Sunday, April 14, 2019

On a Song: "Last night I had the strangest dream..."



 

 

 

Charles Lloyd is a great artist. He plays flute and saxophone. His jazz band is called "The Marvels" and it seems to me that the musicians in his band are also exceptionally accomplished. A few years ago, Charles Lloyd and the Marvels released a CD called I Long to See You. It is an excellent recording in all respects. Lloyd is an old man now, well past 80 years old, and, although he can play intricate passages with ease, there is an appealing simplicity about his best work. He can accomplish many things on his instrument that are beautiful and that I am incapable of describing in mere words.

On I Long to See You, Lloyd and his band cover the song "Last Night I had the strangest dream." I’ve known this anti-war song all my life and assumed that its simple and gorgeous melody, very much like a hymn, was traditional. Certainly, the rough-hewn, but moving lyrics, seem to harken back to another era, perhaps, the late nineteenth-century or, even, before. But, in fact, the song was written in 1950 by a Canadian radio personality named Ed McCurdy.

McCurdy was born in Pennsylvania in 1919 and began his singing career as a crooner. Sally Rand, the famous strip tease and burlesque artist, was impressed by McCurdy’s ability to warble romantic ballads and she hired him for her revue. He was said to have pushed her on a swing while singing a love song directed to the famous fan dancer. Later, McCurdy moved to Vancouver where he hosted several radio shows. He wrote many folk songs and, often, appeared at the Village Vanguard in New York City.

In 1980, McCurdy moved to Nova Scotia. For many years, he was a staple character actor on Canadian television. He died at the age of 81 in the year 2000. He is best known for "Last Night I had the strangest dream", although he wrote many other memorable songs. The anti-war ballad has been covered by everyone from Johnny Cash to Simon and Garfield (and Charles Lloyd whose version features Willie Nelson singing the lyrics).

The song seems related to the folk song "Joe Hill’: "Last night I dreamed I saw Joe Hill alive as you and me/ I said ‘Joe you’ve been dead ten years.’/ ‘I never died," said he". In fact, the ballad stanzas and the rhythm of the lyrics are identical. However, the melody of "Joe Hill" is slightly different, a bit more mournful and minor-key. The flat declarative assertions of "Last night I had the strangest dream" are deflected into political allusion in "Joe Hill" and the effect of the two songs is quite different. (The lyrics to the song that begins "I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night..." were written by Alfred Hayes as a rabble-rousing poem in 1930 – the melody was written in 1936 by an African-American blues-man and jazz musician named Earl Robinson at the Leftist and inter-racial Camp Unity at Wingdale, New York.)

When the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, Tom Brokaw was broadcasting live. He directed his camera-crew to pan across the Wall into East Berlin where a children’s choir was singing. The song that they were performing was "Last Night I had the strangest dream". No doubt, the children knew the song as part of their Communist indoctrination – it was an anti-war protest song, could be mobilized against the Americans in favor of the peace-loving North Vietnamese, and, like Negro spirituals, dramatized the malaise at the heart of Capitalism. But, at that moment, it didn’t matter: the children were singing against the Wall and, therefore, war and, as at Jericho, the wall came tumbling down. (It goes without saying that walls and war are kissing cousins – you don’t need a wall unless you have enemies. In its rhetoric, the Trump administration is the most bellicose American regime to exist in my lifetime and I was born in 1954. Other presidents went to war, but they weren’t necessarily proud about it. Trump, who is a coward and afraid of war, constantly threatens it.)

The lyrics to the song are exceedingly simple, even austere. The speaker dreams that the "the world had all agreed/to put an end to war." This is accomplished in a "mighty room" that is "filled with men." The men are presented a written pledge that they consent to sign: "And the paper they were signing said/ They’d never fight again." When the pledges have all been signed, a million copies are made. Then, the men "all joined hands and bowed their heads/And grateful prayers were prayed." Here "prayed" rhymes with "made" and the clumsiness of the lyric seems almost intentional – "prayers were prayed"; this is bad poetry, but the visionary sentiment transcends the verse’s awkwardness.

There are people in "the streets below" who dance "round and round." Why are they "below"? "Below" what? Presumably, the people are "below" the mighty room" where the peace pledge is executed. This suggests that the poet’s dream invokes a heavenly realm, some place that is far above us. As the people rejoice, dancing "round and round", we learn that "guns and swords and uniforms/ were scattered on the ground." The initial verse is, then, repeated and the song ends.

The tone of the poem invokes a temperance meeting. War is not ended by divine fiat or by angels snatching weapons from combatants. Men end war by signing a pledge, that is making a contract with their fellow men not to fight them. It is all homely and endearing. If we want to end war, we must look to ourselves and our fellow human beings. We must make a compact with them to not fight. War must not be ended by divine decree – men must end war peacefully by making a covenant among themselves to eschew violence. Immediately, such a covenant has the effect of inducing joy in the great multitude of human beings – at least, in the modern world, people who have been induced to fight to the death for the benefit of others. The emblems of war are abandoned, left strewn on the ground.

Viewed from the perspective of McCurdy’s song and lyrics, the end of war is a simple, even, obvious thing. Indeed, war exists as a perversion of the human imagination. If we analyze human affairs correctly, war (which is mass murder as Tolstoy reminds us) seems utterly inexplicable, an enormous and monstrous waste of human resources. The question is not whether war can be ended, but why it has taken humankind so long to reach this fundamentally obvious covenant against mutual slaughter.

"Last night I had the strangest dream..." reminds us that we should tirelessly work for the good of our fellow human beings. Everyone knows that this is perfectly, evenly, indisputably true – and, yet, it seems, that none of us are willing to take even the first, halting steps toward creating a world without war. I’m writing this essay, but this exercise is more aesthetic than ethical. McCurdy’s poem and song shows us the way, but we remain all too willing to look the other way.

What if we were to convene a group of twenty citizens, meeting not in a "mighty room", but on the patio in someone’s back yard or in a rec room downstairs? What if each person were asked to write down ten projects that would be unambiguously beneficial to our community and fellowship? Then, what if the lists were collected and compared and the three items that occurred on every person’s list (and I am sure that, at least, three projects would overlap on all writings) set forth as the consensus of this fellowship and a mandate to do good in accord with those three objectives? And what if means were, then, deployed to take modest steps toward realizing those objectives that unanimously can be accepted as good and worthy? Would this be a first step to the end of war?

There are recruiting posts where you can sign up to serve in the Army or Marines or Navy. Why shouldn’t peace have its own recruiting posts, its own volunteers, its own army. Would those soldiers of peace sing together "Last Night I had the strangest dream..." If you can enlist for war, why can’t you enlist for peace?



Note: nothing in this essay is particularly original. I am aware that the official Peace Corps song is "Last Night I had the strangest dream."

Sunday, April 7, 2019

On the Mariposa Brigade



 

1.

European contact with American aboriginal people was efficiently lethal. In a study published in The Journal of Quartenary Science (March 1, 2019), Alexander Koch and others argues that the near-extinction of New World populations was so massive that it altered the climate. In the article, "Earth System Impacts on the European Arrival", Koch and his fellow writers develop the claim that approximately 60 million people lived in the New World at the time of the first Spanish and European entradas. Disease brought by the European invaders killed 56 million members of this population. As a result, massive tracts of land, equivalent in size to France, were abandoned and, ultimately, reforested – most of these effects occurred in the densely peopled kingdoms in Mexico and Peru, as well as the Amazonian basin. Human populations tend to make the world warmer. Reforestation, the extermination of whole kingdoms almost to the last man, and the abandonment of agricultural slash-and-burn practices endemic to the New World resulted in global climate change – the world became a little bit cooler. Koch’s arguments are supported by several confluent strands of evidence: pollen frozen in circumpolar glaciers shows a substantial decrease in substances associated with agricultural (that is, maize and squash pollen). Carbon dioxide decreases demonstrating loss of population – people exhale carbon dixode. Similarly, soot correlated with slash-and-burn agriculture decreases in the century after the Spanish conquest of central and south America. (Climate science is intensely contentious and Koch’s article has inspired vituperative responses from those who deny climate-change – but the article, which I have read, seems soundly argued and rationally supported by objective evidence.)

In this context, it is a pleasure to write about the Mariposa Brigade. Charged with eliminating Indians in California’s central Sierra Nevada, this band of brothers pretty much failed on all accounts. They must be accounted, I think, the most feckless and incompetent band of Indian fighters ever produced on this continent – and, since most Indian campaigns were conducted with an astonishing level of incompetence, the killing often done by amateurs who improvised most of their massacres, this is saying something significant.

The story begins in 1833. A fur trader, crossing the Sierra Nevada with a small group of men, discovered a mighty chasm in the center of the range. The fur trader reported that the gorge had sheer cliffs a mile deep and that no human being would ever descend to the wooded valley floor. Giant trees stood as sentinel over the immense and mysterious canyon. The fur trader, his name was Joseph Reddeford Walker reported the discovery in a tone of confounded horror – the place was entirely desolate, without sign of any human habitation.

But, of course, Walker was wrong about the unpeopled nature of the place. In fact, there were Indians living in the forest between the enormous granite walls, the Ahwahneechee. The Sierra Nevada is a divide between the coastal Miwok people and the native Americans who make their homes in the Great Basin, generally tribes that speak Paiute dialects. Contrary to popular belief, Indian tribes as defined by the European settlers were not culturally pure entities – indeed, to the contrary, most tribes occupying a particular area were comprised of groups of people intermarried between various clans and language groups. Indeed, some tribes, such as the Hopi, were almost entirely assembled from immigrants from other parts of the Southwest. This seems to have been true of the Ahwahneechee – although the Indians spoke a Miwok dialect and followed craft traditions from that cultural group (for instance, very tightly woven reed baskets in which water could be transported), many of the members of the tribe were bilingual and, also, spoke Paiute. In fact, for several hundred years Paiute and Miwoks had mingled to form the Ahwahneechee – that is, the "people living within the great gaping mouth." (Ahwahnee is the native name for the Yosemite valley.)

Lowlanders are often suspicious of mountain people. Mountain people tend to be insular and quarrelsome, like the Hatfields and McCoys, much given to feuding. Old customs persist in the mountains and the people living there may be fiercely resistant to progress. From the perspective of more cosmopolitan Miwok and Paiutes, the Ahwahneechee were backwards and, even, dangerous. In Miwok, the people living in the "great gaping mouth" were said to be yosse mitte or yohhe mitte. The phrase, spelled variously, means something like "they are killers down there." Around 1850, these people were led by a man called Tenaya. True to form, Tenaya was reputed to be quarrelsome and quick to take offense. At that time, the Ahwahneechee were much diminished in numbers – diseases had decimated the Indians in contact with the Mexican and American settlers. A mysterious plague called the "black disease" wiped out vast numbers of mission Indians along the California coast and nothing is more readily exported than a virus – the disease struck Tenaya’s band about 20 years before the gold rush and many of the Ahwahneechee died. (Some accounts say that Tenaya moved the entire band out of the Yosemite Valley for a decade to avoid further contagion; during their exile from the valley, the Ahwahneechee, apparently, lived with their Paiute relatives at Mono Lake. Around 1840, the tribe returned to place of the gaping mouth.) It’s estimated that Tenaya’s clan consisted of no more than 200 members by 1850.

