- 7 - Indians and the Old Age

  In traditional Cherokee cosmology there is a pervasive symbolic association between ceremonial and domestic fire and the aged. According to W. Gilbert Grandmother Fire is the old woman out gathering wood. Since old age and the adjective old or ancient denotes wisdom, ritual power, and imposes respect, traditional Cherokees address fire, in ritual context, as Ancient White or Ancient Red, Grandfather or Grandmother. Fire is also closely associated with the sun. Thus both fire and the sun, two of the most powerful forces in Cherokee cosmology are regarded as grandparents. In Cherokee color symbolism, red is associated with victory and success; conversely, white reflects old age, wisdom, purity and peace. The Cherokee beloved men, observed J. Adair, are men resembling holy fire. Fire's white and red attributes also reflected the ancient dual political organization of the beloved men in the White and Red hierarchies. Like the elderly, fire ought to be treated with respect. Knowledge of the association of specific illnesses with a lack of respect toward fire is also widespread among today's older Eastern Cherokees. The symbolic association between fire and the aged, both the living ones and the tribal ancestors, has been revitalized by the Celebration of Togetherness between the Eastern and Western Cherokees. The sun and the moon played an important role in traditional Cherokee social, economic, and ceremonial life. The native term for both sun and moon is nunda, which conveys the idea of luminary. The sun/moon was often regarded as an important intermediary sent to help mankind. As mythical grandparents, the sun/moon and fire are the only spirits to which prayers, in the true meaning of the term, are offered. In the old days, the Cherokees called the sun their grandmother and appealed to her in various rites for love attraction and for the cure of certain diseases. The moon, the sun's incestuous elder brother, was referred to as maternal grandfather. According to Gilbert the moon is the especial protector of ball players, just as the fire is of the hunter. Like the beloved men and women of the tribe, whose roles were those of "apportioners" of economic goods and medico-religious services, the sun/moon is ritually called unehlanuhi, meaning "he has apportioned", referring to the time dividing role of the sun, or "the provider". The control women had over much of the agricultural activities was reflected in the symbolic association of corn with the female gender and, more specifically, with "old woman", by which appellative corn was also known to the Cherokees. The mythical ancestor of corn was Selu (lit. corn), the wife of Kanati, the Lucky Hunter. Directly connected with the corn/grandmother complex is another symbolic association between the mortar used to grind corn and old woman ; the mortar is symbolic of abundance and economic well-being and was used by the leading medicine man as a seat or a stool for his ritual paraphernalia, placed upside down in the center of the room where dances were held during winter months. A key element of Eastern Cherokee winter ceremonials that used an overturned mortar and/or ceremonial fire as its center was the so called Booger Dance, interpreted as a ritual dramatization of Cherokee-white relations. Recently R. Fogelson and associates have suggested an alternative explanation to Speck and Broom's classic interpretation of the Booger Dance. It acts out a basic tension between old men and young men in which each fears and desires the power of the other, yet neither can exist alone. In such a context, the temporary disruption of the traditional harmonious order caused by the intrusion and rowdy behavior of the boogers serves to emphasize the need to return to normality and to control anti-social forces. Aboriginal Cherokee mythology and ceremonialism present a number of symbolic and ritual associations between the aged and certain animals. Among the birds, the eagle was considered sacred and associated with the most wise beloved man, the Uku, or town chief. While the eagle was symbolic of victory, peace, and the White Chief, the raven was unmistakably associated with the War Chief, whose native title means precisely The Raven. This bird is also associated with witches and conjuring. Older Eastern Cherokee openly admit that witches are generally old. Like the raven, the owl is also associated with old people and, more specifically, with witches, but this is not always the case. In fact, the ancient fire can also take on the appearance of an owl in order to detect the presence of witches and defend the people from their attacks. There seems to be an overall positive connection between the animal world and the aged. This positive relationship is often reflected in tribal mythology wherein animals are often featured as helpers, assistants, and even avengers for the aged.

