THE CREATION OF CREATION MYTHS
Stories about the origins of any community’s universe—its gods, spirits, heroes, and landscapes; its beginnings, wanderings, sufferings, and fulfillments—are the most important accounts any society can tell itself about itself. They are its divine charter, declaration of independence, constitution, and bill of rights all wrapped into one guiding narrative. Like a cosmic compass, they set its course. They provide models for its institutions and remind its people who they are, why they exist, and how they fit into their grand scheme of things. As foundational narratives, these stories are sometimes dramatized, usually for members only and at regular moments on the community’s ceremonial calendar. They are also recalled as scripts or formulas for conducting proper rituals. And they can be revisited whenever their teachings seem most relevant.
Constituting what some call “original instructions,” such myths inform their constituencies how to behave and move forward in order to remain their unique social selves. They are declarations of all that the culture considers primary, true, and essential. Contrary to the popular use of the term as human invention or falsehood, “myths” of this magnitude are usually considered as sacredly revealed, repositories of ultimate truths, and arbiters of existential questions.
Most of the world’s major narratives of cultural genesis have cohered over time out of a cluster of separate and often older narratives. And commonly, those separate stories, focusing on the establishment of this or that constituent group or cultural practice, wind up being told in multiple ways. Sometimes this is because, through the invocation of these myths, individuals, societal divisions, or priestly elites are making some case or claim and hence they might add, subtract, or alter elements in them.
For these reasons it is usually futile to search for a single originating or seminal version of any culture’s creation story. They have grown out of portions told by different people at different times for different reasons. Whenever outsiders study any culture’s origin myth, they generally try to compare the fullest array of what are called a myth’s variant expressions, whether in lengthy or fragmentary forms, in order to identify their most abiding and widespread elements and to understand the various influences that may have weighed on them over time.
Throughout human history, it has been out of such bundles of separate stories that gifted narrators or big-thinking synthesizers, special-interest groups, or nationalizing committees have tried to compose single, dominating accounts of creation, the emergence of human society, and the relationships between gods and humans.
The culture keepers and storytellers behind such master myths have hailed from various backgrounds. Some were men and women of a rare philosophical or historical bent, or they possessed exceptional memories or storytelling gifts. Some suffered a physical impairment that kept them home, so their full-time job became as community historian, memory bank, or renowned bard. Others may have occupied a privileged religious status or played a noteworthy intellectual or political role in their community. And then there are those individuals whose cultural exposure was so broad that they enjoyed access to an unusually wide range of separate accounts. Such seems to have been the case with Edward Hunt, the narrator of this version of the Acoma creation story.
Different motivations have driven storytellers to compile such authoritative accounts. Given the powerful impact of creation myths on how people believe and act, and the likelihood of multiple versions and the contradictions among them, it is inevitable that some have maintained that theirs should be the true or dominating one. Sometimes select groups or scribal specialists authorized a single orthodox or “revised standard” account and attempted to sideline or even outlaw all others. But for an outsider, all versions tell us something about the complicated and unruly strands, stories, and histories that reveal the community’s development and its evolving sense of itself.
In the remote past, the activity of transmitting central stories and their teachings from one generation to another happened orally, in line with the mouth-to-ear origins of human storytelling. These transmissions introduced all manner of additions and changes. Following the oral transmissions and subsequent elaborations and additions of more stories sometimes came their consolidations into single versions. Often their contents were altered even more by their exposure to creation stories from other cultures, whether the changes were adopted by choice or imposed by conquest.
Then or thereafter, these oral narratives were further condensed as they were fixed into some form of writing or print. And following their conversions from oral to written media, origin stories frequently underwent a fourth transformation. They wove their way into distant societies through the error-prone work of translation from one language to another.
Whether these transformative processes were imposed upon the traditions of small-scale, preindustrial, face-to-face cultures or contributed to the sacred texts of complex societies that produced the so-called world religions, the evolution from oral to written forms usually took a while—often hundreds, sometimes a thousand years or more. In the case of this Pueblo Indian myth, however, its summarizing, narrating, translating, and transcription was completed in about eight weeks. Yet the stories that it contained had been accumulating in the mind of its narrator since he was a child at Acoma Pueblo in western New Mexico.
THE WORLD THIS MYTH CREATED
The society that emerged out of this creation-and-migration narrative is found in today’s Valencia County in western New Mexico, about sixty miles west of present-day Albuquerque. As established in the myth’s closing scenes, the village called Ha’ako, commonly referred to today as “Old Acoma” but advertised in tourist campaigns as “Sky City,” sits on the flat summit of a 375-foot-high sandstone mesa. Its earthen-colored buildings and oversize San Estevan church appear to grow out of the rock itself. The seventeen-acre mesa top is surrounded by clusters of immense sandstone monoliths. This rocky ensemble sits in the midst of a flat plain whose backdrop of low cliffs is interrupted by broad valleys. To the east rises Katzimo, or Enchanted Mesa, whose summit was once occupied by Acoma’s ancestors. This panorama makes for one of the most dramatic town sites in the western hemisphere.
Encompassing a 245,672-acre reservation, with its old mesa-top village and two satellite communities, Acoma Pueblo is one of nineteen autonomous Pueblo Indian tribes in New Mexico and Arizona. Because these towns centered around open plazas and their buildings were multistory, condominium-like structures built of mud and stone, the earliest Spanish visitors in the sixteenth century found them familiar and called them pueblos.
At nearly seven thousand feet above sea level, with an annual rainfall of between only eleven inches and sixteen inches a year, the high arid desert that drops eastward from the Colorado Plateau is a tough place to make a living. The people of Acoma combined dry and irrigation farming techniques, developed individual and collective hunting strategies, and gathered a host of wild foods. Even then, drought, famine, enemy attacks, and European-derived diseases made for a precarious existence.
Today’s pueblos are direct descendants of cultures whose ancient ruins can be visited in the cliffs of Mesa Verde and the creek bottom of Chaco Canyon. Scholars often divide these pueblos into the Western villages—embracing the Hopi, Zuni, Laguna, and Acoma territories—and the Eastern or Rio Grande Pueblos, which extend from Taos Pueblo near the Colorado state line, down to Isleta Pueblo, just south of Albuquerque.
In contrast to “plaza-centered” pueblo villages, which cluster around a communal space, Acoma is a “street-type” pueblo. Facing its three alleylike byways are eight “houseblocks,” with its cross-axial plaza more a widened corridor between two streets. Although much remodeled today, with one-story, single-family houses increasingly crowding the mesa rim, the old-time two- or three-story blocks stepped back with each tier. In the practice of passive solar heating, their southern exposure allowed the sandstone-and-adobe walls to absorb the sun’s warmth by day and radiate it inside during the night. Combined with small, relatively smokeless fires, their cocoonlike sleeping rooms kept families comfortable over the winter. In warmer months, their people dried meat and native fruits in the sun and visited and socialized beneath an open sky, often in the shade of dividing walls on their roof terraces.
Acoma is positioned in the center of a Pueblo Indian world that extends from the Rio Grande River in New Mexico to the Painted Desert in Arizona. Its social and religious institutions reflect the influences of both its eastern and western neighbors. It is one of the seven Indian pueblos that speak dialects of the Keresan language. Like its western neighbors, the Zuni and Hopi, the community features a clan-based society and contains multiple rectangular kivas, or sacred meeting rooms. But Acoma’s medicine-men societies enjoy the kind of prominence usually found among the eastern, or Rio Grande, pueblos. While the pueblo’s farmers practiced the “dry farming” methods of the West—coaxing irregular plots of maize out of apparently waterless, sandy basins—at their satellite “farming villages” they also maintained irrigation ditches, as were more commonly found along the Jemez and Rio Grande river valleys to the east.
