* * * * *
For some years the writer has been merely a friendly neighbor to these
friendly people, and this past summer she spent some time among her Hopi
friends, studying their present-day life, domestic and ceremonial, and
listening to their stories. The foregoing pages record her observations,
supplemented largely by the recordings of well-known authorities who
have studied these people.
To her own mind it is clear that the Hopi are living today by their
age-old and amazingly primitive traditions, as shown by their planting,
hunting, house building, textile and ceramic arts, and their ceremonies
for birth, marriage, burial, rain-making, etc. Even their favorite
stories for amusement are traditional. Surely this can not last much
longer in these days when easy transportation is bringing the modern
world to their very door. Only a few years ago they were geographically
isolated and had been so for centuries. Culturally, the Hopi are not a
new, raw people, but old, mature, long a sedentary and peaceful people,
building up during the ages a vast body of traditional literature
embodying law, religion, civic and social order, with definite patterns
for the whole fabric of their life from the cradle to the grave and on
into Maskim, the home of Hopi Souls. It is because they have so long
been left alone, with their own culture so well suited to their nature
and to their environment, that we find them so satisfied to remain as
they are, friendly, even cordial, but conservative.
The Hopi is glad to use the white man's wagon, cook stove, sugar, and
coffee, but he prefers his own religion, government, social customs--the
great things handed down in his traditions. Their very conservatism is
according to one of their oldest traditions, which is:
=Tradition for Walking Beside the White Man But in Footsteps of Fathers=
In 1885, Wicki, chief of the Antelope Society at Walpi, told Mr. A.M.
Stephen one of the most complete and interesting variants ever collected
of the Snake myth.
One of its interesting details concerns a prophesy of the manner in
which the Hopitah are to take on the White man's culture. In plain words
the Spider Woman tells Tiyo that a time will come when men with white
skins and a strange tongue shall come among the Hopitah, and the Snake
Brotherhood, having brave hearts, will be first to make friends and
learn good from them. But the Hopitah are not to follow in the white
men's footsteps but to walk _beside them_, always keeping in the
footsteps of their fathers![36]
That is just what the Hopi are doing today.
[Footnote 36: Stephen, A.M., Hopi Tales: Jour. Amer. Folklore, vol. 42,
1929, p. 37.]