Bridge to Other Worlds:
Interview with Rina Swentzel,
architect and Tewa scholar
By Linda Mason Hunter

© 2006, Linda Mason Hunter. May not be reprinted in any form without written permission of the author.

"The purpose of life is life."
--Rina Swentzell

Rina Swentzell, PhD, a distinguished Tewa scholar and artist, lives in an adobe solar house she designed and built with her family 25 years ago outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Born in 1939 she grew up primarily with her great grandmother in nearby Santa Clara Pueblo, coiling pots, building houses, and nourished by tales of her ancestors, indigenous Anasazi people who traveled throughout the Four Corners region and the mesas of northern New Mexico before settling a series of villages dotting the banks of the Rio Grande River Valley.

Old traditions from those times are faint memories today. Rina’s generation is the last with personal memories of "those gone before"-- their way of knowing, thinking, and being on this land.

On December 15, 2000, Rina invited me into her home for an afternoon’s conversation. Her house smelled of baking. Over tea at her kitchen table we thoughtfully discussed Pueblo cosmology, life as art, and sacred dwellings. The sun warmed my back through a large window and, as we got deeper into conversation, I watched the sun edge its way over distant mountains toward winter solstice. Rina chose her words carefully, adhering to the Tewa code of honoring the silence, for the more one says the less one sees.

Q: Let’s begin with a brief explanation of Tewa cosmology, how ancient Pueblo people view the earth contrasted with how Westerners view it.

A: According to Pueblo cosmology people are not separate from land and nature. Quite the contrary. We are one with the natural universe in an insoluable connection that has existed from the beginning of time. My ancestors lived intimately with the life forces of the earth. They had a keen awareness of clouds, rain, mountains. That awareness made them sensitive to the spirit within clay, wood, and rocks--materials they modeled into ceremonial and functional items for everyday use.

In contrast, modern European/Christian cultures live separate from nature, believing human life is superior over all of creation. According to Western philosophy, nature is to be subdued, not listened to. It stands to reason that these two cultures, with their differing views on nature, attribute different meanings to life.
In old Tewa, the earth is sacred. How you walk on it matters. Every act should be a benediction, every step a prayer.

Nowhere in Pueblo myths do humans experience a fall from God's grace. The people and their world are sacred and indivisible. It is a world thoroughly impregnated with the energy, purpose, and sense of creative natural forces.

Q. Tell me a little about yourself, your background, what got you where you are today.

A. I was born in Santa Clara Pueblo in 1939, the third of eight children. English is my second language because the Pueblos at the time were much more intact than they are now, socially and economically. Growing up there is like a memory from another world. I went to the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) Day Schools there. I loved going to school.

I didn't grow up altogether in my mother's house. I really grew up in my great- grandmother's house but was in and out of my mother's house, as well. My primary connection was always with my great grandmother.

I left Santa Clara Pueblo after high school and went to college in Texas. Then I went to Las Vegas, New Mexico, where I met my husband, before coming back home to do some teaching for a while in elementary and secondary schools. I had my children during that time--four of them, one boy and three girls.

As they were growing up I started making pottery. I grew up with people making pottery and building houses from mud. As a child I did all that. These are all my pieces (gestures to lovely mellow pots on shelves and countertops in her kitchen). They are all made of clay, but I wanted to be able to put them in the oven and eat off them. Pueblo pottery at the time had moved into decorative art and I wanted the functional back again. So I took the same clays and fired them at higher temperatures to make them usable in the kitchen. They look different, of course, but it was what I wanted to do. I threw them on the wheel (traditional Pueblo pottery is hand coiled). I did that for many years before I went to architecture school.

I got a Masters in architecture at the University of New Mexico. My children were in school at the time so I drove to Albuquerque (65 miles away) everyday for four years. I still don't know how I did it. It was an incredible feat. I was incensed with the low income houses being put up by the government in the Pueblos.

They were literally tearing the fabric of the community. I was really distraught that people weren't building their own houses any more. Houses were being built for them, and they were paying ten dollars a month for frame houses built by subcontractors ("sub" in many ways). The locus of the main plaza was being destroyed by these individual houses. That sense of communality was being destroyed.

