I visited Acoma Pueblo on the Governor's Feast day. I had the opportunity to watch dances being performed. I was not surprised that I was not allowed to take pictures but was when the tour guide stopped the tour to inform me that I was not alowed to take notes unless I was a reporter. Although I am a student reporter, I figured I was not the kind he was referring to so I stopped taking notes. Even as I was jotting down parts of the guide’s speech, I could feel that I was out of sync with the local context. Coming from a university, my process of learning usually involves recording, studying, and sectioning or analyzing a subject. Puebloan culture is diametrically opposed to this kind of positivist thinking and resists being controlled by it.
Rina Swentzell is a scholar from the Puebloan clulture who explains her culture’s holistic beliefs in “An Understated Sacredness”:
Being religiously ego-centric, Pueblo people do live at the center of the universe. Their world is sacramental. It is a world thoroughly impregnated with the energy purpose and sense of the creative natural forces. It is all one. Sacredness, then, is recognizable in everyday life. The purpose of life for Pueblo people is to be intimately united with nature, intimately connected with everything in the natural world. Everything is included in that connectedness.
She goes on to explain how houses are “fed” cornmeal after construction so they may have a good life. She also talks about how the only constant in life is wind and breath. A story she recounts explains how the profane and sacred overlap. On a recent trip to Chaco Canyon, a non-Native friend expressed anger at his girlfriend for unknowingly stepping on a part of the reconstructed walls of Pueblo Bonito. The act, to her friend was, sacrilegious. She was puzzled. As a child she climbed on ruins in full view of her caretakers who never admonished her.
Rina Swentzell gives people who grew up in non-Puebloan environments an idea of what the culture is about, although not all Puebloan beliefs are shared with an outside audience. As a visitor, you will not be told what is discussed inside of a Kiva, a religious structure.
Some anthropologists believe that when one understands a culture, it can be dominated or subdued peacefully by manipulation of that knowledge. A scholar, David Price, recently lectured in the University of New Mexico’s Anthropology auditorium. He explained that anthropology, as a discipline, gained value for the government during the Cold War because the United States government felt that sending anthropologists covertly into foreign cultural territory could yield an understanding of those cultures, and allow them to be controlled by US interests.
The Spanish tried to use this tactic to convert Natives to Catholicism and influenced their culture, but, to this day, pre-Spanish Colonial Puebloan religious beliefs survive. The mission church at Acoma was built by forced Native labor, according to the tour guide. The alter of the Catholic church is built directly over the original kiva. The Spanish must have understood the sacredness of the kiva and so used the same geographical location to usurp its power in the minds for Native people, however, traditional beliefs appear to be indelible.
The mission church holds mass only twice a year. No church pews set up the situational frame seen in other Catholic Churches. An alter is prominently located at the far end of the church, but the floor is wide open, like this inside of a kiva. Below paintings depicting the twelve stations of the cross are paintings of rainbows over corn stocks. Numbers important to Native, not Catholic, religion were used in the construction of the church.
Acoma people have made choices to open their culture up for tourism, one of their most profitable industries in the twentieth century. Today, another industry provides even more revenue. Sky City Casino is owned by Native people and is the largest employer of both Natives and non-Natives and in Cibola County. Sky city Casino must be circumnavigated before one can reach the road that leads to the Pueblo off I-25. From I-25, one must turn in the opposite direction of the Pueblo and circle the perimeter of the casino before heading directly to Acoma Pueblo. The tourism and gaming industries have formed a link that makes them more profitable than they would be on their own. A tension exists between using their culture to attract curious visitors and resistance to fully exposing their culture so that at least parts of it can survive, relatively uninfluenced by outside cultures.
Works Cited
Swentzell, Rina. “An Understated Sacredness.” MASS. 1985.
Price, David. Lecture. How the CIA and Pentagon Harnessed Anthropolical
Research During the Early Cold War [. . .] With Little Critical Notice. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM. 17 February 2011.
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