Because of this history of suppression and punishment, my great grandmother spoke only English to me with the best of intentions. She as well as my parents and grandparents placed great value on education, and they wanted to spare me the punishment in the school principal’s office for speaking Laguna. They knew from experience that non-Indian people often viewed a native speaker in a less positive light even if the native speaker also spoke English perfectly. So I never learned to speak Laguna with my classmates, though I remember baby talk in the Laguna language and a number of other Laguna words and phrases.
Fortunately, my Grandpa Hank, Aunt Alice, and Aunt Susie never stopped telling my sisters and me all kinds of stories from their youth, including the humma-hah stories and other stories about the old days. They told the stories mostly in English, but certain parts, important statements and the songs, were always in the Laguna language. So from the time I was five years old, the stories were my link, my lifeline with the Laguna language and culture. The English that they spoke was a particular form of English—it was their second language, but they’d studied it and they’d choose just the English words and phrases to tell the story as it should be told. They were careful to make the English of their storytelling express the true feeling and the heart of the old story.
Grandpa Hank used to tell me the old stories he’d heard as a child. I remember a wonderful story he told me when I was eleven or twelve and making lunch for him while Grandma Lillie was away. The story he remembered was about a lunch that a young hunter from Laguna took along with him when he went hunting. Grandpa didn’t say his name was Estoyehmuut, Arrow Boy, but I knew it was him because the young hunter appears in many humma-hah stories. Estoyehmuut took along a small cloth sack with his lunch as he hunted rabbits and deer to bring home. Around lunchtime, the young hunter found a nice big cottonwood near a water hole and climbed up the tree to a strong branch where he ate his lunch. No matter how many tamales, or how many tortillas, or how much venison jerky he ate, there was always more food when he reached into the lunch sack. The cloth sack belongs to the magical realm of old Spider Woman in which small spaces actually contain large expanses of space within them and an endless supply of food! How wonderful!
When I put together Storyteller in the early months of 1978, I wanted to acknowledge the continuity of storytelling and the storytellers “from time immemorial,” as Aunt Susie used to say. I wanted to pay tribute to the stories and storytellers of my early life. So I included stories I remembered hearing from Aunt Alice Marmon Little and Aunt Susie Reyes Marmon alongside the short stories that came from my imagination so the reader might get a sense of the influences that the storytellers had on my writing as it developed over the years. I wanted readers to have a feeling of the landscape and the context of the Pueblo villages where the stories take place, so I included photographs, most of them taken by my father, Lee H. Marmon, a photographer in the Laguna-Acoma area for more than sixty years.
I wanted readers to have a sense of the family I came from, so I included family snapshots, too. The shape of Storyteller was unusual because I wanted to give plenty of space to the poems I’d written on paper turned sideways for increased width. I experimented with using space on the page, with indentations and various line spacings to convey time and distance and the feeling of the story as it was told aloud. I was interested in giving the words of the poems plenty of space, which the horizontally oriented book provided. That was the format of Storyteller for thirty years, from 1981 to 2011.
While the overall size of this new edition of Storyteller is identical to the old edition, 9 inches by 7 inches, the new layout has a vertical orientation. Thus the page width is slightly reduced, but there is still enough space to give the “wide poems” the space they need. I decided to replace a few of the horizontally oriented photographs because I thought they’d have to be cropped too much or printed too small. I took the opportunity to add some old family snapshots that I recently found; among them is a photograph of Aunt Alice Marmon Little, who told me so many humma-hah stories.
Dawaa’eh—it is a good thing to have Storyteller back in print. Old stories and new stories are essential: They tell us who we are, and they enable us to survive. We thank all the ancestors, and we thank all those people who keep on telling stories generation after generation, because if you don’t have the stories, you don’t have anything.
STORYTELLER
There is a tall Hopi basket with a single figure
woven into it which might be a Grasshopper or
a Hummingbird Man. Inside the basket are hundreds
of photographs taken since the 1890’s around Laguna.
My grandpa Hank first had a camera when he returned
from Indian School, and years later, my father learned
photography in the Army.
