I was talking with a Navajo singer
in Northern Arizona
--and this was years ago--
I was traveling through
the area with my friend
and we were looking for permission
so we went to his Hogan
and we brought groceries
and sacks of flour
and he invited us in
and we sat and talked for a while,
translating through
his adult grandson,
and the singer asked
if I had any questions,
I could ask anything I wanted,
and I said, "How did your
people come to be in this place?
How did the Dine' arrive
in Northern Arizona?"
And he said, "We came from the ground."
And I knew this story
from Navajo cosmology,
that the people emerged from underground
and that's how they
arrived in this desert.
And so I pressed him on it and he said,
"No, there was no migration,
we didn't arrive from somewhere else,
we came from the ground."
And I think I was being
tone-deaf at this point
but I was trying to get to another point,
I was saying, "Well the Dine' language,
your language is here in Arizona
and it's also in the Arctic,
in the Yukon Territory,
in Alaska and it's also in Siberia."
So there's this arc out
of Asia into the Americas
and he said, "No,
we came from the ground."
And I looked down at the
red Moenkopi hardpack
underneath his Hogan and I thought,
"They came from the ground, of course."
This is part of so many of the stories
that come out of North America,
out of the native American tradition
of going from one world to the next,
arriving in a new world.
For the Navajo, there are
the monster Slayer stories
where two twins are sent out
to kill the monsters
that occupied the world
and make it safe for people.
For the Tlingit and Haida
of the far Northwest coast,
the first people arrived in a clam shell
that was sealed, closed and it washed up
on a beach and trickster
God Raven showed up
and opened up the clam shell
and let the first people out.
For the Hopi, the arrival
into this world was a,
the last world was flooding
and they crawled through a hole
which turned out to be
a hole in the ground
into this world and the water rose
and sent them up to here.
There are so many stories about
arrival and transformation
that I think it must've been a big thing
getting here threading
the eye of a needle.
A journey was involved, a migration,
not from some other land or continent,
but from the ground, from another world,
which to me means a long, long time ago,
an arrival that people
are still talking about
and it was probably
different for everyone.
 
