This Sacred Land

Reverence for the earth traditionally has been a distinguishing characteristic of Native American life. It was eloquently expressed when President Ulysses S. Grant in 1875 opened to white settlers the great Wallowa Valley in northeastern Oregon, ordering Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard to move the Nez Percé tribe to a reservation in Idaho. When Howard arrived with his troops, three Nez Percé leaders protested their removal from their immemorial home-land."

Smohalla, the religious leader, spoke. "You ask me to plow the ground! Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest.

"You ask me to dig for stone! Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again.

"You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, to be rich like white men! But how dare I cut off my mother's hair?"

General Howard gave a snort of impatience. "Twenty times over you repeat that the earth is your mother! Let us hear it no more, but get ready to move!"

A century later, Roberta Blackgoat, spokeswoman for the Navajos of Big Mountain, Arizona, expressed the same emotion with similar poetic metaphors. The mother of six children "all born on the sheepskin," she traveled throughout the Southwest protesting the federal government's plan to relocate several thou-sand Navajos, mandated by the NavajoHopi Land Settlement Act of 1974.

"When a person dies," she was widely quoted, "we bury the body in the land and it turns into earth. So we can't leave our land; it would be like leaving our dead, our bodies. Because the earth is our mother. The liver of the earth is coal; the lung is uranium. Earthquakes and tornadoes are her breath. Now she's in pain. When the government takes her organs, she dies. The government only wants money. It doesn't think of her children: we people and the four-legged people who talk, even as the grass you can hear when the wind blows...."

The difference between the Indian feeling for the earth and the ideology of our materialistic Anglo society has been the root source of conflict since we began our Scattered across the Colorado Plateau are many sites of Hopi and Navajo religious significance. Rainbow Bridge (TOP) is revered for its kinship to sacred springs in the area. Another sandstone formation, Eye of the Sun in Monument Valley (ABOVE, RIGHT), has been held sacred since the ancient Anasazi Indians carved petroglyphs in the stone. (ABOVE, LEFT) More petroglyphs decorate Standing Cow Ruin in Canyon de Chelly, venerated by the Navajos. ALL BY JERRY JACKA

"The Colorado Plateau is a dimensionless, unreal woud in which linear time is encapsulated within the spherical moment and each grain of sand. One knows here that the living earth, like ourselves, is still in the process of becoming."

"The Southwest is a region apart.... This is the last stand of Indian America and the belief that its mountains and mesas, winds and waters give back to human beings whatever they impart by their thoughts and actions."

westward expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The same unbroken umbilical cord between man and land once unified all native peoples throughout that vast ethnographic domain stretching northward from Central America through Mexico to the southwestern part of the United States. Today this Indian America is no longer as it was when I traveled through it on horseback years ago. It is racked by revolutions, stained by bloodshed. The dominating heartland of Anglo-America is the eastern half of the United States. It is densely populated, highly industrialized, and almost solely dedicated to economic prosperity.

The Southwest is a region apart. Nowhere else can we still find so many diverse and beautiful landscapes as its great open expanses of desert, plain, and plateau rising to the upturned blue edge of the distant horizon. This is the last stand of Indian America and the belief that its mountains and mesas, winds and waters give back to human beings whatever they impart by their thoughts and actions. Says an old Hopi adage: "It never rains on land that isn't cared for."

Here, from the Colorado River to the Rio Grande, are the historic homelands and now the official reservations of the Navajos, the nation's largest tribe, occupying the largest reservation; the Hopis, whose mesa-top pueblo of Oraibi is the oldest continuously occupied settlement in the United States; the pueblos of Zuni and Acoma and those along the Rio Grande; the Apaches, Tohono O'odham, Pimas and Maricopas, Hualapais and Havasupais, Mohaves and Yavapais, Cocopahs and Quechans and Chemehuevis. All these tribes have put their ineradicable stamp on the land. Even the thousand-year-old ruins in Chaco Canyon, the first prototypal civilization in America, have been the model for modern pueblo-style architecture. Observable Indian influence makes the Southwest distinctively different from the rest of the country.

