| Excerpt from Native Peoples
Indigenous cultures have been a focus of Richard's writing for decades. In the 1980s and '90s he was a Santa Fe-based correspondent for National Native News and in 1998-99 served as Associate Editor of Native Artist magazine. He contines to write and edit, on a free-lance basis, for Phoenix-based Native Peoples.
Below is an excerpt from an article summarizing the special role jaguars have played in Native societies and cosmologies:
- "Jaguar: Great Cat of the Americas," published in Native Peoples, September-October 2007:
Aztec warriors donned the creature's skin as a protective cloak during battle. The Maya depended on them to guard Xibalba, the sacred underworld. Arizona's Hopi tracked them in ceremonial hunts as late as 1908. Indigenous groups from California's deserts to Argentina's pampas honored them in art, adornment, and ritual. Today the very name bestows status on sports teams and a luxury automobile.
The jaguar — variously referred to as el tigre, onça, and black panther — may be the most widely respected creature endemic to the Americas, yet scientists have only a basic understanding of the charismatic cat, our hemisphere's biggest. Like its closest relatives, the leopards of Asia and Africa, the jaguar is vanishing before it is fully known. What's clear, however, is the feline's mesmerizing effect on humans.
From the Agua Caliente of the Mojave to the Guaraní along the Río de la Plata, Indigenous cultures have been awestruck by this unrivaled hunter. The jaguar embodied god-like powers for the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Inca, and other ancient civilizations, while in the Amazon basin shamans still believe they can transform themselves into jaguar flesh. Tribal people in the southwestern U.S. and Latin America continue to perform jaguar dances and the cat's striking image is frequently incorporated in Native art.
Despite such reverence, this animal is unnecessarily feared and widely misunderstood. Many assume, for instance, that all jaguars are black. (Only about six percent are; typical coloration is tawny gold, dappled with black dots and rosettes.) A jaguar is not a panther. (The term refers to its cousin, otherwise known as mountain lion, cougar, or puma.) Unlike panthers, jaguars almost never kill people. (Only a handful of unprovoked attacks on humans are documented.) Surprising to many, the jaguar is a U.S. native whose history entwines with many North American tribes.
As recently as the 1800s, jaguars roamed the Southwest from California to Louisiana, far from the jungles where they have always been more common. In Arizona and New Mexico, images of the cat occur in murals and rock art left by the Pueblo and Mogollon cultures. Along New Mexico's Río Puerco, the Pottery Mound site contains a spectacular painting of a jaguar while a similar animal is rendered in a smoke-blackened cave near Los Alamos.
Kiva paintings found in Arizona’s Hopi villages depict cat-like creatures believed to be jaguars. Anthropologist Leslie White theorizes that a supposedly mythical beast in Pueblo religion, the rohona, is really a jaguar. At Santa Ana Pueblo, north of Albuquerque, White was told that a rohana image found there was a "big cat with spots" representing one of the "spirit hunters" who, in turn, bestowed power on Santa Ana's human hunters. A similar tradition exists at nearby Zia Pueblo.
Further north, colonial records confirm the Diné (Navajo) spoke to Spanish missionaries variously of a "meadow wildcat," "tiger," and "spotted lion," all believed to refer to the jaguar. The same feline may be among the "Cat People" referred to in Diné creation stories and the "Spotted Lion" of sand paintings. At least three ceremonies practiced by Diné healers refer to spotted cats and their skins.
During the 1860s, hundreds of Diné and Apache were incarcerated by the U.S. military at Bosque Redondo, where officer John Cremony wrote that on his hunts sightings of "jaguars were by no means uncommon." In a separate report, an Apache who attacked a man with ferocity claimed: "I made jaguar medicine on him and grabbed him like a jaguar and killed him. I was like a jaguar."
The Apache, Hopi, and Akimel O'Odham are among Southwest people known to have prized jaguar skin for making quivers, presumably to convey some of the cat’s skills to the arrows they carried. Jaguar bones, teeth, talons, and pelts were valued far and wide as ceremonial and trade goods.
Near El Paso, Texas, rock art depicting Panthera onca — as scientists call the jaguar — is found in two natural shelters known as Jaguar Cave and the Cave of the Masks. These drawings are attributed to the Mogollon culture and suggest Mesoamerican influence. The Cave of the Masks animal wears a "shaman’s cap" that may reflect the cat’s pivotal role among peoples to the south.
