'Indian thought'

ou um bom apanhado, apesar de generalizador, na introdução da antologia de John Bierhorst In the Trail of the Wind: American Indian Poems and Ritual Orations, de 1971.

The power of words. Words are magic, they enable the user to seize control. Sharp cohercise phrases like "Listen!" "Be still!" "Drink my blood!" are especially typical of that style of utterance known as the formula. Elsewhere, phrases which seem merely descriptive - for example, "around the roots the water foams" or "my god descended" - may in fact be cohercive, uttered in order to bring about the action they describe. Much Indian poetry may thus be characterized as compulsive, or incantatory.

The significance of dreams. Dreams are thought of as messages from the spirit world, confering power on the dreamer, who may wish to consolidate this power in a concise symbolic song. Many of the shorter songs in the present collection are dream songs.

Personality. Animals and objects, as well as humans, are believed to be imbued with a personifying spirit: for example, deer, water, wind, even hunger or disease. Translators who write the deer or the wind tend to obscure this quality; but when Frank Russell, translating from the Pima, writes "Wind now commences to sing," the idea is well conveyed.

Dualism. Things in nature, colors, even words are thought of in pairs. Indian poetry is replete with paired stanzas and paired expressions: "The white-rising! The yellow-rising!" In many (but not all) cases the idea is evidently an extension of sexuality: white, for example, may be the male color; yellow, the female. The two together make for completeness - not unlike the paired rhyming of English verse, which similarly gives a sense of completeness.

Father Sky and Mother Earth. Either the sun or the sky as a whole represents the father figure. Sunlight and rain, descending from the sky, are viewed as life-giving substances that promote fertility within the body of the female earth. (According to some Indian mythologies, human life "emerged" from a womb-like underworld, or series of underworlds, inside the earth.) In some religions (Navajo, for example), the cult of the earth is dominant; in other (Inca), the cult of the sun. In still others the two are worshipped together as a dual creative deity - for example, the Quiché god called "Heart of Heaven, Heart of Earth."

The cult of the four world quarters. The four directions (east, west, south, north), corresponding to the four faces of the human body (front, back, left, right), are held sacred in many cultures. By extension, the number 4 itself is also sacred and fourfold repetitions occur frequently in song and myth.

Anonymity. Traditional Indian poets did not consider themselves the originators of their material. Either they had heard it from elders or they had received it from supernatural powers. describing more or less the same methods, the self-conscious European or Euro-American poets speaks of reworking traditional material, or fancifully, of drawing inspiration from a muse. But the traditional Indian poet, being relatively unself-conscious does not see it this way. Traditional Indian poetry, then, has usually been attributed not to individuals but to cultures.

The influence of alien gods. In traditional Indian societies, new prayers, new rituals, even new gods are borrowed as readily as new technologies, to be used to whatever good they may bring. Much of Navajo religion was taken from the Pueblos. The Aztecs enshrined countless gods borrowed from tribes they had conquered. Christianity was similarly embraced, but the spirit in which it was taken explains why many "Christianized" Indians are not truly so at all. Christianity has simply been added to a larger body of native customs, which endures.


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