Vol. 16 No. 1 Spring 2012

The Power of the Kachina Tradition

By Tamara Stewart

Masked figures dance across the dirt plaza to the beat of drums that echoes off terraced masonry roomblocks, performing a modern rendition of an ancient tradition. These spiritual intermediaries, known as kachinas (katsina in the Hopi tradition and kokko in Zuni), convey prayers to the heavens, in return bringing blessings to Pueblo peoples’ lives and rain to their crops. Associated with rain, fertility, and curing, kachinas remain critical components of western Pueblo societies today, enacted in yearly public dances in which they appear as masked, ceremonial figures.

“I feel that what happens to a man when he is a performer is that if he understands the essence of the kachina, when he dons the mask he loses his identity and actually becomes what he is representing,” Emory Sekaquaptewa, a Hopi and former anthropology professor at the University of Arizona, wrote in the article “Hopi Indian Ceremonies.” (Though Sekaquaptewa used the word “mask,” Hopis generally find the word offensive in this context and prefer to refer to it as a “friend” that unites the spirit of the performer with that of the katsina.)

Ancient images of elaborate, masked ceremonial figures pecked on cliff faces and painted on hidden rock overhangs tell us these ceremonies are not new. They can, in fact, be traced back nearly 1,000 years in the American Southwest and likely even farther back in Mesoamerica, according to some scholars.

Colonizing Canada

By Alison Dyer

The November morning was bright and crisp. A hint of wood smoke hung in the air and the still harbor below sparkled like polished pewter. Nearby, inside a rock-lined pit, a woman carefully scraped up soil. “See that light orange subsoil, and that dark circular outline? Looks like a posthole,” said Bill Gilbert as he crouched over the pit. Sporting a long white moustache, he wore a wool toque and a rumpled anorak. “But is it a hole for a 17th- or a 19th-century post? We’ll cross section it to find out.”

Winter was almost upon them, but Gilbert was determined to continue digging. “These are the oldest English defensive works in Canada,” he said. “The only earlier fortification is Jamestown in Virginia.” Gilbert, chief archaeologist with the Baccalieu Trail Heritage Corporation, a nonprofit preservation organization, has been overseeing excavations at Cupids, a small community an hours’ drive west of St. Johns, for the past 16 years. Back in 1995, after just eight days of surveying, Gilbert made a singular archaeological discovery: he found evidence of John Guy’s 17th-century colony at Cupers Cove (now Cupids), Canada’s first English settlement.

Restoring the Glory

By Michael Bawaya

It’s said that Hawaii’s future is built on its past, and that once Moku’ula, the umbilicus of its kingdom, was a source of traditional righteousness and compassion. The genealogies of Hawaii’s ruling class go back to a time when gods walked the earth, according to lore, and their rank was based on this inherited spiritual power.
           
The chiefess Kala'aiheana was born to the High Chief Pi'ilani on Moku’ula sometime in the 16th century. For centuries the Pi'ilani line was connected to the powerful lizard-like gods known as Mo'o Akua, and upon Kala'aiheana’s death she was deified, becoming the sacred lizard goddess Kihawahine, the guardian of Moku'ula Island and Mokuhinia, a spring-fed pond that surrounded the island. Among the many people who worshipped her was King Kamehameha I, who carried her image with him as he traveled the Hawaiian Islands, intent on uniting them into a kingdom he would rule.
           
But that was then. Recent history has been unkind to this once paradisiacal island. Moku’ula, the home of Maui’s rulers from the 16th to the 18th centuries and of King Kamehameha I’s son, Kamehameha III, for a brief time in the 19th century, has vanished beneath a park that also appears to be suffering from neglect. That park, named Malu Ulu Olele, is on Front Street, the main drag in downtown Lahaina, the kingdom’s 19th-century capital and now a bustling tourist town. In 1914 the abandoned, one-acre island and Mokuhinia Pond were covered with approximately two feet of fill, and in the process an important piece of Hawaiian history disappeared from sight and mind.
           
For decades Moku’ula was largely forgotten, said archaeologist Janet Six, who has been excavating the island—which she thinks could be the most important site in all of Hawaii—since 2010. Six, a voluble, enthusiastic woman, directs a field school at Moku’ula sponsored by the University of Hawaii-Maui College, where she also serves as a lecturer.

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