In the Matter of the Ukdena
by Bruce Holland Rogers
This story copyright 1996 by Bruce Holland Rogers. This copy was
created for Jean Hardy's personal use. All other rights are reserved. Thank
you for honoring the copyright.
Published by Seattle Book Company,
www.seattlebook.com.
* * *
Spiral Mind turns in on itself,
thinking
about the story
of its own nature.
* *
*
There are many versions
of the story
Spiral Mind
is thinking.
* *
*
Here is one.
*
* *
But this story
can't begin
until there is a universe to contain it.
Spiral Mind
says,
Manifestation began in formlessness
That's how the story gets
started,
with the making of a place,
a sky above.
This story begins in
the time
when everyone lived in the sky.
Spiral Mind names this
time
The First World of the original era.
* *
*
Clearly,
geography is destiny, and a rivalry between the Superpowers was clear as far
back as 1850 when Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that he foresaw the development of
two principal powers in the world: Imperial Russia, and the United Nations of
Turtle Island. "Both countries control an abundance of natural resources," de
Tocqueville wrote after his visit to North America, "but the exploitation of
those resources is a matter of command in Russia. In the United Nations, the use
of resources is controlled by democratic forces and elaborate religious
restraints."
* * *
It was crowded in the sky.
The human
beings, the spirits, the gods,
the two-leggeds and the
four-leggeds,
people with wings like Eagle and the crawling
people like
Ant
and the digging people like Badger
and swimmers like Box
Turtle,
the grasses and trees,
even the stone people
all crowded
in
together.
* * *
Aluminum extraction relies on a process
devised simultaneously by Charles Martin Hall in the U.N.T.I. and Paul Heroult
in France. In this process, alumina (aluminum oxide) is dissolved in molten
cryolite and electric current is passed through the solution. At the cathode,
metallic aluminum is liberated while oxygen collects at the anode. For the sake
of clarity, this chapter will concentrate entirely on the technical aspects of
the process. Spiritual considerations on the extraction of metals from the
earth, our mother, will be covered in the chapter to follow.
*
* *
Water Beetle came
down to look around
He dove under the waves
and surfaced with mud
in
his jaws.
The Creator Spirits
rolled the mud in their hands.
It grew.
It became islands.
Everyone came down.
* *
*
The human beings came down.
They were red
and brown and black,
they were white and yellow,
and they started in their
own places,
but did not stay there.
They spread themselves out
as far
as possible.
Wherever they were,
they walked until oceans stopped
them.
Even back when this
world was new,
that's how
they
were.
That's how
human beings
have always been.
*
* *
Aroism (from Spanish, aro,
hoop), European term for the plurality of religious beliefs and practices to
which the vast majority of North Americans adhere. Arising initially as a
synthesis of indigenous beliefs and the religions brought to the Americas by
Europeans, Aroism has developed in syncretism with the religious and cultural
evolution of the hemisphere. Aroist belief is generally characterized by
sacralization of all phenomena, but special emphasis is given to particular
sacred locales and to Mother Earth in general. Similar in some aspects to
Animism, Aroism calls upon believers to communicate with the natural
world as they interact with it so that their actions may be in harmony with the
natural order. As Western technological practices such as mining and deep-furrow
agriculture were introduced, Aroist beliefs evolved to allow for resource
exploitation consistent with sacred regard for the earth. Most Aroists adhere to
traditions of Vision Quest, Ritual Purification, and, for women,
Moon Lodge.
* * *
The white tribes
on their part of the
world
were as varied as any people,
but there were some things
most of
them believed.
* * *
"I'll tell you," said the keynote speaker at
the Conference for Spiritual History, "what the white nations of Europe
believed. They believed that children were little bags of sin to be redeemed by
beatings. They believed in the authority of a God King, in the authority of
human kings, in the authority of men over women."
*
* *
The white
tribes believed in a universe divided
between good and evil,
in a world
that was theirs to master
if they could only destroy enough
of the
evil.
* * *
Don't get the idea
that these people were creatures of
darkness.
Any human being can carry light.
*
* *
From: V. Adm.
