Redman's America; Indians of the Ancient Southwest; Navaho Daily Life

[Opens with tribal drumming & chanting] [Dr. Ruth Underhill - Host] Gat cole [uncertain spelling]. That word is in the Zuni Indian language from New Mexico. It means a long time ago, and the reason I use it is because, in this session, I want to talk about the Zuni Indians and other New Mexico people, and can hardly do it without their very long, and interesting history. Now the Southwest, where we have now arrived in this story of American Indians, is really one of the most dramatic and picturesque, and interesting parts of all Indian country. That's where people long ago dug canals, miles long from the rivers, some of them did. It's where they raised corn, beans and squash; where they grew cotton and wove it into cloth; where they built sometimes terraced villages and sometimes those interesting cliff dwellings

that perplexed people so much in ancient days. Here is a cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde, where many tourists already have visited. Probably many viewers know about that. It used to be thought that such an exciting and strange place was built by no indians at all - that it must have been white people, maybe dwarves, maybe almost some magical people. It seems impossible that indians as much as 1,000 years ago could have built such a thing. I'm going to come back to that much later, but before indians could build this, they had a long, interesting history - just as most indian groups did. A history of moving and change and learning, which takes them from

very primitive beginnings, up to this place where they were city dwellers. Now over here we have two of the very early ancestors of our Pueblo Indians. "Pueblo" is a Spanish word, which means "village" and it was given long ago to these people who lived in the highly settled and beautiful little towns, but their ancestors didn't. Now these are people who very probably lived in the area of northern New Mexico - near the border of Arizona, Colorado, and Utah, right up there at the four corners. Oil is now being discovered. These are people who lived in that country somewhere about AD1 perhaps. You can see what very simple people they are. They're wearing almost nothing, and that's the reason in fact, that I'm not using human models. I could not find human models who wished to dress like that. The woman has a skirt made of vegetable fiber, and the man has a little breach cloth, perhaps made of deerskin. The hair, is the black hair of all indians,

and they're wearing it an old fashioned way. Now we do know something about people of this sort, because in the very sunny dry climate of the Southwest their ancient burials didn't decay. And we can find holes/pits lined with stone where they perhaps kept some of their food and which later they used for burial places. Then in the very dry climate, the bodies remained almost like mummies, so that we know something about what they wore, how they did their hair, what utensils they had, and really a great deal about those people who changed their ways of living. I won't say they disappeared. They change their ways of living a thousand years ago or so. Now how do we know all this? How can we give the dates, because as I go on talking, I shall sometimes mention dates. And many of you viewers ask how on earth we could know such a thing. Well here's part of the answer. This is a group of archeologists with little, delicate

picks in their hands - picking carefully and slowly through a gravel bank. They certainly have not just taken a shovel and pulled out the gravel, and grabbed up what relics they found there taking them away to either preserve or to sell. They are being extremely careful, as to just where they get whatever they do get. They're making maps and diagrams of the whole place, and later I will go on into some of the work they have to do on that subject. Here is the kind of landscape where that digging in the other picture was done. This is a trench. It happens to be an old gravel pit, but it wouldn't necessarily be so. It might be an arroyo, as the dry stream beds are called in the Southwest, or it might be a trench which they had dug down because they found on the surface bits of pottery or perhaps bits of stone, which looked as though there had been a settlement here. Now that settlement, long ago, was covered with earth blown in or brought by rains or rivers or by animals. So to find it one has to dig very far down.

Now, this is they way the digging was done. Here is the pick, and here is a much finer tool, a trowel. And here is a little hole in which something significant was found - not a golden vessel and not the money of a pharoh, but just as interesting and valuable to people who are studying early American history. Now after finding there is something, right here, certainly they don't grab it out and take it away. They leave it exactly where it is, perhaps without even touching it except just to see what material it is, and then they make a map. This is the kind of map that would be made of a great, deep trench which might have been dug down to a village site or might have been through a campsite or even a hunting site. I won't have any time to go into explaining these different layers of soil which you see. They are named with technical, archeological names, but you see that there are layers. And when people find that - the diggers - they leave them there as they are and leave everything they may find sticking out from the gravel here, and they call prrobably a geologist.

