Ta’polo believed the source of this behavior to lie in sorcery, “his people had all become powáko (sorcerers), and hence should all be destroyed.” It was Ta’polo who approached Oraibi and Walpi for aid; recruiting warriors to lay waste his own village. It was Ta’polo who left the gate in the massive wall unbarred, and even he who swung it wide as the attackers made their entrance. It was he who pointed out the large kiva called Püvyüñobi, “the sorcerers’ kiva,” wherein the massacre commenced. On Ta’polo’s fate Sáliko was silent.
Of the captives she offered more detail. Sáliko’s ancestor was recognized during the carnage at Mas’ki (Death House) as the maumzrau’mongwi (chief of the Mamzrau Society) by one of the men from Walpi, who asked “whether she would be willing to initiate the women of Walpi in the rites of the Mamzrau.” Thus she survived, and the ritual too stayed alive in a new home. Other of the women who “knew how to bring rain” and were willing to teach the songs were spared. The Oraibi men, she said, even saved “a man who knew how to make the peach grow, and that is why Oraibi has such an abundance of peaches now.” The Mishongnovis saved a prisoner who knew “how to make the sweet small corn grow.” Any woman who had “song-prayers” and was willing to teach them also survived, and “no children were designedly killed, but distributed among the villages”—although most went to Mishongnovi. The remainder “were tortured and dismembered and left to die on the sand hills, where their bones were to be found at “Mas’tcomo-mo.”
Thus intervillage conflict, rape, political struggles, sorcery, revenge, and annihilation have inflected the story for over a century. As have rescue, redemption, the persistence of sacred ceremonies, song-prayers, sweet corn, and peaches. Even as new historical forces swept across the Hopi mesas, the narrative retains, discards, and leaves unknown many elements. And beneath this century of stories lay different tales, buried deep within the fallen stones and drifting sands of Awat’ovi.
Today, the mysteries we seek to resolve involve a larger story, that of the Awat’ovi ruins, the Hopi people, and the tortured relationship between America’s indigenous communities and our fascination with their archaeological heritage. Hopis, Navajos, Native American activists, archaeologists, ethnographers, physical anthropologists, historians, museum curators, the Catholic Church, even U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs agents each have a stake in how the story is rendered. Combined, their claims become a cacophony of stories.
Awat’ovi in the Greater Southwest.
Mutilated bodies, wizards, sorcerers, Indians, and archaeologists—this is the stuff of popular fiction and adventure films. But much more lies within this vignette; in fact, the enigma of Awat’ovi and its many contested meanings are matters of intense urgency. In its essence, “Awat’ovi” now serves as a lightning rod for questions of vital significance: how does one narrate the meaning of an event that many of the descendants of both its perpetrators and its victims might rather forget? Yet it remains intensely alive for them. How do communities learn from the past, and what are the consequences of avoiding painful memories? What might be gained, and lost, in retelling the story?
It seems ironic that in American popular culture and in much tribal tradition itself the term “Hopi” is synonymous with “peace,” for Awat’ovi was not the first Hopi village to experience prophetic violence in the interest of cultural purification. Hopi oral histories recount similar “tales of destruction” across several centuries, some lodged in mythic pasts, others clearly identifiable in place and time. These prophetic histories stress cycles of corruption and renewal, tales that oppose koyaanisqatsi, or disorder and transgressions of the sacred, against suyanisqatsi—lives lived according to principles of communitarian harmony and balance. In each case the narrative pattern resonates across time: spiritual corruption requires violent cleansing. In what now appears a timeless trope, in 1938 the Hopi man Byron Adams declared to representatives of the BIA that at Awat’ovi “the other villages got together and decided to destroy it because evil things were done there. There was no decency. It was agreed that it should never be touched again.”
2
The Sorcerer’s Kiva
. . . there has been a lot of interest in the village from the scientific community, who want to investigate it and learn who lived there and how they lived before it was destroyed.
