A Living Culture

I am fascinated by history and I love reading about discoveries made by archeologists who study artifacts humans left behind in the distant past. This is basically what led me to read E. Charles Adams’ The Origin and Development of the Pueblo Katsina Cult, which I discussed about a week and a half ago. However, I think it’s important to remember that pueblo culture is alive in the modern world. While I think it’s fascinating to read the story of changes that occurred in that culture some 500 years ago, I think it’s also fascinating to read what that culture is like today. In order to learn a little about modern pueblo culture, I turned to a writer who was born at Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, Simon J. Ortiz, and his short story collection Men on the Moon.

I picked this collection for a couple of reasons. Most importantly is that I met Ortiz several years ago when I worked with a local book festival in Las Cruces, New Mexico. At the time, I’d mostly been familiar with Ortiz’s poems, so I was interested in seeing some of his longer tales. Second, I have visited Acoma Pueblo and know the area as it is today. That said, while Ortiz brings his background as an Acoma native to these stories, only a few are actually set at Acoma and the stories aren’t focused exclusively on the “Acoma experience,” whatever that might be. Still, one thing Ortiz says in his preface to the book really resonated with me. “As human beings, we, as personal and social cultural entities, are conscious beings because of story, no other reason.” He talks about how stories have power and how that power is essential to our life. The stories in this collection are personal stories. They are stories of experiences Ortiz has had. They reflect his life and experience and they remind me that he is part of a living culture.

Although I’m curious about the subject after reading Adams’ book, little in this book provided a modern perspective on the katsina. In one story, a character is compared to the virile warrior Kahtzina, Payatyamo. In another story, Ortiz introduces us to a character named Kaiser. The elders tell him legends about the Kahtzina, Spider Old Woman. Later in the story, it’s mentioned that Kaiser always wore his special suit to the Kahtzina dances. Note, the word Kachina or Katsina is not standardized across the pueblos. As I understand, Kahtzina is the Acoma spelling. In a first-person story, Ortiz writes about meeting a man who says, “You see, I teach history, and sometimes I get the feeling my people think I’m giving away secrets. You know Hopi secrets.” The scene reminds us that in the living pueblo culture, many aspects of spiritual life are not for public display. They’re very much a personal thing.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I visited the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. While there, we saw a wonderful exhibit about the project that created a Navajo-language dub of the movie Star Wars. The exhibit discussed how much Star Wars resonated with Navajo culture. In particular, the exhibit highlighted Navajo stories of the Warrior Twins and how many Navajo people saw that echoed in the story of Luke and Leia. As I read, Men on the Moon, I also came to really understand Native Americans as a culture subject to an imperial, authoritarian government. Some of this is expressed in the draconian ways laws are enforced on Native lands. Some of this is the way in which Native people are drafted into the military. Some of this is in the way young people were taken from their homes and forced into “Indian Schools” where they had to learn English and American culture. It’s never easy to be confronted with these viewpoints, but confronting this viewpoints is important if we’re to understand a living culture.

Perhaps my favorite moment in this collection occurs in the title story. Young people give their grandfather his first television and he watches one of the early moon landings. The young people tell the grandfather that they’ve gone to the moon to collect rocks and that they believed there’s no life on the moon. “Yet those men were trying to find knowledge on the moon. Faustin wondered if perhaps they had special tools with which they could find knowledge even if they believed there was no life on the moon.” In effect, the grandfather, Faustin, knows that knowledge comes from stories. However, stories come from life. If there is no life on the moon, there cannot be knowledge. It’s a moment that reminds us how important living culture really is.

Men on the Moon is available at: https://www.amazon.com/Men-Moon-Collected-Stories-Tracks-ebook/dp/B0B8T9YC18/

My research into the novella Breaking the Code involved reading and listening to numerous Navajo stories as well as stories from people who lived in Gallup, New Mexico near the beginning of World War II. You can find out more about my novella at: https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Code-Systema-Paradoxa-Book-ebook/dp/B08RW4CMR8/

Encountering the Katsina

One of the pleasures of attending graduation at Northern Arizona University a couple of weeks ago was the opportunity to meet some of Verity’s friends, including a young Navajo man who graduated with a history degree and shared Verity’s love of Monty Python. We spent the afternoon after graduation with this young man. He gave Verity and my wife, Kumie, katsina dolls as gifts. Traditionally, Hopi people created katsina dolls as a way of instructing young girls and women about the katsinam, spirit beings who bring rain and act as intermediaries between the mortal world and the spiritual world. What’s more, many of the pueblos in the southwest have katsina rituals where masked dancers take on the roles of different katsina. Historically, the word has been spelled kachina, but “katsina” is closer to the correct Hopi pronunciation. Having grown up in the southwest, I’ve long been fascinated by katsina dolls and the concept of the katsina. I decided to learn more and dove into a non-fiction book called The Origin and Development of the Pueblo Katsina Cult by E. Charles Adams.

It’s worth noting, Adams uses the word “cult” in the more archaeological or anthropological sense, meaning a system of beliefs and ritual, not the more modern sense of a group of people following a charismatic or unorthodox leader. Also, Adams approached this issue very much as an archaeologist. He didn’t spend a lot of time trying to explain or characterize the katsina belief and ritual system, but rather looked at how it came to be a ritual system shared among peoples living within many of the southwestern pueblos. So, the book is concerned with tracing the beginnings and spread of masked figures in rock art at or near both inhabited and abandoned pueblos along with the development of the architectural structures, namely the enclosed plazas, where katsina dances are held. According to Adams, the katsina rituals seemed to appear in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, around the time the Anasazi began abandoning their large dwellings in places like New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon. Evidence suggests that was a period of drought in the southwest and it’s long been suspected that the Anasazi left their lands in response to such a hardship. Adams suggests that the katsina rituals developed as a way to help integrate newcomers into certain pueblos and help them learn the beliefs and become part of the community.

Years ago, right after getting married, my wife and I visited Chaco Canyon. At the time, many archaeologists still referred to the disappearance of the Anasazi as a mystery. Yet, the Hopi and other pueblo people maintained that the Anasazi were their ancestors. This book seems to indicate that archaeological evidence has come to support what Native people have long insisted.

Large portions of my Scarlet Order vampire novels are set in the American southwest and there are beings referred to as “kachina.” On the whole, these are beings from other worlds who see themselves as superior to humans and present themselves as gods or other powerful beings. Like many explorers and colonizers of history, these beings have an elevated sense of themselves and are often misguided. In part, I use the old spelling precisely because these beings are not meant to literally be the katsinam of the Hopi or spirit beings recognized by any native people. They’re arrogant, powerful beings who have adopted a role, much as they adopted the role of being angels in European countries. You can lean more about my Scarlet Order novels by visiting http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#scarlet_order