Ceremony All

"She is sitting in her room /  thinking of a story now / I'm telling you the story / she is thinking" (1)

"He rubbed his belly. / I keep them here / [he said] / Here, put your hand on it / See, it is moving. / There is life here / for the people. / And in the belly of this story / the rituals and the ceremony / are still growing" (2) On stories.

Distances and days existed in themselves, then; they all had a story.. They were not barriers. 17

that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. 24

It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human 32

They would breed these cattle, special cattle, not the weak, soft Herefords that grew thin and died from eating thistle and burned-off cactus during the drought. The cattle Ulibarri sold them were exactly what thy had been thinking about. These cattle were descendant of generations of desert cattle, born in dry sand and scrubby mesquite, where they  hunted water the way desert antelope did. 68 (more on land/life connection)

these cattle were everything that the ideal cow was not. They were tall and had long thin legs like deer; their heads were long and angular, with heavy bone across the eyes supporting wide sharp horns which curved out over the shoulders. Their eyes were big and wild. 69

"He could see bundles of newspapers, their edges curled stiff and brown, barricading piles of telephone books with the years scattered among cities—St. Lois, Seattle, New York, Oakland—and he began to feel another dimension to the old man's room. His heart beat faster, and he felt the blood draining from his legs. He knew the answer before he could shape the questions. Light from the door worked paths through the thick bluish green glass of the Coke bottles; his eyes followed the light until he was dizzy and sick. He wanted to dismiss all of it as an old man's rubbish, debris that had fallen out of the year, but the boxes and trunks, the bundles and stacks were plainly part of the pattern: they followed the concentric shadows of the room" (110)

"In the old days it was simple. A medicine person could get by without all these things. But nowadays..." (11)

"in recent years the old man had favored Santa Fe Railroad calendar that had Indian scenes painted on them—Navajos herding sheep, deer dancers at Cochiti, and little Pueblo children chasing burros...on the reservation these calendars were more common than Coca-Cola calendar. There was no reason to be startled. This old man had only done the same thing." (111)

"It is carried on in all languages now, so you have to know English too" (112)

"But long ago when the people were given these ceremonies, the changing began, if only in the agin of the yellow gourd rattle or the shrinking of the skin around the eagle's claw, if only in the different voices from generation to generation, singing the chants...But after the white people came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong...things which don't shift and grow are dead things" (116).

"all of it seemed suddenly so pitiful and small compared to the world he knew the white people had—a world of comfort in the sprawling house he'd seen in California, a world of plenty in the food he had carried from the officers' mess to dump into garbage cans. The old man's clothes were dirty and old, probably collected like his calendars. Te leftover things the whites didn't want...What kind of healing power was in this? (117)

"They want us to separate ourselves from white people, to be ignorant and helpless as we watch our own destruction. But white people are only tools that the witchery manipulated; and I tell you, we can deal with white people, with their machines and their beliefs. We can because we invented white people; it was Indian witchery tat made white people in the first place" (122).

125

Cattle 73, 168, 183, 197

He repeated the words as he remembered them, not sure if they were the right ones, but feeling they were right, feeling the instant of the dawn was an event which in a single moment gathered all things together 169

He did not expect to find Josiah's cattle near Herefords, because the spotted cattle were so rangy and wild...It seemed more likely to find the spotted cattle in the south, far far in the south—the direction they had always gone 173

the spotted cattle, all scattered now, all lost, sucked away in the dissolution that had take everything from him 28

The Texans who bought the land fenced it and posted signs in English and Spanish warning trespassers to keep out. But the people from the land grants and the people from Laguna and Acoma ignored the signs and hunted deer 174

Fences had never stopped the speckled cattle either...It was a fence that could hold the spotted cattle...a wolf-proof fence...to make the land his 175

Hunting the cattle was good for that...It was a cure for that, and maybe for other things too. The spotted cattle wouldn't be lost any more, scattered through his dreams, driven by his hesitation to admit they had been stolen, that the land—all of it—had been stolen from them. 178

wilder than antelope, smarter than elk about human beings. Their memory of people endured long after all other traces of domestication were gone; and he counted on another instinct: the dime memory of direction which lured them always south, to the Mexican desert where they were born.

they ran southeast, in the direction he wanted them to go, with tails straight out behind their manure-stained haunches, running more like deer than cattle, moving form ticket to ticket for cover, avoiding the clearings. They favored trails too low and brushy for horses and riders 183