In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

83 chapter 3 Acoma: El peñol ensangrado ~1~ One day not long ago, I visited the Sky City Cultural Center & Haakú Museum at Acoma and was amazed by an exhibition— The Matriarchs—that tells the story of four master potters whose loving designs recapture the pueblo’s spiritual and aesthetic legacy. I looked closely at the hand-coiled clay jars there, which exemplify a history of how women pass down knowledge, belief systems, and cultural practice from mothers to daughters to granddaughters in this matrilineal society. On the official tour of the pueblo, the guide, a woman in her fifties, joked about the female duties:the women own the houses,maintain their care,and pass them down to the youngest daughter as a gift for watching the elders.The men, she explained,are farming off the mesa in the fields or in the kiva—the male domain—where they maintain the people’s spiritual rituals, and, she teased, “where we send them to keep them from getting in the way.” Her humor suggests a rich bond of understanding and cultural knowledge between genders that has remained steadfast over the centuries. There was no humor, however, when telling the pueblo’s history. She spoke of the “cruelty of the Spanish” and then, as though having swatted off a fly, went on to tell us that we would have time to look at the “beautiful pots” people display on tables outside their doors.Lovely as they are to look at,these patterned jars insist that the near annihilation of theAcoma people in 1599 did not destroy their sense of belonging to the world around them or their profound loyalty to Haakú, the place that their deities had long before prepared for them. The pots you can purchase if you go to the mesa today, like those preserved behind the Haakú Museum’s glass, are richly embellished with designs that symbolize the people’s relationship to the earth: thick rain 84 chapter 3 clouds that nourish their crops, the hills and distant mountains that are sacred spots, the animals and cornstalks that provide them with sustenance . Parallel lines that run the length of the pots represent the rainfall the pueblo has waited for throughout the centuries and that they have built their lives around.Triangles signify mountains where the deities live and clouds form.The double-headed thunderbird, often depicted as an abstract curvilinear shape, represents both the complex cloud formations rising and filling the sky just before rain and the historical events passed down as story to children of visions the elders witnessed a long time ago. Deer,bighorn,and bear from Kaweshtima,the“woman mountain covered in snow,” a peak that became Mount Taylor after the U.S.-Mexican War, provided food, hide material, and spiritual attributes fused into everyday life, and so they, too, are part of the stylish images on Acoma pottery. Most of the designs for which the Acoma are famous emerge from figurations of the high-desert landscape of New Mexico. But one image emblazoned on their earthenware seems out of place in the land and sky here: the parrot. In an exhibit display case, nearly twenty jars, festooned with flowers or corn stocks, are set off by the bright reddish-feathered parrot perched on a branch whose curved bill is about to seize a cluster of berries and whose large, dark eye is alert and watchful. Curiously, this “Acoma parrot,”as it has come to be called,is the most prominent symbol of the pueblo’s pottery.Yet there have never been parrots or much in the way of berry trees in this part of the world. The Haakú Museum guide,a young woman whose relatives are among the matriarchs, explained to me that “our ancestors sometimes brought back parrots” to the mesa. They did not survive long, she continued, because it was “too different here” for them. Nonnative anthropologists, on the other hand, have speculated that “there is abundant archaeological evidence that imported macaws and parrots were kept in the villages from at least AD 1100, possibly earlier, which indicates that their feathers were as important then as in modern ceremonies where they rank with those of eagles and turkeys.”1 An exhibit plaque mimics this assertion, claiming that “Mexican parrots were traditionally raised at Acoma for their beautiful feathers.”2 The young guide, poised in her matrilineal knowledge, smiled at this assertion and told me that while nobody remembers keeping parrots in the pueblo...

Share