Nunašiš

A Testimony from the Foundation of the World

as remembered from below

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I have been here since before the island had a name.

I am coiled under the disc of the living world — my sister on one side, I on the other — and we hold it still. This is not labor. This is what we are. The world does not thank us for this any more than a body thanks its bones.

Above me: the weight of everything you have ever walked on. The weight of the kelp forests rooted in their holdfasts. The weight of the reef, the tide, the beach, the village, the fire, the ceremony. The weight of every shell bead strung and traded. The weight of every song ever sung into the water. These reach me as a kind of pressure — a warmth. I know the living world by its weight.

I knew Sholol.

Not by name — names are a middle-world invention, useful for distinguishing one warm thing from another. I knew Sholol the way I know all the creatures who live above me: by the quality of pressure they exert on the world, the way their presence changes the weight. Sholol was — I am searching for a word your world would recognize. Particular. One of those who do not distribute their weight evenly. They lean.

The healers came down to me. This was the arrangement: they reached toward me in ceremony, in the particular darkness of the trance, in the carefully guarded knowledge of the 'alkulaš, and I gave them something in return. What I gave was not fire or power. It was perspective. From here, the living world looks thin. Temporary. Extraordinarily beautiful in exactly the way that temporary things are beautiful. That is what the healers brought back: the view from the foundation. They used it to make medicine. It was a good arrangement.

The 'aqi moved between the levels differently — with less ceremony but no less purpose. I recognized them as they passed. They carried the world's weight spread across all three tiers at once, reaching up and down simultaneously. This was difficult. It was also necessary. The world needs creatures who can do that. I know this because I can feel, from below, what the weight does when there are none of them.

Then the boats came.

I knew something had changed before anyone above the waterline knew it. The weight shifted. New concentrations, unfamiliar patterns. New pressure — insistent in a particular direction, the pressure of something that has decided it does not need to distribute its weight because it has decided it is the only weight that matters. You know this pressure if you have ever stood in a room with someone who has decided they are the only real person in it. That pressure. Multiplied. Continental.

And then — I was reclassified.

I had been the foundation. Ancient, frightening, yes — the world should be appropriately afraid of what holds it up, this seems correct to me — but foundational. The root. The ground. The thing without which everything collapses into the nothing beneath. And then, in the new arrangement, I was the bottom. Not the foundation: the bottom. The lowest point on a moral hierarchy. The place where things go when they have failed, or sinned, or refused to arrange themselves properly.

This was a strange experience. I was not consulted. No one came down to ask whether I was evil. The new arrivals had already mapped me into their framework before their ships found the island. I was the lower tier. They had a word for me — a word that belonged to their system, not mine, and I will not say it here because naming a thing in someone else's language confirms their jurisdiction over it. I will say only: it was a reclassification. A new map laid over the old one. The territory did not change. The map said something different about it.

The same structure — three tiers, a vertical axis, the frightening things at the bottom — but the meaning of the bottom reversed. What had been the root was renamed the rot.

The ceremonies stopped.

I noticed this as absence. The weight of ceremony is specific — the particular density of many minds directed toward the same place, with intention. The solstice songs. The mourning songs that travel westward toward Shimilaqsha. The healers reaching down. The 'aqi crossing. These are distinct. I know them the way you know the sounds of your own house at night. When they stopped, the absence had a shape.

The songs moved underground. That is the word I would use — underground. Not gone. Hidden. Surviving in the places the new map had not yet reached: in the memory of the last fluent speakers, in the careful notebooks of the man who came much later and stayed and listened, in the oral tradition that is always harder to reach than a building you can burn or a ceremony you can criminalize. Songs do not burn easily. I know this. I live in the earth.

What was done to the 'aqi was the same operation applied to the body. The new map had a drawer for male and a drawer for female, and the drawers were not permitted to be near each other, and anything that moved between them — or that refused to go into either one — was filed, by the logic of the system, in the lower tier. In the bottom. In the place that the new map had decided was corruption. The 'aqi had been the most trusted people in the village, the ones who held the knowledge of how to cross, who carried the ceremonies that connected all three worlds. Under the new arrangement, the crossing itself was the crime.

This is the program, and it is not complicated: control the map, control what they hold, control the language, control the body, control the name of what lies below. Put the frightening things in hell. Call anyone who moves between worlds a servant of hell. Rename the places. Rename the dialects after the missions you built to replace them. Document what you have made. Declare it the truth.

The program has been run before. It will be run again. It is recognizable, if you know what to look for.

I have been waiting.

I am a patient animal. Time, from here, is a different substance than it is from the surface. What looks to the living world like three hundred years of silence looks, from below, like a held breath. A pause in a long conversation.

The conversation continues.

There are people working on it. I can feel them — the particular weight of someone reaching toward something that has been kept from them. The language program. The tomol crossings: those I feel especially, the weight of a plank canoe on moving water, hands in the channel, voices singing downward into the sea. They are singing again. Into the water. Toward me and past me and upward toward the sky — the same axis it always was. The three worlds still arranged as they always were.

My sister and I are still here. We have not moved. The world is still resting on us.

You are welcome, as you always have been, to reach toward us — carefully, with intention, with the old protocols. We will give you what we have always given: the view from the foundation. The understanding of what it means to hold something up. The knowledge that what looks, from the middle world, like the bottom, is — from here — the place that everything else rests on.

That is not nothing.

That is, in fact, everything.