On a bright summer evening, a small boat leaves Yellowknife harbor to take a group out for a picnic on the Great Slave Lake, in the heart of the Canadian north. Yellowknife, with a population of only 13,500, serves as the capital of the Northwest Territories, a jurisdiction as large as India and five times the size of Texas. The Dene and Inuit constitute a majority of the territory’s people, but the small total of only fifty thousand gives the territories fewer residents than some universities.

The Great Slave Lake is 298 miles in length and covers an area of 10,980 square miles, making it the fourth-largest lake in North America after Lakes Superior, Huron, and Michigan. The lake roughly equals the size of Belgium, and is larger than nine states of the United States. The Great Slave Lake receives the waters of the Hay, Peace, and Slave rivers, as well as many smaller tributaries including the Cameron, which tumbles over a roaring waterfall before quietly drifting into the placid lake. The outlet of the Great Slave Lake is the 2,640-mile-long Mackenzie River, which carries the waters of the lake north to the Arctic.

As befits a river flowing out of so great a lake, the Mackenzie drains a total area second only to the combined Mississippi-Missouri system in North America. Even though sparsely settled, the Mackenzie River drains an area three times as large as the Rhine and larger than any other river in Europe, including the much better known Volga and Danube.

On a summer outing I sailed with a group of Inuit and Dene to a small peninsula jutting into Yellowknife Bay. The large gray rocks jut up out of the water like whales, covered in green and bright orange splotches of the slow-growing but ubiquitous lichens of the tundra. Over the centuries the lichens break down the rock and cause small patches of soil to collect in the crevices. Like planted window boxes, these patches spring to life with mosses, brilliant fireweed, fluffy puffs of Arctic cotton, and spruces that grow as slowly as an inch a year and need a human’s life span to grow as tall as a person. Small trees grow along the ground like evergreen vines, hugging the rocks and avoiding the dry, cold winds that blow down from the polar ice cap throughout the winter. The bleached white roots and trunks of dead trees line the shore like beached whale bones at the water’s edge.

Along the coast, one can see an occasional small inukshuk, the stones piled to look like a human figure and used by the Inuit in hunting and as landmarks. These inukshuik, however, rise only three or four feet from the ground, and the relatively haphazard arrangement of the rocks shows that Inuit did not make them; foreign tourists and visitors like ourselves probably made them for fun on other outings on the lake.

In the clear night light of the Great Slave Lake, the tall, blue tower of the gold-mining shaft rises distinctly just outside Yellowknife. This tower, the tallest structure in the Northwest Territories, reaches twenty-five stories into the air in order to house the equipment, machinery, and cables that have cut a shaft a mile and a half into the earth. That shaft leads into eighty-five miles of underground tunnels that snake throughout the surrounding areas and even under the lake itself. Some fishermen claim that in the clear Arctic light of summer, they can see the tower from up to seventy-five miles out into the lake.

Swarms of midges buzz around harmlessly although irritatingly. The least breeze casts them to the ground or pins them to clothing, until a white jacket quickly becomes a mottled gray from all the midges stuck to it. More annoying swarms of mosquitoes also venture out into the dusk of a summer evening. They come in great swarms that some people say resemble tornadoes up to one hundred feet high. Dene tales relate the sufferings of people who traveled across the tundra and mistook a massive mosquito swarm for the inviting smoke of a distant campfire and headed right into them.

The insects of the tundra can drive humans and animals insane. Because of them, explorers found horses useless on the open, flat landscape that seems so appropriate for travel on horseback. The explorers who arrived on horseback soon found that the tormenting bites of blowflies and mosquitoes crazed the horses, causing them to bolt away. The horses ran, kicked, jumped, and bit at the air and the swarms of bugs until they died of exhaustion. Even the native caribou and musk oxen, as well as imported reindeer, suffer from the relentless insects, but the thick coats that help them survive the long winter also help them survive in an environment that rejects cattle and less-hairy creatures of the temperate zones.

Because of the lack of soil in the tundra, the air maintains a dust-free, crystalline appearance that makes distant objects appear many times closer than they are. The acoustics of the area also deceive a southern ear. Sounds carry for miles in the air without pollution and competing sounds to muffle them. In that atmosphere the clicking of a single dragonfly’s wings sounds more like the noise of a rattlesnake than a small insect, and the clicking of a thousand of them sounds like the crisp popping of automatic weapons. The crunch of a foot on the dry lichens reverberates like the amplified sound of someone tromping on popcorn.

