Performing the witchery
for suffering
for torment
for the stillborn
the deformed
the sterile
the dead.
Whirling
Whirling
Whirling
Whirling
set into motion now
set into motion.
So the other witches said
“Okay you win; you take the prize,
but what you said just now—
it isn’t so funny
It doesn’t sound so good.
We are doing okay without it
we can get along without that kind of thing.
Take it back.
Call that story back.”
But the witch just shook its head
at the others in their stinking animal skins, fur
and feathers.
It’s already turned loose.
It’s already coming.
It can’t be called back.
Juana Quicero
The Navajos say the black peaks in this valley are drops of blood that fell from a dying monster that the Twin Brothers fought and fatally wounded.
Estoy-eh-muut and the Kunideeyahs
Estoy-eh-muut, Arrowboy, had not been married
very long before he started to feel
something was not as it should be.
Something felt out of place
but he didn’t know what it was.
At first he thought
it must be the long hours
spent in his fields
the worry over the drought
and the spring that went dry.
But one evening
when he was visiting his parents
his sister asked
who had been sick at his house
the night before.
“No one,” Estoy-eh-muut told her.
“I saw someone last night,”
his sister told him,
“when I got up with the baby—I happened to look
across the plaza and I saw someone
going out your door.”
“You must have been dreaming,” Estoy-eh-muut told her.
“I would have heard if anyone went out.”
Days passed and still Estoy-eh-muut felt
something was out of place.
He slept all night
without dreaming
but in the morning he was exhausted.
As he worked in the fields
the heat made him dizzy and weak.
The corn plants had been sickly that year
and the worms devoured all the bean plants.
When he told his wife, Kochininako.
that he was afraid something was happening
she only laughed
and told him to get to bed earlier.
So he did
but the next morning
he went to see
old Spider Woman,
who always helped the people
whenever they faced great difficulties.
She was sitting under a snakeweed plant
near the entrance to her house.
“Oh you poor thing!” Spider Woman said
when she saw him.
“Have you been sick?
Come inside, rest awhile.”
“How shall I get in?” Estoy-eh-muut asked.
“Your house is so small.”
“Go ahead, put your foot in the door,”
she told him.
And when he did
he was able to enter
the spider hole
“What’s wrong, Grandson?”
old Spider Woman asked him,
“Maybe I can help you.”
“Something doesn’t feel right, Grandmother,
I don’t know what it is
but it seems to be getting worse all the time.
Especially in the morning
when I wake up—
that’s when it is the worst—
a fear for all of us
that leaves me shaking the rest of the day.
“Then whatever it is
it happens at night
while you are asleep,” Spider Woman told him.
“Here, my dear grandson,
take this special powder.
Swallow it
before you go to bed.
The powder will keep you
awake
but I want you to pretend
Don’t tell anyone
not even Kochininako.
Wait.
See what happens.”
So that night
he swallowed the medicine
old Spider Woman had given him
and he went to bed
and pretended to sleep.
Kochininako came to bed soon after
but he could tell
by the sound of her breathing
she was not asleep.
When she touched his shoulder
he did not move.
She got up then
and silently left the room
but she returned
and placed something in the bed
beside him.
“Dark purple corn,”
Kochininako said softly,
“Keep Estoy-eh-muut asleep
while I am gone.
Don’t let him awake
until I return.”
The ear of dark purple corn
had the power to make him sleep
but Spider Woman’s medicine
protected Estoy-eh-muut from it
that night.
He listened
he could hear Kochininako lift the lid
on the cooking pot.
He could hear her bundling up something.
Then she left the house
carrying food with her.
Estoy-eh-muut followed her
wondering where Kochininako was going
in the middle of the night.
He followed her north
far from the village
to a place in the hills
where there are many caves
in the sandstone cliffs.
He could smell woodsmoke
then he could see the dim light
from a fire inside a large shallow cave.
Kochininako stepped inside.
As Estoy-eh-muut crept closer
he could hear the hollow sound
of human voices inside the cave.
Then he knew:
She was a secret member
of the Kunideeyah Clan.
Kochininako was going to a meeting
of the Kunideeyah,
the Destroyers.
“Kochininako, our sister,”
they greeted her
“You are late tonight.”
“Yes,” he heard Kochininako answer
“Estoy-eh-muut took a long time
getting to sleep.”
“Let’s go ahead with our meeting,”
the leader of the Kunideeyah said.
“Each one of you will go under
this cottonwood bow and say
which animal form you want to take.”
“I want to be a bear,”
the first one said
going under the cottonwood bow.
“I want to be a crow,”
said the second one.
Nothing happened.
“Something is wrong,”
the leader said.
“Kochininako, go and see
if an outsider is spying on us.”
Kochininako went out
as she was ordered and
there she found Estoy-eh-muut,
her husband,
creeping around the cave.
This was why the magic
had not worked.
“Estoy-eh-muut is out there,”
she tol
d them.
“Well, take Estoy-eh-muut home,”
they told her.
This time she had a broom straw
in her hand
she said “Broom straw!
Broom straw put Estoy-eh-muut to sleep!”
And as she spoke
Estoy-eh-muut felt suddenly tired
and though he tried to fight it
he fell asleep.
Kochininako took her sleeping husband
to the cliff
a dangerous and precipitous cliff
nearby.
The cliff was called
“Mah’de’haths”
the place of no escape.
She laid him on the narrow edge
and returned to her meeting.
The members of the Kunideeyah Clan
went under the cottonwood bow
changing into animal forms
now that there was no one
to interfere with the magic.
Then the Kunideeyahs went
to perform their night work
uttering weird cries
of wolves, mountain lions, coyotes and bears.
The whip snake Kunideeyah crawled into a house
and left an ugly bundle
of human hair and excrement tied together
to cause madness in that house.