  The fire god is perhaps the oldest image of a Mexican god; its Aztec name is Huehueteotl, meaning "the old one", and is represented as a toothless, decrepit, bearded old man by the Olmecs, Zapotecs, Teotihuacans and Aztecs. He is the god of the center related to the cardinal directions and the Lord of the Year. His female counterpart is Chantico, an aspect of the great goddess Coyolxauhqui, who is connected with the moon, agriculture and war. Very important in the North American mythology and ritual is Grandmother Spider Woman; related to the underworld, fire, the center, war, she often is the Lady of the animals and seeds. Spider Woman is sometimes also a Creator and a trickster; she leads mankind through the underground worlds to this earth and is associated to ants in Southwestern mythology. In the Southeast the image of a spider is connected with fire, sun, the cross symbol of the center and the four directions in many gorgets of the Southern Cult. I cannot demonstrate that this very ancient divine figure developed into a female Creator in North America and a male fire god in Mexico, but the hypothesis is fascinating. In Northern Mexico Grandfather Sun or Fire is worshipped by the Tarahumara, Huicholes, Cora and Huaxtecs. The supreme Mayan god was Itzamną; cross-eyed, toothless and decrepit, he was the god of the most important day of the sacred calendar, Ahau, the god of the Mayan ruling class, protector of medicine and inventor of the writing, his solar aspect was God G, lord of the sacred number four. Selected old women danced wearing special dresses at his feast. The association between the ideas of heat, esoteric knowledge and old age is developed not only at a mythic level but it is also important in today's Mayan religion and society. The opposition "warm-cold" is fundamental in Maya Tzotzil universe. Life is a journey through various stages of warmth from birth to death. An elder, a shaman and a veteran in the system of the political-religious charges reaches the warmest stage of all. Meaningful oppositions between "old-young" and "male-female", associated with "warm-cold", show everybody's position within this very patriarchal hierarchical culture, where the more powerful, the warmest, are the old men and the least powerful, the coldest, are the young women. Among the Tewa, in New Mexico, there is a similar relationship between warmth and religious-political charges. The animal aspect of the lords of the Mayan villages, their nagual, shows old age's somber side: witchcraft. On one hand, shaman ambiguity makes initiates respected, feared and looked for, for example Midewiwin medicine men and women; on the other hand, old people envy the young ones and try to steal their life span by means of their dark powers.

  Old age may be considered as a "social disease", a consequence of human domestication. Animals usually do not live long enough to show old age decadence and only when they are tame, they are permitted to become old. Tameness, that is socialized and "civilized" life, therefore, allows old age to show itself as well as chronic - degenerative or long brewing diseases. Usually pathologies spread especially in an urban context and reduced child mortality rate contributed to population increase, often accompanied by too high birth rates. This process frequently provoked a further diminution of average life hope, that is people are not likely to become old where development of productive forces has not occurred historically. As to North America average mortality birth rate was usually high, but, once overcome this risky age, one might reasonably hope to live a long life, if traumatic incidents were excluded. Since old age was the evidence of one's own experience and ability to avoid death, the elders were feared and respected for their spiritual powers, even if skeletal remains, mummies, myths and pictorial representations depict a picture of Indian old age not precisely idyllic from our modern point of view. However, the Anasazi inhabitants of the American Southwest reached the average age of forty, more or less the same as Europeans at the same period and today's average for many Third and Fourth World people. Diet was important: a diet based especially on cereals was reflected in adult life on the skeleton and blood apparatus and it was especially influential on dental care. Teeth were usually consumed also by the habit of softening hides in the Plains and among the Inuit. Osteoporosis, arthritides and arthroses were influenced by the habits of carrying weights with a burden strap, crossing legs in sitting, kneeling long hours grinding corn and seeds. Pretty frequent were both natural and induced bone deformities as well as bone tuberculosis (Pott's disease) as shown by pottery vases. Bad home ventilation caused lung affections, while anemia due to iron lack was a consequence of an unbalanced corn diet. Most Indian cultures were subject to the risk of famine, that was especially frequent among the hunting cultures. Where medical science was scarcely developed, as was the case in North America compared to Mesoamerica and the Andes, sometimes families were forced to put and end to their aged ones' lives. This was the sad custom in the Arctic, the Subarctic, the Desert and the Plains.

  Don Tomas is a 73 years old Maya Ixil "praying shaman"; in 1982 he escaped from Northern Quiché, Guatemala to Mexico, where he presently lives and has given this interview. He witnesses the persistence of Mayan identity and religion even in extremely adverse conditions. The manipulation of the 260 days' ritual calendar, called Tzolkin by the scholars, demonstrates the continuity of today's Mayan Culture, rooted in its immemorial past. Don Tomas is also aware of the origins of his beliefs and clearly separates the cult of the Saints dominated by the cofradrias (brotherhoods) of far Hispanic origin, and indigenous divination techniques manipulating days and seeds. What has been called syncretism seems more the result of a permanent tension between two different cultural universes than an harmonic synthesis watering down their distinctive characteristics. In Nebaj, as in the other Mayan villages, there is a complex socio-religious structure: the Roman Catholic Church, twelve traditional cofradrias, a score of Evangelical denominations and the Mayan shamans. Besides Don Tomas and the other "praying shamans" who work with the ritual calendar, there are shamans who manipulate the tzite' seeds, a kind of red beans from a tree called pito, together with corn grains, small pieces of glass and other magical objects. Sometimes the "praying shaman", who dreams his office and is initiated by another "praying shaman", may also accept a position in some cofradria. Concluding, Don Tomas demonstrates that the Maya know much more on themselves than anthropologists have ever suspected.

