It’s too cold today — skies gray and heavy with the threat of thunderstorms, currently only a soft, soaking rain — but by week’s end, we’ll begin planting.
It’s an act of faith if ever there was one.
It has been five years since we’ve had any real crop yield here; for the last three, none at all. You cannot plant what you cannot water, and of water there has been none.
We have had two seasons of better precipitation: decent snows, more rain than we are used to having in spring, at least in the last couple of decades. The snows, though, are unlikely to help us this year after all. The colonial world cannot be trusted at the best of times, and these are far from that; pandemic distancing measures have forced the Pueblo to close off all entry to anyone from outside, with roadblocks, locked heavy metal crossgates, and eight-foot high piles of earth set up to enforce it.
It’s good, and much more than necessary, but it has ramifications for the people themselves. Bringing down the water will be mostly, if not entirely, impossible this year, which means no irrigation. No water means no planting, and no harvest. and so I say that planting this year is an act of faith, because bringing anything to fruition will require changes to current circumstances that we know are not going to happen . . . or the installation of a new well.
Planting, irrigation, cultivation, harvest: When most people say that the earth sustains us, this is what they have in mind — attenuated, indirect, slightly metaphorical.
In this place, to say that the earth sustains us is to mean it very literally indeed.
Yes, the earth midwifes our crops to fruition, allows the medicinal plants to grow and the tress to breathe life into our world. But in this place, the earth does so much more directly, too: It houses, it cooks, it feeds, it holds water for drinking. One thing our peoples tend to hold in common is our unbreakable bond with the earth, but here, it manifests more literally than for most.
We know firsthand the gifts of earth as shelter; our house, like the one Wings grew up in, is made of adobe. It’s traditional here, and soon it will be mudding season, too: repairing cracks and patching eroded spots and shoring up weathered walls, then resurfacing in preparation for the annual feast just after summer’s formal end, one that may well be kept entirely private this year. Still, the work will proceed apace, for these are people’s homes, shelter, not merely lodging but living, day and night and in every season and weather.
But in this place the earth feeds and waters the body, and the spirit, too. The Pueblo’s most famed artistic form is its micaceous pottery, made from a local red-gold clay short through with mica, the same clay that formed its walls and shimmered so brightly in the sunlight that it misled invading armies to believe they had found riches.
They had found riches, if only they had understood it: not the short-lived wealth of so-called [and entirely imaginary] Cities of Gold, but the real gift of a life linked to the earth, a familial relationship of true abundance.
But the clay that shimmers and shines so brilliantly in the sunlight also makes long-lasting cook- and storage- and tableware, incredible pots and bowls and plates and ollas with elegant and graceful lines and no need of extraneous adornment. Pottery and clay artists here have refined their work to produce everything from flatly functional pieces to glowing works of high art worth many thousands of dollars on the open market.
And sometimes, they find their most suitable setting with their own relations: set into an open window in the old clay walls, there to catch the glancing touch of the sun, the red and the gold and the silvery mica still visible beneath the rich black color of its delicately lipped sides. This was the largest pot we ever sold, a true masterwork, one that embodied all of the culture’s and symbolic and practical links to the earth in the most beautiful of ways.
It sold to fellow Indigenous people.
And that is perhaps most fitting of all: a reminder of our shared links to each other, to our traditions, to this land, to earth and sky and cosmic powers. The earth sustains us, feeds and shelters us body and spirit . . . a truth perhaps clearer now than ever.
~ Aji
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