Kachina and the Cross (14 page)

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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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BOOK: Kachina and the Cross
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Page 61
Pueblo star symbol near San Cristóbal, Protohistoric period (photograph by the author)
account, Coronado had brought Spanish chickens to the Southwest. If so, they do not seem to have survived the latter part of the sixteenth century, though imported chickens became popular after Oñate. The domesticated turkey, on the other hand, was well established and remained an important protein source into modern times.
It is known that Coronado left a flock of sheep with Fray Juan de Ubeda, who remained at Pecos and in the Galisteo area when Coronado left the Southwest. No sheep seem to have survived his expedition despite the fact that some of the Mexican Indians who "jumped ship" to remain with the Pueblos likely knew about sheep herding. The sheep became vastly popular among Spaniards and Indians alike in the seventeenth century, but sheep could hardly be counted as "native" as of Oñate's arrival.
There was continued emphasis on hunting, important from the earliest times. Such animals as bison (especially among the eastern pueblos), artiodactyls (deer and antelope), and smaller creatures such as lagomorphs (rabbits and hares) were important not only for the larder but also for their skins. Communal rabbit hunts are likely to be very old in the Southwest; from the evidence of the ubiquitous "rabbit stick," they date from Archaic times. Recent analyses suggest that in the Rio Grande Valley and westward, the harvest of rabbits and hares was considerably
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higher than that of deer and antelope, while on the edge of the Plains a larger percentage of artiodactyls were utilized. Fish were probably eaten in the east, though there is little evidence for this usage. Among the western Pueblos there was a taboo against fish for food.
The Pueblos had extensive gathering and used a variety of plants for food and medicine. Examples both from archaeology and from later historical pueblosthe latter probably or certainly going back into prehistoric daysinclude piñon nuts, Rocky Mountain beeweed, various garden greens that also in some cases had edible seeds (cañaigre or wild dock, lambs quarters or goosefoot, pigweed, saltbush, tansy mustard, and purslane among others), wild potato, cattails, wild chile, wild currants, wild mint, sunflower, chokecherry, and in areas where they grow, mesquite beans and the fruits of various cacti. Certain of these contain significant vitamin C and other vitamins, and some have considerable mineral content, including iron. There was a variety of medicinal and ceremonial plants, including tobacco (
Nicotiana rustica
and other species)which was sometimes mixed with point-leaf manzanita, thoroughwart, or sumac and employed in rainmaking ceremonies. Medicinal plants included Mormon tea (
Ephedra
sp.) used as a stimulant, and the psychoactive plant datura with its antiseptic and pain control uses. Golondrina (
Euphorbia
sp.) was a treatment for cuts or burns, with paste from the ground-up plant being spread on the affected area. Doveweed (
Croton texensis
) was useful as a treatment for earache, the moistened leaves being packed into the ear, while a tea made from plumahilla or western yarrow (
Achillea lanulosa
) was used to combat chills. Smoke from the burned hulls of piñon nuts was inhaled by a patient experiencing difficult childbirth, and piñon gum mixed with ground squash seed was packed into wounds. Roots of the cañaigre (
Rumex hymenosepalus
), mentioned above, were also boiled and the water used for treating head colds, as was a tea made from the ''white medicine,'' the boiled roots of
Erigonumfasciculatum.
This latter medicine was also applied to wounds.
This is a small selection of plants recorded for later times; some of them, perhaps most or even all of them, were part of the Archaic heritage of the Pueblos. However, a cautionary note should be introduced here. Certain foods and medicines used by Pueblo Indians in historic times, including accidentally introduced "field weeds," are plants that have a wide geographical distribution and may possibly have been brought by Hispanics or Mexican Indians in the colonial period. Likely there was borrowing back and forth, and certain plants of the historic Pueblos definitely came from the European and Mexican Indian settlers. For example, chile peppers were almost certainly introduced by the Spaniards but in the later historic period were used medicinally by settlers and Pueblos alike. The
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"buttons" from the peyote cactus, containing psychoactive alkaloids including mescaline, may conceivably have arrived in pre-Hispanic times, but the first record of them dates to the 1630s, and they probably came with the early Spanish settlers. In northern and western Mexico, peyote was and is used both in religious ceremonies to produce visions and for medicinal purposes. In the United States it has become the focus of a Native American religion, but one not particularly popular among the Pueblos.
There was always a strong ceremonial component among the Pueblos and their neighbors in the matter of food procurement. In agriculture, for example, it is clear that food plants with their enormous implications for culture change came already intertwined with considerable ceremonial baggage. Such large-scale movement of religious ideas, tied specifically to food production, is reflected, historically, in the similarities in mythology and ceremonialism between the Southwest and Mesoamerica. Some of the hunting rituals found around the Pueblo world today probably go back to an Archaic, possibly even a Paleo-Indian, time horizon. Such things as hunt societies, however, may represent Mesoamerican organizational influence at about the beginning of the Golden Age. Collecting seems to have attracted less ceremonial baggage, but it certainly had some.
Part of the planting ceremonialism had to do with the seasonal movements of heavenly bodies and the shifting of seasons. Observations of the heavens to trace out the seasons, a
calendar
approach to heaven and earth, was strongly developed in Mesoamerica. Important deities were personifications of the sun, moon, and the planet Venus in its appearances as morning and evening star. The importance of these celestial bodies, probably always in their aspects as deities, can be demonstrated in the Southwest. There we find, archaeologically, Quetzalcoatl and Venus associations, and of course the sun and moon were both important in marking the seasonal and agricultural round.