He will be able to tell about when these different layers were laid down. Was there a glacier here? Of course, not in the Southwest. In the Southwest there would have been a rainy season. Was there a very dry period? Geologists can Probably he can give some rather rough dates, just on the basis of that kind of calculation. Then when they find things sticking out here, they will look to see are there animal bones? If there are, perhaps they are very ancient animals whose dates we have some idea of, though not too definite an idea, or perhaps they are modern animals that show us what sort of climate those creatures must have lived in. There may be pollen from ancient plants, which shows what sort of climate there was. Were they willows that grow in wet country, or were they the sort of things that grow in dry country? All of that will be analyzed. And the best thing of all will be, is there any humans -

anything left by human beings? If there are other stone points besides one that that we can find here. I'll stop now and show the great find that happened to be found in that particular gavel bank. How very small and insignificant it looks! Just a little triangular piece of stone, but it's actually it's a kind of triangular point which was made at least 3,500 or 4,000 years ago. We know that because so many others of the same type have been found, but then the diggers will go a great deal further than simply comparing it with other points that they know about. They will then see are there are any human remains, or animal remains. Now if there are they're in great luck, because living things - plant or animal - absorb oxygen from the atmosphere, each species at it's own particular rate. And then when the living being dies - the plant or the animal or a tree - it loses oxygen at a definite rate. So if they find charcoal from an ancient fire, and this particular case they did. They were jubilant! They came back to the department at the university wild with

excitement because old pieces of charcoal had been found. But they had been found in a place right next to the point where it probably had been for thousands of years. They were then taken to a laboratory with enormous machines that I haven't time to show - filters, roof torts [not clearly audible] and all sorts of physical appearances - and the amount of charcoal was measured... the amount of carbon was measured, so they tell just tell how much was left, and therefore, what the date was. And the date turned out to be 3,500 or 4,000 years ago. Now that's a pretty long time ago, and for things that happened more recently, we have really a much more detailed way of finding out dates. This is a section of a tree. Now the device of finding dates by by tree rings is rather a new discovery - something like 30 or 40 years ago, I think, was made.

We all know that a tree as it grows adds ring of sap wood at the edge, outside just under the bark. And every year there is a ring added. A wide ring in wet years, and a narrow ring in dry years, so that every single ring is slightly different and the pattern of the whole thing is one that won't be duplicated, except in a tree that grew in exactly that time, and and at about the same place. Now this doesn't work for all kinds of trees. It works very well in the Southwest, where there are not too many trees. And the pinon particularly, if it grew on a particular slope will have just this pattern of rings. Well suppose that this beam happened to be cut in 1905 - that would be quite late, but we'll say it was in an indian hut built in 1905 - then the very outermost ring shows 1905, then the next ring in there is 1904, and so on way back to the sap wood... to the heart wood of the time when the tree was a little sapling.

Now we take this log and look for one that was cut a little earlier. And we begin to match perhaps about here, is the outermost ring of our new log - that might be 1890 maybe. And it goes back further, then you get another log which perhaps goes back further, and further, and further...and with extremely painstaking work, over a long period of years, the experts in this field have carried the dating in these Southwestern beams to back to just about 1 AD, not exactly that, somewhere near. Now I'm going to talk about the whole Southwest in the coming sessions. Of course there isn't time to go into the whole thing too carefully, but let me show you something of the area we will be traveling. This is what the anthropologists or the archeologists, who are now talking about, what they call the Southwest. Here's the state of Arizona, and here's New Mexico, then above is a little bit of Colorado and some of Utah, over here is a bit of California, down here is a little bit of Mexico. But mostly it's the states of Arizona and New Mexico. Now in those states,

of course, there are many different tribes -- speaking many languages, and they came to that area at quite different times - some of them very early and some very late. When people are looking for material in that country they usually don't find...they're not looking at least... for the stone points that show how early, early travelers came through the country 5,000 or 4,000 years ago. They are trying to find out about the settled people who grew into or "cliff dwellers", as they once were called, and now we call them "Pueblo" indians. Pueblo being a Spanish word that means village. And we have found that the cliff dwellers were simply the ancestors of our village dwelling indians, with their very interesting costumes and ceremonies, their beautiful pottery, their beautiful painting as they now do. They are an immensely Interesting group of people. So looking for remains of them, the diggers might see on the surface something like this. This is a group of pot shards - bits of broken pottery -

and to some people it might look like nothing at all - just scraps, and yet there are very different patterns, even at a distance perhaps you can see that some have quite elaborate patterns. Some have none; some have stripes and others have quite delicate little lines, and if you can see the color, a few are red and others are black and white. Now every bit of that means something to the diggers - it means different periods, different places. Sometimes the pueblo people made one kind of pottery for a long time and then changed for some reason - perhaps new people came in or they made a voyage or trip and learned something new. Or perhaps a piece was brought in from some other area - so that shows there was trade. All of these things tell something and putting them very carefully together with much thought, and much careful calculation, the life of those early people has been worked out. Now perhaps you remember those figures that were shown a little while ago,

dressed in practically nothing, they were apparently the ancestors of our pueblo people and they lived in the northeastern part of Arizona and northwestern part of New Mexico, where they joined to Utah and Colorado, in the country where oil is now being found in tremendous quantities. In old times that was the first standing ground of the ancestors of our Pueblo indians. Now in this particular program, I won't have time to talk about anybody but the Pueblo indians, although there were most interesting developments going on at the south of our southwestern area too. I'll have to allude to it now and then as I go on. You'll remember those partly dressed people, and I remember perhaps that I said that they weren't wearing anything on their feet. Most of those ancient people did wear something on their feet, at least when they took journeys. These are the sandals they made. They are made out of yucca,

