The Responsible Center: Man and Nature in Pueblo and Navaho Ritual Songs and Prayers

Abstract

IN HIS ESSAY, AMERICAN INDIAN SONGS, KENNETH REXROTH CONTRASTS the Native American view of man's relationship with nature and the Western European view: the Native American, he says, identifies self and other, man and nature, while the European sees man as a permanent factor in a perishing world and the sole source of its value, asserting thus his separateness.' What Rexroth does not acknowledge, however, is that in the Native American view man does have a special role in the universal scheme. To speak specifically of the Navaho and the Pueblo, the focal cultures of this essay, man is seen as a creative factor in the eternal circle of the cosmos and as a source of value. Accepting this status, the Navaho and Pueblo clearly have not yielded their destinies to a beneficent nature. Rather they attempt to control both the natural and the supernatural.2 From their perspective, these two realities interpenetrate in the human consciousness; the road through the natural to and from the supernatural is also the human road, a road beginning at the center, man. As one Zuni prayer formula puts it: You [the Fathers] will pass to us on our roads. Without imposing on them a European humanism, we can see that in Navaho and Pueblo ritual songs and prayers, images of and references to nature show man's centrality in and thus control of the natural and the