For more than a thousand years prior to the European invasion of North America, agricultural villages which the Spanish would later call Pueblos had been established in what would become Arizona. These villages would be lumped together as Hopi in spite of the fact that each village was an autonomous political and cultural unit. In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur created the Hopi Reservation by Executive Order.
The Hopi reservation was entirely surrounded by the Navajo reservation and excluded the major Hopi village of Moenkopi. The Hopi were not consulted in the creation of their reservation, and its boundaries ignored a larger area that was settled and claimed by the Hopi. The rather arbitrary boundary lines created by the American government did not please the Hopi.
In 1900, The Western Navajo Reservation and Agency was established by Presidential Executive Order. The new reservation included the Hopi pueblo of Moenkopi.
When the Hopi reservation was created it was named the Moqui Agency, a term which was offensive to the Hopi. In 1917, the reservation superintendent recommended that the name be changed from Moqui to Hopi. In 1923, the name was officially changed.
Briefly described below are some of the events on the Hopi Reservation during the first part of the twentieth century.
Forced Schooling
In the first part of the twentieth century, government policies guiding the education of Indian children stressed assimilation. Children were expected to speak English, abandon their traditional dress and hair styles, worship the Christian gods, and be trained in industrial working-class skills. Girls were to be trained as homemaker and domestic servants. Policies regarding Indian education at the federal, state, and local levels were created with no involvement by Indian parents.
On the Hopi reservation, the forced schooling of Indian children at both boarding schools and day schools was resisted by many parents. In 1903 the Indian Agent for the Hopi Reservation along with a number of heavily armed Navajo police raided the village of Oraibi during the pre-dawn hours searching for children who were not attending school. Men, women, and children were dragged from bed, some naked, some wearing little clothing, and forced to walk, many barefoot, through the snow and ice to the school. They were held in the school all day. The Indian agent told the Hopi that they were to have their children in school, every day, regardless of the weather conditions.
As a result of this raid and other abuses against Hopi children—lack of food, clothing, and medical care—Belle Axtell Kolp resigned as teacher and took the story to the media and to the Sequoia League.
In 1906, the dispute among the Hopis over sending children to school again climaxed. In the village of Shongopavi, some members of the “hostile” faction refused to send their children to school, and the U.S. Government sent in police to arrest the leaders. There was some fighting, and several leaders were arrested. Fifty-two of the “hostiles” moved from Shongopavi to the pueblo of Oraibi.
In Oraibi, the relations between the “hostiles” and the “friendlies” worsened and ceremonies were disrupted. Conservative families who wished to continue their traditional beliefs were expelled from the village and founded the new village of Hotevilla.
Government troops rounded up the people of Hotevilla and marched them six miles to a place near the village of Oraibi. The men were then marched another forty miles to Keams Canyon where they were chained together and forced to work on a chain gang for the next 18 months. Two of the main leaders of the “hostiles” were permanently banished from the reservation by the federal government and 17 other leaders were imprisoned at hard labor at Fort Hauchuca, Arizona. Those imprisoned were not given court hearings but were simply arrested and sentenced without any legal process.
Indian Commissioner Francis Leupp declared that the Hopis must learn that
“hereafter they will conduct themselves reasonably like white men or be treated as white people treat those of their own number who are forever quarreling and fighting among themselves.”
In 1911, a detachment of Black troops under the leadership of Colonel Hugh Scott arrived at the Hopi reservation to help superintendent Leo Crane force the children of the village of Hotevilla to attend school. Colonel Scott went to Hotevilla to interview Youkeoma, the village chief. The troops stood by while Crane and his staff searched the village for children. Sixty-nine children were placed under guard to be taken to the boarding school at Keams Canyon.
Crane and the Black troops next stopped at Shongopovi where village leader Sackaletztewa opposed sending children to school. Using the troops as a way to intimidate the people, Crane searched the village and found three children.
In 1915, the Hopi boarding school at Keams Canyon was judged to be in dangerous condition and was closed. The children were then enrolled in reservation day schools.
Village Government Imposed by U.S.
In 1906, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs deprived Hopi leader Tewaquaptewa of his chieftainship of the pueblo of Oraibi. The Commissioner decreed that Oraibi was to be governed by a commission consisting of the non-Indian teacher in charge of the day school, the War Chief, and a judge known to be hostile to Tewaquaptewa.
