Palatkwapi (Red-Walled City of the Southern Lands) is among those places that defies a precise location, yet establishes one strain of history that runs throughout Hopi accounts of migration, settlement, and dislocation. Some believe the town to lie as near to the Hopi Mesas as Montezuma Castle in the Verde Valley of Arizona, as far distant as Paquimé in Chihuahua, Teotihuacán in the Valley of Mexico, or even Palenque, Chiapas. “Some Hopi scholars and cultural advisors,” caution T. J. Ferguson and Micah Loma’omvaya, “suggest that Palatkwapi may have been an era or epoch rather than a place per se. According to these advisors, Palatkwapi is a sequence of events that happened when Hopi ancestors resided in a region south of the Hopi mesas . . . associated with a number of locations where ancestors of the various Hopi clans lived.” Thus time, rather than place, is the primary referent of the Palatkwapi narrative.
Founded by a coalition of migratory bands who would coalesce into the Water Clan, Palatkwapi was, according to Edmund Nequatewa, “small at first, then it grew large, and by the time it was large there were numerous persons in the village who rejected virtue.” The people, once attentive to the lessons learned in the collapse of the Third World and their rescue by Masauwu, who led them through the sipapuni into the Fourth World, could not answer the crucial question: why are we here? “Evil and corruption had entered the village. Instead of gathering in the kivas to examine the meaning of life, men and women used the kivas for playing totolospi, kokotukwi and other gambling games.” Fields lay neglected, and no longer were pahos created as gifts for the spirits. A Butterfly Dance became popular, performed first by young maidens as was appropriate, but soon “young married women were taking part, and instead of putting it on during the day time in the plaza, they were dancing in the kivas at night.” Things went from bad to worse. Married women abandoned their husbands for the company of other men. A shadow descended on Palatkwapi.
The kikmongwi of Palatkwapi, Tawayistiwa, met with clan leaders to share his dismay at the growing corruption of life in the village. In an effort to halt the slide into koyaanisqatsi, they selected the chief’s nephew, Siwiyistiwa, to impersonate the Tsaveyo ogre, a disciplinarian represented by a black mask with horns and protruding eyes. Called to the plaza, the people of Palatkwapi heard Tsaveyo admonish them to return to their former piety. “Unless Palatkwapi returns to a good way of life it will cease to be a living village.”
For a short time, people heeded the warning, but soon returned to their heretical ways. Tawayistiwa then sent Siwiyistiwa on a mission to a high mountain ridge in the south, there to find a deer and, in exchange for pahos made by his uncle, to obtain the one prong of the stag’s antlers. Once returned, Tawayistiwa crafted four Katsina masks for his nephew, the most significant of which was that of Masauwu, “the Owner of Fire and the Spirit of Death.” Dressed in this “dreadful and fearful costume” Siwiyistiwa ran back to the high ridge and struck a fire, from which he gathered coals into his Masauwu mask. When he breathed upon them, fire would erupt from the mask’s mouth. The youth began haunting Palatkwapi each night, sneaking into the town and, as bidden by his uncle, perching on rooftops and emitting fire from the Masauwu mask as he ground corn in a metate, singing to announce his presence. The people of Palatkwapi heard his voice and witnessed the fire in the darkness, and began to grow fearful. After several nights of growing anxiety, a group of men trapped Siwiyistiwa as he tried to leave the town at dawn, and dragged him down into a kiva. After stripping his masks, and finding the “ghost” one of their own townsmen, they killed him and buried him in the plaza, leaving, at his pleading, however, one hand exposed.
Each of four dawns thereafter, the people of Palatkwapi visited his grave and saw that for each morning one of his four fingers had folded down into his palm. Not knowing what this portended, they continued to “value pleasure above a good life,” carrying on in their kivas. On the fourth morning, when each of Siwiyistiwa’s fingers were clenched in a fist, they heard a “rumbling in the distance . . . the earth began to shake . . . large stones slid from their foundations and the walls of the houses cracked. . . . Out of the gray cloudless sky rain poured down, and a cold wind swept through the plaza.” As the plaza filled with water and became a lake, “the head of the great water serpent Balolokong appeared . . . out of Siwiyistiwa’s grave and its head reared higher and higher as his body emerged from the earth.” On the top of the serpent’s head rose the one-pronged antler from the stag, and his “eyes turned this way and that, surveying the crumbling walls of Palatkwapi.” People fled in terror as the floodwaters from above and cracking earth from below destroyed the village. Children were lost and the old and crippled left behind.
