Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain, A Collaboration with Idiwanan An Chawe

About: Zuni--Appalachia Exchange & Play Creation

When Dudley Cocke was hitchhiking around the U.S. in 1969, he met Edward Wemytewa at a pick-up basketball game in Gallup, New Mexico. In 1984, Dudley was Roadside's director, and the company decided to visit Edward on the tail end of a Utah performance tour. 

Edward invited Roadside to tell stories to the students in the Pueblo’s mid-school. The rest is history, as they say, as the ensuing 30-year exchange and collaboration produced:

• Numerous Roadside visits to Zuni and Zuni visits to Appalachia;
• The founding of Idiwanan An Chawe, the first Zuni language theater, and the creation of many Zuni language plays;
• The creation and touring of Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain: Following the Seasons, a Roadside--Idiwanan play;
• The publication of the book, Journeys Home: Revealing a Zuni--Appalachian Collaboration;
• Performances at the national Museum of the American Indian, New York City; the National Museum of American History, Washington, DC; the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Zuni Senior Center, Zuni, New Mexico; the Appalshop Theater, Whitesburg, Kentucky; Arizona State University; and the New Orleans Environmental Justice Festival.

Book: Journeys Home: Revealing a Zuni-Appalachia Collaboration

This 112-page, bilingual book with accompanying compact disc probes the sixteen-year collaboration between artists from two of our nation's most traditional cultures -- Zuni Native American and Appalachian.  Edited by Dudley Cocke, Donna Porterfield, and Edward Wemytewa, and published by Zuni A:shiwi Publishing in 2002, the book is available from University of New Mexico Press.

New Theaters: Zuni's Idiwanan An Chawe

One result of Roadside Theater’s community residencies is the creation of new regional theaters. The most recent is Idiwanan An Chawe, a Native American theater in the Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico, which creates and performs Zuni language plays.

Idiwanan An Chawe grew out of an ongoing 26-year cultural exchange between Roadside and traditional Native American artists of Zuni. Through this exchange, the two groups co-created and toured Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain, a bi-lingual play with music and dance that explores the differences and common ground of Zuni and Appalachian culture.

In 2002, Zuni A:shiwi Publishing released "Journeys Home: Revealing A Zuni-Appalachia Collaboration," a 112-page book that combines the Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain play text with interviews, language essays, drawings, and a music and spoken word CD to probe and document the collaboration between Idiwanan An Chawe and Roadside Theater. "Journeys Home" is distributed by the University of New Mexico Press.

February 2003, the Smithsonian Institution presented Roadside Theater and Idiwanan an Chawe's latest collaboration, Zuni Meets Appalachia, a performance of traditional and original Appalachian and Zuni stories and music, at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, and at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, NM.

Play Programs & Reviews: Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain

Roadside Wanted to Put Our Region's Story in Play

Book Review: Collected Stories (excerpt), American Theatre

Connecting Traditions
By Lynn Cline

Pasatiempo, a weekly arts supplement of The Santa Fe New Mexican, March 2002

"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.

The Zuni people's oral traditions contain a rich past - ancient knowledge, stories, beliefs and histories that must be preserved for the future, said Edward Wemytewa, the founder of Idiwanan An Chawe, which in Zuni means "Children of the Middle Place."

But radio, television and other forces from the modern world threatened to destroy many of those traditions.

"All the storytellers had just about disappeared in the 1960s," Wemytewa said. "As a people, we used to laugh together, we used to cry together. So we created this Zuni-language theater company to make sure that the language and the beliefs are getting passed on to the younger generation."

The partnership between Roadside Theater and the Zuni theater took root more than 30 years ago, when, during a visit to Zuni, Cocke met Wemytewa at a game of pick-up basketball.

"I enjoyed the culture and community and the natural beauty, but I also saw the struggle of the Zuni people," Cocke wrote in Journeys Home: Revealing a Zuni-Appalachia Collaboration, a new book chronicling the creation of the play edited by Cocke, Wemytewa and Donna Porterfield of Roadside Theater, and published by Zuni A:shiwi Publishing.

"It's a lot like Appalachia. We've got a lot of the same troubles and a lot of the same joys, and that's what drew us together. In sharing our troubles and joys, we got connected to one another. You could say we're both privileged because we each have a sense of our history, of heritage, of being part of a special culture. We each have this historical sense of who we are based on our oral traditions."

As the excerpt from the 1912 New York Times editorial makes clear, mainstream America once viewed both cultures disparagingly. Despite those harsh views, and perhaps even because of them, the Zuni and Appalachian cultures persisted, decades later forming their creative partnership.

After that first meeting in 1969, Cocke returned to Zuni with the Roadside Theater troupe, and people from Zuni traveled to Kentucky to experience life in Appalachia. Workshops and residencies took place, and many stories were shared.

Wemytewa soon realized that both traditional ways of life centered on agriculture and that the Appalachian theater's form of storytelling resembled Zuni storytelling.

Excited about the role of language in performance, Wemytewa formed the Zuni theater troupe to collaborate with Roadside on a play that explored two of the country's most traditional cultures.

"Theater is just a medium that helps us to demonstrate the live use of the language," Wemytewa said.

Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain premiered in Whitesburg in 1996 and has played in Zuni as well as in Arizona and New Orleans. Written by Wemytewa and Arden Kucate of Idiwanan An Chawe and Porterfield and Ron Short of Roadside Theater, the play features Appalachian and Zuni musicians and storytellers and a group of Zuni dancers and singers dressed in traditional regalia.

The play cycles through the seasons, beginning with spring, a season of new life, and ending with winter, when Mother Earth and the Corn Maidens all sleep.

"In Zuni we are season-oriented, and so are they in Appalachia," Wemytewa said.

