The Hopi Indians

by Walter Hough

This is a good example of the poetry of the Hopi which, in the kachina songs, is of no low degree of artistic expression.

The Hopi use the world for a dial and the sun for the clock-hand. The sun-priest from his observatory on a point of the mesa watches the luminary as carefully as any astronomer. He determines the time for the beginning of each ceremony or important event in the life of the pueblo, such as corn planting, by the rising or setting of the sun behind a certain peak or notch in the marvelous mountain profile on the eastern and western horizons. These profiles are known to him as we know the figures on a watch face. Along them he notes the march of the seasons, and at the proper time the town-crier chants his announcement from the housetops.

The clear air of Tusayan renders the task of the sun-priest easy; this primitive astronomer has the best of skies for observation. By day the San Francisco peaks, a hundred miles away, stand clearly silhouetted on the horizon; by night the stars are so brilliant that one can distinguish objects by their light.

The Hopi also know much of astronomy, and not only do they have names for the planets and particular stars, but are familiar with many constellations, the Pleiades especially being venerated, as among many primitive peoples. The rising and position of the Pleiades determine the time of some important ceremonies when the “sweet influences” reign. Any fixed star may be used to mark off a period of time by position and progress in the heavens as the sun is used by day. The moon determines the months, but there is no word for “year” or for the longer periods of time. Days are marked by “sleeps,” thus today is pui or “now”; the days of the week are two sleeps, three sleeps, etc.; tabuco is “yesterday.”

While the larger periods of time are kept with accuracy, so that the time of beginning the ceremonies varies but little from year to year, the Hopi have poor memories for dates. No one knows his age, and many of these villages seem to live within the shifting horizons of yesterday and tomorrow. The priests, however, keep a record of the ceremonies by adding to their tiponi, or palladium of their society, a feather for each celebration. At Zuñi a record of the death of priests of the war society is kept by making scratches on the face of a large rock near a shrine, and by this method a Hopi woman keeps count of the days from the child’s birth to the natal ceremony. Ask a Hopi when some event happened, and he will say, “Pai he sat o,” meaning “some time ago, when my father was a boy”; stress on the word means a longer time, and if the event was long beyond the memory of man, the Indian will almost shake his head off with emphasis.

The only notched time-stick is that jealously guarded by the sun priest, and no one knows just how he makes his calculations from it.

As for dinner time, the great sun and “the clock inside” attend to that; dawa yamu, dawa nashab, and dawa poki stand for “sunrise,” “noonday,” and “sunset.” If the Hopi makes an appointment for a special hour, he points to where the sun will be at that time. The seasons are known to him in a general way as the time of the cold or snow, the coming back of the sun (winter solstice), the time of bean or corn planting, the time of green corn, the time of harvest, etc., but there is a calendar marked by the ceremonies held during each month.

Perhaps these children of the sun are happier in not being slaves of the second as we have become. Our watches, which they call dawa, “the sun,” have not bound them to the wheel by whose turning we seem to advance. They are satisfied with the grander procession of the heavenly bodies, and their days fade into happy forgetfulness.

An experience of several years ago may here be related in order to show how the clan name of a Hopi is a veritable part of himself and also links him to his clan and the most intimate religious and secular life of the pueblo.

There was a jolly crowd of Hopi under the dense shade of a cottonwood on the Little Colorado River one hot day in July. The mound of earth, strewn with chips of flint and potsherds like a buried city on the Euphrates, had yielded its secrets, and the house walls of the ancient town of Homolobi resembled a huge honeycomb on the bluff.