On February 15, Father Arnold Heinzmann wrote from Keams Canyon to announce that “the box containing the precious parcel arrived by mail this morning and I thank God fervently for this great favor. It was very amusing to hear the mail man exclaim as he drew up to the house; ‘What on earth are you expected [sic] that is very light and might be valued at $500.00?’ For the moment I could not guess. Then I saw the name of the sender and all was clear.” Father Stauble weighed in as well, penning a note of gratitude for the “great privilege to possess and honor the remains of one of our predecessors in bringing the light of the Gospel to the Hopis.” In the fog of relief felt by all the parties, no one seemed to question why the remains of a young European male might have been curated and reburied, presumably by Hopis, after the violence of the great revolt. And the story persists in its confusion, for although the body remained at the mission for “a good many years,” it subsequently went missing at St. Michael’s. Watson Smith would later write, “it thus appears a mystery has been compounded upon a mystery, and one may only hope that the uneasy bones have somewhere found a resting place.” Time would reveal that his were not the only “uneasy bones.”
Yet events were closing in on Brew and the Peabody Expedition. Jesse Nusbaum and Superintendent Wilson had communicated the news of the proposed National Monument at Awat’ovi to the Hopi Tribal Council during the autumn of 1938. It was not well received. The council had already decided that no further permits for excavation should be issued without approval of the clan most directly descended from Awat’ovi. At least three, Badger from Second Mesa and Reed and Snake from First Mesa, contended for that right of priority. Both the BIA and the Department of the Interior, in the reformist atmosphere of Collier’s Indian New Deal, felt Hopi approval preceded the government’s right to let the permit. Brew worked behind the scenes to secure the permission of Luke Kawanusea, of Mishongnovi, who Brew claimed as “chief of the badger clan having control of the abandoned city of Awatovi, agrees to the renewal of permit.” Brew placed little credence in the sense of offense that the Hopis felt, arguing instead “that the really important point lies in the various claims for control of the surrounding farmlands. The most important dispute seems to be between the Second Mesa Badger Clan and Sequi’s Clan at First Mesa. There are secondary disputes, however, within each Mesa. These disputes probably go back hundreds of years, and I imagine played an important role in the sacking of Awat’ovi.” By June 22, however, Wilson reported that all three clans were willing to allow the permit, but now felt that the kikmongwi at Walpi and those at Second Mesa must agree as well. In this, at least, Brew’s strategy to play the federal government against the “contentious men,” decision-makers among the Hopi, did indeed display remarkable historical insight, if questionable professional ethics.
Whatever their internal clan and leadership entanglements, the Hopi Council used their new, if ephemeral, tribal constitution and attendant political muscle to oppose the excavations and, implicitly, the establishment of the National Monument. In April of 1939 a formal delegation traveled to Washington, D.C., and requested that neither the BIA nor the Department of the Interior approve the excavation permit beyond August 26 of that year. Among those delegates was Byron Adams of First Mesa, who although he had opposed the constitution and Tribal Council as “merely an institution organized by the white man, and has no jurisdiction in the minds of the Hopis over clan lands,” saw the visit as a chance to make a powerful public statement. In a newspaper article that appeared in April entitled “Indians Ask Science to Leave ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ Buried,” he laid out the Hopi perspective. “There were certain conditions when Awat’ovi was destroyed. 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 afterward, if any of the villagers were left, and they went back there, they would go insane. ‘What good does it do to dig there?’ the villagers want to know. If it were on some other mesa, where no one was living, we might feel differently. But we are still alive. Our civilization is not dead. They are digging up our ancestors and they are touching things we have said shall not be touched.”
The message reached the right eyes. On May 30 the Department of the Interior notified the Peabody that, after consultation with the Indians of the Hopi jurisdiction, “these Indians would not renew this permit to conduct any archaeological work on their lands.” Brew scrambled to move his field season start date up to July 7 from August 7 in hopes of getting his work completed by the August 26 deadline. His report on this final season, published in 1941, concluded with a curt statement “with the fieldwork finished the expedition staff is now engaged upon the final reports . . . in order to make the findings of the Awatovi expedition available to students as soon as possible.”
He wasn’t counting on World War II. Many of the expedition’s key scientists volunteered or were drafted into military service. Eleven reports were, in fact, published. The last made it to print in 1978. In the meantime, members of the expedition and their Hopi workmen had decided to hold a reunion at Antelope Mesa. It took place in the summer of 1975. Times had changed.
