The "Indigenous Resurgence" week in "After Religion" was again an inspiration. I had a guest speaker,
R, an alum who zoomed in from Boriken (Puerto Rico), speaking about her work as a Taino educator and artist. My laptop moved around the room as students asked questions, each of which led to an enlightening conversation. One student asked about R's work teaching Taino language and why it mattered. In her presentation, R had told us about the importance of
cemi, in Taino traditions and practices... but what are
cemi? Many accounts render them gods or divinities; R recommended instead translating
cemi as "ancesteral spirits," though this was imperfect too. In the discussion she enlarged on something her mentor had said. In Taino, c
emi means "sweetness" - the sweetness which manifests in growth and fertility, for instance. This isn't
not "ancestral" or "divine" so much as a window to a profoundly different way of understanding the sacred energies at work around and through all life.
Among the things I'd given students to prepare for class were the first three chapters of Tyson Yunkaporta's
Sand Talk, whose marvelous account of the rainbow serpent I've
shared with you - an account more like "sweetness" than (just) divinity or ancestral energy. I'll be starting next week's class with another passage from his book, whose "totemic entities" seem
cemi-kin.
Old Nyoongars and Yorgas in Perth tell stories about a group of three totemic entities that work together in miraculous ways. Certain butterflies always lay their eggs on a particular bush above the nest of a particular species of ant. The ants collect the eggs and take them down into the nest. When the larvae hatch, the ants carry them up to eat the leaves of the bush at night and then carry them back down again. When they grow too heavy to carry, the ants bring the leaves down to them. The larvae grow a jelly on their sides when they eat those particular leaves, and this is the food that the queen ant eats. The larvae then spin cocoons in the nest for the final stage of the process, after which they fly out of the nest as butterflies and begin the cycle all over again. This intensely interrelated process within a totemic group of three entities – Bush, Ant and Butterfly – would be impossible for a single human mind to design. How do these symbiotic dances develop, when the cause-and-effect relations are so inter-dependent and complex that there is no way to reverse-engineer the process by which the the system came to be? (82-83)
Part of the way Yunkaporta argues that "indigenous thinking can save the world" is recognition of this kind of (always local) complexity, and how it is obscured and disrupted by the west's "lens of simplicity," which "always seems to make things more complicated, but simultaneously less complex" (4). Fun fun!
