The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (27 page)

This cosmology of the Tewa explained why each village was divided into Summer and Winter People, and why those two major divisions were crosscut by ritual societies featuring Warm Clowns, Cold Clowns, Scalp Leaders, Medicine Leaders, and Women’s Ritual Leaders. The story of creation also revealed that no one was born fully Tewa; one had to become Tewa gradually, through ritual achievement. In the course of initiation into successive ritual societies, the Tewa would recapitulate the stages through which their ancestors had worked their way to the surface of the earth.

This story of Tewa creation was recorded by anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz in San Juan Pueblo in the 1960s. Ortiz, born and raised in San Juan, did not have to travel far to collect the story. He sat down with the older members of his own community.

In an earlier chapter we mentioned that foragers often had ad hoc, unscheduled rituals, held whenever resources permitted a large group to live together. In contrast, sedentary agriculturalists were able to hold scheduled, calendrical rituals at the same time every year. The Tewa had between 40 and 50 rituals of this type. They relied on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes and the summer and winter solstices to set the ritual calendar. Most ritual activity was concentrated between the fall and spring equinoxes, because that was a time of reduced agricultural activity.

The Tewa planted corn, chile peppers, beans, melons, squash, and gourds after the spring equinox. Later in the spring they collected wild plants. Vegetable crops were harvested in early fall, after which everyone helped clean the irrigation canals. After the fall equinox it was time to harvest piñons. In the early winter the village authorities began to redistribute stored food. After the winter solstice, in an act of public welfare, the village’s poorest families were given food.

Like the Etoro, the Chimbu, and the tribes of Mt. Hagen, the Tewa had a hierarchy of virtue. This hierarchy involved three levels of “being” for living humans and three levels of “becoming” for the spirit world.

At the bottom of the hierarchy were ordinary Tewa who, over the course of their lives, rarely qualified for ritual or political roles in the village. They were called Dry Food People, a reference to those late-arriving ancestors who had walked on the world only after it had dried out, and had themselves become hard and dry. At the top of the hierarchy were the Made People, or patowa (literally, “completed”), those who had become fully Tewa by ascending to the top of the ritual/religious hierarchy. The patowa were considered the most virtuous people in society. They were at the core of Tewa ritual organization, controlling and directing all public ceremony, a task for which they were helped by lay assistants.

Intermediate in virtue, between the Made People and the Dry Food People, were the
Towa é
(“persons”), who symbolized the six courageous pairs of brothers sent out to explore the world while it was still moist. They lay at the core of Tewa society, mediating between the Made People and Dry Food People.

The path to becoming a Made Person led through at least eight ritual societies. It began with the Women’s Society, followed by the Scalp Society. In the past there was a “scalp leader” whose expertise ensured success in raiding traditional enemies like the Navajo. One role of the Women’s Society was to curate the scalps for him.

Next on one’s ritual ascent was the Hunt Society, followed by the Warm Clown Society and the Cold Clown Society. The terms “warm” and “cold” referred not to actual temperatures but to the Summer/Winter dichotomy. Then came the Bear Medicine Society, so named because its members, like bears, were thought to be able to heal themselves.

Finally came the climactic stages of one’s ritual ascent, the Summer Society and Winter Society. Those who made it to the top were now patowa. In the 1960s these Made People and their lay assistants numbered 52 people, roughly 6 percent of a village of 800. This was small by past standards; according to Ortiz, a much higher percentage of Tewa became patowa prior to 1900.

Described by some anthropologists as “part-time priests,” the Made People endeavored to keep the seasons moving normally while maintaining peace and harmony in their village. They were the representatives on earth of the most respected supernatural beings, Blue Corn Woman and White Corn Woman. After death their souls would be honored; they would come to symbolize those supernatural beings who had remained below the lake and, therefore, never dried out.

For their part, the Towa é had their own souls and, as we shall see, their own final resting place in the ritual landscape. The Dry Food People became lesser spirits, known as the Dry Food Who Are No Longer.

In olden days one kiva in the center of San Juan village had been the Navel of the Earth. From there, four lines went out to sacred mountains at the four corners of the Tewa world: north, south, east, and west. These were the first mountains seen by the pairs of mythical brothers who left the underworld. Each mountain had a lake or pond where the spirits of Made People went to live with the supernatural beings. On each mountaintop the spirits of past Towa é stood watch. Those Towa é had created a mesa on the way to each mountain. Between San Juan village and each of these mesas was a shrine to one of the four Great World Directions. It was to these shrines that the souls of Dry Food People went.

FIGURE 21.
   The Tewa of San Juan Pueblo lived at the heart of a sacred landscape. Its center was the Navel of the Earth (marked with an “X”), which was surrounded by dance plazas (gray rectangles). From here, pathways radiated out past shrines and flat-topped hills to a series of sacred mountains up to 80 miles distant. These mountains stood at the four great World Directions, each associated with a color. Whether one’s soul went to a shrine, a mountaintop, or a mountain lake was determined by how far one had ascended the ladder of ritual/religious achievement. Arrows indicate the direction of ritual movement.

In other words the Tewa world was a carefully laid out, sacred, quadripartite landscape composed of mountains, mesas, shrines, and kivas, all connected by roads or sight lines (
Figure 21
). The existence of such a landscape lends credibility to those archaeologists who have reconstructed Pueblo Bonito as the center of a road system leading to an even older and even grander sacred landscape.

