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But now a small Pueblo form had emerged from obscurity into our circle of brightness. (One person awake anyhow.) Its head and shoulders were hidden in woolly folds. It held into the flashlight a silver object, set with turquoises.

"Will you buy? I—me needs pants for school."

We bought and proffered a sandwich. In return, we were presented after a scurry in the direction of the wall, with a net bag embroidered in red wool and full of apples: evidently straight off the school Christmas tree. The child opined "pretty soon Father come and we have mass." That was encouraging. Meanwhile it was bitter cold. We would venture into the pueblo.

San Felipe has the name of being the most closed and reactionary to white influence of the Pueblo villages, and the Indians' friends had learned as much by experience. It was the only place where they had not been welcomed to the councils of the *Principales* for the discussion of the Bursum Bill. I had heard myself the word of the deaf governor, repeated like a sort of fatal chorus by a series of interpreters, and long it rang in my shamed ears:

White men come. They promise all.

White men go away again.

What they do for Indian?

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

So walking softly, these white ghosts veiled in blankets saw no friendly door to knock at. Perhaps it was as well. They were so much the more aware of mystery, of the nameless primordial life that now at last was beginning to stir inside the house fronts.

Soft drum beats, unaccented and monotonous, sounding from hidden kivas. Pin-on smoke curling into the sky. A lighted pane. A woman's laugh. The shadow of an aged head, like a Roman profile, on a door. Suddenly a rolling drum echoed — out-of-doors this—an American rat-tap-tap. That must be the call to mass. Back we hurried to the church.

The double door stood open now

and alight, and tiny slits, like medieval dungeon windows, threw flickers of radiance down the long expause of the side wall. In the ineffably cold, clear starlight, this church-shape looked as fundamental as a pottery jar. It was an Indian shape, built by Indian hands, smoothed into soft angles, sculptured these centuries ago, when the friars first came to New Mexico, as a shrine to the God of the Christians to be sure, but out of the very substance of the ancient Earth Mother. It was as much a part of New Mexico as the sculptured cliffs. Its front formed a sort of portico, below a carved wooden balcony set in the plaster, and as we crept in we could look down the long nave, empty and white-washed, and high ceiled, glimmering with candles in tin sconces. Cold, how cold and beautiful. In the twinkling distance, an altar, with a tall screen behind, as in some primitive church of Spain or Italy, painted by Indian artists with a crude archaic grace. Christian symbols. Indian horses, prancing in frescoes on the side walls. But no congregation. None but a silent and rather grumpy Pueblo guard at the door, and the little poetess who, with veiled head like a Spanish woman, sank on her knees.

The snow and rain dance

The air of the small hours, at six thousand feet and Christmastime, is keen as a Damascus blade. It cuts into every rib and bone. We had been in and out of the *portal* a half dozen times, while the drummers continued their unsuccessful attempts to beat up a congregation, before we discovered that such occasional Pueblo arrivals as there were—all masculine—went forward and disappeared near the altar. On investigation we found a little door at the left, where a handsome youth with scarlet-bound head invited us into the sacristy. "More warm," he said hopefully.

Indeed the sacristy was a very cheerful place. A large fire was burning in the three-cornered fire-place. And before it, on a bench, three or four distinguished pillars of the San Felipe Mission, with other brown faces shadowed with long black hair, overlooking them, were playing a gambling game, in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke—quite as if it were not after one o'clock and getting later. The young Father, hovering in the background, all dressed in his stiff silken robes, looked only too miserably aware of the hour. As soon as we ap-

A dancer in the Hopi snake dance

CHRISTMAS IN THE PUEBLOS

255

peared he seemed to take a resolution. Whispering to his Indian acolyte, he seized the Host, and walked out into the church. But in a few moments they were back again, a discomforted procession. The Father set down his sacred burden rather hard and I certainly heard: "Nothing doing!"

The pillars of the mission were smiling to themselves. The central one, whom I took to be an official of some sort put in his truly Pueblo word: "Hmm. Plenty time. Poco tiempo we have mass."

