outlines of zuni Creation Myths 3

outlines of zuni Creation Myths 3

I need not add that this fully accounts for the contradictory behavior

of the Indians in reference to the old church, the burial ground, and

other things pertaining to it. The church could not be rebuilt. It had

been dead so long that, rehabilitated, it would be no longer familiar

to the "fathers" who in spirit had witnessed its decay. Nor could it be

taken suddenly away. It had stood so long that, missing it, they would

be sad, or might perhaps even abandon it.

 

The Zuñi faith, as revealed in this sketch of more than three hundred

and fifty years of Spanish intercourse, is as a drop of oil in water,

surrounded and touched at every point, yet in no place penetrated or

changed inwardly by the flood of alien belief that descended upon it.

Herein is exemplified anew the tendency of primitive-minded man to

interpret unfamiliar things more directly than simply, according to

their appearances merely, not by analysis in our sense of the term; and

to make his interpretations, no less than as we ourselves do, always in

the light of what he already familiarly believes or habitually thinks

he knows. Hence, of necessity he adjusts other beliefs and opinions

to his own, but never his own beliefs and opinions to others; and

even his usages are almost never changed in spirit, however much so

in externals, until all else in his life is changed. Thus, he is slow

to adopt from alien peoples any but material suggestions, these even,

strictly according as they suit his ways of life; and whatever he does

adopt, or rather absorb and assimilate, from the culture and lore of

another people, neither distorts nor obscures his native culture,

neither discolors nor displaces his original lore.

 

All of the foregoing suggests what might be more fully shown by further

examples, the aboriginal and uncontaminated character--so far as a

modern like myself can represent it--of the myths delineated in the

following series of outlines. Yet a casual visitor to Zuñi, seeing but

unable to analyze the signs above noted, would be led to infer quite

the contrary by other and more patent signs. He would see horses,

cattle and donkeys, sheep and goats, to say nothing of swine and a

few scrawny chickens. He would see peach orchards and wheat fields,

carts (and wagons now), and tools of metal; would find, too, in queer

out-of-the-way little rooms native silversmiths plying their primitive

bellows and deftly using a few crude tools of iron and stone to turn

their scant silver coins into bright buttons, bosses, beads, and

bracelets, which every well-conditioned Zuñi wears; and he would see

worn also, especially by the men, clothing of gaudy calico and other

thin products of the looms of civilization. Indeed, if one did not see

these things and rate them as at first the gifts to this people of

those noble old Franciscan friars and their harder-handed less noble

Spanish companions, infinitely more pathetic than it is would be the

history of the otherwise vain effort I have above outlined; for it

is not to be forgotten that the principal of these gifts have been

of incalculable value to the Zuñi. They have helped to preserve him,

through an era of new external conditions, from the fate that met more

than thirty other and less favored Pueblo tribes--annihilation by the

better-armed, ceaselessly prowling Navajo and Apache. And for this

alone, their almost sole accomplishment of lasting good to the Zuñi,

not in vain were spent and given the lives of the early mission fathers.

 

