Even as the education program devolved from attraction to coercion in its methods, the land allotment program exacerbated a division between pavansinom (Hopis like Loololma convinced of the benefits of acculturation) and sukavungsinom (those hostile to such measures), and intensified even stronger resistance from hostile Hopis. Especially offensive was a provision that required Hopis to abandon their homes in the mesa-top villages and settle in palakiki-style houses on their individual allotments down in the valley bottoms. The BIA saw the old villages as entrenched resisters to the acculturation program, and allotment would, it was thought, serve to undermine resistance to assimilation. But Hopis pushed back, pulling up survey stakes overnight, destroying survey monuments, and warning that they might descend on the school to free their children.
In June 1891, hostile disruptions reached the point that Lieutenant L. M. Brett was dispatched to Oraibi to arrest their leadership. Met by some fifty armed and well-positioned hostile men, Brett withdrew and recommended a larger detachment return, backed by Hotchkiss guns, which had six months earlier wreaked death upon the Lakota and Hunkpapa Sioux Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee. Nine men suffered arrest and confinement at Fort Wingate, including key ritual leaders from among the hostiles. While imprisoned, the BIA built the Oraibi Day School down below Third Mesa, in hopes of addressing the resistance to children’s distance at Keams Canyon. Attendance hovered around thirty youngsters, yet no children from the hostile faction attended.
To the surprise of reformers in Washington, Hopis and many local, knowledgeable whites joined to oppose the allotment program. Traders like Thomas Keam, early anthropologists like Alexander Stephen, Frank Cushing, and James Mooney, missionaries like Mennonite minister Henry R. Voth, and military men like General A. D. Cook lent their names to a Hopi petition numbering some 125 totemic signatures, at least 50 of which represented pavansinom (those presumed friendly to the government). Motivations may have varied, since Indian traders and anthropologists alike saw Hopi traditionalism as a resource valuable both to Hopi peoples and to the burgeoning art market, and thus worthy of preservation. By 1894 the BIA discontinued allotment at Hopi, one of the few Indian reservations to successfully resist that devastating policy.
Yet tensions between pavansinom and sukavungsinom remained unresolved, and would prove the vortex around which the centrifuge at Oraibi would rotate. One ironic outcome of the BIA’s survey and land allotment study, only grasped much later by ethnographers (perhaps also by Hopis at the time, but who resisted its enunciation), was the realization that “a restricted and tenuous resource base required that Hopi society structure itself on an inequitable distribution of land,” according to ethnographer Jerrold Levy. Since planting fields and orchards were distributed in accordance with the “ranking of clans” in a priority of their ceremonial responsibilities, and as determined by their arrival on the mesas in ancient migrations, the only way that the scarce agricultural resources could be preserved over the long term meant that during periods of drought, surplus population had to be “sloughed off” in an orderly manner. Conversely, Hopi collective agricultural labor required a high degree of “cooperation and social integration.” Thus, an “internal contradiction” existed that kept Hopi society in a “state of dynamic tension, a tension that intensified or eased as droughts alternated with wet periods.”
The internal contradictions at the heart of Hopi society mirrored in key aspects the “ambivalence, paradox, and anxiety” embodied in the Pahaana prophecy. While the intrusion of Anglo ways in the form of schooling and efforts to instill a consumption ethic among the Hopis fostered strains in society, a series of drought years beginning in the 1890s likewise signaled a growing cultural crisis. The missionary Henry Voth reported that no rains fell in 1902 and that the ground had grown so hard that it was nearly impossible to plant corn. In 1903 two train carloads of corn from Kansas were imported to relieve the hunger at Oraibi. Reliable springs, the very reason that the mesas had hosted settlements for centuries, began to dry up. Women waited for hours to fill ollas from seeps of water in the sandy-bottomed springs. A ceremonial ritual order designed to ensure rainfall and plentiful harvests seemed to be failing.
