The Zuñi faith, as revealed in this sketch of more than three hundred and fifty years of Spanish intercourse, is as a drop of oil in water, surrounded and touched at every point, yet in no place penetrated or changed inwardly by the flood of alien belief that descended upon it. Herein is exemplified anew the tendency of primitive-minded man to interpret unfamiliar things more directly than simply, according to their appearances merely, not by analysis in our sense of the term; and to make his interpretations, no less than as we ourselves do, always in the light of what he already familiarly believes or habitually thinks he knows. Hence, of necessity he adjusts other beliefs and opinions to his own, but never his own beliefs and opinions to others; and even his usages are almost never changed in spirit, however much so in externals, until all else in his life is changed. Thus, he is slow to adopt from alien peoples any but material suggestions, these even, strictly according as they suit his ways of life; and whatever he does adopt, or rather absorb and assimilate, from the culture and lore of another people, neither distorts nor obscures his native culture, neither discolors nor displaces his original lore.
All of the foregoing suggests what might be more fully shown by further examples, the aboriginal and uncontaminated character—so far as a modern like myself can represent it—of the myths delineated in the following series of outlines. Yet a casual visitor to Zuñi, seeing but unable to analyze the signs above noted, would be led to infer quite the contrary by other and more patent signs. He would see horses, cattle and donkeys, sheep and goats, to say nothing of swine and a few scrawny chickens. He would see peach orchards and wheat fields, carts (and wagons now), and tools of metal; would find, too, in queer out-of-the-way little rooms native silversmiths plying their primitive bellows and deftly using a few crude tools of iron and stone to turn their scant silver coins into bright buttons, bosses, beads, and bracelets, which every well-conditioned Zuñi wears; and he would see worn also, especially by the men, clothing of gaudy calico and other thin products of the looms of civilization. Indeed, if one did not see these things and rate them as at first the gifts to this people of those noble old Franciscan friars and their harder-handed less noble Spanish companions, infinitely more pathetic than it is would be the history of the otherwise vain effort I have above outlined; for it is not to be forgotten that the principal of these gifts have been of incalculable value to the Zuñi. They have helped to preserve him, through an era of new external conditions, from the fate that met more than thirty other and less favored Pueblo tribes—annihilation by the better-armed, ceaselessly prowling Navajo and Apache. And for this alone, their almost sole accomplishment of lasting good to the Zuñi, not in vain were spent and given the lives of the early mission fathers.
It is intimated that aside from adding such resources to the tribe as enabled it to survive a time of fearful stress and danger, even the introduction of Spanish plants, animals, and products did not greatly change the Zuñis. This is truer than would at first seem possible. The Zuñi was already a tiller of the soil when wheat and peaches were given him. To this day he plants and irrigates his peach trees and wheat crops much as he anciently planted and watered his corn—in hills, hoeing all with equal assiduity; and he does not reap his wheat, but gathers it as he gathers his corn in the ear. Thus, only the kind of grain is new. The art of rearing it and ways of husbanding and using it remain unchanged. The Zuñi was already a herder when sheep and goats were given him. He had not only extensive preserves of rabbits and deer, but also herds—rather than flocks—of turkeys, which by day were driven out over the plains and mesas for feeding, and at night housed near the towns or in distant shelters and corrals. It is probable that his ancestry had even other domesticated animals. And he used the flesh of these animals as food, their feathers and fur as the materials for his wonderfully knitted, woven, and twilled garments and robes, as he now uses the mutton and goat meat for food, and the wool of the sheep for his equally well-knitted, woven, and twilled, though less beautiful, garments and robes. Thus, only the kinds (and degree of productivity) of the animals are new, the arts of caring for them and modes of using their products, are unchanged. This is true even in detail. When I first went to live with the Zuñis their sheep were plucked, not sheared, with flat strips of band iron in place of the bone spatulæ originally used in plucking the turkeys; and the herders always scrupulously picked up stray flecks of wool—calling it "down," not hair, nor fur—and spinning it, knitting, too, at their long woolen leggings as they followed their sheep, all as their forefathers used ever to pick up and twirl the stray feathers and knit at their down kilts and tunics as they followed and herded their turkeys. Even the silversmiths of Zuñi today work coins over as their ancestors of the stone-using age worked up bits of copper, not only using tools of stone and bone for the purpose but using even the iron tools of the Spaniard mostly in stone-age fashion.[1]
This applies equally to their handling of the hoes, hatchets, and knives of civilized man. They use their hoes—the heaviest they can get—as if weighted, like the wooden and bone hoes of antiquity, vertically, not horizontally. They use their hatchets or axes and knives more for hacking and scraping and chipping than for chopping, hewing, and whittling, and in such operations they prefer working toward themselves to working from themselves, as we work. Finally, their garments of calico and muslin are new only in material. They are cut after the old fashion of the ancestral buckskin breeches and shirts, poncho coats of feathers and fur or fiber, and down or cotton breech clouts, while in the silver rings and bracelets of today, not only the shapes but even the half-natural markings of the original shell rings and bracelets survive, and the silver buttons and bosses but perpetuate and multiply those once made of copper as well as of shell and white bone.
