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Vol. 31:1 ISSN 0160-8460 March 2003
The Hopi History Project: Where 21st-Century Hopis Meet 16th-Century Spaniards
by Thomas E. Sheridan
In 1541, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and his force of more than 1,300 Spanish soldiers and Indian allies conquered the Zuni Indians of northwestern New Mexico. Searching in vain for the fabled Seven Cities of Gold, Coronado interrogated the Zunis about "the provinces that fell near its borders." The Zunis told him about Tusayán, "a province of seven pueblos similar to their own." Coronado ordered Don Pedro de Tovar to investigate.
Tovar and 20 others headed west across the high desert of the Colorado Plateau, entering "the country [Tusayán] so secretly that they were not noticed by any man as they arrived." You can almost hear the muffled sounds of the horses as the party hid themselves in a ravine beneath one of Tusayán's "multistoried" villages. Morning dawned. The Spaniards "were discovered." The people "of that land put themselves in order, marching out well armed with bows and shields and wooden clubs, in file, without breaking line." The Spaniards and the Hopi Indians of northern Arizona were about to say hello.
Tovar had one of his Zuni interpreters read the Requerimiento. The Requerimiento was Spanish legalism at its most surreal: Indians had an absolute moral obligation to accept the authority of the Pope in Rome and the king in Spain. If they did not submit, Spaniards had a moral obligation to conquer and enslave them.
The leaders of Tusayán responded by drawing lines in the soil, "demanding that our people not cross those lines toward their pueblos and [that they] deport themselves correctly." Tovar and his soldiers spurred their horses forward. One man from Tusayán "hit a horse in the cheek pieces of its bit" with his club. The Spaniards shouted "Santiago!" and attacked.
Hopis had never seen horses before. They had just heard terrifying rumors "that Cíbola [the main settlement of the Zunis] had been conquered by very fierce people who rode on animals that ate people." Thrown into confusion, the Hopis quickly changed strategy. They feigned obedience and offered gifts of cotton cloth, turquoise, tanned skins, parched corn, and "native birds." Hopis and Spaniards spent the next several days trading until Tovar returned to New Mexico.
That, at least, is the Spanish side of the story. It was written by Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera, two decades after the encounter. Castañeda was a soldier in the Coronado expedition, but he did not accompany Tovar. His account is secondhand, after-the-fact, drawn from memory, but it is all we have.
At least on paper.
Emory Sekaquaptewa, research anthropologist at the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology of the University of Arizona, and Chief Justice of the Hopi Tribal Appellate Court, transforms an English translation of a Spanish colonial document into the Hopi language.
Four centuries later, Heather McMichael, a graduate student in the Spanish Department at the University of Arizona, stares at Castañeda's scrawl and slowly pieces the letters together into a literal, line-by-line transcript. Her fellow graduate students in the Office of Ethnohistorical Research (OER) at the Arizona State Museum-- Judith Caballero of the Spanish Department, and Anna Neuzil and Dale Brenneman of Anthropology-- verify the transcript against the original, translate 16th-century Spanish into 21st-century English, and annotate the translation. Project director Tom Sheridan, an anthropologist and head of OER, and his colleague Diana Hadley, a historian, edit the translations and annotations for publication. One side of the Hopi History Project-- a documentary history of Hopi-Spanish relations-nears completion.
But the process does not end there. The Spanish colonial documentary record, like the records of any imperial power, squints at the lives of Native peoples. Soldiers and missionaries were not privy to whole domains of Native culture, such as religious ceremonies or healing practices. When the Spaniards did observe, they viewed events and people through a myopic lens clouded by their own prejudices and preconceptions. Later generations of scholars who rely on the documentary record alone are limited by what the Spaniards witnessed or did not witness, and how and why they reported it. Native peoples like the Hopis, with a culture as rich and intricate as any on earth, appear as savages, children, two-dimensional foils.
Anthropology graduate student Rebecca Waugh reads a reel of microfilm from the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City, searching for documents about the Hopis prior to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.
That is why the Hopi History Project is reaching beyond the limits of the documentary record to explore the oral traditions of the Hopis themselves. Emory Sekaquaptewa, an anthropologist in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology and Chief Judge of the Hopi Tribe's Appellate Court, translates as many of the English translations as he can into Hopi. This is part of Sekaquaptewa's life's work, to transform Hopi into a written language and teach Hopis how to write as well as speak it. Sekaquaptewa was cultural editor of the Hopi Dictionary (University of Arizona Press, 1998), a massive compendium of 30,000 entries, all with sentences that put Hopi words and phrases into cultural context. He is now senior consultant for the Hopi History Project, working with Sheridan, Hadley, and ASM Interim Director Hartman Lomawaima, a member of the Hopi Bear Clan, to tell both sides of an old and bitter story.
The work shifts from offices at the University of Arizona to the Hopi Mesas northeast of Flagstaff. Stewart Koyiyumptewa, tribal archivist for the Hopi Preservation Office, reads Castañeda's account to Hopi elders like Morgan Saufkie and Valjean Joshevama, Sr. They speak into a tape recorder, recalling stories that have been passed down for 10 or 20 generations about the Hopis and the Kastiilam (Castilians; Spaniards). This stage of the Hopi History Project has just begun, but already tantalizing glimpses into the past are emerging-- Spanish objects incorporated into religious ceremonies, a missionary who only drinks water from a spring many miles away and forces young Hopis to run back and forth with water jugs every day, a bridegroom who tracks Mexican slavers who stole his bride and successfully negotiates with the governor of New Mexico to get her back.
