Open(ing) Authority Through Community Engagement

Museums & Social Issues 7:2 Thematic Issue

Elizabeth A Bollwerk, Natalye B Tate, Robert P Connolly, Elizabeth A Bollwerk, Natalye B Tate, Robert P Connolly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315423272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 2016. Part of the journal on reflective discourse, museums and social issues, Volume 7, number 2 is concerned with opening authority through community engagement and includes articles on a variety of topics.

Footprints of the Ancestors

DOI: 10.4324/9781315423296-2

Reengaging Hopi Youth with Their Culture

George Gumerman, Joëlle Clark, Elmer J. Satala and Ruby Chimerica

Abstract

Collaboration among the Hopi Tribe’s Cultural Preservation Office, Northern Arizona University, and the Museum of Northern Arizona created a Hopi youth exhibit that was a capstone experience for a long-term cultural preservation project. The story of Hopi cultural continuity and the challenges for sustaining these traditions reflects today’s Hopi youth as grounded in their traditional cultural roots yet living with the pressures of the modern world. Hopi youth used personal narratives to communicate their ideas, realities, and hopes for the future. They create significant long-term impacts that revolve around cultural connections, personal and cultural inspiration, and intergenerational learning.

About the authors

George Gumerman IV, Director of the University Honors Program and Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University, has been working with the Hopi Tribe on cultural preservation projects for over a decade. Joëlle Clark is a professional development coordinator, science educator, and an applied anthropologist at the Center for Science Teaching & Learning, Northern Arizona University, where she has designed, written, and taught curriculum and educational printergenerational learningograms for K—12 educators, informal educators, and indigenous communities. An elder from the village of Sichomovi, Elmer J. Satala is of the Butterfly Clan and a member of the Cultural Resource Advisory Team for the Hopi Tribe. Ruby Chimerica, Lizard and Sand Flowers Clans, is a basket weaver and an elder from the village of Bacavi on the Hopi Reservation. She is committed to connecting Hopi youth with their culture.

Museums & Social Issues, Volume 7, Number 2, Fall 2012, pp. 149–166.

Copyright © 2012 Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

It is summer solstice at Yuvqöyvi,¹ the Hopi name for Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Just before the sun rises at around 5:30 am a group of Hopi youth and adults, including a 73-year-old elder, are already up and running to greet the sun so it will not be burdened by carrying them throughout the day. The group will later witness the sun's summer solstice journey as it lights up a niche in the great kiva at Casa Rinconada. The group is visiting Chaco Canyon as part of the Footprints of the Ancestors Project, an intergenerational cultural preservation project designed to connect Hopi youth with their past in order to gain for them a better future.

Hopi culture is adversely affected by increasing pressure to change in a fast paced, modern world. The introduction of wage economy in the 1960s, lifestyle changes, and easier access to the city have struck a heavy blow on the Hopi traditional way of life. The elders’ knowledge is not being passed on, and the physical activity required of Hopi youth as they farmed the land with their families has been replaced by modern sedentary pastimes. The strong Hopi identity as stewards of the land is slowly being lost among the younger generation. New mechanisms need to be developed to facilitate the storytelling role of the elders (Ball, 2004; Cruikshank, 1992).

The Footprints of the Ancestors program has developed over the past ten years in response to this growing crisis of language and culture loss among Hopi youth. The majority of Hopi youth are not learning the Hopi language, and elders are finding it increasingly difficult to pass on their traditional cultural knowledge. In response, Northern Arizona University (NAU) faculty and staff and the Hopi Tribe's Cultural Preservation Office collaborated to create a cultural preservation program. The project promotes the interaction among Hopi youth, elders, educators, anthropologists, and multimedia professionals while visiting Hopi footprints—Hopi ancestral sites and the oral history surrounding them.

As a culmination to the four-year cultural preservation project, the group collaboratively created a museum exhibit focused on the core values of Hopi Culture as told through the voices of Hopi youth. Throughout the exhibit, Hopi youth used personal narratives to communicate their ideas, realities, and hopes for the future. As one Hopi youth reflected:

Since the beginning of the Hopi Footprints project, I have been active in this program. I love to travel and learn things along the way, and this program did and still does just that. The first trip I went on was the trip to Kawestima (Navajo National Monument), and ever since then I wanted and craved the knowledge of my Hopi ancestors. Being involved in Hopi Footprints, I became fascinated with teens my own age. Before these trips, I was pretty quiet and shy, but interacting with different types of people my own age, through the memories we created, stories we shared and different things we learned along the way, this program has not only helped me grow as a person but as a Hopi as well as by helping me learn about where I come from and what my ancestors did to set the foundation of the Hopi ways.

Hopi People and Their Land

The Hopi Tribe of Arizona is a federally recognized tribe with a population of about 12,000 people. The traditional organization of the Hopi Tribe encompasses twelve autonomous villages on and around three mesas, referred to as the Hopi Mesas. In 1936 the Hopi Tribe was formally organized under the Indian Reorganization Act, with an elected Chairman and Tribal Council that operate under a tribal constitution and by-laws (Connelly, 1979, p. 550; Clemmer, 1995, pp. 150–165). The Hopi Tribe as a contemporary political organization exists to support the traditional organization of the Hopi villages and provide services to the Hopi people (Ferguson & Lomaomvaya, 1999, p. 23).