Before the troubles with the Mariposa Brigade, the Ahwahneechee lived in primitive, if serviceable, huts made from bark slabs of incense cedar stacked into a conical teepee-shape. The people were dependant upon acorn mush, a gruel that they made from the acorns of the Black Oak trees standing in tall, noble groves on the valley floor of the "great mouth." Acorn agriculture is labor intensive – the trees must be cultivated and the brush around them suppressed so that the acorns can be readily gathered. The acorns, then, must be shelled and soaked for a long time in water to leach out the tannic acids that would otherwise make them too bitter to eat. This soaking process required repeated cold water immersion of the acorns, something readily accomplished among the rivers and plunging streams in the Yosemite valley. Once the acorns had been suitably prepared, women ground them into a fine flour using metate stones. This flour, seasoned with rabbit or venison, was boiled into porridge, the principal sustenance of the Ahwahneechee. Acorns awaiting processing were stored in Chuckah granaries – these were cedar-wood boxes lined with insect-repellant bay leaves and mounted atop waist-high stilts to keep the contents dry. The first Europeans encountering California Indians remarked on the park-like aspect of the oak forests in which the native people lived – the trees stood isolated from one another in grassy meadows without undergrowth. At first, these landscapes were thought to be natural, but it is now apparent that acorn cultivation throughout California was highly intentional – the vast oak parks were cultural landscapes, the results of hundreds of years of consciously applied agricultural technology.

The coastal Miwok cultivated acorns, lived in the littoral and river valleys, and were, also, great salmon-eaters. The Paiutes to the west of the Sierra were horse-Indians, hunters, and aggressive traders. Some of Chief Tenaya’s kin were Paiutes living at Mono Lake in the basins beyond the Sierra on the present border between Nevada and California. "Mono" means flies and Mono Lake was a big salt-sour body of alkali water that bred black hordes of flies. Salts dissolved in the lake crystallizes into strange towers and pillars, rising up from the pale dead waters like some kind post-apocalyptic monuments. The Paiutes harvested fly larvae from the water, a great delicacy as far as local people were concerned and traded the maggots for venison from the high country, shells and beadwork made by the coastal Indians, and the tightly woven reed baskets that the Ahwahneechee women produced. Winter in the valley of the gaping mouth was harsh and the Ahwahneechee spent the cold months with kin either in the narrow, deep valleys to the west of the Sierra or on the east side of the range with the Mono Lake Paiutes.

The Ahwahneechee knew about the settlers and prospectors swarming into the foothills around Sutters Mill. The Europeans didn’t know about the Ahwahneechee, a state of affairs that was fine with the Indians. Unlike their relatives among the Miwok and Paiute, the Ahwahneechee were content in their mountain fortress, surrounded by cliffs reputed to be a mile high, and Tenaya correctly understood that nothing but harm would occur to his people if they embraced (or quarreled) with the hordes of White men in the San Joaquin valley and the Sierra Nevada foothills.

2.

James Savage was born in 1817 in Illinois when much of that State was still wilderness. Wild Indians ranged the marshes and woodlands and, as a boy, Savage was fascinated with them. Although he was poorly educated and scarcely literate, Savage had a good ear and the gift of tongues – before he was twenty, he had learned several Midwestern Indian dialects.

Savage was ambitious. Illinois was poor in the 1830's and life was difficult. The young man moved to Cayuga, New York where he was married to a woman named Eliza Hall. A business venture failed and Savage returned to Illinois to eke out a living. In 1846, the Middle-Border was infected with Gold Fever. Savage with his wife and brother set out by wagon train for the gold fields around Sutters Mill. The trip was difficult and Savage’s company of travelers, to their misfortune, banded together with the ill-fated Donner party. Caught in the snows of the high Sierra, Eliza gave birth to a baby girl. The trip west was deadly to many women and Eliza died a few hours after the baby was born. There was no food and everyone was perishing from cold and so no one bothered to name the infant – it was clear that she would be dead too in a matter of days if not hours. When this came to pass, mother and daughter were wrapped in blankets and buried together in a shallow pit hacked into the stony ground somewhere on the shores of what is now Lake Tahoe.

Savage survived, descending into the gold fields where he unsuccessfully tried his hand at prospecting. This was hard-work and daunting and Savage didn’t have the patience for mining. Instead, he deployed his linguistic skills, learning the language of the local Indians, the Tularenos. (The Tularenos are Yokuk-speaking Indians who lived in the San Joaquin Valley.) Savage set up trading posts with the Tularenos and, in fact, persuaded them to bring him nuggets of gold that they found in the placer deposits at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains. In a few years, Savage had become wealthy – there are stories of him dragging barrels of gold dust through hotel lobbies in Sacramento and San Francisco. In order to cement his relationship with the Tularenos, Savage married the daughters of several chieftains – ultimately, he was said to have no fewer than five native wives. The Tularenos admired Savage and called him El Rey Herero (the "blonde king"). Savage amended that title to El Rey Tulareno ("the king of the Tularenos") and was known by nickname at the time of the Mariposa Brigade.

An empire-builder, Savage established a trading post on the Merced River about 25 miles from Yosemite Valley. At a place called Wood’s Crossing on the Toulumne Creek, Savage recruited 500 Indians from various tribes to work the placer deposits in the stream. Reportedly, he paid the Indians in blankets, beads and whiskey. Savage’s wealth and power increased. He formed partnerships with other White businessmen and set up trading posts near Agua Fria on the Mariposa Creek and at Coarse Gold Gulch on the Fresno River. At these locations, Savage’s business model was the same – the Indians exchanged placer gold for whiskey and trade goods.

Ongoing trade with the Indians was tenuous and, finally, unsustainable – the tribes resented the incursion of the hordes of White miners and sensed that they were being disenfranchised and excluded from their traditional territory by the land claims staked by the prospectors. During the hungry months, when winter provisions were exhausted, the Indians periodically killed the prospector’s horses and mules for food. Tensions increased and their were clashes. In May of 1850, a small band of Ahwahneechee raided Savage’s Merced Valley trading post – there was a long-range exchange of gunfire and the Indians retreated. With a dozen men, Savage tracked the Indians into the higher Sierra but couldn’t catch them. His Tulareno scouts said that the Indians were Uzamati, the clan of the grizzly bear, experienced fighters who lived in a valley that could only be reached through a narrow defile – the scouts weren’t willing to lead Savage’s party into ambush and, so, the posse returned to the trading post. Summer was hot and nothing much more happened.

But, in the Fall of 1850, one of Savage’s native wives admitted to him that the Indians living in the eastern Sierra foothills were planning an all-out assault on the White prospectors and pioneers. Some of the Indians were already charging tolls to pass through their valleys. Further, they were rapidly coming to understand the gold economy – why toil for gold when you can simply kill the prospectors and take the precious stuff from their saddle-bags? Although the tribes often fought one another, this time there was a common enemy and it was best for them to league together against the foe. This alliance of native tribes was led by Chief Juarez of the Tularenos, one of Savage’s clients. Savage decided to intimidate Chief Juarez by demonstrating to him the power of the White Americans in the "big village" of San Francisco. He brought Chief Juarez to the city and showed him the streets and railroads and the foundaries producing guns and cannons. He took him Fort Point beneath the Presidio so that he could see the federal soldiers and the harbor guns aimed out at the Golden Gate. Chief Juarez was impressed more by the abundance of whiskey and gambling in the city by the Bay. Contemporaries say that he was drunk throughout the entire excursion. Returning from the junket, Juarez told the Indians in Sierra foothills that, broadly speaking, White men came in two tribes – there were city dwellers who were powerful and well-armed and, then, the disorderly mob of prospectors without discipline, poorly equipped for war, and, most of them, drunken louts. Chief Juarez had extracted the wrong moral for his trip to San Francisco: he told the alliance of tribes conspiring against the miners that the city dwellers were a different breed and could not be counted-on to come to the aid of the miners. On that basis, Chief Juarez concluded that the Indians could probably kill prospectors with impunity.

In mid-December 1850, Savage was alarmed to observe that the Indians living near the Mariposa trading post had suddenly vanished. This implied that the warriors had embarked on a raid. Savage assembled another posse of about 16 horsemen and tracked the war party. The two groups met in a place where there was a deep canyon between them. Shouting back and forth, Savage pleaded with the Indians to return their encampment on the Mariposa River. The Indians replied that they were tired of working for the White men and that it was much easier to simply kill the prospectors and take their gold. Savage was afraid that he had been diverted away from his Mariposa trading post so that the place could be raided. So he rapidly retreated. Upon reaching Mariposa, Savage learned the Indians had attacked the trading post on the Fresno River, killed the agents there, and burned the place to the ground. The war had begun.

The State governor issued a proclamation forming the so-called Mariposa Brigade. The name for this war party of White militia was not too fearsome – "Mariposa" means "butterfly." James Savage was appointed the leader of the militia and told to "punish" the Indians. So a man named Savage, compromised by having five Indian wives, was dispatched with the "Butterfly Brigade" to fight the savages in the High Sierra. Initially, Savage commanded 75 men. In mid-January, the Butterfly (Mariposa) Brigade attacked an Indian camp near Agua Fria – Savage’s native scouts had located the encampment, about 400 people all told, and the plan was the classic maneuver deployed in the Indian wars: creep up as close to the camp as possible under the cover of darkness, attack at dawn and kill everyone. Unfortunately for the Mariposa Brigade, the warriors in the encampment discovered the encroaching militia and mounted a counter-attack. In the initial exchange of volleys, six militia men were shot down and, things being uncomfortably hot at the firing line, each wounded man was escorted to the rear by several nervous troopers. This depleted the skirmish line facing the Indians and, after another attack, the militia was repelled. (Two of the six wounded militia died.)

Obviously, more militia would be required to punish the hostiles. Accordingly, the governor ordered that miners be deputized to serve in the brigade. Ultimately, about 165 miners were assembled to fight with Savage’s troops. Various other companies, numbering another 100 men, were recruited. The force was divided into several parties, all of them advancing through the foothills to the High Country where the Indians were hiding. In late February and March of 1851, a number of rather desultory skirmishes occurred – the Indians harassed the columns of advancing militia with long-range sniper fire; the militia stormed abandoned Indian camps and burned the winter stores of acorns in their chuckah granaries. This part of the story is complex and not particularly enlightening and so I will pass over much of the maneuvering in the early Spring of 1851 in silence.

In late March, Savage’s posse reached a valley high in the foothills, a place called Wawona. Wawona was within the traditional range of the Ahwahneechee and a winter camp several thousand feet below the Yosemite Valley. Chief Tenaya was at that camp. Savage’s scouts informed him as to Tenaya’s presence and so runners were sent to Wawona to ask the leader of the Ahwahneechee to parley. The weather was foul and all the high passes were clogged with snow. Tenaya with several warriors came down to meet the Mariposa Brigade led by Savage, mostly responsible for scouting, and a military officer, Captain Boling. Tenaya said that the majority of the tribe was willing to negotiate with the militia and were planning to come down from Wawona, protected by the snow in the passes, in a couple of days when the weather improved. Several days passed and there was no sign of Indians coming down from the big hills to surrender. Accordingly, Boling with Savage and a doctor, Lawrence Bunnel marched higher into the Sierra taking Chief Tenaya and his associates with them as guides. Boling’s company mustered about 75 men.

