CHAPTER IX INDIANS
The story of the Indians in America is the story of the weak in the presence of the strong. Despite the ideals which reign in capitals and cultural centers it is always the same with the main body of the human race—the strong may pity the weak but they will not forbear to use the advantage of their strength. There is little to choose between Spaniards and English. There is little to choose between any of the races; Belgians in the Congo, Portuguese in Brazil, Russians in Turkestan; they have dispossessed, enslaved, expelled, destroyed, without a mist upon their conscience. And it is difficult to think that mankind has improved. If a new world were discovered to-day, if the ocean delivered up a new continent, the first thought would be—Is there gold there? If we found people living on it, specimens would be brought to be shown to prime ministers and exhibited in places of amusement. And there would be a rush to that new world of gold seekers, pirates, adventurers, and Imperial administrators.
So it may be pardoned if at this stage in American history one refuses to wax indignant over how Spaniards and Anglo-Saxon forefathers of present Americans behaved toward the natural possessors of the soil.
The justification for the rapine of America—or at least of North America—is that it has been made into a "going concern." We believe in our curious self-complacence that an American humanity with factories, gilded by millionaires and mighty banks, towering heavenward in mighty cities, is a greater glory to God than the life of Hiawatha and his friends. We must confess that it seems so, and it is difficult to hear the ancient whisper—Where is thy brother Abel?
The Indians, however, are not forgotten. They are more remembered now that they are few. There comes a moment when the old race is mostly underground, or tucked safely away in wildernesses, remote from human ken, that the new race of conquerors becomes sentimental. It has destroyed all that it adored, and now it adores all that it has destroyed. It is so now in the United States, where the Indians have become the pets of tourists and the theme of poets.
You have to travel far to meet the Indians, so the railway companies have used the Indian as an advertisement, not only pictured but living. For at Las Vegas station or at Albuquerque, and many others, do you not see station Indians all bedizened, walking up and down before the delighted traveler's eyes. The Indian has become part of the romance of far travel.
The United States have left their own primitive past behind, and emerged from the mud and the smells and the roughness of pioneer days. All America treads paved sidewalks. All America goes in cars. All America is in clean linen and good clothes. There is electric light, sanitation. Baths have become more national than in Russia or Turkey. America indeed leads civilization and leads it forward. So the distance between the Indians and the citizens of the United States grows more and more remarkable. The gap is a sort of Grand Cañon in itself, a grand cañon in the continuity of human things.
The sentimental interest is therefore greatly intensified by the spectacular one, the paradoxical one, of one people standing still whilst all the rest of the world moves on, a people who refuse to budge from what they were in 1492.
I suppose those Indians were most lucky whose habitat was more remote; those who were furthest from the capital of New Spain; those who were furthest from the centers of population in the United States. Probably the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico were in that position. That is why they have survived so well. The deserts have been their protection.
An acquaintance, buying land near Ramah, New Mexico, found, when he took over a new estate, that there was behind his ranch-house a whole village of cliff dwellings. In a like manner when in 1848 America took over the new territory which was the spoil of the Mexican War she found she took with it the Pueblo Indians, living more or less untouched, unmolested, as they had lived for centuries. Remote from Aztec power, remote from Cortes' power, remote from Spanish power, remote from the seat of power of the Mexican Empire, now remote also from modern America and all that America means, the Pueblo Indians are still happy in their traditional homes, worshipping raingods in the desert, dancing ceremonial dances, dancing their sorrows and their ecstasies.
I was at the Indian pueblo of San Juan on St. John's Day. The Indians and the Mexicans were holding a fiesta. Broadly beat the sun on the mountainous deserts, on the wind-carved, pyramidal mountains and strange rocks, on the sandy waste of the river bed, and on the mud huts of the Indians.
Such a hubbub! The drums of the Indians are beating, throbbing; the many feathers of the war bonnets are bobbing over the sombreros of the dark-suited Mexican crowd which looks on. There is dancing. Let us climb on to the roofs of the mud huts and look down on it.
The drums that they are beating are shaped like sections of tree trunks, but adorned with rude swastikas. Indian warriors, all painted and bedizened and armed, are dancing to the tune of the drum beats, and beautiful women with long hair hanging down their backs, broad set faces, slightly lifting feet in white curl-toe boots, are balancing little feather-topped arrows in each hand.
