The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi | Page 6

population.
[Illustration: Figure 1.--Hopi Family at Shungopovi.
--Photo by Lockett.]
Some clans have indeed become nearly extinct because of the lack of daughters, the sons having naturally gone to live with neighboring clans, or in some cases with neighboring tribes. As a result, some large houses are pointed out that have many unoccupied and even abandoned rooms--the clan is dying out. Possibly there may be a good many men of that clan living but they are not with or near their parents and grandparents. They are now a part of the clan into which they have married, and must live there, be it near or far. Why should they keep up such a practice when possibly the young man could do better, economically and otherwise, in his ancestral home and community? The answer is, "It has always been that way," and that seems to be reason enough for a Hopi.
=Property, Lands, Houses, Divorce=
Land is really communal, apportioned to the several clans and by them apportioned to the various families, who enjoy its use and hand down such use to the daughters, while the son must look to his wife's share of her clan allotment for his future estate. In fact, it is a little doubtful whether he has any estate save his boots and saddle and whatever personal plunder he may accumulate, for the house is the property of the wife, as well as the crop after its harvest, and divorce at the pleasure of the wife is effective and absolute by the mere means of placing said boots and saddle, etc., outside the door and closing it. The husband may return to his mother's house, and if he insists upon staying, the village council will insist upon his departure.
Again, why do they keep doing it this way? Again, "Because it has always been done this way." And it works very well. There is little divorce and little dissension in domestic life among the Hopi, in spite of Crane's[9] half comical sympathy for men in this "woman-run" commonwealth. Bachelors are rare since only heads of families count in the body politic. An unmarried woman of marriageable age is unheard of.
[Footnote 9: Crane, Leo, Indians of the Enchanted Mesa: Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1925.]
=Woman's Work=
The Hopi woman's life is a busy one, the never finished grinding of corn by the use of the primitive metate and mano taking much time, and the universal woman's task of bearing and rearing children and providing meals and home comforts accounting for most of her day.
She is the carrier of water, and since it must be borne on her back from the spring below the village mesa this is a burden indeed. She is, too, the builder of the house, though men willingly assist in any heavy labor when wanted. But why on earth should so kindly a people make woman the carrier of water and the mason of her home walls? Tradition! "It has always been this way."
Her leisure is employed in visiting her neighbors, for the Hopi are a conspicuously sociable people, and in the making of baskets or pottery. One hears a great deal about Hopi pottery, but the pottery center in Hopiland is the village of Hano, on First Mesa, and the people are not Hopi but Tewas, whose origin shall presently be explained.
Not until recent years has pottery been made elsewhere in Hopiland than at Hano. At present, however, Sichomovi, the Hopi village built so close to Hano that one scarce knows where one ends and the other begins, makes excellent pottery as does the Hopi settlement at the foot of the hill, Polacca. Undoubtedly this comes from the Tewa influence and in some cases from actual Tewa families who have come to live in the new locality. For instance, Grace, maker of excellent pottery, now living at Polacca, is a Tewa who lived in Hano twenty years ago, when the writer first knew her, and continued to live there until a couple of years ago. Nampeo, most famous potter in Hopiland, is an aged Tewa woman still living at Hano, in the first house at the head of the trail. Her ambitious study of the fragments of the pottery of the ancients, in the ruins of old Sikyatki, made her the master craftsman and developed a new standard for pottery-making in her little world.
Mention was made previously of the women employing their leisure in the making of baskets or pottery. An interesting emphasis should be placed upon the "or," for no village does both. The women of the three villages mentioned at First Mesa as pottery villages make no baskets. The three villages on Second Mesa make a particular kind of coiled basket found nowhere else save in North Africa, and no pottery nor any other kind of basket. The villages