Mesa of Sorrows

by James F. Brooks

  Standard protocol would require repatriation of bodies and associated ritual artifacts to the Hopi Tribe, but that resolution is clouded by phantoms of the past. If the people of Awat’ovi were indeed transgressors of tradition who deserved their fate, they might well continue to be considered disturbing to Hopi society, whose reburial might reintroduce their trauma into the mesas. The Hopi Tribe is reluctant to reclaim these bodies. Yet neither are they willing to disclaim them, since their descendants still number among the citizens of the Hopi nation. To complicate matters, since many of these burials seem to have been conducted in Christian or pseudo-Christian fashion, and interred during the two decades of experimentation at Awat’ovi, it is possible that the Catholic Church could claim to have a right in their disposition. Without ceremonial precedent, it might be dangerous to everyone, Hopi and non-Hopi alike, were their disposition mishandled. So the bodies remain at Harvard under lock and key, while the politics of the present wrestle with the legacy of the past.

  Ruins provoke an ache in our historical imagination. Whether the remnants of our direct ancestors, or the broader human family, they invite us to reflect on the fragility of our lives. We know full well that our own homes and towns and cities are destined to lie in rubble at some point in the future, and that our remains may someday be carried as ash on the wind or as bones, gnawed by rats under a decaying city’s moon. In light of the events of the preceding millennium, we see Hopis grappling with the very issues that absorb our days—how to define our own communities in relation to others, especially those “outsiders” who wish to take shelter under our eaves, and to create humble and humane avenues for intercultural understanding. The twin forces of absorbing new neighbors and excluding aliens seem intensely central to the catastrophe at Awat’ovi Pueblo in the autumn of 1700, and to the survival of its remnant peoples. In the Awat’ovi case, new forms of pious practice apparently involved both women and men, and born of those peoples’ religious experience in this heterodox community, comprised the “transgression” that caused senior leadership among the Hopis to summon its destruction. And even then, Awat’ovi did not die. Surviving Awat’ovi women brought the Mamzrau ritual to the village of Walpi and the Sand, Rabbit, Coyote, and Butterfly clans to Oraibi. Others found shelter among Navajo bands in the nearby Jeddito Wash, for in 1882 members of the Tobacco People subclan of the Tachii’nii (Red Running into Water Clan) “felt so strongly about their rights to land about Awat’ovi” that the area now called the Jeddito Island of Navajo Partitioned Land (NPL) was set aside for them, “totally surrounded by Hopi Partitioned Land (HPL),” according to ethnohistorian David Brugge. Navajo traditions also indicate that Deer, Rabbit, Tansy Mustard, and Ye’ii (Hopi Katsina) subclans descended from clan mothers who escaped death at Awat’ovi. Not unlike the children born of undocumented mothers who are afforded citizenship in our nation today.

  Neither, too, would Christianity be forever excluded from the mesas. Hopi peoples now embrace an array of denominations: from Mennonites to Mormons to Protestants to Pentecostals. Even Sáliko, “Maumzrau’mongwi,” or chief of the Mamzrau Society, whose narrative guided Jesse Fewkes to the sorcerer’s kiva, had “become Christian” by 1920. Many do so while continuing to honor and perform the traditional ceremonials that assure rainfall, abundant harvests, and the Hopi Way. Catholicism would not return to the Hopi mesas until 1928, in the Saint Joseph Mission in Keams Canyon, and even then the Church came to minister to local Navajos, not the Hopis. Yet in June 2000, Hopi tribal chairman Wayne Taylor invited Bishop Donald Pelotte to meet with a small group of thirty Hopi Catholics. Pelotte “in meaningful dialogue . . . expressed to them his sincere sorrow for any contribution the Catholic Church or any of its members may have had to the painful history shared by the Catholic Church and the Hopi.”

