by Tony Horwitz
Like Aboriginal ritual and belief, Zuni religion is also wreathed in secrecy and taboo. I studied a wall panel at the museum telling of Frank Hamilton Cushing, a Smithsonian anthropologist who lived among the Zuni in the late nineteenth century. Cushing went so native that he was inducted into one of the tribe’s priesthoods, and returned from a battle carrying an enemy scalp. He was embraced by the Zuni—until he published his findings, which disclosed ritual details the tribe regarded as “private information.”
Worse still, his writings had brought a flood of inquisitive anthropologists to Zuni ever since. The museum quoted a tribal councilor, who complained, “We have been studied to death. We don’t need that—we know who we are!”
When I tried to chat up a young Zuni at the front desk, he smiled politely but gave no answer to my questions. Instead, he directed me to the tribal headquarters, where I was ushered into an unusual office. Zuni’s eight-member elected leadership occupied a single room, their desks in a tight semicircle. The arrangement wasn’t a space-saving measure; it reflected Zuni’s communal governance, on which the Spanish had remarked 455 years before my arrival.
“This way, our decisions have to be made together,” explained the lieutenant governor, Carmelita Sanchez, a mocha-skinned woman in a brown pantsuit. She led me to a conference table facing the semicircle of desks. “Are you an anthropologist?”
When I said no, she appeared visibly relieved. But Coronado, like Cushing, was an unpopular subject in Zuni. His invasion in 1540 led to the Spanish colonization of New Mexico and the establishment of missions across the state. This, in turn, sparked a widespread pueblo revolt in 1680, which led to harsh reprisals by the Spanish and the abandonment of five of the six original pueblos around Zuni.
“The conquistadors brought only bad things, violence and theft and missionaries,” one of the councilors interjected, when I asked about memory of Coronado. “Why remember them?”
Carmelita took a somewhat gentler view; Spanish influence wasn’t entirely bad. Two things people often associated with pueblo life, silverwork and adobe brick, were Spanish imports. Before, Indians made their jewelry from turquoise and shells, and built their multistory dwellings from stone, or earth and straw. The Spanish also brought crops and livestock, including sheep, a mainstay of the Zuni economy ever since.
“The Spanish weren’t worse than Cushing and the others like him who invaded us later,” Carmelita said. “Now, people want to DNA-test us and prove we migrated from Asia. We originated here. That’s our belief. Maybe people in Asia came from the Southwest.”
This ran counter to the conventional wisdom of scientists and archaeologists. But what struck me about Carmelita’s comment was the emphasis she placed on religion. The Spanish might have encroached on Zuni sovereignty. But anthropologists committed a graver sin, by trespassing on Zuni belief.
On this subject, Carmelita spoke only in general terms: religion “is a way of life” for today’s 9,500 Zuni, and “sustains the people.” The tribe functioned, in essence, as a theocracy; religious leaders, including several of the councilors, were consulted on almost all matters. Though many Zuni observed Christian rituals and holidays, they did so as a complement to traditional religion. If the two conflicted, it was Zuni practice that prevailed. Christmas, for instance, coincided with Zuni observance of the winter solstice, an occasion marked by fasting and a ban on noise or showy displays. This meant no caroling or Christmas lights.
Carmelita also explained a ritual referred to by the early Spanish. At Cibola and other pueblos, warriors met Coronado’s men by drawing lines on the ground and telling the intruders not to cross. When the Spanish did, fighting erupted. Carmelita said the lines were drawn with cornmeal, a sacred symbol of life to the Zuni and a way of demarcating boundaries. In a sense, the cornmeal line represented a Zuni Requerimiento, one that fell on deaf ears, just as the Spaniards’ summons had done.
“We are accepting of other people,” Carmelita said, seeing me to the door, polite but unsmiling, as she’d been throughout. “But there are lines one does not cross.”
Leaving the office, I went for a walk around the rest of Zuni. The once vertical settlement had gone horizontal, becoming a low-rise sprawl of trailers and modest houses radiating from the town’s original center. What remained of the old pueblo appeared shrunken and semi-abandoned: a lived-in ruin of two-story stone houses, dirt alleys, and dusty plazas. As I toured it at dusk, the only people outside were teenagers in baggy jeans, shooting hoops, and an alcoholic-looking man who whispered hoarsely, “Want to buy a wolf fetish?”