It is intimated that aside from adding such resources to the tribe as

enabled it to survive a time of fearful stress and danger, even the

introduction of Spanish plants, animals, and products did not greatly

change the Zuñis. This is truer than would at first seem possible. The

Zuñi was already a tiller of the soil when wheat and peaches were given

him. To this day he plants and irrigates his peach trees and wheat

crops much as he anciently planted and watered his corn--in hills,

hoeing all with equal assiduity; and he does not reap his wheat, but

gathers it as he gathers his corn in the ear. Thus, only the kind of

grain is new. The art of rearing it and ways of husbanding and using

it remain unchanged. The Zuñi was already a herder when sheep and

goats were given him. He had not only extensive preserves of rabbits

and deer, but also herds--rather than flocks--of turkeys, which by

day were driven out over the plains and mesas for feeding, and at

night housed near the towns or in distant shelters and corrals. It is

probable that his ancestry had even other domesticated animals. And he

used the flesh of these animals as food, their feathers and fur as the

materials for his wonderfully knitted, woven, and twilled garments and

robes, as he now uses the mutton and goat meat for food, and the wool

of the sheep for his equally well-knitted, woven, and twilled, though

less beautiful, garments and robes. Thus, only the kinds (and degree

of productivity) of the animals are new, the arts of caring for them

and modes of using their products, are unchanged. This is true even

in detail. When I first went to live with the Zuñis their sheep were

plucked, not sheared, with flat strips of band iron in place of the

bone spatulæ originally used in plucking the turkeys; and the herders

always scrupulously picked up stray flecks of wool--calling it "down,"

not hair, nor fur--and spinning it, knitting, too, at their long woolen

leggings as they followed their sheep, all as their forefathers used

ever to pick up and twirl the stray feathers and knit at their down

kilts and tunics as they followed and herded their turkeys. Even the

silversmiths of Zuñi today work coins over as their ancestors of the

stone-using age worked up bits of copper, not only using tools of

stone and bone for the purpose but using even the iron tools of the

Spaniard mostly in stone-age fashion.[1]

 

[1] Some of the primitive Zuñi methods of working metals

are incidentally described in my paper entitled "Primitive

Copper-working, an Experimental Study," in The American

Anthropologist, Washington, January, 1894, pp. 193-217.

 

This applies equally to their handling of the hoes, hatchets, and

knives of civilized man. They use their hoes--the heaviest they can

get--as if weighted, like the wooden and bone hoes of antiquity,

vertically, not horizontally. They use their hatchets or axes and

knives more for hacking and scraping and chipping than for chopping,

hewing, and whittling, and in such operations they prefer working

toward themselves to working from themselves, as we work. Finally,

their garments of calico and muslin are new only in material. They

are cut after the old fashion of the ancestral buckskin breeches and

shirts, poncho coats of feathers and fur or fiber, and down or cotton

breech clouts, while in the silver rings and bracelets of today, not

only the shapes but even the half-natural markings of the original

shell rings and bracelets survive, and the silver buttons and bosses

but perpetuate and multiply those once made of copper as well as of

shell and white bone.

 

Thus, only one absolutely new practical element and activity was

introduced by the Spaniards--beasts of burden and beast transportation

and labor. But until the present century cattle were not used natively

for drawing loads or plows, the latter of which, until recently being

made of a convenient fork, are only enlarged harrowing-sticks pointed

with a leaf of iron in place of the blade of flint; nor were carts

employed. Burdens were transported in panniers adapted to the backs of

burros instead of to the shoulders of men.

 

The Zuñi is a splendid rider, but even now his longest journeys are

made on foot in the old way. He has for centuries lived a settled

life, traveling but little, and the horse has therefore not played

a very conspicuous part in his later life as in the lives of less

sedentary peoples, and is consequently unheard of, as are all new

things--including the greatest of all, the white man himself--in his

tribal lore, or the folk tales, myths, and rituals of his sacred

cult-societies. All this strengthens materially the claim heretofore

made, that in mind, and especially in religious culture, the Zuñi is

almost as strictly archaic as in the days ere his land was discovered.

 

 

OUTLINE OF PRISTINE ZUÑI HISTORY.

 

If a historic sketch of Spanish intercourse with the Zuñi people

indicates that little change was wrought on their native mood by so

many years of alien contact, an outline of their pristine history, or

a sketch of their growth and formation as a people, will serve yet

further to show not only how, but also why, this was so, as well as to

explain much in the following outlines of their myths of creation and

migration, the meaning of which would otherwise remain obscure.

