Like all American children I was vaguely aware of them from the time I began to go to school. I remember the pictures we were given to color at Thanksgiving – pilgrims in somber black and grey, an Indian with a tuft of feathers in his hair, a strutting turkey. He had also given us corn and showed us how to grow it. He had been both friend and enemy to the American settler. Without him none of our ancestors could have survived their first New England winter. Because of him many died before we succeeded in calling the land our own. The Indian was alternately pictured for us as a gentle and benevolent child of nature, or as an ignorant and cruel savage. Certain words welded themselves into a stereotype image, words like scalp-lock, tomahawk, war bonnet, warpath, and, in odd juxtaposition with these, peace pipe. Before I ever met an Indian he had been made into a myth.

Later I read and cherished Hiawatha, still later the “Pathfinder” stories of Fenimore Cooper. These characters from legend and story printed an image in my blood or else wakened one that was already dormant there. I began to imagine myself at play as an Indian. I would go tiptoeing among the trees, trying not to let even a twig snap under my feet, tracing the delicate track of a deer as far as I could before it dissolved among the matted pine needles. It was an Indian brave I dreamed of being, not a squaw. I longed to prove myself at tests of endurance, to seek a vision in vigil upon some lonely mountain, to receive a secret name and an animal guardian spirit. How dull, I thought, to have been born a white-skinned little girl whose parents were always finding fault with her for carelessness in dusting the ornate Victorian tables, for keeping disorderly bureau drawers, or for coming to table with grimy finger-nails!

By now it was the summer of 1914. My parents had left Detroit to make their home for the second time in New Mexico. I had no conscious memories of that first period, for I was only ten months old when the flood came which destroyed my father’s property and forced him to move “back east.” He never gave up his dream of returning to the southwest, and the summer of 1914 found him running a kind of guest ranch on the Pajarito Plateau thirty miles west of Santa Fe. To us children the ranch seemed like a dream of Paradise come true. I was not quite eleven; my sister was seven; my brother was just six. For two summers and one long isolated winter we were turned loose to run almost as we pleased among the canyons and cliffs literally at our back door.

Behind the barn in the canyon where we lived was a steep cliff of hardened volcanic ash. The rocks were pockmarked with irregular weatherworn holes; along the base of the cliff at the edge of a sloping talus were a number of astonishingly symmetrical oval openings, and others above these at different levels, like windows in an apartment building, without the regularity of spacing. How excited we were when we were told these were Indian caves. They had been made by human beings. In fact our canyon wall had once been a miniature village where families of men, women and children had “kept house” no one knows how long before Columbus discovered America.

The bottoms of the caves were thick with a powdery whitish dust that choked and blinded us when we tried to sweep it away, but if we stuck it out long enough we would come to a thin layer of plaster forming a real floor. That it could have stayed smooth so long was a marvel to us, brining us closer to the reality of the hands that had made it so. There were little rounded niches at the back of the caves, often filled with a litter of twigs and nutshells squirrels had left there. We could clear them out and store away our own treasures while we played at camping out. We built fires sometimes and roasted apples on pointed sticks. The skins became burnt and tarry before the flesh was soft at all, but we thought nothing could taste better. The small smoke-holes near the entrances to the caves never really worked successfully and we quickly found out why the rounded ceilings of the caves were so black. We could scratch through the black layer with a pointed stick as though we were writing on a blackboard. The soft rock beneath showed almost white. The Indians must have taken as great delight in drawing on rock as we ourselves; the ceilings were covered with images that fascinated us – serpents with trailing plumes hunters with bows and arrows and the animals they hunted; small triangular images of birds; abstract figures that represented the sun, or clouds, or falling rain. Often, climbing up and down among the cliffs, fitting our bare feet and hands into small scooped-out depressions that had been ancient footholds, we found other designs like these outlined in the ruddy faces of the rock. In the brush-covered talus at the foot of the cliffs were scattered fragments of pottery with which we filled our pockets. The broken geometric designs in black and white and sometimes red and black were like messages from a past that filled our thoughts with wonder.

The tops of the mesas were flat and open with a scattering of piñon and juniper trees. Among them we often came upon low distinctive mounds where dwellings made of stone hewn into long rectangular blocks had fallen to ruin. Some of the larger ruins had a circular form, as though the joined houses had been built around a common center. Two miles below the ranch one of the largest of these old communal villages had been partly excavated by archaeologists, exposing rectangular rooms like cells of a wasp’s nest or a honeycomb. We used to find arrowheads made of black obsidian or whitish flint or rosy agate in the water-washed gullies beyond the ruins; sometimes if we were lucky, a bead of blue turquoise among the grains of quartz-sand in an ant heap. We learned to name proudly the oblong metates or grinding stones hollowed out of purplish-gray lava, the smaller oval grinding tool which the women rolled back and forth across the stone; we saw whole and almost perfect pots that had been unearthed; certain jugs we knew were for carrying water, others were cooking pots; a few were vessels used only to hold sacred meal or water in connection with religious observances.