  Today, the relentless winds that shredded the tents of the Peabody Expedition blow across wire fencing that protects the ruins of the High Place of the Bow Clan. Each gust elicits a tone from the wires, fitting for the town’s Navajo name—Tallahogan—The Singing House. With one note a piece of the past is covered by sand, with another the sand blows clear of the past. This is the nature of history on the mesa of sorrows.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book found its origins in a conversation with archaeologist Ruth Van Dyke in 2001, when we each held resident scholar appointments at the (then) School of American Research. I was in the final stages of completing Captives and Cousins, a book on intercultural captivity and slavery in the Southwest Borderlands, and Ruth wondered if I knew a variant of that theme in the distribution of the women who survived the massacre at Awat’ovi Pueblo among the villages of the assailants—were they victims or redeemed from bondage? The following years found me at SAR (which became the School for Advanced Research in 2007) as research faculty, administrator, and executive. Mesa of Sorrows reflects the “peculiar alchemy” of the many diverse humanists, social scientists, Native scholars and artists that exemplified SAR’s community. For more than a decade’s dwelling within that energy and eclecticism, I am grateful. Of special note are resident and visiting colleagues Rebecca A. Allahyari, the late David M. Brugge, Catherine Cameron, Cynthia Chavez Lamar, Catherine Cocks, the late Linda S. Cordell, Sarah Croucher, Armand Fritz, Severin Fowles, George Gumerman, Laura Holt, the late Michael Kabotie (Lomawywesa), John Kantner, Doug Kiel, Stephen H. Lekson, Nancy Owen Lewis, Ramson Lomatewama, the late Hartman Lomawaima, Tsianina Lomawaima, Tiya Miles, Melissa Nelson, Timothy R. Pauketat, Douglas W. Schwartz, Thomas E. Sheridan, David H. Snow, Phillip Tuwaletstiwa, and the late David J. Weber.

  St. John’s College president Michael Peters and dean J. Walter Sterling paid me the honor of a visiting scholar invitation in the college’s Liberal Arts Program in 2013–2014, during which I completed a first draft of the manuscript and heard echoes of “windy Ilium” in Awat’ovi’s story. Alison Colborne at the Laboratory of Anthropology at the Museum of Indian Arts & Cultures in Santa Fe and Patricia Kervick at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University endured my research requests for years. Elizabeth DePalma Digeser and Stuart Smith at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recruited me back to the shores of the Pacific, and each contributed to my thinking about the violence of orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and heresy in cultures ancient and modern, as did friends and colleagues Ryan Abrecht, Liza Black, Debra Blumenthal, Hal Drake, Paige Digeser, Greg Goalwin, Jeff Hoelle, John I. W. Lee, Ann Marie Plane, Adam Sabra, Amber Vanderwarker, Sarah Watkins, and Greg Wilson. Special thanks to Hopi Cultural Preservation officer Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, author, musician, interpreter, and guide. All helped me to understand the trauma and promise encompassed in the deep history of the Southwest; none bear responsibility for errors in my interpretations thereof.

  Don Lamm kept this book alive against high odds, as did Lynne Withey, who provided enthusiasm when my morale flagged. Its completion may have surprised my agent, Lisa Adams of the Garamond Agency, but she gracefully never let that show. At W. W. Norton, Alexa Pugh’s voice remained gentle and encouraging no matter what strains I imposed upon her. My editor, John Glusman, gave me the single best writing instruction I have ever received: “It is your job to make your reader feel smart, not how smart you are.”

  Lila and Jeremy helped me to understand the essence of this story: let us try not to make strangers of our kinfolk and neighbors.

  NOTES

  Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text. Please bookmark your page before following links.

  CHAPTER ONE: THE GATE UNGUARDED

  1“The women and maidens”: Henry R. Voth, The Traditions of the Hopi, Field Columbian Museum 96, Anthropological Papers 8 (1905), quote 249–250.

  2For them it remained: Author’s site visit with Hopi Cultural Preservation officer Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, September 11, 2014. C. L. Redman, S. James, and D. Notarianni, Awatovi Ruins of Antelope Mesa: Preservation
and Development Plans, OCRM Report No. 78, Arizona State University (1990).

  5The crisis at Awat’ovi: Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Mariner Books 2006 [1934]), 78–79.

  5Honor between men: Stephen Mitchell, “Introduction” to Homer, The Iliad (New York: Free Press, 2012), quote xxiii.

