Indian Festival

I was glad when this weekend arrived – work has been very stressful. Fortunately, the people I work with tend to relieve stress with humour, and that helps ease the tension. I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I work with a lot of British expats, and we traditionally go out for curry at Friday lunchtime. This Friday, we started to discuss some of the stupider things we’d done as schoolboys. By far the best was a game that one of the guys used to play in the library. It’s delightfully simple: someone comes into the library, sits down, and whispers “bollocks” to the person next to him. The only rules are these: firstly, that person has to repeat the word to someone else; and secondly, he has to say it louder. Apparently, the game usually finishes with someone running out of the library screaming “bollocks” at the top of his voice. Who said all-boy schools were a bad idea!

So by the time the weekend came, I’d had no time to think of anything to do. Fortunately I heard on the local radio that there was an American Indian Festival in Dallas. It turned out to be very interesting (as unplanned things often do).

I parked the car, paid my $8 entrance fee, and quickly toured the site. I decided to eat first: Indian tacos from “Choctaw Vicki”. An interesting cross-cultural culinary experience. Very similar to Mexican tacos, but served on fried Indian bread. Indian bread is somewhat similar in taste and texture to, if you can imagine it, a savoury doughnut (and I mean an American doughnut, not the pale British imitation). It’s a risen dough, deep-fried, and very tasty. I picked an empty table and sat down on the hay bale that provided seating, to be approached by a young lady who asked if she could join me. I had no objection, particularly as there seemed to be many more tables than available seating. As she sat down, she slid her business card across to me, at the same time beckoning to her companion: “Rita – Michael Motorcycle Hair Salon”. “He’s my boss”, she said, as someone who looked remarkably like an aging biker approached. After they had been sitting for a couple of minutes, I broke the ice by asking if he was “Michael Motorcycle”. To cut a long story short, it turns out he was, and he was fascinated to discover that I was from England, because he had just been there doing interviews with the BBC. It seems that he does Jerry Hall’s hair, and she had been singing his praises in London, so that he’s now thinking about opening a salon in London. He invited me down to his ranch, but I didn’t go yet, mostly because he’s only just bought the land and hasn’t yet built the ranch. But it is in a very pretty part of Texas, on a hill with good views (and hills are rare in these parts), and the land is wall-to-wall Texas blue-bonnets in the Spring. He drew me a map, and said I was welcome to wander about the many trails, so I probably will one of these weekends.

After lunch, I watched Allenroy Paquin on stage. He’s an Apache-Zuni dancer, musician and story-teller. From him I learned that there are 563 American Indian tribes that are officially recognized by the American government. Now we’ve all heard of the Apache, Cherokee, Choctaw, Zuni, Hopi, Seminole, etc., but 563! How many of these will manage to survive after the appalling treatment they received at the hands of “the white man” I don’t know. The systematic attempt at their genocide is, tactfully, hardly ever mentioned by them; and, conveniently, mostly forgotten by us. He was a softly spoken man, and passionate about his heritage and his art.

He told a story that I will repeat here. I won’t get it exactly right, of course, but then he probably didn’t either – that’s what story-telling is all about. But it’s still his story.

“There was once a time when all creatures could talk to each other, and lived in harmony. And in that time there were two sisters who loved each other very much. They loved to play together, and especially they loved to dance. And the time they loved to dance best of all was at twilight – when the weary day was done, but the night was still fresh and young, and the silver moon cast hazy shadows on the ground.

“One evening, they noticed an owl, high up in a tree. They climbed up to the lowest branches, sat down, and looked up at the owl. ‘Hooo, hooo, who are you?’ said the owl. The older sister replied, ‘We are sisters, and we love the moon. In fact, we hope to marry the moon one day.’.

“The owl said, ‘If you love the moon so much, I’ll tell you a story about it:

“When the world was new, monsters roamed the land and terrified the people, and so all the tribes came together and agreed that they should slay all the monsters. But nobody came forward to volunteer, except for one. This brave man single-handedly went out amongst the monsters, and slayed them all. When he returned to his village, they gave him a new name. It was an Indian name of course, and so wouldn’t really mean anything to you, but, translated, it means “Monster Slayer”. They also gave him the highest honour that could be bestowed on anyone: a pure white buckskin robe that was dazzling just to look at. As time went by, Monster Slayer became restless, because there were no more monsters to slay; so he announced that he was going to the Moon, to slay all the monsters there and make it safe for the people of the Moon. Everyone thought he was crazy, but he ignored them. He made a huge bow and arrow from the largest trees he could find, and when he was finished, he took a length of rope, and tied one end to the arrow, and the other to himself. As the Moon came up, he pulled back the bow as far as he could, and unleashed the arrow. It shot up in the air, over the water, and disappeared from view; then the rope went taut, and Monster Slayer, too, went up in the air, over the water, and disappeared from view. The people thought he must surely have drowned, but their curiosity brought them back to the same spot the following evening, when they saw that the Moon shone brighter than ever – they thought it could only be the light reflected from Monster Slayer’s white buckskin robe.”

‘Go home now and pray, and if you pray hard enough, you may be able to marry the Moon.’

“And so the two sisters went home and prayed for four days and four nights, until they fell into a deep sleep. And as they fell asleep, they heard a distant voice saying, ‘If you want to marry me, you must be patient. You must keep your eyes closed until I tell you to open them.’ The two sisters could feel themselves being lifted up, and hear the wind rushing by their ears. This went on for so long that the younger sister couldn’t resist opening her eyes to see what was happening. The instant she did, she started falling back to earth, but, just as she was about to hit the ground, she woke up from a deep sleep. She turned to tell her sister what had happened, but her sister wasn’t there.

“Meanwhile the older sister heard a voice telling her to open her eyes. When she did, Monster Slayer was standing before her, and she squinted at the light reflected from his glorious robe. Monster Slayer said to her, ‘I bow to no-one except you, and now we shall be married’. He took her by the hand, and she smiled, because she could hear faint music that was growing stronger; it was a tune she recognized, that she had heard many times before: the Indian Wedding Song. And she was happy.”

And at that point, Allenroy Paquin played the Indian Wedding Song on his flute: a plaintive, haunting melody that I’m sure is as evocative to Native Americans as the Wedding March is to us.