On Awat'ovi

　

1.

The item is identified as Catalog No. IV B3252 at the Museum fuer Voelkerkunde in Berlin. (The German word "Voelkerkunde" – the study of Volk or tribal people – is best translated "Ethnography"; in this essay, I will refer to this institution as the Berlin Ethnography Museum.) IV B3252 is a fragment of a bowl found in the ruins of the Hopi pueblo named Awat’ovi. This village was located on Antelope Mesa in what is now north-western Arizona – the pueblo was the "High Place" of the Bow Clan, a kinship group in the Hopi tribe.

The bowl fits within the archaeological sequence of Hopi ceramics as Sityaki Polychrome. Even in its fragmentary form, the shard of the bowl, measuring about eight inches across, is handsome, the kind of charismatic object that makes children want to grow up to be archaeologists. The yellow concave surface is the color of cheddar cheese. Painted against this background are two flute-players, painted as black silhouettes. The flute-players have endearing little potbellies and their penises are erect; they hunch forward as if to wring notes from the flutes that they play. Between the two flute-players, a masked figure in red seems to be descending from some heaven imagined as beyond the rim of the bowl. The masked figure is enigmatic, a katsina represented either as a ceremonial dancer representing a rain god or the rain god himself. Based on the figure’s placement, hovering between the two flute-players, I interpret the katsina as divine and not merely a masked dancer.

Below the fluteplayers and the rain-god, eight silhouettes perform a sort of conga-line dance. The dancers have acorn-shaped heads, also turned downward. Each seems equipped with a kind of compound eye. Most notably, the eight line-dancers have erections fully as long as the leg that we see planted on the imaginary surface beneath them – there is no ground line painted and the dancers follow the curve of the bowl. The phalluses sported by the dancers have bulbous orange tips, each tapping the dancer ahead. The painted ithyphallic dancers are ambiguous – viewed from one perspective, the erect penises look like legs with round feet kicking upward. The dancer’s phalluses could be construed like a Rockette’s chorus line high-kicking rhythmically as they prace across a stage. But their feet planted on the notional surface of the plaza where they are performing aren’t equipped with the corona and glans depicted in their phalluses. At one point, the dancers formed a circle around the center of the bowl – there were 13 of them once. History has been hard on this bowl – eight of the dancers no longer exist, although we can imagine them, identical to their brethren shuffling in a circle around the inside of the pot, heads tilted downward and knees flexed.

The pot’s colors are extraordinary – warm yellows, brownish black silhouettes, the Cherokee red of the katsina. The rich, creamy yellow is an artifact of how the pot was fired. Antelope Mesa, where the bowl was made, has seams of bituminous coal and this mineral was used in the kilns in which the pot was finished. The intense heat generated by the slow, but long-burning coal creates the pot’s beautiful cheese-yellow sheen.

Forged in fire, the pot has come through fire twice as well.

2.

We tend to think of non-literate tribal people as ahistorical, entrapped in an amber of timeless, inscrutable traditions. But this notion is untrue. Tribal people’s beliefs evolve and develop over time; one tradition supercedes another. The cult of the katsinam (sometimes called Kachinas) swept through the villages of the Southwest toward the end of the 13^th century. The katsina were nature gods, mostly associated with rain, that lived atop the snowcapped volcanoes now called the San Francisco Peaks (they are near Flagstaff, Arizona). The katsinam descended from their palaces atop this Arizona Mount Olympus and abided with the Hopi (as well as Zuni and Tewa speaking people) from the start of the new year until the heat of summer drove them back to their snowy retreats.

New religions are, often, born in violent chaos and, further, destabilize the cultures in which they are rooted until a consensus is achieved. All gods promise good to mankind, but, often, first a lot of killing has to be accomplished. A case in point are the Icelandic sagas detailing the spread of Christianity among the Vikings. Something similar happened with the katsina cult – ceramics and murals in kivas made during the conversion period, roughly 1250 to 1325, show slaughter, man-eating monsters, and eerie insect gods.

Based on ceramic sequences, we can date No IV, B3252 to around 1300. The beautiful bowl was undoubtedly a heirloom passed from grandmother to mother to daughter – the Hopi people are matrilineal. Since the pot was found at Awat’kovi, we also know that it was probably first destroyed around 1700. It was destroyed again later. Beautiful things are often destroyed, reconstructed, then, destroyed again.

　

3.

A purple storm descends, jabbing its proboscis of lightning into the mesa again and again. Men are singing in covered pits underground. After the rain, the robber fly buzzes through humid air. The flies are big and, when they come close, you can feel their wings displacing air.

　

4.

The Hopi word kookopoeloe names the robber fly with its lance-shaped proboscis and mystix (Greek for "moustache") of bristles protecting its mouth parts from the prey that it seizes and kills mid-air. A true fly of the order diptera (two-winged), kookopoeloe is an aggressive predator – the Hopi imagined it as a sort of puma or mountain lion, a feral winged beast that seized other insects, including locusts and large wasps, stabbing its proboscis into its prey and paralyzing them in flight. The robber fly mates tail to tail – the insects have to look away from one another or they will fight, trying to insert their lance-like hypopharynxes into one another’s bodies. The Hopi often saw the large flies mating and associated them with sex and fecundity. The flies also have a hairy hump on the thorax – this is carapace-covered bundle of muscles that operate their wings. Sometimes, the Hopi seem to have thought of the kookopoeloe as like bison; both animals have a hairy hump on their back. Associated with rain, sex, aggression, hunting and the buffalo, Southwestern Indians found the kookopoeloe (as Claude Levi-Strauss might say) "good to think with."

　

5.

The reader will have noticed the similarity between the Hopi name for the dipteran robber fly and the work "Kokopelli". Kokopelli has come to signify the hunchbacked flute players often found on pictograph-etched rock faces and ceramic pottery in the American Southwest. The little flute-players, often depicted with erections, are "cute" and have engendered enormous middens of kitsch – there is a kokopelli-themed golf bag, kokopelli restaurants and resorts, brew-pubs and taverns. You can buy kokopelli trinkets made from silver and turquoise and key-chains showing the little figure’s silhouette. The two flute-players with discrete hard-ons painted on Catalog No. IV, B3 are kokopelli.

In Hopi, Kokopelli refers primarily to the aerial katsinam, gods that flew down to the pueblos from their mountain haunts bringing rain on their shoulders. Not surprisingly, there is a katsina actually named Kookopoeloe – the deity has a hunchbacked and a long snout. The kokopelli flute-players often have two tiny prongs protruding from their featureless, bug-eyed heads – these are the antennae of the robber fly. The flute is the fly’s stabbing proboscis. Like human females, robber flies were always in heat, always ready to copulate, and, thus, the kokopelli figures sport phalluses. This latter detail is generally omitted in commercial imagery depicting the figures.

