Four Winds: Poems from Indian Rituals

bits of Zuni, Navajo, Tewa, San Juan ceremonial chants, prayers, blessings, rituals that are truly lovely and a living part of our Indian Southwest.
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One was a story of the Nativity, which eventually became Spirit Child. The other was a collection of fables that turned into Doctor Coyote. When I have an idea for a book, I bring it first to Jane, and we talk about it. To be a picture book a text must not be too long, and it must have a flow of word-images that can be transformed into a connected series of illustrations. If the answer is yes, then the hard part is thinking of the right artist to make the pictures.

Jane has a collection of children's picture books going back to the s, the years of our childhood; these are arranged in groups according to illustrator. If she is trying to think of an artist for a particular project, she begins to leaf through the books.

For Doctor Coyote the choice was Wendy Watson. Again we were lucky. It was fun to work with these illustrators. Both Barbara Cooney and Wendy Watson are very serious artists. Barbara traveled to central Mexico to make color sketches—not far from Ixtacihuatl and Popocatepetl. I have saved the letters and postcards we exchanged about such questions as what costumes the three kings should wear in Spirit Child and what sort of house Coyote ought to live in. I keep records like this in a large black file cabinet next to my desk.

It takes many people to create a book. The author if I may call myself that , the illustrator, the designer, and the editor are only four of them. The copy editor, the production director, the paper supplier, the printer, and the binder are some of the others. When everything is finished, it sometimes feels strange to see my name on the cover. Now that I think about it, I suppose Mrs. Ramsey—if she is reading over my shoulder—would rather I promised to send her a copy of Spirit Child or Doctor Coyote. Although I spent more hours working on the dictionary, these smaller books, with their brilliant illustrations, have much more to say.

My fourth-grade classroom was just across the hall from Mrs. But, like the transition from second grade to third grade, the move to fourth grade was a big step to take. That year a part of me decided I was no longer a child. I stopped reading "children's books" and read thick books with no pictures. I don't know how long this went on. This book had won the Newbery Medal the year before, and it was thought that eighth graders should read Newbery books.

The truth is, it was a "children's book" with plenty of pictures, and we all knew it. Since we liked the book, we were careful not to stigmatize it. I remember we said to each other, "Hey, that was a good book! Thinking back to those times, I am always careful not to put the words "children's book" or "for children" anywhere in my books or on the jacket flaps. It is up to every person to define himself or herself. You never know when a child will decide that it is time not to be a child anymore. P eople sometimes ask me why I do what I do. Or, less tactfully, "How did you ever get started in this?

Questions?

I try to have an answer ready, but it comes out differently each time. Sometimes I just say that Jane got me started in books. Which is true enough. One time I gave an elaborate explanation about being in the mountains of Peru and hearing the quena a kind of flute played at twilight. And it's true, I did make several trips to Latin America in the s. Not only to Peru but to Mexico and Puerto Rico. I've already mentioned that Jane went with me to Mexico. And in the s, our daughter, Alice, went too.

I have a picture of Alice climbing the ruins of a Maya temple at Uxmal. Another explanation is that there were virtually no books of Indian stories or Indian poetry for young readers when I was a child, and I wanted to help change that. Well read and feeling older, I graduated from the fourth grade in and took a position in the last row next to the window in Miss Dorothy's fifth grade. One day that fall, when I was walking home from school with my next-door neighbor and classmate, RC, together with some other boys, the conversation turned to teachers, and we began to trade uncomplimentary observations.

There was no personal animosity in it—in fact I liked Miss Dorothy. Rather, it was in the spirit of generational combat. But RC was my enemy. The next morning he got to school early and told Miss Dorothy a tale so lurid it made her head swim for weeks. After the bell rang, and in front of everybody, she denounced me in a fiery speech that she repeated, with variations, day after day.

The girls decided she must be right, and they scolded me privately during recess periods. The pressure did not ease until the end of winter. Meanwhile I got back at RC. I threw him down and held his head against the ground until he cried "Help! My father used to say that the trouble with our village was that there were too many children.

