For those who survived. For those who did not.
For those who bear the weight.
CONTENTS
1.
A GATE UNGUARDED
2.
THE SORCERER’S KIVA
3.
THE SINGING HOUSE
4.
WOLVES FROM THE EAST
5.
AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD
6.
YOU WILL FIND ME POOR, WHILE YOU RETURN IN THE GRANDEUR OF PLENTY
7.
ACROSS THIS DEEP AND TROUBLED LAND
8.
LIMINAL MEN, LIMINAL SOULS
9.
AT THE MOMENT OF THE YELLOW DAWN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
IMAGE CREDITS
INDEX
MESA OF
SORROWS
. . . the woes that come on men whose city is taken; men slain and city wasted by fire, their children and low-girdled women taken into captivity.
—THE ILIAD, BOOK IX, 592–594
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
—WILLIAM FAULKNER, REQUIEM FOR A NUN
1
A Gate Unguarded
The women and maidens you take; the men and old women you may kill.
—TA’POLO, CHIEF OF AWAT’OVI, 1700
I had thought about the bodies, but not about the bones. They weren’t a lot, but they drew the eye. One could hardly take a step without the crunch of a ceramic sherd underfoot, but now I stepped even more carefully. Bleached white with exposure to sun and wind, just a few lay scattered on the sage-covered mounds of the ruins, a splinter of ulna here, what seemed a fragment of cranium a few steps farther along. Until the site had been fenced, sheep grazed the run of Antelope Mesa. Maybe these were sheep. If not, it seemed ironic that so many people’s remains rested in tidy curatorial boxes in the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, while these, perhaps their own brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, were strewn across fallen walls and houses of the High Place of the Bow Clan.
As my guide and I walked the site, we discussed how, although descendants of the victims might today wish to see their distant relatives repatriated from Cambridge and reburied in their former home, the larger, diverse Hopi community harbored doubts. Their proper handling posed an unexplored challenge. The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office bears responsibility for balancing the past with the present, the wishes of the remnant surviving clans, and the cultural integrity of the Hopi nation. As recently as the 1990s, the tribe had contemplated opening the ancient pueblo and its seventeenth-century Franciscan mission for public visitation and interpretation. That would provide an opportunity for Hopis to render their history in a location under tribal control and relieve the burden of tourist visitation on living Hopi towns. But when the prospectus, prepared in consultation with archaeologists from Arizona State University, came up for public comment, objections from descendants of those who died at Awat’ovi foreclosed further consideration. For them it remained an open wound of memory and sorrow, of an event distant in time while still immediate in meaning.
After several hours in the winds that leapt over the rimrock from the Jeddito Valley, we snaked our way back through the sagebrush and cholla and barbwire livestock trap and returned to the dusty SUV. We had walked each precinct of the site, the ancient Western Mound, the two plazas, the Eastern (and later, Colonial) Mounds, the tumbled stone walls of Mission San Bernardo de Aguatubi and its convento, and the mysterious kiva depressions. Its twenty-five rolling acres seemed stunning in their expanse—certainly the largest town in the Southwest when Spaniards stumbled upon it in 1540—and yet terribly intimate in their closer details. Vaguely traced by remaining lines of sandstone masonry, these were storage rooms and milling rooms and cooking rooms and living rooms, and subterranean places of worship. Nearly five centuries of history lay beneath these low rises, some twenty to thirty feet of human striving and loving, hunger and want, sex and death. A trained eye would see the sweep of the Hopi ceramics sequence lying scattered on the surface—from the earliest Kayenta Black-on-Whites through the local Jeddito and Awatovi Black-on-Yellows to the splendid artistry of Sikyatki Polychromes, and finally the more crudely fashioned San Bernardo Polychrome, the style attendant to the sixty-one years (1629–1680) when the Franciscan Order held sway on the mesa. A half-millennium of history and artistry in the glance of an eye.
San Bernardo Polychrome Sherd.