I felt that old world was being destroyed and being destroyed at a pace that I knew would destroy the whole community. And it has. No one has the same sense of community any more. And a lot of it was the individual houses, and the synthetic materials being used, and the sense of not building your own house any more. That's what drove me to study architecture. I couldn't understand.

Growing up in that old community, whenever anyone needed a house you went out there and started mixing mud. We built adobes. We did it. That was just the way it was. It was a great way to sustain community because as we were working on the house people would come by and help. When you do it, the energy's there.

These new houses being built today are not places that have soul and breath, that you can relate to and interact with. More than anything growing up in that way of thinking I couldn't understand why, why the American world would build houses the way they built them. That's why I went to architecture school, to find why do they do this, what they were thinking.

I found out it's a very strange narrow world. My goal was not to have an architecture business, my goal was to try to understand what the world was about.

Q. Do you understand now?

A. To a certain extent I understand. It was really enlightening.

Western architectural design, philosophy, history, all that was absolutely fascinating to me. Americans look at housing and shelter in a very different way than Pueblo people do. We look at it as energy. In American architecture there is very little emphasis on the spirit of place. Houses are not thought to be alive or have spirit.

It's a very masculine approach to building. Houses are seen as massive constructions instead of as places for people to live in and love.

When someone needed a house in the Pueblo we would help build a place for them. It was an act of reciprocation. The act of building--materials, design, the whole thing, including community--is related. It's all tied up with who we think we are.

We grew up believing that we are a part of the breath of the world. That’s the primary belief. That when I take a breath it's the same breath as is in that cloud out there. We're really cosmically connected.

Everything is breathing, therefore related. It's not a notion of separation. I am in one sense very much a part of this house because I am breathing it in. Po-wa-ha--wind, water, breath—connects all life.

The house, too, has breath. Its breath is affected by what is in the house and the people who come into it. When someone walks into a place their smell, their energy gets left there, and that affects the materials. So when anyone enters a house they really are affecting the energy of the house. It becomes a real interactive event.

Wherever you walk you affect the energy of the place. We love to visit old Pueblo ruins because we believe that spirit is strong there. We can walk in history with that energy. The ground itself remembers who walked there. We take deep breaths to breathe in energy. I can breathe in the breath of "those gone before us" in such places. Pueblo tradition tells us that we leave our sweat and breath wherever we go. The place never forgets us. Even more, the structures we build also have breath. They are alive and participate in their own cycles of life and death and of those who have lived within them.

We believe the purpose of life is to be intimately united with nature. Everything is included in that connectedness. Houses, for instance, are “fed” cornmeal after construction, so that they may have a good life. Clay (dirt) is talked to because it is of the earth and shares in the flow of life.

To me this world view makes all the sense in the world. If you believe everything is cosmically connected you actually move through the world in a different way. If you believe a place is alive you step on it in different ways. You move around it in a different way. You move around everything in a different way.

Your coming into my house is a momentous occasion for me. Respect is expected. That's the basic premise. You cannot move without affecting the cosmos where you are.

Q. So you believe houses have energy, much as people do?

A. Yes. Pueblo people believe houses are alive.

Different houses have different energies, or personalities. That was really how we lived. And all of that was destroyed by government housing--that whole idea that when you build a house you did it in a conscious, aware way. Those old houses were blessed before any of the walls went up. And through the whole process the people had communication with the walls.
When the old houses were built the roofs were seen as

the sky and the walls, made out of mud, were seen as the earth. Our whole cosmology was replicated in the house. It became a miniature cosmos, a sacred place. You are reminded of it everyday that you live there in that world.

I think there are all sorts of energies that dwell in the walls and the floors of houses. And sometimes there are not good houses. You know when you go into a house that is not very good. We have ceremonies to rebalance the energy in houses like that.

In the Pueblos, throughout its lifetime a house was continually blessed and healed. Women were generally in charge of this domestic duty. Houses get sick, like people, and need to be healed. When people die they get buried in the floor. So you live with all this energy that is constantly recreating the place. And the house went through different cycles with all of the things that were happening. That constantly had to be paid attention to.

