With Apologies To Arizona And New Mexico
I thought long and hard about which First Nations people might create the Indigenous paradise we find in Shadows From The Sun. No human society has ever come close, and I knew I had to truly believe in the people who emerge on the page.
Then, long before the first sentence of Chapter One was written, I read about rock paintings by First Nations people that had been discovered in the province of Alberta. These pictographs were unlike any others found in Canada. In fact, like nothing found north of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, or New Mexico in the United States. Among other figures on that limestone wall in Grotto Canyon, in the Canadian Rockies, those pictures depict the hump-backed flute player, known as Kokopelli. Kokopelli is the god of fertility and travelers, and is revered only by the Hopituh Shi-nu-mu People. Or the Hopi for short.
Here was a story I’d never imagined. What were the Hopi doing in Canada 500 to 1,300 years ago, so far from the American southwest? According to their own oral history, though, the Hopi had once sent members of their nation off in 4 directions across North America searching for new land to plant corn, and they left paintings of the flute player along the way. One of those groups, the Flute Clan, travelled north to a land of rock and snow, but the cold temperatures forced them to return to warmer landscapes where their crops would grow. And that land is now Arizona.
Local Native people in Alberta have corroborated the account. The history of the Stoney First Nation tells us that these pictographs were made by the “Rattlesnake People” who once lived in Grotto Canyon near Canmore, Alberta. Not surprisingly, it turns out that rattlesnake ceremonies were part of Hopi culture.
Shadows From The Sun was onto something now. What made this Canadian connection more exciting is the literal meaning of the word Hopi: the Peaceful People. A perfect foundation for paradise, I thought. I bought a Hopi-English dictionary and went to work.
I learned that Kokopelli is a hunchbacked figure with special powers who acts, among other functions, as a rain priest. For me, this was especially important. My earliest memory was standing warm and dry in our next-door neighbor’s house in England (she was babysitting me at the time), watching the rain splash against the glass pane of her storm door window. From that moment, I’ve had a special appreciation for rain, not just for the scents and beauty it creates, but for its power to cleanse, rejuvenate and regenerate. Which is why you’ll find that rain is a major element in the story.
In Hopi culture, the number 4 holds a special significance. It represents order, balance, and the natural world, including the four directions, the four seasons, and the four elements (Earth, Water, Fire, and Air). The Hopi also believed this world was the fourth created after the first three worlds or earths were destroyed from man’s evil actions. The gods banished them from their home underground to start all over again in a different world. Ours.
The portal where they emerged from the earth is known as a Sipapú (not to be confused with the ski resort of Sipapu in New Mexico). This is the place where their people first came to consciousness. And it is in a paradise called Sipahpu where we find Lunara and her people living without sin in the book Shadows From The Sun, scheduled to be released in September.
