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.