Thus, only one absolutely new practical element and activity was introduced by the Spaniards—beasts of burden and beast transportation and labor. But until the present century cattle were not used natively for drawing loads or plows, the latter of which, until recently being made of a convenient fork, are only enlarged harrowing-sticks pointed with a leaf of iron in place of the blade of flint; nor were carts employed. Burdens were transported in panniers adapted to the backs of burros instead of to the shoulders of men.
The Zuñi is a splendid rider, but even now his longest journeys are made on foot in the old way. He has for centuries lived a settled life, traveling but little, and the horse has therefore not played a very conspicuous part in his later life as in the lives of less sedentary peoples, and is consequently unheard of, as are all new things—including the greatest of all, the white man himself—in his tribal lore, or the folk tales, myths, and rituals of his sacred cult-societies. All this strengthens materially the claim heretofore made, that in mind, and especially in religious culture, the Zuñi is almost as strictly archaic as in the days ere his land was discovered.
OUTLINE OF PRISTINE ZUÑI HISTORY.
If a historic sketch of Spanish intercourse with the Zuñi people indicates that little change was wrought on their native mood by so many years of alien contact, an outline of their pristine history, or a sketch of their growth and formation as a people, will serve yet further to show not only how, but also why, this was so, as well as to explain much in the following outlines of their myths of creation and migration, the meaning of which would otherwise remain obscure.
Linguistically the Zuñi Indians of today stand alone, unrelated, so far as has heretofore been determined, to any other Indians either sedentary, like themselves, or unsettled, like the less advanced peoples of the plains. Nevertheless, although they as yet thus constitute a single linguistic stock, there are present and persistent among them two distinct types of physique and numerous survivals—inherited, not borrowed—of the arts, customs, myths, and institutions of at least two peoples, unrelated at first, or else separate and very diversely conditioned for so long a period of their preunited history that their development had progressed unequally and along quite different lines, at the time of their final coalition. That thus the Zuñis are actually descendants of two or more peoples, and the heirs of two cultures at least, is well shown in their legends of ruins and olden times, and especially in these myths of creation and migration as interpreted by archeologic and ethnographic research.
According to all these tokens and evidences, one branch of their ancestral people was, as compared with the other, aboriginal in the region comprising the present Zuñi country and extending far toward the north, whence at some remoter time they had descended. The other branch was intrusive, from the west or southwest, the country of the lower Rio Colorado, their earliest habitat not so clearly defined and their remoter derivation enigmatical, for they were much more given to wandering, less advanced in the peaceful arts, and their earliest ruins are those of comparatively rude and simple structures, hence scant and difficult to trace, at least beyond the western borders of Arizona. Considering both of these primary or parental stocks of the Zuñi as having been thus so widely asunder at first, the ancestral relations of the aboriginal or northern branch probably ranged the plains north of the arid mountain region of Utah and Colorado ere they sought refuge in the desert and canyons of these territories. Yet others of their descendants, if still surviving, may not unlikely be traced among not only other Pueblos, but also and more distinctly among wilder and remoter branches, probably of the Shoshonean stock. The ancestral relations of the intrusive or western branch, however, were a people resembling the semisettled Yumans and Pimans in mode of life, their ruins combining types of structure characteristic of both these stocks; and if their descendants, other than Zuñis themselves, be yet identified among Yuman tribes, or some like people of the lower Colorado region, they will be found (such of them as survive) not greatly changed, probably, from the condition they were all in when, at a very distant time, their eastward faring kinsfolk, who ultimately became Zuñis, left them there.