Frustrated, Agaitsay laid down a curse that would shape future relationships between the Tanos and Hopis that endures today. Handing a small ear of corn to the Hopi chief, he asked that the Hopi “chew it up but do not swallow it.” Once the Hopi had done so, Agaitsay demanded he spit the chewed corn back into his hand, and once done, he took the chewed corn into his own mouth, and swallowed. “What is the meaning of this?” asked the Hopi.
“It means that we will take from your mouth the language you speak. We will speak Hopi.”
The Hopi replied, “It is good you will speak Hopi. Now you chew some corn and give it to me.” Agaitsay chewed some corn, but at the last moment spit the corn into a deep hole that the Tanos had dug at the very edge of the lands allotted for their new village. His people then hastily filled the hole with earth and “covered it with heavy rocks.” Shocked, the Hopi asked again the meaning of Agaitsay’s actions.
“It means that you will never have our language in your mouths. We will speak Hopi and Tewa, but your people will never speak the Tewa language. If you were to speak Tewa you would be able to infiltrate into our rituals and ceremonies. . . . We want you to know we will remain Tewas forever.” The hole into which Agaitsay spit the chewed corn remains the most important shrine at the village today, marked by a large boulder of petrified wood.
Tewa Village in 1893, looking north from the edge of the community as defined by the “language curse.”
The Hopis of Walpi had gained battle-tested fighters to protect their eastern flanks from enemies, whether Utes or Navajos or Apaches or Spaniards. The residents of Tewa Village guard their identities fiercely, however, and even today distinguish themselves as holding specialized ritual knowledge associated with warfare. Although intermarriage between Tanos and Hopis became common in the centuries that followed the migration, and clan linkages bind the Tewas to ceremonial kinspeople across all three Hopi mesas, “few Hopis have even a passive knowledge of Arizona Tewa.” The strength of the curse laid down by Agaitsay and embraced by all the descendants of the migration endures. But in those first years after founding of Tewa Village, the question of just where the Tanos would find wives to sustain and increase their numbers remained an open one. Tensions around this issue remained central to Hopi-Tano intercultural relationships. Intermarriage between original and arriving clans had always been resolved on the Hopi mesas, at least in part, by the familial and emotional ties that marriage created. Events soon to unfold to their east, on Antelope Mesa, would provide an alternative to the rigid boundaries that Agaitsay had spit into the sandy soil that memorable day.
The wolves from the east were biding their time.
Map showing route of Tano migration to Hopi mesas.
5
At Play in the Fields of the Lord
We are facing a highly involved political situation, and if we don’t get the permit renewed, the general statement is going to be that the Hopis don’t want us to work. This, of course, is not so.
—J. O. BREW, CAMP JOURNAL, MAY 26, 1939
In 1935, archaeologists in the Peabody Museum at Harvard University also cast hungry eyes westward to the Hopi Mesas. Bill Claflin, curator of southeastern archaeology at the museum, and Peabody director Donald Scott saw a major excavation at Awat’ovi as an important bridge between the earlier focus of archaeologists in the region on the pre-Columbian era and an emerging interest in the Spanish colony and Franciscan missionization. Awat’ovi promised “an unprecedented opportunity . . . for linking precontact Hopi settlement to what was known about historic Hopi life and thus to modern Hopi culture.” They recruited a twenty-nine-year-old doctoral student, John Otis Brew, to craft a research proposal that could be used to solicit funding for such a project.
Little about “Jo” Brew’s background and training suggested he was the ideal man for the task. A 1928 graduate of Dartmouth College with a degree in fine arts and an interest in the archaeology of the classic world, his first archaeological fieldwork took place in Illinois. In 1931 he joined a Peabody expedition in the Alkali Ridge region of southeastern Utah, his first exposure to ancestral Puebloan prehistory. Despite Brew’s inexperience, his work there proved so well designed and meticulous that the Peabody appointed him director of the Alkali Ridge project, which would occupy him until 1934, when he took a year to excavate hill forts and lake island dwellings in western Ireland.
