“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 Zuñi; 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 Zuñi 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 Zuñi.
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 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 Zuñi are often bewildering.
In our own complex culture biography may be a clarifying form of
description. Might it not avail at Zuñi? I venture this biography of
Waiyautitsa.[6]
Waiyautitsa is a girl’s name; sex generally appears in Zuñi 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 Zuñi 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 Zuñi 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 Zuñi, 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 Zuñi women also wear, or “dressing up” in a
pitone, that purely ornamental article of dress without which no Zuñi
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
Zuñi. 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 Zuñi 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 membership 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 Zuñi 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 Zuñi, to be accounted for only through
witchcraft. The other woman was accounted the solitary convert of the
Dutch Reformed Church Mission in Zuñi 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 Zuñi and one
celebration of koko awia, and I have seen but one woman officiate 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 Zuñi 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 Zuñi 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 Zuñi 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 priesthood 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
Zuñi. They were and are associated with the men priests to do the work
pertinent to women. In the case of the Zuñi pantheon or its masked
impersonations, the association is needed to satisfy or carry out, so
to speak, Zuñi standards or concepts of conjugality. The couple rather
than the individual is the Zuñi 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 Zuñi, 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 Zuñi 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
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 Zuñi
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 Zuñi
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. 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 Zuñi 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 Zuñi 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.
Zuñi 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 Zuñi separate whenever they quarrel or get tired of each
other,” a critical Acoma moralist once said to me. The monogamy of Zuñi
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 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, Zuñi for courting, she and he could go to
live with some kinswoman. No one, related or unrelated, would refuse
to take them in. Nobody may be turned from the door. Nor would a girl
whose child was the offspring of a chance encounter be turned out by
her people or slighted. The illegitimate child is not discriminated
against at Zuñi.
Casual relationships occur at Zuñi, but they are not commercialized,
there is no prostitution. Nor is there any lifelong celibacy. As for
courtship, very little of it can there be—at least before intimacy
either in the more transient or more permanent forms of mating,—the
separation outside of the household of boys and girls of various ages
is so thorough. “But what if a little girl wanted to play with boys?”
I once asked. “They would laugh at her and say she was too crazy
about boys.” “Crazy” at Zuñi, as quite generally among Indians, means
passionate. (Girls at Zuñi are warned away from ceremonial trespass by
the threat of becoming “crazy.”)
The young men and girls do, to be sure, have non-ceremonial dances
together, and in preparing for them there are opportunities for
personal acquaintance. I saw one of these dances not long ago. It was
a Comanche dance. There were a choir of about a dozen youths including
the drummer, four girl dancers heavily be-ringed and be-necklaced, the
pattern of whose dance, two by two or in line, was very regular, and a
youth who executed in front of them or around them an animated and very
beautiful pas seul. After dancing outside in the plaza, they all went
into the “saint’s house” to dance for her “because they like her”—a
survival no doubt of the custom of dancing in the Catholic church
observed by the Indians in Mexico and not long since quite generally in
New Mexico.
But it is on the twilight trip to the well, the conventional Zuñi hour
of courtship, that Waiyautitsa will be approached by suitors. Muffled
in his black blanket the youth may step out from the corner where he
has been lurking and put his hand on the girl’s arm. If she will have
none of him, she may avert her head and hasten on to overtake the woman
in front, but if she fancies the fellow, she will pause, if but for
a moment or two, to talk. It is a brief encounter and, with somebody
in front and perhaps another girl coming up behind, it is far from
private; still after Waiyautitsa has had a few such meetings, “two or
four,” she is likely to invite the young man to join her household. At
first, for a few days, he will stay in the common room, in the room
where all sleep (sleeping and dressing, let me say, with the utmost
modesty), he will stay only at night, leaving before dawn, “staying
still” his shyness is called. Then he will begin to eat his meals with
the household. There is, you see, no wedding ceremonial and a man slips
as easily as he can into the life of his wife’s household.
Waiyautitsa will pay a formal visit on her bridegroom’s people, taking
his mother a basket of corn meal. To Waiyautitsa herself her young
man will have given a present of cloth for a dress, or a buckskin for
the moccasins he will make for her. Hides are a product of the chase,
of cattle raising (cowhide is used to sole moccasins), or of trade,
men’s occupations, and so moccasins of both women and men are made by
men. Women make their own dresses, although, formerly, before weaving
went out of fashion at Zuñi, it is likely that men were the weavers,
just as they are to-day among the Hopi from whom the men of Zuñi get
cloth for their ceremonial kilts and blankets, and for the dresses of
the women. Even to-day at Zuñi men may make up their own garments from
store-bought goods and it is not unusual to see a man sitting to a
sewing machine.
