Such is the stupidity of the alien when he seeks to rule the so-called heathen. My method was justified to protect the weak and the young, but I had cast out sentiment.
It may be they shall give me greater ease
Than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.
Quite so many Lispeths. I promptly gave permission for the weaving of a robe, and I hope she has had no use for it, nor will have, these many years.
The mid-West moralist may interpolate a question here. Without their own service, did you permit them to go unmarried? This had little in it of the material compared [[356]]with that robe episode. But as Moungwi, a commissioned Head of the people, vested also with the authority of the State of Arizona, I would solemnize a legal ceremony if events had proved one necessary and the parties had attained a legal age. I never married a woman to a scoundrel. But I have married four couples in one morning, issuing first the State license as a deputized clerk of the court, solemnizing the ceremony as a magistrate, blessing the bride, and immediately thereafter summoning into open court the groom and all other guilty persons for trial on a charge of child-prostitution. This method was drastic, and very wearing on one who had other things to engage his attention. And it was not a very cheering family-event. But it finally produced obedience. There came a time when the Hopi would consult the Agency records as to their children’s ages, and would inquire about school terms, and what Moungwi thought about it, before framing-up family alliances.
The happiest of the Hopi marriages were those following my permission to schoolboys and girls to arrange their own courting, sometimes at the school, thus breaking down old mesa-lines. Boys of the First Mesa married Hotevilla girls: a thing that would never have been tolerated by the parents on either side. Close as are the mesas, housing the one people, they might as well be separate provinces. Seldom will a First Mesa marry an Oraibi, for instance, and vice versa. A local form of derision among the Hopi is to mock the differences in pronunciation and intonation of their common language. Oraibi is less than thirty miles from Walpi, and yet an Oraibi is a being recognizing a different civilization.
When last I visited Phœnix, I entered a shop to make a purchase. A fine-looking Hopi came forward and greeted [[357]]me. We talked about the folks at home, of his summer visit to the mesas, who had died and who had married.
“Now let me see,” I parleyed, for it is hard to remember all individuals of a tribe. “You are married—what is your wife’s name?”
“Why, you know her; she was Youkeoma’s granddaughter.”
“Sure enough—Viola—the one who hid in the wagon and ran away to school at Phœnix, for fear I would send her back to Hotevilla.”