Yava’s narrative adds an unexpected wrinkle, however, that points to the role of clan membership in crosscutting intercommunal rivalries. It seems that some of those from Walpi and Oraibi had kinsmen in Awat’ovi, and betrayed the carnage yet to come. One story he heard from elders claimed that a Two Horn Society priest “dressed up in an Alosaka costume wandered through Awatovi chanting a song with hints of the tragedy to come.” His song referred to the murder of three brothers—Sakieva, Momo’a, and Pakushkasha—by “Hopi converts to the Catholic Church” that had occurred some time in the past. “A gang of hooligans had built a big fire in a pit—and thrown the three brothers into it, killing them.” The boys’ bodies had been “rubbed with cornmeal” before being hurled alive into the flames, which symbolized that “whatever might be planted in Awatovi would never grow.” The Two Horn priest sang a chant that warned his clansmen of imminent danger, urging them to flee the village for soon “everyone will be moaning and crying.”
Only a few members of the Two Horn Society understood the oblique references, but a few managed to slip away and take refuge elsewhere, thereby preserving that fraternity in Hopi society. The kikmongwi, a Bow Clan member, also escaped, according to Yava, along with a few of his clan members. So, too, did the Tobacco Clan leader, identified in some accounts as Ta’polo himself, escape the coming destruction. He had “gathered the most important paraphernalia of the three big kiva societies in the village—the Two Horn, the Wuwuchim, and the Tataukyam—and carried it away in the dark and hid it in one of the canyons.” Tobacco Clan survivors sought refuge among Navajos living below Antelope Mesa down in Jeddito Wash. Navajo Tobacco Clan, therefore, was born of at least one or more Awat’ovi women who escaped capture and distribution among the attackers. In time, those refugees’ descendants would return and take up fields and gardens on lands that once belonged to their progenitors.
Once the destruction ended and the charred town lay deserted, the Tobacco Clan leader approached the Snake Clan at Walpi and offered his ceremonial rights and matériel to the Walpi leaders in exchange for safety and residence within the village. Tobacco Clan members told ethnographer Peter Whiteley in 1995 that Ta’polo himself had built the Tobacco Clan house and Takaukyam (Singers Society) kiva when “he moved into the newly established mesa-top town . . . following the massacre.” He also arranged for at least some of his clan relatives to escape the destruction and live among the Navajos for some time, before rejoining him at Walpi. Further evidence of the mixed ethnic origins of Awat’ovi, according to Yava, lay in the fact that the most important traditional ceremonies from Awat’ovi, including the new fire ceremony, were performed in the “Laguna (Keres) language, not Hopi.” Was Ta’polo, the author of Awat’ovi’s annihilation, a descendant of Keresan migrants to Antelope mesa?
Not just a few Awat’ovi residents survived the massacre. Some family relatives, initiates of the Two Horn Society, and members of Tobacco Clan found escape. The survivors’ ties to clans and ceremonies ancient and central to Hopi religion make it possible that the annihilation of Awat’ovi was much more closely focused on eliminating a faction of Catholic converts than on wholesale elimination of the entire community. This is consistent with the strategy of eliminating the threat of sorcery from within a given community, and yet does little to explain just what form that sorcery took and why it so threatened men like Ta’polo.
Albert Yava casts a brighter light on Awat’ovi than one might expect. His intense interest in linking clan origin histories, migration pathways, and the heterogeneous nature of society on the Hopi mesas to the destruction of Awat’ovi suggest his role as intercultural envoy—not unlike those fugitive and captive survivors who crossed villages and cultures in the aftermath of Awat’ovi’s fall. His birth in Tewa Village, his membership in both the Water and One Horn clans, his initiation and education into One Horn history, which afforded him “full-fledged” status as a Hopi, his time at Chilocco Indian School and fluency in English, which in turn provided him employment as agency interpreter, and a lifelong commitment to his ritual and ceremonial duties all combined to place him in important roles as multitalented cross-cultural mediator.
