New Mexico Mercury

Editor's note: The following excerpt is from Dr. Irene Blea's forthcoming autobiography.

The priests of the Christian god represented by the bleeding and crucified Jesus Christ of my Catholic Spanish ancestors thought our Indian beliefs were heathen. Thus, we kept some things secret, like the fact that on the night I was born, a wolf howled. Its spirit combined with mine. Yes, our family believed in animal spirits and a relationship with all that swims, walks, crawls and, flies. Mama heard the wolf howl the moment I was fully on earth. To her, wolves were beautiful, sacred. They possessed strong medicine, were curios and intelligent.

“A person born on a night the wolf howls is destined to live a solitary and independent life. This person will possess a resourceful spirit and will survive,” repeated Papa a few times while he was still alive.

Some tribes consider the wolf as the pathfinder, the forerunner of new ideas who returns to the clan to share knowledge, wisdom. This is Wolf Medicine. Wolf Medicine brings an understanding of the Great Mystery of life. To obtain this knowledge is to walk many paths, encounter dead ends, retrace one’s experiences, start over, and move forward. Some say those with Wolf Medicine become writers and will attain great heights. Wolves have a great sense of family and are social animals, but they possess strong individualistic tendencies. They seek out lonely places, power places that allow them to think. In the isolation of their power place, they enjoy their true selves. The spirit of the wolf, its beauty and knowledge, are found in the essence of existing and the power of place. For me this place is where and when I entered Mother Earth in 1946.

The wolf’s keen sense recognizes the moon as its powerful ally. The moon is symbolic of psychic energy. In its space, where it exists, are the secrets of wisdom. Baying at the moon indicates a desire to connect with understanding, new ideas, or return home. The wolf’s keen sense of knowing includes the recognizing the voice within, the voice of a person, a leaf, the rain, a stone, the wind, a tree, or an animal. The voice is that of the Great Spirit. This voice and the wolf will not approach unless one is willing to expand their world view and this takes courage.

Courage characterizes my Spanish-Indian family, who were indigenous to the land before we were citizens of Nueva Españas in the late 1500s, Mexican citizens in 1820, before the U.S. war with Mexico, which ended in 1848 and gave birth to a strong anti-stranger feeling. Few strangers visited Guara Mesa, named after the French influence in my family history and where I was born. My great-grand uncle, Davíd Guara, also known as Nané, lived about twenty yards from my grandparents with his son, Davíd, his wife Estér, my mother’s eldest sister and, their four children. Our log cabin was about fifty yards from both houses. Nané personified la sierra. He was the mountain, the largest land owner in the region. As a very young man he and his brothers were forced to homestead their birthplace by the recently arrived Americanos. When adjacent land owners wanted or needed to sell, Nané bought their acreage. I liked the old man and how he pronounced my name in Spanish. Mama named me Irene because she liked the song "Good Night Irene," and she knew a pretty, little rich girl named Irene whose family lived further down the mountain. Every one knew she would birth a girl because she carried me small, high, and pointed in her belly.

Culturally, my name is Irené Isabél Bléa y Mondragón but, it was changed by the American school system. Nevertheless names are important in northern New Mexico. They are a source of pride or shame. When a family member dishonors himself, he dishonors the family and, no family wants to live con verguenza. Mountain people ask three questions of strangers: Where were you born? What is your name? Who are your parents? A name represents much more than the individual. It informs whether one is trustworthy. This practice can be harsh but my family lineage retains a fine reputation.

Just as important as our family name is our attachment to the spirituality and medicine of the land. My indigenous ancestors taught my Spanish family how to interact with the land, how to respect and love it. Land, especially mountain land, is life itself. It is sad when mountain spirits are wounded by humans who build condominiums, operate ski slope and, drive overland vehicles. My family used the earth much more carefully, taking up as little space as necessary, asking permission to consume only what we needed, thanking it for what it gave us. The Spanish contributed to my Pueblo culture apple, peach, cherry and apricot trees. They brought Moorish irrigation systems, horses, cows, pigs, goats, art, music, language, and the awesome power of the Spanish King and Queen Isabela, the genesis of my middle name but, in the beginning they would not tolerate the close association of the Catholic priest and their government.

In 1680, Taos and other Pueblos, chased the Spanish out of the region, but the Spanish returned in 1692 and, learned sometimes begrudgingly, to live with Indians. This part of our family memory is lost. The loss of historical memory, prejudice and discrimination forced us to disguise our native roots in order to survive. Thus, and I grew up mostly Spanish cultured, Genizaro, with some native tendencies.

“Do not to pay attention to what others think of you,” said my father. “They don’t know you.”