A man may use cloth or thread for other than economic reasons. In
case a girl jilts him he will catch her out some night and take a bit
from her belt to fasten to a tree on a windy mesa top. As the wind
wears away the thread, the woman will sicken and perhaps in two or
three years die. A woman who is deserted may take soil from the man’s
footprints and put it where she sleeps. At night he will think of her
and come back—“even if the other woman is better looking.” Apprehensive
of desertion a woman may put a lock of hair from the man in her house
wall or, the better to attach him to her, she may wear it over her
heart. Women and men alike may buy love charms from the ne’wekwe, a
curing society, potent in magic, black or white. There is a song, too,
which men and women may sing “in their heart” to charm the opposite
sex. And there is a song which a girl may sing to the corn as she
rubs the yellow meal on her face before going out. “Help me,” is the
substance of it, “I am going to the plaza. Make me look pretty.” Rarely
do our girls pray, I suppose, when they powder their noses.
Courtship past for the time being, courtship by magic or otherwise,
Waiyautitsa is now, let us say, an expectant mother. Her household
duties continue to be about the same, but certain precautions, if she
inclines to be very circumspect, she does take. She will not test the
heat of her oven by sprinkling it in the usual way with bran, for if
she does, her child, she has heard, may be born with a skin eruption.
Nor will she look at a corpse or help dress a dead animal lest her
child be born dead or disfigured. She has heard that, even as a little
girl if she ate the whitish leaf of the corn husk, her child would be
an albino. If her husband eats this during the pregnancy, the result
would be the same. On her husband fall a number of other pregnancy
tabus, perhaps as many as fall on her, if not more. If he hunts and
maims an animal, the child will be similarly maimed—deformed or
perhaps blind. If he joins in a masked dance, the child may have some
mask-suggested misshape or some eruption like the paint on the mask.
If he sings a great deal, the child will be a cry-baby. The habit of
thinking in terms of sympathetic magic or of reasoning by analogy which
is even more conspicuous at Zuñi than, let us say, at New York, is
particularly evident in pregnancy or birth practises or tabus.
Perhaps Waiyautitsa has wished to determine the sex of the child. In
that case she may have made a pilgrimage with a rain priest to Corn
Mesa to plant a prayer stick which has to be cut and painted in one way
for a boy, in another way for a girl. (Throughout the Southwest blue
or turquoise is associated with maleness, and yellow with femaleness.)
Wanting a girl—and girls are wanted in Zuñi quite as much as boys,
if not more—Waiyautitsa need not make the trip to the mesa, instead
her husband may bring her to wear in her belt scrapings from a stone
in a phallic shrine near the mesa. When labor sets in and the pains
are slight, indicating, women think, a girl, Waiyautitsa may be told
by her mother, “Don’t sleep, or you will have a boy.” A nap during
labor effects a change of sex. When the child is about to be born,
Waiyautitsa is careful, too, if she wants a girl, to see that the
custom of sending the men out of the house at this time is strictly
observed.
After the birth, Waiyautitsa will lie in for several days, four, eight,
ten or twelve, according to the custom of her family. Whatever the
custom, if she does not observe it, she runs the risk of “drying up”
and dying. She lies on a bed of sand heated by hot stones, and upon
her abdomen is placed a hot stone. Thus is she “cooked,” people say,
and creatures whose mothers are not thus treated are called uncooked,
raw—they are the animals, the gods, Whites. To be “cooked” seems to be
tantamount in Zuñi to being human.
It is the duty of Waiyautitsa’s mother-in-law, the child’s paternal
grandmother, to look after mother and child during the confinement, and
at its close to carry the child outdoors at dawn and present him or her
to the Sun. Had Waiyautitsa lost children, she might have invited a
propitious friend, some woman who had had many children and lost none,
to attend the birth and be the first to pick up the child and blow into
his mouth. In these circumstances the woman’s husband would become the
initiator of the child, if a boy, when the child was to be taken into
the Kachina society. Generally the child’s father chooses some man
from the house of his own kuku or paternal aunt to be the initiator or
godfather, so to speak, of the child. Ceremonial rites usually fall to
the paternal relatives.