6
You Will Find Me Poor, While You Return in the Grandeur of Plenty
It is not hard to see why Hopis experienced the factional dissention of Orayvi . . . as the repetition of a cycle of events, the outcome of which could be prophesied on the basis of knowledge of the past.
— JERROLD E. LEVY, 1992
When Harvard lost its excavation permit in August 1939, Jo Brew’s investigation of the ancient Hopi past ran up against the “ethnographic present,” the complex realities of Hopi internal and external politics. Thirty-six years later, a reunion of the Awat’ovi Expedition on Antelope Mesa would illuminate changes in the willingness of Hopis to express an even stronger sense of cultural sovereignty vis-à-vis outsiders who wished to study their history and culture. Proposed by Stanley Olsen of the Harvard Peabody Museum, who had conducted the analysis of “piles and piles” of animal bones recovered during the excavations and with the “enthusiastic collaboration of the tribal officers,” the daylong reunion took place in the spring of 1975. Six Peabody Expedition veterans took part, as did seven Hopi workmen from the 1930s—Gibson Namoki, Max Namoki, Sylvan Nash, Emory Coochwikvia, Eric Lalo, Kenneth Polacca, and Patrick Williams.
After “exploring the site thoroughly” throughout the daylight hours, the reunion party convened for dinner at the new Hopi Cultural Center at Kykotsomovi village on Second Mesa. Ill health prevented Jo Brew’s attendance, so Watson Smith presented his overview of the project and its significance to southwestern archaeology. During the question period that followed his lecture, however, the Hopis expressed “clearly a feeling of dissatisfaction with what had been accomplished, not because we had dug, but because we had not dug enough, or had dug the wrong things . . . forty years ago, they didn’t give a damn.” Furthermore, “they say we shouldn’t have taken all that stuff away [to the Peabody Museum].” Smith seemed startled by a new assertiveness among his formerly congenial excavating crew. “The Hopis, it was plain, felt that our efforts directed to the Spanish mission had been misapplied. . . . it did turn out in the end that perhaps from the Hopi point of view a disproportionate amount of effort was put into that church. The Hopi village was kind of pushed off to one side. They desired a more thorough focus on the native village.”
The intervening thirty-six years had delivered a heightened sense of confidence and cultural protectiveness among Hopis. Like the men from the Peabody, many had seen military service during World War II (including rolls as code talkers, less celebrated than their Navajo neighbors), as had their children in Korea and Vietnam. Further empowered by the rise of Native American activism in the 1960s and 1970s, many Hopis felt able to express their long-held distaste for the manner in which the site excavations were handled.
Clearly, the expedition’s shift in emphasis from exploring the pre-Columbian Hopi village
to the seventeenth-century Franciscan mission complex, and fascination about the annihilation of the residents of Awat’ovi, suggested to the Hopis that the centuries predating the Spanish intrusion on Antelope Mesa were somehow less meaningful than the short century of the mission period. An untoward fascination with the Christian era and the fate of “the Christian Indians of Aguatubi” came at the expense of more ancient and richer Hopi history. Why dig in ruins that held less than a century of history, when the older village embraced a story many centuries deep? The kiva murals that Watson Smith himself had uncovered and curated told of the arrival of the sacred katsinam in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries—surely more spiritually meaningful than the brief, and failed, experiment with Christianity.
Yet Hopi ambivalence toward the anthropological enterprise had much deeper roots. Franciscans, Spanish soldiers, and archaeologists were not the only “Pahaana” (white men, from the East) who intruded on the Hopi mesas over the centuries. Foreigners—whether mythic or real—played prominent roles in Hopi narratives about the past and the future. Thus white men’s “science” found itself confronting an entirely different mode of perceiving history in Tusayán, the first glimpses of which were witnessed nearly a century before.
In the Euro-American mind, history marches from past to present. Each event—birth, death, marriage, divorce, war and peace—accrues in a sequence that shapes the next in knowable ways, although their precise relation may prove elusive. We attend to the past to better comprehend our present. Yet, invert this. What if our present were already active in our past? What if our present is nothing more than a past foretold? This swirl of cause and effect, effect as cause, not linear but cyclical and untethered from western time, more closely captures the way many Hopis understood (and understand) the ruination of Awat’ovi Pueblo.
