Voice above,
     Voice of Thunder,
     Speak from the dark of clouds; Voice below,
     Grasshopper-voice,
     Speak from the green of plants;
     So may the earth be beautiful.

     There is in the ideas of this song a comprehension of the world that is peculiarly native, that is integral in the Navajo--indeed the American Indian--mentality. The singer stands at the center of sound, of motion, of life; nothing within the whole sphere of being is inaccessible to him or lost upon him. At least we have the sense that this is so--and so does he. His song is full of reverence, of wonder and delight, and of confidence as well. He knows something about himself and about the world--and he knows that he knows. He is at peace. I am interested in what he sees and hears, in the range and force of his perception. Our immediate impression may be that his perception is vertical-"Voice above . . . Voice below"--but is it vertical? Is it vertical only? At each level of his expression there is an elaboration of sound and substance. The voice above is the voice of thunder, and thunder rolls. Moreover, it issues from the impalpable dark clouds and runs upon their horizontal range. It is a sound which integrates the whole of the atmosphere. And even so the voice below, that of the cricket, say, issues from the whole landscape and multiplicity of plants. The singer points to nothing in particular and to everything in general; we are given the wide angle of his vision and his hearing.
     This comprehension of the earth and air in language is .a matter of morality, I believe, for it brings into account not only Man's instinctive reaction to his environment but the full realization of his humanity as well, the achievement of his intellectual and spiritual development as an individual and as a race.
     Let me give you another example of this calm and comprehensive view of things, this "world view," as it is sometimes called. Here is a prayer of the Night Chant from the Navajo. As you listen to it, consider if you will the special character of the singer, the quality' of his vision and of his being. And particularly at the end consider the location of his voice in time and space.

Tsegihi
House made of dawn.
House made of evening light.
House made of dark cloud.
House made of male rain.
House made of dark mist.
House made of female rain.
House made of pollen.
House made of grasshoppers.
Dark cloud is at the door.
The trail out of it is dark cloud.
The zigzag lightning stands high upon it.
Male deity!
Your offering I make.
I have prepared a smoke for you.
Restore my feet for me.
Restore my legs for me.
Restore my body for me.
Restore my mind for me.
Restore my voice for me.
This very day take out your spell for me.
Your spell remove for me.
You have taken it away for me.
Far off it has gone.
Happily I recover.
Happily my interior becomes cool.
Happily I go forth.
My interior feeling cool, may I walk.
No longer sore, may I walk.
Impervious to pain, may I walk.
With lively feelings, may I walk.
As it used to be long ago, may I walk.
Happily may I walk.
Happily, with abundant dark clouds, may I walk.
Happily, with abundant showers, may I walk.
Happily, with abundant plants, may I walk.
Happily, on a trail of pollen, may I walk.
Happily may I walk.
Being as it used to be long ago, may I walk.
May it be beautiful before me.
May it be beautiful behind me.
May it be beautiful below me.
May it be beautiful above me.
May it be beautiful all around me.
In beauty it is finished.

     It is by no means accidental or insignificant that in both of these ceremonial songs the singer should have ended upon the notion of beauty, of beauty in the physical world, of Man in the very presence and full awareness of that beauty. Neither is it insignificant that this whole and aesthetic sense should be expressed in language. Man has always tried to represent and even to recreate the world in words. One of our most venerable metaphors for poetry is that of the Renaissance Man, holding up the mirror of language to the face of Nature. Nor, of course, is it accidental or insignificant that we have here, at the very center of the singer's purpose, the language of prayer.
     In her perceptive commentary upon the prose and poetry of the American Indian, Margot Astrov wrote this:
          The singing of songs and the telling of tales, with the
     American Indian, is but seldom a means of mere
     spontaneous self-expression. More often than not,
     the singer aims with the chanted word to exert a strong
     influence and to bring about a change, either in himself
     or in nature or in his fellow beings. By narrating the
     story of origin, he endeavors to influence the universe
     and to strengthen the failing powers of the supernatural
      beings. He relates the myth of creation, ceremonially,
     in order to save the world from death and destruction
     and to keep alive the primeval spirit of the sacred
     beginning. Above all, it seems that the word, both in
     song and in tale, was meant to maintain and to prolong
     the individual life in some way or other--that is, to cure,
     to heal, to ward off evil, and to frustrate death.