Finding refuge on high ground beyond Palatkwapi, the survivors hastened to make pahos and find a way to quiet Balolokong. They chose a young boy—Choong’o—and a girl—Kachinmama, both “of clean hearts and innocent” to act as couriers to the serpent. Balolokong received the children gently and taught them songs that would accompany, in the future, a Winter Solstice ceremony (the nine-day Soyal, marking the return of the katsinam to Hopi from their long sleep in the San Francisco Peaks) to commemorate what had happened at Palatkwapi. If done properly, the serpent promised to “send rain when the people are in need. When a stranger comes to the village, feed him. Do not injure one another, because all beings deserve to live together without injury . . . when people are old and cannot work anymore, do not turn them out to shift for themselves . . . defend yourselves when an enemy comes to your village, but do not go out seeking war. The Hopis shall take this counseling and make it the Hopi Way.”
Meanwhile, the former residents of Palatkwapi regrouped themselves into their clans and shouldered their few remaining possessions. They set out on yet another hegira, “walking to the north, toward Situqui (Flower Butte [the Hopi Mesas today]).” Balolokong gave the children new seeds, and instructed them to look to the north for campfires at night, “for that is where your people are now.” Before they departed, however, he gave one more instruction: “The single horn you saw on my head is my symbol. Therefore let the priests of the Kwan society wear a horn in this fashion to symbolize the knowledge of things I gave the Hopi.”
The destruction of Palatkwapi, if representative of a time rather than a place, shows several elements of “Hopis in the making.” Having escaped the end of their Third World, they had established new communities in the Fourth, organized around the forms of piety instructed by Masauwu. As the village grew in population, the social order began to erode, especially as women began to violate ceremonial and sexual norms. Generational tensions emerged, too, as did challenges to the kikmongwi’s authority. Calling upon others of the priesthood, Tawayistiwa delegated his own authority to his nephew Siwiyistiwa and marked the young man for sacrifice. Siwiyistiwa’s execution and burial calls forth the punishing and purifying powers of Balolokong. This being seems a variation on the feather-and-horned serpent ubiquitous across the Puebloan Southwest, and almost certainly a merging of a migratory idea that combines the water powers of Tlaloc, the Aztec rain spirit, and the Feathered Serpent, Quetzalcoatl, whose origins lie in Mesoamerica and whose iconography coincides with the arrival of the Katsina religion in the Southwest Borderlands. Palatkwapi is destroyed by earthquake and flood, perhaps a reference to the eruption of Sunset Crater near Flagstaff, Arizona, in A.D. 1085. Expelled from their crumbling and flooded city, the survivors divide into clan groups who traditionally comprised migratory units, and move generally northward, chastened and renewed in their adherence to orthodox forms of piety. Among the migrants travels the members of a new sacred society, that of the Kwan or One-Horn, one of the four societies that convened the Wuwutcim initiations at Awat’ovi in the autumn of 1700, and which remains important to Hopi life today. In their journey northward toward the Flower Butte, these “becoming-Hopi” peoples created new towns, often described as “winter villages,” at places again without precise locations—Kunchalpi, Hohokyam, and finally to a place with specific reference, N
euvakwiotaka, a cluster of archaeological sites on Anderson Mesa, Arizona, at a relatively high altitude of 6,200 to 7,200 feet. “After many harvests, where they lived very prosperously,” at Neuvakwiotaka, probably at least a century, they continued to the Hopi towns of Homol’ovi.
Ceramic analysis of the six settlements on Anderson Mesa and Chavez Pass indicate they were founded in the middle decades of the thirteenth century A.D., beginning around 1225, and peaking in population between 1275 and 1300, with depopulation by 1325. One of those villages, today called Grapevine Pueblo, is a likely candidate to figure centrally in another history of conflict in ancient towns, the demise of Hovi’itstuyqa, as does its distant neighbor, Tupats’ovi.
In Tupats’ovi lived a homely boy, Pitsinsivostiyo (Cotton Seed Boy), and his grandmother. They were of the “lower-class people” and lived on the southwest edge of the village plaza, an area of midden dumps and where others went to “relieve themselves.” The two often ate only the thrown-away food of their neighbors, while suffering their disdain. On the northwest corner of the plaza, where dwelled the “upper-class people,” lived an “exceedingly beautiful, industrious,” maiden named Nagai-si, whose desirability as a wife attracted suitors from within the town and beyond. She found none, however, who stirred her heart, and was annoyed to be drawn away from grinding corn or preparing meals for her family. She finally announced a challenge, that the first young man to bring her a red fox—she wished “to own one as a pet”—would gain her love.