David Many Bears
Fleet Operations
*
* *
To: Capt. Henry Jefferson
U.N.S. Nimitz
* *
*
Hank, this is
going to come down to you through channels, but before it does I wanted you to
have some advance notice of the new policy regarding Navy fighter jets for use
in vision quests. NAFCOM acknowledges the right of pilots and their RIOs to use
any means at their disposal to seek a vision, but loss of an Ukdena in the Sixth
Fleet's carrier group has lead us to formulate what you might call Rules of
Engagement with the Great Mystery.
* *
*
The F-4 Ukdena is
rated at a service ceiling of 43,000 at power, but the crew of the Sixth Fleet
mishap had throttled up hard and gone to 56,000.
*
* *
Hank, you and I
both know how imminent the Great Mystery must be at ten miles above the earth,
but we also know that this was a thousand feet above the fleet-configured F-4's
maximum rating. A pilot in combat won't make a mistake like that, but a pilot
who's flying into the sun can get a little lost up there.
*
* *
From now on, each crew is allowed one
official quest flight per deployment, and they aren't to climb above the
military-power service ceiling. I know that there will be some grumbling about
this, and I know that there will be covert questing beyond what we're officially
sanctioning, but this will at least make it clear that the pain of the sundance
is meant for the body, not the airframe of a fighter plane.
*
* *
The red tribes
on this Turtle
Island
were as varied as any people,
but most of them tried to
discover
right relation to one another
and to the earth.
*
* *
The red tribes
believed in
the spiral,
the circle,
and everything
was
alive.
* * *
Don't get the idea
that these people were flames of
enlightenment.
Any human being drags a shadow.
*
* *
Sequoyah, 1766-1843, Tsalagi. First
president of the U.N.T.I., commander in chief of the Continental Army in the War
of Union, called the Father of His Country. He created a syllabary for the
Tsalagi language, based on the characters he saw for English and Spanish
writing, providing the model for the Universal Writing System.
*
* *
New Etowah, capital of the U.N.T.I.,
coextensive with the District of Sequoyah.
* *
*
Andrew
Jackson, 1767-1832. White separatist leader. After his defeat by units of
the Creek Nation in the battle of Horseshoe Bend, Jackson escaped and continued
to lead Europeans opposed to national assimilation. Convinced that his vision of
a European-dominated culture could take root in the west, he led his erstwhile
followers on an ill-fated forced march. See Trail of Tears.
*
* *
In those times
before the white people
came to Turtle Island
the Tsalagi, the Principal People,
lived in the
mountains
that were at the middle of the earth.
*
* *
They
wanted
peace at the center of all things.
At the center of all
things,
harmony.
* *
*
Late in the last year of the eleventh heaven,
seven generations
before the first hell
of the Fifth World,
the days and nights came
into
balance
and the cornstalks grew heavy
with grain,
so the
Principal People began the Green Corn Ceremony
that would preserve harmony
for all beings.
* * *
In the council houses of many villages,
the Tsalagi danced and made
offerings
to the sacred fire.
In the rivers
they bathed seven times for
purity
and held rituals to turn aside any anger
left over from the year
they were about to finish.
* *
*
"What can we
reliably say about Spiritual History in pre-literate times?" said the keynote
speaker. "To a large extent, we must rely upon the oral tradition.
Spiral-thought does not record events with the same emphasis that Arrow-thought
does, of course, so we do not remember the details of the political discussions,
the names, dates, and exact locations of the debates. But we know, generally,
what was decided in the matter of the Ukdena, and we know that it was probably
decided in Green Corn time. To this day, that remains the best time for
establishing national policy."
* *
*
Before he went to
sleep after the fifth day of deliberations, Walks the River made an offering of
cedar smoke to the four directions, to heaven, and to earth. The open eaves of
his wife's summer house let the smoke drift away, but the scent remained behind
to clear his thoughts and purify his dreams. Though the fire was low, he could
see that his wife was watching him with the same expression she had worn during
the council, a mixture of discomfort and expectation. There might have been
impatience in that gaze, too, except that she was an old Tsalagi woman, a Bird
clan woman. She knew how to master herself. She knew how to turn impatience
aside, for the sake of harmony.
Silently, Walks the
River asked for dreams that would help him carry light. Then, with limbs
stiffened by the chill air, he lay down beside his wife.
"It has been five days," she said. She said it
gently, sleepily, as if in answer to a question.
"Yes," he said, keeping his voice level. "I have
counted them, too."