     The word, indeed, is power. It is life, substance, reality. The word lived before earth, sun, or moon came into existence. Whenever the Indian ponders over the mystery of origin, he shows a tendency to ascribe to the word a creative power all its own. The word is conceived of as an independent entity, superior even to the gods. Only when the word came up mysteriously in the darkness of the night were the gods of the Maya enabled to bring forth the earth and life thereon. And the genesis of the Uitoto opens, characteristically enough, in this way: "In the beginning, the word gave origin to the Father."
     Another dimension of this experience is of course the ceremony itself, of which this prayer is a small part. It is elaborate and of long duration, enveloping as it proceeds myriad other components of the relationship between Man and the universe. Always in his religious expression the Indian is concerned to bring virtually all of his being to bear upon the act of spiritual affirmation. He focuses his human strength upon it, the whole strength of his body and his mind, and these forces he integrates in an imitation of the physical world and of its creatures. Nor is it imitation only, as we are inclined to think of that term. Rather, it is more truly a kind of incorporation and synthesis, and appropriation of all that touches upon him in his coming and going. This is difficult for most of us to understand, perhaps, and it gives rise to certain ironies.
     The idea of appropriation--and of the related terms "appropriateness" and "propriety"--is at the heart of Indian religion. Some time ago I was told the story of an Indian man who had come upon bad times. He was without work, and he had a wife and children to support. Moreover, his wife was expecting another child. One day a friend came 'to visit and perceived that the man's situation was bad, and he said to him: "My friend, I see that you are poor, that you have no work and many mouths to feed, and there is no fresh meat in your larder. Now I know you to be a hunter, and I know that there are deer in the mountains close by. Why do you not kill a deer, in order that you and yours might have fresh meat?" And after a time, the man replied: "No. You see, it is inappropriate that I should take life just now, when I am expecting the gift of life."
     In one of his books Vine Deloria, Jr. writes of an Indian woman whose child has died. A Christian man of the cloth comes to her thinking to comfort her. She should not grieve, he says, for her child has succeeded to another and eternal life. But in this there is no solace for the woman, for grief is the appropriate expression of her life at this moment, and it is the only expression that is worthy of her and of her child.
      It might be difficult for most of us to understand such attitudes as these, but to the Indian they are altogether natural and logical, appropriate. They are informed with a sense of propriety that is all but alien to the predominate ethic of Western Man, I believe. And this, more than anything else, perhaps, has led to a situation of cultural and spiritual estrangement, a situation which Western Man has only very recently begun to see for what it is. Even the great Eastern religions, which are revealed to most of us in terms of elaborate interpretation, are obscure to us, inasmuch as our own experience, our own fundamental attitudes and habits of thought--and indeed our very understanding of the process of thought itself--provides no accommodation for them, and they remain for us essentially mysterious and exotic.
      I suspect that we know even less of American Indian religion, and especially for the reasons that I have suggested: it is in its manifestations endless and unwieldy, so it seems; and it is embodied in an oral tradition that is itself alien to us. In order to understand the basic elements of American Indian religion, even in the most preliminary and general way, we shall have to proceed indirectly and with extraordinary patience.
      When my father was a boy, an old man used to come to the house which my grandfather built near Rainy Mountain Creek. He was a lean old man in braids and was impressive in his age and bearing. His name was Cheney. Every morning, my father tells me, Cheney would paint his wrinkled face, go out, and pray aloud to the rising sun. I like to hear of that old man. I like to watch him make his prayer with the eyes of my mind, though I am nearly ashamed to intrude upon so sacred a thing. Old man Cheney had come to terms with himself and with the world. He did not for a moment doubt the source of his strength, and each morning he returned to it his wonder and his words. The earth where Cheney prayed is a deep red, and it bears the innumerable wounds of erosion. It is a huge land--so vast that only sound can take possession of it; a single tree can dominate the plain, but nothing can fill it. It is the kind of landscape in which a man is seen always against the sky--and a man on the back of a horse is regal. The air is hot and clear and filled with an essence that qualifies all objects in the eye and ear. There, in the early summer, I have seen the sun rise out of the ground an immense red-orange disc, scarcely brighter than the moon, beautiful and strange and health-giving. It was old man Cheney's god.
      The sun dance was the great medicine dance of the Kiowas and of other tribes on the Great Plains. It was held at least once each year at. a time and place designated by the Tai-me keeper. All the bands of the tribe converged upon the sun dance place and camped in the presence of the great, ancestral medicine. The institution of the sun dance was a concerted expression of tribal integrity. As a social event it was a time for the exchange of gossip and of wares, an opportunity to show off prized possessions, a festive occasion upon which to take stock of blood resources and prospects. But the sun dance was preeminently an act of faith, a religious declaration. It restored power to the people; it invested them with purpose, and therefore dignity and trust; it enabled them for a moment to celebrate the deepest meaning of their humanity, to send their voices, however frail, against the silence at the edge of the world. During the sun dance Tai-me was exposed to view. It was suspended from a branch of the sacred tree in the sun dance lodge. The rest of the time it was--and is now--kept in a parflesche which is wrapped in a blanket and bound with strips of ticking. The sun dance proper lasted four days and four nights. A buffalo bull was killed, its hide draped upon the limbs of the sacred tree and its head impaled at the top. The buffalo was from the beginning the thread of life; it was food and shelter, god and beast. The head of a buffalo bull, uppermost on the Tai-me tree, its terrified dead eyes fixed on the skyline to the east, was the symbol of life itself. And nothing could have been more perfectly symbolic; the Kiowas could have conceived of no greater sacrifice. The principal dancers fasted the four days through and danced to the edge of exhaustion. Paintings of the sun and moon were made on their bodies, and later the flesh was cut away so that the images were permanent. Far more intimately than we can easily imagine, the Kiowas bound themselves to their religion. Their commitment to faith and morality was total and deliberate, and above all natural, the most natural and appropriate realization of their humanity in the world. Although the sun dance became the supreme religious institution of a young and short-lived culture--the last culture to evolve in North America--it was unspeakably old in itself, as old as the need of Man to know his gods.