The snow-pack at higher elevations was impassable and so the militia moved slowly, staying beneath the altitude where the snow was most formidable and the trails buried. Some Indians from villages in the area surrendered – about 80 men, women, and children were now part of the advance into the mountains, these people ostensibly prisoners but, in fact, outnumbered the militia men. More Indians came down to join the march from side valleys along the Merced River until there were approximately 250 people from various tribes accompanying the advance through the deepening snow.

After "wallowing in deep snow", the Mariposa Brigade staggered over a hilltop above what is now "Tunnel View", a spectacular vista into the Yosemite Valley. The sight of the valley ringed with sheer three-thousand foot cliffs and the waterfalls billowing off the tops of the granite escarpments was so unexpected and moving that the militia simply stopped its march. Dr. Bunnell reported that he burst into tears at the sublime landscape beneath them – many of the other militia-men, most of them cynical and hardened miners burst into tears. The valley floor was well-cultivated, the precious oak trees standing in isolation with meadows of brilliantly green grass between them and the Merced River, tranquil in this part of its course, glistened amidst the fields fragrant with early Spring wild flowers. Bunnell required that the place looked like a well-kept park.

Bivouacked on the hilltop that night, the officers discussed the name that they should give to the marvelous valley. Several of the men proposed "Paradise" or "Eden." Dr. Bunnell suggested that the place be called "Yosemite." In this way, Dr. Bunnell said, we will commemorate forever the name of the valley’s first inhabitants (inhabitants that the Butterfly Brigade had come to extirpate). There was some fierce rum-fueled debate about the name: many of the prospectors objected to naming the valley after a group of thieving, murderous Indians. A vote ensued. Savage cast the deciding ballot and the valley was named "Yosemite." Of course, there was a problem – the people in the valley had never called themselves "Yosemite". They were the Ahwaneechee. If "Yosemite" comes from the word "uzamati" ("grizzly bear") that term would identify only one clan among the several comprising the tribe. If "yosse mitte" is the etymology, something that seems likely, the valley is named after a slur denigrating its inhabitants – the Miwok expression: "they are a bunch of killers down there." It’s probably best to consider the meaning of "yo se mit ee" in Cantonese as reported by Chinese tourists in then national park: Holy-Blessed-Beautiful-Land.

On the morning after the place was named, Savage and his men descended from the hilltop to explore the valley and its side canyons. The land was deserted, the incense cedar wigwams knocked over, and the chuckahs abandoned. Savage and his men set the oak acorn granaries afire and burned the collapsed shelters as well. When the captured Indians on the hilltop saw the smear of smoke rising from the sites of the villages, they concluded that the militia’s intentions were malign. Although a couple of men had been posted to guard them, the Indians were too numerous – in small groups, they simply melted away into the forest. The canyons branching away from the place of the gaping mouth are steep and filled with the rubble from millennia of rock falls. It was slow-going for the milita finding a trail upward between the angular boulders the size of Boeing jets and plunging blasts of icy water. A few hundred yards above the valley, the militia found an old woman sitting idly on a rock and picking at scabs on her shins. She said that she was too old to climb up the fallen rocks toward the rim of the valley and that she didn’t mind if the soldiers shot her down on the spot. A couple of men picked her up and carried her down to the valley floor. No one else was found.

Returning to the hilltop overlooking the valley, Savage and Boling found that Tenaya and the captives had vanished. The sentries were apologetic but said that there was nothing they could do to prevent the Indians from slipping away from the encampment. Defeated, the Mariposa militia left the valley and began the march back into the San Joaquin valley. Along the way, they encountered a large Chowchilla village, another group of Indians living in the sierra foothills. Once more, the militia stealthily approached the village located on a terrace on the other side of the little San Joaquin River. Captain Boling is reported to have given a rousing pep-talk to his troops, assuring them that the moment of their victory over the savage foe was at hand. While he was speaking, the Indians swarmed out of their huts and lined the bank of the river taunting the militia – once again, the element of surprise had been lost. Several efforts were made to ford the river but it was flowing at full spate, swollen by the spring snow-melt. When a location downstream where the river could be crossed was finally located, the troops circled back to attack the village but found it completely deserted. Thwarted once more, the militia returned to its camp on the Mariposa Creek.

A week later another expedition was mounted. The Butterfly Brigade marched back to Yosemite Valley and, dividing into small skirmish-lines. swept down onto meadows and oak groves, troops advancing along both sides of the Merced River. In the interim, the Ahwahnchee had rebuilt their incense cedar bark lodges and begun processing acorns again. But the small villages scattered at intervals across the green and flowery valley floor were deserted. The troops burned the lodges once more and scattered the acorns stockpiled near the metate stones. Five Indians were sighted crossing a meadow near the river. The militia had some horsemen and they rode after the Indians capturing three of them under a massive formation of domed rocks, three great knuckles of granite rising two-thousand feet above the valley floor and veined with snow in the crevasses near their tops. The capture was propitious – the three Indians were Chief Tenaya’s sons.

The captives pointed the way up a narrow defile and said that the Ahwahneechee had fled in that direction. Leaving a couple men to attend to the prisoners, the rest of the brigade advanced up the narrow rift between the soaring cliffs. The Indians above them began to pitch heavy stones down into the crevasse where the militia were laboring upward and a couple men were slightly injured. More big rocks and boulders showered down and so the militia retreated to the meadow under the three huge granite domes where the captives remained under guard. The youngest boy was sent to his father with the message that the militia’s captain wanted to parley with him. He hustled up the defile and vanished. Then, the two other boys fled. One of them escaped, but the other was shot in the back and died at the edge of flowery meadow.

An hour later, Tenaya came down from the mountain. Several militia men approached him and Tenaya thought better of negotiations at that time. He ran back up the hillside but was cut-off and taken prisoner. When he saw his son lying dead on the ground, he began to weep and loudly demanded that the militia men kill him as well. Captain Boling told that he was sorry about the dead youth but that this was war and war led to killing. Boling had Tenaya tied-up and sent back with several men over the trails leading into the valley.

After a couple days hiatus, the Mariposa Brigade moved from the Yosemite Valley up into the high country following a conspicuous trail made by the fleeing Indians above the tree-line and through the Alpine meadows on the high pass. The troops came upon the Ahwahneechee camped by a glacial lake. The Indians were tired and hadn’t posted sentries and, this time, the militia successfully surprised them. Some shots were fired but no one was hurt or killed. The Indians agreed to accompany the militia down to a stockade near Mariposa Creek. Captain Boling and Savage wanted to continue the expedition – there were other bands in the area and, heartened by their successful attack on the Ahwahneechee encampment, the leaders of the brigade proposed rounding-up the other local Indians. Another captain named Kuykendall reasonably protested that these other natives hadn’t done anything to warrant reprisals and should be left in peace. A dispute ensued and Kuykendall was ultimately court-martialed for "unofficer-like behavior" and disobeying orders. But during these proceedings, the militia, after all mere civilians deputized to fight the Indians, became restive. The men’s clothing was ragged, food stores were depleted, and, worst of all, their reserves of tobacco and rum were exhausted. Members of the Butterfly Brigade began to desert and, finally, the militia was formally dissolved on July 1, 1851.

Tenaya’s band of Ahwahneechee was kept at Mariposa Creek for a few months. Then, funds required to hire guards to watch the tribe were exhausted. Tenaya and his people were released on their own recognizance – he promised to stay away from prospectors and refrain from robbing them of their gold and livestock. In exchange, Savage and Captain Boling agreed to leave the band in peace in the Yosemite Valley.

President Millard Fillmore sent three commissioners from Washington to negotiate treaties with Indians living in the Sierra foothills. Eighteen treaties were negotiated and the Indians agreed to cede their mountain domain to the Federal government in exchange for a grant of 8 ½ million acres in the San Joaquin valley. The government had to buy some of this land from settlers living in that area and the cost of the treaties laboriously negotiated with 502 Indian leaders was expected to be about 500,000 dollars. Not surprisingly, the House of Representatives refused to fund the acquisition of the reservation land. Furthermore, the State of California was unwilling to commit prime agricultural terrain in the San Joaquin valley to the tribes. The Indians never received any land or any money. They were put on desolate desert reservations or simply exterminated. (The entire affair was so blatantly nefarious that the actual treaties negotiated with the tribes, all of which were breached, were kept classified as "military secrets" until 1905.)

The members of the Mariposa Brigade including James Savage petitioned the California legislature for payment of wages earned chasing the Indians between January and July in 1851. The legislature was evenhanded, niggardly with the Indians, it was equally niggardly with Savage and his Mariposa militia. No wages were paid. In 1854, Congress agreed to pay mine-owners and trading post operators a small percentage of the damage incurred as a result of Indian raiding. But, by that time, James Savage was dead.

After his military adventures, Savage established two new trading posts near the new reservations proposed for the foothills. White squatters encroached on the land set-aside for the Indians and conflict ensued. Near the Kings River Reservations, squatters murdered several Indians. Savage was outraged. The squatters, lead by a man named Walter Harvey, were killing the customers of his trading post. Savage demanded that the government impanel a commission to investigate the murders. A council was summoned to a place called Four Creeks – this was in August of 1852. Savage’s denunciation of Walter Harvey had been stinging – he accused Harvey of orchestrating a "massacre" of his Indian clients. On the way to Four Creeks, Harvey intercepted Savage and demanded that he withdraw his allegations of "massacre". Savage refused and punched Harvey in the face. Harvey pulled his gun and shot Savage four times through the body, killing him. Harvey was tried for murder but not convicted – it was Bench trial conducted by a judge that Harvey had recommended for appointment and the Court ruled that the defendant had acted in self-defense.

The Ahwahneechee Indians remained in Yosemite until 1926. Quickly enough, they converted their economy from foraging, hunting, and oak cultivation to the production of curios. The women continued to weave wonderfully dense and water-impermeable baskets that they sold to tourists. The Ahwahneechee lived in huts in a corner of the valley but, like the black bears in the park, spent much of their time begging from tourists. Alcohol was a problem for them and some of their women became "commercial" to use the term that people employed at the time. Ultimately, the bedraggled and tiny group of beggars became an embarrassment to the National Park and they were ousted. Forty years later, during the sixties, a couple of very old women returned to the valley where they demonstrated native crafts and posed with tourists. Their daughters are still employed by the Park Service and sometimes give tours focusing on the Native American history in the park. The three enormous granite domes overlooking the meadow where Chief Tenaya’s son was shot down are now called "The Three Brothers."

Tenaya couldn’t forgive the White men for killing his son. He led a couple of raids against prospectors in the Sierra Nevada and killed two of them. A posse of 25 soldiers chased Tenaya back to the Yosemite Valley. He escaped into the high country. The soldiers summarily tried and executed four or five Indians said to be implicated in the killings, shooting them by firing squad. Efforts to capture Tenaya were unsuccessful.

Tenaya joined his kin at Mono Lake. Things didn’t end well for him. About the time, Savage was killed, Tenaya was stoned to death by the Paiutes. Some accounts say that he stole some horses and was battered to death over that crime. Tenaya’s granddaughter told a historian in the first decade of the 20th century that Tenaya had been gambling on some kind of "hand game," that a quarrel erupted, and that the other Paiutes involved in the wager beat him to death with heavy stones.

The name "Tenaya" is pleasantly melodious. Several creeks bear the chief’s name. In the National Park, along the famous Tioga Pass Road, high above the tree-line, there is a splendid glacial lake nestled under a massive ark-shaped dome of rock. This is Tenaya Lake. Savage’s name is ugly. So far as I know, nothing is named after him.

