Surviving Columbus: The Story of the Pueblo People; Interview with Emory Sekaquaptewa, Tape 2

In less, there's probably two things on the Spanish period that I have as questions, but if there's anything that you might add, or, you know, I don't mean, okay, okay. I guess two things. One looking at the period afterwards, how Hopi was more or less free from all of the Spanish influence. It was never reconquered per se, but it also had a role within the Pueblo community in terms of refugees came here. It was, you know, the religion was free here as much of a share between all the Pueblos. Anna, so what I'm trying to do is also look at how Hopi fits into the other Pueblos as well.

Now, my idea, which comes from all traditions about pre-Spanish period, is the bonding element between Hopi and other Pueblos today, and not because of, it may be that they also share this common unfortunate history of the rebellion, but there was a continuation of abuse and suffering by the Hopi's after the Spanish period, when, as late as 1820s, when Mexico won its independence and began to take over the once Spanish territories. But there, their intervention into Hopi, the Mexicans, was more like slave raiding.

And so that is another period, another era of experience with the people from the south, the Spanish speakers. And to the Hopi's, there was no difference between the Spanish and the Mexicans. On the other hand, Hopi's have always been had trade relations and very good one with the other Pueblos. And that for all the Hopi's raised their cotton and their wooled textiles, and the various other things, and traded freely, constantly, even before the Spanish period. And this bond and affinity apparently never faded away, even after the Spanish period was over. And then there are, of course, many things that has been left from the Spanish period,

which the Hopi people and other Pueblos have incorporated into their world, and from that historical point to the present, become very significant in their world of art, economics, culture, and certain kinds of practices. And this is certainly true at Hopi. Even words, there are dozens of words in Hopi, which are obviously Spanish loan words. Obviously, the Kawayo comes from Kawayo. Which is a Hopi word for hand saw carpenters, which comes from the Spanish word, Sierra.

And we can go on and on. See, these words were necessary to become a part of Hopi vocabulary, because they were already enjoying the usefulness, the utility of these things that was introduced to them. And not only that, but fruits of various kinds, peaches, apples, mansana, pears and grapes, which are thrived at Hopi as a matter of fact, many of them are becoming abandoned today, but there are a lot of families who are very devoted to their orchards and still raise a lot

of good fruit, watermelons or melons of different kinds, to add to their agricultural diet. And you really can go on and on, even some of the materials that now become a part of the adornment, adornments for various kinds of ceremonial paraphernalia. So they left their mark for the good. I mean, something that has become a part of the Hopi world in today's Hopi world. And continue to be part of Hopi as if they have always been around, it's become part of their oral tradition, something that has the same value to the Hopi's other things that came from earlier periods of experience and tradition.

Other poets have been influenced also in the governmental structure, they have governors. How does Hopi fit within that tradition? Well, the Hopi's have, they're not abandoned, they still have not abandoned their traditional form of government. The traditional form of government is based upon the order and prominence of the arrival of various clans. Obviously, the first arrivals were the ones who became sort of like a ruling clan. And through that line that leaders came, the village chiefs come through that line so-called kick-mo-wing. And the prominent clans have produced the kind of ceremonies which are considered to be

more powerful. But these are the clans produced the leaders that are called upon as though they were the village fathers, so to speak. And the whole traditional ceremonial system is based upon their leadership, then upon some kind of a modern secular kind of a government. And the ceremonies are determined by the Calendars, the Lunar calendar, as well as by the Solstice calendar. And both of these are constantly observed, and that's probably true with any agricultural people. They watch them very carefully, determine their seasons for planting, for harvesting and

for various other reasons. And also they determine their ceremonial periods, because the ceremonies are nothing more than the enactment of the planting and growing season. They're all connected together when I'm going through the winter and the other one during the summer. So let's see, I've lost my thought here, I'm looking at influences as Spanish government. And so the Spaniards in that sense have made change the hopey world from a more harsher life in terms of comforts of living and food and things like that, that added to it

considerably to the introduction of these things. And I, as a child and still there, always had this great mystical wonder about a certain place, there were two corrals, but the corrals were made up of late stones. There were the largest corrals I could imagine the scene in and out there in nowhere, but it turns out that those corrals were done under the direction of the Spaniards. And they apparently were raising probably thousands of sheep and had hopeys do all of the herding for them.

