Neither of these towns are identifiable today, although the general location along the Anderson Mesa/Chavez Pass regional community seems likely, with references to the rocky heights where the fox was captured suggesting the Mogollon Rim, and the importance of cotton-growing consistent with that cultigen’s presence in fourteenth-century Hopi life. Perhaps the tale of Hovi’itstuyqa’s destruction lies in an intermediate zone, between a “time” and a “place” that moves closer to full focus as the narratives develop. Tension between Puebloan towns was ubiquitous throughout the Southwest, since arable lands were always at a premium, and microenvironmental fluctuations could leave one community destitute while a distant neighbor enjoyed plentitude. The biological necessity of seeking marriage partners from outside one’s community is amply demonstrated in Puebloan courtship and marriage practices, given the relatively small population of these villages. Pitsinsivostiyo’s quest for vengeance for the loss of Nagai-si is an assault to which the maiden accedes. Her virtue surrendered is vehicle for her ruin. Sikyaatayo’s higher status is attractive when compared to the poverty and low status of Pitsinsivostiyo and his grandmother. Preparations for courtship and the red fox motif, Pitsinsivostiyo’s grandmother’s knowledge of bow-and-arrow making and hunting powers texture the story, even as it speaks of allies and enemies in the ancient Southwest. The Kisispayas (Yavapai hunters and farmers of the Verde Valley) are agents of revenge. Summoned from within the doomed town, the attackers kill the male inhabitants, and make captive the women and girls to distribute them among themselves—the fate of Awat’ovi’s survivors. Crops fail and the regional Neuvakwiotaka community disintegrates, setting the stage for the founding of the Homol’ovi cluster that will specialize in cotton growing and weaving in the century ahead.
The people of Tupats’ovi, like so many before, moved on in their migrations toward the Flower Butte, doubtless via Homol’ovi, and finally, with many other migrating clans, to those beckoning mesas with their ever-reliable springs. There they would establish new towns, amid the swirl of history and prophecy and danger that composed Hopi life. Just three miles northwest of Old Oraibi on Third Mesa lie the ruins of Huk’ovi, “Windy Place on High.” Analysis of the ceramic scatter at the ruins of Huk’ovi, Jeddito black-on-orange and Jeddito black-on-white, indicates that the village was established in the middle years of the twelfth century and no longer occupied after the last decade of the thirteenth century, perhaps a consequence of the prolonged drought of 1276 to 1299.
During its heyday, Huk’ovi was equal in population and power to its nearby neighboring village of Pivanhokyapi on Third Mesa. Although occasionally at odds with each other over ownership of planting fields in the valleys below the mesa, it was also common for courtships and marriage to link the towns through kinship. Ceremonial calendars in each village featured dances and feasts staggered in such a way to encourage visitation from neighbors, as did clan linkages allow a wider sense of lineage and kinship than those within each village. Clan exogamy, however, which required youth seeking marriage partners to wed outside their clans, thereby recruiting new resources to each clan, afforded opportunities for social mixing. And the peril of conflict, when greater-than-human powers were at work.
In Pivanhokyapi lived a “very handsome” young man, who caught the eye of a maiden at Huk’ovi during one of their joint ceremonials. She would often encounter him when he was out gathering firewood for his mother, and yet she could not get him to pay the least attention to her. She even asked his friends to bring him over to her home at Huk’ovi at night, but he refused, suspicious of her ardor. “No way will I go over to her place.”
Hopi Mesas and the villages of Huk’ovi, Pivanhonkyapi.
It came time that the residents of Pivanhokyapi staged their famous Ladder Dance, an event that drew an audience from many of the distant villages. On the edge of the mesa were four deep holes drilled into the rock, into which tall pine poles carried miles from the heights of the San Francisco Peaks, some fifty miles distant, were inserted. Four dancers, impersonating katsinam, would climb the poles and leap acrobatically from one to the other, in teams of two, often crossing in mid-flight, barely missing a collision. The watchers waited for these moments, and often cried out when the dancers were in mid-flight, so close were there bodies. It was a great spectacle and demonstrated the grace and power of the dancers.