 

Linguistically the Zuñi Indians of today stand alone, unrelated,

so far as has heretofore been determined, to any other Indians

either sedentary, like themselves, or unsettled, like the less

advanced peoples of the plains. Nevertheless, although they as yet

thus constitute a single linguistic stock, there are present and

persistent among them two distinct types of physique and numerous

survivals--inherited, not borrowed--of the arts, customs, myths, and

institutions of at least two peoples, unrelated at first, or else

separate and very diversely conditioned for so long a period of their

preunited history that their development had progressed unequally and

along quite different lines, at the time of their final coalition. That

thus the Zuñis are actually descendants of two or more peoples, and

the heirs of two cultures at least, is well shown in their legends of

ruins and olden times, and especially in these myths of creation and

migration as interpreted by archeologic and ethnographic research.

 

According to all these tokens and evidences, one branch of their

ancestral people was, as compared with the other, aboriginal in the

region comprising the present Zuñi country and extending far toward

the north, whence at some remoter time they had descended. The other

branch was intrusive, from the west or southwest, the country of the

lower Rio Colorado, their earliest habitat not so clearly defined and

their remoter derivation enigmatical, for they were much more given

to wandering, less advanced in the peaceful arts, and their earliest

ruins are those of comparatively rude and simple structures, hence

scant and difficult to trace, at least beyond the western borders of

Arizona. Considering both of these primary or parental stocks of the

Zuñi as having been thus so widely asunder at first, the ancestral

relations of the aboriginal or northern branch probably ranged the

plains north of the arid mountain region of Utah and Colorado ere

they sought refuge in the desert and canyons of these territories.

Yet others of their descendants, if still surviving, may not unlikely

be traced among not only other Pueblos, but also and more distinctly

among wilder and remoter branches, probably of the Shoshonean stock.

The ancestral relations of the intrusive or western branch, however,

were a people resembling the semisettled Yumans and Pimans in mode of

life, their ruins combining types of structure characteristic of both

these stocks; and if their descendants, other than Zuñis themselves,

be yet identified among Yuman tribes, or some like people of the lower

Colorado region, they will be found (such of them as survive) not

greatly changed, probably, from the condition they were all in when,

at a very distant time, their eastward faring kinsfolk, who ultimately

became Zuñis, left them there.

 

It is quite certain that relatives, in a way--not ancestral--of the

Zuñis still exist. Not many years before Fray Marcos de Niza discovered

Cibola, the Zuñians conquered some small towns of the Keres to the

south-southeastward of the Zuñi-Cibola country, and adopted some of

the survivors and also some of their ritual-dramas--still performed,

and distinctively Keresan in kind--into their own tribe. Previously

to that--previously, indeed, to their last and greatest union with

the settled people mentioned as the aboriginal Zuñi--a large body of

the western branch and their earlier fellows (called in the myths of

creation "Our lost others") separated from them in the country south

and west of the Rio Puerco and the Colorado Chiquito, and went, not

wholly as related in the myths, yet quite, undoubtedly, far away to

the southward. I have identified and traced their remains in Arizona

toward and into Mexico as far as the coast, and if, as the Zuñis still

believe, any of them survive to this day, they are to be looked for

lower down in Mexico or in the still farther south, whither, it is

said, they disappeared so long ago. But, as before intimated, these

relatives (by adoption in the one case, by derivation in the other)

were not, strictly speaking, ancestral, and thus are barely alluded to

in the myths, and therefore concern us less than do the two main or

parental branches.

 

Of these, the one which contributed more largely in numbers, certain

culture characteristics, and the more peaceful arts of life to make

the Zuñis what they were at the time of the Spanish conquest, was the

aboriginal branch. The intrusive or western branch is, strange to say,

although least numerous, the one most told of in the myths, the one

which speaks throughout them in the first person; that is, which claims

to be the original Shíwi or Zuñi. Of this branch it is unnecessary

to say much more here than the myths themselves declare, save to add

that it was, if not the conquering, at least, and for a long time,

the dominant one; that to it the Zuñis owe their vigor and many, if

not most, of their distinguishing traits; and that, coming as they

did from the west, they located there, and not in the north, as did

all these other Pueblo Indians (including even those whom they found

and prevailed over, or were joined by, in the present land of Zuñi),

the place where the human family originated, where the ancestral gods

chiefly dwell, and whither after death souls of men are supposed to

return anon.

