47 Fun Facts About Zuni

What do the Zuni call themselves in their own language?

A:shiwi is the people's own name; 'Zuni' is an outsiders' word that reached English through Spanish, which is thought to have borrowed it from the language of a neighbouring pueblo.

The Zuni call their homeland Halona Idiwan'a, which translates as what?

Middle Place marks the end of a journey: in Zuni origin stories the people wandered for years in search of the centre of the world, and built their home where they found it.

Zuni Pueblo lies in western New Mexico, south of which nearby city?

Gallup was already a trading town for the Zuni when, in 1922, its businessmen launched the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial to show off Native dances and crafts, a summer fair where Zuni jewellers and dancers have long taken part.

How do most linguists classify the Zuni language?

An isolate has no known relatives: Zuni shares a few religious loanwords with its Pueblo neighbours, yet no attempt to tie it to another language family has won general acceptance.

Zuni religion centres on masked spirit beings, also honoured by the Hopi, known by which name?

Kachinas are spirits rather than costumes: when a dancer puts on the mask, the being it shows is thought to be present within him, temporarily transforming him.

Zuni ancestors built the pueblo of Atsinna atop which New Mexico landmark, later covered in travellers' carved signatures?

El Morro's rooftop pueblo housed some 500 to 600 people around 1300; long after they left, the pool at the foot of the cliff drew passing Spanish and American travellers, who carved their names in the rock.

Besides singular and plural, Zuni pronouns have which third grammatical number?

Dual forms single out exactly two people; several unrelated neighbouring languages mark the same thing, a likeness linguists put down to centuries of contact between the Pueblo peoples rather than to common descent.

Which crop were early farmers along the Zuni River already watering from canals some 3,000 years ago?

Maize grew in canal-fed plots small enough for a single household to dig and tend; only much later did Zuni farmers spread out across the land with drought-hardy varieties that could live on summer rain.

An ancestral settlement on the Zuni reservation, excavated in 1930, is known as the Village of the Great what?

Kivas of the usual size served one group within a village, but a 'great' kiva was built far larger so that a whole community could gather in it for shared ceremonies.

The name 'Zuni' is thought to come, through Spanish, from the language of which mesa-top 'Sky City' pueblo?

Acoma and Zuni have been tied together for a thousand years by a footpath between the two pueblos, and hikers can still follow a stretch of it across the lava flows of El Malpais.

Which Moroccan-born scout for Fray Marcos de Niza's 1539 expedition was killed by the Zuni at Hawikuh?

Estevanico had already survived a wrecked Florida expedition and an eight-year trek across the continent, which is why the friar sent him on ahead; the Zuni reportedly killed him as a spy.

Fray Marcos de Niza claimed Hawikuh was one of which legendary seven cities?

Cíbola turned out to be a mirage: by his own account the friar had only glimpsed Hawikuh from a distance, and the soldiers who marched north on his word found plain adobe villages with no gold at all.

Which conquistador stormed the Zuni town of Hawikuh in July 1540 in his search for cities of gold?

Coronado arrived with his men close to starving; when the townspeople refused to let them in he attacked, took Hawikuh and its food stores, and found none of the treasure he had marched north for.

What does 'Dowa Yalanne', the sacred mesa southeast of the pueblo, mean?

Corn Mountain was the Zuni's fortress: families fled to its flat top when Spanish soldiers first attacked in 1540, and went back up whenever danger threatened over the next century and a half.

Since 1978 the Zuni have won back dozens of carved wooden figures of which sacred beings from museums and collectors?

The War Gods are meant to stand at open-air shrines until they weather away, so to the Zuni any figure in a museum case had been stolen; the first came home from a New York auction house in 1978.

Which Smithsonian anthropologist lived with the Zuni from 1879 to 1884 as a pioneering 'participant observer'?

Frank Cushing was 22 when, the story goes, he simply spread his bedroll in a tribal leader's house; he stayed four and a half years, and some Zuni still fault him for publishing their sacred knowledge.

