Tewa Tales

By Elsie Clews Parsons

The Tewa are a Pueblo Indian group from New Mexico, some of whom migrated around 1700, in the aftermath of the second Pueblo Revolt, to their present location on First Mesa of the Hopi Reservation in northern Arizona.
This collection of more than one hundred tales from both New Mexico and Arizona Tewa, first published in 1926, bears witness to their rich cultural history. In addition to emergence and animal stories, these tales also provide an account of many social customs such as wedding ceremonials and relay racing--that show marked differences between the two tribal groups. A comparison of tales from the two divisions of the tribe reveals something of what has happened to both emigrant and home-staying Tewa over two centuries of separation. Yet, while only half of the Arizona tales are distinctly parallel to the New Mexican, additional similarities may be found in such narrative features as the helpfulness of Spider old woman and her possession of medicine, creating life magically under a blanket, or Coyote beguiling girls into marriage.

Elsie Clews Parsons was a pioneering anthropologist in the Southwest whose works included the encyclopedic Pueblo Indian Religion. The Tewa tales she gathered for this volume are thus notable not only as fascinating stories that will delight curious readers, but also as authentic reflections of a people less known to scholars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 1994
• ISBN: 9780816546480

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INTRODUCTION

Over two hundred years ago there was a Tewa migration from New Mexico into Arizona, and on First Mesa, a new Tewa town was built, Hano, or, as its inhabitants prefer to call it, Tewa. The Tewa of today say that their forebears were invited over by the Hopi to serve as a bulwark against raiding hostile tribes.¹ That this is more than legend, or, rather, is legend which is acted upon, appears strikingly in a note entered in the journal kept for me by a Tewa of First Mesa during the year 1920–21.² After writing that meetings are being held in order to fill an office within the Snake clan, the incumbent having gone blind, the journalist states that Tewa men have been sent for to attend the meetings because they are the watchers, i.e. guards, or, in New Mexican phrase, war captains, for the Snake clan. If anything goes wrong with the Snake clan people, the Tewa people have to settle it. Therefore the Tewa go to the meeting and listen. At last we Tewa people say that we want to have the same man keep on till the end of his life because he is the only good man, even if he is blind. The day following the meeting the journalist records: All the Hopi men are very glad that we did not put anybody else in the place. . . . If danger comes, we Tewa people have to go first. We are watchers for the Snake clan. And if ever the Snake clan people do wrong, we make them behave. This predication by the Tewa of warrior-police function in relation to the Hopi Snake clan is the more striking when we recall that the Snake clan or rather society was formerly, there is little doubt, a war society. Tewa warriors were advance guard for Hopi warriors.

The ceremonial relations in general between Tewa and Hopi are fairly close. There is an independent Tewa ceremonial organization which preserves pre-migration Tewa features, although showing Hopi influence; but Tewa individuals may belong to Hopi ceremonies and Tewa men married into Walpi or Sichumovi frequent Hopi kivas. Tewa men and women are bilingual; but Tewa is not spoken by the Hopi, for a very good reason, say the Tewa. Did they not bury their language, when they first came, in a deep hole, with spittle and prayer feathers? Once when I was telling a San Juan man of how the Hopi had found Tewa too difficult ever to learn, although Hopi and Tewa houses were within a stone’s throw and Hopi and Tewa intermingled constantly, this Tewa of New Mexico gave the same explanation of this linguistic oddity.

How their departed tribesmen had protected their language was known to the New Mexican Tewa, but other experiences of those who had left them were not known. There is no migration tale about them, nor can they themselves give any account of from what Tewa pueblo they split off or what was the cause. (The Hopi invitation was not, we may be sure, the motivating cause.) And, as we shall see, the migration tale told as an alternative to the tale of the Hopi invitation and described as of equal validity is quite classifiable with their other myths. Nor can they give account of changes in their customs since their arrival on First Mesa. These lacks or obscurities in tradition go to support other evidences that in what we call history the Pueblo Indians are very little interested; emergence myth and pre-historic migration myth are their history, fully satisfying their sense of the historic.

Something of what has happened to the Tewa emigrants, however, during the past two centuries may be learned from a comparison of the following folk tales from the two divisions of the tribe, as well as what during that period has been happening in the life of the home-staying Tewa. Take courtship and wedding customs. In the joint tales courtship is a simple affair, the meeting is very casual, the boy looks in through the window (Arizona),³ or there is play in the field, or converse at the spring, and either the boy returns with the girl or girls⁴ to their house to spend the night, or the girl takes a basket of meal to his house. There is probably little doubt that such suit by the girl was an ancient Pueblo practice. Today there is much visiting by relatives whose formal consent to the marriage is in order, both in New Mexico and Arizona; but this does not come into the New Mexico tales at all (I take it that this family consultation has been derived from the Spanish-speaking neighbors), whereas in the Arizona tales not only is the family council alluded to, but a very elaborate wedding ceremonial will be described at length, a ceremonial which we recognize as Hopi. The Tewa of First Mesa do in fact follow the wedding ceremonial of their neighbors.