When Brew returned to Harvard the following year to write up his Alkali Ridge dissertation (which proved much delayed; he would not defend and earn his doctorate until 1945), he set to work on the research design for Awat’ovi Pueblo. His vision was robust. “Taken in conjunction with ethnological work and present and projected developments in physical anthropology [the study of human remains] . . . a carefully considered archaeological project lasting with sufficient funds over a period of years should produce in Northeastern Arizona the most complete Southwestern study yet attempted.” His plan, he promised, “would go back much further in time and come down to the present in the time-scale.” Ambitious, and yet, as Brew would come to realize, fraught with political challenges in the “present” that no archaeologists had yet faced.
Brew consulted the earlier reports authored by Victor Mindeleff, Jesse Fewkes, and A. V. Kidder, who had briefly explored Antelope Mesa in the 1920s. He quickly grasped that a project devoted to “deep chronology” ought to encompass more than the single site of Awat’ovi, since investigations to date had not reached the lower levels of that site, and thus it might not represent the baseline of cultural development in Tusayán. The full expanse of Antelope Mesa, therefore, became the field the expedition would explore. Kawaika’a, Chakpahu, Lululongturqui, Ne Suftanga, and Kokopynyama would also be surveyed and in some cases, excavated, in an “attempt to trace the cultural development in the area back to Basket-maker [the earliest Puebloan culture, dating to c. A.D. 600]. . . . [the project] would be of inestimable value to Southwestern Prehistory.” The breadth of the venture would be the most ambitious to date, and raise questions about the evolution of Pueblo culture and identity that remain unresolved today.
Map of the Hopi mesas and associated settlements.
In March 1935, Claflin, Scott, and Brew met to discuss his report over lunch at the Union Club in Boston. Brew proposed a budget for the first year’s fieldwork of $2,500 (the first in a series of budgets that would underestimate costs and require deficit spending by the museum). They also discussed the politics at Hopi and potential resistance to the research design. Brew cautioned that he would seek permission for the project from the Bureau of Indian Affairs “without applying to the Hopis themselves.” He explained that disgruntled Hopis had expelled Jesse Fewkes from Antelope Mesa forty years before, and only should the Hopis identify the “expedition with the Government” would they realize “the work could not be stopped [emphasis in original].” He proposed that it would “be wise for the leader of the expedition to adopt and maintain scrupulously a double attitude toward the Hopi.” Friendly relationships might be key to “management of the labour,” but neither should the Indians “lose sight of the official nature of the expedition.” Whatever they might think of the project, they must understand that it “is useless to act.” In a hint of prescience, he noted that John Collier, President Roosevelt’s new commissioner of the BIA, might reform practices such that it “necessitates getting permission from the Hopis.” If this proved to be the case, he proposed negotiating with the “Council of the First Mesa Chiefs at Walpi, [for] the small units which compose the Hopi ‘nation’ do not agree particularly among themselves.” It would be best to have the “nearest neighbors ‘for’ rather than ‘against’ the project.” At the lunch’s end, Scott appointed Brew, who had never visited the Antelope Mesa or the Hopi mesas to the west, director of the project.
Anticipating a 1935 summer-fall field season, the Peabody sought an excavation permit from the Department of the Interior under the Antiquities Act of 1906. The act was the first United States law to provide general pro
tection for any general kind of cultural or natural resource. As drafted by Edgar Lee Hewitt, who would go on to found the School of American Archaeology in 1907, Section 3 of the Act required that “the examination of ruins, the excavation of archaeological sites, or the gathering of objects of antiquity” on lands administered by the Departments of Interior, Agriculture, or War be carried out only after a permit to do so had been issued by the secretary of the department responsible for the land in question. The permits were to be issued only to institutions “properly qualified to conduct such examinations, excavations, or gatherings. . . .” Furthermore, the objective of these permitted activities was to be “for the benefit of reputable museums, universities, colleges, or other recognized scientific or educational institutions, with a view to increasing the knowledge of such objects.” Finally, the act required that the collections of materials from these investigations be placed in public museums for preservation and public benefit.
