INDIAN GAMES
While the common and secular object of the games of the North
American Indians appears to be purely a manifestation of the
desire for amusement or gain, they are performed also as
religious ceremonies, as rites pleasing to the gods to secure
their favor, or as processes of sympathetic magic to drive away
sickness, avert evil, or to produce rain and the fertilization
and reproduction of plants and animals.—CULIN.
The subject of games will be treated here only as one aspect of the
sociologic interpretation of Indian life. Not to mention games would be
to ignore an important element of youthful training and of adult life
in every pueblo. Yet the subject is difficult to make vivid, unless one
has watched the special sport described. Mr. Stewart Culin, to whom we
owe most of our knowledge of Indian games, and to whose work I wish here
to acknowledge great indebtedness, has given us a monograph profusely
illustrated. To it,[247] and to the many museum collections of the
implements employed in Indian sports, the especially interested reader
must go for more than a superficial acquaintance with them.
All Indians are so devoted to games and gaming that the familiar
sobriquet of “inveterate gambler” is well deserved. But the sport to
which they are most addicted is not, as is popularly supposed, the
playing of cards. That is a vice which the Indian has learned from his
white conquerors and which has proved so baneful that it is now forbidden
under rather heavy penalties by the agents on all the reservations.
It so happens that cards and “nine-men’s morris” are two of the very
few games the Indian ever borrowed from the white man. These are well
balanced by lacrosse and racket, which are the gifts of the Indian to
the white man. Games of all kinds, often quite trivial in appearance,
are played persistently by both men and women, apparently as a mere
pastime, regardless of the wager involved; but one can be pretty certain
that there is hardly any daily pursuit whose enjoyment for the Indian
is not enhanced by some stake. Also it is not to be forgotten that to
every individual of the race, the underlying religious significance
of almost all the games he plays constitutes an important factor in
his development, and practically all of them, when carefully studied,
are found to be so intimately interwoven with religious beliefs and
practices that Indian games may be said generally to possess a devotional
significance. It is probable that some of the games have a divinatory
meaning. Consequently, though betting is the commonest detail of every
day, the Indian’s real absorption is usually in the game itself rather
than in the stake involved.
Since, in general, the great games are played ceremonially to secure
fertility, to give life and prolong it, to expel demons, or to cure
sickness, these are all sure to come at the seasonal periods of planting
and of harvest, or in especial times of disaster to individuals or
communities.
Such races as those still run at Ácoma and at Zuñi are visible proof
that the physical vigor characteristic of the Pueblo tribes in days of
old has not vanished. The invading Spaniards were not seldom amazed by
the indomitable courage of the Indians in facing hardships and their
endurance of cruel suffering without blenching. The stoicism with which
they bear wounds with no outcry is not achieved without much discipline,
and the Indian from his childhood is no stranger to pain. The early
morning programme of an Indian of one of the northern tribes may be taken
as typical of all:
He would bathe, rub himself down with hemlock branches till
the skin tingled with pain, pray to the sky chief and, most
important of all, carry out secret magical performances.
Games to develop the muscles, to strengthen the whole frame, and inure it
to arrow wounds are the constant occupation of the growing lad, and when
he kills his first rabbit or catches a woodpecker with his hands, his
father will proudly celebrate the event by a “smoke” or a feast. Until
a boy is admitted to the hunt, and later to the rank of warrior, there
is no cessation to the disciplinary training, even though much of it is
given under the guise of play.
The normal routine of a youth, in the process of hardening himself to
become even as skilful and as strong as the average of his companions,
seems to us an extraordinary procedure. Withdrawal to the silences of the
woods or the cliffs for a more or less variable length of time was, and
still may be, exacted at the age of puberty, with fasting and continence
also rigidly enjoined. Fasting, learned by degrees, makes the long fasts
required later for ritual purposes more easy, and it has developed the
capacity of the desert tribes to live for long periods upon an incredibly
meagre diet in seasons of drought and the failure of crops. Young men who
seek to gain power and to win the highest reward within the gift of their
tribe, office in the esoteric priesthoods, add to the ordinary discipline
rigors of which we can have little comprehension. They whip themselves
into states of ecstasy, seeing visions in consequence, and receiving aid
from supernatural powers to counteract the mischief-working beings who
live, as they believe, in plants or beasts, or even in certain men and
women. Then they return to the pueblo with the far-away gaze in their
eyes of those who see not as other men see, and it is understood by all
that they have been favored of the gods and are “not as other men are.”
