Other evidence points to the residents of Awat’ovi experimenting with new forms of piety during the post-Revolt decades. Excavating the ruined church’s nave, Brew’s Hopi workmen removed 118 burials (including the young European man interred in the altar). Although interring the dead in that location was forbidden under canon law, in practice it seems common throughout the Spanish colonial world. Since Hopi rebels during the Pueblo Revolt had burned and destroyed the church at San Bernardo de Awat’ovi, excavators had a layer of melted adobe and burned timbers that clearly delineated between pre-Revolt and post-Revolt burials. Sixty-nine of the 118 bodies had been interred after the destruction of the church. All had been laid out in extended, Christian fashion, rather than the flexed-and-bundled fashion of traditional Hopi burials. Fifty-nine of these “Christian” interments featured burial offerings—an eclectic mix of Catholic saint’s medallions, rosary beads, Hopi ceramics, and wooden pahos (prayer sticks). This mixed assemblage of burial goods also drew Ross Montgomery’s Catholic (and deeply prejudiced) interpretation. “This is a significant commentary,” he wrote, “on the transitional type of Christianity often found among primitive peoples subjected to the persuasive influence of zealous and apostolic missionaries who converted them to an incipient but nevertheless efficacious form of Catholicism. These primitive Christian Moqui had faith and rendered good works within their varied but limited capacities.” He could only conclude “the unflexed Indian burials beneath the church floor were of Christians, and some interments were occasioned by the friars’ permission, while others were made after their departure.”
“Limited capacities,” Montgomery thought. Alternatively, we might see the forms of devotion that developed at Awat’ovi in the aftermath of the Revolt as expressions of a very human effort to create spiritual security during troublous times. The rage against the Spanish presence that swept the Puebloan world in August 1680 enveloped the Western Pueblos as well, and even those with Catholic sympathies proved unable, except perhaps in the case of Father Juan Greyrobe at Zuni, to prevent the deaths and destruction visited upon the missions and their personnel. And yet one member of Mission San Bernardo—the nameless young man in the altar burial—seems to have retained special standing among at least one faction at Awat’ovi. He, too, may have died in the Revolt, his body thrown onto the middens or from the escarpment, only to have his bones later collected and bundled for reburial. Or he may have been protected somehow, like Father Greyrobe, and given the chance to survive in a new role—that of a liminal man and liminal soul, residing among the people of the pueblo in return for “becoming Hopi” in some manner. In either case, the presence of his bones in the makeshift altar of the ruined church signals a form of heterodoxy that is more fully realized in the interments in the church nave and fragmentary evidence in the two kivas most closely associated with the mission.
During the period of independence from Spanish colonial rule and Franciscan indoctrination, some residents of post-Revolt Awat’ovi continued to bury their loved ones in the ruined mission church, accompanied by cherished symbols of both Hopi and Catholic spiritual life. The lens of rubble and ash in the nave was sufficiently thick and visible to preclude that those sixty-nine burials were those of “Catholic converts” who died in the rebellion itself, evidence that the interments occurred over some period of time during the two decades leading up to the return of the Franciscans in the spring of 1700. That Fray Garaicoechea did not remark upon their presence to affirm the continuing fealty of the “converted Indians” to Catholic ways—even if in violation of canon law—implies their graves had been covered with a further strata of melted adobe and windblown soil by the time of his arrival that year. The symbolic mixing of Hopi and Franciscan burial goods seems a part of practice in life, as well, if the unusual elements present in the kivas represents how the people of Awat’ovi sought to shape their religious life during the same period. Gathering in those kivas in conjunction with the traditional ceremonial calendar, men and women, if we can infer from the anxiety expressed by their neighbors, undertook to craft new expressions of devotion and to call upon numinous forces both traditional and intrusive during a painful period of uncertainty about their own future and that of the world. An emergent community of worship offered some solace.
