Mercurial

As I jogged east toward the morning sun, I began thinking about the trading post and found myself laughing out loud. Realizing how ridiculous I must look, I quickly checked the road to ensure nobody had seen my fit of laughter; I was worried that anyone witnessing the episode would assume I had run myself insane.












Navajo Basket by Lorraine Black

The chain of events leading to my crackup began when Lorraine Black slumped into the trading post earlier that week with a basket featuring Coyote surrounded by a circle of people holding hands. I complimented her on the weaving and began measuring the size and counting the coils as a prelude to the negotiation process. She immediately halted my evaluation and informed me the basket was incomplete; it needed a horned toad fetish sown onto Coyote's belly to finish it.

In the past, Lorraine and her sister-in-law, Peggy, have used the Coyote motif in conjunction with horned toad fetishes to illustrate how Coyote attempted to relieve Horned Toad of his clean hogan and well kept farm. In the children's story relating to the incident, despite Coyote's persistence, Horned toad refused to voluntarily surrender the farm. After becoming wildly frustrated with Horned Toad, Coyote devoured the toad and went inside the hogan to inspect his newly acquired property. Having been swallowed whole, Horned Toad began to pull the trickster's vital organs until he killed the thief and reclaimed his land.

Lorraine and I unsuccessfully searched the fetish case for a suitable horned toad. After a while, she said, Hey wait, what's that? I told her it was a badger fetish and that it wouldn't work for what she wanted. As she turned the carving over and over in her hand, I could see the wheels start to grind; she was about to give birth to a new tradition.

Navajo culture tends to be somewhat fluid, and this was going to be one of those times when adaptation carried the day. So, as Lorraine began sewing the fetish onto the basket she also began to fabricate a story to convince me the badger was an appropriate fetish for the design. In the end, we had a good laugh and the tradition of Coyote eating Horned Toad became the story of Badger and the trickster.

A few days later I was engaged in cleaning up a mess in the trading post while Barry talked to a couple about Navajo baskets. I noticed him reach for the Badger basket and begin telling the story about Horned Toad's clean hogan and nice farm. Apparently he had not realized how the tradition had migrated or how Horned Toad had become Badger. Not wanting to embarrass him in the middle of his sales pitch, I waited until later to note the change.

As I ran down the road thinking about the basket, Barry's sales pitch and the fluid nature of Navajo culture, I was reminded of an experience I once had with mercury. I was probably 16 years old and had acquired a small amount of this fascinating liquid metal. I was enchanted by it, and after a day of sloshing it around in my hand, watching it move in beautifully fluid motion, seeing it separate into small balls and rejoin into one large pool, I wound up at the silversmith bench at Bluff City Trading. I struck me that I needed to know what happened if I put the mercury under the flame. Since it was already liquid, I wondered what would happen when it was heated. Had I not slept through physics, I would have already known the answer to this mystery.

Barry distracted me before I was able to fire up the torch and I never completed my experiment. Sometime later I mentioned my project to one of our silversmiths who said I had been very fortunate not to have finished the job. He informed me the mercury would have vaporized and probably found its way into my lungs, killing me almost instantly. That memory caused me to consider the Navajo culture, and how it moves like the mercury in shimmering, constant motion. The beauty of the liquid metal is the beauty of the Navajo culture; forever moving, changing and evolving to fit the circumstances.












Navajo Basket at Twin Rocks Trading Post

As I crested a small hill on the sunrise side of St. Christopher's Mission, I noticed the sun break over the horizon and illuminate the earth and sky in a golden glow. A basket woven several years ago by Kee Bitsinnie and a story from Navajo Religion, by Gladys Reichard came to mind.

The weaving and the story, featuring Coyote and Badger as opposing forces, are based on a Navajo legend about the fourth world. The story is of a time when the Navajo people had not been in on the surface long when the they saw the sky bend down and the earth rise up until they touched. At that moment Coyote and Badger sprang forth from the point of contact. After their creation, Coyote went to live with the earth surface people and Badger descended into the lower world.

At that moment, I realized Lorraine had not been fabricating her story at all, she was simply putting her own spin on a traditional legend. I began to understand the flow of the culture, which, like the flow of the liquid metal, was perpetually dancing, changing, evolving, growing, moving forward and receding, ever changing, shining, shimmering and enchanting the observer.