Culin divides all Indian games, including racing, into the two classes
of games of chance and games of dexterity. Games requiring the kind
of intellectual calculation and skill that chess demands seem never
to occur. The aboriginal legend tells us that Iyatiko, the Mother,
invented all games, and that many of them, such as the one called
“chuck-away-grains,” were brought from Si-pa-pu, in the first migration.
Culin also believes that all Indian games are native to these people and
contain no modifications due to white influence other than the common
degeneration which characterizes all Indian institutions tainted from the
same source. Again, he emphasizes
a well-marked affinity between the same games [played by] the
most widely separated tribes, [their variations being] due to
the materials employed rather than in the object or method of
play. In general the variations do not follow difference in
language.
Culin says that the implements used in games are almost universally
derived from the symbolic weapons of the mythic Twins: for example, the
various sticks used in stick games are either miniature bows, or arrows,
and the painted tubes used in guessing games are arrow shafts. Racket may
be referred to the netted shield of the war gods, and is played only by
men.
The games of chance are of two sorts: those in which the implements are
either something in the nature of disks thrown at random to determine a
number or numbers, with the count kept either by pebbles, or by sticks,
or upon a counting board, the gain or loss depending upon the priority
in which the players arrived at a definite goal; and those where the
players guess in which of two or more places a particularly marked lot is
concealed, success or failure resulting in the loss or gain of counters.
Games of dexterity include many modifications of archery, sliding
javelins or darts upon the hard ground or ice, shooting at a moving
target formed of a netted wheel or ring; ball, in several highly
complicated forms, and racing games more or less related to and
complicated with ball games.
A game known as the ball race appears only among the Indians of the
Southwest, including Mexico and California, and is in season only from
March until May, as an appeal for rain. In this sport the ball may be
of stone or of wood. At Ácoma it is a game between the war captains,
and, as among other Keres tribes, it is not played with balls but with
two billets of wood.[248] The winning stick is buried in a cornfield.
At Zuñi[249] the ball race is the great tribal game, which, since it
comes when the men have finished the planting, has also the ceremonial
character of a prayer for rain to fertilize the freshly sown fields.
There is no more exciting event in the whole year at Zuñi. Starting upon
the pueblo, the men race across to To-a-ya-lana (Thunder Mountain), their
holiest shrine, then for two miles or more along its base and back to the
pueblo. Often the racers are followed by as many as two or three hundred
persons on horseback closely watching to see whether they are losing or
gaining the stakes they have ventured. These wagers have been known to
include all the possessions of a man, even his wife; for that matter, the
women become as excited as the men and their betting is quite as heavy.
Shinny, which may be played only in the autumn, is commonly played by
women only, and this is also true of double-ball. The writer saw the
girls of Taos playing at this latter game most gracefully and tirelessly
upon the upper terraces of the north pueblo. Every writer speaks of the
Indian as the most graceful loser in the world, so he at once enlists our
sympathetic attention. Ácoma’s great spectacular game is the Gallo Race
on San Juan’s Day, June 24. Some form of this game is found everywhere
in New Mexico, among the people of Spanish descent, as well as among the
Indians, but the two races play it with a difference.
Lummis,[250] who makes a picturesque story of it as seen at Ácoma, says
that he has
never known a Pueblo Indian to lose his temper in that wild
fight. He gives and takes like a man, strains every fibre of
his being to win but never thinks of harboring a vindictive
thought. In temper as in endurance and skill he is the model
player. The Mexicans rarely finish without bad blood or even
bloodshed.
