I am Tehya

Today my name came up in multiple conversations.  Having a unique name has is benefits and challenges.  With it being the topic of the day I remembered that I wrote the following about it over Memorial Day last year:

I have been searching for my value and my worth everywhere I turn.  I have looked for it in my instructor’s eyes.  I have measured it by my parents’ love and my husband’s affections.  I even put it in the acceptance and approval of my bosses and spiritual leaders.  With a group so fickle, so changing, so flawed, so human, my identity, value, and worth was a result, an output, or the dependent variable in a multivariate equation.  It’s always been increasing, decreasing, winding this way and that, ever changing at the fluctuations of the inputs, the whims and opinions of the people in whose hands I foolishly gave such power over me.  Like a marionette, I have allowed them to manipulate my actions and behaviors.  It is time to cut the strings and see my worth, value, and identity for what it truly is: a constant.  It is a constant because the One who defines me is a constant, never changing in His love for me.  It is not a variable.  It is constant.  Tehya has a constant value.  Tehya has a constant worth.  It is given by God and none other.  And today He showed me that tehya is valued. 

When I was born, my parents didn’t have a name picked out for a girl.  They were leaning toward Nichole, but at the time the name was getting to be too popular.  Naming my sister, Nina, was easy.  Mom had always dreamed of having a little girl named Nina Marie.  If I were a boy, Mom and Dad already had the name Jonas picked out in honor of my ancestor, Jonas Cattell, the Revolutionary War hero of South Jersey.  But there they were, with a little girl and no name.  Being Native American enthusiasts and eventual re-enactors, they wanted to follow Native American tradition, take me home to play with me a bit and select a suitable name when my personality began to show.  The hospital wouldn’t hear of it.  They had to have a name for my birth certificate before they could leave.  Pressed for a name they received suggestions far and wide from family, including my great-grandmother’s sister, Aunt Wanna and her husband, Uncle Joe, who submitted for consideration the two Native American names of their granddaughters:  Tehya, which meant “little flower” and Teniya, which meant “precious”.   Since Mom and Dad had already settled on Rose for my middle name in honor of my mother’s delivery nurse and my rosy cheeks, they felt “little flower” was perfect so they picked Tehya.  I finally left the hospital as Tehya (little flower) Rose. 

With such an unusual name, I get asked all the time about its origin and meaning.  As a child I would enthusiastically reply, “It’s Indian.  It means ‘little flower’ and my middle name is Rose”.  Adults would gush over me telling me how pretty my name was.  Some would even asked how it was spelled and write it down on a scrap piece of paper to give to an expectant friend or family member.  This was the routine until I was about 11 years old.  Aunt Wanna and Uncle Joe came all the way from California to visit my great-grandmother and I got to meet them.  Since this was our first meeting, the topic of my name came up.  Through the conversation between them and my parents, it was revealed that there was a mistake.  Some how, either on their end in submitting the names or on my parents’ interpretation, the meanings had become mixed up.  Turns out Teniya meant “little flower” and Tehya actually meant “precious”.  I wasn’t “Little Flower” Rose anymore.  I was now “Precious Rose”.  I thought about it and decided I liked this meaning better.  I was precious!

Shortly after the mix-up was discovered, I remember a conversation with my Dad.  I was beaming with pride at the new meaning of my name.  “Daddy, I’ m precious!”  I announced obnoxiously.  His humorous reply in his pragmatism was that even a toilet bowl can be considered precious at times.  I’ve never forgotten that conversation, mainly because I think it implied that preciousness isn’t inherent, but is perceived.  My takeaway was that I was only precious in as much as someone else had placed value in me.

