House of Rain

by Craig Childs

  “The Southwest seems to be a landscape built for migration,” I said. “In my mind it is all about movement, about erosion and drought and places where you search for water.”

  I looked around the table, hoping for recognition in someone’s eyes. The translator said a few things. Someone asked a question in Hopi. In answer, the translator simply shrugged. I had no idea what they were saying to each other. Some of the old men looked back at me. Some, in their seventies, eighties, and even nineties, seemed to be looking at nothing.

  I told them that I had seen recent shrines left out in the desert. I knew the Hopi had been there. I recognized their pahos—painted prayer sticks strung with feathers fluttering in the wind—which had been placed near ancient ruins as if marking ancestral territory. Along supposedly abandoned Chaco roads around Yupkoyvi in New Mexico, I had found broken Hopi vessels not more than a few centuries old. That told me that people had been traveling to these places somewhat recently, centuries counting for very little in this landscape. In Utah, around Pokanghoyat, I had come upon colorful fifteenth-century Hopi potsherds left like wishing-well coins atop the ruin of a twelfth-century great house. I had seen fresh turkey feathers hanging from a paho no more than a month old at the mouth of a spring below a thirteenth-century cliff dwelling in Arizona. I said that these places were not as abandoned as one might think.

  The translator said some words. I waited for a response. No one asked anything. Grizzled corn farmers, long-fingered weavers, and sturdy stockmen looked at me, and their silence grew too long for my comfort.

  I spoke again, saying that my principal interest lay in geography, where I was beginning to understand how landscape and climate have always ruled the comings and goings of people, controlling, it seemed, my every step. I called it a landscape of motion, saying that the science of archaeology has been hampered by an inability to comprehend even simple distances. It is crucial that one walk across the land to earn a true sense of how people might once have traveled.

  “I’ve been trying to understand the qualities of distances out here by actually moving across them,” I said. “It seems that a person should learn about the landscape by sleeping on it, by waking up in the morning in December and August and March to see sunrises from different seasons in the same places—traveling by foot, drinking from springs and water holes.”

  After a couple of sentences of translation, one of the older men made a sound with his closed mouth, and the others responded, atten-tion turning slightly as if the air had changed in the room. The idea of walking and living on the land seemed to ring a bell with them.

  “You never hitchhike?” asked a younger man wearing a feedlot baseball cap, his English only shortly cropped by a Hopi accent. He looked to be in his late fifties, early sixties.

  “A few stretches, yes,” I said. “Coming down from Monument Valley, and through Marsh Pass. Here and there.”

  He nodded his head.

  The conversation went on slowly, the translator and I doing most of the talking. There was only a brief eruption, when one man irritably told me in English that there was no way a pahana such as myself could ever grasp the ancestry of his people. I stared at the table’s wood grain. I looked up and said that I could only tell the story that I knew, what I have witnessed on the ground.

  The man who charged me muttered, “Pah!” He waved his hand in the air, dismissing me.

  I was well aware that I was treading on very sensitive ground. Hopi society is one of the most secretive societies in the world. Rites performed inside Hopi kivas are concealed even from other clans. The most valued currency is ceremonial knowledge, which is based, in part, on geography, on distant customs brought to the Hopi mesas centuries ago.

  A prominent ethnohistorian once told me that he had never experienced so small a culture with such a vast cultural repertoire. He said it is as if the modern Hopi preserve an ancient civilization in their social structure and ceremonial makeup. The entire population is no more than that of a small American town, yet different Puebloan languages are spoken on this isolated reservation, and even those who speak the same tongue do so with sharply different accents, telling of divergent heritages. There is far more to the Hopi than meets the eye.

  After quiet set in again around the table, the man who had asked me about hitchhiking leaned forward in his chair. He seemed to like me; he had a lenient voice.

  “If you could ask one question,” he said, “what would it be?”

  I glanced around the table and swallowed. I had many questions. I wanted to know about Antelope Mesa, why no one lives there anymore when it was once the apparent cultural center of northern Arizona. I also wanted to know about the T shape I had seen in so many Anasazi sites. If it was a symbol, then what did it symbolize? But I did not want to waste my question on a taboo topic or on architecture.

