The Southwest -- Ancient And New Cultures Clash In Chaco Canyon

CHACO CANYON, N.M. - A millennium ago, the people we call Anasazi flourished improbably in this desolate basin. Then, just as improbably, they abandoned it. They left no written history, only the remnants of massive stone settlements that command awe but confound interpretation.

By their very mystery, those structures at New Mexico's Chaco Canyon have fascinated generations of archaeologists and sightseers. Of all the ruins, Chaco's circular underground chamber known as the great kiva elicits one of the keenest responses.

Too keen, say Native Americans who claim kinship with the Anasazi.

Many visitors, especially adherents of so-called New Age beliefs, have not been content merely to look at the kiva. They have been moved to perform private rituals in it, or leave homemade offerings. Some have deposited cremation ashes, deeply offending Navajos and Pueblo people for whom the kiva is tantamount to a church.

So, at the tribes' urging, the National Park Service last summer closed the two entrances to the kiva, the largest in the park and officially known as Casa Rinconada. Visitors to Chaco Culture National Historical Park can peer into the roofless chamber, but they can no longer go inside.

Park authorities now are trying to decide whether to permanently bar the public from the site.

A National Park Service study suggests several options for the future of the kiva. Keeping it closed - as the park superintendent has recommended; allowing access only to visitors accompanied by a park ranger; or again allowing full public access.

Kim McLean, the park's chief of interpretation, said the tribes' objections to the public's being allowed inside the kiva were not a factor in the decision to close it. More than 80,000 people a year now visit Chaco Canyon, a sharp increase over just a few years ago, said she said.

"The original fabric (of Casa Rinconada) just cannot stand that much traffic."

Who owns it?

"A kiva, to Pueblo people, is the most religious structure in the pueblo, to be treated with the utmost respect," said Peter Pino, tribal administrator of New Mexico's Zia Pueblo.

"Those are our ancestral homelands," said Petuuche Gilbert, realty officer for the Pueblo of Acoma. "Putting in crystals and ashes is disrespectful, sacrilegious."

It gets down to this: Who owns Chaco Canyon? Not just who owns it legally, but who has cultural and spiritual ownership?

In many places and many ways, Native Americans are asserting sovereignty over their own past: demanding the return of their ancestors' bones or turning away archaeologists armed with digging tools. But this time, the stuff of the debate is not bones or pots but the quality of sacredness itself.

"It's a very, very sensitive subject," said park superintendent Butch Wilson.

For their part, New Age believers also are passionate in their affinity for the canyon.

During the Harmonic Convergence of August 1987, more than 1,000 seekers braved rutted dirt roads - the only way to reach the park - to mark what one hailed as the world's "emergence into the great space of release and surrender." The park service reluctantly, on the advice of its lawyers, allowed them to use Casa Rinconada.

"During the convergence, there was a consensus that this was one of the three most powerful spots on the planet," New Mexico artist Pomona Hallenbeck said recently.

At dawn on the spring equinox of 1994, British scholar Christine Finn watched a tourist couple burn sagebrush, chant and bow to the four directions inside Casa Rinconada. When she queried them, she said, "they thought what they were doing was perfectly valid."

Ranger G.B. Cornucopia said New Age celebrants often are shocked to learn that their devotions offend Native Americans.

"The people who are visiting and leaving things imagine they are replicating ancient practices," said Finn, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford.

To Native Americans, such fantasies are hollow - even hurtful.

"The language is ours," Pino said. "The songs and traditions and dances are ours. When people appropriate them, it's exploitation of intellectual and cultural property."

An ancient center

From roughly 900 to 1150, Chaco Canyon was the nerve-center of a larger Anasazi world that encompassed northwestern New Mexico and spilled into Colorado, Utah and Arizona. Hundreds of miles of roads linked the canyon to the largest of more than 75 outlying settlements.

The canyon is long and narrow, bracketed by ocher-colored sandstone cliffs a half-mile apart. Most of the major ruins, called "great houses," jostle up against the northern cliff. Across the canyon from the largest and best-known, Pueblo Bonito, stands Casa Rinconada, which commands a rise near the southern escarpment.