Retreating to the main road through town, I dined at Zuni’s lone restaurant, a pizzeria, and checked into its only accommodation: a pueblo-style inn with a flat roof, adobe walls, and cozy, close-packed rooms. This was pleasing—until I tried to sleep, only to be kept awake by a crying baby and a bathroom in constant use. Finally dropping off, I woke before dawn to heavy footfalls in the room just above. Pueblo life might be picturesque to tourists, but it was easy to understand why the Zuni themselves had opted for a little elbow room.
THOUGH DEFLATED, LIKE the Spanish, by my first encounter with Fray Marcos’s gilded city, I had one promising lead to pursue. At the museum the day before, I’d learned of a ruined pueblo outside town, where archaeologists had recently found evidence of Coronado’s inaugural assault on Cibola. The Zuni resented outsiders digging into traditional belief, but encouraged respectful study of their physical history. So in the morning, I went to the tribe’s archaeological office, and met its director, Jonathan Damp, a pale, middle-aged man with wire-rimmed glasses. He was one of the few Anglos living in Zuni, and all the more exotic for having grown up in the echt-Yankee environs of northern New Hampshire.
“In school,” he said, as we climbed into his four-wheel drive to visit the archaeological site, “I got the whole nine yards of New England history, and not much else. It was as if nothing happened in this country until the Pilgrims landed.” He slowed as we passed Zuni’s new high school. “When they started construction over there, a three-thousand-year-old irrigation canal turned up. That’s King Tut’s time. A little before the Mayflower.”
A few miles outside Zuni, the road turned from asphalt to gravel to dirt. Jonathan departed even this faint track, veering straight across the plain. Then, pointing at a low hill, he said, “That’s Hawikuh.”
Hawikuh was the Zuni name for the first of the pueblos reached by Coronado. As we drew nearer, I was reminded of the disappointed Spaniard who observed on first approach, “It is a small pueblo crowded together and spilling down a cliff.” Now, with the houses gone and the slope eroded, it was even less: a lonely mound, no more than a bump on the otherwise featureless terrain.
A fanciful image of the battle for Cibola, from a
sixteenth-century Mexican manuscript on Spanish conquest
Parking by the base of the hillock, Jonathan walked me to the top, which was littered with shards and animal bones. “OH’ku glazeware,” he said, nonchalantly picking up and casting away an ancient piece of black, orange, and white pottery. “Site’s full of this stuff.”
Unfortunately, Hawikuh had first been excavated over a century ago, when archaeology was relatively primitive. Apart from tumbling walls, outlining the pueblo’s small, square rooms, little remained. But fresh probes of the ground circling the pueblo had uncovered a number of Spanish artifacts. By carefully mapping their location, Jonathan felt able to reconstruct the battle that occurred at Hawikuh on a hot summer day in 1540.
“Sometimes you have to read between the lines of the written record,” he said, descending to the pueblo’s base. Spanish accounts made it seem that the bedraggled soldiers had triumphed through sheer grit and superior combat skills. Jonathan believed the story was more complex. “Swords and crossbows are sexy, but archaeology has a way of revealing humbler things.”
Horseshoe nails, for instance, which had turned up at a rocky spot just beside the pueblo, where they’d probably been thrown whe
n the animals’ hooves hit rough ground. Harness bells had been found there, too. On another flank of the pueblo, archaeologists uncovered pitted, large-caliber lead balls like those the Spanish shot from their muskets. Ballistic tests revealed the bullets hadn’t hit anything except sand. But their impact, like that of the horses, may still have been felt.
“People today talk about terrorist tactics, or ‘shock and awe’ on the battlefield,” Jonathan said. “Well, think about the Zuni in 1540. They’ve never seen soldiers on horses, or heard and seen a gun fired. Coronado must have known that cavalry and guns would terrorize his foe, even if they weren’t directly effective in taking the pueblo.”
