As a child I used to watch my great grandma A’mooh kneel on the floor of her kitchen to grind green chili with garlic cloves on the curved rectangular stone of fine-grained black lava. The people preferred the lava stones for grinding because stones made from sandstone sometimes left a residue of fine grit in the food.
Aunt Susie said when she was a child, the women of the household and the neighbors did the grinding together, and as they worked they sang songs. The songs changed their task from hard work to pleasure as they lost themselves in the sounds and the words. Maybe the grinding songs kept the clanswomen from gossiping too much. The songs belonged to particular clans and the women didn’t sing the songs of other clans.
It was a grinding song that caused Coyote’s disastrous plunge from a high cliff of yellow sandstone. Coyote wanted to learn the grinding song the cedarbirds sang while they were grinding cedar berries.
The cedarbirds dared not refuse Coyote’s demand to grind with them and learn the song, but as soon as they could, the cedarbirds planned their escape. They told Coyote they had to fly to the top of the high sandstone mesa to drink from a water hole. Coyote demanded to go along so the cedarbirds each donated a feather and they glued the feathers to Coyote’s legs with pine pitch. By flapping his legs very hard Coyote was able to fly in low circles that gradually took him higher, while the birds flew off to the mesa top.
The birds were finished drinking when Coyote finally managed to fly up to the mesa top. While Coyote was drinking he noticed the heat of the sun had made the pitch soft and the feathers were falling off his legs. He realized he wouldn’t be able to fly and would be stranded on top of the cliff. He tried to threaten the cedarbirds to force them to help him, but they flew away.
Old Spider Woman heard Coyote’s cries for help and came to his rescue. She told him to get into her magic basket and she would lower him down from the mesa top. There was only one thing he must not do while she was lowering him: he must not look up. But Coyote could not resist taking a peek and the basket he was riding in plunged to the ground far below and Coyote was smashed to pieces on the rocks. All this because Coyote wanted to learn the cedarbird ladies’ grinding song.
The coarse blue corn flour ground between lava grinding stones made a thick tortilla with amazing flavor — far better than the thin tortillas from machine-ground blue corn. Our neighbors used to take orders from everyone in Laguna and the following day they delivered the most delicious big red chili enchiladas made with these stone-ground blue corn tortillas.
Aunt Susie told me about the special sandstone griddles required to make the delicacy called piki bread. The cook has to work fast; she pours a corn meal batter onto the hot griddle all the while quickly smearing the batter with her bare hand into a film over the griddle so it forms continuous paper-thin sheets that fold around one another.
If the griddle stone is too coarse, the batter sticks and the flaky sheets of corn batter are ruined. So the rectangular slabs of hard fine-grained sandstone were essential for making the piki. Griddles made with other stone would not do, and the people at Paguate village where my great grandmother came from possessed the best source of griddle stones. During droughts or other hard times, the people used to carry the griddle stones in backpacks and walk for four or five days to reach Jemez Pueblo where they traded them for beans and corn to take back to Paguate.
The Anasazi, the ancient Pueblo people, were haunted by memories of terrible famines when the weather or other conditions failed them. Even now the Western Pueblos and the Hopi tell stories about droughts and famines that struck their villages, and forced the people to take refuge at other pueblos to avoid starvation. Sometimes small children and infants were adopted by childless people in other pueblos so the babies might survive.
On the high desert plateau of north central New Mexico, the Anasazi had to pursue food sources relentlessly, gathering seeds, roots, berries and birds’ eggs, hunting small rodents and snaring birds. Hunters stalked deer and elk in the mountains and the antelope and bison on the grassy plains that stretched away to the south and to the east.
Below the mesa and hilltop villages, in the sandy soil at the mouths of arroyos and other small drainages, the people carried on dry farming of corn, beans, melons, amaranth and greens. The deep layers of fine sand trapped and held the runoff down where the roots of the bean and corn seedlings suckled and grew. These deposits of fine sand were rich in nutrients gathered as rain washed the sand from the mesas. Unlike soils of clay, the deep sand deposits captured rainwater almost immediately so little precious water was lost to flooding or evaporation.
The most ingenious engineering was done on the floodplains where small stones were arranged in slender curved half-moons, spaced so the swift muddy runoff from sudden cloudbursts was slowed by the small stone catch-dams and the runoff sank into the deep sand then spread nicely to water the fields of corn and beans nearby.
The Pueblo people lived in the Laguna-Acoma area for thousands of years before the Europeans invaded, but the Spanish record-keepers made no mention of Laguna Pueblo, only Acoma. It was at Acoma Pueblo that the Spaniards chopped off one hand and one foot of every captured Acoma man or boy over the age of seven, in retaliation for an Acoma victory over the Spanish troops in 1598.
Because of their barbarity toward all the Indian tribes, the Spaniards were later killed or driven out of the country all the way to El Paso in the Great Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Even the Apaches and Navajos set aside differences with one another and with the Pueblos to join them in the action to expel the invaders.
In 1692 the Spaniards returned. The Indian alliances that produced the Great Revolt were no longer maintained and the Pueblo resistance failed. Those in the pueblos around Santa Fe who did resist the return of the invaders were killed and their families sent to Mexico as slaves or removed and resettled to Laguna. But the Kawaikameh, the Laguna people, had been living there by the small lake on the Rio San José for thousands of years already when the rebels from the northern pueblos were brought there. Thus the Spaniards erroneously stated Laguna Pueblo wasn’t established until 1698. The error about the date of the founding of Laguna Pueblo was repeated in later histories. The Laguna Pueblo people didn’t bother to correct the error because it made no difference to their reckoning of the world.
CHAPTER 5
From my earliest days, animals and beings of the natural world occupied as much of my consciousness as human beings did. Around humans often I sensed an uncomfortable feeling below the surface, one that left me with unease and anxiety to please everyone. So early on I preferred to play alone, or to be with cats, dogs or horses for companionship, not human beings.
Over time I realized the politics of the Marmons in the pueblo was part of this, but there was more. Another part of the unease I felt as a child may have come from what happened before I was conceived. I found this out when I was in my early twenties from my grandma Jessie, my mother’s mother.