When you come to think of it, the flute-playing kokopelli is not that different from Pan playing his flute amidst the goats in the lonely mountains of Attica. To experience Pan’s presence is to sense the unity of being in the natural world. But Pan is also associated with blind and furious terror.

　

6.

At the turn of the century, German ethnographers studying the Hopi characterized them as uniquely Apollonian. The distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian cultures derives from Nietzsche, a writer whose ideas were immensely influential in the two decades before the First World War. Dionysian cultures were ecstatic, irrational, enamored with darkness and the chthonic depths of the earth. Apollonian people were devoted to classical serenity, reason, and worshiped the light. Dionysian tribal people felt; Apollonian tribes saw and classified.

The Hopi called themselves Hopituh-Shi-nu-mu – that is, the "little peaceful ones." As we will see, this name is more aspirational than realistic. Like all people, the Hopi possessed a mixture of dark and light, Dionysian and Apollonian characteristics.

　

7.

Ethnography begins in looting and ends repatriation.

The rapacious sea-captains of the Dutch East Indian Company seized tribal totems and masks and grave goods from the islands that they visited. These items were evidence of the outlandish beliefs of the naked heathens living in the jungles on their islands. In order to preserve their trade franchises, these sea-captains donated their collections of tribal curiosities to crowned princes. This was the inception of the Ethnography Museum of Berlin. The curios at the center of the museum’s collection, treasures from the mysterious Orient, were gifts given to the Prussian Prince-Electors, the Kurfuersten. These noblemen maintained at their palaces Kunstkammern – that is chambers of wonders: shamanic masks from the Arctic were displayed with geodes, rare crystals and stalactites, portraits painted on grains of rice, and erotica. The Great Prussian Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm III possesed Kunstkammer, a sort of Ripley’s Believe-it-or-not Odditorium, that contained among other things the priceless feathered mantle of Kamehameha II, given in tribute to a German sea-captain in 1828 – the iridescent robe was intended as an honorarium bestowed by one great ruler, the King of Hawa’ii to his counterpart in cold and rainy Prussia. Presumably, Kamehameha thought that Friedrich William would wear the shawl as a sign of his power and dispense justice in accord with the radiant garment. There’s no evidence that the Prussian Elector ever donned the shawl woven from the innumerable brilliant feathers of Hawaiian birds.

When Prince Friedrich Wilhelm’s collection of curios and artifacts was opened to the public in 1843, the museum’s first director was, in fact, a sea-captain. It was thought that this vocation made him a more efficient collector and, indeed, the first official expedition mounted by the Ethnography Museum was to Brazil, where a vast number of tribal masks, idols and weapons were acquired in the Amazon basin.



8.

Around 1150, the high civilization at Chaco Canyon collapsed. The great houses with their finely cut masonry walls were abandoned and the vast, ceremonial plazas covering large subterranean kivas vanished into the dunes of the encroaching desert. Fifty-years of drought ended the Pax Chaco. The obsessively straight curbed highways running from sacred place to sacred place were no longer maintained and the outlier great houses scattered throughout the Four Corners area fell, one by one, to the fire and war-lance of nomadic invaders. Nature was out of balance and the priests whose power was rooted in their ability to summon the rains lost prestige and were torn to pieces by the thirsty people as mere and fraudulent sorcerers. The civilized people, those who built stone houses and cultivated fields of corn and beans, retreated to the tops of inaccessible mesas or built elegant, but profoundly uncomfortable, cliff dwellings. It was an age of fortification. The vast complexes of intricately dressed cut-stone fell into heaps of disorderly rock and the people avoided them as haunted by ghosts and evil spirits. Men ate men – in the human excrement found in Cowboy Wash, the site of a big massacre, there is indisputable evidence of cannibal feasting.

The Hopi, Zuni, and Tewa-speaking people were born of this dark age. They fled from the center to the periphery. The towns that these refugees built, then, became the new centers of the world for their inhabitants. The Hopi, in particular, were refugee people par excellence, the products of the great exodus away from the settled places around Chaco Canyon. Hopi is a language-isolate – this means that it is a distinct language with no known relatives or cognates. Most languages exist in groups: Old Norwegian spawned the Scandinavian languages including English; Latin is the source of the Romance languages such as French and Italian. Hopi stands alone – if there were related dialects they were extinct by the 13^th century. Although the Tewa people (who speak Keresan dialects) and the Zuni as well as the people at Acoma pueblo all lived, like the Hopi, in similarly designed pueblos, all of them spoke different languages. The Hopi were never pure-bred. Rather, their language formed a cultural core around which various refugee clans from other tribes assembled. The Hopi were generous in adopting outsiders. A band that had been expelled from its homelands might make a petition to the Hopi elders for admission to the clan. The elders interviewed the tribal leaders of the supplicant refugees and determined the craft skills (usually the possession of the women) and ritual technologies that the immigrants offered to Hopi commonwealth. Native American religions were syncretic – if an immigrant group possessed a particularly powerful "medicine" (for instance, the ability to summon rain gods or make crops grow or communicate with the ancestors), the Hopi were happy to incorporate those believes into their cult practices. (Later, the tragic Ghost Dance religion that swept through the Plains Indians in the last decades of the 19^th century was synthesized from Mormon prophecy, Christian apocalyptic imagery, and specifically native worship paradigms.) If the elders agreed to incorporate the new immigrants into the Hopi alliance, the newcomers were expected to learn the Hopi language so that they could participate in the political and religious practices unifying the people. They were allowed to retain their own language and gods with the understanding that no native Hopi would ever speak their tongue or, even, try to learn it. Hopi was the language that the gods and nature spoke.

As a result of Hopi generosity to immigrant clans, the tribe flourished. But the Hopi were always only loosely confederated – the individual pueblos were self-sustaining polities. Hopi language unified the clans but the people thought of themselves as primarily members of a village community – the village was their central identity. For this reason, Hopi clans competed with one another and, sometimes, even waged war between villages. The pueblo Awat’ovi on a high escarpment atop Antelope Mesa was considered, therefore, the polity of the Bow people or clan.

　

9.

In 1843, the ethnographic collection of the Prince-Elector at Berlin was moved into the neo-classical edifice of Karl Schinkel’s spectacular Neue Museum (the "New Museum"). The New Museum is a Greek temple built on a high plinth on the so-called Museum Island in the Spree River in central Berlin. The place is beautifully proportioned with an immense Doric portico. It was also crowded with all sorts of paintings, artifacts and historical relics. As German aspirations toward colonialism increased, the ethnography collections expanded. Very soon, they outgrew the dimensions of the galleries in the New Museum.

