N. Scott Momaday:
There is a place, a round, trampled patch of the red earth near Carnegie, Oklahoma, where the Kiowa Gourd Dances were held in the early years of the century. When my father was six or eight year old, my grandfather, who was a member of the Tian-paye, or Gourd Dance Society, took him there. In one of the intervals of the dance there was a giveaway, an ancient Plains tradition of giving gifts as a public expression of honor and esteem.
My grandfather’s name was called, and he let go of my father’s hand and strode out upon the dance ground. Then a boy about my father’s age led a black hunting horse, prancing and blowing, into the circle and placed the reins in my grandfather’s hands, still warm with my father’s touch. The great muscles of the horse rippled in light, and bright ribbons were fixed in its mane and tail. My father watched in wonder and delight, his heart bursting with excitement and pride. And when he told me of that moment, as he did a number of times because I craved to hear it, I could see it as vividly as if I had been there. The brilliant image of that moment remained in my father’s mind all his life and it remains in mine. It is a thing that related him and relates me to the sacred earth.
This afternoon is older than the giving of gifts
And the rhythmic scraping of the red earth.
My father’s father’s name is called,
And the gift horse stutters out, whole,
And the whole horizon in its eyes.
In the giveaway is beaded
The blood memories of fathers and sons.
Oh, there is nothing like this afternoon
In all the miles and years around,
And I am not here,
But, Grandfather, Father, I am here.
To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and its shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time, that indeed confounds time and space. When I stand on the edge of Monument Valley and behold the great red and blue and purple monoliths floating away in the distance, I have the certain sense that I see beyond time. There the earth lies in eternity.
Sacred ground is in some way earned. It is consecrated, made holy with offerings – song and ceremony, joy and sorrow, the dedication of the mind and heart, offerings of life and death. The words “sacred” and “sacrifice” are related.
And acts of sacrifice make sacred the earth. Language and the sacred are indivisible. The earth and all its appearances and expressions exist in names and stories and prayers and spells. North American place names are a sacred music: Medicine Wheel, Bear Butte, Bobaquiveri, Chaco, Sleeping Ute, Lukachukai, Wounded Knee.
Mircea Eliade has said that the sacred, in all times, is “the revelation of the real, an encounter with that which saves us by giving meaning to our existence.” Yes, yes, I want to say, here is a brilliant equation of the sacred with reality, salvation and meaning. But there is more, for the sacred finally transcends definition. The mind does not comprehend it; it is at last to be recognized and acknowledged in the heart and soul. Those who seek to study or understand the sacred in academic terms are misled. The sacred is not a discipline. It is a dimension beyond the ordinary and beyond the mechanics of analysis. For those who would come to the sacred, to sacred ground, it is a kind of mystical experience, a deep and singular encounter.
Sacred grounds is ground that has been invested with belief. Belief, at its root, exists independent of meaning. That is, its expression and object may escape what we can perceive as definable meaning. The intrinsic power of sacred ground is often ineffable and abstract. I behold a particular sacred place, the great gallery of rock paintings at Barrier Canyon, Utah, for example. There on the massive wall are large, sharply defined works of art, anthropomorphic figures in procession. They image ceremony in its ultimate expression: humans, or humanlike gods, engaged in the drama of being. They perform the verb “to be.” They reflect the human condition; they signify humanity in all places at all times. They proceed from the depths of origin, from a genesis nearly beyond the reach of imagination.
The figures in the eternal procession at Barrier Canyon are related to us in story. We do not know the story, but we see its enactment on the face of the earth, that it reaches from the beginning of time to the present to a destiny beyond time. We do not know what the story means, but more importantly we know that it means, and that we are deeply involved in its meaning. The sacred is profoundly mysterious, and our belief in it is no less profound.
In Native American oral tradition the reverence which humans have for the earth is a story told many times in many places in many languages. Speaking of aged men and women of the northern plains, Luther Standing Bear said this:
It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. The birds that flew in the air came to rest upon the earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing.
A prayer from the Night Chant of the Navajo begins with homage to Tsegi! place of origin, “place among the rocks.” It would be impossible to imagine an invocation of greater moment or power, or a word or concept more elemental than the prayer of the night chant:
House made of dawn,
House made of evening light,
House made of dark cloud,
House made of male rain,
House made of dark mist,
House made of female rain,
House made of pollen,
House made of grasshoppers,
Dark Cloud is at the door.
The trail out of it is dark cloud.
The zigzag lightning stands high upon it.
But where there is the sacred there is also sacrilege, the theft of the sacred. To steal the sacred is to rob us of our very selves, our reason for being, indeed our being itself. And sacrilege is a sin of which we are capable. Just look around you.
When I was a small boy there was a box of bones in the barn of my Kiowa homestead on Rainy Mountain Creek, where I loved to go and visit my grandmother. They were the bones of a horse, a legendary hunter, a horse of exceptional speed and endurance. The horse belonged to my grandfather, who owned many horses, and who died before I was born, just before I was born. The bones were for me a tangible link to my heritage. They were sacred. Their very existence made of the barn a singular place, a sacred shrine. Then one day I went there and the box of bones was gone. They had been stolen. Even as a child I knew an unnameable sadness, a sense of loss that would from that moment adhere to my heart.
The sacred places of North America and of Central America and South America and indeed the world… are threatened even as the sacred earth is threatened. In my generation we have taken steps – small, tentative steps – to preserve forests and rivers and animals. We must also, and above all, take steps to preserve the spiritual centers of our earth, those places that are invested with the dreams of our ancestors and the well-being of our children. It is good for us, too, to touch the earth. We, and our children, need the chance to walk upon the sacred earth, this final abiding place of all that lives. We must preserve our sacred places in order to know our place in time, our reach to eternity. Aho.