Until they dug deeper into two of the kivas. More than ritual artifacts lay on these two floors. In one were found the skeletons of three people—an adult woman, an adolescent boy, and a child. The woman’s jaw had been broken before death, and her left femur crudely severed above the knee. The boy and child had probably died of soft-tissue wounds. In the second kiva an adult man’s remains lay on the floor, with two projectile points recovered from the area of his abdominal cavity. It seemed that he had been shot with arrows and the kiva burned down over him—and perhaps the arrows had not finished the job, since his head lay inside the ventilator shaft, as if reaching for air. Again, preplanning seems evident, for two whole pots had been placed on the burning roof beams as they slowly collapsed upon the victim. William Walker, an archaeologist associated with the project, surmised “what appears to have happened is not a battle or series of accidents, but a carefully planned ritual burning and burial of the ceremonial structures at different times and for different reasons. In two cases these rituals included the disposal of victims of ritual violence,” likely a situation in which “witches, violently ‘set apart’ from other burials at the site” were “emplaced in ritual contexts.”
Everyday people, or so it seems, killed by neighbors (or so it seems), and thrown (dead or alive) into revered ceremonial places—kivas were modeled as reminders of earlier centuries when people lived in pit-houses—after which the kivas were “closed” by deposits of sand and sealed by fire. In one case a lone man, in another what might have been a family.
The Homol’ovi towns grew up during a period of religious transformation in the Southwest. In the thirteenth century we see the earliest evidence of the arrivals of the katsinam, sacred beings who walked as lightning, wind, or rain clouds and held power over the seasons. The arrival of the Katsina religion in the region was an astonishing process of culture-wide conversion, and some scholars believe that the proto-Hopi settlements along the Little Colorado River played a role in its genesis. The Katsina societies would allow diverse and linguistically disparate peoples to transcend divisions of kinship, sodality, and residence to create larger communities that provided social and spiritual comfort in troublous times.
But the Katsina conversion would not come without cost—throughout the Southwest an explosion of violent iconography—war shields, Venus stars-of-war, warrior figures, and gruesome monsters suddenly decorate pottery, wall murals, and rock surfaces. Surely some families and individuals who held earlier forms of power resisted the conversion, and paid the price. Or traveling evangelicals who brought the “good news” of the Katsina religion met fates familiar to those proselytizers attempting to spread Christianity into new regions of Asia and Africa at the same time. In either case—and perhaps in that of the Chaco priest and the inhabitants of Cowboy Wash—it seems likely that the motivation toward violence was born of a profound fear of unseen and little understood power. Those whose power lay in hidden knowledge, like the Chaco priest, in signs of cultural difference like the Cowboy Wash community, or in supernatural struggles between old and new religions as at Homol’ovi, may have been marked for death. Thus was the fate of sorcerers, wizards, and witches in the Southwest. And not only in eras shrouded by the fog of time.
When Frank Cushing first insinuated himself at Zuni Pueblo in 1879, he took quick note of accusations of witchcraft that swirled around that village—some of which were aimed at him, since the Zunis had good reason to believe he wished to gain access to secret knowledge. Combining a deft touch with the Zuni language and subtle coercion as a nominal representative of the U.S. government, Cushing would defend himself successfully against charges of sorcery and by 1881 find himself initiated into the Zuni Bow Priesthood. From his increasingly prominent role in Zuni affairs he would have perhaps the most intimate experience with Puebloan witchcraft of any early American anthropologist.
Zuni Indians Torturing a Sorcerer, by Henry François Farny, 1882.
As a member of the Bow Priesthood—specifically charged with trying and punishing sorcerers and wizards—Cushing had a ringside seat for some dozen witchcraft trials at the pueblo between 1879 and 1885. In some cases he intervened to stop the proceedings, yet in others he remained a silent participant in seeking justice. At least nine who were accused died during the period, in one case a family of eight who were clubbed to death and their bodies left to rot. The crimes examined in Bow Priesthood kivas included the bringing of drought, drying winds, murder by invisible means, bewitchment causing illness, fire, crop destruction, grave robbery, and heresy. If not sentenced to die, the convicted might be ordered to join a kiva society or sacred order, suffer ostracism, be beaten, forced to perform public confession, or hanged just short of death.