And these structures still stand today. And of course, the mission, the only mission that still, well, only because it's the only one that's been excavated, and there are still walls, partial walls of the mission standing up in a wet over here. Now, the other two places where the missions were built have never been excavated. We don't know what's there, and hopeys are not quick to find out what's there. Okay, let's look at the American impact. I look at the American period, both in terms of the impact of the government, and also the

new missionaries, the Protestant missionaries coming in and trying to. Well, the first of the Americans, coming through a bad man, they story about a man out there in his field, working hard to raise his melons, to discover that there were three or so men, white men, coming through and helping themselves with the melons and just simply destroying them without eating them all. He tried to stop them and they shot him, shot him dead, so that's really a first encounter with the Americans.

And then thereafter, of course, the military usually. Not really with any plans to, because their target apparently, early days was not the hopey people, it was somebody else, namely Apache and Navajo's who were by this time in this area, and had posed a threat to the settlement of the West by the Americans. So they were the ones who were sought to do something about, and in fact, by this time and perhaps before that time, the hopey too were experiencing pressure from the patches and Navajo's and youths, and these people now become moved in closer in order to discover the hopey story, storehouses full of corn and all kinds of other preserves, and began

to come after them. And so they had already suffered considerable assault at the hands of these other Indians, and so they were quite interested in what the United States military was going to do with them. So they were sympathetic and helpful as much as possible to rid the area of these rotting Indians. So that's how Kit Carson came into the area and met his market hopey, when he was out gathering in the Navajo's taking the Fort Sumner in New Mexico. And then which was good for the hopey in their belief that all of this particular area where they had made their marks, so to speak, and migrations, metaphorically they referred

to them as making the footprints, that since they made those footprints, that that territory belonged to the hopey and not to other people, and that they were one day the time will come when they will go back and reoccupy these places, which will then define what is, in fact, traditional Aboriginal hopey territory. And before that could happen, Davos were free again, and they began to migrate, being on nomadic people, so they began to migrate back in and began to cover the areas, the hopeys were trying to protect, in the meantime the hopeys perhaps made a mistake or at least they were not paying attention to their teachings that they should have gone out and reoccupied these places, reestablished them, but instead began to build institutions

and towns and grew beyond their environmental, the ability of the environment to support them, lands were scarce, things like that, water, and so there's a long, long tradition about how the fathers that be and hopey, using their knowledge and instructions of protecting hopey, the hopey way of life came to a secret plan called the en la vie, the en la vie is to pre-ordain or predestined something, and that pre-ordination was to destroy the secularized hopey village and cause it to split and scatter these people, force them

to go back to other places, out of hatred for it because they created this hatred, top kind of political, factional divisions, which resulted in a very high emotional encounter in a struggle that simply just blew up the village and indeed caused other villages to become established as the result of it, but without destroying the religion itself because what had happened was that that sort of an incident destroyed only the superstructure of the hopey secular life, where people were establishing institutions and organizations in a name of religion, only to just gain a following of people and enjoy this feeling

of leadership for their own self-purposes, and that was destroyed once you have no people around, you have nobody to lead around, so they had the people that left in small fashions of course had to resort to the old fashioned but good ways for survival and they thrived out there in a new environment and so to me at least from the stories it shows that the segmentation is not the destroyed but to bond people to be close together again because this was the traditional ties among these several people, was never severed, never, only the political thing remained and this was the condition when the federal, when the Americans

began to settle in with their own mission of civilizing Indians and making them good little Christians, so by 1860s these people were coming in with different interests, the first the ethnographers, the ethnologists who were looking for almost anything that they can see feel and hear, you know what I mean, and this was following the John Wesley Powell expedition who excited the imagination of the people in the east about the west, the wild west, the last American frontier, so it brought a lot of curious seekers out, many of whom of course, you know, had the sense to document a lot of the things that they did see and hear and feel and so that's what we find first hopi ethnography and then not being happy

