American Indian Culture and Research Journal

When Coronado turned his back from Cibola, he left behind not only the pueblos of Zuni but his dreams of fame and wealth. There was no gold. No one ever saw the wealth within, in the dark, subterranean circular rooms known as kivas, where the splendidly-costumed kachinas in elaborate, week-long ceremonials maintained a complex ritual calendar and danced life and prosperity into Zuni. Probably these rituals, or rumors of them, communicated to subsistence cultures further south, formed the basis of reports to Coronado of great wealth further north. But it was a wealth perhaps only a Zuni could appreciate, for to be a "poor man" there means to lack any ritual knowledge or position. Though the multi-storied pueblo of Coronado's time has been almost entirely supplanted by single story dwellings, Zuni still is the "other," alien culture. Not only Anglos, but most neighboring Indians as well, are forbidden access to kiva rituals. The Zuni language remains classified as a linguistic isolate, genetically unallied to any other in North America. And more than at any other pueblo, the old way, the kachina way, is kept in spite of the "civilizing" forces working for its destruction. That we have a text of "Sayatasha's Night Chant" is itself unusual, for it was given to the transcriber, Ruth Bunzel, "by a man who had never impersonated Sayataca and never expected to. They were verified after the informant's death by the Sayataca wo' Ie [preserver of the true text) who wondered how and why the informant learned them. I myself heard the actual chant twice after recording the text and know it to be accurate.'" This essay proposes to examine the literary form and merit of this single Zuni ritual poem. Recognizing the limits imposed upon us by using a "received text" -that much of its literary significance undoubtedly derives from dimensions of performance unavailable to us-it is nevertheless valuable to study the work for what it can communicate to us as literature. This is especially true since, as "received text," it is so typical of what is being studied as oral-traditional literature in college and university courses in Native American literature. For this reason it seems legitimate to explore a single work as thoroughly as possible with all the literary and folkloristic tools available to us, though ever mindful of how far short of full understanding and appreciation we shall surely fall.