Basketry has at least as many uses as pottery among the Hopi, and a
number of kinds besides the familiar plaques with symbolical
decoration have been eagerly sought by collectors. The crops from the
fields are borne to the houses on the mesas in carrying baskets,
resembling a pannier, which are worked of wicker over a frame of two
bent sticks crossed at right angles. In the house the coiled and
wicker trays heaped high with corn meal, the basket for parched corn
and the sifting basket near the corn grinding stones, will be found.
In the bread-baking room is the coarse, though effective, _piki_ tray,
and occasionally one may still see a neatly made floor mat. The thin
checker mat of ancient days has long since gone out of use, but
formerly, the dead were wrapped in such mats before they were placed
in the earth.
Over the fireplace is a hood of basketry plastered to prevent burning.
The wicker cradle to which the infant hopeful is bound must not be
forgotten. Several small globular wicker baskets for various purposes
may also be displayed among the household belongings. The mat of grass
stems in which the wedding blanket is folded is also a kind of
basketry, as are the twined mats for covering the hatchway of the kiva
and the twined fence around the fields.
With all their own resources, the Hopi are great collectors of baskets
from other tribes. One must not be surprised to see in use in the Hopi
houses the water bottles coated with pitch and the well-made
basket-bowls from the Havasupai of Cataract Canyon, the Pimas of
southern Arizona, and other tribes touched by Hopi commerce.
The vizors of old masks used in the ceremonies were of basketry,
generally a section cut from a Ute basket-bowl, which shows one of the
most interesting employments of baskets among the Hopi. The highly
decorated trays may also be said to have a sacred character from their
frequent appearance in the ceremonies, where they are used to contain
prayer-sticks, meal, etc. Appropriately the women's ceremonies display
many baskets on the altars, and in the public dances each woman
carries a bright plaque. One of the episodes of these ceremonies is
full of action when women throw baskets to men who struggle
energetically for them. On this account these ceremonies have been
called Basket Dances.
One of the frequent sights in a Hopi town is a woman carrying a
heaped-up plaque of meal of her own grinding as a present to some
friend. This usually happens on the eve of a ceremony, like our
Christmas gifts, but no one must fail to notice that an equal present
is religiously brought in return.
The Hopi value their baskets; they appreciate fully a pretty thing,
and this explains why one of the Sichomovi men, who is rich in
Havasupai baskets, has had the good taste to decorate the walls of the
best room of his house with these trophies of Cataract Canyon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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