Cushing’s public statements about witchcraft at Zuni were noteworthy in their sympathy for the accusers, while also attempting to withhold full endorsement of their beliefs. “Absurd as it may seem,” he wrote in the Washington Evening News in 1892, “there is no question of the existence of a certain guild of at least would-be sorcerers or wizards among Zuni Indians. Nor do they owe their reputation, either imputed or self-constituted powers, wholly to superstitious beliefs.” A kind of “hypnotic power” lay within witches, and Cushing felt them fully capable of wreaking havoc on individuals or communities, empowered if nothing else by Zunis’ widespread belief in their efficacy.
Cushing illustrated a sorcerer’s work in crafting an arrow from a stick of mountain laurel, blackened by charcoal to the color of death, fletched with owl feathers (the bird of darkness), and tipped with black obsidian bound to the shaft by feathers of nighthawk, “the swiftest and most silent bird of the night.” Thus armed, the sorcerer will place the object somewhere that the quarry might casually encounter it, “so without further operations on the part of the sorcerer” the knowledge of his bewitchment “prays upon the mind of the victim . . . until he rapidly sinks under its spell.”
Cushing confessed his own naïveté in the judicial process, explaining that when he “first witnessed the trial of a sorcerer, in a most foolhardy manner I attempted by even violent means to protect him. I did not understand the full intents and purposes of these so-called sorcerers at that time.” He cautioned his readers that “while the peculiar beliefs and principles of the Pueblo Indians in regard to sorcery have sometimes the most direful consequences, leading to divisions of the tribe and ultimate separation,” it must also be understood that “it can be seen that their only civil method of eliminating from the native population the undesirable element has been through trial, condemnation, and execution.”
What if a whole community, hundreds of men, women, and children, somehow composed that “undesirable element?” What forces, malevolent or otherwise, might they have had the power to invoke? Could the intracommunity conflict among the Hopi in 1700 hint that the sorcery practiced among the residents of Awat’ovi might demonstrate connections to the powaqa at work among the Zuni two centuries later? What of a later crisis at Hopi itself, which suggests that a powaqa could sometimes embody very different—and perhaps benevolent—qualities of vision and hope for a better future, albeit at the expense of tradition, mean to the story of Awat’ovi Pueblo? The Oraibi crisis of 1906, in which the suspicion of sorcery seems inextricably mingled with historical and social forces that beset the Hopi mesas at the dawn of the twentieth century, provides a more recent reverberation of these questions. Yet three centuries earlier, with the arrival of Franciscan missionaries in the Hopi Mesas, numinous forces from afar stoked fears of metaphysical threats, of evangelical religion, and intensified an ancient anxiety.
3
The Singing House
I wonder if you would be willing to place the body of the padre found under the altar at Awat’ovi in the care of the Bishop of Tucson. I believe it right that all the numerous martyrs—soldiers, colonists, and friars—of the Pueblo Revolt be declared saints, and the placement of the body with the Bishop would assure authenticity of the relic.
—THE
REV. VICTOR R. STONER TO J. O. BREW, 1938
The people of Antelope Mesa met Spaniards in 1540 in the same manner they had greeted strangers for centuries—with a practiced diplomacy that blended guarded hostility with overtures of hospitality. In the spring of that year, conquistador Francisco de Coronado detailed Don Pedro de Tovar to explore the regions west of the Rio Grande, so with seventeen horsemen, a handful of foot soldiers, and Franciscan friar Juan de Padilla, the small column passed through the Cibola (Zuni) territory and entered Tusayán, where “the villages [were] high and the people warlike.”
The massive sandstone cliffs of Antelope Mesa gave Tovar pause, and after a night spent concealed under the ledges and eavesdropping on the whispered conversations above (he had brought an interpreter from Zuni), he arrayed his group on the sands of Jeddito Wash, where a belligerent detachment of armed Hopis met them. Those men forbade entry to Antelope Mesa, etching a symbolic boundary line in the earth. One restless horseman challenged the line and his horse suffered a club blow to the head, in turn triggering a brief fight, the Spaniards chasing the Hopis back to the mesa. The situation calmed when “the people of the village [came] out with presents, asking for peace.”
