Twin Deer Mother and Blossoming Deer Petals

Twindeermother Whitebuffalocalfwoman

Twindeermother Whitebuffalocalfwoman: Relatives, we bow to the artist. Thank you for sharing your envisioning on the tree (of life). Twin Deer Mother (blue, Crystal Mother) and Blossoming Deer Petals (red, Rainbow Mother). Taos Blue Lake People, the Whale's cry and long for your returning to the oceans and seas, wakan (holy walking) with me. The Turtle leads the loving wake. No more trouble, only loving states. Love is the answer towards the wake. Come children stand up and shake. It's the holy ghost walking, the spiritual snake, the to and fro that really makes the perfect garden love could breath, when you are standing next to me. Love inside and love outside, the wonderful dance and singing pride. We are the people who will show the world, just how it's done and how to fulfill. The Whales and Cries, the songs in our eyes, have been calling for you all the nights. Have been calling for you all the daze (days). Loving waves. Singing and crying tears of pain, to make a great big stain, where painted pictures grow inside and dreaming awakens for every single light. I send forth the lands and seas to hold us close. It's time to bow down of course, the Rainbow Trail leads us North (towards the milky way, all the stars streaming together, nourished by HER LOVE). I bow today to bring heavenly waves. White Buffalo Calf Woman sings to bring in the leaves (relatives on the tree of life). Twin Deer Mother does dance every moment a trance. Non-stop parade, celebrations under waves. We are propelled in our hearts. I await for all to begin and start. Blue Lake People, sing and dance with me. Blue Lake People, heaven's gallantly. Blue Lake People, I send my love to you. Twin Deer Mother bows to the love that lives inside of you!

Twindeermother Whitebuffalocalfwoman 

https://www.facebook.com/twindeermother.whitebuffalocalfwoman 

changed her cover photo.

"When you trust your flesh, you lose your address (forgetting you are living in heaven). Trust your soul, the eternal nose (knows or bridge to your flesh, the wild wild west, where the sun does rise within). If you don't know who you are and don't know what you are doing, then know the Soul knows the way, true to yesterday (the eternal circle of life, repeats and grows)! White Buffalo calf Woman sings Twin Deer Mother brings

The Deer-dance at Taos

Gilbert Atencio (1930-19995) Wah Peen

Before sun-up on January sixth I sat in Taos Pueblo, watching the village come awake. A few thin blue lines of smoke rose from the chimney-pots, but there was no other sign of life. The mountain flanks were black with pines, cottonwood and aspens along the streams were white, and Pueblo Creek was coated thinly with ice. All around Taos are cultivated fields, and the two villages, facing each other across the creek, rise in tiers to a height of four or five stories--the tallest of the famous terraced pueblos.

A few dogs appeared scratching, and then men whom I took to be the Chiffonete. In blankets and moccasins they climbed down ladders from the houses, sometimes stopping at the stream to wash, sometimes going directly to the kivas with mysterious bundles of ceremonial things under their blankets. In Taos the kiva entrances are flush with the ground, boldly announced by the tall ladder-poles. Usually one man sat near the ladder, possibly a door-keeper. A little later women began to emerge from the houses, heavy-legged in buckskin boots, with long, full skirts and shawls of soft colors or black. They carried jars, or lard-pails, to the stream for water, they swept with bundles of grass, they carried from house to house the stiff carcasses of sheep, which would later feed the dancers.

Finally the newly elected governor stepped out on his house-top and called, urging all the dancers to go to church. Three gubernatorial calls, muezzen-like in the clear air, three peals of the mission bell, and the people began to drift toward the church. Moving softly, they made a brilliant pageant against the adobe church, with its whitewashed wall. All were wrapped in blankets, plain or striped, and falling in soft loops on the men and stiff cones on the women from their heads to their moccasined feet. The Catholic priest was not present, but his pagan congregation knelt reverently on the adobe floor and murmured responsive prayers to the Christian God before beginning their appeal to the gods of the hunt.

