Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (61 page)

 

T

hese headline-making stories all point to the long, rich, yet still grossly misunderstood history and mythic traditions of the ancient Americas. Each new scientific advance and archaeological find makes it increasingly clear that our image of Native America has been tainted by the antiquated, “cowboys and Indians,” Hollywood version. Or that we romanticize Native Americans as “noble savages” living in Eden-like spiritual and ecological harmony. Or, more recently, they have been depicted mostly as wealthy casino operators running gambling meccas on tribal lands. Needless to say, none of these views is accurate or complete, in part because there were—and are—so many different Native Americans.

Just as the people of Africa were a diverse group, the Native Americans were also a multicolored, many-voiced lot. Set apart by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and living on two large continents that span the Western Hemisphere, the native peoples of the Americas ranged from the Aztecs of Mexico, the Mayas of Central America, and the Incas of South America, to the vastly different tribes of North America. These tribes included the Sioux and other people of the Great Plains; the Navajos and Hopis of the Southwest; the “Five Civilized Tribes” of the Southwest; the “Iroquois Confederacy” of the Northeast; and the Aleuts and Inuits of the Arctic regions—to name just a few of the hundreds of Native American groups.
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The mythologies of the Native Americans were as rich and diverse as the people themselves. Full of nature deities, mischievous animal tricksters, heroic braves, and dueling twins, they all included a great, world-encompassing Creation story. This thinking led to a deep reverence for nature and the concept of a benign Earth Mother. As Native American historian Vine Deloria puts it in his provocative book
God Is Red
, “For many Indian tribal religions the whole of creation was good, and because the creation event did not include a ‘fall,’ the meaning of the creation was that all parts of it functioned together to sustain it.”

Presiding over most of these traditions—which were all preliterate except for the Mayas and Aztecs—was the shaman. This powerful figure supervised group chanting, healing, spirit communication, sweat lodges, and the pipe rituals aimed at connecting with the “Great Mystery.” In the Mesoamerican civilizations, shamans formed a priestly class—like the Celtic Druids—that presided over blood rituals and human sacrifices. Not intended for squeamish audiences, these sacrifices included tearing or cutting out the still-beating heart from a victim’s chest to appease the gods. This grotesque cruelty was sometimes performed on infants while their mothers looked on.

One of the great scientific and academic debates simmering today has to do with who the Native Americans were, how they got to the Americas in the first place, and how long they have been here. Usually, when you hear the expression “Early American,” it refers to colonial-era antiques and life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But those “early Americans” were Johnny-come-latelies compared with the true “early Americans,” who lived in the Americas thousands of years earlier. What you probably learned about their history in school goes something like this:

Near the end of the last great Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago, groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers crossed the 1,000-mile-wide land bridge connecting Siberia to what is now Alaska and Canada. This crossing took place before the great North American ice sheets melted and raised sea levels by some 300 feet, inundating the grassy steppe that allowed people and animals to move between Asia and North America. Probably pursuing large game such as mastodons, these really-early Americans spread out over the two continents and gradually diversified into the tens of millions of people who were present when the Spanish arrived in 1492.

But an array of new research from the worlds of archaeology, biology, and linguistics has shaken that notion to its permafrost foundation. It is now more widely accepted that the real “Pilgrims” may have come to the Americas 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, probably in successive waves of migrations carried out over a long time span, from Siberia, Mongolia, and other parts of Central Asia. Kennewick man, for instance, has been related—based on DNA evidence—to the Ainu, the prehistoric people who first inhabited Japan. Instead of strolling across the land bridge now covered by the Bering Straits, in one great prehistoric walkathon, perhaps Kennewick man and some of the other first Americans came in small, skin-covered boats, hugging the Pacific coastline down to the southernmost parts of South America. Gradually, these ancient people spread out across both continents, a process that continued for a long time.

The likelihood of many waves of immigrants would help explain the tremendous diversity of tribes, languages, myths, and civilizations the Europeans encountered when they arrived in the 1500s. Well before the beginning of the Common Era, tribes had spread out across North America, and impressive civilizations had begun to emerge in Central America and Mexico. These civilizations included cities that were larger, cleaner, and more organized than most European cities of the same period. Their inhabitants wrote hieroglyphic books and erected temples and pyramids as sophisticated staging areas for their religious rites. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived, these extraordinary accomplishments would be relentlessly and mercilessly plundered, and the Mesoamerican city-dwellers would experience death and destruction on an unimaginable scale.

To some degree, myth may have helped make that destruction possible. While some scholars now question the notion, many historians have long held that one reason a fairly small group of Spaniards was able to subjugate populations numbering in the millions lay in the story of an Aztec god named Quetzalcoatl. According to Aztec myth, Quetzalcoatl had departed from the Aztec people with the messianic promise of returning to usher in a new Golden Age. Supposedly, the notion that these white Spanish explorers might be the returning Aztec messiah helped win the Aztecs’ initial welcome, if not their hearts and minds. The Spanish then used treachery, technology, and brutality as the real means to conquest. European diseases, against which these Native Americans had no natural immunities, did the rest of the dirty work.

