“Isn’t it hard to believe that life should be so intricate and complex among those meek, adobe houses on that low hill?” We were on the last mile or so of the forty-mile drive through the red sandstone above and below, and the green cedar and spruce and sagebrush from Gallup to Zu?i; behind us to the southeast was the great mesa to which three centuries ago the people had escaped for a while from Spanish arrogance, the mesa where one day we were to seek for the shrines of the War Leaders and the Song Youth and the Earth Woman as we ostensibly hunted rabbits; and before us, barely in sight, so quietly does an Indian pueblo fit into the landscape, were the rectangular blocks of the many-storied Zu?i houses whose flat roofs make broken lines, mesa-like, against the sky. At the highest point, a three-storied house, the town crier was probably at that very moment calling out to the townspeople the orders of the governor and council for the following day; but we were still too far away to hear, quiet as was the air, and our unarrested eyes turned westward to the flaming spectacle of a sunset the like of which is not to be seen outside the sweeping valley plain of Zu?i.
Now and again, as you walk between those “meek, adobe houses,” dodging a snouting pig, or assuming indifference to the dogs that dash out from every corner to snarl or yelp; now and again as you see the villagers going about their daily affairs, men driving in from the fields, or taking the horses in or out of the corrals, women fetching water from the well or bound on a visit to a neighbor, little boys chasing one another and babies playing about in the dirt, now and again that first impression of material simplicity returns and with it the feeling that the round of life must be simple, too. But the feeling never lasts long, never holds its own with the crowding impressions of ceremonial rain dance or pilgrimage or domiciliary visitation, of baffling sacerdotal organization and still more baffling sacerdotal feuds, of elaborate pantheon, of innumerable myths and tales, of associations in story or cult with every hill and rock and 158 spring, of kinship ramifications and matrimonial histories, of irksome relationships with Mexicans and “Americans,” and of village gossip which is made up so comprehensively of the secular and the sacred as to pass far beyond the range of even a New England church social.
It is not surprising that accounts of Zu?i are often bewildering. In our own complex culture biography may be a clarifying form of description. Might it not avail at Zu?i? I venture this biography of Waiyautitsa.[6]
Waiyautitsa is a girl’s name; sex generally appears in Zu?i personal names. Sex appears somewhat in speech too. Waiyautitsa in learning to talk will make use of expressions, particularly exclamations, peculiar to women. In a recent list of the first words used by a Zu?i child, a boy, there was noted a comparatively large number of kinship terms in his vocabulary. The kinship terms of little Waiyautitsa would be somewhat different from a boy’s. He calls a younger sister ikina; a younger brother, suwe; she calls either hani, meaning merely the younger. And, as the Zu?i system of kinship terms is what is called classificatory, cousins having the same terms as brother and sister, Waiyautitsa has even fewer words than her brother to express cousinship.
When Waiyautitsa is three or four years old she may be recognized as a girl not merely from her speech, but from her dress, from her cotton slip; at this age little boys wear trousers. But not for another three or four years, perhaps longer, will Waiyautitsa wear over her cotton slip the characteristic Pueblo woman’s dress,—the black blanket dress fastened on the left shoulder and under the right arm and hence called in Zu?i, watone, meaning “across,” the broad belt woven of white, green and red cotton, the store-bought kerchief or square of silk (pitone) which, fastened in front, hangs across shoulders and back, and the small foot, thick leg moccasins which cover ankle and calf in an envelope of fold upon fold of buckskin. Before Waiyautitsa is eight or even six she may, however, when she goes out, cover her head and body with a black blanket or with the gay colored “shawl” similarly worn. And I have seen very little girls indeed wearing moccasins or the footless black stockings Zu?i women also wear, or “dressing up” in a pitone, that purely ornamental article of159 dress without which no Zu?i woman would venture outdoors. Without her pitone she would feel naked, she says, and any man would be at liberty to speak disrespectfully to her. When Waiyautitsa is about five, her hair, before this worn, like the boys, in a short cut, is let grow into a little tail on the nape of her neck. In course of time her pigtail will be turned up and tied with a “hair belt” of white, green and red cloth. From ear to ear her front hair will be banged to the end of her nose, the bang drawn sidewise above the forehead except at such times in ceremonials when it is let fall forward to conceal the upper part of the face.
