“isn’t it hard to believe that life should be so intricate and complex among those meek, adobe houses on that low hill?”

we were on the last mile or so of the forty-mile drive through the red sandstone above and below, and the green cedar and spruce and sagebrush from gallup to zu?i; behind us to the southeast was the great mesa to which three centuries ago the people had escaped for a while from spanish arrogance, the mesa where one day we were to seek for the shrines of the war leaders and the song youth and the earth woman as we ostensibly hunted rabbits; and before us, barely in sight, so quietly does an indian pueblo fit into the landscape, were the rectangular blocks of the many-storied zu?i houses whose flat roofs make broken lines, mesa-like, against the sky. at the highest point, a three-storied house, the town crier was probably at that very moment calling out to the townspeople the orders of the governor and council for the following day; but we were still too far away to hear, quiet as was the air, and our unarrested eyes turned westward to the flaming spectacle of a sunset the like of which is not to be seen outside the sweeping valley plain of zu?i.

now and again, as you walk between those “meek, adobe houses,” dodging a snouting pig, or assuming indifference to the dogs that dash out from every corner to snarl or yelp; now and again as you see the villagers going about their daily affairs, men driving in from the fields, or taking the horses in or out of the corrals, women fetching water from the well or bound on a visit to a neighbor, little boys chasing one another and babies playing about in the dirt, now and again that first impression of material simplicity returns and with it the feeling that the round of life must be simple, too. but the feeling never lasts long, never holds its own with the crowding impressions of ceremonial rain dance or pilgrimage or domiciliary visitation, of baffling sacerdotal organization and still more baffling sacerdotal feuds, of elaborate pantheon, of innumerable myths and tales, of associations in story or cult with every hill and rock and 158 spring, of kinship ramifications and matrimonial histories, of irksome relationships with mexicans and “americans,” and of village gossip which is made up so comprehensively of the secular and the sacred as to pass far beyond the range of even a new england church social.

it is not surprising that accounts of zu?i are often bewildering. in our own complex culture biography may be a clarifying form of description. might it not avail at zu?i? i venture this biography of waiyautitsa.[6]

waiyautitsa is a girl’s name; sex generally appears in zu?i personal names. sex appears somewhat in speech too. waiyautitsa in learning to talk will make use of expressions, particularly exclamations, peculiar to women. in a recent list of the first words used by a zu?i child, a boy, there was noted a comparatively large number of kinship terms in his vocabulary. the kinship terms of little waiyautitsa would be somewhat different from a boy’s. he calls a younger sister ikina; a younger brother, suwe; she calls either hani, meaning merely the younger. and, as the zu?i system of kinship terms is what is called classificatory, cousins having the same terms as brother and sister, waiyautitsa has even fewer words than her brother to express cousinship.

when waiyautitsa is three or four years old she may be recognized as a girl not merely from her speech, but from her dress, from her cotton slip; at this age little boys wear trousers. but not for another three or four years, perhaps longer, will waiyautitsa wear over her cotton slip the characteristic pueblo woman’s dress,—the black blanket dress fastened on the left shoulder and under the right arm and hence called in zu?i, watone, meaning “across,” the broad belt woven of white, green and red cotton, the store-bought kerchief or square of silk (pitone) which, fastened in front, hangs across shoulders and back, and the small foot, thick leg moccasins which cover ankle and calf in an envelope of fold upon fold of buckskin. before waiyautitsa is eight or even six she may, however, when she goes out, cover her head and body with a black blanket or with the gay colored “shawl” similarly worn. and i have seen very little girls indeed wearing moccasins or the footless black stockings zu?i women also wear, or “dressing up” in a pitone, that purely ornamental article of159 dress without which no zu?i woman would venture outdoors. without her pitone she would feel naked, she says, and any man would be at liberty to speak disrespectfully to her. when waiyautitsa is about five, her hair, before this worn, like the boys, in a short cut, is let grow into a little tail on the nape of her neck. in course of time her pigtail will be turned up and tied with a “hair belt” of white, green and red cloth. from ear to ear her front hair will be banged to the end of her nose, the bang drawn sidewise above the forehead except at such times in ceremonials when it is let fall forward to conceal the upper part of the face.