The Father drew aside the poets for a confession. If the truth were told, this was his first Indian mass, and he was fairly stumped. They just wouldn't begin. He had been a few minutes late himself, not knowing the way over these black roads in the desert. And when he did get here, the Indians were not ready. He told them—stretching a point because he had to get back to officiate again at Santo Domingo, another twelve black miles—that

and scanty. First came a few Spanish Mexicans, the women slim as the Indian women are solid, with black shawls draped over their heads, the men squeezing their black sombreros under their arms, the children trailing after. Then the Indians, women in cerise, in cardinal, in azure, in purple and pumpkin yellow, with white deerskin boots, with silver chains hung with silver squash blossoms, carrying their babies turtle fashion on their backs. The men, walking so softly in their moccasined feet, had their gaily striped and patterned blankets drawn high over head and mouth, like the prophets, and each child had its own little blanket, furled against the cold and worn with instinctive elegance. Down the long nave they formed scattered kneeling groups, more beautiful in the candlelight than the dreams of the youngest poets. And that was saying much, this night when everything from the cold stars to these exquisitely brilliant figures seemed part of some imme-morial dream. The priest, going through his traditional gestures

The paintings on these two pages are by the Pueblo artist, Awatsireh, of San Ildefonso

The eagle dance

it was already one o'clock. But the chiefs went out and looked at the stars and came in, shaking their heads. "Not so late. Poco tiempo we have mass." He could not budge them. Sending out the drummers was no good, either. The flock would not be herded—

Just then one of the drummers looked in and motioned to the priest. He listened to some sort of message, with growing wonder in his face. Then he drew the poets aside again: "They say—they are waiting for a Child to be born in the pueblo—"

When at last the Child Was Born we slipped up into the carved balcony at the back of the church, where, if we had less share in the service, we could strangely feel, in the pictures that flashed before us, the age-old continuity of all ritual and all religion. The congregation was slow in gathering, even now,

and genuflections, chanting his Latin prayers to people who understood them not, except in the language of the spirit, was another mystic figure. A young Indian boy, with his head bound in a purple fillet like an ancient Greek's, lifted the sacred book and swung the censer. At last the Host was raised, and the heads bowed to the tinkling bell, and mass was over. There was no sermon. But before the congregation had risen from its knees, we saw a marvellous sight. Four young Buffalos, with black painted bodies and horned skins on their heads and shoulders, ran in and danced before the altar.

The wild strong cry with which they entered seemed in itself to carry the ceremonial back many thousands of years. In an instant, the Spanish people had vanished, the priest was gone, and the Indians whom the mass had not drawn began to slide into the church like a surge on a tidal beach

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CHRISTMAS IN THE PUEBLOS

I have seen the majestic Buffalos, with their Buffalo maidens, dance in the sun or the snow on the plazas of Tesuque or San Ildefonso—bringing with them something of the spirit of the plains with which the southwestern Indians, in their arid and mountainous solitude, always maintained a mysterious connection. But this ceremony was a much more perfect and stylistic performance. Four incredibly skilful dancers, the virtuosi of the tribe most surely, were the chief protagonists. The drums, the glimmering lights, the throaty chant, the bold sharp animal rhythms were all created for the glory of the black leaping male creatures, slim fierce fighters of the wilds, claiming primordial rights before the throne of Heaven.

Yet every movement, every rhythm was just as definitely traditional and studied as the priest's. Every one, before it had reached this mold of concentrated perfection, had been fused in the furnace of time. Now facing this world quarter, now facing that, the Buffalos seemed, as Alice Corbin puts it, to strike the land with curved horns. Her interpretation of a Buffalo dance song, though not based on a Pueblo original, comes as close to the spirit of the San Felipe ceremony as anything I have heard among the Pueblos.

Strike ye our land
With curved horns!
Now with cries
Bending our bodies,
Breathe fire upon us;
Now with feet
Trampling the earth,
Let your hoofs
Thunder over us!
Strike ye our land
with curved horns.

When the Buffalos had vanished, another small group of dancers came before the altar. Here the girls were foremost: they wore flowers bunched on their ears, and the song that attended them was full of joyous sweetness. A nativity dance? We never surely knew. For as the celebrants filed up to kiss the image

on the altar, we passed the governor at the door—what a benevolent salute he gave us after all—and slipped after the priest into the desert. We, too, would go back to Santo Domingo. What we should see there might be less highly finished than these San Felipe cameos, but it was certain to be full of an intense and powerful beauty and symbolism.

