Unwritten Literature of the Hopi — Chapter XI, Stories Told Today, Part 2

* * * * * The next two stories are by Dawavantsie, whose name means "sand dune."

She is a member of the Water Clan, and is the oldest woman now living in Walpi.

She is much loved by the whole village, who claim that she is over a hundred years old.

How old she really is, it would be impossible to know, for such things were not kept track of so long ago.

She speaks no English.

When asked about her age she merely shrugs her small shrunken shoulders, draws her shawl around them, and with a pleasant toothless smile, says: "O, I never know that, but I remember a long, long time."

She loves to tell stories, and enjoys quite a reputation as a story-teller among her relatives and neighbors, who like to gather round and listen as she sits on the floor of her second story home, her back against the wall, bare feet curled up and quiet hands folded in her lap.

Her face, while deeply wrinkled, is fine and expressive of much character as well as sweetness of disposition.

Figure 14 shows her posing for her picture just outside her door, on the roof of the next lower room.

Her skin and hair and dress are all clean and neat; her little back is astonishingly straight, and her bare brown feet, so long used to the ladders of Hopiland, are surer than mine, if slower.

She has lived all her life, as did her mother and grandmother before her, in this second story room, on whose clean clay floor we sat for the visiting and story-telling.

From its open door she looks out over the roofs of Walpi and far across the valley in all directions, for hers is the highest house, and near the end of the mesa.

The ancestral home with its additions is now housing four generations.

She has always been a woman of prominence because of her intelligence and has the marks of good breeding--one of nature's gentlewomen.

[Illustration: Figure 14. --Dawavantsie of Walpi.

] The writer's friends, Dr. and Mrs. Fewkes, had told of her several years ago, for it was in her house that they had lived for some time in the early nineties while carrying on research work for the Bureau of American Ethnology.

The writer did not realize that this was the house and the woman of whom she had heard till half-way through the first story, when some mention of Dr. Fewkes, by her son-in-law (a man past middle age) brought out the fact.

When informed of the death of both Dr. and Mrs. Fewkes, her controlled grief was touching.

In speaking of our mutual friend, the writer used the Hopi name given him by the Snake fraternity of the old woman's village so many years ago--Nahquavi (medicine bowl), a name always mentioned with both pride and amusement by Dr. Fewkes.

And I found that in this family, none of whom speak English, exactly these same emotions expressed themselves in the faces of all the older members of the family, who remembered with a good deal of affection, it seemed, these friends of nearly forty years ago.

Over and over, they repeated the name; it stirred memories; they laughed eagerly, and nodded their heads, and began to talk to me in Hopi, completely forgetting the interpreter.

Then their faces sobered and sighs and inarticulate sounds were all that broke the silence for fully ten minutes.

Then quietly the little grandmother turned to the interpreter and asked her to say to me, "He called me his sister."

Silence again, and after a few minutes she went on with her stories.

=Memories of a Hopi Centenarian,= as told by Dawavantsie "One of the first important things I can remember was when some Spanish soldiers came here.

I don't know how old I was, but I had been married for several years, I think, for my first child had died.

I was then living in this same old house.

These Spaniards came from the direction of Keam's Canyon, and they passed on toward Oraibi.

They did not come up onto this mesa at all, but just took corn and melons and whatever they wanted from the fields down below.

"It was early one morning and I had gone with two other girls, cousins of mine, down to the spring at the foot of the mesa for water.

These men came toward us, and we ran, but they caught us and started to take us away.

I fought the man who was holding me and got loose and ran up the mesa trail faster than he could run.

"I rolled rocks on them when they tried to come up and so they gave it up.

I ran on up to the top of the mesa and gave the alarm and our men went to rescue the other two girls, but the Spaniards had horses and they got away with the girls, who have never been heard of to this day.

"The Hopi had no horses in those days, but there were just a few burros.

So the men followed on foot, but they could never catch them.

There was a skirmish at Oraibi, too, over the stealing of girls.

"One Walpi man in the fields was unable to keep them from taking his two girls, so he just had to give them up and he never saw them again.

The poor father had few relations and had to go from house to house asking for food, for he was so grieved that he could never get along after that, but just was always worrying about his girls, and he died in less than a year.

"After a long time other Spaniards came, and a young man who was down below the mesa, practicing for a race before sunrise, saw them and ran back and got enough men to go down and capture them.

They kept their prisoners fastened in a room for a while and then the older men decided that they would not let them be killed although some wanted to; so they took them to some houses below the mesa--the place is still called Spanish Seat--and kept them there.

"After a few weeks they let them go away.

Some Hopi men were bribed to get some girls to go down off the mesa that day so these Spaniards could take them away with them.

"They asked me to go and a girl friend of mine, but we would not go.

One girl did go, for a famine was beginning and this poor girl thought she was being taken to visit with the Zunis and would be better off there.

Nobody ever got track of her again.

"Once food was so scarce that I had to go with my mother and sister to Second Mesa, and we stayed there with our clan relations till food was scarce, and then we went to Oraibi and stayed with our clan relations there until summer.

We could go back to Walpi then because corn and melons were growing again; but we left my sister because she had married there.

"This was a two-year famine and almost everybody left Walpi and wandered from village to village, living wherever they could get food.

There had been more rain and better crops in some of the other places.

