Zuni Religion

Zuni Pueblo's religious life is carried by a set of interlocking institutions rather than by a single priesthood or church. A rain priesthood, organized in several priesthoods each responsible for a cardinal direction and a season, oversees the ceremonial calendar and the prayers that call rain to the pueblo's dry mesa-top fields. Medicine societies, entered through initiation and curing, hold responsibility for healing and for specific ceremonial knowledge passed within the society rather than published outside it. Kiva groups, organized by ceremonial rather than residential affiliation, carry the kachina religion, the complex of masked impersonation through which ancestral and nature spirits are understood to visit the pueblo at fixed points in the yearly cycle.

The ceremonial year culminates each late autumn or early winter in Sha'lako, when giant masked figures representing messenger spirits bless newly built houses across the pueblo in an all-night ceremony that is Zuni's most widely known public observance, though even its public portions are governed by protocols Zuni religious authorities set and can withdraw. Matilda Coxe Stevenson's 1904 study, produced with Zuni cooperation at a moment before the community had settled its own view of what should be published, remains the fullest early outside record of this structure; Zuni religious leaders have since made clear, repeatedly and to researchers directly, that its more detailed passages describe more than the tradition wishes non-Zuni readers to know, and the atlas follows that request here.

The Ahayu:da are a pair of carved wooden effigies of the twin war gods, made new each year by Zuni Bow Priests and placed in shrines in the hills around the pueblo, where Zuni religious practice holds they are meant to weather and return to the earth rather than be preserved. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, collectors, ethnographers and museums nonetheless removed dozens of Ahayu:da from their shrines, and by the 1970s pieces sat in museum collections across the United States, valued by outside collectors precisely for the qualities, age and undisturbed exposure, that Zuni practice treats as the objects fulfilling their purpose rather than being damaged.

Zuni Pueblo argued that the effigies had never been offered for sale or transfer under any recognized authority and that their museum display was a continuing wrong rather than a completed historical event, a position that helped shape the argument behind the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The Smithsonian Institution's 1987 return of its Ahayu:da followed nine years of negotiation, documented afterward by the Smithsonian curator, a Zuni anthropologist and the pueblo's own consulting anthropologist in the definitive published account of the case; other museums followed, and Zuni Pueblo has continued to pursue Ahayu:da still held elsewhere on the same terms. The effigies returned are not displayed or published by Zuni authorities after their return, consistent with the belief that governed their making.