Euro-Americans encountered this swirl well before Jo Brew sensed a “deep time” to the politics involved in the denial of his permit. Perhaps not surprisingly, it came through the notebooks of “Many Buttons.” Although best known for his research among the Zuni, Frank Hamilton Cushing found himself cast as a character in Hopi history at the mesas in 1882, in a complex dance of intrusion and evasion between anthropologists and Hopis that, in some ways, continues today.
In December, Cushing had journeyed north from Zuni to attend winter ceremonies in the Hopi village of Oraibi, and to acquire pottery, weaving, and paraphernalia for the collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. To do so, he established a “little shop” in the plaza at Oraibi, from which he intended to exchange manufactured goods from the East for Hopi goods, preferably of a ceremonial nature. Oraibi’s kikmongwi, Loololma, a “progressive” who favored the Americans and their education for his people, had approved Cushing’s endeavor.
On the evening of December 20, Cushing received visitors in the quarters assigned him by Loololma, however. One “small elderly man threw his robes from his naked shoulders” and demanded that he cease trading. “Stranger Tehano (American, literally, ‘Tejano’). . . . You are a heap of dung in our plazas, you stink of your race. Leave or we will throw you off the mesas, as we throw dung out of the plazas.” Cushing protested. He demanded to understand “why you hate the Americans,” so that he would know “what to tell my fathers, [in] Washington. . . .”
After a discussion among themselves, the Hopis ordered Cushing to “get paper and a writing stick quickly.” He settled himself by the fire, and scribbled deep into the night. At last they “gave him in substance” what Cushing termed “a myth,” although much of it proved an “infuriated argument interspersed with the most insulting messages to Washington.” In his notes, the first detailed record of a “prophetic myth . . . of a complex of prophetic myths,” Cushing found himself, by allusion, cast in the role of “older brother (‘the Americans’),” who “came out of the cave-worlds first” and “journeyed to the land of the sun” while the Hopis undertook their migrations and finally “settled where we now get being.” Older brother “left us and journeyed toward the land of the sun,” so said the ancients, but with a prophecy to carry in memory:
Many men’s ages shall pass while we are apart. Your children shall fill the world whither you go. Then you will turn back towards the place of your birth, seeking a country more spacious wherein to dwell. It is then that you will meet me again. You will find me poor while you will return in the grandeur of plenty, and the welfare of good food. You will find me hungry and offer me nourishment, but I shall cast your morsels aside from my mouth. You will find me naked and offer me garments of soft fabrics, but I shall rend your garments and trample them under my feet. You will find me sad, and perplexed, and offer me speeches of consolation and advice; but I shall spurn your words, reproach, revile and despise you. You will smile upon me and act gently; but I shall scowl upon you. Aside as I would cast filth from my presence will I cast you. Then will you rise and strike my head from my neck. As it rolls in the dust you will arrest it and sit upon it as upon a stool-rock, a glad day for me, for on that day you will but divide the trail of your own life with the knife which severs my head from my body, give immortal life, liberty, surcease from anxiety to me. . . . Thus have spoken the ancients through many ages of men.
A grim, and yet ambivalent, prophecy, in which Cushing seems assigned the symbolic role of Pahaana, or representative of the intruding non-Hopi world from the east. Reviled as “filth” (or turd, synonymous with “witch” in some Hopi narratives) and rejected by the villagers, Cushing-as-Pahaana would behead his erstwhile kinsmen, while simultaneously liberating them to enjoy a pure, harmonious, and immortal new life. One student of the prophecy explains it as an ancient and malleable story aligned with Hopi origin narratives, one that “assigns order to a chaotic, stressful and constantly besieged world,” yet also raises questions about that order. “The most fundamental purpose of all of the versions of the Pahaana prophecy is to maintain ambivalence, paradox, and anxiety, not to relieve it.” Elder Brother, as Hopis term the key figure, embodies a paradox—Elder Brother as Punisher and Elder Brother as deliverer from anxiety—a paradox that signals “a state of complex and alternating state of conflict and cooperation [between outsiders] and Hopis and with each other.”