None, however, proved able to capture the red fox she so wished to own. Six years passed, without a single suitor delivering the prize, nor gaining her hand in marriage. Pitsinsivostiyo knew of the challenge, yet saw no way that he might prevail, when other, more athletic and higher-ranking boys had failed. His grandmother, however, saw how crestfallen he had become, and discovered the source of his discouragement. She began to instruct Pitsinsivostiyo in the rudiments of hunting—how to identity the best shoots of the Apache plume from which he might fashion arrows, the oak from which he could shape and smooth and bend a bow by binding it wet across a ladder and allowing it to dry. She taught him to twist sinew cords to make a bowstring, and soon he had all that was necessary to hunt the fox.
Yet, to the boy’s surprise, when his grandmother sent him to the “rocky hill” where he might find the red fox, she laid out an unusual strategy. She told him to gather the seeds of the “giant dropseed grass” en route, and, once atop the ridge, to find a “large empty place” where he might churn the ground with his feet until it was “really messed up.” He was to shoot his arrows into the ground “all over the empty space,” and then to lie among those shafts so that it seemed as if “you were attacked by enemies and killed.” One arrow he was to tuck in his armpit; another, the obsidian point anointed with pitch, he should stick directly above his heart. “Be lying there when the sun goes down,” and sprinkle the “giant dropseed all over yourself,” as well as some in “your mouth. These seeds look just like maggots.” She had supplied him with several dead mice, several days old and beginning to decay, which he was to chop up and smear on his body “to give off the odor of a rotten corpse.”
Pitsinsivostiyo’s stinking body drew a coyote, which howled to his pack that a body lay waiting to be devoured. As they gather around, the boy peered through his eyelashes and saw, just to his right hand, that among them stood a red fox. Seizing the fox in his hand, he rose and yelled to frighten the coyotes away, then secured the fox. He spoke to the fox, assuring it he meant no harm, but that he wished only to make a gift to Nagai-si; “I am sure that girl will be gentle with you.”
Even while Pitsinsivostiyo was training as a hunter and executing his grandmother’s plan, potential husbands continued to call on the maiden. Among them was a “very handsome” young man from the distant village of Hovi’itstuyqa, a town larger and more prosperous than Tupats’ovi. Carrying the name Sikyaatayo (Red Fox Boy), he, too, had failed to bring her the animal itself, but proved an avid suitor nonetheless, and one whom Nagai-si secretly hoped might succeed. When Pitsinsivostiyo presented the tamed red fox to Nagai-si, and she accepted his proposal of marriage, all were astonished that a poor and homely youth had succeeded where so many better young men had failed. Their marriage raised the boy and his grandmother in the esteem of their neighbors, for they realized that only people “endowed with greater-than-human powers” could have captured the fox and brought him so willingly to the maiden. The people of Tupats’ovi began to talk among themselves, wondering if the boy’s grandmother might be the Old Spider Woman, gifted with numinous powers.
In time, Sikyaatayo heard that Nagai-si had married Pitsinsivostiyo, and yet he still desired her, more even than before. He began haunting the neighborhood of Tupats’ovi, watching Nagai-si in secret as she went around her daily chores. Discovering that she went at dawn each day to “speak her morning prayers to the sun,” he lay in wait overnight, anticipating the yellow dawn.
As Nagai-si returned from the shrine, Sikyaatayo seized her and threw her to the ground. Her fox “cried and howled,” attempting to alert Pitsinsivostiyo of the assault, but to no effect. When Nagai-si finally returned to their house, Pitsinsivostiyo saw “that she was not herself,” she had “let it happen without resistance.” The fox, however, spoke to Pitsinsivostiyo “in plain Hopi. ‘I am sorry for you. This morning when I ran along with your wife for the prayer to the sun, I saw something unpleasant,’” and described what he had seen that morning.