A vast new structure was built in 1873 at the intersection between Koeniggraetzer Strasse and Prinz Albrechtstrasse. (Koeniggraetzer Strasse became Stresemannstrasse during the Nazi period – this was the center of the Nazi bureaucracy and the Ethnographic Museum headquarters were uncomfortably close to the Gestapo headquarters with its labyrinth of basement torture chambers.) Named the Royal Museum for Ethnography, the museum building occupied a roughly triangular plot of land, extending like a partially opened scissors away from the fulcrum where the two roads intersected – the scissor’s two blades were the two wings of the museum. A contemporary engraving shows the Museum’s huge atrium or Lichthof, a bright courtyard immediately behind the curved classical colonnade fronting the intersection. Two mighty totem poles stand in the beams of light descending through a skylight above them. Although it was a big building, the Royal Museum was already too small for the ever-increasing collection of artifacts and antiquities.

The museum’s director, Adolf Bastian, believed that so-called primitive art should be displayed according to comparative-genetic paradigms. All tribal people had cerain common characteristics – they shared certain belief systems that were, in essence, hard-wired into human beings – Bastian’s exhibitions were intended to highlight these hard-wired symbolic systems. Accordingly, he might exhibit all fertility cult idols, notwithstanding their origin, in one part of a gallery. Bastian included German folk art among his collections, but kept it apart from the objects produced by tribal cultures. His view was that tribal people were ahistoric – the genetic structures of belief to which they subscribed were timeless and unchanging. The museum’s two wings were basically divided between tribal art from the South Pacific, Africa, and America with Asian art displayed in the other extension of the building. Notably, the Asian art collection contained huge and detailed plaster casts of bas-relief friezes from Angkor Wat in Cambodia. These casts were very popular with the museum-going public.

10.

Germany aspired to an empire between 1880 and 1914. During this imperialist period, Germany claimed colonies in Ghana, Benin, East Africa (including Tanganyika), Namibia and the Cameroons. In the South Pacific, Germany administered German New Guinea comprised from half of Papua, New Guinea, the Bismarck archipelago, and the Solomon Islands. In addition, the Germans had various concessions in China.

Not surprisingly, the great age of German imperialism corresponded with an era of intense ethnographic field collection. German explorers scoured the world for objects to ship back to the ethnography museum in Berlin. Item No. IV, B3252 was most likely acquired during that period. Germans dug up graves, looted grave goods, and, also, bought shiploads of antiquities and relics. An endless succession of ships and railroad cars brought artifacts to Berlin.

No more storage space existed in the central Berlin museum. Accordingly, a warehouse was rented in Dahlem, a suburb to the southeast of the City Center – it’s where the Free University of Berlin is located. Ultimately, six warehouses were acquired as a vast treasure house for tribal objects and far Eastern art. Around 1910, museum authorities commissioned an eminent architect to design four new exhibition buildings in Dahlem – the plan was to display the warehoused objects in these buildings. Then, World War I intervened. Field collection ceased and Germany was stripped of its colonies, the sources for many of the artifacts shipped to Berlin. Of the four new buildings planned for Dahlem only one was constructed – the neo-classical palace was completed in 1921 just as money for the project was exhausted. The German economy collapsed as a result of war reparations and inflation. People had other things on their mind beyond the curious habits and customs of the Naturvoelker.

At the downtown Berlin museum, the collections were reorganized to acknowledge the new understanding that tribal cultures evolved over time. The collections were displayed in a way that emphasized the evolution of design paradigms and technology over time.

　

11.

The provenance of Item No. IV, B3252 is unclear to me. Publications showing the shield-shaped bowl fragment don’t identify how it came into the collection of the Berlin Ethnography Museum. So I will speculate.

Henry Voth was a German Mennonite born in 1855 at Alexanderwohl, an Anabaptist enclave south of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). Russia controlled Alexanderwohl during the 19^th century and, when the Czar embarked on a series of wars, many Mennonites emigrated – the sect is strictly pacifist and, often, persecuted for refusal to serve in the military. Voth’s family, facing persecution, found their way to Kansas where the Mennonites established several towns. Voth trained for the Heidenmissionen (Conversion of the Heathens), studying some medicine and religious doctrine. The zeal of a missionary burned in him and the young man went West to convert the Arapaho first at Darlington in the Indian territory (now Oklahoma) and, then, the Fort Reno reservation. Voth learned the language of the Indians and studied their rituals, religion, and folk tales. By all accounts, he was an effective, if fierce, proselytizer. But his mission was opposed by the charismatic Ghost Dance sect that spread like wildfire through the Indians of the northern plains and mountain west. Notwithstanding his opposition to the Ghost Dance, Voth studied the phenomenon carefully, corresponding with prominent American ethnologists at both the Smithsonian Institute and the Field Museum in Chicago. He illustrated his reports on the Ghost Dance rituals with objects that he collected and sent to Chicago and Washington, D. C. The Ghost Dance was an apocalyptic millenialist cult – adherents believed that the vanished herds of buffalo would be resurrected, springing forth from the green meadows of western plains, the white men would vanish, and warriors wearing Ghost Shirts consecrated by the faith’s holy men would be impervious to shot and shell: lead would bounce of the Ghost shirts as if they were made of tempered steel. These beliefs perished in the bloody ice at Wounded Knee Creek.

The Mennonite mission to the Hopi called Henry Voth. He traveled to the Third Mesa with his family and lived on the outskirts of old Oraibi, one of most ancient pueblos in the United States. Voth was industrious after the Teutonic manner and learned Hopi. He acquired a Kodak camera and began documenting Hopi rituals – many of the most important images of Hopi life in first decades of the 20^th century were captured by Voth. Again Voth commenced correspondence with scholars in Chicago and Washington. And he also sent his treatises on Hopi religion and language to specialists at the Berlin Ethnography Museum.