Photographs have always had special significance
with the people of my family and the people at Laguna.
A photograph is serious business and many people
still do not trust just anyone to take their picture.
It wasn’t until I began this book
that I realized that the photographs in the Hopi basket
have a special relationship to the stories as I remember them.
The photographs are here because they are part of many of the stories
and because many of the stories can be traced in the photographs.
Robert G. Marmon with Marie Anaya Marmon, my great-grandparents, holding my grandpa Hank. He was named Henry Anaya Marmon, but years later changed his middle name to the initial “C.” because at school the kids had teased him for the way his initials spelled out H.A.M.
I always called her Aunt Susie
because she was my father’s aunt
and that’s what he called her.
She was married to Walter K. Marmon,
my grandpa Hank’s brother.
Her family was the Reyes family from Paguate
the village north of Old Laguna.
Around 1896
when she was a young woman
she had been sent away to Carlisle Indian School
in Pennsylvania.
After she finished at the Indian School
she attended Dickinson College in Carlisle.
When she returned to Laguna
she continued her studies
particularly of history
even as she raised her family
and helped Uncle Walter run their small cattle ranch.
In the 1920’s she taught school
in a one-room building at Old Laguna
where my father remembers he misbehaved
while Aunt Susie had her back turned.
From the time that I can remember her
she worked on her kitchen table
with her books and papers spread over the oil cloth.
She wrote beautiful long hand script
but her eyesight was not good
and so she wrote very slowly.
She was already in her mid-sixties
when I discovered that she would listen to me
to all my questions and speculations.
I was only seven or eight years old then
but I remember she would put down her fountain pen
and lift her glasses to wipe her eyes with her handkerchief
before she spoke.
It seems extraordinary now
that she took time from her studies and writing
to answer my questions
and to tell me all that she knew on a subject,
but she did.
She had come to believe very much in books
and in schooling.
She was of a generation,
the last generation here at Laguna,
that passed down an entire culture
by word of mouth
an entire history
an entire vision of the world
which depended upon memory
and r
etelling by subsequent generations.
She must have realized
that the atmosphere and conditions
which had maintained this oral tradition in Laguna culture
had been irrevocably altered by the European intrusion—
principally by the practice of taking the children
away from Laguna to Indian schools,
taking the children away from the tellers who had
in all past generations
told the children
an entire culture, an entire identity of a people.
When I was a little girl Aunt Susie spent a good deal of time at the Marmon Ranch, south of Laguna. At branding time in the summer we used to visit Aunt Susie and Uncle Walter, and my father would take pictures of the cattle they rounded up. Aunt Susie used to cook all morning long for the big meal at noontime.
And yet her writing went painfully slow
because of her failing eyesight
and because of her considerable family duties.
What she is leaving with us—
the stories and remembered accounts—
is primarily what she was able to tell
and what we are able to remember.
As with any generation
the oral tradition depends upon each person
listening and remembering a portion
and it is together—
all of us remembering what we have heard together—
that creates the whole story
the long story of the people.
I remember only a small part.
But this is what I remember.
This is the way Aunt Susie told the story.
She had certain phrases, certain distinctive words
she used in her telling.
I write when I still hear
her voice as she tells the story.
People are sometimes surprised
at her vocabulary, but she was
a brilliant woman, a scholar
of her own making
who cherished the Laguna stories
all her life.
This is the way I remember
she told this one story
about the little girl who ran away.
The scene is laid partly in old Acoma, and Laguna.
Waithea was a little girl living in Acoma and
one day she said
“Mother, I would like to have
some yashtoah to eat.”
“Yashtoah” is the hardened crust on corn meal mush
that curls up.
The very name “yashtoah” means
it’s sort of curled-up, you know, dried,
just as mush dries on top.
She said
“I would like to have some yashtoah,”
and her mother said
“My dear little girl,
I can’t make you any yashtoah
because we haven’t any wood,
but if you will go down off the mesa
down below
and pick up some pieces of wood
bring them home
and I will make you some yashtoah.”
So Waithea was glad and ran down the precipitous cliff
of Acoma mesa.