With a grim expression on his face he would drive through village streets at excruciatingly slow speeds so as not to run over any of them. But while there may have been more children than adults, the adults were the ones who knew the phone number that would bring the police. With people like RC taking the wrong side, any children's rebellion would have been put down immediately. We did have disturbances, at least one or two every summer. But, sadly, in these outbreaks we always fought each other.

The arena was a wide place in the street where cars could turn around, directly in front of my house. In this space we would play a shouting game called movie star, or another game with long lines of children holding hands and running at each other, chanting, "Red Rover, Red Rover, I dare you come over. Hap Otting was the police chief. My own mother, to her credit, never called him. Usually the informer was a red-haired woman who lived on the other side of the wide place and liked to boast of her special relationship with the authorities.

One day when I was exasperated with my parents, I locked myself in my room and muttered under my breath that I would spite them by never growing up. It would have been a cruel punishment that would no doubt have driven them to their graves even earlier than nature had planned. But nature, for better or for worse, takes its own course—as explained in the old Iroquois story about the boy called Rooted. This boy, it is said, lived in the woods with his uncle, Planter, who had a great elm tree in front of his lodge.

Rooted, the nephew, lay at the foot of the tree, its roots growing over and around his body, holding him to the earth. One spring morning, while the uncle was off in the field planting seeds, he heard the song, "I am rising, I am rising. The uncle gave him some water, then pushed the tree back to an upright position and returned to his planting.

Again he heard the nephew's song, "I am rising, I am rising. When he was halfway home, there came a tremendous crash, which was heard over the whole country. That night the young man and his uncle had a talk. I didn't know it at the time, but while I was vowing never to grow up, I had only seven more years to be at home. In , finally, I was able to leave and begin a new life. By then nobody could accuse me of running away. I simply said I was "going" away and no one knew the difference. My destination was three states to the east, four if you count the West Virginia panhandle.

But it seemed farther, because in the s few people traveled in airplanes. On my first day in New York I walked in a woods of birch trees and hemlocks. There was water seeping through black soil at the edge of cliffs, and ferns were growing everywhere. I just kept walking until my feet were tired. The reason I had come east was that I had known it would be cooler and damper and the vegetation would be more luxuriant.

This was not a trivial reason, because in those days I was a student of plants. I was a winner of science prizes and a collector who brought home specimens and stored them between newspapers until they were stacked to the ceiling. A high school teacher had told me I would become a forest ranger. But eventually I drifted to the strange city I had imagined at an earlier age. Someone gave me a job there, and I became an office worker.

Someone else rented me a room. W hile living in Manhattan I remembered the woods where my camps had been. In southwestern Ohio there are no birches or hemlocks, as there are in upstate New York, and the soil is drier. But nut-bearing trees, especially beeches, grow much larger, and there are pawpaws and sassafras.

There are fewer ferns, but better blackberries.

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The creeks dry up in July, but the rock ledges are filled with fossils, in some places so many and so loose that you can scoop up handfuls. Those woods, where the beeches and the fossils were, had been given to the people of our village by the government of the United States. At least that is what many of us believed. Not long after I had gone away, the question was brought to court, and I was asked to come testify. At first I refused, because I thought a professional biologist should be the one to speak. But someone was needed who not only knew what was there but had lived with it and been a part of it.

The lawyer for the developers was one of the most powerful lawyers in Ohio. He was the brother of a senator. He acted friendly, but when I took the witness stand he tried to make me contradict myself. I said, "It begins in late January when Erigenia bulbosa comes up. I thought to myself, "How does he know how to spell Erigenia?


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In the end it didn't matter about Erigenia or the beeches or the fossils. I accidentally mentioned that the government had laid an asphalt path through one corner of the forest, and this demonstrated that the land had been intended for the people's use. On account of the path, the woods were saved, at least for a little while. Iroquois people here in New York used to say that the first stories were told by a stone, deep in the woods. In southern Canada and in New England, Indian people used to speak of stories as though they were persons. A storyteller might begin by saying, "It is as if a man walked," or "Here lives my story," or "Here camps my story," or sometimes, "My story was walking along, a wilderness-house man, his clothing was made of sheets of moss and shreds of withes formed his belt.

