The Hopi

← Encyclopedia

Drive a wooden planting stick a full foot down into bare dune sand, where no ditch runs and no river bends and the sky yields perhaps ten inches of rain in a good year, and drop into the hole a dozen kernels of blue corn. The seed lies deep enough that its roots can reach the moisture the winter snows drove down into the dune and left there, banked, through the dry spring. It comes up in a single hardy shock rather than the tidy irrigated rows of the valley farms, and it holds. The Hopi have coaxed harvests of blue and red and white and yellow corn from this waterless mesa country for the better part of a thousand years, and the whole shape of their year — the powers who bring the clouds, the exact keeping of the ceremonial calendar, the covenant that binds them to a humble planting life — bends toward the single end of keeping that improbable plant alive.

The behaving ones

The people call themselves Hopituh Shi-nu-mu, and the name they carry is not only an ethnonym. The word Hopi, in the tradition’s own reckoning and in the reference record, is glossed as the behaving one — the mannered, the peaceable, the polite, the one who adheres to the Hopi Way — so that to be Hopi is a standard of conduct as much as an accident of birth. A person can fail to be Hopi and a person can grow into it. The name is a measure held up against a life.

They are a Puebloan people of the high desert of northeastern Arizona, near the Four Corners and just east of the Grand Canyon. Their villages, some fourteen of them, crown three fingers of sandstone that reach south from a larger tableland and rise roughly six hundred feet from the plain — First Mesa, Second Mesa, and Third Mesa, named west to east in the order an outsider counts them. The houses are stone, terraced and interconnected, built of the same rock they stand on, so that from a distance the village and the mesa read as one thing. On Third Mesa stands Old Oraibi — Orayvi — founded before A.D. 1100 and reckoned one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in North America; the National Park Service made it a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and it was listed on the National Register on 15 October 1966. Britannica dates its occupation from about A.D. 1150. Either way the village was old when the first cathedrals of Europe were young.

Walpi, at the tip of First Mesa — stone houses built of the rock they stand on, among the oldest continuously inhabited places in North America. Justjeffaz (Jeff Brunton), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Hopi language belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family, a lineage that reaches far to the south and touches the Nahua tongues of central Mexico. That is a marker of deep time. It sets the Hopi apart as long-settled Puebloan farmers whose residence in this country vastly predates that of their neighbors the Diné, the Navajo, who speak an Athabaskan language carried into the Southwest from the far north only a few centuries before the Spanish came, and whose reservation now surrounds the Hopi mesas on every side. Two peoples, two languages of wholly separate stock, two sacred worlds — the one Puebloan and rooted, the other Athabaskan and lately arrived — living for centuries as close and wary neighbors.

Within the tradition the deeper genealogy is not a matter of language families but of emergence. The Hopi account, which the singers hold and which reached the outside record through the ethnography of H. R. Voth and later summaries — read here at a critical distance, for it was set down by observers standing outside the tradition it describes — tells of a people who climbed up through a succession of prior worlds, each abandoned in its turn when the people grew careless of the right way to live. They ascended at the last through the sipapu, the opening traditionally located in the Grand Canyon, and stepped into this Fourth World. At its threshold they met Maasaw, guardian and caretaker of the earth, keeper of fire and lord of death, master of this world. He granted them the land — not to own but to hold in stewardship — on the condition that they live humbly and in balance, planting with a stick and asking for little. That covenant then sent the clans on long migrations across the whole of the country, north and south and back again, before they gathered on the mesas where they live now. The migration is written, the tradition holds, in the ruins and the potsherds and the rock the clans left behind them everywhere they passed.

To the documentary record the Hopi first appear in 1540, when Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, hunting the cities of gold that were not there, sent a detachment under Pedro de Tovar northwest into the province the Spanish called Tusayan. The first Hopi village the Spanish reached was Awatovi, on the eastern edge of the mesa country. It is a scholarly commonplace, and it is also the beginning of four centuries in which the Hopi met the outside world chiefly by holding their own against it.

The katsinam and the covenant

The Hopi religious world turns on two things: the covenant with Maasaw, and the katsinam. The katsinam — kachinas, in the anglicized spelling — are the ancestral and nature powers of this world. A katsina may be a revered ancestor, a place, a quality, a natural phenomenon, an idea, made person; there are hundreds of them, a vast and specific company. For half the year they dwell on the San Francisco Peaks, the snow-crowned volcanic massif north of Flagstaff that the Hopi call Nuvatukya’ovi, the place of snow on the very top. For the other half of the year they come down to the villages. They come present in the masked dancers who take their form: when a Hopi man puts on the mask and the paint and the costume of a katsina, in the reckoning of the tradition, his own personal identity gives way and the being he represents is present in his place — present to bring rain, healing, fertility, and blessing to a people who ask, of everything they ask for, first and above all for water.

The katsina season is the frame of the year. It opens at the winter solstice, with the observances the Hopi call Soyal; it turns through the Powamu, the Bean Dance, in February, when beans are sprouted in the warm dark of the kivas as a sign and a promise of the planting to come; and it closes in July with the Niman, the Home Dance, after which the katsinam withdraw once more to the Peaks and are gone until the year turns again. The carved wooden figures that outsiders call kachina dolls, and that the Hopi call tithu, belong to this teaching. They are given to children — to girls and infants especially — but they are not toys. They are images to be kept and studied, so that a child grows up knowing by sight and by name the great company of the katsinam, learning the sacred world the way another child learns letters.