Far out on the Great Slave Lake, we seem to have left behind the noise of the miniature city, but my traveling companions for the night claim still to hear the roar of motorboats and trucks in Yellowknife. Most of them live in far quieter places scattered across the tundra, and with their acute hearing they can still perceive the sounds of the town and even of the gold mine long after my ears have ceased to hear anything but a light wind, the lapping of gentle waves, and the rattle of dragonfly wings.

Thirty people have assembled for this picnic from small villages above the sixtieth parallel, which divides the northern Yukon and the Northwest Territories from the southern Canadian provinces. They came from Edzo, Rae, Dettah, and Snowdrift, around the Great Slave Lake and from Hay River, as well as from Inuvik, Arctic Red River, and Aklavik, even farther north.

The women wore parkas that they had made themselves and trimmed with the warm fur of the ferocious wolverine. Lorna Storr from Aklavik carried a baby on a traditional sling about three inches wide and covered with thousands of multicolored beads. The beads spelled out the name of the child, Wills Storr, and his date of birth, November 27, 1988. She had made seven of these slings in her lifetime, one for each of her children.

We sailed on the Naocha (which means “big boat”), a touring boat owned by the Yellowknife Dogrib Dene band of Dettah, a lake village of 151 inhabitants, located three miles across the water from Yellowknife. The group on the lake that evening consisted almost exclusively of Inuit and Dene women with a handful of children. We headed out for a picnic feast of grilled whitefish, fresh salad, fruit juice, and tea, served with piles of bannock, the traditional biscuitlike bread of the north.

These women were all skilled artisans who specialized in their native traditions of working furs and skins, and sewing and embroidery with porcupine quills as well as beads. They had gathered in Yellowknife for three days of meetings on native crafts, and now they celebrated the meeting’s conclusion with a traditional feast out on the water, away from the town. The women gathered with representatives of the territorial and federal governments to discuss better ways of producing and marketing their traditional crafts of worked skins, leather, and beads for a larger national and perhaps international market.

With the decline in world prices for fur pelts brought in by men, the role of the women in their traditional crafts has assumed a greater share of northern economic development. The traditional men’s activity of hunting still produces large amounts of food, but their families need cash as well as food. In their symposium, the women sought to learn more about financial markets for their creations and the use of cooperative marketing efforts to increase their profits, and they shared information with one another about techniques and new ideas. They hoped to combine their traditional crafts with the modern market, without losing complete control of what they were doing.

The women with whom I shared a lakeside picnic on a bright July night in the northern tundra are continuing a tradition of thousands of years of native technology in the working of furs. Men hunted and trapped while women did the manufacturing.

Throughout the great era of the fur trade, the Indian hunters returned with their pelts to camp, and immediately turned them over to the women. These pelts varied in size from the small muskrats of under a foot, through the timber wolves, whose pelts stretched to over six feet, to an occasional grizzly or polar bear skin of twice that size. Beavers and martens usually made a medium pelt, just under three feet in length.

Because the pelts faced a long journey from the Indian camp in North America to the furrier in London, Paris, or Canton, they needed very careful preparation and curing before shipping. After thoroughly washing the fur, the women painstakingly removed every bit of meat or fat that still adhered to the pelt. If left on the pelt, the meat would attract mold and maggots, which could destroy the value of the fur long before it reached the first trading post. To scrape the pelt clean of adherent flesh, women used a flesher, a tool made from a large leg bone, with one end fashioned into the shape of a curved chisel.

After removing the flesh, the women stretched the hide on a frame. Large skins such as deer or bear needed to be stretched on a large frame sunk into the ground and often taller than the women processing the skin. Smaller animals, such as beaver, could be stretched on willow hoops with a diameter of about two feet, which looked like large embroidery hoops.

The women made soft buckskin and leather from the hides of deer, caribou, and elk. Even though these animals lacked thick fur, they did have hair that had to be removed to make the final cloth wearable. The women used scrapers to depilate the skin on one side in much the same way that they used the flesher to deflesh it on the other side. These skins also required more work during stretching; in order to cure them properly, the women had to oil them, rub them with urine or brains, and smoke them.