The girl from Huk’ovi again approached the young man when he was gathering fuel wood out on the mesa, and again he ignored her. “Am I so ugly you run away from me,” she asked. “Do I look so much like an old woman that you’re avoiding me?” He admitted that she was, in fact, “a pretty girl,” but still resisted her enticements, even when she offered her body, “come over here and enjoy yourself on me, you can have my body.”
The boy refused, with the excuse that he would soon be a member of the important ceremony, and the senior men prohibited such sexual liaisons before ritual performances. The girl returned to Huk’ovi, furious at his rejection. “And she would find a way [to punish him], since she was a witch (powaqmana) and a master at her craft. By using her magic powers she caused a crack in one of the holes into which the pine poles had been inserted. . . . with that crack . . . the pole would give way and crash down over the rim with the boy still on it.” Since the postholes lay just a few feet from the edge of the mesa, a fall to the rocks below would surely be fatal.
As the Ladder Dance ceremony neared, the men of Pivanhokyapi gathered in their kiva for preparations. To their surprise, Old Spider Woman called down to them and asked permission to descend. “A girl from Huk’ovi has caused a crack alongside the hole in which your tree is planted,” she warned. “It can’t stay the way it is.” She offered them a special “mushy paste” with which to repair the crack and make the dance pole stable.
On each of three mornings thereafter, however, new cracks were discovered in the rock of the mesa in which the poles would be inserted, and in each case, Old Spider Woman provided the paste with which the cracks could be repaired. When the day of the dance finally came, “the people of Pivanhokyapi and some from Huk’ovi” turned out to watch. The dancers performed “beautifully and uttered cries that were pleasing to the onlookers.” Each team of two would climb the poles, and dance upon their narrow summits, sometimes leaning so far as to make all believe they would fall from the mesa top to the rocks below. As the dancers leaped from top-to-top of the poles, passing each other in the air to the sounds of the drum and grating noise from rattles made of bone scapulae, “the spectators below roared.”
The maiden from Huk’ovi stood among the audience, and wondered that none of the poles had broken during their twisting and bending. At noon, when the dancers paused to eat, returning with the priests to the kiva, she examined the holes in the mesa top and discovered that her cracks had all been mended. Enraged, “by means of her witchcraft, she broke one of the roof beams in the kiva” where the men were resting. The roof suddenly collapsed, crashing “down on all inside.”
Those within the kiva struggled to escape, and the people of Pivanhokyapi tore back the roofing vigas, latillas, and earth in desperation. But “all the men had perished,” suffocated under the heavy beams and dirt roofing. “How the people lamented . . . in hysterics about the terrible event.” Each villager had lost “at least one relative or acquaintance in this tragedy.” The dance, of course, was at an end, and mourning for the dead and their burial took its place.
As night fell, lamentations echoed across the valleys and mesas. One man, crying in sorrow atop a high roof, was startled to see a “light . . . moving straight toward Pivanhokyapi,” a flame that wove and disappeared then reappeared ever closer. Finally, it entered the village plaza, and the people edged closer in the dark to examine its source. It stopped at the shrine in the center of the plaza, and people could see, to their amazement, that it was a woman, “terrifying to look upon.” She showed herself as Tiikuywuuti, “Child Sticking Out Woman,” a spirit from a woman who died in the deep past in th
e midst of childbirth, the mother of all game animals and to whom hunters pray for success when seeking to take prey. Although she wore a hideous mask, she was a beautiful young woman beneath, captured forever at the moment of her death. She was sympathetic to the trials that Pivanhokyapi had experienced, since she abhorred the use of powa, “the power to change,” toward selfish ends. She revealed her knowledge that the young woman from Huk’ovi was a sorceress, and offered, if the people of Pivanhokyapi wished: “I will take revenge for you. If that is your desire, I want some of you to make prayer sticks for me and deposit them here at this shrine. I will then take on this task.”
