Felipe Molina: An Introduction

"Yaquiness as Theory"

by Toby Langen

One day in class perhaps a month before Felipe Molina came to talk to us, a question arose about whether theory really has anything to add to the appreciation and understanding of a Native American work of literature that can be achieved by someone who is enabled by life experience to read from a Native American point of view.

Theory can be loosely defined as the act of thinking about or beholding something. It can also be defined as a belief followed as a basis for action. By either definition, my work with traditional Lushootseed literature has involved me with theory, so that for me the question of the relevance of theory is anything but theoretical (another definition of theory being "mere theory" as opposed to reality).

This question stayed in the air throughout the rest of the term: through the visit of a writer like Leslie Silko who discussed reading, writing, and epistemology in terms of a kaleidoscope of theories -- quantum physics, chaos science, marxism, psychoanalysis -- while maintaining a passionate distance from the values of the societies that produced those theories; and it stayed in the air during the visit of Felipe Molina, who came not to discuss specific works of literature, but to share with us a Yaqui epistemology, a way of beholding the world (and thus a theory) that he called "Yaquiness."

Since his visit came during Lent, Felipe could not sing deer songs for us, and he discussed the deer dance as part of the Holy Saturday observance, rather than as part of the pahko. Yaqui religious culture has a palimpsestic quality that Felipe explains this way: Jesus was among the Yaquis before the Spanish arrived. Thus, when the Jesuits appeared, Yaquis found it easy to work with them. Through the deer ceremonies you can see the model of something that happens in the world: a being from another reality comes into this world, grows up, is killed so that people might live, returns whence he came, but will come again to this world. The deer arrives in the rama as a fawn, though he may be danced by an old man; during the course of the evening the deer becomes older and gives himself to be supernatural food for men; he returns to the wilderness world as a fawn again -- "The wilderness world, that's like heaven to us," Felipe says. Though Christ is 33 when He is crucified, Felipe makes a point of telling us, on Maundy Thursday in the Yaqui observance Christ as an old man -- older than He ever lived to be in this world -- is hunted through the village and captured. And in some people's belief He returns as a baby to His Father after the Crucifixion. It is unsatisfactory to consider the relation of these beliefs a synthesis of Christian and pre-contact Yaqui ideas, for it seems rather that both the Christ and the enchanted deer are frames, theories, by means of which we look beyond that which is before our eyes.

Where is the flower world, I ask. Is it in Sonora, the homeland of the Yaqui people, the way the Holy Land is in the Middle East? I ask this at a time when the desert around Tucson is covered in poppies, lupine, globe mallow, desert daisies -- more flowers than in most years, because this year has been rainy. This year, therefore, it is easy for Felipe to talk about sea ania, the flower world: "You can see it," he says. "If you appreciate it, that's sea ania." In Yaqui Deer Songs/Maso Bwikam Felipe and Larry tell of asking Guadalupe Molina, a deer singer from the Yaqui village of Vicam Switch in Sonora, to tell them about huya ania, the wildnerness world where the first real Yaquis lived and where the enchanted deer still lives. Don Lupe gestures toward the desert and sings a deer song that says in part:

empo sewa yo huya aniwa you are an enchanted flower wilderness world

vaewa sola voyoka you lie with see-through freshness

English cannot reproduce the Yaqui word order in the list of qualifiers for "world" (ania, aniwa in song language): sewa is "flower" in the language of Yaqui song; yo is "enchanted"; and huya is "wilderness." Whatever taxonomic relation exists among these words in Yaqui, and whatever value or connotation this relation carries is not transferable, at least at the linguistic level, into English. Each qualifier defines its own separate world (the flower world is not the same as the enchanted world or the wilderness world), but these realms can be seen, through the Yaqui syntax, as somehow cooperating. Maybe that is what the next line refers to, maybe each world is visible through the lens of one of the others. The "see-through freshness," I think, is what Felipe came to talk to us about. (I need to point out that I really need to know more about the Yaqui expression that is translated "see-through" before I can responsibly make the point I am trying to make. In fact, I need to know Yaqui before I can write the paragraph I'm trying to write.)

At the brown bag lunch I asked Felipe whether he had read Heather Valencia's recent book, Queen of Dreams: The Story of a Yaqui Dreaming Woman. Despite the title, Heather Valencia is not Yaqui; but she did participate in Yaqui spiritual work during the time she was married to the spiritual leader Anselmo Valencia. Queen of Dreams reads like a book by Lynn Andrews, and I expected that if he had read it, Felipe would not have liked it. But Felipe did like it -- not the early part, but the later part after Heather comes to live at Pascua village and to have her visions and dreams among the Yaqui people. It gives a good portrait of Yaquiness, he said, and contrasted it with Jane Holden Kelley's scholarly work, Yaqui Women, which contains a number of life histories edited by Kelley and which he finds dry and too committed to fact. He feels that good accounts of Yaqui lives should reflect Yaquiness by including dreams and spiritual events. If the Yaquiness is missing, then the work carries no message for the people. I thought: Here indeed is something to add to the class discussion of the role of theory.

The evening presentation began with the showing of a film of the Easter ceremonies at Old Pascua during the forties. Afterwards Felipe and three friends provided a kind of commentary that I would call theorizing. Susanna Garcia could hardly speak, because the voice of the cantora on the film's sound track was her grandmother's. Her grandmother had taught Susanna to be a cantora and had recently passed away: "I miss her," said Susanna, and for the six hundred or so people in the room the film could no longer be received as a documentary. Jenny Murieta explained how some years ago her son, then six years old, made a manda that he would become a Fariseo in the Easter ceremonies so that his father, who was on dialysis, could get better. Jenny tried to discourage him, saying that he would have to stay up all night for nights on end and to endure cold, heat and hunger. Now, years later, she says, he is still a Fariseo and her husband is still alive. What six hundred people figure out, though Jenny does not say it, is that the integrity of her son's devotion is not marred by the fact that his father is still in poor health. By this time we have been exposed to so much Yaqui theory that we can receive Mini Valenzuela's message that even we, non-Yaquis, might go to a certain cave in Sonora and see our life's candles burning. She invites us to go through life tending each other's flames. It is a Yaqui pre-Easter sermon, I think, this evening's analogue to the Maehto's message for the people that ends the Easter ceremonies in the village. And it is the third sample of Yaqui theorizing of the film, except that we don't need the film any more.

Earlier in the day, the University administration had released information about budget cuts. It seemed that minority programs were expected to accept disproportionately large cuts, and everyone at the Indian Students Graduate Council house, where the brown bag lunch was held, was upset. We spent some of Felipe's time talking about this. At the end of the hour, Felipe was talking about some work on dreams that he did with a fourth-grade class in a Tucson elementary school. "I guess you're not supposed to have religion in the schools," he said, pointing out that it is not only budget constraints that problematize the survival of Indian Studies in the American school system. He had been discussing dreams about flying with the fourth graders; Yaqui belief holds that if you still retain the purity of the flower body that you are born with, you can fly, at least in dreams, and no one can hurt you. That evening during the speeches at the beginning of the program, there were more heated remarks made about the budget situation. I felt bad, because I thought it was a shame to intrude on the time that was for our guests; and I felt bad, because it was the second time that day. The next morning, I asked Larry if Felipe had said anything about the upset. Yes, Larry said. On his way out, Felipe had gone over to where some of the Indian graduate students were talking after the program and wished them success in their efforts to make the administration reconsider its decision.