Several Indigenous groups continue to hold jaguars sacred in Mexico, where the cat persists in isolated mountains, forests, and wetlands. The Raramuri (Tarahumara) and Huasteca, tribes of the northern Sierra Madre, regularly honor the cat in their ceremonies and shamanic traditions. The highly spiritual Huichol of Nayarit and Jalisco still make elaborate bead-yarn-and-beeswax jaguar masks and figures as totems associated with rain and masculine power.
In central Mexico, folk traditions mingle with both modern Catholicism and rites performed by the Aztec centuries ago. In Suchiapa, for example, the annual Corpus Cristi festival includes dozens of teenage boys wearing jaguar masks. Their job is to lead a procession and secure intersections so the parade will move smoothly. The shouts of these "wannabe" jaguars — demonstrating power in the same way their warrior ancestors did some 500 years ago — are heard blocks away.
But it is in the tropical forests of South America where jaguars play starring roles in the lives of tribal people, particularly through shamans and medicine men. Although their repertoire varies, such individuals generally believe they possess supernatural powers to heal or cause sickness, summon and communicate with spirits, shift perceptions of reality, and transform themselves into such praiseworthy animals as jaguars. When a shaman consumes a psychotropic drug, paints his face with spots or rosettes, and adorns himself with the teeth, claws, and skin of a jaguar, that shaman believes he shares in the cat's ability to rule the rainforest, expand his senses, and explore all dimensions of consciousness. Some shamans store their most sacred compounds in hollowed jaguar bones or within medicine bags crafted of jaguar leather.
The more remote lowland tropical basins are where jaguar is most closely associated with tribal ceremonies and origin stories. Members of the Tukano tribe, for instance, believe the sun created the spotted cat to be his representative on Earth. The sun gave jaguar the yellow color of solar power and the growl of thunder, said to be the voice of the sun.
Members of the Matsés tribe of the Río Gálvez rainforest surprised their European "discoverers" in 1976 with adornments they wore in order to resemble and pay homage to the jaguar. These include thin bones piercing the flares of their noses and meant to resemble cat whiskers, shell earrings said to look like jaguar ears, sticks puncturing lips to evoke long canine teeth, and tattoos or dyes that recall the cat's rosettes and mouth. Sometimes called "the cat people," members of this tribe are masters of 12-foot-long blowguns; the poison for their darts occasionally mixed with jaguar hairs for extra potency.
Perhaps the greatest fascination with the jaguar was among the Classic Maya of Mesoamerica. Priest-kings wrapped themselves in the cat's skin as they sat on elevated pedestals, feet tucked into jaguar-leather moccasins. Stone thrones were sometimes shaped like jaguars, then covered with jaguar pelts as an homage to both gods and rulers.
Over centuries, the Classic Maya wove jaguars into a worshipful tapestry of art, religion, and legend. The animal is thought to have embodied several important deities, including those overseeing the sun, night, rain, and Xibalba — the surreal underworld where only the most holy and powerful men (and an occasional woman) could enjoy infinite afterlife. This same god ruled the night's "sun-less sky." The marks on a jaguar’s fur symbolized the splash of stars across the heavens and simultaneously allowed the cat to blend into the shadows of trees. The feline's wide, perceptive eyes were said to gleam like the moon.
A traditional Maya belief is that the Jaguar God (as a ruler of darkness) is transformed into the fire-eyed Sun God (a ruler of light) precisely at dawn each morning, traveling across the sky before again becoming the Jaguar God at dusk. In this metaphoric way, both the supernatural jaguar and the regal priest-king was said to defy the permanent death that afflicts less-exalted beings. The notion was that some kind of living god was essential in order to take the sun safely through the forbidding night and draw it consistently beneath the earth from west to east. What better emissary than the jaguar? Without this creature, the sun might never return.
The Maya — like the Olmec and Inca before them and the Aztec and Toltec who followed —revered jaguars even as they hunted and sacrificed them. Indeed, few beings have engaged the human heart and soul as consistently and as deeply as have these animals. The jaguar has long dominated the religions and cultures, myths and legends, of nearly our entire hemisphere. It has symbolized gods and nature, virility and power, royalty and magic, healing and destruction. Given this enduring bond, a world without Panthera onca is indeed difficult to imagine.
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