Traveling through the United States from Chicago to Phoenix, we decided to fulfill our urge to spend some time in Southeastern Utah, finding a camp site butted-up against an outcropping of Navajo Sandstone near Canyonlands National Park. The Canyonlands is an area formed by the winding paths and confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers sourced from the Rockies to the east. Running water is extremely evident in the South-West because of the lush flora that springs from the bottom of these canyons. Radio stations are few and far, but we happened upon a station broadcasting in the Navajo language. It became apparent, after some time, that what was being broadcast was the message of Jesus Christ. The Navajo language was being used as a weapon against Navajo culture. The land is violated and continuously colonized. There is no post-colonial America. We drove and drove and felt the history of this area, which largely remains outside of the “U.S. History” taught in schools; we felt the mystery and wonder and we felt it disappearing. The disappearance of culture is an unabated power struggle between the controllers and the controlled, the subject and the object, the namer and the named.
The lands hold secrets
and
saves people from the displeasure
of their gods.
These lands have supported civilization––some claim the ability to estimate––for nearly two-thousand years by a group of people that are ostensibly called the Anasazi. The Anasazi are more reverentially referred to as Ancestral Pueblos. Ancestral Puebloans are the forebears of the Hopi people with ancient roots in the area, long before the Navajo people. The Navajo people are of Athabaskan descent who migrated to the Colorado Plateau in 1400 AD from Western Canada and Alaska, learning methods of agriculture and irrigation from the Ancestral Pueblos. It is this mass influx of Athabaskan people into the Colorado Plateau, and the southern migration of Ancestral Pueblos out of the Colorado Plateau that obscures our understanding of the Ancestral Pueblos’ history. The term commonly used to refer to the ancestors of this region, The Anasazi, is not a self-identifying term, but is placed upon them by Navajo understanding and vocabulary. Anasazi is commonly translated from Navajo as “Ancient Ones” or “Ancient Enemies”. This term misrepresents the identity of Ancestral Pueblos by giving them meaning as opposed to receiving meaning.
The metonymic misrepresentation can specifically be seen in the Fremont Culture, who were named “Fremont” after the Fremont River––running near Capitol Reef National Park in southern Utah where Fremont Culture petroglyphs can be found––which was named after American politician, explorer, and military officer, John Charles Frémont (1813-1890). The ancient Fremont Culture is likely rooted with the Ancestral Pueblos of the area and have more ancient ties to the land than many modern day tribes and explorers. Our signifier for the people is removed doubly away from them. It is not a people we really know, we know them as a people near a river that was “discovered”and named after an American explorer. We know the “Fremont” culture through ourselves and not through the actual culture.
This aside, Ancestral Pueblos remain ambiguous. We, as modern day people with modern day conceptions, know little about the oral and cultural traditions and practices of the Ancestral Pueblos. We have identified various periods of Ancestral Puebloan culture and also those who preceded the Ancestral Pueblos, spanning from the Archaic-Early Basket Maker Period (7000-1500 BC) to today. Ancestral Pueblos began to congregate and live in larger communities by the Pueblo I period from 750-900 CE. By the year 900, they lived in pit-houses of dried mud and stone that would eventually evolve into the architectural wonders of their great pueblos and cliff-dwellings. An increase in population, an implementation of irrigation, a need for religion to account for a drier changing climate: the golden age. Populations continued to grow and their pueblos became palatial sites of up to one-thousand room, multi-storied communities. The pueblos were highly tenable and could ward off invaders with rooms that were entered from the floor with retractable ladders. There is evidence that the Ancestral Pueblos worried about invaders and intruders into their society. They receded from the high desert into the canyons. They protected themselves with their cliff-dwellings that were much harder to penetrate than their great pueblos. They grew paranoid and prognosticated danger. By the year 1350 CE, the greatest of the pueblos and cliff-dwelling sites had been built and were now being abandoned. Migratory waves of new people and drought may have forced many of the Ancestral Pueblos south into central and southern Arizona where they joined larger pueblo communities.
Although the great pueblos were multi-storied edifices, the Ancestral Pueblos began seek protection, once again, in the earth. They descended into canyons and used natural enclaves and caves to inhabit the womb of the earth. They worked their way into cliff-faces that could be as high as one-thousand feet, they used masonry and the naturally sedimentary sandstone to build themselves a subterranean home protected from outsiders. How deep into the cliff and under the ground did their community go? Ancestral Pueblos implemented their myths as education. They worshiped the floral deities and in supernatural spirits (kachinas) that come from the sipapu (portal to the underworld in which all of the human race emerged into this world). Clandestine all-male groups met in kivas to organize ceremonies and rituals to be celebrated by the community.
Sipapus are symbolically represented as an indent in the floor of a kiva, a ceremonial subterranean room entered from the ceiling. The major architectural feature of the kiva may expose cultural beliefs that instill a reverence towards the earth and a trust in the protection it provides. The protection received from the earth is a narrative trope found in much of Oasisamerica, especially the four major pre-Columbian tribes of the South West: Hohokam, Anasazi, Pataya, and Mogollon. Hopi creation stories claim that the world has been created four times by their capricious creator. The reason for recreation and, hence, destruction includes that the people began to differentiate themselves from one another, that “more & more they used the vibratory centers solely for earthly purposes”, that they began to trade for things they did not need, and because they did not use their vibratory centers to sing harmonies in praise. In each destruction and creation of Tokpela (First World), Tokpa (Second World), Kuskurza (Third World), and Túwaqachi (Fourth and current world), the Hopi ancestors were spared and given the opportunity to save themselves for the apocryphal apocalypse.