When the man who spoke with Tiikuywuuti told the survivors in Pivanhokyapi of her offer to avenge their loss, several men “set to making prayer feathers.” Deposited at the shrine, the villagers awaited nightfall, crowding the rooftops of the pueblo.
Once again the distant flame appeared, and approached the mesa in a halting, zigzag line, weaving in course between where lay Pivanhokyapi and Huk’ovi. As it drew close to the mesa, however, it homed in on Huk’ovi, circling the village and finally entering the plaza. Once inside, Tiikuywuuti “went through the motions of grinding corn and singing,” drawing the residents to gather around. Yet as the audience drew near, she quickly dashed from the village toward the west, leaving the people of Huk’ovi bewildered.
When Tiikuywuuti appeared in the plaza the second night, the men decided to lie in ambush and seize the creature. Yet when they rushed upon her, she turned and gazed upon them with blazing empty eye sockets and bared, jagged teeth, frightening them away. Night after night she entered the Huk’ovi plaza, singing her “eerie song,” building a growing fear in the village. “She’s coming here for a reason, we must catch her by any means, this ugly demon.” Yet each time they tried, fear overcame them. A deep foreboding encompassed the village.
Haunted by Tiikuywuuti each night, the clan leaders of Huk’ovi met and pondered a solution. They knew there lay a purpose behind her visitations and were thankful that she had not “harmed anyone yet.” After much debate they decided that to abandon the village might be their only way of escaping the ogre. “Let’s move away from here . . . we’re bound to find a place to live somewhere else.” The villagers packed hurriedly over the course of the night, and set out to the southwest in search of a new, and hopefully safe, home. Yet each night when they made an encampment, Tiikuywuuti would check to make sure Huk’ovi was empty of inhabitants, and then turned to follow the fleeing inhabitants of the deserted village. When they saw her flame approach, they reshouldered their burden baskets and set out again as she prodded them onward. “The people had no choice but to move on.”
Eventually, far beyond the mesas to the southwest, the people of Huk’ovi established a new settlement where, it is said, they became the progenitors of the Mission Indians of California. But the lesson remained: “because of a witch girl . . . the village of Huk’ovi was abandoned and fell into ruin.” The witch, however, may have traveled with them.
A thin membrane separated the world of gods and spirits from the world of common people in Hopi history and culture, and the story of Huk’ovi’s abandonment shows that membrane in all its permeability. Gods existed with their own concerns, especially their role in shaping everyday Hopi lives toward “good living” in the interests of community. Common Hopis were attentive to their responsibilities in demonstrating their fealty to the teachings of Masauwu, even while they remained subject to universal human frailties of self-interest, lust, and rage. Between these resided those spirits with evil intent, and the popwaqt, human actors that were defined variously by Spanish padres as hechiceros or hechiceras, and by Anglo chroniclers as witches, wizards, and sorceresses. Again, perhaps universally across cultures, people who could draw upon numinous powers in ways commoners could not were often the source of admiration and subject to vilification. The constant challenge in any society with such thin boundaries between the supernatural and natural worlds lay in discerning the purposes to which “greater-than-human” powers were aimed. The root of the term powaqa (or powaka)—witch or sorcerer—is at first glance innocuous: powa- simply means “change,” or “transform,” which is then coupled with the element qa/ka, “one who/that which.” Variations abound that have little or no negative connotation: powata (to make right/cure/exorcise); powalti (to become purified/healed as from insanity); powa’iwta (be purified/be back to normal). A powaqa, therefore, is someone with the powers of change or transformation who puts those powers to “personal gain or advantage, usually with negative consequences, including death, for their fellow humans.” The dual nature of powa- probably emerged from deep in the ancestral Puebloan past, long before agriculture and consolidation of small groups into larger communities, from those women and men who anthropologists term “shamans”—people capable of communicating with the spirit/animal world, and often able to take animal form in Nagualism—“a phenomenon that involves animal metamorphosis paired with the faculty of deriving powers” from the transformation.
