The Alluring Indian Country

4 ARIZONA HIGHWAYS DECEMBER, 1935. The Alluring Indian Country The Painted Desert You See From the Highway Is But the Fringe of a Vast Land of Long Ago

THE traveller in northern Arizona, almost anywhere be tween Flagstaff and the state line to the east, is invariably pointed out the Painted Desert. Its subtle coloring in the early morning or twilight hours, or its sharp-etched beauty while the sun rides high, enchants him even as its vast desolateness rebuffs makes him cling to the highway, civilization, water. What he seldom learns is that this magnificent sweep of Painted Desert is but the fringe of the Navajo and Hopi Indian reservations. Real Indian country. And as difficult to penetrate, to know intimately, as the tribesmen themselves. Enormous in extent, it cuts a corner of more than 20,000 square miles from the northeastern portion of the state giving cause of not a few congressmen from the East to question (with simple logic) Uncle Sam's apparent over-generosity in his allotment of half a square mile for every Indian. Surely no Navajo squaw (and they do come bulky) needs that much elbow space! No, but her sheep need feed and the land is arid. Even a farmer from the granite hills of Vermont would scorn to set a plow here. What the Navajo need today is less expansion and better grazing lands.

But he manages; is not uncontent to follow his flocks. His nomadic inclinations are inherited before sheep and horses were introduced by the Spaniards his ancestors camped with placid security wherever game was plentiful. Today he wanders over his limited domain ever in search of greener pastures for his bands of sheep and goats. When cold weather sets in with biting winds and snow flurries he returns By LILA M. KIELHORN to his only permanently built place of adobe the winter hogan. Only the scarcity of timber necessitates this for they are easily and quickly built, resembling an igloo in shape as much as anything. Cedar poles laid horizontally form the low walls while the roof, covered with an odd assortment of brush, sticks, and even stones, over a rounded framework, looks not unlike a huge pack-rat's nest. There are no windows to let in the wintry blasts and prevent the smoke of their hearth-fire from finding a lazy outlet at the small hole in the center of the roof. The only doorway always faces east in salute to the life-giving sun and a sheepskin or two, hung over this opening, serves very well to keep it a snug harbor within.

Too snug for our way of thinking, as the family group is seldom smaller than six and six uncombed, unwashed, but never undressed (no, not in the cold winter; that would be do-ya-shon--davery bad!), humans sleeping, eating, or just "staying put" come stormy weather, in a space scarce sixteen feet in diameter, would make us feel that the proverbial "bug in a rug" wasn't near so snug.

Primitive? Certainly. For the Navajo is a disciple of Nature and will be until his reverence for the Sun and Moon, the Rain Clouds, the Four Winds DECEMBER, 1935.

and their Four Directions becomes obliterated by Education. And education alone will not make him a happier Indian nor yet a better one.

Their inherent strain of superstition -call it ignorance if you wish is so deeply ingrained that not in one generation can it be erased. It is the Indian youth of today who will suffer most, an innocent victim of Progress. His parents remain untouched by the searching fingers of Education; their indifference to the white man a protection. So education is forced upon the children and however essentially primitive they may be they are not stupid and they absorb this new intellectual diet with seeming relish. It is only when their schooling ends and they must choose between work in an alien white world where they are neither citizen nor foreigner and scarce tolerated by society, or a return to their own people where primitive living conditions and standards in turn are intolerable to them.

There is no happy medium except for the comparative few who can remain as employees at the government schools

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

and offices. Either direction they may go the dreadful conflict of readjustment rides with them.

This is true of the Hopi, also, who lives among the nomadic Navajos high up on the mesas in compact, friendly communities.

Less than 4,000 in number they are as distinctly different in physical make-up, tribal customs, language, and occupation from their Navajo brothers (who number 40,000), as if they lived in another country. And in a sense they do. Their nine villages rise high above the desert country on rocky, all but inaccessible perches rightly named by the Spaniards mesas, or tables. Here they live in peace and harmony except for numerous mongrol dogs who threaten with snarls å stranger, very unlike their friendly owners.

Whereas the Navajo is tall and rangy (squaws excepted), stoical in demeanor, and stiff and unyielding in appearance, the Hopi is much shorter, very much broader, and friendly in comparision beyond all words. The Navajo is more representative of the American Indian of fourth-grade history while in the Hopi there is something faintly reminiscent of the Orient.

They are an industrious race, these Hopis. They have to be for their very existence depends on the crops they raise dwarf Indian maize in vivid colors, melons, squash, beans and peas, sometimes cabbage, and where there is protection from frost, peaches. Long ago they realized the futility of protecting their sheep from other marauding tribes and even now leave the precarious business of sheep raising to the Navajos. For them a small flock yielding fresh mutton for feast days and enough wool for blankets is sufficient.

Contrary to their wandering brothers, the Hopi men do the weaving although the laborious task of shearing the sheep each spring; washing the matted, filthy wool; dying, carding and spinning it is left for the woman. These blankets-Navajo rugs to us are woven on crude looms entirely by hand and compare very favorably in texture and design to the more widely known Navajos.

The men are good silversmiths, too, and by the amount of turquoise-stud-ded, silver jewelry they wear is the wealth of a family gauged. Honesty is one of their outstanding traits and though a single turquoise necklace may be valued at hundreds of dollars, rarely, if ever, is a thing stolen.

Although the customs of these two tribes are so unlike, in the matter of natural phenomena they share a mutual reverence that amounts to religion. That is, however differently they may seek to appease them, their gods are all representative of the natural forces the sun, moon, water, etc.

Very devout, even more so than the Navajo, is the Hopi. He has a chanted ritual for almost ever commonplace duty and at frequent intervals the men re-treat to their "kivas" (large rooms of plastered rock with but one opening and that in the center of the roof), for sacred purification rites preparatory to one of their many ceremonial dances.The one most widely known is their spectacular Snake Dance. Held each year the latter part of August it attracts hundreds of visitors and while

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