FWIW: In 1979, I was hired by the Hopi Cultural Center Museum on Second Mesa to be the Director of their Tricentennial project (300th anniversary of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt); why they picked a Bahaana for this, I don’t know. I didn’t apply for it, rather I was recommended by a former boss, who was a friend of Abbot Sekakwaptewa and Fred Kabotie. They called me.
Whatever, how I got to Hopi is beside the point. What happened while I was there is the point. After a brief search, housing was found for me: the House At Pumpkin Seed Point (qv), my landlord: Oswald ‘White Bear’ Fredericks. I lived there for 18 months, during which time I saw WB only rarely. Although he had a house/shop on 264 right outside Kykotsmovi on the way up to the top of Third Mesa, it was closed most of the time; rather, he spent most of his time in Sedona, where I sent rent checks. Indeed, I don’t think I ever saw any of the so-called Traditionalists from Hotevilla during my stay – and as one member of my Board was from Hotevilla, I often visited that village.
I had read _Book of the Hopi_ back in 1963 when it came out, and that colored my initial perspectives on the SW. But when I started taking Anthro courses at UNM in 1967, I quickly disabused myself of its misconceptions. So I knew the back story of both WB and of my house.
I never had the chance to ask WB about those things, but I did ask my Board – composed of adult-initiated men from all three Mesas, some elders, some younger. They were circumspect, essentially saying that they could not tell me what was wrong with the Book, for that would implicitly say what was correct in it. And I did not have the rights to know those things.
When talking about these things, the metaphor I like to use is “freedom of information”, or rather the non-existence thereof. At Hopi, /navoti/ (information, knowledge) is circumscribed by definite boundaries: age, sex/gender, clan, kiva, sodality, village, and Mesa. These boundaries are such that ‘traditionally’, no one could know ‘all’ of Hopi culture, especially those parts which are walled off from others. Thus some things are open: summer Plaza dances, some winter kiva dances; other things are closed.
That is the way things are.
[aside: from the above quote, “one of the major four Kiva groups.” This is somewhat ambiguous. Traditional/non-Xian Hopi men “belong” to a kiva, which is the locus of a variety of activities, katsina dances, etc. In addition, in *some* of the villages, *some* of the kivas are associated with the four major men’s sodalities, usually called “adulthood societies.” I think these are what the “four Kiva groups” refers to. I say *some* because of the structured relationship between some the villages, and because of the unique histories of some of the villages/Mesas. On Second Mesa, it is the kivas at Songopavi that are home to the societies, and men from Mushongnavi and Sipaulovi go there. Up until 1906, Old Oraibi was the only village on Third Mesa. One result of the 1906 split was that the adulthood societies were explicitly abandoned. They never existed in Kykotsmovi or Bacavi, and were only re-constituted in Hotevilla in 1939.
[aside: none of the so-called Traditionalists from Hotevilla were ever initiated into their reconstituted societies.]