But the play looks at much more than simply the seasons. "It's also about the whole mythological world that encircles our two cultures," Cocke said.

The spring segment of the play includes a Zuni Turkey Dance and a Cinderella-style story, Turkey Girl, about a mother who learns a hard lesson after abandoning her children to attend a social dance.

The Appalachian springtime story, Hairy Woman, addresses the tragedies that can arise from people's judgments about those who are different. "Hairy Woman is one of the oldest stories in the mountains," Cocke said. "It's a huge story about origin. It comes to us in this recent 200- to 300-year-old version from its long, long history in Europe, and perhaps even from Africa before that. It's one of the oldest stories we've ever known."

The play's creators hope their traditions will inspire audiences watching Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain to reflect on their own origins.

"We want audiences to think about their own stories, their own songs, their own dances and their own myths - in other words, their own roots and their own traditions," Cocke said.

Seeing the point where two seemingly different cultures can converge may also reveal how connected we all are through stories and songs.

"Without our stories, how will we know its us?" Cocke said. "And without hearing the stories of others, how will we know who they are?"

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Excerpt from 
Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain: Following the Seasons

Ino:de. Idiwan'an luwal'ap, lessi' dekkwin hame' luwala:w ullapna'kya. Dem widelin Tsitda k'yahkwi ya:n'ap, a:deya'kya. A:lashshinde, a:waminande, ts'ana' deyande, kwa'hol uwak'yanapdun'ona' che'k'wat isha'malde a:wan tsemakwi: deya'kya. Ko'n chimik'yana'kowa, yam Awidelin Tsitda an ukkwaykowa' yam do:shonan lakwimo' adeyyaye. Akkya lesna' ants'ummehna' a:deya' delakwayikya.

In ancient time, there lived a people in the Middle Place. The valley was surrounded by many villages near and far. It was a time when the earth was moist and fertile. The old ones, feeble as they were, and the young ones, too, they all had in their minds and hearts the devotion to raise crops. Their existence depended upon the blessings of the seed family, which was rooted in the culture since the Time of the Beginning, when the people had emerged from the womb of the Mother Earth. Eagerly everyone anticipated the planting season. Spring would come to them.

Idiwanan An Chawe, A Zuni Language Theater
By Edward Wemytewa

“Are the Storytellers There? Are the Stories Going to Be Told?”

Edward Wemytewa is a founder of Idiwanan An Chawe, a new (and the first) Zuni language theater. For the past 15 years, Roadside and traditional Native American artists of the Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico have been engaged in an exchange. A joint creation, Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain: Following the Seasons, will be performed in April at The Untold Stories Festival at Arizona State University. The Zuni people, one of the most traditional tribes in the U.S., trace their beginnings in New Mexico back more than 10,000 years.
    
Here at Zuni, our language and our connection to the land are important. Idiwanan An Chawe tells stories in the Zuni language because we are concerned about the language. We have to maintain it. Who we are, our religion, our history, our culture, are embodied in our language. If the Zuni language is lost, how will we make prayers; how will we be Zuni? We are finding that theater — telling our stories through live performance — is a good way to keep the language alive.

Last year, in the winter months, we created a new play about the Zuni Salt Lake called Ma’l Okyattsik An Denihalowilli:we (Gifts from Salt Woman). The Salt Lake is important to us because it is where the Salt Mother lives. We make pilgrimages there for health reasons, to make prayers, and, of course, to gather salt. But the Salt Mother has not always lived at the Zuni Salt Lake. She used to live at K’yanahnakn’a (Lake That Was Emptied).

When the salt deposits dried up at K’yanahnakn’a, the Salt Mother moved, and the people blamed themselves for not taking better care of the lake. The Frog Clan adopted the lake, draining and cleaning it every year. There was the hope that the Salt Mother would return, so the lake became a shrine.

Then, in 1904, the federal government began building the Black Rock Dam just east of the main village. It was completed in 1908, but for the next 25 years there were all kinds of problems, and the dam silted, destroying forever K’yanahnakn’a, once home of the Salt Woman. The shrine and way of life for the Frog Clan were destroyed.

Now it looks like Salt Woman’s present home, Ma’k’yay’a, is threatened. Ma’k’yay’a is on the Zuni Reservation, however, the state issued a permit to a coal company to mine coal on land just twelve miles to the east.

Water is very scarce around here, so we are worried. The coal company says that they are taking measures to ensure that the lake doesn’t dry up, but we don’t believe them because we have hydrologists who say otherwise. The coal company hydrologists have contradicted themselves many times on their points, and have left out information that doesn’t work for them.

It reminds us of the Black Rock Dam. The government built the Black Rock Dam for us becausethey said we would become more successful. Instead, our farming has stopped because the dam didn’t hold enough water.

When we did research for our play, we found that the government had more in mind than just trying to block a body of water. The project was also about making a reservation — centralizing Indians so they could be made manageable. It was about taking land away. It was about educating us to forget our cultural ways. The realization was very upsetting, but, at the same time, it was rewarding that we had access to this kind of information, and that we could share it with our people.

When we made the play, we also made five radio programs that aired on KSHI, Zuni community radio. When they started to air, people stopped us on the street; people stopped us at the store; people let us know that they heard us on the radio. Our programs were live. Sometimes we would be a few minutes late getting on the air, and people would start calling in and saying, “Are the storytellers there? Are the stories going to be told?”

Photos: Idiwanan An Chawe--Roadside Theater Exchange and Performance

Audio: Journeys Home

A collection of Appalachian and Zuni music, humor, stories, and oral histories drawn from Corn Mountain / Pine Mountain that is distributed as a CD with the book Journey's Home, which can be purchesed through University of New Mexico Press. These recordings were co-produced with Taki Telonidis, former senior producer at National Public Radio, and Hal Cannon, founder of the Western Folklife Center.