Holy Turtle Drum by Elk Good Water, Taos Pueblo

Chiffonete always appear for this dance, bare bodies painted in stripes, and their faces decorated evidently with much individual license in spirals, whorls, and concentric circles, also in black and white. On their heads they wear corn-husks, which make fine golden sprays above the chignon. They whoop and yell, always with the restrained musical call of the Indian; they rush up and down ladders and in and out of houses, bringing laughter wherever they go. In every house they are given presents, usually food. All day the Chiffonete run round, making "wise-cracks," shivering in the cold, and often yielding to the seductions of a shawl around the middle.

Soon after noon the dancers appear. First comes a group of men and women who perform the Corn-dance, which is a summer dance, but always suitable, since it is a prayer for growth. They dance in two facing rows, their feet shifting lightly, their hands moving up and down, all in perfect time to the chanting of a group of blanketed men who stamp solemnly ahead of them as they move across the plaza. The women carry bunches of feathers in one hand, evergreens in the other; the men have gourd rattles with which they emphasize the steady beat of the song. The costumes are brilliant, and Indian in feeling, though they are composed mostly of the silks and silkalines, ribbons and calicoes which can be bought in the stores. They dance several times, finally finishing in front of the church.

Gilbert Atencio (1930-19995) Wah Peen

Suddenly queer distant calls are heard, and beyond a broken adobe wall appears a long moving line of deer-antlers. At once the corn-dancers leave and the deer enter, fifty or sixty men and boys wrapped full-length in deer-hides. The heads are well preserved and the faces of the men are hardly noticeable as they move bent over sticks in their bands which make the animal's front legs. There is no color; with dun-colored bodies, horned heads, and weird cries they move like bemused creatures, coming among human beings and knowing themselves for the appointed sacrifice. Among the deer may be a few other animals; men stripped and painted black and wearing heavy buffalo heads; small boys wrapped in the skins of bobcats or coyotes; even tiny tots smothered under the feathers of a turkey. Very small boys walk hidden under the bent bodies of the men.

These costumes are probably an example of the most primitive type of mask: the use of the entire skin to transform the man into the animal and so, somehow, to trick the game into the path of the hunter. This dance as given in Taos today is as ancient as the earliest human efforts at sympathetic magic, and it leads, as we shall see later, to more highly symbolic and artistic versions of the same thing in other pueblos.

Two women lead, dignified figures wrapped in white buckskin robes, or sometimes in white sheets, wearing the usual white boots, their hair flowing down the back and feathered atop. At the nape of the neck hangs the breast of a duck. In one hand each woman carries pine twigs, in the other a gourd. At certain points in the dance each woman moves slowly down the line of waiting men, making sharp peremptory motions with the gourd. As she does this, each man drops to his knees. Returning, she makes a reverse gesture and the men rise. This perhaps typifies the call of the universal spirit of fertility, the usual significance of a woman figure in the Indian dances. They are treated with reverence, and during this figure the nonsense and the thieving of the Chiffonete are stopped.

When the men dance, the Chiffonete bound about, making jokes and, when they can, snatching a small child out of the group and carrying him away. Most of the boys like the fun; if a very small one yells, he is dropped at once. Usually the thief is caught readily by some man from the crowd of watchers, though sometimes the race is a thrilling one before the boy is rescued and returned to the dancing group. This pantomime suggests the legend of the dance.

Long ago, according to the legend, men and animals lived together and understood each other. They spoke the same language, and the animals knew that they must be sacrificed that their human brothers might live. This dance is an appeal to that old understanding. The Chiffonete who snatches a dancer away typifies the hunter who tries to kill the game. The man who saves him is the spirit which always protects the game. In the course of the dance a few Chiffonete get away with their captives, as a few deer must be killed in the course of the year. It is said that in hunting, the Taos Indians do not worry if they are seen by the game, for they know that if the dance has been properly performed, they will be permitted to kill what they need.

Sacred White Buffalo Four Directions by Elk Good Water, Taos Pueblo

The dance is performed several times, but it is soon over and the dancers withdraw to their kiva, still making queer animal-like calls.

In the evening children dance, going in groups from house to house. Each group gives a different dance, the whole thing being a matter of practicing for later and more serious ceremonies. Indian children learn to dance in such ways, following the grown-ups in serious ceremonies and giving dances of their own before the critical but kindly eyes of the elders. The end of the evening is likely to bring an adult group which dances vigorously some such dance as the Comanche dance. Everyone loves such a night, and every house which entertains the dancers is filled with eager friends and replete with hospitality and welcome. White visitors are well received.

