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4.

The Stuff of Life

i. creation and prayer

Most intimately they could watch creation as a child was born. So from the womb of the earth itself they said all life came forth long ago. The underworld was dark and mysterious. People and animals lived there and knew their mother, who was kind and loving, even though she remained far from the daily lives of her children. So they accounted for the impersonality of nature. As all life came from the underworld, so it returned there in death. To come in life and go in death, people and animals had to pass through a lake between the underworld and the world. The first people climbed up a great fir tree through the waters of the lake and entered this world. The place where they emerged was in the north and was called Shipapu.^* Emergence into the world was a tremendous act, full of awe for what was left behind, and of fear and respect for what was found above, on the earth and in the sky. A thing ever afterward could be made sacred simply by saying “It came up with us.”

With them came spirit, and could dwell in everything upon the earth. All spirit was like that of people. Rock, trees, plants; animals, birds, fish; places, directions, the bodies and acts of the sky; the live and the dead; things found or things made—all had the same spirit and behaved in the same ways as men and women. Some spirit was good and some bad, and accordingly had to be propitiated or guarded against. And sometimes spirit would leave its visible form and be gone. If it was bad spirit, people could rejoice; if good, they must mourn at having lost favor with the powers of their lives.

^* With many variants, like all proper names in the myths.

Everything in the world was part of the same living force, whether thought, action, object or creature. Of all this the earth was the center, and all things existed in order to help people to live upon it. And the center of the earth—earth’s navel—was in the center of each group of people and their own city. All things reached out in widening circles of awareness from the very point of the self, individual, and the group, collective. From the center, then, of person and place, reached the six directions, each with its animal deity: north, with the mountain lion; west, with the bear; south, with the badger; east, with the wolf; the zenith, with the eagle; and the nadir, with the shrew. North and west produced the snow; south and east the rain. So the reach of Pueblo belief went across the earth, and into the depths underground and into the heights of the sky, and all tied to the place of emergence which was imitated with a stone-lined pit in the center of each ceremonial chamber, and sometimes out in the open in the very center of the town placita itself. All forces interacted to make life; and of these, none was greater in effect, sacredness and poetry than the sky, with its heroes, goddesses, and ancestors.

“Our Father Sun,” they said. Some said that even the sun had ancestors—two mothers, who before the people came from the underworld saw that people must have light in order to see. The mothers fashioned the sun out of a white shell, a pink abalone shell, a turquoise and a red stone. They carried him to the east and in the morning climbed a high mountain. They dropped the sun behind the mountain; and presently he began to rise, taking his way over trails that ran above the waters of the sky, toward the evening. He set toward the lake which lay between the world and the underworld. He went down through the lake and when it was night on the earth he shone dimly below in the underworld. In the morning again he arose and again the people saw him with joy. What they saw was not the sun himself but a large mask that covered his whole body. By his light everyone saw that the world was large and beautiful. The sun saw and knew, like any other person. And others said that he walked through the sky dressed in white deerskin which flashed with countless beads. His face, hidden by a mask, was beautiful. They said he was the father of the twin boys, Masewi and Oyoyewi, the young gods of war, who protected the people by killing their enemies. The concept of evil, menace, hugeness of danger was defeated by the dream of small, immature mortals—the very cast of hope in people who first imagined their survival and triumph, then willed it, and then achieved it through the spirit which towered to victory over threatening forces. Power and strength came from the sun, as they could plainly see in the daily life all about them. “Our Father Sun” governed the overworld.

But when he went down through the sacred lake at evening the world was dark. He needed a companion god in the sky at night. So they said that the two mothers who made the sun also made the moon, taking a dark stone, different kinds of yellow stone, turquoise and a red stone, and placed it in the sky, where it followed by night the same trails which the sun followed by day. The moon was a mystery, and some said it was a man, others a woman.

Because the moon travelled slowly, not always giving light, the stars were needed, and were made out of crystal which sparkled and shone. At morning a great star shone into the dawn, and at evening another flashed slowly in the west even before the daylight was all gone at the place where the sun went below. They were clear in the heavens, along with many others, hanging near in power and beauty when the night was clear and dark, making at least some things certain and pure in a world where evil spirit could bring about change among people and things, and cause fear.

When clouds came, they brought rain, which blessed the earth and made things grow. Who loved the people and blessed them? The dead ancestors, who once were people, and who came back as clouds to do good for those whose life they already knew, with its constant hope, need and prayer for rain. Clouds were prayed to. The prayers took many forms. Feathers were used to imitate clouds and were put on top of headdresses and sacred masks. Visible prayers were put together out of little sticks decorated with feathers. These could be set about and left as invocations from earth to sky. The dead who departed to life in the clouds were in some places prepared with white paint on the forehead, and feathers and cotton placed in the hair, so that cloud would go to cloud and come back bringing rain.

Lightning, they said, was born of mischief by Masewi and Oyoyewi. The twin war godlings once came to an empty kiva in a village of another world. While all the people were elsewhere the boys stole bows and arrows from the kiva wall and tried to escape unnoticed; but they were seen, their theft discovered, and they were chased by outraged people. Just where they had come from their own world to the other one, and as they were about to be taken, the adventurers were picked up by a whirlwind and thrust back into their own world, where they went home. On the way, Masewi sent an arrow high up to the sky. It made a grand noise. The womenfolk saw it and fainted. The boys shot many more arrows. These were the first bolts of lightning known by the people. Some days later here came rainclouds, bringing the arrows back and delivering rain with many flashes and noises. Arrows fell. The twins were glad their arrows came back to them. Sky arrows were holy to hunters, who prayed to lightning when they got ready to hunt. Thunder was made by an old goddess. They said medicine men could send for thunder and receive it at any time. The wind had a divinity, too, sometimes man, sometimes woman. There was an aged god of the rainbow. When the war twins wanted to visit their father the sun, they walked on the rainbow which quickly took them to him in mid-sky.

The Pueblos said, then, recognizing the exchange of influences and acts between earth and sky, that the Old Man of the Sky was the husband of the Old Woman of the Earth. All things came from their union, just as the child came from the union of man and woman. Mankind and the animals, the earth and the sky with all their elements, all had the same kind of life; and a person must be in harmony with the life in all things. The way to find it was in religion. Prayer and observances were part of all daily life. Bound upon the earth with other living things, the Pueblos said that the same life belonged in everything, and that life was either male or female. Everything they believed came within the frame of those two ideas.

Prayer took many forms.

Sometimes it was only the person who prayed; and sometimes the whole family, or fraternity, or town. Prayers were always visible, a stuff was used, in an act, to make plain the desire locked in the heart. Of all prayer substances, the most common was meal, ground once, from white corn. It had life in it, it came from something that once grew, it fed life in people, its seed made more life in the ground. The Pueblo person took it in his hand and breathed upon it as he prayed. “Eat” he said to it, and then he sprinkled it into the air, or over the ground, or upon the person, place, thing, or animal he wanted to bless. At sunrise he would go out and sprinkle meal and say a prayer. When holy men, or hunters, or warriors went by his house before or after doing their work, he would come to his wall, breathe upon meal, and sprinkle it before their steps. His fingers were bunched at his lips holding the pinch of meal. In breathing upon it he gave his living essence to it. His inward prayer made an arc of spirit from him to all godliness; and his arm when he swept it widely to sprinkle the meal had a noble reach in it; for a gesture can always be bigger than the little member which makes it.

Sometimes pollen from flowers was used and spread in prayer in just the same way.

Another form of prayer, one which lasted longer, and could be left to bear testimony and intercede by itself, was the prayer stick. It was used in every group ceremonial in some pueblos, and often a whole ritual was built around it. It was also used privately. Much care, ingenuity and taste went into its making. The prayer stick was as long as from the wrist to the end of the middle finger. It was cut from oak, willow, spruce or cottonwood. Its stem was richly painted with colors taken from the earth. There was turquoise color, made out of malachite or copper ore mixed with white bean meal. Yellow ochre came from canyon or gully faces, exposed in stripes by long weather. Shale made black. Pale clay made white, iron-stained sandstone made red, and from cactus flowers or purple cornhusk came violet. The colors were mixed with water from sacred springs, and with flowers from the bee-plant. Honey was sprayed on the paint after it was applied. The sky was called by feathers bound onto the prayer stick. Turkey, duck, hawk and eagle; flicker, jay, bluebird, oriole, towhee, yellow warbler feathers were used. To speak to cloud spirits, downy or breast feathers were bound in with the feather bundles. Beads were added sometimes.

When the prayer stick was made, it was prayed over and exposed to smoke. It was breathed upon and given its intention. Then it was taken to do its work. Perhaps it was set up in the house where it would stay for life, expressing its prayer forever. It might be taken to the fields and buried; or set in the riverbank; or taken to a holy spring and established at its lip; or carried high into the mountains to make a remote shrine; or put away with stored food; or sealed up in the wall of a new house; or carried in the hand during ceremonials; or put to earth with the dead. If a prayer stick was left in an exposed place, they could tell by whether it stood or fell how the spirit of its maker was. If it fell, he must have had bad thought while making it, and his offering was in consequence rejected.

Sometimes prayer and its acts were delegated. Certain persons became priests and acted for everyone else. It was agreed that nature did what the priests told it to do. The priests spoke to the world in grander ways than anyone else. When they meant “four years” they would say “four days,” for example. But everyone knew what they meant when they sounded special. It was part of their having power. People watched to see that the priests used their power when it was needed, such as those times every year when the sun had to be turned back. All summer long the sun moved farther to the south, toward the badger. The weather was colder. Every year, in the same month, there came a point beyond which the sun must not be permitted to go. They would know by watching the sun come to a natural landmark when the limit of his southern journey was reached. At that point, on that day, it was the duty of the priests to halt the sun; and with prayer, ceremony and power, make the sun start northward in the sky once again, in its proper way. Half a year later, when the sun touched the point to the north, with the mountain lion, beyond which it must never be allowed to go, the priests brought it back toward the south again. So the natural cycles were preserved. What nature had already ordered was ordered once again by the people in their prayers. To rise above, govern and hold the natural world they imagined their own control of it and solemnly sanctioned the inevitable.

Other ways to pray and gain favor were found in imitating what nature looked like and did. And here the great group prayer was made, when the people came together in ceremony to tell nature what it must do for their lives.

They gave great splendor to the group prayer, and prepared for it with rigor, always in the same ways which had come down to them out of memory. A certain society of men learned invocations and chants which lasted for hours, and had to be word-perfect. They learned choruses and strict drumbeats to accompany them. Sacred costumes were made, and the materials for them came from expeditions, often to the mountains and even farther—boughs of the pine tree, skins of the fox and the rabbit, the deer, the buffalo, the bobcat; feathers from eagles, the bright parrots of the south; and from nearer home, gourds to dry and fill with pebbles from the arroyos, cornhusks to weave into headdresses, paint to put on the body. Groups of men and groups of women worked at practicing over and over the steps of the dance to be used in the ceremony. They must stand—the men separate from the women—just so, and to the beat of the drum, they must lift and put down their feet so, all exactly together; they must turn, and pause, and advance, facing newly, and the women’s bare feet must be lifted only a little and put down again mildly, while the men must smartly raise their feet in their soft deerskin shoes and bring them down to pound on the ground with power. The singers and the dancers and the drummers learned perfect accord. Implements were made in the ceremonial chambers to be used on the day of the group prayer which was held in the plaza of the town. All persons, young and old, worked toward the day. Men and women could not lie together for a certain period before it. Only certain foods might be eaten. For several days before, those who were going to take part made sure to vomit many times a day. The dancing ground was swept clean. If there was any refuse about the houses it was taken away. Thoughts were put in order too. Some of the figures in the dance were going to be the clowns, the spirits who mocked and scolded humanity, whose very thoughts they could see. And above all, there would be certain masked figures who came there from the other world. All the women knew that these were gods themselves—the spirits of rain and growth—who wore wooden coverings on their heads, trimmed with downy feathers, painted to represent the deities of the sky. These were the most mysterious and powerful of all the dancers. They had naked arms and breasts and legs like any other men, and wore foxtails on their rumps, and had pine boughs banded upon their arms, and wore the woven belts and the rabbit-fur baldrics and deerskin shoes, and used the gourds like the real men, but the women said they were not real men, they were actual gods, called the kachinas, and upon them depended the rainfall, the crops and the yield of the hunt. All year, said the women, their masks were kept in the ceremonial chamber, and when time came for the group prayer, they came like gods and put them on, and appeared in the ceremony. The men knew something else. They knew that long ago, before anybody could remember, or think of it, the kachinas really came and danced with the people. But for a long time they had not really come. It was actually certain men who put on the masks and appeared as the kachinas. But they never told the women of the substitution. Children did not know of it, either; and only boys, when they reached a certain age, learned of it, and kept the secret among their sex. If the gods were properly imitated, then they would do as their imitators did, and make the motions which would produce rain, growth and game.

When the day came the whole pueblo was ready. Those who did not dance sat in silence upon the rooftops or against the walls upon the ground. All was still in the early sunlight. The houses, made of earth, looked like mesas, and cast strong shadows. People waited as nature waited for whatever might come. The ground before the houses was empty and clean, dazzling in the light. What would break the silence, and release the bodies full of prayer?

It was a thunderclap which came suddenly and rocked from wall to wall, in the voice of the drums. The drums told the thunder what to do; and thunder, born of storm, would bring rain.

At once the first dancers came like creatures of the air out of the door in the flat roof of the ceremonial chamber; and at the same instant song began and the drums sounded with it. The chorus appeared from between two houses and came to the plaza.

