Roughing it De LuxeCobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
General
Roughing it De Luxe
Cobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
American wit and humor; California -- Description and travel; Grand Canyon (Ariz.) -- Description and travel
The Hopi women are industrious little bodies, clever at basket
weaving--and the men work, too, when not engaged in attending lodge; for
the Hopis are the ritualists of the Southwest, and every Hopi is a
confirmed joiner. Their secret societies exist to-day, uncorrupted and
unchanged, just as they have survived for hundreds and perhaps thousands
of years. In the Hopi House at Grand Canon there is a reproduction of a
kiva or underground temple. It isn't underground--it is located
upstairs; but in all other regards it is supposed to conform exactly to
one of the real ceremonial chambers of the Hopis. The dried-mud walls
are covered thickly with symbolic devices, painted on; and there is an
altar tricked out with totems of the Powamu clan, one of the biggest of
these societies.
Just in front of the altar, with its wooden figures of the War God, the
God of Growing Things, and the God of Thunder, is a sand painting set in
the floor like a mosaic. When one of the clans is getting ready for a
service the official high priest or medicine man of that particular clan
sprinkles clean brown sand upon the flat earth before the altar and upon
this foundation, by trickling between his thumb and forefinger tiny
streams of sands of other colors, he makes the mystic figures that he
worships. After the rites are over he obliterates the design with his
hand, leaving the space bare for the next clan.
In the Hopi House at Grand Canon a sand painting sacred to the Antelope
clan is preserved under glass for the benefit of visitors. The manager
of the establishment, a Mr. Smith, who has spent most of his life among
the tribes of Arizona, told us a story about this.
Two years ago this summer, a party of Mystic Shriners on an excursion
visited the canyon. Mr. Smith chaperoned one group of them on their tour
through the Hopi House. In the sand painting of the kiva they seemed to
find something that particularly interested them. They put their heads
together, talking in undertones and pointing--so Smith said--first at
one design and then at another. An old Hopi buck, a priest of the
Antelope clan, was lounging in the low doorway watching them. What the
Shriners said to one another could have had no significance for him,
even admitting that he heard them, for he did not understand a word of
English; but suddenly he reached forth a withered hand and plucked Smith
by the sleeve. I am letting Smith tell the rest of the tale just as he
told it to us:
"The Hopi pointed to one of the Shriners, an elderly man who came, I
think, from somewhere in Illinois, and in his own tongue he said to me:
'That man with the white hair is a Hopi--and he is a member of my clan!'
I said to him: 'You speak foolishness--that man comes from the East and
never until to-day saw a Hopi in his whole life!' The medicine man
showed more excitement than I ever saw an Indian show.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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