this hair arrangement serves in ceremonials as a kind of mask, as you may see in the frontispiece picture of the headdress worn in the thlahawe, a woman’s corn dance. a mask proper, that quasi fetich which has so important a place in pueblo ceremonialism, waiyautitsa will in all probability never wear. unlike her brother, waiyautitsa will not be initiated in childhood into the kachina society, and consequently she will not join one of the six sacred clubhouses or estufas which supply personators for the kachinas or masked dancers. not that female personages do not figure in these ceremonials, but as was the rule on the elizabethan stage, women are impersonated by men.

to this exclusion of girls from the kachina society and from participating in the masked dances there are a few exceptions. to-day three women belong to the kachina society. they were taken into it not in childhood, but in later life and, it is said, for one of the same reasons women as well as men are taken into the other societies of zu?i. cured by ceremonial whipping of the bad effects of nightmare or of some other ailment, they were “given” to the estufa credited through one of its members with the cure. of the three women members only one is said to dance, and she is accounted mannish, katsotse, girl-man, a tomboy.

waiyautitsa will likely not be initiated into the kotikyane, but she is quite likely to be initiated into another society,—into the great-fire-brand or little fire-brand, or bedbug or ant or wood society, into any one of the thirteen zu?i societies except three, the bow priesthood or society of warriors, of warriors who have taken a scalp, or the hunter society or the cactus society, a society that cures arrow or gun-shot wounds. as women do not hunt or go to war, from mem160bership in these groups they are excluded or, better say, precluded. as we shall see later, affiliation by sex is, in ceremonial affairs, along the lines of customary occupation.

if waiyautitsa falls sick and is cured by a medicine man of the medicine order of a society she must be “given” either to the family of the medicine man or to his society. initiated she may not be, however, for a long time afterwards, perhaps for years. initiations take place in the winter when school is in session, the school either of the indian bureau or of the dutch reformed church, and for that reason, it is said, initiations may be postponed until past school age. despite the schools, i may say, i have met but two zu?i women who speak english with any fluency. one woman is a member of the snake-medicine society, into which she was initiated after convalescence from measles, a decimating disease at zu?i, to be accounted for only through witchcraft. the other woman was accounted the solitary convert of the dutch reformed church mission in zu?i until six or seven years ago she joined the wood society because as a child she had been cured by them of smallpox.

after initiation, the women, like the men of a society, offer prayer sticks each moon, observing continence for four days thereafter, and they join in the four-day retreat in the ceremonial house of the society preliminary to an initiation. unlike the men, however, the women do not spend the entire night, only the evening, in the society house, and, while there, they are listeners rather than narrators of the inexhaustible folk tales that are wont to be told at society gatherings. men are the custodians of the lore, secular as well as esoteric, of the tribe, just as men and not women are the musicians. the men are devoted singers, singing as they dance or singing as a choir for dancers, and singing as they go to or from work in the fields, or as they drive their horses to water in the river or to the corrals on the edges of the town. even grinding songs are sung on ceremonial occasions by men.

in the public appearances of the society, the women members figure but little. societies supply choirs and drummers and ceremonial road openers or leaders to the masked dancers and, during the great koko awia (kachina coming) or shalako ceremonial, to various groups of sacred personages. i have seen several dances in zu?i and one celebration of koko awia, and i have seen but one woman officiate 161 in public. as a daughter of the house which was entertaining the koyemshi or sacred clowns she was in attendance upon that group in the koko awia or advent, so to speak, of 1915.