—ERIC POLINGYOUMA, 2008
Observing the anxiety of the Hopi workmen, I abandoned excavations in the po-wa’-ko kib-va . . . for I did not wish the report to be circulated among their people that I desired to find the skeletons of wizards, as it might prejudice them against me.
—JESSE WALTER FEWKES, 1893
But for the cloven hoofs of grazing sheep and the soft tread of shepherds, Antelope Mesa’s dune grass and juniper groves lay untouched for nearly two hundred years. Yet across the century thereafter it witnessed some of the most vigorous and culturally intrusive archaeological investigations in the American Southwest, especially through the archaeologists’ convention of employing Hopis as diggers and sifters of the remnants of their own ancestral homes. In these early expeditions, the questions that adventurers-cum-academics sought to answer, along with naïve curiosity, often led them to impinge upon aspects of Hopi (and other Pueblo peoples’) culture in ways that produced discomfort and dismay. This, initially a matter of cross-cultural confusion, would intensify in time toward outright and mutual discord.
We might dismiss this as the legacy of an earlier, imperial approach to studying “primitives,” the seedbed from which anthropology itself arose in the nineteenth century as Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States extended their economic and military presence into the homelands of “exotic indigenes.” Yet some of these questions, especially those that suggested that the pre-Columbian history of the Southwest might not have been so peaceful, self-sublimating, and communitarian as popular imagination wished, have in the twenty-first century emerged as central to social scientists’ thinking about the region’s past. Thus the very human inclination that people be stewards of their own history—especially indigenous people who have experienced prolonged surveillance by non-Indian fetishists—runs smack into the equally human curiosity to “know what happened.” Sorcery—the practice of maleficent arts on neighbors—figures prominently among these questions, and the study of those dark talents has become something of a cottage industry among anthropologists. Whether it be a fascination with familiar cases, like that of the witchcraft outbreak at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, or the much less familiar phenomenon of witchcraft among America’s Indian nations, anthropologists have long offered interpretations that stress sorcery’s role in explaining human misfortune and in regulating communal conflicts in small-scale societies.
Alexander Stephen solicited Sáliko’s story about the “Sorcerer’s Kiva” at the behest of Jesse Walter Fewkes. Like Stephen, Fewkes would become a member of the charter generation of southwestern anthropologists. Little in Fewkes’s background would have suggested this trajectory, however. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1850 and educated at Harvard, he took a Ph.D. in zoology with an emphasis in marine biology, further refined by a two-year postdoctoral position at the University of Leipzig. Returning to Cambridge in 1879, he obtained a position at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.
A decade later Fewkes’s life took a dramatic turn. In 1887 a summer field season studying California medusae (jellyfish) included a visit from Harvard classmate Augustus Hemenway’s family, who were undertaking a grand tour of the continent. The Hemenways, Bostonians with enormous wealth from the shipping industry, were passionately interested in southwestern Indians and archaeology, having been introduced to both by Frank Hamilton Cushing during the summer of 1885. Fewkes, Cushing, and the Hemenways would, over a weekend in Carmel, begin one of the seminal (and strained) triangular partnerships in southwestern archaeology.
Soon to be Fewkes’s mentor, Frank Cushing had pioneered American anthropology, “the first professional anthropologist to ‘go t
o the field’ and function as a ‘participant observer,’ ” according to historian of anthropology Don D. Fowler, and shaped what would become standard rites of passage for graduate students hoping to gain entrance to the new discipline. Born in upstate New York in 1857, a lonely and often sickly child who turned to the woods and “playing Indian” to satisfy his imagination, Cushing read the seminal works of Lewis Henry Morgan on the Iroquois and human social organization as a teenager, and at age seventeen had successfully published an essay on his local archaeology with the Smithsonian Institution.
From the top of Zuni, looking east, by John K. Zillers, 1879.
