By
RoseMary Diaz May 14, 2014
This is why all
rivers now twist, turn and wind
as they flow over the face of the earth.
The
evil spirit of drought had come and stayed too long! All of the people, the
animals, the birds and the plants were in abject misery! As the days came and
passed, the birds sang only sad songs; the plants drooped lower and lower; the
animals walked slower and the people were haunted with despair! The earth’s
rhythm was out of step!
The
ancient people were ready to abandon the homes they had lived in all of their
lives. The very old and sick ones were to stay but they were brave and were
ready to accept their fate.
As a
farewell to their ancestors, whose spirits were ever-present, the people
performed a special ceremonial. Unusual preparation was required for this
particular ceremony. They offered prayer sticks covered abundantly with every
available bird feather. They were sprinkled heavily with sacred corn meal, and
they endured great physical suffering to please the Great Spirit. When they
finished their rituals and waited for answer, they gazed at the sky with
prayers and hope in their hearts.
— Why
Rivers Never Run Straight by Pablita Velarde, Santa Clara Pueblo, 1961
On a
rainy, mist-veiled morning, just a few weeks before spring’s official arrival,
a family of blue and grey serpentine clouds gathers overhead. Moving toward the
high cliffs to the west of the Tewa villages, along the now dampened banks of
the Rio Grande, where yucca blooms and eagles fly, it swirls and tosses about
in the cool air. The shapes move into and out of and over and under each other,
becoming more defined as they carry themselves across the sky. Reaching the
edge of the Village Where Cottonwood Trees Grow, their movements slow and they
descend just enough to touch the tops of the tallest trees.
As
the first drum sounds and the dancers emerge from the kiva in one long, slender
line, a single beam of sunlight escapes from within the moving serpent shapes
and brushes damp shadows onto the fine, sandy earth and across the smoothness
of the kiva walls. The air sparkles and glistens all around and breezes from
each direction push through the shadows and float toward the cactus-covered,
obsidian-colored mesa just beyond the village, where the Rio Grande of Northern
New Mexico swims fast and deep, and bright red snakes wind through the tall
grasses of its banks in summer.
The
dancers align themselves from south to north. Moving in perfect time with each
other, every moccasin touching the earth and pushing back away from it in
unison, they become one continuous collective motion, their speed and direction
of step dictated by the drums, and their accompanying songs sung in voices that
resonate through the morning and out into the first moments of the
just-arriving day. The men’s kilts are adorned with horned serpent figures that
twist and twine over the soft woolen monk’s cloth with each dancer’s movements.
The gentle, writhing undulations of the serpents become almost
three-dimensional within these movements as they swim from side to side over
the soft ocean of textile beneath them.
This
is the Bow and Arrow dance: Avanyu is here
For
more than a millennium, the horned or plumed serpent, known in the Tewa Pueblo
language as Avanyu, has occupied a place of great importance within the culture
and cosmology of the Puebloan Indians of the American Southwest. Symbolic both
of earthly and supernatural phenomena — clouds, rain, lightning, bodies of
water and the fusion of the terrestrial to the heavenly — its likeness has
snaked itself across the steep desert rock faces and sheer cliff overhangs over
thousands of miles of the temperamental desert terrain within the vast radius
of what now constitutes the territories of Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona and
Colorado.
Earliest
representations of the iconic serpent figure appear on the black-and-white
painted surfaces of classic Mimbres pottery (A.D. 1000-1150), the precursor to
the fine Pueblo clay work of today. Traveling north, with many intermittent
visitations along the way, primarily in the Casas Grandes and Jornada Mogollon
districts, where it was often included in the decorative motifs of ceramic
works and kiva paintings dating back to between 1200 and 1450, it eventually
wound its way into the upper Rio Grande regions of the Tewa and Tiwa tribes
around 1325. There it retained its significance as a symbol of the various
properties of water and, thus, as a sustainer of life itself. Often depicted
wearing a neckband of a stylized shell design, further implicating its
qualities as a water deity, the horned or plumed serpent is also used as a
metaphorical reference to lightning, which bolts from its open mouth in an
attempt to influence the celestial guardians to coax rain from the sky.
