212 ISLETA, NEW MEXICO 



There is some spinning and weaving of the home-grown cotton, for 

 hair and dress belts ^' and dance leglets and kilts. There are four 

 women belt weavers. Men's dance kilts used to be woven by women ; 

 now men weave them. There are two women weavers of woolen 

 blankets. One of the oldest men of the town was once a blanket 

 weaver. You are told that blankets (manta, the woman's dark 

 woolen dress, also the so-called Hopi ceremonial blanket) are not 

 woven because these they did not have when "they came up." 



Bead making is practiced by a few men, for themselves, not for 

 trade. A Hopi silversmith lives in the toMTi. And there is also a 

 native silversmith. 



Thanks to the Laguna colonists and to an American tourist market 

 there have been in recent years changes in pottery making.*- The 

 product is of an inferior quality in design and in modeling to the 

 Laguna-Acoma ware, bric-a-brac novelties predominating. Lucinda 

 invented, so she said, a bird model from a c^uail her son shot, to be 

 used as a banli." Native cook pots°* are of a crude, undecorated 

 type, polished on the inside "so the beans won't stick." These are 

 the pots, not the decorated ware made for the American trade, that 

 are given with food to the clowois O'^'apyo) in the pinitu dance by 

 their "aunts." 



July is the season for house plastering, inside and out, the plastering 

 being done, as usual, by the women. New houses or rooms are built 

 in March. 



We have referred to the passing of wafer-bread maldng. Grinding 

 by metate, except the grinding of meal for ritual use, is also going 

 out — it is "too hard" for the "schoolgirls." There are three mills*^ 

 owned by Isletans in which the grain is ordinarily ground, also the 

 chili. One of the mill owners is the man we referred to as removing 

 the hearth for wafer bread from his newly acquired house. He is 

 also a storekeeper. As elsewhere, the performance of ceremonies has 

 a bearing on trade in connection with the last night of the cere- 

 mony — that is, "the time they make lots of money in the store" or 

 stores, as there are three, two kept by townsmen, one by a white man. 



"The old people say," remarked Lucinda, summarizing changes in 

 the economic Hfe, "that we keep ourselves too hot and eat too much." 



*' At the bottom of women's dress belts there is a design of five lines. On men's belts there is a lightning 

 design. Women are "scared" to put on men's belts, my guess is, because of this design. Seepp. 213, 301. 

 " See p. 351. 



" Such bird banks are made In Mexico. 

 " Kwerete (Mexican cahete). 

 " Milling dates back to 1870. Census, 113. 



