Hopiland: A Portfolio by Forman Hanna, FRPS

Over the land of the Hopis hangs the pageantry of the centuries, whose time-worn tapestries are weighted down with the story of an ancient people in an ancient land. Their villages of mud and rock, worn by the caress of many suns and many winds, overlook the Painted Desert, which like a brilliant, barren carpet stretches in the sunshine west and south to our great highways of modern travel-pathways for Twentieth Century adventurers-Highways 66 and 89.

The Hopis, friendly, honest and industrious, often come down from their villages to make their way in the world of the white man-Holbrook, Winslow, Flagstaff-but in the end they always return to their land and to their villages. They adhere to the lands and the ways of their fathers. Their beliefs are the ancient beliefs and their gods are the old, old gods of their people. Their ceremonies of worship have come down Time's dusty corridors changeless and unchanging.

Their ceremonies and customs are as old as the people and their lives fall in patterns and formulas as rigid as the sandstone mesas upon which they dwell. When a Hopi maiden becomes of marriageable age, her hairdress solemnly proclaims that fact to the village. The great whorls at the sides of the head are in imitation of the squash blossoms, the symbol of purity in Hopiland. So it has been and so it will always be.

Their villages looking down from the high mesas are separate communities complete in themselves and in a lifetime a resident of one village seldom visits another village and so complete is the isolation that dialects have arisen, characteristic of the individual village. Leadership comes through the clans and clan membership and kinship is inherited through the maternal side of the family. Clan affinity is strong . . . stronger, perhaps, than all other ties.

The villages of the Hopis feature some form of handicraft, so that one learned in the Hopi arts can name the village from which comes a certain basket or a certain piece of pottery. They look down from their mesas on a world that is barren and from which they earn their living by constant toil and pious supplication to their primitive gods. In August their prayer goes to the Gods of the Rain Clouds that their springs will not go dry.

In the olden days the Hopis built their villages on the high mesas as protection against their enemies, and there they have lived content with their lot willed by their gods. They are an urban people living in almost a perfect society, theft and crime and evil ways of living being almost unknown to them. They look down from their high old world unpuzzled by all that is happening beneath and about them for theirs is the ancient wisdom and way of living.