Living in Balance: A Pueblo Woman Discusses Her Balanced Life Philosophy

An interview with Rina Swentzell

Roxanne Swentzell learned much about graceful, peaceful living from her mother, Rina. In turn, Rina Swentzell’s Tewa ancestry informs her every movement, her every thought. At sixty-four, she is one of a few who carries faint memories of “those gone before,” their way of knowing, thinking, and being on the land.

Rina grew up with her great-grandmother in Santa Clara Pueblo, nourished by tales of her indigenous ancestors, the ancient Anasazi people who traveled from southern Colorado to settle a series of pueblo villages along the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico. Now a distinguished scholar, potter, architect, and weaver, Rina lives outside Santa Fe in a solar adobe house she designed and built with her family twenty-five years ago.

On a chilly afternoon in mid-December, Rina invited me into her home to discuss Pueblo cosmology and how it relates to modern American housing. In our conversation she chose her words carefully, adhering to the Tewa code of honoring the silence, for the more one says the less one sees.

Q. Tell me about yourself.

A. I was born in Santa Clara Pueblo, 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 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. 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.... I did that for many years before I got a master’s degree in architecture at the University of New Mexico. My children were in school at the time so I drove to Albuquerque every day for four years. It was an incredible feat fueled by how incensed I was 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 anymore. Instead, they were paying $10 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. Our sense of communality was being destroyed.

In the old community, whenever anyone needed a house you went out there and started mixing mud. We built adobes. 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. I couldn’t understand why the American world would build houses the way they built them. That’s why I went to architecture school, to find why they do this.

Q. Do you understand now?

A. To a certain extent. Americans look at housing and shelter in a very different way than Pueblo people do. In American architecture there is very little emphasis on the spirit of place.... Houses are seen as massive construction instead of places for people to live in and love.

In the pueblo, 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, stone. We constantly modified our houses to fit their use. Beliefs and values were clearly expressed in those structures. Houses were not material symbols of wealth but were, rather, an elegantly simple expression of human shelter.

Q. So you believe houses are alive?

A. Yes. They are alive and participate in their own cycles of life and death and of those who have lived within them. After a house is built we feed it cornmeal so that it may have a good life. Clay is talked to because it is of the earth and shares in the flow of life....

We grew up believing that the primary thing we’re all a part of is the breath of the world. 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.... I’m in one sense very much a part of this house because I am breathing it in. The po-wa-ha—wind, water, breath—connects all life.

The house 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. It becomes a real interactive event.... Your coming into my house is a momentous occasion for me. Respect is implied.

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

A. Yes. Different houses have different energies, or personalities. Those old houses were blessed before any of the walls went up, and through the whole process the people had communication with the walls. The roof represented the sky, and the walls were seen as the earth. It became, then, a miniature cosmos, a sacred place. You are reminded of that cosmic connection, that you live there in that world.

Sometimes you find a not-so-good house. We have ceremonies to rebalance the energy in houses like that. Houses get sick, like people, and need to be healed.

Q. What can make bad energy in a house?

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

Q. What kind of ceremonies remedy bad energy?

A. In order to bring a balance, people come in with song and with good thoughts that come from goodness way deep inside. 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 industrial materials—drywall, pressed wood, fiberglass insulation, that sort of thing—to be dead materials?

A. I don’t believe anything is really dead. Everything is in a particular stage of transformation. 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.

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

A. I would get the people to build their houses themselves and involve the whole family in the process. 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. Straw bale construction isn’t much better. Women and children cannot lift and set down straw bales very well. Women can lift up an adobe block and set it down. A long time ago women would sit and make round balls of adobe block. Kids would carry and put them up. They’d do a little bit at a time. It was an understandable process, done as a family.

Q. Tell me about your house.

A. The house is solar. The entire south side is glass. A woodstove provides supplemental heat. The temperature is not constant. When I grew up in the pueblo we went with the ups and downs. 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, when no one is using it. 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. But I have to be aware of the clouds. 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. 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, nonartists, 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 do 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.