Paula Baxter’s Blog
Hopi Thanksgiving: Native Cultures Alive and Vibrant
I used that first part of the title on a previous blog I used to write. The illustration with it was from an old tourist picture postcard showing a Hopi family looking at their harvest. My point was that North America’s Natives have had a long tradition of thanksgiving celebrations, usually around harvest time in the fall. Our famous holiday based on the Pilgrims and a tribe of Massachusetts Indians was an event that did happen, although the cutesy connotations that have gathered around it sorely deserve — and have received — debunking. Nevertheless, it never hurts to point out that all of North America’s arriving immigrants, Spanish, French, or English, would never have survived in the New World for long without Native help.
Zuni Pueblo: Visitor and Arts Center
No visitor to the American Southwest has ever come away without being impressed in some way by the Native ability to give thanks for what they’ve been given. Those who have visited old pueblo towns, such as Acoma Sky City or the villages on Hopi’s three mesas, saw cultures that had met and survived attempted annihilation and subversion by outsiders. While the Pueblo peoples suffered harshly under Spanish rule, they took their religious beliefs underground, their life ways triumphantly endure. Today, only a token group of Acoma live in their mesa top village, but the fact that it remains inhabited is a tribute to their pride in their heritage. Many pueblos hold feast days, and should you get a chance to attend one, or to view a pueblo harvest dance, you’ll gain a real notion of the power of community thanksgiving.
Pueblo villages were offered as attractions to the early tourists to the Southwest, because the villages were close to non-Native towns and cities and the pueblo dwellers were considered “friendly Natives.” The Rio Grande pueblos received the most visibility, especially those at Isleta, Sandia, Santo Domingo, Tesuque, Ohkay Owingeh (formerly San Juan), and Taos. Pueblo peoples who lived further off enjoyed less tourist traffic, although Acoma, Zuni, and the Hopi mesas had attractions of their own. The Zuni particularly had to put up with nosy white anthropologists in the late 19th century.
Then there are the Natives who have different, more nomadic origins like the Navajo, Apache, Utes, Paiutes, and Plains tribes who had regular trade with the northern pueblos. They readily took to the European introduction of the horse, and quickly achieved a reputation as aggressive warriors. In contrast, tourist literature old and new consistently praises the Pueblo people for their peaceful natures. Yet the Pueblos could also be fierce and passionate guerilla fighters; one example is the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which was (for a time) a decisive defeat for the Spanish colonizers.
Tags: 19 Pueblos, Acoma, Pueblo Revolt, Thanksgiving, Zuni