Two centuries earlier, the enigmatic Francisco de Espeleta performed a role similar to Yava at the Hopi mesas. This Hopi man would serve as a central, if ambiguous, leader and diplomat in the prelude to the obliteration of Awat’ovi. His precise role remains confusing in Spanish documents, however, and no Hopi accounts exist for clarification. He may have been the boy that Padre José de Espeleta rescued from hanging in 1664 at Awat’ovi, “who had committed no offense other than to attend to the father notary,” and in doing so had run afoul of the lieutenant general of the province, Pedro Manso de Valdés, who in the constant infighting between secular government and the Church had prohibited “any Indians to go as escort” to the Franciscans. Apparently, a doñado (a youth “given to the Church and raised up”) with the godparent sponsorship of the Padre Espeleta, he seems to have been born for the Badger Clan. Since Father Espeleta was stationed at Awat’ovi from 1663 to 1672, whence he passed along his enthusiasm for music and choral singing sufficiently that Navajos called that pueblo Tallahogan, the Singing House, he probably served as padrino to young Francisco during his early boyhood, under whose tutelage he learned to “read and write” and with whom he may have traveled to Mexico.
If Francisco de Espeleta were in his youth at Awat’ovi when Padre Espeleta arrived in 1663, he may have accepted baptism to gain the padre’s protection and godparent sponsorship. He certainly would have received religious instruction along with the training in the Catholic liturgy. By the time of the 1680 revolt he would have been in young adulthood. He may have attended the padre when the latter was transferred to Oraibi in 1672, which would account for his later association with that village. José de Espeleta died at Oraibi, his throat cut and body hurled from the mesa, in an attack the Hopi sources claim was organized and executed by the Badger Clan. On the fragmentary evidence, Francisco de Espeleta’s clan membership seems likely to have been Badger, and he may have turned on his Catholic faith in August 1680. At least one Spanish source accuses him of slaying his own padrino, describing Francisco as “a proverbial viper, cleverly implanted in [the padre’s] household by the Devil.”
Yet, when Francisco de Espeleta next appears in Spanish accounts some twenty years after the death of Father Espeleta, he seems ambivalent in his passion for the Pueblo rebellion and the revitalization of Hopi ceremonialism. As the reconquest solidified in the Rio Grande Valley after 1696, Spanish commanders and Franciscans alike turned their thoughts to the rebel strongholds to the west. Although Governor de Vargas had received the nominal submission to the Crown by the Zunis and Hopis in 1692, no Europeans had ventured toward the mesas since then. Yet “don Francisco,” as Spanish accounts claim that his Hopi kinsmen termed him, had emerged as a prominent leader and spokesman during the hiatus. In early May of 1700, as “Cacique of Oraibi,” he sent a message via envoys to Governor Pedro Rodríguez Cubero, “professing a readiness to rebuild churches and receive missionaries.” At the same time, he sent word by runner to Padre Juan Garaicoechea at distant Zuni Pueblo. Garaicoechea had, in 1699, reopened the mission at Halona, the first step toward restoring the faith among the Western Pueblos. Espeleta invited him to “come and baptize children” in his town. Once Garaicoechea reached the Hopi Mesas on the twenty-eighth with his escort Alcalde José López Naranjo, however, “he was not permitted to visit Oraibi.” It seems that an untrue rumor spread that the “messengers to Santa Fe had been killed,” the anger at which prevented don Francisco’s invitation from being realized. Espeleta promised “to notify him soon when they were ready for another visit.” Padre Garaicoechea received a warmer welcome at Awat’ovi, finding that “the convent had been rebuilt or repaired by its Indians, who were glad to see their mission re-established.” Garaicoechea baptized seventy-three “young Moquis” during his few days at Awat’ovi. “The other Moquis, while outwardly friend
ly, still dissuaded the missionary from visiting their homes.”
Don Francisco’s unexpected message to Padre Garaicoechea in May 1700 indicated a certain willingness to entertain a Catholic presence, if only ephemeral, in Oraibi. The ambiguity grows with the content of the message he carried to Santa Fe on October 11 of that year, as interpreted from the sources by the historian Hubert Howe Bancroft. In that month Espeleta led a delegation to Santa Fe to meet with Governor Pedro Rodríguez Cubero, “not as subjects and vassals of the crown, but as delegates of a foreign power to conclude a treaty of peace and amity.” He is described at that conference as “one of the leading chiefs of the Oraybe,” along with “twenty other delegates.” He “proposed a simply treaty of peace” to Governor Cubero, “his nation, like Spain, to retain its own religion.” Cubero countered that he “could offer peace only on the condition of conversion to Christianity.” In reply, “the Moqui chief proposed as an ultimatum that the padres should visit one pueblo each year for six years to baptize, but postpone permanent residence till the end of that period. This scheme was likewise rejected, and Espeleta and his companion leaders went home for further deliberation.”