     There is an unhappy sequel to this. The sun dance died away because it was forbidden to exist by the white man and because the white man destroyed the buffalo. The last Kiowa sun dance was held in 1887 on a tributary of the Washita River above Rainy Mountain Creek. The buffalo were gone. In order to have their dance, the Kiowas had to buy an animal from the domestic herd which Charles Goodnight preserved in Texas. In 1889 a sun dance was planned, but it was found out and prevented by the soldiers at Fort Sill. On that occasion, the Kiowas were going to suspend an old buffalo robe from the sacred tree. Perhaps the most immoral act ever committed against the land was the senseless killing of the buffalo. The loss of the sun dance was the blow that killed the native Kiowa culture. The Kiowas might have endured every privation but that, the desecration of their faith. Without their religion there was nothing to sustain them in spirit. Subsequent acceptance of the Ghost Dance, of peyote, and of Christianity were for the Kiowas pathetic attempts to revive the old deities; they had become a people whose spirit was broken.
      And here is the saddest irony of all: that inhumanity is all too often the underside of religious experience. Human history is rife with examples of religious persecution, and no chapter more than that in which the American Indian figures, for no segment of humanity has been more nearly brought to extinction in the name of religion and by means of religious licence. One has only to consider the history of the Mission Indians in California or that of the Pequods in Puritan New England--and the moral rationale which could enable a Calvinist Divine of the seventeenth century to observe "Thank God that on this day we have sent nearly 600 heathen souls to Hell." But these are merely the most visible examples in this catalogue of things that pertains to religion and the dehumanization of Man, and in spite of their atrocious nature, there are others still more lethal and contagious.
      If we assume, as most of us do, I suspect, that there is a positive correlation in the theme of Religion and the Humanizing of Man, we had better admit of serious qualifications. It will behoove us to look on all sides and to bear in mind that we are ourselves the products of a history that is at best morally ambiguous, in which our experience is informed at the center by an anomalous tension between the humane and the inhumane.
     One night a strange thing happened. I had written the greater part of The Way to Rainy Mountain, all of it, in fact, except the epilogue. I had set down the last of the old Kiowa tales, and I had composed both the historical and autobiographical commentaries for it. I had the sense of being out of breath, of having said what it was in me to say on that subject. The manuscript lay before me in the bright light, small, to be sure, but complete; or nearly so. I had written the second of the two poems in which that book is framed. I had uttered the last word, as it were. And yet a whole, penultimate piece was missing. I began once again to write.