Drought struck Hopis unequally, however. Powerful ceremonial clans—Bear, Parrot, Patki, Bow, and Snake—for instance, held rights to fields high in the Oraibi Wash that could be flood-irrigated when scattered-but-often-fierce rains did fall. Others, like Water Coyote, Lizard, and Sand, although large in membership, held farming lands less well situated to catch runoff on the alluvial fans of tributary watercourses, or none at all. In fact, careful analysis of land allocation shows “an almost perfect correlation between the ceremonial scores [status rank of clans] and the quality of land controlled. The system of clan ranking by ceremonies is nothing more than a translation of economic reality into the realm of the sacred,” according to Levy.
Ironically, the land distribution system envisioned by reformers took need, as determined by individual family size, as a crucial variable, but failed to understand that Euro-American–style “nuclear” families were not the fundamental component of Hopi kinship. Clan and matrilineage crosscut the western model of family in ways that fee simple allotments could never equitably address. Circumstances grew dire. “Drought, depression, deprivation, arroyo cutting [which prevented irrigation ditches from drawing floodwaters to fields] and land gridlock” combined to create a widely perceived sense of imminent crisis. Rapid growth and competition for grazing land from neighboring Navajo outfits compounded the atmosphere of threat from without.
When it came in 1906, the “Oraibi split” is commonly explained as the culmination of tensions between the pavansinom (conciliatory, if not entirely friendly to white society and reforms) and sukavungsinom (hostile to the threats to Hopi lifeways embodied by white society and reform efforts). It began with struggles over the two factions’ ceremonial responsibilities. The hostiles, who held responsibility for the Niman (Home) Dance—performed each July as the “going home” ceremony for the rainmaking katsinam, who attend to the precipitation essential for Hopi farming between the Winter and Summer solstices—were prevented by the friendlies from performing the ritual. Pavansinom blocked access to the Niman shrine and thus the ability of the dancers to send the Katsinam to their spiritual home. With the Niman postponed, the Snake Dance, also the ceremonial duty of the sukavungsinom, was likewise delayed. The standoff seemed to threaten the very essence of Oraibi’s religious obligations. Adding to the tension was the arrival in Oraibi of some fifty adamant “hostiles” from the Spider Clan at Second Mesa’s Shungopovi, who had recently clashed with Superintendent Theodore G. Lemmon while resisting his attempt to seize their children for the Oraibi Day School. They reinforced their clansmen there, and began a campaign to undercut the ceremonial authority of Tawaquaptewa, the friendly kikmongwi of Oraibi (who had followed his uncle, Loololma, into the chieftainship).
Finally, on September 6, Tawaquaptewa heard that the hostiles intended to assassinate him. Through a long night, each faction held councils in village houses, and the pavansinom decided they would drive the sukavungsinom from the town the following day. With several whites they had summoned as witnesses (including Elizabeth Stanley, acting principal of the Oraibi Day School and her colleague, field matron Miltona Keith), the friendly faction rushed into the hostiles’ council and began to force the hostiles out of their gathering, even to the point of literally lifting them from their feet. These captives were carried beyond the village bounds and set down. The hostiles, oddly, outnumbered their attackers by as much as four to one, yet seemed to lodge little objection beyond their passive refusal to walk out of the village.
The women and children of the hostile faction joined their menfolk on the outskirts of Oraibi, while groups of pavansinom periodically threatened them to maintain their exclusion. Throughout the afternoon there were exchanges of words between the factions. The unfriendlies seemed to understand that a prophecy required one group of disputants to l
eave the village, yet wished it not to be them. Finally, a line was drawn in the dirt and they found themselves on the outside. Still, the friendlies remained nervous, for they understood the prophecy to augur that those who left might return and claim vengeance on the village.
An anxious stalemate held until October, when the BIA stepped in with a “Program for Dealing with the Existing Hopi Troubles.” This included the abolition of the Oraibi tribal government, the expulsion of the leaders of both factions and the stipulation that they remain banished for life, as well as that allotment be restarted despite the decision twelve years earlier to halt the project. When Superintendent of the Navajo Agency at Fort Defiance Reuben Perry, who had been placed in charge, interviewed the hostile leader Yukeoma, he learned that the hostiles wanted nothing of the boarding school uplift program, wished simply to live as they had for centuries, and that if the government desired to resolve the dispute, ought to abandon any hope for assimilation and behead the leadership of the friendly faction—clearly a reference to the role of white elder brother in the prophecy.