if waiyautitsa belongs to a society, she will offer or plant the befeathered prayer sticks, which are so conspicuous a feature of pueblo religion, but, being a woman, waiyautitsa will not cut or dress the sticks. she will only grind the pigments and, perhaps, paint the sticks. nor as a woman would she offer the sticks on certain other ceremonial occasions when the men offer them. once a year, however, at the winter solstice ceremonial on which so much of zu?i ritualism pivots, waiyautitsa will be expected, even in infancy, to plant, planting for the “old ones,” i. e., the ancestors and for the moon, but not, like the men, for the sun or, unless a member of the kachina society, for the ancestral beings, the kachina.

at the conclusion of the winter solstice ceremonial, when certain sacred figures called kwelele go from house to house, the women carry embers around the walls of the house and throw them out on the kwelele. it is the rite of shuwaha, cleansing, exorcism. there are a number of other little rites peculiar to the women in zu?i ceremonialism. through them, and through a number of rites they share with the men, through provisions for supplying food in the estufa to the sacred personators or for entertaining them at home or making them presents, women have an integral part in zu?i ceremonialism. in what we may call the ceremonial management, however, they appear to have little or no part.

even when women are initiated into the kachina society, or are associated with the ashiwanni or rain priests, their functions seem to be primarily of an economic or housekeeping order. the women members of the rain priesthoods have to offer food every day to the fetiches of these sacerdotal groups—to stones carved and uncarved, and to cotton-wrapped lengths of cane filled with “the seeds the people live by.” for the seed fetiches to be in any way disturbed in the houses to which they are attached, involves great danger to the people, and on a woman in the house, the woman member of the priesthood, falls the responsibility of guardianship or shelter. but even these positions of trust are no longer held by women—there are only six women ashiwanni among the fifteen priesthoods. the woman’s position among the paramount priesthood, the rain priesthood162 of the north, has been vacant now for many years—no suitable woman being willing, they say, to run the risks or be under the tabus of office. aside from this position of woman ashiwanni, women count for little or nothing in the theocracy of zu?i. they were and are associated with the men priests to do the work pertinent to women. in the case of the zu?i pantheon or its masked impersonations, the association is needed to satisfy or carry out, so to speak, zu?i standards or concepts of conjugality. the couple rather than the individual is the zu?i unit. sometimes, in ceremony or in myth, the couple may consist of two males.

there is one masked couple i have noted in particular at zu?i, the atoshle. two or three times during the winter our little waiyautitsa, together with other girls and very little boys, may expect to be frightened by the atoshle, the disciplinary masks who serve as bugaboos to children as well as a kind of sergeant-at-arms, the male atoshle at least, for adults. if the children meet the old man and his old woman in the street, they run away helter-skelter. if the dreadful couple visits a child indoors, sent for perhaps by a parent, the child is indeed badly frightened. i suppose that waiyautitsa is six or seven years old when one day, as an incident of some dance, the atoshle “come out” and come to her house. the old woman atoshle carries a deep basket on her back in which to carry off naughty children and in her hand a crook to catch them by the ankle. with the crook she pulls waiyautitsa over to the grinding stones in the corner of the room, telling her that now she is getting old enough to help her mother about the house, to look after the baby and, before so very long, to grind. she must mind her mother and be a good girl. i once saw a little girl so terrified by such admonition that she began to whimper, hiding her head in her mother’s lap until the atoshle was sprinkled with the sacred meal and left the house to perform elsewhere his role of parent’s assistant.