The Commissioners ordered Tewaquaptewa, his wife and children and Frank Siemptiwa of Moencopi and his wife and children be taken to the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California where they were to be taught American customs and English Before leaving for Riverside, Tewaquaptewa appointed his brother Sakwaitiwa as the village chief of Oraibi. There were soon violent differences between Sakwaitiwa and the government imposed on the village by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
In 1910, Tewaquaptewa and other Hopi leaders who had been sent to the Sherman Institute in California returned home. In his book Pages from Hopi History, Harry James writes:
“If government authorities had labored under the supposition that the experiences of Tewaquaptewa and Frank Siemptiwa would make them supporters of government policies and wholeheartedly willing that their people should become Christian converts, they were in for a rude surprise.”
With regard to Tewaquaptewa, Frederick Dockstader, in his chapter on Hopi history in the Handbook of North American Indians, reports:
“This enforced absence affected him deeply, for upon his return in 1910 he was a vindictive, bitter man, and this attitude in time caused the decline of the village to a mere shell.”
Ceremonies
To encourage tourism into the southwest, the Santa Fe Railway promoted the Hopi Snake Dance as a tourist attraction and in 1900 published a pamphlet on the dance written by a Smithsonian anthropologist, Walter Hough. In the pamphlet, Hough reassured the tourists that while the Hopi continued to perform their Snake dance, they were not dangerous. According to Hough, Indians were living examples of the childhood of man. While the Religious Crimes Code had made ceremonials such as the Snake Dance illegal, it was not enforced against the Snake Dance because the railroad promoted it and the tourists demanded to see it.
In 1917, a news service cameraman defied the Hopi rule against taking motion pictures of the Hopi Snake Dance. He was chased through the desert and his camera was confiscated. After reporting the incident to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, superintendent Leo Crane received the order that no photographs should be permitted. The ban on photography continues today.
In 1920, the non-Indian principal of the Oraibi School interrupted a Hopi ceremony when he saw a clown dancer with a huge artificial penis. In the words of the principal, he stopped the ceremony and told the dancer—
“that if he ever did a thing like that again, I would put him in jail. He told me that he did not know it was wrong, that it was a Hopi custom.”
In 1922, word of the efforts of the Indian Office to prohibit Pueblo religions in New Mexico reached the Hopi. Several Hopi leaders decided to meet in Winslow, a non-Indian town which is located off the reservation. They feared that if they were to meet on the reservation that the Indian Office officials would arrest them. Meeting with the Hopi was the distinguished writer James Willard Schulz.
Schulz heard the Hopi complain about threats from government if they continued their religion. One elder stated that he would rather be shot down by the government while doing his religion than try to live without it. The Hopi were determined to stand firm and to continue to observe their traditional ceremonial calendar.
Five Hopi visited Washington, D.C. in 1926 and presented four tribal religious dances before an audience of 5,000. The Hopi wanted to show people, including Vice President Charles Dawes and two Supreme Court justices, that their ceremonies were not cruel rites.
Long Hair
Non-Indians have frequently been offended by Indian dress, and particularly by the fact that in many Native American cultures, men wear their hair long. In 1900, Charles E. Burton became the Indian Agent for the Hopi. He ordered that all Hopi boys and men have their hair cut. Those who did not cut their hair voluntarily were to have it cut by force.
In 1904, the Indian agent for the Hopi forced a number of men to have their hair cut. This was an act which disregards the ceremonial purpose of long hair. According to John Loftin, in his book Religion and Hopi Life:
“Hopi men grew their hair long in the back as a symbol of the falling rain for which they prayed.”
For the Hopi, for a man to have his hair cut during the growing season was tantamount to asking that the corn stop growing.
Sheep Dip
In 1921, Robert E. L. Daniel, the superintendent of the Hopi reservation, together with eight employees and seven policemen, all armed with pistols and buggy whips, went to the village of Hotevilla. The people were then forcibly stripped and dipped in sheep dip (black leaf 40). The superintendent wrote:
“We prepared their baths at the proper temperature, bathed them, and boiled and dried their clothes for them while they were being bathed. Yet they had to be driven or dragged to the tub, and forced into it like some wild beast, unblessed with human intelligence. Pure unadulterated fanatical perversity is the only explanation.”
Reports by others differ from that of the superintendent. In the words of Violet Pooleyama:
“They started putting our men and boys in it just as if they were sheep. They took the women and girls and put them in it, too. When the women fought with them, they often threw them into the sheep-dip clothes and all. Sometimes they tore the clothes off the women and girls.”
According to the superintendent, the Hopi were dipped because they were “dirty” and they had lice. On the other hand, the Hopi feel that they were forced through this humiliating process as a form of punishment for refusing to send their children to school.