Then the dancers came, great ranks of them, the men in front, the women behind them, led by a man holding a long pole into the air, decorated with eagle feathers that spoke to the sky, as from one cloud to another. They all advanced as slowly as a shadow from a high cloud on a still day; but they never ceased their movement. The men pounded the stamped ground. The women padded softly upon it. The men commanded nature. The women waited to receive it. Slowly the long columns reached out and out into the dancing-ground until they were all seen. They crossed it. They faced and returned. The chorus and the drummers sang and beat without falter. Everyone was exactly together in rhythm and action. The evolutions of the dancing and singing groups were made so gradually and in such slowly changed relation to one another that they seemed like the slow wheeling of the stars overhead at night.

In their right hands the men held the rattles of dried gourds containing seed pods or pebbles. With these at intervals they clattered upon the ground the sound of seeds falling; and again they showered together upon the earth the sound of falling rain.

In their left hands the men and women carried bunches of eagle feathers which like those on the banner that towered above them and went with them in their grave evolutions invoked the clouds of the sky.

In their left hands the women carried pine boughs; and pine boughs were bound upon the arms of the men. These were a prayer for everlasting life, for the pine tree was always green.

The men proclaimed by their presence the seed, and invoked it, and wet it, pounding their power into the earth, and ordered that it live and grow.

The women impassively like the earth itself showed by their presence how the seed was received and nurtured.

With their pine boughs spaced throughout the ranks, they looked like a little forest. Advancing powerfully against the light they were like a movement of the earth in an analogy of slow time. The voices of the singers barked together and made order out of the sounds of the animal kingdom. The arms moved, the legs rose and fell, the bodies travelled in such unanimity and decorum that they all seemed like a great woven construction, something man-made, some vast act of basketry, the parts tied and yet flexible in supple buckskin; again, moving against the sidelines, they seemed like a cliff advancing; or if the watchers shut their eyes and only listened for a moment, they heard the singing voices clapping flatly back from the facing houses, and the clatter of seeds, the swipe of rain, the breeze of pine trees, the rattle of little shells tied to costumes, and in all of it the spacious and secret sound of the sky into which all other sounds disappeared and were taken to the gods.

All day long the insistent pounding of the prayer went on.

The clowns—koshare—played about the undisturbed edges of the formal dancing groups. They were painted white, with here and there a black stripe. They were naked, and used their nakedness in comic outrage and in joking punishment of generative power. They leaped and ran. They now went soberly by the dancers and jogged like them and then broke away to enact a burlesque at a corner of the dancing-ground. A little boy or two, painted like them, capered along with them learning the mocking idiom of the people’s self-critics. Against so much work and preparation and proper devoutness in the great dance, it was necessary to send a different kind of prayer through the antics of the koshare—all the things the people knew about themselves but would not say separately. Fun included hurting. About that there was nothing odd. Much of life hurt.

The masked gods moved with the men.

The singers and drummers, massed closely together, turned and changed formation, now into a solid square, now a circle, but so slowly that the watchers hardly saw the change take place, but only realized it the next time they looked. The drums smote the air every time the dancing feet charged the ground with the day’s stern message, in beat, beat, beat. Every now and then, as dictated by the words of the chant, and the phases of prayer, the whole united government of bodies and voices and shaken air would suddenly break, missing a beat, and break again, missing another, making a clap of silence, a falter like a loss of light, a chasm in design, until, still in absolute union, legs, arms, voices, drums would resume the steady pounding by which the power of that town was driven, beat, beat, beat, into the earthen and airy body of nature.

And the whole day long it pounded.

According to the season, the dance took its theme from different gods. With them all, it practiced imitation of nature to influence nature. The rainbow dance with its arches of willows carried by women suggested rain as the rainbow could never appear in a dry sky. The turtle dance reminded the powers of water, for water came with turtles. The corn dance showered the sound of seeds and rain on the ground. The parrot dance with its blaze of feathers woven on costumes made nature think of the warm south where the parrots lived, and the hot sun, also, which made crops grow. The eagle dance, in which men soared along the ground with eagle wings tied to their arms, reminded of how strong an eagle was, and how such strength could cure anything. Before huntsmen set out, the dance would imagine and predict success for them—sometimes in the deer dance, with men garbed in deerskin and hunted down by other dancers as heroes; or the antelope, the elk, the buffalo, all costumed accordingly, and full of respect for the habits of the beloved adversary and victim who would be brought to death in order that the people might live. In the animal dances, little boys sometimes went costumed as bobcats and coyotes, jogging under the dancing bodies of men who impersonated deer or buffalo. Sometimes a boy dancer was a turkey, bridling and flaring with a suit of feathers.

To imitate was to induce, in gesture, sound and article.

To impersonate was to become.

To endure ordeal was to know not exhaustion but refreshment.

For when evening came the dancers, the singers and drummers were not tired. They were stronger than ever. They were lifted up. In giving they had received. The great ranks ended their slow stately evolutions, and the men retired to the kiva. The women sought their houses. The chorus broke formation and entered the kiva. The clowns went trotting lazily over the town. They capered benignly now. Dwellers came forward from their rooms and breathing upon corn meal dusted it into the air before the clowns who took the tribute with a kindly bend of painted nakedness. The spectators drifted to their rooms.

Such a pueblo typically sat on an eminence above the river, and near to it. The river was a power which like the light of the sky was never wholly lost. It came from the north beyond knowing, and it went to the south nobody knew where. It was always new and yet always the same. It let water be taken in ditches to the lowest fields. Trees grew along its banks—willows, cottonwoods, young and old, always renewing themselves. The water was brown, as brown as a body, and both lived on earth as brown. The river was part of the day’s prayer.

Evening came down over the west, like thin gray smoke pulled over color, and the evening star stood like a great trembling drop of water on the soft darkness of the sky.

Before daylight was all gone, the pueblo was silent but for the little sounds of ordinary life—voices lost in narrow walls, a dog, someone breaking branches for firewood, children. The twilight was piercingly sweet and clear. The river went silent and silken between its low banks where grasses grew and saplings and little meadows sprung up out of mudbanks. Sky and town and valley were united in deep peace after the hard wonders of the dancing day. And at that hour the men of the dance came through the sapling groves to the river. The deepening yellow dusk put color on the water. The men came in their ceremonial dress. They took it off and went naked to-the river’s edge. There they breathed upon the pine boughs which they had worn, and the baldrics of rabbit fur, and sometimes the gourd rattles, and cast them upon the sliding surface of the water. They sent their prayers with the cast-off branches and the skins which, wherever they were borne by the river wherever it went, would go as part of that day’s pleading will. Then entering the river the men bathed. The brown water played about them and over them and they thanked it and blessed it. Silken as beavers they came out and dried. Now their voices rang and they laughed and joked and gossiped about the long hard day, for its ceremony was over, and its make-believe, and could be talked about quite ordinarily. They felt strong and refreshed. It was good to have such a river, and such a town, and to have done such a work as that of today. Everything about it told nature what to do; everything was done in exactly the right way; all the ways were right, because, said the men, “they came up with us.”

So the idea of creation, and so the ways of propitiating the creators.

ii. forms

There in that long stretch of New Mexico valley (which even so was but one seventh of the whole length of the river) the Pueblo Indians ordered the propriety of their life to the landscape that surrounded them. This act was implicit in all their sacred beliefs. It recognized the power, nearness and blaze of the sky; the clarity of the air; the colors of the earth; the sweep of mountain, rock, plain; and the eternity of the river. Environment directly called forth the spirit and the creations of the people. The weather had direct effects upon vegetable growth, and the life of waterways, and the change in land forms. It had equally direct effect upon the human personality and its various states and views of life. The presence of mountains; the altitude of the very valley itself; the outlying deserts beyond; the effects created by the interchange of influence and response between that particular land and that particular sky—all had effect and expression in the Pueblo world.

The natural forms rising from a landscape created by surface water action, and wind, and volcanic fury—that is to say, river, desert and mountain—bore intimate fruits in their imitation by the forms of Pueblo life. The cave became a room. The room became part of a butte. The butte, joined with others like it, resembled a mesa, terraced and stepped back. The Pueblo town looked like a land form directly created by the forces that made hills and arroyos and deserts. Daylight upon the face of a pueblo looked the same as daylight upon the face of a cliff. Who knew how much this was accidental, and how much devised by the Indian in his sense of propriety in the natural world, his reverence for all its aspects, and his general application in imitative symbols of all the living and enduring forms he knew about him? Even where his town stood above the river, the river dictated his farming methods; for the irrigation ditch leading from the river to the fields below the town was in itself but a tiny river in form, with the same general laws of flow, and reach, and structure as the big river. People not too long the owners of such a concept would not find it a naive one, to be taken for granted. It would instead be a grave and reassuring fact, to be thankful for along with all of the other energetic expressions of the landscape, among which the Pueblo Indian prayed passionately to be included as a proper part-not a dominant part, not a being whose houses and inventions and commerce would subject the physical world until he rose above it as its master; but as a living spirit with material needs whose modest satisfaction could be found and harmonized with those of all other elements, breathing or still, in the dazzling openness all about him, with its ageless open secrets of solitude, sunlight and impassive land.

So every act and relationship of Pueblo life included the intention to find and fulfill such harmony. The whole environment found its way by spiritual means into all of Pueblo life. Works of art captured the animal and vegetable and spiritual world—always in objects meant for use, never display for its own sake. The work of art, in the sense that all elements were brought together—colors, emotions, ideas, attitudes—in harmonious proportion and mixed with fluent skill, the work of art was the act of living, itself. No one part of it had significance alone, just as each feature of the landscape by itself meant less than what all meant and looked like together.

Worship entered into every relation between the people and their surroundings. The mountains were holy places; temples standing forever which held up the sky. Gods lived in them, and other supernaturals. The priests of the people went to the mountains to call upon the deities of the four points of the compass. The various pueblo groups identified their sacred mountains differently. For one of them, the northern one was Truchas Peak; the eastern one was the Lake Peak of the Santa Fe range; the southern one was the Sandia range, which they called Okupiⁿn, turtle mountain; the western one was Santa Clara Peak of the Jemez range, which they called the mountain covered with obsidian. All of them rose far back and above the Rio Grande, into whose valley they all eventually shed water.

The action of the river upon land forms was recognized at times by the Indians. Near the pueblo of San Ildefonso is a great black mesa on the west of the river, faced across the river on the east by high ground. This place they called P’o-woge, “where the water cut through.” In the midst of supernatural explanations of natural conditions this was suddenly a cool and observant conclusion; not, however, to the disadvantage of another idea, which was that in the great cave on the north side of the black mesa there once lived (they said) a cannibal giant. His cave was connected with the interior of the vast, houselike mesa by tunnels which took him to his rooms. His influence upon the surrounding country was heavy. Persons did the proper things to avoid being caught and eaten by him.

Lakes and springs were sacred too, and natural pools. They were doorways to the world below. If everything originally “came up” with the people through the sacred lake Shi-pap, the same action could be imagined for other such bodies of water. Many of these were springs which fed the river. Gods and heroes were born out of springs, and ever afterward came and went between the above and below worlds through their pools. Every pueblo had sacred springs somewhere near-by. There was every reason to sanctify them—physical, as life depended upon water; spiritual, as they had natural mystery which suggested supernatural qualities; for how could it be that when water fell as rain, or as snow, and ran away, or dried up, there should be other water which came and came, secretly and sweetly, out of the ground and never failed?

Some of the rivers that went into the Rio Grande dried up for months at a time. In the Pueblo world, the most important tributaries were Taos, Santa Cruz, Pojuaque, Santa Fe and Galisteo Creeks on the east, and on the west, Jemez Creek, the Chama River. Of these only the last one had perennial flow. Its waters were red in melting season and colored the Rio Grande for many miles below their confluence. But the courses of them all bore the valley cottonwood. It was the dominant and most useful tree in all the Pueblo country. Its wood was soft and manageable, and it supplied material for many objects. Its silver bark, its big, varnished leaves sparkling in the light of summer and making caverns of shade along the banks, its winter-hold of leaves the color of beaten thin gold lasting in gorgeous bounty until the new catkins of spring—all added grace to the pueblo world. The columnar trunks were used to make tall drums, hollowed out and resonated with skins stretched over the open ends. The wood was hot fuel, fast-burning, leaving a pale, rich ash of many uses. Even the catkins had personal use—eaten raw, they were a bitter delicacy in some towns. And in that arid land, any tree, much less a scattered few, or a bounteous grove, meant good things-water somewhere near, and shade, and shelter from the beating sun, and talk from trifling leaves.

The feeling, the sense, of a place was real and important to the people. Almost invariably for their towns they chose sites of great natural beauty. The special charm of a place was often commemorated in what they named it. On the river’s west bank stood a pueblo called Yuⁿge, which meant “Western mockingbird place.” The name was a clue to the sense of the place, for above its graces of flowing water, rippling groves and the high clear valley with its open skies would rise the memory of the May nights when the prodigal songs of the mockingbirds year after year sounded all night long in the moonlight. The birds sang so loudly as to awaken people from sleep. Night after night a particular voice seemed to come from the very same tree with the same song. It was like a blessing so joyful that it made an awakened sleeper laugh with delight, listening to that seasonal creature of the river’s life. In the daytime little boys on rooftops caught moths which also appeared in May and whistling to the mockingbirds released the moths which the birds in an accurate swoop caught in midair with their bills.

Everything in the landscape was sacred, whether the forms of nature, or those made by people—altars, shrines, and the very towns which were like earth arisen into wall, terrace, light and shadow, enclosing and expressing organized human life.

iii. community

It was an organized life whose ruling ideas were order, moderation, unanimity. All ways were prescribed, all limits set, and all people by weight of an irresistible power took part in the town life. Examples of such controls elsewhere suggested that they must come from a ruler, a presiding head of state whose decrees could only be obeyed, on pain of despotic gesture. But the Pueblo people had no ruler; no despot. The irresistible power which ordered their communal life was the combined and voluntary power of the people—all the people, in each town, giving continuity to inherited ways by common agreement.