whether from fear, from supernatural fear or fear of being talked about as any zu?i woman who rests or idles is talked about, or whether from example, more from the latter no doubt than from the former, waiyautitsa is certainly a “good girl,” a gentle little creature, and very docile. sometimes she plays lively games with her “sisters” next door like the game of bear at the spring. a spiral is traced on 163 the ground and at the center is placed a bowl of water to represent a spring. the girls follow the spiral to get water for their little turkeys which, they sing, are dying of thirst. then the “bear” rushes out from the spring and gives chase. but for the most part the little girls play quietly at house. in this way and in imitating at home her industrious mother or aunt, or her even more industrious grandmother or great-aunt, waiyautitsa learns to do all the household tasks of women. she learns to grind the corn on the stone metate—that back-hardening labor of the pueblo woman—and to prepare and cook the meal in a number of ways in an outside oven or on the american stove or on the flat slab on which hewe or wafer bread is spread. for the ever cheery family meal she sets out the coffee-pot, the hewe or tortilla, and the bowls of chile and of mutton stew on the earthen floor she is forever sweeping up with her little homemade brush or with an american broom. (a zu?i house is kept very clean and amazingly neat and orderly.)

and waiyautitsa becomes very thrifty—not only naturally but supernaturally. she will not sell corn out of the house without keeping back a few grains in order that the corn may return—in zu?i thought the whole follows a part. and she will keep a lump of salt in the corn storeroom and another in the bread bowl—when salt is dug out, the hole soon refills, and this virtue of replacing itself the salt is expected to impart to the corn. there are other respects, too, in which waiyautitsa will learn how to facilitate the economy. she will sprinkle the melon seeds for planting, with sweetened water—melons should be sweet. seed wheat she will sprinkle with a white clay to make the crop white, and with a plant called k’owa so that wheat dough will pull well. seed corn will be sprinkled with water that the crop may be well rained on.

from some kinswoman who is a specially good potter, waiyautitsa may have learned to coil and paint and fire the bowls as well as the cook pots and water jars the household needs. she fetches in wood from the woodpile and now and again she may be seen chopping the pine or cedar logs the men of the household have brought in on donkey or in wagon. she fetches water from one of the modern wells of the town, carrying it in a jar on her head and walking in the slow and springless gait always characteristic of pueblo women. 164 perhaps that gait, so ponderous and so different from the gait of the men, is the result of incessant industry, a kind of unconscious self-protective device against “speeding up.”

waiyautitsa will learn to work outdoors as well as in. she will help her mother in keeping one of the small vegetable gardens near the town—the men cultivate the outlying fields of corn and wheat (and the men and boys herd the sheep which make the zu?i prosperous), and waiyautitsa will help her household thresh their wheat crop, in the morning preparing dinner for the workers, for relatives from other households as well as from her own, in the afternoon joining the threshers as the men drive horses or mules around the circular threshing floor and the women and girls pitchfork the wheat and brush away the chaff and winnow the grain in baskets. waiyautitsa will also learn to make adobe blocks and to plaster with her bare hand or with a rabbit-skin glove the adobe walls of her mother’s house, inside and out. pueblo men are the carpenters of a house, but the women are always the plasterers, and waiyautitsa will have to be a very old woman indeed to think she is too old to plaster. on my last visit to zu?i i saw a woman seventy, or not much under, spending part of an afternoon on her knees plastering the chinks of a door newly cut between two rooms.

the house she plasters belongs, or will in time belong, to waiyautitsa. zu?i women own their houses and their gardens or, perhaps it is better to say, gardens and houses belong to the family through the women. at marriage a girl does not leave home; her husband joins her household. he stays in it, too—only as long as he is welcome. if he is lazy, if he fails to bring in wood, if he fails to contribute the produce of his fields, or if some one else for some other reason is preferred, his wife expects him to leave her household. he does not wait to be told twice. “the zu?i separate whenever they quarrel or get tired of each other,” a critical acoma moralist once said to me. the monogamy of zu?i is, to be sure, rather brittle. in separation the children stay with the mother.

children belong to their mother’s clan. they have affiliations, however, as we shall see, with the clan of their father. if the mother of waiyautitsa is a badger, let us say, and her father a turkey, waiyautitsa will be a badger and “the child of the turkey.” she can not marry a turkey clansman nor, of course, a badger. did 165 she show any partiality for a clansman, an almost incredible thing, she would be told she was just like a dog or a burro.

