A relatively level area of natural land that is covered with grass and often wild flowers. Meadows can be found in low as well as high altitudes, and in a variety of climates. In the American Southwest, small, open grasslands are a typical feature of the otherwise densely forested mountains, and can also occur around sources of water such as rivers and lakes.
Generally speaking, in most indigenous traditions, including the Pueblo and Navajo cultures, when a dancer dons a mask for a specific ceremony, that dancer becomes the god represented by the mask, just as the mask becomes animated by the god as it is worn. The boy or man who prepares to wear a mask for a specific ritual actually becomes, or personates, the god whose semblance is captured by the mask. During the ceremony, the wearer does not impersonate or merely act like the god, but rather, he is the god.
Masks are sacred objects that facilitate communication and connection between man and gods. Even when not worn during ceremonial dances, masks are revered objects that are fed and taken care of, for example by Pueblo kiva societies or clans, who are responsible for the masks' well-being as if, and because, they are vital, dynamic, and sentient things.Masks are sacred objects that facilitate communication and connection between man and gods. Even when not worn during ceremonial dances, masks are revered objects that are fed and taken care of, for example by Pueblo kiva societies or clans, who are responsible for the masks' well being as if, and because, they are vital, dynamic, and sentient things.
According to the Zuni migration story, as the Zuni migrated in search of the Middle Place, conceptually understood to be the center of the world and what today is known as Halona:Itiwana, or the Zuni Pueblo, the people split into several groups. One group followed the Little Colorado River south, and near to where it joins the Zuni River running west out of what today is New Mexico, they found the Lake of the Dead, or in Zuni Koluwala:wa. Underneath its waters lay a village where the Zuni kachina, or ancestor spirits, live. The Zuni believe that after they die, they return to the lake to join their ancestors.
Kothluwalawa is also referred to as the Dance Hall of the Dead.
The Laguna people of central New Mexico consist of a pueblo group that occupies six major villages, of which the political center is Old Laguna (Kawaika) on a knoll above the San Jose River about 42 miles west of Albuquerque on U.S. Route 66/Interstate-40. Both the Spanish word "laguna" and the Keresan word "Kawaika" mean "lake." Living in modular, terraced pueblo communities similar to other regional descendants of the Ancestral Mogollon Puebloans, the Laguna understand that all things in nature are sacred and connected and that relationships between natural elements are both reciprocal as well as cyclical.
Notable members of the Laguna include photographer Lee Marmon, his daughter the novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, and political activist Paula Gunn Allen. Allen is considered the foremother of Native literature.
Clown figures that appear alongside kachina during Zuni and Hopi ceremonial processions and dances. With grotesque features formed from misshapen and irregular lumps of clay, koyemshi appear uncanny and unformed, familiar yet disturbingly alien. Part of their purpose is to maintain order during ceremonial occassions, and to do so they employ ribald humour and an organic, mocking slapstick that underscores the sacredness and moral seriousness of the ceremony at hand by countering it with sly parody and comedic anarchy.
In Puebloan tradition, a kiva is both a sacred space to observe religious rituals as well as a society associated with a particular kiva. Kivas symbolize Puebloan emergence, or birth, into this world, and their architecture evokes an enclosed space of sacred potential. The training associated with healing rituals or with the social responsibilities of each kiva society occurs within the particualr kiva associated with thatspecific power or responsibility. Each kiva cares for and is identified by a mask associated with its guiding entity, a force or persona associated with weather, health, warfare, or collective well-being.
Jerking venison is a method of treating deer meat by drying it on racks. Salt and other flavorings can be applied to assist in drying and preserving the meat and to add to its flavor. Once the venison is cut into strips and hung on a rack, it can be allowed to air dry, especially if it has been treated with salt and herbs. However, it is faster and it adds more flavor to place the racked meat over or near a fire so that the heat and the smoke from the fire facilitate the drying process and also imbue the meat with a smoky flavor.
To formally, if not ritually, bring an individual into a specific group or organization. The initiation process can be triggered by coming of age and reaching a certain societal point of maturation, by accomplishing a series of tasks, or by learning the steps, songs, and procedures of various ceremonials, among many other possibilities. To become initiated into a group suggests that one has passed from one stage of life into another, from one series of responsibilities to another, and from one set of behaviors to another.
A historically incorrect but contemporaneously common method of referring to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Believing, or hoping, that they had stumbled upon the eastern shores of the subcontinent of India, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European explorers called the local peoples they encountered "indios" (in Spanish) or Indians; the misnomer stuck and is a vernacular conundrum that persists in the Americas through to the present. Contemporary references to indigenous peoples in the Americas have replaced "Indian" with tribal names, or the terms "Native American" or "First Peoples."
Hillerman's fiction deals exclusively with Native American cultures located in the Southwest region of the U.S., in particular the Navajo, but also the Hopi, Zuni, and other Pueblo groups. In most cases, Hillerman uses the word Indian when referring to members of these various cultures.
"Ice Age" refers to the Pleistocene epoch, which ended between 13,000 - 9,000 years ago. He Pleisticene epoch was the most recent period during which the Northern Hemisphere was covered in advancing and then retreating sheets of ice, otherwise known as glaciers. During the late Pleistocene epoch, Paleoindians moved through areas of what is now known as New Mexico, although evidence of their hunting camps grows scarce the futher one travels west beyond the Rio Grande Basin.