  5Tuhu’osti, autumn: The following is drawn from Fewkes, “A-Wa’-To-Bi: An Archaeological Verification of a Tusayán Legend,” American Anthropologist 6 (October 1893): 363–376, based on narrative of Saliko given to A. M. Stephen, 1892—Saliko, descendant of survivor of massacre, in 1892 “Mamzrau’mongwi,” or chief of the Mamzrau Society (women’s initiation ceremony based on knowledge preserved by her ancestor); note that by 1920 Saliko had “become a Christian” and moved off the mesa; the Mamzrau ceremony was extinct at Walpi from E. C. Parsons, “The Hopi Wöwöchim Ceremony in 1920,” American Anthropologist 25, no. 2 (1923): 156–187, esp. 171–72; more narrative details from Michael Lomatumay’ma, Lorena Lomatumay’ma, and Sidney Namingha, Jr., “The Destruction of Awat’ovi,” in Hopi Ruin Legends: Kiqotutuwutsi, collected, translated, and edited by Ekkehart Malotki (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 298–409.

  6Once, six other villages: The seven villages on Antelope Mesa were Awat’ovi, Kawaika’a, Chakpahu, Pink Arrow, Nesuftonga, Kokopnyama, and Lululongturque; John Otis Brew, “Hopi Prehistory and History to 1850,” in Alfonso Ortiz, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 9, Southwest, 514–523, quote 514 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1979); for Hopi view on Chaco-to-Tuuwanasavi, see Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma in David Grant Noble, In Search of Chaco: New Approaches to an Archaeological Enigma (Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, 2004), 41–47; for post-Chaco migrations and “gathering of the clans” motifs, see Patrick D. Lyons, Ancestral Hopi Migrations, Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona, No. 68 (2003); Wesley Bernardini, Hopi Oral Tradition and the Archaeology of Identity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005).

  6Wuwutcim societies initiated: E. C. Parsons, “The Hopi Wöwöchim Ceremony in 1920,” American Anthropologist 25 no. 2 (1923): 156–187.

  7totokya, the climax of the ritual: Ibid., 166–173.

  8“moment of the yellow dawn”: Michael Lomatumay’ma, “The Destruction of Awatovi,” in Hopi Ruin Legends, quotes, 399.

  8“There was crying”: Ibid., quote 399–401.

  8“Wherever they came”: Ibid., quote 403.

  9“These are ours”: Ibid., quote 405.

  9“In that case no one”: Ibid.

  10“has been considered”: Ibid., quote 407; Eric Polingyouma, “Awat’ovi, A Hopi History,” in Hester A. Davis, Remembering Awatovi: The Story of an Archaeological Expedition in Northern Arizona, 1935–1939 (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Monographs, no. 10, copyright 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College), xv–xviii, quote xvii.

  10Alexander McGregor Stephen: Don D. Fowler, A Laboratory for Anthropology: Science and Romanticism in the American Southwest, 1846–1930 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 138–139.

  12“whether she would be willing”: Fewkes, “A-Wa’-To-Bi,” 363–376, quote 365–366.

  14“the other villages got together”: Byron Adams, as quoted in typescript report of April 1939 Hopi delegation address at Office of Indian Affairs, Washington, DC, in “Press Notice and Reviews, 1937–1977,” folder, 995-11, 5-16, Awatovi Collections, Peabody Museum, Cambridge, MA.

  CHAPTER 2: THE SORCERER’S KIVA

  15“there has been”: Eric Polingyouma, “Awat’ovi, A Hopi History,” in Davis, Remembering Awatovi, quote xvii.

  15“Observing the anxiety”: Fewkes, A-Wa’-To-Bi,” quote 375.

  16witchcraft outbreak at Salem: For Salem, the classic works include Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); John Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004 [updated ed.]); for recent anthropological approaches, see Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997).

  17“the first professional anthropologist”: Fowler, A Laboratory for Anthropology, 117–125.

  18“find out all you can”: Ibid., quote 118–119.

  19“Many Buttons”: Ibid., quote 119.

  21Cushing-led Hemenway Expedition: Ibid., 148–171.

  22their massive masonry walls: Martha A. Sandweiss, “The Necessity for Ruins: Photography and Archaeology in the American Southwest,” in May Castleberry, ed., The New World’s Old World: Photographic Views of Ancient America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 62–85.

  23“Not only does Dr. Fewkes”: Cushing to Baxter, June 16, 1891; Matthews to Cushing, January 7, 1891; quoted in Fowler, A Laboratory for Anthropology, 162.