The Pahaana prophecy represents a Hopi variant of apocalypse-and-rebirth themes widespread across the ancient (and New Age) Americas, resonating with similar themes found among the Mayas (Kukulkan), Aztecs (Quetzalcoatl), Venezuela’s Makiritares (Watunna Wanadi), and closer to home in the Zunis’ Beginning narrative and the Navajos’ Blessingway. In each of these, a revered ancestor departs to the east and only returns at a moment of crisis among his kinsfolk, bringing transformation and rebirth in often violent fashion. The most familiar version, given much elevation, perhaps, by Franciscan chroniclers, was that the Aztecs conjoined the story of Quetzalcoatl with the arrival of conquistador Hernán Cortés on the coast of Mesoamerica in 1520, thereby easing the Spanish conquest.
Among the variations offered by individual Hopi clans, certain elements of the Pahaana prophecy, as lodged within the larger emergence narrative, remain consistent. An “Edenic” world becomes corrupt, either through overcrowding or immorality, or both, and as life descends into chaos (koyaanisqatsi), a righteous few find escape to a new world as destruction is visited upon their recalcitrant kin. Pahaana/Elder Brother, who appears shortly before the apocalypse with revitalized teachings from Masaw, a deity associated simultaneously with death and life, usually effects both annihilation of the corrupt and ascent of the chosen few. Once in the new (fourth, or our current) world, the narratives shift to tracing the migrations of the unique clans who would ultimately find a home in the center-place, or the Hopi homelands. Bear and Badger Clans are most commonly cited as the first arriving and hence highest-ranked of these migrating peoples.
Frank Hamilton Cushing may have been the first to have the prophecy directed at him, but he was certainly not the last. No precise term exists in the Hopi language that translates as “prophec
y;” rather, the compound word wuk-navoti (“revealed knowledge”) is generally rendered as such. The Pahaana prophecy is “grafted on to the emergence myth,” with its cycles of crisis and renewal, and thus Pahaana is a central agent in the perpetual tension of the Hopi historical imagination. The fact that recorded versions of the prophecy only begin with Cushing in 1882 is evident in many of the “signs” that the dialectic of destruction and resurrection is imminent—World War I, World War II, the dropping of the atomic bomb, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Apollo 11’s moon landing in 1969, the intrusion of New Age “false prophets” into Hopi ceremonial life, and, more recently, the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, or the rising crisis of global warming. Yet the prophecy’s prominence in Hopi engagements with outsiders surely occurred much earlier, perhaps even before Europeans entered Tusayán. Rebirth following world destruction is sometimes contingent upon the survivors’ promise to follow the “simple life that [Masaw] had prescribed,” perhaps as a method of assuring that migrants to the Hopi mesas would adhere to the prevailing ceremonial orthodoxy. That one version specifies only “those who had strayed—popwaqt (witches)—would have their heads cut off” strengthens this defense-of-orthodoxy theme.
The people of Tusayán had certainly experienced the arrival of strange beings with numinous powers before the Franciscans, in the form of the katsinam (Rainmaking Spirits from the Gods) who overwhelmed earlier religious traditions beginning in the late thirteenth century, and whose arrival affected both cultural trauma and social rebirth. In the later decades of that century, these new ideas and their supernatural expressions began to stride across the peaks, plateaus, and canyons of the Southwest. Uncertain in origin and much debated in genesis, the katsinam arrived at a moment of crisis among Puebloan peoples and provided rejuvenating beliefs, ceremonies, iconography, and ways of social belonging to peoples frayed, frightened, and fighting in the cataclysmic world of the centuries before the arrival of the Christian god and saints. Numbering some 250 individual beings, if current patterns may be read into those of the past, the panoply of Katsina spirits appeared in Puebloan communities each year after the Winter Solstice and before the spring rains, when “men ask the sun to return so that the crops will grow.” The arrival of these new evangelicals is often recalled today as benign. The predominant interpretation of the social significance of the Katsina religion, or “cult,” focuses on its extraordinary ability to bridge divisions of ethnolinguistic identity and create new forms of transcommunity identification. Katsina societies existed in more than one community, building semiotic and symbiotic communities that functioned in the interests of social solidarity. But that success seems to have been hard won. Real struggles unfolded between older Pueblo Medicine societies, Sacred Clown, Hunting, and War sodalities and the agents of the Katsina religion, often expressed in narratives of gods in conflict with the mortals. Among the eastern Rio Grande Pueblos, the katsinam gradually experienced “domestication” and were subsumed within the earlier sodalities, but in the west, at Zuni and Hopi, the katsinam prevailed.
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