          During the first hours after midnight on the morning
     of November 13, 1833, it seemed that the world was
     coming to an end. Suddenly the stillness of the night
     was broken; there were brilliant flashes of light in the
     sky, light of such intensity that people were awakened
     by it. With the speed and density of a driving rain, stars
     were falling in the universe. Some were brighter than
     Venus; one was said to be as large as the moon.

     I went on to say that that event, the falling of the stars, that explosion of Leonid meteors in 1833 is among the earliest entries in. the Kiowa calendars. So 'deeply impressed upon the imagination of the Kiowas is that old phenomenon that it' is remembered still; it has become a part of the racial memory.
     "The living memory," I wrote, "and the verbal tradition which transcends it, were brought together for me once and for all in the person of Ko-sahn." It seemed eminently right for me to deal, after all, with that old woman. Ko-sahn is among the most venerable people I have ever known. She spoke and sang to me one summer afternoon in Oklahoma. It was like a dream. When I was born she was already old; she was a grown woman when my grandparents came into the world. She sat perfectly still, folded over on herself. It did not seem possible that so many years--a century of years-could be so compacted and distilled. Her voice shuddered, but it did not fail. Her songs were sad. An old whimsy, a delight in language and in remembrance, shone in her one good eye. She conjured up the past, imagining perfectly the long continuity of her being. She imagined the lovely young girl, wild and vital, she had been. She imagined the sun dance:

     There was an old, old woman. She had something on
     her back. The boys went out to see. The old woman
     had a bag full of earth on her back. It was a certain
     kind of sandy earth. That is what they must have in the
     lodge. The dancers must dance upon the sandy earth.
     The old woman held a digging tool in her hand. She
     turned towards the south and pointed with her lips. It
     was like a kiss, and she began to sing:

     We have brought the earth.
     Now it is time to play;
     As old as I am, I still have the feeling of play.

     That was the beginning of the sun dance.
     By this time I was back into the book, caught up completely in the act of writing. I had projected myself--imagined myself--out of the room and out of time. I was there with Ko-sahn in the Oklahoma July. We laughed easily together; I felt that I had known her all of my life--and all of hers. I did not want to let her go. But I had come to the end. I set down, almost grudgingly, the last sentences:

     It was--all of this and more--a quest, a going forth
     upon the way to Rainy Mountain. Probably Ko-sahn
     too is dead now. At times, in the quiet of evening,
     I think she must have wondered, dreaming, who she
     was. Was she become in her sleep that old purveyor
     of the sacred earth, perhaps, that ancient one who, old
     as she was, still had the feeling of play? And in her
     mind, at times, did she see the falling stars?

