we have bad luck
For we are men.
You have good luck
For you are women.
To Navaho camps we go
Ready for war. Good-bye.
Bad luck—but ready, they sang, with realism and a larger bravery.
The Pueblo warriors painted themselves, for there was power in paint, and to go out to save their community life was in itself a ceremony. The surface of their bodies, perceptive of touch, caress and wound, was beautified with designs that came alive with movement—the lift and fall of breathing, the haul and suck of the belly in exertion, the climb and pound of limbs. Flesh became a living temple of esthetic and spiritual feeling. It was an act of both art and religion, and the warrior’s mortal humanity, his bodily stuff dear because it was not immortal, was the very material of his craft. Using the colors of the earth itself, the great source and repository both, the act of devotion combined in tragic wholeness the Pueblo man’s concepts of himself and his gods. Upon his own nakedness he used his earth in the symbols of what he believed in.
First he put on his skin a layer of tallow. Over this went the colors—gypsum white that clothed but did not conceal his legs; red, from clay or crushed amaranth blossoms, on arms and chest; lines of soot black edging designs; yellow from the dust of sunflower petals. He ceremonially washed his hair in yucca suds. Wearing only invocations as armor, he went to the enemy carrying his loins wrapped in buckskin. A buckskin baldric hung over the left shoulder, and above the left shoulder peered the bow case and the quiver, from which arrows could be slipped with the right hand, the left holding the bow. From a tight belt were slung a stone knife and a club, a pouch of sacred objects to bring power, and a little bag of ground meal to be used with water as food on the campaign. Bad luck—but ready for war. The Pueblo men were devoted to their soil. Their towns rose from the river earth like shapes of nature. Their fields were cunningly cultivated. The seed corn secured them life. Their wives gave houses to live in to generation upon generation. There was every reason to stay at home and live well. But their most powerful enemies came from the plains where nothing grew but food for the wandering herds of buffalo, whose flesh made meals for the marauders, whose droppings gave them fire, whose vast seasonal whims took them drifting like cloud shadows over the exposed prairies. The invaders had little to lose and much to gain. But the pueblo people had everything to lose and they fought for it and kept it. Their ways came up with them from a long time ago, and gave them strength.
They lost few of their reluctant prehistoric wars, though perhaps a town here, a scatter of houses there, might suffer and be abandoned. They could come home and make sacrifices of thanksgiving with ceremonies, smoking clay pipes filled with red willow bark, and telling of battle. They had earned their ease. When they wanted to relax and gossip, and be purified, the men took sweat baths together, putting heated stones in a closed room, and pouring water upon them, and finally going to the river to bathe. The river always purified. It seemed to bring some thoughts from far above, who knew from where, and carry others far downstream, who knew whither. Using the river, a person could dream awake, like a child.
The people treated their children tenderly, from the time of birth to the entrance into adult societies. Ceremony and symbol accompanied the child into the world, and at every stage of life thereafter attended him.
The mother unbraided her hair and wore her clothing unknotted that her unborn child might learn to come easily without stricture into the world. A midwife delivered him. In slow or dangerous deliveries, medicine priests might be sent for. They had measures. With invocations, they would hold the laboring woman up by her hips. Again, they would burn pine-nut shells on live coals in a medicine bowl, placing it under her blankets to sweat her. They would massage her belly and call forth the child.
When the baby was born, the midwife cut its cord and wiped its eyes. If a boy, she put his legs and feet into a black pottery bowl so that he might have a heavy voice, and then handed him to his maternal grandfather. If a girl, the midwife put her in the grinding bin for a moment to make her a proper woman, and handed her to her maternal grandmother. The midwife took the afterbirth to the river and threw it into the water which took it away in purification. For her help she received a gift of fine meal.
The paternal grandmother or aunt took up corn meal and with it sprinkled on each wall of the room four little parallel lines, saying to the infant, “Now I have made you a house, and you shall stay here.” In his blankets the baby was laid between two unblemished ears of corn that would guard him until he was given his name. His mother chose a woman to name him, which would be done after four sunrises. Before dawn on the fifth day the sponsor came to the baby’s house. Taking him up, and accompanied by the mother, she went outdoors just before sunrise and as the sun rose she presented him to the light, and spoke his name. The sun was his spiritual father. All then returned to the house and feasted. The sponsor was given a gift of meal. The child was given an ear of corn so that he might always know plenty. Then he was put upon his cradleboard and was so carried on her back by his mother for the first year of his life. Thereafter he was taken from it and taught to walk. Young girls and old men helped to take care of him in his infancy. Through him, the one could learn motherhood, the other could contemplate the cycle of life.
A girl grew up learning the ways of the household from her mother.
Between five and nine years of age, a boy was taken by the men for schooling in the man’s duties of government arid ceremony. He was initiated into a kiva. He was too small to learn anything of the ritual or to understand the revelations that awaited him later, and that in their stunning force would bring him almost at one stroke from the sweet useless thoughts and illusions of boyhood to the purposeful impostures used by men. As a little boy in the kiva, he was brought into direct relation with the spirit powers, and given strength. He learned through fear and pain, for the masked kachinas came to his initiation bearing yucca whips with which they whipped him until he cried. Their lashes drove out the badness in him and made him ready for a good future. His elders nodded and approved as he cried under the punishment of his innocence. Now he had his allegiance, and though understanding nothing of what he did, perhaps he might impersonate an animal in one of the dances, and trot cleverly among the legs of the dancing men.
At adolescence, ready with new powers and desires, the boy was again the victim of a kiva rite. Again the masked gods came and whipped him, harder than before. He venerated them. He felt that the greatest power in the world was chastising him directly. He knew the gods, for they danced in their masks at all the great ceremonials. He knew they came from the sacred lake far underground to the north, where all life had come up. He knew the gods had come down to be about him on this day. It was terrible to be so near to the gods and to receive punishment from their own hands. But he bent himself under the painful honor and valiantly endured what he must.
And then more horrifying than any of the blows he had taken, more shocking than any other discovery of growth, an incredible thing happened to him. The masked gods who were savagely whipping him suddenly stopped, faced him, and lifted from their heads and shoulders their bright copper-green wooden masks with feathers and designs, and showed themselves to be men—neighbors, or uncles, people whom the boy had always known and taken for granted.
The boy was stupefied with terror and amazement.
Then the dances? Who were the gods there?
They were the same men who here, at the kiva ceremony, now removed all their masks. All were men. None was a god. But only men knew this. Women and children still believed that it was the real gods who came masked to the pueblo. Here: let the boy learn how mortal the masked figures were: take this whip. The boy was made to whip the unmasked gods who had whipped him. They put a mask on him and he knew how it felt to be the impersonator of a god from the sacred lake. When he learned