Archaeologist
Polly Schaafsma, Ph.D., is well acquainted with Avanyu, having dedicated many
years of study to its mysterious and powerful presence throughout the
Southwest. In an essay “Quetzalcoatl and the Horned and Feathered Serpent of
the Southwest” (found in the book The Road To Aztlan: Art From A Mythic
Homeland by Virginia M. Fields and Victor Zamudio-Taylor, 2001), she notes
Avanyu’s “bewilderingly complex personality,” which, much like its Mexican
counterpart, Quetzalcoatl, “is multifaceted and ambiguous, cosmic in scope, its
roles in myth and ritual involving the unpredictable — endings and beginnings,
change, transition, and transformation.”
Dr.
Schaafsma writes, “The horned serpent continues to be revered as an important deity
among the Pueblos and is known by various names among the different linguistic
groups, including Kolowisi (Zuni), Paaloloqangw (Hopi), and Awanyu (Tewa). …
The serpent may be associated with the four (or six) directions, the colors of
which the snakes also assume. Nevertheless, the Pueblo horned serpent is
primarily a water serpent, an ambiguous entity both feared and respected. … His
home is in springs, ponds, rivers, and ultimately the oceans, all believed to
be connected under the earth’s surface, and … may cause torrential rains and
floods.”
Today
Avanyu continues to wind around the smooth, hand-polished surfaces of the
black, red and polychrome vessels made by some of Native America’s pre-eminent
potters, including Judy Tafoya and Sharon Garcia of Santa Clara Pueblo and
Russell Sanchez of San Ildefonso Pueblo; and across the canvases of its masters
of two-dimensional works, including Hopi-Tewa artist Dan Namingha, and
third-generation Tewa painter Margarete Bagshaw (Santa Clara Pueblo), who has engaged
the Avanyu image in her dynamic and energetic large-scale paintings, as did her
mother and grandmother, painter and printmaker Helen Hardin and the great
painter Pablita Velarde, respectively, in their acrylics, caseins, watercolors
and lithographs. All of these artists cite the inherent spiritual and cosmic
references contained in the Avanyu form.
Though
the iconic symbol of the plumed or horned serpent is still used extensively
among contemporary Pueblo artists, the secrets of Avanyu remain closely guarded;
many sources are reluctant to offer dialogue on the subject of Avanyu, and
therefore, the discourse is limited.
Painter
Margarete Bagshaw notes, “I have grown up seeing the Avanyu wrapped around the
pots made by my aunt Legoria Tafoya, as well as other Santa Clara potters. The
Avanyu is who I pray to, by painting, when our mountains have fire caused by
severe drought. It appears in cloud formations, lightning, rivers and wind. I
was taught by my grandma that it will either bless us with sustenance or punish
us with flood or drought, for the way we as a society behave. The most
important thing, she said, is to always show great respect when Avanyu appears.
Be humble and hold it in high regard.”
When
the final verse is sung and the last drumbeat marks the end of the dance, the
single line of dancers disappears back into the silence of the kiva. The bows
and arrows and kilts are put back in their proper places, where they will rest
until Avanyu returns. The gathering of serpent-shaped clouds ascends again, now
rising far above the treetops and wrapping the beam of sunlight inside itself,
then drifting onward toward the distant canyons to the west, where wild roses
grow and dragonflies flutter in springtime, toward formations in the landscape
that suggest Avanyu’s very origin.
It
moves quickly through the thin, cool air, then dips down into the horizon and
travels far beyond view. Avanyu has gone home. For now.
Their
sign came one bright night amid great excitement and fear! For from the sky
fell a comet of fire, roaring, writing and winding as it fell to earth! The
earth trembled, for Ava-yun-ne had found the Evil Spirit of drought. The combat
was victorious for Ava-yun-ne! As he disappeared back to Si-pa-pu, the voice of
Thunder sang in a loud voice, followed by the steady rhythm of raindrops. The
rain continued until the arroyos were filled and became rivers, which flowed in
the same winding pattern of the Ava-yun-ne.
This
is why all rivers now twist, turn and wind as they flow over the face of the
earth.
RoseMary
Diaz (Tewa) is a freelance feature writer and an award-winning and anthologized
poet who studied literature at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Naropa
University and the University of California at Santa Cruz. RoseMary spent much
of her childhood at her family’s home in Santa Clara Pueblo, where she
participated in many traditional dances. She resides in Santa Fe.
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