For more than a thousand years prior to the European invasion of North America, agricultural villages, which the Spanish would later call Pueblos, had been established in what would become Arizona. In spite of the fact that each village was an autonomous political and cultural unit these villages were lumped together by the U.S. government as “Hopi.”
The designation “Hopi” is a contraction of Hopi-tuh which means “peaceful ones.” Among the Hopi, town sites were determined by two factors: (1) the proximity to water, and (2) the desire for security. To provide security, the Hopi villages tend to be located on the tops of mesas.
In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur created the Hopi Reservation by Executive Order. The Executive Order which created the reservation allowed the Hopi only the use of the lands and did not recognize their ownership of the lands. The reservation was totally surrounded by the Navajo reservation and excluded the major Hopi village of Moenkopi. The Hopi were not consulted in the creation of their reservation and its boundaries ignored a larger area that was settled and claimed by the Hopi.
The rather arbitrary boundary lines created by the American government did not please the Hopi. Their ancestral homeland had encompassed hundreds of miles of land and had ranged from near what is now the New Mexico-Arizona borderlands, west to the Grand Canyon, and south to the Mogollon Rim. The Hopi clan petroglyphs and religious shrines had demarcated this area for many centuries.
Like many other American Indian nations in North America, the Hopis were farmers. Among the Hopi villages, each clan was given land which the clan members would farm together. The Hopi clans are matrilineal which means that each person belongs to the mother’s clan. Traditionally, men had no right to ownership or inheritance of the land. Prior to marriage, a man worked his own clan lands. After marriage, he worked his wife’s clan’s fields. In the American worldview, however, such communal land patterns were an afront and barrier to civilization. For American governmental officials, academics, and religious leaders, land had to be individually owned by men, with each man farming his own land.
In 1887, the United States passed the General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Act, which was intended to turn Indians into land-owning farmers. The idea of the Dawes Act was to break up the reservations by giving each Indian family an allotment of land, similar to the homesteads given to non-Indian settlers. Under the Act, the lands not allotted to the Indians would be opened up for non-Indian settlement. In his book The Rogue River Indian War and Its Aftermath, 1850-1980, historian E. A. Schwartz reports:
“The philosophy behind the Dawes Act was a near-mystical belief in the efficacy of private property ownership, which was expected by some to erase the differences between white and Indian people and to lead, at last, to the assimilation of Indians into American society.”
Historian Joy Porter, in her book To be Indian: The Biography of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker, writes:
“The idea was to foster ideally Christian, English-speaking nuclear family farms in the Euro-American tradition. Essentially, the act was a Draconian attempt to impose state law, individualized self-sufficiency, and non-Indian concepts of thrift, work, and relationship to the land.”
While the Dawes Act stressed allotment of Indian lands, its actual goal was to destroy Indian cultures and Indian reservations.
Following the passage of the Dawes Act, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs arranged for Oraibi leader Loololma and other Hopi leaders to visit Washington, D.C. where they were encouraged to accept allotment, Christian missionaries, and American schools. Loololma returned to the Hopi supporting the American programs.
By 1891, the village of Oraibi was divided into two factions labelled “hostiles” and “friendlies” by government officials. The “hostiles” opposed sending children to school and the allotment of Hopi land. When the government sent surveyors to Oraibi to map the land for allotment, The Oraibi “hostiles” pulled up the survey stakes as soon as the surveyors left, and the federal government responded by ordering the arrest of the outspoken Oraibi chiefs who had opposed allotment. The troops were met by armed “hostiles” and the Hopi made a formal, ceremonial declaration of war against the United States.
The soldiers called for reinforcements, including Hotchkiss machine guns. The soldiers took eleven prisoners (the war chief and ten other leaders). Five of the prisoners were taken to Fort Wingate where they were forced to tend the gardens of the American officers. The Hopi prisoners did not stand trial nor were they provided with any legal protections.
During the confrontation, the Oraibi leaders showed the American military officers a stone bearing a number of pictographs which defined the boundaries of the lands which were granted to the Bear Clan and other clans by the god Masau-u upon their arrival at Third Mesa. The Americans simply dismissed this evidence of land titles as primitive superstition.
Ultimately, the concept of allotment and the private ownership of farmlands by men was incompatible with Hopi culture. While the Dawes Act resulted in allotment of most Indian reservations, it did not result in the allotment of Hopi lands.
Indians 101
Twice each week—on Tuesdays and Thursdays—this series present American Indian stories. More from this series:
Indians 101: The Hopi Reservation in the 19th century
Indians 101: Kansas Land Sharks and the Kickapoo
Indians 101: The Whoop-Up Trail
Indians 101: California Missions 200 Years Ago, 1819
Indians 201: The Indian Removal Act
Indians 101: The Navajo, Sheep, and the Federal Government
Indians 101: Denying Indian Nations Legal Representation
Indians 101: American Indian Relocation
