Mesa of Sorrows

by James F. Brooks

  Yava’s willingness to buck convention showed itself soon thereafter, when he began courting Ida Haupove of Tewa Village, who worked at the trading post at Keams Canyon. Her parents, however, disapproved of him as a son-in-law, so the two obtained a marriage license from the Indian Agency and were married in the First Baptist Church in Keams Canyon. Her mother’s clan never accepted him, perhaps an echo of the curse that affected Hopi-Tewa relations. Albert and Yava had three daughters, but Ida died shortly after the last was born when her brakes failed on the steep road leading down off of First Mesa. Yava would marry again, this time a Hopi woman, Taiyomana, whom he met at a Niman (Home Dance) ceremony at Walpi—a dance to mark the departure of the katsinam as they return to their home in the San Francisco Peaks. Taiyomana had three children of her own, and after a complicated courtship that involved her own ex-husband summoning tribal police whenever Yava visited her, they, too, married in Keams Canyon. Yava now moved into her home, which had belonged once to his own biological father’s mother; by customs of matrilocal residence, Yava’s move into her home brought him closer to his father. Yet, this marriage, too, proved short-lived, since the tensions around her first husband and their children could not be resolved. Frustrated, Yava finally told her, “Okay, then, go back to your old man.” They were formally divorced through the Tribal Court. Finally, Yava found a longer relationship with Virginia Scott, a Navajo woman whose husband had left her “Navajo style.” They had two daughters and three sons together, but she, too, left him and the children, leaving him to parent alone in a hard land.

  Albert Yava’s memoir captures more than a lone man’s transformation at the turn of the twentieth century at Flower Butte, however. In fact, he found it hard to imagine that outsiders would learn much from his personal details, when larger questions of history and culture fascinated him throughout his life. The Tewa migration to the Hopi Mesas figured far more prominently in his mind, as did the “curse” that defined their long-term relationship with their Hopi neighbors. So, too, did the history of clan migrations and the subtle rankings of power among them, which created the political terrain upon which Hopi history would be played out. His induction into the Kwakwanteu or “One Horn Lodge” provided him this deep background. Finally, the destruction of Awat’ovi occupies a startling amount of his narrative, at least insofar as his Tewa progenitors generally claimed no role and little knowledge of that formative event in Hopi history.

  Yava’s narrative emphasizes the martial experience of his Tewa ancestors in his rendering of their solicitation and relocation to Tusayán. Noting that “the people of the Hopi villages did not think of themselves as belonging to the same tribe,” but rather, “Walpis, Mishongnovis, Shongopovis, Oraibis and so on,” he saw the Snake and Bear clan emissaries to the Rio Grande in 1696 as driven by fear of attack from Utes, Apaches, and Comanches. These mounted raiders conducted harvest-time raids for Hopi corn. In addition to crops, these raiders also seized women and children, some of whom they retained as slaves, while others they sold to Spanish buyers at trade fairs. Many Hopi men died in the defense of their kinspeople. The population of Walpi, beset as well by “attacks from Oraibi . . . was down to seven families, and they were feeling pretty desperate.”

  The Walpi delegates undertook their four journeys across three hundred dangerous miles. Finally, after the presentation of three pahos, called uudopeh in Tewa, representing men, women, and land, bore the promise that if the Tanos would come to the defense of Walpi they would find reward in that town’s sons and daughters as “husbands and wives,” the people of Tsaewari accepted.

  In Yava’s telling, however, things took a strange turn once the Tewas reached the foot of First Mesa. Rather than welcoming them to settle as promised, the Walpis refused their guests the right to enter their town, stopping the Tanos somewhere near the ruins of Sikyatki Village. Perhaps, Yava wonders, “it was because there were so many Tewas in the group that they made the Walpis uneasy . . . there may have been as many as two hundred men, women and children in the group.” The Walpis then, to the Tanos’ dismay, “contacted the Utes and challenged them to make an attack on Walpi.” “‘We’ve got some real fighters here now. Why don’t you come and try to drive them off?’” The Utes accepted the challenge.