As we drove by the stars of the wise men, we talked of the Pueblo gift to Christ. It was characteristic of the Indian blend of realism and mysticism to wait till the human child was born—and then to pour out as a symbolic offering to love and gentleness this fresh, liberating life stream that surges up from the earth's center at the pound of an Indian's feet, and the sweep of his disciplined body. Such ceremonies as the Buffalo Dance, as distinguished from the more familiar rain and fertility rites and prayers of the growing season, are, of course, hunting rites which go back to the not-so-distant day when the Pueblo lived wholly by his own powers of subjugating and controlling his universe. They are intended to capture and propitiate the creatures of the wild in the winter season. That they should now be entwined with Christian ceremony is a tribute to the Franciscans, who knew how to tolerate as well as to censure. Perhaps the Pueblo has taken Christianity as just another sort of magic, destined to placate this Unknown which still lies so formidably about him. At all events he is baptized and married by Christian sacraments, Christian saints are precious to him as his fetishes, and in the daily truth of Christianity the white man might often pattern by the red. No one knows better than a Pueblo the tenderness that fills the house when a child is born. For all our years of white man dominance, no one lives more by (Cont. on page 288)

Francisco (right) with his daughter and one of the friends who shared in their Christmas celebration

CHRISTMAS IN THE PUEBLOS

*(Continued from page 256)*

the harmonies of love and less by the jars of hate.

Arriving at three in the morning in an Indian village, one recognizes kindness when it is given. Before our car had really stopped in front of the Santo Domingo church, where the remains of the pyre we saw from La Bajada were still smouldering, a friend rose out of the dark. It was Santiago, the tribal interpreter.

"I know you. Lady come Bursum Council. Glad to see you. Come my house after mass. You bring friends, too. Don't forget, you spend night my house."

So he ushered us into another candle-lit nave, not quite so grandiosely lovely as at San Felipe—for this church is a modern replica of an older one destroyed by flood—and found us a place to stand on a narrow adobe bench built against the wall. Here at least the shepherd did not lack for a flock. The whole population of nine hundred souls seemed to be in the church, men, women, children with babies on their backs. Mass was just over and as one bright colored stream swept out, another, the dancers, swept in.

Perhaps one-third of them were women, some dressed in garments of fringed or beaded skin, traded from the plains, some in the regulation Pueblo woman's dress, full short black skirt and bodice crossing diagonally to one shoulder, these last with many colored mantas of gorgeous silk which

288

floated out from their shoulders as they danced. All wore
feathers on their heads, and their black hair was cut square
and heavy over the forehead, bobbed over the ears, and hung
long and shiny—loose behind. All had many silver necklaces
and chains of turquoises and wampum, which rattled as they
moved, and their legs were wrapped in snow-white deerskin
puttees or loose boots. The other and more spectacular
two-thirds of the dancers were men, nude but for a short
kilt or loin cloth, their strong bodies—for the most part
much more finely proportioned than the women's, at least
by white standards—painted in diverse crude colors and
designs of the type now popularly called cubistic, though the
cubists, of course, originally borrowed them from primitive
art. Their faces, too, were stencilled in weird geometrical
fashion, in cunning harmony with the color scheme of the
body and with the silk head band or war bonnet, and had
curious tinselly marks scratched straight across the cheeks,
near the eyes, to indicate the clans. Heavy silver belts and
wrist shields, rattles of turtle shells or bear claws hung be-
low the knee, tomahawks and spears and sometimes shields
completed the accoutrement. Long hair was the rule:
Santo Domingo is far too traditional to allow boys who come
home from government schools with clipped heads a place
in the ranks of dancers. There were men of all ages; white-
headed elders, evidently the warrior priests of the tribe, who
directed the religious aspect of the ritual, men in the prime
of life, virile lithe young bucks. The women ranged equally
from the portly, not to say monumental elder matrons, full
of the dignity and esteemed conviction of their Pueblo beauty,
with thick square bodies enlaced by hand-woven belts of red
or green, to slim young girls, scarcely adolescent, with down
tied in their hair like snow, and charming little round spots
of vermilion on their cheeks, behind which their shyness
seemed to hide.

In the two long lines which formed down the nave, the
older men and women balanced side by side, the middle-aged
were fittingly companioned, while youth was matched with
youth. But the most agile and horrific of the young war-
riors, who carried spears and had war bonnets slithering
down their backs, made a perpetual weaving, darting pat-
tern in and out among the rest, as if in menacing pursuit of
ambushed enemy. Some quaint little devils—at least they
were painted black as the ace of spades—with helmet-like
caps perched on their heads, like tropical islanders, and long
black spears and shields, made lunges on the side to keep the
crowd in place.

## As the Priest Stood with Upraised Hand

The rhthmically dancing war folk filled the nave as water
fills a vessel, and the high walls, lighted by candles in high
sconces, reflected every movement in gigantesque shadow, as
they reeched every pounding foot and rattling necklace. Be-
fore the raised altar the young priest in his robes stood this
time through the whole Indian ceremony with upraised
hand, like the image of a saint on a decorated missal. And
when the red man swooped and threatened with his spear
his eyes grew round with wonder. Now and then a high
screaming war cry sounded, like a sharp note of punctuation
of the monotonous choral song, on which the color and
thrilling balance of the ceremony were embroidered. The
voices, chanting in unison, gave a rich resurgent sound, which
merged with the iteration of the rhythm, and with the re-
petitive action of the bodies, swaying and turning this way
and that, the women so quiet and muted, the men so swift
and free.

