Zuni Dance Ceremonies

I think I mentioned in an earlier post that the Zuni tribe has really impressively maintained their traditions. I’m not sure what their religious calendar is based on, but the dates of their dances don’t make much sense to outsiders, and are often announced to the Zunis themselves with little advance notice. Their biggest annual celebration is usually held sometime in December, but I was lucky to catch some of the more minor events in April. During my month there, I attended 3 different religious dances from 2 different dance cycles. The three were relatively similar, but each was a bit different.

The afternoon dances are held in the original pueblo (Zunis have lived in this same pueblo for hundreds of years, except for a brief 20-ish year period in the 1680s during the Pueblo Revolt when they fled from the Spanish and stayed on top of Dowa Yolanne—Thunder Mountain—their sacred mountain mesa 5 miles away). In the center of the pueblo is a small plaza (smaller than a basketball court) that is formed between several original stone houses. To watch the dances, some chairs are set up on the edge of the plaza, but the majority of the observers sit inside the houses and watch out the windows, or sit on top of the flat roofs of the houses to look down into the plaza. The Zunis call this place in their old village the “anthill” or the “middle ground,” and believe it is related by the Zuni river, which flows (well just trickles nowadays) from the middle ground eventually into the Colorado River and into the Grand Canyon, to the “middle ground” where they emerged from the underworld in their creation story.

Although the society considers itself matriarchal, where the women hold the power and own the homes and land (although suspiciously domestic violence against women is a big problem here), only men participate in religious activities, only men enter the kivas (places for religious ritual), and only men dance. There would be anywhere from 20 to 40 dancers, 1 or 2 dance leaders distinguished by different dress, a drummer, and 8-10 mudheads. The drummer kept a basic beat, and the dancers moved in a slowly snaking circle-line stomping their feet to the rhythm. In the second cycle there were about 10 people dressed with long black wigs with bangs and low ponytails that I think were maybe supposed to be women.

The costumes were very interesting, and this was the most obvious thing that differed between the two cycles. They wore wooden masks painted turquoise with white and black facial features, and each person had a slightly different mask. The masks were attached to huge headdresses that covered the whole head and were made of pine boughs (like what you make wreaths out of at Christmas time) with a few feathers sticking out. They also had on lots of turquoise jewelry, like long necklaces with big chunks of turquoise, bracelets, and rings (sometimes 3-5 rings/hand). They wore white moccasin boots that came up to mid-calf, and had bells on their boots or around their legs that added to the drum beat as they danced. In the second cycle they had these flat discs pinned to the back of their necks with 3-4 long ribbons hanging down their back that reminded me of mums (you know from high school homecoming) and beaded leather pouches over their shoulders that hung down on their hips.

In the second cycle each dancer was holding an ear of corn, and the dance leader had cornmeal that he was sprinkling on the ground and on the mudheads’ heads. This made me think it might have been a harvest dance, but unfortunately I really have no idea what the religious meaning and purpose behind the dances was.

The pattern of the dances seemed to be the same. There is some dancing, interrupted by a mudhead intermission, and finally some wrap-up dancing. The dances start anywhere from 3 to 5 in the afternoon and wind down around sunset. The “mudheads” are a select group of around 8 men who are topless with long wool blankets wrapped around their waists for bottoms. They rub mud on their chests and backs as a kind of paint, and they wear these ugly masks that cover their whole heads and look kind of like aliens from Mars and kind of like pigs with their noses squashed in. Apparently they are supposed to be like town idiots, and they serve as a warning of what can happen with inbreeding. (I’m not sure if that inbreeding part is true, that’s just what I heard.) They sort of use their comic relief to keep the village in line—they make fun of tribal leaders and issues that they don’t think are going well, and they also call out children who’ve been bad. They have this comic relief intermission in the middle of the dances where they do little skits. Everything’s in Zuni (almost every Zuni has a functional ability to speak and understand the Zuni language), so I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but it usually made the audience laugh. One of their skits involved dividing into 2 groups and playing a red rover-type game where they threw a ball and if they hit someone from the other team, that person had to switch to the other side, but their team could reclaim them by hitting them with the ball while they were crossing the plaza, and once or twice they just kept hitting this one guy and making him run back and forth and back and forth while everyone laughed. Most of the things they act out are done purposefully clumsily.

There are also night dances, usually on weekends, (which I didn’t get to see) which are held inside people’s homes. The people gather outside the house and watch the dances through the windows.

Crownpoint Navajo Rug Auction

Yes that's right: a RUG auction. A special monthly event just for people interested in buying rugs. Now you may not realize (as I had no idea before coming out here) that Navajo hand-woven rugs are apparently world-renowned. Some of the weave is so tight that they're practically waterproof. Now rug is a loose term, because you may not want to use something the size of a bathmat as an actual bathmat when it cost you $300+. Larger ones big enough to actually fill a living room floor are going for thousands.

