The Heart of the Sky: Travels Among the Maya.

THE HEART OF THE SKY

Travels Among the Maya Peter Canby HarperCollins, $25, 350 pp.

Utatlan is a Maya archaeological site located in the Guatemalan highlands. I was there on October 12, 1992, when hundreds of Maya descendants gathered for their own religious and political commemoration of Columbus's Quincentennial, an event marking what many view as the beginning of a five-hundred-year assault on their culture. Dressed in colorful traje (traditional clothing), with young children at their sides, people burned incense, hoisted protest banners and celebrated their traditions. Amid the archaeological ruins of their ancestors, the celebration proclaimed resistance and survival.

Having recently been to Guatemala, I had a special interest in Peter Canby's The Heart of the Sky, which describes three years of travel among Maya communities in southern Mexico and Central America. There are approximately 7 million Maya descendants today, speaking some thirty distinct languages and spread from the Yucatan to Guatemala, from the Chiapas highlands to Honduras. Canby covered the entire region, and his journey brought him into contact not only with the Maya, but also with many noted scholars who have, in recent years, made major breakthroughs in our understanding of pre-Columbian Maya history. History is the key word here, because, as Canby repeatedly shows, most of us know even less of the modern Maya.

The title, The Heart of the Sky, comes from "the name of the god" in the Popal Vuh, a colonial era manuscript describing the Maya creation story. This manuscript, which may have been translated from older hieroglyphic texts, is one of the few written links to the only civilization in the Americas known to have developed its own writing. Spanish friars burned hieroglyphic books when they found them, considering them a key link in the chain of Indian tradition they were committed to break. Now, five hundred years later, scholars from these same Western traditions work painstakingly to decipher the meaning of remaining hieroglyphs and to reconstruct the story of the Maya society which flourished in Meso-America between A.D. 200 and 800.

There is a tendency to think the culture of the Maya peaked there and, as Canby writes, "view the contemporary Maya as being in the process of absorption by the outside world." Canby's longstanding interest in the Maya leads him to a different view. "If one looks at the Maya as a colonized people who have retained their identity by continually adjusting their institutions to meet the demands of the outside world, their culture can be regarded as a vital and even expanding one." It is with this perspective that Canby travels and then weaves together the story of Maya past, present, and future.

The book is a collection of adventures, observations, and conversations, marked equally with insight and frustration. In remote villages, buses don't come and rainstorms do. Some Maya welcome Canby to their homes, while others try to take his money. He drops into caves and hikes through the Lacand6n forest. Along the way, he talks with Maya village leaders, a government informer, religious principals, and, with a final and by now not unexpected irony, has breakfast in McDonald's with the only Maya Ph.D. in Guatemala.

What makes Canby's book more than an accounting of visits to exotic people and places is that he does not hesitate to ask questions, ranging from the hard to the naive, about the full range of Maya experience. This includes overt racism, an economic system that has forced indigenous people into subsistence work, and political repression in Guatemala that has brought a high degree of militarization to traditional Maya communities.

Canby is reluctant upon his initial ventures into Guatemala, "since being labeled a subversive in Guatemala is the equivalent of getting a death sentence, and since talking to an Indian might, under the wrong circumstances, be construed as subversive." With over half the modem Maya living in Guatemala, there are many people to talk to and much to learn. It is estimated that tens of thousands of indians were murdered in counter insurgency actions there in the early eighties, a reality brought again to the world's attention with the awarding of last year's Nobel Peace Prize to Quiche leader Rigoberto Menchu. Canby's conversations in refugee camps, "relocated" villages, and certain towns, such as Santiago Atitlan, site of a highly publicized massacre, are blanketed in an atmosphere of fear and suspicion. It is no wonder that the questions sometimes ring hollow ("But why did the army begin the assassinations?" "Are the refugees guerrilla supporters?") and the answers are guarded.

There are moments of stilted dialogue in the book and an occasional tendency to make cynical statements about very subtle things. Upon encountering two Catholic sisters dealing with malnutrition issues in an Indian village, Canby remarks "Perhaps because it was such a relief to find the Catholic church concerned with something beyond restricting people's reproductive rights, I told the nuns how happy I was to see them in a region too full of evangelicals." This particular swipe at the church is a North American statement, but even in his encounters with native religion, Canby doesn't attempt to suspend or conceal his own skepticism.

But these minor slips of discipline are rare. Canby's most honest writing occurs when the day has been too long and the "gringo" has been unwelcome, or when the guides get lost in the forest and food is running out. He reveals then the emotions that come when the world and everyone in it appear indifferent, if not downright hostile to one's fate. It is in these moments that he seems to come closest to the experience of those who have found the dominant culture hostile to their own for the past five centuries. Yet Canby knows and is ever reminded of his outsider status. At one point, in the Chiapas highlands to witness a carnival celebration, he follows the costumed figures dancing through the streets. He drinks three shots of pox, the local moonshine, and is soon exchanging words in Tzotzil, the local language. For a brief moment, the whole world looks different. But the experience is fleeting. The dancers move on and Canby recalls, "I wanted to catch up with them, but it suddenly struck me as futile. I belonged, inevitably, to another world."

Most of us do and that is precisely what the book is about. Peter Canby's invitation to travel with him is well worth accepting, though nothing can ever substitute for one's own journey. One of the Maya women that Canby meets finally bids him and his notebook farewell with that same thought:

"'Another thing,' she said. 'You can't always be writing. There are things you can only learn from living with the people, things you can only learn in your heart.'"

The Heart of the Sky reminds readers that we have been living with the Maya people for five hundred years and still have much to learn.