these exogamous restrictions aside, and the like restrictions that may arise in special ways between the household of waiyautitsa and other households, waiyautitsa would be given freedom of choice in marrying. even if her household did not like her man, and her parents had told her not “to talk to” him, zu?i for courting, she and he could go to live with some kinswoman. no one, related or unrelated, would refuse to take them in. nobody may be turned from the door. nor would a girl whose child was the offspring of a chance encounter be turned out by her people or slighted. the illegitimate child is not discriminated against at zu?i.

casual relationships occur at zu?i, but they are not commercialized, there is no prostitution. nor is there any lifelong celibacy. as for courtship, very little of it can there be—at least before intimacy either in the more transient or more permanent forms of mating,—the separation outside of the household of boys and girls of various ages is so thorough. “but what if a little girl wanted to play with boys?” i once asked. “they would laugh at her and say she was too crazy about boys.” “crazy” at zu?i, as quite generally among indians, means passionate. (girls at zu?i are warned away from ceremonial trespass by the threat of becoming “crazy.”)

the young men and girls do, to be sure, have non-ceremonial dances together, and in preparing for them there are opportunities for personal acquaintance. i saw one of these dances not long ago. it was a comanche dance. there were a choir of about a dozen youths including the drummer, four girl dancers heavily be-ringed and be-necklaced, the pattern of whose dance, two by two or in line, was very regular, and a youth who executed in front of them or around them an animated and very beautiful pas seul. after dancing outside in the plaza, they all went into the “saint’s house” to dance for her “because they like her”—a survival no doubt of the custom of dancing in the catholic church observed by the indians in mexico and not long since quite generally in new mexico.

but it is on the twilight trip to the well, the conventional zu?i hour of courtship, that waiyautitsa will be approached by suitors. muffled in his black blanket the youth may step out from the corner where he has been lurking and put his hand on the girl’s arm. if 166 she will have none of him, she may avert her head and hasten on to overtake the woman in front, but if she fancies the fellow, she will pause, if but for a moment or two, to talk. it is a brief encounter and, with somebody in front and perhaps another girl coming up behind, it is far from private; still after waiyautitsa has had a few such meetings, “two or four,” she is likely to invite the young man to join her household. at first, for a few days, he will stay in the common room, in the room where all sleep (sleeping and dressing, let me say, with the utmost modesty), he will stay only at night, leaving before dawn, “staying still” his shyness is called. then he will begin to eat his meals with the household. there is, you see, no wedding ceremonial and a man slips as easily as he can into the life of his wife’s household.

waiyautitsa will pay a formal visit on her bridegroom’s people, taking his mother a basket of corn meal. to waiyautitsa herself her young man will have given a present of cloth for a dress, or a buckskin for the moccasins he will make for her. hides are a product of the chase, of cattle raising (cowhide is used to sole moccasins), or of trade, men’s occupations, and so moccasins of both women and men are made by men. women make their own dresses, although, formerly, before weaving went out of fashion at zu?i, it is likely that men were the weavers, just as they are to-day among the hopi from whom the men of zu?i get cloth for their ceremonial kilts and blankets, and for the dresses of the women. even to-day at zu?i men may make up their own garments from store-bought goods and it is not unusual to see a man sitting to a sewing machine.

a man may use cloth or thread for other than economic reasons. in case a girl jilts him he will catch her out some night and take a bit from her belt to fasten to a tree on a windy mesa top. as the wind wears away the thread, the woman will sicken and perhaps in two or three years die. a woman who is deserted may take soil from the man’s footprints and put it where she sleeps. at night he will think of her and come back—“even if the other woman is better looking.” apprehensive of desertion a woman may put a lock of hair from the man in her house wall or, the better to attach him to her, she may wear it over her heart. women and men alike may buy love charms from the ne’wekwe, a curing society, potent in magic, black or white. there is a song, too, which men and women167 may sing “in their heart” to charm the opposite sex. and there is a song which a girl may sing to the corn as she rubs the yellow meal on her face before going out. “help me,” is the substance of it, “i am going to the plaza. make me look pretty.” rarely do our girls pray, i suppose, when they powder their noses.

