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Performing Archive

List of Large Plates Supplementing Volume Seventeen

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Pueblo ceremonial chambers are known as kivas (the Hopi name) or estufas (the name applied to them by the Spaniards under the misapprehension that they were sudatories). They are circular or rectangular, wholly or partly subterranean, or simply cells in the communal structure that forms a pueblo. The character of the underlying soil or rock was probably the factor that determined the degree to which a kiva was made subterranean. The one here illustrated is mostly underground, and has a walled stair leading to the roof, which is surrounded by a parapet. Similar structures have been found in excavating ruined pueblos. (See Volume XVII, illustration facing page 68.
The ceremony called Koheye-hyare ("tablita dance"), occurring in June and again in September, is characterized by public dancing and singing for the purpose of bringing rain-clouds. The name refers to wooden "tablets" worn by female dancers. (See Volume XVII, illustrations facing pages 56,60,62,64,66,68.) In the plate the performers are dancing in to the plaza, men and women alternating in pairs. At the right is the group of singers, their aged leader slightly in advance and the drummer at one side.
The Buffalo dance is performed, though the original object of exerting prenatural influence on the abundance and accessibility of the buffalo no longer prevails. The two male dancers are accompanied by the Buffalo Girl, who is fully clothed in native costume and has a pair of small horns on the head. These three give a very striking and dramatic performance under the watchful eye of the head of the hunters' society.
Inscription Rock, or El Morro (The Castle), as the Spaniards called it, is a striking landmark on the ancient trail between Acoma and Zuni. Beginning with Juan de Onate, who passed here in April, 1605, on his return to the Rio Grande from "the south sea," Spanish explorers and the administrators recorded their names and dates on smooth surfaces of the cliff, which reveal also numerous Indian petroglyphs. (See Volume XVII, illustration facing page 88.) Two ancient ruined pueblos are found on the top of the rock.
In the early eighties one of the house-groups of Zuni rose to a height of six well-defined stories. In 1903, when the photograph here reproduced was made, there were five stories. In 1910 a single apartment was four stories from the ground, but in 1919 this room was demolished. Note the bottomless pots forming chimneys, the wooden drain piercing the coping, the hemispherical oven of Spanish provenience on a roof.
Kyaqimassi ("house chief") is the title of the Shiwanni of the north, the most important of all Zuni priests. Waihusiwa in his youth spent the summer and fall of 1886 in the East with Franklin Hamilton Cushing, and was the narrator of much of the lore published in Cushing's Zuni Folk Tales. A highly spiritual man, he is one of the most steadfast of the Zuni priests upholding the traditions of the native religion.