Their neighbors grew increasingly worried, perhaps in part because Francisco de Espeleta, now cacique at the staunchly conservative village of Oraibi, heard of the doings on Antelope Mesa. Given his training and depth of knowledge of Catholic ritual gained under the tutelage of Fray José de Espeleta, he might, more than many, have seen the unraveling of traditional Hopi religious life as imminent. The decades of the interregnum were not quiet times on the Hopi mesas, however much they may have thought the elimination of the Franciscan missions might have distanced them from the outer and threatening world. Shortly after 1682, some or all of the southern Tiwa peoples of Sandia Pueblo on the Rio Grande sought refuge and shelter on Second Mesa, founding the village of Payupki, where they would reside until conflict with the neighboring Hopi village of Chukubi stimulated them to return to their Rio Grande home in 1748. In the summer of 1696, survivors of de Vargas’s punishment of the Jemez Pueblo participants in the short-lived “second” Pueblo Revolt also headed west and made residence among the Hopi at the unknown site of Akokavi (Jemez oral history suggests Sikyatki or Walpi, as well), although they would return in the early 1700s, finding their presence unwelcome. Perhaps most significant, the Tanos of Tsaewari were on the move that same summer, on the journey that would result in the founding of Tewa Village on First Mesa, at the behest of the Walpi Snake Clan leadership. Each of these refugee peoples had experienced the worst of Spanish colonization and brought with them powerful opposition to the Catholic Church. And yet they also brought their own unique forms of Pueblo ceremonial life, which even in the centuries before 1540 had presented stresses that the formative communities on Flower Butte had experienced as volatile.
The Hopi mesas, some three hundred miles distant from the bloody Spanish reconquest and resettlement of the Rio Grande, were anything but insulated from that trauma. Overwhelmed by refugees fleeing that conflict, assaulted in their fields and villages by raiding Utes, Apaches, and Navajos, so militarily weak that Walpi, at least, was driven to the indignity of soliciting aid from experienced Tano fighters, and witnessing at Awat’ovi the emergence of a heterodox experimental piety that posed an alternative to the practice of orthodox Hopi religion, the entrenched spiritual and political leadership sensed the end of their world fast approaching. The arrival of the Franciscan friars Garaicoechea and his fellow Franciscan Antonio Miranda in May of 1700, probably timed to overlap with the former mission’s patron saint feast day of May 28, intensified this anxiety.
The Hopi delegation that visited Governor Pedro Rodríguez Cubero in Santa Fe in October of that year, led by Francisco de Espeleta, doubtless knew that the Tanos were on the move toward Hopi. Those seasoned fighters would soon strengthen Hopi’s ability to resist Indian raiders and Spanish forces alike. Spanish accounts suggest outrage at the proposal Espeleta laid out, positioning himself as a delegate “of a foreign power to conclude a treaty of peace and amity” threefold in its aims. Suspecting that Espeleta and his twenty-six fellow leaders sought to buy time for the incorporation of the “apostate Tanos” into Hopi defenses, Governor Cubero scoffed at Espeleta’s terms. To fashion a process of annual visitation by Franciscans to individual Hopi villages would delay the Hopis’ return to the faith for years, as would the provision to establish the right of those Hopis who wished to do so to “retain their own religion.”
From the Hopis’ perspective, however, the delegation’s proposal sought to fold relationships with Spanish Franciscans into a process similar to that of preceding centuries, when new arrivals would call at the gates of established towns to display and demonstrate the efficacy of their ceremonial practices. If those ceremonies enhanced Hopi life, especially in summoning life-giving rains, the newcomers would find w
elcome. If the petitioner’s ceremonies promised little, their admission to the village was rejected—a reasonable, if disheartening, outcome for the wanderers. Espeleta’s proposal offered a practical, political solution that would allow Hopi culture to adopt, adapt, and evolve, as it had always done, and as was unfolding in the kivas of Awat’ovi. Governor Cubero’s arch and arrogant rejection of their offer and his insistence on Hopi “conversion to Christianity” as the only road to peace, in fact, destroyed the possibility of peace.
