Sacred Ground (7 page)

* * *

They stopped living in the cave at Topaa-ngna and moved to the marshy plain just inland from the ocean, not far from the foothills. They built round shelters and hunted small game and went once a year into the mountains to harvest acorns. Marimi visited the cave whenever she sought counsel from her raven and from the moon. She would feel the spirit gift come upon her and she would blindly make her way up the little canyon, her head filled with pain, and she would sit in the darkness of the cave while the visions came upon her. In this way were the laws of her new family given to her.

Marimi understood the vital importance of a person knowing his clan and his second family and first family. Because if a person didn’t know these, he might commit taboo without knowing it. So she tried to construct Wanchem’s lineage. Because the raven led her to him, she decided he was of the Raven Clan. His second family were People Who Live With The Cactus. And his first family was Marimi’s new one: “people who eat acorns.”

The little family flourished and grew. In their fourth winter in the mountains snow fell, covering every branch and creek. A bear hunter, having lost his way, sought shelter in Marimi’s cave, where she found him. He stayed with the family until spring and then continued on his way. In the summer, Marimi brought forth the hunter’s babies, another pair of twin girls.

As the children grew and soon faced adulthood, Marimi started to worry about taboos and family ties. The rules weren’t hers but had been decreed by the gods at the beginning of time: that brother should not marry sister, nor first cousin on mother’s side marry first cousin on mother’s side. If these rules were broken, a tribe could sicken and die. But Marimi knew that first cousin on mother’s side could marry first cousin on father’s side, so what the family needed was new blood. She went into the cave for counsel and the raven told her to find a husband in a neighboring tribe and bring him back.

Taking her spear and a basket of acorns, Marimi traveled eastward to a village she had passed through seasons ago. There she offered shell-beads, which were highly valued, and promised the new husband plentiful acorns and fishing. But he must accept Topaa ways, she said, and become one of them. His family agreed that this was a good thing, to have ties with a coastal tribe, who were rich in otter skins and whale meat. The chosen husband was Deer Clan, People Who Live On Trembling Ground, “dwellers in the marsh.” Now he joined “people who eat acorns.”

When Marimi’s first daughters entered womanhood, they married Payat and Wanchem. One of the hunter’s daughters also married Payat, because Marimi had made him chief of their small tribe, and the chief could have more than one wife. The second hunter’s daughter found a husband in a traveler from the east, who had come in search of otter skins and had decided to stay. Marimi’s husband from the Deer Clan gave her three sons and four daughters, who in time married and increased the tribe.

As the seasons came and went, Marimi taught her daughters and granddaughters how to weave baskets, how to chant and sing so that the basket was given life and therefore a spirit. She taught the young ones the rules and taboos of the Topaa: that when grasshoppers and crickets were scarce, they were not to be eaten; at the acorn harvest, the acorns were not to be harvested to depletion but some were to be left to ensure a bountiful harvest next time; a husband did not sleep with his wife during the five days of her moon; the hunter bringing back meat did not eat of it, but ate of another hunter’s meat. Because without rules and without knowing the taboos, she said, a person didn’t know how to conduct his or her life. The Topaa knew from nature that there were rules: cat never mated with dog, deer did not eat flesh, the owl hunted only at night. Just as animals lived by rules, so must the Topaa.

One autumn a blight struck the oak trees and the acorns dropped to the ground like ash and small game vanished from the land, so that not even a squirrel could be roasted on the fire. The family began to starve and Marimi remembered how she had once prayed to the moon for help. She prayed again now, respectfully, promising gratitude in return. And a miracle occurred: the next night fish washed up on shore living and flopping, and Marimi had everyone run with baskets up and down the beach, collecting the living fish, which when dried provided enough food until the spring, when berries and seeds appeared in plenty. In gratitude, the next time the fish ran ashore, Marimi had her children throw a certain number back, telling them that what we take from the gods, we give back to the gods.

Marimi taught her family the importance of telling stories, how the stories must be handed down so that the clan would know its history and the ancestors would be remembered. And so every night at the campfire, she told them how the world was created, how the Topaa were created, she told them stories of the gods, and the fables that taught lessons. She told them how they must pray respectfully to Father Sun and Mother Moon, that the Topaa were the children of the gods and that they needed no shaman to speak on their behalf. Like all parents, the sun and the moon liked to hear their children’s voices, but only if they were respectful and obedient and promised to be reverent. Under such terms did the gods protect their children and provide well for them.

Every now and then, as the years passed, Marimi would pause in her labors and look to the east, where a small yellow sun was breaking over the summits, and she would think of her mother and the clan, and she felt a special pain in her heart.

* * *

When Marimi’s hair was as white as the snow that had brought the bear hunter long ago and she knew she must soon make the journey west over the ocean to join her ancestors, she spent all her days in the cave, mixing paints: red, from alder bark; black, from elderberries; yellow, from buttercups; purple, from sunflowers. With these she painstakingly recorded her journey across the Great Desert in pictographs on the cave wall so that future Topaa would know the story of their tribe.

