El Morro and the Zuni Reservation (Part II of Sasquatch's Southwestern Sojourn)

On Saturday, I was up before the dawn (just like in the Supertramp song). The Colonel gave me a ride to RM's house, where Mrs. RM was making blueberry pancakes from scratch. Fantastic pancakes. Did I mention that Mrs. RM cooks really, really well?

Sufficiently stuffed, RM and I then hit the road for El Morro, also known as Inscription Rock. It's about a two-hour drive there from Albuquerque. We had a supply of water and roasted piñon nuts to keep us from starving. Piñon nuts are pine nuts, but they're not the same ones that you'd find in commercially-available pesto. Because this particular breed of pine nuts isn't commercially available, there's a cottage industry built around them. They have to fall from a piñon tree and be harvested off the ground—it's a fairly labor-intensive task as I understand it. Before I had one, I asked RM what they tasted like. He said the most accurate description he could come up with was "creamy." As usual, he was right. You eat them with the shell on and they're really good, even if you still have tiny bits of shell floating around your mouth 20 minutes after you've finished. According to a few sources, you can make a really good pesto out of these if you're willing to put in some effort...

On the road to El Morro

El Morro is a National Park Service site. It's 200 feet tall and made mainly of sandstone. There's a waterhole at the bottom of it, which made it a popular stopping point for travelers. Starting in the late 1500s, the Spanish—and later Americans—passed by El Morro. Many of these travelers would carve their names into the soft rock at the base of the bluff. Well ahead of them, the inhabitants carved various petroglyphs. Don Juan de Oñate, the first Spanish governor of New Mexico, made the first European carving, saying "Passed by here the Governor Don Juan de Oñate, from the discovery of the Sea of the South on the 16th of April 1605." Depending on whom you believe, he either made it or didn't, and may have been hedging a bit by making this grand pronouncement in the rock.

Oñate's CYA inscription.
Note the care he took to avoid carving over the petroglyph...

El Morro from the back side.
That thing looks like it's going to fall off, but the Park Service is keeping a careful eye on it.

After a two-mile hike to the top, RM and I saw the box canyon formed by the bluff (I kept thinking of Roland and the thinny from Book IV of the "Dark Tower" series), as well as the ruins of an 875-room pueblo. The view from the top of El Morro is fantastic, even when the weather isn't cooperating (we were freezing). Once we hiked back down, I bought a copy of "The Pueblo Revolt."

The view from the top of El Morro

A few of the 875 rooms

The intrepid explorers having summited El Morro

We had a quick lunch of apples, piñon, and Mrs. RM's ginger snaps, and then headed off for Zuni. The Zuni Indians* are one of the Pueblo peoples, with about 6,000 population. This was the first time I'd ever been to a reservation before, excepting a brief pass-through in South Dakota when I was 14. I didn't really know what to expect—it was quite an eye-opener. The land surrounding the pueblo is beautiful, especially the principal mesa just outside of town. It's considered sacred, and RM told me I shouldn't photograph it. No problem. I was there to be educated, not to offend anyone. (I found out later that a photo permit is available for purchase. Apparently a bit of commerce will mitigate any offense that might be taken, at least regarding the natural splendor. You still aren't allowed to photograph anything that deals with ritual, and that makes perfect sense to me.) The thing that was most striking to me was the poverty that seemed to prevail throughout the pueblo. I've done a little research, and found that around 43% of the Zuni live below the poverty line. We stopped in at the Zuni Visitor Center to look at the various fetishes and silverwork. Once we got back to the car, a guy in his mid-20s came up to my side and asked us for money. We gave him around $5 or so, but it made me uncomfortable—not the guy himself, as he didn't seem threatening—that it was somewhat de rigeur to hit up the tourists for cash like that. I asked RM about it, and he said that he didn't really mind it, considering the hospitality he'd been shown by the Zuni when he was there for the Shalako Ceremony last year.

The Shalako Ceremony is the most important event of the year for the Zuni. The Shalako are the gods' messengers, and run back and forth all year long with messages, as well as bringing moisture and rain when needed. When they leave, the carry the Zunis' prayers for rain. As I didn't see the Shalako Ceremony, I can't really do it any justice. If you can ignore the cartoon at the top of this page, the text below will outline the ceremony for you. RM and Mrs. RM have been invited back this year—they'll be there this weekend, in fact. I'm looking forward to hearing about it.

From the Zuni reservation, we went to the Navajo reservation to visit the parents of one of RM's friends. They weren't home, so we headed north to Gallup, which is along old Route 66. We stopped for gas, and visited one of the myriad Indian artwork/jewelry stores there. Some of the pottery is absolutely amazing, but I have a real thing (not a good one) about the texture of unglazed pottery, so I probably couldn't have most of it in my home. After being subjected to a bit of the hard sell by the woman working there, RM and I made our way east on I-40 through a torrential downpour. I was glad he was driving.

Again, there was much Scrabble played once we got home, and again, I lost. Grrrrr....

The final installment of my New Mexican adventure will appear shortly

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* Before you take me to task regarding the use of "Indian" rather than "Native American," I am using the same rationale used by Fergus M. Bordewich in his book Killing the White Man's Indian. On pages 19–20, he says that

...the more formal "Native American" feels strained and unsatisfactory, and implies that other people born in the United States are somehow less "native" than, say, a Yaqui immigrant from Mexico or than someone who may be only one-thirty-second Cherokee by measure of "blood quantum" but who nonetheless meets the criteria for membership in that tribe. "Indian" has the virtue of clarity; it remains by far the most commonly used term among natives themselves and the established form for organizations such as the National Congress of American Indians, the radical American Indian Movement, and the new National Museum of the American Indian, for such agencies as the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Services, and as part of the official name of most modern tribes.