THE CORN WOMAN'S STORY
Indian corn,mahiz, or maize, is supposed to have come originally from Central America. But the strange thing about it is that no specimen of the wild plant from which it might have developed has ever been found. This would indicate that the development must have taken place a very long time ago, and the parent corn may have belonged to the age of the mastodon and other extinct creatures.
Different tribes probably brought it into the United States at different times. Some of it came up the Atlantic Coast, across the West Indies. The fragments of legend from which I made the story of the Corn Woman were found among the Indians that were living in Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee at the time the white men came.
Chihuahua is a province and city in Old Mexico, the trail that leads to it one of the oldest lines of tribal migration on the continent.
To be given to the Sun meant to have your heart cut out on a sacrificial stone, usually on the top of a hill, or other high place. The Aztecs were an ancient Mexican people who practiced this kind of sacrifice as a part of their religion. If it was from them the Corn Woman obtained the seed, it must have been before they moved south to Mexico City, where the Spaniards found them in the sixteenth century.
A teocali was an Aztec temple.
MOKE-ICHA'S STORY
Atipiis the sort of tent used by the Plains Indians, made of tanned skins. It is sometimes called alodge, and the poles on which the skins are hung are usually cut from the tree which for this reason is called the lodge-pole pine. It is important to remember things like this. By knowing the type of house used, you can tell more about the kind of life lived by that tribe than by any other one thing. When the poles were banked up with earth the house was called anearth lodge. If thatched with brush and grass, awickiup. In the eastern United States, where huts were covered with bark, they were generally called wigwams. In the desert, if the house was built of sticks and earth or brush, it was called ahogan, and if of earth made into rude bricks, apueblo.
The Queres Indians live all along the Rio Grande in pueblos, since there is no need of their living now in the cliffs. You can read about them at Ty-uonyi in "The Delight-Makers."
Akivais the underground chamber of the house, or if not underground, at least without doors, entered from the top by means of a ladder.