Mesa of Sorrows

by James F. Brooks

  Whole Sikyatki Polychrome jar.

  Just a few miles southwest of Sikyatki Pueblo, well out of sight and on the opposite flank of First Mesa, lay the older, emphatically Hopi community of Qöötsaptuvela, or Ash Slope, which the people of Walpi today consider their ancestral home. Viewed from above, from Walpi today, it wears its name well, several mounds of masonry rubble with a distinctive ashy cast, with the name Ash Slope doubtless referring to its aspect after the residents moved up onto the mesa top around 1700, seeking a more defensive location in anticipation of the Spanish effort to punish them for their role in the annihilation of Awat’ovi.

  Given the proximity of the two villages, their diverse origins and languages, and the limited arable lands below in Polacca Wash, tensions between their peoples probably ran deep and long. As is so often the case, however, material tensions were second to those inspired by passion and power.

  In Sikyatki at this time lived a couple with a beautiful daughter, who drew suitors from within the village, as near as Qöötsaptuvela, and as far as Awat’ovi, miles distant on Antelope Mesa. The girl would receive visitors while grinding corn, allowing them to speak to her through the vent hole of the upper rooms of her family’s house. In time she grew tired of the interruptions, however, and narrowed the field to just two youths, both from her own village of Sikyatki.

  These two young men came from different clans, Coyote and Swallow, and their rivalry for the girl’s attentions began to create daily stresses within the village, as each clan sided with their clansman and spoke poorly of the other. The girl knew she was the source of unpleasantness within her people, and at last decided to bring piki bread to the home of Coyote Boy, thereby signaling her willingness to be his wife. Coyote Boy’s “uncles and other male relatives were readying the wedding garments for their new daughter-in-law.” They set to weaving her wedding robe and the large sash and fashioning the wedding boots from soft deerskin.

  Swallow Boy, however could not accept the girl’s decision, an arrogance born of the fact that he and his relatives “were all witches who were powerful and great troublemakers.” Among their powers were those of metamorphosis. “If they intended to travel somewhere, they did not do so by the strength of their own legs but in the guise of coyotes, wolves, owls, and crows.” Their neighbors called them with contempt “turds,” but feared them terribly as well.

  So powerful were Swallow Boy’s relatives that they stalled the wedding by calling for a contest between the two youths, to make a final determination of who would take the maiden as his wife. The Sikyatki kikmongwi accepted this delay, since he feared what would become of his people should the tensions grow more violent. The sorcerers laid out the contest, a footrace that would unfold over vast distances as a footrace between Coyote Boy and Swallow Boy, who would run first to the southeast to the Little Colorado River, and carve their clan symbols in a rock there, each marking his arrival with his sign, the second arrival placing his below the first. From there they would race northeast to the Rio Grande, again leaving their clan marks, and turn to the northwest to run to the Big Colorado, and finally return to First Mesa. The winner would cross a line gouged in the sand, on either end of which was thrust a stone knife. “The one who comes in first will pick up his knife and wait for the loser. As soon as he arrives, the winner is to sever his head.”

  Coyote Boy was by far the fittest and fleetest of the two, and yet his clansmen knew that Swallow Boy would transform into a swift animal or bird in order to win the contest. His clansmen promised a solution, and once the race was underway, retired to their kiva to consider their strategy.

  When the race began, Coyote Boy moved easily into the lead. When he turned to look behind, he seemed so far ahead that he had lost sight of his rival. Yet when he reached the Little Colorado, he found the Swallow Clan mark already incised on the rock. In his running he had noticed a nighthawk swooping overhead, and realized that Swallow Boy had adopted that form for any leg of the race where there were no spectators. At each juncture, he found the Swallow Clan mark in rock before his own, and lost hope that he could ever overcome the other’s sorcery. His clansmen in the kiva, however, knew of his trouble and were smoking their pipes, blowing clouds of smoke into the sky. These clouds gathered into “thick thunderheads” over the trails the boys were racing, and suddenly let loose great sheets of rain. Swallow Boy in his nighthawk guise was drenched and forced to change back into his human form. Coyote Boy overtook him and now had hope he might prevail.