I myself, a native son, cannot imagine This region without Indians. Since childhood I have been associated in some way with members of many tribes. Their human faults have made it impossible for me to romanticize them. They have shaped my life, my thoughts, my work. In the traditionalist elders I have cherished as intimate friends, I was always aware of a mysterious relationship with all the forces of earth and sky. Mysterious because they never talked about it. I had learned one does not ask an Indian a direct question. So I never queried Valencio Garcia of Santa Ana Pueblo, Tony Mirabal and Tony Lujan of Taos Pueblo, or Dan Qochhongva and John Lansa, Hopi religious leaders, about their beliefs.

My old adobe house, home for many years, lies in New Mexico on the forested slope of the Sangre de Cristo range, a short horseback ride from Taos Pueblo. Old friends come to visit us: Tony Reyna, former governor of the pueblo, and Pete Concha, its present cacique, or religious head. We do not talk about the beneficent influence of the sacred mountain rising above us. My visitors beat the big belly drum in the room and sing, their deep male voices echoing its heartbeat.

Our small house in Arizona, in which we live much of the year, is set in the desert outside of metropolitan Tucson. To visit us here comes a dear younger friend, Joseph, from the Tohono O'odham reser-vation not far to the south.

Joseph found life difficult on his sun-struck, waterless Tohono O'odham reservation. Often he became confused and discouraged. He then went out into the desert to consult his spiritual advisor, an aged tortoise. What wordless advice Mr. Tortoise gave him, Joseph never said; nor did we ever question him. But he returned refreshed and confident. If ever the wounds the red and the white have inflicted on each other are finally healed, it will be by men like Joseph with the counsel of his desert tortoise.

The age-old wisdom that infuses traditional Indian belief is the intuition of a reality not perceived by the rational intelThe age-old wisdom that infuses traditional Indian belief is the intuition of a reality not perceived by the rational intellect. Its spokesmen are not only Joseph's Mr. Tortoise, Old Man Coyote, the eagle, and the ant, but the living land. If this is mysticism, anathema to many other minds, so be it. The Indian mode of thinking is mystical, and it reflects the earth spirit itself. One feels this acutely in the heartland of the immense Colorado Plateau. This rugged upland spreads out with both sublime and terrifying aspects I have seen nowhere else. Through it the Colorado River has cut the greatest chasm on earth, and elsewhere it is gashed by a maze of other canyons, gorges, and gulches. Flat-topped mesas, monolithic buttes, and high graceful spires, all shaped by erosion and cutting wind, punctuate the horizon. Whole forests lie petrified in stone, flanked by lakes of frozen lava. It is a dimensionless, unreal world in which linear time is encapsulated within the spherical moment and each grain of sand. One knows here that the living earth, like ourselves, is still in the process of becoming.

The region is commonly known as the Four Corners, for here four states meet: Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. This is the sacred homeland of both Navajos and Hopis.

The Navajo myth of creation marks its limits with four sacred mountains. Within the boundaries they define is Tsilth-nah-ot-zithly, "Mountain-Around-Which-Moving-Was-Done," the great axial core of the world where the First People emerged from their underworlds. Today it is marked by Huerfano Mountain, a low hill which is but the material image of a metaphysical reality.

This is a striking parallel to Mount Kailas, 22,000 feet high in the Himalayas of Tibet, the spiritual heart of Buddhist cosmography. Known in Sanskrit as Mount Meru, it is believed to be the axis of the universe, akin to the spinal cord in man's nervous system. This is its metaphysical reality; Mount Kailas is only its visible, physical manifestation.

The worldwide scope and psychic function of sacred mountains is explained in

"Such practices... express the intuitive recognition that everything in nature possesses a spiritual essence as well as a material form, and all is interconnected in one vast body of universal life."

the work of W. Y. Evans-Wentz, an eminent Western scholar who became a Buddhist, settled in India, and became an authority on Tibetan Buddhism.

He himself owned a sacred mountain. It rose east of San Diego, California, on an immense ranch which he had inherited, and was known to the surrounding Yuman tribes as Cuchama, the "exalted high place." My own long association with Dr. Evans-Wentz began when, late in life, he returned here and began to compile a book on sacred mountains. He died in 1965, before his book was published. Cuchama itself he deeded to the State of California, requesting that it be preserved as a public property. The rest of his large estate, including his manuscript of Cuchama and Sacred Mountains, he bequeathed to Stanford University. It was my privilege in 1981 to edit and annotate it for publication, and to deliver Stanford's annual Evans-Wentz Lecture on comparable symbols and beliefs in Buddhism and Southwest Indian religion.