 

 

Wednesday, April 3, 2019

On Awat'ovi



 

1.

The item is identified as Catalog No. IV B3252 at the Museum fuer Voelkerkunde in Berlin. (The German word "Voelkerkunde" – the study of Volk or tribal people – is best translated "Ethnography"; in this essay, I will refer to this institution as the Berlin Ethnography Museum.) IV B3252 is a fragment of a bowl found in the ruins of the Hopi pueblo named Awat’ovi. This village was located on Antelope Mesa in what is now north-western Arizona – the pueblo was the "High Place" of the Bow Clan, a kinship group in the Hopi tribe.

The bowl fits within the archaeological sequence of Hopi ceramics as Sityaki Polychrome. Even in its fragmentary form, the shard of the bowl, measuring about eight inches across, is handsome, the kind of charismatic object that makes children want to grow up to be archaeologists. The yellow concave surface is the color of cheddar cheese. Painted against this background are two flute-players, painted as black silhouettes. The flute-players have endearing little potbellies and their penises are erect; they hunch forward as if to wring notes from the flutes that they play. Between the two flute-players, a masked figure in red seems to be descending from some heaven imagined as beyond the rim of the bowl. The masked figure is enigmatic, a katsina represented either as a ceremonial dancer representing a rain god or the rain god himself. Based on the figure’s placement, hovering between the two flute-players, I interpret the katsina as divine and not merely a masked dancer.

Below the fluteplayers and the rain-god, eight silhouettes perform a sort of conga-line dance. The dancers have acorn-shaped heads, also turned downward. Each seems equipped with a kind of compound eye. Most notably, the eight line-dancers have erections fully as long as the leg that we see planted on the imaginary surface beneath them – there is no ground line painted and the dancers follow the curve of the bowl. The phalluses sported by the dancers have bulbous orange tips, each tapping the dancer ahead. The painted ithyphallic dancers are ambiguous – viewed from one perspective, the erect penises look like legs with round feet kicking upward. The dancer’s phalluses could be construed like a Rockette’s chorus line high-kicking rhythmically as they prace across a stage. But their feet planted on the notional surface of the plaza where they are performing aren’t equipped with the corona and glans depicted in their phalluses. At one point, the dancers formed a circle around the center of the bowl – there were 13 of them once. History has been hard on this bowl – eight of the dancers no longer exist, although we can imagine them, identical to their brethren shuffling in a circle around the inside of the pot, heads tilted downward and knees flexed.

The pot’s colors are extraordinary – warm yellows, brownish black silhouettes, the Cherokee red of the katsina. The rich, creamy yellow is an artifact of how the pot was fired. Antelope Mesa, where the bowl was made, has seams of bituminous coal and this mineral was used in the kilns in which the pot was finished. The intense heat generated by the slow, but long-burning coal creates the pot’s beautiful cheese-yellow sheen.

Forged in fire, the pot has come through fire twice as well.

2.

We tend to think of non-literate tribal people as ahistorical, entrapped in an amber of timeless, inscrutable traditions. But this notion is untrue. Tribal people’s beliefs evolve and develop over time; one tradition supercedes another. The cult of the katsinam (sometimes called Kachinas) swept through the villages of the Southwest toward the end of the 13th century. The katsina were nature gods, mostly associated with rain, that lived atop the snowcapped volcanoes now called the San Francisco Peaks (they are near Flagstaff, Arizona). The katsinam descended from their palaces atop this Arizona Mount Olympus and abided with the Hopi (as well as Zuni and Tewa speaking people) from the start of the new year until the heat of summer drove them back to their snowy retreats.

New religions are, often, born in violent chaos and, further, destabilize the cultures in which they are rooted until a consensus is achieved. All gods promise good to mankind, but, often, first a lot of killing has to be accomplished. A case in point are the Icelandic sagas detailing the spread of Christianity among the Vikings. Something similar happened with the katsina cult – ceramics and murals in kivas made during the conversion period, roughly 1250 to 1325, show slaughter, man-eating monsters, and eerie insect gods.

Based on ceramic sequences, we can date No IV, B3252 to around 1300. The beautiful bowl was undoubtedly a heirloom passed from grandmother to mother to daughter – the Hopi people are matrilineal. Since the pot was found at Awat’kovi, we also know that it was probably first destroyed around 1700. It was destroyed again later. Beautiful things are often destroyed, reconstructed, then, destroyed again.

 

3.

A purple storm descends, jabbing its proboscis of lightning into the mesa again and again. Men are singing in covered pits underground. After the rain, the robber fly buzzes through humid air. The flies are big and, when they come close, you can feel their wings displacing air.

 

4.

The Hopi word kookopoeloe names the robber fly with its lance-shaped proboscis and mystix (Greek for "moustache") of bristles protecting its mouth parts from the prey that it seizes and kills mid-air. A true fly of the order diptera (two-winged), kookopoeloe is an aggressive predator – the Hopi imagined it as a sort of puma or mountain lion, a feral winged beast that seized other insects, including locusts and large wasps, stabbing its proboscis into its prey and paralyzing them in flight. The robber fly mates tail to tail – the insects have to look away from one another or they will fight, trying to insert their lance-like hypopharynxes into one another’s bodies. The Hopi often saw the large flies mating and associated them with sex and fecundity. The flies also have a hairy hump on the thorax – this is carapace-covered bundle of muscles that operate their wings. Sometimes, the Hopi seem to have thought of the kookopoeloe as like bison; both animals have a hairy hump on their back. Associated with rain, sex, aggression, hunting and the buffalo, Southwestern Indians found the kookopoeloe (as Claude Levi-Strauss might say) "good to think with."

 

5.

The reader will have noticed the similarity between the Hopi name for the dipteran robber fly and the work "Kokopelli". Kokopelli has come to signify the hunchbacked flute players often found on pictograph-etched rock faces and ceramic pottery in the American Southwest. The little flute-players, often depicted with erections, are "cute" and have engendered enormous middens of kitsch – there is a kokopelli-themed golf bag, kokopelli restaurants and resorts, brew-pubs and taverns. You can buy kokopelli trinkets made from silver and turquoise and key-chains showing the little figure’s silhouette. The two flute-players with discrete hard-ons painted on Catalog No. IV, B3 are kokopelli.

In Hopi, Kokopelli refers primarily to the aerial katsinam, gods that flew down to the pueblos from their mountain haunts bringing rain on their shoulders. Not surprisingly, there is a katsina actually named Kookopoeloe – the deity has a hunchbacked and a long snout. The kokopelli flute-players often have two tiny prongs protruding from their featureless, bug-eyed heads – these are the antennae of the robber fly. The flute is the fly’s stabbing proboscis. Like human females, robber flies were always in heat, always ready to copulate, and, thus, the kokopelli figures sport phalluses. This latter detail is generally omitted in commercial imagery depicting the figures.

When you come to think of it, the flute-playing kokopelli is not that different from Pan playing his flute amidst the goats in the lonely mountains of Attica. To experience Pan’s presence is to sense the unity of being in the natural world. But Pan is also associated with blind and furious terror.

 

6.

At the turn of the century, German ethnographers studying the Hopi characterized them as uniquely Apollonian. The distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian cultures derives from Nietzsche, a writer whose ideas were immensely influential in the two decades before the First World War. Dionysian cultures were ecstatic, irrational, enamored with darkness and the chthonic depths of the earth. Apollonian people were devoted to classical serenity, reason, and worshiped the light. Dionysian tribal people felt; Apollonian tribes saw and classified.

The Hopi called themselves Hopituh-Shi-nu-mu – that is, the "little peaceful ones." As we will see, this name is more aspirational than realistic. Like all people, the Hopi possessed a mixture of dark and light, Dionysian and Apollonian characteristics.

 

7.

Ethnography begins in looting and ends repatriation.

The rapacious sea-captains of the Dutch East Indian Company seized tribal totems and masks and grave goods from the islands that they visited. These items were evidence of the outlandish beliefs of the naked heathens living in the jungles on their islands. In order to preserve their trade franchises, these sea-captains donated their collections of tribal curiosities to crowned princes. This was the inception of the Ethnography Museum of Berlin. The curios at the center of the museum’s collection, treasures from the mysterious Orient, were gifts given to the Prussian Prince-Electors, the Kurfuersten. These noblemen maintained at their palaces Kunstkammern – that is chambers of wonders: shamanic masks from the Arctic were displayed with geodes, rare crystals and stalactites, portraits painted on grains of rice, and erotica. The Great Prussian Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm III possesed Kunstkammer, a sort of Ripley’s Believe-it-or-not Odditorium, that contained among other things the priceless feathered mantle of Kamehameha II, given in tribute to a German sea-captain in 1828 – the iridescent robe was intended as an honorarium bestowed by one great ruler, the King of Hawa’ii to his counterpart in cold and rainy Prussia. Presumably, Kamehameha thought that Friedrich William would wear the shawl as a sign of his power and dispense justice in accord with the radiant garment. There’s no evidence that the Prussian Elector ever donned the shawl woven from the innumerable brilliant feathers of Hawaiian birds.

When Prince Friedrich Wilhelm’s collection of curios and artifacts was opened to the public in 1843, the museum’s first director was, in fact, a sea-captain. It was thought that this vocation made him a more efficient collector and, indeed, the first official expedition mounted by the Ethnography Museum was to Brazil, where a vast number of tribal masks, idols and weapons were acquired in the Amazon basin.



8.

Around 1150, the high civilization at Chaco Canyon collapsed. The great houses with their finely cut masonry walls were abandoned and the vast, ceremonial plazas covering large subterranean kivas vanished into the dunes of the encroaching desert. Fifty-years of drought ended the Pax Chaco. The obsessively straight curbed highways running from sacred place to sacred place were no longer maintained and the outlier great houses scattered throughout the Four Corners area fell, one by one, to the fire and war-lance of nomadic invaders. Nature was out of balance and the priests whose power was rooted in their ability to summon the rains lost prestige and were torn to pieces by the thirsty people as mere and fraudulent sorcerers. The civilized people, those who built stone houses and cultivated fields of corn and beans, retreated to the tops of inaccessible mesas or built elegant, but profoundly uncomfortable, cliff dwellings. It was an age of fortification. The vast complexes of intricately dressed cut-stone fell into heaps of disorderly rock and the people avoided them as haunted by ghosts and evil spirits. Men ate men – in the human excrement found in Cowboy Wash, the site of a big massacre, there is indisputable evidence of cannibal feasting.

The Hopi, Zuni, and Tewa-speaking people were born of this dark age. They fled from the center to the periphery. The towns that these refugees built, then, became the new centers of the world for their inhabitants. The Hopi, in particular, were refugee people par excellence, the products of the great exodus away from the settled places around Chaco Canyon. Hopi is a language-isolate – this means that it is a distinct language with no known relatives or cognates. Most languages exist in groups: Old Norwegian spawned the Scandinavian languages including English; Latin is the source of the Romance languages such as French and Italian. Hopi stands alone – if there were related dialects they were extinct by the 13th century. Although the Tewa people (who speak Keresan dialects) and the Zuni as well as the people at Acoma pueblo all lived, like the Hopi, in similarly designed pueblos, all of them spoke different languages. The Hopi were never pure-bred. Rather, their language formed a cultural core around which various refugee clans from other tribes assembled. The Hopi were generous in adopting outsiders. A band that had been expelled from its homelands might make a petition to the Hopi elders for admission to the clan. The elders interviewed the tribal leaders of the supplicant refugees and determined the craft skills (usually the possession of the women) and ritual technologies that the immigrants offered to Hopi commonwealth. Native American religions were syncretic – if an immigrant group possessed a particularly powerful "medicine" (for instance, the ability to summon rain gods or make crops grow or communicate with the ancestors), the Hopi were happy to incorporate those believes into their cult practices. (Later, the tragic Ghost Dance religion that swept through the Plains Indians in the last decades of the 19th century was synthesized from Mormon prophecy, Christian apocalyptic imagery, and specifically native worship paradigms.) If the elders agreed to incorporate the new immigrants into the Hopi alliance, the newcomers were expected to learn the Hopi language so that they could participate in the political and religious practices unifying the people. They were allowed to retain their own language and gods with the understanding that no native Hopi would ever speak their tongue or, even, try to learn it. Hopi was the language that the gods and nature spoke.