ETERNAL BICKERING AMONG CLANS: THE HOPI OF OLD ORAIBI

Black Mesa rises 6,000 to 7,000 feet in northern Arizona, just east of the Grand Canyon. The hills are dotted with piñon and juniper trees, but the growing season is barely long enough for agriculture. Hopi Third Mesa is a peninsula-like extension of Black Mesa, and it is here that the village of Old Oraibi was founded.

Like the Tewa the Hopi once resided in the underworld. One day they heard footsteps above them and investigated but found that the surface of the earth was still cold and dark. Eventually they discovered that the footsteps were those of a supernatural being named
Masau’u
(“Skeleton”). Seeing the light of a fire in the distance, they approached and came upon a garden of corn, beans, squash, and other cultivated plants. Skeleton met them, fed them, and warmed them by his fire.

Now fortified for their journey, the Hopi began to wander. They were already divided into clans that reckoned descent in the mother’s line, and their leader was called Matcito or Machito, head of the Bear clan. Matcito led them to Old Oraibi, where Skeleton allotted them land. Soon after, other clans began to arrive, each offering to perform a beneficial ceremony if allowed to settle there.

Members of the Bear clan picked the best land for themselves and erected a stone boundary marker on which they carved a bear claw. Matcito was named
mongwi,
or village headman, and he allowed other clans to cultivate land at Oraibi on the conditions of good secular behavior and proper ritual.

So large was the plot of land set aside for Matcito and his Bear clan that they could use it to support a war leader. Members of the Kokop clan, late arrivals at Oraibi, were allowed to settle there because they had helped the war leader fend off an enemy raid. Henceforth the Kokop clan would consider the defense of Old Oraibi to be one of its main responsibilities.

This Hopi account of creation was recorded in the early 1930s by anthropologist Mischa Titiev. Titiev was the son of Russian immigrants rather than a Native American like Alfonso Ortiz. He became such a friend to the people of Oraibi, however, that he was eventually adopted into the Sun clan.

Hopi cosmology provided justification for the leadership role played by the Bear clan. It drew on that widespread principle of social logic, “We were here first.” The Oraibi origin myth also supported a scenario long advanced by Southwest archaeologists, namely, that many historic Pueblo villages were multiethnic in origin, that lands were allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, and that late arrivals had to be on their best behavior.

In the matrilineal society of the Hopi, daughters remained for life in their mothers’ households; their husbands joined them there. A typical extended family included a woman’s maternal grandparents, her parents, her mother’s sisters and their husbands, and her unmarried brothers and sisters. Such a family occupied a block of contiguous rooms in the village.

Families at Oraibi were grouped into lineages, about 39 in all, and the lineages were grouped into 21 clans. These clans were in turn grouped into nine larger units. Had there been only two of these larger units, each representing half the village, they would have been considered moieties like the Summer and Winter divisions of San Juan Pueblo. Since there were nine of these larger units, however, anthropologists refer to them as
phratries,
borrowing the ancient Greek word for a group of clans.

Titiev discovered a number of obsolete clan names at Oraibi, suggesting that some former clans had become extinct. Many clans shared kivas peacefully with each other. Others, however, bickered continuously, validating prophecies that they were destined to quarrel.

Oraibi had both clan houses and kivas. There were 31 clan houses in which the women kept
tiponi,
or clan fetishes, the equivalent of the sacred bundles of the Plains Indians discussed later in this chapter. There were also 13 kivas, eight of which could host major rituals and five of which could host only minor events. At least nine of the kivas had mountain shrines associated with them, creating a sacred landscape similar to the Tewa. Titiev believed that in the past each clan had “owned” a specific ceremony, usually held in one of the kivas it controlled.

Hopi kivas were rectangular and subterranean, entered through a hatch in the roof by a ladder (
Figure 22
). In the middle of the floor was a
sipapu,
a cavity representing the hole through which humans had emerged from the underworld. The kiva also had a fireplace and a hollow bench, used to conceal sacred objects from view. The kiva was for ritual performances; the clan house was for private meetings and the curation of ritual paraphernalia.

Like the Tewa, the Hopi scheduled many of their rituals to coincide with solar or lunar events. One of the most important rituals commemorated the departure of the Hopi from the underworld. According to Hopi cosmology, when their ancestors left the underworld they brought with them a number of spirit beings called
katcinas,
anglicized “kachina.” The kachinas had accompanied the Hopi during their wandering but were killed in an enemy attack and returned to the underworld. Each year they were allowed to return to earth for a period extending from the winter solstice to the summer solstice, during which time they could mediate between the Hopi and the spirit world.

FIGURE 22.
   Instead of building men’s houses, the achievement-based village societies of the American Southwest built subterranean kivas that were entered through the roof. This drawing, based on a 100-year-old photograph, shows three Hopi men exiting a kiva at Old Oraibi Pueblo, Arizona.

At the proper time of the year, dancers from two clans impersonated kachinas by dressing in sacred masks and costumes that the kachinas had allegedly left behind. Like the bull-roarers of the Australian Aborigines, the costumes of the kachinas were so old that no one could remember when they had been made. Prior to initiation, children watched the kachinas in awe, believing that they were supernatural beings; after initiation, they knew them to be Hopi men in costume.