My enthusiasm for my new name meaning was further dampened by continued jeering from my peers, and eventually, as a typical adolescent seeking to be like everyone else, I came to despise my name.  It was such a pain.  No one could pronounce it right.  People would avoid me because they were afraid to say my name.  I could always tell when the teacher got to my name on the roll as she would stop, take in a deep breath, give some kind of disclaimer, and then botch my name.  Some teachers avoided it all together and just called me “Miss Allen”.  If people could say my name, they still couldn’t spell it.  My subscription to Time Magazine in High School came addressed to “Tenya Allen”.  Even my grandmother misspelled my name on my Christmas stocking as “Tahya”.  As if!  I could never get a souvenir with my name on it like my little sister Sara could.  What was the purpose of those anyway?  Was it just to make the rest of us with unusual names feel even more outcast?  How terrible!  How awful!  How dare my parents curse me and make my life so complicated with this crazy name!  Didn’t they know how hard it was going to make my life?  And then they had the nerve to mix up the meaning and make fun of it likening me to a toilet bowl!

As an adult seeking individuality and a sense of uniqueness, I eventually made peace with my odd name.  New people in my life, much like the adults of my childhood, would ohh and ahh over my name.  Some would ask me more details about its origin, specifically which tribe it was from.  I had no idea, so I did what anyone would do in the 21st century, I googled it.  I was surprised to see it listed on so many websites.  There it was again and again:  Tehya, Native American, Precious.  One site credited the name to the Pueblo Zuni of New Mexico/Arizona.  But then there were other web sites that listed made up Native American names.  My heart sank to see my name listed among them.  How can that be?  I feverishly searched for evidence on the validity of my name, but came up lacking.  My name might be a fraud.  Say it isn’t so!  Have I been misleading people?  Does my name even mean anything?!?  I felt lost and confused.  When people asked me about my name, I would modify my speech to say, “It’s supposedly Native American”, sometimes even adding, “but it’s questionable”. 

As I started on this endeavor to better understand my identity, my value, and my worth according to my Creator, I decided to go back and revisit the origins of my name.  Taking a deep breath, I typed into Google, “Tehya Zuni” and unlike last time, a number of scholarly articles and books came up, mostly by Dr. Dennis Tedlock and his wife Barbara.  Dr. Tedlock is the McNulty Professor of English and Research Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo.  As anthropologists, he and his wife spent many years among the Zuni, publishing their research in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.  Barbara wrote a book called “The Beautiful and the Dangerous – Encounters with the Zuni Indians” where she wrote a personal narrative about her time with the Zuni, describing in great detail the physical appearance and depth of character of these people.  The Zuni are closest to the Hopi in religion and tradition, but their language is unlike any other tribe.  It is considered an isolate and despite existing for millennia, did not have a written form until the last century.  The Zuni word tehya is spelled the same as my name and appears several times in the Tedlocks’ writings.  The most descriptive use was used to describe women’s bodies.  The following is an except from Dr. Tedlock’s publications where he describes a lecture he received from a Zuni tribesman:

“Didn’t I know that the bodies of women are tehya – precious, valuable, guarded?  No, it wasn’t just a matter of sex, ‘that’s secondary.  It’s their bodies that are tehya’.  Finally in one last effort to make me understand, he crossed the horizon of my own mythic world and said, ‘it’s like Eve.  She found she wanted to be tehya at that spot, so she put a big leaf to it’.  And so there she was, Eve as a Zuni saw her, not discovering evil and shame, but choosing to make a part of herself precious, valued, and guarded.”

I like that.  Tehya doesn’t just mean precious, it also means valued and guarded, and what a beautiful picture of Eve.  Furthermore, in Zuni culture, women are inherently tehya or valued.  Men have to be initiated to “save them” or “make them valuable, but Tedlock doesn’t use the word tehya to describe the value that men may attain.  It appears to me from my brief survey of their writings and use of the word tehya, that tehya is an adjective used to describe something with inherent value, valued simply for what it is, not for its merits.  Something that is tehya, has a value unto itself given by its Creator. 

Here, after all these years of searching for my value, my worth, my identity, it was in my name.  This is the amazing hand of God at work.  My name was not a mistake or an error.  It’s not false or made up.  It was divinely given to me, just as Christ named Peter the rock to remind him of who he was in Christ, God named me Tehya to remind me of my identity and value in him. 

I am Tehya.