very roughly woven together, and I couldn't let the figures wear them because they are very ancient things, and they could hardly be touched. Certainly no human being would be allowed to wear such a thing out of a museum. Well we can picture, then, these very lightly clad people, plodding along in their sandals, getting what food they could - rabbits and wild plants, and sometimes even inner bark of plants. Perhaps they lived now and then, as they wandered, in a little hut like this. I've showed this before, and it's the sort of hut that is used in the country that I've called the Great Basin. One reason we think it may illustrate the old custom, is because it's still used sometimes. Very soon, though, they being to do a little better. Now this is northern Arizona - not actually a cave, a sort of rock shelter - where the people could build their little shelters, and have the rock in back of them, and possibly

could keep out some of the snow and rain. Here they are constructing a shelter with some poles, putting a roof on it. This may have been about 1,600 years ago, as far as the tree rings show. How did they live at that time? Though I think you can see some pots and baskets in there. I've mentioned they did a lot of hunting. There weren't any very big animals, perhaps, in that area - any more than there are now. They chased a great many rabbits, and this was a great tool. This is the rabbit stake, which is still used by Pueblo people, right up to now. It's not really a boom-a-rang. It's a stick which they could throw at a running rabbit, and knock him on the head. Then it was quite easy to go up and finish him. Sometimes they drove a group of rabbits - a number of men all throwing sticks. They also very early began to make baskets. In fact, all the human groups do that. We've never found an early group of people who didn't find some way of putting vegetable material together and making something some kind of container.

So this is a container made by those primitive people with their...that I've just been showing, and it's very beautifully made. It's a bowl basket, the kind that they use to put over the heads of their dead people. It's beautifully coiled, It has colors, it has red and black, and a big rim of black towards the middle. Then they did make some sort of cloth. They didn't have a loom, and they didn't have cotton. Sometimes they used vegetable fiber, and sometimes they took the fur of their rabbits or some little animal and twisted it together by a sort of basketry technique - no loom. Nothing as detailed and elaborate as a loom yet, but they twisted fur together and made this little thing, which maybe in apron for a woman, or it maybe the bottom of a breach cloth perhaps. Now after they had begun to live with those little houses, which you saw...

which you saw the beginning over there. Somehow the news of corn - that great American food - came up from Mexico. It came first to the people furthest south, of whom I haven't had time to talk. And then little by little, perhaps around 300AD, something like that. Now We can't be too sure just when the first corn came. These people, who had been called the basket makers because they made these baskets and put them over the faces of their dead and because they didn't seem to have much but baskets, they began to raise corn. I don't image they were the great long ears, as we can buy now at the food store. Here's a little ear that I picked up myself once near an ancient basket maker site, when I was prowling around the rocks down in the Navajo country, where now the Navajos live but once these ancient people lived. You see it's not much wider than your thumb, and not much longer than two fingers, but it made all the difference. It meant that they could settle down, they could have their houses altogether in one little thing like a village, they could then move out of huts when they needed to, but they could have their regular food right there besides their houses. Now this shows a few of the houses they had - these are in Colorado,

I think, southern Colorado right on the edge of New Mexico and the picture shows how the house was built, more or less. Inside, where you can't see, there are four steady poles. Of course they had nothing with which to saw timber, and so it would be pretty hard to get poles that would be strong enough, but they managed to by hacking with stone tools. There are four poles inside - they support a roof of poles laid crosswise. And on top of the roof are narrower poles, then finally some earth perhaps. Then against the roof are lean these slender poles, that they could easily get, and when that's done then the whole thing is covered with earth. Now earth is a wonderful insulation. Our early pioneers found that when they built the kind of house they used to call the Soddy. It's the best insulation known, until we got our very modern improvements. Well they moved on, and new people arrived. The old basket makers apparently didn't go away, but they stayed where they were, but new people came in. Possibly they brought with them beans. Our basket makers had been raising corn, and probably squash.

The beans are a good source of protein and people can do a lot more when they have that excellent food, so the newcomers may have brought beans, or after a while may have got them. They also probably brought the bow and arrow, which the old basket makers hadn't had. They generally used just a spear that they threw. Now here, you can't really see this picture too well, but perhaps down in the front you do see a house being constructed with the slender poles making the roof. This was probably a ceremonial house. It's very likely they had begun to have important ceremonies, where they all gathered by this time. In back of them is a whole row of little houses, just the sort they made in the cave shelter, but they're put together. It looks like a modern motor camp on a small scale. There little houses have not separate walls where they join - it's one wall.

