Indians point with their lips. I’m back home from my trip to the Five Tribes Storytelling Conference. It was held on the historic grounds of Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma. It’s a school that has been attended by generations of Native Oklahomans. Everywhere I walked on its grounds, I felt as if the soil was speaking to me. Telling me, “Walk slow, young fella. Listen here.” No matter how many years we have under our belts (or over them, eh Greg and Tim?), we are always no more than toddlers next to the earth. It holds not only the dust of countless generations before it. It also holds, as my friend Chief Oren Lyons of the Onondaga Nation once expressed it to me, the faces of our children and grandchildren yet to be born. Every bit of that earth. Not dirt, but dukwan, as it is called in the Mohawk language. It is that which holds something, as Mohawk elder and tradition keeper Tom Porter explained it to me this past summer. It holds the molecules of all life itself. How many stories that red Oklahoma earth holds. Earth of a place where tribal nation after tribal nation was forced to go. Not one Nu na da ul tsun yi—“the Place Where They Cried” led there, but dozens. So many reasons to weep. And yet whenever I’m in Oklahoma, despite that weight of history, I’m always lifted up by stories. As always, I received far more from this trip than I was able to give. Guess I am never going to catch up. I just meet too many generous people, hear too many stories. Like those shared with me and the others in the warm circle of the Five Tribes gathering by so many folks that I need to devote a post just to talking some about them, thanking them by name. Some of those stories I heard this time around are so private that I know I’m not supposed to do much more than hold them in my heart, thankful for the way they’re carrying me. Like the one told me by a person who realized while at an archaeological site during a college course the living nature of the soil at an old village site in central New York. Ancestral earth that should not be disturbed. But I think it’s okay for me to speak about the deeply sacred, hither-to unknown to the non-initiated, Oklahoma Pan-Indian Legend of the Ducklips. (Okay, Mary Beth? Oh, and by the way, isn’t okay a Choctaw word?) Right. If any of you reading this have seen some of the pictures posted from the conference you know what I’m talking about. Those photos of various Native participants posing with their lips tightly pursed and thrust forward or off to the side. Ducklips. What I am about to explain next is not new to those who know the difference between Ind’ins (Native Americans) and Indians (whose ancestral roots are from the South Asian subcontinent). It is simply that throughout Native North America it is regarded as incorrect behavior to point—as do non-Native Americans—with your finger. Especially at someone else. Like you are shooting a gun. Or sending something their way. Instead, you turn your head and either purse your lips in that direction or maybe point your chin over there. Which practice led to that joking series of selfies and group shots over the days we were together in Muskogee and gradually getting sillier, tireder, more punch-drunk from all the wonderful energy we were sharing together. (I wouldn’t be surprised if half the folks who were there are going to spend half the week sleeping it off—even though none of us were drinking anything stronger than coffee.) But like anything that happens to me when I am in Oklahoma, it immediately brought to my mind a series of stories. Such as the one the Cherokee cultural historian Rayna Green told me once. About an old Ind’in man, maybe a Cherokee, who had an incredible bird dog. A white man heard about that old man’s dog and decided to see if it was as good as everyone said. He went to that elder’s house and the old Cherokee agreed to take the white man out hunting with his dog. They walked along for a while and then that dog just stopped. “What’s your dog doing?” the white man asked. “Pointin’ a bird,” the old man said. “He doesn’t look like he’s pointing to me,” the white man said. “Jes walk round front,” the Cherokee man said. So the white man walked around in front of the dog, looked down and sure enough. . . Do I need to say more other than it was an Ind’in dog? Then there’s the one that my Creek elder friend Louis Littlecoon Oliver told me when I was visiting him in Tahlequah one time. “There was this Creek man,” Louis said, “who had real long lips. One day a man come into town. He asked that man with long lips where he could find some wild onions. So the man with long lips, he pointed where to go, sort of like this and this. . . and this. And the man who wanted to find those wild onions just shook his head sadly and said ‘That’s too far for me to go.’” Silly stories, you say? While I was in Muskogee and telling my stories to an audience that was probably more generous than I deserved, one of the best things for me was that I was able to share the meaning of the name those of us who are Abenaki call ourselves. Alnobak. Translated sometimes as just “people.” But that “al” at the start can mean right. Or normal. Referring to behaving properly. As we should. But it can also mean “silly.” (I hear my son Jesse speaking to my granddaughter: “Carolyn, alnita pita.” And her giggling as he says that because he’s just told her she is being very silly.) We were meant to laugh. That’s another thing Indians point to with their lips. And what were we all pointing at in those photos? At each other. At the land that holds us. At the laughter that has helped us survive and thrive. The sacred silliness our grandchildren will share.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 03:25:50 +0000
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