In addition to preparing skins and furs for sale, the women manufactured the clothing for the hunters and voyageurs who transported the furs. Inuit and Aleut women made fur-lined jackets with an attached hood, giving the world the parka. They called the special high boot of sealskin a mukluk. The parkas and jackets made by Inuit women had a sophistication of design that surpasses our concept of a mere jacket or coat.

The women who made these specialized clothes understood the requirements of the human body in the Arctic weather. They used the warm down of the king eider duck for extra insulation on the sides, where a person moves very little and thus requires extra warmth. Less-insulating cormorant feathers could be used on the back and chest so that these areas might “breathe” and prevent the wearer from overheating. The clothing crafted by the Inuit women had to serve many purposes: it not only kept the wearer warm, but it had to minimize perspiration, which would wet the clothing and then freeze, possibly endangering the life of the wearer in the Arctic cold. To make one piece of clothing, the women might use feathers with different insulating properties from a half dozen species of birds.

A series of drawstrings secured in various places allowed for quick and simple opening and closing of the clothing to adjust it for changing temperatures, winds, and moisture. By adjusting the strings, the person wearing the garment could make it cooler or warmer without removing the attached mittens.

A woman often added strips of fur to the collar of a jacket, the cuffs of sleeves, the ankles of moccasins, and to the rim around the face of a hood or the waist of a jacket or pants. In addition to blocking the cold air from entering these places on the clothes, the strips of fur minimized wear at points where the clothing might begin to ravel and fray. Even more important, these strategically placed strips prevented chafing from the rubbing of the clothing against the wrist, waist, neck, face, or other points where the clothing might irritate the skin. Because heavy winter clothes had to be worn for so much of the year, even a minor irritation arising from them could cause severe problems after a few months.

As a substitute for fur along such edges, the women often used strips of caribou hide or, in the south, strips of deerskin. The women also used the fringes for decoration. These dangling strips of rawhide on native clothing became emblematic of Indian or western-style clothing.

In temperate zones, cultures usually strive to control a large section of the environment through architecture. Roofs block the sun and protect people from rain, snow, blowing sand, or harsh winds. Windows and air shafts minimize cool air in hot periods or prevent the loss of warm air in cooler seasons. In English, we call people who design these large indoor environments architects, and consider them professionals of great learning. The word architect derives from the Greek, and means “primary doer.”

By contrast, women who make clothing are merely seamstresses, a word derived from an Old English verb meaning simply “to sew.” Theirs is presumably a craft that requires great training and some skill, but little knowledge or understanding. The making of clothing in temperate zones is rarely considered a matter of life or death; the clothing is for comfort and protection only so long as the wearer has to be outside during inclement weather.

In the Arctic, where the control of such large spaces through architecture has proven difficult, the Inuit culture adapted to the harsh climate through carefully constructed clothing. In performing their craft, these women act as architects of the micro-environment encasing the body. In the Arctic, where clothing represents a life-or-death protection almost every day of an individual’s life, their work makes life possible.

The art and craft traditions of the Native Americans underwent a profound change when they encountered the European mercantile tradition. Their work in fur, leather, and beads had to be standardized into items that could be sold on the world market. The beadwork found few buyers, but the sophisticated techniques used by native women in processing furs found an important role in those markets.

The Indian women scattered across the forests and plains of the North American interior from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries worked as piece workers in the preindustrial phase of textile and cloth manufacturing that depended on dispersed labor operating out of women’s homes. The Ojibwa, Cree, and other native women of the north played as important a part in the international manufacturing system as did contemporary women weaving wool in rural Britain, or peasant girls in Chinese filatures drawing silk threads from cocoons.

In addition to processing the furs, Indian women sewed the canoes and kayaks needed to transport them. The light but sturdy bark canoe was usually the best type of boat for the small streams and rivers of North America, because the paddlers could easily portage it overland from one body of water to the next, a distance that could vary from a few feet to several miles.

From making wooden baskets and bark containers, the women possessed the knowledge and skill to work bark. They sewed the canoes together and coated them with pitch in much the same way that they sewed together their skins or pieces of bark to make smaller containers. Dugouts, by contrast, often required more manual labor, particularly upper-body strength, to dig out the wood, and thus men usually made this form of canoe.

