Nancy Yaw Davis

The Zuni Enigma

An excerpt

The first Europeans to arrive in Zuni territory were Spaniards in search of "Seven Cities of Cibola" reported to be rich in gold and silver. The first, in 1539, was a black scout from Morocco named Esteban, who came in advance of Fray Marcos de Niza. Esteban offended the Zuni and was promptly killed; Fray Marcos hastened a quick retreat without actually entering any of the villages. The next year an expedition with several hundred armored horsemen under the command of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado explored the Zuni area and other pueblos, but withdrew in frustration in 1541 because no gold had been discovered. Six major villages were occupied at that time.

Four decades later, Spaniards returned to establish mission stations among the Pueblo groups. The first Zuni mission was begun in 1629 at Hawikuh, one of the six named Zuni communities, and another church was added at Halona in 1632. In that same year two priests were killed by the Zunis of Hawikuh, temporarily halting Catholic efforts. Missionary activity may have begun again about 1660 at Hawikuh, but this time it was the Apaches who killed a priest.

By 1680, Spanish exploitation, including attacks on religion, slavery, floggings, and hangings, became intolerable, and the Zuni joined the Pueblo revolt led by Popé, a Tewa Indian from the pueblo of San Juan to the east. All the pueblos joined the effort; missions were burned, priests killed, and the Spaniards expelled.

The Zuni, who had occupied six villages until 1680, retreated to the top of Corn Mountain (Dowa Yalanne) during the revolt. By 1692, when Spanish control was reestablished, the Zuni had consolidated into one community at Itiwanna, the true middle, also called Halona, the present location. They had been especially resistant to Spanish efforts at Christianization and kept their religion viable throughout this tumultuous period.

Information is sketchy about mission activity after 1703, but we know that three Spanish exiles were killed during this early period by the Zuni. When Mexico threw off Spanish control in 1821, all the Spanish troops and missions packed up and left. Then the pueblos became exposed to new risks: raids by Navahos, Apaches, Comanches, and other Plains tribes.

The American Period: 1846 to 1950

The Zuni had maintained their self-sufficiency and religious continuity for three centuries, despite Spanish, Navaho, and Mexican intrusion; very few converted to Catholicism. When the American period began in 1846, after the Mexican War, new boundaries were drawn; New Mexico became a territory of the United States in 1848. The next hundred years brought about rapid cultural changes and challenges as external contact intensified and accelerated.

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a stream of expeditions, missionaries, ethnologists, traders, and government officials arrived. Although few stayed, the disruption was significant: Epidemics lowered the population, and deep political factions developed over religious matters.

Until 1934, the Zuni political system was directed by the religious leaders—rain priests, kiva officials, and the sun chief, who appointed the governor. But the federal Indian Reorganization Act called for an elected council. A new tribal council was duly elected and installed by the established council of priests, and today religious leaders continue to be influential in secular decisions and serve as special advisors.

World War II became a turning point in Zuni history, when over two hundred Zuni men left the pueblo for various military services. When they returned as veterans, they had a difficult time reentering the pueblo's social and religious structure, but by 1950 their influence in politics was shaping new developments in the economy, education, and community services. Women in this matrilineal but conservative tribe received the right to vote in 1965.

American Southwest-Japan Parallels

Since the major theory here is that Japanese influence was one of many contacts in the Southwest, a brief comparative chronology will help align events in the two regions. Just as the Zuni area has a history of a flow of different peoples and ideas arriving from various directions and sources, the peoples and cultures of Japan also experienced a flow of influences introduced from Korea, China, and Southeast Asia.

Japan, like the American Southwest, has a prehistory that includes a paleolithic period, pottery, pithouses, agriculture, irrigation, and new peoples and influences arriving from the south and west. The long Jomon period (10,000-300 B.C.) yields evidence of the earliest pottery in the world, followed by the Yayoi period (300 B.C.-A.D. 300), during which a new population from the west brought rice agriculture, irrigation, and bronze to the islands. Next, another group arrived with the horse, initiating the Kofun (Yamato) period (A.D. 300-710) and the beginning formation of the state. Chinese influences came in small doses for a while, and then in intensive blocks during the Nara period (710-793). The formation of the state of Japan continued through the Heian period (794-1184), about the same time that the Anasazi civilization developed in the American Southwest. The Heian period ended with a military takeover about the time the Anasazi civilization collapsed.

Just as southwestern North America experienced an influx of ideas from Mesoamerica, including the introduction of corn, squash, and beans, so Japan was introduced to rice and terracing from sources to its own south and west. And, in a further parallel, Japan's history was linked periodically with China's, just as the Southwest was sporadically in touch with successive civilizations in Mesoamerica. These parallels are mentioned simply to provide a framework for larger considerations of shared events common throughout the world: Innovations and people have forever moved about in prehistoric times as well as today.

Documented historic events also reveal similarities. In 1542, three years after the Spaniards began exploring the Southwest, the Portuguese reached Japan. Catholic missionary efforts began in 1549 with St. Francis Xavier, but were prohibited by 1629. The emperor of Japan declared an edict in 1635, forbidding foreign influences and establishing a period of isolation that lasted until 1868, the end of the Tokugawa period and the beginning of the Meiji.

Like the Japanese, and of course many other cultures of the world, the Zuni varied in their response to outside influences: sometimes taking in new people and ideas, as described in their migration story in the next chapter, and at other times shutting them out, which is what they did to the Spanish and the Navaho. The Japanese first accepted the Portuguese and the Catholics in the sixteenth century, then excluded them in the seventeenth century. Japan was by size and by isolation in a stronger position than Zuni to impose the edict of 1635 to keep foreigners out of Japan. But the Zuni tried through their participation in the 1680 revolt, and have managed ever since to maintain their religion.

Shinto leadership in Japan first confronted China and Buddhism in the sixth to eighth centuries. Sometimes the Chinese embassies won converts and the Japanese sent nobility to be educated and to study Buddhism in China, sometimes going as far away as Tibet; at other times local dynasties fought back and reasserted their power. In Japan, this history of relationships with others is partly documented in written records, set down in a combination of Chinese characters called kanji and two systems of symbols, hiragana and katakana, derived from Chinese characters but applied in a uniquely Japanese manner. Zuni history depended on memorized narrative mastered for accuracy and repeated periodically throughout the year.

Thus, the colorful contemporary Pueblo of Zuni is of composite origin; different peoples arrived at various times over a long period. The Native Americans who live there now account for their diverse clans by a long migration story about their search for the middle of the world. I believe Japanese pilgrims provided one source among many that shaped the unusual characteristics of Zuni.