Perry declined Yukeoma’s request, but did, on two occasions, attempt to stage a pistol duel between Tawaquaptewa and Yukeoma, in each case giving only one a firearm, however. Neither shot the other. Perry seems to have stage-managed the scenes in an effort to undermine each chief’s authority, to demonstrate that neither was really willing to carry the dispute, and perhaps the prophecy, to its logical or prophetic conclusion. He warned both leaders that if they persisted in their conflict, the government would remove each from authority. Now Perry brought troops to the hostile encampment at Hotevilla, where they were settling in for the winter, and seized eighty-two children who were taken to the Keams Canyon Boarding School. The hostile men were given the option of returning to Oraibi or being placed under arrest. More than half refused, and were put to hard labor at the Keams Canyon Agency. The majority of women and children remained at Hotevilla and fended for themselves through a harsh winter, hunting rabbits for subsistence. The friendlies at Oraibi agreed to make peace with their expelled kinsmen. The hostile men, once released from their prison labor, looked for a new village site and settled on one at Bacavi Springs, about one mile from Hotevilla. The leader of the Bacavi hostiles, Kewaninptewa, gave Hopi Agency Superintendent Horton H. Miller a symbolic handful of thirty-two beans that stood for the number of children from his faction who were now enrolled at Keams Canyon, and even floated the idea that a school be established at the new village of Bacavi. Thus ended, at least for the moment, the crisis at Oraibi. Two new villages had been established, removing the hostile element from Oraibi, and effectively splitting the sukavungsinom into two, weaker, threats to government order.
Yet this version leaves several vexing questions unresolved. First, all accounts make clear that the sukavungsinom significantly outnumbered the pavansinom, both in overall village membership and during the expulsion of the hostiles, by at least two-thirds. A census of the hostile encampment at Hotevilla in October 1906 counted 539, which Superintendent Lemmon estimated as a substantial majority of Oraibi’s total population. That they were expelled from the village by the smaller faction and that the sukavungsinom did not resist with their weapons (guns, and bows and arrows) surprised him as well, for he knew from experience they could be fierce fighters. He noted also that Elizabeth Stanley and Miltona Keith, who observed the struggle, expressed surprise at the calm demeanor of those who were carried from the village bounds. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis E. Leupp, after reviewing these and other eyewitness accounts, wondered just how much the opposition to civilization really lay beneath the dispute, and he mused that internal political issues may have lain much closer to the core disputes.
Of course, internal politics among the Hopi involved more than the Americans were likely to grasp. Agency Superintendent Lemmon, only two days after the struggle, interviewed Tawaquaptewa and other members of the pavansinom, who explained the whole affair was simply the fulfillment of a Hopi prophecy and that the expelled faction would journey, as had so many in the past, to new homes elsewhere (perhaps the Keet Seel ruin in Navajo National Monument, some one hundred miles to the north). Later, Lemmon heard virtually the same narrative from members of the sukavungsinom, which suggested a level of concordance, at least around the prophetic structure of the crisis.
That white outsiders were recruited, if only by the pavansinom, to witness the climax of the fission hints that at least some elements of the Pahaana prophecy were at work. Their presence, as symbolic representatives of Pahaana, and the explicit references to whites as potential agents for “beheading” leaders of the opposition—invoked not by Tawaquaptewa, leader of the friendlies, but by hostile leader Yukeoma, suggests that each faction had a certain common understanding of the meaning of the split in the village. In narratives shared long since the crisis, in the 1980s, a deeper significance began to emerge. All parties, while not excusing the other of wrong thinking or wrongdoing, held mutually a belief that the culture-changing intrusions of white society (for better or worse) as well as internal struggles over ceremonial and village leadership constituted an atmosphere of koyaanisqatsi, or chaos. “A corollary of Pahaana’s return,” writes Peter Whiteley, “is that it will coincide with a stage when Hopi life becomes corrupt and decadent.” Each faction doubtless thought the other popwaqt, or sorcerers whose power had grown beyond acceptable levels. The Hopi philosophy of history, as expressed in the emergence myth’s cycles of destruction and rebirth, required that the crisis be brought to a head. Once the chaos fomented in the collapse of the current ritual order was abolished, cultural renewal, either as envisioned by pavansinom or by sukavungsinom, would come to fruition. “By splitting the village,” Whiteley explains, “the leaders could simultaneously solve the symptoms of ritual corruption—that is, the land, water, and population problems. . . . The education program and the general acceptance of the white man’s ways were chosen as the necessary catalyst.”
