Mesa of Sorrows

by James F. Brooks

  Yet this solution confronts several problems. First, each of the villages at Tuuwanasavi, or the “Earth-Center,” was a mosaic of diverse clans who migrated from every direction across several centuries. First arrivals outranked later immigrants, clan rivalries were common, languages often incomprehensible, some rituals shared, some new and accepted, others rejected. Gaining entrance to the Hopi Mesas was not easy, as the Tanos discovered after their migration from Tsaewari. And even if accepted as neighbors, lines might be drawn around language and ceremony and clanship that harbored latent resentments. Many of these communities in the past had suffered punishment and desolation as the result of chaotic and corrupt behavior, or koyaanisqatsi. Those who survived carried those lessons forward, yet seem seldom to have been able to instantiate them in enduring ways. This pattern long predated the crisis at Awat’ovi, and would postdate it as well. One can hear premonitions and echoes of Awat’ovi in each of their histories.

  Recall that the great earth/water serpent Balolokong destroyed Palatkwapi (the Red House) by earthquake and flood when the people there came to disregard Masauwu’s teachings. Most offensive were the women who joined men in gambling games in the kivas, took part in lascivious Butterfly Dances, and enjoyed sex with “men who were not their husbands.” Then the people of Hovi’itstuyqa perished when one of their own young men raped and absconded with the young bride from Tupats’ovi. Her poor, enraged husband recruited Yavapai warriors to revenge his shame—with the offer of captured women as their reward. Likewise, the residents of Huk’ovi abandoned their home when chased out by the ghostly flames of “Child-Sticking-Out-Woman,” a deity enraged that a Huk’ovi maiden might use powa (the power to change) toward selfish ends—in this case to avenge her rejection by a youth from neighboring Pivanhokyapi. The witch’s ability to trigger the collapse of kiva roofs in Pivanhokyapi and kill the men trapped beneath prefigures in grim detail the events at Awat’ovi. Her supernatural powers and self-serving motives constituted the fundamental definition of “sorcery” in Hopi culture. Ironically, Pivanhokyapi itself would experience immolation as well, when women joined the gambling frenzy of totolospi and offered their own bodies as rewards. Finally, the legendary village of Sikyatki, whence the finest Hopi pottery would find its origins, was reduced to the shadow of rubble and ash one sees today on the winding road up to First Mesa. The cause? Sorcerers from the Swallow Clan meddled in two youths’ competition over the affections for a Sikyatki maiden. The social chaos that followed spurred the village chief to invite warriors from “Old Walpi” (Qöötsaptuvela) to purify his people with fire and blood—and gain rights to Sikyatki’s cornfields while doing so. These “tales of destruction” are central to Hopi historical patrimony today. Despite the creativity and precision of their details, they seem to convey one clear message: in the deep past, when women ventured beyond the edges of their culturally defined duties as maidens, wives, or mothers, koyaanisqatsi spread like a cancer through these communities.

  In a different, apparently male-dominated register, between 1896 and 1906 intravillage tensions focused on the threat to Hopi religion posed by Protestant missions and “white man’s” education, clan ranking, ceremonial status, and access to agricultural fields. The factional struggles suspended virtually all ceremonial activity at Oraibi; the clans responsible for important rituals in the ceremonial calendar found their members split between the two factions. The attendant social chaos led to the fissure at Oraibi, brought about by leaders who hoped to restore suyaanisqatsi after a decade’s turmoil. In this case, Hopis avoided overt violence by crafting a “push-of-war” between two factions, and allowing the creation of three new communities to relieve the social stress. Awat’ovi stands as only one among many community crises—yet the most traumatic and remembered—in the long history of Hopi people.

  Hopi woman dressing the hair of an unmarried girl, 1900.