Q. What can make bad energy in a house?

A. It may be mean thoughts, or violent things happen in the house. Unhappy things happen. Any of those things make a wound that becomes very intense and stays in the walls. All sorts of things. Or, a house may be just off balance—it doesn’t feel right any more.

Q. What kind of ceremonies take care of the bad energy?

A. In order to bring balance people come in with song and with good thoughts that come from goodness way deep inside you. Good words are spoken. We don’t call it prayer; we call it “to put out good words.” Prayer is like talking to a superhuman. We do not have that.

When a house is built we put offerings in the walls, usually objects that have been blessed by the medicine people. These may be special sticks wrapped around feathers, stones, fetishes, cornmeal bags for feeding and nurturing, as a promise that the house will always be cared for.

Q. Do you consider the kind of industrial materials most Americans build with--drywall and pressed wood and fiberglass insulation, that sort of thing--to be dead materials?

A. I don't believe anything is really dead. Everything is a in particular stage of transformation. I think everything in our world is alive. We may not like the kind of energy a certain material has, but it is alive. Drywall has a different personality, a different character. Some of it is natural material. Gypsum is natural. The process makes all the difference in the world. That's why the way we move, the way we create, is important. (Sighs).

I think we're talking about the difference between a feminine world and a masculine world. Men do things in a very different way than women do. I love to build with my daughters. I can work with them in a cooperative way. We all built this house together. We helped build the strawbale house down below us. And we built the house next door. But we all feel that as soon as a man enters, different processes and materials, even measurements become important.

Tools are different, and you can't just stop when you feel like having some tea. When left on our own we flow. We stop when it's time to eat some watermelon. We have a different rhythm so the end result is different.

I think the real challenge in life is how we bring that other into our world, how we get some sort of balance.
The Pueblo world is always talking about opposite energies at work in the world. They see male and female as the primary extension of the cosmic level. The sky is male, the earth is female. How have they managed to create the world in which we live? Opposite energies need to be brought together in order for incredible creativity to take place. Without male and female coming together life won't happen. You can't have creativity without tension. Tension is inherent in the world.

Q. So we aren't looking for an absence of tension?

A. No. We know that tension is part of life and we must learn to live with it. We're always looking for how opposites come together with tension but with harmony. We don’t live in an “either-or” world. But that state of harmony in tension doesn’t last for very long. Everything is in a state of flux. We know that nothing remains static. When opposites come together and there's some tension, and they're going to stay there for a while, it's beautiful. It's actually exquisite, that tension where creativity occurs. It's a lifting of veils, a way of perceiving.

Nature teaches us. We take in everything that happens in nature. Of course in New Mexico we see it every single day. The clouds come over the mountains and they begin to form and billow, and snow comes down for a while, and then before you know it the sun is out and there are patches of beautiful blue sky. Before long everything is roiling and moving around again. With all that movement we get no rain. We're so intensely aware of it here in the desert. We're just on the brink of being able to survive.

Imagine in earlier days we didn't have gas stations, we didn't have grocery stores, none of that kind of stuff that separates us from really feeling the place we live in. The Pueblo philosophy comes from really feeling the place we live in. It comes from just living on the edge of being able to survive. When those clouds are coming and there's promise of rain, that's about as exciting as it gets. To get a few drops of rain on this place, or some snow, and to be right there with it, that's a moment of creation. It is a very female-oriented way of looking at the world.

Tewa people didn't develop a notion of God or heaven. The idea is that we live here. The interaction between sky and earth gave birth to all living beings. We literally see ourselves as part of that coming together. So we relate to the earth and behave towards it in a very different way when you believe this is all and there is no more.

Our cosmology is close to the Gaia concept of the Far East. The person who gives you birth is called “Gia” in Tewa. Women who take care of entire extended families are also known as “gias.”

At the social and political level everything is organized around opposites. Every person is either winter or summer--those opposites again, coming together to form community. Usually a male leader serves as a guide for the winter people and another as a guide for the summer people. When one of those leaders finally achieves a certain status they also become “gia,” they become “mother.” “Gia” translates literally as mother. They become mother in that larger community. It’s reinforced at different levels that the ideal person is a mother, or Gia.

Western European thinking is very different with God and heaven above and everything moving upward towards a male figure. Western thought is oriented towards maleness. Although in Christ you begin to have the softer side, more love. But it's primarily God, finally. A very, very different focus.