Zuni women traditionally grew chilies, onions and herbs in small clay-walled plots known as what kind of gardens?

Waffle gardens take their name from the grid of low earth ridges around each sunken square, built to hold precious water close to the plants' roots in a land of little rain.

Which stone, prized across the Southwest, do Zuni jewellers most often set in silver?

Turquoise was Zuni wealth long before silver: the people cut and traded it for centuries, and only in the 1890s did a Zuni smith first set the stone in the metal they had recently learned to work.

We'wha, the celebrated Zuni weaver and potter, met which US president on a visit to Washington in 1886?

Grover Cleveland received We'wha at the White House near the end of a six-month stay in Washington, where society took the visitor for a Zuni princess and photographers pictured We'wha weaving at a loom.

Matilda Coxe Stevenson, who wrote extensively on the Zuni, holds what distinction in US science?

She was also the first woman hired by the Bureau of American Ethnology and helped found the Women's Anthropological Society.

Where did a Zuni hunter carry the stone fetish of his guardian animal?

Over his heart, in a small buckskin bag hung from a thong; after a kill the hunter dipped the stone animal in the blood of his prey so that it, too, could drink.

In Zuni fetish tradition, which animal is master of the prey gods and guardian of the north?

The mountain lion was given the north, in the story, for being 'strong of will', and its yellow coat matches the colour of that direction; each of the other guardians is counted as a younger brother.

Which two stone-setting techniques using many tiny stones are Zuni specialties?

Zuni are also known for mosaic and channel inlay work, mostly in turquoise, sometimes coral.

By the 1880s, what was the usual fuel Zuni potters used to fire their pots?

Animal dung, in practice dried sheep manure, was by then almost the only fuel; while a pot was being finished nobody sang or whistled nearby, for fear the being thought to live in the clay would copy the sound and break the vessel.

Which motifs are among the most common on traditional Zuni painted pottery?

Frogs, dragonflies and deer: the first two are rain symbols, tadpoles, dragonflies and frogs standing for early, middle and late summer, while the deer is drawn with a line from mouth to chest that stands for its breath.

Who traditionally heads a Zuni household?

The eldest woman of a lineage heads the home because house and fields pass from mother to daughter; a husband moves in with his wife's family rather than the other way round.

Zuni Salt Lake, sacred as the home of the Salt Mother, fills what kind of geological feature?

A volcanic maar is a crater blasted out when rising magma meets groundwater; the shallow lake that fills this one has no outlet, so the salt carried in by springs stays behind as the water evaporates.

What did a utility drop plans to open near Zuni Salt Lake in 2003?

A coal mine would have pumped groundwater that the Zuni feared fed the lake, the home of their Salt Mother; after years of lawsuits and protest the utility gave up the plan.

The Zuni River runs west off the Continental Divide to join which larger river?

The Little Colorado meets the Zuni River at Kołuwala:wa, or Zuni Heaven, where in Zuni belief the spirits of the dead go to live; in 1984 Congress set the land around it aside for the tribe.

About how often do Zuni pilgrims travel the 'Barefoot Trail' to Kołuwala:wa, or 'Zuni Heaven'?

Every four years the pilgrims follow the trail across land that is no longer theirs; when a rancher moved to bar them in 1985, the case went to a federal court, which in 1990 granted them a right of way across his land.

What form of leadership does the Zuni Tribe have today?

An elected governor and council run tribal affairs and face the voters at regular tribal elections; in earlier centuries it was the pueblo's priests who held that authority.

Congress approved a national historical park on Zuni land in 1988; how did Zuni voters respond?

Zuni voters went to the polls and they rejected it overwhelmingly: a lease to the National Park Service would have meant sharing control over how outsiders visit a pueblo that keeps much of its ceremonial life private.

In which dystopian novel does John 'the Savage' grow up on a desert reservation where Zuñi is spoken?

