Even when women are initiated into the Kachina society, or are associated with the ashiwanni or rain priests, their functions seem to be primarily of an economic or housekeeping order. The women members of the rain priesthoods have to offer food every day to the fetiches of these sacerdotal groups—to stones carved and uncarved, and to cotton-wrapped lengths of cane filled with “the seeds the people live by.” For the seed fetiches to be in any way disturbed in the houses to which they are attached, involves great danger to the people, and on a woman in the house, the woman member of the priesthood, falls the responsibility of guardianship or shelter. But even these positions of trust are no longer held by women—there are only six women ashiwanni among the fifteen priesthoods. The woman’s position among the paramount priesthood, the rain priesthood of the North, has been vacant now for many years—no suitable woman being willing, they say, to run the risks or be under the tabus of office. Aside from this position of woman ashiwanni, women count for little or nothing in the theocracy of Zuñi. They were and are associated with the men priests to do the work pertinent to women. In the case of the Zuñi pantheon or its masked impersonations, the association is needed to satisfy or carry out, so to speak, Zuñi standards or concepts of conjugality. The couple rather than the individual is the Zuñi unit. Sometimes, in ceremony or in myth, the couple may consist of two males.
There is one masked couple I have noted in particular at Zuñi, the atoshle. Two or three times during the winter our little Waiyautitsa, together with other girls and very little boys, may expect to be frightened by the atoshle, the disciplinary masks who serve as bugaboos to children as well as a kind of sergeant-at-arms, the male atoshle at least, for adults. If the children meet the old man and his old woman in the street, they run away helter-skelter. If the dreadful couple visits a child indoors, sent for perhaps by a parent, the child is indeed badly frightened. I suppose that Waiyautitsa is six or seven years old when one day, as an incident of some dance, the atoshle “come out” and come to her house. The old woman atoshle carries a deep basket on her back in which to carry off naughty children and in her hand a crook to catch them by the ankle. With the crook she pulls Waiyautitsa over to the grinding stones in the corner of the room, telling her that now she is getting old enough to help her mother about the house, to look after the baby and, before so very long, to grind. She must mind her mother and be a good girl. I once saw a little girl so terrified by such admonition that she began to whimper, hiding her head in her mother’s lap until the atoshle was sprinkled with the sacred meal and left the house to perform elsewhere his role of parent’s assistant.
Whether from fear, from supernatural fear or fear of being talked about as any Zuñi woman who rests or idles is talked about, or whether from example, more from the latter no doubt than from the former, Waiyautitsa is certainly a “good girl,” a gentle little creature, and very docile. Sometimes she plays lively games with her “sisters” next door like the game of bear at the spring. A spiral is traced on the ground and at the center is placed a bowl of water to represent a spring. The girls follow the spiral to get water for their little turkeys which, they sing, are dying of thirst. Then the “bear” rushes out from the spring and gives chase. But for the most part the little girls play quietly at house. In this way and in imitating at home her industrious mother or aunt, or her even more industrious grandmother or great-aunt, Waiyautitsa learns to do all the household tasks of women. She learns to grind the corn on the stone metate—that back-hardening labor of the Pueblo woman—and to prepare and cook the meal in a number of ways in an outside oven or on the American stove or on the flat slab on which hewe or wafer bread is spread. For the ever cheery family meal she sets out the coffee-pot, the hewe or tortilla, and the bowls of chile and of mutton stew on the earthen floor she is forever sweeping up with her little homemade brush or with an American broom. (A Zuñi house is kept very clean and amazingly neat and orderly.)
And Waiyautitsa becomes very thrifty—not only naturally but supernaturally. She will not sell corn out of the house without keeping back a few grains in order that the corn may return—in Zuñi thought the whole follows a part. And she will keep a lump of salt in the corn storeroom and another in the bread bowl—when salt is dug out, the hole soon refills, and this virtue of replacing itself the salt is expected to impart to the corn. There are other respects, too, in which Waiyautitsa will learn how to facilitate the economy. She will sprinkle the melon seeds for planting, with sweetened water—melons should be sweet. Seed wheat she will sprinkle with a white clay to make the crop white, and with a plant called k’owa so that wheat dough will pull well. Seed corn will be sprinkled with water that the crop may be well rained on.
