Witchery Unleashed in the Gulf

Just days after celebrating the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, we experienced the greatest oil spill in U.S. history. And it is still going on! I can’t begin to express how discouraged I am about the news. I have boycotted Exxon since the Valdez tanker spill fouled the Alaskan coast in 1989, and here we are again. Only much, much worse.

As I gaze upon the images of birds slimed by the oil spill, I think of a scene in the George Clooney film Three Kings. The film takes place during the aftermath of the First Gulf War and includes a hard-bitten woman reporter who has seen everything and seems impervious to the brutalities that human beings inflict upon each other. But when she sees a pelican caught up the spills caused by Saddam Hussein’s destruction of Kuwaiti oilrigs, she bursts into tears.

Is that because she cares more about birds than about people? I think the explanation is more complex than that. We feel that the earth has an innocence that we have lost, and when we see it desecrated by human perversity, we feel that our own remaining innocence has been invaded.

Looking to literature for someone describing human assaults on the earth, I thought of Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 novel Ceremony. There the Laguna Pueblo writer explains horrors such as the Gulf spill as the work of witches.

According to Silko, witches are those forces that cause us to grow away from the earth. The good news is that, at least in Ceremony, they can be fought.

Tayo, Silko’s protagonist, is suffering from multiple traumas, including the trauma of what white culture is doing to the land. He thinks that he is powerless to combat the horrors, which are detailed in a long poem. Here’s an extended passage:

Caves across the ocean
in caves of dark hills
white skin people
like the belly of a fish
covered with hair.

Then they grow away from the earth
then they grow away from the sun
then they grow away from the plants and animals.
They see no life
When they look
they see only objects.
The world is a dead thing for them
the trees and rivers are not alive
the mountains and stones are not alive.
The deer and bear are objects
They see no life.

They fear
They fear the world.
They destroy what they fear.
They fear themselves.

The wind will blow them across the ocean
thousands of them in giant boats
swarming like larva
out of a crushed ant hill

They will carry objects
which can shoot death
faster than the eye can see.

They will kill the things they fear
all the animals
the people will starve.

They will poison the water
they will spin the water away
and there will be drought
the people will starve.

They will fear what they find
They will fear the people
They kill what they fear.

Entire villages will be wiped out
They will slaughter whole tribes.

Cropses for us
Blood for us
Killing killing killing killing.

And those they do not kill
will die anyway
at the destruction they see
at the loss
at the loss of the children
the loss will destroy the rest.

Stolen rivers and mountains
the stolen land will eat their hearts
and jerk their mouths from the Mother.
The people will starve.

They will bring terrible diseases
the people have never known.
Entire tribes will die out
covered with festered sores
shitting blood
vomiting blood.
Corpses for our work

Set in motion now
set in motion by our witchery
set in motion
to work for us.

You can fill in your own favorite examples of the witchery at work. Poisoning the water, of course, could include mountaintop removal, aquifer depletion, and dam building as well as the Gulf oil spill.

But while the poem seems to be putting all the blame on whites, the medicine man who is treating Tayo refuses to indulge in that kind of victimization. Witches, he says

want us to believe all evil resides with white people. Then we will look no further to see what is really happening. 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 manipulates; and I tell you, we can deal with white people, with the machines and their beliefs.

And then he says something which needs a fair amount of explaining. He claims that “we invented white people; it was Indian witchery that made white people in the first place.” Then he proceeds to tell a story of a witch competition where the most evil witch is the one who invents the story of whites coming to America and devastating the land. The poem I cited above is from that story.

Okay, so I don’t think Indians literally invented whites. But I do believe that witchery is caused by our getting out of alignment with the earth, and Indians too have been out of alignment. When the Pueblo become dependent on what Silko calls Ck’o’yo magic, which can be seen as our modern materialist lifestyle, then they  (like the rest of us) lose touch with Mother Earth (Nau’ts’ity’i), who expresses her anger through droughts and other catastrophes.

The oil spill can be traced to our misalignment. We have become so dependent on energy that we push our environment to the limits. Then, when nothing goes wrong, we curtail “excessive government regulation” that slows the extraction and push even harder. Sooner or later, inevitably, a mine explodes here, an oilrig explodes there.

In Ceremony, some Indians become fatalistic over the situation, others become destructively angry. The medicine man works with Tayo to develop ways that he can work constructively with the land, with white society, and with alienated Indians. In a post a couple of months ago, I talked about how Silko also gives us a way to respond to Tea Party anger.

Ceremony, as its title indicates, is structured as a healing ceremony. The Indians have something to teach the rest of America about living in harmony with nature. Through telling Tayo’s story, Silko works to enlighten us.

I know that, too often, it seems as though the witchery has the upperhand. As the oil spill, still uncontained, makes its way towards the fragile wetlands of the Gulf coast, people must be feeling that there is no hope.

Hopelessness, however, is what the witchery wants us to feel.

In Ceremony, the people purify themselves through healing rituals and Mother Earth is finally placated.  Think of this as making adjustments in our energy use. As Silko writes,

Everything was set straight again after all that ck’o’yo’ magic.

The storm clouds returned
the grass and plants started growing again.
There was food
and the people were happy again.

So she told them
“Stay out of trouble
from now on.

It isn’t very easy
to fix up things again.
Remember that
next time
some ck’o’yo magician
comes town.

We need to focus on cleansing rituals.  It’s a daunting task but, as Silko says multiple times throughout her book, “It isn’t easy.  It never has been easy.”