Sikyaatayo abducted Nagai-si and took her to Hovi’itstuyqa, a long day’s travel to the northwest. Disconsolate and “bent on revenge,” Pitsinsivostiyo again turned to his grandmother for advice. But poor and friendless as they were, they had no allies or even kinsmen upon whom to call to avenge the dishonor. Old Spider Woman advised he seek help from among the distant Kisispaya (Yavapai?) people, who lived well beyond the Hopi country to the southwest. They did not dwell in pueblos, but in “roundish huts,” and spoke a different language, but one that sounded familiar enough through their trading visits that he could have a conversation. The chief of the Kisispaya called his warriors together, and then Pitsinsivostiyo spoke, describing the offense to his honor and his request: “I would like you to raid the village of Hovi’itstuyqa in my behalf and destroy it. You can do whatever you want. If you’re interested in the women and girls, you can round them up. If you want to kill them along with the rest, that’s all right, too. The loot such as food and other items of value that you find, you can distribute however you see fit. My only wish is to see that place destroyed.”
The Kisispaya warriors gathered weapons and packed dried venison for the four-day journey to Hovi’itstuyqa. Pitsinsivostiyo went ahead to scout. Slipping into the village after nightfall, he snooped into houses through the ladder openings in their roofs. At last he found where Sikyaatayo and Nagai-si lived, and, peering down, he saw them making love. Nursing his rage, he returned to find the Kisispaya camp “in a spot out of site of Hovi’itstuyqa” where they were straightening their arrow shafts over a fire’s embers, and testing their bows. Pitsinsivostiyo described what he had witnessed, and claimed the right to kill Sikyaatayo himself, after which he would yell to call the warriors into the pueblo. “Deal severely with them. I do not want you to spare any man or boy.”
The next night Pitsinsivostiyo again entered the sleeping village, while the Kisispaya encircled the walls and quietly drifted through the plaza and alleyways. Pitsinsivostiyo found the couple in their home, illuminated by firelight on “unfolded bedding . . . clinging to each other.” Peering down through the ladder-entry, he pulled an arrow from his quiver and fixed it in the sinew bowstring, drew the bow tight, and “aimed right at the heart of Sikyaatayo.” The arrow flew true, penetrating the young man’s heart and exiting his back. Pitsinsivostiyo released a cry of revenge and the Kisispaya attackers “scattered through the village . . . rushing from house to house where they killed the men and boys. The women and girls were all herded together.” Plunder fol
lowed—“necklaces, earrings, provisions, and everything of value.”
The village in flames, the Kisispayas herded the women and girls back to their encampment. Dividing the captives among themselves, the Kisispaya chief selected Nagai-si as his own reward, to which Pitsinsivostiyo agreed. “Very well, I promised the women to you. This one here did not want me and followed that boy here. I can’t treasure her anymore.” He “laid out a road marker in the direction of the Kisispaya homes and they departed.” Pitsinsivostiyo returned to Tupats’ovi and reported the annihilation of Hovi’itstuyqa to his grandmother. She “felt sorry for the people of Hovi’itstuyqa,” and when she saw that the red fox had followed Pitsinsivostiyo home, she made a paho for the animal, now grieving the loss of his mistress, and ordered that her grandson return him “to his people.” The fox, relieved and honored, told Pitsinsivostiyo that “his people had always desired a prayer feather,” and now, with this gift, he directed that in Katsina dances henceforth, the feather should be worn, along with the pelt of red foxes.
Yet, soon Pitsinsivostiyo “was troubled by what he had done to the people of Hovi’itstuyqa. . . . He should not have murdered all the people there. After all, not all of them had wronged him. Sikyaatayo alone had hurt him by stealing the love of his wife.” Anguishing over his role in the massacre, he “blurted it all out to his grandmother.” She knew, she replied, that “when you plotted this wicked scheme that it would be troubling you one day.” She had sided with him out of loyalty, but was herself tormented by the events. The only solution, she felt, was to flee. “If we stay here, we’ll never be able to forget. . . . we should just get up and go to the southeast . . . where we came from in the first place.” The two left under cover of night, leaving all their meager belongings behind, and living off wild plants as they traveled. When the people of Tupats’ovi found that the two were gone, they discovered that “their cotton was beginning to give out.” It was at this point it became clear that Cotton Seed Boy was more than just a name for the homely young man, that in fact he had “owned the cotton. When he left, he took it with him. . . . too late, they treasured what they had had in him. . . . From that day on they could no longer grow any cotton.” A young man’s rage at the loss of his wife brought ruin not only to a distant town, but to his own people as well.
Mesa of Sorrows Page 13