This hair arrangement serves in ceremonials as a kind of mask, as you may see in the frontispiece picture of the headdress worn in the Thlahawe, a woman’s corn dance. A mask proper, that quasi fetich which has so important a place in Pueblo ceremonialism, Waiyautitsa will in all probability never wear. Unlike her brother, Waiyautitsa will not be initiated in childhood into the Kachina society, and consequently she will not join one of the six sacred clubhouses or estufas which supply personators for the Kachinas or masked dancers. Not that female personages do not figure in these ceremonials, but as was the rule on the Elizabethan stage, women are impersonated by men.
To this exclusion of girls from the Kachina society and from participating in the masked dances there are a few exceptions. To-day three women belong to the Kachina society. They were taken into it not in childhood, but in later life and, it is said, for one of the same reasons women as well as men are taken into the other societies of Zu?i. Cured by ceremonial whipping of the bad effects of nightmare or of some other ailment, they were “given” to the estufa credited through one of its members with the cure. Of the three women members only one is said to dance, and she is accounted mannish, katsotse, girl-man, a tomboy.
Waiyautitsa will likely not be initiated into the kotikyane, but she is quite likely to be initiated into another society,—into the Great-fire-brand or Little fire-brand, or Bedbug or Ant or Wood society, into any one of the thirteen Zu?i societies except three, the bow priesthood or society of warriors, of warriors who have taken a scalp, or the Hunter society or the Cactus society, a society that cures arrow or gun-shot wounds. As women do not hunt or go to war, from mem160bership in these groups they are excluded or, better say, precluded. As we shall see later, affiliation by sex is, in ceremonial affairs, along the lines of customary occupation.
If Waiyautitsa falls sick and is cured by a medicine man of the medicine order of a society she must be “given” either to the family of the medicine man or to his society. Initiated she may not be, however, for a long time afterwards, perhaps for years. Initiations take place in the winter when school is in session, the school either of the Indian Bureau or of the Dutch Reformed Church, and for that reason, it is said, initiations may be postponed until past school age. Despite the schools, I may say, I have met but two Zu?i women who speak English with any fluency. One woman is a member of the Snake-medicine society, into which she was initiated after convalescence from measles, a decimating disease at Zu?i, to be accounted for only through witchcraft. The other woman was accounted the solitary convert of the Dutch Reformed Church Mission in Zu?i until six or seven years ago she joined the Wood society because as a child she had been cured by them of smallpox.
After initiation, the women, like the men of a society, offer prayer sticks each moon, observing continence for four days thereafter, and they join in the four-day retreat in the ceremonial house of the society preliminary to an initiation. Unlike the men, however, the women do not spend the entire night, only the evening, in the society house, and, while there, they are listeners rather than narrators of the inexhaustible folk tales that are wont to be told at society gatherings. Men are the custodians of the lore, secular as well as esoteric, of the tribe, just as men and not women are the musicians. The men are devoted singers, singing as they dance or singing as a choir for dancers, and singing as they go to or from work in the fields, or as they drive their horses to water in the river or to the corrals on the edges of the town. Even grinding songs are sung on ceremonial occasions by men.
In the public appearances of the society, the women members figure but little. Societies supply choirs and drummers and ceremonial road openers or leaders to the masked dancers and, during the great koko awia (Kachina coming) or shalako ceremonial, to various groups of sacred personages. I have seen several dances in Zu?i and one celebration of koko awia, and I have seen but one woman officiate 161 in public. As a daughter of the house which was entertaining the koyemshi or sacred clowns she was in attendance upon that group in the koko awia or Advent, so to speak, of 1915.
