Need help with New Mexico shaman

There is no tribe called "Pueblo" - it's a name of convenience to distinguish the village-based tribes from the less settled tribes. (it means "town" in Spanish) The Hopi do not live in New Mexico - they are a couple hundred miles to the West in Arizona, scattered over several villages. The Zuni do not live near Chaco Canyon - they live SW of it, near the AZ/NM line.

Neither tribe's religious leaders would be living near Chaco because it's either public land or on someone's ranch.

Neither tribe has what you would call shamans, and the thought of any of their religious leaders talking to someone who is not in the tribe or a trusted long-time friend about any sort of powerful object from their heritage is glaringly wrong. They just do not do it. They do not do rituals for outsiders, and they seldom invite outsiders to tribal rituals.

If you want a shaman-for-hire in New Mexico, you are going to end up with some guy from the Bronx who has decided that he has Indian blood, magical powers and gives seminars on it.

Following along on what Tsu Dho Nimh (I have to g) says here ...

IMO, you need days, maybe weeks, of concentrated library research before you tackle this one.

Your basic idea is cool. You can follow up with any of many groups of AmerIndians in New Mexico and Arizona. They are all equally likely to be descended from the Chaco Canyons peoples. Nobody knows.

Background reading. This isn't necessarily specific to your area, but it's interesting and they might be at your library.

Carlos Castenada here and Tony Hillerman here

If you are doing a paranormal ... why can't he be Anasazi? That gets you out of several spots, and adds a twist. You will still have to do some heavy research on the Anasazi, but at least you get the modern tribes out of it.

She meets him (not introduced, he makes the first move), talks with him, even takes him to Chaco to look at the pictograph. But when she tries to find out what tribe he belongs to, people tell her what we just did: He can't belong to any of the known tribes because: blah, blah, blah.

She goes back to where she picked him up to go to Chaco and the house she found him living in isn't even there. No one at the park (it's a national monument) remembers him, but they remember her. One of the rangers remembers taking her picture, she remembers the ranger taking the picture ... but the man is not in the picture.

I was just on vacation in that area, and my parents had close friends in the Zuni tribe, used to go to ceremonies there. If your heroine is not from the west, she's going to have cultural problems, and freak out at the size and barren area. Get "The Roadside Geology of New Mexico" for background because it explains what the heaps of ash and piles of rocks look like.

How's this: She's sitting in a coffee shop in Farmington, NM (good-sized town northwest NM, about due north of Chaco), having exhausted her attempts to find a shaman ... because no one is talking about their tribal religion to her. The BIA (tribes do not like the BIA) has just laughed her out of their office, and the chaplain at the hospital in Farmington (It's a major regional center) has told her that the patients' families bring in the healer of their choice and that the hospital doesn't have a list of them.

A man in levis, well-worn cowboy boots and a plaid shirt walks in, sits across from her, and says, "I hear you looking for me." (could be a woman, they are also people of power, she'd be wearing a polyester house dress and tennis shoes). Jewelry - turquoise earrings and necklace, stone strand only because silverwork came with the Spanish) Hair is long and tied back in a Navajo style figure eight with a woven strip of cloth.

The accent on the English will be odd - all the tribes in that area clip the words short in a staccato rhythm.

And listening to the Navajo station is great: you hear stretches of Navajo babble then a few words of English ... %$!!%!%$ Safeway Supermarket @%*&#@%$@^% Colorado Rockies !%$!%$^ $% %^@^@. Sports broadcasts often use a Navajo nickname for the team and players and sports terms, so you hear even less English.

Deborah B said:

Okay--thanks for the info. This doesn't solve my problem, though. How about Navajo? I realize that they are not decended from the Anasazi (one source said that the name itself may come from the Navajo for "enemy ancestors") but do they have shamans? Or Medicine men?
He would not necessarily have to live right near Chaco Canyon, although they will eventually travel to see a pictograph that is located there. Would Arizona be better?
Ideas, suggestions, anyone?
Also, I am assuming that (for the sake of this story) that this Shaman/medicine man/wise elder talks to her because he recognizes the mystical object as something that used to belong to the Anasazi and has been lost for many years. It is both powerful and sacred and caused both the rise and fall of the Anasazi civilization. He'd talk to her because of what she carries, no matter who she is, because it was the responsibility of his people and they lost it.
Hope that clears things up a bit.
Thanks, Deborah

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Everybody (all the Indians all around Chaco) still goes to Chaco to leave offerrings and prayer sticks. The Navajo live all around Chaco. The pueblo type religion doesn't exactly have shaman and in fact the Navajo for the most part don't either. The Navajo have Singers (Xatali), and some vaguely shamanistic practitioners (Star-gazers, hand-tremblers)...why do you need a shaman? A mystical object would be
obvious to any Pueblo Priest or Navajo singer or Sacred Clown or Witch Hunter. "Pueblo" covers all of the village-dwelling Indians of the SW. Puebloan covers an even larger range, including a lot of things in Navajo Religion that are derived from Puebloan sources.