Thank you http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/sw/dg/dg04.htm. We bow.
To read more about Taos visit http://taos.org/art/historic-landmarks?/item/1/Taos-Pueblo

The iconic view of Taos Valley, as seen when entering from the south, includes Rio Grande Gorge and Taos Mountain. Photo by Jeremy Landau. Relatives I had a vision overlooking this as a tree. The tree moved with the Sun and it was so very slow gentle flowing. I was swimming in pure ecstasy. Had to call the Turtle to help save me. It was just way too much love for me to feel for a long duration. Yet, I learned about true love the trees and lands gift to us every single day. To and fro they sway to tell us a love story all the waves. Twin Deer Mother arrived home to play, praising every single day. To and fro, rocks that know, we are the Holy Cloud people ready to ride the sky!

"Click Below to Join Us, Welcome Home Rainbow Warriors of Prophecy"

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Rio Grande Bridge by Gak Stonn

Shame and blame are the past's game, and now we are onto a new frame, the vision of Oneness of heaven above (soul), where song's sing down below (flesh), rejoice I say, rejoice and play, while we learn to live a new way! Brotherhood here we come, let's hop, skip and play! Twin Deer Mother dances on the waves.

Dances with Buffaloes

by Suzanne Ruta

On Christmas Eve at Nambe, a small (population 650) American Indian village and sovereign Indian nation, 20 miles north of Santa Fe, the buffalo come out to dance by the light of a great bonfire. They come after evening Mass at the ancient St. Francis of Assisi church, and dance for just a little while before returning to the kiva, the underground ceremonial chamber, center of the pueblo's traditional religious life. With the buffalo come the deer, their horns circled with sprigs of fir, like candles in Advent wreaths, the antelope and a couple of Pueblo Indians dressed up as their old enemies, the Comanches, for comic relief. "Pueblo" is the Spanish word for village, and it is also used to describe the inhabitants. There are 19 of these villages — actually self-governing tribes or nations — encompassing 60,000 Pueblo Indians in New Mexico. The northern Rio Grande Pueblos arrived in the 14th century, after drought forced migration from the Four Corners area where their ancestors, known by their Navajo name, Anasazi, or Ancient Ones, built the great cities at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. The New Mexico Pueblos speak three languages plus four dialects, as well as English. They work as farmers, government employees, Head Start teachers, and technicians at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. There are Pueblo doctors, lawyers, architects and of course artists. Pueblo jewelers and ceramicists sell their work over the Internet. Others work at the nine Pueblo gambling casinos. The casinos bring much needed income and (so far mostly low paying) jobs. But they are controversial. Joe Sando, a Pueblo historian, wonders who will teach the children to speak Keres, the southern Pueblos' language, if grandparents spend their afternoons at the casinos. In northern New Mexico, such worries may be premature. The old ceremonial life continues as in the past. On Christmas Day at sunrise, at Jemez and several other pueblos, the animals come down from the hills at sunrise. The buffaloes in great horned headdresses are accompanied by dainty buffalo ladies with their crowns of turkey or eagle or parrot feathers. The deer wear their bits of evergreen, as if bringing their mountain habitat right down into town. The animals dance again publicly on Jan. 6, Epiphany, or Three Kings Day, as it's called in New Mexico, following the Spanish custom, and throughout the winter months. Dance is central to life in the pueblos, and goes on year round. Summer in the high desert of northern New Mexico brings choral rain dances or corn dances, soothing and exhilarating. Winter, with a few exceptions, is the time for powerful, dramatic re-enactments of life and death among the animals, the birth of tragedy from the spirit of the hunt. When the Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully, in his passionate appreciation "Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance," called the pueblo dances "the most profound works of art yet produced on the American continent," it was primarily the winter dances he had in mind. If only one could get the dates straight. The rich mix of Roman Catholic and native traditions the Pueblos observe means that some dances fall on fixed dates in the liturgical year. Dances that correspond to saints' days or to the Christmas cycle are generally open to the public. After that, things get murky. Ask about winter dances at Santo Domingo Pueblo, in the dusty plain south of Santa