  As the thunderstorm ebbed, however, the lead changed back and forth as Swallow Boy was able to resume the race as the nighthawk. Coyote Boy received from one of his clansman a magical gourd that could itself be made to fly, and with this he was able to keep pace until they both drew near First Mesa and the crowds that had gathered on the rooftops of Sikyatki Village. They could see Coyote Boy in the lead and raised a cheer. Swallow Boy’s kinsmen saw the boy slowing, falling into a trot, then a stumbling walk, but he had no choice but to remain in his human form. Coyote Boy crossed the line first, and awaited the dawdling rival. “The moment he arrived, Coyote Boy ran up to him and grabbed his long hair from behind. Then he thrust the knife into the boy’s throat and cut off his head. The witch boy died instantly.”

  With the victory, the boy’s uncle, head of the Coyote Clan, demanded that the Swallow Clan leave the village forever. “You caused your own misery, because you are people without compassion. You are so mighty that you could not show any pity.” Yet, “under no circumstances were the witches going to submit to the wish of the Coyote clan people. They had no intention of causing their own ruin by leaving. They were extremely powerful and declined to leave.”

  In this atmosphere of unresolved conflict, “the people of Sikyatki settled down to their daily routine again, but life was not very peaceful.” The sorcerers, or Turds, resented the fact that they were beaten and caused every possible trouble for the rest of the villagers. Finally, the kikmongwi of Sikyatki, “who held all of his children dear,” decided “to terminate this corrupt way of life. He wanted the witches wiped out and the village destroyed.” Lacking the power to do so, however, he finally called upon the kikmongwi of Qöötsaptuvela for aid.

  The Sikyatki chief explained that he would soon call for a communal harvesting party that would draw all the men away from the village to the fields below in Polacca Wash. Knowing that Sikyatki’s demise would make available those same fields for his people, the Qöötsaptuvela kikmongwi agreed, and when the harvest was announced, he gathered his fighters and they lay in wait in the dark of night. When the Sikyatki men departed for harvest, “they rushed the village. In no time they were inside. Quickly they pulled the ladders from the rooftops of the houses where the women and children were . . . and set everything on fire. Some of the men had come with pitch they had gathered. This they smeared on the walls of the houses . . . which quickly caught fire.” The men in the fields below saw the smoke and ran back, but Qöötsaptuvela’s warriors “fell upon them. As soon as a man reached them, he was dispatched. Since the Sikyatki men had no weapons with which to resist, they died without being able to fight back.”

  A bare few Coyote Clan members survived by running away, and found succor in the village of Oraibi, far distant. They became the last arriving clan at Oraibi, and thus ranked at the bottom of the social order. “All the witches, those excrement people, perished.” So, too, did the village kikmongwi, “who had hatched the plan.” The fate of the maiden whose beauty had underlain the terror remains unremarked.

  As in all Hopi narratives of destruction, variations exist, and in the case of Sikyatki some simply have the villagers, like those of Huk’ovi, abandoning their sorcery-ridden town and migrating elsewhere in order to bring an end to the koyaanisqatsi. But in each case the trigger for the rise of witchcraft and chaos lies with young men’s contest over a maiden, by whose allure they are drawn away from the communitarian principles at the center of “good living.” Their contest for the maiden’s attenti
on and services as wife highlights individual self-interest rather than the village’s well-being. Sorcerers are looked upon as “excrement,” yet their presence in village life seems almost necessary, the dark side of the mirror in an “Apollonian” society. Lust, jealousy, rage, and revenge all figure at the heart of a millennium of community conflict and violence. In each case—perhaps strange to Euroamerican sensibilities but consistent with the primacy of community in the Puebloan world—wholesale obliteration, rather than select individual persecution, is the storm that washes away the corruption and brings a fresh dawn for renewal.

  With the end of Sikyatki and, in the distance, the long shadows of conquistadors and Franciscan friars working their way toward Tusayán, the “moment of the yellow dawn” drew near. At Awat’ovi Pueblo, whose “residents were wont to do many things,” the nexus of prophecy, koyaanisqatsi, violence, and purification would link the ancient and recent past in ways that shaped the very heart of “Hopiness” today.