  Instead I said, “I wonder if you know of any clans who went south from here and never came back. Any lost clans who kept going. Back in the fourteenth century or so.”

  The room was quiet again. I said, “That’s what I would ask.”

  I wanted to know where the rest of the Anasazi had gone. Certainly, they did not all end up here. Besides the pueblos of Hopi, there are numerous other pueblos in northern New Mexico that carry Anasazi ancestry, such as Zuni, Acoma, Cochiti, and Taos. A whole civilization once rose in this landscape. Only scattered populations remain.* Where had the others gone?

  The man who had opened the door a crack for my inquiry leaned back in his chair. Tension eased in the room as some of the elders shifted in their seats. The conversation was over.

  Relaxed talking began among the men. The man who had been translating turned to me and said, “It would take about a year to answer your question.”

  Some of the men got up for coffee, pushing their bodies out of their chairs, helping each other by taking each other’s arms. The translator stood up. I was left in my chair, tired, as if I had walked a very long way to get here.

  As Yeatts and I walked through the ruins, I asked him about ancestry—the relationship between Hopi and Anasazi. But when I used the word Anasazi, Yeatts put his hands in his pockets and looked uncomfortably at the ground.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  Yeatts shook his head as if to say it was nothing, but I knew better than to use that word here. Yeatts reminded me that the Hopi prefer the word Hisatsinom, a Hopi term for their ancestors. Anasazi, I knew, was an insult.

  The word Anasazi was crafted by the Navajo, who in the 1800s were paid by white men to dig skeletons and pots out of the desert. The Navajo who came up with this name probably did not arrive in the Southwest until the sixteenth century, nomads from present-day southeast Alaska and British Columbia moving into a land left mostly empty by the departure of the previous civilization. Their reservation now dwarfs the Hopi reservation and surrounds it on all sides. Understandably the Hopi do not like having their ancestors named by the Navajo. For a long time Anasazi was romantically and incorrectly thought to mean “old ones.” It actually means “enemy ancestors,” a term full of political innuendo and slippery history.

  In Navajo, a notoriously complex and subtly coded language, ’Ana’í means “alien, enemy, foreigner, non-Navajo.” ’Anaa’ means “war.” Sází translates as something or someone once whole and now scattered about—a word used to describe the final corporeal decay as a body turns to bones and is strewn about by erosion and scav-engers.

  “You understand why it is an unpopular term,” Yeatts said. “It is not a name the Hopi chose.”

  “I understand,” I told him, aware that the word suits the needs of the Navajo by implying that these previous people are dead and gone, the land abandoned, available to whoever wants it.

  “But Anasazi is also a very rich term, full of history,” I said.

  “The Southwest has many conflicting histories to contend with,” Yeatts admitted.

  I told him that I could find no easy solution for what to c
all these people I was following, that I understood naming the past can either connect people to their ancestors or alienate them. I politely suggested that although Hisatsinom is an adequate word for the Hopi, like Anasazi it does not take into account other names and languages. How do the Zuni feel about using a Hopi word for their ancestors? What about the Pueblo people of Jemez, Santa Clara, Sandia, Acoma, Santo Domingo, Zia, Taos, Isleta, Tigua, Tano, San Felipe, and Tesuque? Four isolated language families are now spoken by the modern Puebloans who represent what is left of the Anasazi. Among those language families are numerous dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible even if they belong to the same family. The linguistic background of the Pueblo people points to incredibly different histories, which are glaringly oversimplified by the word Anasazi.

  I spoke to many people—natives, scientists, wilderness travelers—in search of a consensus about what to call these ancestors, but I found none. Most archaeologists and Pueblo people implored me to switch from Anasazi to Ancestral Puebloan. One could argue that this rather bleak term is a combination of English and Spanish, neither having linguistic roots in the ancient Southwest. However, none of the Pueblo people would accept another tribe’s name for themselves or their ancestors, and this is as neutral a term as they will ever find in the current political environment.