Only one month later, devastation would be visited upon Awat’ovi. Badger Clan membership also provided Espeleta clansmen at Awat’ovi, Oraibi, and Mishongnovi. Since from 1680 forward he was living in Oraibi, he may not have witnessed the “all sorts of things” that the “residents of Awat’ovi were wont to do,” but surely his clansmen in that town reported on those activities. Just what he made of those doings is unclear.
As “cacique of Orayvi,” Francisco de Espeleta, in historian Charles Wilson Hackett’s treatment of the documents, “came with more than one hundred of his people to the said pueblo [of Aguatubi], entered it, killed all the braves, and carried off the women, leaving the pueblo to this day desolate and unpeopled.” The Hopis remained, according to Friar José Narváez Valverde, “in their heights in primitive freedom” under Espeleta’s command, “because of his having been brought up and taught to read and write by one religious whose name was Espeleta. . . . since this uprising (1680) it has not been possible to reduce them.”
Albert Yava and Francisco de Espeleta, as liminal men, straddled the complex forces of encounters between Hopis and outsiders. In their comprehension of multiple languages, cultures, and religious traditions, they worked in the perilous spaces in between, seeking, perhaps above all, to preserve Hopi ways while understanding those “ways” were themselves a matter of negotiation, confusion, compromise, and conflict. Despite a thorough education in the white man’s ways and a lifetime exposure to Christian missionaries, Yava lived out his life as a defender of Hopi-Tewa traditional life and spiritual practices. “I myself have listened to these missionaries,” he explained late in life. “They come to my house sometimes, and I invite them in and hear everything they have to say. Sometimes I have gone to one church or another on Sunday. Of course, a great deal of what they say is interesting. But I have not heard anything yet to persuade me that what they have is superior to what we Tewas and Hopis have.” Of Francisco de Espeleta’s feelings we know far less. On the one hand, he experienced baptism, adoption under compadrazgo (godparenthood), and training in the Catholic faith as a neophyte. On the other hand, he may have had a hand in the martyrdom of his own protector and padrino. By the year 1700 he seems to have been attempting to distance his Hopi kinspeople from Spanish imperial control, while proposing a limited Franciscan presence in Hopi country, allowing annual visits to individual Hopi villages in such a way as to mediate the impact of the conversion mission. If, indeed, he rallied warriors from Oraibi to participate in the devastation visited upon his natal village of Awat’ovi, he seems to have become alarmed at what he discovered was happening among his relatives on Antelope Mesa in the aftermath of Father Garaicoechea’s brief visit in the spring of 1700, and increasingly so between his embassy to Governor Cubero in October of that year and the attack one month later.
Just what drew Espeleta’s concern may lie in the story of another, even more ephemeral, character in the Awat’ovi story. The “young European man” discovered by the Peabody Expedition, intered in the makeshift altar in the church at Mission San Bernardo, provokes speculation. Canon law explicitly prohibited “the burial of a corpse or . . . body of a deceased person, not canonized or beatified, below or within the cubic content of a fixed or immoveable altar.” Although the altar in which the “redeposited bundle burial” of the young man “about twenty-one years of age” seems not to have been constructed until after the burning of the church in the 1680 revolt, and thus perhaps beyond this proscription, “the legislation of the Church” stressed that even “altars of the intermediate or quasi-fixed type” maintained a “comparable dignity.” It is unlikely, therefore, that Padre Garaicoechea conducted the burial during his time at Awat’ovi, even if he did engage in repair and rebuilding that showed archaeologically in a temporary place of worship fashioned within one of the standing rooms of the convento.
