Prayer-sticks, tied in little bundles, offered to the gods. And reflect
for a moment. The Apache was an enemy, a most bitter and sinister
enemy. The most southerly and westerly ruins of Hopi civilization are
to be found along the Rio del Lino, or Flax River, as the Little
Colorado was named by the Spanish. Their dawn settlements are far to
the north, in hidden cañons close to the Utah line; and it is not
likely that their eastern pueblos, those of the Hopi proper, were ever
beyond the upper reaches of the Jedito Wash country. But these
prayer-sticks are found far beyond those limits. They suggest religious
pilgrimages into enemy provinces. Perhaps the early Hopi accepted even
this dangerous means of placating his deities. Primitive knowledge
would have located the sources of rain in the western range, where the
San Francisco peaks lift their snow-capped heads, and in the White
Mountains of the Apache country. The Navajo fastened his legends to
that highest desert elevation, Navajo Mountain, and it is not likely
the Hopi ventured there. But his Rain gods, those powerful to relieve
the aridity of his country and ensure against famine, dwelt in
mountains somewhere, and therefore, trembling perhaps, muttering
incantations, he went to them.
Anything that is strange, and possibly potent, has been absorbed into
their embroidered religion. The clans like to procure colored glass.
They make much of tortoise shells, and other things speaking of the
sea. President Roosevelt was petitioned by them to forward a jar of
sea-water. They have—or had—a Parrot clan, a fantastic touch
reminiscent of some lonely friar who had a mission garden and in it
kept his pets.
Close to their homes are many shrines that excite the curiosity of
tourists and that sometimes get visitors into trouble. Once a couple of
the overly curious were thrashed with whips by Hopi of the Chimopovi
district—for which the guilty were severely punished by the Agent then
in charge. But more than one Agent has ordered busybodies to replace
bahoos and gifts taken from such places. While I had a hand in this,
and finally stopped the plundering of old graves, and once prevented
the sale and removal of an entire Hopi altar, still I must admit that I
never caught a tourist or a “scratcher” pillaging a newly made grave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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