The Hopi call themselves Hopituh Shi-nu-mu, roughly "the peaceful people," and they have kept their world on three fingers of high rock longer than almost anyone on the continent. Twelve villages sit on and below the three mesas — named, east to west, simply First, Second, and Third. On Third Mesa stands Old Oraibi, founded around 1100 and generally reckoned the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in North America; on First Mesa, Walpi clings to a spine of rock barely wider than a road, its stone houses seeming to grow out of the cliff. This is not a ruin and not a museum. It is a living community, sovereign and self-governing, each village led in the old way.
The Hopi hold that this is the Fourth World, and that they emerged into it from below and were charged with keeping it in balance. The katsinam — spirit beings who arrive as the clouds do — bring rain to corn planted by hand in dry fields without irrigation, a way of farming that shouldn't work and has for a thousand years. Much of the ceremonial life is closed to outsiders by design, and for good reason: it is how the Hopi have held their religion intact through Spanish missions, the Pueblo Revolt, and everything since.
Visitors are welcome in most villages, but as guests, and the rules are firm and non-negotiable: no photography, no video, no audio, no sketching or note-taking, anywhere in the villages or of any ceremony. Walpi offers guided tours; Second Mesa has the Hopi Cultural Center. The one deep fracture in Hopi memory is internal — in 1906 a bitter disagreement at Old Oraibi over how far to accommodate the United States was settled by a nonviolent push-of-war, a literal pushing contest, and the losing side walked off to found Hotevilla. Come to buy a carving or a pot from the person who made it, and otherwise to listen. Winslow, to the south, guards the ancestral Hopi villages at Homolovi; Holbrook is the other southern approach.
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