"Ever since then some Walpi people have scattered among other villages, where they married, and some went as far as the Rio Grande villages, and some perished on the way.

"Again after many years, Spaniards came, stealing corn, and this time they went through the houses and stole whatever they wanted.

They took away ceremonial and sacred things, that was the worst.

And when they left, they went northeast, past where Tom's store is now.

"No, there were never any Spanish missionaries living in Walpi; those who tell of priests living here are mistaken--too young to know.

I have heard of those at Oraibi long ago, and at Awatobi; some were killed at those places.

"Some of the rafters of this house, not of this room but another part, were brought from ruins of Awatobi.

An uncle of my daughter's husband here brought some sacred things from Awatobi and revived some of the old ceremonials that had been dropped on account of our not having the right things to use for them.

Spaniards had already been here and taken some of those things out of the houses, so some ceremonies could never be held any more without those things.

You see, the Awatobi people had some such things, too, and so our people wanted to save them.

I think some of our trouble with Awatobi was to get these things.

"I remember that after the famine, when crops were good again, we had trouble with Navajos.

It was in the summer and a Hopi hoeing his field was killed by a bunch of thieving Navajos, and that started the trouble.

This man who was killed had a crippled nephew working with him at the time, and that boy got away and ran back to Walpi with the word, and everybody was surprised that he could run fast enough to get away.

"After that they made him a watchman to look out for Navajos.

"A good while after that two Hopi boys were fired upon by prowling Navajos who were hiding in the village of Sichomovi.

For a number of years then the Navajos plundered the fields, drove off the stock, and killed children.

Then they stopped coming here for a good while, but later they began doing all those things again, worse than ever.

So then the Hopi decided to shoot every Navajo they saw in their fields, and this stopped the trouble.

"Now the Navajos are good friends, come here often, and bring meat."

=The Coyote and the Water Plume Snake,= by Dawavantsie "Once upon a time a Coyote and a Water Plume Snake got acquainted.

One day the Coyote invited his friend, the big snake, to come and visit him at his house.

The Snake was pleased to be invited, so he went that very night.

"The Coyote was at home waiting, and when his guest arrived, he told him to come right in.

So the Snake started in, first his head, then his long body, and more and more of him kept coming in, so that the Coyote had to keep crowding over against the wall to make room.

By the time the Snake was in, tail and all, the Coyote had to go up and stay outside, for his visitor took up all the room in his house.

"Now the Coyote could still put his head close to his door and visit with the Snake, so that they had a very good visit.

But that night was pretty cold, and after while the Coyote was so cold he got cross and wished the Snake would go home.

"Well, by and by, the Snake said he must go home now, so he said goodnight and invited the Coyote to come over to his house the next night.

"The Coyote said he would be sure to come over, then he went into his house and sat by the fire and got warm and made plans how he would get even with that big Water Plume Snake.

"Well, next day he went and gathered a lot of cedar bark and some corn husks and some pine gum, and he made himself a great long tail and put lots of wool and some of his hair on the outside, so that it was a very big tail and long, too.

"So when evening came, he waited for it to get dark, then he started for the kiva of the big Snake.

"When he got there his friend was waiting and had a nice fire and received him with good welcome and told him to come right in and get warm.

"Now the Water Plume Snake was sure surprised when the Coyote got in and kept going round and round, pulling his long tail after him, and being wise he saw just what was going on, and now he knows the Coyote is making fun of him.

So he just says nothing and makes room enough for the Coyote by going outdoors himself.

"So the Snake just put his head in and was very nice and polite and they have a good visit.

But the Snake got very cold and still the Coyote will not go home and the Snake is nearly freezing.

"At last the Coyote says he have to go and the Snake is pretty cold and pretty mad, too.

So he says good night to the Coyote and crawls right down into his house quick as the Coyote's body is out, and when he sees all that big tail rolling out he just holds the end of it over the fireplace and gets it burning.

"But the Coyote is very pleased with himself and he don't look back but just goes right along.

After a while he notices a fire behind him and turns around and sees the grass is burning way back there.

So he says to himself, 'Well I better not go into my house for the Hopi have set fire to the grass to drive me away, and I'll just go on, so they won't find me at home.'

"But soon the fire got going fast in that cedar bark and before he can get that tail untied he is burned so bad that he just keeps running till he gets to Bayupa (Little Colorado River).

There was a great flood going down the river and he was so weak from running that he could not swim, so he drowned.

And that is what he got for trying to get even with somebody."

Quentin Quahongva, who tells the next story, lives at Shungopovi, Second Mesa.

He is a good-natured, easy-going man of middle age, and usually surrounded by a troop of children, his own and all the neighbors'.

[Illustration: Figure 15. --Quahongva, Story-teller of Shungopovi, and Listeners.

] We had no more than started our first story when the youngsters began to appear.

They squatted about on the floor and covered the door step, and were good listeners.

Their squeals of glee brought other children scampering, as the story-teller imitated the song and dance steps of the Eagle, in one of his stories.

But the one we have chosen to record here is a Bear story.

Figure 15 shows Quahongva surrounded by those of the children who had not been called home to supper when the stories ended.

One small girl in the foreground is carrying her doll on her back by means of her little shawl, exactly as her mother carries her baby brother.

Quahongva was a good story-teller.

Some of his tales were long enough to occupy an evening.

His best story took two and a half days for the telling and recording, so can not be included here.