Indian Talk

Today I gave a speech. Well, a talk, to a captive audience of little old ladies, who came into the “activity room” aided by walkers or wheel chairs.

Each year at Montclair, the “retirement home” where I live, the residents go on a fantasy trip. Last year they “took a cruise.” This week we are traveling down old Route 66.

On Monday we started in Chicago with a baseball game – local firemen substituted for the Cubs on the lawn. followed by Chicago-style pizza and hot dogs. On Tuesday (yesterday) for St. Louis we listened to a jazz trio and ate barbecue. Today was an imaginary stop in New Mexico.

The “Native American” who was supposed to give the talk on Indians did not show up. I did a last minute, impromptu substitution. Without preparation, without notes, without thinking about what I was going to say before the words came out of my mouth. Just as I am writing this tonight.

I had no hesitation in talking about Indians in New Mexico. I lived in Albuquerque for more than 20 years. I love the state, and – pause – I loved some Indians.

Some of the old ladies in my “audience” had been to Santa Fe and bought jewelry, but none seemed to know much about Indian culture.

I began by telling them about a man I met soon after I moved to Albuquerque. He retired from the Bureau of Indian Affairs after working with the Iroquois in New York and later with the Navajo in New Mexico. I asked, “Is there much difference between an Iroquois and a Navajo?” He said, “Is there much difference between a Swede and an Italian?”

Each Indian tribe is different and has distinct customs. Mostly I talked about the Pueblos. The Spanish found these peoples living in farming villages in the Rio Grande Valley. "Pueblo" is the Spanish word for "town." Nineteen of them survive today in New Mexico. Some of them were there when the Spanish came in the 16th Century, and were there a thousand years before that.

I said, “I think I learned as much about the Pueblos as any Anglo – which means I don’t know much.” They survived the Spanish occupation by outwardly adapting but keeping their own customs and religion in secret. I visited Cochiti Pueblo so often that they told me I was an adopted member of the tribe, but I was never permitted entry into a kiva. That’s a big round structure, like an adobe water tank at ground level, which can only be entered through a hole in the center of the flat roof.

I described feast days, which combine honoring Catholic saints with pagan ceremonies. For the corn dance the men, with jangling shell bandoliers on bare-chests and with deer-skin kilts, are paired with women in one-shouldered black wool dresses called “mantas.” In the heat of the summer sun the women dance bare-footed on the hot sand.

In a Pueblo low adobe houses are built around a plaza of hard-packed sand. On first seeing that big, dusty place, my initial reaction was, “How ugly! Why don’t they pave it and make it suitable for dancing?” Then I realized, these dances are religious ceremonies. The women are placing their feet on Mother Earth.

I told my friends, “We see people doing something that seems strange to us, and our reaction may be, ‘Why don’t you do it our way?’ They may have very good reasons for doing it their way.”

The old ladies said they liked my talk.