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.