Kokopelli’s got a weird place in American culture. Pretty much unique among pre-Colombian divinities, the mainstream makes a...
Kokopelli’s got a weird place in American culture. Pretty much unique among pre-Colombian divinities, the mainstream makes a point of keeping his name and symbolism alive… as kind of a lazy, vague symbol of “The Desert Southwest”.
Like, if you rule out bare crosses and only count crucifixes with the actual body of Christ, I might have seen more public depictions of Kokopelli than any other god in America, and I could not tell you a single Kokopelli story.
What’s Kokopelli known for? Well, I’ve got a vague sense he’s a trickster, and I guess he plays the flute. “Oh, like the flutist tricksters Pan or the Pied Piper?” Fuuuuuuck if I know, dude.
Kinda related, kinda not, but the membrane between Anglo and indigenous culture seems to be more permeable in the Southwest, especially New Mexico and northern Arizona. I would guess it’s mostly because there’s a proportionally large native population there, and perhaps there’s some different cultural dynamic given that Anglo-Americans are a minority there.
Like, when you hear Navajo spoken everyday on the bus, and your friend talks about visiting their grandparents out on the rez, you don’t consider yourself Indian, but you consider yourself part of the same super-community as American Indians. They’re still the Other, but not the same way they are to someone from New Jersey whose main exposure to American Indians came through grade school lessons about Squanto.
So things like Kokopelli and skinwalkers and the Zia sun symbol feel like they’re part of your culture, broadly speaking, though they may not feel like yours specifically.
This is kind of what I’m getting at when I talk about “Oklahoma braids”, like the high, tight, long braids on men from like Oklahoma or New Mexico or Alaska who by all other appearances signal white trash
Which is not exclusive of native identity! That’s part of the thing of that medicine wheel/dreamcatcher symbol quartered into white, black, red and yellow slices, that “Native American” is a cross-racial identity