Brave New World gives John an outcast mother from London and a stray volume of Shakespeare, so the 'Savage' speaks his feelings in lines from plays the World State has banned.

The Koyemshi, sacred clowns who appear at Zuni ceremonies, are better known in English by which name?

Mudheads get their name from the pinkish clay that coats their bodies and knobbly masks; they are clowns with a serious religious job, and they turn up in the ceremonies of the neighbouring Hopi as well.

Which mystery writer set his Edgar-winning 1973 novel Dance Hall of the Dead at Zuni Pueblo?

Tony Hillerman took the title from a name for the Zuni land of the dead, a village beneath a lake where the departed join their ancestors; the mystery opens with the killing of a Zuni boy in training for a part in the Shalako ceremony.

Zuni Café, the San Francisco restaurant that borrowed the tribe's name in 1979, is best known for which dish?

Roast chicken with bread salad, cooked in a wood-fired brick oven, became the signature once chef Judy Rodgers arrived in 1987; founder Billy West had started out grilling steaks in the alley on a Weber.

Which anthropologist's 1934 classic Patterns of Culture held up the Zuni as a calm, orderly 'Apollonian' society?

Ruth Benedict, who had collected myths at Zuni in the 1920s, borrowed the word from Nietzsche to set the pueblo's sobriety and restraint against the ecstasy-seeking 'Dionysian' cultures of the Plains.

The all-night Shalako ceremony takes place on or around which point in the year?

Winter solstice marks the turn of the Zuni year, and the night-long dances held shortly before it were once open to all comers; in 1990 the Zuni closed them to the public.

Around 1100, Zuni ancestors were in contact with the Ancestral Puebloans of which site?

Chaco Canyon's reach shows on the ground: large buildings in its style, known as outliers, went up in the Zuni area in those years, though how they were tied to the villages around them is unclear.

From which neighbouring people did the first Zuni silversmiths learn their craft in the 1870s?

Navajo smiths, who had learned from Mexican silverworkers, taught the Zuni in return for livestock; by about 1890 Zuni smiths were passing the craft on to the Hopi in their turn.

In 1984 Congress created a reservation around the Zuni's sacred site of Kołuwala:wa in which state?

Arizona holds the site because Zuni country once reached well beyond today's reservation; until Congress acted, the pilgrims' destination lay on land the tribe no longer owned.

A Navy 'Zuni' rocket, named after the tribe, set off the 1967 USS Forrestal fire that nearly killed which future senator?

John McCain was in his jet on the flight deck when an electrical fault fired the rocket from another aircraft and ruptured a fuel tank beside him; he scrambled out over the plane's nose, and 134 men died in the blasts that followed.

How does a Zuni wife traditionally signal that she is ending her marriage?

She puts his belongings outside on the doorsill, and there is not much to move: a dance skirt and sash, perhaps a box of precious feathers; he picks the bundle up and goes back to his mother's house.

Which deity ranks with the Earth and Sun parents as one of the Zuni's three most powerful?

The religion is katsina-based, with major ceremonies at the winter solstice, summer, harvest and again in winter, and honours deities of both genders.

Which new structures do Zuni's towering Shalako figures bless each year?

Dwellings are built new or replastered through the year to receive the six giant figures, who spend a night blessing them; to be chosen as a host is an honour, but with the building and the crowds to feed, a very costly one.

Which order ran Zuni's Spanish missions from 1629 into the early 19th century?

Franciscans paid dearly for the post: within three years of founding the first mission, two of the friars had been killed by the Zuni, and the order finally gave the place up early in the nineteenth century.

Which photographer, famed for the twenty-volume The North American Indian, made portraits at Zuni in the early 1900s?

Edward S. Curtis ended up without the rights to the work that made his name: short of money in the late 1920s, he signed them over to the family of his late backer, the financier J. P. Morgan, to see the last volumes into print.