Dancing Gods

Indian Ceremonials of New Mexico and Arizona

Erna Fergusson

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 1988
• ISBN:
  9780826327635
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

One of the most remarkable features of life in the Southwest is the presence of Native American religious ceremonies in communities that are driving distance from Sunbelt cities. Many of these ceremonies are open to the public and Dancing Gods is the best single reference for visitors to dances at the Rio Grande Pueblos, Zuni Pueblo, the Hopi Mesas, and the Navajo and Apache reservations. Fergusson's classic guide to New Mexico and Arizona Indian ceremonies is once again available in print. It offers background information on the history and religion of the area's Native American peoples and describes the principal public ceremonies and some lesser-known dances that are rarely performed. Here is information on the major Pueblo rituals--the Corn Dance, Deer Dance, and Eagle Dance--as well as various dances at Zuni, including the complicated Shalako. Fergusson also describes the Hopi bean-planting and Niman Kachina ceremonies in addition to the Snake Dance, the Navajo Mountain Chant and Night Chant, and several Apache ceremonies.

"Still the best of all books about the Indian ceremonials of New Mexico and Arizona....perceptive and simple, reverent and lucid."--Lawrence Clark Powell, Southwest Classics

V: Hopi Dances

THE BEAN-PLANTING CEREMONY

THE REAL RETURN OF THE KATCHINAS IS CELEBRATED IN Powamu, the Bean-Planting Ceremony: an elaborate ceremony, lasting eight days. On the first day, masks are brought to the kiva and renovated. Flat color is applied from the mouth, as a Chinaman sprinkles clothes; design is painted with a yucca brush. On the first day, also, messengers visit all the kivas and announce the ceremony quietly. This variation from the usual Hopi custom of making announcements at the top of the lungs is due to the convention that the names of the Katchinas must not be spoken aloud. The priests, in the kivas, are chanting the myth on which the rites are based. They emerge only to visit every home in which there is a tiponi, feathered wands which are owned by certain priests, or by women through whom the legendary family descends.

During these days the clowns are much in evidence. They are like the Zuñi Mudheads, with their clay-daubed bodies and their heads hidden in knobby sacks. They dash about, calling jokes, many of which are said to be in Zuñi, trip each other up, and cause laughter wherever they go. A part of their play is concerned with a basket plaque piled high with wooden cones. They challenge the girls to lift the plaque without spilling the cones, a feat none of them can accomplish. Finally a youth does it; the clowns fall over as though dead from the shock, and must be revived by methods even more shocking to the few white people who have seen this rite—probably a sexual pantomime. Dr. Fewkes, always discreet, says that anyone of scientific attainment may learn all—presumably by proving an interest purely scientific. The treasure of the tray turns out to be seeds, which are distributed to the women to plant in the fields and so assure fertility.

On the third day youths bring in baskets of wet sand which they leave near the kiva hatchways. Later, as the actors enter, each man fills a basket or bowl with the sand, carries it into the kiva, and plants his beans in it. From then on, hot fires are kept going, attendants keep the sand constantly wet, and blankets are stretched across the opening so that every kiva becomes a regular hothouse in which the seeds are forced to an unseasonable sprouting.

Late on the fifth night Hahawuctqi, “mother of the terrifying monsters,” appears upon the kiva roof and announces in her weird falsetto call that she has arrived and wishes to see the children. An answering voice responds that the children have all gone to bed and urges her to postpone her visit until morning. Thus are the children warned of the presence of the horrible and thrilling beings who bring gifts for good children and punishment for naughty ones. It must fill with trepidation many a little brown Hopi snuggled into blankets and fearfully eager for the coming day.