As early as the Anasazi Pueblo II times, measurements of the solstices can be demonstrated archaeologically at places like Yellowjacket in southwestern Colorado. The great Classic sites of Chaco Canyon and the Pueblo III period at Mesa Verde and Hovenweep also show evidence of such measurement. Siting lines, sometimes originating in the pueblos, or in shrines specifically built for that purpose, were used to observe the sunrise or sunset. All that is necessary is that a reasonably distant eastern skyline (or western skyline, if the observation is of the sunset) be available, one that has sufficient horizon features to measure, day by day, the slow apparent movement of the sun northward or southward as it rises or sets.
The moon was also important. For example, at Chimney Rock in the Piedra drainage of southern Colorado, some ninety miles north of Chaco Canyon, two
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adjoining spires rise from a rather barren sandstone plateau. Here was built a Chacoan outlier, apparently to take advantage of the northernmost declination of its 18.6 year lunar "cycle," at which time the moon, as seen from the site, rises between the two spires. The site itself was constructed in A.D. 1076 at the time of a northern "standstill" of the moon.
We know very little of the calendar calculations made by Pueblos as of the time of Oñate. But calendarial observations were part of their heritage and continued on into the future. Pueblos in the later historic period were especially interested in the summer and winter solstices. Both were important. The summer marked the end of the planting season and the beginning of the summer ceremonial round, but perhaps the winter solstice, with its "turning" and renewal of the sun, was most critical. The priestly observers, especially at Zuni, attempted to make the winter solstice correspond to the full moonalas, something that they could not always do. The historic Pueblos also studied the night skies for other signs of the changing seasons with observations of the Pleiades, Sirius, and Venus as morning and evening star.
In recent times, although the winter solstice remains important, eastern Pueblos do not have the complex star and calendar lore of their Zuni and Hopi cousins. This was probably
not
the case in Oñate's time. In colonial days, the intense Spanish occupation of the Rio Grande Valley and the heavy Christianization of the ceremonial life and use of the handy Gregorian calendar permitted some of the old calendar ways to be discarded. This dependence on an alien calendar cannot have been the situation in A.D. 1598.
In the upper Rio Grande Valley, the sun sets earlier and earlier in the evening until around the middle of December, when the evenings lengthen. The situation is asymmetric as regards sunrise, however. The sun continues to rise later each day until around mid-January. The absolute
shortest
days of the year (clockwise) are the handful around December 21. Of course, neither the Pueblos nor Oñate's Spaniards had the chronometric capabilities to measure the
times
of sunrise and sunset, but the farthest south position of the sun on the eastern horizon also comes in the period around December 21. The various pueblos varied in desirability of their locations for solstice dawn or sunset observations, depending on the height of mountains on the eastern or western skylines. But the balance of the evidence is that they made such observations, and that these were important in the ceremonial and the agricultural year.
The religious and ceremonial life of Pueblos of Oñate's time must largely be reconstructed by archaeology and by analogy with nineteenth-and twentieth-century practices. The early Spaniards gave very little specific information. Still, a number of early Europeans do mention masked dances, almost certainly
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dances of the kachina cult. Kachinas are ancestor figures who visit the Pueblos and perform ceremonial weather control and fertility dances, with the kachina being embodied by masked individuals. The kachinas, as discussed in chapter 2, were everywhere in the Pueblo world. Cognate words for the cult appear in the Keresan languages and in the Towa and Northern Tiwa. The Tewa and Zuni use different terms, however; at Zuni, for example, the kachina are called
kokko.
There are other cross-pueblo similarities and differences. In Zuni, Hopi, the Keresan towns, and Southern Tiwa, but not in the Tewa-Towa area, the kachinas reside in a water source west of the given tribe. The dead take the form of kachinas in Towa, Tewa, Hopi, and Zuni, but the Keresan towns seem to be split on this issue. There are other differences; for example, whether women can be initiated into the kachina cult. Obviously, centuries of evolution and differential acculturation pressure from the Spaniards has caused variations in the cult. Some of the variations, of course, may have been there from earliest times.
The kachina cult is related to Tlaloc, the Mesoamerican god of rain and weather-making. The practice of human sacrifice to Tlalocfor example, the sacrifice of children to promote rainhad dropped out of the Pueblo kachina cult before the first Spanish conquest. There is indication, especially in the folklore, that such sacrifices were performed in prehistoric times.
Kachinas reached the Pueblos, perhaps moving up the Rio Grande Valley, a little after A.D. 1300. This was a time when rich influences from the Casas Grandes culture of Chihuahua (specifically, the Casas Grandes Medio period) was spreading across southern New Mexico and into western Texas. The very visibility of the kachina ceremonies made them vulnerable when the Spaniards arrived. As we shall see, the missionaries took special aim at these ceremonies, equating them with diabolical behavior. The result was the partial suppression of the cult, especially in the east. Though the Pueblo Revolt restored the kachinas for a time, and the eighteenth-century Franciscans were less vehement in their attacks, eastern manifestations of the cult weakened in the eighteenth and later centuries. It seems likely that alternate and colorful Christian ceremonies were accepted as emotional substitutes. Still, kachinas are found today among the eastern Pueblos, though not the complex panoply seen in the west. Among the Zuni and Hopi, the Christianization agenda of the seventeenth-century missionaries largely failed and kachinas won the day.
In a recent book, I speculated on the great Zuni and Hopi
Shalako
ceremony, an elaborate winter solstice observance that involves spectacular masked dances. I suggested, following earlier work of anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons, that the Shalako rites had been introduced during the interregnum period that followed the Coronado expedition of 1539-42. Brought by central Mexican Indians who

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