Although it is true enough that Indian stories are made up at definite times by real people, the preferred idea is that the story has a life of its own, independent of the narrator. It is as though it belonged to the land or to certain spirits rather than to the human mind. The same could be said of songs. What this means, for one thing, is that Indian stories and Indian poetry can never be outdated or oldfashioned.

How many New Yorkers who wrote novels or poetry in English a hundred years ago are remembered today? How many will be remembered a hundred years from now? No one can say for sure. But the myths and tales recorded by Iroquois storytellers a hundred years ago—if the libraries that contain them do not catch fire or sink beneath oceans—will still be valued ten thousand years from now, just like all things in nature.

Here in the Catskills we have many poets and novelists—some of them famous, at least for the time being—and in a large village twenty minutes from where I live, there is a writer-in-residence program. Every year a writer is asked to give a series of workshops for people who want to participate in discussions about writing or who want to improve their own writing skills. In I was asked to conduct these workshops, not exactly as a writer but as a translator. There would be a poster advertising the sessions, and people would "The valley between two mountain ridges. Red spruce and balsam fir are on the high peaks, with birches, hemlocks, and other trees on the slopes.

I was asked for a picture that could be used on the poster. Since I have never been comfortable about pictures of myself in connection with Indian literature and have never had "author's" photographs on my book flaps, I decided to use a picture that conveys at least one idea of who the real writer might be. That picture is from a thousand-year-old Maya vase, and it shows a rabbit writing a hieroglyphic book. It is the picture you see in the text of this essay. The vase has personal significance for me because I knew the people who once owned it.

They were fortunate to have come into possession of what some people regard as the finest Maya vase ever discovered. The Kaplans thought highly of the vase with the rabbit and believed it ought to be in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But this was before the Museum had built its "primitive" wing. As things turned out, the vase went to Princeton University, where it is kept safely for future generations, although not as many people can see it as would have, had it found its way to the Metropolitan. At the time I went back to Ohio and testified in the trial about the woods, I was living in a five-story tenement in midtown Manhattan.

It was in this building that I met Jane. I lived on the top floor in the front. Her apartment was directly across the hall, facing the back. It was noisy in this place. Across the street in the front, the presses of the Daily Mirror rolled all night long. Across the alley in the back, parking attendants raced automobiles up and down the twisting ramps of a five-story garage.

Memories of this building are one of the many things that Jane and I have in common. After we were married and had lived at several different addresses, all in midtown Manhattan, we decided to stop being office workers and see if we could work and live by ourselves in the country. The house we found in the Catskills was an old, run-down boardinghouse in a valley between two mountain ridges covered mostly with birches, hemlocks, oaks, maples, and white pines. That was twenty years ago, as I have said, and we are still living and working in the same old house.

On the ground floor in the back, Jane has her studio, where she works as a free-lance designer; and I have my own studio, on the west side of the house, where I do my reading and studying and work on my translations. T here is an old Italian proverb that has the same form as the English expression "losers weepers.

In the same vein, the Hebrew poet Chaim Bialik has lamented, "Translation is like kissing through a handkerchief. Recently an Iroquois teller of traditional stories said to me, "There's a problem here. The trouble is, they don't sound right in English. You have to use too many words. And the New England poet Robert Frost once said—offering a sour definition that has been quoted hundreds of times—"Poetry is what's lost in translation.

Yet if we did not have translation, we would be isolated from the rest of the world's thoughts. We would not have the Bible, which was written in Hebrew and in Greek. We would not have the epics of Homer. And of course we would know nothing of American Indian lore. The rabbit as writer. Detail from a Maya vase, ca. Translation may be impossible, as many have said. But translators never stop trying, always hoping for a magical combination of words in English that will exactly convey the meaning of the original.