Ironically, Yukeoma, leader of the hostiles who founded Hotevilla, cast back to ancient tradition and established his clan, Kookop, or Fire Clan, as the first arriving clan of that new community and therefore the highest-ranking clan, with priority rights to farming lands. The Fire Clan, however, held no important ceremonies and would in time find its primacy challenged by others. The revival of the Pahaana prophecy in the decades leading up to 1906 served as a tool of religious leaders to foster a regeneration of the ritual ceremonial order as foretold through the concept of revealed knowledge. Yet in many respects the fissioning left Oraibi, Hotevilla, and Bacavi with such fractured leadership and ceremonial knowledge that “the collapse of the ceremonial calendar” did not allow for the reconstitution of a revived piety. Hotevilla did become, and remains, a conservative stronghold of Hopi ceremonialism, if only a shadow of what it once was, and more oriented toward farming and sheep grazing than many of its neighbors on the mesas. Bacavi has grown more progressive than its neighbor. Oraibi dwindled in population to fewer than 100 residents (from more than 800 in 1900). Tawaquaptewa held the leadership position of kikmongwi until 1948, then briefly reclaimed it in 1956. Shortly before he died in 1960, he ordered that “he be buried with all his ceremonial equipment,” apparently in an effort to force “an end of ceremonies” and the prophetic rebirth of Hopi religion. His son, Stanley Bahnimtewa, however, continued the Soyal ceremony when he stepped into the kikmongwi’s role in 1978.
Clear, however, is the truth buried within Jo Brew’s later observation, in 1939. The Peabody’s Awat’ovi Expedition was “facing a highly involved political situation” that mobilized “claims for control of the surrounding farm lands,” long-running disputes between clans around ceremonial and political rank, all of which went back “hundreds of years, and . . . played an important role in the sacking of Awat’ovi.” What he may not have realized were the number of centuries that underlay these disputes.
7
Across This Deep and Troubled Land
Aliksa’i. T
hey say they were living at Awat’ovi. Great numbers of people were at home there, so many, in fact, that some people did not know each other. . . . There were settlements all across the land. The residents of Awat’ovi were wont to do all sorts of things.
—THIRD MESA VERSION, 1993
Jo Brew sensed that storm clouds born of internal strife, many centuries deep, underlay some aspects of the tensions that forced the Peabody Museum’s exit from Antelope Mesa. As Hopis began to recount stories of their ancient past to ethnographers interested in preserving these histories and the original language in which they were maintained, a sense of the extraordinary depth they curated began to emerge. These were rendered in “mytho-historic” form, wherein accounts are “laden with actors and agents . . . with greater-than-human faculties: gods and goddesses, culture heroes and evil sorcerers, terrifying spirits, animals capable of speech.” Little in the Hopi versions of history do not find comparable form in the epic histories of the Western world—from the fall of Troy to the founding of Rome. In a sense similar to the cultural lessons contained in The Iliad, Hopi accounts of violence in their deep history “anchor the present generations in a meaningful, significant past, functioning as eternal and ideal models for human behavior and goals, ” in Christopher Vecsey’s words. Or, as in the case of Paris’s insult to Menelaus’s hospitality, cautioning against individual hubris that will lead to ruination.
Periodic eruptions of violence were common among peoples of the ancient Southwest. But these seldom merit rehearsal in the epic narratives of Hopi history. Rather, tales of wholesale destruction of communities warrant memory and retelling. Ranging from locations long lost to mapmakers to those as recent as Oraibi, these histories attend to key tenets of life in the Puebloan Southwest.
Mesa of Sorrows Page 12