The “witch girl” of Huk’ovi sought self-serving ends, although just what she might have gained from marriage with the handsome youth from Pivanhokyapi is obscure. It may be that the youth’s spectacular skills in the Ladder Dance suggested equal skills as a husband and provider, and a fine career ahead in the ceremonial sphere. Perhaps she stood in for a sense of inferiority between Huk’ovi and its neighbor, since it was Pivanhokyapi that seems most renowned for its ceremonial traditions. Women’s role as agents of koyaanisqatsi, however, is ubiquitous in Hopi history, as is the suffering of whole communities for the transgressions of an individual.
Ironically, Pivanhokyapi and its residents would themselves suffer immolation and ruination in time. Although well regarded for their piety and adherence to the ceremonial calendar, as years passed their piety led also to a sense of tedium. The first expressions of this showed when frenzy arose around a game of chance, totolospi. First men took to the kivas to gamble away the hours, and soon women joined them. Women offered themselves as prizes, and “no one belonged to anyone anymore. It was total promiscuity.” Finally, even Talawasyi, the kikmongwi’s wife, joined the craze, ignoring her nursing child through the night and refusing to correct her ways. The kikmongwi, seeing that the koyaanisqatsi was consuming his community, entreated the Yaayapontsa (Wind Gods) for assistance. At his pleading, they agreed to bring fire from the San Francisco Peaks and purify the community by setting it aflame, even while the gamblers were inside the kivas, thereby killing most of the people. Only the children, who had been spirited away from Pivanhokyapi, lived to renew the pious life. Both Huk’ovi and Pivanhokyapi would suffer similar fates, although many of the former would migrate westward, while only a few of the latter would carry their message into later generations.
Purification through obliteration, called down by one’s own leader, brings these stories to the cusp of the historic era with the demise of Sikyatki. This community, located on the northeast slopes of First Mesa, its ruins now largely covered by windblown sands, looms large in contemporary Hopi culture by virtue of the stunningly complex and beautiful pottery crafted during its heyday in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when it grew to some 600 rooms in size with a population of perhaps 800 residents. Between 1325 and 1400 the total occupation of the Hopi Mesas seems to have doubled, “likely corresponding to an influx of immigrants” from the south—Anderson Mesa, Chavez Pass, and Homol’ovi—as well as less well understood arrivals from the north—Kayenta—and the east—Keres-speaking peoples from the Rio Grande and San José river valleys.
Sikyatki was no longer occupied when the first Spanish entradas began in 1540. Yet its significance endures in the form of Sikyatki Polychrome pottery. Characterized by extraordinary artistry and highly expressive, asymmetrical, often abstract renderings of life forms—plant and animal—and fired in an oxidizing atmosphere that yielded a rich, creamy yellow background, Sikyatki Polychrome (and associated Matsaki and Fourmile styles) su
ggests a geographically wide-ranging explosion of creativity that probably superceded linguistic boundaries. So distinctively different was this form, which extended eastward to encompass the whole of Antelope Mesa, that archaeologists have long wondered if these communities might have come from a different linguistic stock than those of Second and Third Mesas, echoed in the Hopi notion that not everyone across the three mesas “knew each other.”
When Jesse Walter Fewkes excavated portions of Sikyatki on behalf of the Smithsonian Institution, he collected some five hundred of these remarkable vessels. Ironically, among his workmen was a Hopi man named Lesou from Walpi Village, who was married to a Tewa woman of Tewa Village, a descendant of the immigrants who arrived to fortify the northern approaches to First Mesa between 1696 and 1700. Nampeyo, his wife, “was so enchanted with the artistic designs and aesthetically-pleasing colors” that Lesou showed her on sherds collected from the excavations that she began reproducing the images and forms in her own wares. Inspired by Sikyatki, Nampeyo initiated a renaissance in “Hopi” pottery fabrication and decoration that continues today through her descendants and affines. Archetypical Hopi pottery today, therefore, may draw upon a distinctive tradition and renaissance artist neither of which derived from “original” Hopi stock.
Mesa of Sorrows Page 14