An ambitious man named Fred Harvey established several luxury hotels along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad (and, later, other westbound railroads as well). His hotels catered to tourists traveling west to see the scenic wonders of the Grand Canyon and northern New Mexico. (The hotels recruited young women to work as chambermaids, receptionists, and waitresses in their dining halls. These were the so-called "Harvey Girls" – there is a Hollywood musical about them circa 1946 starring Judy Garland. Will Rogers said that the "Harvey Girls" kept the American West well-supplied "with ham ‘n eggs and wives.") Harvey’s upscale restaurants and hotel lobbies needed decor and, so, he dispatched agents to the reservations to collect curios. Henry Voth’s enterprises at Oraibi needed money and the Indians were happy to earn cash producing pottery and colorful blankets for Harvey’s businesses – ultimately, Harvey had about 45 hotels and restaurants called "Harvey Houses" along the train route west from Topeka to California. Most of his businesses were equipped with gift shop selling Native American souvenirs. Voth’s transactions with Fred Harvey made him expert in Pueblo pottery. At this time, Voth was also corresponding with Aby Warburg, the famous cultural theorist, then working for the British Museum in London. Voth was a learned man and he shared his studies internationally. He also was an avid "pot hunter", digging out ancient burial sites and sending his harvest of ceramics and shards to museums around the world. Many items in the Berlin Ethnograpy Museum were collected by Voth on the Third Mesa and dispatched to the Pueblo specialists employed by the Museum.

The Hopi at Oraibi were afraid of the spectral ruins at Awat’ovi. Sometimes, however, sheep wandered afield and grazed amid the half-fallen walls extruded from the barren rocks like broken teeth and the young men had to venture into desolate fallen walls and towers to retrieve them. Some of the walls at Awat’ovi were fifteen feet thick, still higher than a man could reach, and there were mazes of windowless, doorless cells built up against the big ramparts. Navajo shepherds said that they sometimes heard voices singing in the ruins – perhaps, it was just their imagination because in Navajo, the ruins had always been called Tallahogan, the Singing House. Voth was intrigued by the place and made some excavations there. During one of these digs, he saw a piece of ceramic, partly covered with soot, resting among the fallen rocks – when he spit on the shard and rubbed off the ash, it glowed with a pale daisy-colored radiance, something like a piece of light-colored cheddar cheese. The figures painted on the pot were obscene, not suitable for Fred Harvey’s hotel lobbies or the showcases in his restaurants. So Voth cleaned off the pot, painstakingly recorded its appearance with his Kodak, made some notes as to the dispositions of the figures, and, then, sent it off to one of his correspondents in Berlin.

Drought struck the Third Mesa in 1902. The traditional Indians who had resisted Voth’s missionary work blamed those who had converted – life on the Third Mesa was "out of balance" (kooyanitsqatsi). Voth’s proselytizing had scared away the katsinam. The ground dried up and was so hard that it couldn’t be pierced with a planting stick – it didn’t matter because there was no moisture with which to grow corn and beans. Voth had to order two freight cars full of corn from Kansas to feed his flock. Dissension in the tribe resulted in a schism at Oraibi. Voth’s Christian Indians moved out of the village to a place a mile distant and established New Oraibi. Old Oraibi, hunkered down on the edge of the mesa, sweltered in the sun and starved.

When he was sixty, Henry Voth was worn out by missionary work. He and his wife said goodbye to his converts, rather few for the 20 years that he had spent among the Hopi – the Indians were a stiff-necked, obstinate people set in their ways and difficult to win for the Lord. Voth returned to the old Cherokee Outlet in Oklahoma where he was appointed pastor of a Mennonite church at Goltry. He served the Church until he was 72 and, then, died in 1931.

　

12.

It’s an old story: once upon a time, there were two brothers, both of them tribal chieftains. The elder brother went to the East to seek his fortune. For many years, he was absent in the lands where the sun rises. One day, he returned in triumph to his younger brother. In the years that he had been gone, the younger brother had been profligate – he had squandered the wealth of his people and they were now poor, desperate, and vicious. The tribe had become dissolute – sexual perversion flourished, strange sicknesses afflicted the people, and they had forgotten the sacraments central to their religion. The climate had changed – summer was more hot and dry than it had been before and the winter was much longer and more cold. Floods washed away fields where the people grew corn and squash. Even the wild animals had become scarce. Dogs and coyotes told the older brother that the tribe and the younger brother had neglected all of the common decencies that made men civilized.

Confronted with this accusation, the younger brother admitted that he had allowed the people to fall into decadence and that their way of life was not sustainable. The younger man knelt before his elder brother, offering his throat to the blade. Weeping, the older brother decapitated the younger man, seizing his head by the forelock and waving it as a warning to the people. The tribe repented of its evil ways: the old forms of worship were reinstated, the katsinam returned from the conical snowy peaks bearing rain in its proper measure – the fields flowered, sexual perverts were put to death, and balance among the seasons was restored. Koyaanisquatsi became suyaanisquatsi (life in balance). After order was restored, the people accused the older brother of murder. He submitted to their judgement and was decapitated.

This is the way that the chaos of the Third World named koyaanisquatsi becomes the serenity and peace of the Fourth World called suyaanisquatsi. The story is told from the Aleutian Islands, and on the Third Mesa and down to Peru and the Tierra del Fuego – when Cortez arrived in Mexico, he was hailed as Quetzalcoatl, the winged serpent incarnated in the elder brother who had gone East for many hundreds of years but had now returned to the people of his younger brother.

　

13.

Men’s deeds cast a long shadow. One of Henry Voth’s first converts was a member of Katsinam clan, Fred Quoyawayma. His daughter, Polingsaya, attended Voth’s Mennonite school at Oraibi. Voth was aggressive about recruiting children for his school and vigorous about enforcing attendance requirements – this angered many Hopi parents and partly led to the schism that ultimately divided Oraibi into two villages. Polingsaya (the name means "butterfly among flowers stirred by breeze") was a good student and her father admired Henry Voth enough to send her to a Mennonite High School in Riverside, California. Polingsaya returned to the Third Mesa and worked for awhile as a missionary. But she was not content: her fellow Hopi were suspicious of her affiliation with the White missionaries and the missionaries were condescending to her – she was too Hopi for their tastes.

Polingsaya went to college at Bethel in Kansas, an university with which Voth was closely affiliated. She returned to Arizona as a substitute teacher and, then, full-time educator in the Navajo Morman town of Tuba City. After a few years, the Bureau of Indian Affairs hired her to teach at Hotevil or New Oraibi – the village founded by the progressive Hopi after the Oraibi split. By this time, Polngsaya Quoyawayma’s thinking had changed – instead of attempting to convert the Hopi to European customs and religion, her approach was synthetic: she aimed to unite the best traditions in both cultures. In order to achieve this objective, Polingsaya conducted her classes in both Hopi and English. This innovation made her a pioneer in bilingual Indian education, the paradigm that supplanted the infamous BIA boarding schools in which native children were punished for speaking their home language. By 1941, Polingsaya’s methods were so well-established and so universally acclaimed that she was appointed to teach teachers how to apply these techniques. She wrote an acclaimed novel about her childhood Sun Girl and, later, collaborated with other writers on books about Hopi history. She won many awards and, late in life, invented a new technique for firing ceramic pottery – her pots are distinctively pink. She died at the age of 98 in Phoenix, Arizona.