Everybody, together, in a pueblo, owned all the land, all the religious edifices and ritual objects. Assignment of use was made by a council of elders. Heads of families were granted the use of portions of land, which could be reallotted every year, according to change in families through marriage or death. Religious properties were assigned to proper organizations.

Crops grown by families upon their assigned plots belonged to them alone. Families owned objects which they made for their own use. Families were given permanent possession of rooms in the pueblo for as long as the family existed and could build additional space as needed. When a family died out its apartments were abandoned and went into ruins.

Since property was entirely for use, and not for sale or trade within the pueblo, everybody lived upon the same scale. Their rooms were alike. Their holdings in food, clothing, furniture, were about the same. Living closely together, they interfered very little with their immediate neighbors, though within the family there was no privacy and no desire for any. Outbursts of feeling, emotion, violence, were bad form, and so was indulgence in authority for its own sake, instead of for the propriety it was meant to preserve. Nobody was supposed to stand out from everyone else in any connection but that which had to do with official duties. Everyone understood that certain work—official or religious—had to be done by someone who was given, by common consent, the authority to do it. But nobody was supposed to propose himself for the job, or go out after it. If he was chosen for it, a man with real reluctance but equally real obedience to the wishes of his associates accepted it and did his serious best while in office. If anybody in such a position showed the wrong attitude, or indeed, if anyone at all transgressed against the accepted way of things, he was shown his error in the ridicule he received from other people. He did not like to be laughed at in the town, or made sport of by the clowns in the dances, and he would mend his ways if he had gone too far out of line. There was no excuse for him to feel differently from anybody else, and to behave accordingly. As there was a proper way to perform all acts, everyone not only understood ritual but performed it. United in gesture, the pueblo had a strong sense of its own identity. Everyone agreed how things were and had to be and should be. Understanding so, there could be few disappointments in life, and few complete bafflements.

Certain towns had thin, narrow, long stones which rang with a clear song when struck. They were hung by deerskin thongs to the end, outdoors, of a roof beam. The singing stones could be heard in the town and the near-by fields. To summon men for meetings, the stones were struck. Meetings were held often, for the town had many organizations, each with particular work to do.

In some towns, all people were divided into two cults—the Summer, or Squash, People; and the Winter, or Turquoise, People. Other towns knew four seasons of the year, and organized accordingly. All towns had secret societies with particular social duties, all religious in form. At the head of the pueblo, as guardian of all spiritual lives, was the cacique. He served for life. He had many duties, for no important act was ever done without ritual, and it was he who blessed and approved all ceremonies. In his own life he invoked holiness with fasting and prayer. That he might be free entirely for his sacred offices he was relieved of all other work. His house was built for him. Other people planted for him and cultivated his crops and made his harvests. In his shrines he kept fetishes which had to be fed with rabbit meat. Men went on special hunts to bring him rabbits, and the sacred food was prepared by his appointed helper, who cooked the rabbits, and also kept his house for him, making fires, sweeping the packed earthen floor, and ministering to his needs.

The cacique made important appointments to the priesthood. Two of these were the war priests, named for the twin boy-gods Masewi and Oyoyowi. They held office for a year. Part of their duty was to observe the cacique in the performance of his duties, and to admonish him if he was negligent. Each year he appointed ten assistants to the war priests. His influence was great, his position among the people that of the fountainhead of all spiritual belief and practice. He was both father and mother to them, a living analogue of the source of their lives. Upon his death his successor was chosen by the war priests from his own secret society.

The cult was a medium through which the people could formally take part in the religious life of the pueblo. Everyone belonged to one or another of the cults in the town. Membership was hereditary, except that a girl who married entered the cult of her husband. If she was widowed she could choose between remaining in the cult of her husband or returning to that of her father. The cult had a head who was in charge of all its activities. The most sacred of objects were the masks used in the kachina dances—those great group prayers in which the gods of rain were believed by women and children to be actually present in the dance. These masks, and the costumes that went with them, and the miniature carved figures representing the godly kachinas, were kept by the cult leader as his own personal duty. He alone could mix the turquoise green paint used in decorating the masks. Not everyone could have masks. Only married men of mature experience could have them. With the mask came powers—the wearer turned into someone else. His real person was hidden not only from the spectator but delivered from himself. Behind the mask he was the godlike being which the people saw. He escaped into a new and sacred dignity, leaving behind him the weak man of every day to whom he must return when he doffed his mask again but surely with some lingering joy and a new strength.

The cult had its ceremonial home in the large chamber of the kiva, sacred to its own members. It was usually circular, sometimes underground, generally above ground. Here was the very house of power and ritual. It was entered through a hatch in the roof, by a tall ladder which leaned down to the floor. A small altar stood in the room, sometimes against the wall, sometimes free. Before it was a small round hole. This was called by the same name as the original place where the people came up into the world—Shipapu. A shaft built into the wall brought air to the altar, and with it could come and go the spirits addressed in prayer. Smoke from fires built before the altar was carried out through the entrance hatch in the roof by the spirits of the kachinas. On another plane of experience and discovery, the air descending through the shaft made the fire draw, and set up circulation which drew smoke to the roof and out into the air through the hatchway. At about the height of a kneeling man, a deep shelf or seat ran around the wall of the interior. The wall was sometimes painted with sacred images and symbols of weather, animals, birds, plants, and human actions, all with ritual purposes.

The whole kiva itself was a powerful symbol. It was like a small butte with a flat top, a land form often seen. In its interior it gave passageway to the two worlds—the earth-world above, through the hatch to natural life of land, creatures and sky; and the netherworld below, through the portal of the world’s womb from which all had come so long ago. Both worlds were made to join in the kiva. Here the holy pigments were prepared, and the costumes for the dances. Inherited rituals were studied and learned here. Sacred objects remained in the kiva when not in use out of doors. Fetishes were fed there. Boys were initiated there into knowledge and power of which they had known only animal intimations. There dancers painted and dressed for their outdoor ceremonials, and when readied came in a crowding line up the ladder through the hatch, over the roof and down to the ground. To perpetuate the kiva in filling vacant kiva offices, there the members met in conclave. There in the significant number of four times—invocation of the whole world through its four quarters—ceremonies were prepared during four days of vomiting and other purifications.

Each kiva group was dedicated to the ceremonial work of one of the seasons. Since ritual and its texts were elaborate, and long, and transmitted only by memory with no written records, and since every phase of community life was accompanied by its ceremonial observance, no one cult could learn and execute the liturgy for all occasions. Yet certain events, like the great corn dance, called upon two or more cults to perform in the plaza, alternately throughout the day-long invocation of the spirits of fertility and growth, when one group would dance while the other waited to take its place, with all joining at the end.

So the religious life of the people was formalized in groups that separately represented neither the whole town nor a single clan but drew symmetrically upon the population until all were included, empowered in the same terms, and actors of the same myths. Religion was not a thing apart from daily life. It was daily life, a formalization, an imitation of nature, an imagined control of the elements, and of what was obscure in the spirit of men and women.

In addition to the major divisions of the kiva groups, which cut boldly through the whole company of the town for organized religious acts, there were smaller groups with specialized missions whose members were not chosen along the lines of kiva organization. These were the secret societies. Each had its unique purpose. There was one in charge of war. Another appointed all holders of major nonreligious offices. Another comprised the koshare, the clowns of the dances who served also as the disciplinarians, through censure or ridicule, of individuals who offended against the unspoken but powerful sense of restraint and decorum that governed behavior. Several others were curing societies, and together constituted the medicine cult. And another embraced the hunters of the town. All selected and initiated their own members throughout the generations.

Of the secret societies those which did battle on behalf of the people against illnesses of body and spirit had the largest number of members. Their work was highly specialized and in much demand. Almost everywhere there was reason to call upon them, for even a suspicion of illness was enough to invoke the powers of the curing societies. It all related to what the people said was behind illness—any illness but the little commonplace ones that came and went in a day. No, there were other kinds that came from nowhere, lasted a long time, and had strange effects. They were not accounted for in ordinary ways. Something was at work, something wicked, something unseen, and clever, and dangerous because it might be right here, anywhere, abiding for the while in a bird, or an animal, or a person, or a rock, none of whom knew it. Possibly an ant, or a toad, or a buzzing insect contained the responsible thing. One day well, the next day sick—the invalid, they said, must have received the sickness in his sleep when nobody was watching, and the awful thing had its chance to happen. Once again they had struck, those powers of evil and illness, of whom everybody knew, and sooner or later encountered. They were witches, male and female, who were invisible, who put themselves into innocent creatures and objects, and who did their worst work in all success because people could not recognize them and prevent them from creating harm and havoc. All witches worked upon the same purpose—to make people sicken and die. Sometimes they put spells also upon useful animals to make them die. The danger was so real and so prevalent that everyone kept a sharp watch for suspicious behavior on the part of persons, animals and things. And yet much else had to be done, daily, and so the people gave to the curing societies the special responsibility of keeping vigil against witches, and of taking proper action when the blow fell.

It was they said most fortunate that the doctors of the medicine societies were able to receive extraordinary powers from the real medicine men of the spirit world—the ones who were animal-gods and heroes, whose benign influence reached to all the quarters of the world, and to the zenith and the nadir too: the mountain lion, the bear, the badger, the eagle, the wolf, and the shrew. Thanks to these powers, the doctors were able to recognize witches where no other person could possibly do so. Once identified, the witches could be unmasked and worked against. It was hard work, calling for exactly learned methods, and sadly enough there was always the possibility of failure. Still, everything possible had to be done, and if in the end the doctors lost their patient, the people did not hold it against them, but realized that in this case the opposing powers were the stronger, and could not but prevail. Witches were powerful, that was just the point of being so careful about them, and working so energetically against them. Witches especially tried to destroy the young men. It was particularly evil of them thus to strike against the strength of the present and the seed of the future.

When a person was bewitched into sickness, great forces went to work to save him. His people sent for the doctor of a medicine society who came to the house. Family and friends were there. The prevalence of witches was of much concern to everyone. The doctor followed a procedure known to all, for it was established long ago. He removed his clothes, returning to his animal estate naked. He went to the patient whom he examined with thorough care, feeling him all over his naked body to determine the location of the malevolence which had invaded him. He prayed. If there was a fracture he made splints and set the bone. If there was lameness he massaged. If there was an eruption he lanced it with a flint knife. If no visible ailment showed he administered medicines brewed of herbs and water. He anointed the sick body with his curative saliva. He was disembodied from his daily self. The patient and the people knew him as a power in tune with greater powers, and as he worked, they felt in themselves the energy he brought and the conviction of recovery he carried. Hope arrived with him. Witches might be strong, but here was strength too, in every curative gesture, word and thought. At the end of the treatment, the doctor resumed his clothes and left, with instructions to summon him again if the patient did not improve rapidly.

If he was needed again, he then assembled all the other members of his own medicine society and unless the patient was critically ill, the doctor worked with them for four days in ritualistic preparation for the major cure which they were to undertake. If the patient seemed to be dying, they went to him in the first evening. Otherwise on the evening of the fourth day (the people said great virtue resided in the number four) they went to the house of sickness. The doctors undressed. To frighten the witches they painted their faces black. Over their heads from ear to ear they each fastened a band of white eagle-down, and around their necks hung necklaces of bear claws. Each doctor held two eagle wing feathers and a gourd rattle. The medicine society was ready to go to work.

The doctors in turn came to the patient and felt over his body to determine the seat of illness. When they found it they would know into what member the witches had shot their evil, and what was its nature. The whole cure led to the extraction of the evil object from the patient’s body.

Meantime there were prayers and chants. Paintings of colored meal were laid upon the swept floor by a medicine priest. He sprinkled grains of color through his fingers, drawing lines with delicacy. He aimed the dropping meal with his thumb that sifted it, to compose in flax yellow, turquoise blue, berry red, skin brown, black, and white, a design full of magic power against sickness and witches. Before he changed from one color to another, he cleaned his fingers by twiddling them in a little pile of clean sand, like the sand that was spread down as the general background of the painting. It was almost hypnotic, to see the curative design come to being out of the little pouring streams of colored motes. Where nothing was, now power dwelt. How fortunate to know that it came manifest on the side of good, against evil! And then medicines were mixed and administered. The doctors partook of them along with the patient.

The proceedings were dangerous, they said, because such a gathering of virtue and opposition would in itself attract witches who would do their utmost to defeat the forces of good. Therefore, the war priests attended also, Masewi and Oyoyewi, to defend the doctors at their hopeful work. They stationed their assistants outside the house of illness with bows and arrows with which to shoot the witches if they came close. Nobody was in any doubt—the witches were there, and the last act of the curing drama was soon to come, after everything proper had been done in the sickroom. It was sober and urgent in feeling—so many personalities, so much gesture, such powerful singing, all the medicines—and the patient alone and bare in the midst of it felt these forces pulling at him and empowering him to recover. The doctors labored mightily. Feeling the flesh of the patient, one of them found what they had all searched for—the place of illness, and the physical cause of it: turning to the assembled powers, he indicated the place, and then he bent to it and sucked upon the skin, or he operated with his hands, until he was able to come away from the sufferer and show everyone the cause of the trouble which had been stricken into the sick man by the witches. It was sometimes a thorn; again, a little snake, or a lizard, or piece of rag, or a pebble; any small foreign substance might turn out to be the seat of trouble. Only a trained doctor, they agreed, could ever find it, and bring it forth for everyone to see.

And now it was time to do battle directly with the witches who lurked outside. Already they had been partially defeated with the discovery of their projectile in the flesh of their victim. The doctors would finish the cure by physically punishing the witches so they would hardly dare to repeat their wickedness soon again.