The war chiefs' dance is a sort of war prance; an arrow-shooting gesture, a spear-holding gesture! And as they dance they jingle their belt bells and set earrings and rattles all atinkling. Their long hair is done up in twin pellicules of fur, and hangs in long tails over their shoulders—or it is inter-plaited with bright ribbons. Their faces are painted in various ways. The leading man, carrying a pink-melon-colored, scythe shaped banner, has black ladders on his cheeks climbing to his yellow-circled eyes. Another man has a striped face, stove black alternating with brightest orange; another has yellow star-rays round his eyes and the ruddiest blood-red over the rest of his face. One is painted top half yellow, lower half rose-red. Almost all wear war bonnets, brown or fawn felt hats, or buckskin caps trimmed with selected black and white feathers. All the feathers are white tipped except those which have been dipped in the war paint. On one warrior this headdress is adorned with small circular mirrors the size of watch lids; they circle his face and gleam in the sun, but they also continue downward at the bases of the long stream of feathers to his ankles. For these feathery bonnets, starting as a broad crest to the brows, finish only short of the ground—and how they dance in the wind as their owners dance!
All the men carry weapons and shields—spears with bright ribbons, imitation bayonets, revolvers, pistols, swords, bows and arrows. One, having on his shield a blood-red star and crescent, slews in the air with a great curved sword. Several are naked to the middle, but all are powdered or dabbed with white paint. They have large feminine-looking breasts, deep-cut navels, smooth skins and no hair. They perspire profusely, and fan themselves occasionally with feathers. One almost naked pagan has the stars and stripes for a loin cloth, and prances about with a sham rifle. Occasionally the seminaked ones seem to obtain furs from somewhere, and appear with their backs and bellies quite covered up.
The drummers are older looking men, very stern in their expression. They know nothing of tradition except its binding force. One of them has a crown of fresh-cut stems of the cottonwood tree. They beat their throbbing drum taps. They sing, they chant, they mumble—mumble, mumble, dum, dum, dum—it is hardly a tune but a sensual appeal. The men do the dance, plunging back and forth; the women throb and quiver, with their broad-booted feet, and short, broad, brightly enwrapped bodies, and wide, woodlike faces, and low, broad brows framed in sharp-cut ebony hair. Their front hair is cut Egyptian-wise, sphinx-wise, while down to where the waist should be behind hangs a great cloud of untrimmed waving tresses. They quiver, the men prance. All the dancers are in fours—the men and the women in alternate files, thirty men and thirty women.
The men are the fighters; the women serve them with arrows. The men prance in front of the women; the women are protected by them. The women scarcely change their positions the whole time, but the men diagonalize between files and prance forward in front of them, lifting high their weapons and emitting curious little cries and yelps. As they kill in the ritual they give the deathcry of the victims.
They dance six long dances, and after each, in a processional bacchanalia, leave the scene of the dance, and with splendor of waving color, file upward on ladders on to the roofs of the houses and disappear through holes in the roof into the two kivas, or council chambers of the men and of the women.
It is also a Mexican holiday, and near by goes a dilapidated "merry-go-round," worked by hand by two men, with the wretchedest burble of music, a torn canvas roof, and a flag. Somewhere, also, in the background, a cowboy is riding a bucking bronco while dark-eyed Mexican youth looks on.
But the mud huts of the Indians and the freshly made, green-branched street shrines of St. John and the Madonna are the real background of the fiesta. The last dance of the afternoon is danced bowingly and worshipfully into a green alcove, where stands a little silver and white Virgin, and an old Mexican is sitting beside her, playing dreamily on a violin. In one respect at least the Indians are not as they were. They have become Catholics. I am told that is merely a polite acquiescence on their part, and though with their faces they bow to the Madonna their hearts know her not.
In the course of the summer we rode to seven or eight Indian villages; sometimes to dances, sometimes just to see the villages themselves and the normal way of life in them. And we were much besought to buy turquoise rings and bracelets and brightly woven saddle blankets and rugs. Some visitors to Santa Fe bought great quantities of these things, and one of the poets disported five or six large silver and turquoise rings on his fingers and had more still in a drawer. Nearly all the ladies of Santa Fe had waist belts adorned with silver conches. The Indians work the same turquoise mines which have been theirs immemorially, and they mine also silver, though I think not a little of their silverware is now derived from molten dollars. Paper money seems always inacceptable to the Indians. So one always carries a weight of silver in one's pockets when traveling in these parts.
