Lone cottonwoods and willows struggle to stay alive along the larger washes. The other two have very sparse vegetation, primarily rabbitbrush and a few piñon and juniper trees. First Mesa is the narrowest and rockiest of all, with no vegetation, only houses, on top. The mesas are around 6000 feet in elevation, receive an average of eight inches of precipitation a year, and have no permanent water courses. Their reservation was created by Congress in 1881, an island surrounded by the Navajo Reservation, with borders that have been the source of unfortunate legal disputes estranging the two tribes in recent years. Continuing to live much as they had for centuries-farming like their Anasazi ancestors of the Four Corners area-the Hopi did not have sustained contact with Europeans until the 1860s, after the Southwest became part of the United States. The villages on the easternmost Antelope Mesa were abandoned early in the 18th century in a convulsive and successful attempt by the Hopi to rid themselves of Spanish missionaries. The Hopi live in villages on and at the base of the finger-like projections of the southern edge of Black Mesa in northern Arizona, areas that outsiders now call (going from east to west) First, Second, and Third Mesas (Fig. The Hopi’s special responsibility is to keep the world in harmony, in other words, to keep the system going, and they do this by performing an elaborate cycle of yearly ceremonies. Just as each of them has behaviors, characters, and responsibilities particular to their kind, so do the Hopi. People, specifically the Hopi, are but one more kind of life, differing from the others as the crow differs from the mouse. All forms of the organic world-and the inorganic, also–are interrelated and interdependent, with none having particular hegemony over the other. I use these stories to illustrate the way the Hopi people conceptualize themselves and their relationships with other living creatures (see box on The Hopi Cycle of Life). To ensure that they remained humble and ever-mindful of their onerous role to maintain the cycle of life, he gave them a hard place in which to live. Masau’u accepted them, assigning them their specific responsibilities to form the whole fabric of Hopi life and ceremony. One group brought corn, another cotton, another the knowledge of this ritual or that one, and so on. Masauu asked each group what they could contribute. These different groups of people had been wandering around exploring the Fourth World and then came to this area, first the Bear and Badger people and then, one by one, the others. Balenquah continued, Masau’u, a dirty, disheveled, nondescript, smelly old man, assembled the people who became the Hopi. Crow failed to fly that high and so did the others, even Eagle, but the ordinary, undistinguished little wren (in some versions of the story, the shrike) flew so high that it found an opening and reported it to the people, who then climbed up a reed planted by chipmunk and emerged. Recounting the myth, he related the efforts of several different birds sent to the top of the Third World to look for a hole. According to the Hopi Emergence myth, he said, the people had lived in three underground worlds before climbing up to this, the Fourth World. In September of 1991, Clifford Balenquab, Governor of Third Mesa’s Bakabi village, talked about the Hopi world as seen through its mythic history.
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