Anazazi is a Navajo word. The Navajo are not in fact a monolithic group by descent. They essentially invented their identity in the early 18th century when Puebloan refugees (like those Tiwa who live among the Hopi) from the reconquest of New Mexico in the 1690s...banded together with the Athabaskans living in the San Juan basin (ie the area all around Chaco). The area where the Navajo invented themselves is up around what is now the Jicarilla Apache
Reservation a supersacred area with those "underground observatories" (ie star charts in caves) which probably derive ultimately from MesoAmerican sources. So literally, the Navajo are as Anazasi as the Pueblos and a lot of them live in old Anazasi areas.

Anyway, I would read up on all this stuff.
There's no way to explain it all in a few posts. It is a huge and complex area and its very easy to get the wrong idea about the religions of the Indians of New Mexico and Arizona.

Deborah B said:

Colorado Guy-- the answer to your question about why the Southwest is a) the Anasazi are a perfect fit for a number of elements in the story, including the mystery surrounding them which allows me to link their rise and fall to this mystical object, b) I found a picture of a pictograph in Chaco Canyon that perfectly matches element in the story and c) that seems to be the way it came full-blown into my head (you know how that goes, I'm sure). Zuni looks like a good fit, and I believe that there is a reservation near Gallop which isn't too far away. If they do not have shamans, what do they call their wise men?

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If I understand you correctly, this mysterious thing is an actual object (it could be made of copper since the Anazasi could probably work copper)...but its possessor knows that it is Anazasi and that nobody else knows about it? How does the possessor know what they know about it? Why do they think a Zuni religious expert would know more about it? I mean its a good theory...but what's the actual evidence?

Deborah B said:

Wow. I hadn't even thought of that. I'll have to mull it around a bit, but there is certainly some potential there. Hmmm...
Clever folk, you Absolute Writers...
And I do love the idea of anything that gets me out of major research and puts me back to only minor research most of which I've already done. (Not a lazy writer, I swear, just a mightily overloaded one.)
What does everybody else think?
I'd had my protagonist in a scene where she is given the card for the local Indian Affairs guy, who was supposed to direct her to a shaman who had taken part in a movie that was shot there. I could have the IA guy not be able to track him down, and when she watches the movie, there's no sign of him...but then he finds her. Might work...
Mulling, mulling...

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The shaman who finds you is not the Shaman you want. If I were looking for a religious expert I would start at the University of New Mexico and work my way down the chain of particulars to whatever grad student was working with something like what I needed to figure out. Then I would have them help me work back through such things as the gallery owners who deal with the artists until I felt I was getting in the right ballpark for whatever the object was (maybe it resembles motifs in the silver work of a certain Navajo outfit from the 1930s...it might have disappeared from more modern silver) and then I would have to start buying things from that outfit and going out and visiting them, perhaps having some over to parties and generally being a helpful guy (there are whole books on what "helpful" means in the context of a Navajo outfit)....If I was incredibly lucky, I'd find the old guy who might know what the thing was. That would be time-consuming, but probably a lot more likely to work than trusting somebody who turns up and says he's a shaman.

job said:

Following along on what Tsu Dho Nimh (I have to g) says here ...

IMO, you need days, maybe weeks, of concentrated library research before you tackle this one.

Your basic idea is cool. You can follow up with any of many groups of AmerIndians in New Mexico and Arizona. They are all equally likely to be descended from the Chaco Canyons peoples. Nobody knows.

Background reading. This isn't necessarily specific to your area, but it's interesting and they might be at your library.

Carlos Castenada here and Tony Hillerman here

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Hillerman is flawless on the world of the Navajo. He obviously knows them well. Castenada is very useful too. Note that the shaman types in Castenada are pan-regional and they would be regarded as potentially very dangerous by local religious practioners (though Pueblo priests and Navajo Singers would not fear them, they would be very suspicious of their influence over others and regard them as prone to practicing too much of the "black arts" side of the regional magic/religion)....which makes me wonder: since the local priests and singers constantly maintain their religious cosmos via ceremonies...wouldn't they detect the mystical object quite easily? How is it that they can't spot it right away? From about 300 miles?

Sokal said:

Hillerman is flawless on the world of the Navajo. He obviously knows them well. Castenada is very useful too.