Here, for example, is an Aztec poem that I have looked at many times:. Annochipa tlalticpac, zan achica ye nican. Tel ca chalchihuitl, no xamani. No teocuitlatl in tlapani. You can begin by recognizing that an means "not," nochipa means "forever," tlalticpac means "on earth," and so on, until you have a version that looks something like this:.

Not-forever on-earth, only moment already here. Though indeed jade, also it-shatters. Also gold the it-breaks. Oh oh quetzalplumes they-splinter. As Robert Frost would have said, the poetry has been lost. We can fix things a little by choosing different words and making the English read more smoothly.

But there will still be a problem in meaning. It can be understood that jade shatters, and feathers splinter. But does gold break? If you drop a gold ring, it remains whole. In fact the underlying idea, which would be understood by Aztec listeners, is that "jade," "gold," and "plume" are poetic images that stand for the warrior, whose body is broken on the field of battle. This is really a kind of war song. If I were translating these lines today, I would work for a strict version, to be accompanied by a note explaining the imagery.

Years ago, however, I published the poem in a rather free version that went like this:. That is how the verse appeared in my book In the Trail of the Wind: American Indian Poems and Ritual Orations.

Four Winds: Poems from Indian Rituals - Google Книги

I wish now that I could redo it. Writers of books sometimes talk about the letters they receive from young people, letters that bring tears to their eyes or that make their hearts leap for joy. My readers are more critical. Not long ago I heard from a young man who lives on the other side of the Hudson River, about seventy-five miles from here. In the past few weeks my English class has been doing a project on the writers of our area.

I picked your book In the Trail of the Wind: Upstairs are six tiny rooms where trout fishermen used to spend the night. I read your book and I liked it, but there is one thing that I dislike. That is, in my opinion, I think you should have said more about the ritual orations. After a while I was starting to get bored reading all the poems.

I was wondering why you decided to include so many poems. Is there some reason why? If so, could you write back and explain. I did write back, thanking him for his letter, and I explained that many of the "poems" are in fact the words used in rituals. I suggested some books to read on Indian religion and ended by saying, "I hope you will read more Indian poems.

Many people feel, as I do, that the poetry of the Native Americans has great strength and power. But what I learned from my critic is that some of my translations were not good enough. If I had done a better job with the one about "jade" and "gold," if I had been able to explain that it was a song sung in a special kind of war ritual, it might have been more enthusiastically received.

I could not have done so at the time, unfortunately, because I had not yet completed my research on Aztec poetry. O nce when I was a child I read a mystery story in which there was a house with a "dead" room, a room in the middle of all the others, with no windows on the outside. Our house, too, has a dead room, which, I suppose, is the next best thing if you don't have a hidden staircase or a secret passage.

The dead room stays dark and cool in the summer, but it is not very "Alice climbing the ruins of a Maya temple at Uxmal," Mexico, mysterious. Actually it is a cheerful room if you switch on the lights because it is where Jane keeps her collection of children's books. Next to the dead room, on the west, is my studio, the only room that still has the flower-patterned linoleum from the days when the place was a boardinghouse.

This is the room with the black file cabinet and the shelves of dictionaries and manuscripts. Legends of the American Indians. There is also a small microfilm reader that I made myself out of plywood and a broom handle. And there are a few musical instruments, including a log drum for testing drum cadences in old Aztec manuscripts and a Bolivian flute that Alice sent me from Indiana, where she has now gone to start her own life. South of the dead room and to the right is Jane's studio, which is a more artistic-looking space than my own workroom.

Here there are drawing boards and a large white-topped counter for laying out books still in the planning stage, books that are still "dummies" or that have advanced to being "finished layouts" or even "proofsheets. But there are also shelves along the wall. Jane's studio, like mine, is filling up with books. Some of them will have to be moved to a closet, and some in that closet will have to be transferred to an upstairs closet or to a new wall of shelves that I have built in the dead room. We have bookshelves over doorways and in the living room and in the upstairs hall.