 

According to their own showing in the myths they were, while a

masterful people, neither so numerous at the time of their coming, nor

so advanced, nor so settled, as were the peoples whom they "overtook"

from time to time as they neared the land of Zuñi or the "Middle of the

world." They did not cultivate the soil, or, at least, apparently did

not cultivate corn to any considerable extent before they met the first

of these peoples, for, to use their own words, they were "ever seeking

seeds of the grasses like birds on the mesas."

 

There is abundant reason for supposing that the "elder nations"--these

peoples whom they "overtook," the "People of the Dew," the "Black

people," and the "Corn people" of the "towns builded round"--were

direct and comparatively unchanged descendants of the famous cliff

dwellers of the Mancos, San Juan, and other canyons of Utah, Colorado,

and northern New Mexico. The evidences of this are numerous and

detailed, but only the principal of them need here be examined.

 

The ruins of these rounded towns of the Corn tribes which Hernando de

Alvarado and Fray Juan de Padilla saw in 1540 while going southeastward

from Zuñi, are especially characteristic of the Zuñi region, and extend

quite generally both southward toward the Rito Quemado and the Salinas

in western central New Mexico, and, by way of the Chaco, northward

nearly to the Colorado boundary. They are as often half round as they

are wholly oblong or circular, and even when completely rounded or

oval in outline are usually divided into two semicircular parts by an

irregular court or series of courts extending lengthwise through the

middle, and thus making them really double villages of the half-round

type.

 

A comparison of the ground plans of these round or semicircular ruins

with those of the typical cliff ruins reveals the fact that they were

simply cliff towns transferred, as it were, to the level of the open

plains or mesa tops. Their outer or encircling walls were, save at

the extremities of the courts, generally unbroken and perpendicular,

as uninterrupted and sheer, almost, as were the natural canyon walls

surrounding to the rearward the older cliff towns to which they thus

corresponded and which they apparently were built to replace; and the

houses descended like steps from these outer walls in terraced stories,

facing, like the seats of an amphitheater, the open courts, precisely

as descended the terraced stories of the cliff dwellings from the

encircling rock walls of the sheltered ledges or shelves on which they

were reared, necessarily facing in the same manner the open canyons

below. Thus the courts may be supposed to have replaced the canyons,

as the outer walls replaced the cliffs or the back walls built nearest

them in the rear of at least the deeper village caves or shelters.

 

Other structural and kindred features of the cliff towns are found

to be equally characteristic of the round ruins, features which,

originating in the conditions of building and dwelling in the cliffs,

came to be perpetuated in the round towns afterward built on the plains.

 

So limited was the foothold afforded by the scant ledges or in the

sheltered but shallow hollows of the cliffs where the ancient cliff

dwellers were at first forced as a measure of safety to take refuge and

finally to build, that they had to economize space to the utmost. Hence

in part only the women and children, being smaller and more in need

of protection than the men, were accommodated with dwelling places as

such, the rooms of which were so diminutive that, to account for them,

theories of the dwarfish size of the cliff dwellers as a race have been

common. As a further measure of economy these rooms were built atop of

one another, sometimes to the height of several stories--up, in fact,

to the very roof at the rear of the cavern in most cases--and thence

they were terraced toward the front in order that light and air might

be admitted as directly as possible to each story.

 

For the double purpose of accommodating the men and of serving as

assembly rooms for councils and ceremonial functions, large circular

chambers were constructed almost always out in front of the terraced

dwelling cells of the women and children, and thus in the more exposed

mouths of the caverns or shelters the villages nestled in. These round

assembly rooms or kivas were often, indeed, built up from sloping

portions of the sheer outer edge of the village cave shelf, in order to

be as much as possible on a level with or even below the limited ground

space between them and the houses farther back, so that the front along

the lower and outermost row of these house cells might remain open and

unobstructed to passage.

