The Hopi Indians

by Walter Hough

With the departure of the kachinas a new class of ceremonies begins. The dancers who previously appeared in strange masks and headgear now perform unmasked, and the cumbrous paraphernalia is laid away for another year. The great event of the summer, the Snake Dance, is now at hand, and everyone sets about preparing for a good time. In the latter part of August, after this ceremony, the pueblo resumes its normal state and the people settle down to the feast of good things from their fields, which they attack with primitive zest and enjoyment. It is greatly to the credit of the Hopi that they work well and rest well like the unconscious philosophers they are.

The moon of September watches over a scene of peace and plenty in Tusayan. The cool, clear nights betoken that frosts and the time of harvest are approaching. The heat of summer is gone and the season is ideal.

Since the Hopi are good people one would infer that they need no rulers. One might live among the Hopi for some time and not wittingly come in contact with a chief or a policeman or any evidence of laws, but the rulers and laws are there nevertheless.

The voice of the town crier awakens one to the fact that here is the striking apparatus of some sort of a social clock. It will be found that there is an organization of which the crier is the ultimate utterance. Chiefs are there in abundance, the house chief, the kiva chief, the war chief, the speaker chief who is the crier; chiefs of clans, who are chiefs of the fraternities: all these are members of the council that rules the pueblo. The council meets on occasion and acts for the common weal, and the village chief publishes their mandates by crier.

In this most democratic organization the agents of the Government who wish to treat with the Hopi, not finding a responsible head, felt forced to appoint one. Thus each Hopi pueblo received a supreme ruler, who neither deceived himself nor the people as to the power he acquired from Washington, which was nil. The true rulers are the heads of the clans, and by their wise advice and their knowledge of the traditional unwritten laws everything is regulated for the tractable Hopi. Each pueblo acts for itself and knows nothing and cares less for the doings of the other pueblos, so there has never been a league of Hopi tribes. In a few instances there was a temporary unity of action, as when the people of other pueblos destroyed Awatobi, an event related circumstantially in the tradition. (See p. [210].) Traces of this independence of action abound in the Southwest. The ancient ruins show that the clans built each its house cluster apart from the others and moved when it liked. The present villages are made up of clans and fragments of clans, each living in the ward where it settled when it joined the others in the old time.

These clans are larger families of blood relations, who trace their descent from the mother and who have a general family name or totem, as Eagle, Tobacco Plant, Cloud, etc. Although no blood relationship may be traceable between them, no youth and maid of the same clan may marry, and this seems to be the first law of the clan. The working of the strange law of mother-right makes the children of no clan relation to the father. Since the woman owns the house and the children, the father is only a sojourner in the clan of his wife.

Another law of the greater family was that of mutual help, providing for the weak, infirm, and unprotected members. From this grows the hospitality of the Indian, and nowhere does this graceful custom prevail more than among the Hopi.

As if in recognition of the interests of the whole people in the farming lands the messengers sent out to bear plume-prayers to the nature gods while the ceremonies are in progress encircle all the fields of the pueblo, so that all may receive the blessings of rain. While the lands are spoken of as belonging to the village, they are known to have been immemorially divided among the clans, hence at Walpi the oldest and otherwise ranking clans have the best land. The division of the land in severalty by the United States government some years ago had no effect on the ancient boundaries and no one but the surveyor knows where his lines ran.

Every once in a while the Hopi have a “raising,” but instead of the kind and willing neighbors of the “bee” in the States, here the workers are clan relations. Coöperation or communal effort goes a long way toward explaining why the days of the Pueblo dweller are long in the land and the Mormon settlers in the Southwest also followed this primitive law which goes into effect wherever men are gathered for the common weal.

Laws are but expressions of common sense formulated by the wisest and most experienced. The Hopi must have good laws, for though their laws are stronger by far than those written and refined by civilization, the people observe them unconsciously and never feel the burden. There are so few infractions of the law that it is difficult to say what the various punishments are. The taking of life by force or law is unknown; the respect of mine and thine is the rule among the Hopi, and so on through the temptations of life that beset mortals. There is no desire to place the Hopi on a pedestal and declare them perfect, for they are not; but in many ways they set their civilized brothers an example. As to punishment, it is probable that a loss of standing in a fraternity, ostracism from the clan or pueblo, and ridicule are the suasive penalties.