Laying cotton cloth, dressed and tanned skins, cornmeal, pine nuts, “birds of the country,” and turquoise (“but not much”) before Tovar’s men, the residents of Awat’ovi invited the Spaniards “to visit, buy, sell, and barter with them.” From conflict to commerce with barely a shrug. The governing assembly of “the oldest men” grudgingly allowed Tovar to make camp near the village, and used the next few days to take the measure of the visitors’ power—military, economic, and spiritual—the same qualities that they judged in considering new clans for acceptance into the Hopi world. Friar Padilla doubtless strove to deliver his message of salvation to the people of Awat’ovi and neighboring villages, but nothing in the expedition’s reports suggests much interest in matters spiritual.
Having “received the submission of the whole province,” Tovar returned to Coronado’s camp along the Rio Grande with news of an even greater river to the west. By late summer of 1540, Coronado had dispatched don García López de Cárdenas back to Tusayán to explore this possible route to the “South Sea,” the Colorado. Well received at Tusayán and “entertained by the natives,” López enjoyed the services of Hopi guides to the river, who managed to avoid revealing the location of their ancient trails down from the rim.
The people at Tusayán experienced glancing Spanish visits over the next seventy years. In 1583, Antonio de Espejo arrived on the mesa and was later reported to have been astonished by the generous reception offered his small group of ten men. Hardly had they pitched camp when “about one thousand Indians came laden with maize, ears of green corn, piñole, tamales, firewood, and they offered it all, together with six hundred widths of blankets small and large, white and painted, so that it was a pleasant sight to behold.” So, too, did the Hopis provide “venison and dried rabbits” to the Spaniards, a bountiful and hospitable welcome that in Indian custom had long served to establish an expectation of reciprocal grace and generosity. An expectation that too often the strangers failed to meet.
Tamales, tortillas, venison, cotton mantas, and dried rabbit did not form the wealth that had drawn Spanish adventurers northward, however. The decades after Juan de Oñate’s establishment of an outpost at San Gabriel del Yunque at the junction of the Rio Grande and Chama River featured disappointment after disappointment in their quest for wealth like that of the Aztecs and Incas. So severe was the operating deficit of the early colony that by 1608, the Council of the Indies recommended abandonment of the settlements, to which the crown gave serious consideration. Yet the regular orders of the Catholic Church held the balance of power in Madrid and the fragile, underfunded colony persisted with the goal of harvesting souls from the clutches of the devil, who tried “in all possible ways to impede and obstruct the promulgation of the divine law.” The arrival in New Mexico of thirty new Franciscan missionaries in 1629 permitted the Church to look westward again at the province of Tusayán.
On August 20 of that year, Padres Cristóbal de la Concepción, Andrés Gutiérrez, and Francisco de Porras arrived at Antelope Mesa and undertook to establish a permanent Catholic presence among those “great sorcerers and idolaters.” A contemporary account captures not just this Franciscan disdain for Hopi religion, but a sense of what composed Hopi life: “They harvest much cotton; the houses are of three stories, well planned; the inhabitants are great land tillers and diligent workers. Among them it is considered a great vice to be intoxicated, [although] for amusement they have certain games and a race they run with great speed.” The people of Awat’ovi had been alerted to the arrival of the missionaries by an “apostate from the Christian [presumably Rio Grande] pueblos” and met the missionaries with suspicion. Under the cover of their military guard mounted on “armored horses,” the friars entered Awat’ovi and “set forth through the streets, preaching, the sonorous echoes of their voices at once bringing men and women to listen to them . . . as the Indian now approached without fear, they gave them . . . trinkets such as rattles, beads, hatchets, and knives in order to make them feel that the friars came to give rather than ask.”