When you focus on the earth as a mother that you came from, and you know it in a very deep way, of course you treat the earth in a different way, and you aren't thinking of leaving a dirty place. The word for us as people is "Nung." And the word for earth, the stuff the earth is made of, is "nung." Identification is there. We are earth.

Q. What happens to the soul when the physical body dies?

A. Our breath leaves. Our breath doesn't flow through us any more, it returns back to the movement of the sky, that movement that keeps everything alive while our bodies return back into the earth. The spirit becomes part of the breeze, the wind, the clouds. It integrates back into the exquisite whole that we're part of. Existence is not determined only by a physical body but also by the breath, symbolized by the movement of wind and water. It is about transformation.

That cosmology gives you a very different sense of place. Everything is sacred. It isn't like in Western thinking where there is the notion that the earth is a dirty place you want to get away from. That it's a sinful, ugly, dirty place. How can you love a place that you think about in that way? You can't create a love in a deep way if you think that real joy and glory is yet to come.

Q. So is the spirit at home when it leaves the body?

A. This is it. The whole thing is always home. You don't go anywhere. It's not really an end when your spirit leaves the body. Death of the physical body isn't meant to be frightening. It doesn't change all that much. We are transformed but we're still part of the working of the whole thing. It's not an individual soul that continues but is one being—the cosmos through which the po-wa-ha flows.

It's not a separation but a coming together. That's the whole cycle of life. We don't pull out and separate from this thing. We remain a part of its fate.

Q. What does one strive for on earth?

A. One strives to be a mother, and that is a loving, giving, nurturing, harmonious person. And the gesture is that (opening her arms). It's encompassing. It's a hug. It's love. In our community, the old community, all the stories and songs are always about asking for love from the cosmos. Asking to be loved and to love. It's what we all want. That's the heart of it.

This place, this time, is all that there is. There is no heaven, no God. This place is where it all happens--happiness, sadness, pain, obligations, responsibility, joy. Human life, in the traditional Pueblo world, is based on philosophical premises that promote consideration, compassion, and gentleness towards both human and non-human beings. In this thinking, every act or thought has an effect on the configuration and feeling of the whole of existence. Rituals, dances, and songs, even today, are about achieving harmony with the life force, the po-wa-ha.

Q. Where does art fit in?

A. We don't have a word for art. It's that act of doing what you have to do every moment in the best way you can. That's what art is. Anything is art as long as you are doing absolutely the best you possibly can. The focus is on the doing rather than the product. It has to be done with that sense of, "I am capable of loving, I am capable of taking love. This is what I have to do before me right now. I will hold it as lovingly as I can. I become an act of art."

The Orientals are so great at it--putting out some tea and making it beautiful, it becomes art. I think you do it as ritual. That's why the dance is so important.
One thing we've always heard is to walk carefully. That's another art form. Walk carefully so you're aware of everything around you.

Q. Pueblo people are known for their powerful dances and feast days. What are your dances for?

A. Dances are symbolic rituals, extremely symbolic. They occur outdoors. Your feet are touching the ground. As a woman you wear the tablitas on your head, a turquoise headdress with symbols of clouds and mountains on it. So you bring the two energies—sky and earth--through you, thus becoming a part of that sacredness. It's very symbolic.

Pueblo dances help center the people because they are for communication with the clouds and the wind, for getting in touch with other realms of existence. The dances literally bring that cosmic breath to the landscape and to the human community. And knowing that not welcoming that breath of the larger world into the human place would be unhealthy. Humans cannot be isolated within their own world.

Dancing is a spiritual exercise lifting the veil between realities, between this world and the next. In the dance we live for a time in a venerable holding pattern, in the dancing circle that we call the “middle heart place” between earth and sky, hovering in a super-reality that is at once the subconscious and conscious self. In this place you dance to honor the meaning of life--all life--to honor the earth as our home, the supporter of all life.

Q. Tell me about your house.

A. The house is solar. The entire south side is glass. A woodstove provides supplemental heat. My husband has an electric heater in his room. He likes more constant comfort. But I grew up in the Pueblo where we went with the ups and downs. We were expected to. If it's wintertime you're supposed to be cold. You can't have the constant temperature that's the expectation of today. That constancy takes the personality out of the house.