Each pueblo is a community and lives a communal life. Their land is held in common, and is inalienable. I believe their title derives from the King of Spain, legalized by the Mexican Republic and recognized by the United States when they conquered the country. Much of the best land, however, has been stolen from them. There are many squatters, both English- and Spanish-speaking. In many places their water has been diverted, and they have been left stranded on yellow sands. They have never been able to defend themselves in civilized courts, being incapable of grasping the procedure—and they have suffered accordingly. All this summer and autumn there raged a campaign fostered by the artists and literary colony in Santa Fe, for the protection of the Indians and the institution of new works of irrigation to give them back their lost water. Thanks to this campaign a spoliatory measure which passed the United States Senate, commonly called the "Bursum Bill," was recalled. The object of this Bill has been chiefly to give a legal title to the squatters. There is a good deal of hope that, having frustrated the passing of this bill, the Indian Committee of Santa Fe will have been able to introduce into Congress a highly practical measure which at the same time would help and protect the Indians, benefit the squatters, and pay for itself. This is a bill for new irrigation works and compensatory land grants to the Indians.
The great problem of living is that of water, and more than half the Indian dances are prayers to a nature god for rain. The description which I give here of our ride to Santo Domingo pueblo to their greatest festival may give some suggestion of the desert and the Indians praying for rain.
We rode down from the mountains with their green pastures to the parched valleys and plateaus, and were told irrigation had ceased for want of water. The river beds and channels and dykes were yellow and dry and scorching. Rivers, instead of broadening out, grew less as they flowed—attenuated. They became trickles, they became the mere wetness of the tongue in the mouth, they disappeared.
Even the cactus has withered. The roselike cactus blossoms of the higher mountains are no more. The fresh, green, spiny stalks are brown and frightful in death. There is no grass for the horses, and the only green things on the waste are rank, poisonous, deep-rooted weeds which draw their sustenance from the moisture which is far below.
The bones of dead cattle tell a melancholy tale of thirst. Woe to the herd of the cowboys who do not know where water is to be found. They are driving their herds over vast distances—from California into Texas or beyond; they are taking their time, feeding well as they go. Or they ought to be feeding well. And the cowboy's mind-map of the world is one of hidden springs and constant pastures. So they have driven the herds upwards, even though that be out of their way. For there is no water or pasture below.
Our horses would fain return. When we rest them at noon they trail their reins after them and start homeward and are not easily captured. We have found alkali water in the depths of an arroyo. The horses try to drink it but lap up bitter sand instead. They quit trying to drink it and lie down on it instead and try to roll in it.
We climb black, boulder-strewn cliffs and look painfully once more at the bleached bones of cattle. We walk our horses all the afternoon over a sun-blazing prairie toward a horizon that seems infinitely removed. And we see in the distance the bright, gleaming wheel of a water windmill, and the wheel is surely revolving. Though not our way, it means water, and we will go to it.
We are soon on a cow trail, a goat trail, a human trail—all making for the windmill. How gayly the wheel flashes in the sunlight. It is truly a delight—a token of happiness. But, alas, when we get to it we find the cisterns and the troughs all empty. The wheel is revolving, but it is drawing forth no water. All is desolate. We dismount and sit on the wall of the concrete reservoir, and the horses wonder why they are there.
But up above us revolves the wheel, once descried afar, now over our very heads and actual. And it cries as it revolves:
No waw ... ter—Hell!
Creak, cranger—
He ... ll,
No waw ... ter—
And all strewn around on the ground are discarded bottles and cans, and a cross of new wood marks somebody's grave.
"No waw ... ter!" Well, on to the horses again. We'll be on the great Rio to-morrow, far away, low down below this sun-cursed moor. The horses will drink deep when we get there. And we shall join the Indians who on the day of St. Dominic are going to intercede and dance for rain.
On the evening of the second day we rode into the mud-hut settlement of the Indians of Santo Domingo and admired their large new church with its external fresco of horses. The horse came to the Indians at the same time as the Cross, and perhaps to them is as holy.
