The Zuni Indians: Their Mythology, Esoteric Fraternities, and Ceremonies

Matilda Coxe Stevenson's The Zuni Indians is an early ethnographic account of Zuni religion, mythology and ceremonial life, based on Stevenson's extended residence among the Zuni and published through the Bureau of American Ethnology at the turn of the twentieth century. Its value as a source is genuine firsthand documentary detail from a period and access level later researchers could not replicate, including description of esoteric fraternities rarely recorded by outsiders. Its limit is equally real: Stevenson wrote within early twentieth century anthropological conventions that treated Native religious practice as an object of salvage documentation rather than working collaboratively with Zuni interpretive authority, and contemporary Zuni scholars and tribal authorities are the appropriate check on how her descriptions and disclosures of restricted ceremonial material should be used today.