　

14.

The elder brother from the East appeared on Antelope Mesa at Awat’ovi on August 20, 1629. The elder brother’s name was Francisco de Porras. Porras was a Franciscan missionary who brought the gospel to the Hopi village. At that time, the town was large, boasting masonry apartments that lined the rim of the escarpment, some of them four stories tall. The bottomland below the mesa was a patchwork of green irrigated fields where the Hopi grew beans, squash, corn and fine cotton used for weaving. Awat’ovi had a large plaza and several commodious underground kivas. Neat masonry walls surrounded the village and fortified it against enemies.

The priests in the Katchina cult opposed Porras’ missionary work and threatened to pitch him off the rim of the mesa. But, then, he cured a boy blind from birth. When the child’s eyesight was restored, Spanish Catholic sources tell us that "conversions followed like foam." Many among the Hopi were disposed to license new religious rites – it wasn’t so different from embracing the cults of immigrant clans who had joined the tribe before. But the Franciscan god was jealous and, presaging events that occurred almost 300 years later at Oraibi, the Hopi divided into two factions – progressives who supported the Catholics and conservatives who felt that the presence of the priests and his followers menaced their way of life.

Porras commanded that the people build a church. The task was arduous. The priest specified that cyclopean walls be constructed, heavy stones piled upon stones, and the interior place of assembly was vast by Hopi standards, a dark echoing space under a ceiling made from matted reeds and clay supported by great timber vigas. The vigas were cut from whole trees, harvested on mountains at the Black Mesa forty miles away, and, then, laboriously dragged to the construction site. The enterprise of building the mighty stone church took half-a-lifetime and exhausted countless man-hours. Simply hauling water from the valleys to the barren cliff-top to mix the mud for adobe bricks occupied the women of the village for days at a time. Later, the Bow Clan people regarded their conscription in gangs constructing the church as a kind of forced labor. But, of course, the Hopi vastly outnumbered the three or four Franciscan missionaries and, no doubt, many of them took pride in the huge ungainly edifice squatting on the edge of the mesa cliff. For the progressive members of the Bow Clan, the church signified a special dispensation granted to the people at Awat’ovi.

There were other dispensations as well: the priests also demanded that a convento, or lodging house, be built in the shadow of the church, additional spacious rooms made from carefully joined stones with long vigas holding up the ceilings. The Franciscan missionaries taught their apostles to sing in the European manner, plainchant and hymns rendered in complex polyphony, masses and liturgy, even, motets. The Hopi were musical and quickly mastered the songs that they were taught. At night, there was singing in the plaza and within the great gloomy cavern of the mission church and, even, voices sounded underground in the subterranean kivas. The church was given the name San Bernado de Aguatubi, after one of the Franciscan’s patron saints, Bernard of Clairvaux.

The Mission Church was not yet finished when Porras died. In the midst of vigorous life, he was seized with a mysterious illness. Dying in agony, Porras maintained that apostates among the Hopi had poisoned him. But work on the church continued – its foundation walls were more than six feet thick. The people remained divided. The site of the church itself signified the divisions in the community: the church altar was built directly atop one of the community’s principal kivas. Before the foundation stones were set, Hopi priests, who had become adherents of the new religion, carefully deactivated the sacred powers intrinsic to the kiva – the ritual vessels were broken and fine, sifted sand was poured into the round pit, burying its benches and sipapu, it’s hearth and old murals painted on the walls. The schism in the clan, also, took on a physical dimension – the mission Indians relocated to build their apartments in next to the dressed stone walls of the church. The adherents to traditional cults maintained their distance, on the other side of the plaza.

As the years passed, disquieting events manifested the conflict in the village. The priests were accused of seducing village women, sending their husbands on long quests to locate and carry sacred water from remote springs, while the Castillas, as they were called enjoyed their wives. Apostate Indians were sometimes publicly flogged or, otherwise, humiliated. In 1655, a Franciscan priest beat a native disciple to death. (He was removed from his position and sent back to Mexico City, a long hike that took, at least, six months.) A few years later, a Hopi named Juan Suni was arraigned at Awat’ovi on charges that he had mimicked a priest and, perhaps, traduced the holy sacraments. In fact, it was probably a misunderstanding: Juan Suni was a member of the Sacred Clown society and, as such, felt it was his duty to mock and caricature prominent men in the village – this was the role of the Clown dancers. Suni was probably simply discharging his role in that society and the priest, the clown dancers’ thought, should have been honored by thought important enough to burlesque. But the Franciscans were not amused and Suni was beaten and, then, sent as an indentured servant to faraway Santa Fe. Also significant was the fact that the other mission churches at the six or seven Hopi pueblos were largely empty – the only converts were at Awat’ovi. In fact, when Indians were converted in one of the other villages, they were generally ostracized and, so, moved to Awat’ovi to join the pueblo of mission Indians there.

The Franciscans hung bells in their high tower and they rang over the fields below the mesa where the Hopi worked among their cotton and corn. People were still "washed on the head with water"– that is, baptized. But discontent was growing.



15.

The rule of war is that what you do to others will, ultimately, be done to you. Americans wage war more blithely, perhaps, than other people because this principle has never really applied to our homeland. But it’s a rule in which Europeans are well-schooled.

The Nazis knew what the Luftwaffe had done to London, Rotterdam, and Warsaw. It was inevitable that aerial war would come to Berlin. And, so, in 1941, the major museums on the Spree island and scattered about Berlin and its suburbs were shuttered and the collections carefully hidden in unobtrusive places. No one had time to spend looking at precious things in museums any way. The war was supposed to be all-consuming.

In the years immediately preceding the Blitzkrieg, the collections of the Berlin Ethnographic Museum had been divided and, further, divided. The art of the so-called Naturvoelker (primitive people) was regarded as a pure expression of these people’s instinct for their "blood and soil" and so cautiously valued. But the mongrel folk art of the Balkans, Ukraine and Eastern Europe, thought to be a sickly hybrid between East and West was considered degenerate. Some objects were left on display but purely for diagnostic purposes – the art expressed a kind of racial pathology.

The art of the American Indians was highly regarded. Courtesy of the writer of melodramatic Westerns, Karl May, the Germans have always had a soft spot for American Indians. Winnetou, the Sioux warrior, and the noble Apaches were pure-blooded, valiant and true, in fact, honorary Aryans. German soldiers were encouraged to emulate the self-sacrifice and courage shown by Native Americans. The same was true of the American paratroopers leaping out of airplanes to the cry of "Geronimo!"