Traders who employed Indian men to transport furs often employed the women of their families to work in gangs making canoes at the fort. The women made them in several standardized sizes, from the one-person canoe, about fifteen feet long, to the large Montreal canoe, which surpassed thirty-five feet in length and was five feet wide amidships, with a carrying capacity of four tons and up to twelve adults. The larger canoes were more than double the size of the modern, mass-produced canoes used for recreation.

Inuit women sewed kayaks from sealskin in much the way that southern women sewed bark canoes, but the Inuit women faced the added necessity of making their seams watertight without the use of pitch or resin, since no trees grew in their Arctic homeland. They developed an intricate series of minute stitches and folds that made the sealskins waterproof without adding measurably to the weight of the kayak. They named this specially sewn seam silalik, meaning “takes the weather.” After sewing, they coated the entire vessel with seal oil to protect the kayaker even further from the seawater laced with piercing ice. The women used the same techniques to make thin sealskin raincoats that kept the wearer dry in the summer, when the air was too warm for a person to wear fur, but the seawater was cold enough to cause death through hypothermia.

In Inuktituk, the language of the Inuit, a man does not ride in a kayak; he wears it, much the way he wears a parka on land. The kayak is actually a piece of sewn sealskin clothing much like the other pieces made by his wife, except that she makes the kayak to be buoyant. These special qualities allowed the Inuit hunters to roll over in a 360-degree turn with their kayaks and then right themselves without wetting their inner clothing or the contents of the kayak.

Because of the mobile life-style of the hunting peoples of North America, they had little incentive to acquire heavy objects. Their creative work went into very small objects rather than into large constructions such as temples, pyramids, statues, or furniture. Art existed in the decoration of utilitarian objects. The women who made clothing decorated it with designs made with moosehair, dyed threads, or colored porcupine quills. Later they used small glass beads brought in by white traders.

From earliest times in North America, we see evidence of the creation of beautiful objects with great care, and we see consistent themes and cultural patterns. Some of the earliest archaeological sites in eastern North America date from the Hopewell culture (named for the farm on which the first relics were discovered), which radiated from southern Ohio and flourished for about half a millennium until around A.D. 400. In that ancient culture we see some of the same creative emphasis that we see in Native American craft work to the present day.

This appeared clearly in one of the earliest burial mounds found on the Hopewell farm. There, archaeologists found a young man and a young woman buried side by side. As Stuart J. Fiedel describes the burial in Prehistory of the Americas, “She was bedecked with, and surrounded by, thousands of pearl beads and buttons made of copper-covered wood and stone; she also wore copper bracelets. Both individuals wore copper earspools, copper breastplates, and necklaces of grizzly bear canines” (Fiedel). The skulls had even been buried with artificial noses made of copper. Their bodies were then surrounded by a line of copper earspools. Archaeologists found more than 100,000 pearls in the Hopewell mounds (Prufer).

Other graves revealed individuals buried with hundreds of spearpoints, effigy figures made of sparkling mica, effigy pipes, pearls, quartz crystals, copper panpipes, clay figures, and bear teeth inlaid with pearl, as well as worked and unworked pieces of obsidian, green chlorite, gold, silver, meteoric iron, and flint. In the absence of other forms of ivory, the Hopewell people carved the fossilized tusks of the giant mammoths that had become extinct thousands of years earlier. Some of the graves even included decorated, engraved human bones, and perforated jawbones of humans and animals.

The Hopewell people delighted in diverse and exotic material-objects. They collected alligator teeth from the southern swamps, barracuda jaws, turtle shell, and conch shell from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. They imported copper from Lake Superior, blue flint from Indiana, chalcedony from North Dakota, mica from North Carolina, galena from Illinois, obsidian from Wyoming, and the teeth of grizzly bears from the Rocky Mountains (Fiedel).

In a direct precursor of Cahokia and other Mississippian towns that followed the Hopewell culture, we see trade networks that spanned about two-thirds of what is now the United States. The obsidian from near the modern border of Wyoming and Idaho traveled the farthest of the items traded by the Hopewell people. To reach the central Hopewell sites in southeastern Ohio, it traveled roughly two thousand miles. Even today the trip from Yellowstone Park in Wyoming to Chillicothe, Ohio, by car requires approximately four days of ten hours’ driving each day over modern freeways. In Hopewell times, the obsidian and bears’ teeth possibly took years to reach Ohio as they were slowly passed from one trader to another and transported that long distance by foot. From Ohio the materials passed on to even more remote parts of the Hopewell world, until they finally came to rest in a burial mound.