At regular intervals I check the beams in the cellar to make sure they are not sagging under the weight. Out the back windows of the house, including the windows in Jane's studio, you can see a small meadow and a line of aspens and pines. In the morning and again in the evening, deer come to browse in the meadow. Sometimes I find bear droppings there. Bears and wildcats are native to this valley, although I have yet to see them in the yard. On the front of the house is the old boardinghouse kitchen, with windows looking out on the road through a ragged hemlock hedge.

Sometimes a child, or two children, will pass by, but seldom more than two or three. In this mountain valley the houses are neither attached nor clustered, and in many of them there are old people. My father would have approved of a community balanced between young and old.

But it is not a place where a child can run out the front door and find a four-leaf-clover hunt already in progress or a cappistol fight or a game of mothers-and-fathers, or perhaps a choice of two or three such events. Instead there is a quiet road and lanes that disappear into the woods. This is a village that is reasonably safe for adults, safe at least from the ravages of earthly powers.

Death was unknown in my village in Ohio. There were no cemeteries, either in the village itself or for miles around. But here in the Catskills there are funeral parlors, and in our small village there are two cemeteries within a few hundred yards of the house. One afternoon when Alice was four—my age when I ran away from home—I took her walking, and when we had trouble deciding which way to go, I said, "Would you like to go this way and see a cemetery?

I love cemeteries" was the answer, although she had never been to either of these places. Her experience with death was something I missed entirely as a child. My father's and mother's funerals, when I was thirty-two and thirty-five, respectively, were the first I ever attended. My village in Ohio had seemed like a place where no one would ever grow up, let alone die. But if we lacked an acquaintance with death and with the ceremonies that attend it, we made up for it by our intimate knowledge of other forms of ritual.

Autobiography Feature

Suddenly, in a front yard or at the curb, someone would appear with a rope and there would be cries of "no ender first" and "no ender second," and all who had said nothing would line up with their fists extended. Then no-ender-first would go down the line tapping each fist, chanting, " One potato two potato three potato four, five potato six potato seven potato more.

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When all but two fists had been eliminated, the rope would start to turn, and no-ender-first would jump in, chanting, " Straw berry short -cake, Huckl e-berry Finn, when I call your birth -day, please come in: Jan -uary, February, March, A -pril. To keep myself young I walk to the store every morning to pick up the newspaper. Jane, who doesn't like to walk that far, starts out later and meets me when I am halfway back home, and we walk the rest of the way together.

Sometimes it is quite early, and if it happens to be a weekend, there may be people still asleep. A few days ago, on the way to the store, I heard a little girl's voice calling out to me from inside a house: We have one of your books. Folktales of the Iroquois. Her parents had already told me about finding a copy of this at the nearest bookstore, which is sixteen miles away.

In a whisper I hoped would be loud enough for her to hear but not so loud that it would wake the neighborhood, I said, "Thanks. But I really wanted to tell her that I hoped she would read more Iroquois stories, that I hoped she would remember them for a long time, that she should ask her parents to take her to the Iroquois Festival at Cobleskill on September third, that she ought to know I am not really a writer but a collector and a translator, and that the stories she liked, far from having been written by me, were told by a stone somewhere deep in the woods of upstate New York.

O ne evening in , not long after writing the above essay, I received a phone call from our neighbor, a young man who lived with his wife in a small yellow house barely visible through the trees. That's how much it costs now to adopt a child. Our neighbor owned these woods, and for years we had been hoping to buy them. Now, however, we were putting our daughter, Alice, through college.

She had become a painting major at the Rhode Island School of Design and had at least another year to go. Would buying the woods be a responsible thing to do? These woods are a tiny fragment of the Catskill forest, separating our backyard from the Bushkill, the trout stream that used to attract fishermen as overnight guests when our place was run as a boardinghouse half a century ago. Pileated woodpeckers can be seen there, and great blue herons. Among the different kinds of trees are sycamores, hemlocks, and white pines. This modest one-acre tract, with its red trilliums, jack-in-thepulpits, Carolina spring beauty, and fragile-fern, was to bring a change in my neighbors' life—they adopted a baby boy and in the glow of family happiness were suddenly able to have a second child on their own, a girl—and in addition a change came in my life.

