A History of American Literature

14 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods

And then there is the way the Zuni story of the lovers and their owl friends is

anchored in a familiar geography. The young man succumbs to the desire to touch

the woman he loves, forgetting the owl’s warning, at Thunder Mountain close to

“the river that flows by Salt Town.” The owl advised him, earlier on in the story, that

he would find his spirit wife at “the middle anthill”; and, to catch the resonance of

that, we have only to remember that the Zuni myth of origin has their people end

their journey from the place of emergence in the Middle, a site of achievement and

balance from which no further movement is necessary – and that the sacred name of

Zuni Pueblo means the Middle Anthill of the World. Native American myths are

about living as and where you are, staying or wandering, and the rhythms that pulse

through all creation binding the place where you live to the story of the world and

the story of time. They are about continuities between all animate beings, between

the living and the dead and future generations, between the mysterious and the

mundane – and between the universal and the immediate, furnishing legend with a

local habitation and a name. Continuities like these, all of them, are measured in the

concluding words of the poem chanted on the eighth night of the Zuni ceremony of

the Coming of the Gods: when the man in whom the spirits of the earth and the

dead are incarnated, after intense preparation, calls for the life-giving aid (“the

breath”) of the ancestors (“the fathers”) to renew the community (“add your

breath”) in the here and now. “Let no one despise the breath of the fathers,” he

declares. “But into your bodies, / Draw their breath.” “That yonder to where the road

of our sun father comes out,” he continues,

Your roads may reach;

That clasping hands,

Holding one another fast,

You may finish your roads

To this end, my fathers,

My mothers,

My children:

May you be blessed with light;

May your roads be fulfilled;

May you grow old;

May you be blessed in the chase;

To where the life-giving road of your sun father comes out

May your roads reach;

May your roads all be fulfilled.

Spanish and French Encounters with America

The Zuni were the first Pueblo encountered by the Spanish. A party led by Alvar

Nunez Cabeza de Vaca in 1528 had heard tales of an area far to the north where the

natives told of the “Seven Cities of Cibula” overflowing with wealth. So when, some

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