Mimbreños

Mimbreños.
You buried your ancestors
in floors beneath your homes.
You slept on them,
you kept them with you always.
They grew through earthen floors
filling your lives
with dreams of passing worlds.

--Benjamin Alire Sáenz, "The Dead"

I had never heard of the "Mimbreños." 

They were a people in southwest New Mexico, part of a larger ethnic group, the Mogolon culture.  They are named after the Mimbres ("little willow") river, that runs through their region. 

The beginnings of their culture can be seen as far back as A.D. 200,  but their "classic" period was A.D. 1000-1130, by which time the Mimbreños had settled into towns and had become an agricultural people.

What do we know about them?  They originally lived in "pit houses"-- houses half dug into the ground, and covered with a roof.  In the larger communities, they build large, communal pit houses, called "kivas," which were probably used for community and religious ceremonies.     

But by the beginning of the classic period, they were moving out of pit houses and building large, above-ground pueblos -- some of which contained hundreds of rooms.  At the same time, they began a ceremonial destruction of their kivas, burning them to the ground in great fires.

The Mimbres culture is best known today for its characteristic black-on-white pottery.  The pottery became quite sophisticated, and was both geometric and figurative in the designs used.  Some were used as ceremonial burial masks, covering the faces of the dead, but most were produced for actual home use.

Near the end of the classic period, Mimbreños began abandoning their homes, and the culture disappeared within a few years.  The end of the Mimbres culture, in its characteristic features, is usually blamed on local drought.

The Mexican-American novelist Benjamin Alire Sáenz, who has written novels for adults and young adults, as well as books for children, began his writing career as a poet.  I learned of the Mimbres culture from two poems included in his collection Calendar of Dust (1991).  "The Dead" marks the coming of the Mimbres people, from the time of their ancestors' first crossing of the Bering Strait, through the millennia as they cared for themselves and honored their ancestors, to the full flowering of their culture, and until ultimately their people and its culture died from drought.

The other poem, "Resurrection," is a reflection on the passage of time, and the communion between the living and the dead.  Four stanzas -- First, the still-visible accomplishments of the ancient Inca civilization; second, the lifelong anguish of the poet's mother over the death of her brother, a brother whose photo she holds close;  and third, the poet's thoughts and memories as he looks at photos of his own dead relatives, relatives with whom he once walked, all hoping to cross the border, hopes that for all but him were unfulfilled. 

The communion of the living with the dead.  The communion of the present with the past.  The fourth stanza returns to the now extinct Mimbres people:

The Mimbres buried their dead beneath their homes.
At night, softly, the buried
rose, re-entered the rooms of the living
as blankets woven with the heavy threads of memory,
blankets on which the Mimbres rested,
on which they slept, and dreamed.

Sáenz's poetry is haunting and melancholic, as is his recollection of the slow rise and rapid collapse of Mimbres civilization. As are the lives of those of us still living. And as is the life of our own civilization.

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." --William Faulkner