Culture : Guatemalan Tribes Wear History Well : What comes off the backstrap looms in rural villages is more than folk art to these indians.

Swaying back and forth as if in prayer, Katrina sits at her loom, her eloquent hands weaving a world of color and design that recall the myths and dreams of a long-dead but still revered past.

To the tourists watching the 17-year-old Ixil Indian, her work on a primitive machine called a backstrap loom is exquisite fantasy, an example of folk art, something to take home and display next to the Navaho blanket, the Inca sun disk and the other souvenirs of past trips into the quaint but otherwise useless remnants of past lives.

To Katrina and the millions of other Guatemalan Indians, what she is doing on market day in this Mayan town 87 miles north of Guatemala City is hardly quaint or a fantasy or even an effort to coax a few dollars from the pale-skinned strangers.

As she builds her patterns of blue and yellow birds, pink and purple flowers, green and scarlet geometric shapes, Katrina is proclaiming to an alien world her identity, her value, her part of an ancient civilization.

She re-creates through her artistry the legends, the history of her people. She tells the world where she comes from and what her place is in the community. Her work is a virtual encyclopedia of Guatemalan existence.

For Guatemala’s Indians, who constitute nearly 60% of the country’s 9 million people, their unique dress and their language are the physical manifestations of their identity, their nationhood--and of their refusal to integrate into the white, European-derived establishment that rules the country.

“Not to wear traje (the Spanish word for costume) is a matter of shame, particularly for women,” said Linda Asturias de Barrios, curator of the Ixchel Museum of Indian Dress here.

“They will do whatever they can to maintain Indian identity,” she said in the cramped office of the small museum, which houses the only systematic collection of Mayan textiles in the country.

It is an identity that has been under siege since the Spanish explorers arrived in 1523 and imposed a colonial economic, political and cultural system that remains the base of Guatemalan society to this day.

Until now, the attack was largely unsuccessful. Unlike every other Central American country where the past Indian culture has been all but reduced to a tourist curiosity, Guatemala has the largest and most cohesive remnant of the Mayan empire that ruled the region before Columbus.

However, the Mayan remainder is slowly being ground down, the victim of a combination of government policy, economic pressure and the insidious encroachments of modern life. Even the rugged geography that once protected Indian life by isolating it is being overcome by roads and modern communications.

“We have to teach them (the Indians) a certain social point of view and values in order to integrate them into society,” according to Col. Carlos Fernando Duran Hernandez, ranking spokesman for the Guatemalan army, the leading institution in trying to end Indian separatism.

Although denying that the army wants to destroy the use of Mayan language and dress, Duran told The Times that “we cannot have one nation inside another nation. We are trying to create a country where the people identify themselves as Guatemalan, not Mayan.”

The military, in fact, forces its 47,000 members (80% of whom are Indian) to speak only Spanish and prohibits them from wearing traje. Since every Indian man has to serve up to two years in the army, the military’s rule is a real threat, according to several Indian leaders.

“When they come out, they have acquired so much of the ladino culture that it is difficult to re-enter Indian life,” said one anthropologist who asked not to be named.

“Even their own communities suspect them, so they often end up moving to cities and assimilating.”

While there are no laws discouraging the wearing of Mayan clothes, it is almost impossible for Indians to get a job, go to school or gain political office unless they adopt both the dress and the language of the ladino society, the term used to describe the largely white, Spanish-speaking and European-dressed minority that runs Guatemala.

This approach by the government and the military “does grave damage” to Mayan identity, said Demetrio Cojti, one of only five Indian professors at the University of San Carlos, Guatemala’s largest and most prestigious university.

“It is a form of national oppression designed to make Guatemala Mayan-free,” he said in an interview. “If an Indian wants to save himself economically, he has to die culturally.”