Far more significant, myth played a role in crushing religious traditions, which contained striking similarities to Catholicism. Powerful images of death, penitence, self-mortification, blood sacrifice, and a dying-and-reborn god—many of them central to Catholicism—pervaded the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan traditions. These parallels were not lost on the Spanish soldiers and the priests who followed them. Professing concern for the Mesoamerican soul, the Spanish co-opted native beliefs and set about their real goal—acquiring massive tracts of land and seizing as much gold and silver as they could for Spain’s royal coffers.

The path to exploitation in North America was a variation on a theme. Unlike the fairly swift, relentless Spanish conquest of the natives of Mexico and South America, the Europeans moved more slowly in North America. They had to. First, there were hundreds of tribes and groups to conquer, across a huge and largely uncharted space. While some of these people lived in sophisticated, organized settlements, others occupied remote places or were on the move, following the buffalo and better weather. The Europeans had to work longer at dropping a moving target that quickly learned the value of fighting back and was often quite good at it.

But in the end, the song remained the same. What took place all over North America was a grotesque
Groundhog Day
, in which identical awful things happened over and over, minus a happy ending. The pattern was this simple: The Europeans arrived and were welcomed and often aided by the natives. Once the conquerors had promised to keep the peace, they aggressively expanded, broke treaties, declared war, pitted one tribe against another, and unwittingly (for the most part) introduced diseases that nearly exterminated the native people, along with their language, mythic traditions, and sacred beliefs. In the four hundred years between Columbus’s arrival and the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, upward of 90 percent of an estimated 40 to 100 million people were wiped out in one of the largest “ethnic cleansings” the world has ever witnessed—all in the name of progress, “civilization,” and the God of Christianity.

The story of what was lost is still being written as new discoveries are made each day. A palace with a Mayan princess is found. Sacrificial victims in an ancient tomb are unearthed. The skeletal remains of an early man are opened up for study. And a new generation of scholars, eager to retell this tale from the “loser’s” point of view, continues to stir up the long-accepted histories and theories of what happened to the “primitive” people of the New World. As a result, each day new light is shed on the vibrant mythic traditions of the Americas.

How did Native American myth go up in smoke?

What is “civilized”? What is “savage”? To the “civilized” Europeans who came to the Americas in the 1500s, the answer was simple. “Civilized” meant clothes-wearing, literate, European Christians. The word “savage” meant “Indian.” Led by medicine men smoking pipes, having visions, curing with herbs, and rejecting the white man’s “salvation,” the native tribes were, in the European view, doomed souls. Unfortunately, that view dominated from the sixteenth century on.

Maybe that is why the public today is still largely in the dark about Native American mythology and beliefs. The Europeans—and later, Americans—didn’t just crush the Native American “savages.” They composed the diaries and letters, painted the artwork, took the photographs, and wrote the first histories that either ignored or demeaned a conquered people. They suppressed native mythologies and languages to near-extinction, allowing them to go up in the smoke of burning villages. Church schools, missionaries, and government agencies like the notorious Indian Affairs Bureau added to the catastrophe, forcing native children to accept “Anglo” names and denying them the right to speak their mother tongues or learn their ancestral sacred stories. Sacred native places were built over and renamed—a process still going on as a Wal-Mart outlet goes up near Teotihuacán in Mexico, or an astronomical observatory is placed on a mountain sacred to the San Carlos Apaches in the state of Arizona.
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People who shrug this off might see the issue differently if Native Americans secured rights to build a gambling casino atop Arlington National Cemetery.

But there is more to the story. As the authors of
The Encyclopedia of Native American Religions
write, “Indian country in North America is still home to hundreds of religious traditions that have endured, despite a long history of persecution and suppression by government and missionaries…. Native American sacred beliefs are as dignified, profound, viable, and richly faceted as other religions practiced throughout the world. Native sacred knowledge has not been destroyed or lost but in fact lives on as the heart of Native American cultural existence today.”

What is known of these sacred traditions today comes largely through efforts during the past century to interview native survivors who preserved an oral tradition. These survivors included Black Elk, whose 1932 memoir,
Black Elk Speaks
, records the visionary recollections of an Oglala Sioux holy man who witnessed the nineteenth-century spiritual revival called the “Ghost Dance” and the massacre at Wounded Knee. Memories such as his have been added to the handful of written sources that do exist, such as the Popol Vuh, a re-creation of sacred Mayan writings discovered 300 years ago in a Guatemalan church, and a few hieroglyphic books from the Aztecs and Mayas. From the Spanish colonial era, there is also a large library of works about native beliefs, but these are somewhat suspect, given their source—often priests, or natives who may have wanted to curry favor with their Spanish masters, or deceive them.

More recently, the effort to preserve Native American traditions has been invigorated by a generation of scholars far more sensitive to their subject. In September 2004, more than 20,000 members of some 500 Native American tribes gathered in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian. Built at a cost of more than $219 million, the museum housed the Smithsonian Institute’s hundreds of thousands of Native American objects.
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There is also a revival of interest in tradition among young Native Americans, who hope to save something of their past as a complement to their heightened political activism in both the United States and Latin America. Award-winning poets, short-story writers, and novelists such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and Sherman Alexie have joined in the rescue effort with creative works such as
Ceremony
,
Love Medicine
, and
Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven
, which explore tribal mythic traditions and their impact on contemporary Native Americans. Finally, archaeology and other scientific research have also added immensely to a picture that has been rescued from the ashes of the Native American holocaust.