Mesa of Sorrows by James F. Brooks

Author:James F. Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Hopi Mesas and the villages of Huk’ovi, Pivanhonkyapi.

It came time that the residents of Pivanhokyapi staged their famous Ladder Dance, an event that drew an audience from many of the distant villages. On the edge of the mesa were four deep holes drilled into the rock, into which tall pine poles carried miles from the heights of the San Francisco Peaks, some fifty miles distant, were inserted. Four dancers, impersonating katsinam, would climb the poles and leap acrobatically from one to the other, in teams of two, often crossing in mid-flight, barely missing a collision. The watchers waited for these moments, and often cried out when the dancers were in mid-flight, so close were there bodies. It was a great spectacle and demonstrated the grace and power of the dancers.

The girl from Huk’ovi again approached the young man when he was gathering fuel wood out on the mesa, and again he ignored her. “Am I so ugly you run away from me,” she asked. “Do I look so much like an old woman that you’re avoiding me?” He admitted that she was, in fact, “a pretty girl,” but still resisted her enticements, even when she offered her body, “come over here and enjoy yourself on me, you can have my body.”

The boy refused, with the excuse that he would soon be a member of the important ceremony, and the senior men prohibited such sexual liaisons before ritual performances. The girl returned to Huk’ovi, furious at his rejection. “And she would find a way [to punish him], since she was a witch (powaqmana) and a master at her craft. By using her magic powers she caused a crack in one of the holes into which the pine poles had been inserted. . . . with that crack . . . the pole would give way and crash down over the rim with the boy still on it.” Since the postholes lay just a few feet from the edge of the mesa, a fall to the rocks below would surely be fatal.

As the Ladder Dance ceremony neared, the men of Pivanhokyapi gathered in their kiva for preparations. To their surprise, Old Spider Woman called down to them and asked permission to descend. “A girl from Huk’ovi has caused a crack alongside the hole in which your tree is planted,” she warned. “It can’t stay the way it is.” She offered them a special “mushy paste” with which to repair the crack and make the dance pole stable.

On each of three mornings thereafter, however, new cracks were discovered in the rock of the mesa in which the poles would be inserted, and in each case, Old Spider Woman provided the paste with which the cracks could be repaired. When the day of the dance finally came, “the people of Pivanhokyapi and some from Huk’ovi” turned out to watch. The dancers performed “beautifully and uttered cries that were pleasing to the onlookers.” Each team of two would climb the poles, and dance upon their

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