Now after they got to this point, somewhere around 700AD, they learned about cotton. Cotton is an American plant, but it's also an old world plant - the two are of somewhat different structure. And they began to weave. Now at first, the weaving was very simple, and I can't follow in this short talk just what happened as it grew more and more complex. But here, we do have a piece of woven cotton cloth made long before the white men came. And we know that there are signs of looms in the houses. The posts where the looms proudly stood. The looms are very like what people used in Peru, and it's quite likely then that news often came up from the south. Our early Indians traveled and went about a great deal and the news passed from one tribe to another, so they doubtless heard about looms and began to make better and better cloth. Long before the white people came. Now finally, somewhere around 700AD, in Mesa Verde which many of the viewers may have visited, we have this

cliff palace. And here is a house built of stone with three stories. Here's one that seems like a tower with a parapet where people perhaps can watch for enemies. And here's a two story house. It's in the shelter in the rocks - quite high up, with the fields down below - and perhaps they built that sort of thing to get away from new people coming in. Now I'm going to come to the Navajo and Apache very much later, but some people suppose that those wild, very, very primitive people were filtering into the Southwest about this time, and the early village dwellers, with their corn, felt they had to get out of the way of these rather gypsy-ish intruders. Now the people in this sort of dwelling were really what we might call quite civilized. They didn't have writing, not exactly, although I'll show you some pictures they made. But they were making pottery. One of those pot shards that we have give some idea of their designs. This is one of their kitchen pots. It was made by a method of coiling. The woman, whom you're going to see her

much more intimately later. She took little coils, sausage shaped coils of clay, and wound them round and round and shaped this. She made little dents in it all the way around. They seemed to like their kitchen pots that way. Then it was baked, and became a pretty useful thing to cook mush in. Now here is the kind of pot that was made around the same time, and this one was made in Mesa Verde. You can see how beautifully the lines were drawn on it. What an elaborate pattern of diagonals there is. This was all done without any measuring . The woman just kept the measures in her head - did it without anything but her little brush, which was made with a stem of the yucca plant of shredded....maybe she shredded it with her teeth and got to be in brush form and then dipped this perhaps into

a black that was made from what we call bee balm - the plant we call bee balm. Now I have talked, very briefly, and this whole story is so brief that it finds me to think that I'm not saying more. I did talk about a ceremonial building - perhaps out in front of the row of other buildings. They had such things in Mesa Verde, and I didn't show you one. Evidently there were elaborate ceremonies going on in those great underground kivas - that's kiva, the Hopi word - and I'll be talking about them again. Also they did quite a little what we might call artwork - sometimes in the kiva, and we'll get to that again, with interesting murals showing the masks and costumes that were used; sometimes on rocks. This perhaps is a mask, and this is a corn plant, this is a man - maybe he has a mask. He seems to have horns on his head. He has an animal with him - possibly a rabbit, maybe a dog, who knows, and then some rather mystic

signs. Those were found on the rocks around New Mexico. Now I'm almost at the end of what I can tell about this early history. I'll be alluding to it again and again, and as an introduction to what's coming, I want to show you a girl from the pueblos as she was rather later. This girl... maybe she would apologize for her hair. It's not the kind of hair they had a thousand years ago. It's modern. She shouldn't have curls. But this is a dress from Acumel [unsure spelling], one of the pueblos, made of wool. And wool is what came in with the Spaniards. My next stories are going to include, quite often, things that happened after the Spaniards came. Now they brought things that actually revolutionized life among the pueblos. She holding one little thing that indicates, and that's a ball of wool used for weaving. If I could manage it,

I would have had her hold a horse, and a sheep, and a watermelon, and peaches - various other things to show that the Spaniards changed things in pueblo life. But all of that will come in other talks, and so will descriptions of the other people who were further south and who developed rather differently because indians, we all know by now, were thoroughly different people. For the present, I end with the Zuni word with which stories end when the old lady gets through telling a long and wonderful tale of the past, and that is, 'laywee' [spell?] it is all. That's all. [chanting and drumming] [chanting and drumming] [Chanting and drumming] [Chanting and drumming] [Chanting and drumming]

[Chanting and drumming] [Chanting and drumming] [Chanting and drumming] [Chanting and drumming] [Chanting and drumming] [Chanting and drumming] [Chanting and drumming][Dr. Ruth Underhill - Host] [yá'át'ééh]. This time my greeting is in Navajo. [Dr. Ruth Underhill - Host] Yahte [spelling unsure]. This time my greeting is in Navajo. We have arrived at the largest indian tribe in the United States. And just as present there are the

richest. That's what everyone has heard of the oil and uranium and various other things have been discovered on their the reservation. Now they're also a very interesting tribe because they're newcomers to the Southwest, historically speaking. They came long after the Pueblo people whom I talked about in other sessions. Maybe somewhere around 1000AD, but we're not quite sure, and migrated into that very settled farming country - where the farmers and the weavers and the well-organized little villages were. They came in as wanderers and fighters, and in the fairly short time - some hundreds of years - changed so completely that what I have to say about them is as much history as description. I have to tell how they moved and got different things as time went on. Now we have some real Navajos with us. Here is a woman wearing the kind of dress that they learned after they came into the southwestern country. I shall have to be talking about their very early time when they didn't dress