In wedding ceremonial on First Mesa, corn grinding figures conspicuously, as well as in the daily life. This is so, too, in the Arizona tales. Now in the New Mexican pueblos grinding is passing out — corn is taken to the mill or ground in a coffee mill — the metates are being removed from the floors, and the daily life of woman is thereby transformed. In the New Mexican tales there are few references to grinding, an instance here, perhaps, of how quickly a change in the daily life may be expressed in the folk tale.

In the Arizona tales racing figures conspicuously, as it does in the life of First Mesa. Racing of the relay type occurs among the Northern Tewa, but only once a year; in the tales there is no reference to racing. First Mesa racing is engaged in by the kachina, and in the tales the kachina race, too. The kachina cult is highly developed on First Mesa, and the kachina figure in the tales. They figure far less in the New Mexican tales, just as the kachina cult among the Northern Tewa is very meagre. At San Juan there is said to be but one kachina dance during the year. Inferably in respect to the kachina cult as in that of racing, the First Mesa tales express Hopi influence.

Of the eighteen Arizona tales nine, in whole or in part (Tales 5, 10, 16, 19, 21, 24, 27, 28, 30) are paralleled in the New Mexican tales. But a still larger measure of parallelism will appear if we consider such characteristic incidents or features as : the helpfulness of Spider old woman and her possession of medicine; the test or trial by smoking; the outcast situation of the boy of the story; creating life magically under a blanket; showing the boy about game animals by marking their tracks; the magically rapid growth of the story child; Coyote beguiling girls into marriage; the girl rejecting her suitors, in one case, — a very striking little parallel here between the Santa Clara tale and the First Mesa tale, — because of the jar included in the gifts of courtship : all these incidents or features are constructive elements in the tales, and having these elements in common gives the tales a family resemblance independently of specific plot.

The incident of rejecting suitors is one of those baffling tale elements in Pueblo folklore which is both Indian and Spanish. In their folk tales as in their ritual and daily life the Pueblos have drawn much from their Mexican neighbors. The Pueblo novelistic type of tale, distinctive in Indian folklore, has certainly been influenced by, it may have developed from, the Hispanic or European type of fairy tale. In most cases the content of this Pueblo type is wholly Pueblo or Indian, but now and again, indubitable incidents from Spanish folklore are introduced, and there are many Spanish tales transposed bodily into Pueblo setting. This transposition has occurred, as might be expected, at different periods, that is, there is an older stratum of acculturated tale and a more recent. Of course it must be borne in mind that in such tale stratigraphy the reckoning may be far from chronological, depending not merely on the date when the Spanish tale was taken over, but on the integrity of the native culture. A Spanish tale might be introduced today into Zuñi folklore and have the same accultural cast, or very nearly, as one introduced one hundred years, even two hundred years, ago, shall we say, into the folklore of one of the Eastern pueblos. This might be true likewise of Spanish tales introduced today on First Mesa. And yet all the Spanish tales recorded in Part II, Tales 21 (False Message), 24, 25, 27, 28 are, I think, of the older stratum; they are tales that were carried from New Mexico.

In Part I, the older Spanish tale stratum is represented, I sugges, among the novelistic tales, by tales 35–37, 39; among the animal tales, by tales 61–69, although some of these may well have been acquired comparatively recently. Indubitably recently acquired tales are tales 38, 40–44. Tale 38, the familiar Spanish tale of Missing Tongues, and the variant in tale 39 afford an interesting illustration of the difference between the recently acquired tale and the tale acquired long enough ago to be well worked into the native lore. Tale 42, The Three Bears, is, I think, of recent borrowing, but the narrator, an artist and imbued with the native culture, seems to me to have already fitted the tale in to his Pueblo culture with the admonition, Whenever you see a bear, do not kill it. I confess the speculation is finely drawn.

In many cases tales from the older or more thoroughly acculturated stratum are enigmatic, so thoroughly blended are the two cultural elements, Pueblo and Spanish, that analysis is extremely difficult, if not impossible. As usual in such cases of blending, only through a richer material of variants can analysis proceed, each new variant supplying, so to speak, a bit of connective tissue. The following collection of tales is distinctly valuable, I think, from this point of view. In particular I have in mind the elusive folklore about the so-called Pueblo culture-hero, Poshaiyanki (Zuñi-Laguna) or Poseyemu (Tewa), who has been more or less identifiable with Montezuma or Jesus or the war gods. In old Mexico, God the father and God the son were identified with Sun and Morning Star. In Pueblo myth there are traces of a like identification, through the war god or gods, the two little boys, Ahayuta achi of Zuñi, the Towae of the Tewa. These two were conceived magically, begotten by Sun whom they journey to search for in the sky. Cast away, unfathered, and at first abused of boys and men, these two in the end triumph and put to shame their persecutors. These two, or the one they vaguely merge into, are identified with Morning Star. That Jesus was identified with these little boys when he was first heard about from the Franciscan Friars I long since surmised. Now the Tewan tale of Poseyemu as recorded at San Juan supplies evidence of that identification, at least a few links of evidence. Poseyemu was begot by World Man, magically by piñon. He was treated badly by his people, even after he was recognized by his father, World Man, given a name and finely arrayed. However, with Pontius Pilate, his enemies say, We did not find anything bad in him. He predicts coming events, and then he leaves his people, that Montezuma, as he is now called, going to the South and saying that some time he will come back to restore his people to their own.

