Untitled - California State University, Long Beach

great power. Beneath their surfaces lie entrances to the four worlds
below” (20). She goes on to describe how there was once a lake near the
village, Ka’waik, in which the giant water snake-spirit Ma’sh’ra’true’ee lived,
from which the snake “carried the prayers of the people to the Mother
Creator below” (24). Once the lake dried up, the connection to the four
worlds below was severed and the snake disappeared (27). Water, then,
was understood as the physical conduit to the other worlds. Clouds were
also part of this cosmology, as the Pueblo people understood clouds as the
souls of departed loved ones. Silko writes, “On All Souls Day, November
2, the people take oven bread and red chile stew to the graves to feed the
spirits of the dead. All these feedings of the spirits were conducted with
such tenderness and love, that as a child, I learned there is nothing to fear
from the dead. They love us and bless us when they return as rain clouds”
(17). The water in the body thus becomes the water in the earth once a
person passes on and, hence, the water in the sky. Human spirits rejoin
the water cycle in death.
As Silko also writes in Yellow Woman, a collection of her nonfiction
essays, natural springs also have spiritual significance within the Pueblo
worldview as the source of their life and culture: “[T]he small spring
near Paguate village is literally the source and continuance of life for the
people in this area. The spring also functions on a spiritual level, recalling
the original Emergence Place and linking the people and the springwater
to all other people …” (YW 36). As Silko writes, theses desert springs
“literally” enable the “continuance of life.” “Water conservation” seems
a woefully inadequate phrase for describing the traditional Pueblo
understanding of water as sacred. The multidimensional spiritual
and practical understandings of water within the Pueblo world defy
categorization into such an easy-to-understand (and Eurocentric) ethic
of conservation.
Agriculture was a significant means of subsistence for Pueblo people,
138 | Ely
and further exemplifies an ethics of sacred water. Silko describes the
practices of Pueblo agriculture in Sacred Water through the story of her
grandmother’s neighbor, Felipe Riley. She tells the story of how Felipe’s
careful diversion of surface rainwater kept her grandmother’s cellar from
flooding for many years and was so integrated into the landscape of
Laguna as to be virtually invisible. Silko writes:
Felipe Riley used to dry farm with the run-off water from the
hillside. He diverted the water with an intricate network of
small stone check dams which he carefully engineered so that
the rain water fed small ditches leading to his pumpkin and
squash plants, his peach and apricot trees, and his big corn field.
… Felipe’s arrangement of stone check dams was so subtle, and
conformed to the natural contours so well that we never realized
how Felipe had saved our old houses from the floodwater until
after Felipe had passed on. Without Felipe’s care, the rocks
which formed the check dams gradually scattered. (44-6)
Felipe used the ambient rainfall of the region to farm an abundance of
fruits and vegetables, controlling the floodwaters in the least-invasive and
most useful way possible. Silko contrasts Felipe’s depth of understanding
and careful execution of water diversion to that of the U.S. government,
whose “engineers spent months, and many thousands of dollars to install
giant storm drains that dump the run-off into the river” (46). Felipe’s
arrangement of dams was so subtle that it melded with the desert
environment as it diverted life-giving water to his garden—a stark contrast
to the “giant” drains that “dump” water into the river. Furthermore,
Felipe’s method could not be reproduced by someone who does not know
the land as well as he, which indicates the critical importance of passing
on cultural knowledge of traditional farming and water management
techniques.
The use of seasonal precipitation to water crops is called dry farming,
Ely | 139