just like this. I'll get to that in a few moments. And the men dressed in ancient costume. Very soon I'll go on with a description of what they're wearing, but we ought to look at this map, as I always do. Here are Arizona and New Mexico, and all of this country was occupied more or less, as I've been mentioning, by different kinds of village dwellers. Now when the Navajo came wandering down, from perhaps Canada, with a very different language from many of the village dwellers - in fact a language which is spoken by Canadian Indians. When he came wandering down they at first settled way up here in north central New Mexico, where if you could see the map well, you would see that it's mountainous, wooded or canyon sort of country. And later, as I'll go on to say, they spread and moved all through that country or Arizona, New Mexico until now their reservation is far larger than that of any of the Pueblo people. Now if we look at them again, we'll see that they're not wearing the very clothes that

they must avoid when they first arrived. I showed in another session people dressed in shredded bark, and mentioned that very likely in the extremely early days of our southwestern country, that was the costume. Now maybe some of the Navajos did wear shredded bark when they first arrived or else they were very simple clothing of skin. But they moved in among these farming people who had sheep, who had weaving, and who already were making very excellent clothing, and they married them. They not only learn from them as neighbors, because indians don't so often do that. The people who are not relatives are not considered to be trustworthy people that you really should know. So they actually married Pueblo people. Now if you look at the woman's dress... by the way her hair is dressed in the way that Navajo still wear their hair and they may have done it from very early days. It's in a bun at the back tied with cotton string - the sort of cotton string that the Pueblo people raised

and spun themselves. Then her dress... you might think at first sight that it is like the Pueblo dress, and I show Pueblo people another time when the women wore a little black blanket just wrapped around her and tied. It went under the one arm and over the other. Now the Navajo woman does not wear a single blanket. Maybe she wanted to stride faster and maybe she wanted to ride a horse as she did later, and maybe she was used to wearing two buckskins attached at the shoulder. However that is, she is wearing two blankets attached at the shoulder. Then she has a belt of the sort that the Pueblo people wove, and that the Navajos soon learned to weave, and her whole dress is not just a plain black blanket. It has red at the top for a yoke, and has red at the bottom. It's a very handsome costume. If you want to buy one of those now, it would cost you $100 because I once priced one. Then on her feet, she wears the kind of moccasin that some of the Pueblo people had in one of our sessions. Made so that the sole is

crimped over the upper - a very interesting sort of moccasin. And then she has white leggings above made of deer skin. In her arms, you might have seen, she's carrying her baby in a cradleboard. Now almost all indians did have cradleboards, and I haven't usually been able to get a baby who could be brought and shown in a picture, but each group does have its own sort of cradleboard. The Navajos make them out of wood - this is very thin wood - then on top of the wood generally was shredded bark, which can be used of course as diapers and thrown away like Kleenex. The baby is laid on that, then the buckskin is laced over the baby with thongs, and there's a sort of arch over the baby's head where a little awning could be placed if the baby were to be out in the sun. Navajo women carried the baby that way on horseback, and they hung it against the wall of the little dwelling, and generally carried it... I've heard the statement made that after it's three months old, the baby can go anywhere. Imagine one of our

modern people thinking that. Now her husband is also wearing wool, and I shall get to the point of how and when they used wool. Of course when they arrived from the Northwest they certainly didn't have any wool. They were probably wearing a skins and bark, as I've said. He's wearing a shirt made of wool from the black sheep. It's a very simple sort of cut. The sleeves aren't sewn in, they're made in a sort of kimono shape with the whole thing open down the side, and in the way that people did when they didn't know how to fit, and gather, and bind seams. He wears a necklace of turquoise, which I suppose was traded from Pueblo people. It's a very beautiful necklace which the Navajo like to wear now whenever they go to the ceremonies. His trousers are cotton, white cotton, such as the Pueblos used, and they didn't wear that sort of thing until after the Spaniards had come but they and the Navajo soon learned. Then on his feet

he wears the same sort of brown moccasin, dyed with alder bark, and very tall leggings - because these Navajo very soon became riders rather than walkers and they needed something strong on their legs. Now the kind of house they live in you can see behind them. It's out in a very barren place. It's made... here is a model of that house which you can see a little bit, and which we'll see again as they move. It's made like the teepees that I mentioned for northern people. The teepee, I said, was made of tall trunks of trees or tall poles leaned together in a cone shape. Now if I turn this around, you can see that the foundation of it is poles, with a crotch at the top and the crotches are interwoven so that the poles stand up together, then it's covered with poles, possibly with bark and leaves and then the outside of them, earth - a good, thick