  Despite their arduous travels and lack of defensive location on the heights of the mesa, the Tewas, once scouts had warned them of the approaching Ute horsemen, prepared a battle plan. Agaitsay, the Tewa chief, divided his men into two parties, one to hold the Utes from the front while the other circled behind under the cover of the cliff-fall rocks. He ordered that his archers aim either for the warrior or his mount, knowing that a Ute unhorsed would be no match for his Tewa fighters. The Ute charge was fearsome, with their war bonnets waving and “little mirrors reflecting the sunlight.” The Tewa warriors, however, stood strong, and an arrow brought down the Ute war captain. Once quarters had closed, the Utes changed to their lances, and the Tewa replied with war clubs, knocking some Utes off their horses. Each time the Tewas seemed to prevail, the Utes would regroup and charge, and yet were gradually forced back. Soon the Utes dismounted to face their attackers, shielding themselves at one moment behind the parfleches they had brought on the expedition, which would later give that place the Tewa name Tukyu’u, or Meat Point. Falling back even further, they sheltered behind several boulders, later called Kokwadeh, or Stone Wall. By day’s end only three Utes remained able-bodied, and threw their bows out from behind the rocks and asked for a parley.

  The Ute leader asked, “What people are you? We can see you’re not Hopis.” Agaitsay replied, “We are Tewatowa.” The Ute apologized: “My cousin, we didn’t know it was you. . . . I’m sorry, my brothers, that we fought against you. . . . we just came to get some corn and things like that.”

  Agaitsay said that the Tewas were in Hopi country to stay, and forbade the Utes from ever returning in war. The Utes collected their wounded men and departed, leaving their dead behind. The Tewas collected the weapons scattered across the battlefield, took scalps, and, locating the four bravest of the Ute warriors, removed their hearts and buried them at the precise place where battle was joined. A season later, seeing a tree had sprouted at that spot, they decided that they would defend that place forever. Today, Yava points out, the place is called Pingto’i in Tewa, “Place of Hearts,” and a juniper tree grows inside the ring of stones they placed during the burial. A petroglyph on the cliff face at First Mesa commemorates this battle even today, showing a Tewa bison-hide shield and “a long row of marks indicating the number of Utes that were killed.”

  Yava’s version recounts the decision by the Walpis to allow the victorious Tewas to establish their village on the northern heights of First Mesa, and the curse that prevented Hopis from ever learning the Tewa language. Tewas built their houses of stone “according to the clans they belonged to, with Bear clan, the leading phratry, assigned the most prominent,” with houses arranged on the “four dies of the central court.” Since Yava’s Water Clan was affiliated with Bear, they too held a place of prominence. To Yava, had the Tanos failed the test of the Ute attack, they might never have been invited to settle on First Mesa.

  Yava’s version of the Tewa migration never mentions the second Pueblo Revolt of 1696 and the impetus it gave the Tanos/Tewas of Tsaewari to accept Walpi’s invitation and leave the Spanish colony on the Rio Grande behind. He does mention later Tewa and Keres migrants who ventured west to escape the Catholic gaze and Spanish tributary demands, however. Some settled “down in the Wepo Valley” (and the west side of First Mesa), another group on the south side “near what is now called Five Houses.” Still another sojourned with the Zunis before following the Zuni Trail to Hopi, and a last group that “arrived here in a heavy mist, and because of the mist people didn’t know the direction this group came from.”

  Variations in Tewa histories of migration and settlement in Tusayán may be a matter of differences in clan memory. But they signal something more: an anxiety abo
ut claiming a right to occupancy while simultaneously marking the distinct differences between Hopi and Tewa peoples and their histories. Tewas were clearly not the first “outsiders” to enter Flower Butte, nor to find a home there. But Tewa memory and history has worked hard to set them aside from the experience of other outsiders, perhaps because they knew well the fate of another “foreign” people, the residents of Awat’ovi, in the autumn of 1700.

  Yava’s concern about tensions between “natives” and “newcomers,” insiders and outsiders, in the settlements of the Hopi mesas shapes his understanding of what transpired at Awat’ovi. His story of the Tewa migrations attends carefully to the sequence of arrivals, and insists that their presence was by invitation, rather than as refugees, as well as their temporal depth—“you can see that we aren’t exactly newcomers in Hopi country . . . we were here when the first Anglos arrived from the East.” Yet he insists as well that Tewa village continues to occupy a liminal place in what “Hopiness” really stands for, insisting that the Simpeng’i (Black Man) mask and dances—“to commemorate how we emerged into this world at Sibopay and began our long journey that eventually led us to Hopi country . . . were made on First Mesa to help the Tewas remember their old traditions and not get swallowed up by the Hopis.”