Standing above and behind all of it is Maasaw. He is the master of this Fourth World, keeper of its fire and its dead, and it is his covenant that fixes the terms of Hopi life: the people are caretakers of the land and not its owners, bound to a hard and humble and deliberate existence, planting the deep-driven corn and keeping the calendar exactly, because the keeping is the rent they pay for the world. To be Hopi, again, is to behave — and behaving, here, means holding up the ceremonial year so that the rain comes and the corn stands.

Much of this is closed. The songs, the masks, the enactments, and the knowledge held in the kivas are the tradition’s own, and the Hopi guard them as such; they are set down here only at the distance of the public record, as description and not as instruction, and where the tradition keeps a thing to itself the account keeps its distance too. The clearest measure of that reserve is the famous Snake Dance, in which dancers of the Snake and Antelope societies carry live snakes, rattlesnakes among them, as messengers pure enough to bear the people’s prayers for rain down to the powers of the underworld. It was once performed before outsiders, and photographed, and gawked at; for well over a century now the Hopi have closed it to cameras and to non-Hopi eyes, and what an outsider may say of it ends more or less where that closing begins.

Holding their own

The Spanish came back after Coronado with priests. From 1629, in the great Franciscan push into the Southwest, missions rose among the Hopi: San Bernardino at Awatovi, San Bartolomé at Shungopavi, San Francisco at Oraibi — massive stone churches, some of them built over and around the very kivas whose rites they meant to end, raised with Hopi labor pressed into the work. For half a century the friars pressed against the ceremonial life of the mesas. Then, in 1680, the Hopi rose with the other Pueblos of the Rio Grande in the coordinated revolt that swept the Spanish out of the whole northern province at once. They killed the missionaries in their villages, pulled down the churches, and — where they had not already done so — moved their villages up onto the defensible mesa tops, where several of them stand to this day.

When the Spanish reconquered New Mexico in the 1690s the Hopi, alone among the Pueblos, effectively kept them out. The hinge of that outcome was Awatovi. Around 1700 some of Awatovi’s people moved to readmit the friars and the mission; and in the winter that followed, men from the other Hopi villages fell on Awatovi and destroyed it utterly, killing the men and dispersing the survivors, and it was never rebuilt. In the Hopi understanding this was the guarding of the whole ceremonial order against a renewed Christian breach in the mesas’ defenses — an interpretation that scholars record and that remains, in its motives and its particulars, a contested and much-argued thing. What is not contested is the result: the fall of Awatovi left the Franciscans, uniquely among the Pueblos, largely unable to return. The Cline Library’s teaching account at Northern Arizona University lays out the sequence from the missions through the Revolt to Awatovi’s end.

Old Oraibi, on Third Mesa, around 1900 — terraced stone dwellings reached by exterior ladders, in a village founded before A.D. 1100. George Wharton James, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The Americans arrived by paper. On 16 December 1882 President Chester A. Arthur set aside a Hopi reservation by executive order — a plain rectangle drawn on a map, which later turned out to sit entirely inside the far larger Navajo Reservation that grew up around it. The overlap became one of the longest and bitterest land disputes in the modern Southwest, a tangle of grazing rights and partitioned land and forced relocations between Hopi and Diné that Congress took up in acts of 1974 and 1996 and addressed without ever fully settling. The two peoples, distinct in tongue and tradition and long resident as neighbors, found themselves argued over the same ground by a government that had drawn its lines without them.

The hardest rupture was internal. Through the turn of the twentieth century Old Oraibi, the mother village of Third Mesa, split down the middle between those willing to accommodate the American schools and agents and those determined to keep the outside world and its demands off the mesa entirely. In 1906 the quarrel came to a head, and it was settled — remarkably — without blood, by a pushing contest: a line scratched on the rock, the two factions shoving against each other until one side was forced over it. The traditionalists lost the push and left, led by a man named Yukiuma, to found the new village of Hotevilla, and soon after Bacavi. Oraibi, which had been the largest and most influential of all the Hopi towns, never recovered its old primacy and dwindled toward the quiet, private, photography-shunning place it remains. Three decades later, on 24 October 1936, under the Indian Reorganization Act, the Hopi Tribe ratified a constitution that set a Tribal Council over the villages while leaving the old village-based religious authority intact beneath it — a graft of new form onto old root that has held, uneasily, ever since.

The San Francisco Peaks are still contested ground, and the contest has moved into the federal courts. A ski area on the western slope of the sacred massif proposed to make artificial snow from reclaimed municipal wastewater — treated sewage effluent, spread over the mountain the katsinam come down from. The Hopi, the Diné, and eleven other nations sued. In 2007 a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit sided with them, finding a substantial burden on their religion; the following year the full court reheard the case and reversed. On 8 August 2008, sitting en banc, it held that the snowmaking imposed no substantial burden on religious exercise within the meaning of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and in 2009 the Supreme Court declined to take the case. The snow on Nuvatukya’ovi has since, in part, been made from wastewater, over the objection of the peoples for whom the mountain is a home of the sacred powers.

The Hopi are today a living people numbering something over nineteen thousand — about 19,338 self-identified in the 2010 census — still on the three mesas, still dry-farming the dune fields in the old deep-planting way, still keeping a ceremonial year much of which they guard, rightly and firmly, as none of the outside world’s business. What an account like this one can honestly hold is the outline the Hopi have allowed to become public: the villages, the corn, the long migrations, the shape of the calendar, the covenant named. The rest stays where it has always stayed, up on the mesa, inside the tradition, kept by the behaving ones for the powers who bring the rain.

→ Related: The San Francisco Peaks · The Dine · The Apache · Changing Woman · The Holy People · Spider Woman · The Hero Twins · Talking God · Canyon De Chelly · Shiprock · Mount Taylor