Animal effigies reached their most artistic form in the Hopewell “platform pipe.” On these objects, a carved animal usually stands on a small platform about twice as long as the animal. The back of the animal has a bowl carved into it, and one end of the platform on which it stands has a small opening. One shows an erect beaver carved in pipestone and sitting on his tail. The eyes were inlaid with pearls, and the buck teeth of the beaver were carved from bone. Another pipe features a falcon with a cocked head looking up toward the sky with pearl eyes with the pupils clearly carved into them.

The artists did not create mere abstract versions of animals; in almost every case one can readily identify exactly what kind of bird or mammal is depicted. Apparently the artists observed these animals with great care and then depicted them in natural poses that most clearly characterize the particular animals. Platform pipes show a coyote howling, a raven picking at the ground, a falcon springing into flight, an eagle soaring, a snarling panther bearing its teeth and about to pounce, a duck diving into the water, a turtle swimming.

A similar realism appears in their terra-cotta statues of humans. Because the material is relatively perishable, fewer of these survive. One sees clear images of a mother nursing her child, a man kneeling or sitting as though in a public meeting, athletes playing ball. The peaceful pursuits and the simplicity of these pieces perhaps accounts for their lack of renown. We have no sculptures of gladiators or warriors in the heat of battle, no heroic struggles of humans against lions, no erotic sex goddesses. We have simple people performing the tasks of daily life and merely living their unheroic lives.

Adena and Hopewell art can be almost surrealistic in its attention to the mundane. One of the most magnificent pieces ever created in America, prehistoric or contemporary, depicts a human hand. About two thousand years ago, some unknown artists cut a sheet of mica into the shape of a human hand with long, elegant fingers and a naturally crooked thumb. This simple piece of art, without gender or generation, portrays the most human part of the human being, the part of the anatomy that separates the human from all the other animals. Other pieces of mica depict the claw of bird, the whimsical profile of a human with a comically large mouth and pointed nose, a coiled snake, a swastika, a human torso.

The tradition of skillful work seen in Hopewell artifacts continues today in the elaborate beadwork applied by Native Americans to the most mundane articles—a button or a snap, a belt or a buckle, a hair clasp or a barrette. At virtually any powwow or other large gathering of Indians today, one can see an array of modern daily items covered with beads and small plastic decoration. Beadworkers spend hours carefully making a case to cover a keychain, a coin purse, a disposable cigarette lighter, the cover for a tissue box, or a small, beaded picture frame.

One of my own cherished objects is a fountain pen case covered in beads and presented to me by Twila Martin Kekahbah, the first woman elected tribal chair of the Chippewa Band of Turtle Mountain on the North Dakota-Saskatchewan border. I value that pen both because it reflects not only the friendship behind the gift but also the meticulous work that created it. The person who made the case tied each knot separately to create a geometric zigzag pattern interspersed with small floral motifs. The art and care that went into the case will outlast the manufactured pen inside, but I can remove the case and put it around another pen.

A large display of Indian beadwork may look at first glance like the craft exhibit from the local prison or from a summer camp for youngsters. Displayed in large amounts, it looks cheap and rarely impresses the observer with its artistic delicacy. Beadwork was not made to be looked at en masse, as on a store shelf or in a museum case; it was made to be appreciated through the use of one small piece at a time. It was made to show its beauty through use.

The same attention to appearance that we see in the beadwork of the north and the plains area also appears in the baskets woven over a large part of the southern and western United States. Basket weaving was concentrated in a wide belt area from South Carolina to California and up the Pacific coast to British Columbia; it was done primarily in those parts of North America that lacked birch trees, which had loose, pliable bark that could be removed easily in large sheets. Wherever such birch trees grew, women usually found that they could work its pliable bark into an array of excellent containers much faster and easier than by weaving them.

In the southern and western quadrants of North America, which usually lacked birch trees, the natives developed weaving techniques for hundreds of types of plants. Basket weavers learned to work with roots, reeds, the bark of trees, plant stems, palm fronds, and whatever other plant could be sliced into long, narrow strips of a flexible yet durable material.