Unbelievably, as it now seems, I was unsure. I even tried to convince myself that I wasn't really interested anymore. But my wife, Jane, insisted: We did do it. And after we had bought our piece of the Bushkill woods, the next step was to preserve it. People like to say they love woods, but unless you do something about it the woods have a way of disappearing. A private land conservancy had just started up in our part of the county, and we got in touch with them to see if our one-acre tract might qualify for a conservation easement.

An easement would mean that we could continue to own the property and could sell it or pass it along to our daughter, but the conservancy would own the "development" rights, guaranteeing that the woods would never be changed. The author photographing a floodplain forest for the land conservancy, This was not an easy step to take. The conservancy's contract was a stiff one. It held us legally responsible for any vandalism or timber poaching that might occur, even if caused by an outsider without our knowledge.

A lawyer friend found this part of the contract outrageous and advised us not to sign. One day, in a flash, I realized that I would sign, and I called up the director of the conservancy and said, more dramatically than the moment deserved after all, it was only an acre , "I'm asking you to take care of my land—forever. Not long after that my new friends at the conservancy asked me if I would organize a search for all the rare plants and animals in our part of the Catskill Mountains.

An enormous undertaking that at first I rejected. But then, again, I had a flash. And so began a three-year project, eventually involving hundreds of people in our community, including many landowners who gave permission to have their properties searched. Experts were brought in, mostly botanists and zoologists, who looked for plants and animals, but also archaeologists, who identified Native American sites and catalogued the arrowheads, stone knives, pottery fragments, and bone needles that were found there.

The end result was a book that I was able to write, drawing upon the knowledge of a great many people, entitled The Ashokan Catskills: My name is on the title page, but the book's real inspiration came from Elinor Boice, president of the Rondout-Esopus Land Conservancy, who supplied the idea. Within three months the book had sold out and had to be reprinted.


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More importantly, the project established a base for preserving the natural heritage of the Ashokan region. One of the first results was a conservation easement that now protects a deep ravine known as Cathedral Gorge, locally famous for its waterfall, less known for its rare plants and animals, including a kind of moss found nowhere else in New York State.

This, too, will be taken care of—forever. While investigating American Indian sites for the Ashokan project, I began to wonder what stories might have been told in these woods and along these streams before the arrival of the first Dutch settlers. I wanted not only to see, with heightened awareness, what Native people had seen in this part of the world but to hear, or at least read, the words they might have spoken.

This was not an easy thing to research. The Delaware, or Lenape, who had originally lived in southeastern New York and New Jersey and had used the rockshelters of the Ashokan region as hunting camps, had long since been pushed westward, ending up mostly in Oklahoma and Ontario. The search led me to manuscripts stored at the Museum of the American Indian in New York, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and in tribal archives in Oklahoma. The outcome was not one but two books, Mythology of the Lenape: The White Deer is a collection of unretouched Delaware stories, not rewritten, not retold, with photographs of the storytellers who had heard traditional lore from their parents and grandparents.

It is the first publication of these stories. Yet it is a book for children—designed by Jane, as are nearly all my books—calculated to give young readers a taste of authenticity. Barbara Bader, the children's literature critic and historian, calls it a book of "real stories told by real people. I hope that the translation's original publication before being collected in Bierhost's book gives the name of the person who sang the songs, recited the poems and repeated the prophecies.

Their names should be on the page too. Personally, not even including the name of the translator on the page or any other information is very strange in any collection, let alone in a book consisting only of translations. All in all, the format chosen makes it a much less interesting book, poetry simply presented, but these works are historical works that should to be rooted in their respective contexts so that the reader can more fully appreciate their meaning. For myself, I'm curious enough to check out the revised edition.

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Books by John Bierhorst. Trivia About In the Trail of t No trivia or quizzes yet. Quotes from In the Trail of t I can sing among the flowers: