The Aztecs divide the universe into four separate realms or regions. First, there is Ilwihkaktli’ or the arc of the heavens. This region is symbolized in Aztec altars by a leaf covered arch to which has been attached representations of the sun or stars. The second region is the earth which in Nahuatl is called Tlali’. The earth is the seat of human activity and is represented in rituals by the surface of altar tables. Third is Miktlan or the realm of the dead which exists under the earth’s surface. The souls of all people who die “naturally” go to Miktlan to live a life similar to that on earth. Miktlan is represented in religious rituals by a display which is located on the earth floor underneath of altar tables. Finally, there is Apan or the realm of water where all souls of people who die violently go. Apan is the region that connects all other regions into one integrated whole. The sky is reflected on its surface, streams and springs flow on the earth and yet their depths penetrate to Miktlan, the underworld. In religious rituals Apan is recognized by a display that is set up by a spot that has been designated as sacred to the water.
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Rattle dances usually take place only at night and are rather long in duration, sometimes lasting up to one hour. The dances themselves are seen as offerings or sacrifices dedicated to Tonantsi’ and the more energy and effort invested in their execution the more they are appreciated by the diety. In fact, this element of sacrifice is considered to be the primary raison d’etre for the dances themselves. Informants state that throughout the year Tonantsi’ supplies all that is necessary for a good life–food, health, happiness, etc., and thus feel it is only fitting that during the ceremony dedicated to the honor of Tonantsi’, her followers sacrifice as much of their goods, energy and time as is possible in order to show as much gratitude and appreciation as possible. Indeed, informants will state that physical exhuastion in her honor is testimony to her honor as much as physical offerings.
from https://folkways-media.si.edu/docs/folkways/artwork/FW04358.pdf
Category Archives: nayra
from Kuki’s Metaphysics of Literature:
“The past is not simply something that has already gone. The future is not simply something that has not yet come. The past comes again in the future; the future has already come into the past. If we follow the past far enough, we return to the future; if we follow the future far enough, we return to the past. Time forms a circle; it is recurrent. If we locate time in the present, we can say that this present possesses as present an infinite past and an infinite future and, moreover, that it is identical with a limitless present. The present is the eternal present with an infinite depth; in short, time is nothing but the infinite present, the eternal now.”
Excerpts from The Bells of Old Tokyo: Meditations on Time and a City by Anna Sherman:
The world was like a leather bag filled with water, he once wrote, and at the bottom of the world was a puncture: time seeped out of it, drop by drop.
Time was like a whirlpool.
Time could be stopped if you stood between the sun and a sundial.
The present moment could be sometimes like the Mekong or Bangkok’s Chao Phraya: a vast river. The past and future were tributaries that sometimes overflowed their own banks, and spilled into each other.
Time was like a palace’s great hall, with partitions that could be taken away. Every instant that would ever be, or had ever been, might be seen all at once.
Sand pouring from a woman’s shoe: the most enchanting hourglass in the world.
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According to the anthropologist Carmen Blacker, the word for divination in Japanese is ‘ura or uranai, a term which appears to indicate primarily “that which is behind, and hence invisible” (nayra)
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But some imported ideas were rejected outright. In 1948, the Japanese, still recovering from the war and the lingering exhaustion that followed years of starvation and despair, held noisy protests against American-style Daylight Savings Time. The Occupation authorities were surprised: bringing the clocks forward an hour had seemed a minor innovation, when more drastic ones – granting suffrage to women, abolishing the hereditary rights of the nobility – drew fewer and less vehement complaints.
Daylight Savings Time became sanmah ta-imu (‘summer time’) in what the historian John Dower has termed ‘the marvelous new pidgin terminology of the moment. The Japanese felt summer time drew out the difficulty of their daily lives, and when the Occupation ended, it was one of the first things to be scrapped.
People wanted darkness to come earlier.