If Waiyautitsa belongs to a society, she will offer or plant the befeathered prayer sticks, which are so conspicuous a feature of Pueblo religion, but, being a woman, Waiyautitsa will not cut or dress the sticks. She will only grind the pigments and, perhaps, paint the sticks. Nor as a woman would she offer the sticks on certain other ceremonial occasions when the men offer them. Once a year, however, at the winter solstice ceremonial on which so much of Zu?i ritualism pivots, Waiyautitsa will be expected, even in infancy, to plant, planting for the “old ones,” i. e., the ancestors and for the Moon, but not, like the men, for the Sun or, unless a member of the Kachina society, for the ancestral beings, the Kachina.
At the conclusion of the winter solstice ceremonial, when certain sacred figures called kwelele go from house to house, the women carry embers around the walls of the house and throw them out on the kwelele. It is the rite of shuwaha, cleansing, exorcism. There are a number of other little rites peculiar to the women in Zu?i ceremonialism. Through them, and through a number of rites they share with the men, through provisions for supplying food in the estufa to the sacred personators or for entertaining them at home or making them presents, women have an integral part in Zu?i ceremonialism. In what we may call the ceremonial management, however, they appear to have little or no part.
Even when women are initiated into the Kachina society, or are associated with the ashiwanni or rain priests, their functions seem to be primarily of an economic or housekeeping order. The women members of the rain priesthoods have to offer food every day to the fetiches of these sacerdotal groups—to stones carved and uncarved, and to cotton-wrapped lengths of cane filled with “the seeds the people live by.” For the seed fetiches to be in any way disturbed in the houses to which they are attached, involves great danger to the people, and on a woman in the house, the woman member of the priesthood, falls the responsibility of guardianship or shelter. But even these positions of trust are no longer held by women—there are only six women ashiwanni among the fifteen priesthoods. The woman’s position among the paramount priesthood, the rain priesthood162 of the North, has been vacant now for many years—no suitable woman being willing, they say, to run the risks or be under the tabus of office. Aside from this position of woman ashiwanni, women count for little or nothing in the theocracy of Zu?i. They were and are associated with the men priests to do the work pertinent to women. In the case of the Zu?i pantheon or its masked impersonations, the association is needed to satisfy or carry out, so to speak, Zu?i standards or concepts of conjugality. The couple rather than the individual is the Zu?i unit. Sometimes, in ceremony or in myth, the couple may consist of two males.
There is one masked couple I have noted in particular at Zu?i, the atoshle. Two or three times during the winter our little Waiyautitsa, together with other girls and very little boys, may expect to be frightened by the atoshle, the disciplinary masks who serve as bugaboos to children as well as a kind of sergeant-at-arms, the male atoshle at least, for adults. If the children meet the old man and his old woman in the street, they run away helter-skelter. If the dreadful couple visits a child indoors, sent for perhaps by a parent, the child is indeed badly frightened. I suppose that Waiyautitsa is six or seven years old when one day, as an incident of some dance, the atoshle “come out” and come to her house. The old woman atoshle carries a deep basket on her back in which to carry off naughty children and in her hand a crook to catch them by the ankle. With the crook she pulls Waiyautitsa over to the grinding stones in the corner of the room, telling her that now she is getting old enough to help her mother about the house, to look after the baby and, before so very long, to grind. She must mind her mother and be a good girl. I once saw a little girl so terrified by such admonition that she began to whimper, hiding her head in her mother’s lap until the atoshle was sprinkled with the sacred meal and left the house to perform elsewhere his role of parent’s assistant.
Whether from fear, from supernatural fear or fear of being talked about as any Zu?i woman who rests or idles is talked about, or whether from example, more from the latter no doubt than from the former, Waiyautitsa is certainly a “good girl,” a gentle little creature, and very docile. Sometimes she plays lively games with her “sisters” next door like the game of bear at the spring. A spiral is traced on 163 the ground and at the center is placed a bowl of water to represent a spring. The girls follow the spiral to get water for their little turkeys which, they sing, are dying of thirst. Then the “bear” rushes out from the spring and gives chase. But for the most part the little girls play quietly at house. In this way and in imitating at home her industrious mother or aunt, or her even more industrious grandmother or great-aunt, Waiyautitsa learns to do all the household tasks of women. She learns to grind the corn on the stone metate—that back-hardening labor of the Pueblo woman—and to prepare and cook the meal in a number of ways in an outside oven or on the American stove or on the flat slab on which hewe or wafer bread is spread. For the ever cheery family meal she sets out the coffee-pot, the hewe or tortilla, and the bowls of chile and of mutton stew on the earthen floor she is forever sweeping up with her little homemade brush or with an American broom. (A Zu?i house is kept very clean and amazingly neat and orderly.)