Taking up each a sleeve made of the skin of a bear’s leg (the power of the deity of the West) the doctors covered their left arms and took flint knives in their right hands. Linking arms they went out into the dark of the night in the open air before the house, and there as they knew they would they came upon the witches, who were invisible to all but them. A fearful struggle followed, as the people could hear in the sickroom. The patient could hear how mightily he was being avenged and—all hoped—freed of his trouble. There were shrieks and thunders, blows and wounds and imprecations without, as the doctors fought in the dark. The whole town was aware of the battle. The witches were strong and terrible. They might lead the doctors away. The sounds of the fight came and went. Now and then there was a human scream as a witch killed a doctor, who fell down dead, in proof that the enemy was formidable and the cure hazardous. Gradually all sounds whimpered down to nothing, and the guardian war priests went to look at the evidence of the struggle. On the ground they found the dead doctors. The other doctors who survived on their feet helped to carry the dead ones back to the curing chamber. There, with measures known to the doctors as part of their powers, the dead men were revived.

But the witches were repulsed. Sometimes a witch was killed by a shot through his heart with a flint-tipped arrow. Witches were known to have escaped the very grasp of a doctor, leaving only their clothes in the doctor’s hands—but that was proof, anyway, of how close the battle was. There was much to talk about when the whole thing was over. The medicine meal had to be swept up, the pictures destroyed, the ceremonial equipment taken away. The Masewi always stood up, at the end of the curing labor, and told all how the patient had been cured. How strenuous the efforts; how huge and powerful the witches; how deep-seated the disease, and how wise the doctors to find it; how satisfactory the way in which all had participated; how fortunate the patient.

Then with the luxurious thoughts of the aftermath, the people went home. Now and then for the next several days one or another of the doctors would call informally upon the patient until he was well entirely, or dead. If it was death instead of cure, everyone however saddened knew where it came from and sighed over the awful power and strength of the witches, whose thundering blows and calls and general tumult they had heard through the darkness several nights before in the town. No wonder the doctors had not prevailed. If it was cure, that was not surprising, they said, for who did not recall the fury of the encounter with the witches, the valor of the doctors, the expertness of their ritual? No wonder witches could not endure such powerful attacks.

Thus comfort through organized observances.

The whole year had its cycle of them.

All winter the river ran shallow and lazy from the faraway north, and deep against the sky of the whole valley the snow was locked on the peaks by cold air. The fields by the pueblo were dry and the irrigation ditches which ran to them from the river were overgrown with the dry golden stalks, the pink brush, of the past year’s weeds. In March^* it was time to clean the ditches and then with prayer, dancing and prayer sticks, open the ditches to bring the river water in upon the spring plantings. The masked gods came from the otherworld to attend. They were seen right there in their masks among the dancers.

In April with four days of preparations the assembled kiva groups of the pueblo held a dance for the blessing of corn, which would come to summer harvest. Water, rain, were the greatest of blessings, and all was asked in their name, and in their image, gesture, and sound. The curing societies during this month went into retreat for purification and for prayer, again invoking rain, upon whose coming the lives of plant and person and animal alike depended. They retreated to their houses which they called, during the retreat, Shipapu, the same as the place of origin, through which everyone had come up. The retreat over, dances followed, again with the gods in their masks, who also had spent the same time in retreat at the real Shipapu. Well into the summer, retreats and emergence ceremonies continued.

^* For convenience I have used modern calendric names, which of course were not available to the Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande in the period before recorded history.

In early summer the ceremony was held by the curing societies to pull the sun to the south, where his hot light would make long days and help things to grow.

In full summer they danced again for corn. Sometimes they started out in clear day, with all the kiva groups in fullest magnificence under a spotless blue sky which gave back heat like stone near fire. Rain could never come from such a sky. But all day they pounded the prayer into the ground and showered the sound of falling drops of rain from the air to the earth while the heat grew and grew and the shadows of the houses stood like triangles painted on pottery in black paint; and presently they might see without giving any sign what loomed in the north and the west against the ringing blue—dazzling white thunderheads marching slowly and powerfully over the sky toward this town, these fields and seeds. The blessings were vast and visible; and late in the day as the prayer still beat its way into the ground, the light might change, and the clouds meet over all, and brown color of the bodies and the town and the earth all alike would turn dark like the river as rain came and fell upon them and answered them and the sparkling green shoots of the corn in the fields. Sometimes it rained so hard and long that the earth ran and the gullies deepened, and new cracks appeared leading to them, and rocks rolled scouring new ways to the river, and the river rose and flowed fast carrying unaccustomed things sideways in the queer sailing current of flood.

In September as the border of summer and winter was reached the Summer People and the Winter People both held dances. Autumn brought hunting dances too, and some of them were given later in wintertime. In November came the feast of the dead, when all the ancestors came back to the pueblo to visit for a day and a night. It was a blessed occasion and a happy one. And before long it was time to urge the four curing societies to watch the sun, and call it back to the north before it went too far southward.

In midwinter the kiva groups chose their officers for the next year, and held dances to honor them, to bless them and to make them know the right ways. The curing societies now frequently in the winter held general cures for everyone. People could come to the curing ceremonies with their ailments and have them included with the other ills against which the doctors gave battle. They purged everyone, the whole town, of evil spirits. Again they cried out and struck blows against the witches, while all heard the encounters, and were reassured.

In February the koshare danced, the clowns, the critics, who hazed the people, sometimes to laughter, sometimes to shame, the spirit of irony and perversity thus accounted for and made useful.

And it was by then observed that the sun was safely on his way north again, and there was a ceremony to confirm this and give thanks.

Then the winter’s weeds stood thick again in the ditches, and the path of life from the river to the fields had to be readied. Once again it was time to burn the weeds away, clean the ditches, let the river in, and set the plantings of another year.

It was an organized life based upon the desire for peace. The Pueblos rarely went to war unless they had to resist attack. The war society with its chief captains Masewi and Oyoyewi maintained the magic necessary to use in times of crisis from without the town. The war society was also a medium for the forgiveness of killing. Its members—all men—were those who had brought upon themselves the danger of having killed someone. This danger was the same whether the killing was accidental, murderous, or in sanctioned conflict. If there was blood upon a man he had to join the war society to wipe it out. He then became a defender of his people. He was confirmed with ceremony. After his initiation he went—like all boys and men after initiations and dances—to the river to bathe his body and his thoughts.

As for thoughts, when grave matters were in the air, requiring the judgment of the cacique and his council, these leaders fasted. They did penance the better to make wise decisions. Their fasting was known about. At home they abstained. In the kiva they abstained. They spoke to no one of what lay heavily upon their thoughts, but their concern was plain to all. Soon there was wonder, and gossip, worry; something was brewing; what would it be; was there anywhere to turn but once again to blind Nature?

But at last the council would speak to them. At evening, the town crier went to his rooftop. Perhaps the sky was yellow behind him and the house fires sent their smokes upward in unwavering lines of pale blue above the earth’s band of twilight. The murmur of talk was like the sound of the river beyond its groves. Facing four ways in succession, the crier told four times what the council had decided and what it wanted of the people. On their roofs, or by their walls, or in their fields, the people heard him, and gave no kind of response; but they all heard and in proper order and time did what was asked of them.

iv. dwelling

When the Pueblo builders came to the river they found dwellers in little shelters built of upright poles stuck in the ground with brush woven among them and covered with dried mud. The walls of the cliff cities which had been left behind were of chipped flat stone anchored with earth. Now by the river there was no stone to be had, and the outlines, the terraces, the pyramids of the cliff towns were reproduced in the river material—clay, adobe, mixed with brush or straw from dried grasses native to the valley. At first even the upright poles of the scattered jacales along the river were used, in modified design. The poles were set close together in double rows. Between the rows wet earth was poured. The faces of the walls, outdoors and in, were built up with adobe scooped together a handful at a time and patted, puddled, into place. Layers were allowed to dry, and new layers for strength and thickness were added. When a wall was thick enough it could support beams; cross branches could be laid on the beams and plastered over, to make a ceiling, and a roof. Once a smooth level was managed on the roof, it could serve as a floor for a second storey, which in turn could support a third, and a fourth, until the great hive with all its cells had a porous strength shared by all its supporting uprights and laterals. There was no entrance at ground level. Ladders took the dweller from ground to all levels above.

The cities were much alike in form, varying most in color. The Rio Grande long ago cut down through different layers of buried color, revealing each at widely separated places along its course. The local soil made the walls, and gave them their color. The prevailing hue was pale, the Indian tan of dried river mud, wherever the pueblos sat on or near the river course in its most pastoral character. Where lava still showed in the soil in spite of centuries of weathering after forgotten upheavals, the earth, and the town, had a gray look, as at San Ildefonso. Up the Chama river, the ancient pueblo of Abiquiu had a dusty vermilion adobe, taken from the red hills and cliffs. A faint pink clay went into the pueblos of the Piros farther down the Rio Grande near Socorro.

The form of the pueblos was found not only on the Rio Grande. Those cities, and the typical life they showed, were common to great areas, over long gaps of time. Just as certain tribes of Pueblo Indians came to the river to resettle, so others went westward and grew their cities in northwestern New Mexico and northeastern Arizona. Even deep in Mexico, and long before them in time, the Rio Grande Pueblos had their counterparts among the Aztecs, whose houses, temples, rituals and organization suggested theirs. Much came northward with the seed of corn and of ways to cultivate, invoke and protect it.

In the community house each family had a room. It was private, for its only entrance was through a hatch in the roof, entered by a long ladder. It was small—about twelve by fourteen by seven or eight feet. The walls were painted with gypsum and water whitewash. Much gypsum was available in the river country. The beams overhead were brought from forests far away. The length of the timbers determined the size of the room. Smoke from fires built on the floor went up through the hatch in the ceiling. Little openings in the walls let a draft in and gave a view outward, and in times of trouble served as a hole through which to fly arrows. Blankets of cotton and yucca fibre mats made beds and places to sit upon. There were also drum-shaped stools carved out of cottonwood trunks, and hollowed out on top.

If the family grew, a room next door was built, connected by a low opening to the first room. Each family prepared its own food. Food and water were kept in pottery vessels, and cooked in them. Pottery bowls were used to eat from. The pots were more than just receptacles. They were works of art, and more, they were made as acts of devotion, just as the poetry and song and drama and design of the dances were. All imaginative creation and skilled craftsmanship went to fulfill a direct purpose which was partly religious, partly esthetic and always utilitarian. A pot was made in a certain size and shape for a certain purpose; beyond that it was decorated with designs which spoke of the potter’s desire for blessings from the natural world and its gods. By representing the forms of life associated with fertility, rain and growth, the Indian painter called them into being on his own behalf. Handling pots decorated with such symbols, the family had daily communion with the powers. The designs were without meaning for their own sake. Their value was not inherent in their lines, masses and colors, but dwelt in their spiritual message. They were outpourings of wish, not of artistic pleasure. As all forms of art and craft went to express the unanimous belief and observance of the people, so every person was in some degree an artist or a craftsman. The arts like all other phases of Pueblo life were communal in their purpose and realization.

The people of the Rio Grande had no metal crafts. Their products were all made with stone or bone tools, and with fingers. Raw material and finished object remained close to each other. What was inherent in the one determined the form of the other.

Pueblo symbols for bird, or cloud, lightning or rain, animal, or man, or mountain, were used by all makers. There was a common graphic language in each tribe. Its designs were not meant to be realistic, nor were they purposely grotesque. They were stylized images hallowed by long usage and accepted as descriptive. The typical Pueblo pot carried bands of design around its circumference combining specific symbols with abstract lines and spaces. Even these last had a suggestive power. Though they represented nothing, they seemed to recreate the spaces and the angles, the sweep and line of the Southwest, the shafting of light in the sky, the bold mesa, the parallels of rain and the dark spots of juniper on hills otherwise bare. There was a genius common to all Indian artisans—a tepee recalled a pine tree, a pueblo was a mesa, a clay cist was a seed pod. Whatever its conscious motive, however symbolic its style, the impulse to record life was an ancient one; and in any degree of its fulfillment always respectable as art.

The needs of daily use called forth in the Rio Grande town Indians a profuse and vigorous creation of pottery. They took the same material of which they made their houses and with it made their vessels, and somewhat by the same method, building up surfaces of moist earth, letting them dry, adding more, and exposing the final form, in the one case, to the baking sun, and in the other, to the fire of the kiln. The decorations of the pottery were rich, often using two or three colors, some of which had a glazed finish. Black, white, red and natural clay color were the most common. A syrup of the yucca fruit was used with paint and water. The designs were painted with a brush made of yucca leaves. The line was flowed firmly, the sense of balance and proportion was exquisite, and the use of color was both strong and delicate. In such artistry there seemed to be an impersonal obedience to laws of harmony and grace which dwelled deep in the common spirit of the people. They said that life existed in everything; and that when they made a pot, they gave personal life to it, just as all creatures, places and things had personal life. Believing so, they knew a responsibility not to art and its abstract aims, but to life and its hope of perfection. They dared not make even a pot with less than their utmost skill if it was to live a good life. Allowance was invariably made for its spirit to breathe and come and go in the painted design on its surface. Somewhere in the decoration there was always left an opening in the design, a gap, a space not closed, so that life might enter there or flow from it. Wherever decorative design appeared—on textiles, walls, or on the half-sections of gourds fashioned into ladles—the ceremonial gap was represented.

v. garments

The pueblo people wove cloth and wore it hundreds of years before they came to the river. They made thread from the native cotton, and used a true loom, and whether they invented it or acquired it from Mexico no one can say. Cloth came from yucca fibres, too. On their clothing they painted or embroidered designs, much like those which they used in making baskets and pottery. Their costumes were rich and complete, according to the season. In summertime, the children went naked, and the men and women wore as little as necessary. In cold weather they had plenty to cover themselves with, some of it magnificent. They domesticated the wild turkey for the use of his feathers. Turkey tail feathers were part of the dance paraphernalia, and the soft little feathers of breast and body were tied with yucca fibres to make rich, warm blankets that could be worn as cloaks or slept in. Turkeys evidently had no other use, for the Pueblos did not eat them; but a glaring and straining bunch of live turkeys tied together by the legs made a ceremonial gift to visitors who came to the pueblo.

