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Performing Archive

Zuni / Zuñi

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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.