Hopi

Located in the northeastern portion of modern-day Arizona, the Hopi homeland has been inhabited for at least 10,000 years by a people who mastered a complex and difficult environment and survived periodic incursions from European colonizers.

There is little archaeological evidence for any Hopi communities before the year A. D. 1, but there are remains that suggest that the Hopis inhabited small communities, or even individual farms, for the period up to 1300. At that point Hopi population grew, and some areas became much more populous, although Hopi abandoned some sites, in all likelihood because drought made some regions uninhabitable. Hopi also had conflicts with other indigenous nations, notably the Navajo, Apache, and Ute. Still, despite hardships, the Hopi homeland emerged as one of the three principal Pueblo centers from approximately 1300 to 1600.

Long before Spanish CONQUISTADORes arrived, the Hopi had become master farmers. Like other peoples in the region, they learned how to extract great yields from CORN, which became the staple of their diet, along with beans. To battle the ferocious winds of the area, the Hopi built windbreaks from stones and plants, many of which survived hundreds of years. Hopi farmers also found ways to cope with the region’s limited rainfall. They planted on floodplains of local streams, and, perhaps more significant, they practiced irrigation. Hopi success went beyond agriculture. In the centuries before Europeans arrived, Hopi became perhaps the only indigenous people in the region to use coal for cooking and heating and to use coal fires to heat their painted pottery, which became among the most celebrated in the world.

The Spanish arrived in 1540 searching, as they so often were, for the great riches they believed existed in the region. Spanish explorers sent out by Francisco Coronado first arrived under the direction of Pedro de Tovar in the Hopi town of Awatovi. Coronado sent Tovar there from his base at Zuni because the Zuni had told him that there was a place lying to the west similar to theirs. Coronado hoped that they meant that the fabled city of Cibola could be found there, but he also recognized that an exploratory venture to the west might achieve one of his other goals: to discover a water route to the Pacific Ocean. Tovar reported back that his men, who included a Franciscan named Juan de Padilla (probably the first emissary of the Catholic Church to visit the region) had heard about a major river farther west. Coronado then sent another mission, under the direction of Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, with the hope of finding a passage to the sea. Although they were perhaps the first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon, they could not figure out how to descend to the Colorado and so had to abandon the search.

The Spanish returned in 1583 led by Antonio de Espejo, who followed clues left by Tovar. Espejo encountered Hopi at Awatovi and, in classic Conquistador fashion, claimed the region for the king of Spain (presumably after reading the Requerimiento to the Hopi, who probably had no clue about its meaning). For the next generation the Spanish paid only occasional attention to the emerging colony of New Mexico, although Franciscans believed the region ripe for their spiritual attentions. In 1629, 30 Franciscans took up residence in the area and found converts among the Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi. One of the missionaries, Francisco Porras, who had arrived at Awatovi in August 1629, allegedly performed a miracle by restoring sight to a blind boy by placing a cross on his eyes. That act apparently helped the Franciscans to establish themselves in the region and perhaps explains why they had more followers in Awatovi than in other parts of the Hopi homeland as late as 1700.

Despite the miracle, the Franciscans never had a large following among the Hopi, but the importance of New Mexico to the Spanish could not be measured in converted souls alone. Like other peoples in the southwest, the Hopi world changed as a result of long-term contact with Europeans, who brought new goods and foods into the region at the same time that their diseases, part of the Columbian Exchange, often devastated indigenous communities. Perhaps it was lingering tensions about the changes in their world that fueled the hostilities known as the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, a resistance movement that swept across the Hopi homeland and elsewhere and became the greatest indigenous resistance movement of the 17th century and a signal that European colonization would not always be tolerated by the peoples Europeans hoped to Christianize and control. The survival of Hopi ceremonies and religious beliefs, which demand that humans pay proper attention and respect to divine forces, suggests that the Franciscans had little chance to eradicate religious beliefs that stretched back hundreds of years to a time when the world was in order.

Further reading: J. O. Brew, “Hopi Prehistory and History to 1850,” in Handbook of North American Indians, William C. Sturtevant, gen. ed., vol. 9, Southwest, ed. Alfonso Ortiz (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979), 514-523; Arlette Frigout, “Hopi Ceremonial Organization,” in Ortiz, ed., Southwest, 564-576; Louis A. Hieb, “Hopi World View,” in Ortiz, ed., Southwest, 577-580.