Fe, and you run into the famous Pueblo reticence, in its most charming, offhand form: "We don't put out a schedule. We don't specify in advance. But if someone calls and no one answers the phone, they can be pretty sure something is happening. We won't be in the office." Or try to pin down the date, in late February, of the beautiful deer dance at San Juan Pueblo, up in Rio Arriba County, and you run into a studied vagueness. The trick is to remember that although they are great theater — mysterious, powerful, moving and often humorous — Pueblo dances are not performances. They are communal prayers, religious ceremonies, linked in ways that outsiders will never understand to seasonal ceremonies, initiations, rites of passage, fasts, and retreats that the Rio Grande Pueblos — with their 460 years of experience dodging Spanish and American coercion and curiosity — do not perform in public, but out of sight, in the kivas, or in villages closed to outsiders for the day. Still, you can probably see a Pueblo dance almost any week this winter. But leave cameras, tape recorders, video equipment, even sketchbooks at home. A handout from Jemez Pueblo's Walatowa Cultural Center actually forbids "unauthorized publication of information." Failure to comply can bring trouble. When Santa Fe's daily paper, The New Mexican (now under a different owner), ran aerial photographs of the corn dance at Santo Domingo Pueblo years ago, the pueblo sued the paper for violation of its privacy laws. The paper printed an apology, in terms dictated by the pueblo. Like few events in our media- ridden world, then, Pueblo dances will not be televised, much less Webcast in real time. They must be seen live. But for anyone who has the patience, the gumption and the winter underwear to spend several hours of a January day outdoors in quiet watchfulness, the existential rewards are great. For a city visitor, it's a spiritual exercise in itself to scale back to the right frame of mind. On my first trip to New Mexico some years ago during a pause in the dancing at Santo Domingo Pueblo, I waved excitedly to a new acquaintance across the plaza. When that venerable gentleman, who left Boston for the great Southwest in 1942, glowered and turned away, I began to get the point. On the dancing ground, the "middle heart place" between earth and sky, as it's called in the Tewa dialect, dancers and observers share a relaxed attentiveness and quiet absorption in the matter at hand. Taos pueblo, the northernmost of the Rio Grande pueblos, is five miles north of the town of Taos. Architecturally it is the most traditional, with its two old squared-off hives five stories tall (and now mostly uninhabited), and it can feel like a wild place in winter, backed up against its sacred mountains with the Great Plains just beyond. This may be the best place in the world to see the deer dance (on Christmas or Three Kings Day). "In a snowy downtrodden clearing between the adobe cliffs, on the backbone of a continent" as Frank Waters memorably sets the scene in his classic 1950 study, "Masked Gods," the large chorus of deer file in, accompanied by the beat of drums and old traditional chants in Tiwa, the native dialect of Taos and Picuris Pueblos. Exactly how old are the chants? They go back farther than anyone can remember, according to Rina Swentzell, a Santa Clara Pueblo writer who frequently interprets Pueblo culture for the outside world. The Taos deer dancers wear whole deerskins with the head attached, just like old-time deer hunters, who, historians report, dressed as living decoys, in order to lure deer into ambush. Once caught, the deer were wrestled to the ground and suffocated. Imagine killing deer in hand-to- hand combat! The Taos deer dance is remote human memory made visible, history on the hoof. This celebration of winter, the season that winnows the herds, is full of tragic pathos. Farther south, in the gentle folds of the Rio Grande Valley, in late February, with the sacred mountains at a more comfortable distance, the San Juan Pueblo deer boys are a dashing lot. In their blue bandannas and white store-bought shirts worn open at the neck, they look like the chorus from the ballet "Rodeo." Their openwork white mesh leggings, furred moccasins, profusion of belts, garters, fringes, pompoms, tassels, jangling bells make a stylized and witty statement of what it means to be a deer. The bits of white fluff (cotton, eagle down?) and greenery about their persons suggest that this dance has to do with the weather. Like Groundhog Day, it roots for a quick spring thaw. The kiva is one pole of Pueblo ceremonial life. The other is definitely the kitchen, as visitors often discover on dance days, when impromptu invitations to lunch are common. Two years ago at Jemez, a hospitable family invited a friend and me to lunch in their small