Dreamer

There is rain falling as I wander into the canyons
of other language.
Here,
the Apache language of Cibecue.
They have three major forms of Yat’i’ — the spoken word:

yat’ti’ which is ordinary talk

‘okąąhí which is prayer and

nagoldi’é which is narratives or stories.

Narratives are futher broken down into four major and two minor groupings:

godiyįhgo nagoldi’é, literally: ‘to tell of holiness’

ágodzaahí or ágodzaahí nagoldi’é: literally ‘to tell of that which has happened’,

and nlt’éégo nagoldi’é: literally ‘to tell of pleasantness’.

There are stories that arise in the context of gossip: ch’idíí.

And then there are Coyote stories: ma’highaalyú nagoldi’é:
to tell of coyote travels.

To even write this slows me down into the animal body.
I think of the groupings as hillsides
with four mesas and two smaller canyons with a pack of coyotes
howling through, yíp! yíp! yíp!
echoing off the side of red rocks.
This language locates me in my love for the desert places,
great space that lays like a
bowl of the desert gods under open sky.

Ágodzaahí: August 1881.
Hot Arizona day, when the respected medicine man
that Cochise and Geronimo sought counsel with was arrested
and the Battle of Cibecue Creek ensued.
The medicine man was known as “the Dreamer.”

The godiỵíhgo nagoldi’é were the myths only told by medicine woman and man.

Somehow the Dreamer’s godiỵíhgo nagoldi’é comes to me on this day:

“Power is everywhere. It lives in everything. It might be known through a word or come in the shape of an animal. We all have power but some tap into different rooms. Power speaks to those who listen. The greatest thing a person can have in Apache belief is power!”

The Dreamer dreams down the rivers of time, of internet,
on pages made from trees,
ink that is the ash of history, and the spirit
animal that quietly stalks around these four walls I find myself in.

I think of a question that I onced asked a woman spokesperson from the local Nissenan tribe where I live as a settler. I asked her what happened to the Nissenan after the gold rush. She answered me geographically, locating her answer by hills, mountains, borders of rivers. The indigenous sense of being located. The answer profoundly moved me, though I know she didn’t think anything of it.

Power finds me by the fireplace, writing Apache words that emanate
ancestral authority that humbles me:
a wandering orphan
looking backward into the window of my people who came
from islands who spoke Tagalog.

The word Tagalog comes from place too, as does Apache language,
deriving from the endonym taga-log meaning river dweller. The ancient script looks like the shape of waters along a shallow creek bed, full of movement and flow.

Endonyms are the inner names for a location, or a group of people,
a language or dialect. There is no separation. Land, river, trees are
the nouns that could roll out of my mouth, if only I could speak my father’s
tongue. I only know salamat: thank you.
I look up to constellations that crown my head.

‘okąąhí Dreamer, thank you for coming to me today.
I will drink your seed of power and let it fall
like shooting stars
through the cracks of our broken times.
I know our ancestors lean close to feed us
wisdom. I thank you with the betel nuts from
my ancestors. I see the stars in your crown shining
through the rain. In this place we quietly rest in kinship.

What I want, most of all, is the space to speak from
and with the land.

Related posts:

SharePoint and OneDrive are two popular collaboration tools developed by Microsoft. While they share some similarities, they are not the same platform. In this blog, we will discuss the differences…

Only three of the 2957 Plymouth dealers in 1999 were not also Chrysler dealers, so very few dealers were impacted by the decision to streamline the Phil Spencer Wearing A Hexen Shirt. And many of…