Intemperate

Alfonso Ortiz’s The Tewa World explicates the world view of the Tewa people of San Juan, a small pueblo north of Santa Fe. I visited it often for the ceremonial dances before everything shut down; the dances still go on, an ancient ritual too important to be abandoned but no longer open to outsiders.

While the beliefs of this pueblo, so traditional it is viewed as the mother pueblo of the villages further south, might seem remote to our grueling concerns and worries today, I think the point of view Ortiz expresses is relevant.

It is based on dualism. The pueblo is divided into two moieties, founded on “a system of antithetical institutions, with the associated symbols, ideas and meanings in terms of which social interaction takes place.” This is akin in my mind to a definition of intelligence as the ability to hold two competing ideas in the mind at the same time without needing to resolve them.

The moiety system is almost impossible to imagine in western culture, so firmly based on right and wrong, black and white. And so we are riven, today, not only by righteous concerns for justice on all levels but by the need to express those concerns in very loud voices—as in this link in my last post.

Does speaking softly and temperately mean weak feelings? I don’t think so. But it does make progress more likely since any movement forward requires cooperation.

Two examples stand out in my mind.

Years ago I went to one of the winter dances at San Juan Pueblo. Snow was falling, it was very cold, and only a small crowd of outsiders were watching the stylized Deer Dance, with men wearing deer antlers and stooping forward on sticks to mimic the deer’s walk. It was one of the very few dances where taking photos was permitted, and I was taking a lot.

A pueblo woman, deeply shawled, approached me and asked if I would take a photo of her eighteen-year-old grandson who was one of the deer. I did, and gave her my phone number so she could let me know where to send a print; she called, and I sent the photo and was graciously thanked.

Two years later, she called again, crying. She told me her grandson had just been killed in a car wreck, and my print was the only picture of him she had.

I don’t think this moving exchange could have happened if she had upbraided me about the many miseries we white people have inflicted on her tribe and for which I am certainly responsible, having done nothing.

On the national scale, fifty years ago President Richard Richard Nixon signed a federal bill returning the sacred Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo. This was after many years of effort, both by the pueblo people and by their white supporters, including Mabel Dodge Luhan. The result was a historic accomplishment that could not have been achieved if the Taos pueblo people had shouted their grievances.

Their grievances were, and are, real, as are the grievances suffered by dark-skinned people and finally expressed, forcefully, in protests such as Black Lives Matter. And they must be expressed and they must be remedied. But it will take the cooperation of the same white people who are responsible for these injustices for anything to be accomplished. And I fear we are alienating potential allies with the fury of our voices.

An example of the cooperation I mean was provided last night by a webinar on “The Politics of Gender Justice and Healing” hosted by NewMexicoWomen.org. The six women who spoke eloquently about the need for change represented six ethnic groups. They were all young and they were all friends, combining the efforts of the charitable groups they head: The Healing Circle Wellness Center in Shiprock, N.M., and Indigenous Lifeways in Gallup, N.M., among others. Two quotations for me summed up the enormous potential of this cooperation: “Radical Kinship is a Feminist Movement” and Audre Lord’s “Without Community There is no Liberation.”

Kinship and community depend on cooperation, and to a degree on temperate speech.

It is dangerous to express any doubts about today’s powerful and essential fight for justice. But is it possible, for the sake of progress, to hold two conflicting thoughts in mind at the same time: that the injustices are real and must be remedied and that those responsible are also potential allies?

[For those of you in New Mexico, please be sure to check for Thursday’s Taos News, featuring the Leyendas special on the Blue Lake Return.]

In Writing, New Mexico Mabel Dodge Luhan House Mabel Dodge Luhan San Juan Pueblo Blue Lake