Yet the monsters and their mother do not emerge until late afternoon, when they appear in procession. The mother, a man, leading, wears the black dress and a white mantle and leggings. Her mask is a flat black face, with hair in pigtails such as the women wear, feathers raying from the crown, and a fox-skin ruff. She carries a long juniper whip, a whitened dipper, and a flat tray covered with gifts for the children: ears of corn, seeds, and bundles of sticks for little girls, and tiny snares of yucca fiber for little boys. The other woman figure, Soyokmana, is such a terrifying old witch as every people in the world seems to have invented to scare children into virtue. She is dressed like the “mother,” but her hair is straggling, her clothes are old and dirty, and she carries a crook in one hand and a knife in the other. The others (Natacka) usually appear in Navajo velvet shirts, belted around slim waists with heavy silver belts, and with white buckskin mantles over the shoulders. They all wear terrifying masks: great snouts, bulging eyes, and horns. Each carries a bow and arrows in his left hand, leaving the right hand free to receive gifts, for this is a begging expedition.

There are three such groups, one for each village. They visit every house in their own village, and every house in the other two villages into which one of their men has married. For in Hopiland the custom still lingers of a man’s going to his wife’s people. So one meets them everywhere, hooting as they pass along the crooked streets and as the “mother” calls at every door or at the top of every ladder. Her queer cry always brings out women with food or children to be admonished. Children cling to their mothers or to each other, bright black eyes peering bravely over blanket folds, or they stand sturdily to face the fearful being, determinedly not afraid.

During the following two days all sorts of queer happenings take place, all significant for the reception of the great spirits, but unaccountable to whites. Men run naked the length of the mesa, hooting, or lie full length on kiva-tops, making nosing motions at each other, grunting and groaning; they dash in and out of the kivas, naked and painted, feathered and jeweled, dance a few steps, and rush off again. Even Fewkes, the insatiably curious investigator, could not find out what it all meant.

Every fourth year, during Powamu, occurs the initiation of children, which is a whipping administered by the Flogger Katchina (Tunwupkatchina). The ceremony takes place in the late afternoon, when Tunwup enters the village from the west. His mask varies from year to year, but it always has bulging eyes, horns, and a mouth full of red tongue and teeth. His body is painted with stripes or zigzags, and he carries a bundle of yucca for a scourge. Arriving at the plaza, this creature prances up and down its limited length, making no sound except the weird inhuman cries of his kind. Children, both boys and girls, are brought in by their god-parents, stripped, and led up to the monster, who, still prancing, wields his whip vigorously, striking each little bare brown back until the child shrieks with pain and fright. Usually he gives five or six such strokes; sometimes, if a child seems unduly frightened, he merely waves his whip and does not strike at all. Sometimes adults present themselves for the punishment, which is thought to have healing properties. In these cases the beating is apt to be vicious. Sometimes, especially if there are many children of suitable age, there is more than one flogger.

This is the Hopi revelation of “the secret of life”: the knowledge that Katchinas are not really spirits, but men dressed to represent them. It is noticeable that younger children, who have not been flogged, are never permitted to look at the Katchinas when they come begging, though when they dance this care is not observed.

The final act of Powamu, the dancing, takes place in the nine kivas which dot the mesa. Every one has been freshly plastered for the occasion with a thin mud from a sacred spring, and each job of plastering has been signed with the print of the slim hand of the girl who did it.

We were permitted, one year, to enter one of the kivas and witness all the ceremonies of that last night. Our host, stopping on the kiva roof, spoke down the hatchway and was answered in Hopi words. Then we descended the ladder. Leaving the cold star-spangled air, it was like dropping into the very bowels of the earth, where there was a hot thick stench of unwashed people, and where the only light came from a smoky oil-lamp and a smoldering fire. Once inside, everything outside seemed impossible: there could be no crystal freshness of an Arizona night, no biting air that would cleanse the lungs. We were back in a time when people lived underground in a darkness varied only by shifting gleams of a false light, when the only hope was in weird rites designed to reach incredible beings, themselves hampered by ignorance of the real powers.