Cushing left Cornell University in his freshman year to take work at the National Museum in Washington, D.C., concentrating on exhibits for display by the Smithsonian at the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition. Just three years later, he found himself appointed as “ethnologist” to John Wesley’s Powell’s Smithsonian-sponsored “collecting party” under orders to “find out all you can about some typical tribe of Pueblo Indians. Make your own choice of field, and use your own methods; only, get the information,” were his orders.
Cushing chose as his subjects the people of Zuni Pueblo, distant neighbors to the Hopis across the New Mexico line among the red cliffs and green pines of the Zuni Mountains and some one hundred miles southeast of Antelope Mesa. Although under orders to “get the information” within three months, Cushing would stay among the Zunis for more than four years. He insisted on making sketches of ceremonials at the Zuni Pueblo of Halona, poked into secret ritual areas, and earned the resentment of many of his hosts. Yet an alliance with Patricio Piño (Palowahtiwa), the pueblo’s governor, protected him, and he proved remarkably adept at learning the Zuni language (an “isolate” unrelated to any other indigenous language in the Americas). Within two years he gained initiation into the Bow Priest Society, one requirement of which was to take an enemy scalp, which Cushing claimed to have done on an Apache battlefield; others believed it to have been mailed from his father and colleagues at the Army Medical Museum. Within a year, he earned the Zuni name Tenatsali, or Medicine Flower. In his enthusiasm to “become Indian” he fashioned himself a costume that earned him the perhaps less honorable name of “Many Buttons.”
Despite what might seem a caricature of the anthropologist “gone Native,” as the four years progressed, Cushing played an important role in furthering Zuni diplomacy in Washington, in preventing white ranchers from encroaching on Zuni lands, and in resisting Mormon and Presbyterian evangelizing efforts at the pueblo in New Mexico. Even as his frail health continued to limit his aspirations, he accompanied the delegation of Zuni elders and Governor Piño to a meeting with President Chester A. Arthur in 1882, and took Zuni legal battles into the halls of Congress.
On one such trip, Cushing brought three Zuni guests to the Hemenway house at Manchester-by-the Sea, and spent long evenings translating their “legends and folk tales” for his enchanted hosts. With these trips would come the links to Jesse Fewkes and the latter’s role as heir apparent to Medicine Flower.
“Many Buttons” (Frank Hamilton Cushing) in Zuni costume, ca. 1880–1881.
Frank Hamilton Cushing with Laiyuahtsailunkya, Naiyutchi, Palowahtiwa, Kiasiwa, and Nanake (detail), 1882.
By 1886, Mrs. Hemenway decided to sponsor the Cushing-led Hemenway Expedition to trace Zuni and Hopi migrations through archaeological field research. But Cushing’s fragile health and often-quixotic theories (he had decided that the Zunis descended from Mexico’s Toltecs) led to his removal in 1889. Fewkes, of all people, found himself appointed director of the expedition. His decision to accept the job was doubtless reinforced by the fact that his position at the zoology museum had not been renewed. It seems a pattern of plagiarism had been discovered in his research and writing. His new focus on archaeology would not correct that tendency.
Fewkes endorsed Cushing’s research agenda, if not his interpretations. As journalists, photographers, and railroad tourism opened the Southwest to American readers and travelers, the discovery of ancient civilizations inspired popular fascination. While these ruins might not resonate with European cultural traditions like those of the classical Mediterranean, their massive masonry walls and wide windblown plazas offered something in addition to lost cities and cliff dwellings—living Puebloan neighbors who claimed direct lineal descent from the builders of those archaeological enigmas.
Unlike Europe, the Mediterranean, or the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, the American Southwest allowed the curious to imagine that in the exotic ceremonies they witnessed at pueblos like Acoma, Zuni, Taos, and Walpi—renowned for its Snake Dance, wherein Snake Society priests danced with live rattlesnakes clenched in their teeth—they might be experiencing millennium-old rituals firsthand. “Living ancients” inhabited the desert Southwest, and the founding members of the American archaeological profession saw it as their duty to make the connections between the wind-swept plazas of abandoned pueblos and the dancing throngs and thundering drums of similar plazas in thriving, if “timeless,” modern Indian villages.