As Espeleta’s delegation returned disheartened to the Hopi Mesas in mid-October, surely the future lay heavily in their minds. They were working within their understanding of the cyclical nature of history, as they understood through the Pahaana prophecy. When chaos and crisis threatened the harmony of Hopi life, as it had in cycles of corruption, crises, and renewal in their passages between the preceding three worlds, Pahaana, the “white elder Brother,” might be expected to “adjudicate between those who had sincerely adhered to the Hopi way and those who had departed from it,” according to ethnographer Peter Whiteley. Those who had strayed—sorcerers—would suffer beheading. The October delegation’s offer had provided, at least from Francisco de Espeleta’s liminal experience, a “Hopi Way” that, had the governor agreed, would have placed Cubero in the role of Pahaana and brought the Spanish into alignment with the Hopi understanding of history.
When the delegation resettled in their respective villages, they may have heard another unsettling report from Awat’ovi. During Fray Garaicoechea and Miranda’s time on Antelope Mesa—a length of residency indiscernible from the scanty documents—the friars had created a new church in one wing of the convento, removing several Hopi alterations and building a long, narrow nave and apse and a baptismal font that employed a pot “of 17th century Hopi type, except for the size and shape, which were not native.” A mere fraction in size to the church destroyed in the rebellion, still it stood as evidence of the Franciscans’ intent to return the “converted Indians of Aguatubi” fully to the faith. Garaicoechea and Miranda may have been as equally dismayed as many of the established Hopi priests, if for very different reason, when they saw how the people of Awat’ovi had experimented with the Holy Faith.
A second piece of construction proved even more alarming. During the Peabody’s 1938 and 1939 field seasons, another structure came to light in the far northeastern corner of the site. This turned out to be an unfinished, even hastily abandoned, effort by the Franciscans to build a military barracks/stable where a detachment of Spanish cavalry soldiers could be stationed. Measuring some 150 feet wide and 120 feet deep, with stalls for a dozen horses and barracks for an equal or greater number of soldiers, it was clearly intended to be a substantial, permanent statement of the Crown’s martial presence. No adobe walls had been raised atop the stone foundations, and even those foundations were not entirely laid into their trenches. The excavators realized that the project had been suddenly suspended. It seems likely that the Franciscans had become aware of the imminent arrival of the Tano migrants, perhaps only by rumor, and knew that once they combined with the hostile parties from the mesa villages to the west that their project would be in real danger.
As word of Governor Cubero’s rejection of the Hopi delegation’s proposal circulated across the mesas, and evidence of the Spanish intent to restore a pure version of the Catholic faith—by force of arms if necessary—became evident, koyaanisqatsi rose from latent to evident. Although the experimental religious practices at Awat’ovi seem to have been indulged by neighbors for two decades, the perfect storm of refugees pouring into the Hopi country, the arrival of the Tanos and other refugees packing a fierce anti-Spanish stance, the expectation that Spanish soldiers would soon accompany the next foray of Franciscans to Antelope Mesa, and resentment around Awat’ovi’s power and privilege provoked a maelstrom of fear and anger.
As would their counterparts two centuries later when confronted with koyaanisqatsi at Oraibi, Espeleta and his fellow leaders in the mesas to the west saw only one solution. The corruption at Awat’ovi—a symptom of the widespread disorder throughout Hopi lands—must end so balance could be restored. In keeping with the long history of leaders summoning devastation upon their own people, Ta’polo, whose status at Awat’ovi must have been compromised by the alternative forms of worship there, called upon allies in distant villages for aid. They laid plans for the fulfillment of the Pahaana prophecy, with or without the aid of “elder brother.” Espeleta and his one hundred warriors from Oraibi may have formed the core, but many other kinsmen and clansmen joined in, perhaps not fully realizing their role in making history, yet attracted by the promises of women and maidens and a chance to gain the rich planting fields and orchards associated with Awat’ovi. At the moment of the yellow dawn a blanket snapped in the fading darkness, a fortress gate swung wide, and the purifying slaughter began.