Today the people of Acoma have largely relocated off the mesa, occupying housing projects and dispersed homes in and around the colony villages of Acomita and McCartys. Some have resettled in towns like Grants and Albuquerque. Over the winter, a few families are assigned to reside on the summit to maintain a symbolic presence and fulfill ritual duties. But most Acoma families still retain house and room rights on the mesa, where they return for the yearly round of ceremonies and feast days. Some festivities are open to the public, but others are off-limits to outsiders.
A living architectural shrine, Old Acoma remains the spiritual pivot of the tribe’s universe.
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While Acoma Pueblo may be, as its tour guides claim, the oldest continuously occupied settlement in North America, archaeologists allow more cautiously that the “Acoma cultural province” has received residents for a very long time. First were stone-and-bone tool-using Paleo-Indians who lived in the region more than ten thousand years ago. Around 5500 BC, the extended residence of Archaic period hunter-gatherers began; they later settled on mesa tops and valleys and adopted gardening as a secondary food source. By AD 400, they were evolving into the culture now referred to as Ancestral Pueblo. Their farming practices, belief system, and fertility and harvest rituals developed in the “great house” ruins of the Four Corners region. But a convergence of factors—drought high among them—cast their inhabitants on various roads toward the south and southeast. As early as AD 950, some of these early migrants appeared along the San Jose and Puerco river valleys, with Acoma mesa itself settled by the 1400s.
The village’s written history began in 1540, when a scribe on Hernando de Alvarado’s expedition into the Southwest wrote home about this “strange place built upon solid rock.” He described its defensible location, and at least seven ladder-and-stone-step trails to the summit where piles of rocks were readied to rain down on invaders like him. Near the edge of the mesa, freshwater cisterns held ample snowmelt and rainwater. Stored within the houseblocks lay enough dried corn, meat, and fruit to sustain its people for up to four years.
Over the following decades, the Spanish traded for Acoma food and sought to convert the Indians to Christianity. Relations soured in 1598 after Mexican-born Don Juan de Oñate, authorized to obtain the pueblo’s submission to the Spanish crown, developed doubts about its loyalty. His suspicions were confirmed when his nephew Juan de Zaldívar and most of his platoon were killed by Acoma arrows, clubs, and rocks. In retaliation, Oñate dispatched Juan’s brother, Vicente, with seventy armor-clad soldiers and their cannons.
In late January 1599, the Spanish committed one of the bloodiest revenges in southwestern history. The three-day punishment of Acoma ended with more than six hundred dead Indians and a village in rubble. Documents describe the Spanish sentencing survivors over twenty-five years of age to amputation of a foot, with other males and females between twelve and twenty-five condemned to twenty years of servitude. By then its population was down to around fifteen hundred members. Despite these brutalities, thirty years later a priest named Fray Juan Ramírez somehow rallied townsfolk (tribal tradition says forcibly conscripted them) to reconstruct the church’s ten-foot-thick adobe walls, harvest its ponderosa pine rafters from the San Mateo Mountains, and complete the forty-foot-high roof for New Mexico’s largest church, San Estevan del Rey, whose much rebuilt and restored edifice still towers over the mesa.
Over the next half century, life at a weakened Acoma remained relatively isolated and peaceful. Within other Indian pueblos that lay closer to Spanish scrutiny, a wave of religious suppression against “heathen” practices intensified. Sacred kivas were invaded, ceremonies disrupted, spirit masks and ritual regalia burned, and native priests and medicine men publicly whipped. Among them was a religious leader from San Juan Pueblo named Po’pay. With rebels from other villages, he secretly organized what became the All-Pueblo Revolt. One day in early August 1680, most of the loosely connected Pueblo Indian world, spreading across four hundred miles, rose up against Catholic missions and Spanish ranchos. In this most successful of American Indian uprisings, Acoma hurled its priest, Lucas Maldonado, to death on the rocks below. All told, nineteen Catholic missionaries and nearly four hundred Spanish colonists were killed; the survivors fled into old Mexico.
Although the region was reconquered by the Spanish twelve years later, the authority of Catholicism was never the same. The Pueblo kivas and Christian churches came to conduct parallel, sometimes entwined, celebrations, but native ways of belief, ritual, and theocratic organization now held sway. By 1820, as Mexico took over the American Southwest, and thirty years later, when the United States assumed control, Acoma’s population kept dropping. Yet its people maintained their time-honored rhythms of growing corn, squash, and tobacco; hunting for rabbits and antelope; harvesting wild foods; and fulfilling the ceremonial cycle that regulated their lives.
The next threat to Acoma’s isolation was the Santa Fe Railway, which cut across Acoma and Laguna pueblo lands in the early 1880s. Pueblo women began selling pottery along the tracks, and Indian dances and arts were advertised by railroad publicists. Generations of tourists became exposed to what one writer has called “the romantic inflation” of Pueblo life.
In the early 1920s, Acoma joined with fellow Pueblos in successfully opposing federal legislation that attempted to legalize the thousands of non-Indian squatters. Over the next forty years, its population steadily increased. Since the 1970s, the pueblo has attracted thousands to the tribe’s casino-and-hotel complex at Acomita off Interstate 40.
But Acoma remains ambivalent about embracing a modernizing world. At the foot of the mesa, visitors see exhibits and orientation films at a two-million-dollar museum before a tram takes them up to the old village for a tour with native guides. Outsiders are welcome to attend the September 2 annual Acoma Fiesta, but for key rituals and dances in their old religious calendar, the old village is closed off. Always hovering over the community is the challenge of how to remain a semisovereign, religiously private, Keresan-speaking traditional Pueblo people within a wired, multiethnic, open-access world.
EDWARD PROCTOR HUNT: THE STORY OF THE NARRATOR
To appreciate this version of Acoma’s origin myth, one must review its narrator’s unconventional career. Born four months before the onset of the Civil War and dying three years after the end of World War II, his successive names were Day Break, Edward Proctor Hunt, and Chief Big Snake. While the 1942 publication of the myth attributed the work only to “a group of Pueblo Indians from Acoma and Santa Ana visiting Washington [in the fall of 1928],” a glance at a 1957 Smithsonian report on Pueblo Indian music suggests the storyteller’s identity. Its frontispiece featured a photograph of the Edward Hunt family troupe in their “show Indian” outfits of Plains Indian war bonnets and heavily beaded shirts, vests, and leggings.
The stories that Edward Hunt braided into this narrative were so packed with detail because he was so steeped in his tribe’s lore. He was the stepson of a Fire Society medicine man but regarded the man as his father for the rest of his life. Four days after birth he received the first of his four initiatory experiences. His body was held up, or “given,” to the rising sun, and he was named Gaire, meaning “First Light of Dawn,” or Day Break.
Next, like most Pueblo boys, around the age of five or six he was inducted into the Katsina Society. That training taught him the mythic origins of the rain-bringing supernaturals called Katsinas. They were spirits of the ancestors who lived in the clouds and mediated between human and cosmic worlds. They brought rain, health, and all good things, and were impersonated by initiated members only. Behind their masks and regalia, the boy learned, were his own relatives and neighbors. The injunction to keep this secret was driven home by whippings with yucca staves. Katsina rituals also taught Day Break songs and prayers and life lessons that were reinforced by seasonal ceremonies and stories told over long winter nights.
His third ritual experience was less predictable. When Day Break was around ten, a bucking horse knocked him unconscious; he seemed dead to the world. The family prepared him for burial in the campo santo, the old low-walled cemetery that lies in front of San Estevan. When rays of sunlight woke him up, the lad’s near-death experience signaled his candidacy for a medicine men’s society, with its tough training and ritual duties.
Day Break’s life might have unfolded in this traditional vein but for the arrival in late 1880 of a Presbyterian missionary who persuaded a number of parents, his included, to release their children to a new Indian boarding school in Albuquerque. There the boy’s hair was cut, his body clad in a Civil War–style uniform, and he began a regimen of dormitory life, marching drills, and language and math classes. He helped to construct the school’s new building, maintained its vegetable garden, sang in the choir, prayed before meals, attended Sunday services, and was forbidden to speak his language. One day the school received a box of donated clothes. In the pocket of a coat received by Day Break was a Bible with a note that allowed the finder to take its owner’s name: Edward Proctor Hunt.