  In Mesoamerica old age was highly respected as everywhere in pre-Columbian America, and it was also felt as absolutely necessary to the universal balance. The Mesoamerican universe saw old age as the place where the products of the human mind had been sedimenting. This idea developed through the centuries, though at the beginning of the Mesoamerican cultures, the Olmecs (3500-600 b. C.) had Mother Earth, represented by the jaguar, as absolutely central to their worldview. They do not represent old people and their principal image is the "feline" child, the Great Mother's mythical son and symbol of universal fertility. Olmec art do not love wrinkles and physical decadence, even if the elders were surely the depository of sacred knowledge. Teotihuacan thought (600 b. C.- 450 A. D.) shifts Mesoamerican cosmogonic vision from immobility to Movement and influences human roles. The Movement of the Elements produced a Time that projected itself on the human mind as actual experience. Knowing the past, as the place of the formation of experience, was a safer reference point than acting well. Especially meaningful is the old, toothless Mayan god Itzamną, who embodies the synthesis between intellectual energy, power and knowledge. Mesoamerican philosophy, though staying on this path since the 7th century b. C. , made a turning point with the arrival of the Nahuas, who introduced their thought connected with their nomadic experience. In the new Nahua and Mixtec Mesoamerica, in the first half of the second millennium A. D., though the individual heroic action represented the sacrifice of the part in favor of the Whole and physical energy measured the value of the blood offer, old age wisdom tracked the path of life and established the right canons of correct acting according to acquired experience. It is the time of the first flourishing of the Highlands thought, as shown by an old "god" carrying a brazier on his head: the so called Fire God, though we do not know whether he actually was a divine being and a fire god. This old, bearded man with the brazier, always sitting cross-legged as an Indian, is represented in an almost identical form by all the Mesoamerican cultures, until the last one, the Aztecs, told the Europeans his name: Huehueteotl, the Old God.

  Pipe Mustache was John Mink's grandson and in 1943, when he died, John Mink was the "last Indian", whose name become famous printed in books translated in many languages. Nobody knows who named him John Mink; his real name was Zhu-ni-ia Ghi-zhig (Coin-Sky) and allowed two anthropologists to attend a shaman seance, since he was a famous medicine man and a Midewiwin initiate at Lac Courtes Oreilles. When he died the two anthropologists said that he had left no descendants or close relations. In their obituary written in anthropological books his death was interpreted as the disappearance of the spiritual head of the few last "heathens". If he did not leave any descendant, where does Pipe Mustache come from ? He was born at Lac Courtes Oreilles in 1904 and got his name, Oma-scooz (Deer) from a medicine man called Pipe. His parents nicknamed him Little Pipe and Running Deer, because he was a very active child. Though given traditional teaching, he was sent to the mission school at seven. He survived the harsh methods of the missionary school and saved his traditional culture, becoming a famous medicine man and the spiritual leader of his reservation. He was also a politician and a delegate of the NCAI. He worked with schools and universities and programmed a computer course for the teaching of the Ojibwa language. He died in 1993, fifty years after his grandfather and stubbornly continued his grandparent's "anachronism". This story's moral is that the Indians shared old people's destiny: they are "Vanishing", doomed to physical and cultural disappearance by Anglo-American society.

  A band of Athapaskan Gwich'in, stricken by famine, decides to abandon two very old women to die. Left only with some hides and a bone knife, the unlucky elders react struggling for life and succeed. This story, written by the Gwich'in writer Velma Wallis, transforms into a novel an old Gwich'in myth. Published in 1993 by a small Alaskan publisher is a best seller though it was severely criticized by the tribe's traditionalists. But there is nothing that denigrates the Gwich'in in the novel, if we consider the myth as the story of an infraction of a fundamental cultural trait, respect for the elders. This is the main leitmotiv, together with the relationship between mankind and animal world. The famine stricken Gwich'in band is represented as people forced to imitate a pack of wolves to survive. The victims of this shift from culture to nature, the two old women, answer reaffirming their humanity, re-inventing the material culture of their people. They survive till spring and scarcity becomes plenty, which means closeness to the source of animal power: protecting themselves from mosquitoes they disguise themselves with muskrat grease and hides, while the break of cultural respect for the elders causes further scarcity for the unfortunate band. The recomposition of the Gwich'in group with the two women is very gradual and involves rules of hospitality, gift exchanging and, finally, reunion of relatives. The novel demonstrates that social order bases itself on indeterminate roles, on the inverted signs of strength and weakness. Ignorance of this on the social level means ignorance on the natural level; transgression of codes and famine are equivalent and the balance is re-established through the sharing of the goods between the weak and the (supposed) strong.

  The Museum of the American Indian a the former Custom House at Battery Park, Manhattan, is a typical museum structured mainly on exhibitions. There are three ideal routes: the past, present time and experiment, connected by a multimedial network: the Creation Journey, All Roads are Good, and This Path We Travel. In this museum, whose staff is almost all Native American, and an emanation of the Smithsonian Institution, more than 600 native nations are represented and more than a thousand examples of Indian artifacts are exhibited. The novelty consists of associating all the native cultures of the Americas, where a Navajo rug stands near a Bolivian blanket and a Mayan poncho. Videos accompany the visitors, communicating the flavor of the storytelling, the songs and dances, the music of language, while native artists explain their work. All the exhibitions are conceived as interactive, by touching video screens and samples of the materials of the artifacts. Fifteen native artists shared a three years' experience of collective creation involving also indigenous populations: some of these works are exhibited on the 3rd floor of the museum as a "celebration of native creativity", in the awareness that today's Native Americans live in a society whose values are not theirs.

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