To both systems, sacred mountains are great repositories of psychic energy upon which pilgrims draw. To Buddhists they are analogous to the chakras, or psychophysical centers in the human body; or, more roughly, comparable to industrial power plants. Located throughout all the continents, they serve as distribution points of psychic and spiritual power. As such, they stimulate not only all life in their immediate vicinity but that of the planet as a whole.

The common belief in the spiritual nature and power of the earth, held by other races and religions in China and Japan as well as in India and Tibet, throws that of our Native Americans into universal perspective. Our Southwest, too, is sacred land, part of one planetary body which must be preserved against destruction.

Hopi ceremonialism is the most abstract and mystical of any I have known. It reenacts in the rituals, dances, songs, and prayers of nine ceremonies the drama of all creation. Their express purpose is to help maintain the harmonious order of the universe.

What impressed me during the three years I lived among the Hopis, recording the esoteric meanings of their ceremonies, was the inclusion in the rituals of every form of life on earth and in the sky. Major ceremonies were timed by the location of the sun at the solstices and equi noxes. Old Dan Qochhongva from his underground kiva conducted the Wuwuchim rituals by watching through the roof opening the movement of Choochokam (the "harmonious ones") - the Pleiades -and Talawsoh, the highest star in Orion's belt.

John Lansa permitted me to accompany him on his pilgrimage to obtain spruce branches for the Niman kachina ceremony. Before cutting them from a great spruce tree, he planted a prayer-feather at its foot and asked its permission. He then explained to me, "Salavi, the spruce, you must know, has the most magnetic power of all trees to bring clouds and moisture. It is the chochokpi, the throne for the clouds, for its branches swing outward and upward where the clouds rest. When we take its branches, it is just like we are harvesting our corn, which will grow from the rain the clouds bring. So it is the spirits of the spruce, the clouds, and the rain who accompany us back home...to take part in our ceremony."

Eagles are captured for the ceremonial use of their feathers. But before they are sacrificed, their heads are washed to signify their adoption into the tribe. Then their lives are snuffed out bloodlessly with a blanket, and their plucked bodies are carried to an eagle burying ground.

Rattlesnakes and bull snakes are featured the last day of the Snake-Antelope ceremony, when snake priests publicly dance with them in their mouths. Days before, the snakes are gathered from the desert and loosed in a kiva. They are washed, fed ritual cornmeal, prayed and sung over, insuring their cooperation in the ceremony.

Such practices also are observed in the Rio Grande pueblos. They express the intuitive recognition that everything in nature possesses a spiritual essence as well as a material form, and all is interconnected in one vast body of universal life.

We cannot needlessly destroy one part without injuring ourselves and disrupting the harmonious whole. This holistic perspective conflicts with the narrower view of a world that is leveling 28 acres of tropical forest every minute, destroying great expanses of land by strip mining and industrial development, contaminating rivers and the oceans, and polluting the air we breathe. Our present environmental protection efforts to halt this suicidal devastation are limited by our conception of ecology as being merely the biological relationships between physical organisms and their environment-a mechanistic view of the land and its plant and animal kingdom as inanimate matter and living organisms devoid of spirit. We have yet to raise our sights to the level of the Indians' ecology.

How long can our Southwest Indian traditionalists continue to assert the preeminence of spirit over matter against the pressures of modern life? How much longer can our ailing planet withstand the devastations of the juggernaut of technological progress? We know only that a great change in our mode of thinking is beginning to take place. We here are learning from our Native American neighbors that we too are temporary dwellers in this sacred land which must be preserved as the ultimate mother of us all.

Selected Reading

Mountain Dialogues, by Frank Waters. Ohio University Press, Athens, 1981.

Masked Gods, Navabo and Pueblo Ceremonialism, by Frank Waters. Ohio University Press, Athens, 1985.

The Colorado, by Frank Waters. Ohio University Press, Athens, 1984.

The Book of the Hopi, by Frank Waters. Penguin Books, New York, 1977.