We rode along the broad street, three times as broad as New York's Broadway, and hoof-marked and wheel-marked from wall to wall. The squaws were ascending and descending ladders to go in or come out at the doors which they have in their roofs. On strings along their roof-taps chunks of meat were dessicating in the sunlight. But in front of many houses were portals of green branches and boughs brought up from the woods along the bank of the river.
The Indians neither saluted us nor welcomed us. But their dogs barked at us and we passed on—away through their cornfields down to the Rio Grande-the great river. And there we camped, where the rapid flood rolls down from the Rockies, red with the color of Colorado.
It was the eve of the festival of St. Dominic. Indians in their covered wagons were coming from all parts—Jemez Indians, Tesuque Indians, Navajos ... Indians also on horseback, galloping along the opposite bank of the river and plunging their horses to the ford. All night long the moon among her clouds looked kindly down upon the river and listened, as it were, to the galloping of the horsemen and the crunching of the wheels of the wagons on the valley sand.
Indians encamped in the valley and let loose their horses, built fires beside ours and fried their corn and broiled their coffee; gay men and tittering squaws and wild-eyed little ones. Up in the settlement the guests slept in the streets on the roadways, though all night long music never ceased, nor the throb of the drums for the morning. On the white mud church where the horses were painted on the outside walls they lit seven flaming altars which blazed into the night sky. It looked then like an Aztec pyramid lit for human sacrifice to Quetzalcoatl—the god of the air. Perhaps to the Indians it was. Who knows their minds?
As for us, we slept in the bush on the verge of the red-flowing waters, and our horses neighed to one another and whinnied, the night long.
Next day, as on the night before, we swam in the river—its rapid current flattering our achievement. It was red and warm and mighty, rolling us in wave motion ten feet at a thrust. Yet it was weak. It would be a strong Indian who would swim the Rio Grande when it is in its strength. For it is then capable of washing away villages and towns as it goes. Has not the old church and half the pueblo of Santo Domingo been swept to limbo by the river?
Three beautiful youths come and sit by our camp fire and smile at us—one is in a black velvet coat and with a crimson ribbon in his long ebony hair—he is handsome and romantic as Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Following him we ride up to Mass in the church of the painted horses, and we find the pueblo arrayed in the many colors of gorgeous Indian life. And on top of the kiva or council chamber is a banner crowned with a cluster of many-colored painted feathers. An Indian takes our horses into his yard and we go into the church.
What was there more impressive than the service in Latin, completely in Latin, with not a word of Spanish or of English! Or the Indians singing the chorus of praise and serving at the altar! A giant, as it seems, in terra cotta-colored coat and neatly tied, voluminous black hair standing constantly at the altar steps.
Saint Dominic is waiting—he lies prone on the ground. St. Dominic will be invoked at the Breaking of Bread; Sanctus, sanctus, "Oh Santo Domingo, where art thou at this hour—we'll reach thee." Tinkle, tinkle, goes the church bell, and then suddenly, dum-a-dum-dum-dum-keroah, go the drums and horns of the Indians, and spludge, spludge, they fire their rifles in air.
The bearers raise St. Dominic on high. He seems veritably to rise from the dead as he gradually ascends above the worshipers' heads. He is golden and patriarchal and benign, and they carry in front of him a little gilt dog. Domini canes, the dogs of the Lord, the Dominicans used to be called, and the pun has endured.
As St. Dominic is carried to every Indian house and byway of the gray mud built pueblo the horns and the drums accompany him, and spludge, spludge, goes the accompaniment of fired guns. And when all the visiting has been done the figure is placed in the alcove of green boughs—the street shrine before which two hundred Indians will dance a prayer for rain.
And now onward all the day the Indians dance. First come the Koshare, who represent the spirits of their ancestors. All but naked, they are painted a dull gray—to look either like corpses or invisible as ghosts. There are strange black bands and traceries on their limbs and bodies, and their faces are painted to affright; they grimace, they insinuate, they strike terror, and also they make mirth. They have corn stalks in their hair, and sandals on their feet.