But three years later, Catholic authorities, jealous of Presbyterian claims to their flock, pressured his parents to withdraw him. Edward rode a flatcar home on the new Santa Fe railway. With other boarding school returnees, he was taken into a kiva and horsewhipped for speaking English, having short hair, wearing leather shoes, and following white ways.
Then Edward found himself bound for a second institution, St. Catherine’s Indian Industrial School in Santa Fe, which had just been founded by Catholic missionary (later to become America’s second saint) and Philadelphia heiress Katharine Drexel. Here Edward used skills learned at Albuquerque to help build its original classrooms and dorms as well. But his stay lasted less than a year. His stepfather’s death in August 1887 returned the young man home to Acoma and a final initiation. As eldest son and pursuant to the old man’s dying wish, Edward was indoctrinated into the Koshares, Acoma’s brotherhood of sacred clowns. It was during this lengthy training that he learned a major portion of the origin myth he retells in these pages.
When Edward fell in love with Marie Valle, a daughter of one of Acoma’s most prominent families, her father took objection. This may have been because both she and Edward belonged to Acoma’s Sun clan, which made them almost siblings. Or perhaps it was because she was pregnant, although normally that was not a problem where large families absorbed most newborns. Or possibly it was because their families were so socially distant; his stepfather was a poor medicine man often dependent on the charity of clients. Nor was Edward’s standing helped by his growing reluctance, as a closeted convert to Christianity, to participate in the more esoteric aspects of the pueblo’s ritual life.
After a shotgun ceremony at nearby San Rafael, Marie’s father dropped off the newlyweds near the eastern edge of the Malpais, a forbidding 114,000-acre volcanic wilderness that sprawls between the Acoma and Zuni Pueblo territories. They set up camp in a crudely roofed rock shelter, and for three years here they raised the first three sons of their eventual twelve children.
But banishment from one tribe was followed by his rescue by another. In 1885, Marie Hunt’s older sister, Juana, married into a mercantile family of five German Jewish brothers. Hailing from Prussia, the Bibos had immigrated one by one to western New Mexico. This union gained Solomon Bibo, Juana’s husband, access to her influential Acoma family and the village’s leading Antelope clan. It also brought Edward Hunt an unusual brother-in-law. Fluent in Acoma, Zuni, Navajo, Spanish, German, Yiddish, and English, “Don Solomon” Bibo became an effective trader and networker with the outside world.
Exploiting his connections with the Valle family, Solomon’s fortunes rose. Before long, through shady maneuverings, he even became the tribe’s largest landowner. For three terms he even served as its governor, hence his popular characterization as the first “Jewish Indian chief.” Although Solomon’s involvement in Acoma political life was not without controversy, his loyalty to his new family brought young Edward under his wing. At the Bibo trading post in the nearby Hispanic village of Cubero, Edward swept floors; inventoried goods; learned to restock at supply warehouses in Albuquerque; became conversant in English, Spanish, Navajo, and a bit of German; and was inspired to become a shopkeeper and entrepreneur on his own.
When Solomon and Juana left New Mexico for San Francisco around 1898, Edward Hunt stepped into the commercial vacuum. At his Acomita general store, he provided information for a stream of writers, anthropologists, and photographers. Edward S. Curtis, Charles F. Lummis, Elsie Clews Parsons, Leslie A. White, and others owed much of their information and images to him. Wrote famous photographer Edward S. Curtis in 1923, when acknowledging Hunt’s help, “Excepting Zuni and Hopi, he is the only Pueblo informant with whom it was not necessary to work in seclusion and under a pledge of secrecy.”
Hunt’s role as an outspoken culture broker and successful businessman, his reputation as a “progressive” Indian, and his unwillingness to let his boys join Acoma’s kiva groups clashed with the tribe’s conservative elders. Tensions peaked in 1918; the Hunts agreed to move away. As if unwilling to make a clean break with native life, however, they were formally adopted into Santa Ana Pueblo, a Keresan-speaking pueblo closer to the Rio Grande River. But Edward’s independent spirit and Christian leanings caused friction there as well. In 1924, the Hunt family packed up and moved into an Albuquerque suburb.
By now his enterprising son Henry “Wolf Robe” Hunt had contacted the Oklahoma-based Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Circus. The last of the great Wild West Shows to tour Europe, the Millers were subcontracted by the Sarrasani Circus, based in Dresden, Germany, to supply Indians for their 1926–28 “Festival of All Nations” tour. Dressing up as a Plains tribesman and redubbed “Chief Big Snake” by the Millers, Edward along with his sons Wilbert and Henry, performed war dances and chased stagecoaches around arenas in Germany, Belgium, France, and Italy.
This time abroad may have freed Edward to gather his memories and compile Acoma’s creation story as his independent mind saw fit. Perhaps telling this narrative was also a way for the Hunts to recenter themselves once they returned home. Whatever their motivations, six months or so after returning to America the family showed up in Washington, DC. In late August 1928, Edward began narrating the myth, first to visiting British anthropologist C. Daryll Forde, then with the brand-new “chief” of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology, Matthew W. Stirling.
For this task he was uniquely qualified. As a medicine man’s son, an initiate into the Katsina Society, a candidate for becoming a healer himself, a member of the hunter’s society (for killing a bear), and an initiated sacred clown, Edward’s exposure to Acoma’s esoteric lore was broader than most.
In Washington, Edward shared what he knew of his people’s world, the tribe’s ancestral locations, the creation of its characteristic animals and plants, and other features of western New Mexico’s cultural ecology. His exposure to Catholic and Protestant texts added echoes from Christian cosmology—people made “in the image” of God, creation by “the word,” temptation by an evil serpent, committing “a sin,” and a universal flood. Not trained to identify or analyze all that they were hearing, Forde and Stirling found themselves also recording a medley of Acoma genres—sacred creation stories; magical songs, prayers, and side plots; and stories of primordial migrations, legendary wanderings, and the tribe’s ultimate arrival at its current location as a distinctive ethnic group.
For about two months, the Hunts appear to have worked almost every day. Both of Edward’s sons—twenty-six-year-old Henry Wayne “Wolf Robe” Hunt and twenty-one-year-old Wilbert “Blue Sky Eagle” Hunt—aided in translating the basic text as well as the songs that were an integral part of it. The fourth member of their group, Philip Sanchez, adopted from the Pueblo of Santa Ana and nicknamed “Silvertongue” for his beautiful voice, was coached so the Smithsonian could record them. In addition, Henry, an aspiring artist, drew pictures to illustrate the document.
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After the Washington sojourn, the Hunt family made Albuquerque its home base but traveled widely. Over the Depression years, they exploited the country’s passion for Indian lore, patching together a living as entertainers and educators for Boy Scout groups and school districts throughout the South and Midwest. By the 1940s, Edward and Marie had retired to their suburban Albuquerque home while their children created their own careers, which included work as telephone linemen, railway shopmen, jewelry makers, touring showmen, and trading post proprietors along Route 66 between Oklahoma, New Mexico, and even California.
Five years before his father’s death from stomach cancer on February 13, 1948, Wolf Robe Hunt learned from his Tulsa, Oklahoma, newspaper that the Smithsonian had recently published Edward Hunt’s version of the Acoma origin myth. He wrote his scholar friend, the linguist John P. Harrington, for copies for himself, his dad, and “my younger brother Blue Sky Eagle Wilbert, who is with the army somewhere.” Some years later, not knowing that the old man had died, he wrote Wolf Robe again. Unaware that photographer Edward S. Curtis and ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore had publicly named his father as one of their key informants, in his response Wolf Robe expressed concern that Harrington protect his family’s identity by not talking about their Smithsonian work. “As for myself,” Henry said, “I am away from home, and have been for a number of years, although I visit each year. I feel as I were merely an interpreter for my Dad.” Then he added, as if privy to the personal toll on Edward Proctor Hunt of passing through such a gauntlet of identities, “Of course we know no one can hurt Dad now.”