If she divorced him, he could
always go live in his sister's house. It pained him to think such a thought, and
he doubted that his wife would turn him out, but who would blame her if she did?
What was worse than for a man to seem stubborn and argumentative at the holiest
time of the year?
He waited, but she said nothing
more. Soon she was breathing the breath of sleep. He heard one of his daughters
whisper to her husband in a far corner of the lodge, and an ember popped in the
fire.
Give me a dream, he prayed again. Let me see
them in my dream.
And then he let the night sounds
carry him, the sounds of dark water in the river and wind moving through the
trees. Those sounds were still in his ears when he crossed into the dream side
of the world and found himself standing on an unfamiliar mountain's grassy bald.
Around him were other mountains, covered with fir and spruce. He raised his
hands into the dream sky, asking for bountiful life, a prayer for his arrival.
Light dazzled him. Something huge was there in front
of him, making the air near him hiss with its passing, and then it was far away.
It moved partly in the air and partly along a mountain ridge, making the trees
sway. He wanted to see it clearly, but it was not a thing the eyes could easily
hold.
"Ukdena," he said.
The presence swirled high into the air. It was not
one being, but a group. They twisted and twined together, parted, and rushed
together again. They moved from one side of the sky to the other.
Their scales flashed like facets of crystal. Walks
the River squinted. Their bodies were long, sinuous, humping and curving as
though even in the sky they had to follow the lines of the mountain ridges
below. Once, he thought he caught a glimpse of transparent wings, and for a
moment there seemed to be an eye that gazed at him, cold and brilliant.
"Enemies," the Ukdena hissed. Their terrible claws,
glittering like ice, opened and closed on the wind. "Enemies. Powerful enemies!"
"Where?" Walks the River asked them. "Where are
these enemies?"
"Far," said the Ukdena. "Numerous.
Growing. Dangerous, dangerous enemies!" They danced their dance and glittered
and burst into flames that didn't harm them. They roared like a forest on fire.
"Hate them! Murder! Blind! Burn! Hate and live!"
Scales flashed. Claws opened and closed. The gaze of
dark Ukdena eyes made Walks the River shiver and sweat in his sleep as their
glittering bodies curled and knotted and slithered apart in the sky.
He rose quietly and dressed, slipping out of his
wife's house before she and her daughters could wake up to repeatedly ask no one
in particular when the council would be over.
He
went to watch the river. There was, as far as he could see, no right way to act.
If he continued to argue, he brought discord into the council house. And, in
truth, he did not love the Ukdena. Walks the River had always been a man of
peace.
He went to his sister's lodge to eat
breakfast. There was no talk of the council there, but there was no talk of
anything else, either. Walks the River was not sure if he was losing the support
of his clan or not.
With the men who were catching
fish, it was the same. Walks the River watched them dam the fishing stream, and
then a man named Runner threw ground horse chestnuts into the shadowed pools of
still water where the fish hid themselves.
"The
other clans are in agreement," Walks the River said. "We are the only holdouts.
I begin to feel that we are not behaving well."
The
men waiting for the fish asked him if his dreams had changed, and he said that
this time the Ukdena had spoken, had warned him of distant enemies.
"You must do what is right," one of the young men
said without looking up from the water. He offered no elaboration.
"Yes," Walks the River agreed. "I must do what is
right."
The first of the paralyzed fish floated to
the surface. The young men began to choose the ones they wanted and loaded them
into baskets. Soon they had all they wanted.
Walks
the River looked through the foliage, seeing light from the ridge line glint
between the trees. He had never seen the Ukdena in the waking world, but the
priests saw them all the time. "People grow impatient."
"Do not stand aside until you are almost moved to
anger," advised Runner. He opened the dam, and fresh water rushed into the
pools. The remaining fish soon recovered and dove back down into the deeper
water. "As long as you do not become angry," another man said, "there is only a
little shame. We can bear it."
So it was that on the
sixth day of the council Walks the River sat in the circle of seven Beloved Men
with his resolve unbent. Behind him sat the people of the Wild Potato clan, and
he felt supported by them, at least in some measure.
In the center of the circle of Beloved Men stood the
principal priest, the second priest, and Red Fox, who was the secular officer.
