American Indian life

by Unknown

Waiyautitsa will be carried out and buried by her father and other men in the household. No women will go to the burial, nor will the widower. The widower, as soon as the corpse is taken outdoors, will be fetched by his women relatives to live at their house. There they straightway wash his hair—a performance inseparable in Zuñi, as at other pueblos, from every time of crisis or ceremony. The hair of all the other members of Waiyautitsa’s household will be washed at the end of four days by women relatives of her father. During this time, since the spirit of Waiyautitsa is thought to linger about the home, the house door will be left open for her at night. The bowl used in washing her hair, and the implements used in digging her grave will also be left outdoors. Her smaller and peculiarly personal possessions have been buried with her, and bulky things like bedding have been burned or taken to a special place down the river to be buried. The river flows to the lake sixty miles or so west of Zuñi, where Waiyautitsa’s spirit is also supposed to take its journey. There under the lake it abides, except when with other spirits it returns in the clouds to pour down upon Zuñi fields the beneficent rain. People will say to a child, when they see a heavy cloud, “There goes your grandmother”; or they will quite seriously say to one another, “Our grandfathers are coming.”

Waiyautitsa’s children may go on living at home with their grandmother, Waiyautitsa’s mother, or it may be that one of them is adopted by a maternal aunt or great-aunt or cousin. Zuñi children, cherished possessions as they are, are always being adopted—even in the lifetime of their mother. Adopted, a child—or an adult—will fit thoroughly into the ways of his adoptive household. It is the household as well as the clan which differentiates the Zuñi family group from our individualistic type of family. The household changes quite readily, but, whatever its composition, it is an exceedingly integrated and responsible group.

However the children are distributed, it will be the older woman or women in the household who will control them. This household system is one that gives position and considerable authority to the elder women—until the women are too old, people say, to be of any use. (In spite of this irony, I have heard of but one old woman who was neglected by her household.) An older woman who is the female head of the household is greatly respected by her daughters and sons-in-law and grandchildren, as well as by the sons or brothers who continually visit the household and often, as temporary celibates, return to live in it.

The older woman is highly esteemed, but she is by no means the head of the household—unless she is widowed. Wherever the household contributes to the ceremonial public life, her husband is paramount. In the non-ceremonial, economic life, too, he has equal, if not greater, authority. And in the general economy he more or less expects his wife to serve him and wait on him. This conjugal subordination is not apparent to any extent among the younger people; the younger husband and wife are too much drawn into the corporate household life. But as time passes and they in turn become the heads of the household, the man appears to be more given to staying at home, and more and more he takes control.

From this brief survey of the life of a woman at Zuñi, in so far as it can be distinguished from the general life, we get the impression that the differentiation of the sexes follows lines of least resistance which start from a fairly fundamental division of labor. From being hunters and trappers men become herders of the domestic animals, drivers or riders. Trade journeys and trips for wood or for the collecting of other natural resources are associated with men, and work on the things acquired is men’s work—men, for example, are wood cutters, and bead makers, whether the objects are for secular or sacerdotal use. Analogously all work upon skins or feathers is work for men whether it leads to the manufacture of clothing or to communication with the supernaturals. Again, as farmers, men are associated with that system of supernatural instrumentalism for fertility and weather control which constitutes in large part Zuñi religion. In other words, the bulk of the ceremonial life, a system for the most part of rain rituals, is in the hands of the men. So is government. The secular officers are merely representatives of the priests. Zuñi government is a theocracy in which women have little part. The house and housekeeping are associated with women. Clay is the flesh of a female supernatural, and clay processes, brickmaking or laying or plastering, and pottery making are women’s work. There are indications in sacerdotal circles that painting is, or was thought of as, a feminine activity. Corn, like clay, is the flesh of female supernaturals, and the corn is associated with women. Even men corn growers are in duty bound to bring their product to their wife or mother. Women or women impersonations figure in corn rituals. It is tempting to speculate that formerly, centuries since, women themselves were the corn growers. To-day, at any rate, the preparation of corn, as of other food, is women’s work. Wherever food and its distribution figure in ceremonials, and there is a constant offering of food to the supernaturals, women figure. Fetiches are attached to houses and in so far as providing for these fetiches is household work, it is women’s work and leads to the holding of sacerdotal office by women. The household rather than ties of blood is the basis of family life. The children of the household are more closely attached to the women than to the men. One expression of this attachment is seen in reckoning clan membership through the mother.

Household work at Zuñi as elsewhere is continuous. The women are always on the move. The work of the men, on the other hand, is intermittent. Hunting, herding and farming are more or less seasonal activities and are more or less readily fitted into ceremonial pursuits, or rather, in their less urgent periods, take on ceremonial aspects. In the ceremonial life the arts find expression, and the men and not the women are, by and large, the artists of the tribe.

Attached to the ceremonial life are the games of chance and the races that are played or run at certain seasons. Here again the intermittent habit of work of the men, together with their comparative mobility, qualifies them as gamesters and runners to the exclusion more or less of the women. Formerly, to be sure, the women played a pole and hoop game, and, given ceremonial exigency as among the Hopi, the women no doubt would run races.

Household work is confining. Hunting, herding, trading lead to a comparatively mobile habit, a habit of mind or spirit which in the Southwest, at least, is adapted to ceremonial pursuit; for Pueblo Indian ceremonialism thrives on foreign accretions, whether of myth or song or dance or design of mask or costume, or, within certain limits of assimilation, of psychological patterns of purpose or gratification.

To the point of view that the differentiation of the sexes at Zuñi proceeds on the whole from the division of labor, the native custom of allowing a boy or man to become, as far as ways of living go, a girl or woman, gives color. Towards adolescence, and sometimes in later life, it is permissible for a boy culturally to change sex. He puts on women’s dress, speaks like a woman, and behaves like a woman. This alteration is due to the fact that one takes readily to women’s work, one prefers it to men’s work. Of one or another of the three men-women now at Zuñi or of the men-women in other pueblos I have always been told that the person in question made the change because he wanted to work like a woman or because his household was short of women and needed a woman worker.

And yet among the Hopi, where the economy is practically identical with the Zuñi, there are no men-women; in this tribe the institution, it is said, was never established. This, like other customs, is not merely a matter of economic adjustment; economic or psychologic propriety or consistency or predisposition may count, but of great importance also are the survival of traits from an earlier culture, and the acquiring of traits from the culture of neighboring peoples. Were we to understand the interplay of all these factors in the life, shall we say, of Waiyautitsa, we might be a long way towards understanding the principles of society, even other than that of Zuñi.