Page:Natalie Curtis - Songs of Ancient America.djvu/9

 SONGS OF ANCIENT AMERICA

THREE PUEBLO INDIAN CORN-GRINDING SONGS FROM LAGUNA, NEW MEXICO

HE song of the southwestern Indian is the voice of the American desert. It is outlined on the vast silence as the clear-cut mountain-line is traced upon the rainless sky. The three songs here offered are old traditional songs from the Indian town, or pueblo, of Laguna, New Mexico.

Laguna is one of the largest and most representative of the New Mexican pueblos. Its people are of the pueblo tribes who were conquered by Coronado in the sixteenth century, and held by the Spaniards until in 1680 all the pueblos rose in rebellion and cast off the Spanish yoke.

Pueblo culture is of a high order on the primitive plane. When first discovered by the Spaniards these Indians were living, as to-day, in towns or villages of stone and adobe, and were then, as now, a peaceful and industrious folk. Their main sustenance has always been the native com prepared in various ways and ground by the women in stone mealing-bins, or. The corn is placed on a flat stone set into the floor of the house at an angle, and is ground by rubbing a cube-like stone up and down over the grains. The woman kneels to her work and sways back and forth with rhythmic swing, and as she grinds she sings, for the Indian accompanies nearly every act of life with song.

The natives of Laguna are small, gentle, and refined; natural potters and weavers; natural poets and song-makers, as well. Yet, under the influence of the white man, the art of the Indian—the making beautiful of common things—fast fades away, and the natural utterance of a healthy people, the unconscious burst of song, is almost stilled.

The corn-grinding songs here given were taught to me by the pueblo women, and written down at Laguna. Of course, the melodies are not always sung exactly alike by different singers, since there is no notation, and the songs, as an Indian so well expressed it, are held, not on paper, as with us, but "all in the head." I give the versions which, by careful comparison, seem most authentic. They are those sung for me by an aged woman, the wife of the "medicine-man." The quavering voice had the ring of old-time authority. How often had she sung thus at her grinding in all these many years!