What the exact words of the Domingo war song were I
do not know: it would have taken many days of Indian con-
ference to discover their substance, in this pueblo where
even the ethnologists have learned few secrets. But here
is a similar war song of the pueblo of Zuni, which Matilda

Coxe Stevenson records. The peaceful Pueblo artist and
farmer has never been a warrior from choice. But till fifty
years ago he lived in constant terror of the nomad, raiding
Navajo. And what are fifty years in the life of men whose
instinctive memories are so close to the Stone Age still?
The Pueblo must keep his weapon sharp, at least in symbol-
ism, he must be ready for the lurking danger.

To you of the six regions
Whose homes cover the earth
I give shells.
Yellow ant, blue ant, red ant, all color ant
U-hu-we-u-hu-we-
U-hu-we-u-hu-we.
To you whose homes
Are covered with mountain tops
I give shells
Yellow, blue, red, white, all color, black.

When we meet the enemy
A little arrow storm will arise.
When we meet him on the road near by

He will never more inhale the sacred breath of day.
I inhale the sacred breath of day.

All come quickly,
The enemy comes from ambush.

A Navajo is killed,
We inhale the sacred breath of day.

You have met the enemy.
He will never more inhale the sacred breath of day.

The enemy is destroyed.
Who will be our great Bow priest?

Who is to become a Bow priest?
Well! who will kick the scalp?

His younger mother, his elder sister.

Who will wash the scalp?
His younger father, his elder brother.

Well!

Good!

To the spectator, as surely to the participator in Indian
ceremonies, comes afterward the most relaxed, harmonious
release of soul and body. The night, or what remained of it,
in the Indian house, was peace itself. In the long room,
quiet and dark, but for the ruddy firelight under the beamed
ceiling, many tired folk are lying on their rugs. There in
the corner a group of Santa Fe artists. Here by the fire
our young poets and poetesses, steeped in joy and imagism.
At the other end, the Indian family, immobile on its sheep
skins—all but our tall host; he sits upright on a little wooden
stool, tending the fire of his guests. I slept and waked and
floated off again, keeping ever the sense of that stern, un-
changing profile, bent on its task, patient as the seasons,
the watcher of a timeless fire, which nourishes the very spark
of life.

## Christmas Morning

In the morning we are awakened by an opening door: an
Indian woman, speaking soft words and vanishing again.
At quick intervals, another and another. Santiago, throwing
on a log, announces: "Christmas morning Pueblo woman
asks friends to breakfast. Say—you eat first me and my
wife. Then you go eat my friends."

So, after due formalities and courtesies we start for a
round of morning breakfasts. This great, spread out, and
so vital village of Santo Domingo, in the valley of the Rio
Grande, below the Jemez mountains, is never so beautiful as
in the lurid, mauve-pink light of winter dawn. Women
carrying great water jars on their heads, above shawls that
fall from crown to heel in noble silhouette, are moving to-
ward the river. The animals are stirring in their rustic
corral. Piñon smoke scents the air. And at the door of
every house is watching the stout and radiant Christmas
matron.

The decorated food bowls stand ready in the middle of

00

the mud floor. We sit, cross-legged, while the children
gather round and the grandfather, smiling, accepts our gift of
cigarettes. With a tortilla, or a piece of blue corn wafer bread,
in color and consistency like a wasp's nest, we scoop up meat
and chile. We accept a tart made of white flour and dried
melon rind. Then we go on to Patricio's, and Francisco's,
and Juan Cate's, the governor's. Juan's wife is brushing
his hair—no Pueblo male ever does this for himself—with
something that looks like a hearth brush and tying it into a
queue. He will sing later, in one of the dance choruses, as
a leader should. Francisco's handsome daughter, Maria,
has her head in a foaming bowl of suds. This rite in-
variably precedes the dance. The ceremonies begin again
immediately after breakfast, in the plazas. Not the Christian
ceremonies. They are over. The Indian ceremonies will
go on for three days more at least.

They had, in fact, begun before we left. Our last Santo
Domingo vision was of the warriors, a hundred strong,
sweeping down the length of the plaza. Their spears, their
crouching running bodies, their streaming feather bonnets
shone and glittered in the winter sun. One look, one more
deep breath of joy and power. Then, regretfully, we cranked
the car and turned white faces toward an orthodox Christmas
dinner.