Zuni people

“ 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." ”

“ It is never her duty, but a special privilege which is rarely accepted. If she accepts she passes through both ceremonials described. She chooses her godfather, who gives her for the first ceremony a woman's blanket and for the second a woman's dress, a white blanket, a quantity of blue yarn, a woman's belt, a buckskin, a sacred blanket, and the mask she is to wear. But even here in Zuñi, where the people are so controlled by the priests and have such a superstitious dread of disobeying the commands of the Kōk-kō, women have been guilty of desecrating their sacred office and marrying. ”

“ Everything, in fact, to be learned of the round-ruin people points quite unmistakably to their descent in a twofold sense from the cliff-dwelling people; and it remains necessary, therefore, only to account for their change of habitat and to set forth their supposed relationship finally to the modern Zuñi pueblos. ”

“ There the ceremonial of the scalp dances of initiation were performed over the scalps of the two friars, an observance designed both as a commemoration of victory and to lay the ghosts of the slain by completing the count of their unfinished days and making them members by adoption of the ghostly tribe of Zuñi. The scalp-dance is also supposed to proclaim in song, unto the gods and men, that thenceforward their people are of the enemy, and unto the gods of the enemy that the gods of Zuñi are victors over them, whereof and wherefore it will be well for them to beware. ”

“ Loew: “If you wish to see what a great people we once were you must go upon the mesas and into the cañons of the vicinity, where ruins of our forefathers are numerous.”
One of the most important pueblos yet remaining inhabited, and one of the first that Coronado encountered in his expedition, is Zuñi. The present pueblo is considered as the remaining one of the Seven Cities—at least, by the majority of Americanists. Whipple describes Zuñi as follows: “Treading an opening between rocky bluffs, . . . we entered the valley, several miles in width, which leads to Zuñi. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They bear on the history of man the world over. I have become convinced that they thus bear on human history, especially on that of human culture growth, very directly, too, for the Zuñis, say, with all their strange, apparently local customs and institutions and the lore thereof, are [378] representative in a more than merely general way of a phase of culture through which all desert peoples, in the Old World as well as in the New, must sometime have passed. ”

“ In Zuñi, where, at the present day, each individual feels himself identified with some part of the body of a quadruped, his clan totem, the conception of the state as “a living animal,” is an actual reality. Their pueblo moreover represents a 6+1=7, or a “seven in one,” the miniature counterpart of the far distant Ooraon village of Chota Nagpore and of the ancient archaic kingdoms of India, Persia, Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, etc. Anciently the Zuñis called themselves the Ashiwi, a name remarkably like that of the Ashvins, derived from the Akkadian ash=six. ”

“ They say he’s gone into the mountain to talk with Manitou; and from time to time queer sounds are heard that set the Indians almost wild—strains of sweet music come out of cracks in the rocks, and then a strange voice like the rumbling of thunder follows. And at such times every Zuni will be sure to flatten himself, face downward, on the ground, listening with all his might, but not daring to look, for fear he might see too much, and be struck blind; because that’s what the Witch Doctor has warned them might happen if they got too curious. ”

“ In the beginning, says the Zuni account of the coming of men upon earth, they dwelt in the lowermost of four subterranean caverns, called the "Four Wombs of the World," and as they began to increase in numbers they became very unhappy, and the children of the wise men among them besought them to deliver them from such a life of misery. Then, it is said, "The 'Holder of the Paths of Life,' the Sun-Father, created from his own being two children, who fell to earth for the good of all beings. ”

“ Now, however, the good friar whom the Indians called Kwan Tátchui Lók‘yana ("Juan Gray-robed-father-of-us") , was called to council by the elders, and given a well-scraped piece of deerskin, whitened with prayer meal, and some bits of cinder, wherewith to make markings of meaning to his countrymen. And he was bidden to mark thereon that the Zuñis were good to those who, like him, were good to them and meddled not; nor would they harm any who did not harm their women and children and their elders. ”

“ The fearful and mysterious, the magical and occult, all these and many other elements are usually included in the primitive man's religion, and hence terms like "sacred" must be given a less restricted value than they have in our speech or culture.
Again, while the Zuñi word shíwani, "priest," literally signifies guardian and possessor, as well as maker or keeper of the flesh, or seed of life of the Zuñis, it must not be supposed to represent a medicine-man, shaman, or sorcerer—for all of which there are specific differentiated terms in the Zuñi tongue. ”

“ The Zuni authorities are a governor and high priest; the latter is called the cacique, who, besides being the oracle of the tribe, is their temporal as well as spiritual ruler. No outward personification of their Divine Being is made use of; but, entering their estufas (temples) with a bueno corazon (good heart) , they simply pray for some blessing, looking to no visible object as a medium of intercession between themselves and their God. ”

“ Sooner or later such acculturation invariably effects radical change in the forms of things used by one or the other of the peoples thus commingling, or by both; though in the latter case the change is usually unequal. In the case here under consideration there is to be found throughout the nearer Zuñi country ruins of the actual transitional type of pueblo thus formed by the union of the two ancestral branches of the Zuñis, the round town with its cliff-like outer wall merging into the square, terraced town with its broken and angular or straight outer walls ”