covering of earth. That sort of thing... not in just this shape, but the idea of covering a wood structure with earth you'll find in Alaska and all through the northern part of the United States and the southern part of Canada. You'll find it in Siberia, and even over into Europe. In old times this covering structure with earth was the way to make insulation. And up to the time when we got very modern things for our insulating material, this was the best way to keep a house warm in winter and cool in summer. Then, you see, they did make a little vestibule at the side with a taller door than some of the other Indians because these people are living in a more or less peaceful country. They're not doing so much fighting. Over here you see see... get an idea of the structure. A good many poles - there are three or four with their crotches interwoven, then other poles

lean against them, and then over that whatever material they could find. Actually that is the way the hogan (hooghan)- which is their name for house or dwelling - that is the way the hogan was made, but this is really the skeleton for a sweat house. Now really almost all Indians who didn't have running water made a sweat house. And certainly people who lived in the desert, where you couldn't get a stream where even drinking water had to be carried, they certainly couldn't have a water bath very often, but they had this extremely good substitute, which also was used in Russia, and Finland and by the ? [not decipherable]. It was a very ancient system of getting clean. Here is a little sweat house covering with its insulating material, and the door where a man crawls in. Here you see the man crawling in. The arrangement was that he would get inside here, and pull a curtain over it. I think he has blankets over the whole thing in this rather modern sweat house. Then some helper would sit out here with a fire,

and in the fire would put special round, smooth stones - quite large ones saved for this purpose, a very useful piece of equipment. Then he would put the stones in the fire. When the man was safely inside (the bather), the helper would take wooden tongs and lift stones, which the bather would then lay inside. Then into him would be handed a little jar of water. He would pour the water on the stones, and of course the steam would rise, it would fill that very small insulated building quite soon, so that he would get a marvelous sweat bath and he could rub himself over well. Generally they did that after he came out, he would rub with evergreen branches, and if there was water around then he would plunge in cold water. Many, many indian groups had sweat houses, and if I don't mention it at various times, it's because there's so much detail. I don't always get to it. But some of them used it entirely as their means of curing when they were sick, and I remember that on the Northwest coast, when measles was brought

by a shipload of people of white Americans, that Indians by the hundreds had measles. They treated themselves to this sweat bath, and of course measles gives you a fever, then they jumped into cold water and they died by the hundreds. So the sweat bath turned out not to be always just the right kind of cure. Now I said that they use the pot, and the Navajos when they first came to the Southwest seemed to have brought a pot with them. Now this one that I'm showing looks like an old, battered kitchen pot, and actually that is what it looks like, although it's clay, but it's not polished like the beautiful pots I showed as made by the Pueblos. It doesn't have all sorts of decoration punched on it with a stick. It's just a useful, old pot. And no one knows just when these wanderers learned to make a pot, because actually a pot isn't something that traveling people want very much - it's just too breakable, too heavy - but they seemed to have it when they came to the Southwest, and it's made in the way I showed for eastern people -

rounded at the bottom. Probably the women carried it in a net and then they stuffed the top with grass as to make a cover. Some people say that this type of pot may have come all the way from Siberia. Now another thing that they probably brought with them when they came to the southwest was the bow. And this looks like a very simple piece of apparatus, but actually it was for that time, perhaps a modern weapon... perhaps an improved, more dangerous weapon. The bow that the Pueblo people had was usually what I would call just a straight stick pulled into an arc with a string. It didn't have two curves. Now this one does have two curves, like what we call a cupid's bow. It was made of very strong wood, and then along the outside to make it stronger so that this curve could be held and wouldn't tend to break, sinew from the deer's back was glued. So this was a very strong and dangerous weapon, much more so than the bows that the Pueblo people used. And possibly when these wanderers came filtering in, one family after

another, and wandering in among the settled people, they brought those bows and they were rather much to be feared. They certainly did kidnap women and they certainly stole corn from the granaries, and they're coming may have been, some of the students say, one reason why the Pueblos retrenched - brought their villages away from the outlying country and got them closer together. Well then here's one other object that was brought when they came. When I was talking about the desert people in Nevada, I mentioned that they made a water bottle out of basketry, and then they covered it with pine pitch to make it watertight. Well possibly some of our immigrant Navajos...by the way they weren't called Navajos then, they used to be called, they called themselves Dine' - the people, and the Pueblos called them strangers or enemies. But our wondering people perhaps learned as they passed through the desert to make this kind of a bottle. That's willow...