From some kinswoman who is a specially good potter, Waiyautitsa may have learned to coil and paint and fire the bowls as well as the cook pots and water jars the household needs. She fetches in wood from the woodpile and now and again she may be seen chopping the pine or cedar logs the men of the household have brought in on donkey or in wagon. She fetches water from one of the modern wells of the town, carrying it in a jar on her head and walking in the slow and springless gait always characteristic of Pueblo women. Perhaps that gait, so ponderous and so different from the gait of the men, is the result of incessant industry, a kind of unconscious self-protective device against “speeding up.”
Waiyautitsa will learn to work outdoors as well as in. She will help her mother in keeping one of the small vegetable gardens near the town—the men cultivate the outlying fields of corn and wheat (and the men and boys herd the sheep which make the Zuñi prosperous), and Waiyautitsa will help her household thresh their wheat crop, in the morning preparing dinner for the workers, for relatives from other households as well as from her own, in the afternoon joining the threshers as the men drive horses or mules around the circular threshing floor and the women and girls pitchfork the wheat and brush away the chaff and winnow the grain in baskets. Waiyautitsa will also learn to make adobe blocks and to plaster with her bare hand or with a rabbit-skin glove the adobe walls of her mother’s house, inside and out. Pueblo men are the carpenters of a house, but the women are always the plasterers, and Waiyautitsa will have to be a very old woman indeed to think she is too old to plaster. On my last visit to Zuñi I saw a woman seventy, or not much under, spending part of an afternoon on her knees plastering the chinks of a door newly cut between two rooms.
The house she plasters belongs, or will in time belong, to Waiyautitsa. Zuñi women own their houses and their gardens or, perhaps it is better to say, gardens and houses belong to the family through the women. At marriage a girl does not leave home; her husband joins her household. He stays in it, too—only as long as he is welcome. If he is lazy, if he fails to bring in wood, if he fails to contribute the produce of his fields, or if some one else for some other reason is preferred, his wife expects him to leave her household. He does not wait to be told twice. “The Zuñi separate whenever they quarrel or get tired of each other,” a critical Acoma moralist once said to me. The monogamy of Zuñi is, to be sure, rather brittle. In separation the children stay with the mother.
Children belong to their mother’s clan. They have affiliations, however, as we shall see, with the clan of their father. If the mother of Waiyautitsa is a Badger, let us say, and her father a Turkey, Waiyautitsa will be a Badger and “the child of the Turkey.” She can not marry a Turkey clansman nor, of course, a Badger. Did she show any partiality for a clansman, an almost incredible thing, she would be told she was just like a dog or a burro.
These exogamous restrictions aside, and the like restrictions that may arise in special ways between the household of Waiyautitsa and other households, Waiyautitsa would be given freedom of choice in marrying. Even if her household did not like her man, and her parents had told her not “to talk to” him, Zuñi for courting, she and he could go to live with some kinswoman. No one, related or unrelated, would refuse to take them in. Nobody may be turned from the door. Nor would a girl whose child was the offspring of a chance encounter be turned out by her people or slighted. The illegitimate child is not discriminated against at Zuñi.
Casual relationships occur at Zuñi, but they are not commercialized, there is no prostitution. Nor is there any lifelong celibacy. As for courtship, very little of it can there be—at least before intimacy either in the more transient or more permanent forms of mating,—the separation outside of the household of boys and girls of various ages is so thorough. “But what if a little girl wanted to play with boys?” I once asked. “They would laugh at her and say she was too crazy about boys.” “Crazy” at Zuñi, as quite generally among Indians, means passionate. (Girls at Zuñi are warned away from ceremonial trespass by the threat of becoming “crazy.”)