Waiyautitsa is a girl’s name; sex generally appears in Zuñi personal names. Sex appears somewhat in speech too. Waiyautitsa in learning to talk will make use of expressions, particularly exclamations, peculiar to women. In a recent list of the first words used by a Zuñi child, a boy, there was noted a comparatively large number of kinship terms in his vocabulary. The kinship terms of little Waiyautitsa would be somewhat different from a boy’s. He calls a younger sister ikina; a younger brother, suwe; she calls either hani, meaning merely the younger. And, as the Zuñi system of kinship terms is what is called classificatory, cousins having the same terms as brother and sister, Waiyautitsa has even fewer words than her brother to express cousinship.
When Waiyautitsa is three or four years old she may be recognized as a girl not merely from her speech, but from her dress, from her cotton slip; at this age little boys wear trousers. But not for another three or four years, perhaps longer, will Waiyautitsa wear over her cotton slip the characteristic Pueblo woman’s dress,—the black blanket dress fastened on the left shoulder and under the right arm and hence called in Zuñi, watone, meaning “across,” the broad belt woven of white, green and red cotton, the store-bought kerchief or square of silk (pitone) which, fastened in front, hangs across shoulders and back, and the small foot, thick leg moccasins which cover ankle and calf in an envelope of fold upon fold of buckskin. Before Waiyautitsa is eight or even six she may, however, when she goes out, cover her head and body with a black blanket or with the gay colored “shawl” similarly worn. And I have seen very little girls indeed wearing moccasins or the footless black stockings Zuñi women also wear, or “dressing up” in a pitone, that purely ornamental article of dress without which no Zuñi woman would venture outdoors. Without her pitone she would feel naked, she says, and any man would be at liberty to speak disrespectfully to her. When Waiyautitsa is about five, her hair, before this worn, like the boys, in a short cut, is let grow into a little tail on the nape of her neck. In course of time her pigtail will be turned up and tied with a “hair belt” of white, green and red cloth. From ear to ear her front hair will be banged to the end of her nose, the bang drawn sidewise above the forehead except at such times in ceremonials when it is let fall forward to conceal the upper part of the face.
This hair arrangement serves in ceremonials as a kind of mask, as you may see in the frontispiece picture of the headdress worn in the Thlahawe, a woman’s corn dance. A mask proper, that quasi fetich which has so important a place in Pueblo ceremonialism, Waiyautitsa will in all probability never wear. Unlike her brother, Waiyautitsa will not be initiated in childhood into the Kachina society, and consequently she will not join one of the six sacred clubhouses or estufas which supply personators for the Kachinas or masked dancers. Not that female personages do not figure in these ceremonials, but as was the rule on the Elizabethan stage, women are impersonated by men.
To this exclusion of girls from the Kachina society and from participating in the masked dances there are a few exceptions. To-day three women belong to the Kachina society. They were taken into it not in childhood, but in later life and, it is said, for one of the same reasons women as well as men are taken into the other societies of Zuñi. Cured by ceremonial whipping of the bad effects of nightmare or of some other ailment, they were “given” to the estufa credited through one of its members with the cure. Of the three women members only one is said to dance, and she is accounted mannish, katsotse, girl-man, a tomboy.
Waiyautitsa will likely not be initiated into the kotikyane, but she is quite likely to be initiated into another society,—into the Great-fire-brand or Little fire-brand, or Bedbug or Ant or Wood society, into any one of the thirteen Zuñi societies except three, the bow priesthood or society of warriors, of warriors who have taken a scalp, or the Hunter society or the Cactus society, a society that cures arrow or gun-shot wounds. As women do not hunt or go to war, from membership in these groups they are excluded or, better say, precluded. As we shall see later, affiliation by sex is, in ceremonial affairs, along the lines of customary occupation.
If Waiyautitsa falls sick and is cured by a medicine man of the medicine order of a society she must be “given” either to the family of the medicine man or to his society. Initiated she may not be, however, for a long time afterwards, perhaps for years. Initiations take place in the winter when school is in session, the school either of the Indian Bureau or of the Dutch Reformed Church, and for that reason, it is said, initiations may be postponed until past school age. Despite the schools, I may say, I have met but two Zuñi women who speak English with any fluency. One woman is a member of the Snake-medicine society, into which she was initiated after convalescence from measles, a decimating disease at Zuñi, to be accounted for only through witchcraft. The other woman was accounted the solitary convert of the Dutch Reformed Church Mission in Zuñi until six or seven years ago she joined the Wood society because as a child she had been cured by them of smallpox.
After initiation, the women, like the men of a society, offer prayer sticks each moon, observing continence for four days thereafter, and they join in the four-day retreat in the ceremonial house of the society preliminary to an initiation. Unlike the men, however, the women do not spend the entire night, only the evening, in the society house, and, while there, they are listeners rather than narrators of the inexhaustible folk tales that are wont to be told at society gatherings. Men are the custodians of the lore, secular as well as esoteric, of the tribe, just as men and not women are the musicians. The men are devoted singers, singing as they dance or singing as a choir for dancers, and singing as they go to or from work in the fields, or as they drive their horses to water in the river or to the corrals on the edges of the town. Even grinding songs are sung on ceremonial occasions by men.
In the public appearances of the society, the women members figure but little. Societies supply choirs and drummers and ceremonial road openers or leaders to the masked dancers and, during the great koko awia (Kachina coming) or shalako ceremonial, to various groups of sacred personages. I have seen several dances in Zuñi and one celebration of koko awia, and I have seen but one woman officiate in public. As a daughter of the house which was entertaining the koyemshi or sacred clowns she was in attendance upon that group in the koko awia or Advent, so to speak, of 1915.
If Waiyautitsa belongs to a society, she will offer or plant the befeathered prayer sticks, which are so conspicuous a feature of Pueblo religion, but, being a woman, Waiyautitsa will not cut or dress the sticks. She will only grind the pigments and, perhaps, paint the sticks. Nor as a woman would she offer the sticks on certain other ceremonial occasions when the men offer them. Once a year, however, at the winter solstice ceremonial on which so much of Zuñi ritualism pivots, Waiyautitsa will be expected, even in infancy, to plant, planting for the “old ones,” i. e., the ancestors and for the Moon, but not, like the men, for the Sun or, unless a member of the Kachina society, for the ancestral beings, the Kachina.
At the conclusion of the winter solstice ceremonial, when certain sacred figures called kwelele go from house to house, the women carry embers around the walls of the house and throw them out on the kwelele. It is the rite of shuwaha, cleansing, exorcism. There are a number of other little rites peculiar to the women in Zuñi ceremonialism. Through them, and through a number of rites they share with the men, through provisions for supplying food in the estufa to the sacred personators or for entertaining them at home or making them presents, women have an integral part in Zuñi ceremonialism. In what we may call the ceremonial management, however, they appear to have little or no part.