THE STORIES EDWARD TOLD
Edward’s account of the ethnogenesis of the Acoma people forefronted them as the earth’s original humans, their ecology as the earth’s first landscape, and their mesa-top village as “the center of the world.” His narrative followed two sisters, “Mothers,” as they climbed upward through three underworlds until emerging upon this earthly plain. It traced the creative work of one of them, Iatiku, as she guided her Indian children to create their world and culture and launch their migratory search for a permanent home.
Of the eight traditional myth types for world creation, which folklorist Anna Birgitta Rooth identified across North America, Edward’s narrative exemplifies the drama of the Emergence, which predominates across the Southwest. Most Pueblo peoples suggest that their first appearance on the new earth’s surface occurred at the mythic site of Shipapu, located in the so-called Four Corners area, where the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah intersect.
Part 1, “Iatiku’s World,” opens in darkness, three levels below the earth. Up above the earth, the sun and other features of our world already exist. Almost as an aside, we learn the world was born when a supreme progenitor hurled a blood clot into space. Less interested in ultimate or metaphysical beginnings, however, the narrative quickly turns to cultural unfoldings.
From below the place called Shipapu, two supernatural sisters climb a series of trees toward the light. Guiding them is a female spirit, Tsichtinako, or “Thought Woman.” After teaching them their language, she hands baskets to them. These contain seeds to plant as well as animal effigies representing the many creatures that they will bring to life.
The girls present a dramatic contrast. Iatiku, or “Bringing to Life,” is the elder. Darker skinned and a slower thinker, she belongs to the Corn clan. Nautsiti, or “More of Everything in the Basket,” is lighter complected and has a quicker mind, and she chooses the Sun clan. She is described as lazy, greedy, and rash, Iatiku as industrious, forbearing, and gentle. Nautsiti’s basket contains foreign items—domesticated animals and plants, metals, written words; Iatiku’s holds features of the environment for sustaining the Acoma people to come.
Now unfolds an inventory of creation, the myth’s litany of the first this and the first that. As they mature, the sisters learn about the sun’s movement, how night follows day, how to orient themselves in the four directions, and how to use fire, corn, and salt so as to cook and feed themselves. They plant seeds to feed the animals, make mountains to support the trees that they will cut to roof their homes, and plant other seeds to feed themselves. Through song they animate the fetishes so as to create game animals, which will feed the fetishes that they bring to life as prey animals. From birds to fish, turtles to water snakes, gradually they bring the world alive with creatures and places.
After Nautsiti is impregnated by a rainbow snake, she bears twin sons. Taking one of them, she heads east and there produces white people. Back at Shipapu, the other son grows up and marries his aunt, Iatiku. Their offspring will parent the Acoma people. Iatiku then groups the successive generations into the clans that eventually will number varyingly between a dozen and twenty.
With the spirit Tsichtinako abandoning her, Iatiku must create the rest of Acoma cosmology and culture on her own. She establishes the spirits of the four directions, who will dispense the four seasons; assigns Katsina spirits to rule the clouds; and teaches the new people how to summon them with prayer sticks. With magical words she creates their distinctive pueblo architecture—their domestic houses, central dance plaza, and ceremonial kivas. Instituting a men’s hunting society, she sets rules for the killing and butchering of game and creates new fetishes and rituals to help hunters be successful.
From generating and nurturing, Iatiku moves to governing. She establishes the offices of War Chief and Country Chief. When an evil snake reappears with plague, she institutes the five medicine mens’ societies with their altars. They learn to use ritual objects so as to alter the course of events, bring the near dead back to life, and even make rain during severe droughts.
To add spice to human life, Iatiku introduces a counterforce—sacred clowns, called Koshari. They behave boorishly, interrupt sacred activities, mimic dignitaries, do things backward, and provide relief from the seriousness of ritual life. They teach people to have fun: to hold public dances, play ball games, and run kick stick races.
Having armed her people with this foundation, Iatiku sends them to their next village location, at the place known as White House—speculated to be today’s ruins of Chaco Canyon or Aztec, New Mexico. But there the diversions she taught them prove their downfall. The men become addicted to a hide-the-stick gambling game, whose songs disrespect other men’s wives and even insult Iatiku herself. Hurt and angered, Iatiku prepares to depart, but not before alluding to the prospect of her own death; only in the afterworld will she reunite with them. Finally, she leaves instructions so the people can find their ultimate home, Ha’ako, which lies to the south. Abandoned by both Iatiku and her Katsinas, the people suffer drought and famine until a “good man” saves them.
Element by element, each in proper sequence, this section has produced the Acoma physical world. Artifact by artifact and practice by practice, it has also created their cultural world. Covenants have been decreed between humans and spirits and between humans and nature. Now Iatiku’s children possess cosmological principles, survival skills, religious and political practices, rituals for healing, a social identity, and an ethical structure. Future rituals by humans will recapitulate the symbols and acts that are this section’s dramatic arc.
So her people will know when they have reached their destination, Iatiku instructs early on that when they believe they have reached Ha’ako, they must yell out loud. A clear echo is the signal that they have finally arrived. In addition, she gave them two eggs, one plain and whitish, the other a beautiful blue; from one will come crows, from the other parrots. Upon reaching Ha’ako they are to divide into two groups by choosing between the eggs; one band will stay and the other will continue traveling southward.
Bereft of Iatiku’s guidance and the Katsinas’ support, the people finally arrive near Ha’ako, or present-day Acoma mesa. Until now, they have escaped the consequences of their bad behavior. Will impulsive human nature disturb their lives again?
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The opening of part 2, “Birth of the War Twins,” has a familiar ring. Much as Nautsiti was impregnated by wet drops from the Rainbow Serpent, now the Sun god impregnates a young girl with piñon nuts. The duo of Iatiku and her absent sister, and the latter’s two boys, are joined by a third pair of newborns, Masewi and Oyoyewi, sons of the Sun. When their protective energies are needed, they are exalted as the Hero Twins. But when their ferocity goes too far, they become threats to community stability.
The boys mature unusually fast and acquire remarkable skill with weapons, first as hunters, later as warriors. Eager to meet their Sun father, they are aided by Spider Woman (apparently an avatar of the spirit Tsichtinako, who originally helped the two girls). She guides them in their magical journey to the Sun’s home in the sky. They must endure tests before their Sun father acknowledges his paternity, praises their mettle, and grants them superhuman killing and healing powers.
• • •
At the beginning of part 3, “The War Twins’ World,” harmony at White House has been restored and the War Twins are living peacefully among the people. From Iatiku’s children of myth, the people have transformed into a historical band of migrants who must take responsibility for their lives.
But a disrespectful younger generation upsets things once again. They revive the gambling game with its rowdy songs and mocking imitations of Katsinas. The spirits retaliate, causing a terrible war between spirits and humans that seems to be unparalleled in the annals of pueblo mythology. Rallying to their community’s side, the Twins help to kill nearly all the Katsinas. Although they come back to life, their human victims do not. Traumatized, the survivors face a dilemma. How can mortals and supernaturals possibly interact after such destruction? Their planes of existence are complementary and interdependent, yet clearly they must dwell physically apart. Then the Katsina Chief comes up with a brilliant solution.
A sacred drama will mix ritual, stagecraft, masking, and the willing suspension of disbelief. But impersonating spirits is no simple matter. Participants must become more than actors. As described in many Indian folktales, bad behavior or improper conduct of rituals runs the risk of leaving them permanently stuck between realms. During their masked visits in the plazas, streets, and kivas, the impersonated spirits bring otherworldly powers into a human community. The gravity of such appearances is counterbalanced by the levity of sacred clowns. They allow the townsfolk to enjoy vicariously the sort of fun-making that once cost them so dearly. As the clowns mock the Katsinas, everyone’s smiles amount to a collective release. Yet these “delight makers,” as early ethnologist Adolph Bandelier labeled them, borrowing from a phrase by the famous scholar Frank Hamilton Cushing, also distract the people from observing the Katsinas too closely, lest the true identities of the individuals who are personifying them be disclosed.
