Posted on by TracyC

The Mystery of the Lost Village

The Boxcar Children

#37 The Mystery of the Lost Village by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1993.

Grandfather Alden is going on a fishing trip with a friend, and he arranges for his grandchildren to stay with a family on a Navajo reservation. They’ve never been to a reservation before, and there will be hiking and a powwow. The kids are all eager to go!

The family the Aldens are staying with is the Lightfeathers, and they have two children about the same age as the Aldens, Joe and Amy. The Lightfeathers tell the Aldens interesting things about Navajo history, culture, and crafts. What grabs their attention the most is a story about an ancient village nearby that was abandoned due to drought. The stories that have been passed down through the generations tell them roughly where the village was supposed to be, but the remains of the lost village have never been found.

Joe, Amy, and the Aldens ask if they could try digging for the lost village. Mrs. Lightfeather once studied archaeology, and they ask her if she can help them. Mrs. Lightfeather says that, although the village may be gone, traces of it should be left. The children begin laying out an orderly dig and start their search. They find some arrowheads and pottery, but when they show Mrs. Lightfeather what they’ve found, she says that they can’t continue their dig for much longer. The adults have just heard that a developer is taking over the land to build vacation homes. The children are dismayed when they find out that the developer is going to clear all of the trees. Of course, if the children can find signs of the lost village, the site would become an archaeological site, and the developer would have to stop. They only have two weeks to find some evidence of the lost village before the development starts!

There are some suspicious people hanging around. Michael Runningdeer, who works for the real estate developer, has been checking the boundaries of the reservation to check where they can develop. While they’re working on their dig, the kids meet a woman called Rita Neville, who says that she’s working on a documentary. Ted Clark is a genealogist who says that he has come to the reservation to trace his family’s roots, but Amy thinks it’s strange that he doesn’t seem to know things that someone with Navajo roots would usually know.

As the children work on their dig, they start finding more things, but someone also starts filling in places where they’ve been digging. In other places, someone has been digging where they haven’t dug yet. Then, someone steals an impressive bowl that Violet found. Is someone trying to prevent them from making a discovery that would stop the development, or is this a case of greed for Native American artifacts?

My Reaction

I liked this mystery as a kid, but I have a bone to pick with this story now. Perhaps the rules have changed since the book was written, but I know from living in Arizona that it’s routine to call in professional archaeologists to survey sites before digging and development take place. Because this area was inhabited by different groups over the centuries, archaeological finds can be just about anywhere.

I was attending ASU when they build the bio-sciences building, and people were allowed to watch the archaeologists survey the site. They did find an old Native American burial ground on the site. It didn’t stop the development completely, but they did record and catalog all of their finds before reburying them in the same locations where they were found. The logic of that is that Arizona is a very dry climate, and it preserves things buried in the ground very well. Putting a building over the site will prevent the site from being disturbed again for a long time. In the future, there may be better archaeological tools and scientific techniques that can be used to reevaluate the site and the things in it, and by then, the building may no longer be there.

What I’m saying is that there are rules and practices regarding archaeology and development in this region. Because this book was written about 30 years ago, when I was a kid, I’m not sure how different the rules were then, but I’m sure that archaeological surveys of this type were conducted back then, too. One of my old college teachers was an archaeologist, and he told us about digs he participated in around one of the reservations years before. I’d be surprised that development so close to a reservation, as in this story, would be allowed to go ahead without an archaeological survey from one of the universities or other archaeological organizations in the state. I just think that there should have been professionals working in the area before the kids started their dig.

I liked the pieces of information that the Lightfeathers explain to the Aldens about Navajo history and culture. My favorite piece of trivia was the explanation about how, rather than putting clay cooking pots directly over the fire, historical Navajos would heat a stone in a fire and then put the stone into a pot of water to heat the water for cooking. I think it’s a creative solution to cooking in a vessel that can’t be used directly over fire.

Jessie is allowed to participate in a dance at the powwow as a guest of a Navajo family, and Amy helps her put together regalia for the dance. (See Jingle Dancer for an example of this in a different tribe.) I sometimes find it a little cringey now when characters in stories too easily participate in Native American events and are quickly called honorary members of the tribe, but in this case, the Aldens do help make an important discovery.

Posted on by TracyC

The Day of the Ogre Kachinas

The Day of the Ogre Kachinas by Peggy D. Spence, 1994.

My Dog, Betty

First, I would like to apologize for the cover picture above. This book was in better condition when I first got it. Then, I accidentally left it where my dog could play with it. Oops. She greatly enjoyed this book, which was printed on high-quality and apparently tasty paper, and thought it was a lot of fun, although she found it very difficult to get through. In fact, she did not get past the cover. (Thank goodness.) I enjoyed it much more.

The story is set in a Hopi town in Arizona (my home state!) and features Hopi traditions about kachinas. The introduction to the book explains a little about kachinas, which are spirits that represent concepts in the natural world. In Hopi ceremonies, men dress up as these spirits and dance or act out certain rituals. The ritual in this book is that of the Ogre Kachinas, which is meant to influence children’s behavior, teaching them what their community views as right and wrong and letting them know when they have overstepped the boundaries of their community. (I don’t know if eating the cover of a book counts as overstepping, but I promise that no doggies were harmed or even frightened as part of this book or the reading of it.)

Judson Honyouti, a young Hopi boy, is not a bad kid, but sometimes, like many other kids, he does things that he shouldn’t do. Sometimes, he forgets things or loses his temper and fights with people. His parents and the other adults in his village try to teach him the right things to do, but sometimes, he needs a little extra help to remember.

