From akha@loxinfo.co.th Tue Aug 10 11:02:19 1999 Received: from mxu1.u.washington.edu (mxu1.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.01) with ESMTP id LAA20188 for ; Tue, 10 Aug 1999 11:02:18 -0700 Received: from chmai.loxinfo.co.th (root@chmai.loxinfo.co.th [203.146.0.65]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.06) with ESMTP id LAA03038; Tue, 10 Aug 1999 11:02:16 -0700 Received: from loxinfo.co.th (loxppp6-chrai1.North.loxinfo.net [203.146.34.6]) by chmai.loxinfo.co.th (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA11483; Tue, 10 Aug 1999 23:14:25 +0700 (ICT) Message-ID: <37B050ED.5DD96E40@loxinfo.co.th> Date: Tue, 10 Aug 1999 23:18:54 +0700 From: Matthew McDaniel X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 (Macintosh; I; PPC) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: akha@loxinfo.co.th Subject: Akha Weekly Journal Aug 10, 1999 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Two Akha Stories: Death of an Elder Now That is a Grub! *** Death Of An Elder He was old and I knew his day was coming when he told me his jaw was tightening up. I had always known him as frail. He was the Dzoeuh Mah which is like a cultural headman for an Akha village. He called me often to his stoop. I tried to always go. The last time he referred to his jaw. I knew he was concerened. He asked me to care for the spirit gate and make the trail big, to move the stones and fill the holes. I took care of it all immediately. I gave him one of the new Akha Culture T-shirts that I had. He was appreciative but a man with things on his mind. He often had a fever and I helped him for that. I remember once I entered his hut and he was busy injecting himself for fever and cough. I often brought him an atomizer. He had many sons and also as an elder in the village he settled many disputes including in marriages. But I don’t think he could handle the low land heat. The government has made his village move from Hua Mae Kom. His wife had died of fever about this time last year. But my memories were of him comforting his sick grand child, gathering the blankets around her on the porch where she sat crying. In the hut his body carefully wrapped I could read the fear on the faces of his son who took over his duties as the new Dzoeuh Mah. His sons faced the uncertain future, both their Nyeeh Pah mother and Dzoeuh Mah father dead now. And mostly there was only heat, stillness and poverty left, for the wind was gone. **** Now That Is A Grub! I have no idea how she knew it was up there. We were way out in the “Jungle” (see note). Now the Jungle was like going out to a place that was say part of your house, not all that different than running your hands through your hair. I had gotten down the trail a ways because I saw the trail as something to walk down, while she was busy viewing what she could do with this knife she had while relating to all that was around her. Knives were like devices for exploring, no harm intended to the plants. Plants were like life pods that you opened, borrowed, cut for a piece and ate. Predestined meals. Anyway, I heard this “wack, wack” sound of that knife and Akha Mah was three quarters buried in the brush of life, dragging on this great bamboo stalk till it toppled and then politely asked me if I would grab the tip and pull it out of the thicket onto the trail. I thought she was looking for those tiny little bamboo grubs. But instead she wacked away at the top of the bamboo stalk that had still been growing, grabbing it dispite the fact that it was covered in brown hair which were these wonderful incredibly fine slivers called “jah saw”, just like sand they were really great for covering the forearm and in between the fingers before they ‘changed’ from sand to micro thorns like what you might find on cactus apples. (hey, I remember stuffing a bunch of those in my pocket during a ‘raiding party’ in the dark of southern California when I was a kid. Boy, I thought I was really hauling home some fruit till I went to dig them out of my pocket and looked at my hands) Anyway, with total apparent indifference that belied her precision, she wacked off the external layer of the tip of the large bamboo stalk to show me, completely revealed now, the compartment in which there was a very large grub. Now this was a GRUB. It had a black embony head and a tough skin of rinkles on a fat cream yellow body that wsa bigger than a bricklayer’s thumb. Serious stuff. She popped it out with a flick of the blade onto the trail and said that when they grew completely tired of bamboo that they jumped out and dug a hole in the ground and later became a huge butterfly. But she was taking this one back to the village for grandma. She did, and it sat in a bowl, looking for the corner door, till grandma came but with all the people in the cooking hut, someone popped that grub, I mean took it completely out of the bowl and it was gone. Poor grandma. But there were some of those bamboo grubs, the small white ones. My friend wacked down another stalk she spotted and I don’t know how she did that, but she knew and she popped all the compartments open like she could have shaved a man with that knife from a distance, sort of laughing as she went along, and came to this one