As for the rest they all wear their long hair hanging so that men look like women, but the men have branches of green tassels on their heads and the women wear green wooden crowns. The men have armlets of green with pine twigs in them. The upper parts of their bodies are all exposed, but are painted dark brown and seem as of stone. The men wear fox skins hanging behind them, like tails. The drums beat, the men incant, the Koshare wave their hands to heaven and make every gesture that means falling rain.
The living dance in ranks, but the wild Koshare, the spirits of the dead, dance in and out at will and seem to improvise all they do. They lead the dance, they dominate. It becomes an orgy of marvelous beauty, dimpling, dazzling; a great moving phantasmagoria. It is like the manes of a hundred black horses plunging together on the prairie; it is like running shadows and sunshine over mountain meadows of flowers. And all the while the drums, and all the while the incantations—
Strangest of all is the body of earnest old men at one side, not dancing, and yet somehow contributing to the dance. They are all farmers. They want the rain for their crops. They are terribly intent. They never cease turning from the heavens to the earth and back again and making with their fingers the gesture of trickling water and dropping rain, calling all the while something like—
"Ukky-ukky-you-you, ukky-ukky-yah-yah, ukky-ukky-yum-yum, ukky-ukky-you-you!"
How they want it to rain! There's no doubt of the sincerity of their prayers.
The dance is in two sections; one represents Winter, the other Summer. They dance separately and then come in together in one grand bacchanalia, the Koshare exceeding themselves in yelling at visitors and sightseers, booing into their faces and kicking their shins.
Little children come bringing loaves to place at the feet of St. Dominic, who stands benignly in the silver and green shadowland of his bower in the village street. He seems to be listening to something. He is altogether remote from this time. He is thinking of something else, trying to remember something. But be that so or no, little loaves have been placed in front of him, and outside the shrine in an astonishing frenzy the dance goes on.
The beautiful Indian girls, so young, so dark and jewel-like, lift all their naked feet in perfect time, in a hypnotic time, and balance their bodies, balance to the rhythm of the great dance with half-closed eyes.
The Rio Grande, away below, rolls on in red waves from Colorado to the sea. The clouds that are above are merely messengers, fleet-footed Mercuries whose message is not to be delivered here.
And yet, what is that which is forming away to the North; surely a thundercloud. The mountains have stopped the clouds. It is raining. The clouds are broadening and enveloping.
"Ukky-ukky-you-you," the old men clamor, and point back to their crops. "Ukky-ukky-yah-yah" don't stop for a moment, "ukky-ukky-yum-yum."
The Koshare become the spirits of the storm, making the most astonishing leaps, and crying out and pulling the rain out of the heavens toward them. The ardor of the dance redoubles and there is no rest. And the heat, as of an oven, is not tempered by the breeze. Suddenly glimmering white ribbons are pulled through the clouds and it is lightning, a sign at least that the prayers are being heard.
These people know how to pray for rain. No idle "May it please Thee, O Lord" sitting on plush, but a terrific dynamic appeal by one force in nature to another. What wonder if year after year the Santo Domingo dance brings rain!
But what a drama! It rakes one's soul. You are torn by it. Will it rain, will it rain? See the dance, see the clouds approaching, see the old men, see the waving fields of green flowering corn, see the maidens like jewels, see the young men like princes, see the dreadful and marvelous Koshare all gray and stove-black with masklike faces, grimacing and simpering and yet somehow compelling! See the emblems of Christ, see the Church, see the Kiva, white magic and black magic, altogether, all toned up, all compelling, throb-throb-throb, dum-dum-dum, ukky-yah-yah, ukky-ukky-you-you!
Ah it comes, yes, a spot, a wind-carried token of a storm somewhere else, a black tooth-mark in the pueblo dust. See the Koshare drop to it, lick it up with their tongues, dust and all, and cry, "More, more, all hands to the sky, all hands to the earth, ukky-ukky-you-you, ukky-ukky-yah-yah!"
But it does not rain. It rains all around; it will rain. Cool airs creep in. The dance ends at last, and all who danced in it are exhausted. Candles on long poles are lit. St. Dominic is raised again, and he and the little gold dog are borne away to the church.
A bell rings quietly in the evening air and the streets begin to empty—of all but Mexicans and Americans. In the distance you hear the river rolling by, hear also the hoofs of the horses and the splashing of those who are fording the Rio Grande homing into the night.