And Waiyautitsa becomes very thrifty—not only naturally but supernaturally. She will not sell corn out of the house without keeping back a few grains in order that the corn may return—in Zu?i thought the whole follows a part. And she will keep a lump of salt in the corn storeroom and another in the bread bowl—when salt is dug out, the hole soon refills, and this virtue of replacing itself the salt is expected to impart to the corn. There are other respects, too, in which Waiyautitsa will learn how to facilitate the economy. She will sprinkle the melon seeds for planting, with sweetened water—melons should be sweet. Seed wheat she will sprinkle with a white clay to make the crop white, and with a plant called k’owa so that wheat dough will pull well. Seed corn will be sprinkled with water that the crop may be well rained on.
From some kinswoman who is a specially good potter, Waiyautitsa may have learned to coil and paint and fire the bowls as well as the cook pots and water jars the household needs. She fetches in wood from the woodpile and now and again she may be seen chopping the pine or cedar logs the men of the household have brought in on donkey or in wagon. She fetches water from one of the modern wells of the town, carrying it in a jar on her head and walking in the slow and springless gait always characteristic of Pueblo women. 164 Perhaps that gait, so ponderous and so different from the gait of the men, is the result of incessant industry, a kind of unconscious self-protective device against “speeding up.”
Waiyautitsa will learn to work outdoors as well as in. She will help her mother in keeping one of the small vegetable gardens near the town—the men cultivate the outlying fields of corn and wheat (and the men and boys herd the sheep which make the Zu?i prosperous), and Waiyautitsa will help her household thresh their wheat crop, in the morning preparing dinner for the workers, for relatives from other households as well as from her own, in the afternoon joining the threshers as the men drive horses or mules around the circular threshing floor and the women and girls pitchfork the wheat and brush away the chaff and winnow the grain in baskets. Waiyautitsa will also learn to make adobe blocks and to plaster with her bare hand or with a rabbit-skin glove the adobe walls of her mother’s house, inside and out. Pueblo men are the carpenters of a house, but the women are always the plasterers, and Waiyautitsa will have to be a very old woman indeed to think she is too old to plaster. On my last visit to Zu?i I saw a woman seventy, or not much under, spending part of an afternoon on her knees plastering the chinks of a door newly cut between two rooms.
The house she plasters belongs, or will in time belong, to Waiyautitsa. Zu?i women own their houses and their gardens or, perhaps it is better to say, gardens and houses belong to the family through the women. At marriage a girl does not leave home; her husband joins her household. He stays in it, too—only as long as he is welcome. If he is lazy, if he fails to bring in wood, if he fails to contribute the produce of his fields, or if some one else for some other reason is preferred, his wife expects him to leave her household. He does not wait to be told twice. “The Zu?i separate whenever they quarrel or get tired of each other,” a critical Acoma moralist once said to me. The monogamy of Zu?i is, to be sure, rather brittle. In separation the children stay with the mother.
Children belong to their mother’s clan. They have affiliations, however, as we shall see, with the clan of their father. If the mother of Waiyautitsa is a Badger, let us say, and her father a Turkey, Waiyautitsa will be a Badger and “the child of the Turkey.” She can not marry a Turkey clansman nor, of course, a Badger. Did 165 she show any partiality for a clansman, an almost incredible thing, she would be told she was just like a dog or a burro.
These exogamous restrictions aside, and the like restrictions that may arise in special ways between the household of Waiyautitsa and other households, Waiyautitsa would be given freedom of choice in marrying. Even if her household did not like her man, and her parents had told her not “to talk to” him, Zu?i for courting, she and he could go to live with some kinswoman. No one, related or unrelated, would ............