The government officials used baseball bats to club men who resisted and ten of the Hotevilla men were taken to jail in Keams Canyon for resisting. In one instance, they knocked a man out for two hours. When he came to, they handcuffed him, hung him from the saddle of a horse, and dragged him to Keams Canyon.
Navajo
When the Hopi Reservation was created in 1882, there were at least 300 Navajo living in the area which was designated as the Hopi Reservation. They were not asked to leave. From the viewpoint of most government administrators all Indians were the same and there was little understanding of the cultural differences between tribes.
In 1911, Leo Crane, the new superintendent for the Hopi reservation, requested a cavalry escort for a tour of the reservation. He found that four-fifths of the reservation had been taken over by Navajo and their sheep.
The Indian Office in 1930 decided that it was time for the Hopi and the Navajo to settle their differences by having delegates from both tribes meet in Flagstaff, Arizona. The Navajo had 11 delegates: 5 were Navajo from Hopi lands and 6 were Navajo from the western portion of the Navajo reservation. The Hopi had 13 delegates: 10 were from the 1882 reservation area and 3 were from Moencopi (a Hopi pueblo located outside of the reservation area). The arbitrator from the federal government told the delegates that this was an opportunity for the two tribes to resolve their land, grazing, and water problems. The conference, however, settled nothing.
Migrations
In 1904, about 30 Hopis from the pueblo of Shongopovi led by Tewahonniwa moved to the pueblo of Oraibi. Village chief Tewaquaptewa objected to the move as it has been a bad year for Hopi crops and there was the prospect of a water shortage, but he was overruled by Lomahongyoma of the Spider Clan. The newcomers were given plots in fields that belong to Tewaquaptewa’s Bear Clan.
In 1907, a splinter group of Hopi conservatives under the leadership of Lomohongyoma who had left the pueblo of Oraibi and founded the pueblo of Hotevilla returned to Oraibi. In a few months they were once again driven out of the village. They then established the pueblo of Bakavi, about a mile east of Hotevilla.
Tribal Reorganization
In 1934, the federal government made a major change in policies with the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). Under the IRA, the allotment of Indian lands was stopped; Indian tribes were encouraged to reorganize their governments; and the repression of Indian religions lessened. The government preferred that the reorganized tribal governments mirror the U.S. government rather than traditional Indian governments. Anthropologist Richard Perry, in his book From Time Immemorial: Indigenous Peoples and State Systems, writes:
“In creating tribal councils as mechanisms firmly articulated to the federal government, the state could give the appearance of participatory democracy and lend legitimacy to various policies, even while placing pressure on the councils and using its power to veto their actions.”
Under the IRA, each reservation voted whether or not to reorganize. In 1936, only 20% of the Hopi voted on tribal reorganization under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. Less than 15% of the total population supported reorganization, but the act passed, and the entire Hopi Reservation was reorganized. Harry James writes:
“When the final vote was taken, the Hopi who opposed the establishment of a tribal council were true to their traditional procedure in such matters and simply abstained from voting either for or against it.”
As a result, many traditional village leaders refused to recognize the new tribal council. According to writer Catherine Feher-Elston, in her book Children of Sacred Ground: America’s Last Indian War:
“…the constitution divided Hopi society, as many theocrats opposed it and many kikmongwis refused to recognize its legitimacy.”
The Commissioner of Indian Affairs appointed anthropologist Oliver La Farge to write the constitution and bylaws for the Hopi Tribe. The constitution called for a one-house legislature with a tribal chairman and a vice-chairman. LaFarge proposed the Hopi constitution because he was concerned about what he perceived as the fragmentation of Hopi culture. He apparently did not realize that a centralized government is foreign to Hopi tradition. Despite resistance to a unified Hopi government, a tribal council was established and all of the villages, with the exception of Oraibi and Hotevilla, sent representatives.
Indians 101
Twice each week—on Tuesdays and Thursdays—this series presents American Indian topics. More twentieth-century histories from this series:
Indians 101: World War II Veterans Come Home
Indians 101: Changing Federal Indian Policies Through the Indian Reorganization Act
Indians 101: Early 20th Century Indian Books
Indians 101: American Indians and the Korean War
Indians 101: Indians, Iwo Jima, and the American Flag
Indians 101: Dissolving Cherokee Government
Indians 101: Boulder Dam and the Navajo Reservation
Indians 101: World War II Impacts on Indian Reservations