So, as Moungwi, I gave them fair warning that these things must stop. They did not stop. An Indian, of whatever tribe, will always chance a test. They are a great people for stolid experiments. My first idea of punishment was, the child-wife to the boarding-school, the groom and his father to the Agency jail.
“But,” these male unfortunates finally convinced me, “you are punishing the wrong persons. We men have had nothing to do with the matter. Get the old women.”
And when this was done there were lamentations and floods of tears. One old virago nearly washed me from her home. It was a wet season at the mesa. And the virus worked about as successfully as a local philosopher of the Hopi described another’s conversion to Christianity via baptism.
“First time they get him, just like vaccinate him—no take. He backsliding now—dance all time—old Hopi again. But next time they get him baptized, mebbeso it take all right—mebbeso.”
Not all of my efforts produced success.
You may ask, Why not secure the girl in school before this untoward happening? The younger children of the Hopi all attend day schools, located close to their homes, and often a girl will reach maturity before the matrons [[355]]have knowledge of a marriage scheme. With the child-wife in the boarding-school, caught during those first four days, there was no procession to mamma’s house, no corn-grinding, no attendance of the Katchina dance, and no robe. The joy had been taken out of life. There was mourning in both camps; for, as Jacob was in jail, there was no water-hauling, no woodcutting, no unpaid laboring in the field. It was a very sad state of affairs, tribally, and apparently this strange Moungwi had little sympathy for the human race,—at least the Hopi division of it, and its urge to perpetuate itself.
One day, about two years after the imposition of such a sentence, I met an old man at a distant mesa who asked for a talk.
“His daughter is home now,” said the interpreter, “and he wants your permission to have her robe woven.”
“Robe—you mean a wedding robe?”
“Yes. You recall she had no tribal ceremony; and it is like this: When the white people marry, they have a ring. The white robe is our ring. If she dies, there will be no robe to bury her in.”