This house is very different from any other house I've ever lived in. And it's the most responsive to what's happening outside. It's a wonderfully sensitive house in that as soon as the sun comes up in the morning this living area (the lowest part of the house) is just flooded with sun. You feel the heat coming from the sun and it's wonderful. You're wide awake then because you're supposed to be--the sun is up.

The bedrooms in the back remain dark and cool for a while. By the time the sun goes down the back rooms are warmed up and you're ready to go to bed. The living area cools down through the night, but no one is using this area during the night. So the temperature moves around in this way, changing with the day, with the season. Through all the windows I can watch the seasons change. Through the clerestories I can watch the sun as it travels across the sky.

Even if the outside temperature goes down to zero the house remains very livable. I haven't used the fireplace now for going on the third day because the house is so warm. Then you have to be aware of the clouds, like I did before you came over. I was thinking, "Oh, we're going to have to build a fire." The house allows me to take part in the changes going on outside. It's a conscious thing.

Q. How were the old Pueblos structured?

A. Pueblo people are very egocentric. They live at the center of the universe. The heart of the earth is "bu-ping-geh" (heart of the Pueblo), which for the Tewa people is the open community space within the village where ritual dances take place. The bu-ping-geh contains the literal center of the earth or the “nan-sipu," which translates as the bellyroot of the earth. Each Pueblo cosmos encircles the nan-sipu, and the surrounding areas where the sky and earth touch are the boundaries of the well-organized spaces for people, animals, and spirits to live.

All built structures were not meant to last forever but rather to meet immediate needs. And they were built to be beautiful, within human scale, using accessible, simple materials--mud, wood, and stone. They were constantly modified to fit their use. Beliefs and values were clearly expressed in those structures. Houses weren’t material symbols of wealth but, rather, an elegantly simple expression of human shelter.

In the Pueblo there were no manipulated outdoor areas that serve to distinguish humans from nature. There were no areas where nature was domesticated. Within the Pueblo outdoor and indoor spaces flowed freely and were hardly distinguishable. One moved in bare feet from interior dirt floors enclosed by mud walls to the well-packed dirt smoothness of the Pueblo plaza. All senses were utilized in this movement. Each of the various dirt surfaces (interior walls, outdoor walls, plaza floor) were touched, smelled, and tasted. We carried special rocks in our mouths so that their energy would flow into us. Everything was touchable, knowable, accessible.

Q. How would you fix housing on the Pueblo today?

A. I would get the people to build their houses themselves. That was my whole frustration at the time I went to architecture school. Why don't they just set it up so these people remember how to build their own houses? I don't know why they can't. They used to just a few years ago. They all knew how. Five years later, 30 years later, no one can remember how to do it.

People don't see that it's a process, that the way you do it is very meaningful--the kind of materials you use, the way you put things together. Hammering nails is a masculine thing. It takes strength and it's violent. If it were totally up to women it would not have evolved in that way. We have a different way of putting things together.

The way things are put together is very important--the materials that are used that allow women and children to be a part of it. Women don't have the strength to build the standard American way.
One of the things I find wrong with strawbale building is the size of the bales. Women and children cannot work with them very well. They can't lift them and set them down. You can lift up an adobe block and set it down. Women can do that. That's why a long time ago women sat in a place making round balls of adobe block. Kids carried them and put them up. They'd do a little bit at a time. It was an understandable process, done as a family.

Q. Given that this earthly plane is often painful and confusing, and that people fight with each other and ruin their environment in so many ways, do you see the future as hopeful or not?

A. What remains as hope in the end is that we all--Indian, non-Indian, artists, non-artists, rural or urban--desire that genuine experience of oneness with the breath of life that forms the world we live in. And I do believe that however we express ourselves we all yearn to feel the breath of the universe assuring us of our connection with the clouds, wind, rain, and mountains--and with ourselves and each other.
It's spiritual fulfillment rather than material acquisition--a way that affirms that all life expressions are of one spirit or breath. Our continued existence as one species of organism depends upon the breath, or spirit, that informs the whole universe.