-
Preface
- University of Arizona Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
xvii Preface Spiderwoman Called Up This Knowledge This history begins with an offering of cotton and macaw feathers, yellowblue plumes and eagle down to the weaver, the spider inside these stories. Before I can write these words, I put cotton on the spindle of the great midwife, the life weaver Tlazolteotl, who is Nahua guardian of midwives, birthing women, the Mexican sweat lodge, and other purification rites. As Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko writes in Almanac of the Dead (1991), histories carry spirits, ancestors waiting, breathing into the years and memories. I offer the spirits food for what they speak to us in these pages. I cannot make whole the stories. This is part of the soul wound, the susto, of that which was disappeared or was usurped by oppressors. But I can leave these offerings because, over the hundreds of years since these books were created, enough knowledge of the old ways remained to arrive to me. In doing so, some points of time/experience are made whole in a dynamic constitution; knowledge is experienced with the whole of our being. I look for medicine within the painted knowledge, for the medicine made of stories , dreams, and ceremonial sweepings. What story is created from plants, patterns of nature, and human deeds? The maguey’s needle is also thread. In my examination of Indigenous medicine and various rites of renewal , I term this healing knowledge “Red Medicine.” Red Medicine addresses how birthing and the attendant ceremonies that comprise rites of regeneration and Indigenous knowledge are medicinal practices that address soul loss, land loss, and cultural and spiritual fragmentation. In xviii • Preface birthing, a family and community are reminded of the everlasting cycle of the natural world: genesis, transformation, and return (Harjo and Bird 1997; Carrasco 1998; Cajete 1994; Gonzales 2003). The concept of regeneration , so crucial to life, birth, and the social reality of communities , is expressed not only in birthing practices, but also in ceremonies, dreaming ways, and purification rights. This book presents an integrated context in which the birth experience can be understood in the context of other forms of traditional medicine. Indigenous communities traditionally would understand the birthing rites as related to these other ceremonies of renewal and healing. Red Medicine is the red of ceremonies and blood, the red earth and red cloth for healing; it is the red of protection and “the red and the black” paint of the codices and, therefore, knowledge. It is the red of women’s blood powers and red of the woman’s direction in some expressions of Nahua thought; it is the red coral worn for protection, as is the red thread; the red of primary color and firstness and the red inside the color brown; it is the red of vitality and of the ability to live and continue. It is the red of original colors and originality. It is the ceremonial red and the red cloth of ceremonies. When I pursued my doctorate in mass communications, I found that working with symbols, stories, and narrative research was a coherent way for me to understand the ecology of birth and the ecological principle of regeneration that is signified by the Mesoamerican Spiderwoman/Weaver, referred to in this book as Tlazolteotl. Birth informs much of what scholars refer to as Mexican traditional medicine (MTM). It is a foundational Figure 1. Spider hole and woman, Nuttall 13. [54.152.43.79] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:37 GMT) Preface • xix paradigm of regeneration. My work seeks to offer a holistic treatment of the medicinal knowledge that elders have passed on to me, long before my doctorate, as a way to convey enduring Indigenous knowledge (IK) in birth and in other rites of renewal. Red Medicine is the culmination of a twentyyear cycle of my experiences with Indigenous medicine and combines my journalistic work, my apprenticeship with elders, and my research into symbols as medicine. The book is organized around the Mesoamerican Spiderwoman, who represents an Indigenous “natural law” of regeneration. The symbols of this regenerative process are expressed in time, limpias, or purification rites, birth, traditional medicine, and weaving, and the expressions of these symbols have grown exponentially in vectors of Indigenous Mexican and Chicano communities. Therefore, the medicinal applications of the symbols of this Spiderwoman are foundational to understanding rites of regeneration as they are expressed through birth, dreams, and limpias. As you will read in these pages, Red Medicine contains the bodyspiritplacetime. In Red Medicine, the...