Hopi Sovereignty as Epistemological Limit

The headlines of the March 6, 1886, edition of the Illustrated Police News, a late nineteenth-century London weekly, read “Cowed by a Woman: A Craven Red Villain Weakens in the Face of a Resolute White Heroine—Exciting Adventure in an Indian Village in Arizona.” The now famous illustration accompanying the story showed anthropologists Colonel James and Mathilda Coxe Stevenson confronting Hopi village members who had barred their entrance into a village kiva (see Figure 1).

The Stevensons had been sent from Washington, D.C., by Major John Wesley Powell, the founding director of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology, to collect samples of Hopi ceremonial paraphernalia and to describe the ritual activities being conducted with them. The image shows Coxe Stevenson, generally recognized as one of the most important pre-Boasian ethnologists of the American Southwest,¹ waving her fist at a Hopi man, while her husband stands behind her, brandishing a rifle. Around them are several Hopis, some standing above and some emerging below from the underground kiva. One is seen in the background waving a lasso to, according to the report, capture the Stevensons and take them into “the underground chapel of the village . . . [to be] summarily dealt with.”² Despite the threatening image, Col. Stevenson is reported as saying, “that while the situation was highly interesting, it was probably less alarming than it would have been to people unacquainted with the natural timidity of the Pueblos.” As such, the late nineteenth-century reader is reassured that the central figures in the image—picturing a Hopi man flailing his arms and legs wildly at Coxe Stevenson—actually shows the Indian man, and not the white woman, being undone by the confrontation.

Figure 1.

From The Illustrated Police News, March 6, 1886. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Museum Support Center.

The image and the story is thus one of intrepid Euroamerican hero-scholars battling at the frontiers of knowledge, demanding a scientific and legal (given that their commission was from a U.S. governmental agency) “right” to know what these Hopis are doing in their kiva. Today, however, the image might also be read to suggest the ways in which Hopi have, from some of their earliest confrontations with them, taken exception to Euroamerican epistemological projects concerning their culture and society. In this way the image suggests a much more contemporary trope of settler—indigene relations, one in which Hopi language, culture, and society present qualities that, at the end of the nineteenth century, resonate with the politics of knowledge and representation that have animated Indigenous claims to sovereignty around the world at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

This article endeavors to tease at the borders of knowledge and knowing, and the theories that inform them; that the Hopi police against intrusions like those of the Stevensons’—intrusions that have persisted until today. Virtually every effort by Euroamericans to give “order” to Hopi life via two dominant modes of modern knowledge production (or epistemology)—law and science—have regularly and repeatedly confronted their exceptions among aspects of Hopi life. But it will be argued that the limits that Hopi culture, society, and language present to Euroamericans resonate with ways that knowledge is produced, transmitted, and policed by and between Hopis themselves. In fact, Hopis have always been deeply engaged in diagnosing the epistemological lines and limits between each other, relying on complexities of relatedness (wiwta: “connections”) and tradition (navoti: “teachings”) to do so in ways that come to give Hopi knowledge the form of property, phenomena tightly controlled by some to the exclusion of others. In so doing, Hopi concerns about who possesses knowledge of tradition, and how, animate questions of identity and authority that are regular and recurrent features of Hopi sociocultural and political practice.

I argue that these two Hopi theories of knowledge production and its limits—one that understands Hopi knowledge as a central discourse of authority between Hopi people, and one that understands Hopi knowledge as an enduring exception to Western epistemologies and the authority (legal and scientific) they generate...