I don’t want to hurt her.”Ībove: Feather Smith and Zelda Yazza, her medicine woman.Īlready jangled by the large audience, the demands of the ceremony, and her medicine woman’s caution to avoid expressing emotions, Feather reveals only a sliver of herself.
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I learned how to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open for her. “My three older daughters, I was so impatient,” she says. A psychologist who helps her people untangle their addictions, Smith-McNeal thinks that, in some ways, Feather raised her.
She bundled her son’s nine-month-old daughter in her arms, brought her home, adopted her, and raised her Mescalero. When the call came, Smith-McNeal drove four hours north from Mescalero to Zia Pueblo, where the baby’s mother lived. Her parents were too young and not at all in love. SHE IS BUT A WISP, THIS FEATHER, seemingly as fragile as the fawn-colored kitten she cradles, itself a piece of cottonwood fluff. In doing so, they stake a claim to a tribal tradition that was banned for nearly a century and declare their allegiance to the Apache way.Ī few hours later, still fighting nerves, one of the girls, Feather Smith, says in a barely audible voice, “I think this will teach me to be independent and not depend on other people.” She looks toward her adoptive mother, Willymae Smith-McNeal, who does not smile but slowly nods. For the next four days, they will wear these hot and heavy dresses, try their hand at traditional tasks, and endure an all-night ritual open only to fellow Mescalero. The feast portion of their puberty rite has begun. They loop around the basket and return to catch their breath.
They stare across the Mescalero fairgrounds’ packed dirt at a woven basket filled with medicine-sage, eagle feathers, clay. Their teenage years beckon, yet they have chosen to become like the mothers, grannies, and aunties around them, the metaphorical mountains of their community: Apache women, keepers of the tribe. After four days of helping their families set up elaborate encampments of tents, tepees, and open-air kitchens, they must now demonstrate honor, power, and generosity before a throng of tribespeople and strangers alike. Just 13 years old, each girl stares forward, nervously intent. These old ways abide: Medicine men and women meet with each girl, offering advice, sprinkling cattail pollen, bestowing blessings. Fourth of July heat already shimmers off the tallest pines of the Sacramentos, in southern New Mexico, when three Mescalero Apache girls wearing beaded buckskin dresses take their places before a towering tepee. A LONG TIME AGO, this happened at sunrise, each girl sprinting toward the new day.
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