This much I knew. Fortress Awat’ovi, the easternmost pueblo village on Antelope Mesa, Arizona, had stood for centuries as the eastern gateway to the whole Hopi landscape. Long renowned for its martial strength, in the autumn of 1700 it fell easily to an early dawn assault, not by traditional enemies like the nomadic Utes or Navajos, but to a combined force of Hopis from neighboring villages. Its assailants apparently gained entrance under cover of darkness through an unguarded gate in the fortified masonry wall that encompassed the village. They encountered little resistance, for most of the people of Awat’ovi had spent the night in their kivas practicing traditional, yet perhaps unorthodox, rituals. Trapped therein, their attackers rained crushed red peppers, flaming torches, and arrows upon the victims. Those who were spared were taken captive and marched westward toward the other Hopi pueblos. At a place later known as “Mas’tcomo-mo” (Ghost Mound) many were tortured and slain; some few women and children survived to be married or adopted into their attackers’ villages. Balance had been restored, according to most Hopi accounts.
Yet the enigma remains—what provoked such gruesome internecine violence? How could the massacre have “restored balance?” Why were some allowed to live? Who collaborated in leaving the gate unguarded? What role did the recent return of Franciscan missionaries to the village play in the catastrophe? Why does this account resonate with even more ancient tales of violence in the pre-Columbian era? Why do Hopis, archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists each contend to know and explain the significance of that moment in the late autumn of 1700? What do the event, the place, and the people involved have to tell us about communal violence in the past, and in today’s world? Does a species of hope exist somewhere amid the rubble and lost lives of Awat’ovi Pueblo?
To an outsider attuned to the Western classical tradition, the annihilation of Awat’ovi evokes the destruction of another ancient city, Priam’s great and windy Ilium, “strong-built Troy.” That city’s fall in the twelfth century B.C. provided the foundation for the Western humanistic tradition. No less has the fall of Awat’ovi formed one substance of Hopi, and perhaps by extension, Puebloan, worldviews. The legendary anthropologist Ruth Benedict, writing in the 1930s, borrowed from the Classics in describing Puebloan peoples as “Apollonian,” in their values of order, control of the senses, and humility in self and behavior. The crisis at Awat’ovi sculpted the very core of these values, as the epic of Troy provided the rootstock for Western ideas about honor, shame, and the ruinous consequences of pride.
While the destruction of an entire city— its residents either slain or in bondage—in retribution for Paris’s abduction of Helen, seems barbarous and extreme today, Paris’s violation of the sacred laws of hospitality would have made perfect sense to Homer’s audience. Honor between men served as the bond that held life together and prevented “society from flying apart into lawlessness and savagery.” So, too, did the sense of koyaanisqatsi (chaos, or moral corruption) emerging at Awat’ovi offer only one solution: regeneration of an ideal social order through obliterating violence.
Tuhu’osti, autumn, brought a swirling cold wind across Antelope Mesa that night. The mesa’s sandstone escarpment loomed for several miles above the sandy bottoms of Jeddito Wash in what would become
Arizona, and its few scrubs of sagebrush and stunted junipers did little to break the course of the cold front. A new moon cast dim light, catching the wisps of smoke as they were torn from the rooftops of Awat’ovi Pueblo. Looming three masonry stories in height, and home to several hundred people, it had been founded centuries before by members of the powerful Aawatngyam (Bow Clan).
Once, six other villages had crowned this mesa’s eastern rim, frontier outposts in an ancient Pueblo Indian world that spoke many languages while sharing some ceremonial and cultural customs and contesting others. Five centuries had passed since the grand experiment at Chaco Canyon, Yupköyvi (the Place Beyond the Horizon) in the Hopi tongue, drew to a close and the hisat’sinom (those who lived long ago) had journeyed in search of Tuuwanasavi, “the earth-center.” These migrations had themselves taken centuries, leaving their traces in many places, until gradually the clans came together again at Situqui (Flower Butte), the four mesas of the Hopi world. Each clan brought new ideas, new ceremonies, new artistic expressions, and new villages had again been built of stone and adobe on mesa tops and sheltering slopes.
Now only Awat’ovi remained on Antelope Mesa. From the valley below, the village seemed to sleep. But an owl perched on the parapets of the Franciscan mission church at Awat’ovi would have seen signs of life.
