A woman of sixty or more carries a plastic bucket down through a gap in the cliff below Third Mesa at first light, holding to handholds smoothed by five centuries of palms, fills it at a spring seep where the water comes up slow and cold, and climbs back to the town where she was born. The town is Old Oraibi, one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States. There has never been a year when nobody lived there.

Hopi farmers have raised corn, beans, melons and squash in the washes below the mesas on about ten inches of rain a year for at least a thousand years. In the oldest telling, Maasaw, the caretaker of this world, offered the people an ear of corn and warned them the land would never be easy; if they kept faith and kept up the ceremonies, the corn would feed them. The clans reached the mesas after long migrations, each by its own road.

Between those migrations and the present lie the kachina season, the coming of Spanish soldiers and friars, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when the Franciscans on the mesas were killed and their missions torn down, and the long middle years. Then come the split of Oraibi in 1906, the agents and the boarding schools, the fights over land, water and coal, and the villages that govern themselves on the mesas today.

Friars, soldiers, agents and coal companies have all come to the mesas with plans for the people who live there. The woman with the bucket is still making her climb.

The Towns That Never Died: The Hopi and the Fight for the Mesas

Comentarios