“ Traje is an identity,” Cojti said over coffee in a lounge of Guatemala City’s most luxurious hotel. “People exist through their own audible and cultural manifestations. . . . Traje is an ethnic reaffirmation of a people. But it is hard, because you are treated as inferior if you are so dressed.”

Diego Velasco Brito, an Ixil Indian from the north-central city of Nebaj, is the only Indian in the National Congress. To him traje is “the fact of Indian unity, a sign that the people maintain unity.”

Ironies abound in any examination of the Indian question here. While the most prominent proponents of Indian unity and independence are men, with only one or two regional exceptions it is only Indian women who wear traje in everyday life.

Both Cojti and Brito wear Western clothes and speak excellent Spanish. Cojti is particularly eloquent in the language of the people he calls “invaders,” and in his designer eyeglasses and modern dress he appears as ladino as most of his university colleagues.

The same applies to Brito, whose only outward sign of Indian identity is a knitted shoulder bag called a morales. For the congressman, it has the dual purpose of Indian identity and concealing the Uzi submachine gun he carries.

The greatest irony, however, lies in the fact that the Spanish conquistadores themselves are in part responsible for both the development of traje and for the maintenance of that other great symbol of Indian identity and unity, the Mayan language.

While anthropologists and historians are not in complete agreement, the consensus is that the white invaders either created or encouraged the weaving of distinct colors and patterns for each tribe and region in Guatemala as a form of identification and control.

The idea was to make it easy for the Spaniards to see and identify any Indian in order to ensure he was working and living where ordered. It also served what American anthropologist Sheldon Annis describes in his book “God and Production in a Guatemalan Town” as a means to “create a new class of being . . . an identifiable work force, tribute payers, potential soldiers and the usually pliant objects . . . of the conquerors.” It was nothing less than the creation of a caste society.

And until just a few years ago, the ruling powers discouraged Spanish among the Indians in order to keep them from entering the mainstream society and threatening the economic position of ladinos.

Even though the policy on language has changed, to a large degree that colonialist approach is in place today, even to the point that members of military intelligence are still taught the colors and patterns of traje in order to keep track of Indians.

And when the Indians were perceived as potential support for a radical guerrilla movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the army slaughtered them by the tens of thousands.

This led many Indians to abandon their dress and their communities to avoid being identified.

But the greatest danger to the continued unity and meaningful existence of the Mayans as a people is economic.

Nearly every expert interviewed spoke of the increasing cost of making traje as threatening the existence of the dress form. Miguel Morales, an Indian human rights worker, said it takes at least $75 to make a complete outfit--a quarter of what an average Indian worker earns in a year.

Furthermore, in order to survive economically, Indian women have been forced into the mainstream economy. “This means they can’t spend the necessary money nor do they have the time to devote to weaving,” according to Rosario de Palanco, another anthropologist at the Ixchel Museum. (It takes three to five months to weave a complete set of traje . )

It also means that the women are forced to wear ladino clothes to get work, no matter how marginal, in the white society. “It is the same force that pressured Indian men to give up traje and learn Spanish,” said Cojti.

There are, nonetheless, signs of hope for the Mayans. “One area of revitalization comes from the refugee communities (in Mexico and the United States),” said Asturias de Barrios.

“The refugees are basing their effort to maintain their identity on weaving,” she explained. “Weaving and clothing are totally related to their culture and Indian identity.”

And there is a growing effort to give Indians cultural, political and economic autonomy as part of a federal form of government. The current government of President Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo has paid lip service, at least, to the importance of Mayan culture, writing two constitutional provisions recognizing the legitimacy of Indian language rights.

Even Efrain Rios Montt, the former leader who is a presidential candidate in upcoming elections, tries to attract Indian support by calling for more rights. This is particularly ironic since he was responsible for killing thousands of Indians while he was military dictator in 1982 and 1983.

But the odds against the formation of a meaningful, autonomous Indian society are great, particularly in a country where the most powerful institution, the military, sees any form of ethnic political identity as potential for subversion.