The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi Part 11

"'All right,' said their father, 'come on the fourth day and get them.'

"So they went home and told their grandmother, and on the fourth day they came back and got their wives.

"The Hopi always kept the head of this Giant to use as a mask in some dances.

"Really the most important thing we do with this kind of a mask is for the men to wear when they go round the village and call out the children and scare them a little bit and tell them to be good so they don't have to come back with the basket and carry them off. Sometimes they act like they were going to take some naughty children with them right now, and ask the parents if they have any bad ones, and the parents are supposed to be very worried and hide the children and tell the Giants their children are good, and always the parents have to give these Giants that come around some mutton and other things to eat, in order to save their children; and then the children are very grateful to their parents.

"You see, the parents always tell the men who are coming around, beforehand, of a few of the things the children have been doing, so when they come looking for bad children they mention these special things to show the children that they know about it. And parents tell children a Giant may come back for them if they are pretty bad, and come right down the chimney maybe.

"My brother is a pretty tall man, and I am the tallest man in Oraibi, so we are sometimes chosen to act the part of Giants. Then we paint all black and put on this kind of a mask. It is an enormous black head with a big beak and big teeth. The time when the Giants go around and talk to the children is in February.

"There were a good many of these masks, very old and very funny ones.

But a beam fell, killing many giant masks and leaving only two of the real old ones. So now we have to use some masks made of black felt; one of these is a squaw mask.

"I don't know if we can wait till February, or not, mine is getting pretty bad already." (Note: This last was said with a big laugh and a look around to see where his own boy was. And just then the tall little son, aged eight, let out a yell exactly like any other little boy who has cut his finger on Daddy's pocket knife. The buxom mother and two aunts went scrambling down the ladder to see what was the matter. The father got up, too, but laughed and remarked, "He be all right," and came back and sat down. H.G.L.)

One of the most pleasant memories the writer has kept of her Hopi story-tellers is that of wholesome Mother Sacknumptewa of Oraibi. She must be middle-aged, and is surprisingly young-looking to be the mother of her big family of grown-up sons and daughters. She wore a brand-new dress of pretty yellow and white print, made in the full Hopi manner, and her abundant black hair was so clean and well brushed that it was actually glossy. Her house was spic and span and shining with a new interior coat of white gypsum.

Her long Indian name, Guanyanum, means "all the colors of the b.u.t.terflies."

It was late afternoon, and she sat on the clean clay floor of her house and husked a great pile of young green corn for supper, as she told me the two little fables that follow. There was a poise and graciousness about this woman, quite outstanding; yet she was a simple, smiling, motherly person who often laughed quietly, or broke into a rhythmic crooning song as she imitated her characters.

Several of her grown children gathered round and laughed with hearty approval at her impersonations, and at last her husband came in smiling and sat near, joining in the songs of the frog and the locust, to the great merriment of their children.

=The Coyote and the Turtle,= as told by Guanyanum Sacknumptewa

"A long time ago, there were many turtles living in the Little Colorado River near h.o.m.olovi, southeast of Winslow, where Hopi used to live. And there was a coyote living there too, and of course, he was always hungry.

"Now one day the turtles decided they would climb out of the river and go hunt some food, for there was a kind of cactus around there that they like very much. But one of the turtles had a baby and she didn't like to wake it up and take it with her because it was sleeping so nicely. So they just went along and left the baby asleep.

"After a while the little turtle woke up and he said, 'Where is my mother? She must have gone somewhere and left me. O, I must go and find her!'

"So the baby turtle saw that the others had crawled up the bank, and he followed their tracks for a little way. But he soon got tired and just stopped under a bush and began to cry. (Note: Her imitation of the crying was good. H.G.L.)

"Now the coyote was coming along and he heard the poor little turtle crying. So he came up and said, 'That's a pretty song; now go on and sing for me.'

"But the baby turtle said, I'm not singing, I'm crying.'

"'Go on and sing,' said the coyote, 'I want to hear you sing.'

"'I can't sing,' said the poor baby, 'I'm crying and I want my mother.'

"'You'd better sing for me, or I'll eat you up,' said the big hungry coyote.

"'O, I can't sing--I just can't stop crying,' said the baby, and he cried harder and harder.

"'Well,' the big coyote said, 'if you don't sing for me I'm going to eat you right up.' The coyote was mad, and he was very hungry. 'All right, then, I'll just eat you,' he said.

Now the little turtle thought of something. So he said, 'Well, I can't sing, so I guess you'll have to eat me. But that's all right, for it won't hurt me any; here inside of my sh.e.l.l I'll go right on living inside of you.'