 

The dwelling rooms or house cells themselves were made as nearly

rectangular as was practicable, for only partitions divided them;

but of necessity such as were placed far back toward or against the

encircling and naturally curved rock walls, or the rear masonry walls,

built in conformity to their curvature in all the deeper caves, had

small triangular or keystone-shape spaces between their partitions.

These, being too small for occupancy even by children, were used as

storerooms for grain and other household supplies. When the cave in

which a village was built happened to be very deep, the living rooms

could not be carried too far back, as neither light nor sufficient

air could reach them there; hence here, chiefly against the rear wall

or the cave back itself, were built other storerooms more or less

trapezoidal in shape, according to the degree of curvature in the rock

face against which they were built, or, as said before, of the rear

wall itself, which in the deeper caves often reached from floor to roof

and ran parallel to the natural semicircular back of the cavern.

 

Against the rearward face of such back walls when present (that is,

between them and the rear of the cave itself), behind the village

proper, if space further permitted, small rooms, ordinarily of one

story, or pens, sometimes roofless, were built for the housing of the

flocks of turkeys which the cliff dwellers kept. Beyond these poultry

houses was still kept, in the deeper village caves, a space, dark and

filled with loose soil and rubbish, in which certain of the dead,

mostly men, were buried; while other dead were interred beneath the

floors of the lowermost rooms, when the soil or sand filled in to level

up the sloping rock bottom of the shelter was sufficiently deep to

receive them.

 

A noteworthy peculiarity of the doorways in the upper stories leading

toward the rearward storerooms already described was that they were

often made T-shape; that is, very narrow at the bottom and abruptly

widened at the top. This was done in order to avoid the necessity of

making these openings for entrance and egress too large proportionally

to the small size of the rooms. Thus, neither were the walls weakened

nor were the inmates needlessly exposed to cold; for fuel, even of the

lightest kind, was gathered with risk and transported thither with

great difficulty, and the use of it was therefore limited to cookery,

and yet a person bearing a back load of corn, or other provender might,

by stepping first one foot, then the other, through the narrow lower

portion of such a doorway, then stooping with his blanket or basket

load, pass through without inconvenience or the necessity of unloading.

 

Nearly all of these features--so suited to, and some of them evidently

so unavoidable with, a people building eyrie-like abodes high up on

limited sloping ledges in pockets of the cliffs--were, although they

were totally unnecessary to the dwellers in the half-round or double

half-round towns of the plains, where space was practically unlimited

and topographic and other conditions wholly different, nevertheless

characteristic of these also.

 

Not only were the external walls of these old villages of the plains

semicircular, as though built in conformity with the curved rock walls

of the hollows in the cliffs, but they were continuous. That is, in

all the rounded town ruins, except those which seem to have been

reconstructed in more recent times, the outer walls were built first as

great semicircular inclosures, hollow artificial cliffs, so to say, and

afterward the house walls were built up against them inside, not into

them, as they would have been had these outer and the inner walls been

built up together. Moreover, not only were the ground plans of these

towns of the plains semicircular, as though built in conformity with

the curved rock walls of hollows in the cliffs in ancestral fashion,

but the storerooms were also still tucked away in the little flaring

spaces next to these now outer and surrounding walls, instead of being

placed near the more convenient entrances fronting the courts. The

huts or sheds for the turkeys, too, were placed not in the inclosures

of the courts, but against and outside of these external walls of the

villages; and while many of the dead were buried, as in the cliff

houses, under the floors of the lowermost rooms, others of them, almost

always men, and notably victims of war or accident, were still buried

out beyond even the turkey huts. So both the turkey huts and some of

the graves of these round villages retained the same positions relative

to one another and to the "rearward" of the dwellings that had very

naturally been given them in the cliff villages; for in these, being

behind the houses and in the rear of the caves, they occupied the most

protected areas; while in the round villages, being behind the houses,

they were thrown quite outside of the villages, hence occupied the most

exposed positions, which latter fact would appear inexplicable save by considering it as a survival of cliff-town usage.