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=Their Country--The People=
The Hopi Indians live in northern Arizona about one hundred miles
northeast of Flagstaff, seventy miles north of Winslow, and seventy-five
miles north of Holbrook.
For at least eight hundred years the Hopi pueblos have occupied the
southern points of three fingers of Black Mesa, the outstanding physical
feature of the country, commonly referred to as First, Second, and Third
Mesas.
It is evident that in late prehistoric times several large villages were
located at the foot of First and Second Mesas, but at present, except
for two small settlements around trading posts, the villages are all on
top of the mesas. On the First Mesa we find Walpi, Sichomovi, and Hano,
the latter not Hopi but a Tewa village built about 1700 by immigrants
from the Rio Grande Valley, and at the foot of this mesa the modern
village of Polacca with its government school and trading post. On
Second Mesa are Mashongnovi, Shipaulovi, and Shungopovi, with Toreva Day
School at its foot. On Third Mesa Oraibi, Hotavilla, and Bacabi are
found, with a government school and a trading post at Lower Oraibi and
another school at Bacabi. Moencopi, an offshoot from Old Oraibi, is near
Tuba City.
This area was once known as the old Spanish Province of Tusayan, and the
Hopi villages are called pueblos, Spanish for towns. In 1882, 2,472,320
acres of land were set aside from the public domain as the Hopi Indian
Reservation. At present the Hopi area is included within the greater
Navajo Reservation and administered by a branch of the latter Indian
agency.
The name Hopi or Hopitah means "peaceful people," and the name Moqui,
sometimes applied to them by unfriendly Navajo neighbors, is really a
Zuni word meaning "dead," a term of derision. Naturally the Hopi do not
like being called Moqui, though no open resentment is ever shown. Early
fiction and even some early scientific reports used the term Moqui
instead of Hopi.
Admirers have called these peaceful pueblo dwellers "The Quaker People,"
but that is a misnomer for these sturdy brown heathen who have never
asked or needed either government aid or government protection, have a
creditable record of defensive warfare during early historic times and
running back into their traditional history, and have also some accounts
of civil strife.
The nomadic Utes, Piutes, Apaches, and Navajos for years raided the
fields and flocks of this industrious, prosperous, sedentary people; in
fact, the famous Navajo blanket weavers got the art of weaving and their
first stock of sheep through stealing Hopi women and Hopi sheep. But
there came a time when the peaceful Hopi decided to kill the Navajos who
stole their crops and their girls, and then conditions improved. Too,
soon after, came the United States government and Kit Carson to
discipline the raiding Navajos.
The only semblance of trouble our government has had with the Hopi grew
out of the objection, in fact, refusal, of some of the more conservative
of the village inhabitants to send their children to school. The
children were taken by force, but no blood was shed, and now government
schooling is universally accepted and generally appreciated.
A forbidding expanse of desert waste lands surrounds the Hopi mesas,
furnishing forage for Hopi sheep and goats during the wet season and
browse enough to sustain them during the balance of the year. These
animals are of a hardy type adapted to their desert environment. Our
pure blood stock would fare badly under such conditions. However, the
type of wool obtained from these native sheep lends itself far more
happily to the weaving of the fine soft blankets so long made by the
Hopi than does the wool of our high grade Merino sheep or a mixture of
the two breeds. This is so because our Merino wool requires the
commercial scouring given it by modern machine methods, whereas the Hopi
wool can be reduced to perfect working condition by the primitive hand
washing of the Hopi women.
As one approaches the dun-colored mesas from a distance he follows their
picturesque outlines against the sky line, rising so abruptly from the
plain below, but not until one is within a couple of miles can he
discern the villages that crown their heights. And no wonder these
dun-colored villages seem so perfectly a part of the mesas themselves,
for they are literally so--their rock walls and dirt roofs having been
merely picked up from the floor and sides of the mesa itself and made
into human habitations.
The Hopi number about 2,500 and are a Shoshonean stock. They speak a
language allied to that of the Utes and more remotely to the language of
the Aztecs in Mexico.[4]
[Footnote 4: Colton, H.S., Days in the Painted Desert: Museum Press,
Flagstaff, 1932, p. 17.]