  Yava is also quick to mark the people of Awat’ovi as outsiders—“that big Laguna village on Antelope Mesa, Awatovi, had died just before we got here. It was destroyed in 1700, and we arrived according to our tradition, in 1702” (although his editor, Harold Courlander, notes that “the actual year of arrival is not certain”). Yava saw Antelope Mesa as a potpourri of linguistic identities—Kawaika’a was “Laguna” as well as Awatovi, as was Chakpahu. Akokavi was “a settlement of Hemis (Jemez) people.” Recent ceramic analysis reinforces Yava’s sense of the diversity of this easternmost mesa, as well. From 1325 forward, waves of diverse migrants entered the Hopi Mesas, some driven by drought, others by hunger, some by fear of Spanish oppression, while still others may have been drawn to the enduring ceremonial strength of the villages on the high mesas. The social map of Antelope Mesa shows a mosaic of peoples, each recalling distinct origins, resisting complete assimilation, yet also fully aware of the urgent need to find enduring cultural allies.

  Yava’s concerns about insider/outsider dynamics at First Mesa, and his extension of those to the settlements on Antelope Mesa, reflect a centuries-deep process at work in the “peopling” of Tusayán. Turmoil and travel were the watchwords of the fourteenth-century Southwest, and yet somehow balancing those forces was the “magnet” effect of a few “center-places”—the northern Rio Grande, the Zuni River Valley, and the Hopi Mesas, which appear “to have been a particularly popular destination, receiving thousands of immigrants during the A.D. 1300s and 1400s.” Today, says archaeologist Kelly Hayes-Gilpin, “members of the Hopi Tribe . . . are explicit that contemporary Hopi identity is synonymous with social diversity . . . Hopi is explicitly an aggregation of different groups that maintain important aspects of their unique histories and traditions.” These peoples spoke different languages, solicited permission to join existing villages, and, challenged to present their ceremonial powers, they were sometimes absorbed, and sometimes rejected. If denied, they would move on to another possible host. Finding a community to adopt them was essential. To remain outside one of the center-places would have been “isolating, undesirable, and perhaps even dangerous” in the unstable world of the times, according to archaeologist Patrick Duff.

  And yet, this very embrace of distinct and different peoples under the umbrella of “Hopi” seems to have been forged out of endemic struggle and conflict. It is clear that intercommunal violence coursed across the Southwest between 1225 and 1300 as “Pax Chaco” disintegrated, with villages sacked and set ablaze and unburied bodies, often mutilated, strewn randomly across ancient sites. Indeed, village architecture that developed after 1300, high-mesa defensible locations with multistory terraced roomblocks, and narrow, controlled entrances into the central plazas, shows real attention to the presence of external enemies. These plazas may also have served to contain and control the pueblos’ population and their internal terracing, in which the highest stories were reserved for the highest-ranking leadership and allowed those leaders to monitor relationships among their heterogeneous occupants. In the fourteenth century, the potential for conflict may have been more likely internal, among residents, and local, between nearby villages, than it ever was external. As Tessie Naranjo, of Santa Clara Pueblo, once commented to the author, “Plaza pueblos are as much about embracing people within, as they are about keeping people out.”

  Yava’s narrative of Awat’ovi’s demise reinforces this sense of internal conflict in dialogue with external tensions. Although its earliest founders, the Bow Clan, may have been “Hopis,” by the early 1600s the town had absorbed migrating “Kawaikas, Payupkis and other Eastern Pueblos.” Many of Awat’ovi ceremonies derived from these immigrants, since the songs that First Mesa “inherited from them” are “not in the Hopi language.” When the Franciscans arrived “Awat’ovi was a big village. I think it had four rows of terraced houses, three plazas or courts, and five or six kivas.” The Franciscans “were pretty successful at converting people at Awatovi . . . eventually more than half the population” accepted baptism. The converts abandoned their homes in the Western Pueblo and moved “to the north side to be near the church, you might say that Awat’ovi was broken into two halves.” Although the majority of the people were adherents of the Catholic faith—perhaps only nominally so—“the padres gave the Awatovis a rough life. The people had to haul stones and timbers, construct the church buildings, and do everything they were told to do.” The padres, it was said, “frequently took women and young girls into their quarters and seduced them,” although the precise nature of the seduction is unnamed. In order to bring the women and girls into the convento, “the padres would send a young man to some distant place to get sacred water from a certain spring, and while he was gone they would take his wife. Some of these young men never returned home because they were killed by enemies.”