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I was offering more basic intros than the OP poster needed. (g) Happens that way. But I figured these two would be easily accessible, available, and would do no harm.

If I were writing something along these lines I might go for a stone object that had, a hundred or two hundred years ago, been modified into a fetish animal. (turquoise? petrified ivory? The thought of a white bear is very appealing to me)

This would accord with the way sacred objects travel through different belief systems, retaining their 'sacredness'.
It would put the holder in a modern context where he or she is an active part of the religious community -- lots of cool, interesting things to say about specific and real traditions then.
And it at least partially frees the story from the unbroken-chain-of-40-generations-of-magic plot device.

If I were from Atlanta or London or Kyoto, (and magic were real,) and I wanted to find a psychic superpower in Taos,
I'd go to my local, known and trusted, psychic and ask for an introduction to someone who could point me to the right man/woman in Taos.
Then I'd travel up the chain from local Devonshire wiccan to ebony-black London University professor to Jewish shopkeeper in the Bronx to Ute surgeon at the hospital in Gallup ... before I got directions to the old man at the end of the four-wheel-drive arroyo.

Sokal said:

Note that the shaman types in Castenada are pan-regional and they would be regarded as potentially very dangerous by local religious practioners (though Pueblo priests and Navajo Singers would not fear them, they would be very suspicious of their influence over others and regard them as prone to practicing too much of the "black arts" side of the regional magic/religion)....which makes me wonder: since the local priests and singers constantly maintain their religious cosmos via ceremonies...wouldn't they detect the mystical object quite easily? How is it that they can't spot it right away? From about 300 miles?

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Another reason for (1) the shaman to be operating as a powerful and benevolent man/woman within the current belief system. (2) the magical object to have found its spot within the traditional religious structure ... nu?

Deborah B said:

the card for the local Indian Affairs guy,

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I think somebody else might have said this ...
but you probably want to research relations between the BIA and your Indian group. Not always cordial.

You might consider church, school or hospital if you want a knowledgeable authority figure.

If she's doing the research herself -- maybe there's some unexplained incident she's tracking -- that could lead to newspaper files and a helpful reporter.

Your protag could get in touch with a local pan-mystic organization that offers her shaman up on a silver platter,
or, equally, they could be totally clueless UFO-hunters who offer him up almost by accident.

job said:

I was offering more basic intros than the OP poster needed. (g) Happens that way. But I figured these two would be easily accessible, available, and would do no harm.

If I were writing something along these lines I might go for a stone object that had, a hundred or two hundred years ago, been modified into a fetish animal. (turquoise? petrified ivory? The thought of a white bear is very appealing to me)

This would accord with the way sacred objects travel through different belief systems, retaining their 'sacredness'.
It would put the holder in a modern context where he or she is an active part of the religious community -- lots of cool, interesting things to say about specific and real traditions then.
And it at least partially frees the story from the unbroken-chain-of-40-generations-of-magic plot device.

If I were from Atlanta or London or Kyoto, (and magic were real,) and I wanted to find a psychic superpower in Taos,
I'd go to my local, known and trusted, psychic and ask for an introduction to someone who could point me to the right man/woman in Taos.
Then I'd travel up the chain from local Devonshire psychic to ebony-black London University professor to Jewish shopkeeper in the Bronx to Ute surgeon at the hospital in Gallup ... before I got directions to the old man at the end of the four-wheel-drive arroyo.





Another reason for (1) the shaman to be operating as a powerful and benevolent man/woman within the current belief system. (2) the magical object to have found its spot within the traditional religious structure ... nu?

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I think you're right and from the if-I-were-writing-this point of view: if an object really is powerful and the religion isn't dead, the object is going to be held in secret somewhere (I know this sounds corny...but it does happen even now...for example the Dogon kept the "Mother of the Masks" concealed for decades)...but there are other possible scenarios: some other group might have taken the object (plundering sacred objects is very common) and they might have used powerful black magic to mask the primary object so that the object appears for example to be an obsidian snake in the collection of some European museum (assuming it was looted and transformed and looted in say 1130, 1260 and 1560)...one would take the snake to a proper mesoamerican shaman only to have it alter and errupt into something else while a silver tower emerges from Kin Ya'a (a tower kiva complex near Chaco) and signals some vacationing Aliens to stop by for a few miracles.

And the rest is pure thriller.

job said:

Your protag could get in touch with a local pan-mystic organization that offers her shaman up on a silver platter,
or, equally, they could be totally clueless UFO-hunters who offer him up almost by accident.