Respectively, the worlds were destroyed by fire from above and below, the poles shifted causing the world to flood and freeze over, and the oceans swallowed all of the earth. The destruction of Tokpela and Tokpa lead the Hopi people underground into the ant people’s great subterranean kiva. They were given instructions by Sotuknang, nephew of the creator of all from the void, Taiowa: “You will go to a certain place. Your kópavi (vibratory center at the top of your head) will lead you. This inner wisdom will give you the sight to see a certain cloud, which you will follow by day, and a certain star which you will follow by night. Take nothing with you. Your journey will not end until the cloud and star stops.” At this place, Sotuknang took them to the ant people’s mound and allowed them to enter the ant kiva where they will be taken care of until the Tokpa, the new world, is ready. We see it at the end of Tokpa as well. After they began to desire things they did not need in this newly created world, it was again destroyed and purified. The Hopi, the chosen people of Taiowa, were, once again, protected by the ant people in their underground kiva. This point in which the Hopi people descended and ascended from is still represented in the architecture of ceremonial kivas found in grand Ancestral Pueblo complexes.
It seems that these stories may have been quite influential in the Pueblo I, II, III, and IV eras based on their implementation of architecture. The Ancestral Pueblos might have viewed the earth as a place to be protected by when threat arrives, they have myths that recount the help they received from allies of the underground, they moved to and lived in the cliffs late in their history. Why did they move back toward the ground? What was invading them? Many of the great complexes of the Four Corners region of the U.S. were abandoned, and we cannot specify why. There was drought and new peoples migrating to the area, but was this reason enough to abandon the land they had resided in for so long? Their pueblos and cliff-dwellings were highly tenable but they disappeared. They moved further south. They left and gave us little evidence to identify and understand them.
Today, the descendents of First Nation peoples and Ancestral Pueblos are sequestered by force into reservations throughout the U.S.A., subjected to a systematic denigration of the culture that has been transmitted across generations from mysterious ancestors. “Old World” colonizers migrated to the region in search for freedom and validated identification while inhibiting and limiting the freedom and identity of the First Nation peoples they found. Every group of people throughout the world has been chosen by god and saved by its graces, every person is blessed with a touch of the divine. We ask ourselves where the Ancestral Pueblos have gone and what happened to them, but shouldn’t we be asking what happens to the Navajo, Lakota, or Apache today? Where have they gone? What have we done to them? They live on a reservation, though the name of their settlements are misleading. Etymologically, reservation stems from the Middle English meaning that refers to the pope’s ability to nominate a permanent Church appointment that pays a pastor for his services with property and income (which is now given to tribes within the U.S. not as a holy right but as payment to stay out of our way). Reserve then has further ties to the Latin reservare, or keep back. The etymological sources of the word reservation has a double meaning that is pertinent to the treatment and sequestration of First Nation peoples. The Latin root, reservare, meaning keep back, can analyzed as a coercion centered upon an object from a more powerful subject. To be associated with that which can be reserved is to be associated with that of no agency, with that that is not a subject but an object to be acted upon. There is a power dynamic present in reserving something.
It is to say that I, the reserver,
have the power over this object
in which I can use whenever I see fit,
I can use it now
or later.
I can use this space, in which I also have control of,
to keep this object there until I want to use it.
I reserve this thing as mine and to be used by me at whatever time I see fit.
Another analysis of the etymological stem of reservation, reserve, or reservare, is based on the definition of a place set aside for special use in which the happenings of the reserve is not inline with “ordinary” ways of life. We sequester with the definition of difference. Power dynamics are always prevalent. Who defines? Who reserves what for whom? Who controls the resources and their distribution?
This is not for us but for them,
this is all for me and that is for them,
give them that much,
and I will have the rest.
What have we done to the First Nation? What do we currently do to them? Is there no way back? Are they gone, hidden away into their own territories. Modern day tribes on their reserves are just as, unfortunately, mysterious to us as the Ancestral Pueblos. We give with coercion and do not receive with humility. Our mind set as colonizers is based on hubris. We know best. This is how you should be; this how we are.
I pray that they will be protected, that they are being protected. I pray to propitiate Sotuknang and Taiowa in order to save the people so close to the brink of destruction and plight. I pray that their creation myth––out of all the creation myths one can believe––got it right. I pray that there is an ant colony underground that will protect them, I pray that they can use the vibratory centers at the tops of their heads, I pray that they are Taiowa‘s chosen people because there has never been and there will never be a point in which this area is not colonized and not given over from one culture to another. The Navajos were late to the game (respectively) and took over for the Ancestral Pueblos who had taken this land from an other culture centuries before. Is it handed away or is it taken? How much force does an invader apply? How much defense does a denizen resort to? There is no post-colonial. We have ostensibly occupied, sequestered, and forgotten; they have apocryphally ascended, retracted, and survived.
ifeigle 