Peabody’s plan of work encompassed only the 1935 field season, and Brew presumed that renewals would be pro forma in the years ahead. Although they would take several years to erupt, contradictory forms of federal paternalism would converge to create yet another crisis at Awat’ovi Pueblo. Reformers in the Roosevelt administration laid the terrain in 1934, with the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act championed by Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs John Collier, Sr. Alarmed by the disintegration of tribal lands in the wake of the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, which surveyed tribal lands and allotted parcels to individual Indian owners in the hopes of producing “yeoman” farmers and ranchers in the idealized Jeffersonian model, and ashamed by the collapse of Indian economic and cultural self-sufficiency that followed, Collier’s “Indian New Deal” sought to reorganize collectively held tribal lands and provide self-government to tribes through constitutional forms of government.
Collier appointed Oliver La Farge, anthropologist, director of the National Association on Indian Affairs and 1930 Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Laughing Boy—a romance set among the Navajos, and soon to be a major motion picture—to negotiate the crafting of the Hopi constitution. This would prove a daunting task that confirmed Albert Yava’s description of the Hopis as peoples who “did not consider themselves as belonging to the same tribe.” One student of the question cautioned that “to write a workable constitution for the politically diverse Hopi villages was hopeless from the start . . . the extreme parochialism and distrust among them precluded the successful creation of a single governing instrument for them all.” These culturally internal challenges were perhaps intensified by the fact that La Farge’s primary fieldwork and research had been among the Navajos, with whom the Hopis were waging a struggle over the allocation of Reservation lands. La Farge assured Collier that he could be “pro-Hopi” in working toward a tribal constitution, yet betrayed prejudices in the correspondence between the two men. “A cantankerous and tight-minded group of Indians . . . [who] quarrel constantly and the talking never ceases,” he said of them, and worried that formalizing a democratic and secular system of governance would encounter “melancholy results . . . [since] the chiefs and the religion still govern 80% of the people.”
Traditional forms of Hopi governance, especially the behind-the-scenes customary power of each village kikmongwi (chief), presented particular challenges to La Farge’s efforts to convince the Hopis of the utility found in adopting a western-styled democratic system of popular sovereignty. The kikmongwi opposed any unifying government that would eliminate the sovereignty of their individual communities, whereas the “boilerplate” constitutions utilized by the Indian Reorganization Act aimed to centralize governance that could further the causes of the federally recognized tribes. La Farge shuttled from mesa to mesa and village to village, needing to be “everywhere at once, to spend hours with numerous individuals as well as groups, at widely separated points.”
He gained Collier’s approval to customize the IRA constitution in order that the new tribal council could exercise no authority in strictly village matters, and that in the traditionalist villages the kikmongwi would appoint council members who answered directly to him, whereas in the “progressive,” often-Christian villages council representatives would enjoy popular election. Thus composed, the council would represent the whole Hopi tribe in dealing with the outside world.
On October 26, 1936, about half of the Hopis eligible to vote cast ballots decisively in favor of the new constitution, 651 supporting and 104 opposed. Whether or not these 755 voters truly represented a majority of voters remains hotly contested, yet even if they surpassed the 50 percent margin, those who “voted with their feet” by ignoring the referendum clearly represented a negative majority. The lack of confidence among Hopis doomed the council’s ability from the very beginning, therefore, and by 1940 participation in and the legitimacy of the council fell so low that it was disbanded; external-relations decisions reverted back to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. La Farge, who had initially congratulated himself and Collier on their “outstanding success,” would later lay the blame on Hopis themselves, rather than on what critics like Frank Waters called “a white man’s concept utterly foreign to the nature and background” of the Hopis. La Farge may have agreed, although in tone rather differently than Waters. “The council stopped meeting, no new representatives were elected, the constitution went into abeyance. Above all, no village, I think, was prepared to surrender any part of its sovereignty or to lay aside any of its quarrels with other villages.”
