Dancing Gods: Indian Ceremonials of New Mexico and Arizona

I: The Pueblo People

SUN-DRENCHED AND QUIET STAND THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO and ARIZONA, queerly withdrawn from the modern life about them. Usually built of the soil on which they stand, they appear to have grown out of it, and their color is the same. There are few trees in the villages, but they are surrounded by cultivated fields, and cottonwoods and willows grow along the watercourses. The houses huddle in solid blocks of adobe like slightly battered apartment houses. Irregular ladder-poles rise sharply here and there and protruding beams drop deep black shadows against the walls. Always there is a mission church, carrying the cross aloft on weather-worn adobe towers, and a government building whose machine-made angularities are an insult to the softly molded contours of the adobe. Drifting in and out are the people, brown-skinned and enigmatic, with sloe-black eyes, sliding walk, and flashes of vivid color in blanket, sash, or head-band.

Who are they? Where do they come from? There are two ways of arriving at the answer to these questions. One is to ask the Indians themselves. The other is to consult the archæologist or the ethnologist. It is interesting how often Indian tradition agrees in essentials with the finds of scientific investigators. Isleta, for instance, has a tradition that its people came from the north, that they crossed the sea where it is so narrow that a ten-year-old boy could throw a stone across it, and then, finding very little sun, that they came farther and farther south until they finally settled at Isleta. More than one archæologist is satisfied that the Pueblo people did come from the north, crossing Bering Strait and drifting south. Taos, according to their tradition, came north, following a bird and making many villages, until they finally found the right location at the foot of their sacred Pueblo Peak and on both sides of their ever-running stream. This movement northward also has its scientific supporters, who think that these Indians came from Mexico, offshoots perhaps of the Aztec stock.

All the Indians who now live in villages in New Mexico and Arizona are Pueblo people, which simply means town people. They were so called by the Spanish explorers who found them in the middle of the sixteenth century and were naturally struck by their towns and town organization. There are now about nine thousand Indians living in pueblos in New Mexico and Arizona. They form self-governing communities who support themselves by farming the lands they own communally, and who live a life of astonishing independence of thought, organization, and religious belief in the center of a modern American state. Today they speak five Indian languages in the New Mexico pueblos, and another in Arizona, where the Hopis cling to their rocky heights. They also speak Spanish, which is preached to them in their Catholic churches, and the young ones all speak English, which they learn in the government Indian schools and in which they trade with store-keepers and make interesting and inaccurate statements to tourists.

THE CLIFF DWELLERS

BEHIND THE PUEBLO LIFE AS WE SEE IT WAS THE LIFE OF the cliff dwellings and of the great communal villages. These habitations are being studied with meticulous care by archæologists, who examine literally every foot-mark and finger-print for clues as to who these mysterious folk were and how they lived. Here, too, Indian tradition is a check and stimulus to scientific investigation. The Hopis have a legend, for instance, that their ancestors undertook to build a great temple, that they were struck with a confusion of tongues and had to leave it unfinished, and that they then moved south and established the present Hopi villages. Archæologists, excavating at the Mesa Verde, uncovered there what they chose to call the Sun Temple. It was obviously a very important effort, probably for ceremonial purposes only, and it was left unfinished for obscure reasons. A Hopi Indian, visiting the place soon after the discovery of the Sun Temple, identified it absolutely and with great excitement as the very place of the legend.

Archæologists learn a great deal about prehistoric life from the Pueblos, all of whom have traditions connecting them with the inhabitants of the ruins which are found all over the southwest. The Santa Clara people, for instance, claim descent from the inhabitants of Puye, and all the Keres of the Rio Grande valley consider the Rito de los Frijoles as their ancestral home. In these cases and in many others the medicine-men of the modern villages make ceremonial visits to the ancient home sites; and ancient shrines, such as that of the stone lions of Cochiti, are visited by all Indians. Ceremonial objects from the ruins always fill a modern Indian with reverent interest. Aniceto Suaso, working with Jeançon at Po-Shu, recognized and arranged in order certain bases for prayer-plumes and readily told the uses of a prehistoric spear-head, which he said would bring prowess in the hunt to anyone who had it. Also at Po-Shu, an Indian woman in child-birth tied into her girdle an ancient fetish found there, and reported that it helped her very much. This obstetrical fetish was in the shape of a large-stomached woman. Hunting-charms are usually in the form of animals, preferably lions or bears. In Zuñi we may still see the fetishes in ceremonial use. In other pueblos they are used only in secret ceremonies, though every modern Indian carries his medicine-bag, containing his personal fetish, bits of various metals, and the corn-pollen which is always the sacred symbol of life.