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Since the late nineteenth century, Japan has used the Western calendar, but never the Christian system of counting years from the birth of Christ…The end of the Cold War gave its name to the reign of Emperor Hirohito’s successor, Emperor Akihito: Heisei (‘Peace Everywhere’), because he ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne just as the Soviet Union was collapsing. The 9/11 attacks happened in Heisei 13. Under the old system, the emperor’s astronomers might perhaps have restarted time by calling a new nengo after the so-called Bubble Economy collapsed in 1991, or after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. But Heisei – Peace Everywhere has continued on, while North Korea launched missiles into the Sea of Japan and the United States fought al-Qaeda.
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In 1921, a “Correct Time” propaganda was carried out in Japan under the sponsorship of the Education Department, and some eighty bell-ringers were rewarded for their long and faithful service. The recipients…included two women, one of whom was named Matsu Obata, aged 82. For fifty years she had struck the bell twenty- four times a day, and she had been admired for her accuracy in the execution of her duty, one requiring a great deal of watchfulness…
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The monks wore enormous, tight-woven wicker barrels over their heads, hats that symbolize the death of the ego. When the Tokugawa fell, the emperor’s new government outlawed komusō, because they had often acted as spies for the Tokugawa. After 1868, komusō temples were burned, and much of the sect’s musical repertoire lost: notes that imitated the crying of cranes, or the beating of their wings; wind; petals falling; a bell. The Meiji authorities appropriated the beehive-shaped hat for convicts, who wore them into court. What had symbolized the ascetic’s ascension toward the sublime became stigmatized, an object of shame.
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Kobayashi moved toward the eighteenth-century tomb of Tsunayoshi, the ‘Dog Shogun. Tsunayoshi became infamous for his edicts that penalized anyone who mistreated animals, especially dogs. ‘For the sake of a single bird or beast, the death penalty was inflicted. Even relatives were given capital punishment or deported and exiled…one contemporary account complained, after Tsunayoshi’s death, and his so- called ‘Laws of Compassion’ were rescinded.
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Reducing a land to atoms,/ These atoms are measureless, untold./ Boundless lands, as many as these atoms/ are gathered on a single hair.
‘For Buddhists, the past, the future, and this moment: everything flows at the same pace, Takahashi said. ‘Every second is equal. The past and the future and what’s happening now, aren’t separate.
You can say a lot about time: but time is also things that don’t happen. I grew up in Hokkaido. On my route to school there was a crossroads and at the crossroads was a stop light. It was such a quiet place that my younger brother and I used to blast right through on our bikes without stopping. But one day, for some reason, I did stop. And a car whipped around the bend and zoomed through the crossing. If I hadn’t held back a few moments before, I would have died. Right in front of my younger brother.
Afterward I thought everything had happened in slow motion. For my brother, the moment went by like a flash. But time has the same flow: everywhere and always. How we think of it must just be a function of our brains. That sense is just the way we process our fear of death.
Because no one comes back to tell us what happens after we stop breathing, we’re scared of death. Time is the frame- work, the scaffolding, for how we experience that terror. Time lets us look away from fear. You might think of time as the life we have left.’
‘And the dead?’ I asked. ‘What about the dead?’
Takahashi shrugged. ‘The dead have slipped out of the framework.’
Excerpts from Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko (which I cannot recommend enough):
Perhaps the earth was spinning faster than before; rumors like this had circulated among tribal people since the First World War. Calabazas had heard the arguments the traditional believers had had among themselves- each accusing the other of being tainted by Mormonism or Methodism or the Catholic Church. But he had also heard them discuss the increased spin of the earth; others disagreed and had asserted it was instead the universe running downhill from a great peak and the increased speed was only temporary, before it reached the plain to slow gradually and regain a measure of stability.
Calabazas himself had no proof about the speed of the earth or about time. He did not think time was absolute or universal; rather each location, each place, was a living organism with time running inside it like blood, time that was unique to that place alone.
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That week the Barefoot Hopi had talked about desecration. Earth was their mother, but her land and water could never be desecrated; blasted open and polluted by man, but never desecrated. Man only desecrated himself in such acts; puny humans could not affect the integrity of Earth. Earth always was and would ever be sacred. Mother Earth might be ravaged by the Destroyers, but she still loved the people.
‘For me, understanding and reading 17th and 18th century colonial documents through Wabanaki political and cultural frameworks is part of a process of ôjmowôgan, the Abenaki word for history. The language tells us that “history” is a collective process of telling and re-telling, an ongoing activity in which we are all engaged.’
– Lisa Brooks, from https://www.mainememory.net/sitebuilder/site/2976/page/4665/print
Silko explains that the Laguna view on the passage of time is responsible for this condition, stating, “The Pueblo people and the indigenous people of the Americas see time as round, not as a long linear string. If time is round, if time is an ocean, then something that happened 500 years ago may be quite immediate and real, whereas something inconsequential that happened an hour ago could be far away.”
Excerpts from https://publications.iai.spk-berlin.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/Document_derivate_00002030/BIA_055_067_081.pdf (this does include briefly the negative associations between q’iwa, homosexuality, and unproductivity that Elly mentions in the other thing I will link below, but think it is worth reading first if you are not familiar with the language/vocabulary for context before diving deeper):
Ethnomusicological studies in other parts of the world have noted correspondences between sound structure in music and social structure (e.g. Feld 1984). Similarly, I shall suggest that specific sounds used in musical performance, by certain peasant farmers in highland Bolivia, both appear to reflect and are perceived to manipulate social and cosmological structures. (note: see Noise by Jacques Attali for more on how musical relationships can affect new relationships in this world and beyond)
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Whilst in the towns q’iwa is commonly translated as maricón or homosexual, in the countryside it is used in a less specific way to refer to a variety of aspects of gender mediation. A man with a high-pitched voice is q’iwa as is a woman who speaks in a low-pitched voice or acts like a man. Similarly the term is used to refer to men when they dress up in women’s clothes for certain rituals. But more specifically, on several occasions I have been told that q’iwa is khuskan qhari, khuskan warmi or “half-man, half-woman”. As such, q’iwa represents the conjunction of male and female, where the opposing sexes mix together equally.
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Excerpts from https://www.momaps1.org/post/228-transcriptions-of-the-indigenous-and-migrant-justice-symposium:
Elly Crampton Chuquimia Quiñones-Tancara: In the 5th edition modern Aymara-Castellano dictionary, q’iwa & q’iwsa are treated as synonyms for queer people. Strategically, the new entries omit the anti-queer or bad character traits that have come to be associated with the terms (thank you Dr. Pairumani). We recall the musical or medicinal roles of these terms, which shows their unique medicinal or practical functions— for instance, the q’iwsa siku and q’iwa pinkillu. Q’iwsa also relates to the anti-spiral, unscrewing, twisting or luxation/dislocation, and q’iwa— the tears of our ancestors as qillqa, as writing, as language, joyful sadness. It is this medicine that also directs our roles as queer (q’iwa/q’iwsa) people for our communities, our relations, which is our ayni to the pachanaka, reciprocity to our people. The refusal of this medicine, brought by Christian doctrine, state law, and so forth, has caused a break in ayni that has yet to be paid back, or made just. In our commitment to our relations and the wak’as, our ancestors, we as queer people continue to give back what we owe, even when our medicine is so often mistaken for poison. We have a saying in our language, which is said many ways, but that I learned this way: qhipnayr uñtasisawa sarnaqaña. This is translated as: hay que mirar el pasado y el futuro para proyectarse en el presente—we must look at past and future in order to project ourselves in the present. Google translates it as: walking around looking backwards. Recalling the verb q’iwsuña, in the context of this phrase, we’re reminded that living in so-called reverse is also a perspective of balance. When it’s winter in our territories, it’s summer over here—to be in good relation with these lands I must live in reverse.
The phrase qhipnayara uñtasisawa sarnaqaña also implies we live with the ancestors in permanent encounter. The ancestors in our misperceived individuation, the elders of our elders, what physicists call the void, vacuum, the powerful small, where spacetime undoes—they say—somewhere around 10 minus 33 cm (a physicist told me that once). Can we understand that permanent encounter means we can give up the story of loss and recovery and remember what we already know, what cognitive neuroscience calls implicit or non-declarative memory, immemorable memory, which, as such, cannot be forgotten.
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Ch’ixi indicates grayishness. Specifically, tiny spots, in contrast to the word allqa, which refers to big spots. This is important because allqa is associated with the contrasting colors that are seen as paired, and sometimes differentiated from q’iwa or queer medicine, which is frequently called lonely or single, separated from pairing (while q’iwsa also means “to remove something from its place,” we should be careful using q’iwa and q’iwsa as synonyms).
Through ch’ixi, what appears as a solid color, gray, is in fact made up of various spots. What is sometimes missed in the translation of the word ch’ixi, is that it also means a pile of small rocks, additionally, referring to the Pleiades constellation. Ch’ixi is also accumulated scree or the rocky debris that forms below mountains. Perhaps this recalls the image of our chullpas, the stone mounds that hold our eldest elders, in Paqajes. The spots & grayness of ch’ixi describe the titi felid or Andean cat, which the great Aymara scholar Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua drew as chuqui chinchay or qowa, writing this quote “very speckled animal” was “guardian of hermaphrodites, Indians of two natures.” Pachacuti also illustrates the relation, between the Pleiades, Venus, and chuqui chinchay or qowa the cat—our elders still speak these connections, as do confesionarios from the early colonial period.
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It is in this context that Dr. Cusicanqui works our ancient queer medicines. Elaborating on that, we look at the suffix -naka, which is often referred to as a pluralizing suffix. Our elders tell us this suffix does not just indicate pluralization however, but variety, more precisely. So, when we say q’iwanaka and q’iwsanaka, we are referring to the manifold variations of so-called queer medicine. Re-sounding and practicing q’iwa and q’iwsa medicine is part of our ayni, our obligation of reciprocity as queer people. We say this in order to address the misunderstanding, of q’iwa, as unproductive, which comes with the historical violence of forced sterilization on queer people by the occupying states. Dormancy or repose, is not the same as unproductivity—Guamán Poma and his uncredited scribes and elders showed us this beautifully, in their planting ceremony illustrations.
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This is why we listen to the tree, the bud, pankara, the butterfly, snail, ant, cricket, the trash, the river, the road that we set foot upon every day as stem, where we, as sariri, relay Tunupa, who they say changed from man to woman across the water, seemingly walking alone, only paired or connected across spacetimes. Recall the elders’ famous saying, translated as: “Do not pity q’iwa people, because they walk looking at the stars.” As mentioned, the last time we spoke, balance is a matter of perspective.
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The pachanaka, or manifold spacetimes, stained us, jiwasa, before the creation of the World over our mother, the earth. Like titi, we were already stained before Europe arrived to these lands—very speckled, muy pintado, to quote elder Pachacuti again. This is the bittersweet red song, the lonely q’iwa melody, the transnocturnal huayño, the blood-red penumbra that spilled out as the chullpas mistakenly sang the first sunrise, seeing each other for the first time, individuated in sadness and joy, shared aloneness, speaking with tears, our first language: the birth of the mundo en policía, the policed world.
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Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: Our languages have been colonized, our philosophers have been killed, our theorists have been killed, and we have been left with nothing but degraded words, only words reduced to their pragmatic meanings. Then it’s up to the new generations.
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Because the thing about the potency of ch’ixi is that it’s indeterminate. It is neither male nor female, it is neither above nor below, but it is both at the same time.
It is both male and female, it is both above and below. So how can this be transferred to the human? One can be in two forms. Ch’i—The pronunciation is a little difficult because there is ch’ixi with aspirate [pronunciation] and there is ch’ixi with explosive [pronunciation]. Ch’ixi is soft, it is unlearned. And I’ve made it more understandable with the notion of Pa’churrima divided heart, divided soul like the “double bind” that Gayatri Spivak talks about, right? I mean, “double bind” is when you have one identity mandate and you have the opposite mandate. You have the mandate to be white, and you have the mandate to be Indigenous. And they are in a clash. But that causes schizophrenia, social schizophrenia, collective schizophrenia, and personal schizophrenia. And the ways to cure these schizophrenias are to find [how] to live with the contradiction of having this identity that has two roots. They force you to choose one to deny the other, and I refuse to ignore the fact that I am also white, that I also have European roots, and that I do not regret it because I am not to blame for having been born that way. So I want to liberate myself by recognizing the best, the most profoundly contentious of both dimensions.
https://moodle.swarthmore.edu/pluginfile.php/509827/mod_resource/content/2/Layli-Long-Soldier-Whereas.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3DrH7RFbbQekPXuE8px64gEETPlb7Qu8h8n6gqJjIkNFAT2drp_QnrNN0
38
by Layli Long Soldier
Here, the sentence will be respected.
I will compose each sentence with care, by minding what the rules of writing dictate.
For example, all sentences will begin with capital letters.
Likewise, the history of the sentence will be honored by ending each one with appropriate punctuation such as a period or question mark, thus bringing the idea to (momentary) completion.
You may like to know, I do not consider this a “creative piece.”
I do not regard this as a poem of great imagination or a work of fiction.
Also, historical events will not be dramatized for an “interesting” read.
Therefore, I feel most responsible to the orderly sentence; conveyor of thought.
That said, I will begin.
You may or may not have heard about the Dakota 38.
If this is the first time you’ve heard of it, you might wonder, “What is the Dakota 38?”
The Dakota 38 refers to thirty-eight Dakota men who were executed by hanging, under orders from President Abraham Lincoln.
To date, this is the largest “legal” mass execution in US history.
The hanging took place on December 26, 1862—the day after Christmas.
This was the same week that President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
In the preceding sentence, I italicize “same week” for emphasis.
There was a movie titled Lincoln about the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.
The signing of the Emancipation Proclamation was included in the film Lincoln; the hanging of the Dakota 38 was not.
In any case, you might be asking, “Why were thirty-eight Dakota men hung?”
As a side note, the past tense of hang is hung, but when referring to the capital punishment of hanging, the correct past tense is hanged.
So it’s possible that you’re asking, “Why were thirty-eight Dakota men hanged?”
They were hanged for the Sioux Uprising.
I want to tell you about the Sioux Uprising, but I don’t know where to begin.
I may jump around and details will not unfold in chronological order.
Keep in mind, I am not a historian.
So I will recount facts as best as I can, given limited resources and understanding.
Before Minnesota was a state, the Minnesota region, generally speaking, was the traditional homeland for Dakota, Anishinaabeg, and Ho-Chunk people.
During the 1800s, when the US expanded territory, they “purchased” land from the Dakota people as well as the other tribes.
But another way to understand that sort of “purchase” is: Dakota leaders ceded land to the US government in exchange for money or goods, but most importantly, the safety of their people.
Some say that Dakota leaders did not understand the terms they were entering, or they never would have agreed.
Even others call the entire negotiation “trickery.”
But to make whatever-it-was official and binding, the US government drew up an initial treaty.
This treaty was later replaced by another (more convenient) treaty, and then another.
I’ve had difficulty unraveling the terms of these treaties, given the legal speak and congressional language.
As treaties were abrogated (broken) and new treaties were drafted, one after another, the new treaties often referenced old defunct treaties, and it is a muddy, switchback trail to follow.
Although I often feel lost on this trail, I know I am not alone.
However, as best as I can put the facts together, in 1851, Dakota territory was contained to a twelve-mile by one-hundred-fifty-mile long strip along the Minnesota River.
But just seven years later, in 1858, the northern portion was ceded (taken) and the southern portion was (conveniently) allotted, which reduced Dakota land to a stark ten-mile tract.
These amended and broken treaties are often referred to as the Minnesota Treaties.
The word Minnesota comes from mni, which means water; and sota, which means turbid.
Synonyms for turbid include muddy, unclear, cloudy, confused, and smoky.
Everything is in the language we use.
For example, a treaty is, essentially, a contract between two sovereign nations.
The US treaties with the Dakota Nation were legal contracts that promised money.
It could be said, this money was payment for the land the Dakota ceded; for living within assigned boundaries (a reservation); and for relinquishing rights to their vast hunting territory which, in turn, made Dakota people dependent on other means to survive: money.
The previous sentence is circular, akin to so many aspects of history.
As you may have guessed by now, the money promised in the turbid treaties did not make it into the hands of Dakota people.
In addition, local government traders would not offer credit to “Indians” to purchase food or goods.
Without money, store credit, or rights to hunt beyond their ten-mile tract of land, Dakota people began to starve.
The Dakota people were starving.
The Dakota people starved.
In the preceding sentence, the word “starved” does not need italics for emphasis.
One should read “The Dakota people starved” as a straightforward and plainly stated fact.
As a result—and without other options but to continue to starve—Dakota people retaliated.
Dakota warriors organized, struck out, and killed settlers and traders.
This revolt is called the Sioux Uprising.
Eventually, the US Cavalry came to Mnisota to confront the Uprising.
More than one thousand Dakota people were sent to prison.
As already mentioned, thirty-eight Dakota men were subsequently hanged.
After the hanging, those one thousand Dakota prisoners were released.
However, as further consequence, what remained of Dakota territory in Mnisota was dissolved (stolen).
The Dakota people had no land to return to.
This means they were exiled.
Homeless, the Dakota people of Mnisota were relocated (forced) onto reservations in South Dakota and Nebraska.
Now, every year, a group called the Dakota 38 + 2 Riders conduct a memorial horse ride from Lower Brule, South Dakota, to Mankato, Mnisota.
The Memorial Riders travel 325 miles on horseback for eighteen days, sometimes through sub-zero blizzards.
They conclude their journey on December 26, the day of the hanging.
Memorials help focus our memory on particular people or events.
Often, memorials come in the forms of plaques, statues, or gravestones.
The memorial for the Dakota 38 is not an object inscribed with words, but an act.
Yet, I started this piece because I was interested in writing about grasses.
So, there is one other event to include, although it’s not in chronological order and we must backtrack a little.
When the Dakota people were starving, as you may remember, government traders would not extend store credit to “Indians.”
One trader named Andrew Myrick is famous for his refusal to provide credit to Dakota people by saying, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.”
There are variations of Myrick’s words, but they are all something to that effect.
When settlers and traders were killed during the Sioux Uprising, one of the first to be executed by the Dakota was Andrew Myrick.
When Myrick’s body was found,
his mouth was stuffed with grass.
I am inclined to call this act by the Dakota warriors a poem.
There’s irony in their poem.
There was no text.
“Real” poems do not “really” require words.
I have italicized the previous sentence to indicate inner dialogue, a revealing moment.
But, on second thought, the words “Let them eat grass” click the gears of the poem into place.
So, we could also say, language and word choice are crucial to the poem’s work.
Things are circling back again.
Sometimes, when in a circle, if I wish to exit, I must leap.
And let the body swing.
From the platform.
Out
to the grasses.
“In my study, I noticed something interesting about the etymology of “genre” and “gender.” Both words come from the Latin word “genus,” translating to “race.” It was an enlightening discovery to learn that “race,” “gender,” “genre,” and even “class” all come from the same word in Latin, thereby having the same function.”
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/117/387112/noise-is-the-nigga-of-sound/
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/138/553676/who-haunts/
https://www.e-flux.com/notes/575616/how-to-haunt-oppenheimer-and-black-hanford?utm_campaign=later-linkinbio-e_flux&utm_content=later-39391406&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkin.bio