“You are a beautiful miracle, received into this world with willing arms and smiles,” said my mother.

When I was born, women still rendered fat and made lye soap outdoors in large black kettles. They drew water from a clear stream, and everyone prayed throughout the day. My extended family numbered about twenty-four people sustained mostly on venison and Rocky Mountain Rainbow trout. We got milk from a few cows, ate wild turkey, and berries that grew on the ground or on bushes. The Choke Cherries the women and children gathered from Capulín bushes was made into jelly. Grandpa made Choke Cherry wine. We also collected the precious piñon nut in October, roasted it, stored it, and ate it all winter. Our planting season was short and the women dried or canned fruits and vegetables in mason jars.

High on the north side of Sangre de Cristo Mountains, named for the blood of Christ, it was common to experience the first snow in late October and be snowed in until May. Winters tended to depress my mother and she probably suffered from sunlight deprivation due to those long winters encased in living quarters that were hand built, certainly not air tight, where the wind whistled in through unseen gaps in the windows. She intensely dislikes wind whistling through cracks in window and door frames. I’ve attempted to help her make new memories with regarding to this sound and regret that I have failed. I also dislike winter.

In spring the women birthed children. Some babies like the sister who followed me, Juanita, died within a few hours. My papa said my grandmother prayed over the new born because Mama was too distraught to think of anything other than her loss. It was difficult to accept. I haven’t accepted it and still write poems to her. Juanita was born blue. I have a congenital heart murmur and I suspect she had a heart abnormality. I shall see her in the spirit world, where she will tell me what caused her death.

“You were an easy birth,” says my mother. “I prayed you would be a girl. Your birth was the happiest moment of my life. I couldn’t believe you were mine.”

The winter snow melt was early when I began my Earth Walk a few minutes after nine o’clock on a May night. The room in which I was conceived and born was cold. Granma took me from my mother, wrapped me up quickly, and placed me in a box on the oven door of the stove to cleanse me, helped me breathe the earth's pure air by lifting me upside down, clearing my mouth, and washing my eyes with a mild tea made of a sacred herb. She was the first human to witness me. She heard the wolf howl. While I approached this world, my tall and broad shouldered grandfather, waited with his bronze chiseled features and his and grandma’s eleven children, my tias and tios, and their children in his home roughly seventy yards away from our cabin. He heard the wolf howl. My tia Ester, tio Davíd and their four children, were Nané’s house. When Nané heard the wolf call, he smiled.

I imagine the darkness in the sky was clear. My father said he studied them as he stood on the small porch of our log cabin. I feel I saw him there, in loose fitting denim work pants secured firmly around his waist with a worn brown leather belt. He wore a blue and gray flannel shirt and heavy work shoes. His straight hair light brown hair was combed back as if it had just been washed and was still damp.

“It was perspiration,” he said. He took a long deep breath. “The wolves had not howled on the mountain for a very long time until the night of your birth. I heard the wolf howl a long clear cry then, I heard you cry.” He stopped. “Wolves never howled again. Hunters simply killed them off.” He paused again, as if traveling back in time. “They were magnificent when I was a child, magnificent.”

When he was nine years old my father’s father, my grandfather, died and my papa was sent to live with his aunt, whose husband had also recently died. That aunt made dad herd her sheep. He was a child shepherd who spent three weeks at a time alone on the east side of the mountains. Every three weeks someone came to a designated place and left him food.

“Sometimes I waited for hours and no one came.” Dad pursed his lips, “If I was lucky, and the person who brought the food had time, I got to visit with them for a while. Otherwise, I watched that hungry wolves would not attack the sheep, especially the weak ones.”

 “Herding sheep at papa’s young age, for such a long time, helped define him,” said Mama. It explained why he rarely talked, but when he did, he talked a lot. Papa told me he generally had little to say because most things were evident.

He never related to me if he was anxious for me to be born but, my five-foot, six-inch, papa was an impatient man when it came to getting things done. I’m sure he wanted the birthing to begin and end just as quickly as the fireballs he saw when he was a Shepard.

“Fireballs appeared out of no where, flew in a straight line, stopped, rotated then leaped over the land. Brujas,” he said. Yes, we believed in witches, beings with supernatural powers, shape shifters able to do uncanny things to people. They could hurt, even kill, a human being by constructing small images made of mud, straw dolls, with incorporated pieces of the intended victim’s hair or clothing.

In true Tewa fashion my father moved to the mountain when he married my mother. He was born in Mora, a village and, learned to speak English on the USS Lexington while in the Navy during World War II. His ship was sunk by the Japanese two months after his discharge. Victory in World War II and the return of its military personnel had the U.S. bustling with activity. Part of the bustle included making babies, lots of them, about seventy-five million of them. This caused a major upward explosion in the US population, a baby boom. I am among the first of those post-war babies, a Baby Boomer.