  According to Yava, Oraibi, Mishongnovi, and Awat’ovi all joined in the 1680 revolt in order to “get rid of the Castillas.” The One Horn Society took a leading role in the rebellion, commemorating their victory by caching both the lances of the Spanish soldiers and the church bells themselves in secret crypts. At Awat’ovi, the church itself was destroyed, but the convento converted for residential use. “It began to look as if the Castillas weren’t coming back.”

  And yet the Spanish did return in the year 1700. First to Awat’ovi, where Yava recalls that those who had been baptized as Catholics welcomed them, while others resented their return. When the padres began repairing and rebuilding the church and convento, the villagers at Walpi, Shongopovi, and Oraibi saw a new era of conversion coming upon them and grew restless. At Awat’ovi, according to Yava, “when the padres came back . . . they made the Catholic converts feel bold again. Ever since the uprising they had been kind of quiet, but now they were showing themselves and acting in a contentious way.” Frictions long thought past, renewed themselves.

  The form of the Catholic adherents’ “contentious” acts provoked the kikmongwi, “a Bow Clan man,” who felt his control of the town slipping away. Young people failed to attend to religious traditions and social norms. Constant trouble erupted between the traditionals and the Catholics, who were in the majority. People fought publicly. The Catholics were ridiculing and interfering with Hopi religious ceremonies. “The kikmongwi saw that everything was falling apart, but he couldn’t stop it. He decided that the only thing that could be done was to destroy the village and wipe the slate clean.” The stories that Yava had heard claimed, “The Awatovi chief was really responsible for everything that happened after that.”

  The kikmongwi of Awat’ovi first approached his counterpart at Walpi. Complaining that conditions had grown dire in his village, that it was “full of evil” and the “Castill
a sorcerers” were contributing to rapes and killings and that ceremonies were being disrupted, he asked that Walpi detail some of its warriors to punish his people. It was, he suggested as in times before, the rupture that brought Hopi from the Third to this Fourth world. When the Walpi chief declined, saying his people wouldn’t wage war on their own brothers and sisters, the kikmongwi shifted his focus to the leader of Oraibi. When asked why his men ought to wage war on kinsmen, he replied, “I only want you to kill the men. You can take the women and children as prisoners. They will help to keep your population flourishing.” Again the Oraibi kikmongwi deferred, but when the Awat’ovi chief claimed he was already in negotiations with Walpi, and that they should go together, the former agreed. At Walpi they found the kalatekmongwi, or war chief, who seemed more willing. Explaining that the Oraibis would be entitled to all the women, the Awat’ovi kikmongwi promised that “you Walpi Reed Clan people, you can have all the land and the fields, because they’re too far away from the Oraibis. The land is yours, the women are theirs.”

  The Walpi’s war chief agreed, and although the Walpi kikmongwi told him that attacking a neighbor was “not the Hopi way,” he gathered his Reed Clan warriors. Oraibi warriors suggested they gather for an attack in four days, position themselves beneath the walls of the pueblo, and the “Awat’ovi chief would stand on a high rooftop and give a signal when all the people were asleep in the kivas and houses.” Just before the break of dawn the Awat’ovi chief waved a burning torch and the warriors stormed into the town, pulling the ladders from the kivas and trapping the men and boys who were resting after their all-night ceremonies. Throwing “burning cedar bark, firewood, and crushed chili peppers” into the kivas, those below died in their airless trap. Houses also caught fire, and the attackers slew any they met, old men and women and many of the boys. They herded the younger women and children out of the village and took them to Skull Ridge or Skull Mound. Dissension broke out between the Walpi and Oraibi warriors, since the Walpis had captured the younger women whom the Oraibis felt were their prizes. Anger exploded into violence, and many of the captives died, since after the Awat’ovi affair “people used to find a lot of skulls there.” Exhausted by the carnage, they agreed to divide the surviving captives among Oraibi, Walpi, Mishongnovi, and Shungopovi. The women became the source of the Awat’ovi clans in the villages, including Tobacco, Rabbit, and Tansy Mustard.