But the infant will receive attentions of a ritual or magical nature,
likewise from his mother and her household. He is placed on a cradle
board in which, near the position of his heart, a bit of turquoise is
inlaid to preclude the cradle bringing any harm to its tenant. Left
alone, a baby runs great risk—some family ghost may come and hold him,
causing him to die within four days. And so a quasi-fetichistic ear of
corn, a double ear thought of as mother and child, is left alongside
the baby as a protector. That the baby may teethe promptly, his gums
may be rubbed by one who has been bitten by a snake—“snakes want to
bite.” To make the child’s hair grow long and thick, his grandfather or
uncle may puff the smoke of native tobacco on his head. That the child
may not be afraid in the dark, water-soaked embers are rubbed over his
heart the first time he is taken out at night—judging from what I have
seen of Zuñi children and adults a quite ineffectual method. That the
child may keep well and walk early, hairs from a deer are burned, and
the child held over the smoke—deer are never sick, and rapid is their
gait. Their hearing, too, is acute, so discharge from a deer’s ear
will be put into the baby’s ear. That the child may talk well and with
tongues, the tongue of a snared mocking bird may be cut out and held to
the baby to lick. The bird will then be released in order that, as it
regains its tongue and “talks,” the child will talk. A youth who speaks
in addition to his native tongue Keresan, English and Spanish, has been
pointed out to me as one who had licked mocking bird tongue.
Waiyautitsa will give birth to three or four children, probably not
more, and then, as she approaches middle age, we may suppose that
she falls sick, and after being doctored unsuccessfully first by her
old father who happens to be a well known medicine man of the Great
Fire-brand society, and then by a medicine man from the ne’wekwe
society whose practice is just the opposite, Waiyautitsa dies. Within
a few hours elderly kinswomen of her father’s will come in and wash
her hair and body, and at dawn sprinkle her face, first with water and
then with meal. The deceased will be well dressed, and in a blanket
donated by her father’s people she will be carried to the cemetery
lying in front of the old church, a ruin from the days of the Catholic
establishment in Zuñi. There to the north of the central wooden cross,
i. e., on the north side of the cemetery, Waiyautitsa will be buried.
Women are buried on the north side and men on the south.
Waiyautitsa will be carried out and buried by her father and other men
in the household. No women will go to the burial, nor will the widower.
The widower, as soon as the corpse is taken outdoors, will be fetched
by his women relatives to live at their house. There they straightway
wash his hair—a performance inseparable in Zuñi, as at other pueblos,
from every time of crisis or ceremony. The hair of all the other
members of Waiyautitsa’s household will be washed at the end of four
days by women relatives of her father. During this time, since the
spirit of Waiyautitsa is thought to linger about the home, the house
door will be left open for her at night. The bowl used in washing her
hair, and the implements used in digging her grave will also be left
outdoors. Her smaller and peculiarly personal possessions have been
buried with her, and bulky things like bedding have been burned or
taken to a special place down the river to be buried. The river flows
to the lake sixty miles or so west of Zuñi, where Waiyautitsa’s spirit
is also supposed to take its journey. There under the lake it abides,
except when with other spirits it returns in the clouds to pour down
upon Zuñi fields the beneficent rain. People will say to a child, when
they see a heavy cloud, “There goes your grandmother”; or they will
quite seriously say to one another, “Our grandfathers are coming.”
Waiyautitsa’s children may go on living at home with their grandmother,
Waiyautitsa’s mother, or it may be that one of them is adopted by
a maternal aunt or great-aunt or cousin. Zuñi children, cherished
possessions as they are, are always being adopted—even in the lifetime
of their mother. Adopted, a child—or an adult—will fit thoroughly
into the ways of his adoptive household. It is the household as well
as the clan which differentiates the Zuñi family group from our
individualistic type of family. The household changes quite readily,
but, whatever its composition, it is an exceedingly integrated and
responsible group.
However the children are distributed, it will be the older woman or
women in the household who will control them. This household system
is one that gives position and considerable authority to the elder
women—until the women are too old, people say, to be of any use.
(In spite of this irony, I have heard of but one old woman who was
neglected by her household.) An older woman who is the female head of
the household is greatly respected by her daughters and sons-in-law and
grandchildren, as well as by the sons or brothers who continually visit
the household and often, as temporary celibates, return to live in it.
The older woman is highly esteemed, but she is by no means the head of
the household—unless she is widowed. Wherever the household contributes
to the ceremonial public life, her husband is paramount. In the
non-ceremonial, economic life, too, he has equal, if not greater,
authority. And in the general economy he more or less expects his
wife to serve him and wait on him. This conjugal subordination is not
apparent to any extent among the younger people; the younger husband
and wife are too much drawn into the corporate household life. But as
time passes and they in turn become the heads of the household, the
man appears to be more given to staying at home, and more and more he
takes control.