At Ácoma, the starting-point is at the foot of the great mesa. Two old
men go out to a level spot at the foot of one of the buttes and plant a
cock in the sand so that only his head and perhaps two inches of neck
can be seen. In 1922, I was told that an unusual number of entries were
made, and that men started on the top of the Rock in a foot-race and
mounted the horses at the bottom, while running full speed, to catch
the fowl and carry it off—“a great race,” said my Indian informant,
laughing immoderately at the recollection. The victor is pursued by all
the others, who tear off bits of feathers and claws or whatever they can
secure. The struggle often lasts as much as four hours, the tireless
horses and riders, of surpassing agility and endurance, tearing over “the
broad plain, hither and yon through rock-walled passes, up and over steep
ridges of knee-deep sand, rider and horse alike unrecognizable for foam
and dust in their wild career.”
Among the games of dexterity played at Ácoma, Culin mentions the shooting
of arrows at bundles of tied-up grass as the only variety of archery
pursued.
A specialty of the Ácomas which they regard as their original possession,
though it is also played at Zuñi, is a game called _bish-i_. The
tradition is that the greatest of all legendary gamblers, Gau-pot, played
this game against the sun, was defeated, and became blind. The implements
are four pieces of hollow cane split longitudinally, each five or six
inches long. Before the canes are thrown, the players breathe upon them,
and so great is the sacredness of the game that no women may ever touch
the canes. The playing of this game is confined to the winter season in
the _kivas_, where a society called _Bish-i_ is devoted to its cult.
As has been said in another connection, the adult Indian appears seldom
to do anything purely for fun. Almost the only games indulged in for
mere amusement, as we play them, are the simple ones of the children,
who, like children everywhere, play at the occupations of their elders.
Imitative warfare, however, is not confined to these men of smaller
growth, with their bows and arrows.[251] Cat’s cradle, which we think of
as a childish amusement but which is played by adults the world around,
is regarded by most authorities as being without religious significance.
But, as Culin says,[252] it is known by “every tribe of whom direct
enquiry was made,” and the Zuñis believe that this string-game was
taught by the Spider Woman to the war gods for their netted shields.
The distinguished English anthropologist, Dr. Alfred Haddon, and his
daughter collected several hundred forms of cat’s cradle among the South
Sea Islanders, and on their way back to England lingered in Arizona,
where, with Dr. Alfred Tozzer’s help, they identified more than a dozen
varieties of the game among the Navajos, some of which appeared to have
a ritualistic significance. Mr. Culin was told by Dr. Bernard Haile of
St. Michael, Arizona, that the Navajos have a legend to the effect that
the holy spiders taught them how to make the numerous figures of stars,
bears, coyotes, snakes, and so forth, on the solemn condition that the
game should be played in winter only, because then snakes and spiders are
asleep and cannot see them. Certain death was sure to overtake anyone
playing at any other season. But Dr. Haile could not discover any deeper
religious use or meaning.
To conclude: games, like every other aspect and detail of the Indian
community, are socio-religious in essence, and hark back in many tribes
to their origin myths. Here we find the description of a
series of contests in which the demiurge—first man, culture
hero—overcomes some foe of the human race by exercise of
superior cunning, skill or magic. [The primal gamblers seem
always to have been] the divine Twins, miraculous offspring
of the Sun, who live in the East and West, who rule night
and day; summer and winter. They are the morning and evening
stars. Their virgin mother, who appears also as sister and
wife, is constantly spoken of as their grandmother, and is the
Moon or the Earth, or the Spider Woman, the embodiment of the
feminine principle in Nature. Always contending, they are the
principal patrons of play and their games are the games now
played by men.[253] [Such a condition of mind almost justifies
Bandelier’s strong statement that] the Indian with all his
democratic institutions, in society as in religion is the
merest slave. His life is the best exemplification of what a
many-headed tyranny can achieve. Every step is controlled by
religious fear.[254]