Picture-Writing of the American Indians: Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-89, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1893, pages 3-822Mallery, Garrick
History
Picture-Writing of the American Indians: Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-89, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1893, pages 3-822
Mallery, Garrick
Picture-writing, Indian
A study of characteristic features in these so-called sand
pictures of the Navajos would seem to indicate a Pueblo origin of
the art, this notwithstanding the fact that it is to-day more highly
developed or at least more extensively practiced amongst the Navajos
than now, or perhaps ever, amongst the Pueblos. When, during my
first sojourn with the Zuñi, I found this art practice in vogue
among the tribal priest magicians and members of cult societies,
I named it dry or powder painting. I could see at a glance that
this custom of powder painting had resulted from the effort to
transfer from a vertical, smooth, and stable surface, which could
be painted on, to a horizontal and unstable surface, unsuited to
like treatment, such symbolic and sacramental pictographs as are
painted on the walls of the kivas, temporarily, as appurtenances
to the dramaturgic ceremonials of the cult societies, and as
supposed aids to the magical incantations and formulæ of all the
monthly, semiannual, and quadrennial observances and fasts of the
tribal priests; sometimes, also, in the curative or “Betterment”
ceremonials of these priests. It is noteworthy that, with the
exception of the invariable “Earth terrace,” “Pathway of (earth)
life,” and a few other conventional symbols of mortal or earthly
things (nearly always made of scattered prayer meal), powder
painting is resorted to amongst the Zuñi only in ceremonials
pertaining to _all_ the regions or inclusive of the _lower_ region.
In such cases paintings typical of the North, West, South, and East
are made on the four corresponding walls of the kiva, whilst the
lower region is represented by appropriately powder or paint colored
sand on the floor, and the upper region either by paintings on the
walls near the ceiling or on stretched skins suspended from the
latter. Thus the origin of the practice of floor powder painting
may be seen to have resulted from the effort to represent with more
dramatic appropriateness or exactness the lower as well as the
other sacramental regions, and to have been incident to the growth
from the quaternary of the sextenary or septenary system of world
division so characteristic of Pueblo culture. Hence it is that I
attribute the art of powder or sand painting to the Pueblos, and
believe that it was introduced both by imitation and by the adoption
of Pueblo men amongst the Navajos. Its greater prevalence amongst
them to-day is simply due to the fact that having, as a rule, no
suitable vertical or wall surfaces for pictorial treatment, all
their larger ceremonial paintings have to be made on the ground, and
can only or best be made, of course, by this means alone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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