From this brief survey of the life of a woman at Zuñi, in so far as
it can be distinguished from the general life, we get the impression
that the differentiation of the sexes follows lines of least resistance
which start from a fairly fundamental division of labor. From being
hunters and trappers men become herders of the domestic animals,
drivers or riders. Trade journeys and trips for wood or for the
collecting of other natural resources are associated with men, and
work on the things acquired is men’s work—men, for example, are wood
cutters, and bead makers, whether the objects are for secular or
sacerdotal use. Analogously all work upon skins or feathers is work for
men whether it leads to the manufacture of clothing or to communication
with the supernaturals. Again, as farmers, men are associated with
that system of supernatural instrumentalism for fertility and weather
control which constitutes in large part Zuñi religion. In other words,
the bulk of the ceremonial life, a system for the most part of rain
rituals, is in the hands of the men. So is government. The secular
officers are merely representatives of the priests. Zuñi government is
a theocracy in which women have little part. The house and housekeeping
are associated with women. Clay is the flesh of a female supernatural,
and clay processes, brickmaking or laying or plastering, and pottery
making are women’s work. There are indications in sacerdotal circles
that painting is, or was thought of as, a feminine activity. Corn,
like clay, is the flesh of female supernaturals, and the corn is
associated with women. Even men corn growers are in duty bound to bring
their product to their wife or mother. Women or women impersonations
figure in corn rituals. It is tempting to speculate that formerly,
centuries since, women themselves were the corn growers. To-day, at
any rate, the preparation of corn, as of other food, is women’s work.
Wherever food and its distribution figure in ceremonials, and there
is a constant offering of food to the supernaturals, women figure.
Fetiches are attached to houses and in so far as providing for these
fetiches is household work, it is women’s work and leads to the holding
of sacerdotal office by women. The household rather than ties of blood
is the basis of family life. The children of the household are more
closely attached to the women than to the men. One expression of this
attachment is seen in reckoning clan membership through the mother.
Household work at Zuñi as elsewhere is continuous. The women are always
on the move. The work of the men, on the other hand, is intermittent.
Hunting, herding and farming are more or less seasonal activities and
are more or less readily fitted into ceremonial pursuits, or rather,
in their less urgent periods, take on ceremonial aspects. In the
ceremonial life the arts find expression, and the men and not the women
are, by and large, the artists of the tribe.
Attached to the ceremonial life are the games of chance and the races
that are played or run at certain seasons. Here again the intermittent
habit of work of the men, together with their comparative mobility,
qualifies them as gamesters and runners to the exclusion more or less
of the women. Formerly, to be sure, the women played a pole and hoop
game, and, given ceremonial exigency as among the Hopi, the women no
doubt would run races.
Household work is confining. Hunting, herding, trading lead to a
comparatively mobile habit, a habit of mind or spirit which in the
Southwest, at least, is adapted to ceremonial pursuit; for Pueblo
Indian ceremonialism thrives on foreign accretions, whether of myth or
song or dance or design of mask or costume, or, within certain limits
of assimilation, of psychological patterns of purpose or gratification.
To the point of view that the differentiation of the sexes at Zuñi
proceeds on the whole from the division of labor, the native custom of
allowing a boy or man to become, as far as ways of living go, a girl
or woman, gives color. Towards adolescence, and sometimes in later
life, it is permissible for a boy culturally to change sex. He puts
on women’s dress, speaks like a woman, and behaves like a woman. This
alteration is due to the fact that one takes readily to women’s work,
one prefers it to men’s work. Of one or another of the three men-women
now at Zuñi or of the men-women in other pueblos I have always been
told that the person in question made the change because he wanted
to work like a woman or because his household was short of women and
needed a woman worker.
And yet among the Hopi, where the economy is practically identical with
the Zuñi, there are no men-women; in this tribe the institution, it is
said, was never established. This, like other customs, is not merely
a matter of economic adjustment; economic or psychologic propriety
or consistency or predisposition may count, but of great importance
also are the survival of traits from an earlier culture, and the
acquiring of traits from the culture of neighboring peoples. Were we
to understand the interplay of all these factors in the life, shall we
say, of Waiyautitsa, we might be a long way towards understanding the
principles of society, even other than that of Zuñi.