White] THE PUEBLO OF SIA, NEW MEXICO 3 
the herding of horses, cattle, and sheep; foods and cooking; ethics and 
etiquette; games and recreation; and many other things are omitted 
or merely alluded to. One of the most curious omissions is her failure 
to tell us how many kivas Sia had in the 1880’s. Zufii has 6 kivas; 
Acoma, 5 or 6; the Rio Grande Keres and the Tewa, 2; and Sia has, 
as we now know, alternated between 1 and 2 kivas. But how many 
there were in 1890 when Mrs. Stevenson was there for a final checkup 
before publication, she does not say. 
Mrs. Stevenson uses native terms to some extent, but there are 
many important instances in which she does not. She does not, for 
example, give us the Keresan names for ‘‘war priests” and ‘‘war chiefs” 
(1894, p. 18), which would have helped us to determine which of the two 
has become extinct since her day. She lists a governor and a lieu- 
tenant governor without giving their native names; and we are at a 
loss to identify her ‘‘magistrate and his deputy”’ (ibid.)—unless they 
be the fiscales. She uses “‘theurgist’”’ throughout, but never uses the 
native term tcaiyanyi (medicineman). She employs the important 
term honawai’aiti (which she spells honaaite), but did not grasp its 
proper meaning. And no informant has been able to identify her 
“Sussistinnako, a spider” (ibid., p. 26) from this spelling and pronun- 
ciation; the closest we could come to it was Tstvyostinako, Thought 
Woman (see White, 1942 a, p. 82). 
When Mrs. Stevenson describes ceremonies that she had witnessed 
she is almost always lucid, and sometimes vivid and graphic. But in 
some instances she is quite incomprehensible. Fewkes, for example, as 
well as the present writer, found her account of the initiation ceremony 
of the Snake society, which she obtained from an informant (1894, pp. 
86-89), so obscure as to make it impossible to know precisely what 
was taking place (Fewkes, 1895, p. 121). 
I do not mention these omissions and shortcomings of Mrs. Steven- 
son’s work in any sense of disparagement. ‘“The Sia” is an excellent 
piece of work in many respects, and it is one of the first studies of a 
Southwestern pueblo ever made. The total amount of time spent at 
Sia, by both James and Matilda Stevenson, was not great, and no 
doubt many things were not observed, and they had little precedent 
to guide their interrogation of informants. Her description of the 
esoteric ceremonies which she witnessed are vivid and detailed; they 
have not been duplicated in studies of the Keres and they probably 
never will be repeated. All things considered, ‘‘The Sia’ was a very 
creditable achievement. 
It is not easy to define Mrs. Stevenson’s attitude toward the Pueblo 
Indians. She unquestionably regarded their culture as inferior to 
that of the United States and Europe, as, of course, it was. But 
whether she ‘looked down’ upon the Indians or not is a question. 
