Tomorrow is the first day of the Feast of San Geronimo, the Pueblo’s largest and most significant [public] celebration. It is, now, a hybrid festival, one that nominally honors the Catholic Saint Jerome while observing traditions far older, held on the last two days of September every year.
At this season, in this place, it serves as a line of demarcation on multiple levels: of summer’s end; of autumn’s appearance; of winter’s arrival not far off; of celebration of harvest and abundance and reminder of the duty to gather and put up resources for the long cold months ahead. There are other qualities that give these days form and shape and substance, too, but not all are for public consumption.
To outsiders, it’s a time to mostly to watch the dances; to eat, if invited into a home to do so; to consume, in a cross-cultural sense. The dances are, of course, the highlight of the celebration, and none more so than those that feature the pole climbers: men dressed traditionally who scale the pole shown above, erected annually just for this purpose, and then perform a leaping, flying dismount from the top. It’s a feat of outstanding athleticism and agility, one that requires practice, skill, a flawless sense of timing, and no small amount of courage.
On October first, when the feating is over for another year and the people get back to the business of autumn, the pole remains up for a time. There, it serves as a marker, catching light and casting shadow, drawing the eye toward the plaza at the community’s center, and thence pulling it inexorably beyond to the sacred peaks. For those who climb it — and the jump off it — it is a chance to touch the sky, a way to trip the light and line between worlds. For those watching below, earthbound, it brings light and shadow down to earth, inscribing upon its soil a map of sorts, tracing a path that we cannot quite walk, yet still may follow.
As autumn spirals among the swirling leaves ineluctably toward winter, there comes a point when the pole must come down, and the men of the village hew through its solid trunk a few inches above the earth, then haul it away.
What remains yet casts a shadow, now shortened like the winter’s light itself: a modest line, one without much reach, yet nevertheless solid and substantial. It will stand, short and sturdy and strong, throughout the early weeks of winter, a reminder that the time of feasting was not so long ago, and will come again soon, even if the days now grow cold and the air thin.
It seems to me, as an outsider, a symbol of another sort, too: one of survival in the face of the onslaught — not merely of snow and ice and freezing winds of the coming season, but of the storms inflicted by an invasive world outside the village walls that would long since have chilled the people’s culture into dormancy and destruction, had it been able.
But the people have their own ways, and however much they have chosen to adapt, to survive the onslaught of the last half-millennium and more, by selectively incorporating traditions from outside their own, their identity remains as solid as the stump, rooted firmly in the earth of this place.
There’s no small amount of irony in that, particularly in relation to its association with San Geronimo, Saint Jerome. I’ve written about him here before, on a couple of occasions, and his very existence in the names and words of this place are a never-ending source of irony. As I noted a month ago today:
Most people probably don’t really grasp the particular significance of Saint Jerome, nor of the underlying reason that Spanish priests would have chosen him as the patron saint for this village. Jerome, or, as the Spanish called him, San Geronimo, was the patron saint of librarians, encyclopedists, and, perhaps most significantly, translators.
It didn’t help the Spanish much. Like another Native icon upon whom the same name was bestowed by colonizers, the language here has remained steadfastly impervious to all real attempts at compilation and translation. More than a half-millennium later, it is still defiantly unwritten, even in the face of new attempts at linguistic incursion by new[er] evangelists bent on conversion of multiple kinds, including those who wish to impose their own religious and cultural practices from without, and those who wish to steal those of the people for themselves.
Words hold power; our peoples all across this continent have always known this. Here, those words are not for anyone but the people themselves.
By December, the Quiet Season, the light is brittle and the leaves are off the trees, yet the stump remains, casting its short strong shadow on the earth, its presence as solid as the words of the people.
In the cold season, as the year winds down toward the holidays brought by the same soldiers and priests who tried to bring new words and new gods, the stump’s shadow is a reminder that much older ways survive and thrive. As I wrote last month (and earlier), of the man of another Native people who was given the name of Saint Jerome, what appears to the outside world as adoption is often only adaptation, a survival mechanism, the brokerage of an internal existential peace that grants the old ways the space to continue to live:
It is ironic to me that Mexican soldiers in the service of the Spanish should have called upon Saint Jerome for deliverance from the Chiricahua leader whose defenses bedeviled them so. It’s how Goyathlay, better known to the rest of the world as Geronimo, perhaps the most feared of all Native leaders, was given the Catholic saint’s own name. As I wrote here last year:
Goyathlay and his warriors were famous among both Spanish (Mexican) and U.S. soldiers for their courage, daring, and strategic aggression. Word of his exploits traveled fast and far, as did word of his purported supernatural powers. As an enemy, he was respected, but also feared outright. During clashes in Mexico, where he and his warriors raided and harried the Mexican forces mercilessly, word of his arrival — or even of the possibility that he might be in the area — instilled such fear into the soldiers’ hearts that they invoked the name of their patron saint, Jerome — in Spanish, Geronimo (pronounced Hay-ROE-nee-moe, but with short, sharp vowels, unlike those found in English). It became a cry of terror, so the story goes, and it stuck: The Spanish evermore thought of him as Geronimo; the U.S. soldiers picked up the name, but, as was their wont, predictably mispronounced it Jer-AH-nih-moe; and Goyathlay himself no doubt both laughed and yawned at the thought that he was capable of striking such terror into the hearts of the invaders that they would accidentally reward him with the name of their patron saint. Today, it’s appropriated for everything from military actions to charging cries in children’s games.
Funny, that. An Apache medicine man turned fierce warrior, the last holdout, the one who harried colonizers from the lowliest settler all the way up to the American president himself and not a few from the imposed border to the south, a man whose real name referred to yawning, would eventually acquire the name of a bibliophilic monk from the other side of the world and, in a subversion of the entire colonial process, convert a bookish name based on words into a fearsome war cry, a symbol of military power and strategy and courage in battle, a prayer for salvation and relief from the self-defense of the oppressed.
And it is this dynamic that the pole now represents, at least in part, however unconsciously or unintentionally. Whether at its full height, or cut into a short solid stump, it is a symbol of survival (and for those who climb it, survival in very real, tangible terms) of the old ways, of identity. Yes, there is a veneer of other traditions, outside traditions, overlaying the celebration like a shadow over the earth. But pole, like the feast itself, casts its own shadow: one that precedes and supersedes outside influence; one that, whether drawn up to full height or cut down to a mere foot, is a visual representation of the substance that underlies it.
The stump itself will be removed eventually, of course. At that point, there will be no visible shadow in that place any longer, no line, no map.
It doesn’t matter. Like the old tongue, its existence resists translation. It need not be visible, describable, articulable by outsiders. Invisible and untouchable, it, like the language, exists in the spirit of the people themselves. This week may see a feast of form and shadow, but the spirit is always there.
~ Aji
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