Down below
just as her mother had told her
there were pieces of wood,
some curled, some crooked in shape,
that she was to pick up and take home.
She found just such wood as these.
She went home
and she had them
in a little wicker basket-like bag.
First she called her mother
as she got home.
She said
“Nayah, deeni!
mother, upstairs!”
The pueblo people always called “upstairs”
because long ago their homes were two, three stories high
and that was their entrance
from the top.
She said
“Deeni!
UPSTAIRS!”
and her mother came.
The little girl said
“I have brought the wood
you wanted me to bring.”
And she opened
her little wicker basket
and laid them out
and here they were snakes
instead of the crooked sticks of wood.
And her mother says
“Oh my dear child,
you have brought snakes instead!”
She says
“Go take them back and put them back
just where you got them.”
And the little girl
ran down the mesa again
down below in the flats
and she put those sticks back
just where she got them.
They were snakes instead
and she was very much hurt about this
and so she said
“I’m not going home.
I’m going to Kawaik,
the beautiful lake place, Kawaik
and drown myself
in that lake, bun’yah’nah.
That means the “west lake.”
I’ll go there and drown myself.”
So she started off,
and as she came by the Enchanted Mesa
near Acoma
she met an old man very aged
and he saw her running and he says
“My dear child,
where are you going?”
She says
“I’m going to Kawaik
and jump into the lake there.”
“Why?”
“Well, because,”
she says
“my mother didn’t want to make any yashtoah
for me.”
The old man said “Oh no!
You must not go my child.
Come with me
and I will take you home.”
He tried to catch her
but she was very light
and skipped along.
And everytime he would try
to grab her
she would skip faster
away from him.
So he was coming home with some wood
on his back,
strapped to his back
and tied with yucca thongs.
That’s the way they did
in those days, with a strap
across their forehead.
And so he just took that strap
and let the wood drop.
He went as fast as he could
up the cliff
to the little girl’s home.
When he got to the place
where she lived
he called to her mother
“Deeni!”
“Come on up!”
And he says
“I can’t.
I just came to bring you a message.
Your little daughter is running away,
she’s going to Kawaik to drown herself
in the lake there.”
“Oh my dear little girl!”
the mother said.
So she busied herself around
and made the yashtoah for her
which she liked so much.
Corn mush curled at the top.
She must have found enough wood
to boil the corn meal
to make the “yashtoah”
And while the mush was cooling off
she got the little girl’s clothing
she got her little manta dress,
you know,
and all her other garments,
her little buckskin moccasins that she had
and put them in a bundle too,
probably a yucca bag,
and started down as fast as she could on the east side of Acoma.
There used to be a trail there, you know, it is gone now, but
it was accessible in those days
.
And she followed
and she saw her way at a distance,
saw the daughter way at a distance.
She kept calling
“Stsamaku! My daughter! Come back!
I’ve got your yashtoah for you.”
But the girl would not turn
she kept on ahead and she cried
“My mother, my mother.
She didn’t want me to have any yashtoah
so now I’m going to Kawaik
and drown myself.”
Her mother heard her cry
and says
“My little daughter
come back here!”
No, she kept a distance away from her
and they came nearer and nearer
to the lake that was here.
And she could see her daughter now
very plain.
“Come back my daughter!
I have your yashtoah!”
And no
she kept on
and finally she reached the lake
and she stood on the edge.
She had carried a little feather
which is traditional.
In death they put this feather
on the dead in the hair.
She carried a feather
the little girl did
and she tied it in her hair
with a little piece of string
right on top of her head
she put the feather.
Just as her mother was about
to reach her
she jumped
into the lake.
The little feather was whirling
around and around in the depths below.
Of course the mother was very sad.
She went, grieved back to Acoma
and climbed her mesa home.
And the little clothing,
the little moccasins
that she’s brought
and the yashtoah,
she stood on the edge
of the high mesa
and scattered them out.
She scattered them to the east
to the west
to the north and to the south—
in all directions—
and here every one of the little clothing—
the little manta dresses and shawls