ABSTRACT
A very young man, in his early twenties, sat out on an adobe rooftop under the relentless Arizona sun, watching the masked dancers in the plaza below. He was thinking of how influenced he had been in his teens by D.H. Lawrence’s interpretation of such dances—and how wrongheaded it now appeared to him in his few-months-old wisdom. But even if the interpretation was wrong, the evocation was uncannily right. And here he was, in Lawrence country; the country of Mornings in Mexico, of “sun, sand and alkali.” The shattering heat of the noon sun, combined with the monotonous thud, thud, of the drum, was giving him a headache, despite his big hat and bottle of water. Old Joe, an Indian, but a visitor to this Pueblo, said quietly, “I can never wear a hat when I’m watching one of these dances.” Old Joe was confusing his own Indian heritage with his Catholic sense of piety. You wouldn’t wear a hat to church, ergo…. And these masked kachina dances were secret in his Rio Grande Pueblos. The Hopi had no such sense of secrecy; Catholicism had never taken here. They were confident, in their isolated mesa tops, of little interference, and didn’t mind if outsiders attended their sacred dances. Joe could never quite get over this: that same thing to him so sacred it must be totally hidden from the outside world, could be paraded for that world to see! But he took off his hat in Catholic reverence anyway.