  Second, like so many Pueblos in the seventeenth century, Awat’ovi cleaved into Catholic adherents or sympathizers versus those devoted to maintaining traditional religious observances and ceremonies. Yet, in the Spanish period, Oraibi (Mission San Francisco) and Shungopovi (Mission San Bartolome) also hosted—however much under coercion—Franciscan proselytizers. This begs the question of why Awat’ovi alone came to be the locus of “chaotic” practices. If only the Catholic converts were the cause of the chaos, why, then, ought “all the men and old women” of Awat’ovi die, when the evidence suggests that women and young people may have been the primary force behind the disruptive practices? Since the annihilation of his people was solicited by the kikmongwi, a regrettable but necessary cleansing of chaos and corruption, “just like at the end of the third world,” why are the men and boys, as they wrap up the many days of the wuwutcim ceremony, the target of the massacre? Perhaps the most ancient of all Hopi ceremonials, the wuwutcim conferred elements of supernatural power on initiates, without which “the individual has not even the basis for a claim to political office . . . and eternally a sukavungsino (commoner) with no access to power.” Although some Awat’ovinam would survive, the method of attack would suggest that the wuwutcim priesthood and young male initiates, trapped during their ceremonies in the kivas, were those most certain to die.

  After all, these victims were performing the very form of piety that Ta’polo feared was vanishing from his community. Why were kivas the focus of the attack, if they represented the very deep memory of Hopi’s movement from one world to another in their cycles of death and rebirth? How does the Pahaana prophecy underpin the events that unfolded at Awat’ovi? And how does the trauma of the event serve to shape the very essence of the Hopituh Shinumu (the Peaceful People) today?

  One vein of understanding lies in the kivas themselves. During the Peabody Museum excavations of 1935–1939, Jo Brew’s crews reopened Jesse Fewkes’s “sorcerer’s kiva,” designated “Test 31” in the Peabody Expedition reports. It proved to be “the largest kiva” excavated at Awat’ovi, and “unusual in shape,” in that the length was “almost exactly twice its width.” It was located in the center of “what appeared to be a large plaza, occupying the area between the Spanish church and convento . . . and a house block of native dwellings . . . to the northwest.” The kiva showed some of the longest duration of construction and use among those that the expedition investigated. Tree-ring cutting dates for its first construction extended to the middle years of the fourteenth century, and the latest timber samples yielded dates ranging from 1599 to 1628, just as the Franciscans arrived on the mesa. Thus it seems to have been somewhat isolated at the time of its first construction, some one hundred yards east of the Western Mound in an open plaza. Even then, the kiva may have held special prominence in Awat’ovi’s ceremonial life. Only later, as the town grew and residential blocks were extended eastward, and especially after 1629, the kiva came to lie between the Franciscan mission and the residential houses of those Hopis who had relocated from the Western Mound to be closer to the Franciscans, which were constructed atop roomblocks of an earlier era. The “Catholic converts” probably dismantled portions of their homes in the Western Mound, at least so far as to salvage the precious roofing timbers, which in turn created some confusion for archaeologists looking at tree-ring data in the new homes that recorded cutting dates from times before the Franciscan mission. Whether they did so voluntarily, or under some form of coercion, is uncertain. The kiva, however, remained and seems to have hosted continuous use, however much its precise use may be confusing.

  The rectangular kiva proved unusual in several other respects. An “unusually broad but low bench” some nine inches high extended from the rear end of the kiva one-third of its length, or about nine feet. Excavators found a “unique feature” in an embrasure from the floor level to the upper surface of the bench, lined with stone slabs, and in one corner a wooden post to steady the vertical slabs. A semicircular aperture or tunnel, some four inches in diameter, ran from the mouth of the embrasure to the rear of the kiva and connected there to the ver
tical ventilator shaft. The bench itself, and the aperture, was paved with “neatly fitted stone slabs.” Nine “small circular holes” had been drilled through the paving stones of the bench, some in rows of three, others apparently isolated in their locations. The kiva floor was likewise paved with stone slabs, less carefully fitted than the bench, into which thirteen small circular holes had also been drilled, arranged in two parallel rows of four and five holes without a “definable pattern,” although presumed to serve as loom anchors for men’s traditional weaving activities, especially dance regalia. The slab-lined firebox “was filled with coal ash,” and near the front end of the structure, excavators found a rectangular pit lined with “badly rotted” wooden boards. This may have served dual functions as a “foot-drum” and sipapu. The kiva walls “were of the usual flimsy construction” of later-period architecture at Awat’ovi, and although remnants of plaster survived, the plaster showed “no evidence of paint,” as had the earlier kivas of the Western Mound. These later walls may reflect modification in the shape of the kiva, especially its extension to a rectangular shape.