  8

  Liminal Men, Liminal Souls

  Time after time, contention within a village, or between villages, or between clans caused people to leave, and in the journeys that followed, they were looking for a place of harmony where they could follow good teachings and a good way of life . . . living together as people who were civilized and worthy of being in the Fourth World.

  I believe that when the destruction actually took place they were mortally afraid of letting that Catholic thing grow and spread. Some people regarded the padres as sorcerers.

  —NUVAYOIYAVA, TEWA VILLAGE, 1978

  Nuvayoiyava, “Big Falling Snow,” was born in 1888, as the tensions between the Hopis and the federal government over education, economy, and culture were heading to a breaking point. As, too, were tensions inside Oraibi. He lived through and beyond these crises, all the while understanding them in the context of the Hopi past.

  Born to Iechawe (Blue Smoke) of the Pehtowa (Wood, Stick, Spruce) Clan, a woman of Tewa Village on First Mesa, and a Hopi father, Sitaiema, from Walpi, Nuvayoiyava’s life proved as complicated as the wider Hopi world at the dawn of the twentieth century. His father left his mother while he was “still in the cradle,” but later sponsored his initiation into the Kwakwanteu (One Horn) kiva society, which had its origins in the destruction of Palatkwapi many centuries earlier. His father was of the Water (Cloud, Mist) Clan, itself the principle clan of Palatkwapi. By Tewa and Hopi customs of matrilineal descent, he was Tewa, but by his induction into the One Horns he was also fully recognized as Hopi. Thus Nuvayoiyava’s kinship and clan ties linked him to the Tanos of the Rio Grande Valley, their migration to Tusayán after 1696, and back to the “time,” if not the place, of the very emergence of those migratory peoples who in time would become Hopis.

  Nuvayoiyava’s earliest years were those of a traditional Hopi youth. He and his friends protected precious seed corn from field rats by identifying their burrows and digging down to kill them with pointed sticks. Other times they crawled stealthily toward prairie dog colonies to shoot the sentries with arrows as they raised themselves to scan for predators. “If lucky enough to get one,” they would gut it, singe off the hair and after salting, “wrap it in corn leaves and roast it in hot ashes,” a cherished rustic meal. Sheep and “long-legged goats” needed tending as well, especially when pasturing overnight far from Tewa Village across Polacca Wash. Predators like coyotes were one concern, but sheep thievery between villages, and sometimes by Navajo neighbors, also required the boy’s vigilance.

  His Tewa stepfather Peki (Turned Over) of the Tewa Village Corn Clan taught Nuvayoiyava the secrets of Hopi corn cultivation, too. Since winter moisture was stored deep in the sands of the washes, seed corn had to be buried six to eight inches deep in order to find enough moisture to germinate. If the seasonal monsoons came on time, in late June and July, the rain would wash in sheets off the bedrock of the mesas above and provide floodwater irrigation just as the stalks were beginning to emerge through the sand into the sunlight. Now at their most vulnerable to rats and prairie dogs, Nuvayoiyava and other boys protected the cornfields day and night, as they did later when ripening ears drew crows and ravens. Once the ears matured and were harvested, the cornstalks were left standing in fields, “where the blowing sand would cover them up, and thus helped fertilize the ground.” In addition to his Corn Clan knowledge, Peki was deeply respected by his fellow Tewa villagers, as someone with good judgement and a gentle, thoughtful manner in resolving conflicts. Nuvayoiyava, therefore, enjoyed an education in Tewa and Hopi culture unusually broad and deep, given that he “learned about rituals, ceremonies and traditions” of the Walpi One Horn fraternity from his father, and Corn Clan wisdom from his stepfather, toward growing corn in the sandy washes.