As a result of Hopi generosity to immigrant clans, the tribe flourished. But the Hopi were always only loosely confederated – the individual pueblos were self-sustaining polities. Hopi language unified the clans but the people thought of themselves as primarily members of a village community – the village was their central identity. For this reason, Hopi clans competed with one another and, sometimes, even waged war between villages. The pueblo Awat’ovi on a high escarpment atop Antelope Mesa was considered, therefore, the polity of the Bow people or clan.

 

9.

In 1843, the ethnographic collection of the Prince-Elector at Berlin was moved into the neo-classical edifice of Karl Schinkel’s spectacular Neue Museum (the "New Museum"). The New Museum is a Greek temple built on a high plinth on the so-called Museum Island in the Spree River in central Berlin. The place is beautifully proportioned with an immense Doric portico. It was also crowded with all sorts of paintings, artifacts and historical relics. As German aspirations toward colonialism increased, the ethnography collections expanded. Very soon, they outgrew the dimensions of the galleries in the New Museum.

A vast new structure was built in 1873 at the intersection between Koeniggraetzer Strasse and Prinz Albrechtstrasse. (Koeniggraetzer Strasse became Stresemannstrasse during the Nazi period – this was the center of the Nazi bureaucracy and the Ethnographic Museum headquarters were uncomfortably close to the Gestapo headquarters with its labyrinth of basement torture chambers.) Named the Royal Museum for Ethnography, the museum building occupied a roughly triangular plot of land, extending like a partially opened scissors away from the fulcrum where the two roads intersected – the scissor’s two blades were the two wings of the museum. A contemporary engraving shows the Museum’s huge atrium or Lichthof, a bright courtyard immediately behind the curved classical colonnade fronting the intersection. Two mighty totem poles stand in the beams of light descending through a skylight above them. Although it was a big building, the Royal Museum was already too small for the ever-increasing collection of artifacts and antiquities.

The museum’s director, Adolf Bastian, believed that so-called primitive art should be displayed according to comparative-genetic paradigms. All tribal people had cerain common characteristics – they shared certain belief systems that were, in essence, hard-wired into human beings – Bastian’s exhibitions were intended to highlight these hard-wired symbolic systems. Accordingly, he might exhibit all fertility cult idols, notwithstanding their origin, in one part of a gallery. Bastian included German folk art among his collections, but kept it apart from the objects produced by tribal cultures. His view was that tribal people were ahistoric – the genetic structures of belief to which they subscribed were timeless and unchanging. The museum’s two wings were basically divided between tribal art from the South Pacific, Africa, and America with Asian art displayed in the other extension of the building. Notably, the Asian art collection contained huge and detailed plaster casts of bas-relief friezes from Angkor Wat in Cambodia. These casts were very popular with the museum-going public.

10.

Germany aspired to an empire between 1880 and 1914. During this imperialist period, Germany claimed colonies in Ghana, Benin, East Africa (including Tanganyika), Namibia and the Cameroons. In the South Pacific, Germany administered German New Guinea comprised from half of Papua, New Guinea, the Bismarck archipelago, and the Solomon Islands. In addition, the Germans had various concessions in China.

Not surprisingly, the great age of German imperialism corresponded with an era of intense ethnographic field collection. German explorers scoured the world for objects to ship back to the ethnography museum in Berlin. Item No. IV, B3252 was most likely acquired during that period. Germans dug up graves, looted grave goods, and, also, bought shiploads of antiquities and relics. An endless succession of ships and railroad cars brought artifacts to Berlin.

No more storage space existed in the central Berlin museum. Accordingly, a warehouse was rented in Dahlem, a suburb to the southeast of the City Center – it’s where the Free University of Berlin is located. Ultimately, six warehouses were acquired as a vast treasure house for tribal objects and far Eastern art. Around 1910, museum authorities commissioned an eminent architect to design four new exhibition buildings in Dahlem – the plan was to display the warehoused objects in these buildings. Then, World War I intervened. Field collection ceased and Germany was stripped of its colonies, the sources for many of the artifacts shipped to Berlin. Of the four new buildings planned for Dahlem only one was constructed – the neo-classical palace was completed in 1921 just as money for the project was exhausted. The German economy collapsed as a result of war reparations and inflation. People had other things on their mind beyond the curious habits and customs of the Naturvoelker.

At the downtown Berlin museum, the collections were reorganized to acknowledge the new understanding that tribal cultures evolved over time. The collections were displayed in a way that emphasized the evolution of design paradigms and technology over time.

 

11.

The provenance of Item No. IV, B3252 is unclear to me. Publications showing the shield-shaped bowl fragment don’t identify how it came into the collection of the Berlin Ethnography Museum. So I will speculate.

Henry Voth was a German Mennonite born in 1855 at Alexanderwohl, an Anabaptist enclave south of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). Russia controlled Alexanderwohl during the 19th century and, when the Czar embarked on a series of wars, many Mennonites emigrated – the sect is strictly pacifist and, often, persecuted for refusal to serve in the military. Voth’s family, facing persecution, found their way to Kansas where the Mennonites established several towns. Voth trained for the Heidenmissionen (Conversion of the Heathens), studying some medicine and religious doctrine. The zeal of a missionary burned in him and the young man went West to convert the Arapaho first at Darlington in the Indian territory (now Oklahoma) and, then, the Fort Reno reservation. Voth learned the language of the Indians and studied their rituals, religion, and folk tales. By all accounts, he was an effective, if fierce, proselytizer. But his mission was opposed by the charismatic Ghost Dance sect that spread like wildfire through the Indians of the northern plains and mountain west. Notwithstanding his opposition to the Ghost Dance, Voth studied the phenomenon carefully, corresponding with prominent American ethnologists at both the Smithsonian Institute and the Field Museum in Chicago. He illustrated his reports on the Ghost Dance rituals with objects that he collected and sent to Chicago and Washington, D. C. The Ghost Dance was an apocalyptic millenialist cult – adherents believed that the vanished herds of buffalo would be resurrected, springing forth from the green meadows of western plains, the white men would vanish, and warriors wearing Ghost Shirts consecrated by the faith’s holy men would be impervious to shot and shell: lead would bounce of the Ghost shirts as if they were made of tempered steel. These beliefs perished in the bloody ice at Wounded Knee Creek.

The Mennonite mission to the Hopi called Henry Voth. He traveled to the Third Mesa with his family and lived on the outskirts of old Oraibi, one of most ancient pueblos in the United States. Voth was industrious after the Teutonic manner and learned Hopi. He acquired a Kodak camera and began documenting Hopi rituals – many of the most important images of Hopi life in first decades of the 20th century were captured by Voth. Again Voth commenced correspondence with scholars in Chicago and Washington. And he also sent his treatises on Hopi religion and language to specialists at the Berlin Ethnography Museum.

An ambitious man named Fred Harvey established several luxury hotels along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad (and, later, other westbound railroads as well). His hotels catered to tourists traveling west to see the scenic wonders of the Grand Canyon and northern New Mexico. (The hotels recruited young women to work as chambermaids, receptionists, and waitresses in their dining halls. These were the so-called "Harvey Girls" – there is a Hollywood musical about them circa 1946 starring Judy Garland. Will Rogers said that the "Harvey Girls" kept the American West well-supplied "with ham ‘n eggs and wives.") Harvey’s upscale restaurants and hotel lobbies needed decor and, so, he dispatched agents to the reservations to collect curios. Henry Voth’s enterprises at Oraibi needed money and the Indians were happy to earn cash producing pottery and colorful blankets for Harvey’s businesses – ultimately, Harvey had about 45 hotels and restaurants called "Harvey Houses" along the train route west from Topeka to California. Most of his businesses were equipped with gift shop selling Native American souvenirs. Voth’s transactions with Fred Harvey made him expert in Pueblo pottery. At this time, Voth was also corresponding with Aby Warburg, the famous cultural theorist, then working for the British Museum in London. Voth was a learned man and he shared his studies internationally. He also was an avid "pot hunter", digging out ancient burial sites and sending his harvest of ceramics and shards to museums around the world. Many items in the Berlin Ethnograpy Museum were collected by Voth on the Third Mesa and dispatched to the Pueblo specialists employed by the Museum.

The Hopi at Oraibi were afraid of the spectral ruins at Awat’ovi. Sometimes, however, sheep wandered afield and grazed amid the half-fallen walls extruded from the barren rocks like broken teeth and the young men had to venture into desolate fallen walls and towers to retrieve them. Some of the walls at Awat’ovi were fifteen feet thick, still higher than a man could reach, and there were mazes of windowless, doorless cells built up against the big ramparts. Navajo shepherds said that they sometimes heard voices singing in the ruins – perhaps, it was just their imagination because in Navajo, the ruins had always been called Tallahogan, the Singing House. Voth was intrigued by the place and made some excavations there. During one of these digs, he saw a piece of ceramic, partly covered with soot, resting among the fallen rocks – when he spit on the shard and rubbed off the ash, it glowed with a pale daisy-colored radiance, something like a piece of light-colored cheddar cheese. The figures painted on the pot were obscene, not suitable for Fred Harvey’s hotel lobbies or the showcases in his restaurants. So Voth cleaned off the pot, painstakingly recorded its appearance with his Kodak, made some notes as to the dispositions of the figures, and, then, sent it off to one of his correspondents in Berlin.

Drought struck the Third Mesa in 1902. The traditional Indians who had resisted Voth’s missionary work blamed those who had converted – life on the Third Mesa was "out of balance" (kooyanitsqatsi). Voth’s proselytizing had scared away the katsinam. The ground dried up and was so hard that it couldn’t be pierced with a planting stick – it didn’t matter because there was no moisture with which to grow corn and beans. Voth had to order two freight cars full of corn from Kansas to feed his flock. Dissension in the tribe resulted in a schism at Oraibi. Voth’s Christian Indians moved out of the village to a place a mile distant and established New Oraibi. Old Oraibi, hunkered down on the edge of the mesa, sweltered in the sun and starved.

When he was sixty, Henry Voth was worn out by missionary work. He and his wife said goodbye to his converts, rather few for the 20 years that he had spent among the Hopi – the Indians were a stiff-necked, obstinate people set in their ways and difficult to win for the Lord. Voth returned to the old Cherokee Outlet in Oklahoma where he was appointed pastor of a Mennonite church at Goltry. He served the Church until he was 72 and, then, died in 1931.

 

12.