house near the plaza. From the street we walked right into a small living room with a table set for 20. A bunch of Navajo school kids were quietly mopping up a late breakfast or an early lunch. They had driven clear across the state to see the Jemez corn dance and late fall market. When they had finished eating it was our turn to heap our plates from the many bowls and platters on the table, with red and green chili, beans, pozole, turkey, ham, cole slaw, syrupy-sweet bread pudding, pumpkin pie and Cool Whip. As we ate, members of the extended family arrived from Albuquerque and points east and joined us at the table. In the adjoining kitchen, the matriarchs, stalwart grandmothers and aunts, worked and joked nonstop. They held things together in the pueblo, one felt, the way the crust contains the filling of a pie. Most pueblos in northern New Mexico are open to visitors on ordinary days (when no dances or rituals are being held). They may charge admission; they may also permit photography in some parts of the village, for a fee. San Ildefonso, on Route 4, north of Santa Fe, is a great place to visit at any time. After the jumble of shops in downtown Santa Fe and the clutter of billboards on Route 285 North, it's a relief to reach spacious, scattered, undemanding San Ildefonso. Here is a city-state of fewer than a thousand people living on 26,000 acres right down the hill from Los Alamos National Laboratory. How does it keep its balance, living between two worlds? Does it have to do with the messy old cottonwood tree to one side of the plaza or with the clear, familiar profile due north of the Black Mesa, the beloved humpbacked volcanic mountain? Of course it has to do with memory. San Ildefonso knows where it came from. And you can go there, too. Head on up Route 4, across the Rio Grande at Otowi, toward Los Alamos. Watch for the cheerful wooden "Welcome to Los Alamos, the Atomic City" sign on your right. A few yards past that early cold war relic, park on the left side of the road, and you're at the foot of Tsankawi mesa, home to a perfect pueblo in the sky, where no one lives. Tsankawi was built in the 15th century by San Ildefonso ancestors driven out of the Four Corners area by severe drought. But the lure of the river proved irresistible. By the late 16th century they had moved down to a less arduous life, on the banks of the Rio Grande. Now Tsankawi is part of Bandelier National Monument, run by the National Park Service. (No trace here of the fire that savaged Bandelier last spring. The burned-out area lies eight miles to the east.) In their jokey big brotherly way, the rangers have studded the steep narrow trail to the mesa top with stern but friendly warning signs. But even in midwinter, with the odd patch of ice on the trail, the half-hour climb is manageable. You can put your feet right into the niches worn into the soft white volcanic rock by generations of soft-shoed Pueblos. I've been here with arthritic elderly aunts and world-class mountain climbers. Fifteen minutes up the trail you can stop at the first plateau and kneel beside the slight hollows in the stone where women knelt to grind corn way back when, or you can trek on another 15 minutes to the top of the long narrow butte, where the old multistory stonework complex has collapsed and gone to ground. But it's easy to tell where the dance floor would have been. Just look for the place where the mountains are at eye level all around. In one direction, the young, volcanic Jemez range; in the opposite direction, beyond a tender line of haze above the Rio Grande gorge, the jagged snowy profile of the Sangre de Cristo range; to another side, a sequence of pale pink mesas of volcanic tuff like this one, honeycombed with cozy, formerly inhabited caves. The difficult thing at Tsankawi is not climbing to the top of the mesa; it's finding a reason to come down again. Thank you Sister Suzanne Ruta for sharing. Your devoted Twin Deer Mother http://www.turtletrack.org/Issues00/Co12302000/CO_12302000_Dance_Buffalo.htm

Sing a song, and get along, to have joy in life, full of tears, because you know, the sacred flow is all we have to get us home! Dance all day, and learn to play, with all you do and think and say, because we need love to please, to open hearts and doors to be! Welcome all your relatives, into the heart of all your sin and say, "I love you this very day" and "I won't let you get away!". I will fight for love this day, I will fight to show the way, because I am here to love you dear, my heart that sheds so many tears. And when we hope to comfort folks, then we will be prepared to say, "Come pray with me, learn joy to speak, and song and dance will keep us in relief". Whisper song and let a breeze come home to know your knees, where prayer is your living sacred breeze! White Buffalo Calf Woman sings