From subterranean ceremonial chambers known as kivas there extended tall pine ladders, vaguely lit by the flicker of hearth fires within. Late autumn was the season of the wuwutcim wimi ceremonies, wherein the Tao (Singers), Ahl (Horns), Kwan (Agaves), and Wuwutcim societies initiated adolescent boys into tribal knowledge and manhood. Even more than the matrilineal clans, these four kiva societies were a man’s primary allegiance. Lasting more than two weeks and including collective rabbit hunts, shrine visits, dances, feasts, and nightlong singing in the kivas, the wuwutcim wimi had, for centuries, ensured the transfer of sacred knowledge across generations of men.
This night was, perhaps, that known as totokya, the climax of the ritual. Seven arduous dance performances by the scores of initiates had filled the day, dawn to dusk, young men painted in yellow pigments, kilted, with fox-skin pendants and feathers of parrots and eagles. Hundreds of villagers had turned out to view the dances, at times grave and at times bawdy, with women of the Mamzrau society occasionally taunting and tossing water or urine on the boys. The rhythm of drums had filled Awat’ovi’s plazas, pounded now to fine dust by the naked feet of the dancers. As dusk fell, the initiates returned once again to their kivas to resume their training. At the top of each kiva ladder remained one senior man to receive bowls and baskets of food—mutton stew, dried peaches, sliced squash, rolls of paper-thin blue corn piki bread—prepared by the women of the Pueblo in honor of their young men. Feasting would be followed by exhausted sleep.
But this night would—in fierce and enduring trauma—create questions that remain unanswered. Just what transpired in those kivas that night is one of the ghosts that haunt the story of Awat’ovi.
Even the wisps of smoke and firelight could not be seen by the encamped warriors below the mesa’s cliffs, tucked as they were below the eyesight of any a’losaka patrols who maintained order and security during such rituals. Young men and seasoned fighters composed the raiding throng, it is said, and “their number was incredibly large.” They had gathered beneath the mesa at sundown, while the people of Awat’ovi focused their attention on the culminating dance. All night they had lain low, awaiting a signal. To pass the hours, “some sharpened the points on their arrows, others the blades of their stone axes.” Preparing for the fight ahead, “they painted their faces, putting red ocher along their eyes above their nose.” They slashed vertical lines down their cheeks with black hematite. White eagle plumes adorned their hair, which allowed them “to run with great speed in pursuit of the enemy.” Each had with him a bundle of finely shredded juniper bark and greasewood kindling. Silent, they waited through the long and cold night.
They had come from Oraibi. From Walpi. From Mishongnovi. Hopi villages to the west.
At the very “moment of the yellow dawn” the signal came. From atop one kiva, out of sight from below, they heard a sharp crack, the snap of a blanket in the chill air. Rising up, they filed swiftly up stairstep stones to the unguarded western gate in Awat’ovi’s defensive wall. Fanning out through the village, the attackers followed their orders. Running from kiva to kiva, one group of the strongest men yanked the ladders out and hurled them aside. Those inside had no chance of escape. Dipping their juniper bark into the still-hot embers of the women’s cooking fires, the attackers hurled the burning torches and kindling into the kivas. Grabbing firewood and strings of dried red chiles from nearby house walls, they thrust this new fuel through the small kiva entrances. Arrows followed. “There was crying, screaming, coughing.” As the heavy roof beams of the kivas caught fire, they began to sag and collapse, one after another.
Another group of warriors raced through the village with their own orders, storming into the sleeping houses. “Wherever they came across a man, young or old, they killed him.” Some they seized and cast into the kivas, some suffered crushed skulls from stone axes, and some were thrown off the cliffs. Old women died too. Younger women and girls were seized and herded together along the western wall, under guard, while the attackers set fire to the village itself. Firewood stacks prepared for winter now became bonfires. Stores of corn flared as well. “Awat’ovi presented a terrible sight. It had been turned into a ruin.”
Forcing scores of captives before them, the attackers descended Antelope Mesa and journeyed toward their home villages. Crossing a small wash that locally dwelling Navajos called Tallahogan (Singing House)—a reference to the Catholic hymns they had heard emanating from the mission church in earlier years—the warriors began to debate among themselves the division of their spoils. The men from Oraibi claimed they were to have first choice among the captives, after which the Mishongnovi men were to have their selection. The Walpis would have rights to the planting fields of Awat’ovi, no women. If any women were left after the Oraibis chose theirs, the men from the other villages might have them. Yet the Mishongnovis and Walpis recalled no such agreement. They had already selected the women they wanted. “These are ours. We won’t give them back to you!”