grub. One grub? Where were all the grubs? She looked again. Then she found this tiny hole with black around it and she told me this tiny green snake had gone in that hole and eaten all the grubs but that one. Ah, we were too late. But then I took her word for it because last time I saw a snake it was cooking itself in a stump because it had a nasty habit of being in the rice field and wanting to bite hands, so the Akha got the stump real hot, then put it on top of the stump for a sky bird to eat, which it did. And next thing I knew that green viper was jumping out of a dream that this old Akha spirit woman was havin, so I stayed way clear when she started tellin about what snakes were up to. I think she could see these invisible trails they left. I looked in this hole in the clay bank. Shouldn’t do that she said, there is a snake lives in there comin and goin. The hole was dead end but I took her word for it because when I took a small stick and pushed it in the hole, the stick went through the dirt and kept going, so maybe there was even a staircase in there, wasn’t sure. Leave it for now. Not a big hole, just about small tomato big was all. Now course there was these big hairy holes like a wind gypsy spun them with down and if you dug down in there it had this silk thing like a laundry shute and at the bottom was this really big hurkin spider the size of a thimble before you added on the legs. It had really big hairs on it and went hoppin down through the field. Well, while your diggin around, never know what you might find. Now there is this tiny vine, grows in the rice. Sort of like an ‘earth joke’ because when you dig down in, there is this really huge hairy tuber down in there sometimes as big as a melon, and all these hairs are like a really thick stubble on an old man’s chin, and when you pop it out of the hole you don’t have to give it but the slightest poke, really I think it just hops on its own between blinks and off it goes down the hill, the stubble like ‘anti-lock NO brake system’ same as the ones melons have, and it don’t stop for nothing but goes leapin and jackin way up off the ground way on down the hill faster than you could run or catch it or crash yourself, all the way into the bottoms of brush where you can’t see it no more. Hey, I tried to get a big stone to roll like that, lots of times in kid life and I always had to go down there half way and kick start that damn stone again. God I hate that. But not these earth jokes, they jump outa that hole and go hard set for the bottoms all on their own. Well Akha Mah showed me where the corn was gettin high, some had three ears on one stalk, she was really proud of them, good seeds she said. We made it to the spring. Drank long and cold from the water, she told me the Lahu put a dead dog in it way up there somewhere, but I think that was before. And never let a Lahu know you have a melon patch, gotta hide it, cause they’ll bloody steal them all, hey I knew that one for true, cause they took my melons and next thing I saw my whole melon family in the market headed off in some Thai woman’s slave train. But hey, they were really good dancers with rice plantin sticks so what the heck. I even forgot where we were goin that day, oh yeah, it was up on the ridge to the border, but I met this Akha guy huntin and Akha Mah, she said really bad things happened up there at the border in the trees so she took off down one trail and me I headed up into the forest and it was all plumb dark time I got my dogs on home to the village. It rained and the pucker brush was kneck high and bein soaked wasn’t the word for it. Course I didn’t notice that because the sky was gettin dark and I couldn’t see the trail, cause the brush was that thick, lots of the trail was washed out, so I was steppin in these narrow ruts, the only sound that came out was the poppin of my knees as I kept from pickin up speed. And it was a long time gettin to the village from the time I could first see it. (Note: The Akha did not view the earth from the outside it would appear but more seemed to see themselves as creatures exuded from its surface as if they were attatched to an external womb by an invisible cord. They did not appear to see the earth as its components that they walked on, named and interacted with, but more as if they were walking on the skin of what bore them, the latest scene current before them in a show that their ancestors had lived as part of a great connected distance in the past. It was a very different way of viewing the earth, what it was and what they were as individuals, and how it was all sewn together.) -- Matthew McDaniel The Akha Heritage Foundation 386/3 Sailom Joi Rd Maesai, Chiangrai, 57130 Thailand Mobile Phone Number: Sometimes hard to reach while in Mountains. 66-01-881-9288 US Address: Donations by check or money order may be sent to: The Akha Heritage Foundation 1586 Ewald Ave SE Salem OR 97302 USA Donations by direct banking can be transferred to: (Preferred) Wells Fargo Bank Akha Heritage Foundation Acc. # 0081-889693 Keizer Branch # 1842 04 4990 N. River Road. Keizer, Oregon, 97303 USA ABA # 121000248 Web Site: http://www.akha.com mailto:akha@loxinfo.co.th Discussion Groups: akha@onelist.com indigenousworld@onelist.com .