  When about five or six years old, Nuvayoiyava’s family sent him to the day school below First Mesa at Polacca. The Indian Agency at Keams Canyon had found the people of Tewa Village more receptive to the idea of children’s education than the Hopis and often showcased Tewa children as the hope for the future. Nuvayoiyava did not find school to his liking, however. “On the first day at school they gave us all new clothes, white man’s style. We didn’t like those clothes very much because they made us feel ridiculous. Altogether, we felt pretty strange, getting educated in a language we didn’t understand.” At recess the children shed their clothes, hid them nearby and “ran naked back up to the village up on the mesa.” However, the truant officer at Walpi, Nuvayoiyava’s uncle Chawkweina, chased the children “all through the village and over the roofs” and took them back down to Polacca, where they were forced to dress again. This happened several times before the Tewa kids surrendered to the inevitable. The school also changed his name, since the matrons had difficulty making sense of the lack of family names among the Hopi. Nuvayoiyava’s name, they failed to understand, reflected his father’s Water Clan lineage, a name chosen by his paternal aunts to make clear to others his “father’s clan affiliations.” Big Falling Snow signaled the Water Clan. But the teachers had difficulty with the prounciation and so shortened it to “Yava,” which became his “family” name. He was given the English name “Albert” since one teacher who had taken a personal interest in the boy liked it over “Oliver.” When initiated into the One Horn fraternity, however, he received a ceremonial name—Eutawisa (Close in the Antelope)—to indicate membership in that society. His life would always find him weaving between different cultural norms.

  When Albert Yava turned eight he found himself transferred to the Boarding School at Keams Canyon, where his induction into white education intensified, since he no longer had the nightly respite of returning to his Tewa Village family. On his first day in Keams Canyon he was given a bath and had his hair cut “white man’s style,” which left him deeply distressed. “The long hair we boys wore on the sides symbolized rain, you might say fertility,” and the short hair embarrassed him in front of his family when he returned for visits. His parents thought that the whites “were pretty high-handed and insensitive, as well as ignorant” of Hopi customs. He was well aware of struggles within Walpi, and even the villages on Second and Third Mesas, between “conservatives” and “progressives” around the government’s education program, and was sympathetic to the fact that many parents were deeply suspicious of what the government programs might do to their children. Still, he and others found many of the teachers generally kind and they inclined “to learn white man’s ways so that we’d know how to cope in later years.”

  When Yava reached eighth grade in the Keams Canyon school, the final year of instruction and when most of the teenagers would be returning to their home villages, with little to do but return, half-transformed, to traditional life, one teacher suggested he consider attending the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma to continue his education in the company of students from many different tribes throughout the West. His parents, however, strongly opposed his leaving Hopi society for a distant school, and none of his arguments—especially the fact that
they “had no livestock to take care of, nothing”—could persuade them otherwise. He finally enlisted an uncle, Nelson Oyaping, who served as an agency policeman and who “in the Hopi-Tewa way” was responsible for his welfare, to sign the permission in lieu of his parents.

  At Chilocco, Yava mixed with boys from dozens of western tribes. They attended classes for half the day and learned trades the other half—carpentry, blacksmithing, shoe- and harness-making. Each summer as many as three hundred of the boys were detailed to work in the beet fields of Colorado, backbreaking work that inspired him to look for a higher level of training. In the end, he earned a harness-maker’s certificate and made harnesses for use in other reservations, as well as becoming an adept cobbler, making shoes for the Chilocco track team. By the time he graduated in 1910, he wasn’t sure that he was “well educated,” but had acquired skills that provided income throughout his life. He returned to the Hopi reservation to find tensions continuing, since the Oraibi split had not created a new world of suyanisqatsi. He returned to helping Peki with the corn and herding sheep, getting them to grass and always looking for water. Once, at Peki’s urging, he explored a pueblo ruin east of First Mesa to find a water source, and after he and his stepbrother excavated around some sand-covered masonry, found a buried spring that came back to life once uncovered. He considered this a gift from Peki, who “had remembered something handed down from the past.”

  In time, however, Yava grew uneasy at what he found on the reservation. Few opportunities to earn money existed, raising sheep was a challenge, and he didn’t find avenues to employ the trades he had acquired at Chilocco. He found some work on the new railroad down in Winslow, but when he learned that his mother back home in Tewa Village had fallen ill, he walked the sixty-five miles north to First Mesa. Fortunately, his livestock-handling and saddler skills proved useful to the Indian Agency at Keams Canyon, and once the agents understood his educational accomplishments and facility with English, he added the role of interpreter to his employment, which paid twenty dollars a month.