courtship past for the time being, courtship by magic or otherwise, waiyautitsa is now, let us say, an expectant mother. her household duties continue to be about the same, but certain precautions, if she inclines to be very circumspect, she does take. she will not test the heat of her oven by sprinkling it in the usual way with bran, for if she does, her child, she has heard, may be born with a skin eruption. nor will she look at a corpse or help dress a dead animal lest her child be born dead or disfigured. she has heard that, even as a little girl if she ate the whitish leaf of the corn husk, her child would be an albino. if her husband eats this during the pregnancy, the result would be the same. on her husband fall a number of other pregnancy tabus, perhaps as many as fall on her, if not more. if he hunts and maims an animal, the child will be similarly maimed—deformed or perhaps blind. if he joins in a masked dance, the child may have some mask-suggested misshape or some eruption like the paint on the mask. if he sings a great deal, the child will be a cry-baby. the habit of thinking in terms of sympathetic magic or of reasoning by analogy which is even more conspicuous at zu?i than, let us say, at new york, is particularly evident in pregnancy or birth practises or tabus.

perhaps waiyautitsa has wished to determine the sex of the child. in that case she may have made a pilgrimage with a rain priest to corn mesa to plant a prayer stick which has to be cut and painted in one way for a boy, in another way for a girl. (throughout the southwest blue or turquoise is associated with maleness, and yellow with femaleness.) wanting a girl—and girls are wanted in zu?i quite as much as boys, if not more—waiyautitsa need not make the trip to the mesa, instead her husband may bring her to wear in her belt scrapings from a stone in a phallic shrine near the mesa. when labor sets in and the pains are slight, indicating, women think, a girl, waiyautitsa may be told by her mother, “don’t sleep, or you will have a boy.” a nap during labor effects a change of sex. when the child is about to be born, waiyautitsa is careful, too, if she wants a girl, 168 to see that the custom of sending the men out of the house at this time is strictly observed.

after the birth, waiyautitsa will lie in for several days, four, eight, ten or twelve, according to the custom of her family. whatever the custom, if she does not observe it, she runs the risk of “drying up” and dying. she lies on a bed of sand heated by hot stones, and upon her abdomen is placed a hot stone. thus is she “cooked,” people say, and creatures whose mothers are not thus treated are called uncooked, raw—they are the animals, the gods, whites. to be “cooked” seems to be tantamount in zu?i to being human.

it is the duty of waiyautitsa’s mother-in-law, the child’s paternal grandmother, to look after mother and child during the confinement, and at its close to carry the child outdoors at dawn and present him or her to the sun. had waiyautitsa lost children, she might have invited a propitious friend, some woman who had had many children and lost none, to attend the birth and be the first to pick up the child and blow into his mouth. in these circumstances the woman’s husband would become the initiator of the child, if a boy, when the child was to be taken into the kachina society. generally the child’s father chooses some man from the house of his own kuku or paternal aunt to be the initiator or godfather, so to speak, of the child. ceremonial rites usually fall to the paternal relatives.

but the infant will receive attentions of a ritual or magical nature, likewise from his mother and her household. he is placed on a cradle board in which, near the position of his heart, a bit of turquoise is inlaid to preclude the cradle bringing any harm to its tenant. left alone, a baby runs great risk—some family ghost may come and hold him, causing him to die within four days. and so a quasi-fetichistic ear of corn, a double ear thought of as mother and child, is left alongside the baby as a protector. that the baby may teethe promptly, his gums may be rubbed by one who has been bitten by a snake—“snakes want to bite.” to make the child’s hair grow long and thick, his grandfather or uncle may puff the smoke of native tobacco on his head. that the child may not be afraid in the dark, water-soaked embers are rubbed over his heart the first time he is taken out at night—judging from what i have seen of zu?i children and adults a quite ineffectual method. that the child may keep169 well and walk early, hairs from a deer are burned, and the child held over the smoke—deer are never sick, and rapid is their gait. their hearing, too, is acute, so discharge from a deer’s ear will be put into the baby’s ear. that the child may talk well and with tongues, the tongue of a snared mocking bird may be cut out and held to the baby to lick. the bird will then be released in order that, as it regains its tongue and “talks,” the child will talk. a youth who speaks in addition to his native tongue keresan, english and spanish, has been pointed out to me as one who had licked mocking bird tongue.