  Each name is history—or prehistory—seen from a particular vantage. Anasazi is a purely material, diagnostic point of view made of pottery and ruins, lacking ethnohistorical interpretation. Hisat-sinom is Hopi ancestry, direct kin relationships with ancient people. Ancestral Puebloan is the whole package of Pueblo ancestry bundled up with the Colorado Plateau as its home. Each is a tool with its own limitations—inadequate in some senses, revealing in others. The most common denominator is the name Pueblo. Referred to now or a thousand years ago, these are the Pueblo people, a culture based on corn and kivas, their masonry rooms butted against one another, forming compact pueblos, an architectural hallmark. Though it is a Spanish word, an outsider’s term, Pueblo reasonably encompasses both history and prehistory, telling of a people who have been here since the beginning.

  Yeatts stopped atop a hill of broken pottery, at the peak of this buried pueblo. We stood beside each other gazing south across dry, maize-colored washes, a brindle expanse. He said, thoughtfully, “Maybe it’s more than Anasazi you’re looking at.”

  The desert spread a hundred miles into the distance. Everything looked so deathly dry that it seemed no one could possibly live here. Yeatts is right, I thought. This was not a mere culture I was following, at least not in the common use of the word. It was a form of organization carried across a landscape, a means of orchestrating a mobile civilization in the face of a marginal, unstable climate where geography presents boundless possibilities. It was an umbrella covering many heritages and clans, something that could be traded, incorporated, fought for, resisted. It was a time, a place, and a way of living. I see why we cannot agree on a single term. There probably never was one.

  THE CHOICE

  PAINTED DESERT

  T. J. Ferguson is a man of brief but rich smiles. He is very white, both the full hair on his head and his roomy beard as brilliant as snow. In an even-tempered voice he told me that it is a mistake to see prehistoric archaeology and Native American history as being separate.

  “It’s an unbroken chain,” Ferguson explained, his soft, glacial-blue eyes peering into the desert as he spoke. “You can’t look at one without looking at the other. And if you’re following paths of migration, you’ll find them in linguistics and in oral traditions. They are still very much intact.”

  Ferguson, an ethnohistorian, works a delicate line as a liaison between modern tribes and the scientific realms of archaeology. He is a repository of so much sensitive cultural information that I had to acquire permission from the Hopi tribe before speaking with him about matters of migration. Permission was granted.

  We sat in his backyard just outside Tucson in the warmth of a spring morning. His perfectly white hair was dazzling in the sun, and a single, tightly strung braid of white ran down the middle of his back. He told me that Anasazi is a limiting term, that the people I was studying had been far more than a constellation of archaeological traits. Names, he said, are troublesome, placing sometimes false boundaries. Names also have power, and one should be careful when using them.

  I asked him what name I should use, and he gave me no answer. Calmly, almost generously, he said it was my dilemma.

  “But there is some entity that I am following,” I said. “A belief system or a cultural faction that left tangible remains as it went. I feel like I’m stalking someone through a crowd, cultural groups coming and going all around me, while I’m right on this one trail south, a big group of people in motion.”

  Ferguson merely nodded.

  I asked him about oral tales of migration, and he reminded me that only initiates of certain Pueblo societies are entrusted with the full stories. These are sensitive matters, he told me. The oral traditions of Pueblo people contain information of a different quality than what archaeologists have assembled. Ferguson said that from the Zuni tribe, a Pueblo group now living in northwest New Mexico, the most rudimentary stories of migration would take all day and well into the night to recite, and in some cases would be unintelligible to me. Stories within stories tell of people leaving one place and then another, directed by omens and hardships and the advice of ancestors. Each clan has its own narrative expressing a different path taken across the Southwest to arrive where the people live now. These stories are a form of cultural validity, naming people’s places in the heredity of this landscape. Perhaps this was why I sensed so much movement, a crowd of cultural groups. People had, indeed, been going in many different directions, moving in and out of one another. Their stories keep track of these directions, forming a map.