According to their traditions the various Hopi clans arrived in Hopiland
at different times and from different directions, but they were all a
kindred people having the same tongue and the same fundamental
traditions.
They did not at first build on the tops of the mesas, but at their feet,
where their corn fields now are, and it was not from fear of the
war-like and aggressive tribes of neighboring Apaches and Navajos that
they later took to the mesas, as we once supposed. A closer acquaintance
with these people brings out the fact that it was not till the Spaniards
had come to them and established Catholic Missions in the late
Seventeenth Century that the Hopi decided to move to the more easily
defended mesa tops for fear of a punitive expedition from the Spaniards
whose priests they had destroyed.
We are told that these desert-dwellers, whose very lives have always
depended upon their little corn fields along the sandy washes that
caught and held summer rains, always challenged new-coming clans to
prove their value as additions to the community, especially as to their
magic for rain-making, for life here was a hardy struggle for existence,
with water as a scarce and precious essential. Among the first
inhabitants was the Snake Clan with its wonderful ceremonies for rain
bringing, as well as other sacred rites. Willingly they accepted the
rituals and various religious ceremonials of new-comers when they showed
their ability to help out with the eternal problem of propitiating the
gods that they conceived to have control over rain, seed germination,
and the fertility and well-being of the race.
In exactly the same spirit they welcomed the friars. Perhaps these
priests had "good medicine" that would help out. Maybe this new kind of
altar, image, and ceremony would bring rain and corn and health; they
were quite willing to try them. But imagine their consternation when
these Catholic priests after a while, unlike any people who had ever
before been taken into their community, began to insist that the new
religion be the only one, and that all other ceremonies be stopped. How
could the Hopi, who had depended upon their old ceremonies for
centuries, dare to stop them? Their revered traditions told them of
clans that had suffered famine and sickness and war as punishment for
having dropped or even neglected their religious dances and ceremonies,
and of their ultimate salvation when they returned to their faithful
performance.
The Hopi objected to the slavish labor of bringing timbers by hand from
the distant mountains for the building of missions and, according to
Hopi tradition, to the priests taking some of their daughters as
concubines, but the breaking point was the demand of the friars that all
their old religious ceremonies be stopped; this they dared not do.
So the "long gowns" were thrown over the cliff, and that was that.
Certain dissentions and troubles had come upon them, and some crop
failures, so they attributed their misfortunes to the anger of the old
gods and decided to stamp out this new and dangerous religion. It had
taken a strong hold on one of their villages, Awatobi, even to the
extent of replacing some of the old ceremonies with the new singing and
chanting and praying. And so Awatobi was destroyed by representatives
from all the other villages. Entering the sleeping village just before
dawn, they pulled up the ladders from the underground kivas where all
the men of the village were known to be sleeping because of a ceremony
in progress, then throwing down burning bundles and red peppers they
suffocated their captives, shooting with bows and arrows those who tried
to climb out. Women and children who resisted were killed, the rest were
divided among the other villages as prisoners, but virtually adopted.
Thus tenaciously have the Hopi clung to their old religion--noncombatants
so long as new cults among them do not attempt to stop the old.
There are Christian missionaries among them today, notably Baptists, but
they are quite safe, and the Hopi treat them well. Meantime the old
ceremonies are going strong, the rain falls after the Snake Dance, and
the crops grow. The Hopi realize that missionary influence will
eventually take some away from the old beliefs and practices and that
government school education is bound to break down the old traditional
unity of ideas. Naturally their old men are worried about it. Yet their
faith is strong and their disposition is kindly and tolerant, much like
that of the good old Methodist fathers who are disturbed over their
young people being led off into new angles of religious belief, yet
confident that "the old time religion" will prevail and hopeful that the
young will be led to see the error of their way. How long the old faith
can last, in the light of all that surrounds it, no one can say, but in
all human probability it is making its last gallant stand.
These Pueblo Indians are very unlike the nomadic tribes around them.
They are a sedentary, peaceful people living in permanent villages and
presenting today a significant transitional phase in the advance of a
people from savagery toward civilization and affording a valuable study
in the science of man.
Naturally they are changing, for easy transportation has brought the
outside world to their once isolated home. It is therefore highly
important that they be studied first-hand now for they will not long
stay as they are.