There’s no record of how the Zuni reacted to guns, but horses clearly made an impression. When Coronado later sent a lieutenant to a Hopi pueblo in Arizona, the officer learned that its inhabitants “had heard that Cibola had been captured by very fierce people, who traveled on animals who ate people.” (Horses had similarly terrified the Aztec, who described them as snorting stags with loud bells, foaming mouths, and hoofs that scarred the ground.)
Archaeologists had also found obsidian arrowheads at Hawikuh, possibly from arrows shot by the indios amigos who accompanied Coronado from Mexico. The Spanish, who were eager to highlight their own bravado, made no mention of their native allies in accounts of the battle. But the presence of hundreds of Indian warriors may explain how the small Spanish force was able to quickly seize the well-defended pueblo.
Jonathan also suspected that the Zuni chose to flee rather than put up a strong fight. As we drove back from Hawikuh, he pointed at a steep, thousand-foot-tall mesa, a sacred site known as Dowa Yalanne, or Corn Mountain. “Whenever the Zuni came under threat,” he said, “they retreated up there.” They did so after killing two Spanish friars in 1632, after an attack by the Apache forty years later, and after the great pueblo revolt of 1680. When Coronado wrote that the Zuni “fled to the hills,” he probably meant Corn Mountain.
In a sense, the Zuni had stuck to a strategy of tactical retreat in the centuries since. After 1680, they never took up arms against whites again. More bellicose tribes suffered tremendously, losing their lands and lives, while the Zuni kept to themselves and clung to their diminished but relatively intact society.
Jonathan said the Zuni continued to keep their distance today, not only from whites but also from other tribes, such as the Navajo, who lived on nearby land and in the closest city, Gallup. After ten years in Zuni, Jonathan still felt he’d barely penetrated the place, beyond the surface soil on archaeological sites.
This resident-alien status was a source of confusion to his six-year-old son, who had lived in Zuni his entire life. “He knows I’m not Zuni, and he’s been to the Wal-Mart in Gallup, so he knows I’m not Navajo either,” Jonathan said. “And I don’t look like his mother, who’s from Ecuador. So one day he said to me, ‘Dad, I’ve figured out what you are. You must be a Hopi!’ ”
CORONADO SPENT THE summer and fall of 1540 in Cibola and obsequiously renamed the largest of its pueblos Granada, the hometown of his patron, the viceroy. He also dispatched scouts to reconnoiter other parts of Tierra Nueva. One party traveled west until reaching a river gorge so vast that the Spanish thought it ten miles “through the air to the opposite edge.” Three of the most agile men tried to descend to the river, and were “lost from sight.” They returned at day’s end having made it only a third of the way down.
“Those who stayed above had estimated that some huge rocks on the sides of the cliffs seemed to be about as tall as a man,” one Spaniard wrote, “but those who went down swore that when they reached these rocks they were bigger than the great tower of Seville”—a 250-foot-tall campanile. This wondrous testimony is the first European description of the Grand Canyon.
That same summer, another Spanish party had its own adventure while exploring Arizona, by water. Soon after Coronado’s departure from New Spain, the viceroy had sent two ships from the west coast of Mexico to resupply the army, mistakenly believing that Cibola lay close to the coast. The convoy’s commander, Hernando de Alarcón, ran out of sea at the head of the Gulf of California, where he found the mouth of “a very powerful river,” today’s Colorado. He took twenty men and two boats upstream, pulled by a towrope, to see if he could reach Cibola.
Though he failed, Alarcón left an unusually sensitive account of first contact with Indians. Upon encountering natives with bows and arrows, he threw down his sword and shield, “stepping my feet on them, making them understand by this and other signs that I did not wish to make war.” He also lowered his boat’s banner and ordered his men to sit down. For a moment the natives seemed uncertain, murmuring among themselves. “Suddenly, one came out from among them with a rod that bore some shells,” Alarcón wrote. “I embraced him and gave him in exchange some beads and other things.”
Thereafter, he traveled peacefully through several hundred miles of well-populated country, fed and fêted by Indians who wore waist cords adorned with feathers, “which hang behind them like a tail.” Natives, in turn, marveled at the Spaniards, combing their beards and patting the wrinkles from their clothing.