　

16.

The people of the Southwestern pueblos spoke different languages and, often, went to war with one another. But they recognized the common threat posed by the Castillas and negotiated an alliance to wage war on the Spaniards. Drought afflicted the land. The Franciscan priests had expelled the katsinam and banned the masked dancers whose role was to summon the rain gods from their mountain lodges. In 1675, three katsina dancers, accused of violating the canon law prohibiting masked dancing, were hanged in the plaza of Santa Fe. On the Hopi mesas, a rogue priest, Father de Guerra, led a group of his disciples on a search through people’s houses for woven cotton fabrics – the material was demanded as tribute for his church. When he found curious assemblages of feathers and carved idols in some of the people’s homes, he doused them in turpentine and set them afire. When the owners of this ritual regalia protested, he poured turpentine over their shoulders and heads and set them on fire as well. This sort of conduct was beyond the pale and Church authorities called Father de Guerra to account. But, after some mild discipline, he was not exiled to Mexico City, but, instead, assigned a new Church at Isleta, west of the Mission on the Colorado under Sandia Mountain (near modern-day Albuquerque). This was too much and the leaders of the pueblos met secretly, decided upon a date for an uprising, and, then, sent runners to the various villages. The runners carried knotted rope. Each knot represented a day. When the last knot was untied, the warriors were to attack the Spanish in each of their strongholds and kill them all. The runners reached the old pueblo at Taos and the great Pecos pueblo to the east of Santa Fe; fleet-footed men ran as far west as Acoma and the Zuni and Hopi villages on the remote Arizona mesas. Except for the mission Indians, everyone agreed that the Spaniards should be slaughtered.

On August 10, 1680, the Rio Grande pueblos around Santa Fe rebelled. Priests were murdered. Some of them were hung from the vigas of their churches and roasted over slow fires. The Hopi at Awat’ovi and the other villages on the mesas seized the Franciscans and killed them. Father Figueroa was cut down as he said his prayers in the great Mission church. As the mission Indians stood by, paralyzed by fear, the warriors looted the church and knocked down its bells. At Oraibi, Father Espelata was dragged from his monastic cell, his throat slit, and his body ignominiously cast off the mesa cliff. A new priest, Fray Augustin de Santa Maria was beheaded. Father Trujillo at the Hopi pueblo of Shungovi was forced to watch the dismantling of his church. The vigas so laboriously dragged from the Black Mesa two generations ago were heaped in a pile, a fire was started, and Trujillo was bound and hung over the blaze.

By the end of August, no Spanish were left alive on the Third Mesa or at Awat’ovi on Antelope Mesa or, indeed, anywhere else within Hopi territory. About 430 Spaniards were killed in pueblo country, between the Pecos big house in the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the East and the Zuni and Hopi villages overlooking the canyons in northwest Arizona. A bedraggled and terrified caravan of Spaniards in their hot and dusty iron breastplates riding alongside barefoot women and children crossed the deserts to take refuge in El Paso. The great Pueblo Revolt had achieved its purpose – the Castillos had been expelled from the Hopi villages and the other pueblos in the Southwest, each place claiming itself to be the center or navel of the earth. The world had been purified.

　

17.

No one knows exactly what happened at Awat’ovi during the next twenty years. The archaeological record provides some clues, but they are indistinct. The church was abandoned and its roof collapsed. But there is evidence that people still sometimes used the ruins for worship. The spacious rooms of the convento, too large for the Hopi, were subdivided by the erection of internal walls, and people moved into those tenements and lived there. The kivas were restored, although many of them were now equipped with cross-shaped icons and lit with candles made in imitation of those once used by the Franciscan missionaries. Most puzzlingly, someone lovingly wrapped the bones of dead European in precious textiles and, then, bound the corpse into the flexed position that the Hopi used in their mortuary practices – people began as wet oozing fetal balls and that was how they ended as well, buried with their knees strapped up under their chins. The dead European had been first defleshed, possibly with knives and also by exposure. Then, his bones, tied into a fetal position, were buried midway between the old deactivated kiva filled with sifted sand and the ruined altar of the mission church. When the bones were discovered during a Harvard-sponsored dig conducted by John Otis Brew in 1936, the skeletal remains were sent to Harvard’s Peabody Library where they were stored in a steel case. In 1937, a Catholic priest named Reverend Stoner, trained as an archaeologist at Tucson, embarked on a campaign to have the skeleton repatriated to his diocese. Stoner argued that the Vatican was considering canonizing as saints the priests who died in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and that the Church should have possession of this potential relic. Wrangling ensued over the skeleton. Reverend Stoner seems to have concluded that the dead European was Father de Porras – in that way, avoiding contentious issues as to the justice of the Pueblo Revolt. After all, Father de Porras was an innocent, poisoned for bringing the light of the Gospel to the Hopi. Finally, Harvard conceded the point and shipped the bones to the Church, postage pre-paid and the package insured for five-hundred dollars. It’s not clear to me what happened to these remains.

A thick stratum of ash and soot was found during Brew’s excavation in the mission church and convento. Above this lens of burnt material, Brew found 69 burials. These burials meant that between 1680 and 1700, when the pueblo was destroyed again and its people all murdered, the Hopi in Awat’kovi had been burying many of their dead in the consecrated earth under the ruins of the church. Further, 59 of these burials were supine, the skeletons set on their backs and often interred with grave goods that included rosaries and crucifixes. A dead Catholic priest had been carefully buried as a Hopi; dead Hopis had been carefully buried as Catholics. Despite their deaths, the Franciscan fathers’ influence continued – many of the Hopi at Awat’ovi seem to have considered themselves, at least, partially Catholic. Perhaps, this should not be surprising. Awat’ovi was the capitol village of the Hopi and its most cosmopolitan settlement. It was also conspicuously religious – as late as the early 20^th century, Hopi elders recalled that alone among the settlements Awat’ovi possessed the full complement of the tribe’s cult societies, a total of 18 in all. None of the other villages were as pious.

　

18.