what they called coiled basketry made of willow, then pitched with pine pitch all the way outside. Inside to get the pitch covering, they would put the lumps of pine pitch inside, and then throw in hot stones, shake the whole thing round, and that would cause the pitch to spread all over the inside. So this is a good watertight bottle which people travelling in a desert would need to have. Now that is perhaps the outfit that they had when they arrived in the southwest - the sinew backed bow, maybe the water bottle that they learned, and maybe the pot. And perhaps they were dressed just in skins and bark, so we had very simple people with extremely little baggage - either intellectual or material - arriving among settled people. And the fact that they learned so quickly is another most interesting thing about Indians. That when they find something that they really want - not that something is told to them by white

people - and they find something they really want, they are most anxious to learn it and have it. Now something they really wanted was sheep. I mentioned in talking about the Pueblos. that the Spaniards came to that southwestern country in 1598, just about 1600, and brought sheep, horses and cattle. Now the Pueblos did not get the horses. Spaniards did not want them to have them. They were afraid these subject people would get away, and the settled people didn't need them very much. But the Pueblo people did get sheep, and were taught by the priests how to sheer. Very soon, as I've mentioned before, they began to spin the sheep wool, and weave it, and to make garments out of wool. Well the Navajos, all this time, were living off in a canyon country in the north central New Mexico, not really with the Pueblos at all. They met them occasionally, and they had already learned something about farming from them. They perhaps had little patches of corn patches. But when a great event happened in the Pueblo history... when the Pueblo people

revolted against the Spaniards - that happened in 1680 - they actually did revolt and they actually drove the Spaniards out of their country and kept them out for 12 years. Spaniards went down on the border of what we call Texas, and stayed for 12 years. Now the Pueblos, after they had done that, of course were very frightened that an invading army would come back and they left their little hill villages and moved up into country that they thought was inaccessible, which was the canyon country where the Navajos were living, and that was a time when those two groups really got together. They must've intermarried greatly because we now see a great many Pueblo people who look like Navajos, and we see Navajos who look like Pueblos. I think our Navajos today have a great deal the look of Pueblo people. Some of the Navajos are very tall and rangy - rather different. Now in this time that they were together, the Navajo in the first place learned about sheep. They may have had a few before, but certainly they hadn't had too many. They couldn't get around to get them.

But they found that sheep were a good thing, and they were wanderers and raiders. They started raiding the Spanish ranches very early and driving off sheep. I suppose they sometimes traded for them, but their tale is it could possible to raid a corral and get sheep pretty easily. Why should they trade? So they began to be sheep owners. And here we have a picture of the kind of sheep that the Spaniards brought to New Mexico, and that the Navajos learned to use. Now they're not the kind of sheep that white people use at present. They're an entirely different sort - they're small, long-legged, skinny. They have long wool, and perhaps you can see the long wool hanging down. A long wool, not very greasy, which was extremely good for weaving. The Pueblo people had been weaving that wool, and their Navajo spouses, as they lived with them, began also to weave wool. And soon we begin to hear in the Spanish records, that these wild people called Navajos are weaving

better than some of the goods from Spain. And then they stopped talking so much about Pueblo weaving, and more and more they talk about Navajo weaving. Now I will go on with Navajo weaving on another day because it's a most exciting subject. But the point is that now that we're going through these very interesting changes, we've got to the point that our Navajos, who had come with nothing have now learned about sheep, they're beginning to weave, and they were very fond of their sheep. Here is a picture of a Navajo woman with a lamb. I always like this one because it has that serene sweetness of face which Navajo women always seem to me to have. Now besides sheep, the Navajos learned about horses. And horses of course were much more valuable to them than they were to the settled Pueblo people. Navajos wanted to take their flocks of sheep back and forth over the country - at least twice a year, sometimes three or four times - and they

often had at least two homes which they used - one in winter and one in summer. And for that they needed horses. This picture shows them going through the canyons, as they so often do, men on horseback, women following in the wagon. Now they got their horses from the Spaniards, of course, some of them by trading if they could and very often by raiding. The Spaniards had ranches with large numbers of horses, because the gentleman had to ride wherever they went. The Navajo soon learned, as the Comanches did and later the Utes, they learned to rush up to a corral at night, yell like wolves, scare the horses out and follow them and left with as many as they could. They didn't, of course, get very good saddles from the Spaniards. They made their own. At least at first they simply put a sheepskin over the horse and tied it down under his belly, and did without stirrups. But later on they made this sort of wooden saddle which they covered with buckskin. Then they often made a saddle blanket. We had two of them here - quite elaborately made. Of course that

came a little bit later. They also got horse furniture [unsure] from the Spaniards. This is the horse bridle and bit, which was used a good deal later. It has silver decorations that weren't made at this particular time, and the reins are long pieces of twisted rawhide. Horses became a very important part of Navajo life. In fact I remember one old Navajo was talking to me about the past and I mentioned something about when they got horses. He looked at me in amazement and said "If there were no horses, there were no Navajos!". Well of course it's true - they really were not Navajo, in the sense that we know them, until they got this great, important method of traversing the country, and so they did. When they had finished that long time where they lived with the Pueblo people up in north central New Mexico, then they got on their horses and took their flocks of sheep and they spread all over the country around Arizona, New Mexico, mostly the desert

