This is a short essay I wrote for Plateau Magazine (Museum of Northern Arizona) about Hopi connections to the Glen Canyon region. This issue compliments a small exhibit currently on display at MNA titled, “Archaeologists in Glen Canyon”. The exhibit will run through the summer of 2023.

The essay, with voice-over, is also on display at the John Wesley Powell museum in Green River, Utah.

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“Hopisinmuy Wu’ya’mat Hisat Yang Tupqa’va Yeesiwngwu”

From a Hopi perspective, the Glen Canyon region is recognized as a vast landscape that safeguards monuments of Hopi culture and history. This is land of the ancestors, known in Hopi as Moti’sinom, “The First People” and following them, the Hisat’sinom, “The People of Long Ago”. These two concepts describe not only the cultural evolution of Hopi ancestry, but also acknowledge the longevity of their presence, spanning millennia back into time periods designated as “Paleo” and “Archaic”. Hopi ancestors were among the very first to experience this landscape and call it Home.

Who were these people? And where did they go?

Hopi oral traditions recall that many ancestral clans comprised these groups. They include, among others, the Flute, Deer, Fire, Bearstrap, Water, Butterfly and Rattlesnake clans. For generations they occupied this area, raising their families, and marking their presence upon the landscape. We see traces of their lives within the archaeological record as artifacts, which includes ancestral villages, ceramics, stone tools, textiles, and burials of departed ones. Hopi people believe these are the metaphorical “footprints of the ancestors”, left behind as testimony of their time in the sculpted sandstone canyons and mesas.

Eventually the clans moved on, embarking on a series of migrations in search of their final destination. During these movements, knowledge was accumulated; medicine, technology, architecture, language, arts, celestial understandings to track the seasons, and ultimately, the development of agriculture. We believe this farming tradition, dedicated to the cultivation of corn and other crops, heralds a cultural shift that led us on the path to “Becoming Hopi”. Finally, after thousands of generations, the migrations are completed with the great gathering of the clans at Tuuwanaasavi, “The Center of the Universe” – the Hopi Mesas of today.

This history underscores the cultural continuity between modern-day Hopi and our ancestors. How this connection manifests, often daily, is in the traditional know-how a Hopi person maintains; the crops we grow, the art we create, the ceremonies we perform, and the language we speak. Our ancestral history, the invisible strands of genetic code, and the visible evidence of material culture, are continued in the modern expressions of Hopi people.

These connections are also maintained within Hopi songs and prayers that commemorate landforms found in and around Glen Canyon. Such as, Toko’navi – Navajo Mountain, Namiqw-wunu – Rainbow Bridge, Pisis’vayu –The Colorado River and Yotse’vayu – The San Juan River. An ancient oral history from the Rattlesnake clan details the adventures of Tiyo, a young Hopi boy who journeyed down the San Juan and Colorado Rivers in a cottonwood raft, centuries before John Wesley Powell claimed to be the first to do so.

In modern times, Hopi people continue to visit the Glen Canyon area. We come as any visitor wanting to see and explore these lands. Yet we also come to pay respects to our forebearers. We know that below the waters of Lake Powell there is a landscape that contains memories of Hopi history. We would like to see Glen Canyon restored to its former, natural beauty; hallowed ground that is imbued with the spirits of ancestors, who remain as stewards over a Hopi cultural landscape.