Statement from a Hopi Elder in 1998
I don’t even know where I got this from but today, while cleaning through boxes piled in the corner of my dining room, I came across this stapled sheaf of papers called: Techqua Ikachi: Messages from the Guardians of Land and Life.
Inside the front cover it says: “The Sacred Teachings of Native Cultures have been given to us on the condition that they NEVER be sold. To do so would be like selling someone else’s Mother. Feel free to copy and distribute this document to as many people as you wish. Please include this page. Thank You.”
I would like to share with you only a small excerpt from this 72-page booklet. This is from a statement by Hopi Traditional Elder Martin Gashweseoma in Maniwaki, Quebec on Sunday, November 29, 1998.
“We all started out as one people at the beginning. Even you who are sitting among all the rest of you out there (and here). Right now we are all different from one another because of our language, because of our dress clothes, because of our hair. But that don’t make no difference, because we came from one at the beginning. That’s where we were given our different dress codes, our different hair styles, our foods, what we are to live with. This was all given to us. So we all have different foods that we life with. The people up north here live with the salmon, and the caribou. Down south we live with the corn, the vegetables. Very seldom do we go out and kill a four legged. Most of our food supplies, corn, beans, you know, the different vegetables. But these were all given to each one of us; we were given these things at the beginning.”
Techqua Ikachi: Messages from the Guardians of Land and Life
Isn’t that lovely. It never occurred to me that our differences were given to us in the beginning. However, when I think of the Christian Bible, it also says that early in the beginning, we were given different languages, so it sounds like Grandfather Martin Gashweseoma’s traditional knowledge lines up with the knowledge of the tradition I come from. How lovely, especially that I didn’t really understand it until reading this.