Finally, she lay dying, surrounded by her family. Although they were now nine families from five tribes and four clans, and brothers of one group had married sisters from another, and strangers who had wandered in to marry extra daughters, ultimately, the youngest generation were all descended from Marimi. She had taught them to hunt and to gather nuts, to weave baskets and sing the songs of their ancestors, to revere Mother Moon, and to live harmoniously with the spirits that inhabited every animal, rock, and tree. She told them never to forget that they were Topaa.

Payat was there, himself now a grandfather, and he smiled sadly as Marimi laid her hand on his head in benediction. “Remember,” she said, “there will be no outcasts in my family, there will be no living dead as you and I once were. Teach our people not to live in fear and helplessness as we once did, but in love and peace.”

She said: “And remember to tell the children our story, about our journey from the east, about how we caused the earth to tremble when we stepped on Grandfather Tortoise’s burrow, how we found Wanchem by the magical stream, how Mother Moon protected us and lighted our way. Teach our children to remember these stories and to tell them to their children, so that Topaa in generations to come will know their beginnings.”

Marimi then summoned her great-granddaughter, who had since infancy suffered from blinding headaches and visions, which Marimi no longer saw as an affliction but as a blessing, and she placed her hand upon the girl’s head, and said, “The gods have chosen you, my daughter. They have given you the spirit-gift. So now I give my name to you for I am to join our ancestors, and by taking my name you will become me, Marimi, clan medicine woman.”

They buried her with great ceremony in the cave at Topaa-ngna, sending her spirit to the West with her medicine pouches, her spear thrower, her hairpins and earrings. But the sacred raven’s spirit-stone they kept, draping it around the neck of the chosen girl, now named Marimi, who would be the clan medicine woman and whose duty it would be to tend the cave of the First Mother for the rest of her life.

Chapter Three

Your name is Walks With The Sun and you were out with a hunting party; you strayed too far and got lost, so you settled here and made this place your home.

No, Erica, thought as she studied the photographs she had taken of the skeleton in the cave. This woman would never get lost.

You are Seal Woman and you sailed down from the northwest in a long canoe, you and your lover running away from tribal taboos that forbade you to marry.

Or you came from islands far to the west, long sunk back into the sea, and you were named for a goddess.

Pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger, Erica leaned back from her worktable and stretched, rolling her head and shrugging her shoulders to get the stiffness out. She looked at the time. Where had the hours flown?

As she reached for her cold coffee she contemplated the mess piled on the workbench— artifacts waiting to be examined and labeled and catalogued. Erica was in the trailer that had been converted into a lab filled with scientific equipment, microscopes, tall stools, and a bulletin board covered with pins and notes and drawings. It was early evening and she had been sorting the last of the day’s finds. She was the only one in the lab; everyone else was either still at dinner in the cafeteria tent or socializing around the camp.

When Erica had uncovered the skull in the cave floor, Sam Carter had authorized her to commence a full-scale excavation. They got the go-ahead from the Office of Environmental Preservation, and while Sam was to be the field director, he gave Erica the honor of conducting the hands-on work, despite sharp criticism from both within and outside the State Archaeologist’s Office. However, he had cautioned her: “Be objective, Erica. After the embarrassment of the Chadwick shipwreck, there were those who wanted you fired. But you’re a good anthropologist and I don’t think your career should go into the toilet because of one impulsive mistake.”

Promising to be careful, Erica had approached the job with her characteristic vigor and exuberance, wasting no time getting started marking out the cave floor with stakes and string, and then meticulously scraping off the soil with the edge of a trowel blade, curbing her eagerness to plunge through the soil layers and find the riches of history underneath. The scraped-off dirt was placed in buckets and hauled topside, where volunteers sieved through it to see if it contained archaeological material.

Outside the cave, the noisy business of geologists, engineers, and soils specialists got under way in earnest along Emerald Hills Drive.

And Jared Black, of course, had
his
job.

They were in a race. Jared’s task was to locate the most likely descendant as quickly as possible and then to turn the cave and its contents over to that person or tribe. As soon as that happened, Erica suspected she would be out of a job. She was Anglo, and once the cave was owned by Native Americans they would want their own people on the excavation, possibly even halting the excavation altogether and sealing the cave. And so Erica was working long, hard hours, desperate to decipher the mysteries of the cave before Jared Black accomplished his goal.