The burial, believed architectural historian Ross Gordon Montgomery, “could have been accomplished only between 1680 and the early summer of 1700,” and conducted by one or more members of the community. As a secondary, or “redeposited” burial, the timing is suggestive, since the bones probably lay elsewhere while time or scavengers defleshed and disarticulated the skeleton. The body must have been that of a postulant or novitiate in the Franciscan order, whose name lies unrecorded in the scant records that survived the rebellion, or, less likely, that of a secular soldier assigned to the mission prior to August 1680. In either case, the young man may have died in the violence of that moment—perhaps his body lay exposed to the elements, and his bones gathered later—or he survived for some period of time only to pass away during the twenty-year hiatus, and his body defleshed by human hands. The latter seems less likely, for he would have been quite young in 1680 if he were twenty years old in say, 1690. If a postulant or novitiate in 1680, he must have held the respect of at least the “Catholic convert” faction, who so carefully bundled his bones in Hopi cotton cloth and laid them upon a woven Hopi tray basket in the makeshift altar as a sign of their, if not the formal Church’s, veneration for him as a human being.
At first glance, this seems an unlikely scenario, that amid the passionate rejection of all things Spanish and Catholic during the Pueblo Revolt a young Franciscan-in-the-making would have been accorded such tender treatment, whether he survived the initial slaughter or died the same day as did the padres at Oraibi, Walpi, and Awat’ovi. But a case exists to suggest otherwise. During the days of rage that seized the Hopi Mesas, residents of the Pueblo of Halona at Zuñi allowed one of their padres—kwan tatchui lok’yana (Juan Greyrobe, Father-of-Us) to live, if he would adopt their manners and customs, grow out his hair, and marry a Zuni woman. As Frank Cushing would put it two hundred years later, Juan Greyrobe “had a Zuñi heart and cared for the sick and women and children, nor contended with the fathers of the people.” In order that he be able to fulfill his new, indigenized mission, all “the ornaments of divine worship” in Halona’s church of Nuestra Señora de La Candelaria were saved, and moved to a new fortified village atop Dowa Yalanne mesa, where Diego de Vargas, leading the forces of reconquest, would note their, but not the friar’s, presence in 1692. Among those ornaments was the eighteen-inch-tall Santo Niño de Cíbu (Zuni), a statue of the infant Jesus, which today remains under the stewardship of the matrilineally descended Yatsattie family, whose progenitors preserved the figure in 1680. The Santo Niño embodies two attributes—both the male Christ Child and a female spirit representing the Zuni “Daughter of the Sun”—dual, symmetrical qualities once celebrated by an annual fiesta that drew many Hispano Catholics and Zunis together into the central plaza at Halona, yet now seldom observed.
The young man in the altar at Mission San Bernardo may have been held in similar esteem among the Catholic sympathizers. Perhaps he even lived beyond the day of judgment to care for the sick, and
women and children, who likely were those whom the Franciscans attended most carefully, as vulnerable to the message of redemption in Christianity. His presence, however, to the anti-Catholic traditionalists, may well have provided the seed of anxiety that sorcerers inhabited the High Place of the Bow Clan, even after the purge of 1680. A Pahaana from distant lands, interred within the precinct of Awat’ovi, lying in wait for the return of Father Garaicoechea. With his imminent revival came the rebirth of the “doings” that the Hopi priesthood so feared.
9
At the Moment of the Yellow Dawn
Nowadays the Hopis want to forget that whole Awatovi affair. They’re ashamed of what happened because they were supposed to be the Peaceful People.
—NUVAYOIYAVA, TEWA VILLAGE, 1978
The Pueblo of Awat’ovi—diverse, populous, creative, and quarrelsome—had become, during the critical two decades of 1680 to 1700, the focus of anxious attention among its Hopi kinsmen and clansmen. And yet precisely what activities and attitudes attracted looming violence remains unclear. The dominant explanation, at least in popular accounts today, lies with their embrace of Christianity between 1629 and 1680, and their willingness to entertain the Franciscans’ return in May of 1700, even to the point of allowing their children to receive baptism. They had, according to Spanish accounts, “repaired and rebuilt the convento and church,” in anticipation of the rebirth of the Holy Faith on Antelope Mesa. As this version goes, Catholic Awat’ovi died that Hopis might preserve the religion of their ancestors.
Mesa of Sorrows Page 17