Pageant of the Pueblos

IN OUR States, the regions where prehistoric Indians attained the highest cultural peaks were the Southeast, with its mound-building, corn-farming peoples, the Northwest Coast, where salmon fishing provided the main food for the caste-conscious builders of wooden houses, and the Pueblo country of the Southwest, where some peacefully inclined people erected great independent citystates, with highly developed architecture, ceremonialism, arts, and crafts.

Here in the Southwest scientists are slowly pushing the history of the Pueblo people back into a prehistoric past which is revealing a pageant of human advance from the meagerest of beginnings to a great climax of achievement, then disaster by drought and warfare followed by a forced exodus to a new homeland where a brave renaissance was interrupted by the coming of the rapacious white man-a pageant nonetheless thrilling because its drama has been recovered from the earth by spade and trowel.

The Indian life of the Northeast Coast and the Southeast was largely broken up by the onslaught of white man's land greed; but in New Mexico and Arizona a few Pueblo tribes, partly because of isolation and partly by a secretive tenacity, plus hard work, managed to cling to their land and a great deal of their distinctive customs, and thus remain today a superlatively interesting group of people who live and think much differently than we do.

It is with these folks-their times from about 400 A.D. to 1540 A.D.-that Paul Coze's paintings are concerned. Utilizing every bit of knowledge that could be gained from research and the advice of scientists and of the superintend-ents and rangers in charge of many of the ancient ruins, the artist portrayed several aspects of prehistoric Pueblo life on a scale seldom before attempted. To many persons, although they may find it difficult to appreciate the attention to detail and the effort to establish the fitting mood which has gone into the scenes, the paintings should bring a new concept of the ancient Southwestern people, a group varying widely from the feather-bonneted horse warriors of the Plains who have become through western movies and pulp magazines the prevailing, although stereotyped, symbol of the Indian.

And our Southwestern natives are still with us-their towns along the Rio Grande and in the Zuni country of New Mexico and on the Hopi mesas of Arizona make up a part of the large Indian segment of the perplexing racial minority problem of the United States-which we must solve before we shall be able to make much of a success in helping govern the bewilderingly different peoples of the world.

Arizona and parts of her sister southwestern states-New Mexico, southwestern Colorado and southern Utah-are fortunate in possessing most of the myriads of ancient home sites in which the intricate Pueblo prehistory can be traced by study, and the influences and forces which molded and changed the growth of their particular type of life can be worked out.

Not all, or even most, of these valuable historical resources will be preserved for the analysis and use of future generations, for vast numbers of ruins are destroyed every year by road-building and land-clearing operations, through inundation by dammed waters, to say nothing of vandalistic digging by thoughtless or ignorant seekers after pottery