Kiva

“ Fig. 22. Ground plan of the chief kiva of Shupaulovi.
On the lower or main floor a shallow pit of varying dimensions, but usually about a foot square, is made for a fireplace, and is located immediately under the opening in the hatchway. The intention in raising the hatchway above the level of the roof and in elevating the ceiling in the middle is to prevent the fire from igniting them. The ordinary fuel used in the kiva is greasewood, and there are always several bundles of the shrub in its green state suspended on pegs driven in the wall of the hatchway directly over the fire. ”

“ Women usually enter the kivas only on occasions when they take part in the ceremonies, or are invited in to witness them.
An unmarried boy, after being initiated, often sleeps in the kiva of his society. His mother’s house may be crowded with younger children so the warm, underground room is much more pleasant. Married men very often sleep in the kiva, too, but for different reasons. When a man marries, he goes to live with his wife in the midst of her clan relatives. Often he remains, in a sense, an outsider. While he prizes his family and his home, he prizes, also, his kiva sanctuary. ”

“ This opening into the underworld is barely large enough to admit the human hand and extends only about a foot below the floor surface. It is commonly single, but in one kiva two of these orifices were detected. A similar symbolic opening occurs in modern Hopi kivas, as has been repeatedly described in the author’s accounts of pueblo ceremonials. An important structure of a Spruce-tree House kiva is an upright slab of rock, or a narrow thin wall of masonry, placed between the fireplace and the wall of the kiva. ”

“ Being entirely underground, and with only the one small door in the roof, a kiva is kept perfectly warm by a small fire in the central firepit. Fresh-air comes down the ventilator shaft to drive the smoke out through the door and the lower part of the room is never smoky. The floor is covered with mats and skins and the men loaf, sleep and work in perfect comfort. Unmarried boys who have been initiated into the religious societies live in the kivas most of the time during the winter and the married men often sleep in them. They are far more comfortable than the houses. ”

“ The roof of the kiva is supported by great, heavy beams, which are brought from the San Francisco Mountain with infinite trouble and labor. In Oraibi there are thirteen kivas, each probably in the possession of some society, one of which belongs to women, who there erect their altar in the mamzrouti ceremony. ”

“ XXXVIII, illustrating a court of Oraibi, shows in the foreground a kiva hatchway of the usual form seen in Tusayan. Here there is but little difference between the entrance traps of the ceremonial chambers and those that give access to the rooms of the first terrace; the former are in most cases somewhat larger to admit of ingress of costumed dancers, and the kiva traps are usually on a somewhat sharper slope, conforming to the pitch of the small dome-roof of the kivas, while those of the house terraces have the scarcely perceptible fall of the house roofs in which they are placed. ”

“ No traces were seen, however, of any structural devices like those of Tusayan that would serve as aids to the weavers, though the weaving of the particular articles comprised in the collection from this spot would probably not require any cumbrous apparatus.
Kiva ownership.—The kiva is usually spoken of as being the home of the organization which maintains it. Different kivas are not used in common by all the inhabitants. Every man has a membership in some particular one and he frequents that one only. ”

“ The other cause assigned is the necessity for additional room when a gens has outgrown its kiva. When a gens has increased in numbers sufficiently to warrant its having a second kiva, the chief of the gentile group, who in this case is also chief of the order, proposes to his kin to build a separate kiva, and that being agreed to, he assumes the direction of the construction and all the dedicatory and other ceremonies connected with the undertaking. ”

“ Two or three feet from the fire pit, and in a straight line with the ventilator shaft, the deep recess, the deflector and the fire pit is a small hole in the floor of the kiva. This hole is usually about 3 inches in diameter and from 4 to 6 inches deep; its walls and bottom often covered with a smooth layer of mud. In the present day kivas this hole is known as the “sipapu”, and is considered to be the symbolic entrance to the underworld. The kiva was a combination ceremonial, club, and workroom for the men. ”

“ Similar lines are still made with meal on kiva walls in Hopi ceremonies, as the author has often described. One of the pedestals of kiva A is decorated with a triangular figure on the margin of the dado, to which reference will be made later.
The author has found no conclusive answer to the question why the kivas are built under ground and are circular in form. He believes both conditions to be survivals of ancient “pit-houses,” or subterranean dwellings of an antecedent people. In this explanation the kiva is regarded as the oldest form of building in the cliff-dwellings. ”

“ All these factors may have had some influence in the design, but we have already seen that excavation to the extent here practiced is wholly exceptional in pueblo building and the unusual development of this requirement of kiva construction has been due to purely local causes. In the habitual practice of such an ancient and traditional device, the Indians have lost all record of the real causes of the perpetuation of this requirement. At Zuñi, too, a curious explanation is offered for the partial depression of the kiva floor below the general surrounding level. ”

“ The circular kiva is a survival of an ancient type—a survival supported by all the power of religious feeling and the conservatism in religious matters characteristic of savage and barbarous life; and while most of the modern pueblos have at the present time rectangular kivas, such, for example, as those at Tusayan, at Zuñi, and at Acoma, there is no doubt that the circular form is the more primitive and was formerly used by some tribes which now have only the rectangular form. ”

“ It is highly appropriate that ancient ceremonies should take place in a kiva, the symbolic representation of an underworld, for many of the ceremonies are said to have been practiced while man still lived within the Earth Mother. The word kiva is restricted to subterranean chambers, rectangular or circular, in which secret ceremonies are or were held, and the term kihu is suggested for ceremonial rooms above ground. The five kivas at Walpi are examples of the true kiva, while the Flute chamber may be called a kihu. ”