Hopi people speak the Hopi language, which is a branch of the Northern Uto-Aztecan language family (Hill, Sekaquaptewa, Black, Malotki, & Lomatuway'ma, 1998, p. xv; Seaman, 1985, p. 3). On each of the three Hopi Mesas people speak a different dialect. All the dialects are mutually understandable, and the Hopi language is one of the principle means of integrating the Hopi people into a unified cultural group (Ferguson & Lomaomvaya, 1999, p. 24).

The Hopi people have strong historical connections to a much broader expanse of land that was used and occupied by Hopi ancestors in earlier centuries. Their aboriginal area captures all of Arizona, New Mexico, and portions of Utah and Colorado (Kuwanwisiwma, 2002). The thousands of archaeological sites that dot the Southwest landscape show evidence of their migrations, marking their affiliation and broad historical homeland.

Oral history recounts their migrations while creating a setting for natural and cultural preservation. Leigh Kuwanwisiwma (2002, p. 161) explained that upon emergence to the present Fourth World, clans were challenged to commit to a life plan dictated by a guardian deity and caretaker of the earth, Maasaw. Clans were asked to live a life of humility, cooperation, and respect for the lifeblood of humanity—the earth. As directed by Maasaw, they set their “footprints” on the landscape by establishing ritual springs, sacred trails, trail markers, shrines, and petroglyphs. As they moved on to new areas, they left behind sites, potsherds, and other physical evidence to show that they vested the land with spiritual stewardship and thus fulfilled their pact with Maasaw (Dongoske, Jenkins, & Ferguson, 1993, p. 27; Ferguson & Lomaomvaya, 1999, p. 76; Kuwanwisiwma, 2002, p. 161; Parezo, 1996, pp. 238–242).

The Hopi believe their ancestors did not abandon these archaeological sites, and they remain places that have strong emotional and ancestral affiliation (Balenquah, 2012). They provide physical evidence, verifying Hopi clan histories and religious beliefs. Many of the sites are still referred to during the recounting of particular clan histories by clan elders (Bernadini, 2005; Ferguson & Lomaomvaya, 1999, p. 76), setting the stage for the Footprints of the Ancestors cultural preservation project.

Today, many Hopi people think that the survival of their culture and tradition depends on their teaching the younger generations to take care of their ancestral sites and thus fulfill the pact with Maasaw. One Hopi elder said (in Garic, 2005, p. 92):

We have to be serious. In order to keep our name, the young ones should continue to live the Hopi way. We made a pact with Maasaw to take care of the land; now we have to teach the children to do the same. They have to continue to take care of our shrines, put offerings. If the shrines are not taken care of, things go wrong…. It is our responsibility to show the young ones how to follow their ancestors’ footprints.

Recognizing the threat of losing the Hopi way of life, tribal elders know that the cultural survival of the Hopi people depends in part on their responsibility to teach the children Hopi traditional knowledge. To achieve this goal, it is extremely important for the Hopi to speak and preserve their language, as well as to maintain their traditions, beliefs, and values (Gaseoma, 1999, pp. 4–6). Hopi people also realize that to continue to live many of their traditional values and lead a successful life in two very different worlds they have to balance today's modern society with Hopi traditional life.

Footprints of the Ancestors

NAU's participation in the Footprints of the Ancestors Project has a long history that began by first developing relationships and trust. In the past, anthropologists and indigenous peoples have often had conflicting, one-way relationships. This program developed on a foundation of respect, reciprocity, and ultimately friendships that made the project a reality. This effort is not pure research, but applied work where individuals roll up their sleeves and work side by side to address issues critical to Hopi communities (Vasquez & Jenkins, 1994). Gumerman and Clark's role in the program is to facilitate the connections among youth, elders, and place.

Further trust building was developed during Grand Canyon river trips with Hopi elders and tribal professionals who were videotaped along the river for an interactive educational CD-ROM entitled Archaeology of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado Plateau. To seek permission for the CD-ROM project, Gumerman and Clark met with the Hopi Cultural Resource Advisory Team (CRAT)—a group of elders who advise the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office (HCPO). At one of these meetings it was suggested that we do a similar project focusing on archaeology—but specifically for Hopi youth. Gumerman and Clark began a series of planning meetings with Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, director of the HCPO, that resulted in a Hopi Footprints curriculum project.

Hopi Footprints: Building Better Teachers with a Community-Based Culture Curriculum Project created a community-based cultural curriculum for Hopi schools by linking elders and cultural specialists with teachers and anthropologists. The Hopi Footprints Project affects students indirectly, through teachers learning from elders and scholars, and then disseminating this knowledge in their classrooms. Building on this three-year curriculum project, our long-term Footprints of the Ancestors Project works with Hopi youth directly.

Evolving out of the earlier curriculum project while supporting an initiative of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, the Footprints of the Ancestors Project is based on experiential student learning, community service projects, and student multi media product development, including a museum exhibit. We traced the footprints of Hopi ancestors as we visited places of Hopi cultural significance at archaeological sites across the American Southwest (Navajo National Monument, Homolovi State Park, Chaco Culture National Historic Park, Mesa Verde National Park, and the San Juan River). Their footprints, the archaeological sites and the oral history surrounding them, connect past cultural traditions that are linked to today's Hopi people. At each site, intergenerational learning activities for Hopi youth provided opportunities for Hopi elders and archaeologists to share their knowledge and facilitate an exchange of ideas (Figure 1). The learning activities focused on particular themes such as health, food, ethnobotany, community...