Much of the fascination of modern Indian ceremonial is due to the antiquity of its rites and forms. Religious form is always the last human habit to yield to change; and in the altars, sacred symbols, and customs of the modern Indian we can trace the history of his ancestors. The most ancient of whom we have any record were wandering tribes who made no permanent homes, contenting themselves with slight brush shelters—the prototype of the kisi in which the modern Hopis keep the snakes during their annual Snake-dance. Later, as agriculture developed and the people needed more stable homes, they dug into the ground and made a circular room, roofed with mud-daubed logs and entered from above by means of a ladder. These people are called the small house or pre-pueblo people, according to the degree of their development, and their house is still a prominent feature of every pueblo, for it is the kiva, the ceremonial lodge. As the people drew together into villages, they probably maintained their blood-relationships through certain ceremonies conducted in the kivas, thus establishing the clans which are the unit of pueblo organization today. The modern kiva is still the center of clan and religious life, and until very recently all young men were required to sleep in the clan kiva until marriage. The whole history of kiva architecture may be traced in the modern pueblos, from those entirely underground as at Taos and in the Hopi villages, to those entirely above ground as in most of the Rio Grande pueblos. At Zuñi and at Acoma the kivas are square and are built into the block of houses, probably to conceal them from Christian priests who would abolish them.

The modern kiva has retained many features of the original home—the ladder entrance from above through a hole which is also the smoke-vent, the ventilator and smoke-screen, the fire in the center, the absence of windows, and even the hole in the floor, which typifies sipapu, the entrance to the underworld. Today the preliminary services for every dance are performed in the kiva, the men meet there for all clan and pueblo business, and some form of the old custom of youths’ living in the clan kiva is found almost everywhere.

The pre-pueblo people left little except the type of their home and bits of crude pottery and weaving. Their descendants of the cliff dwellings and of the communal villages are easily studied and their life has been reconstructed in considerable detail. These two types of building were probably contemporaneous, as Bandelier makes clear in his novel The Delight Makers, in which he pictures prehistoric life in the Rito de los Frijoles. Bandelier thinks that at Puye the cave houses, built along the south face of the cliff, were the winter homes of the people who in summer occupied the communal dwelling on top of the breezy mesa. At both Puye and the Rito de los Frijoles the homes are very simple rooms built in terraces against the friable tufa cliffs, in which were artificial or natural caves used for storage rooms. The communal village was architecturally a development of this type. The cliff idea was retained in the outer wall, built solid as a defense, and the terraced houses stepped down from that to the central plaza. The Chaco Canyon villages and the pueblo of Pecos are both excellent examples of this type.

The finest cliff dwellings are at the Mesa Verde. The first sight of the Cliff Palace or the Balcony House is had on stepping out to the brink of a narrow canyon, fringed with tall pines and dropping hundreds of feet into the leafy stream bed below. Just under the canyon’s brim stand those marvelous dwellings, still in the sunlight, just as they have stood for more than a thousand years. The walls of stone, finely worked and fitted, are solid, rising as high as five stories and giving the general effect of an enchanted castle held under a spell of silence and distance. Nowadays one can approach by graded government trails adapted to the tenderest of feet, but once the active brown dwellers climbed up and down by toe and hand holes which only a very skillful or daring modern will attempt. Remember, also, that the cliff man not only got himself over those trails, but also his game after the hunt, and the crops which he raised either on the valley floor below or on the plateau above his home. It must have been hard living, but worth it in the security from marauding bands of nomadic Indians, once one was snugly there.

Wherever the prehistoric Indian built, he always chose sites well defended by nature, as were the cliff dwellings, or easily defended by man, as were the Chaco Canyon villages, which stand in a plain over which no enemy larger than a coyote could approach unseen. Besides security he needed water and arable land, game, and timber suitable for building, but not too large to be cleared away with stone implements. In some places the water-supply which served the prehistoric Indian has disappeared, either by dropping into the sand, as at the Gran Quivira, or because grazing animals have destroyed the grass roots and allowed great arroyos to wash away the soil, as at Chaco Canyon.

How many of these places were inhabited at one time and why they were abandoned cannot yet be determined with any accuracy. Recently, however, A. E. Douglass of the University of Arizona has perfected his discovery of the determination of prehistoric dates by tree-rings. In the southwest rainfall varies so much from year to year that annual tree-rings differ greatly and accordingly, wider rings indicating heavier rainfall. By comparing series of rings in living trees with identical series in beams and supports found in ruins, Professor Douglass has finally worked out a chronology continuous from the tenth century to the twentieth. So it is now definitely established that the southwestern Indians were building their finest houses when William the Conqueror was conquering the tribes of Britain.

Between that time and the Spanish conquest the Indian had developed his religion, his government, his art, and his architecture to its height. Take away from the modern Pueblo what the white man has brought him, and you will see what he used and how he lived before the white man came. His rooms, then as now, were built of stone or adobe, roofed with piñon or cedar beams over which were laid saplings or brush and earth. The rooms were small because the only trees manageable with primitive tools were small trees. Floors were of hard-packed earth finished with adobe mixed with blood. A fire-place, built in the corner, gave light and heat and smoke. In many ruins are found alternate layers of smoke and fresh plaster, indicating an effort at good housekeeping against very heavy odds. A niche in the wall held the sacred meal, poles hung on thongs held garments or drying meat, and metates or grinding-stones were set in the floor. Then as now meal was ground by a kneeling woman who swung her body back and forth, bearing down on the mano which crushed the kernels into finer and finer meal. No doubt the prehistoric woman sang the very songs which still celebrate the wonder of the corn, for then as now the corn was the sacred mother, typical of all good, on whose bounty life