waiyautitsa will give birth to three or four children, probably not more, and then, as she approaches middle age, we may suppose that she falls sick, and after being doctored unsuccessfully first by her old father who happens to be a well known medicine man of the great fire-brand society, and then by a medicine man from the ne’wekwe society whose practice is just the opposite, waiyautitsa dies. within a few hours elderly kinswomen of her father’s will come in and wash her hair and body, and at dawn sprinkle her face, first with water and then with meal. the deceased will be well dressed, and in a blanket donated by her father’s people she will be carried to the cemetery lying in front of the old church, a ruin from the days of the catholic establishment in zu?i. there to the north of the central wooden cross, i. e., on the north side of the cemetery, waiyautitsa will be buried. women are buried on the north side and men on the south.

waiyautitsa will be carried out and buried by her father and other men in the household. no women will go to the burial, nor will the widower. the widower, as soon as the corpse is taken outdoors, will be fetched by his women relatives to live at their house. there they straightway wash his hair—a performance inseparable in zu?i, as at other pueblos, from every time of crisis or ceremony. the hair of all the other members of waiyautitsa’s household will be washed at the end of four days by women relatives of her father. during this time, since the spirit of waiyautitsa is thought to linger about the home, the house door will be left open for her at night. the bowl used in washing her hair, and the implements used in digging her grave will also be left outdoors. her smaller and peculiarly personal possessions have been buried with her, and bulky170 things like bedding have been burned or taken to a special place down the river to be buried. the river flows to the lake sixty miles or so west of zu?i, where waiyautitsa’s spirit is also supposed to take its journey. there under the lake it abides, except when with other spirits it returns in the clouds to pour down upon zu?i fields the beneficent rain. people will say to a child, when they see a heavy cloud, “there goes your grandmother”; or they will quite seriously say to one another, “our grandfathers are coming.”

waiyautitsa’s children may go on living at home with their grandmother, waiyautitsa’s mother, or it may be that one of them is adopted by a maternal aunt or great-aunt or cousin. zu?i children, cherished possessions as they are, are always being adopted—even in the lifetime of their mother. adopted, a child—or an adult—will fit thoroughly into the ways of his adoptive household. it is the household as well as the clan which differentiates the zu?i family group from our individualistic type of family. the household changes quite readily, but, whatever its composition, it is an exceedingly integrated and responsible group.

however the children are distributed, it will be the older woman or women in the household who will control them. this household system is one that gives position and considerable authority to the elder women—until the women are too old, people say, to be of any use. (in spite of this irony, i have heard of but one old woman who was neglected by her household.) an older woman who is the female head of the household is greatly respected by her daughters and sons-in-law and grandchildren, as well as by the sons or brothers who continually visit the household and often, as temporary celibates, return to live in it.

the older woman is highly esteemed, but she is by no means the head of the household—unless she is widowed. wherever the household contributes to the ceremonial public life, her husband is paramount. in the non-ceremonial, economic life, too, he has equal, if not greater, authority. and in the general economy he more or less expects his wife to serve him and wait on him. this conjugal subordination is not apparent to any extent among the younger people; the younger husband and wife are too much drawn into the corporate household life. but as time passes and they in turn become the171 heads of the household, the man appears to be more given to staying at home, and more and more he takes control.