For the next misfortune to befall the people, however, a “disease with blisters,” there is no retrospective explanation; no one appears to have misbehaved. Indeed, history may have intervened here, in the form of the early sixteenth-century smallpox epidemic, which native demographer Russell Thornton suggests spread from northern Mexico to the Southwest in 1520. To counter the plague, the people migrate to Sage Basin, reestablishing their buildings, the plaza, and their kivas.
Then a visit by some Katsinas revives the bad behavior of disrespectful men yet again. To avoid a repeat of the earlier bloodbath, the village War Chief comes up with another solution through the medium of performance. The community will reenact the terrible war with the Katsinas. Its stage prop will be a curtain of dried buffalo hides, representing the village walls. Some will play the part of invading Katsinas, others the defending villagers. The War Twins will participate as well. In the ensuing melee, those performing as invading Katsinas will pretend to die, but the actual mockers will pay with their lives.
After angry relatives of the dead split off, the rest move to yet another location, Tule Lake. A new medicine society purges the site, a new village emerges, but drought and famine return nonetheless. Falling back on their old role as community saviors, the Twins sneak into Katsina country to steal weather-controlling medicine. The Katsinas retaliate with storms and floods. The people save themselves by ascending a mountain. Only when the Twins shoot arrows at the waves do they subside.
From now on, nothing will deflect the wandering people from their search for their predestined home. Carrying Iatiku’s oracular eggs, they bypass the site of future Laguna Pueblo, camp at Antelope Range, then visit Hardwood Pass, and finally reach Katzimo (also known as Enchanted Mesa). All the while they maintain the cycle of dancing, praying, and planting associated with the agricultural year.
For the Twins, one adventure remains. Sounding as if Hunt has inserted a folktale into his epic, the two clash with the evil gambling spirit of South Mountain. Humbled at last by this chastening experience, they are beset by the same kind of fears as ordinary human beings.
Finally arriving at Ha’ako, the people locate the clear echo and learn who is to stay and who must travel southward by choosing between the two eggs. Thinking that by picking the attractive blue egg they will be associating with the beautiful parrots, most select the blue. But when they crack it, crows burst forth. While this contingent will remain at Ha’ako, those aligned with the white egg, which yields colorful parrots, splinter off, presumably into old Mexico.
• • •
Accepting punishment for their impetuous actions, the Twins submit to a purification ritual. This institutes yet a third ceremony for the people to practice in the years ahead. The scalps of their victims are propitiated so enemy spirits cannot haunt their killers, and at the same time so Pueblo warriors can be honored for bravery. Disconsolate about facing a future as inactive commoners, the Twins disappear into a rock near the mesa’s edge.
Still encamped at the mesa’s foot, the people prepare for their ascent to its summit. Rather than conducting their arrival in a spirit of triumph, they make this final move with reverential, stately care. First the medicine men clear ants, centipedes, and snakes from the surface. A main Rainbow Trail up the mesa is purified and marked by prayer sticks. Additional offerings are deposited where the seven kivas are to be constructed. After building the houseblocks, Country Chief and the Antelope clan establish the freshwater cisterns. The village’s guardian beings—mountain lion, bear, green frog, and snake—are assigned their corner places, as if replacing the role of the Twins.
Then comes the moment for everyone to ascend “the completely kerneled long ear of corn”—a metaphoric designation for Acoma mesa itself. Arriving by the blessed trail, the medicine men receive village officials and the Antelope clan. Next come the people, clans, and societies, each assigned their specific homes or meeting places. With the people observing every ceremonial detail, the entire settling-in period consumes two days. Here they dwell for a long time: “Year after year they continued to go through their ceremonies.”
With a final sentence, Edward ends his narrative, like a ribbon snipped by scissors.
“This is as far as the tradition is told.”
SYMBOLS, THEMES, AND PATTERNS
Layered into Hunt’s version are explanations, symbols, motifs, themes, and patterns that are found across the Pueblo Southwest. From Corn to Breath to Moisture to Centers to Cardinal Directions, key elements of their world are highlighted in various ways. When Edward Hunt told anthropologist Leslie White about corn, for example, he singled out those special ears treasured by most Pueblos, whose kernels cover their cobs to the tip. Sought out by farmers, they were ground into the sacred meal that accompanied prayers and blessings. But some of these ears were kept whole, to be clothed and adorned as the Honani fetishes that symbolized Iatiku herself, the “mother of all Indians.”
Resonances of corn as a key symbol and root metaphor do not end there. According to Hunt, the Acoma tribe’s male Cacique, its spiritual leader chosen from the Antelope clan and to serve for life, is regarded as Iatiku’s earthly embodiment. He retains and regularly “feeds” such a fetish. Furthermore, Hunt confided, the sandstone mesa of Acoma itself is envisaged as the butt end of a giant ear of corn. So when the Cacique tells a man bringing a new bride to the Pueblo to “come on top of my head,” he is conflating this key symbol’s multiple meanings: staff of life, Iatiku, corn fetish, corn as mesa, and himself as an embodied summation of them all.
Hunt’s stories are beset with dualities; so much comes in pairs, parallels, complementaries, opposites, or inversions. Two sisters are cocreators of the world, yet their natures and cultural preferences are diametrically opposed. While they are fighters for life, the War Twins are also destroyers. They model both how humans should defend themselves as warriors and how to protect themselves against the consequences of doing so, with rites that honor their victims’ scalps in order to avoid being haunted by them.
The gods of the dependable seasons are regulators; they lack initiative, are unrepresented in Pueblo dances, and remain largely aloof from human life. But the Katsinas are controllers of uncertain weather, willful intercessors and recipients of human requests, and interact in community life. Male and female roles in the culture are distinct and separate, yet they are as complementary as those opposing seasons and their supernaturals: the summer Katsinas and the winter Kopishtaiya. For the people to survive, agriculture—the production of life—must be coupled with hunting—the taking of life.
These pairings are opposed by separations that mark what French scholar Lucien Sebag highlights as the Hunt narrative’s five “crisis” moments. First is the separation between the sacred female pair and their male, godlike creator, which is followed by the second, a rift between the sisters. Third is the divorce between human beings and their “mother,” which leads to the fourth, the bloody rupture between humans and their Katsina spirits. Last comes the break between humans and their War Twin protectors, which leaves the Acoma people on their own. This sequence of abandonments and closures by which a community individuates bears inescapable resemblance to the process by which human beings bid farewell to their protectors along their stages of growth toward adulthood.
Directional actions carry symbolic meaning. In Hunt’s account, we encounter three movements. The first follows a vertical axis. Like corn plants whose growth strains upward, the first “humans” (or their sacred progenitors) ascend skyward through underworld tiers, each associated with its particular color, animal, and botanical species. Upon death, this order is reversed, as deceased tribespeople are said to be “planted” back into the earth. To access the powers of their generative underworlds, Pueblo ritualists descend into kivas and stamp on boards covering little cavities that symbolize the Shipapu location from whence humans first emerged. In the myth’s middle section, movement along this axis continues, as Spider Woman enables the War Twins to ascend to their Father Sun’s realm, where he tests them before granting their superhuman fighting skills.
A second movement is the order by which earthly features, notably the directional mountains, are created—north, west, south, east. As with the primordial actions in the myth, this counterclockwise sequence is second nature to today’s Acoma people. By dance movements and physical gestures, song verses, prayerful invocations, and indrawn and exhaled breaths, the spiritual powers of these directions are always addressed in this order.