As if he had not already put the question to them a
score of times already, the principal priest said, "In the matter of the Ukdena
and a third priest, how are we resolved?"
"As we
have heard," said Woods Burning, the Beloved Man of the Deer clan, "The Ukdena
are growing fewer." He looked at Walks the River and the Wild Potato clan behind
him. "We acknowledge that this is true. And fewer priests train to control the
energies of the Ukdena. That also is true. But is this bad? The Ukdena are
dangerous, so it is a good thing that there are fewer of them. And since there
are fewer of them, we need fewer priests to control them. Therefore, in the
matter of a third priest for the village who would learn the ways of the Ukdena
and carry the objects that control them, let it be resolved that we shall not
support such a priest. We have two priests already. That is enough."
The other Beloved Men spoke in turn. For the Wolf
clan and the Long Hair clan, they spoke. For the Paint clan and the Blue clan
and the Bird clan. All agreed that the village would not support a third priest,
that maintaining the Ukdena was too costly a task for a village of their size to
take on.
"I have considered," said Walks the River,
"and I have dreamed." For a moment, he could feel the hope that filled the
lodge, the expectation that he was going to throw in with the rest and make the
opinion unanimous and harmonious at last.
"The
Ukdena are growing fewer because there are fewer priests to master them
and hold them to the earth. Yes, the Ukdena are dangerous, but under the control
of the Principal People they are dangerous only to our enemies."
The disappointment filled the room like bad air.
"All right," said the second priest. His job was to
manage the discussion, and he was allowed no opinion of his own. "Let us
consider again the nature of the Ukdena."
"We all
know their nature," said Holds the Corn Up, Beloved Man of the Long Hair clan.
"They are anger and fear. The Ukdena are war dragons, and we are at peace."
"You are right. They are the unmastered anger and
fear of all the world's people," said Walks the River. "And why does this energy
come here, to the Principal People, if not to be guided by us? Why are we
together, Tsalagi and Ukdena, in the same place, the middle of the world, if not
so that the Principal People might direct those energies safely? We must hold in
trust all the powers that attach to us."
"I have had
a dream," said the Paint clan's Beloved Man. "In my dream, I saw the Great Bear
dancing, stomping."
Everyone had that dream sooner
or later, and everyone understood what it meant. The Great Bear was stamping out
fear and ignorance from the world.
"I think," the
man continued, "that the Ukdena are the very thing that the Great Bear is trying
to drive out of the earth with his dancing."
"No
power is all good or all bad," said Walks the River. "In my dreams, I have seen
the Ukdena." And they are terrible, he thought. They will lead us into
war. But he said the other words, which were also true. "The Ukdena are
beautiful."
The secondary priest said, "The man who
has not mastered himself looks at the Ukdena and sees demons. But the man who
knows his heart and masters clear thought will see angels instead. The Ukdena
are the same Ukdena." This was not opinion, but simply a review of the facts.
"It's just a question of one priest," Red Fox
reminded everyone.
"Ours is the Very Middle
Village," said Walks the River, "in the middle of the world. We are at the
center of many circles. Already, the science that communicates with the Ukdena
and guides them for us is in decline. Our decision may travel from the center
like a stone in still water. If we will not maintain the Ukdena, how do we know
anyone will? I think that if we make the wrong decision, the Principal People
will forget how to master the Ukdena. I can imagine a time when the Ukdena pass
out of this world with hardly any notice by our people. What if we call to them
and they are no longer here to answer us?"
"Why
should we call to them?" said Woods Burning. "Why should we bring down fear and
anger to the earth? When is fear good? When is anger good?"
"A man without fear cannot be brave," said Walks the
River. "As for anger, it is needed for passion. For justice."
"For justice, we have the law," said Woods Burning.
"If the Shaawanwaaki raid our village and kill five people, then we will kill
five Shaawanwaaki. If a Blue clan man murders someone in the Long Hair clan,
then the killer or someone else in his clan must die. The law maintains harmony.
Nothing else is needed."
"Walks the River imagines a
time without Ukdena," said the Paint clan's Beloved Man. "I imagine instead a
time of abundant Ukdena. If there are too many of these beings held here by our
medicine, then no one will be able to contain them. They will range farther and
farther from the middle of the world. Other people do not train themselves as we
do. Who knows what the wandering Ukdena might do in the lands of people who do
not see as clearly as we must see?"