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Oh very nice. Silver platters, UFO-hunters. Remind me not to write this book for a few years.

Sokal said:

Castenada is very useful too.

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ROFL: I was chatting with a Yaqui leader several years ago - a very old man I had known for several years, one who felt comfortable enough with me that he ordered me around like he did his own grandchildren - and asked him what he thought of Carlos Castaneda. He snickered and said that Castaneda was very inventive, but not at all accurate.

You do not get anywhere with any of these tribes by asking questions. They will either boot you off their rez, look at you blankly or tell you what you think you want to know ... which is not anywhere near the truth. I was sitting at a Phoenix event with a bunch of Zuni dancers, wrapped in a blanket and cuddling one of the little dancers when some guy with multiple cameras and a New York accent barged into the tent asking questions. He asked if I was Zuni too (I'm a gringo). Before I could answer, one of the Zuni women jerked her chin at me (they don't point with fingers) and said "She my daughter. She best silversmith in tribe, but she don't speak English." So I sat there and listened while they told the guy all kinds of wild tales.

Sokal said:

I think you're right and from the if-I-were-writing-this point of view: if an object really is powerful and the religion isn't dead, the object is going to be held in secret somewhere (I know this sounds corny...but it does happen even now...for example the Dogon kept the "Mother of the Masks" concealed for decades)...but there are other possible scenarios: some other group might have taken the object (plundering sacred objects is very common) and they might have used powerful black magic to mask the primary object so that the object appears for example to be an obsidian snake in the collection of some European museum (assuming it was looted and transformed and looted in say 1130, 1260 and 1560)...one would take the snake to a proper mesoamerican shaman only to have it alter and errupt into something else while a silver tower emerges from Kin Ya'a (a tower kiva complex near Chaco) and signals some vacationing Aliens to stop by for a few miracles.

And the rest is pure thriller.

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Wait a minute ... wait a minute ... wasn't this on the X-files ... third season .....

You got three recent 'museum lootings' -- the Pahlavi collection in Iran, the 'new governments' in the former Soviets, and the museums that were in Kuwait when the Iraqis walked in. Any of those could have had the object in the collection, thinking it was Sassainian or Turkic.
Now that it's out in the daylight again it gets all active. It ends up at auction in New York (London, Chicago) where the heroine is ...


(jo slaps herself upside the head. Stop it jo. Just stop it.)

Tsu Dho Nimh said:

ROFL: I was chatting with a Yaqui leader several years ago - a very old man I had known for several years, one who felt comfortable enough with me that he ordered me around like he did his own grandchildren - and asked him what he thought of Carlos Castaneda. He snickered and said that Castaneda was very inventive, but not at all accurate.

You do not get anywhere with any of these tribes by asking questions. They will either boot you off their rez, look at you blankly or tell you what you think you want to know ... which is not anywhere near the truth. I was sitting at a Phoenix event with a bunch of Zuni dancers, wrapped in a blanket and cuddling one of the little dancers when some guy with multiple cameras and a New York accent barged into the tent asking questions. He asked if I was Zuni too (I'm a gringo). Before I could answer, one of the Zuni women jerked her chin at me (they don't point with fingers) and said "She my daughter. She best silversmith in tribe, but she don't speak English." So I sat there and listened while they told the guy all kinds of wild tales.

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The Zuni sound very cool. The no-pointing with the fingers thing is regional. And...I don't want to defend Castaneda, but I think he is worth reading.

job said:

Wait a minute ... wait a minute ... wasn't this on the X-files ... third season .....

You got three recent 'museum lootings' -- the Pahlavi collection in Iran, the 'new governments' in the former Soviets, and the museums that were in Kuwait when the Iraqis walked in. Any of those could have had the object in the collection, thinking it was Sassainian or Turkic.
Now that it's out in the daylight again it gets all active. It ends up at auction in New York (London, Chicago) where the heroine is ...


(jo slaps herself upside the head. Stop it jo. Just stop it.)

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You have to face the fact that variations of this mysterious object are all over the place in a million Mcguffins from the Pink Panther to the grit in the wine bottles in the wine cellar in Notorious

Maybe...no...yes...it was that innocent-looking box of Sassanian Silver nutcake cups in the Warbly Collection in Baltimore MD...

Nice too how insanely over-educated the heroine has to be to just happen to wonder who was collecting Sassanian Silver Nutcake Cups in Baltimore MD in 1908 when the Warbly got the cups as a bequest...hmmm....my god I only know two art historians who would even care and one of them is an reeally an expert on butterfly illustrations and the other is so mentally unbalanced that you have to claim to be writing an essay on her father's collection of erotica just to get her email address.