There are nine great houses in the canyon, each with hundreds of rooms massed around a central plaza dotted with kivas. Casa Rinconada is remarkable both because it is the largest kiva in the canyon and because it stands apart from the great houses.

Part of the rub is that no one, not even the Anasazis' descendants among the score of Pueblo tribes clustered along the Rio Grande, knows what the Anasazi believed. It is not clear whether the Pueblo religion, which centers on ancestor spirits called "kachinas," existed during Chaco's heyday.

Even attaching the word "kiva" to Casa Rinconada is educated guesswork. Kiva is a Hopi word for the ceremonial chambers in contemporary pueblos. The Chaco structures resemble - on a much larger scale - some modern kivas, so archaeologists surmise that they had a ceremonial purpose.

Casa Rinconada, which is 63 feet in diameter and 12 feet deep, shares a basic design with other Anasazi kivas. A raised stone bench circles the floor, and niches line the walls. On the floor are a stone fire pit and four stone-lined housings for timbers that supported the wood roof.

Lost in time

Anasazi ruins often incorporate structures with astronomical functions. At the north end of Casa Rinconada are two rooms whose use is unclear. If you stand on the west so their doorways line up, a butte in the distance bisects the opening. On the fall and spring equinoxes, the sun rises along the edge of that butte.

"At Casa Rinconada you can say that you can get a bunch of people in it, and everybody can see what's going on," said Stephen Lekson, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "It's sacred theater. Whatever went on there would have been highly esoteric and deeply religious."

Similarly, the great houses appear to have been built primarily as public spaces rather than dwellings.

"They weren't just putting a roof over their heads," Lekson said. "They were investing labor in buildings for social and political reasons. They were sending an architectural message."

That message, like the most basic facts of Chacoan society - how many people lived in the canyon, why they settled there, why they vanished from it between 1130 and 1300 - is lost to time. Riddled with ambiguity, the canyon is like a giant Rorschach test, an invitation to the imagination.

People were accepting that invitation long before the Harmonic Convergence, even before as U.S. Army expedition stumbled on the ruins in 1849. Navajo story tellers have recounted tales of the Anasazi for centuries, even though Navajos are not closely linked by blood to the Anasazi as many Pueblo people are.

"That's the wonderful thing about Chaco Canyon," Finn said. "All sorts of people use it. They go down there for all sorts of reasons."

Culture clash

It's when cultural or spiritual urges become, as it were, flesh, that tensions arise - especially when the acts display what might be construed as arrogance.

"I haven't seen a whole lot of people leaving crystals on the altars of Roman Catholic churches," observed Philip LoPiccolo, curator of the park service's Chaco Museum collection.

Let alone Aunt Sophie's ashes.

"For Native Americans, to put ashes in a kiva is incomprehensible," said park archaeologist Dabney Ford. "It's a dirty, disgusting thing to do."

Pino of Zia Pueblo acknowledged that most offenders probably transgress in innocence. "As a visitor, you may blunder out of ignorance," he said. "But you should have the respect not to do it again."

Instead, he said, "Some say, `Who are you? We're mightier than you'."

Today, however, might - in the form of federal law - rests with the Native Americans. Pueblo and Navajo representatives serve on a committee that has considerable sway over what happens at Chaco.

If traditionalists had their way, the entire canyon might be closed to sightseers. In Navajo culture, sacred sites "are visited only for special purposes - not just to gawk," said Rena Martin, who works for the tribe's Historic Preservation Office.

No one expects the park service to go that far. "That point has passed," Pino said. "We understand that."

Besides, Martin said, the infatuation with the Anasazis, and with Native American culture generally, is welcome - to a degree.

"In a way, it's kind of good," she said. "People are curious, they find our culture exciting and fascinating.

"But you feel like people are taking from you, just as they have in the past."

So, when does interest become intrusion? When does emulation become appropriation? At Chaco Canyon and elsewhere, the park service must grapple with matters that, until recent years, few gave thought to.

Sacred sites: How to protect places with religious and cultural significance is being confronted throughout the West. K 6