Third is the more historical, horizontal movement of migratory peoples from north to south. As the myth’s third section has the emergent Acomans leaving their original Shipapu site of Emergence, they embark on their stop-and-start migration toward this “center of the universe.” Here an “actual” geography takes over. Their progress is less a straight line between points than a centripetal movement, a spiraling ever inward until the slow-learning, long-suffering people gain sufficient maturity to earn their predestined homeland.
Almost in evolutionary and hierarchical sequence, the myth gradually introduces characters and creative actions that eventually come into dramatic interplay. Periodically we are given what folklorists call “explanatory motifs” that inform us how the magpie gained its coloring, why locusts are reborn underground, when pottery was invented, and so forth. Where ritual details may seem tiresome, readers must not forget that this myth is providing formulaic instructions for achieving outcomes that often defy nature’s normal course (making snow fall in July), surpass ordinary human abilities (restoring the near dead to life), or conquer evil powers (identifying and killing a witch).
Other places where a reader’s interest may flag are the slowed-down, close-up episodes in part 3, where the people are forced to address the apparent inability of humans and spirits to coexist. We might describe the eventual solution as an “enacted transformation,” in which humans temporarily take on the powers and personalities of Katsinas. In the myth’s most remarkable example of human creativity, we witness a culture inventing a dramaturgical strategy for restoring harmony with the spirit world, without whose assistance, in their uncertain environment, they will surely perish.
Peppering Hunt’s version are inferences about proper social behavior, making the document a guidebook for what one might call the “Tao of Acoma.” Rules about hunting are especially picky; one must feed, water, and adorn dead animals so their spirits will continue to give themselves to hunters. Similarly, one must respect one’s dead enemies, lest their ghosts come back to haunt their killers. Nor must one ever ridicule the rain-bringing Katsinas. The older sacred sister’s character and conduct is suggested as less than desirable; one must be generous, soft-spoken, and gentle with crops. The myth censures the disrespectful younger gamblers in the kiva, whose vulgarities toward women; their creator mother, Iatiku; and the Katsinas wreak havoc.
Linked to the version’s admiration for the “common man” is its diminished emphasis on any particular culture hero. What superheroes we have are the War Twins. But once they have cleared the land of monsters, their aggressive tendencies are deemed immoderate, generally a negative in Pueblo society. It is as if the communal ethos of the Pueblo world, with its anxieties about the polluting consequences of bloodletting, turns exploits that might otherwise arouse admiration into causes for anxiety. Violence may be necessary, but its destructive energies must never get out of hand. In a pinch, let “the people” become their own collective hero. Might Edward Hunt, a man banished from Acoma by its conservative elders, be making a personal case in the myth by setting up a comparison between the less effective office of the village Antelope Chief and the successful efforts of a modest, noninterfering “common man”?
Similarly is the Trickster figure brought under society’s thumb. The first Koshari, or sacred clown—who was different from other people because, in Hunt’s beguiling phrase, “he knew something about himself”—is created as a Delight Maker whose function and latitude is circumscribed. This is no antisocial agent of rampant disorder, as one finds in the Coyote trickster of neighboring tribes. The Acoma clown joins a ceremonial brotherhood and is entrusted with the tribe’s most sacred teachings. His inversions of acceptable behavior take place on prescribed occasions and under clear guidelines. No matter how outrageous, no person or value is ever threatened by his burlesques. Indeed, the delight and relief everyone feels at clown performances may stem from how they allow onlookers to vicariously blow off steam over their society’s behavioral strictures while simultaneously reinforcing Acoma’s core values.
• • •
Hunt’s version closes with the ancestors of today’s Acoma people starting to live out their myth’s directives and implications on their own. His story has let their cultural ethos come into being before our eyes. We have witnessed Acoma’s physical world grow out to the four directions, its philosophical and moral structures come into focus, its people maturing as they explore and humanize their new world.
At the end, their former relationship with the spirits has been replaced by a divinely sanctioned but humanly created connection that requires participatory maintenance, in the form of ritual actions and proper behavior, in order to endure. Through sacred theater and impersonation, humans can half become the Katsinas, so as to secure their blessings. To control the weather in their favor, these masked performers can safely visit and dance and help their people through transitional moments in the year. To remind themselves of the costs of disrespecting the spirits and any humans they have killed in battle, every five years they can dramatize that terrible war and the ensuing scalp ceremony that have been so vividly recalled in this myth. The narrative has bequeathed to its Acoma people the codes of proper behavior and correct ritual so they may perpetuate their particular existence. This explains the seriousness of the Pueblo need to keep their key ceremonies and kiva practices from the eyes of outsiders, lest their powers drain away. And while these powers are initially designed for members only, they believe that their benefits extend to the entire world.
It is not easy for a culture to arrive at an integrated sense of itself. People must make their ecological surroundings comprehensible and meaningful. They must work out the kinks and contradictions born of their evolving premises. They must invent corrective devices to the negative sides of human nature and establish a moral code in accord with their cosmological principles. They must do all this generally and specifically, and they must leave room for human beings to enjoy their lives. To preserve a sense of equality, they must also disperse the knowledge of how all this works throughout the community, even if some are entitled to know what the uninitiated are not.
What Edward Hunt provided in the nation’s capital was his summarizing version of a narrative that, seen from today’s perspective, supported Acoma’s claim of an endurable identity in the contemporary arena. By the time his ancestors installed themselves on their home mesa in western New Mexico, they had “suffered into knowledge,” as the playwright Aeschylus once put it. They had earned the tools to face the future. Edward had preserved the story of how a new ethnicity joined the world’s collection of distinctive small-scale societies.
PREPARING THIS EDITION
Of the dozen or so published examples of Pueblo Indian creation stories, mostly collected by anthropologists and folklorists over the past century or more, this version of the Acoma Pueblo origin myth is among the most complete ever consigned to print. It took fourteen years before it appeared, and then few noticed. It was published in the thick of World War II, drably and inexpensively released like any other official document, and distributed via the U.S. Government Printing Office’s mailing list. One of its own editors had to write its first review. It would take another fifteen years before scholars and anthologizers began to appreciate its culturally bounteous and densely structured contents. Since then, it has been widely analyzed and excerpted. French anthropologist Lucien Sebag made it the centerpiece of a book-length study. Pueblo scholar Alfonso Ortiz featured it in his anthology of American Indian literature. Archaeologist Stephen H. Lekson saw it as supporting his ideas about Ancestral Pueblo migrations. Today it is recognized as one of the major contributions to American Indian mythology.
It may have been John Peabody Harrington, the eccentric genius of American Indian linguistics, who had previously met the Edward Hunt family out West and gave them entrée to the Smithsonian. However it transpired, in late August 1928, the Hunt entourage found itself at the Smithsonian Castle, in the second-floor office of Matthew W. Stirling, the brand-new “chief” of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology.
A modest man, Stirling would have been first to admit he was not prepared for this assignment. One imagines he wished his predecessor, the southwestern ethnographer Jesse Walter Fewkes, were on deck. Not a linguist, folklorist, or ethnographer, Stirling had replaced the ailing Fewkes only weeks earlier and would hold the post for another thirty years. But he was an archaeologist, untrained at eliciting information from the living. He had excavated Indian sites in California, North Dakota, and Florida; his scholarly renown would come ten years later when National Geographic reported his dramatic find of huge stone heads carved by the ancient Olmecs of southwestern Veracruz.
For now, Stirling could count on ethnographic colleagues who regularly sought out native informants like the Hunts. This was the tail end of what has been described as the Smithsonian’s “Golden Age of Anthropology,” when documenting Indian cultures remained a priority. As the manuscript was prepared, some of the discipline’s leading lights would contribute to its editing process.
No sooner did the Hunts sit down to work than they met another recent arrival to the Smithsonian. C. Daryll Forde was a twenty-six-year-old new PhD in prehistoric archaeology from University College, London. Author of a recent book on ancient seamanship and destined to become a leading Africanist, Forde was just starting a two-year Commonwealth postgraduate fellowship. Thrilled to meet real Indians while gearing up for his American field trip, he was easily recruited to transcribe in longhand Hunt’s early sessions (episodes one through twenty), which Stirling let him add to his résumé through separate publication in a British folklore journal. When Stirling compiled the entire manuscript, he patched Forde’s material into its opening section.