from this brief survey of the life of a woman at zu?i, in so far as it can be distinguished from the general life, we get the impression that the differentiation of the sexes follows lines of least resistance which start from a fairly fundamental division of labor. from being hunters and trappers men become herders of the domestic animals, drivers or riders. trade journeys and trips for wood or for the collecting of other natural resources are associated with men, and work on the things acquired is men’s work—men, for example, are wood cutters, and bead makers, whether the objects are for secular or sacerdotal use. analogously all work upon skins or feathers is work for men whether it leads to the manufacture of clothing or to communication with the supernaturals. again, as farmers, men are associated with that system of supernatural instrumentalism for fertility and weather control which constitutes in large part zu?i religion. in other words, the bulk of the ceremonial life, a system for the most part of rain rituals, is in the hands of the men. so is government. the secular officers are merely representatives of the priests. zu?i government is a theocracy in which women have little part. the house and housekeeping are associated with women. clay is the flesh of a female supernatural, and clay processes, brickmaking or laying or plastering, and pottery making are women’s work. there are indications in sacerdotal circles that painting is, or was thought of as, a feminine activity. corn, like clay, is the flesh of female supernaturals, and the corn is associated with women. even men corn growers are in duty bound to bring their product to their wife or mother. women or women impersonations figure in corn rituals. it is tempting to speculate that formerly, centuries since, women themselves were the corn growers. to-day, at any rate, the preparation of corn, as of other food, is women’s work. wherever food and its distribution figure in ceremonials, and there is a constant offering of food to the supernaturals, women figure. fetiches are attached to houses and in so far as providing for these fetiches is household work, it is women’s work and leads to the holding of sacerdotal office by women. the household rather than ties of blood is the basis of family life. the children of the household are more closely attached to172 the women than to the men. one expression of this attachment is seen in reckoning clan membership through the mother.

household work at zu?i as elsewhere is continuous. the women are always on the move. the work of the men, on the other hand, is intermittent. hunting, herding and farming are more or less seasonal activities and are more or less readily fitted into ceremonial pursuits, or rather, in their less urgent periods, take on ceremonial aspects. in the ceremonial life the arts find expression, and the men and not the women are, by and large, the artists of the tribe.

attached to the ceremonial life are the games of chance and the races that are played or run at certain seasons. here again the intermittent habit of work of the men, together with their comparative mobility, qualifies them as gamesters and runners to the exclusion more or less of the women. formerly, to be sure, the women played a pole and hoop game, and, given ceremonial exigency as among the hopi, the women no doubt would run races.

household work is confining. hunting, herding, trading lead to a comparatively mobile habit, a habit of mind or spirit which in the southwest, at least, is adapted to ceremonial pursuit; for pueblo indian ceremonialism thrives on foreign accretions, whether of myth or song or dance or design of mask or costume, or, within certain limits of assimilation, of psychological patterns of purpose or gratification.

to the point of view that the differentiation of the sexes at zu?i proceeds on the whole from the division of labor, the native custom of allowing a boy or man to become, as far as ways of living go, a girl or woman, gives color. towards adolescence, and sometimes in later life, it is permissible for a boy culturally to change sex. he puts on women’s dress, speaks like a woman, and behaves like a woman. this alteration is due to the fact that one takes readily to women’s work, one prefers it to men’s work. of one or another of the three men-women now at zu?i or of the men-women in other pueblos i have always been told that the person in question made the change because he wanted to work like a woman or because his household was short of women and needed a woman worker.

and yet among the hopi, where the economy is practically identical with the zu?i, there are no men-women; in this tribe the institution, it is said, was never established. this, like other customs, is 173 not merely a matter of economic adjustment; economic or psychologic propriety or consistency or predisposition may count, but of great importance also are the survival of traits from an earlier culture, and the acquiring of traits from the culture of neighboring peoples. were we to understand the interplay of all these factors in the life, shall we say, of waiyautitsa, we might be a long way towards understanding the principles of society, even other than that of zu?i.

elsie clews parsons