It’s an old story: once upon a time, there were two brothers, both of them tribal chieftains. The elder brother went to the East to seek his fortune. For many years, he was absent in the lands where the sun rises. One day, he returned in triumph to his younger brother. In the years that he had been gone, the younger brother had been profligate – he had squandered the wealth of his people and they were now poor, desperate, and vicious. The tribe had become dissolute – sexual perversion flourished, strange sicknesses afflicted the people, and they had forgotten the sacraments central to their religion. The climate had changed – summer was more hot and dry than it had been before and the winter was much longer and more cold. Floods washed away fields where the people grew corn and squash. Even the wild animals had become scarce. Dogs and coyotes told the older brother that the tribe and the younger brother had neglected all of the common decencies that made men civilized.

Confronted with this accusation, the younger brother admitted that he had allowed the people to fall into decadence and that their way of life was not sustainable. The younger man knelt before his elder brother, offering his throat to the blade. Weeping, the older brother decapitated the younger man, seizing his head by the forelock and waving it as a warning to the people. The tribe repented of its evil ways: the old forms of worship were reinstated, the katsinam returned from the conical snowy peaks bearing rain in its proper measure – the fields flowered, sexual perverts were put to death, and balance among the seasons was restored. Koyaanisquatsi became suyaanisquatsi (life in balance). After order was restored, the people accused the older brother of murder. He submitted to their judgement and was decapitated.

This is the way that the chaos of the Third World named koyaanisquatsi becomes the serenity and peace of the Fourth World called suyaanisquatsi. The story is told from the Aleutian Islands, and on the Third Mesa and down to Peru and the Tierra del Fuego – when Cortez arrived in Mexico, he was hailed as Quetzalcoatl, the winged serpent incarnated in the elder brother who had gone East for many hundreds of years but had now returned to the people of his younger brother.

 

13.

Men’s deeds cast a long shadow. One of Henry Voth’s first converts was a member of Katsinam clan, Fred Quoyawayma. His daughter, Polingsaya, attended Voth’s Mennonite school at Oraibi. Voth was aggressive about recruiting children for his school and vigorous about enforcing attendance requirements – this angered many Hopi parents and partly led to the schism that ultimately divided Oraibi into two villages. Polingsaya (the name means "butterfly among flowers stirred by breeze") was a good student and her father admired Henry Voth enough to send her to a Mennonite High School in Riverside, California. Polingsaya returned to the Third Mesa and worked for awhile as a missionary. But she was not content: her fellow Hopi were suspicious of her affiliation with the White missionaries and the missionaries were condescending to her – she was too Hopi for their tastes.

Polingsaya went to college at Bethel in Kansas, an university with which Voth was closely affiliated. She returned to Arizona as a substitute teacher and, then, full-time educator in the Navajo Morman town of Tuba City. After a few years, the Bureau of Indian Affairs hired her to teach at Hotevil or New Oraibi – the village founded by the progressive Hopi after the Oraibi split. By this time, Polngsaya Quoyawayma’s thinking had changed – instead of attempting to convert the Hopi to European customs and religion, her approach was synthetic: she aimed to unite the best traditions in both cultures. In order to achieve this objective, Polingsaya conducted her classes in both Hopi and English. This innovation made her a pioneer in bilingual Indian education, the paradigm that supplanted the infamous BIA boarding schools in which native children were punished for speaking their home language. By 1941, Polingsaya’s methods were so well-established and so universally acclaimed that she was appointed to teach teachers how to apply these techniques. She wrote an acclaimed novel about her childhood Sun Girl and, later, collaborated with other writers on books about Hopi history. She won many awards and, late in life, invented a new technique for firing ceramic pottery – her pots are distinctively pink. She died at the age of 98 in Phoenix, Arizona.

 

14.

The elder brother from the East appeared on Antelope Mesa at Awat’ovi on August 20, 1629. The elder brother’s name was Francisco de Porras. Porras was a Franciscan missionary who brought the gospel to the Hopi village. At that time, the town was large, boasting masonry apartments that lined the rim of the escarpment, some of them four stories tall. The bottomland below the mesa was a patchwork of green irrigated fields where the Hopi grew beans, squash, corn and fine cotton used for weaving. Awat’ovi had a large plaza and several commodious underground kivas. Neat masonry walls surrounded the village and fortified it against enemies.

The priests in the Katchina cult opposed Porras’ missionary work and threatened to pitch him off the rim of the mesa. But, then, he cured a boy blind from birth. When the child’s eyesight was restored, Spanish Catholic sources tell us that "conversions followed like foam." Many among the Hopi were disposed to license new religious rites – it wasn’t so different from embracing the cults of immigrant clans who had joined the tribe before. But the Franciscan god was jealous and, presaging events that occurred almost 300 years later at Oraibi, the Hopi divided into two factions – progressives who supported the Catholics and conservatives who felt that the presence of the priests and his followers menaced their way of life.

Porras commanded that the people build a church. The task was arduous. The priest specified that cyclopean walls be constructed, heavy stones piled upon stones, and the interior place of assembly was vast by Hopi standards, a dark echoing space under a ceiling made from matted reeds and clay supported by great timber vigas. The vigas were cut from whole trees, harvested on mountains at the Black Mesa forty miles away, and, then, laboriously dragged to the construction site. The enterprise of building the mighty stone church took half-a-lifetime and exhausted countless man-hours. Simply hauling water from the valleys to the barren cliff-top to mix the mud for adobe bricks occupied the women of the village for days at a time. Later, the Bow Clan people regarded their conscription in gangs constructing the church as a kind of forced labor. But, of course, the Hopi vastly outnumbered the three or four Franciscan missionaries and, no doubt, many of them took pride in the huge ungainly edifice squatting on the edge of the mesa cliff. For the progressive members of the Bow Clan, the church signified a special dispensation granted to the people at Awat’ovi.

There were other dispensations as well: the priests also demanded that a convento, or lodging house, be built in the shadow of the church, additional spacious rooms made from carefully joined stones with long vigas holding up the ceilings. The Franciscan missionaries taught their apostles to sing in the European manner, plainchant and hymns rendered in complex polyphony, masses and liturgy, even, motets. The Hopi were musical and quickly mastered the songs that they were taught. At night, there was singing in the plaza and within the great gloomy cavern of the mission church and, even, voices sounded underground in the subterranean kivas. The church was given the name San Bernado de Aguatubi, after one of the Franciscan’s patron saints, Bernard of Clairvaux.

The Mission Church was not yet finished when Porras died. In the midst of vigorous life, he was seized with a mysterious illness. Dying in agony, Porras maintained that apostates among the Hopi had poisoned him. But work on the church continued – its foundation walls were more than six feet thick. The people remained divided. The site of the church itself signified the divisions in the community: the church altar was built directly atop one of the community’s principal kivas. Before the foundation stones were set, Hopi priests, who had become adherents of the new religion, carefully deactivated the sacred powers intrinsic to the kiva – the ritual vessels were broken and fine, sifted sand was poured into the round pit, burying its benches and sipapu, it’s hearth and old murals painted on the walls. The schism in the clan, also, took on a physical dimension – the mission Indians relocated to build their apartments in next to the dressed stone walls of the church. The adherents to traditional cults maintained their distance, on the other side of the plaza.

As the years passed, disquieting events manifested the conflict in the village. The priests were accused of seducing village women, sending their husbands on long quests to locate and carry sacred water from remote springs, while the Castillas, as they were called enjoyed their wives. Apostate Indians were sometimes publicly flogged or, otherwise, humiliated. In 1655, a Franciscan priest beat a native disciple to death. (He was removed from his position and sent back to Mexico City, a long hike that took, at least, six months.) A few years later, a Hopi named Juan Suni was arraigned at Awat’ovi on charges that he had mimicked a priest and, perhaps, traduced the holy sacraments. In fact, it was probably a misunderstanding: Juan Suni was a member of the Sacred Clown society and, as such, felt it was his duty to mock and caricature prominent men in the village – this was the role of the Clown dancers. Suni was probably simply discharging his role in that society and the priest, the clown dancers’ thought, should have been honored by thought important enough to burlesque. But the Franciscans were not amused and Suni was beaten and, then, sent as an indentured servant to faraway Santa Fe. Also significant was the fact that the other mission churches at the six or seven Hopi pueblos were largely empty – the only converts were at Awat’ovi. In fact, when Indians were converted in one of the other villages, they were generally ostracized and, so, moved to Awat’ovi to join the pueblo of mission Indians there.

The Franciscans hung bells in their high tower and they rang over the fields below the mesa where the Hopi worked among their cotton and corn. People were still "washed on the head with water"– that is, baptized. But discontent was growing.



15.

The rule of war is that what you do to others will, ultimately, be done to you. Americans wage war more blithely, perhaps, than other people because this principle has never really applied to our homeland. But it’s a rule in which Europeans are well-schooled.

The Nazis knew what the Luftwaffe had done to London, Rotterdam, and Warsaw. It was inevitable that aerial war would come to Berlin. And, so, in 1941, the major museums on the Spree island and scattered about Berlin and its suburbs were shuttered and the collections carefully hidden in unobtrusive places. No one had time to spend looking at precious things in museums any way. The war was supposed to be all-consuming.

In the years immediately preceding the Blitzkrieg, the collections of the Berlin Ethnographic Museum had been divided and, further, divided. The art of the so-called Naturvoelker (primitive people) was regarded as a pure expression of these people’s instinct for their "blood and soil" and so cautiously valued. But the mongrel folk art of the Balkans, Ukraine and Eastern Europe, thought to be a sickly hybrid between East and West was considered degenerate. Some objects were left on display but purely for diagnostic purposes – the art expressed a kind of racial pathology.

The art of the American Indians was highly regarded. Courtesy of the writer of melodramatic Westerns, Karl May, the Germans have always had a soft spot for American Indians. Winnetou, the Sioux warrior, and the noble Apaches were pure-blooded, valiant and true, in fact, honorary Aryans. German soldiers were encouraged to emulate the self-sacrifice and courage shown by Native Americans. The same was true of the American paratroopers leaping out of airplanes to the cry of "Geronimo!"

 

16.

The people of the Southwestern pueblos spoke different languages and, often, went to war with one another. But they recognized the common threat posed by the Castillas and negotiated an alliance to wage war on the Spaniards. Drought afflicted the land. The Franciscan priests had expelled the katsinam and banned the masked dancers whose role was to summon the rain gods from their mountain lodges. In 1675, three katsina dancers, accused of violating the canon law prohibiting masked dancing, were hanged in the plaza of Santa Fe. On the Hopi mesas, a rogue priest, Father de Guerra, led a group of his disciples on a search through people’s houses for woven cotton fabrics – the material was demanded as tribute for his church. When he found curious assemblages of feathers and carved idols in some of the people’s homes, he doused them in turpentine and set them afire. When the owners of this ritual regalia protested, he poured turpentine over their shoulders and heads and set them on fire as well. This sort of conduct was beyond the pale and Church authorities called Father de Guerra to account. But, after some mild discipline, he was not exiled to Mexico City, but, instead, assigned a new Church at Isleta, west of the Mission on the Colorado under Sandia Mountain (near modern-day Albuquerque). This was too much and the leaders of the pueblos met secretly, decided upon a date for an uprising, and, then, sent runners to the various villages. The runners carried knotted rope. Each knot represented a day. When the last knot was untied, the warriors were to attack the Spanish in each of their strongholds and kill them all. The runners reached the old pueblo at Taos and the great Pecos pueblo to the east of Santa Fe; fleet-footed men ran as far west as Acoma and the Zuni and Hopi villages on the remote Arizona mesas. Except for the mission Indians, everyone agreed that the Spaniards should be slaughtered.