Before narrating his people’s genesis, Hunt explained that “the entire account should be given in its proper sequence, just as it was taught to him during his period of initiation as a young man.” Later in the storytelling, however, he was more precise and pluralistic about his actual training: “The tradition is told and taught when a man is being initiated into one of the societies.” But personal circumstances had seen Edward initiated into more of them than was customary for any single Acoma man. So he seems to have sequenced a number of these various induction stories, each with its separate mythic episodes of origin, into this continuous epic.
For example, he also told Stirling, “During the 4-day period when the Chaianyi [medicine men] are setting up the altar, they tell it. The songs contain information also.” Then he clarified how: “Besides, in preparing for a ceremony, that part of the tradition which they may relate is told.” As an example, when Edward told of the arrival of winter Katsina, he explained, “Before the Kopishtaiya come, when the men are getting ready for them, they tell in the kiva the part [of the myth] they are going to enact. Thus they will be thoroughly familiar with the spirit and details of the ceremony.” At another point, however, clarifying the importance of the Koshari Society (of which he was an initiated member), he explained how they were “the group of sacred clowns to whom theoretically all religious secrets are divulged.”
These are Edward’s only hints about any syntheses he was imposing on his material. Even though Stirling was new to Pueblo thought and unacquainted with their society’s dispersal of cultural knowledge throughout these various groups, he sensed that “the sequential and comprehensive character of this version has given fresh meaning to various concepts and rituals of Keresan religion.”
Hunt had already described some of his initiatory experiences to photographer Edward S. Curtis’ hired fieldworker, Charles Strong, in 1909, and with ethnographer Leslie A. White, in 1926. Among his people, Hunt told Stirling, the narrative belonged to a genre known as gutti’amunish wupe’ta’ni in Keresan, which he translated as “origin tradition—by passing word from one to another.”
As Stirling described their stop-and-start process, he noticed that “the tradition is couched in archaic language so that in many places the younger interpreters [Henry Wayne and Wilbert Hunt] were unable to translate and the elderly informant would have to explain in modern Acoma phraseology. This may account in part for certain obvious paraphrases of Pueblo or even of merely Indian ways of speaking. Other paraphrases may have been made for the benefit of the white man or as interpretation of Acoma religion by one who is an exceptionally good [Christian] and no longer a participant in the ceremonial life of Acoma.” As Stirling grew impressed with the narrative’s significance, it became clear how “with this myth, according to Acoma ideology, everything in the culture must harmonize. When new practices are adopted, there is an attempt to fit them into the general scheme.”
We presume Hunt began with phrases, which his son Henry Wayne patiently translated into English sentences. Watching, listening, and hurriedly writing down Henry’s translation, Stirling was struck that although the old man was an avowed Protestant, “he apparently put himself completely into the spirit of the pagan beliefs at the time he was recounting the narrative . . .” Periodically, Stirling may have broken in with a question, as parenthetical comments in the original text seem to indicate where Hunt is responding to interruptions or volunteering asides and clarifications.
As if to underscore the narrative’s authority to provide liturgical scripts for the proper conduct of initiations, curing rituals, and group ceremonies so they can work their magic—making rain, healing the sick, protecting tribal members, staving off ghosts and witches—Stirling observed that at moments Hunt “gave what seemed to be undoubted evidence of hesitancy and even fear in recounting certain passages.”
This caution was probably because creation narratives were rarely just about primordial events. Like many sacred texts, in mysterious ways they embodied their generative powers. Recapitulations in the forms of uttered words and ritual actions perpetuated the creative forces and cultural processes of which they spoke. At the same time, Stirling noted how Hunt took pains “to differentiate between contemporary practice and what was given in the tradition. Frequently after his dictation when I would question him to bring out concrete instances, he would say, ‘It is not done so anymore.’”
• • •
Regrettable in this entire process were a number of oversights. First and greatest was Stirling’s failure to record or transcribe Hunt’s narration in the Acoma dialect of his Keresan language. Neither a Pueblo linguist nor a cultural anthropologist, Stirling did his best, writing as rapidly in English as possible to keep up with Henry’s similarly untrained translation, which he was doing in his head. But as linguistic anthropologist Dennis Tedlock, a leading scholar of Pueblo Indian sacred texts, argues, “Where style is concerned, just about anything collected by the old written dictation method is nearly worthless.” Without training in orthographic methods for capturing the original language and producing an interlinear translation, which would include all repetitions and songs and the original flow of narration prior to breaking into shorter, choppier English sentences, most opportunities for any subsequent revelations about Acoman oral genres, rhetorical strategies, or deeper glosses of key concepts were lost.
Second, the song texts recorded during this time were not reincorporated into the text, where they functioned as more than adornment. By lending incantation, repetition, and vocal range to prayers and blessings, songs brought these mythic events into the present, much as they enabled the story’s events to take place as they originally had at the dawn of creation. When anthropologist Ruth Benedict was collecting similar material at Zuni Pueblo in the summer of 1925, for instance, she praised her informant: “Nick is invaluable—if I could only take his ‘singsongs’ in text!” Benedict went on to describe how he “told me the emergence story with fire in his eye yesterday through twenty-two repetitions of the same episode in twenty-two ‘sacred’ songs. He’d tried to skip but habit was too strong.”
One can imagine Hunt similarly incapable of reciting the myth without punctuating it with the songs and repetitious verses that activated the channeling of the myth’s powers. Notably in part 1, where Iatiku gives life in such fixed order to key features of Acoma ecology and sociology, the verses energized the creative processes. As early ethnographer Washington Matthews wrote of Navajo sacred song sequences, here was an example where “myth is the key . . . Few songs except extemporaneous compositions exist independently of myth.” Later these very same songs—heard at name givings, religious initiations and ceremonies, and critical moments in the agricultural cycle—rang out again so as to reaccess their ancient potency.
Like Benedict’s Zuni friend, Hunt probably exercised some sort of textual triage for the sake of the unfamiliar cause at hand, which was getting the narrative down on paper instead of re-creating ceremonial instructions for efficacious purposes. So songs were referred to but not included, prayers were mentioned but their multiday repetitions were ignored, and only an outline of ritual actions was described. Still, Hunt may have felt a twinge of unease at brokering not only a conversion from the oral to the written, but a transition from the myth’s functional venues to this new archival context. Yet his frequent citing of songs underscores the mysterious, essential link between poetic expressions and real life. “Song at the very beginning was experience,” wrote Acoma poet Simon Ortiz. “There was no division between experience and expression . . . The purpose of the song is first of all to do things well, the way that they’re supposed to be done . . . The context in which the song is sung or that a prayer song makes possible is what makes a song substantial, gives it the quality of realness.”
A third drawback was the absence of documentation on Hunt’s performative or “paralinguistic” accompaniment to his spoken narration. What gestures he made, what facial expressions, where he slowed down, spoke loudly, whispered, or mimicked various participants—all that was lost. “Cut off from their performance context,” laments folklorist Elaine Jahner of so many Indian texts collected over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “they are like the dry bones of skeletons. They show us only outlines, yet these are precious because they are all we have to tell us how tales were adapted as cultures faced revolutionary change.”
Occasionally, father and son conferred over difficult passages, unfamiliar rituals, or ceremonial or archaic words. But apart from Stirling’s idea to put a few of these “asides” in parentheses, typographical conventions such as brackets, italics, double columns, or marginal notations for documenting the “total performance” of such sessions were nonexistent in those years. I have either bled them into this edition or omitted them as redundant or nonessential. Whenever Hunt underscored that some esoteric practice was still extant, out of respect for contemporary Pueblo sensitivities I have not included them. To appreciate what was missed in this process, the scholar of traditional American Indian literatures Karl Kroeber reminds us of the customary settings for listener-narrator interaction during such oral performances in their traditional contexts: “The Indian audience listened very carefully to each teller’s particular vocal inflections, verbal innovations, rhetorical omissions and additions, shifts in the order of events, modifications of character, and so forth, because these performative qualities endowed the old story with its special contemporary relevance.”