This imperative gave birth to what would be called the “direct-historical” method. Avid amateurs with aspirations to scientific legitimization like Cushing, Fewkes, Adolph Bandelier, and Edgar Lee Hewett sought to use the information contained in Indian “legends and folk tales,” as well as contemporary study of ritual and social organization gleaned through the new field of ethnology (literally, the knowledge of culture), to inform scholarly and public understanding of the ancient denizens of the Southwest. Using analogy and homology, they proposed to “read backward” their ethnology and assess that against archaeological materials discovered in their excavations to test the hypotheses that clear links across vast sweeps of time might exist.
Fresh to his new position directing the Hemenway Expedition, Fewkes employed his scientific training in zoology to shape his research agenda. In contrast with the charismatic and highly emotional Cushing, who absorbed languages and lifeways by full immersion (some would say by the romance of conquest), Fewkes sought detachment and distance in his data collection. But he was not above pillaging his predecessor’s field notes for insights that he happily published as his own. Shortly before his death, Cushing would write a friend, “Not only does Dr. Fewkes pre-empt my field, or rather, jump my claim, but he makes use of my material . . . without even quotation marks when my own words are used.” Fewkes would become a master at utilizing others’ hard work for his own professional advancement. As old southwestern hand Washington Matthews would write to Cushing, “Our Boston friend [Fewkes], while in Zuni never spoke a word of Zuni and didn’t know a word of Spanish . . . yet he learned all about them in two months. What a pity we have not a few more such brilliant lights in Ethnography!”
Doubtless Cushing and Matthews were right to criticize Fewkes’s peripatetic and superficial ethnography, but the latter’s research agenda pointed to a development in the discipline that would come to dominate the field in later decades: a comparative approach that emphasized the generation of theoretical advances about human cultural evolution alongside the collection and inventory of clay vessels, grinding stones, projectile points, and ancient textiles preserved in the dry desert air.
Zuni and Hopi begged for comparison, since of the pueblos west of the Rio Grande Valley they were unquestionably the “least tainted” by contact with Euro-Americans. Although each spoke mutually unintelligible languages, and would come to be understood as quite different in many aspects, their similar aggregated pueblo settlements, clan-based social organization, and ceremonial calendars suggested membership in a broader Puebloan worldview. Like the Hopi’s search for Tuuwanasavi, “the earth-center,” Zuni migration stories organized around a quest for Itiwana, “the exact center point of the universe,” wherein they would locate at the village of Halona. They shared the Katsina religion, and many secret societies. From his vantage point at Zuni, the Hopi mesas beckoned to Fewkes, who saw there the possibility of crafting a regional understan
ding of Southwestern prehistory.
In 1891, Fewkes moved the headquarters of the Hemenway Expedition from Cushing’s old house at Zuni Pueblo to the Hopi mesas. In well over his head, uncertain of himself, and given to bouts of insecurity, he found a savior in Alexander Stephen. Deeply engaged in his language and culture studies of the Hopi, and living on First Mesa with his Navajo wife, Stephen seemed not to aspire to an academic life, but very much wished to see his knowledge of the Hopis available to the wider world. Stephen provided Fewkes introductions and access to Hopi people and ritual life that Fewkes could never have obtained on his own. For $115 per month from 1892 to 1894, Stephen served as a researcher and ambassador for Fewkes, who regularly published “Stephen’s intimate knowledge of Hopi dances and ceremonies as his own.”
In the summer of 1892, Fewkes decided to test his scientific methods against Hopi oral tradition by exploring the destruction of Awat’ovi. He first directed Stephen to collect as many forms of the narrative as possible, while he himself looked into the writings of predecessors like Bandelier and John Bourke. Bandelier had gleaned some few references to the event from his study of Spanish colonial archival documents—the earliest a 1701 mention by Juan Domingo de Mendoza of the “annihilation of the converted Indians of Aguatubi.”
Mesa of Sorrows Page 2