The people’s clothes took their prevailing color from the natural hues of cotton and yucca fibre. Designs were added in colors taken from the earth and plants. There was a rich red, from clay. Mustard yellow came from rabbit brush, and a soft golden yellow came from ochreous earth. Larkspur and blue beans yielded a delicate blue stain, and copper sulphate gave again the brilliant blue-green dye which prevailed in the kachina masks.

A man dressed himself in a breechclout of cloth when he wore no other clothing. Otherwise, he wore a broad kilt wrapped about his waist. It was held in place by a richly decorated sash whose ends hung down. His shirt was a square of cloth with a hole cut for the head. Around his head he wore a cloth bandeau. His legs were sometimes covered by the superb buckskin leggings which he imitated from those of the hunting Plains Indians. The leggings were not joined, but hung separately from the sash or breechclout by leather thongs, from the crotch to the ankle. They were often gathered at the knee with ties of rawhide. On his feet he wore soft skin mocassins. Over all he wore a robe or cloak, now of turkey feathers, again of rabbit fur cut in strips and laced together with yucca thread. Tied to interesting points of his costume he wore, if he was fortunate, a number of the little copper bells and beads made far away in Mexico, and very rare in his river country. But some of the bells came northward in trade, and possibly some were made by wandering metalworkers from far to the south who came to the river and used local metals; but without leaving their skill behind them, for the pueblo people had no metal crafts in that time. Such an ornamental bell was about an inch long, open at the bottom, with a pebble strung on a thread for its clapper. The beads were an inch long and shaped in tight little cylinders. The bells seemed to be cast by some lost method and the beads were hammered. The man wore jewels, too, as many as he could contrive out of strings of turquoise, bone inlaid with bright stones, black, red, or blue; and bits of shined rock in any beautiful color. He wore strings of precious color about his neck, and hung them from his ears, and wrapped them about his arms. Finally, on many occasions, he used paint on his skin as decoration, whether in the dance, in ceremonies for the sick, in rites of the hunt, or in war.

A woman wore a mantle four or five feet long, and about three feet wide, which she wrapped about herself under the left arm and over the right shoulder and held together with a long decorated belt that went several times around her waist. She wore nothing on her head and, except in bad weather when she used mocassins, nothing on her feet. Like her husband she wore as much jewelry as she could get, and in her uses of the dance and other ceremonies, she wore paint, but only on her face.

As among people anywhere, the children wore miniature imitations of adult costumes, except in hot weather, when they wore nothing at all.

The skins of the people were the color of moist river-earth. Their eyes were black and so was the thick hair of their heads. In general they were not tall. The men, from the exercises of their rituals, the ordeals of work, were lean and muscular. The women early lost the figures of maidenhood and grew heavy, moving modestly and calmly about their duties, fixed in their pivotal positions as the bearers of life, the holders of all that brought stability to the family.

vi. man, woman and child

For in the analogy of woman as the repository of continuing life, it was the wife and mother who was custodian of the family dwelling, and all communal property. Growing up among her relatives, she was courted by her suitor, who sometimes played to her upon the flageolet in the evening on the hills at a little distance from the town, when the fading light was still clear, and the day’s sounds were dying away. If she heard him with favor, and took him as her husband, he joined her in the circle of her blood relations, who helped her with materials to build new rooms for her own life. She herself made the walls out of earth long ago laid down by the passage of the river. She received her husband in the shelter of her own life, with her person, her house and her years. It was hers to create all the enfolding and conserving gestures of life, whether as maker of shelter, of children, or of pottery. She took her husband for life and he understood that he was to have no other woman. A daughter born meant that the mother’s family was increased, for the child would in her time bring a suitor to the same family premises; while a son born meant that one day he would leave and find his mate in another settled family bound together by its matron. From mother to daughter the home was passed on; not from father to son.

The father and mother rarely separated from one another; but if it came to pass that the marriage must end, it was the man who was removed, leaving the dominion of the family secure with the mother and her relations. He would one day find his few personal possessions set out upon the doorstep of his home by his wife, whereupon he would weep, take up his things, and return to the house of his mother. For it was there that he went at important times; and if his mother was dead, he would find his sister there, to whom he gave his ancestral allegiance.

A woman in her house produced the clothes worn by her husband and children. She prepared the food and cooked it. The staple of the diet was corn, and she ground the meal, often before sunrise. While her husband sang to her a song which celebrated the act of grinding corn, or beat upon a drum, she worked the kernels in time with his rhythm. She put the corn upon a large flat stone and ground it with a smaller bar of stone, and in time the first was hollowed out like a dish and the second was rounded off at the edges by the work. Her hands grew hard and big and her fingernails wore down as she labored. For each batch of meal she used several different stones, going from coarse to smooth, always refining the flour and roasting it after each grinding. Sometimes several women ground corn together at night. If a woman wanted to make a gift to a man, she would give corn bread or any cooked food.

She kept her house immaculate and the roof above it and the space before it. Her broom was made of slender branches of Apache plume (or poñil) bound to a willow stick. When she swept her floor she first sprinkled it with water or blew a spray of water from her mouth. Her soap was made from yucca roots. To make cord or rope she boiled the succulent leaves of the yucca and when they cooled she chewed them until they were soft, and then drew out the stringy fibers which she worked together.

Her day was busy and her duties were serious. Much depended upon her, not only what needed to be done, but also how. From her mother she had learned the proper ways of life, and it was her own obligation to transmit these to her own daughters. Even hopes and desires had their proper gestures, to be made in the image of what she wanted. If she wanted a son and had none, she went to find a stone that had the shape of a man’s generative member. From this she scraped a little stone dust and put it into water and drank. She prayed. She deeply knew her animal womanhood and enacted its appointed nature in harmony with what she saw of life all about her.

A man’s purposes and duties were all plain, too.

If he owned no house, anyhow he governed the town. He explained life through religion and ordered, preserved and executed the ceremonies which he said kept the year and its seasons in their proper passage. He provided raw food by farming and hunting. Like the seed for children, the seed corn belonged to him. All the powers latent in the fields were his, and so was the rubble after harvest. Harvested food and stored corn was, he said, “my wife’s.” If he wanted to make a gift to a woman, he gave the products of his work—game, firewood, embroidered or woven cloth, which it was his to produce. He ruled the river and brought its water to the fields for irrigation. And in times of danger from other peoples, he made war.

The Pueblo people were peaceful. They said they never carried war to others, but gave battle only in defense of their own lands, towns and families. One Pueblo tribe sang a song of war which told of no glory, no brag, no zest for a fight.

So we have bad luck

For we are men.

You have good luck

For you are women.

To Navaho camps we go

Ready for war. Good-bye.

Bad luck—but ready, they sang, with realism and a larger bravery.

The Pueblo warriors painted themselves, for there was power in paint, and to go out to save their community life was in itself a ceremony. The surface of their bodies, perceptive of touch, caress and wound, was beautified with designs that came alive with movement—the lift and fall of breathing, the haul and suck of the belly in exertion, the climb and pound of limbs. Flesh became a living temple of esthetic and spiritual feeling. It was an act of both art and religion, and the warrior’s mortal humanity, his bodily stuff dear because it was not immortal, was the very material of his craft. Using the colors of the earth itself, the great source and repository both, the act of devotion combined in tragic wholeness the Pueblo man’s concepts of himself and his gods. Upon his own nakedness he used his earth in the symbols of what he believed in.

First he put on his skin a layer of tallow. Over this went the colors—gypsum white that clothed but did not conceal his legs; red, from clay or crushed amaranth blossoms, on arms and chest; lines of soot black edging designs; yellow from the dust of sunflower petals. He ceremonially washed his hair in yucca suds. Wearing only invocations as armor, he went to the enemy carrying his loins wrapped in buckskin. A buckskin baldric hung over the left shoulder, and above the left shoulder peered the bow case and the quiver, from which arrows could be slipped with the right hand, the left holding the bow. From a tight belt were slung a stone knife and a club, a pouch of sacred objects to bring power, and a little bag of ground meal to be used with water as food on the campaign. Bad luck—but ready for war. The Pueblo men were devoted to their soil. Their towns rose from the river earth like shapes of nature. Their fields were cunningly cultivated. The seed corn secured them life. Their wives gave houses to live in to generation upon generation. There was every reason to stay at home and live well. But their most powerful enemies came from the plains where nothing grew but food for the wandering herds of buffalo, whose flesh made meals for the marauders, whose droppings gave them fire, whose vast seasonal whims took them drifting like cloud shadows over the exposed prairies. The invaders had little to lose and much to gain. But the pueblo people had everything to lose and they fought for it and kept it. Their ways came up with them from a long time ago, and gave them strength.

They lost few of their reluctant prehistoric wars, though perhaps a town here, a scatter of houses there, might suffer and be abandoned. They could come home and make sacrifices of thanksgiving with ceremonies, smoking clay pipes filled with red willow bark, and telling of battle. They had earned their ease. When they wanted to relax and gossip, and be purified, the men took sweat baths together, putting heated stones in a closed room, and pouring water upon them, and finally going to the river to bathe. The river always purified. It seemed to bring some thoughts from far above, who knew from where, and carry others far downstream, who knew whither. Using the river, a person could dream awake, like a child.

The people treated their children tenderly, from the time of birth to the entrance into adult societies. Ceremony and symbol accompanied the child into the world, and at every stage of life thereafter attended him.

The mother unbraided her hair and wore her clothing unknotted that her unborn child might learn to come easily without stricture into the world. A midwife delivered him. In slow or dangerous deliveries, medicine priests might be sent for. They had measures. With invocations, they would hold the laboring woman up by her hips. Again, they would burn pine-nut shells on live coals in a medicine bowl, placing it under her blankets to sweat her. They would massage her belly and call forth the child.

When the baby was born, the midwife cut its cord and wiped its eyes. If a boy, she put his legs and feet into a black pottery bowl so that he might have a heavy voice, and then handed him to his maternal grandfather. If a girl, the midwife put her in the grinding bin for a moment to make her a proper woman, and handed her to her maternal grandmother. The midwife took the afterbirth to the river and threw it into the water which took it away in purification. For her help she received a gift of fine meal.

The paternal grandmother or aunt took up corn meal and with it sprinkled on each wall of the room four little parallel lines, saying to the infant, “Now I have made you a house, and you shall stay here.” In his blankets the baby was laid between two unblemished ears of corn that would guard him until he was given his name. His mother chose a woman to name him, which would be done after four sunrises. Before dawn on the fifth day the sponsor came to the baby’s house. Taking him up, and accompanied by the mother, she went outdoors just before sunrise and as the sun rose she presented him to the light, and spoke his name. The sun was his spiritual father. All then returned to the house and feasted. The sponsor was given a gift of meal. The child was given an ear of corn so that he might always know plenty. Then he was put upon his cradleboard and was so carried on her back by his mother for the first year of his life. Thereafter he was taken from it and taught to walk. Young girls and old men helped to take care of him in his infancy. Through him, the one could learn motherhood, the other could contemplate the cycle of life.

A girl grew up learning the ways of the household from her mother.

Between five and nine years of age, a boy was taken by the men for schooling in the man’s duties of government arid ceremony. He was initiated into a kiva. He was too small to learn anything of the ritual or to understand the revelations that awaited him later, and that in their stunning force would bring him almost at one stroke from the sweet useless thoughts and illusions of boyhood to the purposeful impostures used by men. As a little boy in the kiva, he was brought into direct relation with the spirit powers, and given strength. He learned through fear and pain, for the masked kachinas came to his initiation bearing yucca whips with which they whipped him until he cried. Their lashes drove out the badness in him and made him ready for a good future. His elders nodded and approved as he cried under the punishment of his innocence. Now he had his allegiance, and though understanding nothing of what he did, perhaps he might impersonate an animal in one of the dances, and trot cleverly among the legs of the dancing men.

At adolescence, ready with new powers and desires, the boy was again the victim of a kiva rite. Again the masked gods came and whipped him, harder than before. He venerated them. He felt that the greatest power in the world was chastising him directly. He knew the gods, for they danced in their masks at all the great ceremonials. He knew they came from the sacred lake far underground to the north, where all life had come up. He knew the gods had come down to be about him on this day. It was terrible to be so near to the gods and to receive punishment from their own hands. But he bent himself under the painful honor and valiantly endured what he must.

And then more horrifying than any of the blows he had taken, more shocking than any other discovery of growth, an incredible thing happened to him. The masked gods who were savagely whipping him suddenly stopped, faced him, and lifted from their heads and shoulders their bright copper-green wooden masks with feathers and designs, and showed themselves to be men—neighbors, or uncles, people whom the boy had always known and taken for granted.

The boy was stupefied with terror and amazement.

Then the dances? Who were the gods there?

They were the same men who here, at the kiva ceremony, now removed all their masks. All were men. None was a god. But only men knew this. Women and children still believed that it was the real gods who came masked to the pueblo. Here: let the boy learn how mortal the masked figures were: take this whip. The boy was made to whip the unmasked gods who had whipped him. They put a mask on him and he knew how it felt to be the impersonator of a god from the sacred lake. When he learned enough he would be able to act out what all the other people believed of the gods. He now owned a tremendous secret which he must never, never betray. They spoke of one boy who had told, and what had happened to him. It appeared that they had cut off his head and then, using it like a ball in a game, had kicked it to the sacred underworld.