The present troubles the ghosts of the past. One can hear it in the voices of the tourists who visit the ruins of Troy each year to discern the truth of its destruction in The Iliad and The Aeneid as they reflect on the currency of the ancient tales. Or in the American Southwest, where visitors wonder at the profound silences that now blanket places like Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, and the wind-swept Salinas Pueblos and missions of the Estancia Basin in New Mexico. Public interest in the annihilation of Awat’ovi has waxed and waned with its shadowy presence in the popular imagination. Even Hopis themselves, who on the one hand may “want to forget the whole Awat’ovi affair,” find it a source of continuing conversation among tribal members. One hears that the town’s demise stemmed from “the Catholic orgies” conducted in some of the kivas, and thus a case of corruption purified. On the other hand, a Hopi sobriety activist once explained that Hopis kept Awat’ovi in their minds as an equivalent of the fourth and fifth steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (“a fearless and searching moral inventory, followed by admission to God, to ourselves, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs”).
Rejection and embrace of the story take other forms as well. In a recent history of the Peabody Museum’s Awatovi Expedition, Eric Polingyouma, from Shungopovi Village, cautions that Awat’ovi, like neighboring Antelope Mesa villages, “was not a Hopi village. It was settled by Keresans.” Later, Hopis from Homol’ovi did join the founders of Awat’ovi, and “relationships with nearby Hopi villages were good, some Keresans married into Hopi, and religious ceremonies were adopted that are still practiced today.” In the years following the Pueblo Revolt, he explains, “attempts to rebuild Hopi life were interrupted again by the arrival of Catholic fathers at Awat’ovi in 1700. Their arrival brought the Hopi villages together, and Hopis destroyed Awat’ovi. . . . no one has ever claimed the village.”
On the other hand, Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, of the Greasewood Clan of Bacavi Village and director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, draws a direct line from Bow Clan claims from Chaco Canyon to Aztec Ruins National Monument and finally to the founding of Awat’ovi in the thirteenth century. Emphasizing clan lineages over Polingyouma’s linguistic associations, Kuwanwisiwma sees Awat’ovi as solidly within the broad affinity group of Hisat’sinom (people from long ago) who over time came to subscribe to the “Hopi way of life . . . cooperation, sharing, respect, compassion, earth stewardship, and, most of all, humility.” Like Albert Yava, he also notes deep tensions that predated the Franciscan Catholic intrusion, especially in the rivalry between Awat’ovi and Oraibi for predominance in ceremonial life. Awat’ovi, he explains, was the only Hopi town with a full compliment of eighteen ceremonial societies; Oriabi had seventeen. The latter only joined in the ruination of their rival once they were promised that Two Horn priests and Antelope Clan women would be given them as captives, who would complete their ceremonial ranks. As director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, Kuwanwisiwma occasionally guides tours of the restricted Awat’ovi ruins, to tell of its founding and demise.
Awat’ovi resides in a liminal zone. Physically on Antelope Mesa, which
long stood as a borderland between the Rio Grande Puebloan world and that of the Hopis, and in memory, an event that runs counter to every idea of “the Hopi way.” The lack of fixity persists in other aspects, too. The Peabody Expedition left another potent and unresolved legacy. One hundred and eighteen bodies were excavated from the church itself, not the “sorcerer’s kiva” that Fewkes discovered. They cannot speak, but they give rise to a swirl of voices. Disinterred during the 1930s excavations, more than half are from burials in the mission church nave that postdate the rebellion of 1680, and may involve some victims of the massacre itself. At least some are among the nearly one hundred sets of human remains from Awat’ovi neatly arranged in archival cardboard boxes along one wall of stainless-steel rolling storage in Harvard’s Peabody Museum. Their disposition under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 is uncertain. Since the site of Awat’ovi lay outside Hopi Reservation lands in the 1930s (rather, on lands assigned the Hopis by executive order), the vast collection of the Peabody Expedition is not, ironically, the responsibility of the Peabody Museum, but of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. That, too, remains unsolved.
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