Pima women of southern Arizona wove baskets by coiling strips of willow around cattails. The Hopi of northern Arizona wove patterns of kachina images in varied shades of green, blue, and red into their serving trays woven with the stems of hilaria grass and yucca leaves. The Salish of the interior plateau in Idaho and western Montana wove baskets from cedar and spruce root in a design that made them appear to be shingles. The Chitimaca of the Gulf states created square baskets with lids and decorated in a distinctive red-and-black geometric design made from cane strips.

Basketry reached its most elaborate expression in ancient California. The mild climate minimized the need for elaborate shelters, and the abundance of seafood, land animals, and plants eliminated the need for agriculture. California natives used baskets for gathering acorns, trapping fish, and storing food, and because they knew how to make baskets waterproof, they cooked in them by dropping heated stones into a basket of water. They also used the same weaving techniques to make hats, serving trays, and mats for sitting or for protection against sun and wind.

Some of the best baskets in museums around the world today come from the California Pomo, who lived north of San Francisco, around the Russian River. The Pomo lived in simple conical tepees and collected food with a heavy reliance on acorns, from which the women leached the bitter tannin through a long process that resulted in a healthy and nutritious flour.

Among most native groups, women did most, if not all, of the basket weaving. Among the Pomo, however, men did the basic items—the large mats, the baby carriers, the fishing traps. This left the women free to experiment with different materials and designs in their much more finely crafted baskets.

The baskets woven by the Pomo women were diverse and magnificent, varying in size from that of a thimble not able to hold any more than a teaspoon of liquid to baskets as large as three feet in diameter. They used willow for the warp, sedge root for the weft, and a variety of bulrushes and barks that they dyed to give them contrasting red, black, and brown shades. The Pomo wove these wooden materials into designs as elaborate and varied as those found in the finest textile designs of wool.

In addition to weaving designs into the baskets, the Pomo women decorated their finished baskets with multicolored feathers, particularly those of the yellowhammer, and with shells, strings of handmade beads, and abalone pendants. The women could produce a rich, velvety texture with the feathers that sometimes made the baskets appear to be woven from fur.

Because of the perishable materials used to make baskets, they do not survive as long as do items made of stone or pottery. Only in areas such as the Southwest, with its especially dry climate, do we find the remains of baskets much over a hundred years in age. In the cultural hierarchy of crafts and arts, baskets lack the prestige of more durable goods, and thus have found less museum space than ceramics and carved artifacts.

Basketry requires a tremendous amount of work to produce an object that may easily be burned or rot. Thus, as we find in ancient American civilizations, settled populations usually replace baskets with pottery whenever practical. This transition occurred most clearly in the Southwest, when the civilizations based around basketmaking turned to ceramics. Mesa Verde in Colorado, Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, and Canyon de Chelly in the Navajo Nation of Arizona show the high level of the general Anasazi culture and of their ceramics in particular.

Native American pottery reached its highest expression in the southwestern United States. This highly evolved ceramic tradition arose very early among both the Anasazi people of the Four Corners area and the Hohokam of New Mexico. During their Golden Age, from A.D. 1100 to 1300, the Anasazi created a complex design of distinctive black-on-white pottery made with a dye from the woodland aster. They decorated mugs, pitchers, vases, ladles, bowls, and animal effigies with constant variation within a very narrow range of motifs and figures such as the mysterious figure of Kokopelli, the hunchbacked flute player.

The ceramic traditions of the Anasazi people traveled southeast to the Mogollon people of New Mexico, where the tradition reached a distinctive expression among the people along the Mimbres River, which runs for a mere sixty miles before it is defeated by the desert and the scorching sun. The people along this river created exquisite pots, which they buried with the dead. Often, one of these pots had a hole punched in it as a way of ritually killing the object before burying it.

The Mimbres pottery has a characteristic black-on-white or red-on-white design that includes stylized drawings of insects, animals, birds, and humans. Some of the designs appear similar to those used by the central Mexican civilizations. Other works show abstract geometric designs of great complexity. The unique quality of Mimbres pottery shows in the imaginative combination of naturalistic and geometric figures, such as two swirling and interlocking sets of rams’ horns. Some of these abstractions become visual puns in which the black foreground may form the figure of a human face while the white background forms a bird. They seem to be distant precursors of the twentieth-century drawings of M. C. Escher, in which fish become birds and birds become fish.