There would be much learning and several years to go through before they were men; but boys passing the stage of discovering the gods were no longer children. There were other stages of adulthood denied. They could not smoke until they had qualified in the hunt, killing deer, buffalo, rabbit and coyote. If boys were found breaking the rules, they were thrown into the river, in punishment.

Though punishment played less part in the lives of children than fear. Unless children behaved well, they would be in danger from giants and bogeymen who knew all. Once a year the bogeymen, wearing fearful masks, came to the pueblo and knew exactly which children to visit and scold. They knew all the bad things that parents had been harping on. They appalled the children, who had heard of one giant, for example, who went every day to a pueblo near the black mesa in which he lived, and stole children, took them home, and ate them. The bogeymen made threats. The children shivered. And then their parents in anguish begged them not to take the children or hurt them, they were sure the children would be better boys and girls from now on, wouldn’t they, children? With sobs and shudders the children promised. The bogeymen rattled their masks. No, who could be sure. Threats and horrors were renewed. The parents pleaded. Promises were repeated. At last the dreadful visitors consented to go, for this time. But remember and beware!

Happier children were favored with the protection of the masked gods, the kachinas, who rewarded their goodness.

In the morning, waking up, one of the children in the family was sent out to make a prayer, sprinkling sacred meal or pollen to the sun. Then came duties, and then play. The boys tried all the games played by the men. They practiced the kick-race, which the men ran on a course sometimes as long as forty miles, circling out by landmarks and back to the pueblo. Two teams played, each kicking a lump about five inches in size made of hair stuck with pinyon gum. The men could kick the ball twenty yards. The boys tried. They also played a game using a curved stick with which they knocked a deerskin ball filled with seeds. The winner was the one who broke the ball. They liked to run relay races, wearing tufts of down to make them light as birds. All running games were valuable, they said, because they kept the sun running in its course. The boys pitched little stones at a larger target stone. They threw darts and practiced with bow and arrow. Boylike, they discovered things to do with things, and took the fruit of the ground-tomato which had a puffy envelope over it and, by smacking it against their foreheads, made a fine loud pop.

Children were desired and cherished and given all that their families could give, of things and powers and certainties. The blessings of life came from the parents, the ancestors, to whom gratitude and veneration were due. On the hot afternoons of the summer, when the sky blue had golden shimmers over it from heat, and the cottonwoods were breathless and the river ran depleted in and out of their shade, there rose on the hot silver distance the big afternoon rain clouds, with their white billows and black airy shadows. They had promise and blessing in them—rain and life. The people pointed to them and said to the children with love and thanks, “Your grandfathers are coming.”

vii. farmer and hunter

The people did not consider that the cloud that made the rain that fell on the mountain thus made the river. Long ago, when they lived on the mesas and plateaus, far from the valleys, they needed water direct from the clouds to make their crops grow. In dry times they took water out to the plants in jars and spilled it carefully on the roots. Sometimes when heavy rain brought fast floods, they channelled the runoff to their fields. Running waters took usually the same channel, deepening it, widening it, turning its soil over. The people began to use such places in which to plant, so that their crops would receive the water that fell and ran.

When they came to the river and through generations settled their life along its farming plain, they saw that if water could run into the river from all the uplands, then on the immediate floor of the valley it was in many places possible to run water out of the river to the fields. Nearly a thousand years ago Pueblo people were irrigating their fields through well-laid canals and ditches. The river had in some places sharp steep deep walls of rock which ran for many miles. But most of these hard-buried canyons opened out as the river went downstream into wide flat valleys whose floor on each side of the riverbed was lush with growing grasses, plants and trees. In such places the people placed many of their towns. The river was accessible. They used it and it sustained them.

There were thirty thousand people, living in at least thirty, perhaps up to seventy, towns on the Rio Grande of central and northern New Mexico. They cultivated in all about twenty-five thousand acres, through irrigation from the river and its tributaries, and by the use of controlled floodwater. They grew corn, beans, pumpkins, gourds and cotton. They said it was the leaves that made the plants grow, because when the leaves dropped off, the plants stopped growing. The leaves could be watched. Roots were below ground and could not be watched. But even things that could be watched might mean nothing. Pollen from corn was sacred and used in many a prayer; it was part of the great plant which gave life; but nobody noticed what pollen did to make more corn.

Seed corn was kept into the second season before it was planted. Each town used its own, and refused to plant that of other towns, for, they said, the corn was the same as the people. Sowing was assisted by much prayer. Under the waxing moon of April the corn was planted, so it would grow as the moon grew, for under a waning moon the corn paused in its growth. Each farmer made his own prayer, and conducted his own ritual. One said this:

Mother, Father, you who belong to the great Beings, you who belong to the storm clouds, you will help me. I am ready to put down yellow corn and also blue corn, and red corn and all kinds of corn. I am going to plant today. Therefore, you will help me and you will make my work light. You will not make it heavy and also you will make the field not hard. You will make it soft.

The river water was let into the ditches to run to the fields. As the sluices were opened, the farmers prayed and threw feathers upon the first seeking ruffles of the muddy water in the dry ditches whose winter reeds had been burned down. As plants grew the farmers cultivated them with sharpened sticks. Each plant had its own little crater of shaped earth to conserve water. The fields were laid in long narrow strips touching at their ends to the river course so that each would have access to water. The farming lands were owned by the town, and each family man’s share was assigned to his use by the cacique’s council.

The growing plants had enemies that had to be watched out for. So, in a place commanding a good view of the fields and the country beyond them, the old men who could no longer do the work of irrigating and cultivating served as guardians of the fields. For this duty a lookout was built, eight or ten feet square and two stories high. Four posts held up the deck of the second floor and a brush roof over the top. There were no side walls, for the view had to be clear. But brush was sometimes set along one side as a windbreak. Under the platform, in the ground, there was a first floor made of a shallow pit with a fireplace and food storage. The guard sat up on top. Women came and prepared his food in the pit below him, while he kept up his watch against enemies. Sometimes they were Navahos, Apaches, Comanches who grew no food for themselves but knew where to find it all done for them. Sometimes it was birds who came to flock through the tender new plants and strip them clean. Small riverside animals sometimes found a crop to their taste and had to be scared away. The watchman often had a dog with him who could give chase, or bark an alarm, or simply doze and scratch companionably and affirm by his devoted presence how suitably things were arranged, with one to lead and one to follow, and behind both, the need, the power and the responsibility of the earthen town whose life came from the river.

As crops matured, the people danced for rain in late spring, full summer, and early fall. Then came the harvest. First the melons were taken in and stored, and then the corn. In many towns the ground was swept clean before the corn was brought through the streets from the fields. Everyone, men, women and children, took part in the harvest, which lasted for several days. It was a happy time, full of social exchange and pleasure. Neighbors helped one another. The storage bins were ready. The year’s hard work was over for a spell. Peace and plenty repaid virtue. The winter was coming when nothing would grow. The days would be bright, the nights cold, sometimes there would be ice on the river. The cottonwoods would turn golden and keep their dried leaves. The stalks and grasses by the water would be rods of rusty brown and black and pink and pale gold. In the fields, the corn husks would dry and crackle in the wind. The ditches would be clogged with withered weeds. Vegetation did not rot. It dried up. A seed planted then would be lost. But it did not matter, for now in harvesttime there was enough food to last through the coming months, and people could live.

If the summer was the man’s season, then winter was the woman’s. For the harvest was hers, and she knew what to do with it to make all its produce into good dishes to eat. There were two meals a day to prepare, the first in midmorning, when everyone had already been at work for several hours; the second in late afternoon, when smoke from cooking fires stood plain against the setting sunlight. The mother and her girls prepared the food. They had to have enough on hand in case anyone appeared at mealtime. This often happened. Brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents, felt free to go visiting and to take a meal in the family at any time. Friends sometimes came, too, with the unspoken question, What do you suppose she is going to serve this evening? They would find out, and whatever it was, they would know it represented the best the family could offer, for the news would travel fast if the guest found any evidence of poverty, carelessness or clumsiness in the meal. The company sat in a circle on the floor. The tone was one of gaiety and good humor, for it was not good manners to be gloomy or disagreeable while dining. The room was small, the air smoky, the floor hard, but with much to say, and plenty to taste, they all enjoyed themselves.

The staff of life was maize. It was prepared in many ways. It was boiled in the whole ear, or the ear was toasted over charcoal fire, and the corn was eaten off the cob. It was ground into meal and cooked as a mush and eaten hot. For anniversaries and dances and weddings, corn bread was made in fancy shapes called flowers, with fluted designs, or shell-coils, or petals, or little hunks pinched out into spikes. Thin large wafers of corn dough mixed with fine cottonwood ashes were baked into tortillas. Corn meal, ground fine, and toasted three times, was carried by travelers, who needed only to add water to it to have a nourishing dish called pinole.

Roots of wild onion and mariposa lily were cooked for green vegetables. Milkweed was eaten raw or boiled. Seed pods were boiled, and seeds often made into dumplings with corn dough. The berries of the ground-tomato and nuts from the oak and pine were eaten raw. Pumpkins were given as presents, and served uncooked, and also could be preserved. The housewife cut off the rind, opened one end of the pumpkin and scraped out seeds and pithy fibres, and put the pumpkin to dry overnight. The next day she tore it carefully into long, spiral strips, and hung each strip to dry on a cottonwood sapling which she had trimmed as a drying rack. When the pumpkin meat was dry, it could be bundled together and stored, until it was wanted for stewing and making into pies.

The people had meat on special occasions. They liked mountain sheep, deer, squirrel, prairie dog, mountain lion, badger, fox and the fat field mouse. Meat was cut into little strips and, unsalted, hung out in the sun to dry, after which it could be stored without spoiling. Fresh meat was cooked on sticks held over a fire of coals, or included in a stew with vegetables. Fat and marrow were the tastiest parts. When the ducks came down the river in the fall, or went back up in the spring, they snared them and cooked them between hot stones. They did not eat fish, for this reason: they said that two pueblos faced each other across the Rio Grande near the confluence of the Chama and the main river. The towns belonged to two groups of the same ancestry. Desiring intercourse, they said they would see that a bridge was built over the river between them. Their medicine men built it, reaching out from one bank with parrot feathers, and magpie feathers from the other. When the feather spans met, people used the bridge until evil witches one day overturned it, causing people to fall into the river, where they became fishes. The people said they must not eat their own bewitched relations.

They made tea from the leaves of coyote plant, coreopsis, mistletoe, and thelesperma, and if they wanted the bitter brew sweetened, they used corn syrup. Young girls whose mouths were pure were chosen to make the sweet syrup. For days before they worked, they kept spurge root in their mouths to clear their breaths. Then they chewed fine corn meal until it became a paste. This was added to a mixture of water and corn meal, and the cornstarch and the saliva of the maidens combined to make sugar. There was no alcoholic drink.

The people took much of their food from wild nature. After the corn harvests they went to the mountains to gather the little sweet nuts from the piñon tree, and crops of acorns and wild plum. Men and women, young and old, went on the expeditions, and for the young, these were occasions of love-making and courtship. To the children who stayed home in the pueblo the elders would bring back sticky juniper boughs loaded with frost-purple berries.

The pueblos never domesticated animals for food. One pueblo did not even have a word meaning animal. Each kind of animal had a specific name, and each creature had its own identity, like a living person. The dogs they lived with, perhaps the domestic mouse, the turkeys they kept for feathers, could no more be eaten than a person (for it was a long time since human sacrifice had taken place among them, even though to the south in Mexico it still was performed daily in untold numbers). But the wild animal was fair game, and the hunt was one of a man’s glories. It made him not only a provider, proud to bring home that which kept life going. It gave him a challenge, and it told him of his own animalhood which he must use with all his craft and power if he was to succeed over other creatures. The mountain lion was his hunting god, a symbol of the killer who saw with a piercing yellow stare, who moved as softly as cloud, and who killed with claws like lightning. On a mountain top above one abandoned plateau city, hunters had long ago carved two stones into the likenesses of the mountain lion, and later hunters carried little images of him in clay or stone when they went out.

Some useful animals were found near home—the prairie dog, whose bark the men could imitate to perfection, the beaver along the river, whose meat was good to eat, whose fur was needed in dance costumes. All the animals they hunted had many uses—food, hides and fur for clothes, bone for instruments, sinew for stitching and for bowstrings, leather for drumheads, pouches, bags. They said in one of the towns to the north that the animals of the hunt lived together far off to the west in a great kiva, and when the people needed them, they were sent out to be hunted. They were clever, and every skill had to be shown by the people, and by their dogs. Before a good hunting dog went out with his master, he was given food containing powdered bumblebees which would buzz and sting inside him and give him power.

Some hunts took place far away and lasted several days, some just for a day, near-by.

The deer hunt was often sacred if the meat was to be used in a ceremony. The deer was hunted by many men, who scattered until they could surround him. They closed toward him. They forced him to a trap, made of a great snare of yucca fibres, sometimes over two hundred feet long. They took him alive, and smothered him to death, so that his blood would not be spilled and his meat contaminated and made useless in the rites for which they took him. If the deer was captured for food and other use, he was killed with a knife. So with other animal victims too. When they came back dead with the hunting parties, they were received in the pueblo with great respect. Many more animals would be needed for food, and if they heard from the spirits of those already taken and killed how gentle the people were, how respectful of the loved creatures whom they had killed out of need, then when the hunters went out again, the wild quarry would be kind and come to be captured and killed and given honor. So they laid the bodies of the deer, and the other animals, on fur rugs; and covered them with blankets, and hung precious ornaments on them of turquoise and shell. The animal dead lay for a little while in pathetic splendor before being put to many uses.