Eager to receive what in Tusayán were indeed precious and welcome tools and symbols of wealth, the people of Awat’ovi were less than receptive to the friars’ message of doom or salvation. Despite the presence in Porras’s arms of the original cross of Mother Luisa de Carrión, the indigenous kiva and Katsina priests at the pueblo kept the people alarmed and resistant. Only a “great miracle”—reported by some chroniclers and doubted by others—in which Porras was able to restore sight to a boy blind since birth, shifted the sentiments of the citizenry of Awat’ovi. It followed that “the conversion rose like foam.”
Such were the words of Catholic hagiographers throughout New Spain. These chronicles were devoted to weaving stories of mysticism, martyrdom, and imperial expansion into evidence for missionization and saved Indian souls that would continue both royal and papal commitment to a cause that lacked any economic reward. Yet to dismiss these accounts as entirely instrumental would be to overlook the insights they offer on the Franciscan thought world. However vastly different Catholicism may have seemed to the “idolatrous” practices of the Hopis and other Puebloan peoples, Franciscans walked a world in which numinous forces visible and invisible were everywhere, and the natural and magical closely intertwined. Miracles like that of the suddenly sighted boy at Awat’ovi were not inexplicable, or even requiring explanation, for they simply made manifest the power of God. The Franciscan world was alive with miracles, sure evidence that God’s kingdom drew near. For example, Friar Alonso de Benavides, whose 1630 chronicle recounts early Franciscan activities in the province of New Mexico, bore witness to them. He had personally visited Mother María de Jesús (1602–1665) in her convent in Ágreda, Spain, and heard from her own lips of her numerous magical “flights” to New Mexico, as many as four in a single day, in which she preached salvation among the Apaches and Jumanos. He even obtained “the very habit that she wore when she went there. . . . the veil radiates such a fragrance that it is a comfort to the spirit.” Mother Luisa de Carrión (1565–1636)—whose original cross Porras carried—also claimed to have undertaken many visits to the Indians of New Mexico. Within a few years of Porras’s successes with her relic, she would become a victim of the Spanish Inquisition, forced to have her tongue measured “to determine whether it was short, like a witch’s.” The Hopis and Zunis were not alone in the seventeenth century in punishing signs of sorcery.
However much conversions at Awat’ovi rose like foam, Porras had just a few energetic years of planting the faith among those people until his work came to a quick and painful end. But the friar started with a big vision. Looking to the east from the massive three-story town of ancient Awat’ovi, he could see extensive residential roomblocks, still occupied, a spacious plaza, and mounds of masonry rubble, crum
bling adobe mud, and crushed pottery covering more than an acre of the mesa top, the remnants of an adjacent Pueblo dating from the fourteenth century. Doubtless concerned about resistance should he immediately attempt to dislodge the occupants, Porras looked to the plaza to locate mission “San Bernardo de Aguatubi” in honor of the saint’s day on which he had first arrived at Antelope Mesa, August 20—Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. Porras set out to construct a church and convento complex so imposing that the residents of the town would be awed by the architectural expression of the power of the Christian god. He laid out a cruciform church that measured more than 8,000 square feet, with foundation walls more than 6 feet thick, and a transept 28 feet wide—one of the largest churches in the province. It would be a monument to Franciscan diligence in announcing the work of Christ.
Alas, Porras’s church would not rise much beyond the foundations. By 1633 he received the last rites. Yet, clearly the friar could not have accomplished the construction preliminaries that he did without substantial labor from at least some of the residents of Awat’ovi. His ability to recruit their assistance probably combined intrigue with the new spiritual presence in the community, deft manipulation of symbols potent in the Hopi world (wooden crosses seem to have occupied a mimetic spiritual role as pahos, or wooden prayer sticks), psychological persuasion, and physical coercion. Benavides claimed that Porras had mastered the Hopi language in nine months and “converted and baptized more than four thousand souls and instructed the Indians with great perfection.” Certainly, an exaggeration both in numbers and perfection—a census report a decade later counted but 900 souls at Awat’ovi and Walpi, combined. Porras’s subsequent fate suggests imperfections in his instruction, but the fact that he moved forward in establishing the mission implies some level of success.
Mesa of Sorrows Page 4