Connecting Traditions

By Lynn Cline

Pasatiempo, a weekly arts supplement of The Santa Fe New Mexican, 3/02

"The majority of mountain people are unprincipled ruffians," a New York Times editorial stated in 1912. "There are two remedies only: education or extermination. The mountaineer, like the red Indian, must learn this lesson."

Zuni Pueblo's Corn Mountain, or Dowa Yalanne, and central Appalachia's Pine Mountain stand 1,600 miles apart, and Zuni's history is a far piece from the history of central Appalachia, settled in part by the Scots-Irish and the Cherokees.

Despite the geographic and cultural differences, a trove of traditions link the people who live in the densely forested Cumberland Plateau - which includes areas in southwest Virginia, upper Tennessee, eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia- with those who live in one of the oldest continually occupied settlements in North America, located in eastern Arizona and western New Mexico.

If you question whether a group of Southwest Native Americans rooted to an ancient past can share much in common with the mountain people of Appalachia, then don't miss Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain: Following the Seasons.

The contemporary bilingual play relies on stories, humor, music and dance to honor the cycle of seasons that once nurtured traditional life for the people of Zuni and Appalachia. Performances take place at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday, March 2, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center.

Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain emerges from a collaboration between Idiwanan An Chawe, a Zuni-language theater company, and Roadside Theater, a theater company in Whitesburg, Ky. that celebrates the culture and voices of people living in the Appalachian Mountains.

"Both cultures have very strong oral history traditions," said Dudley Cocke, one of the founders and the director of Roadside Theater, in a recent phone interview. "Ours reach back to the British Isles. The songs, the stories and the histories are all in the oral traditions, and that's critical because both here in Appalachia and there in Zuni, there's been very little access to the written word."

Cecil Sharp, a noted British musicologist who from 1916-1918 studied the songs of Appalachia, found that the story tradition was more intact there than it was in the British Isles where it originated, Cocke said.

The Zuni tribe, one of the most traditional tribes in the United States, relied so heavily on oral language that an alphabet didn't exist until the Zuni people decided to develop one 30 years ago.

Zuni traditions reach back more than 9,000 years to when the Ino:de:kwe, Zuni for "ancestors," originated at the Grand Canyon, then migrated south and east searching for the Middle Place. Those ancestors, known to the rest of the world as the Anasazi, a Navajo word that means "ancient enemy," settled in places today called Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde and Bandelier.

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