Southwestern Homelands by William Kittredge

Author:William Kittredge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Published: 2002-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

Having bought some ears of variously colored corn, for kitchen decorations in Montana, and a brilliantly patterned red sash, Annick and I walked among ancient houses at Old Orabi, the oldest Hopi village. I wondered why a simple life like this (an inherently stupid thought, there are no simple lives) couldn’t be enough. The reason was obvious—because I believe in the need to constantly reinvent ourselves, in the usefulness of staying up on our toes, the need for incessant rethinking of our purposes and strategies. But there can be too much staying up on our toes. It can lead to fretful, aimless, and frenetic social hopping and bopping, driven by a fear of what might happen if we ever slowed down. What if we went to sleep at the switch, or at the wheel, and fell behind, or crashed? Or simply noticed that we weren’t up to much beyond staying on our toes?

The Hopi, on the other hand, believe in repetitions and order. I recalled a story from Native American Testimony edited by Peter Nabokov, told by Peter Nuvamsa, Sr. Confronting hippies who had taken to hanging around the Hopi mesas, Nuvamsa asked, “Why are you here? Why do you behave this way, doing anything that comes into your head? We do not like the way you are behaving. It’s not our way. It’s improper.”

They said, “What’s wrong with what we’re doing? We are here because we’re on your side. You have been put down by the establishment, and we are against the establishment.” I told them, “No, you are not on our side. You don’t behave well. Whatever you want, you take it. Whatever you want to do, you do it. There are rules in the world. You can’t be just anything you want.”

The Hopi, in short, as I get it, do not think of themselves as a counterculture. They believe in responsibility. They believe droughts and epidemics are the predictable result of conduct on the part of Hopi leaders and Hopi society. They live in a coherent, practical one-to-one trade-off relationship with sacredness, and still they are certainly among the most religious people in the world.

The Hopi focus on encouraging rain for the corn. Without rain there is no corn, and soon, no Hopi. That, most basically, is how they understand transactions with their Rain Gods. In Legends of the American Desert, Alex Shoumatoff says, “The scant rainfall on which their survival depends will only come through prayer, through everybody’s heart being right.

“The Hopi believe…that when they die they become benevolent beings known as kachinas and eventually take the form of clouds, becoming Cloud People, whose substance, or navala, is liquid and is manifested as rain. As Cloud People who send down their life-giving fluid to their kin, the dead continue to play a vital role in the order of things. Their kin must perform certain ceremonies and smoke pipes known as cloud-blowers before they plant their corn. They must summon the Cloud People and beseech them to release their navala.

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