On August 10, 1680, the Rio Grande pueblos around Santa Fe rebelled. Priests were murdered. Some of them were hung from the vigas of their churches and roasted over slow fires. The Hopi at Awat’ovi and the other villages on the mesas seized the Franciscans and killed them. Father Figueroa was cut down as he said his prayers in the great Mission church. As the mission Indians stood by, paralyzed by fear, the warriors looted the church and knocked down its bells. At Oraibi, Father Espelata was dragged from his monastic cell, his throat slit, and his body ignominiously cast off the mesa cliff. A new priest, Fray Augustin de Santa Maria was beheaded. Father Trujillo at the Hopi pueblo of Shungovi was forced to watch the dismantling of his church. The vigas so laboriously dragged from the Black Mesa two generations ago were heaped in a pile, a fire was started, and Trujillo was bound and hung over the blaze.

By the end of August, no Spanish were left alive on the Third Mesa or at Awat’ovi on Antelope Mesa or, indeed, anywhere else within Hopi territory. About 430 Spaniards were killed in pueblo country, between the Pecos big house in the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the East and the Zuni and Hopi villages overlooking the canyons in northwest Arizona. A bedraggled and terrified caravan of Spaniards in their hot and dusty iron breastplates riding alongside barefoot women and children crossed the deserts to take refuge in El Paso. The great Pueblo Revolt had achieved its purpose – the Castillos had been expelled from the Hopi villages and the other pueblos in the Southwest, each place claiming itself to be the center or navel of the earth. The world had been purified.

 

17.

No one knows exactly what happened at Awat’ovi during the next twenty years. The archaeological record provides some clues, but they are indistinct. The church was abandoned and its roof collapsed. But there is evidence that people still sometimes used the ruins for worship. The spacious rooms of the convento, too large for the Hopi, were subdivided by the erection of internal walls, and people moved into those tenements and lived there. The kivas were restored, although many of them were now equipped with cross-shaped icons and lit with candles made in imitation of those once used by the Franciscan missionaries. Most puzzlingly, someone lovingly wrapped the bones of dead European in precious textiles and, then, bound the corpse into the flexed position that the Hopi used in their mortuary practices – people began as wet oozing fetal balls and that was how they ended as well, buried with their knees strapped up under their chins. The dead European had been first defleshed, possibly with knives and also by exposure. Then, his bones, tied into a fetal position, were buried midway between the old deactivated kiva filled with sifted sand and the ruined altar of the mission church. When the bones were discovered during a Harvard-sponsored dig conducted by John Otis Brew in 1936, the skeletal remains were sent to Harvard’s Peabody Library where they were stored in a steel case. In 1937, a Catholic priest named Reverend Stoner, trained as an archaeologist at Tucson, embarked on a campaign to have the skeleton repatriated to his diocese. Stoner argued that the Vatican was considering canonizing as saints the priests who died in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and that the Church should have possession of this potential relic. Wrangling ensued over the skeleton. Reverend Stoner seems to have concluded that the dead European was Father de Porras – in that way, avoiding contentious issues as to the justice of the Pueblo Revolt. After all, Father de Porras was an innocent, poisoned for bringing the light of the Gospel to the Hopi. Finally, Harvard conceded the point and shipped the bones to the Church, postage pre-paid and the package insured for five-hundred dollars. It’s not clear to me what happened to these remains.

A thick stratum of ash and soot was found during Brew’s excavation in the mission church and convento. Above this lens of burnt material, Brew found 69 burials. These burials meant that between 1680 and 1700, when the pueblo was destroyed again and its people all murdered, the Hopi in Awat’kovi had been burying many of their dead in the consecrated earth under the ruins of the church. Further, 59 of these burials were supine, the skeletons set on their backs and often interred with grave goods that included rosaries and crucifixes. A dead Catholic priest had been carefully buried as a Hopi; dead Hopis had been carefully buried as Catholics. Despite their deaths, the Franciscan fathers’ influence continued – many of the Hopi at Awat’ovi seem to have considered themselves, at least, partially Catholic. Perhaps, this should not be surprising. Awat’ovi was the capitol village of the Hopi and its most cosmopolitan settlement. It was also conspicuously religious – as late as the early 20th century, Hopi elders recalled that alone among the settlements Awat’ovi possessed the full complement of the tribe’s cult societies, a total of 18 in all. None of the other villages were as pious.

 

18.

The Castillos returned, more of them and better armed. In 1693, Santa Fe was recaptured. At first, the Indians accepted the return of the Spanish but, then, rebelled again and there was a bitter siege at Santa Fe. Hundreds were killed in the reconquista. (The festival at Santa Fe celebrating the bloodless recapture of the city is based on lies and half-truths.) By 1695, Franciscan priests were back on the Hopi mesas. Ute and Navajo Apache raiders had attacked the Hopi villages and destroyed some of them. During the wars with the nomadic invaders, the Hopi’s crops failed. The winter between 1695 and 1696 was lethally cold and many people died of starvation. Refugees fleeing the Spanish reconquista at Santa Fe and the upper Rio Grande flooded on the Hopi mesas. But there was no place for these refugees – the land was over-taxed and crops were failing. Tanos warriors, hardened by battles with the Spanish, turned their faces west and joined the Navajo and Ute raiders in attacking the fortified villages on the mesas. The Franciscans were back at Awat’ovi, this time with a garrison of mounted soldiers and they rousted the Hopi out of the old convento, tearing down the interior walls so that they could stable their horses in those structures. These Spaniards weren’t much interested in the Church – they were harder, more avaricious men than the priests.

The weather was strange. The human robber flies had returned. Kooyanisquatsi reigned. Life was out of balance.

 

19.

In the end of March 1945, Berlin was dead, although it was still fighting. Swarms of bombers buzzed like flies over the cadaver of the city. Several bombs dropped through the Lichthof (atrium) of the Ethnography Museum. It was probably accidental, the incendiary bombs intended for the Anhalter Bahnhof, a train station across the street. The grandiose Lichthof with its towering totem poles and Papuan ancestor figures was empty when the bombs pierced the building. The collections had been spirited away.

Bombs shattered the adjacent train shed, knocking molten girders and metal sheets down onto the shredded tracks. An aerial photograph taken in 1947 shows a large open space where the train shed was once located – the ruined infrastructure of ticket booths and concessions appears as a kind of battered brick amphitheater around the empty area where the trains once pulled into the station. Across the street, there is simply no trace of the rounded museum portico that stood at the intersection between the two diagonal streets. The roads are clear and the debris seems to have been either bulldozed or hand-picked out of the vacant lots. The stolid Biedermeier facades of the museum’s wings are upright, but galleries behind them seem to be gone.

In Dahlem, German soldiers hid in the museum branch there as well. The building was shelled and a photograph made after the war shows the neo-classical facade ravaged by pot-hole-sized craters.

 

20.

Hopi values were piety, kindness to strangers, valor in the defense of the people, fortitude, temperance, chastity, generosity, and respect for elders. So long as these values were observed, suyaanitsquatsi prevailed – life was in balance.

But something was wrong at Awat’kovi. The people were deviating from the right way. Perhaps, they were inventing a new religion. Perhaps, sorcery was afoot. The Hopi believed in witchcraft and, from time to time, executed sorcerers, carefully shredding their bodies so that they could not reconstitute themselves. The bones of dogs were found in some of the kivas when Awat’ovi was excavated in 1936. Dogs are cousin to coyotes and coyotes are in league with the manifold devils of earth and sky. Dogs and coyotes are able to speak with one another and everyone knew that, from time to time, a coyote would prevail upon a dog to bite its master and run wild in the plaza, frothing at the mouth. No one had ever allowed dogs into the kivas for fear that they would tell their cousins about the religious sacraments celebrated there and, in that way, allow the dark forces an advantage over the light. Dog meant witchcraft.

History progressed – men grew wiser with each generation – but there were also cycles observed in time. Suyaanitsquatsi sometimes gave way to koyaanitsquatsi. Life out of balance could only be purged by violence, by killing dogs and coyotes and sorcerers. The katsinam shunned places where life was out of balance.

It had happened many times before. The mesas were dotted with broken places, ruins that no one dared enter. These were dead villages, the wreckage left by slaughtered human beings, places where life had been out of balance until the avenging angels appeared with fire and sword. Long ago, the debauched people at Pawatkapi had been killed by a huge horned serpent – the ruins of the town showed where the dragons tail had broken its towers. Sityakti, the place where the beautiful polychrome pottery had been invented, was destroyed when its people became arrogant and defied the gods. Pivanhokyapi, the village of the famous Ladder Dance, was destroyed by a beautiful young witch from Huk’ovi, a neighboring village, when she was spurned by a boy from the village. The witch knocked down the vertical ladders poised on the edge of the mesa precipice from which the young men leaped back and forth. Old Spider Woman, the village’s patron and protectress, restored the ladders and made them firm in their post-holes but this was insufficient to save the town. When the men were leaping from ladder to ladder, the witch stood in the crowd, enraged. When the dance was complete, the men retired to their kivas. The witch broken down the roofs of the kivas filling the subterranean places of worship with poisonous fumes and the men all died. Disconsolate, the women and children fled across the mesa to seek refuge in other villages and the ruins of the Ladder Dance pueblo were abandoned to the lizards and carrion crows.

Sometimes, the elder brother came back from the East, pale as the Pahanas (White men). He condemned the people’s wickedness, was beheaded, and, after the evil ones had been butchered, the younger brother was beheaded as well.

After the Ladder Dance lodge was destroyed, a flame spurted from the ruins and crossed the mesa to Huk’ovi, the place where the beautiful young witch lived. At Huk’ovi, the people had become addicted to gambling – the men wagered on totolopsi, a game played with dice, and, when they had exhausted all their worldly goods, they staked their wives on the roll of the die. The wives didn’t protest and thought it exciting to be passed from hand to hand. So the fire came to Huk’ovi and coalesced into Tiiykuywuuti, Woman with Child Sticking Out. Tiiykuywuuti wore a mask that was so fearsome that those who looked upon it went mad. When she removed the mask, the cowed people of pueblo gazed upward to see a pale, radiant maiden, a girl who had died in child-birth, with her corpse-baby still wedged between her thighs. Tiiykuywuutki said she had come to kill all witches and sorcerers but that she would spare the village if the people went elsewhere, joined other clans, and renounced their wicked gambling. The people at Huk’ovi fled their village and Tiikuywuutki put on her horrible mask and threw down all the walls and burned the kivas. Those living in Huk’ovi were so terrified that they crossed the desert basins and snowy mountains to establish villages along the California coast.

In 1700, the head man at Awat’ovi was Ta’palo. Ta’palo despaired of the wicked ways of the people in his village. When they would not respond to his admonitions, he left the lodge of the Bow clan and walked to Walpi, a village renowned for its fierce warriors. Ta’palo told the soldier society at Walpi that the people of Awat’ovi were misusing the power that the Hopi called pawa – the medicine that lets humans change their religion and institution. The people in Awat’ovi were committing blasphemy, denying the divinity of the katsinam, and engaged in all sorts of sexual perversion. Furthermore, their sorcerers were blighting the crops and distorting the seasons. Ta’palo said that Walpi could have the rich bottom-lands held by the people of Awat’ovi if the soldier society would lead an assault on his village and purge the place of its witches. The Walpi were greedy for the lands held by the Bow clan and agreed that life was out of balance there and that suyaanitsquatsi. The people at Walpi said that the warriors of the Bow clan were well-disciplined and courageous and that more troops would be required to destroy the Awat’ovi. So Ta’palo went to Oraibi. He told the soldiers there that they could have their choice of the women and children spared after the Awat’ovi was knocked down. The people at Oraibi agreed to join the expedition, but thought that more fighters were needed. Ta’palo then went to the village of Mishongnovi. He told the warriors there that they could make slaves of any woman or child not picked-out by the men from Oraibi. So the soldiers at Mishongnovi also agreed to join the assault.