Together with the Anasazi people, the Mogollon probably merged into the people that we now call Pueblo, living in eastern New Mexico and along the Rio Grande River, south of Taos. They have kept their traditional emphasis on ceramics, and today some of the world’s greatest potters live in the New Mexican pueblos such as Acoma and Zuni, as well as in the Hopi pueblos of Arizona.

Throughout the Southwestern tradition, we find a great emphasis on ceramics—bowls, jars, cups, beakers, and large storage pots commonly called ollas, as well as various forms for which we have no name. Even though the creators of these objects put tremendous effort into creating diverse forms and into decorating them, these objects usually were made for daily use by common people. These egalitarian societies did not craft precious porcelains for an elite class; instead, they created beautiful utensils for themselves and their families. The people of the Southwest tradition lacked the Old World distinction between higher-class ceramics and common pottery.

The contrast between the egalitarian nature of native American crafts (beadwork, basketry, weaving, and pottery) and the elite nature of the grander Old World art (sculpture, painting, and architecture) appeared to me most vividly during a visit to the Anasazi ruins at Mesa Verde.

The best view of the Cliff Palace site at Mesa Verde comes from across the canyon on the western side, facing the ruins. The first time I saw it, the whole area had been dusted with a heavy coat of spring snow. Snow hung in the juniper trees in large clumps molded into odd shapes by the wind and the sun at midday. The snow gathered on ledges and crevices along the red and black walls of the canyon, forming alternate stripes of white, red, and black that appeared almost to have been laid out by a careful gardener. Protected by the overhanging cliff, the courtyards of Cliff Palace looked almost as though they had just been cleaned and all the snow swept neatly over the lower side of the canyon wall.

Seen from the western side of the canyon, Mesa Verde looks almost like a city suspended in midair, hovering above the earth. The afternoon sun, shining through the thin air of the high plateau, gave the buildings a crisp, clean appearance, as though they were newly made. Given the Anasazi penchant for selecting dramatic sites and making such dramatic structures, it is little wonder that so much mysterious and mystical nonsense has been written about them and their creations.

Cliff Palace is the largest of the ruins at Mesa Verde. It consists of a series of multistoried sandstone buildings that abut one another to form a single large edifice. Rectangular and round towers rise up from among the rooms with their precision-made square corners. Interspersed amid these 217 rooms are twenty-three large, circular rooms, the sacred kivas where the ancient ones enacted the ritual life of their pueblo. Even from the far side of the canyon, one can still see the airshafts built next to the kivas for ventilation in the underground chamber.

Under any circumstances, this castlelike structure would provoke the interest of a visitor, but its location frames it in a surreal setting. The whole city rests in the three-hundred-foot-wide mouth of a cave in the middle of the canyon wall. The steep walls of the cliff above the city and below it seem to offer no means of approach. The brown color of the buildings blends with that of the surrounding rock, creating the illusion that the entire structure was carved from the living rock, rather than having been pieced together stone by stone.

To reach the ruins themselves from the western side of the canyon, one must drive all the way around the canyon and approach Cliff Palace from the rear, where the mesa hides the community from sight until one is right on it. Without making the short trip down the side of the cliff to the opening, a person unfamiliar with the area could literally stand on top of the entire community and never know it existed.

Moving from the west side of the canyon to the east on a cold day, one moves from the shadow into the sunshine and quickly appreciates the comfortable practicality underlying the plan of this city. In the colder months, the ruins of Cliff Palace radiate heat absorbed from the sun that shines directly into it all during the day. The sunshine streams into the sheltered niche and reaches far back to the rear of the cave, and the sandstone walls absorb its warmth. The setting—inside a cave located in a canyon—protected the community from cold winds, especially from the north.

In the summer, when the sun shone relentlessly from almost straight overhead in this part of the world, and the atmosphere at such high elevations offered little escape from the penetrating rays, the overhanging cliff shielded the entire community. Thus the city was protected except for the front row of walls, which were usually shaded by overhanging roofs.

Such skilled use of passive solar energy minimized the amount of fuel that the Anasazi people needed to gather, transport, and burn. In the semiarid conditions of the mesa, this helped to preserve the fragile ecology by not overusing the trees for firewood, and prevented the use of potentially good cropland for housing.

