Those narratives are sometimes described as “original instruction.” By that, it means they’re not only entertaining stories. He was the one who was on deck, so to speak, when Edward Hunt showed up with his family and began to recite this great story. The initiatory stories are what he patched together for the origin myth that he told to the then director of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology, Matthew Sterling. Describe his conflicted world and the ordeals he faced as a result. ![]() Edward Hunt was caught between cultures and eventually banished from his tribe for taking “the white man’s road”-specifically, revealing secret initiation ceremonies to the outside world. Sure, you can come out.” So I immediately got a ticket and flew out to New Mexico. I called it, and there was an old man at the other end who was that last surviving son of the 12 children of Edward Hunt. But with a little sleuthing I was able to locate the name of the author at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Anthropological Archives in D.C. It was told by a group of Indians who appeared in Washington, D.C., in 1927-that’s all it said. I found this castaway government publication called The Origin Myth of Acoma Pueblo, published anonymously. This is a familiar circumstance the world over, whether in Africa, Latin America, India, or North America. For that book I wanted to look at every possible American Indian creation story I could find, because so often lurking in them are accounts of the culture’s very first house. I was interested in doing a book on American Indian architecture. So you have an impasto of cultures in the Southwest, which exist to this day in sometimes fraught, sometimes amenable relationships, but always tremendously interesting. ![]() There were layers of regimes: the Spanish regime and the American regime, on top of what was already a very complex socio-political foundation. Stories were told to him about that dramatic and painful episode in the life of their culture, and the coming of Euro-Americans in the 1840s, first to his mesa, eventually taking over the Southwest and introducing a new political regime. This gave me an opportunity to tell about the archaeology of the region the arrival of the Spanish and its impact the great 1680 revolt of the Pueblo Indians, which was still remembered by his home community. These were some of the oldest continuously occupied communities in North America. The book is set among the Acoma Pueblo of New Mexico, one of the most remote and conservative Native American tribes in the area. ![]() He and his family led a peripatetic life, bouncing off of American Indian government policy towards American Indians, which vacillated every 20 years. He also acquired the status of something of an outcast, because he brought back to his community ideas and influences that were not necessarily welcome. That lifespan, from the onset of the Civil War to three years after World War II, in which one of his boys participated, was a pretty eventful time in American history as well as in Indian-White relations.įor various reasons he ended up acquiring a lot of knowledge and a new religion, which was Christianity. It’s a little bit of a mystery, but the earliest I can remember that I was aware of Native Americans on this continent was when I was six, on a train with my mother, and we were going through the Wisconsin Dells, which is a gathering place for American Indians of many tribes in the Great Lakes region. ![]() I’ve sought the answer to that question many times. You’ve written a number of books on Native American culture, and you’ve lived among the Navajo and Lakota Indians. Speaking from his home in Playa del Rey, California, Nabokov describes how Hitler regarded the Sioux as Aryans why he thinks the Acoma Origin Myth ranks with the Bible and the Koran as one of the world’s great texts and why casinos are a godsend for Native Americans. His latest book, How The World Moves: The Odyssey Of An American Indian Family, tells the powerful story of an Acoma Pueblo family from New Mexico as they battle to preserve their culture across three generations.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |