Wicazo Sa Review

Justin B. Richland
Hopi Sovereignty as Epistemological Limit
Wicazo Sa Review - Volume 24, Number 1, Spring 2009, pp. 89-112

University of Minnesota Press

Project MUSE - Wicazo Sa Review - Hopi Sovereignty as Epistemological Limit Project MUSE Journals Wicazo Sa Review Volume 24, Number 1, Spring 2009 Hopi Sovereignty as Epistemological Limit Wicazo Sa Review Volume 24, Number 1, Spring 2009 E-ISSN: 1533-7901 Print ISSN: 0749-6427 DOI: 10.1353/wic.0.0017 Hopi Sovereignty as Epistemological Limit Justin B. Richland 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...