We do not know the name of the people who lived there; we call them simply the Anasazi, a Navajo name meaning “ancient ones.” The Anasazi lived for thousands of years in this area of the southern Colorado plateau; they started building their major cliff dwellings about A.D, 900, and reached a climax in the thirteenth century. Even though Cliff Palace is the largest of the dwellings, dozens more dot the surrounding cliffs. Square Tower House rose to eighty-six feet, with eighty rooms and seven kivas. Balcony House had two kivas and forty-five rooms, and Spruce Tree House had 114 rooms and eight kivas, while Long House had 150 rooms and twenty-one kivas. The Anasazi built between five hundred and one thousand such cliff settlements in the Mesa Verde area. Other canyons in neighboring Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico contain thousands more such ruins built in the cliffs and on the flat land at the top of the mesa or, in the case of Chaco, on the canyon bottom.

If we look around the world at other buildings erected between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, we find that the unique setting of the Mesa Verde cliff houses places them in a separate architectural category. At first glance, the cliff dwellings seem to lack the great sophistication of contemporary buildings of other cultures. During the same time that the people of Mesa Verde built their cliff houses, the Maya built pyramids in the Yucatàn and Guatemala, the Italians built the Doge’s palace in Venice, the Arabs built the Fatimid mosques of Cairo, the English built Westminster Abbey, and the Moors built the Alhambra in Granada, Spain.

Each of these structures tells us something important about the people who built it. The ruins that they left show us what values they wanted to express in their architecture. The power of a ruling aristocracy appears clearly in their castles, built as giant military machines, or in their palaces, built as theme parks of amusement and entertainment. The power of an organized religious group and the state behind it show clearly in the cathedrals, monasteries, mosques, and temples built for the lavish display of religious rituals.

At Mesa Verde we see none of this. Compared to St. Paul’s Cathedral, a kiva is a stone-lined hole in the ground. Compared with the palace of the Venetian Doge, the unadorned rooms of Cliff Palace seem small and quite plain. The towers of Mesa Verde show no signs of military use, and appear puny and weak against the power implied in the massive towers and gates of the castle of Nuremberg or the Kremlin of Moscow. The courtyards where Anasazi women ground corn at Cliff Palace lack the grandeur of the courtyard in the Alhambra, where the women of the harem recited poetry beside flowing fountains and pools of cool water. The Anasazi dance and ceremonial areas offer the visitor none of the opulence of the palaces of Europe.

Mesa Verde did not serve as home to kings, popes, caliphs, khans, harems, monks, or knights. The common Anasazi people built their buildings for themselves and their children. The rooms of Mesa Verde housed their builders and their builders’ children and grandchildren for centuries. The ruins are the remnants of homes built by and for the common people, built by a people without a rigid class structure. Nowhere else in the world of that time do we find such spectacular and well-built homes for the common people

For every castle and palace in the world, tens of thousands of laborers, slaves, prisoners, serfs, and common people lived in hovels that have long since disappeared, leaving very little archaeological trace. Millions labored in the fields to feed the thousands who served the civic, martial, and religious edifices of the powerful elite. Most of the great architectural wonders of the world, from the pyramids of ancient Egypt to the Great Wall of China, were built at the expense of poor people who had to live in huts and eat gruel in order that some great prince, emperor, shah, pope, or pharaoh might be protected or exalted by massive structures of monumental design.

When the early European explorers and settlers saw the ruins of the Anasazi and the other Indians of the area, they gave them names such as Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde, Montezuma’s Castle in Arizona, Cutthroat Castle in Utah, or Casas Grandes in northern Mexico. The whites saw the ruins through European eyes, attuned to the culture of a highly stratified society; therefore they assumed that anything so grand must have belonged to some type of aristocracy. It was inconceivable to the class-ridden Spaniards, and later to the Anglos, that common people could have built such residences for themselves.

I saw in the work of the women picnicking on the Great Slave Lake the same values, the same attitude toward creativity, that I had seen at Mesa Verde. A thousand years and three thousand miles of space separate the ancient Anasazi people of the warm, sunny south from the native Dogrib and Yellowknife people about the Great Slave Lake in the subarctic. Despite this spatial and temporal distance, tremendous cultural continuity persists in the Native American perspective toward social life and toward the objects of social life.

In weaving a baby sling for her son, Lorna Storr made an object that would endure for his entire lifetime and could be passed on to his descendants through the twenty-first century. Her art went into her family, into the immediate life around her. That same attitude toward creativity and daily life would have been understood by the ancient workers who skillfully placed one rock on another to build the great buildings of Mesa Verde.