But this mutual discovery required a great deal of effort. Conversation, even with an Indian interpreter from Mexico, was halting and poorly understood. Most communication had to be done with gestures, gifts, pantomime, drawings, even crude carpentry. “With some sticks and paper I had some crosses made,” Alarcón wrote. “I made it clear to them that they were things I esteemed most.”
One native, who understood some of the interpreter’s language, asked Alarcón if the Spanish “came from beneath the water or from the earth or had fallen from the sky.” Alarcón replied with a stock conquistador line: “I was sent by the sun.” But the Indian persisted, “asking me how the sun had sent me, since it traveled on high but did not stop.” Also, why hadn’t the sun sent anyone before? And why couldn’t children of the sun understand everyone?
“I began to wear myself out,” Alarcón wrote of his attempts to persuade his inquisitor. “I told him that God abided in heaven and that he was called Jesus Christ. I was careful not to stretch myself further into theology with him.” Later, in apparent mockery of his claim to have come from above, Indians “took corn and other seeds in their mouths and sprayed me with them, saying that was the kind of offering they made to the sun.”
Natives were as exhausted by Alarcón’s constant questions as he was by theirs. When Alarcón invited an Indian elder to sleep on board the Spanish boat, “he replied to me that he did not want to come, because I would tire him out asking him about so many things.”
Farther upriver, Alarcón heard of a pueblo that had been visited by a bearded black man who wore bells and feathers on his arms and legs. He’d been killed, Indians said, so he couldn’t take news of the pueblo to other strangers. This was undoubtedly a reference to Estevanico’s visit to Cibola, which Alarcón learned was just ten days’ travel away. But the river narrowed between high mountains and he could go no farther. Outriders from Coronado’s army later found a tree etched with the words “Alarcón reached this point.”
Like so many of the Spaniards who wandered early North America, Hernando de Alarcón is little remembered today. But his brief account gave me a glimpse of an alternate history embedded in the saga of European conquest. With hindsight, it’s tempting to see the exploration and settlement of America as grimly mechanistic: the inexorable grinding down of one world by another. Individuals seem to matter little, except as agents of distant empires, or as their inevitable victims.
But what happened in America wasn’t foreordained, particularly during the fluid period of early contact. Nor did all newcomers, or all natives, behave the same. Those Europeans who reached across the canyon of language and culture, as curious fellow humans rather than as combatants, almost always discovered Indians willing to respond in kind.
The list of such men is short, and most, like Alarcón and Cabeza de Vaca, were vulnerable wanderers who might
have acted differently if they’d had more men and arms. Still, it was refreshing to encounter the rare Spaniard who didn’t reach for his sword and recite the Requerimiento at the earliest chance.
I SPENT FIVE days in Zuni, trying to glimpse what lay behind the pleasant but impassive mask the town presented to outsiders. Each night, I compared notes with the innkeeper, a Frenchman who had lived in Zuni for thirty years. “I still don’t know what’s going on here,” he confessed. “A Frenchman goes to church for an hour on Sunday and is saved. Here, not. The ritual is constant, a ceremonial cycle that keeps drawing people back into the loop of their culture.” He laughed. “I’m not in the loop.”
As a blow-through, I had even less hope of understanding. But on my last day in town, I decided to try again with the most forthcoming Zuni I’d met, a young man named Wells Mahkee. Heavyset, with close-cropped hair, Wells had studied English at a college in New Mexico and now edited and produced reports at Zuni’s archaeological office. He’d also grown up in the old pueblo, and still lived there with his family. When I first met him, Wells promised to show me around. But each time I’d returned to his office, he said he was too busy; perhaps he was regretting his earlier offer.
When I appeared yet again, just as the office was closing for the week, Wells shut off his computer and walked me to a wall photo of Zuni in 1890. The picture showed tall, tightly packed houses, ladders, and rooftops crowded with earthen ovens. “People lived literally on top of each other,” he said.
The twentieth century had brought an end to Apache and Navajo raids; Zuni no longer needed to live so defensively. Eventually, the pueblo’s top stories had crumbled or been dismantled to build new houses. The Zuni also began to adopt American notions of space and privacy. When Wells was a child, the houses still had interior doors between them, so that one room opened into a neighbor’s home.