The Castillos returned, more of them and better armed. In 1693, Santa Fe was recaptured. At first, the Indians accepted the return of the Spanish but, then, rebelled again and there was a bitter siege at Santa Fe. Hundreds were killed in the reconquista. (The festival at Santa Fe celebrating the bloodless recapture of the city is based on lies and half-truths.) By 1695, Franciscan priests were back on the Hopi mesas. Ute and Navajo Apache raiders had attacked the Hopi villages and destroyed some of them. During the wars with the nomadic invaders, the Hopi’s crops failed. The winter between 1695 and 1696 was lethally cold and many people died of starvation. Refugees fleeing the Spanish reconquista at Santa Fe and the upper Rio Grande flooded on the Hopi mesas. But there was no place for these refugees – the land was over-taxed and crops were failing. Tanos warriors, hardened by battles with the Spanish, turned their faces west and joined the Navajo and Ute raiders in attacking the fortified villages on the mesas. The Franciscans were back at Awat’ovi, this time with a garrison of mounted soldiers and they rousted the Hopi out of the old convento, tearing down the interior walls so that they could stable their horses in those structures. These Spaniards weren’t much interested in the Church – they were harder, more avaricious men than the priests.

The weather was strange. The human robber flies had returned. Kooyanisquatsi reigned. Life was out of balance.

　

19.

In the end of March 1945, Berlin was dead, although it was still fighting. Swarms of bombers buzzed like flies over the cadaver of the city. Several bombs dropped through the Lichthof (atrium) of the Ethnography Museum. It was probably accidental, the incendiary bombs intended for the Anhalter Bahnhof, a train station across the street. The grandiose Lichthof with its towering totem poles and Papuan ancestor figures was empty when the bombs pierced the building. The collections had been spirited away.

Bombs shattered the adjacent train shed, knocking molten girders and metal sheets down onto the shredded tracks. An aerial photograph taken in 1947 shows a large open space where the train shed was once located – the ruined infrastructure of ticket booths and concessions appears as a kind of battered brick amphitheater around the empty area where the trains once pulled into the station. Across the street, there is simply no trace of the rounded museum portico that stood at the intersection between the two diagonal streets. The roads are clear and the debris seems to have been either bulldozed or hand-picked out of the vacant lots. The stolid Biedermeier facades of the museum’s wings are upright, but galleries behind them seem to be gone.

In Dahlem, German soldiers hid in the museum branch there as well. The building was shelled and a photograph made after the war shows the neo-classical facade ravaged by pot-hole-sized craters.

　

20.

Hopi values were piety, kindness to strangers, valor in the defense of the people, fortitude, temperance, chastity, generosity, and respect for elders. So long as these values were observed, suyaanitsquatsi prevailed – life was in balance.

But something was wrong at Awat’kovi. The people were deviating from the right way. Perhaps, they were inventing a new religion. Perhaps, sorcery was afoot. The Hopi believed in witchcraft and, from time to time, executed sorcerers, carefully shredding their bodies so that they could not reconstitute themselves. The bones of dogs were found in some of the kivas when Awat’ovi was excavated in 1936. Dogs are cousin to coyotes and coyotes are in league with the manifold devils of earth and sky. Dogs and coyotes are able to speak with one another and everyone knew that, from time to time, a coyote would prevail upon a dog to bite its master and run wild in the plaza, frothing at the mouth. No one had ever allowed dogs into the kivas for fear that they would tell their cousins about the religious sacraments celebrated there and, in that way, allow the dark forces an advantage over the light. Dog meant witchcraft.

History progressed – men grew wiser with each generation – but there were also cycles observed in time. Suyaanitsquatsi sometimes gave way to koyaanitsquatsi. Life out of balance could only be purged by violence, by killing dogs and coyotes and sorcerers. The katsinam shunned places where life was out of balance.

It had happened many times before. The mesas were dotted with broken places, ruins that no one dared enter. These were dead villages, the wreckage left by slaughtered human beings, places where life had been out of balance until the avenging angels appeared with fire and sword. Long ago, the debauched people at Pawatkapi had been killed by a huge horned serpent – the ruins of the town showed where the dragons tail had broken its towers. Sityakti, the place where the beautiful polychrome pottery had been invented, was destroyed when its people became arrogant and defied the gods. Pivanhokyapi, the village of the famous Ladder Dance, was destroyed by a beautiful young witch from Huk’ovi, a neighboring village, when she was spurned by a boy from the village. The witch knocked down the vertical ladders poised on the edge of the mesa precipice from which the young men leaped back and forth. Old Spider Woman, the village’s patron and protectress, restored the ladders and made them firm in their post-holes but this was insufficient to save the town. When the men were leaping from ladder to ladder, the witch stood in the crowd, enraged. When the dance was complete, the men retired to their kivas. The witch broken down the roofs of the kivas filling the subterranean places of worship with poisonous fumes and the men all died. Disconsolate, the women and children fled across the mesa to seek refuge in other villages and the ruins of the Ladder Dance pueblo were abandoned to the lizards and carrion crows.

Sometimes, the elder brother came back from the East, pale as the Pahanas (White men). He condemned the people’s wickedness, was beheaded, and, after the evil ones had been butchered, the younger brother was beheaded as well.

After the Ladder Dance lodge was destroyed, a flame spurted from the ruins and crossed the mesa to Huk’ovi, the place where the beautiful young witch lived. At Huk’ovi, the people had become addicted to gambling – the men wagered on totolopsi, a game played with dice, and, when they had exhausted all their worldly goods, they staked their wives on the roll of the die. The wives didn’t protest and thought it exciting to be passed from hand to hand. So the fire came to Huk’ovi and coalesced into Tiiykuywuuti, Woman with Child Sticking Out. Tiiykuywuuti wore a mask that was so fearsome that those who looked upon it went mad. When she removed the mask, the cowed people of pueblo gazed upward to see a pale, radiant maiden, a girl who had died in child-birth, with her corpse-baby still wedged between her thighs. Tiiykuywuutki said she had come to kill all witches and sorcerers but that she would spare the village if the people went elsewhere, joined other clans, and renounced their wicked gambling. The people at Huk’ovi fled their village and Tiikuywuutki put on her horrible mask and threw down all the walls and burned the kivas. Those living in Huk’ovi were so terrified that they crossed the desert basins and snowy mountains to establish villages along the California coast.