Then, as we settled on our blankets, nonsensical notions gave way before the sight of familiar things. We sat at the eastern end of the kiva on a slightly raised platform, probably a foot higher than the floor at the fire-place end. A few women were there when we went in, and others drifted in from time to time, muffled in blankets, which they dropped as they sat, showing flat heads and faces with untidy twists of hair falling down their cheeks. Many of them were barefooted even on that cold winter night, and as they loosened their blankets, some of them brought to light perfectly naked babies. Men came down the ladder too, but they usually sat at the ceremonial end of the room, squatting on their haunches near the fire, stooping to pick up coals and light corn-husk cigarettes, exchanging remarks and chuckles with the men already there, busy with the manufacture of corn-husk flowers.

They smoothed the pale gold husks on their knees, tore them into the right shape, and then, dipping twisted yucca fiber into shallow pottery bowls, they applied a light-red paint to one half of each leaf. The work was apparently negligently done, while conversation went on, but the results were beautiful. Soon four petals were ready, and then they were quickly twisted into the shape of a big open flower, like a squash blossom, tied, and laid aside. Without any apparent effort or hurry each man soon had beside him a pile of pale-gold and red blossoms.

Then they began to dress. Lazily they rose from where they sat and, without the slightest embarrassment, removed their shirts, trousers, and shoes, neatly folding their things and laying them in corners. That left their smooth brown bodies exposed, the demands of propriety being satisfied by those modest curtains, front and back, which are the gee-string. Each man then painted his own body, making one leg, one arm, and one half the torso red, and the other one white, the same color scheme as that of the flowers, though the thin wash of white paint over the brown skin gave a different effect. Then each man gave a helping hand to others, painting the backs like the fronts. Chatter and laughter went on all the time. Each man loosened his own hair, and with a grass brush he curried and shook it until it lay in a shining black mane to his waist behind and fluffed out in bobbed puffs over his cheeks. Then he tied three of his flowers to his crown, making a chaplet of the big gay blossoms, most effective against shining black hair. Somewhere in this process white kirtles and sashes were adjusted, turtle-shell rattles, strings of shell and turquoise, and silver-studded baldrics were put on; and those ordinary young men in faded overalls and dirty shirts were suddenly brilliant and beautiful figures, studies in all the possible shades of red and gold and ivory-white.

Then, obeying the hints of the leader, given usually with the slightest bending of the head, they moved into two facing lines, shifted, stamped, rattled their gourds, and swirled into the dance. It was thrilling how quickly that hot underground room was transformed into a chamber of mystery as those gay creatures stepped and turned and swayed with graceful precision. Shining brown skin slipped over muscles which were hard but never strained, hands and feet moved rhythmically, voices chanted one of those compelling songs so characteristic of the Indian. Then it seemed that there was real force in that underground prayer, a real relationship with all the glory of the starry night outside.

The dance was soon over, and the dancers left, climbing the ladder into blackness and departing in a dying jingle of bells. They had gone to visit another kiva, and soon another group entered ours, calling first at the top, and then dropping down the ladder with rattle of shells and sound of voices. During the night every kiva group visited every other kiva—a long succession of different dances and various costumes.

The night wore slowly on. The atmosphere in the kiva thickened, and we were frequently glad to accept our hosts’ invitation to visit other kivas in order that we might breathe outside air and save our puny lungs from succumbing to the fetid reek, which apparently did not affect the Hopis at all. Going along the mesa on those expeditions, we encountered groups of dancers, jingling along under the stars, voices always musically gay and laughing, kirtles swishing softly, and bodies smelling of sweat as they brushed past us on the narrow stony path.

