Hopi Katsina Songs ed. by Emory Sekaquaptewa, Kenneth C. Hill, and Dorothy K. Washburn (review)

Emory Sekaquaptewa (1928–2007) was a Hopi linguist, anthropologist, and tribal judge who dedicated much of his life to preserving Hopi culture and language. Among his numerous contributions as researcher, educator, and steward of Hopi knowledge, the most well-known is the Hopi Dictionary Project, for which he served as Cultural Editor. The project was a decade-long initiative funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities undertaken in partnership with the University of Arizona, which culminated with the landmark publication of the Hopi Dictionary = Hopìikwa lavàytutuveni: a Hopi–English dictionary of the Third Mesa dialect with an English–Hopi finder list and a sketch of Hopi grammar (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998). Hopi Dictionary, a systematic compendium of Third Mesa dialect, features some 30,000 entries and a sketch of Hopi grammar, and has since been adopted by the Hopi people as the standard guide for teaching the language. Hopi Katsina Songs, edited by Sekaquaptewa along with Kenneth C. Hill and Dorothy K. Washburn, is a crucial extension of the Hopi Dictionary Project (which Hill also edited) that will remain valuable for scholars working with the rich heritage of archived Hopi songs. Like the Dictionary, the present volume is not meant, as the editors themselves indicate, to be read down from front to back (p. 38); instead, it presents 150 songs drawn from seven separate archival collections, annotated individually with word-by-word translations (done by Sekaquaptewa, who also contributed 25 songs) and explanatory comments (provided by Washburn) illuminating each song’s metaphorical meanings as they relate to larger themes in Hopi cosmology. As such, folklorists and ethnomusicologists will find in this book an important textual guide to accompany extant archival recordings of Hopi katsina songs found in a number of individual and public collections.

To a broader readership, this book will provide an attractive point of entry into understanding the value systems and objects that comprise Hopi cultural patrimony—katsina songs are, in essence, oral texts that “describe the core beliefs of the Hopi life-way and how they should be followed” (p. 19). Katsinas (also commonly known as “kachinas”) are “perfect life-promoting spirit beings” who, in Hopi belief, travel from their homes, from the four cardinal directions in the Fifth World in the form of clouds or rain, to Hopi villages in the present (Fourth) World (p. 1). Their appearances at festivals, gatherings, and ritual dances align with key times in the cultivation cycle of corn, and the songs themselves, as the present volume so richly details, delineate myriad aspects of the metaphors that connect contemporary Hopi culture to the past.

The songs in the book are taken from recordings that span the first half of the twentieth century, in addition to those contributed by Sekaquaptewa himself. The earliest recorded katsina songs, from the Natalie Curtis Burlin collection, date from 1903. Sekaquaptewa attempted to translate recordings made in the 1890s by Jesse Walter Fewkes, but the degraded sound quality of those examples prevented any meaningful translation. The most recent recordings, made by ethnomusicologist George List, date from 1960. In sum, the main goal of katsina songs is to instill and reinforce a positive, productive, and moral community-based lifeway. Corn, as is well known, is the key metaphor to Hopi life. It forms the subject of many of the songs transcribed here, and the various aspects of its progenitive, sustaining properties—as well as the important lessons in morals and ethics embodied in the corn lifeway—are voiced evocatively and sensually in Sekaquaptewa’s translations.

The editors, in anticipating any possible charges of impropriety for disseminating or reproducing culturally-sensitive or restricted material, make the disclaimer right away that katsina song are, by and large, public texts, not limited to Hopi audiences. Indeed, they are “relevant for all humankind” (p. 1), although it is doubtful that such universality...