Of course, there’s another explanation for Ta’palo’s rage. Perhaps, he was just a disappointed politician, someone who had been a leader but was, then, rejected by the people. No one knows for sure.

21.

Berlin’s center had been knocked flat. The air smelled of fire, diesel fuel, raw sewage, rotting flesh. Tanks thundered over the broken roads and sidewalks, crushing corpses into pennant-shaped banners of empty skin. People cowered in cellars. On the streets, men hanged for cowardice or treason dangled from lamp posts, shredded by the shrapnel in the air, brown and ragged like jerky spilled from a parfleche. At a ruined train station, a woman’s suitcase fell open – she was carrying the corpses of her two small children, both reduced to tiny carbonized figures with little fists clenched under their chins.

What remained was soot, rubble, smashed ceramics and grey ash.

 

22.

The warriors hiding in the darkness painted their faces, strung their bows, honed the edges of their knives. At dawn, Ta’palo crept into Awat’ovi and pushed the gate in the walls ajar. The soldiers heard voices singing, a motet learned from the Franciscans. The voices were tightly intertwined, woven together like the baskets that the women in the village made.

Most of the men at Awat’ovi were in the kivas attending to their morning devotions. The warriors attacking the village surrounded the kivas and hacked apart the men who tried to escape by ascending the ladders. Then, the war parties pulled the ladders from the kiva pits and hurled burning embers into sacred gathering places. By this time, the whole town was on fire. Soldiers lit dried ristas of hot pepper on fire, creating choking poisonous smoke – these were thrown into the kivas as well. It was all over in a few minutes – the men and boys were slaughtered as well as the village’s dogs. Everything that could burn was set afire. The old women committed suicide or were flung off the mesa top.

The women and girls were herded into a stony dry wash near the village. A quarrel ensued among the warriors. The Oraibi claimed first choice with respect to the captives. But the Walpi said that it was their ferocity that had destroyed Awat’kovi and that the most beautiful women and girls belonged to them. The men from Mishongnovi disagreed and said that they had been promised the best captives. The war parties raised their weapons and were about to fight when someone from Oraibi suggested a way to end the quarrel: "Let’s just kill them all," the man said.

The warriors were wild with blood-lust. Once killing is commenced, it’s not an easy thing to bring to a stop. And, so, the men fell upon the women, torturing them to death. Arms and legs were cut off and breasts were slashed. Thirty of more women and girls were killed in this way. The slaughter ended only when one of the women, pleading for her life, said that she and her sisters knew the ritual that summoned the rain gods to the mesa. She said that they also were expert basket weavers and that it would be wasteful to cut them into little pieces. The men’s fury was slaked. They looked about, appalled at the carnage in the dry wash. The women were spared so long as the agreed to never speak again about Awat’kovi.

In the smoldering village, everything was ruined: it was all soot, rubble, broken pottery, and grey ash.

 

23.

After the fall of Berlin, soldiers searched through all nooks and crannies in the Reich. They were hunting renegade Nazis, crazed dead-ender militia, war criminals, and booty. The Allies located artifacts from the Berlin Ethnography Museum’s collections in Dahlem and other city suburbs. The building in Dahlem was disfigured but not destroyed. A small exhibition of Ethnography Museum treasures on loan from the Allies was mounted in the chilly galleries of that structure in 1946. The Allies repatriated the museum collections that they had captured back to the Bundesrepublik Deutschland in 1950. Another show was staged in ruins of the downtown Museum across from the smashed Anhalter Bahnhof and only a stones throw from the old Gestapo headquarters. That show opened on May 21, 1955 – this was before the Berlin Wall divided the city. The items looted by the Soviets were taken to Moscow and Leningrad. Some of these artifacts were sent to Leipzig in the DDR (East Germany) in the 1966 and 1971. These objects formed the core of a new ethnography museum constructed in that city, a town that the East Germans had rebuilt as a showplace for their culture and economy. About 45,000 objects were shipped from Moscow and Leningrad back to Leipzig at that time. The Leipzig Museum showed its artifacts in icy vitrines, reverting to the notion that so-called primitive art was timeless, a-chronic, and governed by abstract forms arising the collect Kunstwollen (artistic drive) of the tribal communities where the things had been collected.

The Ethnography museum ruins in central Berlin were on the site where the Wall was built in 1961 and so the old building was entirely torn down. During the period that Germany was divided, two ethnography museums existed – the East German collection in Leipzig and the Berlin Museum of Ethonography at Dahlem, near the campus of the Freie Universitat in the old American sector. The shell-cratered Dahlem Museum was, ultimately, razed and replaced by a museum built in the new Brutalist style, all rough-looking prestressed concrete and steel cantilevered stairways and balconies.

After the Wall came down, the collections in Leipzig and Dahlem were re-integrated. The museum at Dahlem where the collections were assembled was much too small. The old Berlin Schloss, or royal residence, had been destroyed by fire bombs on February 3, 1945. The smashed palace was in the Russian sector and so was replaced by the hideous jumbo Palace of the Republic – this was a structure designed to contain what counted as the East German legislative bodies, but, also, large enough to accommodate concert venues, cafes and restaurants, a library, as well as skating rinks and bowling alleys. After East Germany collapsed, the vast complex of buildings was found to be lethally rotten with asbestos. The complex was bulldozed and, on its spot, the Germans began erecting an exact external replica of the royal Baroque palace destroyed in the war. The inside of the structure was modern, indeed, post-modern, and, in fact, there is something weirdly post-modern as well about construction workers laboring to install towering pre-fabricated sections of rococo facade around a core equipped with all the intricacies of 21st century HVAC and state-of-the-art computerized exhibition galleries. The restored Berlin palace or Schloss (castle) is called the Humboldt Forum and the collections of the old Berlin Museum of Ethnography will be displayed there – apparently this year (2019).

German curators estimate that 25,000 items identified in the catalogs and indices of the old Ethnography Museum were lost in the War, most of them, presumably, still hidden in Moscow and St. Petersberg.

 

 

24.

It would be nice to pinpoint exactly when No. IV B3252 was smashed. But internet searches haven’t yielded any information on that point. All that we know is that the bowl was broken during World War II. Half the ceramic was shattered, apparently comminuted, so that the figures painted on the bowl could not be reconstructed. Of the 13 sportive conga-dancers with their knobby erections, only six survive substantially complete. Two partial figures are at the head and tail of the curving procession and, since all dancers are identical, it’s easy enough to imagine the others completing the circuit around the concave interior of the bowl. I wonder whether there was a katsina figure on the opposite rim of the pot, flanked by kokopeli flute players – this seems plausible to me, but I don’t know.

I would like to tell you that a bolt of shrapnel smashed half the pot to pieces or that a Soviet looter, running through the fiery streets was shot and fell on the bowl or that American troops tried to cook K-rations in the pot over an open fire and broke it or that a 500 pound incendiary bomb plummeting to the earth didn’t detonate but that it’s huge blunt nose knocked the pot into pieces, pulverizing the little dancers with their hard-ons. But, of course, it’s equally likely that the pot was broken in shipment or that some butter-fingered museum attendant simply dropped it on the floor while trying to arrange ceramics on a shelf. No. IV B3252 survived the massacre at Awat’ovi but didn’t make it through the Fall of Berlin. It’s the nature of war to smash things up.

A photograph shows that the pot has been mended in sober, non-demonstrative manner. Where the pot has been restored, the ceramic is the color of the bowl’s background, that is vaguely cheese-colored, but without figures painted on the surface.

 

25.

Flashflooding still uncovers bones in the Tallahogan ("Singing House") wash. Most of the skeletons were retrieved from the massacre site in the thirties. Forearms were broken, so-called "parry" wounds, and skulls had been smashed apart during the killing. Many of the bones showed that they had been cut through with stone axes and obsidian blades. Bones still sometimes emerge occasionally from the sand and gravel of the wash. It’s a lonely place, off-limits, and people don’t go there.

 

26.

Ethnography begins in looting and ends in repatriation.

In the late 19th century, a Norwegian Arctic explorer, Johan Adrian Jacobson, on expedition funded by the Prussian King in Berlin ripped open some Chugach graves hidden in caves near Prince William Sound. The graves contained heavy implacable masks, cut from spruce or hemlock, and the carved figure a of an ancestor, a yard-high post with a glowering face cut into it. (A cradle and carved cane were also looted.) The grave-goods reached Berlin and were indexed as part of the Ethnography Museum collection.

In 2018, the museum repatriated the masks and shaman figures to the Chugah tribe. Everyone seems to have regarded the return of the figures as public relations coup. Photographs show a representative of museum handing a large, crudely carved mask to someone from the tribe. Unless you read the caption, you can’t tell which man works for the German museum and which represents the Indian tribe – both seem equally European. The mask is forceful, with the nose and forehead carved like an archaic helmet, the sort of head-gear that you might imagine Beowulf wearing. One eye is open, the other is closed in death. Both men are wearing bluish plastic gloves of the type associated with TSA searches and rectal examinations. Although it’s not visible in the photograph, the mask was painted red with a pigment made from seal oil, human blood, and powdered hematite.

This is second time the masks and other grave goods have been repatriated. The items were lost in World War II. They resurfaced in the fifties in St. Petersberg, then, Leningrad. The Soviet authorities sent the masks to Leipzig in 1966 where they were displayed. The masks and other grave goods, then, went to Dahlem after the reunification of Germany. Upon the building of the Humboldt Forum in the Berlin Schloss, the museum contacted the Chugah corporation (Native American groups are incorporated in Alaska) and agreed to repatriate the items to Alaska.

There are more than 60 steel boxes in storage at the Peabody Museum at Harvard. These boxes contain skeletal remains excavated from the ruins of Awat’ovi. Some women survived the slaughter and, since the Hopi are matrilineal, there are clans that still trace their kin to Antelope Mesa and the ruined town. Of course, the Native American Graves Repatriation Act would entitle the Hopi to recover the bones at Harvard and return them to Indian Country. But the Hopi have pointedly not asked for repatriation. The people killed at Awat’ovi were powerful sorcerers and, if their bones were returned to Antelope Mesa, their ghosts would stalk the killing grounds seeking revenge. And, so, the dead from Awat’ovi are orphaned, an embarrassment to the Peabody Museum and not wanted by the Hopi.

In recent years, the Hopi have erected a tall chain-link fence around the ruins of Awat’ovi. The gate of that fence is always locked.

 

 

Note: some of the source material for this essay derives from an excellent book by James F. Brooks, Mesa of Sorrows: A history of the Awat’ovi Massacre (W.F. Norton & Co., 2016). A photograph of Berlin Ethnography Museum No. IV, B3252 may be found in Ekkehart Malotki’s fine book The Making of an Icon – Kokopelli, (University of Nebraska 2000), see Plate VII.