\n\n\n\n\n\nKokopelli\u2019s 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\u2026 as kind of a lazy, vague symbol of \u201cThe Desert Southwest\u201d.
\n\nLike, 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.\n
\n\nWhat\u2019s Kokopelli known for? Well, I\u2019ve got a vague sense he\u2019s a trickster, and I guess he plays the flute. \u201cOh, like the flutist tricksters Pan or the Pied Piper?\u201d Fuuuuuuck if I know, dude.
\nKinda 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\u2019s mostly because there\u2019s a proportionally large native population there, and perhaps there\u2019s 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\u2019t consider yourself Indian, but you consider yourself part of the same super-community as American Indians. They\u2019re 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\u2019re part of your culture, broadly speaking, though they may not feel like\u00a0yours 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
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