While they argued, a small contingent of surviving Awat’ovi men and boys overtook them and attempted a rescue. They were quickly defeated, and the victors severed their heads and piled them in a cairn. Turning again to the dispute, since the Mishongnovis and Walpis would not give up their captives, the Oraibis shouted, “In that case no one will have them. Let’s get rid of them. If we kill them all, nobody can have them.”
Slaughter ensued. Several dozen women and girls died in the carnage, stabbed, beaten, or pierced with arrows. Pleas for mercy only enraged the men further. Some women suffered mutilation before death, arms or legs amputated, their breasts slashed. Finally, one woman cried: “Some of us are initiates of a society. We know how to make rain. We’ll teach you the art of rainmaking if you spare us and take us along.” A handful of Mamzrau (Rain) and Lakon (Basket) society members found safety in this way and were divided equally among the three villages. These few, made anew as Oraibis, Mishongnovis, or Walpis, were warned “never to show any longing” for Awat’ovi, “never to think of returning to it.”
Recently, Eric Polingyouma of Shungopovi Village has explained that since its destruction Awat’ovi “has been considered an evil place. No one at Hopi claims it.” It now stands as a caution to future generations.
Like the winds on that fateful night, Awat’ovi swirls with stories. Seldom do they align precisely; even less often do they resolve into consensus. Different forms of evidence and differing genres of recounting history—that of traditional Hopi oral narratives, that of Franciscan missionaries, that of the archaeologist’s trowel, that of the ethnographer’s notebook, to name but a few—produce diverse and refracting voices through which we hear the mystery. A tension that is an endur
ing attribute of the past. What follows is but one history of Awat’ovi, a history, not the history, one author’s journey into a distant time and enigmatic event. The swirl of stories recounted here reminds us that we may think we are done with the past, but the past may not be done with us.
Early in the year 1881, for instance, “a mysterious and self-styled ethnographer” named Alexander McGregor Stephen arrived at Keams Canyon, a trading post and stagecoach stop just beneath the northwest slope of Antelope Mesa. Born in Scotland in 1845, perhaps educated at the University of Edinburgh, by 1862 he was in the United States and enlisted as a private in the Union Army, 92nd New York Infantry. He probably saw combat at the siege of Petersburg and the battle at Little Sailor’s Creek, Virginia. Mustering out in 1866, he headed for the West and prospected for gold and silver in Nevada and Utah, practicing metallurgy to keep himself in cash. At Keams Canyon he hooked up with Thomas Keam, who ran the Tusayán Trading Post there.
Whatever Stephen’s education, he had an exceptional facility for languages, and after marrying a Navajo woman, he quickly picked up that language and soon was fluent in Hopi as well. Well equipped to serve as guide and interpreter for the sudden arrival of anthropologists yearning to study the ancient denizens of the Southwest, Stephen would give us one of the earliest Hopi accounts of Awat’ovi’s demise.
In 1892, just two years before his death, Stephen transcribed and translated the Awat’ovi story from Sáliko, a woman of Walpi Village and, by virtue of her descent from a captive survivor of the Awat’ovi destruction, the hereditary chief of the women’s Mamzrau Society ceremonials at Walpi. Certain key details enter the narrative with Sáliko, the only woman to provide an account in what is today more than a century of Hopi versions of the event.
A large village with many inhabitants, said Sáliko, Awat’ovi lay under the leadership of a man named Ta’polo, who was “not at peace with his people and there was quarreling and trouble.” Because of the internal strife, little rain had fallen, although the spring-fed gardens below Awat’ovi remained fertile. Despite this, the men of Awat’ovi were thuggish with their neighbors; “they went in small bands among the fields of other villagers and cudgeled any solitary workers they found. If they overtook any woman they ravished her, and they waylaid hunting parties, taking the game, after beating and sometimes killing the hunters.”
Mesa of Sorrows Page 1