Religious Transformation in the Late Pre-Hispanic Pueblo World

10. North, South, and Center: An Outline of Hopi Ethnogenesis

10 North, South, and Center An Outline of Hopi Ethnogenesis Wesley Bernardini The religious transformations of the fourteenth century in the American Southwest involved both novel introductions and things that were left behind. New ritual practices tied to the Katsina religion or the Southwestern Cult swept broad areas, while long-standing ways of life in places like the Mesa Verde region were let go. Efforts to reconstruct the events of this dynamic period benefit from the incorporation of Hopi oral tradition as a historical resource. These traditions provide a record of the experiences and issues deemed important enough to remember —both at the time and retroactively. Because they represent an emic view, these accounts have the potential to highlight behavioral processes and scales that are not commonly the focus of archaeological study. As such, they can spark a productive round of “tacking” (Wylie 1989) between oral and archaeological lines of evidence that produces new questions, models, and insights (e.g., Bernardini 2005). Some Hopi discourse frames clan history in terms of a duality not previously recognized in the archaeological literature: the Motisinom (“first people”), who originated in the north, and the Nùutungkwisinom (“later people”), who came from the south. In this view, contemporary Hopi society emerged from the convergence of these two populations on the Hopi mesas and the reconciliation of their distinct religious traditions . The culture that resulted understood the Hopi mesas as Tuuwanasavi , the earth center, where hopivötskwani, the Hopi path of life, would be practiced. Elements of the reconciliation of these two religious traditions underlying Hopi society are still visible in the Hopi ritual calendar and in tensions in Hopi philosophy. Motisinom and Nùutungkwisinom are relative, not absolute, terms; in addition to the usage cited above, they are also used to distinguish between earlier and later migrants to villages established in the twenti- North, South, and Center: An Outline of Hopi Ethnogenesis 197 eth century. As with much Hopi traditional knowledge, conditioned by the unique historical and ritual perspectives of different clans, there are also differences in usage across villages and mesas. Archaeologists are still working to understand the historical implications of these terms; this chapter represents one of what will necessarily be many attempts to reconcile these terms with the archaeological record. This attempt is admittedly speculative and perhaps even provocative, and it is intended to push our understanding of both Hopi traditional knowledge and the archaeological record. With these caveats in mind, this chapter argues that understanding the nature and interactions of Motisinom and Nùutungkwisinom religious traditions is central to an understanding of Hopi ethnogenesis, and to larger patterns of migration and cultural evolution in the American Southwest. Nùutungkwisinom and Motisinom populations were the products of different historical trajectories, diverging most significantly in their participation or nonparticipation in the Chaco Phenomenon . Understanding the story of these two historical and cultural trajectories thus has the potential to shed light on broader phenomena like Chaco, the abandonment of the Colorado Plateau in the late AD 1200s, and the migrations and reorganization of populations in the late preHispanic period. Because the Hopi mesas were one of only a handful of population centers into which late pre-Hispanic southwestern populations consolidated following the demographic upheavals of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Adams 2004; Bernardini 2005), the story of the Motisinom and Nùutungkwisinom is important to an understanding of postcontact trends as well. Motisinom and Nùutungqwsinom in Hopi Traditional Knowledge The current anthropological view of Hopi social organization, derived primarily from the ethnographic work of Titiev (1944) and Eggan (1950), emphasizes three primary scales of identity: clan, village, and tribe. The clan—a totemically named, exogamous matrilineal descent group—is “the outstanding feature of social life, in Hopi eyes” (Eggan 1950:62), the primary medium through which identity is expressed in the community. Each clan has a unique migration history that recounts 198 Wesley Bernardini its origins and legitimizes its control over a particular ceremony (Bernardini 2008), though not all Hopi clans control ceremonies. Villages grew through the aggregation of clans, each of which (according to Hopi traditional knowledge) was required to demonstrate the efficacy of its ceremony before gaining entrance to the village (Eggan 1950:64; Fewkes 1900:585). Historically, each village has functioned as a largely endogamous and autonomous political, ritual, and subsistence unit, though “daughter” villages, which lack the full complement of ceremonies , are ritually dependent on “mother...