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Gazing at the Sky Loom
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20602 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1992 |
3,419 Words |
| Author
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Ron McCoy
Ron McCoy is professor of history at Emporia State University
(Kansas). His article "She of Myth and Memory: The Remarkable
Legend of Sacagawea" appeared in the March 2002 issue of The
World & I. |
EARTH & SKY
Visions of the Cosmos in Native American Folklore
Edited by Ray A. Williamson and Claire R. Farrer
Albuqerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1992
289 pp., $ 25.00
O our Mother the Earth, O our Father the Sky.
Your children are we, and with tired backs
We bring you the gifts that you love.
Then weave for us a garment of brightness;
May the warp be the white light of morning,
May the weft be the red light of evening.
May the fringes be the falling rain,
May the border be the standing rainbow.
Thus weave for us a garment of brightness
That we may walk fittingly where birds sing.
That we may walk fittingly where grass is green.
O our Mother the Earth, O our Father the Sky.
So runs "The Song of the Sky Loom," which comes from the Tewas of New Mexico's Rio Grande Valley. Even in translation, the sentiments underlying these words possess a capacity for dispelling the banal by making way for the profound. As Von Del Chamberlain, director of Salt Lake City's Hanson Planetarium, opines, they conjure up the sense of a "border between earth and sky."
But what's an astronomer doing, commenting on a North American Indian song? Isn't that like an anthropologist talking about astronomy? Or a historian delving into folklore? A folklorist racing toward the library's history section? Certainly, because interdisciplinary is the watch word in Native American studies, as once-rigid walls bounding areas of interest--and nourishing narrowness of focus--come down. A case in point: Native American sky watching.
As astronomer Ray A. Williamson and anthropologist Claire R. Farrer, coeditors of Earth & Sky: Visions of the Cosmos in Native American Folklore, make clear, the term sky watching embraces several types of naked-eye astronomy. The include observing stars and planets for purposes of navigation as well as noting the passage
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