(Source: https://threader.app/thread/1435316974028984327)
Some remarkable passages from Davi Kopenawa’s book The Falling Sky, discussing the Gods of the white people’s ancestors, whom white people have forgotten, but of whom Kopenawa and other Yanomami spiritworkers are aware.
“Do not think that the napënapëri images we make dance are those of the white people who are nearby around us. Those white people of the present only want our death.” “Today’s white people know nothing about the xapiri who inhabit their land and they never even think about them. Yet they always existed, long before the white people themselves were created. The spirits are truly numerous there!” “Even though today’s white people of Europe have forgotten it, the xapiri who live on their land are the images of their ancestors who died long ago. These are the images of the first outsiders with ghost talk whom the shamans call napënapëri.”
“The napënapëri spirits want to keep the beauty of their mirror-land and protect it from epidemic fumes. Yet today’s white people no longer know how to take care of it, and they know nothing of these images, which are those of their ancestors. This worries me too.” “In the past, their long-ago elders knew them and made them dance. They knew how to imitate their songs and build their spirit houses for the young people who wanted to become shamans.” “Little by little they stopped hearing these spirits’ words. Then the books made them forgetful, and they finally rejected them.”
These are just a couple out of a number of passages in which Kopenawa discusses these spirits. There are some idiosyncrasies to his account of them, of course, but on the whole it is a valuable empirical account from a master spiritworker of our own spiritual history. He can discern a large number of Gods, forgotten by the whites he encounters, who are responsible for the achievements of our civilization. “It was they who taught today’s white people to build airplanes, machines to capture songs, and image skins.”
These Gods are still present, still engaged. Contact with Them is difficult, but sought by Kopenawa and his coworkers. “Our shamans value these spirits’ bravery highly and many are those who want to call them down to dance for them. Yet it is not easy.” (I would note that the term translated here as “images”, if one tracks how Kopenawa uses it throughout the text, seems to have a sense more like “forms”.) I think that this unprompted testimony, from a master practitioner of a powerful, intact tradition, can be balm for the souls of many in my community, weary of constantly being marginalized, pathologized, taunted by the ignorant and arrogant.