"Now the coyote thought about this a little bit and didn't like the idea very well.

"Then the baby turtle said, 'You can do anything you want with me, just so you don't throw me into the river, for I don't want to drown.'

"Now the old coyote was pretty mad and he wanted to be as mean as possible. So he just picked that baby up in his mouth and carried him over to the river and threw him in.

"Then the baby turtle was very happy; he stuck his little head out of his sh.e.l.l and stretched out his feet and started swimming off toward the middle of the river. And he said, 'Goodbye, Mr. Coyote, and thank you very much for bringing me back to my house so that I didn't have to walk back.' And the little turtle laughed at the old coyote, who got madder and madder because he had let the little turtle go. But he couldn't get him now, so he just went home. And the baby turtle was still laughing when his mother got home, and she laughed too. And those turtles are still living in that water. (Note: Here is manifest all the subtlety of "The Tar Baby," though generations older. H.G.L.)

=The Frog and the Locust,= as told by Guanyanum Sacknumptewa

"Qowakina was a place where Paqua, the frog, lived. One day he was sitting on a little wet ground singing a prayer for rain, for it was getting very hot and dry and that was Paqua's way of bringing the rain, so he had a very good song like this. (Note: Here she sang a pretty little song, very rhythmic, and her body swayed gently in time to the music. It occurred to the writer that this would make a good bedtime story and the little song, a lullaby, for it went on and on with pleasing variation. H.G.L.)

"Not far away Mahu, the locust, was sitting in a bush, and he was singing too, for he was getting pretty dusty and the weather was very hot, and so he, too, was praying for rain. He has a very nice song for rain, and it goes this way. (Note: Here came a lovely little humming song whose words could not be interpreted, since they were but syllables and sounds having no meaning in English. However, these sounds had a definite order and rhythm. At this point the husband smilingly joined in the song, and the unison of both sounds and rhythm was perfect. H.G.L.)

"By and by the locust heard the frog, so he came over and asked him what he was doing. The frog said he was hot and wanted it to rain; that's why he was singing. Then the locust said, 'Now isn't that strange, that's exactly what I do to make it rain, too, and that's the best thing to do.' So they both sang.

"Pretty soon they noticed that the clouds had been coming up while they were singing, and before long it rained, and they both were happy.

"After this they were always great friends because they had found out they both had the same idea about something."

XII. CONCLUSION

For some years the writer has been merely a friendly neighbor to these friendly people, and this past summer she spent some time among her Hopi friends, studying their present-day life, domestic and ceremonial, and listening to their stories. The foregoing pages record her observations, supplemented largely by the recordings of well-known authorities who have studied these people.

To her own mind it is clear that the Hopi are living today by their age-old and amazingly primitive traditions, as shown by their planting, hunting, house building, textile and ceramic arts, and their ceremonies for birth, marriage, burial, rain-making, etc. Even their favorite stories for amus.e.m.e.nt are traditional. Surely this can not last much longer in these days when easy transportation is bringing the modern world to their very door. Only a few years ago they were geographically isolated and had been so for centuries. Culturally, the Hopi are not a new, raw people, but old, mature, long a sedentary and peaceful people, building up during the ages a vast body of traditional literature embodying law, religion, civic and social order, with definite patterns for the whole fabric of their life from the cradle to the grave and on into Maskim, the home of Hopi Souls. It is because they have so long been left alone, with their own culture so well suited to their nature and to their environment, that we find them so satisfied to remain as they are, friendly, even cordial, but conservative.

The Hopi is glad to use the white man's wagon, cook stove, sugar, and coffee, but he prefers his own religion, government, social customs--the great things handed down in his traditions. Their very conservatism is according to one of their oldest traditions, which is:

=Tradition for Walking Beside the White Man But in Footsteps of Fathers=

In 1885, Wicki, chief of the Antelope Society at Walpi, told Mr. A.M.

Stephen one of the most complete and interesting variants ever collected of the Snake myth.

One of its interesting details concerns a prophesy of the manner in which the Hopitah are to take on the White man's culture. In plain words the Spider Woman tells Tiyo that a time will come when men with white skins and a strange tongue shall come among the Hopitah, and the Snake Brotherhood, having brave hearts, will be first to make friends and learn good from them. But the Hopitah are not to follow in the white men's footsteps but to walk _beside them_, always keeping in the footsteps of their fathers![36]

That is just what the Hopi are doing today.

[Footnote 36: Stephen, A.M., Hopi Tales: Jour. Amer. Folklore, vol. 42, 1929, p. 37.]