"Neither thing
has happened," said Red Fox. "We have always held the Ukdena here in harmony."
"The Ukdena grow fewer," said Walks the River. "That
is certain. Who knows what turn the future will take?"
"Is the future singular," said the Beloved Man of
the Blue clan, "or is it multiple? Is there one future, or many?"
"The future shall unfold according to prophecy,"
said Holds the Corn.
"Yes," agreed Woods Burning,
"but many paths are possible to the same point in prophecy."
The principal priest said, "In the matter of the
Ukdena and a third priest, how are we resolved?"
Again, the Beloved Men of the majority clans spoke
their positions. Nothing had changed. Walks the River looked at his bony hands
and bit his lip. What else was there to do? All of his arguments had been
repeated many times. He had not moved any of the others, and he had not himself
been moved to join them.
Politeness dictated that he
should withdraw now. He and all of his clan should leave the council house so
that the decision could be made unanimously in their absence. That was not what
he wanted to do, but how could he stay and still believe himself a reasonable
man?
Clearly he must withdraw.
But he waited. He thought of what the Blue clan
speaker had just said. Was there one future, or many? Perhaps he was now at the
place where the futures divided like channels of a river moving around a great
stone. He was the great stone. If he leaned one way, this channel would be the
greater. Lean the other way, and the other channel would determine how prophecy
would be fulfilled.
And what prophecy was it that
was flowing around him? What futures might depend on him?
The Ukdena were beautiful. The Ukdena were terrible.
Harmony was beautiful and holy, but was it better preserved by defending the
Ukdena or by letting the matter drop?
Continue or
withdraw? Each choice seemed both right and wrong.
"We will not be moved," he said for his clan.
People in the Council House shifted around, as if
feeling for the first time the stiffness of sitting for many days. The Beloved
Men of the other clans looked over their shoulders to read the eyes of their
people.
After a time the speaker for the Wolf clan
turned to face the priests and the sacred fire. "It is the sixth day," he said.
"For six days, the Wild Potato clan has not moved. Nothing moves them, and they
do not turn aside. Walks the River is a thoughtful and well-mannered man. He
bears a lot and does not anger. This begins to change our hearts. We say there
shall be a third priest, and he shall learn to master the Ukdena."
That was how the tide turned, but politics flow
slowly. It was not until late in the next day that the Blue clan and Deer clan
supported the training of a new priest.
"Think of
the Great Bear, stamping on the ground," the Paint clan's Beloved Man argued,
though the flow had clearly shifted against him. "Fear and ignorance, that's
what he tramples down. Let the Ukdena decline. We don't need them. We do not
need a third priest."
But it was after this speech
that Holds the Corn had brought the Long Hair clan to the other side, in favor
of maintaining an additional priest. Woods Burning felt his own clan shift
beneath him, and whatever his own feelings, he had to speak for his people. "Let
there be a third priest," he said.
The Paint clan
held their ground until the end of that seventh day. Their Beloved Man argued
about the risks of crowding the skies with Ukdena, but too many Ukdena seemed a
less plausible future than a future where the last Ukdena had vibrated itself
out of this world. Everyone had already agreed that the Ukdena were in decline.
In the end, the Paint clan could not agree with the
majority, but they left the Council House and let the village make a unanimous
decision in their absence.
"In the matter of the
Ukdena and a third priest," said the principal priest, "how are we resolved?"
"That there shall be a third priest so that we may
remember how to hold the Ukdena to the earth," said Red Fox. "That is the
decision of all the people."
If any Tsalagi were
angry over the outcome, they turned their anger aside and it did not show. The
village held the form of harmony, and the sacred fire was extinguished. The last
year of the eleventh heaven was over. The priests kindled a new fire in the
Council House, and women carried embers from it into each home. The people
carried their new clothes to the river, and then they bathed, letting the
current carry away their old clothing and the old year with it. When they
stepped ashore to dress in new garments, they were themselves renewed. It was
the twelfth heaven, seven generations before the first hell of the Fifth World.
Walks the River did not dream of the Ukdena again,
and in the year that followed, he died in his sleep. Many Beloved Men died in
that year, but they had lived long enough, at least, to see the twelfth heaven.
