The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi | Page 6

Clan, the Spider Clan, and others.
[Footnote 8: Voth, H.R., Traditions of the Hopi: Field Columbian
Museum Pub. 96, Anthropological series, vol. 8, pp. 36-38, 1905.]
Sons and daughters are expected to marry outside the clan, and the son
must live with his wife's people, so does nothing to perpetuate his own
clan. The Hopi is monogamous. A daughter on marrying brings her
husband to her home, later building the new home adjacent to that of
her mother. Therefore many daughters born to a clan mean increase in
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