NOTES ON ISLETA, SANTA ANA, AND ACOMA
By ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS
THE following data were got during a stay at Laguna. On Isleta, my informant was a Laguna man whom I shall call Felipe whose family had moved to Isleta and who had grown up and married there. The all too meager information about Santa Ana was from a Santa Ana man married to a Laguna woman. On my second visit to him he told me that his wife did not want him to talk—she is the daughter of one of the leaders in the ceremonial life of Laguna—and besides "some smart boys," as he called them, had advised him against talking to me, and, he might have added, frightened him. The refusal was characteristic. Pueblo Indians are quite as much afraid of being talked about as New England villagers or the smart set of a metropolis, and the charge of giving or selling information to a white is grave.—Information about Acoma clans is in part from notes made two years ago during a stay in Acoma. Other data about Acoma were got casually from some visiting Acoma women come to Laguna to trade, and more deliberately from an old Acoma acquaintance living at Acomita. As I had expected, he was more communicative away from Acoma than he had been in Acoma. Besides, he learned that the next day I was leaving the country. Even so, he balked about telling me even the group names of the cheani or medicine-men. Information is indeed so difficult to get from Acoma and certain pueblos that when any is obtained, fragmentary though it be, it should be presented, both for what value it may have in itself and because the only way to learn something from the Pueblo Indian, as from the secretive elsewhere, is to know something.
The clans (daainĭn) of Isleta are Day (tŭ), Bear, Lizard, Eagle, Chaparral-Cock, Parrot, Goose, Corn.[1] The first four are accounted
- ↑ A. F. Bandelier mentions fourteen clans. From the above list he omits Lizard, Chaparral-cock, and Parrot; he gives Sun instead of Day (see below), and he includes,