The bear Kunideeyah attacked
a lone night traveler from another pueblo
and dragged the body away.
Wearing wolfskin shirts
other Kunideeyahs
stampeded the deer from the hunting places
so the village people would go hungry.
The bull snake strangled a sleeping baby
and the coyote partner
carried the small corpse away
moving through the night
doing their work of destruction.
When they had completed their missions
the Kunideeyahs returned to the cave
and regained their human forms.
They feasted at midnight
on the heart of the slain traveler
and on the infant’s brain.
When they had finished
they fell upon each other
men embracing other men
women reaching for the rattlesnake,
the whip snake Kunideeyahs
they desired.
They returned to their homes
before dawn.
Estoy-eh-muut woke up
on a ledge so narrow
he could not move in any direction.
“Oh my mother! Oh my sister!”
he cried,
“Kochininako has put me on the ledge
and I don’t know how to get down!”
Two little ground squirrels heard his voice
coming from the cliff which is
impossible to reach.
They knew no person could reach
that ledge alive
so they became very frightened
thinking what they heard was
a dead person crying.
They ran home
and hid themselves in a pile of acorns
so that only their little bright eyes
peeked out.
When Old Mother Ground Squirrel came home
she asked why they were hiding.
They told her they heard a dead person
crying on the high cliff.
“Dead persons will never cry,”
she told her children,
“Let’s go.
Probably the Kunideeyahs have left some
poor victim up there to die.”
The ground squirrels went
to the foot of the high cliff
where they heard a voice crying
“Oh my mother! Oh my sister!
Kochininako has put me on this cliff
and I don’t know how to get down!”
“Oh my poor grandson,”
the mother ground squirrel called
up to him,
“You must not move or you will fall.
I will get you down in four days.”
“I’m so thirsty, Grandmother.”
“You must bear your thirst, Grandson.
In four days
I will see that you get water.”
Then the old ground squirrel planted
four piñon seeds
at the foot of the cliff.
She watered them everyday
and on the fourth day
the seeds had grown into tall piñon trees
reaching the ledge just where
Estoy-eh-muut lay.
Then the little ground squirrels carried
water in little acorn shell cups
up the piñon trees
to the ledge.
It took many acorn cups to satisfy
Estoy-eh-muut’s thirst.
When he had regained his strength
he climbed down a piñon tree
and went home with the old ground squirrel
and her children.
Estoy-eh-muut was a great hunter
and he brought the family
many rabbits and deer.
After a long time there
he was ready to go home.
He had not traveled far
when he heard someone calling
“Grandson! Grandson! Over here!”
It was old Spider Woman
calling from her place
under a yucca.
“Estoy-eh-muut! Grandson!
Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,”
he told her,
“Kochininako belongs to the Kunideeyah Clan
and I must warn the people about her.”
“Oh my dear Grandson.
You can’t go home yet.
When Kochininako sees you did not die
on the cliff
she will try to kill you.”
“But what can I do?”
“Remain here with me four days
while I prepare something
to protect you,” Spider Woman told him.
So Estoy-eh-muut waited
while Spider Woman took yucca fiber
and began weaving a coiled ring
called a maas-guuts
used to cushion the water jars
the people carried
balanced on their heads.
As she wove it
an unusual design began to appear—
the figure of a snake.
On the fourth day
Grandmother Spider had completed
the small woven-coil ring
and she gave Estoy-eh-muut
the instructions:
“Now listen very carefully, Grandson
to what I say:
You must not let
Kochininako see you first or
she will kill you.
As soon as you see her—
quickly—
roll this maas-guuts
right at her!”
Estoy-eh-muut gave Spider Woman some
rabbits and a deer he had brought
and thanked her for all her help.
He approached the village
very carefully from the hill behind it.
He waited on the hill
and when he saw Kochininako come out
he rolled the woven coil down the hill
at her
the way Spider Woman had told him he must.
The coiled ring of
woven yucca fiber
went rolling straight to Kochininako
but when it hit her chest
it became a rattlesnake that struck her
and killed her.
In my essay “Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit” I wrote about the matriarchal society still in place at Laguna when I was a girl. The women owned and inherited the houses, so they knew how to repair their houses with adobe
plaster. Lillian Romero stands smiling with a load of adobe plaster.
My father has more than one portrait of the Enchanted Mesa near Acoma. I came across this view that I’d not seen before—with the snow on the ground and the clouds above the mesa as bright as snow themselves. He made this photograph of the mesa in 1949.
My father was seldom far from one of his cameras. His second love was automobiles, probably because Grandpa Hank loved cars. My father later became fixated on Jeeps and Range Rovers. My mother snapped this shot of him in 1949 when the Jeep station wagon was brand-new.
Jose Sanschu and his wife always traveled the four miles from Mesita to the post office and store at Laguna by wagon. I was horse-crazy from the time I can remember, and when I was only three or four, I used to dance with joy when I saw the old folks in their wagon pulled by two horses. They were very kind and gave me rides in the wagon.
The Go-wa-peu-zi Song:
Hena-ti-tzi
He-ya-she-tzi
So-you-tano-mi-ha-ai
Of the clouds
and rain clouds
and growth of corn
I sing.
It was summertime
and Iktoa’ak’o’ya-Reed Woman
was always taking a bath.
She spent all day long
sitting in the river
splashing down
the summer rain.
But her sister
Corn Woman
worked hard all day
sweating in the sun
getting sore hands
in the corn field.
Corn Woman got tired of that
she got angry
she scolded
her sister
for bathing all day long.
Iktoa’ak’o’ya-Reed Woman
went away then
she went back
to the original place
down below.
And there was no more rain then.
Everything dried up
all the plants
the corn
the beans
they all dried up
and started blowing away
in the wind.
The people and the animals