2 posts tagged “tradition”
Sunday morning, before leaving Albuquerque, we went to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. Strix had heard that it was a neat place to visit, so as long as we were in Albuquerque with a morning to spare, we went to check it out.
There are 19 Indian Pueblos in New Mexico. Ethnically, they belong to specific tribes, like the Hopi and Zuni tribes, but they are otherwise isolated communities of Native Americans, having been isolated by the influx of European settlers in the late 1600's and again by a push for Indian land following the Indian Appropriations Act in 1851. Today, many of these communities have been designated Indian Pueblos and granted a degree of home-rule, much like the larger Reservations.
The Indian Pueblo Cultural Center was built as a place to celebrate the cultures of those Pueblos... and to sell their goods. They do a good job on both counts.
The first thing I noticed when I entered the Center was the shape of it. It's a D-shaped building with a courtyard, which has circles in the center of it.
This is reminiscent of the shape of some of the more famous Native American ruins of New Mexico.
This is the much larger Pueblo Bonito, an extensive Anasazi ruins site in Chaco Canyon.
We arrived just in time for a demonstration of native dance. I stupidly didn't bring my camera, so you get treated to blurry camera-phone pics. Enoy:
A couple of the several murals out in the courtyard.
The Silverfox Dance.
I apologize for the quality of this video. It's very poor. But, at least you can year a little bit of the singer/drummer beating out the rhythm of the dance.
After watching the dancers, we visited the museum which was followed, predictably, by the gift shop and gallery. Honestly, we spent more time in the gift shop and gallery, and I was astonished by the high quality works of art there.
One thing I find interesting about Native American culture is that much of it is centered around the preservation of traditions. However, when you look at the "traditions," much of it does not date back to before the Spanish colonization. "Traditional" Native American food contains ingredients that didn't exist before the Spaniards came (like the "traditional" Navajo fry bread), and are influenced by Spanish and Mexican cuisine. Many of the dances were actually created in the 20th Century for competitive Powwow events. The costumes contain things, like tin bells, which they could not have had prior to Spanish colonization. Many of their arts and crafts, today, like their pottery, have been updated to include techniques that didn't exist before colonization.
At the same time, even if their cultures aren't "authentic" in their tradition, in that they are a fusion of Native American and European cultures, they are still unique, and therefore worth preserving. I was glad to have visited the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center.
My leadership class meets once a month, and the last class day was Friday. It was a particularly interesting day, including a mock County Commission meeting in which we all got special rolls to play and a Jeopardy-style game at the end of the day. It was a little different than the show Jeopardy, in that whenever you answered a question wrong you got pelted with silly string.
Afterwards, I went to a social at the home of one of the alumni. I know it's tacky to take pictures of another person's home, particularly if you don't know them very well, but I really liked his house.
These are camera phone pics, so they don't quite do it justice, but you get the idea. It was a really neat fusion of Art Deco and Southwest themes.
Following the social, I met Strix at the IHOP for a Mensa dinner. We have a tradition of eating pancakes on Friday the Thirteenth, so this was a friggatriskaideckapancake party. As it happens, the number of attendees added up to thirteen, as well.