     For some time I sat looking down at these words on the page, trying to deal with the emptiness that had come about inside of me. The words did not seem real. The longer I looked at them, the more unfamiliar they became. At last I could scarcely believe that they made sense, that 'they had anything whatsoever to do with meaning. In desperation almost, I went back over the final paragraphs, backwards and forwards, hurriedly. My eyes fell upon the name Ko-sahn. And all at once everything seemed to refer to that name. The name seemed to humanize the whole complexity of language. All at once, absolutely, I had the sense of the magic of words and of names. Ko-sahn, I said. And I said again KO-SAHN.
     Then it was that that ancient, one-eyed woman Ko-sahn stepped out of the language and stood before me on the page. I was amazed, of course, and yet it seemed to me entirely appropriate that this should happen.
      "Yes, grandson," she said. "What is it? What do you want?"
      "I was just now writing about you," I replied, stammering. "I thought--forgive me--I thought that perhaps you were . . . that you had. . . "
      "No," she said. And she cackled, I thought. And she went on. "You have imagined me well, grandson, and so I am. You have imagined that I dream, and so I do. I have seen the falling stars."
      "But all of this, this imagining," I protested, "this has taken place--is taking place in my mind. You are not actually here, not herein this room." It occurred tome that I was being extremely rude, but I could not help myself. Anyway, she seemed to understand.
      "Be careful of your pronouncements, grandson," she answered. "You imagine that I am here in this room, do you not? That is worth something. You see, I have existence, whole being, in your imagination. It is but one kind of being, to be sure, but it is perhaps the best of all kinds. If I am not here in this room, grandson, then surely neither are you."
      "I think I see what you mean," I said meekly. I felt justly rebuked. "Tell me, grandmother, how old are you?"
      "I do not know," she replied. "There are times when I think that I am the oldest woman on earth. You know, the Kiowas came. into the world through a hollow log. In my mind's eye I have seen them emerge, one by one, from the mouth of that log. I have seen them so clearly, how they were dressed, how delighted they were to see the world around them. I must have been there. And I must have taken part in that old migration of the Kiowas from the Yellowstone to the Southern Plains, for I have seen antelope bounding in the tall grass near the Big Horn River, and I have seen the ghost forests in the Black Hills. Once I saw the red cliffs of Palo Duro Canyon. I was with those who were camped in the Wichita Mountains when the stars fell."
      "You are indeed very old," I said, "and you have seen many things."
      "Yes, I imagine that I have," she replied. Then she turned slowly around, nodding once, and receded into the language I had made. And then I imagined I was alone in the room.

     Who is the storyteller? Of whom is the story told? What is there in the darkness to imagine into being? What is there to dream and to relate? What happens when I, or anyone, exerts the force of language upon the unknown?
      These are the questions which interest me most. If there is any absolute assumption in back of my thoughts on this occasion, it is this: that we are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at last, completely, who and what and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.
      Now let me return to the falling stars. And let me apply a new angle of vision to that event; let me proceed this time from a slightly different point of view.
      In the winter of 1833 the Kiowas were camped on Elm Fork, a branch of the Red River, west of the Wichita Mountains, In the preceding summer they had suffered a massacre at the hands of another tribe, and Tai-me, the sacred sun dance doll and most powerful medicine of the tribe, had been stolen. At no time in the history of their migration from the north, and in the evolution of their plains culture, had the Kiowas been more vulnerable to despair. The loss of Tai-me was a deep psychological wound. In the early cold of November 13, there occurred over the earth an explosion of meteors. The Kiowas were awakened by the sterile light of falling stars, and they ran out into the false day and were terrified.
      There was symbolic meaning in that November sky. With the coming of natural dawn there began a new and darker age for the Kiowa people, and the last culture to evolve upon this continent began to decline. Within four years of the falling stars the Kiowas signed their first treaty with the United States; within twenty, four major epidemics of smallpox and Asiatic cholera destroyed more than half their number; and within scarcely more than a generation their horses were taken from them and the herds of buffalo were slaughtered and left to waste upon the plains.
      Do you see what happens when the imagination is superimposed upon the historical event? It becomes a story. The whole piece becomes more deeply invested with meaning. The terrified Kiowas, when they had regained possession of themselves, did indeed imagine that the falling stars were symbolic of their being and of their destiny. They accounted for themselves with reference to that awful memory. They appropriated it, re-created it, fashioned it into an image of themselves; they imagined it. And by means of that act of the imagination could they bear what happened to them thereafter. No defeat, no humiliation, no suffering was beyond their power to endure, for none of it was meaningless.
      How are we to integrate these things? Within our frame of reference, what is the condition of humanity in the light of anomalous history? And how is it determined upon the basis of religious considerations? In a sense these are exclusive questions. In the context of the American Indian world view, they are scarcely relevant, for they are hypothetical and abstract. They do not occur to the man who refuses to take a life when he is expecting the gift of life, to the woman who will not be cheated of her grief, and to a wizened elder who, each day of his life, paints his face and prays aloud to the rising sun. In these people and in their world there is no separation of religion and humanity, for the one thing is indispensably the other.
      I have had some close and personal experience of American Indian religion. When I lived at Jemez Pueblo as a boy, I entered into the current of life there and eventually perceived the great spiritual tides that move upon that world and determine virtually everything within it. I have seen the ancient races which are run at dawn, the descent of men who are buffalo and deer from the hills at first light, and the harvest dances, in which all the sound and motion of the universe is concentrated in the one dimension of the music and the dance. Once I went with the people of Jemez to plant the Cacique's fields, and I felt that I had entered into some primordial migration of Man through time. I felt of seeds in the earth and ate of their yield, and all of it culminated in the profound spiritual reality of fellowship and community--and on that afternoon it was a community of the whole world.
      And years later, when I was grown up, I visited my grandmother for the last time. Together we went to the place where Tai-me is preserved. Tai-me was acquired by the Kiowas almost 300 years ago, in the course of their migration to the Southern Plains. I had known of this medicine, but I had not understood that it was extant, that it continued to be a vital element in the Kiowa world long after the sun dance, of which it was the central figure, had passed from existence. After a long and preliminary parley, an hour of storytelling, my grandmother, my father, and I were ushered into the presence of Tai-me. It was suspended, even as in sun dance times, from a sacred tree. As I had been instructed, I made an offering, a gift of red cloth, the bright yardage that is especially prized among Kiowa women and which is used to make the traditional dress. When I had draped the material over the parflesche in which Tai-me is preserved, my grandmother prayed aloud in Kiowa. She prayed for a long time, while I stood before the medicine bundle. During those moments, which seemed somehow apart from time, I felt that I had come to the first full spiritual realization of my life. As I wrote of it in The Way to Rainy Mountain:

          Once I went with my father and grandmother to see
     the Tai-me bundle. It was suspended by means of a
     strip of ticking from the fork of a small ceremonial tree.
      I made an offering of bright red cloth, and my
     grandmother prayed aloud. It seemed a long time that
     we were there. I had never come into the presence of
     Tai-me before--nor have I since. There was a great
     holiness all about in the room, as if an old person had
     died there or a child had been born.

     And again, a few years later, I was taken into the membership of the Taimpe, or gourd dance, society of the Kiowa tribe. And now, at each annual celebration of that society in July I dance with my kinsmen to the drums and the ancient songs, even as Mammedaty did before I was born. There have been times when I have wondered what the dance is and what it means--and what I am inside of it. And there have been times when I have known. Always, there comes a moment when the dance takes hold of me, becomes itself the most meaningful and appropriate expression of my being. And always, afterwards, there is rejoicing among us. We have made our prayer, and we have made good our humanity in the process. There are lively feelings. There is much good talk and laughter--and much that goes without saying. Here and there the old people begin to play at words with the young, telling stories of this and that--of how Saynday came to reside in the moon. And I think of the falling stars and of Ko-sahn, and of that ancient, who, old as she is, still has the feeling of play.
     Religion for the American Indian is a constituent of language and drama, in which Man achieves a certain unity with nature and with the powers which inform the cosmos. And this duality of language and drama is basically a humanizing equation, I believe. When the Indian exerts his spirit upon the world by means of whole and deliberate religious expression, he transcends himself in a sense; he expands his awareness to include all of Creation. And in this he is restored as a man and as a race. Nothing in his universe isolates him, but he is part and parcel of all that is and forever was and will be. His humanity consists in concentric forces that are indivisible and of which he is the absolute and the center. He is the Man made of Words, inasmuch as he consists in his prayer. And this is his affirmation:

     Friends, behold!
     Sacred, I have been made. Friends, behold!
     In a sacred manner
     I have been influenced
     At the gathering of the clouds.
     Sacred I have been made,
     Friends, behold!
     Sacred I have been made.