On the left is a Navajo Butterfly Maiden carved in wood recently by Navajo master carver Kae Nez-Atsowi,. She's holding. eagle feathers. In the middle, offering a pot of camp coffee, is a Hano clown, carved around 1981 by Hopi/Navajo artist Clarence Cleveland. On the right is a Hopi Jemez ripe corn-butterfly Kachina-woodcarving carrying a rattle and some evergreen branches, carved sometime in the 1980's by K. Lomaoya, master Hopi carver. These and others are for sale by the web gallery of Sunshine Studios in Santa Fe. As I prepared this sad history with its upcoming deadline, prospects of violence, heartbreak, anger, endless manipulated hostilities, it came to seem that these beautiful and instructive carvings belong right here. Hano is a Hopi town on First Mesa. The people there are Tewa-speaking. The history of their adoption and refuge given by older-clan Hopis is lost or I don't know it. Something to think about, maybe, if the right people should happen to see it. Art can speak, and much better than politicians or lawyers, too. What else are webs for, Grandmother says, but communication? This is a web, the world-wide web. It connects, or will connect, everyone, everywhere. If you have come to this page through some direct link, you should read the historical essay on the previous page, here about the roots and actualities of the Navajo-Hopi land dispute, before reading what Big Mountain Navajo residents' partisans are saying of it, which is what is to be found in most of these links. The most noteworthy factor of my web research, covering a 10-year span of accessible Internet material is that all presentations, regarding the Big Mountain situation -- web, email list, press -- have been highly slanted against the Hopi tribe and Hopi people, by ignoring almost all facts of this dispute. Whose land has been and is being taken away from them, for example. Where the Indian press has chosen to support what they describe as elders who could resolve things, the Hopi elders people know about turn out to be a highly unrepresentative and vigorously publicized small group of individuals from Hotevilla. These individuals have in effect been created as external public spokesmen by the efforts -- sustained over 30 years -- of a California-based group of well-financed white people. This group, the Committee for Traditional Indian Land and Life (and its associated recently-founded Touch the Earth Foundation) began operations in 1967, the year Black Mesa mining began and has shown -- for a simple bunch of airhead Nuagers -- remarkable tenacity and consistent disruptive targeting focussed entirely upon the Hopi Nation, over the 30-year period of its existence. Most of the Hopi links below are to various products and productions of this group. |
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LINKS
PG Note: Two websites, both identifying themselves as products or expressions of traditional Hopi elders' views are not Hopi in any sense. These sites are Techqua Ikachi a newsletter with some 48 articles purporting to be by Hopi elders, running on a website that mainly purveys "Classical Yoga Teachings of Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. " on a server in Hawaii. The Hopi newsletter publishing organization's address is given as Solana Beach, CA. Many of these articles are reprinted from paper newsletters of the 1970's published by the Committee for Traditional Indian Land and Life, the well-financed California group that has targeted the Hopi nation for 30 years. The second such site is Hopi Cloud Dancing. Here an non-Indian individual identifying herself as Katherine Cheshire has recently started a foundation (Touch the Earth, address is given as Mt. Shasta, CA) that raises money and continues the work of the 1967 Committee on Traditional Indian Land and Life. Committee for Traditional Indian Land and Life, was founded in Los Angeles in 1967, the year mining operations began at Black Mesa. Though mostly composed of early Nuager Southern California types, the steady focus of this group over 30 years on highly disruptive manipulative activities targeting Hopis argues there may be covert purpose and non-airhead direction. In 1976, one of this group's founder/officers, a supposed elder Mohawk woman who was actually white, was exposed -- in connection with her infiltration of the American Indian Movement -- as an FBI operative, who may have taken orders from other agencies as well. Using the fake Indian name "Blue Dove" and falsely claiming to be Mohawk, Virginia Miller Riccardo Extrum DeLuce, a former actress/model/stripper, was admitted in court, on the record, by her FBI handlers to be an FBI operative. She had become the treasurer of all California AIM chapters, and also served on boards of many pro-Indian or politically supportive