In spite of a rough beginning, however, Papa formed an unbroken bond with Mama’s family. Prior to their marriage, my father, returned early from the South Pacific because his first wife, Bernie, died. She was born and died in el Canyon del Maco now known as the Pecos Canyon along the Pecos River. She left three children. Two years after her death from cancer, Papa proposed to Mama.

“I’ll be honest with you,” said Papa. “I think you are a nice and decent woman and I need help raising my children.”

“Think about it,” said my grandmother to my mother. “He comes with an entire family.”

But, Mama was worried she would remain an old maid at age twenty-four and married him after knowing him for two months. They were married in the same church by the same priest that married Papa and Bernie in Pecos. My father was not very romantic. As a wedding gift Grandpa gave Mama, not Papa, nine sheep, in case she ever had to get rid of her husband and needed to become self sufficient. It turned out the children did not want to leave their grandmother and the place where they and their mother entered the earth. Their grandmother, their aunts and uncles also did not want them to leave. In short, Mama and Papa were stuck with one another.

“I feared Papa would not need or want me anymore,” said Mama. My father also had marital concerns.

“I found myself married in the Catholic faith to your mother,” he said. “I was spiritually committed to a new wife with no children.” After their wedding they ate dinner at my aunt’s house on blackened tin pie plates.  I was born less than a year later.

While I made my way onto the earth, a piñon wood fire burned in the stove. My mother was in her twenty-fourth year, and highly excited. She expected to birth many children and she did, seven. I was the first. My mother was assisted in her delivery by my maternal grandmother, Sofia Garcia, who married my Tewa grandfather, Abran Mondragon, in Taos and birthed twelve live children. My family provides insight into the complexity of marriage and intermarriage in northern New Mexico in the early to mid 1900’s. My maternal grandmother, Sofia Garcia, married Abran Mondragon. Abran’s father had a Spanish last name because his paternal grandfather was the offspring of an Indian mother and Spanish father. Grandpa had an aunt who lived in the Pueblo de Taos until she died. I once took Mama to the Kit Carson Museum in Taos, and she was surprised to see her aunt’s photo on the wall. My great aunt had the same deep dark eyes reflected in many of my relatives. Beneath the museum photo was an inscription that read “Girl with goat, Taos Pueblo.” We learned that tia Mercedes was about three years old in the photo. Mama was greatly disturbed by the unauthorized and gross exhibit of our relative’s photo. Some say the photo no longer hangs in the museum dedicated to the life of a man considered at least a traitor by some Spanish-speaking New Mexican and, at worse, a terrorist engaged in genocide by some Native people.

Over the years, Mama has repeated how she changed my diapers in the frigidity of our mountain den. She did it lit by the flame of a kerosene lamp while she was still in bed.

“The steam and scent of your infant urine dispersed into the darkness as I lifted the blankets and undid the wrappings around your tiny bottom,” she says in Spanish. “You lay on my lap kicking and cooing, smiling into the night.” Her soft smile appears at this spot of the story, “I bundled you up and warmed you under my arm until you fell asleep.” The smile disappears when she adds in English, “For several months I lay still, listening for the wolves. I never heard them.” In fact, the Mexican gray wolf did not howl again in New Mexico for thirty-seven years, when it was reintroduced by people who cared about it.

Some members of our family spoke English but, only on rare occasions, when they encountered Anglos. My birth and baptism was registered in English with the local Catholic priest three weeks after my birth. There was no clergy where we lived. The nearest settlements were Ojo Feliz and Ocaté on the southern base of the mountain. To the east was the small village of Miami and twelve miles from there was Springer, where mountain people went to comply with a law that required us to register births, deaths, and marriages.

Mama rarely went to Springer but she came down the mountain and went with my madrina to purchase my baptismal garments: a short silky white dress with a matching cap, a supple, rosey blanket and, patented-leather shoes. My godparents were my mother’s maternal cousin Sofia Cordova Chavez and her husband Julio Chavez, who lived in Miami at the time but later moved to Springer. The couple drove the twelve miles alone with me to Springer, baptized me, and returned to Miami.

“Your godparents, Sofia and Julio Chavez, where happy to be your padrinos and to be our compadres,” said my mother. “They named you Isabel, after the Spanish Queen Isabela. Your baptismal name is also the Spanish version of Elizabeth the cousin to the Virgin Mary.”

While I was baptized, the women cooked, the men set out chairs and the children ran around awaiting my return. Mama does not remember what they ate, but Grandma made a cake and I suspect someone had a drink or two of Choke Cherry wine.