Yet, at least in the case of the Peabody Expedition to Antelope Mesa, and the memory of Awat’ovi to the Hopi people, the short-lived constitution would prove a powerful new historical force. And La Farge’s comments may have echoed issues at work within Tusayán many centuries earlier.
Peabody’s Awat’ovi expedition commenced its first field season on September 24, 1935, and ran for ten weeks. Brew served as leader, with the assistance of Alden Stevens, J. A. Lancaster as crew foreman, and Lyndon Thompson as cook. Brew hired eight Hopi crewmembers, three from First Mesa and five from Second Mesa. Each man was paid $2.00 per working day, compared to $3.00 per day for Thompson. Six from this inaugural crew—Gibson Namoki and Sylvan Nash of First Mesa and Everett Harris, Alec Dennis, Leland Dennis, and Jacob Poleviyum from Second Mesa—would serve in subsequent years and emerge well schooled in archaeological fieldwork methods. Brew would write that the Hopi excavators were so “familiar with the materials of ancient construction that they recognized plaster walls, adobe floors, etc., immediately. . . . They have sharp eyes, too, attested to by the number of tiny square and other shaped pieces of turquoise we are getting which seemed to have dropped out of the turquoise mosaics.”
Peabody Expedition Camp, with the Western Mound in the middle distance. The Hopi crew’s tents are in the far distance, right.
The expedition formed a tight-knit and largely self-sufficient community, dubbed “New Awat’ovi,” even as the days grew short and nights cold in the high desert autumn. “We are quite comfortable in camp, with stoves in the tents,” Brew wrote. The camp was “a scene of great activity: men in the trench, engineering department with plane table, range pole, pegs, and flags all over the site; a crew digging fence post holes; a team of horses and scraper; one Hopi making boxes, and the cook making cinnamon rolls, angel cake, and pun’kin pie (out of sweet potatoes).” The Hopis proved diligent workers, but kept largely to themselves, sharing a smaller tent-camp complex somewhat apart from the main camp. At the main camp, the archaeologists converted the pottery tent to an evening “concert hall,” from which they offered “an answer to the Hopi songs that drifted over to us after dinner from the camp of the Hopi workmen.”
Brew’s plan of work involved three elements: reconnaissance mapping of Antelope Mesa in its entirety; survey and test excavations on the large sites of Awat’ovi, Kawaika’a, Chakpahu, Lululongturqui, Ne Suftanga, and Kokopynyama; and investigation of several “small, early sites” in order to assess the tempo
ral depth of settlement on the mesa. In all, surveyors identified sixty-one archaeological sites, ranging in age from Basketmaker III (A.D. 600–800, with the innovations of bean cultivation to augment corn agriculture, pottery-making, and the adoption of bow-and-arrow weaponry) to the end of ancient settlement on the mesa with the destruction of Awat’ovi in 1700. Thus, more than 1,000 years of human occupation lay before their eyes, from the humblest of pit-houses to the great pueblos numbering several stories and hundreds of masonry rooms encompassed in massive villages. At its peak during the classic period (A.D. 1150–1300), the mesa, fine springs, and farming lands below the caprock may have supported a population of more than 4,000. At last, southwestern archaeology had a single location in which the sweep of Ancestral Puebloan prehistory and history lay open to the eyes, hands, and minds of scientific exploration and analysis. Although the earliest periods, ranging from Basketmaker III through the Pueblo I (A.D. 800–1000) and Pueblo II (A.D. 1000–1150), were the least well understood elements of this prehistory, the impressive and enigmatic ruins of Awat’ovi Pueblo would act as a magnet for investigation in the seasons ahead.
Aerial view of Awat’ovi from the south. Surface of Antelope Mesa, with Awat’ovi in the foreground. The honeycomb area in the left foreground is the excavated portion of the Western Mound; to the right, the Eastern Pueblo and Mission San Bernardo de Aguatubi.
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