Around each of the larger communities or within the central plazas were usually several cistern-like holes, dug a man’s height into the solid rock. These, we were told, were all that remained of the kivas, the equivalent for the Pueblo people of our churches. They had once been roofed over, the only opening by a ladder – and the ladder itself had the significance of joining earth to sky.

We had seen an existing kiva with its ladder in the modern Pueblo of San Ildefonso, the closest to us of many in the valley of the Rio Grande below the plateau on which we lived. My father had several friends at San Ildefonso, gentle men who helped him with his building, or whom he had met through the archaeologists working at Tserege. They had brown, pleasant faces, with eyes gentle and bright as birds, and wrinkles of merriment like bird-tracks at the corners of their eyes. We were fascinated by their long braids of black hair wound with colored yarn, the red scarves they sometimes wore tied around their foreheads, their quiet way of speaking which so often concealed a joke. These were the first real Indians we had known, and try as we would, we could not make them fit into our picture of Powatin or Hiawatha or Uncas.

Once or twice that summer we were taken to San Ildefonso to see what our parents called a “rain dance” – much later we learned to refer to these as Corn Dances. These first experiences have mingled with so many later ones that it is hard to be sure which are the earliest. At eleven years what background is there for understanding, beyond the most elementary sensory impressions?

There was the enormous and unbelievably vivid blueness of the sky; the wide horizon that stretched in every direction as we drove down to the Pueblo from our steep plateau; the arid landscape, all sun-baked gullied hill, the pinkish earth dotted with juniper and pinon like cloves stuck into a roasting ham; the swirling mud-colored river and its inhospitable gravelly banks; the occasional groves of cottonwood trees; the rectangular forms of broken mesas, capped with dark purple lava; the sudden moist-looking dark green of alfalfa fields.

Then the cluster of low earth-colored houses, doorways and windows trimmed in blue and white, some Indian, some Spanish, coming and going in wagons drawn by thin, resigned-looking horses, in those years a very few automobiles. Indian women and children sat against the walls of the houses; a dusty smell everywhere, a smell in the air of pinon fires, of coffee boiling, of corn and mutton cooking for a feast.

There is waiting and waiting. Suddenly a jingle of bells, a flurry of movement, a focus of attention at the top of the round kiva, as up from the ladder within and down the adobe steps at the side a swarm of men and women come. The bodies of the men are almost bare; they are shod with moccasins, with shells and sleigh bells at their knees and waists, fox-skins dangling behind, strings of shell around their necks, evergreen branches in armbands and in their gesturing hands. The women wear black woven stuff that leaves one shoulder bare, silver pins in the shape of butterflies at the hem of the skirt, red woven sashes. They incline to be short and somewhat dumpy, but with their long black hair streaming over their shoulders, crowned with a blue-painted tablita, designed in terraces like summer clouds, their surprisingly slim and naked feet treading the dust so lightly, they have an effect of grace and not stolidity.

The dancers form into two lines that weave geometric patterns back and forth, as men and women change places in an intricate movement, breaking the line and forming it again. Up and down, both within and outside the parallel lines move other men whose bodies are painted a kind of ashen color and who have headdresses made of dried leaves of corn. These continually gesture with their hands the shape of falling rain, the movement of blades of corn springing upward from the earth. The great drum seems to beat from an enormous hollow place between one’s ribs. The voice of the chorus follows the drum all day, filling the air with a mighty sound of joy and power.

My mind was seething, in those days, with a mixture of Greek and Irish mythology along with tales of Christian saints being roasted on gridirons or tossed to lions for their stubborn faith. My parents were not formally religious and though both came from Protestant backgrounds, because of educational problems in a still sparsely settled southwest, I had been sent for several terms to various Roman Catholic boarding schools. The Indians, I had been told, were pagan; though nominally Catholic, they worshipped many gods; they believed in magic; they believed that they could, by dancing, make it rain. Alas for the beam in the eye with which we are all infected, one way or another, when we are young. It is always the outsider, the stranger, who is depicted for us as “wrong,” and growing up becomes for many of us a long painful experience in learning to recognize the projected shadow of our own black selves.

I managed to toss this instruction rather lightly aside. For me the Indians were part of a landscape I was coming to love, and their ceremonies celebrated rhythms of nature which were part of my daily life. I was sure they must have loved beauty to have built their homes in such spectacular places, and was disappointed to have it revealed to me much later that the mesa sites with the wide views were chosen the better to keep watch for approaching enemies and for advantage in defense against marauders.

It thrilled my romantic heart to know that certain mountains were held to be sacred, to be the abode of divinity; that there were shrines and holy places throughout the plateau where feathered sticks were planted in token of prayer. Certainly where sky and mountain meet a mystery takes place – things happen beyond the power of man to contrive – clouds seethe out of invisible air in displays of tremendous energies; the sunset light on a snowfield four thousand feet in air stirs the heart like crashing music. The first star coming into the night’s blue sky is always a miracle no matter how many times it happens.

— Peggy Pond Church