Zuni Erotic

The Zuni call themselves A:shiwi, and what marks them off from every neighbor is the language. Shiwi'ma is an isolate: not Keresan like Acoma, not Tanoan like the Rio Grande pueblos, not Uto-Aztecan like Hopi, not Athabaskan like the Navajo next door. Nobody has convincingly tied it to anything else, and unlike most Native languages in the United States it is still largely passed to children at home. Roughly ten thousand Zuni live in and around the Pueblo of Zuni in western New Mexico, one town on the Zuni River that they call Halona Idiwan'a, the Middle Place, the spot their emergence story says they searched for after climbing out of the underworlds. Summer farming villages at Ojo Caliente, Pescado and Nutria, plus trust lands across the Arizona line, round out the homeland.

Contact came early and badly. Hawikuh, one of six or seven Zuni towns then, is where Estevanico died in 1539 and where Coronado attacked in 1540 chasing the rumor of Cíbola. During the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 the Zuni withdrew onto Dowa Yalanne, the mesa over the valley, and afterward consolidated into the single pueblo that exists today. Distance from Santa Fe spared them the tighter Spanish grip that reshaped the eastern pueblos, and the result is a religious life outsiders still see only at the edges. Society is matrilineal, with houses and clan membership passing through women, while the ceremonial year runs through six kiva groups, rain priesthoods, medicine societies and a kachina society into which every boy is initiated. It peaks at Shalako in late November or early December, when towering beaked figures enter the village at dusk to bless newly built houses, escorted by the Koyemshi clowns. No photographs, no sketches, no recordings: the tribe enforces this.

Some things outsiders rarely know. The Zuni forced museums to return carved Ahayu:da war god figures from 1978 onward, years before federal repatriation law existed, and they run the country's first tribal eagle aviary for ceremonial feathers. The pueblo is a town of artists: turquoise inlay and needlepoint jewelry, and the small carved stone animals that grew out of hunting medicine, are a main source of income for most households. Zuni Salt Lake to the south, home of the Salt Mother, was long neutral ground where rival peoples gathered salt in peace, and the tribe spent a decade fighting off a coal mine they feared would drain it. And the lhamana, a recognized role for men who lived and worked as women, had its most famous holder in We'wha, the weaver who went to Washington in 1886 and was received by President Cleveland.