Early the next morning, all too soon after getting to sleep, we were roused. We lay in a row of bed-rolls on the floor of a Hopi house in Polacca at the foot of the mesa. A kitchen stove, a box with a pail on it, a mirror, several lithographs, a row of Katchina dolls, and a phonograph were its furnishings. The dawn was just turning from pale gray to pale rose, and above us on the high point of Walpi rose a musical cry. It was, we knew, the call of a priest announcing that the Katchinas were in the village and would soon appear. Very soon the children in our house excitedly pointed to one of the Katchinas leaping down the mesa-side. Against the dun-colored rocks he was a brilliant figure of turquoise-blue and dull green. As he came closer, uttering his queer hoots, we picked out the detail of his costume: a turquoise-blue mask with snakes painted under the eyes, feathers sticking out of the ears, feathers on top, a collar of spruce. His body was painted green and yellow, and his moccasins were brilliant blue. Tousled youngsters trooped out to meet him, still struggling with sleep, but alert enough to hold out little brown hands for presents. He had brought dolls and gay-colored rattles for the girls, bows and arrows for the boys, and for both the long, pale-green sprouts of the beans which had been forced out in the over-heated kivas. All the time the dancer kept his feet moving in short jerky steps, a little as though to fight the cold; but we knew that this constant motion and the high falsetto hoots were to create the illusion of a being of another world. All through the three villages such figures were moving, and nearly all the morning they were busy bringing gifts to every child, especially the long, trailing streamers of pale green which were seen in every house, in every child’s hands.

Later performances were not so pleasant for the children, and very upsetting for white visitors, filled with notions of the lasting effects of terror on the child mind. About noon the procession of monsters again came out of their kiva, the mother leading, six other ogres in animistic masks, and the witch-like creature with crook and bloody knife: Soyokmana. This group visited every house, hooting their request for food, presenting bean-sprouts, and receiving gifts, which they put into their huge bags. If the food offered was not enough, the Soyok whistled indignantly through her teeth, and the others gave hoots amounting to disgusted groans. Usually the racket worked and more food was forthcoming. At many of the houses Soyok, hideous old witch, used her crook to hook some child around the neck and hold him there, screaming in terror, squirming with horror, and clinging to his mother in an agony terrible to see.

Protests to our host were met with his quiet, gentle Hopi voice: “But that is our way. He has been naughty. His mother asked them to come.” Altogether it was too much for the white visitors, and they left the mesa.

There was no dancing during the day. The masks disappeared into the kivas before mid afternoon, and we were told that when the final acts of smoking and the disposal of ceremonial things were properly attended to, there was great feasting. Certainly in every house big pots were stewing up messes in which the bean-sprouts were an important ingredient, that there might be great fertility in the coming spring.

So the Katchinas come in, every year. From that time until the “going-out,” in July, there are masked ceremonies constantly in all the Hopi villages. White people who have lived there say that there is hardly a week without its ceremony. They differ greatly from year to year; some are dying out, some new ones, so they say, are being brought even now from other peoples. Any and all of the gods may come and disport themselves as they, or their impersonators, please, until the season of the ancient gods comes round again.

NIMAN KATCHINA: THE GOING-AWAY OF THE GODS

WE WOKE IN OUR BORROWED HOPI HOUSE AS DAWN WAS breaking over Keams Canyon, and low-hanging clouds parted to let the sun rise. Indians were coming out of their houses in Polacca and starting up to Walpi, afoot over the trails, and up the road on horses or in wagons. Our car followed them, picking up several walking Hopis until we were well loaded. Everyone wanted a smoke and did not mind mentioning it if we seemed forgetful. Burros moved aside to let us pass, a Navajo couple on two wiry ponies whooped into a gallop and passed us on the rocky up-grade, breaking all the rules of horsemanship.

On the mesa, people were beginning to stir. As we passed along through Hano and Sichomovi, we saw people performing the most intimate details of toilet in the open, no more abashed than the scratching dogs and the chickens ruffling in sand baths. A few women were sweeping out, a few family parties were sitting on the ground around pots of food, breakfasting. The inevitable Hopi smell hung heavy, even in the cool morning air. Blue sky, cloud-streaked, was reflected in the muddy water-holes. Ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• I: The Pueblo People
• II: Dances of the Rio Grande Pueblos
• III: Dances of Zuñi Pueblo
• IV: The Hopis
• V: Hopi Dances
• VI: The Navajos
• VII: Navajo Religion
• VIII: The Apaches
• IX: Apache Dances
• Index