The first visitor he had brought to the cave was Chief Antonio Rivera of the Gabrielino tribe. He was there to possibly identify the painting and therefore allow Jared to start the legal wheels in motion. As the visitor was of advanced age, he had been lowered to the cave in a chair, and while Chief Rivera had sat and gazed at the pictographs, Erica had paused in her work to watch him. The face mapped with a million lines and creases, coppery and weathered, remained a mask as the small, alert eyes flitted from one symbol to another, stopping, fixing, staring, absorbing, and then moving on. He had sat motionless for nearly an hour, his eyes drinking in the magnificent mural, body rigid, rough cracked hands flat on his knees, until finally he had heaved a ragged sigh and risen from the chair to say, “It is not of my tribe.”

One after another Jared brought tribal members into the cave— Tongva, Diegueñeo, Chumash, Luiseño, Kemaaya— some young, some old, men and women, in suits or jeans, short hair or braids, to stand or sit and ponder the perplexing mysteries of the ancient mural. And each, upon leaving, shook his or her head to say, “It is not my tribe.” Some of the visitors looked at Erica with clear displeasure, recalling ancient taboos about women trespassing in holy places. Some were even uncomfortable about themselves being there. A woman from the Purisima tribe north of Santa Barbara became highly agitated and left, saying that she had broken the taboo which forbade women to look upon the sacred symbols of a shaman’s vision quest and that now her entire tribe would be cursed because of her being here. Some visitors, however, looked favorably upon Erica and her work. One young man, a member of the Navajo tribe and a professor of Native American history at the University of Arizona, shook Erica’s hand and said he looked forward to hearing of her progress.

Jared also produced Anglo experts, men and women trained in universities to know Indian ways. These, too, with their degrees and book knowledge, shook their heads and departed.

The painting wasn’t the only mystery in the cave.

The 1814 one-cent piece she had found the day before, for example. In 1814 it was illegal for Californios to trade with Americans. American ships were not allowed to dock at San Pedro or San Francisco, and anyone who jumped ship was caught and deported. So how did an American coin get into the cave? Erica knew it couldn’t have been dropped there years later, when California was part of the United States, because the relief was so sharp. One could clearly see the wreath embracing the words
One Cent
, and around that,
United States of America.
On the other side, the Liberty head with a wreath on her curly hair surrounded by twelve crisply defined stars and the numbers 1814, all sharply defined. A coin that had been in circulation for years would be worn smooth from so much handling. This one had been recently minted when it was lost. And so there was a mystery here.

There were more.

Erica looked at the black-and-white photos tacked to the bulletin board showing the remarkable discovery Luke had made while cleaning the cave walls: words etched into the sandstone wall of the cave: La Primera Madre—
The First Mother.

Who was the First Mother? Was this possibly a clue as to the identity of the Lady?

That’s what they were calling her: the Lady. The woman whose intact skeleton had been gradually exposed by Erica over the past weeks, complete with burial objects, remnants of clothing, and even wisps of long white hair.

Determining gender had been easy: the pelvis was clearly that of a female. Age at time of death, which Erica placed between eighty and ninety, was determined by looking at the teeth, which were worn down nearly to the jaw, indicating a lifetime of eating food contaminated with coarse sand and dirt. Determining the historical age of the skeleton was another matter and required carbon-14 analysis. The bone tissue dated between nineteen hundred and twenty-two hundred years old, and the fact that a spear and a spear thrower had been buried with the woman instead of bow and arrow also placed her prior to fifteen hundred years ago.

Erica had also been able to deduce that the Lady had been a medicine woman. Buried with the skeleton were pouches of seeds and small woven baskets containing herbs. Most of it had disintegrated but microscopic analysis had so far identified several of them as healing herbs.

What Erica couldn’t resolve, however, was tribal affiliation. The woman had been tall, which meant possibly Mojave, who were among the tallest tribes on the North American continent. The burial objects were not Chumash, nor had the Chumash buried their dead this side of Malibu Creek. The woman couldn’t have been Gabrielino since they cremated their dead. Her funerary objects were intact, and the Indians of the Los Angeles basin ritualistically broke the deceased’s possessions— snapping an arrow in two, breaking a spear— so that the objects would die and their spirits could join their owner in the afterlife.

But whoever she was, whatever her tribe, those who buried her had done so lovingly and with great care and reverence. The Lady had been found on her side, arms folded at her chest, knees drawn comfortably up in what looked like a fetal or sleeping position. She had been wrapped in a blanket of rabbit skins, most of which had disintegrated but which could still be seen in small patches on the skeleton. Several shell-bead necklaces were strung around her neck, and strands of shell-beads on both wrists. Pollen analysis indicated she had been laid in a bed of flowers and sage, and small offerings of food— seeds, nuts, berries— had been placed near her hands. Around the body the woman’s personal possessions had been carefully laid: feathered hairpins, engraved bone earrings, a flute made of bird bone, and various objects which Erica could not identify but suspected held ritualistic significance. Traces of ochre suggested the corpse had been painted red before interment.

