Kachina dancers - Shalako - Zuni Pueblo New Mexico
©Patrick McDonnell 2021
Kachina dolls at the Museum of American Indians Washington DC
We ride West out of Albuqueque following the old trail of highway 66 crossing the dried out bed of the Rio Grande, only a trickle of water left by the irrigation, past the old volcanic fields of black tuffa, past Acome Pueblo perched on its mesa. The ride is long in the back of the van on the hard floor. My friend's dad is an Indian Agent, so we are to be guests of honor - really high school kids on a lark. Not knowing what to expect, yet excited by the unknown.
We arrive at Zuni pueblo just at sunset. The last rays of the sun light up Corn mountain. The pueblo is not that imposing. Not a Mesa Verdi, or oma, still it has an aura of ancientness that transports us into the past, as if we have hitched a ride in a time machine and not a Ford van. We ignore the history that has transpired here, the conflicts with the Spanish, the blood, the wars, the sins and omissions.
The winter New Mexico cerulean sky darkens to a dark indigo blue as stars appear and a chill fills the high mesa air, and we are glad we are dressed warmly. We wander the streets of the vilage, not knowing what to expect, my friend acts as a guide, a habitué of Indian dances. Our first encounter is with the mud heads, Koyemshi, dancers with round ugly head dresses, made of clay, like overturned pots. They make jokes that send the Indian audience into gales of laughter. Evidently much of what they say is obscene, but they are allowed this prerogative, as they represent children born from incestuous liaisons. They are the products of taboo, and can speak of taboos freely.
When we finally enter one of the new houses, we are greeted by the sight of the family fortune hanging on the walls; silver and jewelry decorated rafters. Turquoise of all colors, eagle feathers, leather goods. A table is laid out with food. Venison and corn, all free for the honored visitor, and Indian bread freshly cooked outside in the oven. A feast of thanksgiving, like the Arab, the Indian considers the guest is sacred, his house is your house, their generosity has no limits. The Zuni Indians smile at us, welcoming faces worn by the sun, wrinkled in the old, bright as a new button in the young.
In the middle of the floor is a deep pit, ten or twenty feet long and three feet deep. Soon we find out why it has been dug. The Kachina dancers arrive. The tall head dresses are four or more feet tall, some as tall as fourteen feet, they have to lean forward till they reach the dancing pit. The Kachinas are magnificently decorated, young warriors who dance all night and at dawn they will race against other Kachina dancers. Now they respond to the drumming and singing of the old medicine men. They hold bells which they shake, and they dance, light of foot even in heavy costumes and head pieces, as if the corn god has take over their bodies. They bless the house with their dance. Like Dervishes, they can not stop, nor show any strain.
How can I describe their presence? Godlike? Tall, with beaks that click open and shut, half man, half monster, animal; like the fabled Minotaur of Crete. They will dance all night, until dawn when they will race against each other. They represent spirits of nature. They are powerful.
In my High school class in Albuquerque I have Indian friends, Apache and Navaho,Hopi. I even date a Metis girl, Spanish with Indian blood, beautiful with her long shiny black hair and eyes. Her nose is hooked and her cheek bones high. They are shy, quiet, except when they play in sports. My dream is to be a long distance runner, so I try out for the cross country team; the best in the state. Foolish, why not try to play basket ball with Michael Jordan? The Indians run circles around me, and in the end, one of them slows down and lets me win and we all fall down laughing. They exchange curses and insults, calling each other's mothers whores and worse. Only friends can say these things. They have accepted me into their world - for a while.
But their world is not my white world, their world is the reservation. I remember this as I wander around the star lit Zuni streets to stumble on the darkened Mission church. The Church of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe sits abandoned. Closed, they tell me, because the priest has been run out, he tried to make them forgo the old gods, the old traditions. In the moon light, the church sits cold and forbidding, a reminder of the failure and success of the white man. The massacres, the Indian uprisings echo in the night, ghosts of the past. I don't hear them tonight, just the dogs barking and laughter. The stars are bright in the clear night air, they look so close, so hard and diamond sharp. I feel my soul drifting away, like the smoke from the pueblo houses, freeing itself form the base clay of my body, to fly away into the night. I feel at home.
©Patrick McDonnell 2021
Taos New Mexico
©Patrick McDonnell 2021
View of Rancho de Taos, Taos and Sangre de Christo Mountains and of my friend Marsha.
