The mid-West moralist may interpolate a question here. Without their
own service, did you permit them to go unmarried? This had little in it
of the material compared with that robe episode. But as Moungwi, a
commissioned Head of the people, vested also with the authority of the
State of Arizona, I would solemnize a legal ceremony if events had
proved one necessary and the parties had attained a legal age. I never
married a woman to a scoundrel. But I have married four couples in one
morning, issuing first the State license as a deputized clerk of the
court, solemnizing the ceremony as a magistrate, blessing the bride,
and immediately thereafter summoning into open court the groom and all
other guilty persons for trial on a charge of child-prostitution. This
method was drastic, and very wearing on one who had other things to
engage his attention. And it was not a very cheering family-event. But
it finally produced obedience. There came a time when the Hopi would
consult the Agency records as to their children’s ages, and would
inquire about school terms, and what Moungwi thought about it, before
framing-up family alliances.
The happiest of the Hopi marriages were those following my permission
to schoolboys and girls to arrange their own courting, sometimes at the
school, thus breaking down old mesa-lines. Boys of the First Mesa
married Hotevilla girls: a thing that would never have been tolerated
by the parents on either side. Close as are the mesas, housing the one
people, they might as well be separate provinces. Seldom will a First
Mesa marry an Oraibi, for instance, and vice versa. A local form of
derision among the Hopi is to mock the differences in pronunciation and
intonation of their common language. Oraibi is less than thirty miles
from Walpi, and yet an Oraibi is a being recognizing a different
civilization.
When last I visited Phœnix, I entered a shop to make a purchase. A
fine-looking Hopi came forward and greeted me. We talked about the
folks at home, of his summer visit to the mesas, who had died and who
had married.
“Now let me see,” I parleyed, for it is hard to remember all
individuals of a tribe. “You are married—what is your wife’s name?”
“Why, you know her; she was Youkeoma’s granddaughter.”
“Sure enough—Viola—the one who hid in the wagon and ran away to school
at Phœnix, for fear I would send her back to Hotevilla.”
Birth and baptism; marriage and divorce; many dances; a lifetime of
endless toil and endless prayer; many harvests, rich and meagre. Then
comes the time when he has planted his last crop, or she has finished
the last of household labors. Something happens to end things, and to
serve summons to the Judgment Seat, that lonely prominence overlooking
the Oraibi-Dinnebito Washes in the west. The tireless feet will no
longer cover the steep trails to the pueblo on the heights; the mesa
and the valley will know them no more. Death, as to us all, comes as a
surprise. There is a sad wailing that is soon hushed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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