Deer hunts were held in fall and spring, rabbit hunts many times a year, and for several different purposes. The ceremonial treasures of the kiva had to be fed—the kachina masks, the scalps collected in warfare, the sacred fetishes made by the medicine priests. Rabbit meat went for that, and the hunts were held in spring and fall. Other rabbit hunts were held in honor of the cacique and the war captain, to supply them with food and fur. The men alone hunted for these. In the fall, when harvesttime brought high spirits and symbolized sharp change in the year’s life, rabbit hunts were held for the girls, in which they were permitted to join. The koshare were in charge of the hunt, and, holding authority from all the people and the gods, performed without resistance from the people whom they mocked, chastised and humiliated. They seemed to act on witless impulse, and they also gave freedom to the spirit of the perverse and the sardonic which lived somewhere in everyone, and never otherwise escaped into comic mockery of life and its origin. The power of the koshare was absolute when they took charge. They called the girls and men and boys to the hunt, telling them the time and place to assemble. Woe to them if they were late. What happened to them was the worst kind of punishment—they were made objects of derision. The koshare watched for those who came late, had them lined up in the presence of all the other hunting men and girls, and ordered them to show their sexual parts to everyone. The victims were half-ashamed, half-satisfied at making a sensation, and all went on the hunt in high spirits.

The men were armed with throwing sticks with which to kill rabbits. The girls did not kill. They all walked to the hunting place. Girls brought food along for lunch. When a man killed a rabbit, all the girls broke loose in a run and each tried to be first to pick up the dead game. Whoever touched it first could keep it, and take it home. At lunchtime she was the one who had to feed the man who killed the rabbit. The koshare watched to see that all was properly conducted. After lunch the hunt was resumed. The party spread out and drove the rabbits within an always contracting circle. Now and then someone, a man, a girl, would be far out on the circle, and might disappear together behind a protecting bush or rock. If they were certain they had not been noticed, they had forgotten the koshare, who came to see what they were doing. If they were coupled together carnally, the koshare broke them apart, and took them back to the party in captivity for the rest of the day. News of the arrest, and what for, would spread, and everyone with amusement would wait for what came next, for all knew what must follow. At the day’s end, when the hunt was over, and the whole party gathered together to return to the pueblo, the koshare produced their prisoners and had them resume and complete before everyone the act which had been interrupted. After this, all went home. The girls took their trophy rabbits with them, and cooked them for their families to eat.

On the hunts they encountered members of the reptile creation, but did not fear them. The rattlesnake was the only poisonous snake in that part of the river world, and though the people knew of its dangerous nature, they did not regard it with horror. Some of them used the murderous snake in ceremonies as messenger to the cardinal points of the world. The swift, a little gilded lizard, was the supernatural of the sixth, or downward, point of direction. Turtles sometimes lay in their path. They saw many of the harmless horned lizard, or horned toad, and blue and green racer snakes, brown bull snakes, little water snakes with black and gold stripes running the length of their bodies. Deep and dim was the memory of past life which came stepping down the generations in talk; the people knew of a curious mixture in nature between snake and bird, each of whom was born in an egg. They made prayers to their image of the feathered serpent, and believed prodigies of a bird that could crawl and a snake that could fly. Land and sky with all their separate mysteries were brought together in that god, and in thread and paint the people made his picture again and again.

To find certain game the hunters had to go far away from home. For the big bear they went deep into the mountains to the north, and for the bison whose robe was so rich, whose meat was so good, and whose head and horns were such mighty ornaments for the dance, the men of the pueblos went to the eastern plains. Out of their own valley of the Rio Grande, they followed a pass eastward to the valley of another river, the Pecos, which began its life between high mountain walls. But the eastern wall ended more or less due east from the central Rio Grande world, and the hunters came up a grand escarpment to the plains not long after crossing the Pecos. They had to go carefully in some years, for the plains people sometimes came that far west, and not always for peaceful purposes. But with care and good fortune, the Pueblo men could advance to the immensity of flat land and hunt the buffalo. They could see, it seemed, forever, if time and distance there became one. The horizon was clear and flat and the light was stunning. Stiff grass grew everywhere, and in dry years was brittle and yellow. From time to time they would see far away what looked like a grove of trees. But there were no trees on that plain. Those tree trunks, rising to dark blurs of joined treetops were actually the legs of buffalo against the white lower sky, and the heavy tree crowns were their bodies—all optically enlarged in the shining air. The buffalo at first were not afraid. Sometimes they moved off in answer to scents on the wind. Sometimes they watched the hunters approach. When the attack came they would heave and run away together. The hunters had their plans. They set great snares and then as in the rabbit and deer hunts they separated and began to drive the buffalo inward to the trap. They set fires around the circle they made and the big herds ran against them in confusion and were turned back as the burning circle narrowed. In high weather, the sky was blinding blue and the sunlight white. Strenuous buffalo-colored smoke blew upward in rolling clouds. Fire in daylight at the edge of the hunt showed yellow and red and brighter than the air. There were yells and commotion. Silvery waves of heat arose. The buffalo stormed from side to side. Their eyes glared sidewise in terror as they fled to their doom. Behind them came the naked hunters shining with sweat and triumph, making calls and motions of menace. Blue, black, straw, curly smoke and pelt, running flame and figure—the picture ended with the capture and the kill.

It was a different picture when they hunted buffalo in the winter. They found the great herds black against the snow and searched until they found deep drifts piled up on unseen obstacles by the hard north wind that made storm on those plains. Spreading out on the white flat land, in a thin line of dark dots, the hunters began to drive the herd toward the drifts of snow. In the end, the buffalo got in deeper and deeper, until at last they could flounder no more and were caught for red slaughter on the white drift.

There were years when plains people, the Comanches, came west bringing buffalo furs and horns to the river people to exchange for corn, corn meal and other precious things. Products and stories, habits and words, beliefs and wonders—there was much to trade.

viii. travel and trade

The Rio Grande pueblo world had corridors to other worlds. Mountain passes to the east gave upon the great prairies. Deserts and mountain parallels to the west finally led to the sea. The river’s own valley led south to Mexico through a pass which opened on a vast plain just as the river turned southeastward on the course which finally took it to the sea. With these roads open, the people yet did not travel them very far, and only the hunt took them away from their pueblo world. The river towns knew one another, and exchanged visits, and took part in one another’s dances, and showed, and sometimes traded, curious rare objects that had come from nobody knew just where, or by what crawling pace, through what perilous distance. A stranger now and then appeared, walking, moving into the sight at first like a fleck of dust that bobbed on the glaring distance and seemed to come hardly nearer. He would be noticed. Someone saw him and told. Without seeming to, many people watched, as they went on with their work. Where was he from. What would he want. What did he bring. Was he alone. Perhaps he finally arrived half a mile away and sat down and stared at the pueblo for a while and rested. And then moving gradually so as not to be noticed, he came closer, and was at last where people could hear him, and see his ingratiating nods, as he unpacked his pouch and revealed bits of color.

Perhaps he came from northern Mexico, where he obtained from another man who got it from another farther south who in turn had it from a hunting party in the jungle a bundle of macaw feathers—sunflower yellow, scarlet, sky blue, copper green. For their rarity, beauty and sacred meaning, they were wanted for ceremonial use on masks, headdresses, robes. Sometimes the trader brought with him a live macaw with its feathers still in place. That was a treasure. The bird changed hands and after an honored lifetime of yielding its blazing feathers to the needs of ritual, was buried in the pueblo with ceremony, prayers and fetishes.

Perhaps he came from the deserts to the west, bringing a rare red paint, chips of agate, and fine baskets which had come to him through many hands.

If he came from the plains, the trader might have with him not only the useful products of the buffalo, but also worked buckskin, moccasins, odd foods.

The pueblos were a thousand miles from the sea, with every danger of weather, distance, time, human and animal conflict, desert and mountain between. Yet the trader, walking, for there was no other way to travel, might have with him a pouch of little sea shells that came either from the ocean to the west or the gulf to the southeast. The trader may never have seen the sea; but others had, and what they found came slowly and through many relays to the upper river whose origin and whose end, in relation to its populated part, none of the people knew. The shells were acquired and made into necklaces, pendants, fringe. From the western sea came over sixty species of shells, and from the gulf, nearly a dozen. Red coral beads came through tribe after tribe, from the seacoast inland.

The trader may have brought stone tools to offer, or a few pots to exchange for the kind made by the women here in the town.

And beyond all that, there was much to tell about and to hear.

The walking trader might come alone, but often he had company. Even so, in such a wilderness, reaching so far and open without forest and with little water, it took an intermittent multitude toiling on foot in tiny, scattered bands across rocky space immeasurable time to make their mark. But they made it. Trails were established, first in relayed knowledge of landmarks, and then in barely worn but visible pathways that were like the first tributaries of communication struggling to feed a stream of knowledge.

The incoming traders looked for things to take back with them when they left. News of what was to be had always took people to country strange to them. In the river towns, traders saw the accumulated produce of the pueblo farms. There was corn meal to be had, either coarse, or ground fine in pinole. Dried pumpkin seeds, squash were bartered. Irrigation ditches ran to cotton fields, and picked cotton was made into cloth, and cloth could be carried away in bulk, or in the form of shirts, kilts, sashes, or shawls. Mineral and vegetable dyes were used to decorate such garments. The traders might trade for the knowledge of how to use such colors.

There was one color and substance they wanted most, for the river pueblos had much of it, and prized it dearly. It was turquoise, and the people knew of a place, the only place in the river world, where it could be found in the earth. South of the site of Santa Fe, they mined turquoise for centuries in undisputed ownership. They made necklaces and ear pendants of the rich green-blue stone, usually carving little discs which they pierced and strung on yucca fibre. It was their principal jewel, and as such it was given to the gods in costumes, vessels, masks, fetishes with sacred meaning—and sometimes with magnificence: in one ancient town there was a superb basket, made in the shape of a cylinder, paved with 1,214 turquoises. If the people had treasure to bury, it was turquoise, and bits of red coral, which they put into large jars and hid in the earth.

Not only trade from far away made trails. The river people themselves went travelling to fulfill their needs, one of which was salt. They knew where to find it, in great deposits across the mountains to the east of the Rio Grande, and about in a line with the southernmost of the river pueblos. There, across that mountain range from the river valley, lived other town people who spoke a different language. They occupied ten or more communities, and their life faced out across the great plains to the east. Mountains behind them divided them from the river world. Precariously they survived the wandering fighters of the plains who came periodically to make war. Their bleak riches were the salt deposits which lay in a series of shallow, white lakes surrounded by low curving hills whose skyline seemed like the idling path of a circling and banking vulture. In some years the lakes were dry and the salt glistened dry at the sun. In others, a milky water filmed over the beds and rippled like cotton cloth when the wind came. Little vegetation grew about the lakes. They were like part of the underworld exposed. Nobody stayed by the brackish water for very long, but gathered up salt, and made whatever trade was necessary, and returned on the trail through the mountains to the river.

They saw much along the way. There were long-abandoned towns here and there, and from the ruins the travellers could learn something about the vanished inhabitants. Wanderers sometimes came to the pueblo world from down south on the river where, they said, there once flourished life in river caves that was long since gone. The river went more or less straight south, as you left the pueblo cities, and for the most part, the best—though not very good—trails were along the west side, for on the east, mountains came very close to the river and made travel difficult if not impossible. But finally after its usual succession of canyons and flat, fertile valleys, and after finding a pass between the ends of two mountain ranges, the river turned southeastward across a hard desert. Travellers had little reason to go there. They said that as far away as many days of walking, the river entered mountains which no man could enter, and disappeared between high rock walls into deep shadow. There were few people there.

But news of the other people who had once lived in river caves far away drifted with the wanderers. (These were the caves of the Big Bend and below.) The Pueblo dwellers listened, though the facts were scattered and few. Still, they could recognize by their own ways what other people must have been like.

The caves were in a great rocky wall of a river far to the southeast. (Was it the same river? It might be. And yet it was very far away. Rivers came from many places. Who could be sure?) The rocks were marked with lines like the flow of water. Water once made the caves and filled them and then left them as the river floor fell. People came to live in them for part of the year, passing the rest of the seasons on the flat plain above the river cliffs. On the cave walls and on near-by rocks they made pictures by scratching with hard stone. They drew animals and the four directions and made marks to show time passing, and more often than anything else they drew hands in outline on the rock. There: hand, meaning a person was here; the thumb spread, the fingers straight. On a wall, hand. On a flat stone up on the plain, hand. I, long ago, hand now, and forever, said the rocks, without saying who, exactly.

From the river they took smooth large pebbles the size of the palm of your hand and painted upon them various yellow, blue and gray lines and made certain spaces which sometimes looked like a man, sometimes like nothing to see but like something to think. They carried these, or made offerings of them in ceremonies, or buried them. They took their colors from rock and berry. With a hollowed bone from a deer’s leg filled with color that could ooze from a little hole in the end, they drew their shapes and spaces.

They had no corn, but near their places up on the plain above the cliff they gathered berries and yucca and ate of them. In time bushes and stalks grew nearer to the cave entrances, as seeds were dropped near the shelter. Paths and toe holds—the only way to the caves—led from the plain above. The men fished in the river where they could get to it. They used hooks made from bent thorns of devil’s-head cactus, and yucca fibre nets weighted with round stones, and stone fish-knives. With a throwing stick from which they discharged spear and arrow they hunted running animals. With bone daggers they struck a wounded animal to death.