* * *
The keynote speaker said, "The extent to
which Ukdena-mind became prevalent on Turtle Island is evident in the report of
Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a sailor in Hernando de Soto's 'discovery' voyage, who
wrote that the crew saw 'dragons' in the air above Cuba. Some researchers have
even speculated that a forgotten earlier explorer, a Genoan called Cristobal
Colon, made landfall in the Americas fifty years ahead of de Soto. Ukdena-mind,
and the fear and suspicion it often generates if unchecked, could explain what
happened to this Colon. As was the case for de Soto, it's almost certain that
the Caribs would have welcomed him with arrows. De Soto himself narrowly escaped
the destruction of his fleet on his first voyage. But this earlier landfall and
contact would explain the arrival of smallpox on the continent two generations
before the first significant wave of European invaders. Our history might have
been very different if, without two generations of previous exposure to the
disease, the native peoples had been forced to contend simultaneously with
aggressive invaders and a virulent disease to which they had no time to build
immune resistance."
Almost with the speed of Ukdena,
the sickness crossed the water between islands, entered the low country of the
Apalachee rose into the mountains of the Tsalagi. From the Tsalagi homeland in
the middle of the world the disease spread in all directions. People died. Young
and old they died. Potawatomi and Kansa Kiowa and Paiute Shuswap and Shoshoni
Chiricahua and Azteca they died. That was during the first hell of the Fifth
World. So many people died That Turtle Island seemed empty. But the ones who
survived, they were the strong human beings, the ones the sickness couldn't
easily kill, and their children were also strong. The disease kept coming back,
but every time the people were stronger and the disease could not kill so
easily.
"As opposed to Africa," the speaker said,
"development of cultural exchange took a very different turn in the 'new' world,
thanks to this pattern of successful resistance. Rather than cultural conquest
or even cultural hegemony, the North American continent experienced something
like a cultural marriage and an exchange between equals. Some of what was traded
was tangible, as in the exchange of maize for wheat. Other trades were more
subtle. Europeans learned how to hold the Forms of Peace. The Turtle Island
Nations were introduced to the concept of the Nation State. It was this more
subtle trade that effected the greatest change in both cultures. Europeans
gradually stopped thinking of themselves as clever for accepting more gifts than
they gave. There may be an objective sense in which it's true that, as the
Ukdena priests say, this continent is built on the energies of Ukdena-mind. Ours
is a nation built on the backs of dragons."
* *
*
The river of
prophecy
is one river.
* *
*
The current weaves and divides,
but water
always flows
downhill.
* *
*
Perhaps there is more
than one
reality.
* * *
Spiral mind is wide enough
to contain another universe.
*
* *
"I can sum up Indian history in the United
States of America in very few words," said the keynoter at a conference in
Washington, D.C., the nation's capitol. "The Trail of Tears. Sand Creek. Wounded
Knee. We can imagine how things might have been different, but we're confronted
nonetheless with how things were, and are. But I also want you to consider this.
Where did the people of this continent go? They did not all die in the American
genocide, though nine-tenths of them did. Their descendants are not all living
on reservations, though many are, trapped there as a matter of public policy.
But where are the rest?
"Let me frame it in another
way. No conqueror is left unaffected by the conquest. Consider that in the
United States of America today we have people who look like Europeans who will
chain themselves to a tree and risk death for the sake of an owl. I'm talking
about a process that goes both ways, of course. There are also people who look
like Indians who will lease their tribal lands to strip miners. Who, then, is
more Indian? Who is more white? Where are the Indians now? Where are the
Europeans?"
* * *
"Some would say that the effect of all those
secret grandmothers, Indian women giving birth to and raising children in
families that were designated "black" or "white," has been the
Indianization of the majority culture. In this view, a lot of secret
wisdom was passed down along with that secret blood. Proponents of this notion
point out that the very attributes considered by the Europeans to be marks of
savagery sound like a portrait of the still-evolving American culture:
permissive child rearing; the habit of bathing more often than "necessary";
suspicion of "authority"; passionate pride; acceptance and empowerment of women
and of more than one sexual norm; fluid class distinctions, or no such
distinctions at all."
* *
*
On Turtle Island
Arrow Mind and Spiral
Mind
twine and twist
together.
* *
*
It is one mind now.
*
* *
In any version of
the story,
it is one mind.
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