Time blended itself in my mind, like marbleized paper, first you drip colors
onto water, and then you stir them around, comb them into something new and beautiful. They put marble paper at the end and beginning pages of old books - there must be a name for them. End pages? Now my memories are like that, as I ride north from Albuquerque with my son, earlier it was with my friends and my mother. All these travels confuse me; my son is the same age as I was back then. We are going to Santa Fe and then mabye see the dances at the Pueblo, but I feel I have stepped onto a Hollywood movie lot, because the bare landscape I knew is now strewn with billboards solar powered and signs for Indian bingo, outlet stores, the detritus of American civilization. We stop at Camel rock, now barb wired off, to walk over discarded condoms, cans and clothing. In the gloaming it looks like the old rock, but the darkness hides the graffiti.
We take the back road to Taos, they advertise that it is cell phone free, and it is like I am 18 again, the same age as my son. It is strange as if I am reborn. The air is pure, the sky cobalt blue and my son and I are arguing about driving the way I used to with my mom. Deja vu. Soon the magic of the place works its charm and my son is amazed, hard to do in a teenage, and maybe he sees what I saw, feels what I felt.
My son tells me the Pueblo is different than what I depicted. He says looking around to both sides of the pueblo, "I didn't think it would be so big." To me it has shrunk, but I have traveled and aged, life makes things smaller. Maybe not the Grand Canyon. There are dark clouds over the Sangro de Christo mountains; blood of Christ Mountains. A flash of lightning, thunder and then they arrive, the dancers. We have taken refuge from the sun with a friendly Indian woman and her daughter. My father is one of the Shamans, she tells us and my son looks impressed. I have told him stories, but tried to not over awe him. What if he is disappointed, what if he thinks I am exaggerating? The same sentiments I had with my mother, who had come here when she was young and then dragged me to this old place. I had felt a strangeness, as if this was like Stone Hedge, some forces welled up from the ground and imbued it with an otherness that was hard to describe. Did my mother feel the power too? She told me she was descendant from a Cherokee chief, but was it a lie?
Sun is gone, in the sudden coolness, the corn dancers move around the plaza, people cannot take pictures; few talk, as this is a holy occasion. We have been or will go to San Juan Pueblo to see the Buffalo dancers the same day, but here in Taos, the past and the future are entwined. Rain drops fall on the dry dusty ground, and I smell the smell it makes; not like a green rain, but a starched thirsty rain, the ground sucks it in and then goes back to being dry. But underneath, the water goes on, down to the aquifer, a hidden treasure. In the dark mountains the Holy lake is hidden from white eyes as well, because some things have to be hidden to be understood.
We stop after Taos at a drive-in restaurant to order in the car, my son marvelling at the low rider cars, marvels at the looks and sounds of the Chicanos. This is my past, I want to tell him, so unlike what you have experienced and he wants to know it. He had surprised me, " I want to go with you to New Mexico," and my heart had jumped in my chest. I fear if he will find it humdrum? He listens to music on his walkman in the plane, trying not to be with me. You see the Kachina dolls in the airport store, they represent real dancers I tell him with too much eagerness embarrassing him, and when he saw real ones he understood. When he met my old friends and teachers, again, a light shown in his eyes. So this is where my father comes from - these are the people who formed him, taught him and loved him. Even when the creepy dentist tries to manipulate me, I have the force to say no, and confound him (now I recognize the pattern of narcissism, they use you and then abuse you). Afterwards my son asks me why and I explain how some people just want to use you and you have to keep up your guard, but not always, because there are good people out there. Only it is so hard to tell who is who.
My son and I follow an old man in the Hilton who has a big bosomed lass on his arm; they are attending a rich man's seminar - and we laugh at them behind our hands. We go swimming in the hotel pool; dry air - hot water, mixed memories floating by. I am taken for someone else, important, then I correct him and he walks away miffed. My son sees what I have been telling him all along about Narcissists.
We can't go back to the past, a strange land some writer once described, but we can return to the same places and they have changed just as we have changed and will never be the same again, but it recalls some distant memory that warms us in our old age. Our children take our places and make their own mistakes and lead their own lives and sometimes we can bridge that divide, like the day at the Taos pueblo, when the past and present fused for a few hours.
NO MAN EVER STEPS IN THE SAME RIVER TWICE
HERACLITUS