organizations in California, to spy upon them for the U.S. government, as well as to disrupt and manipulate their actions and policies. (And in the case of AIM, finances.) One of the groups she was a part of was the CTILL group. Deluce was an officer, had been one of its founders, and was known to be close to its still active founder/officer Craig Carpenter. DeLuce had her major tribal contacts in Arizona, rather than California. It is not known if any Hopis ever became aware of this situation. It is not known what became of Deluce -- who was 56 at the time of her exposure in 1976. She vanished from the California scene, after her compelled trial testimony regarding her part in the frameup of 2 AIM activists for a murder they did not commit at a California AIM camp in 1974. The CTILL group's manipulative focus has been entirely on the Hopi tribe. The group typically urges rejection or tries to disrupt ordinary amenities (such as a well or a sewer line). Note this current example written up by Cheshire. Note reference to a much earlier disruption focussed around a Hotevilla well. In addition to this type of disruption, another consistent theme over 30 years has been repeated attacks on the Hopi Tribal Council -- no matter who they are, or what policies the try to pursue. It should be observed that over these years, a number of council people have at least as good a claim -- some feel a better claim -- to call themselves traditionalists (because ceremonies and initiations were never halted nor lost, as some have been at Hotevilla) . This group over the long period seems to have quietly attended their religious duties, while also trying to help the Hopi people in practical ways to survive difficult economic and political times. They do not present themselves to the world as prophetic elders, missionaries of peace or mouthing vacuous pieties of world salvation. No well-funded groups of whites carries on public relations campaigns for them. Members of this group of traditional-practical people have included the present tribal chairman since at least the early 1970's. Members of this group are always attacked by the Committee on Traditional Indian Land and Life, and their friends, and that has been going on for 30 years. It does not seem to be typical airhead nuage group behavior. On this page will be found a variety of Nuage ceremonies purportedly Hopi and various prayers (in English) that this Cheshire has taken around to various California schools. Here's the Touch The Earth - Mount Shasta foundation doing their thing, well, one of their things. Note that Craig Carpenter -- 1967 CTILL founder -- is listed as some kind of officer. This is more along the lines of nuage ripoffs of Native spirituality fundraising, promoting some perverse and ignorant curriculum to be sold to California schools, etc.
Here's a very different picture. It also glances in passing at Hotevilla, but an Indian woman reported it:
Since there is considerable InterNet fake Hopi info and fake Hopi fundraising, I note here that the Hopi Tribe does have a cultural foundation that works to preserve the language and culture. It works in other appropriate and relevant ways with and for its own people. Its name is The Hopi Foundation. It is based in the village of Bacavi on Third Mesa. My most recent contact info for it is: Hopi Foundation Hopi Foundation works with professionals and with local traditional people, "to contribute to and improve the quality of Hopi life." In addition to cultural preservation, the foundation has explored ways to employ solar energy (see LaDuke's article above), is restoring traditional clan houses, and makes college fellowships available to Hopi students. It responds to proposals for action, study, or cultural activities support from both villages and individuals. Those who want to support Hopi traditions or traditional people might put their money there, instead of what might be termed "the first Nuagers before Nuage was even invented.".
If you arrived at these links from an unrelated surf, an essay, with mapsl, of the historical and legal genesis of the present Navajo-Hopi land dispute situation is on the previous page nere. See also links seemingly unrelated to this dispute to Navajo nation and Hopi information sources on the (Arizona Indian Tribes) Map--page. |
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Text, maps and graphics copyright -- Paula Giese, 1996, 1997 except where elsewhere attributed. CREDITS: The three carvings were accidentally found (among many) while researching this page. The large, fuzzy, poorly-saturated commercial photos were cropped of their backgrounds, color-enhanced, size-reduced, shadowed, and sharpened in PhotoShop for the purpose of this particular use on this particular page. Last Updated: 3/20/97 |