Religion: The Return of the Gods

In the big New Mexico pueblo of the Zuñis, largest of all the Indian pueblos, met the chiefs of the six clans. The matter before them was of great solemnity: How did the Zuñi gods chance to be residing in a white man's kiva, and what were the white boys doing with them?

The white boys were members of the famed Koshare troop of Boy Scouts in La Junta, Colo. Founded in 1933 by a railroad contractor named Buck Burshears, the Koshares (Pueblo Indian for clowns) have made a specialty of re-creating Indian dances, faithful to the last feather and as accurately chanted, stomped and hopped as scholarship and rehearsal can make them. Koshares are the pick of all La Junta scouts; they spend hundreds of dollars on their costumes and go on tour each summer in their own especially equipped bus, netting as much as $50,000 a season. Their headquarters is a $150,000 kiva, or ceremonial house, roofed by a lace-log pattern of 620 poles.

Whipped to Manhood. But the Zuni chiefs knew nothing of all this. What had brought them together and what they passed around among themselves was a picture clipped from the Denver Post showing groups of two of their most potent gods, the Mudheads and the Shalakos, among the white men. After due deliberation, the chiefs sent a delegation to the Indian Commissioner in Gallup, N. Mex., 33 miles north of the pueblo, to protest against the sacrilege and to inform him that henceforth the great Zuñi pueblo would be closed to all non-Zuñi visitors.

When Buck Burshears heard of this he reacted with speed and tact. Would the Zuñi chiefs honor the Koshare troop by appointing two representatives to attend a performance of the sacred dances, to see for themselves that no mock was being made of the gods? And to show that the white chief spoke with no forked tongue, he sent two round-trip railroad tickets to La Junta.

Last week they came—Oscar Sheka, Keeper of the Sacred Masks, and Leo Quetawke, Head Councilman in charge of Law and Order. They were dressed in windbreakers and dark trousers and their seamed, impassive faces were shaded by the black ten-gallon hats that the Indians of the southwest love to wear. At the railroad station they met another Zuñi and brought him along. He was Enos Coonsis, a 19-year-old soldier in the field artillery at nearby Camp Carson. Like most .Zuñis, Enos had gone to church while he was at school, but like most Zuñis he had little understanding of Christianity. The gods that Artilleryman Enos worships are the Katchinas, the masked dancers whose sacred dual identity was revealed to him some six years ago at the dread Whipping Ceremony at which Zuñi boys become men.

Something Alive. In the kiva of the Koshare troop, a capacity crowd of 400 watched while the dances began with the ceremonial lighting of a fire. Soon the Mudheads bounded in. The Mudheads are idiot children born of a god's incestuous union with his sister; their sack-like masks with doughnut-shaped eyes and mouth are hideous and their movements are wild and grotesque. The touch of a Mudhead can drive a good man sex-mad, say the Zuñis, and they shrink before their threatening leaps and insane gyrations. Later in the evening the Shalakos had their turn.