“ The Zuni philosophy, then, endows all the elements and phenomena of nature with personality, and that personality is blended with the personality of the beast "whose operations most resemble its manifestation". ”

“ Since that time, the grandmother has gone, no one knows where. But Áhaiyúta and Mátsailéma are the bright stars of the morning and evening, just in front of and behind the Sun-father himself. Yet their spirits hover over their shrines on Thunder Mountain and the Mount of the Beloved, they say, or linger over the Middle of the World, forever to guide the games and to guard the warriors of the Land of Zuñi. Thus it was in the days of the ancients. ”

“ Consequently, as a child at play on the floor finds sticks all-sufficient for the personages of his play-drama, chairs for his houses, and lines of the floor for the rivers that none but his eyes can see, so does the primitive man regard the mute, but to him personified, appliances of his dance and the actions thereof, other than they seem to us.
I can perhaps make my meaning more clear by analyzing such a conception common to the Zuñi mind. The Zuñi has observed that the corn plant is jointed; that its leaves spring from these joints not regularly, but spirally ”

“ The studies of Major Powell among the Maskoki and other tribes have made it very clear that kinship terms, so called, among other Indian tribes (and the rule will apply no less or perhaps even more strictly to the Zuñis) are rather devices for determining relative rank or authority as signified by relative age, as elder or younger of the person addressed or spoken of by the term of relationship. So that it is quite impossible for a Zuñi speaking to another to say simply brother ”

“ When all the knots had been numbered and untied, then, to a man, the Zuñis arose to slay Spaniards wheresoever they might encounter them. They forthwith killed Fray Juan de Bal, the priest of Hálona, burning his church and destroying the chapels in the lesser towns round about. Not content with this, they dispatched warriors to the Tusayan country to see to it that the Hopi remain faithful to their promise and vigorously to abet them in its fulfilment. ”

“ Nothing in this world or universe having occurred by accident—so it seems to the Zuñi mind,—but everything having been started by a personal agency or supernal, he immediately begins to see in these characteristics of the corn plant the traces of the actions of the peoples in his myths of the olden time. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Certain other complexities of strain have arisen through the coming in to the pueblo of women from other nations. One Zuñi governor married a woman from the Cherokee Wolf clan, and as a matter of course she was received into their Coyote clan. In two or three generations it will be forgotten that her descendants were ever anything but Zuñi. Our author admits that the social fabric of Zuñi may be [182] more closely knit than some others, but is of the opinion that all Southwestern tribes are so intimate that what is true of one may be predicated of the rest. ”

“ Each man and woman deposited a piece, that he or she might always have plenty of wood for heat and light. Some three hundred feet above is another shrine, directly attached to the "father" rock, and to the white man difficult of access. Here I found many offerings of plume sticks (Tē līk-tkī-nā-we) .
Before entering upon the purely mythologic phases of Zuñi child life I will present a brief sketch of some of the Zuñi beliefs. There are thirteen secret orders in Zuñi, in many of which women and children are conspicuous, besides the purely mythologic order of the Kōk-kō. ”

“ Believing, as the Zuñis do, in this arrangement of the universe and this distribution of the elements and beings chiefly concerned in them, and finally in the relationship of their clans and the members thereof to these elementary beings, it is but natural that they should have societies or secret orders or cult institutions composed of the elders or leading members of each group of their clans as above classified. The seriation of these secret and occult medicine societies, or, better, perhaps, societies of magic, is one of the greatest consequence and interest. ”

“ Many of the sacred symbols in his possession were acquired after much trouble and not a little risk, for the Zunis have an unwritten law that no white man is to have any of the objects used in their ceremonies, and that any one parting with them is entitled to have his throat cut. ”

“ From a Roman station, 23 a royal villa, a chapter of noble virgins, Zurich had gradually increased to a free and flourishing city; where the appeals of the Milanese were sometimes tried by the Imperial commissaries. 24 In an age less ripe for reformation, the precursor of Zuinglius was heard with applause: a brave and simple people imbibed, and long retained, the color of his opinions; and his art, or merit, seduced the bishop of Constance, and even the pope's legate, who forgot, for his sake, the interest of their master and their order. ”

“ All the classes of these, including the class that specially protects the animals necessary to men, "are believed to be related by blood." But among these essences, the animals are nearest to man, most accessible, and therefore most worshipped, sometimes as mediators. But the Zuni has mediators even between him and his animal mediators, and these are fetishes, usually of stone, which accidentally resemble this or that beast-god in shape. Sometimes, as in the Egyptian sphinx, the natural resemblance of a stone to a living form has been accentuated and increased by art. ”

“ As long as we are in the world, gathering Saints, preaching to the nations and building up Zion, Zion will be as a city set on a hill, which can not be hid. But the Lord proposes to preserve his people as far as possible from the influences of Babylon, and the transactions outside of the Order will be carried on through the Council of the Order; agents will be appointed by the voice of the Order, that what we bring, from abroad may be bought from first hands and in the lowest market, that we may derive the benefits of it, instead of giving the profits to middlemen who are not of us ”