OER is giving the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office translations in chronological order, even though Project personnel have already transcribed and translated some documents from the late 18th century. Sheridan and Hadley are still searching archives in Mexico and Spain for documents about the Franciscan missionization of the Hopis prior to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when the Hopis and other Pueblo peoples drove the Spaniards out of New Mexico for 14 years and destroyed many missions and their records.
Now in its third year of funding from the NHPRC, the Hopi History Project follows much of the same methodology established by earlier projects of the Documentary Relations of the Southwest (DRSW), a program founded by Jesuit historian Charles W. Polzer, S.J., at the Arizona State Museum in 1975. Project editors select representative documents to tell the story about important aspects of life in northern New Spain, that vast, shifting frontier of conquest stretching from Louisiana to California. Dr. Tracy Duvall, an anthropologist who also has a master's degree in Latin American history, is finishing the fifth and final volume in DRSW's series on the Presidio and Militia on the northern frontier of New Spain. His volume concerns the Marqués de Rubí's inspection of New Spain's presidios in the 1760s. Earlier volumes, all published by the University of Arizona Press, traced the development of presidios and militias from the Chichimec wars of the 16th century to the growing militarization of the frontier in the mid-18th century.
The Hopi History Project will produce the third volume in a series focusing on relations between Native peoples and Spaniards. The first, Rarámuri: A Tarahumara Colonial Chronicle, 1607-1791, edited by Sheridan and Thomas H. Naylor (Northland Press, 1979), explores patterns of missionization and rebellion among the Rarámuri, the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental. The second, Empire of Sand: The Seri Indians and the Struggle for Spanish Sonora, 1645-1803, edited by Sheridan (University of Arizona Press, 1999), examines how small bands of Comcáac, or Seris, successfully resisted Spanish conquest because of their intimate knowledge of the desert and sea along the Gulf of California.
Franciscan missionary Carlos Delgado's baptismal entry at the mission of San Agustin de la Ysleta, November 9, 1742 (Archives of the Archdiocese of New Mexico, New Mexico Records Center and Archives, Santa Fe, Roll 5). Delgado's entry records only the Christian names of los sigientes parbulos que saque de la Provia de Moqui, hijos de padres Jentiles ("the following children that I removed from the Province of Maqui, children of gentile parents"). Ysleta, now Isleta, is located south of Albuquerque along the Rio Grande, hundreds of miles away from the Hopi mesas. There was a severe drought in Hopi country at the time. Perhaps some of the "Moquis" who migrated to Isleta were descendants of the Rio Grande Pueblo peoples who had taken refuge among the Hopis during the Reconquista, or Reconquest, of New Mexico, in the 1690s.
Beginning with the Hopi volume, however, OER is introducing three major changes. Project personnel used to produce Spanish transcriptions that modernized spelling, spelled out abbreviations, and inserted punctuation. On the Hopi project, OER staff and students are producing literal, line-by-line transcriptions. Translations are also more conservative, as OER struggles to strike a balance between preserving the author's style, even when it is clumsy and convoluted, and making the translation comprehensible to modern readers.
The third and most radical innovation is the incorporation of modern Hopi commentary. The knowledge of Hopi elders steeped in the oral traditions of their clans and religious societies will correct at least some of the inherent biases in the Spanish and Mexican documentary record. They may also illuminate aspects of Hopi history about which the documents are mute. Did the leaders of Tusayán draw the line in the sand by sprinkling sacred corn meal? Was it a challenge to the Spaniards or an indication that all inside the line was sacred and not to be despoiled?
"For their part, the Hopi Tribe hopes to glean information on a wide variety of subjects including Hopi trading networks and trail systems, Hopi cultural affiliation with other tribal groups, Hopi tribal sovereignty, and the Spanish perception of Hopi land occupation at contact," co-project director Lomawaima explains. "Hopi people also want to learn more about how the Spanish empire functioned and why it was unable to reconquer and reincorporate the Hopi into the imperial system after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680."
The Office of Ethnohistorical Research hopes to collaborate with the Hopi Tribe in making these documents available to the Hopi community for cultural and educational purposes. Sheridan and Hadley have participated in Hopi Culture and History Week for the past 3 years and in the Hopi commemoration of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt in August 2001. OER hopes that the Hopi History Project will serve as a model of collaboration between Native peoples and ethnohistorians. We also hope it will be the first in a series of documentary histories that include the oral traditions of the peoples themselves.
Detail from Francisco Alvarez Barriero's Plan Corographico del Reyno y Provincia de el Nuevo Mexico, 1727 (Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla, Guadalajara 144). The map shows the "Pueblos Reveldes de Moqui" west and well outside the boundaries of New Mexico. Moqui was the Spanish term for the Hopis, the only Pueblo people never reconquered after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt.
Thomas E. Sheridan, project director of Documentary Relations of the Southwest, is also director of the Office of Ethnohistorical Research, Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona.
