Jemez Term Analysis

Dypaloh. There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and the plain was bright with different-colored clays and sands. Red and blue and spotted horses grazed in the plain, and there was a dark wilderness on the mountains beyond. The land was still and strong. It was beautiful all around.

Abel was running.

[Abel’s] father was a Navajo, they said, or a Sia, or an Isleta, an outsider anyway, which made him and his mother and Vidal somehow foreign and strange. Francisco was the man of the family, but even […] the boy could sense his grandfather’s age, just as he knew that his mother was going to die of her illness. It was nothing he was told, but he knew it anyway and without understanding, as he knew already the motion of the sun and the seasons.

The people of the town have little need. They do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way of life. Their invaders were a long time in conquering them; and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky and make their living from the things that are and have always been within their reach; while in the discrimination of pride they acquire from their conquerors only the luxury of example. They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held onto their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.

He was running, and his body cracked open with pain, and he was running on. He was running and there was no reason to run but the running itself and the land and the dawn appearing. […] He saw the slim black bodies of the runners in the distance, gliding away without sound through the slanting light and the rain. […] His legs buckled and he fell in the snow. The rain fell around him in the snow and he saw his broken hands […]. And he got up and ran on. He was alone and running on. […] Pure exhaustion laid hold of his mind, and he could see at last without having to think. He could see the canyon and the mountains and the sky.