The Cloud People

A complexity of an Indigenous Identity

“Tobisi zá guca lidxinu
tobisi gucanu laanu
nayeche bi’ndanu
tobisi nga ladxido’no
dxi beedxe
guie
ne yaga
ca bixhozenu
biza’ca laanu.”
- Irma Pineda

Walking through the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum, the Cahuilla people are alive.

As we take our seats at the start of the exhibition, a screen envelops our vision. The surround sound fills our ears, and the vibrant colors captivate our eyes. Everyone in the theater is enthralled by the moving images illuminating the room watching the story of the Cahuilla people unfold. The film bears the weight of their culture, nurturing its vitality in order to keep the name of its people alive.

The Cahuillas’ ancestors dance around the theater’s screen, the story of their beginnings told for the world to see. It's welcomed and admired and it's nothing like what people have seen before.

It is believed that the world was born of clay. People were molded from the Earth, rose from its foundations into living and breathing beings with warmth in our bodies.

In the grand scale of the world, it is a small snippet, yet it shares the becoming of an existence.

Images of their past and present play on the television screens as we continue through the museum, interviews are playing, traditions are being explained. I stand there, watching and comparing myself through their features and artifacts.

The baskets on display, woven so intricately with delicate finger work, showing care and attention.

We are an extension of one another, the Cahuilla people and the Zapotec people.

I vividly remember being a little girl, watching the women of my family, gathered together in a circle weaving similar patterns, speaking our mother tongue with the reeds on their laps and the grass intertwined within their gentle but firm fingers.

It will die with me.

I am only able to weave ribbons in between the braids of my hair, just how my mother had taught me so, and her own mother before that.

And someday, I too would be braiding these ribbons within the hair strands of my own daughter.

Just as how a Cahuilla mother will sit with her daughter and watch as her child’s nimble hands will caress the weaves in an attempt to create the patterns she watched her mother braid so effortlessly.

An eternal cycle of remembrance thrives from the roots of indigenous women, a testament to their collective spirit.

She’ll be reminded of the little girl she once was, now turned into a mother – one she had also affectionately admired.

Can I consider myself a part of this, when I am shut out by my own past? The stories of my own people are slowly fading away in the emptiness between each other, as our adolescents begin to grow distaste for their own heritage, yearning for acceptance in a larger society.

I am trapped in this darkness, drowned in the world that took over what used to be mine. My people are trapped behind the museum glass, stared at like zoo animals. Everything we left behind, is treated as mere artifacts – bought, sold, or auctioned for its value. The men with the pale skin decided their entitlement over my sacred lands, stealing and destroying it to make room for their crosses.

As I walk out of the Cultural Museum, surrounded by the green of the hills through the dusty air. These hills, the sacred land of the Cahuilla people, are now overshadowed, holding only a small building to display its history, and preserve their native artifacts. Yet the whispers of their ancient beings linger in the dry breeze and the sighs of the wind. Although the land has become confined to a modern space, it speaks in volumes of the Cahuilla legacy that cannot be displayed in glass. It breathes life into the memories and stories of the past that are rooted in the Earth and people that roamed these hills so freely before.

The casino right across the street, attracting the greed of visitors and locals itching for the ecstasy of winning a jackpot.

It’s an addiction, the casino becoming an accomplice, their own personal brand of cocaine, that they can access just a drive away.

It’s a common reality that the casino brings into their city. It often is an instability for an economy. Some welcome it, others reject it.

Moreso, it brings more disparity than prosperity, as it drains the pockets of naive people, in hopes of making something out of nothing.

-

I was born from the clouds – my ancestors have taught me that, although my own mother refuses to believe it.

“Nuestra gente no sabía nada entonces.” She once told me.

Our people knew nothing then.

They have consumed her. Their corrupt minds ripped out what was taught by our ancestors right from inside her, and replaced it with an empty promise that can only be fulfilled if she begs for forgiveness.

Our entire existence has become an apology.

The act of being born is now thought of as a sin. We bend to our knees to beg and plead, crying out, “God have mercy on us!”

We forget who we are.

“La cara de mi ancestros vivirá para siempre,

somos infinito”

The face of my ancestors will live on forever, we are infinite.

Perhaps we’ll find salvation in the beads of the rosary.

But my wounds have begun to turn.

The Cahuilla people understood this fate.

The replica of a house in the exhibition they once built told the story. The screens within its walls illuminated it – the sacred traditions and practices that once was, now replaced by the white man’s God.

Their old prayer house stood as a silent testament to the past, encapsulating a once-thriving culture with ceremonies and dances, now left abandoned. The people have ceased to gather there, the language has fallen silent. It dwindled and faded, leaving the house empty and alone.

Its old wood, no longer of any use, was burned to the ground to mark a new transformation – to release the old spirits, and cut ties with their past.

Christianity made its way through them, replacing what they had once cherished. Two different beliefs became so intertwined that one began to constrict and suffocate the other. It led to the demise of culture.

Igniting and destroying their own history because there was no one else to carry it on into the new world.

Just like the burning of their old prayer house, their language was incinerated, – gone – nothing but ash – no bones left to identify it, no one to pass it on into the new world.

-

“Cuerpo de mi cuerpo”

Body
of
my
Body

I speak a dying tongue.

We are a dying people.

Is the end near?

God isn’t our savior. God has killed our people.

He’s taken over my people, and we lost a part of ourselves, unable to remember what had come before his settlement.

It was all washed away. The legends, the traditional beliefs between humans and the natural world disappeared.

Is that what his love means to her?

Jesus Christ is this all I’ll ever be?
Jesus Christ I’m alone again
Jesus Christ will I die alone?
Jesus Christ, maybe I am scared to die.
Jesus Christ are you going to come in at night to steal my soul like a creeping thief in the wind?

-

It's 3:21 pm - in the spur of the moment, we head to the grounds of the Tahquitz Canyon.

The sun’s arrows are beaming down on us as we tread through the crumbles of the mountains surrounding us.

The canyons are calling us, their boulders stretch out like arms beckoning us into a tender embrace. Enclosing us, like a mother cradling her child, we venture further into their bodies, tripping through the cracks, my converse no longer the color of white.

The frogs croak, and the earth groans beneath our feet. The rocks and the ripples of the cascading waterfall move with life, the mist spraying my face, making me shiver from its cold breeze.

“Sangre de mi sangre”

Blood
of
my
Blood

My flesh is the rocks, crushed and molded together,
my blood is the water overflowing in its arteries.

The canyon runs rampant with the sound of children’s laughter echoing through its ridges. People stopping to take pictures in front of the waterfall, then stripping to swim underneath it, basking in the glory of what Taquitz left behind.

-

There is a God-shaped hole growing in my chest and I am starting to wonder what kind of person I am.

I am Zapotec. That I know.

My people came before the Aztecs. Our pyramids continue to remain standing just as how the Mayans have theirs.

I have my father’s nose and my mother’s eyes.

I’ll rip open my chest down to the bone and expose my heart, so my ancestors can carve their words into me, breathe through me, live inside me. I want to make them whole – to make them mass.

It is my last resort – the only act I can commit with sincerity for them. To continue to carry them with me always.

For my mother, who is not at fault for what had been lost.

For my father, who is still too scared to speak Zapoteco in the public’s eye for fear of judgment.

For a God who will pull me apart and divide me, so he can return my body to the clouds when Death comes to greet me.

So I may dance, cleansing the Earth from the rain pouring out of my body.

Words: Nathaly Hernandez-Lopez

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