country where the Pueblos were not living, but they surrounded the Pueblo villages, and later on they came to be pretty dangerous enemies to those villages. Now also in that time of living together they had learned about weaving. I don't think that they could have learned much earlier. Of course there are no records, so we can't be quite sure. And if you ask a Navajo woman when she learned weaving, or when her people did, she will say we were taught by spider woman at the beginning of the world. A spider, of course, knows how to weave a web, and she taught the Navajo, and the idea that they could have learned from Pueblo people was quite shocking. They wouldn't accept it at all. This did surely, though, learn because their earliest blankets were of the very sort that I spoke of when I talked about Pueblo weaving - they were black and white from the white sheep wool and the black sheep wool - and they were just made in stripes. Now as time went on they did invent and learn beautiful new patterns. I'm going to take a whole session to tell about that. That's a long, exciting subject. Here is a Navajo loom - a little model of one - and it's made of two notched poles, with the horizontal pole

between them. The web, as people generally call the woven part, has been pulled down. Now Navajos, generally, rolled it up and left the warp part - that hadn't been woven - right down at the bottom, so the woman could sit down there and weave. I can't do that on this model. And also, you can hardly see it on the picture I have. Here is a hogan of a new type. You can see this is not that ancient teepee shaped dwelling. This is a dome shaped dwelling, which was possible to make after people were more or less settled. As I mentioned, all in the family would live in one place for three or four months, then when the pasture was not so good there they move to their second home, but they didn't wander without

direction. It wasn't just wandering anywhere - each family had it's own places where it would go with its sheep, and here is a woman weaving outside her hogan. It's covered with earth, and seems to be partly made of stone. They did do that when they got away where they couldn't get the tall timbers. Then two women over here are spinning, and I don't see what the third one is doing. Now I haven't said so much about Navajo family life, and I may have to take more time for it another time. They is always so much to say about an Indian group. These people apparently when they first came from the north had the same custom that they now have, and which the western Pueblos had, of having the man come to the woman's house to live - to his wife's house. I mentioned that with some of the eastern Indians, Iroquois particularly I think, and I did

say that when this brash young warrior appeared at the home of a young woman who had always been subject to her mother, that there was some likelihood that he and the mother wouldn't get along too well. So the rule was made that the man, the young husband, would never speak to his mother-in-law and the Navajos keep that up to this very day. I believe there are some modern young men who've been to college who don't do it, but the well mannered old Navajo never spoke to his mother-in-law, and she didn't want him to. She felt that if he did, it would be actually disrespectful and she would resent such behavior. The Navajos also had a real wedding ceremony - something that you don't find with many Indians. Quite often the women just comes to live with their husband without anything much happening, or he goes to live her. But with Navajos there was a ceremony in which the two sat side by side and ate corn meal mush out of a basket. This is a real wedding basket. The Navajo women don't make it much now because they are many taboos

connected with it. It's quite a difficult matter to observe them all. They probably learned it from the Paiute, and they trade for it now from the Paiute. You can see it has a little opening where the pattern doesn't go all way around, and that we'll find when I talk about further about Navajo crafts, that's a usual thing. Not to quite to finish something because then the soul of the maker isn't imprisoned. She still has something yet to be done. She hasn't finished. She's not ready to stop and perhaps die. So this wedding basket is used and the two young people dip first from one direction, then from the next, all four directions, after which they are given lectures by the old people as to how they must behave, and especially the young man is told how he mustn't speak to his mother-in-law. And finally he comes to live with her. Now if they wish to divorce, which does happen sometimes - in fact they are much freer than whites are - if they wish to divorce she, in old days, would take his saddle like the one I've shown and put it outside the door, and when he came home from hunting or whatever he was doing, he would recognize the hint. He would go back to his mother. Now it's time to say goodbye, and since I have a real Navajo with me I see no reason...Come over here. [Navajo woman] Hagoonee (Hágoónee'). [Underhill] I see no reason that I should... You must come right over here beside me, so they can hear you. Now I want you to say goodbye instead of me. How do you say it? [Navajo woman] Hagoonee. [Underhill repeats] Hagoonee. Now I don't believe that I could do it, and maybe people would like to hear it again, so to be sure just what it is, do say it again. [Navajo woman] Hagoonee. [Underhill repeats] Hagoonee. Well that is all. Now it's time to say goodbye, and since I have a real Navajo with me I see no reason...Come over here. [Navajo woman] Hagoonee. [Underhill] I see no reason that I should... You must come right over here beside me, so they can here you.

Now I want you to say goodbye instead of me. How do you say it? [Navajo woman] Hagoonee. [Underhill repeats] Hagoonee. Now I don't believe that I could do it, and maybe people would like to hear it again, so to be sure just what it is, do say it again. [Navajo woman] Hagoonee. [Underhill repeats] Hagoonee. Well that is all. [Drumming and chanting] This is National Educational Television. [white noise]