Anyway I drove up to Crownpoint Elementary School for the rug auction. It was way more entertaining than expected. Hilarious in fact.

Some more background: No Navajos are actually buying rugs. I don't think there was one minority member in the whole bidding group. The average age of the bidders was about 70. I was definitely the youngest person there. Also if you get there early you get to actually see the rugs up close. While I looked at them and thought some were pretty and some not so much to my taste, other obviously serious old-timers were pawing through them and making sweeping comments about the value (or usually the lack thereof) of the rugs based on the artist, the pattern, or who knows what other mysterious qualities a proper Navajo rug must possess to be collector-worthy. I heard that some of the people are rug dealers from Santa Fe.

Finally after much anticipation and some Navajo tacos, the bidding began. The best part was that the auctioneers were 2 60-something year-old white cowboys. They were wearing their cowboy hats and boots and speaking with an authentic southern drawl. The bidding also went on in this almost unintelligible 90-mile-per-hour auction language, but was occasionally slowed and punctuated by comments by one or the other of the cowboys that began with "looky there," "man alive," and "I'll be darned" ... followed by "that's a real nice rug," or "that's a pretty little rug," at which point I sometimes had to bite my lip to keep from laughing out loud. And I'm from Texas.

Goodbye South America, Hello American Southwest

I'm not sure if I mentioned this in my last post, but that trip to Atacama was the last thing I did in Chile before I came back to the United States for (?) good. I'm now halfway through a one-month rotation at Zuni Indian Hospital in Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico, population 10,350 (only around 1,000 non-Zunis). The hospital is part of Indian Health Services, and is on the Zuni Reservation. Sorry for the delayed update, but I have no internet at home and working for IHS means that my computers at work are government computers, so all interesting sites, including my blog, are blocked.

A little about where I am: Zuni is about an hour south of Gallup, New Mexico (which is on I-40), and is just 15 miles from the Arizona border. It's beautiful red rock mesas with tons of running, biking, and hiking, but it is pretty much the middle of nowhere. The hospital has about 15 inpatient beds (which usually are mostly empty), OB delivery capacity, an ER, and an outpatient clinic. Anything surgical or complex gets taken by ambulance or plane to a bigger center. There are 14 doctors, mostly family practitioners who do everything from delivering babies, pediatric clinic visits with kids, taking care of people with chronic diseases in clinic, to urgent care/ER and admitting and taking care of hospitalized inpatients.

Zunis are Pueblo Indians, and the old plaza in town is the oldest continuously-inhabited place in the United States. Almost everyone still speaks Zuni as a first or close-second language, the majority live on the reservation, and they very seriously maintain their ancient religious and cultural beliefs and practices.

A few nice statistics I found on the Zuni tribe to give you a snapshot of the community I'm treating in the hospital (The wife of one of the former physicians, an epidemiologist, did all these stats):
-They have relatively high birth rates and they die young, so overall the population is young. 1/2 are age 25 or under.
-The death rate is 15% higher in Zuni than the US.
-The average age at death is 60 years.
-68% completed high school, 11% college, and 1.1% a graduate degree.
-Median household income $22,000
-41.7% families have incomes below the federal poverty level.
-Unemployment was 12% in 2003 (probably more post-financial crisis)
-Health
--The most common chronic conditions:
---High blood pressure (28% of the population)
---High cholesterol (21%)
---Diabetes (20% of Zunis, but 64% over the age of 60!)
And super high rates of complication from diabetes--3.2% of diabetics have had a foot or leg amputated, 8.7% are on kidney dialysis, and an additional 36.5% have chronic kidney disease on their way to dialysis
---Past or current alcohol abuse (20% of people, and 2x as many women as men!)
--Overweight/obesity is high among both children & adults compared to the rest of the U.S.:
---Adults 37% obese, 45% overweight, only 14% healthy weight
---Children 31% obese, 22% overweight
--Leading causes of death:
---20% alcohol-related (10 times the national average)
---16% cancer (most colorectal) (this makes up 23% of US deaths)
---14% diabetes (6 times the national average)
---13% injuries (including homicide, suicide, and alcohol-related accidents) (US total is just 4.4%)
---10% cardiovascular disease (US has 29%: Half the national average for heart disease and just 1/4 the national average for stroke)
---4% kidney failure
--20% of births are to teenage mothers (2 times the national teen pregnancy rate) ---For pregnant girls ages 16-19, 33% of the fathers of their babies were over 40 years old!!
--The health stats they do have going for them:
---Higher rates of breastfeeding than national average
---Lower rates of smoking

So that's where I am and what I'm dealing with in the hospital. I'll update when I return to internet again. Meantime I'm going to hit the slopes in Colorado for some final spring skiing tomorrow!