholic family and his real alcoholic Reservation. Life and reality have no meaning whatsoever unless we create a story out of it. This is why Thomas Builds-the-Fire is such an endearing character, and why The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire makes such a wonderful story. Because it is all such a big damn lie. It is Art.

The birth of Huitzilopochtli.

I can’t help comparing the playfulness of the North American Indian tales with the severity of the Mexican Indian myths. While the American Indian trickster is a mix of a god, a cheater and a fool, the characters of the Mexican tales are solemn, violent and terribly powerful gods. Sometimes they seem to have in them a small part of the trickster attitude as well, but no one would ever dare to mock them.

One of my favorite Mexican Indian myths is the one that recounts the birth of Huitzilopochtli. Huitzilopochtli was the god of war - like Ares was for the Greeks - and he was the principal deity of the Aztec people. Because I wanted to share this myth with you, I have attempted to translate it from Miguel Leon-Portilla’s spanish version. I tried to keep the rhythm that characterizes the original tale, which shows particularly well the Indian oral tradition. In a way, the verse and the repetition is very much like the Navajo Night Chant; only the theme and tone of this myth is… well, slightly different.

Anyway, I hope you will be as fascinated and throughly horrified as I was when I first encountered this story.

In Coatepec, close to Tula,

There a woman had been living

There a woman lived

Called Coatlicue.

She was the mother of the 400 Southerners

And of a sister of theirs,

Called Coyolxauhqui.

And this Coatlicue was doing penitence there

She swept, she was in charge of the sweeping,

That’s how she did her penitence,

In Coatepec, the Mountain of the Snake.

And once,

When Coatlicue was sweeping,

Out of the sky came a plumage

Like a fine ball of feathers.

Right away, Coatlicue picked it up,

And put it in between her breasts.

When she was done with the sweeping,

She searched for the feathers between her breasts

But there was nothing there.

That’s how Coatlicue became pregnant.

When the 400 Southerners learned that their mother was pregnant,

They were very angry and said:

“Who has done this to her?

Who got her pregnant?

He is insulting us, he is dishonoring us.”

And their sister, Coyolxauhqui told them:

“Brothers, she is the one dishonoring us,

We shall kill our mother,

The perverse one, already with child.”

When Coatlicue found out about this,

She was very frightened,

She was very sad.

But her son, Huitzilopochtli, already in her womb,

Confronted her, told her:

“Fear not

I already know what I should do.”

Having heard her son’s words,

Coatlicue was comforted,

Her heart calmed down,

She felt at ease.

In the meanwhile, the 400 Southerners

Got together to reach an agreement

And unanimously determined

To kill their mother,

For she had dishonored them all.

They were very angry

They were very upset,

It was as if their hearts would jump right out of their chests.

Coyolxauhqui urged them all the time,

She invigorated the fury of her brothers

So that they would kill their mother.

And the 400 Southerners

Prepared themselves

And put on war clothes.

And these 400 Southerners

Were like captains

They twisted and tangled their hair,

Like warriors they fixed their hair.

But one of them called Cuahuitlicac

Was untrue in his words

What the other Southerners said

He immediately went to tell,

To communicate to Huitzilopochtli.

And Huitzilopochtli’s answer was:

“Be careful, stay vigilant, 

My uncle, I know quite well what I must do.”

So when the 400 Southerners were finally decided,

When they had reached an agreement

To kill, to finish off their mother,

They started to move forward,

Guided by Coyolxauhqui.

They were well strengthened, well dressed,

Well prepared for the war,

They distributed their paper-clothes,

Their anecúyotl, their bracelets,

Their flaps of painted paper;

They tied little bells around their ankles,

Those bells called oyohualli.

Their arrows had barbed tips.

Then they started to move,

They walked in order, in a line,

In a neat arrangement,

And Coyolxauhqui guided them.

But Cuahuitlicac went up into the mountain

To talk to Huitzilopochtli

And he told him:

“They are coming.”

Huitzilopochtli answered:

“Pay close attention and tell me from where they’re coming.”

Then Cuahuitlicac said:

“They are coming from Tzompantitlan.”

And once again Huitzilopochtli asked him:

“From where are they coming now?”

Cuahuitlicac answered:

“They are coming from Coaxalpan.”

And again Huitzilopochtli asked Cuahuitlicac:

“Look well and tell me where are they.”

Right away Cuahuitlicac replied:

“They are now in the mountain slope.”

And yet another time Huitzilopochtil said:

“Pay attention, tell me where are they.”

And so Cuahuitlícac said:

“They are already in the mountain top, they are coming,

Coyolxauhqui is guiding them.”

In that precise moment Huitzilopochtli was born;

He wore his war clothing,

He took his shield made from eagle feathers,

His darts, his blue dart thrower,

The so-called turquoise dart thrower.

He painted his face

With diagonal strips,

With the color called “child paint”.

On his head he wore fine feathers,

He also put on his earmuffs.

And one foot, the left one, was dried up,

But it was wearing a sandal covered with feathers,

And Huitzilopochtli’s legs and arms

Where painted in blue.

Then the so-called Tochancalqui

Set fire to the snake made of torches – called Xiuhcoatl,

And this snake obeyed Huitzilopochtli.

Huitzilopochtli used the snake to wound Coyolxauhqui,

And he cut off her head,

Which fell to laid abandoned

In the slope of Coatepec,

The Mountain of the Snake.

Coyolxauhqui’s body

Rolled down the slope,

It fell down to pieces,

On different places laid her hands,

Her legs, her body.

Then Huitzilopochtli straightened up,

And persecuted the 400 Southerners,

He harassed them, he made them scatter

From the mountaintop of Coatepec,

The Mountain of the Snake.

And when he had followed them

To the foot of the mountain,

He persecuted them,

He chased them as if they were rabbits.

In vain they tried doing something against him,

In vain they moved at the beat of the bells,

In vain they shook their shields.

There was nothing they could do,

There was nothing they could achieve,

They had nothing to defend themselves with.

Huitzilopochtli chased them, frightened them,

Destroyed them, annihilated them.

And even then,

He continued to pursue them.

They begged quite a lot, and said:

“Stop already!”

But Huitzilopochtli was not satisfied,

With more strength he fought against them.

Just a few managed to escape,

And were able to run free from Huitzilopochtli’s hands.

They went south,

Those few who were able to escape from Huitzilopochtli’s hands,

And their name is 400 Southerners.

And when Huitzilopochtli had killed many,

When his rage diminished,

He took their clothes, their finery, their anecuyotl,

And wore it all, took all for himself,

Made all those things his badges.

And this Huitzilopochtli, it was said,

Was like a portent,

Because with just one fine feather

Felled from the sky into his mothers womb

He was conceived.

He never had a father.

He was worshiped by the mexica people,

For him they offered sacrifices,

He was honored and served by them.

And Huitzilopochtli rewarded

He who worshipped him like that.

And his cult came from that place,

From Coatepec, the Mountain of the Snake,

As it had happened in ancient times.

This huge stone depicts Coyolxauhqui, ripped apart by her brother Huitzilopochtli.