  The kiva’s contents proved similarly striking to Watson Smith, the specialist who developed techniques for recording the famous murals found at Awat’ovi. Six “restorable” post-Sikyatki jars lay near the front, as did “three pottery objects that resembled what had elsewhere been identified as candlesticks, certainly of Spanish inspiration.” In addition to five fairly common loom blocks, used by Hopi men for the weavings they created in the kivas, a “metal arrow point” and “several disarticulated human bones” were found, apparently “thrown into the kiva after it had burned.” On the bench itself lay a “fractured human skull,” facedown. Remains of charred beams lay on the bench, and “fragments of charred grass and reeds were scattered” on the floor. Many of the floor stones and the remnants of plaster “showed discoloration by fire.”

  Peabody excavation floor plan of T31, or “the Sorcerer’s Kiva.”

  The Peabody excavators explored only one other kiva in the vicinity of Mission San Bernardo, one located within the eastern roomblock itself, termed “Test 22, Room 10” in their report. Of the sixteen kivas excavated by Brew’s crews at Awat’ovi, Test 22 was second only to Test 31 (the Sorcerer’s Kiva) in size. Unlike T31, however, it was situated within a block of residential rooms about 100 feet from the Mission. Test 22 also formed an unusual rectangle, measuring some 20 feet in length and 16 feet in width. Like T31, it featured a substantial one-foot-high bench that extended some one-third of the length of the room, as well as an extension around two sides of the kiva that provided sitting space for kiva participants, uncommon among Awat’ovi’s kivas. A rectangular slab-lined firepit was filled with coal ash, like T31. It, too, had numerous small circular holes drilled in the paving stones of the floor, although none in the bench itself. Most striking, however, was an absence—“no evidence of a sipapu or footdrum was discovered in the floor.”

  Watson Smith was again surprised. Like T31, the walls of this kiva showed a light plastering, but “no evidence of paint,” so common in the murals of the kivas excavated in the Western Mound. It, too, harbored extensive evidence of burning and violence, and abundant charred viga and latilla timbers scattered throughout the lower levels of fill. A “human mandible, human ilium,” fragments of a human skull and a “human scapula” lay somewhat deeper. The walls were blackened and burned, and atop the slab-paved bench lay charred piles of cornhusks. Four loom blocks lay on the side-benches, discolored and cracked by fire. Nearby, a basalt object that suggests an ax, or maul. A “skeleton of a dog lay on the floor,” while “scattered profusely over the floor and tops of the benches were quantities of charcoal, ashes, charred logs, plants, twigs and grass, all suggesting remnants of roofing materials.” The logs offered three quite reliable cutting dates of 1422, 1657, and 1696, suggesting that the kiva—if its builders had reused the earliest pieces from preceding versions—may have been remodeled as late as 1696, during the period in which the people of Awat’ovi had been wont to do all sorts of things.

  Both kivas lay in close association with the residences of the Catholic converts and Mission San Bernardo, and exhibited distinctive differences in size (larger), shape (rectangular), decoration (lacking painted wall murals), floor features (aperture ventilator in T31, sipapu absent in T22), and fill features (ceramic replicas of Spanish candlesticks), plus clear evidence of violent ends—burned fuels and roofing materials, weapons, and disarticulated human remains—and data suggesting construction and use during or immediately after the Franciscan period. Only one other kiva at Awat’ovi, Kiva A, which lay in between the Western Mound and the eastern village/mission complex, showed any evidence of the European presence, in its case, “the bones of a domestic sheep” that lay on the floor. Kiva A was clearly in use during the 1629–1680 period, but displayed no signs of violent destruction.

