Reading the Sun

T he bluff on the north bank of the Concho River in Paint Rock, Texas, is home to around a thousand Indigenous paintings, ranging from around two thousand to two hundred years old.Many people passed through here-Comanche, Apache, Jumano.A Coahuilteco friend says the paintings were made by "ancestors," which is probably the best answer as to who left them here.While the meanings of some of the paintings are lost to the living, this isn't universally so.(Moreover, the insistence on the part of some scholars that Indigenous rock art cannot be read is baffling-when was the last time you heard someone make a similar claim about the stained glass of roughly contemporaneous medieval European churches?In both cases, the religious traditions and peoples that produced these works are alive and well.)I want to discuss a painting at the east end of the bluff.The interpretation I will offer of it is a collaboration with two Indigenous scholars: Matilde Torres and Mary Weahkee. 1 The painting is maybe one thousand years old and shows a woman that's just given birth to twins, her head to the west, feet to the east.Her hairstyle suggests that she's unmarried.There's a medicine man praying for her as she labors, smoking a pipe, lifting the prayers upward, but her dark face tells us that she didn't make it.There's afterbirth between her feet, stretching down and to the east, and a twin 1. Matilde Torres is an Otomi Indigenous Mexican cosmologist and environmental advocate.Mary Weahkee is Comanche/Santa Clara Pueblo and an archaeologist and lithic analysist.For a 3D rendering of the painting, see Jeremy Elliott, "Birth Scene No Blend," Sketchfab,