Judson is nine years old, and he knows that when he sees kachinas in a ceremony, it is only some of the men in his village, wearing costumes. He hopes that when he is old enough, he may become one of the kachina dancers himself, but for that to happen, he must follow his people’s ways and be a good member of his community. To be a good member of his family, Judson helps his father to take care of their cornfield and helps to look after his little sisters, but he still sometimes gets into trouble.

One day, Judson falls asleep while tending his family’s sheep, and most of them wander off. His father has to help him find the sheep again. Then, when his mother asks him to take some stew to his grandfather, Judson drops the bowl because he is playing and not paying attention. To make up for losing the stew, Judson gives his portion to his grandfather. Then, when Judson is supposed to be helping his mother to make piki (or paper bread) so that she can use it to trade in the market, Judson gives into temptation and eats too much. He has to help her make more.

In the market in the plaza, the Ogre Kachinas (really, men dressed up in costume), frighten the children and warn them that they must obey their parents. The Ogre Kachinas like to eat naughty children (but not really), and they say that they will return again soon to see if the children have been good. If they have been bad, the Ogre Kachinas might carry them away!

Even though Judson knows that the Ogre Kachinas are just human beings, their warnings worry him because he knows that he has been doing things wrong and has been getting into trouble. In spite of Judson’s attempts to do better, he still keeps getting into trouble. He fights with his sisters and even hits two other boys when he gets into fights at school. His father warns him that the ogres might come for him if he doesn’t behave, and sure enough, the Ogre Kachinas come one night.

The Ogre Kachinas dance around Judson and his parents and confront Judson with their knowledge of all of the things that Judson has been doing lately. They threaten to take Judson away and eat him because they like to eat bad boys! Even though Judson knows that the kachinas are just ordinary humans in disguise, it’s an alarming performance! However, as part of this tradition, Judson’s parents speak up for him and tell the Ogre Kachinas to leave Judson alone.

It’s true that Judson has done things that he shouldn’t have done, but in many cases, he also did something to try to make up for what he had done wrong, like when he gave his portion of the stew to his grandfather to make up for the portion that he had ruined. He gets into trouble, but he is also polite and helpful in many ways. His parents say that he is actually a good boy and would make the ogres sick if they tried to eat him. Judson is relieved to hear that his parents love him and value the good things he does, even when he isn’t perfect. The Ogre Kachinas not only remind children of what they are not supposed to do but provide an opportunity for the parents to explain that they value their children and what the children do right. As Judson’s parents give the kachinas gifts of food and send them away, Judson realizes that their parents must have done the same for them when they were children and that the same thing has also happened for all Hopi children for generations.

I like books that include a little history and interesting information about cultural practices, but I also like this book for its understanding of human nature. First, I grew up in Arizona (in the American Southwest, for those who live outside of the United States), where this story is set. Although I am not Native American and didn’t grow up on an Indian Reservation, like Judson, I knew about Kachinas and was fascinated by them when I was growing up. I read books about Kachinas, and I loved the display of Barry Goldwater’s Kachina doll collection at the Heard Museum when I was a kid. I used to remember more of the individual names of different kinds of Kachinas and could point out the different ones in the Goldwater collection, but I’ve forgotten some of them as an adult. These things slip away if you don’t reinforce them. The book describes how Kachinas function in Hopi culture. There are different kinds that perform different ceremonial functions, but the main ones in the story are the Ogre Kachinas, which are meant to help frighten children into good behavior.

The need for both positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement is a real part of the human condition. Negative reinforcement has a bad reputation in modern times for making people feel scared or ashamed, and I think that it isn’t enough to have just negative reinforcement (punishment or criticism for things that a person has done wrong) or just positive reinforcement (praise for doing things right) by itself; I think they function best as a pair, the way they do in this story. It isn’t enough to just tell people what not to do (negative reinforcement) because it often leaves them wondering what they should have done instead, and it’s not enough to just give them praise with no criticism because it leaves them with the feeling that they do nothing wrong, and they’re often surprised later when they find out that things they’ve been doing have been seriously getting on everyone’s nerves all along. I think an over-reliance on positive reinforcement alone is part of the modern phenomenon where people don’t realize that they’ve been acting like bullies or saying really inappropriate things for years because, somehow, no one clued them in earlier in life. I’m pretty sure that I know why that is: it’s difficult to be the bearer of bad news or criticism that someone has gone too far with their behavior, to play the role of the disciplinarian, the “rules police” who has to stop the game to tell someone they’re not playing right. In an odd sort of way, the Ogre Kachina costumes probably make it easier for the elders of the community to dish out the criticism and discipline because they’re not quite doing it as themselves; they’re doing it in disguise as the horrible “ogres.”

To help people understand how they’re really supposed to behave in society, they need to know both what they’re not supposed to do and what people really want them to do instead. Judson gets both kinds of feedback in the story during the Ogre Kachina ceremony. First, he is confronted by what he has done wrong, and then he gets to hear his parents explain what he has done right in order to emphasize both what they love about him while helping him to realize what he needs to fix in order to be a better person in their society. Having a child confronted by scary ogres that threaten to eat him for doing things wrong sounds pretty scary, but the book does note that Judson is old enough to know that the Kachinas are just people in costume. Even though he’s kind of scared at being confronted by them, and for a moment, he does feel like they’re really threatening to eat him, he is aware that they are not what they appear to be and realizes that it’s all part of the ceremony. It also means that he is old enough to accept the rebukes as the consequences of their behavior, and he finds his parents’ praise of his good deeds as a motivator to do even better next time, not as an excuse for the things he did wrong.

By the way, Betty the dog was not punished for eating the book cover. I just took the book away from her and gave her a toy she could chew on instead. She is a good doggy, and I should not have left the book where she could get it. Bad Tracy!

The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.