It seems my grandparents were forever the same age. My grandmother was short and sturdy, with gentle features and long gray hair that streamed down her back when she undid it at night. In the morning, she glided the comb through the silver and gray strands several times, parted it in the middle, twisted and rolled it, secured it to the back of her head, just above her neck, in the traditional bun worn by old women. Mountain girls wore their hair this way when they were married.

The international Treaty of Guadalupe insured that Spanish would be recognized as an official language in the United States. This insurance did not last. Officially, I was born in Red Lake, New Mexico. It’s not true. Red Lake was the nearest Post Office. I was born some distance away in la Laguna Colorada, on Guara Mesa in Colfax County, still one of the poorest counties in the nation. Red Lake exists on some maps but, at the time of this writing, only a small number of senior citizens recall la Laguna Colorada or Guara Mesa. The place of my birth exists only in the minds of the few still alive and well enough to remember it. In short, we no longer have access to where I first breathed the earth’s unpolluted air.

As I grew, older members of my extended family shared vivid recollections of the wolves: the way the magic animal ran through the woods in packs, how they were not deterred by snow, how their howling into the night let them know they were not alone, that, every once in a while, one of them was forced to live alone, and how they protected and taught their babies the way my family protected me. My father was the most protective. He continually reminded me of my beginning.

“Don’t forget,” he said, “Abraham Lincoln has nothing over you. You were born in a long cabin under a kerosene lamp.”

On the mighty mountain, we knew nothing of Halloween, but we had stories of La Llorona, the woman who wept and wailed and could steal our soul. There was no Thankgiving Day. Every day was a day of thanks giving. There were plenty of prune pies posole, music and dance for Christmas Eve, but no Christmas presents or Christmas tree. On New Year's Day salianos a pedir los dias, we sang as we visited our neighbors, greet them in celebration of the first day of the year. Sometimes we received an orange or an apple, a bit of candy and best wishes for a new year. The Easter season meant forty days, and forty nights of not eating meat, Lenten fasting, penance, and prayer. Holy Week demanded the hand carved santos be covered. My Penitenté male relatives retreated into la Morada, in Ocaté, where in the off limits, hand-built, structure they engaged in passionate penance, prayer, and fasting.

Today, a few families observe these practices. Like the Mexican gray wolf of the 1940’s, the tradition is highly threatened. Wolf hunters could not, would not, recognize the wolf’s contribution to the ecosystem, the balance necessary for a healthy environment. Out of fear, and a greedy need for trophies and profit, hunters shot, trapped, and poisoned the wolf. Hunters skinned the brown, black, and silver creatures then marketed its hide. My ancestors saw this, felt this. They witnessed huntsman justify their actions by telling ugly stories about the ruthlessness of the wolf as mean and dangerous. It was no threat to us. Other than horses and a few sheep we possessed little livestock and the wolves did not bother it.

Perhaps trophy-seekers need to build monuments to them selves. I do not know. I do know, however, that early hunters placed no worth upon the life of a wolf and its contributions to the ecosystem. There have been occasions when I felt hunted or trapped but, the spirit of the mountain, the blood of Christ and, the gift of the wolf keeps me alive, even when it seemed necessary to gnaw off my own limb, crawl, or hobble to get away.      

One thing haunts me, Juanita. I write poems to her. Perhaps I would have been less on the fringe if she had lived, less alone if we had grown up together. I want to call her on the telephone and, visit her home. I want her photo placed upon my library shelf, next to those of my siblings, their children, and their children’s children. Each poem about Juanita is dream. I’ve written about being afraid of some unknown thing. Perhaps we would have shared clothes as children or, she would join me as our lives revolved around Mama after Papa died. I fear she would grow to be a right wing conservative, that she would lecture me on the shortcomings of poor people, and that this was why our family lost the land and the war with the Americanos.

Sometimes I am more certain, than others, about her existence. In my dreams the side of her entire face touches mine. We are twins, with the same color of skin and hair, the same voice, the same cackle when we laugh. She was born where I was born, how I was born, to the same mother, delivered by the same grandmother, in the same log cabin, shrouded by the same light of the same kerosene lamp. I exited my mother’s womb at night, she in the morning. We shared the same pink lips, brown eyes, and soft cheeks. I imagine our skin, delicate, radiant in the sun. In my poems I say adios to her, my warm late night visitor. During fearful seasons of grief, I question why she had to die? According to Mama, she died in the same wooden box that rested on the open oven door when I was born. She was buried with our ancestors and other babies, under a cluster of young pine trees. The trees are fully grown by now and, I want to be buried there when I die. I want the wolf to howl at the moon, to know that I have learned the secret of the Great Mystery.