“ Many of the kivas were built by religious societies, which still hold their stated observances in them, and in Oraibi several still bear the names of the societies using them. A society always celebrates in a particular kiva, but none of these kivas are now preserved exclusively for religious purposes; they are all places of social resort for the men, especially during the winter, when they occupy themselves with the arts common among them. ”

“ Now occurs one of the strangest portions of the whole ceremony. The Antelope priests have already returned, with due decorum, to their kiva. One by one the Snake men arrive at theirs, sweating and breathless from their run up the steep trails. When all have returned, they step to the top of their kiva, or, as at Walpi, to the western edge of the mesa, and there drink a large quantity of an emetic that has been especially prepared for the purpose. Then, O ye gods! ”

“ An excavation of the desired dimensions having been made, or an existing one having been discovered, the person who is to be chief of the kiva performs the same ceremony as that prescribed for the male head of a family when the building of a dwelling house is undertaken. He takes a handful of meal, mixed with piki crumbs, and a little of the crumbled herb they use as tobacco, and these he sprinkles upon the ground, beginning on the west side, passing southward, and so around, the sprinkled line he describes marking the position to be occupied by the walls. ”

“ It is also to be noted that the ladder to the surface is always of pine and always rests on the platform, never on the lower floor. In their traditional genesis, the people climbed from the [47] third house by means of a tree or a ladder of pine through such an opening as the kiva hatchway to the outer air, or the fourth world. [29]
The kiva has also been called the nearest approach that the Indian had to a school-house for the boys of the tribe. There, during the long winter evenings, the old men—tellers of tales—would sit wrapped in their many-colored blankets and recite their legends ”

“ There is no reason to suppose that the kiva was a necessity in the ancient performance of the Tusayan ritual, and there are still performed many ceremonials as secret and as sacred as any others which occur in rooms used as dwellings or for the storage of corn. Thus, the Flute [Pg 612] ceremony, one of the most complicated in Tusayan, is not, and according to legends never was, performed in a kiva. On the contrary, the secret rites of the Flute society are performed in the ancestral Flute chamber or home of the oldest woman of the Flute clan. ”

“ Just then Teni thought of Mavo, so they started back.
On the way they stopped at a round room which was in the center of this queer house.
“What is this room?” said Teni.
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“The kiva,” said the boy. “All the men of this cliff village sleep here on the skins which you see scattered about.”
On a shelf in one part of the kiva was a curious-looking doll baby with a painted face, long hair, and bright-colored clothes.
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This doll was an idol, so the children stopped to put some red corn at its feet, touching its dress very gently. ”

“ The form of the kiva is characteristic and may be used as a basis of classification of pueblo culture. The people whose kivas are circular inhabited villages now ruins in the valley of the San Juan and its tributaries, in Chelly canyon, Chaco canyon, and on the western plateau of the Rio Grande. ”

“ The Sä-lä-mō-bī-ya remove their masks after entering the kiva, when they immediately lose their identity as the Kōk-kō. They are merely men now, praying to the Kōk-kō. This ceremony over, they return to their respective kivas, having put on their masks before leaving the Kiva of the Earth. ”

“ This word of the Tusayan language is adopted to take the place of the Spanish term “estufa,” which literally means a stove, and is misleading, because it strictly applies only to the sweat houses which lodge-building Indians use. The kiva is the ceremonial chamber of the ancient and modern Pueblo peoples. They are found wherever the remains of Pueblo architecture occur, and are distinguished from the typical dwelling rooms by their size and position and generally by their form. ”

“ North kivas of Shumopavi, seen from the southwest.
Access.—The last described semi-subterranean kiva and the similar one in the court of the village, show a short flight of stone steps on their eastern side. Entrance to the ceremonial chamber is prevented when necessary by the removal of the ladder from the outside, or in some instances by the withdrawal of the rungs, which are loosely inserted into holes in the side pieces. There is no means of preventing access to the exposed trap doors, which are nearly on a level with the ground. ”

“ There are reasons for believing that the use of rectangular kivas is of later origin in the pueblo system of building than the use of the circular form of ceremonial chamber that is of such frequent occurrence among the older ruins. Had strict orientation of the rectangular kiva prevailed for long periods of time it would undoubtedly have exerted a strong influence towards the orientation of the entire pueblo clusters in which the kivas were incorporated ”

“ The ordinary term for the ground story rooms is used, “kikoli,” the house without any opening in its walls. But on the second mesa, and at Oraibi, although they sometimes use this term kikoli, they commonly apply the term “kiva” to the ground story of the dwelling house used as well as to the underground chambers.
It is probable that a class of kivas, not specially consecrated, has existed from a very early period. The rooms in the dwelling houses have always been small and dark, and in early times without chimneys. ”

“ Consecration.—When all the work is finished the kiva chief prepares a baho and “feeds the house,” as it is termed; that is, he thrusts a little meal, with piki crumbs, over one of the roof timbers, and in the same place inserts the end of the baho. As he does this he expresses his hope that the roof may never fall and that sickness and other evils may never enter the kiva.
It is difficult to elicit intelligent explanation of the theory of the baho and the prayer ceremonies in either kiva or house construction. The baho is a prayer token ”

“ Here we shall be privileged to enter if no ceremony is going on. The kivas are generally hewn out of the solid rock, or partially so, and are from twelve to eighteen feet square. When not otherwise occupied it is no uncommon sight to see in a kiva a Hopi weaver squatted before his rude loom, making a dress for his wife or daughter, or weaving a ceremonial sash or kilt for his own use in one of the many dances.
In every Hopi town one cannot fail to be struck with the nudity of the children of all ages, from the merest babies up to eight and even ten years. ”