  Were these “sorcerers’ kivas”? According to numerous Puebloan accounts, successful witch- or sorcerer-slaying required extreme measures. The slain witch’s body must be butchered, scattered, bones ground to meal, and burned, lest the malevolent spirit be able to reconstitute itself. The remains were either tossed to the winds, or ritually sealed in the place of their death, never to be exhumed. Whole artifacts might be sealed within as well, like the ceramic jars the Peabody excavators discovered. Yet nothing points to such a conclusion so much as the skeleton of the dog found on the floor of T22. Throughout the Puebloan world, coyotes, dogs, and witches are found in association with one another in stories about emergence, conflict, chaos, and renewal. They also converge in association around the symbol of the sipapu, the aperture through which people have migrated from a world riven by corruption to a new life in which they might practice being “people who were civilized and worthy of being in the Fourth World.” Coyotes were (and are) thought of as “a witch’s pet,” and are the preferred form into which sorcerers transform themselves “in order to travel more stealthily at night.” Dogs, especially black dogs, are likewise suspected, especially if they “bark or whine for no apparent reason or they dig up the ground around the house which is usually interpreted as a bad omen.” Yet domesticated dogs also play a liminal role in Pueblo thought, for they have long served humans as scouts, camp guards, nighttime village sentries, and household pets. Dogs, therefore, stand midway between the generally negative associations of coyotes and their own, more positive aspects, even to the point of receiving reverential treatment after being sacrificed in the Niman (Going Home) ceremonies in July, their skulls adorned with “corn wafers, corn mush, meat, prayer meal, and tobacco” before being ritually deposited in crevices in the mesa cliffs.

  Of the 72 cases of dog remains recovered by archaeologists in the Southwest, spanning more than a thousand years of Puebloan history, 46 (63 percent) feature dogs in either pit-houses or kivas, with the next most frequent context those scattered on surfaces. According to archaeologist William Walker, pit-houses (in their early manifestations) and kivas are associated with ceremonial activities in which passage from “underworlds” to the current world are prominent. Likewise, anomalous human remains (those associated with violent ends) are predominantly found in pithouses or kivas—127 of 253, or 50 percent—with the next highest percentage (27 percent) found in surface structures with evidence of destruction. Clearly, humans who suffered death in subterranean spaces (or who had their bodies thrown in after their death) and dogs share an association with death. The frequency of dogs in those spaces leads in two, obliquely similar directions—dogs died either as partners of the humans or as guardians of the passageways between the underworld and this world. Dogs were slain as a “witch’s pet,” or sacrificed to assure that the executed humans, thrown into the depths of the underworld, might never again emerge through the sipapu. According to Walker, a dog in a kiva could either be “a witch executed at the threshold of the underworld” or “a faithful dog protector sacrificed to stand spiritual watch and prevent witches from crawling up from below
.”

  Kiva T31 was certainly that same kiva that J. W. Fewkes had excavated in the early 1890s, and which his Hopi workmen had termed the “sorcerer’s kiva” upon their disturbing discovery of the bodies that lay therein. But the T22 kiva suggests that there may well have been more than one “sorcerer’s kiva” at Awat’ovi. The Brew expedition excavated only three kivas in the eastern village, including the spectacularly preserved example that lay beneath the altar of Mission San Bernardo, the uncovering of which had led to the revelation of the altar burial. Since that kiva, designated 788, had been carefully filled with sand prior to the construction of the church, it held no clues to activities during the mission period. Surely other kivas existed at the site, and, given the consistencies found in the random (if very small) sample chosen by Brew, seem likely to have contained a similarly confusing set of traits as do T31 and T22. Each show deviations from what might have been considered orthodox usage, and yet each hewed to standard elements as well. Each found its end in fire and blood.

  In other words, in at least two of the kivas in which the attackers trapped their victims, people had combined traditional Hopi architectural styles with later modifications in shape and furniture—the elongated “altars”—and Spanish paraphernalia—candlestick holders. The absence of wall paintings, so prominent throughout Antelope Mesa, and in one case, a sipapu (although the rectangular pit in T31 may have served as such) suggests that specific Katsina ceremonies might not have been included in the form of worship therein, although the white plastering may have simply been in preparation for the painting of murals, whatever their features. These two kivas also hint at an extension of the Franciscan pedagogical architecture found at Awat’ovi and several other pre-Revolt missions, the “convento kivas” located in mission courtyards that the padres constructed during the 1630s and 1660s as “familiar places” for the religious instruction of Pueblo youth, perhaps both boys and girls. One such was located beneath the “cloister garth” at San Bernardo de Aguatubi, according to Ross Montgomery. These “theaters of conversion” had fallen into disuse by the time of the Revolt, but they may have lingered on in the minds of the “Catholic converts” at Awat’ovi as places of contemplation and worship once their churches lay burned and ruined. And yet these “Catholic converts” seem not to have rejected all traditional ceremonial duties, either, as those who died were trapped in kivas during the wuwutcim initiation rituals.