Moquis and Kastiilam: Coronado and the Hopis

The following document and interview constitute the first chapter in Volume I of Moquis and Kastiilam: Hopis, Spaniards, and the Trauma of History. When published, the two volumes will tell, from both Hopi and Spanish points of view, the story of Spanish attempts to conquer and missionize the Hopi Indians of northeastern Arizona between 1540, when the Coronado expedition first breached the Pueblo world, to 1821, when Mexico won its independence from Spain.¹ For nearly five hundred years, the story has been overwhelmingly one-sided. Historians and anthropologists have relied upon documents written by representatives of the Spanish empire. Hopi voices have been silenced, ignored, or relegated to “myth.” Those of us on the Hopi History Project, a formal collaboration between the University of Arizona and the Hopi Tribe, have attempted to restore a balance to the historical record by presenting not only Spanish documents about the “Moquis,” the Spanish term for Hopis, but also Hopi oral traditions about the “Kastiilam,” the Hopi term for Spaniards. Some of those traditions had made their way into print before our project started (Nequatewa 1967 [1936]; James 1974; Courlander 1971; Yava 1978). Others come from interviews with Hopi elders carried out by Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office (CPO), a three-day meeting with members of the Hopi Tribe’s Cultural Resources Advisory Task Team (CRATT), and discussions between University of Arizona researchers and Hopi CPO staff. We argue that Hopi oral traditions passed down since 1540 are living records of the past that have just as much, if not more, scholarly validity as the letters, court records, and reports of Spanish officials and Franciscan missionaries. Both are lines of evidence—“texts” in the parlance of literary and cultural criticism—that need to be interrogated. Both have their strengths and limitations that need to be understood.

The primary advantage of Spanish colonial documents is their contemporaneity. Most were written soon after the events they describe, some by eyewitnesses. They are usually chronological, including the dates they were written and the dates events occurred. They usually record the names of at least some of the individuals who participated in those events and give the locations where they occurred as well. And they frequently discuss motivations for the Spanish actors in question. In other words, the documents present the “who,” “where,” “when,” “what,” and “why” enshrined in Western narrative tradition, at least when those factual touchstones involved prominent Spaniards.

But that does not mean they were “objective” records of encounters between Hopis and Spaniards. All history is highly selective. As ethnohistorian Bernard Fontana observes:

What we call “history” is a recitation of events selected from the past, which in its most literal sense is all that has preceded the present: a rock that fell, a dog that barked, an infant who cried, a woman who coughed, a prince who was enthroned king. All historians—and on occasion each of us is a historian—select from this infinity of events those we deem worth telling. The basis of that selection provides the built-in bias of history. History, more than being a debate about the past, is an argument about the present and future. It often tells us less about what was and more about who we are. It is a tool used by all of us either to justify or to condemn the status quo. It is a statement of the world either as we now perceive it to be or as we think it ought to be. The past is immutable, but history, a battleground for the public mind, is ever changing.

(Fontana 1994:xi)

Some of the documents translated and edited in Moquis and Kastiilam: Hopis, Spaniards, and the Trauma of History deliberately and consciously reflected the intentions of their authors. Authors like Fray Padre Alonso de Benavides exaggerated Franciscan missionary successes to win more royal support for Franciscan missions. Both missionaries and Spanish officials gleefully recounted the misdeeds of one...