Nor did Stirling provide details as to how the text’s complementary songs and pictures were actually recorded. Presumably Hunt also interrupted his narration so he could direct his son Henry in correctly rendering the drawings and watercolors that illustrated the ceremonial regalia, altarpieces, and Katsina masks he mentioned in the myth. More intrinsic to the story line were those songs that punctuated the text. When Stirling separated them out, he left no “stage directions” about how they were originally sung. Altogether, nearly seventy songs were collected, sung by Philip Sanchez, and recorded on wax cylinders by Anthony Wilding, Stirling’s assistant.
• • •
During the eight or nine weeks of interviews, Stirling put his pencil to 189 lined yellow pages. Once this transcription phase was done, the task of editing and annotating could begin. But that waited for nearly a decade while the manuscript languished in Stirling’s files. In the spring of 1937, Leslie A. White, an anthropologist who had already written his foundational study of Acoma for the Smithsonian, The Acoma Indians, asked Stirling about the manuscript’s present state. A year later, White began preparing its largely linguistic footnotes, with help from Elsie Clews Parsons, the independently wealthy and prolific doyenne of Pueblo Indian studies. Work on the song texts was handed out to Parsons’ famous mentor, Franz Boas, who was acquainted with Keresan linguistic materials from his former work at Laguna Pueblo.
It was natural for Stirling to turn to White. As a University of Chicago graduate student in anthropology, White had made his first field trip to Acoma in the summer of 1926, when he worked closely with Edward Hunt, then living at Santa Ana Pueblo. “All the material we recorded has been annotated and generally edited by Dr. Leslie A. White,” acknowledged Stirling in the original publication, “who for many years has been a student of the Keres.”
Stirling also offered special thanks “to the late Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, who took part in the editing.” Not much happened in southwestern Indian scholarship without Parsons’ critical review, scholarly approval, and, customarily, financial support. An heiress, early feminist, fearless ethnographer, and published author who was smitten by the anthropology courses she took under Boas at New York’s Columbia University, Parsons amended Stirling’s and Henry’s sentences for clarity and strengthened White’s commentary.
• • •
From this postnarration process, Hunt the narrator was excluded. Once he was back in New Mexico after the original narrating sessions of 1928, it was as if he had dropped his birthright into a well. He wasn’t consulted for additions or double-checking. He was given no indication about when, if, or how the material would appear in print. Fourteen years later, on December 3, 1942, thirty-five hundred copies of the finished, edited version were published at a cost of nearly two thousand dollars, with two strikes against any wide response. For one, the drab green cover on its 123 pages looked more like that of a government seed catalog than a Native American equivalent to the Old Testament. Lacking a public relations office, the Bureau of American Ethnology sent no publication list to bookstores. And besides, the nation had no sooner emerged from the Depression than it was embroiled in a world war. Young scholars were now soldiers overseas. Who but a few specialists had time for such an obscure document?
For nearly two decades, the publication went largely unnoticed. Yet it was precisely the mine of cultural riches for which the French anthropological philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss searched throughout his academic career. After convening research seminars at L’École des Hautes Études in 1951 to analyze New World myths, Lévi-Strauss waited a while to tackle the Pueblo Indian material. But during his 1961–63 sessions, he assigned Lucien Sebag, a Tunisian-born ardent practitioner of his system of structural analysis, to scrutinize this and other Keresan versions. In Sebag’s posthumous 485-page book-length analysis, he nicely summarized Hunt’s material: “The text forms an homogeneous whole which begins with the creation of the world and finishes with the settlement of the Acomas at the center of the world. Its coherence is total, and one does not note contradictions between the diverse parts of the myth. This is the greatest Keresan myth that has reached us, and it will constitute the center of our research.”
When scholars and anthologizers explored American Indians and world mythology a few decades later, they rediscovered the unique window offered by this publication into Pueblo Indian rituals, metaphysics, and ethics.
A NOTE ON THIS TEXT
Thirty years ago, while working on a book on American Indian architecture, I was canvassing American Indian creation stories for references to the cosmological meanings encoded in native buildings. In a Smithsonian Institution bulletin, I ran across this anonymously authored account of Acoma’s sacred “mother of all Indians,” Iatiku, magically creating their first houses, plaza, kivas, and sacred places. After quoting from that work and citing it a second time for a subsequent book exclusively on the architecture of Acoma Pueblo, I remained curious about its narrator. That led me into a quarter-century investigation of the remarkable life of Edward Proctor Hunt, which is now the core of How the World Moves: The Odyssey of an American Indian Family, a biographical work on the man, his family, and their times.
But I also thought the origin myth deserved a wider readership and a treatment that provided its background, profiled its narrator, and made this big story more accessible. To that end, I conducted a sentence-by-sentence examination of the 1942 edition; reviewed official correspondence and papers associated with this Bulletin 135 of the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives; and located Stirling’s original, handwritten transcript in the Elsie Clews Parsons papers at Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society (Mss. no. 4846).
From this research it became unfortunately clear that from a contemporary scholar’s perspective, the three oversights of the original sessions—failures to record it in the native tongue; to incorporate song texts in their proper places; and to document Edward’s storytelling pace, tone, and gestures—had weakened that first publication. But for a general readership, the story remained valuable and warranted another edition.
I realized that a portion of the original narration, relating the birth and exploits of the War Twins, was relegated to an appendix, along with Hunt’s asides on installing Acoma tribal officers and initiating members of its Katsina and Koshari societies. I restored the Twins section to its sequentially appropriate middle place, creating a tripartite narrative and letting that section serve as the bridge between the more mythical and more historical parts of the story.
After reading the work numerous times, I also felt that Stirling’s paragraphing was cumbersome. This led me to imagine ways to open up his text while retaining its integrity. Retyping the entire work three times, in the process of reparagraphing, I discovered subtle breaks or “breathers” between discrete actions. All told, I discerned eighty-two of these “scenes,” which proved of more or less equal length. Since Stirling kept no day-to-day log of the original storytelling process, I have no evidence whether this conformed to the pace of the original storytelling and translating. But the total time might have fit into eight or so five-day weeks of continuous narration, with each of these separate scenes possibly completed on a given morning and afternoon. After redrafting this restored, three-part version, between these scenes I then interspersed brief present-tense summaries to help readers follow the drama.
My examination of texts of the myth’s songs recorded at the Smithsonian and their mentions in the actual myth made me confident about reinserting at least a few at their proper place in the document. I attempted this so as to provide readers with something of the flavor of the performative dimension of the stories Hunt was stringing together.
In my last review, I worked on the sentences with care, omitting only a few to eliminate redundancies, occasionally splitting them into two, at times clarifying a word or finding a synonym when I encountered a term that was confusing or that I suspected present-day Indians might dislike, such as rejecting “costume” in favor of “outfit” or “regalia.” To further respect contemporary Pueblo concerns about publishing visual images of sensitive cultural features, I have omitted all of Henry’s thirty-six illustrations and the historical photographs, maps, and drawings that were included in the original publication. The written account should be sufficient for the reader’s imagination.
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Narratives of great magnitude like the Acoma creation story, lacking ultimate authors and going back to unknowable beginnings, are inexhaustible. Their multiple versions always yield new meanings; Edward’s contribution is only one of them. Attempting to “get to the bottom” of any of them is futile and presumptuous. No matter how directed and developed by an individual narrator, they remain repositories of a collective imagination and are driven by cultural survival. One of humankind’s greatest artistic productions, they are at once specific, universal, and essential.
PETER NABOKOV