  23Zuni and Hopi: In time, anthropologists would see that the differences between each tribe outweighed in many respects the similarities. Zuni prehistory seemed oriented more toward cycles of eastern (Mogollon) in-and-out migration that swelled and shrunk villages, whereas the Hopi mesas had been almost constantly absorbing new clans since the late thirteenth century, primarily from the Four Corners region. Social psychological differences were identified as well by ethnographers like Ruth Benedict, who saw Zunis as less beset by internal divisions and less subject to fissioning, since they had maintained Halona as a single community across the three centuries since Spanish contact. See Stephen Plog, Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2008), 156–160.

  24“Stephen’s intimate knowledge”: Fowler, A Laboratory for Anthropology, quote 163.

  25Fewkes’s essay: Fewkes, “A-Wa’-To-Bi,” 363–376, based on narrative of Saliko given to A. M. Stephen, 1892. Fewkes later says that Ta’polo himself brought the phallic society of Tataukyamu from Awat’ovi to Walpi, strong evidence that he survived the massacre. See also J. W. Fewkes, “Preliminary Account of an Expedition to the Cliff Villages of the Red Rock Country and the Tusayan Ruins of Sikyatki and Awatobi, Arizona, in 1895,” in Smithsonian Institution Annual Report, 557–588, and Fewkes, “The Alosaka Cult of the Hopi Indians,” American Anthropologist 1, no. 3 (1899): 527n; on the “defection” of Hopis during Fewkes’s 1895 excavations, see J. O. Brew to D. Scott, March 1, 1935, 995-11, Box 1, F2, Awat’ovi Archives, Peabody Museum.

  29white women from New York: Margaret Jacobs, Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879–1934 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999).

  29widespread and terrifying warfare: Jonathan Hass and Winifred Creamer, Stress and Warfare Among the Kayenta Anasazi in the Thirteenth Century (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1993); Christy G. Turner and Jacqueline Turner, Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1998); Stephen H. Lekson, Chaco Meridian: Centers of Political Power in the Ancient Southwest (Lanham, MD: Rowman AltaMira, 1999); Steven A. LeBlanc, Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999); James F. Brooks, “Violence and Renewal in the American Southwest,” Ethnohistory 49, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 205–218.

  30the Chacoan cultural system: Stephen H. Lekson, ed., The Archaeology of Chaco Canyon: An Eleventh-Century Pueblo Regional Center (Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, 2006).

  32Chaco Canyon unraveled: Ibid.

  32“in our history”: John Kantner, Ancient Puebloan Southwest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), quote 99–100; Paul Pino quoted in Ana Sofaer, The Mystery of Chaco Canyon (film, 1999).

  33the two faces of sorcery: For the dual nature of the status of powaaqti (pl., “witches or sorcerers”), see Peter M. Whiteley, Deliberate Acts: Changing Hopi Culture Through the Oraibi Split (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988), quote 214–215.

  34the Four Corners region: Brian
R. Billman, Patricia M. Lambert, and Banks L. Leonard, “Cannibalism, Warfare, and Drought in the Mesa Verde Region During the Twelfth Century A.D.” in American Antiquity 65, no. 1 (2000): 145–178, summary, 167–169; recent identitification of trachybasalt temper sources in the Four Corners region, however, suggests the ceramics could have been locally produced, therefore indicating internecine, rather than xenophobic, violence. See David Gonzales, Fumi Arakawa, and Alan Koenig, “Petrographic and Geochemical Constraints on the Provenance of Sanadine-bearing Temper in Ceramic Potsherds, Four Corners Region, Southwest USA,” Geoarchaeology: An International Journal 30 (2015): 59–73.

  36“the remains of few men”: Kristen A. Kuckelman, “Bioarchaeological Signatures of Strife in Terminal Pueblo III Settlements in the Northern San Juan,” AAPA paper, 2010; Crow Canyon Research Reports, http://www.crowcanyon.org/ResearchReports/CastleRock/Text/crpw_contentsvolume.asp; for comparison of Cowboy Wash with Sacred Ridge (an earlier case of massacre) as an example of “ethnic cleansing” in the ancient Southwest, see James A. Potter and Jason P. Chuipka, “Perimortem Mutilation of Human Remains in an Early Village in the American Southwest: A Case of Ethnic Violence,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 29 (2010): 507–523; for a survey of witchcraft cases in Southwest prehistory and ethnography, see J. Andrew Darling, “Mass Inhumation and the Execution of Witches in the American Southwest,” American Anthropologist 100, no. 3 (1998), 732–752.