There were not many caves—less than a dozen, and only one family lived in each, at a time. They built fires under the overhang of rock, using long slender wooden drills which they palmed to spinning against a wooden hearth to make smoke, spark and flame. From the dry hard brush of the plain they gathered little bundles of kindling.

Like many people they wore few clothes in warm seasons, when the men went bare, and the women wore skirts made of yucca fibre that was corded and woven into matting. In cold times, they all wore blankets of lechuguilla fibre twisted with strips of rabbit fur. Traders rarely came their way, and so they had no turquoise, no red coral for necklaces. Instead, they strung together something that made beads, that was fairly hard to get, even dangerous, and was therefore valuable and not entirely commonplace. It was the vertebrae of the rattlesnake.

What they used more than anything else were baskets and other articles woven from fibre or straw or tender twigs. They made no pottery. But baskets served to cook in and eat from. The children had toy baskets to play with. Even bracelets were made of basketwork. They came to know, as anyone might, how to make baskets from watching birds. The parent birds brought little twigs and bits of grass to make a nest, twining them in and out until a little cup-shaped wall was made. There the nestlings were safe as they grew. A woman of the river caves in time would have her nestling and must carry him with her and keep him. If she wove a nest for him out of fibres, she might make other things in the same way.

As children grew within each family, they met new times of life during ceremonies which told them fearful things and made them able. The gods lived in the sun, in fire and in the snakes of the canyon and the plain. People of the river, and those far away to the south beyond the river in Mexico, prayed to the same powers. Shaped stones and modelled clay represented other powers to help men make and keep life through the day’s hard work of providing shelter and food—coyotes, bears, lions, frogs, wolves.

All about them on both sides of the river, ranged other people who hunted everywhere, never staying to live and worship and grow in one place; but always prowling to kill. They were Comanches, Apaches, Lipans. Lipantitlan was the rippling name of the domain where they roved. They came to the caves, perhaps many times, and in the end, they finished forever what was trying to fix its life there above the river in the rocky walls. It was like much life in many other places of the desert and mountain land. It did not last very long, but it made signs, even in death.

A body was buried in rock shelters or under piled rocks in the open. Its limbs were gathered against itself and bound. A few of its meagre possessions were placed with it—things to work with and to pray. Woven fibre matting was wrapped around all, and where at last it lay, a blanket of cactus leaves, thick and bristling with sharp needles, was put to protect and cover all. On a flat rock face near-by was a picture that said “Hand,” and meant “Forever.”

Below, in its rocky trough, the river went on and presently—not very far off—was joined by another big river from the north—the Pecos of today. The two streams came along the flat sides of a great rock wedge that ended sharply, like a stone hatchet. They went on as one river when they met below the hatchet edge.

All along the river there were wandering people, even at the coast where the brown water went into the green sea. People travelling inland followed rivers, and those by the sea followed the shore. Out of Mexico went travellers up along the coast, coming to the mouth of the river, crossing it, and going on beyond to see what they could find. The travellers met trouble at times, for the people who roved the great vaporous sea-plain were hostile. They were naked hunters, always moving, and they attacked not only animals but people, and when they made any kill, they ate of it. Otherwise on the sandy plain where the sky all day long changed from thick to thin and back again, there was little to be had except roots in the sand and food from the sea. They snatched the white crabs of the beach and fished in the surf and in the end-waters of the river that passed through empty wilderness to meet the tide.

In news that came to the river pueblos from travellers who had seen, or heard, all of it, there was little of any other cities that lived anywhere else along the river. Towns at the river’s mouth were made of sand grasses that blew away in hurricane or fell down dry if the rovers left them for long. A few dug-out pits roofed with yucca stalks clung to the river in the middle desert (southeast of the site of El Paso) whose people grew corn and went to the buffalo plains to hunt. But it was much harder country than the pueblo valleys up north—rockier, hotter, barer, dryer. Sometimes the desert part of the river failed to run. Its mountains were too far away to renew it. It was, there below, a river to cross, not to live along. The pueblo people were the only ones, with their many towns up and down the green, gold, blue, black and pink valley of their world, to whom the river through a thousand years gave continuing life, and connection with one another.

People from the farthest north pueblo, Taos, which was on a plateau too high for the growing of cotton, came south to the central towns below the volcanic canyons of the river, where the land forms stepped down immensely and the farms lay two thousand feet lower in altitude, and traded for cotton cloth.

During November men from the red rocks and plains of the west came on travels to see dances and to make trades, and went home again to their own towns, that were made of shale and mud plaster.

Other travellers, the Navahos, wandered with the seasons, and sometimes reached the western edge of the river world. If fixed with the spirit of war, they struck, thieved, and fled. If at peace, they threw up their mud cells, like wasps’ hives, and dwelled in them awhile. If someone died in a Navaho hut, it was fearfully abandoned and a new one built by the survivors. The house meant nothing in itself. Thus, neither did a town, or a place. The Navaho moved, always just ahead of his hunger and his fear.

Stable, relatively secure amidst all such movements and motives, the river people received the trails as they were made, and maintained themselves at home by their work, their search for harmony with the visible world, and their endless propitiation of forces of whose existence they dreamed but whose nature they did not know.

ix. personality and death

Imprisoned in their struggle with nature, the people sought for an explanation of the personality they knew in themselves and felt all about them, and came to believe in a sorcery so infinitely distributed among all objects and creatures that no act or circumstance of life was beyond suspicion as evil or destructive. Neighbors might be trusted; but they had also to be watched in secret, for who knew who among them might finally turn out to be a witch? If every object, every animal, every man and woman quivered with the same unseen personal spirit, to whom prayers might be said, and of whom in anxiety blessings could be asked, then they could also and with terrible swiftness turn out to be agents for evil. Long ago, they said, the young war gods Masewi and Oyoyewi, the powerful twins, lived amongst the people, and protected them by killing witches and giants. Nature was vast and people were little and danger was everywhere. But (in the universal canon of faith which brings to every Goliath his David) there was the very cast of hope in the people who imagined their survival and triumph in the midst of menace, then willed it, and even by implausible means achieved it.

But at great cost.

Anyone suspected of sorcery was put to death, often in secret, often by individuals acting without formal sanction. What would identify a witch? A vagrant idea in someone’s head; a dream (for dreams were always seen as truth, as actual life encountered by the spirit freed from the sleeping body); a portent in nature; perhaps a conspicuous act, aspect or statement, anything too unusual, too imaginative in unfamiliar terms; persistent misfortune or sickness among the people which must be blamed upon someone—the notion could come from anywhere. If only one or two people knew of the witch, he might be secretly killed. If everyone suspected him and knew about him, he would be accused and pressed to confess. In their search for a victim the people sometimes fixed upon an ancient person who had outlived his family and, obtaining a confession through torture, exiled him to another pueblo or simply killed him. Sometimes people in one town would discover a witch in another town who was causing them grief, and would murder him virtuously. Retaliation, inspired by the highest motives, would follow. The killing of witches at times reached such numbers that whole towns were nearly wiped out by it.

Otherwise believers in peace, and calm, measured life, the people sanctioned their only outbreak of violence in connection with punishment of witches, whose machinations, they said, threatened the communal safety of life. Was that very communality itself an expression not so much of the dignity of men and women as their fear—a fear which put them always on guard, created a propriety of the commonplace, and held as its core a poisonous distrust of one another? The old people told the children that no one could know the hearts of men: there were bad people—witches—everywhere. Evil resided in them, and never came from the gods. The gods were exempted from doubt or blame. All believed so and, believing, all followed the same superstitions in the same strength of mind. Such strong beliefs, laced through with such compelling fears, created a personality common to the people as a whole.

Men went out during the night to encounter the spirits at sacred sites. They went in fear and returned trembling, whatever their experience, for they went to garner omens for themselves. Going home from the shrine they must not look behind them, no matter what might seem to be following them. They would consider gravely before they would tell what they had encountered, for what had been gained could be lost if not kept secret. It would not be a sin to tell—there was no guilt in the people since they were not responsible for what nature did to them—but in telling a secret, new power against menace might be lost. Ordeals were spiritual rather than physical. Endurance of torture was demanded only of witches.

The personality had many private faces, each with a new name. A man had his name given at birth as a child of the sun. When he joined a kiva, he received another, and another when he entered any organization, and he was nicknamed after his various duties and kinds of work. The personality was renewed and purified by ritual acts, such as vomiting. Before all ceremonial dances, all taking part were required to vomit in the early morning for four days (four was a powerful number in all ways). They said that those who vomited breathed differently from those who had not. “After you vomit four days you’re changed.” A man thus purged left the daily world and entered the supernatural.

The personality was clever. A man prowling in hostile country wore sandals made of wooden hoops wound with thongs of rabbitskin. His footprints were round; from them, he was sure, nobody would tell which way he was coming or going.

The personality could be shared: images of men or animals were made in gestures of menace, to frighten trespassers away from property.

And the personality was vain, for the people of this town looked down upon the people of that town, saying that those others did not hunt so well, or farm, or fight, or sing, or dance, or race, so well as we do, the poor crazy things, with their silly ways, and their bad imitations of what we do which they stole by watching us secretly. But this was a pitying superiority, without anger or quarrel.

The most immediate medium of personality was talk. The people of the river world did not all speak the same language, but were divided into two general groups, Keres and Tewa, each of which had its localized variations. But all derived from the same mother tongue long ago far in Mexico, and ventured northward with the farming people and their maize. In spite of differences in language the river pueblos with minor local variations lived under much the same beliefs, customs and ways of work. Their language was expressive and exact. The men spoke it with voices that seemed to try to escape from smothering. They formed some words deep in the throat. Others were framed lightly on the lips. Some ideas were given through little pauses in a series of sounds, and a tiny round-mouthed silence became eloquent. Their words were never written even though in Mexico the mother tongue of the Aztec people was used in written form. The pueblo people taught all their knowledge by word of mouth. The greatest body of it had to do with ceremony and ritual. “One who knows how”—that was a man of power who remembered all that had been told to him. For the dances those “who knew how” had to memorize tremendous amounts of ritual, word-perfectly. Such men showed great powers of mind which their life in other directions hardly equalled. The great movements of time and the seasons, the acts of life and work, the inherited stories of the gods, the forms of prayers, all had to be stored in mind, along with their many variations and combinations, until a vast body of knowledge rested trembling and precarious on the spoken thread of the generations that was spun from elder to youth. Thus even the act of literature was not individual but co-operative, since it took one to tell, and another or more to listen, and remember. Much of what was so recorded in memory was to be kept secret among those “who knew how.” If a man betrayed them, he was punished. The war captains put him naked within a circle drawn upon the ground. He must not lie down, but stand or sit. If he moved to step across the circle he was shot with arrows by the captains.

People within a language group visited one another’s towns. Before he went, a man had his hair washed by the women of his family before sunrise, and his body bathed in yucca suds. They gave him a new name for his venture. At the end of his journey, if he found a friend awaiting him, he took his hand and breathed upon it, and clasping it with both hands lifted it toward the sky without words, for joy muted his speech.

“May I live so long,” prayed the people, “that I may fall asleep of old age.” The personality ended with death and had to be exorcised from living memory, and become one with all ancestry, impersonal, benign and beyond fear. When a man lay dying among his relatives they sent for the doctors of the curing society that combatted witches. Then doctors came and undressed the dying man to examine him carefully. If he was already dead, they put a cotton blanket over him. His people brought all his clothes to the doctors who tore little holes in each garment to let its life, too, escape and leave the dead cloth. They folded the arms of the dead across his breast, tying his wrists together. His legs they closed up against his body. They wrapped him in this huddled position with cotton blankets. His clothes were included. A feather robe was folded about him next, and lastly, a yucca matting was bundled over all, and tied with a woman’s sash. Crouched in silence within its wrappings the body was a restatement of the attitude of birth, when the unborn infant was folded within the womb; and bound by a mother’s cincture to the womb of all it was now returned. The doctors rinsed their mouths and washed their hands, saying to each other,

“Now he is gone.”

“Yes, he is gone back to Shipapu.”

“The place from where all emerged.”

“He is gone back to Shipapu.”

The family took the body out of doors to burial in the open ground, or in a rocky crevice, or in a midden. With it were placed water and food. The food was cooked, so the dead could feed on its aroma. The dead man’s turquoises, his weapons, his tools were buried with him, for he was now about to set out on his journey to the underworld from which all life had come, and his spirit would need the spirits of all such articles to use in the life that awaited him. He was on his way to be one with the gods themselves. At the end of his journey he would take up again what he did in the world, whether as hunter, farmer, priest, or dancer.

Four days after his burial, his personality was finally expunged with ceremony. The doctors returned to his house and arranged an altar on which they laid sacred ears of corn, bear paws, a medicine bowl and kachinas. They sang songs and ceremonially cooked food for the ghost to smell. They made a painting on the floor with colored corn meal. He was gone, and to confirm this and help him where he now would be forever, they made a bundle of offerings containing moccasins in which he might journey, a dancer’s kilt and turtleshell rattle and parrot feathers and necklace which he might use to start rain from the ghostly world. They buried this out of doors. Underground, he would find it. Doctors then dipped eagle feathers into the medicine bowl on the altar and sprinkled the meal painting, the sacred implements and the people. They swept the walls of the dead man’s room with the eagle feathers to brush away his spirit, and they went to other houses where he had last been seen and did the same. Returning to the house of the ghost, they sang again, and all settled down to a feast provided by the family. A few morsels were thrown aside by the doctors for the spirits. At the end of the repast, the doctors arose and were given finely ground grain for their services. They destroyed the painting and took up its colored meal in a cloth which they gave to a woman, who carried it to the river. There she threw it into the water which for all his life had flowed by the dead man, had sustained him, purified him, and which now took away his last sign forever, through the shade of cottonwoods and into the sweet blue light of distant mountains beyond the pale desert.