That the tale of Escape up the Tree was European we have had little or no doubt since its Negro-Indian distribution from the Southeast to the Northwest was worked out.⁵ However the long, very Indian-seeming story as it is told at Zuñi is so different in its elaboration from the story told by several other tribes that links between are most welcome. Such a link is the San Juan version. But what of The Woman Stealer of Santa Clara (Pt. I, Tale 34) and of First Mesa (Pt. II, Tale 10)? Are we to see in it a variant of Escape up the Tree, or the original Pueblo tale which made it easy to take over the Spanish tale? In the first hypothesis, to which I incline, the Santa Clara-First Mesa tale belongs to an earlier stratification, a more thorough adaptation, and the Zuñi-San Juan tale is later or less adapted.

In Pueblo witchcraft belief and throughout Pueblo folk tales is expressed the idea that the animals or birds have but to take off their skin to become human. This belief seems as native as any I know. And yet it is also a belief of European witch-lore, occurring also in European folk tales. In these Tewan tales it is interesting to find the incident occurring in the European tales of The Duck Girls and The King’s Son Becomes a Deer, as well as in the Pueblo tale of The Witch Wife, if that tale is of Pueblo origin. The witch meetings sound strangely European.

In contrast to those enigmas of acculturation there are in the collection Amazon tales of women going to war, which have very obviously separate sources, and show no acculturation at all. They are a good instance of how the same general idea may be expressed so dissimilarly that there is no suspicion of common origin.

In the collection, variation of still another type may be noted, that of the individual story-teller. My San Juan informants were uncle and niece.⁶ The woman interpreted for the man, who was also the source of all the stories she told independently. Therefore where the same story was told by both, the differences may be fairly put down to individual variation.

The San Juan uncle, a man of about sixty, and a member of the hierarchy, was a highly accomplished narrator, the most accomplished I happen to have met in any pueblo. Not merely was his memory excellent and his general intelligence high, but he was an artist, truly a great artist, with feeling for values, humorous and dramatic, yet using with fidelity as well as with resourcefulness the patterns of his narrative art and of his daily life. His sister’s daughter, a woman of forty, was a good interpreter, knowing enough English for clear and full statement, and yet not too much to mislead her into paraphrasing and dressing up, vernacularly. The Santa Clara narrators were a middle-aged brother and sister,⁷ both more Americanized than the San Juan narrators and consequently more reticent in ritualistic references, but they were passable story-tellers, the brother at least, and to him in particular are due the more recently borrowed Spanish tales, heard by him in Tesuque. My own Tesuque informant, a man whose daughter interpreted for him, was not a competent narrator, so that with two exceptions, his brief tales are grouped as fragments or variants. The narrators from San Ildefonso were by far the least satisfactory. The man was unscrupulous and lazy, the woman, for whom a young daughter interpreted very badly, was extremely timid; so that the San Ildefonso contribution is scanty and incoherent. I include it merely for the sake of minor points of comparison. The First Mesa tales (péyuh) were told in English by a Tewa Bear clansman married at Sichumovi. Some of them he heard from his mother at Hano⁸ or Tewa. His mother was a good storyteller, he says, but as a rule the men are far better narrators, he thinks, than the women. As at Zuñi and at Jemez, men get practice telling the tales in the kiva. In narrating in English the Tewan was quite carefully translating, as he related, sentence by sentence; the repetitious character of the narrative is in evidence. His narrative style is very similar, as far as I can appreciate, to the style of the New Mexican narrators, and similar, I may add, to Zuñi narrative.⁹ All of which differs from the more prolix style of Keresan narrative, as Dr. Boas has recorded it in text, although a part of this difference, not all, I think, may be accounted for by the inevitable difference between narrative in Indian with literal translation and narrative in English.

Since writing the foregoing both Miss Bunzel and I have recorded additional tales or variants from the same First Mesa narrator. Comparison of the variants, making due allowance for the difference in audience, Miss Bunzel having had a comparatively slight acquaintance with the narrator, shows a surprising range of variation in the same narrator. Compare, for example, Tales 8 and 9, in both of which the maiden leaves home in temper, but the cause of her outbreak is different enough to make of the matter two quite independent tales which in their second parts, however, merge into the same tale with differences which are merely variants. Possibly the narrator would assert that Tales 8 and 9 are throughout two entirely different tales and always told as such. Nevertheless I would surmise from the whole evidence that the narrator feels free to combine and recombine tale parts or