with just gathering information they decided to bring the missionaries who were apparently in competition with each other, different kinds of denominations, in competition with each other to see, to get their own territory of Indians to civilize and Christianize, so around 18, late 1880s and 1890s we see the arrival of the Menonite Church and began to get involved with Hopi, first in us using kind of an ethnologist strategy of seemingly being interested in Hopi ceremonies and by gaining the confidence among Hopi people who was able to get access to some other sick ceremonies, otherwise would have been closed to them, but not

only did they get gain access, but they began to document the stuff, which later of course were published as reports in the American Ethnology reports under the Smithsonian Institution and so it went on and they built their churches and of course in that period of American history, the American government, they'd not assume any responsibility for the teaching and the civilizing of Indians, there's was to keep the Indian uprisings down and so the missionaries were in fact encouraged and invited by the government to do this kind of work among Indians and so in most Indian are reservations, they were the forerunners of a modern American Indian education program, they built their schools first along with

their churches and their missionizing work and then the federal government decided that maybe they did have some responsibility for educating Indians to become Americans, so they built these boarding schools removed for the most part from reservations and brought children there, severed from their parents and to get them away from their own cultural influences and make them into little Americans, by the turn of the century, my mother and father were both literally captured off the street and taken to a boarding school which was not that far away but only at Kim's Canyon about 45 but in those days no automobiles nothing like that, so they experienced the forced schooling and eventually they were transferred

down to the Phoenix Indian school where they got the balance of their education. In a meantime my grandfather which is my mother's father was among those who were opposed to the forced education on Hopi so it should be voluntary and that there were enough people who thought that they were interested in their children's modern education, they shouldn't have to force people and for this kind of opposition he and other opposition colleagues were taken as prisoners by the United States cavalry and my grandfather spent about two years down in Fort Wachuca, southern Arizona as a prisoner of the American cavalry

for his opposition to the federal programs, in any case none of these people my grandfather and my parents have ever felt that they could bring themselves to hate Americans for it, it's just exactly the other way, they learned the value of having a modern education but without giving up yours, your own culture because they saw that you can live comfortably in both worlds and so pretty much that's where I'm coming from, now since up to this point the American government had no way of establishing formal relations with Indian tribes because Indian tribes did not have to any rule of government or organization that could

be understood as being universal among them so the federal government had no way of trying to have diverse ways of relations with different Indians because obviously the policy was to make Indians part of the population a civilization of America so the Indian reorganization act was passed by Congress for the purpose of setting up formal relations with Indian tribes according to the principles of government that was in place under the Constitution of the United States and so each tribe at least voluntarily decided whether it wanted to go under the Indian Organization Act, adopted its own tribal constitution and be ruled by that and be recognized as having a formal relation with the federal government and

in Hopi the tribal constitution under the Indian Organization Act provisions came into being in 1936 and that's when the tribal council was organized according to the provisions of that constitution and some of the Indian tribes chose to keep their treaty relations with the federal government which also provided for a way of government that incorporated a democratic process such as Navajo but they have pretty much in time Indian tribes have pretty much worked out their governmental policies and programs to fit into the scheme

of American government in terms of the criminal civil laws and various policies that would allow for a democratic exercise of power and office. I think this point probably wanted to what key characters, why have the Hopi people survive with their culture intact, despite all this contact, despite all this history, what is it that has allowed Hopi people to maintain their culture and life? Well I think it's there, I think it's that they are isolated enough geographically. They don't wake up in a morning and see high rises out the window, you know what I mean?

Of the Bahana world, the non-Indian world and you see lots of Indian communities in that kind of a situation, I mean it's hard for them to separate from that kind of visual connection as well as everyday kind of connection with it, a way of life across the street literally. But in Hopi you don't and because perhaps because of this isolation, they've also been able to keep intact most of their cultural institutions, their ceremonial institutions. And because the ceremonial institutions for the most part are in place, that means oral tradition is also very strong because that's those are the instruments of oral tradition. So if you add up all of these, I think you can perhaps make one conclusion and that is

that where your culture is strong and that is it has context in practice, institutions and symbolism, then you're not threatened by any other way of life or any way of belief or any other way of belief system. You're happy and comfortable, you can enjoy Rome without becoming a Roman. View, see, let me tell you, I'm happy.