While sounds from the camp drifted through the open window— someone playing a guitar, teams tossing a volleyball— Erica sent herself back through time. She gazed at the photos taped above the workbench, taking in the white hair and fragile bones that had once been part of a living, breathing woman, and suddenly felt an overwhelming need to know the Lady’s story.

Stories were what made people real, what gave them souls. Erica would never forget the day she had first started wanting to know people’s stories, the day her life’s course was set forever. She had been twelve years old and visiting a museum with a school group. They were in the anthropology wing looking at the dioramas while the teacher lectured about the lives of the Indians depicted in the reconstructed village behind the glass. Erica had been suddenly filled with an inexplicable awe to think that these people had died long ago and yet here they were, showing people in the present how they lived! What a wonderful thing to do, to not let people die and be forgotten, but to keep them alive and remembered.

Who are you? Erica silently asked the eggshell skull with its delicate cheekbones and touchingly vulnerable jaw. What was your name? Who loved you? Whom did you love in return? Alone in the cave, amid the shadows and silence, handling the Lady’s brittle skeleton so sweetly curled on its side, Erica had been rocked with unexpected emotion. It had been like tending to a child or nurturing a baby. She had felt fiercely protective of the forgotten, lonely bones, wanting to gather them to her breast and keep them safe.

That was when her resolve had been born: to learn the woman’s identity before Jared Black found the cave’s legal owners.

Perhaps the latest find, unearthed from the cave that afternoon, would provide a clue. The strange object was roughly the size and shape of a small football and consisted of a rabbit fur bundle tied with animal sinews decorated with shell-beads. Erica had found it at a level lower than the 1814 coin but above the soil layer from which she had extracted pottery shards. Since the Indians of the Los Angeles basin didn’t fire clay but instead traded with visiting Pueblo peoples for pottery, Erica scoured reference catalogues of Southwest pottery that had been dated and identified. She had been able to determine, by the lead ore content in the glaze and the sandstone temper, that the pots had been made in Pecos, a large Indian pueblo on the Rio Grande, around the year 1400. That still left a range of four hundred years. Further analysis was required to determine more precisely the year that the rabbit fur bundle had been left in the cave.

Erica was certain there was something inside.
An offering left by a descendant who had come to the cave to pray for a miracle— a woman hoping for a child, a warrior desiring a maiden.

Erica wanted to open it, but her eyes ached. Deciding to go for a walk and get some air, she picked up a book from amid the clutter on her workbench and tucked it under her arm.

* * *

The land behind the Zimmerman property was actually the north crest of the canyon, with the producer’s mansion sitting on the south crest, across the sinking backyards. Here, among oak, dwarf pine, and chaparral, trailers and tents had been erected to accommodate the archaeologists and volunteers who had come to sieve, clean, sort, catalogue, photograph, analyze, and run tests on everything that was being brought out of the cave and out of the Zimmerman pool crater— mostly, it was human bones.

During the day, the area buzzed with activity. While police, disaster teams and myriad city workers dealt with homeowners, curiosity-seekers, and news crews, licensed land surveyors were mapping the ground conditions of the mesa and comparing them to historical mapping. They worked all over the neighborhood with levels, theodolites, drills, backhoes, electronic distance-measuring equipment, seismic analysis units, and various types of small sampling tools to collect soil for laboratory analysis. Another backyard had partially sunk, creating a dramatic scene of an elaborate Renaissance-style fountain cracked in two and tilting.

Archaeologists weren’t the only ones living at the site. There were people from the Seismographic Institute, monitoring delicate instruments which they had placed all over the mesa and Emerald Hills Estates; uniformed rent-a-cops hired by the homeowners to protect the mansions from looters; and construction workers brought in to shore up the cliff, the swimming pool crater, and the inside of the cave— guys in hard hats flirting with the leggy anthropology majors who had been recruited from UCLA. Many of the hard hats were Indians hired under new legislation initiated in part by Jared Black, who had argued that construction-site monitoring of Indian burial mounds not only provided jobs for Indians, it also raised cultural awareness for tribal members, helped pay for tribal training programs, and provided experts that developers and government agencies needed in order to comply with state and federal environmental impact laws.

There were other Indians here as well, protestors on the other side of the police barriers who demanded that the excavation be stopped even though no one knew which tribe the cave and the skeleton belonged to. There were also Indians who wanted the dig to continue in hopes of getting an identification. Jared Black was often seen talking to the protestors, trying to mediate between clashing Native American groups. Already one fight had broken out, the protestors taken away in handcuffs. Emotions were running high. Since the NAGPR Act of 1990, skeletons were being removed from museum collections around the country for reburial. The Smithsonian had already returned two thousand skeletons, with the remaining fourteen thousand to follow. But the problem with the Emerald Hills Woman was that her tribal affiliation was as yet unidentified and so some tribes were worried that a member of a rival tribe might handle the bones and possibly put a curse on them and her descendants.