Loving Indians

One of the saddest effects of COVID for me is the closing of our neighboring eighteen northern pueblos, especially as we are in the summer season of harvest dances. This will be the first summer in more than two decades that I have not been standing in a crowd of white people, watching Indians dance.

They call themselves Indians, not Native Americans, which is the improved term we tried to apply to them.

From my first years here, I saw and was a part of the group of entranced white women at these dances. We didn’t know much, but our enchantment didn’t depend on knowledge. Sometimes we behaved incorrectly, arriving with cameras, and were immediately warned in no uncertain terms by an elder to put them away. The same with cell phones. We were expected to attend, in silence; no clapping, and to wait, sometimes for hours, standing up in the hot sun. Once a well-intentioned white woman brought her homemade cookies and tried to present one to a dancer; he trampled it under his foot. When the dances are finally finished, sometime in the afternoon, all the houses that surround the plaza are open to us. The women in each family have spent many hours preparing a feast, with all the traditional dishes. The dancers are not there.

The adamant separateness of these men, whom we might see but not recognize another day working at a local gas station or Walmart, is part of what enchants us. That they are usually energetically athletic, often handsome, is certainly a part of the draw. Older men, with paunches, from the big chorus of drummers and chanters.

But it is more than this. There are good-looking, athletic white men among our own people. I think the real draw is the powerful, silent, traditional discipline that unites them. If you are born in one of the pueblos, you are expected to dance, which means fasting, enduring a sweat lodge, and being present no matter what your other obligations are. Men coming home from jail are included as well as the usual trouble makers and alcoholics. To be born is to belong, and to submit to these group rituals. The rivalries and exclusions that break white families must happen here, but they don’t affect the dances.

Our men, now, seem to have few rituals outside of the dry routines of work. They don’t dance; it’s rare even to see a man get up from the bar when the La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe hosts a Country-Western band. I do see men when I go to church although they are far outnumbered by older women, but I don’t have much sense of group discipline other than what is provided by praying and singing hymns. And of course most of the men I know wouldn’t dream of going to a church or synagogue or any other house of organized worship.

Family provides its familiar rituals of birthday and feast day gatherings, but so many families, like mine, have broken apart and are put together again with a sense of the fragility of the ties that sometimes bind. A divorce, a dispute, can break it all apart.

I’m including a short story I wrote soon after moving to New Mexico called “Going Native,” because that is a part of it: our longing to be more than a spectator of an ancient and sacred way of life.

And a video of some pueblo dances.

In New Mexico New Mexico