  I was struck by Ferguson’s hushed equanimity, his gentle but authoritative voice. He seemed at ease in his place balanced between archaeology and a people’s remembered history. He explained how he had accompanied various tribal members far south of the Colorado Plateau, where he walked with them among ruins, showing them what archaeologists had reported there. He listened carefully to what the tribal members had to say, their hmms and ahs as they looked into the pits of abandoned kivas, picked up pieces of pottery, pleased but not surprised to find evidence of their own ancestors so far away. Ferguson was impressed by the specificity of their responses. A person representing Zuni was drawn to the more colorful pottery found lying about, while those of southern tribes such as Tohono O’odham passed over the same pottery, preferring undecorated wares of brown and gray. To Ferguson this meant affiliation, memory. Different kinds of pottery had belonged to different groups of people, and those people had bloodlines stretching directly from a thousand years ago to today.

  While Ferguson traveled with these representatives, a Zuni man told a story. It was about something that had happened near the Little Colorado River, in the country of the Painted Desert, south of Antelope Mesa.*

  People there were given a choice of two eggs, the Zuni man said. One was dull and buff-colored, the other brightly chromatic. One group chose the colorful egg, and out of it sprang a dark bird, a raven. From this they knew they were to remain on the Colorado Plateau. The second group chose the plain egg, from which hatched a rainbow-colored parrot. These people were told, “A’lahoankwin ta’hna ton a’wanuwa” (To the south direction you shall go).

  As Ferguson retold the story of the two eggs, I thought, There you are. Pushing through a crowd of ancient cultural groups, I caught a glimpse of the people I was following, the ones who had vanished. They were just turning a corner when I saw them, passing through the Painted Desert late in the thirteenth or early in the fourteenth century on their way south.

  The metaphors in this story were clear to me. The people who chose the raven were meant to stay in this northern land. Ravens are icons on the Colorado Plateau, black jesters echoing in the canyons
and across arid plains. The colorful egg from which the raven sprang may have represented the rise of fourteenth-century yellow wares and multicolored pottery on the Colorado Plateau. The dull-colored egg might have indicated a tradition of buff pottery known from the same era far south of here, in the desert of southern Arizona, land of the prehistoric Hohokam culture. The parrot that came out of the second egg is strictly a southern bird, the colors of Mexico and Mesoamerica. For more than a thousand years, parrot feathers, like macaw feathers, have been prized in the Southwest. The raven and the parrot are symbols of two places, two different courses of history.

  Ferguson warned me not to read too much into these stories. They are told in a far different language than the one I understand—not just different words, but a whole other way of communicating. This is a civilization other than my own, with unseen rules and agendas, a phonetic memory unfamiliar to me. Even if I comprehend the words, I am likely to muffle their true meaning with my own projections.

  Then Ferguson said, “The Zuni have a tradition of Lost Others.”

  “Lost Others?” I asked, suddenly even more alert to Ferguson’s voice.

  “The Zuni consider them to be ancestors,” Ferguson said. “Still part of the Zuni body.”

  I had asked the Hopi about any lost clans that went south and did not return but had not thought to ask the Zuni, who have just as old an ancestry in the Southwest as the Hopi.

  “Is there any remaining contact? Do they have any idea where these people went?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. Somewhere far to the south.”

  “South,” I repeated. “Any idea how many people?”

  “Maybe many,” Ferguson said, his tone of voice suggesting it is not possible to know, or it is not my business. His tone also belied an unanswered question in his mind, the same question that was sending me searching across this land: where did these people go and why? This question is not simply answered with words such as south and drought. Edicts and cultural imperatives had been in place, groups of people directed this way and that. Something had happened once in the rippling badlands and tightly packed settlements of the Painted Desert, a choice made between two different eggs, one telling people to leave, the other instructing them to remain. I mused that the Little Colorado River would have been a good place to make such a choice, a thin ribbon of water passing east to west, a boundary at the edge of the Painted Desert. North of the river lies the bulk of the Colorado Plateau, a landscape of high desert and scattered green mesas. To the south the land rises steadily, finally consumed by broad alpine forests, the world changed completely. The people would have gathered at this river and made their decision there.