In 1700, the head man at Awat’ovi was Ta’palo. Ta’palo despaired of the wicked ways of the people in his village. When they would not respond to his admonitions, he left the lodge of the Bow clan and walked to Walpi, a village renowned for its fierce warriors. Ta’palo told the soldier society at Walpi that the people of Awat’ovi were misusing the power that the Hopi called pawa – the medicine that lets humans change their religion and institution. The people in Awat’ovi were committing blasphemy, denying the divinity of the katsinam, and engaged in all sorts of sexual perversion. Furthermore, their sorcerers were blighting the crops and distorting the seasons. Ta’palo said that Walpi could have the rich bottom-lands held by the people of Awat’ovi if the soldier society would lead an assault on his village and purge the place of its witches. The Walpi were greedy for the lands held by the Bow clan and agreed that life was out of balance there and that suyaanitsquatsi. The people at Walpi said that the warriors of the Bow clan were well-disciplined and courageous and that more troops would be required to destroy the Awat’ovi. So Ta’palo went to Oraibi. He told the soldiers there that they could have their choice of the women and children spared after the Awat’ovi was knocked down. The people at Oraibi agreed to join the expedition, but thought that more fighters were needed. Ta’palo then went to the village of Mishongnovi. He told the warriors there that they could make slaves of any woman or child not picked-out by the men from Oraibi. So the soldiers at Mishongnovi also agreed to join the assault.

Of course, there’s another explanation for Ta’palo’s rage. Perhaps, he was just a disappointed politician, someone who had been a leader but was, then, rejected by the people. No one knows for sure.

21.

Berlin’s center had been knocked flat. The air smelled of fire, diesel fuel, raw sewage, rotting flesh. Tanks thundered over the broken roads and sidewalks, crushing corpses into pennant-shaped banners of empty skin. People cowered in cellars. On the streets, men hanged for cowardice or treason dangled from lamp posts, shredded by the shrapnel in the air, brown and ragged like jerky spilled from a parfleche. At a ruined train station, a woman’s suitcase fell open – she was carrying the corpses of her two small children, both reduced to tiny carbonized figures with little fists clenched under their chins.

What remained was soot, rubble, smashed ceramics and grey ash.

　

22.

The warriors hiding in the darkness painted their faces, strung their bows, honed the edges of their knives. At dawn, Ta’palo crept into Awat’ovi and pushed the gate in the walls ajar. The soldiers heard voices singing, a motet learned from the Franciscans. The voices were tightly intertwined, woven together like the baskets that the women in the village made.

Most of the men at Awat’ovi were in the kivas attending to their morning devotions. The warriors attacking the village surrounded the kivas and hacked apart the men who tried to escape by ascending the ladders. Then, the war parties pulled the ladders from the kiva pits and hurled burning embers into sacred gathering places. By this time, the whole town was on fire. Soldiers lit dried ristas of hot pepper on fire, creating choking poisonous smoke – these were thrown into the kivas as well. It was all over in a few minutes – the men and boys were slaughtered as well as the village’s dogs. Everything that could burn was set afire. The old women committed suicide or were flung off the mesa top.

The women and girls were herded into a stony dry wash near the village. A quarrel ensued among the warriors. The Oraibi claimed first choice with respect to the captives. But the Walpi said that it was their ferocity that had destroyed Awat’kovi and that the most beautiful women and girls belonged to them. The men from Mishongnovi disagreed and said that they had been promised the best captives. The war parties raised their weapons and were about to fight when someone from Oraibi suggested a way to end the quarrel: "Let’s just kill them all," the man said.

The warriors were wild with blood-lust. Once killing is commenced, it’s not an easy thing to bring to a stop. And, so, the men fell upon the women, torturing them to death. Arms and legs were cut off and breasts were slashed. Thirty of more women and girls were killed in this way. The slaughter ended only when one of the women, pleading for her life, said that she and her sisters knew the ritual that summoned the rain gods to the mesa. She said that they also were expert basket weavers and that it would be wasteful to cut them into little pieces. The men’s fury was slaked. They looked about, appalled at the carnage in the dry wash. The women were spared so long as the agreed to never speak again about Awat’kovi.

In the smoldering village, everything was ruined: it was all soot, rubble, broken pottery, and grey ash.

　

23.

After the fall of Berlin, soldiers searched through all nooks and crannies in the Reich. They were hunting renegade Nazis, crazed dead-ender militia, war criminals, and booty. The Allies located artifacts from the Berlin Ethnography Museum’s collections in Dahlem and other city suburbs. The building in Dahlem was disfigured but not destroyed. A small exhibition of Ethnography Museum treasures on loan from the Allies was mounted in the chilly galleries of that structure in 1946. The Allies repatriated the museum collections that they had captured back to the Bundesrepublik Deutschland in 1950. Another show was staged in ruins of the downtown Museum across from the smashed Anhalter Bahnhof and only a stones throw from the old Gestapo headquarters. That show opened on May 21, 1955 – this was before the Berlin Wall divided the city. The items looted by the Soviets were taken to Moscow and Leningrad. Some of these artifacts were sent to Leipzig in the DDR (East Germany) in the 1966 and 1971. These objects formed the core of a new ethnography museum constructed in that city, a town that the East Germans had rebuilt as a showplace for their culture and economy. About 45,000 objects were shipped from Moscow and Leningrad back to Leipzig at that time. The Leipzig Museum showed its artifacts in icy vitrines, reverting to the notion that so-called primitive art was timeless, a-chronic, and governed by abstract forms arising the collect Kunstwollen (artistic drive) of the tribal communities where the things had been collected.

The Ethnography museum ruins in central Berlin were on the site where the Wall was built in 1961 and so the old building was entirely torn down. During the period that Germany was divided, two ethnography museums existed – the East German collection in Leipzig and the Berlin Museum of Ethonography at Dahlem, near the campus of the Freie Universitat in the old American sector. The shell-cratered Dahlem Museum was, ultimately, razed and replaced by a museum built in the new Brutalist style, all rough-looking prestressed concrete and steel cantilevered stairways and balconies.

After the Wall came down, the collections in Leipzig and Dahlem were re-integrated. The museum at Dahlem where the collections were assembled was much too small. The old Berlin Schloss, or royal residence, had been destroyed by fire bombs on February 3, 1945. The smashed palace was in the Russian sector and so was replaced by the hideous jumbo Palace of the Republic – this was a structure designed to contain what counted as the East German legislative bodies, but, also, large enough to accommodate concert venues, cafes and restaurants, a library, as well as skating rinks and bowling alleys. After East Germany collapsed, the vast complex of buildings was found to be lethally rotten with asbestos. The complex was bulldozed and, on its spot, the Germans began erecting an exact external replica of the royal Baroque palace destroyed in the war. The inside of the structure was modern, indeed, post-modern, and, in fact, there is something weirdly post-modern as well about construction workers laboring to install towering pre-fabricated sections of rococo facade around a core equipped with all the intricacies of 21^st century HVAC and state-of-the-art computerized exhibition galleries. The restored Berlin palace or Schloss (castle) is called the Humboldt Forum and the collections of the old Berlin Museum of Ethnography will be displayed there – apparently this year (2019).

German curators estimate that 25,000 items identified in the catalogs and indices of the old Ethnography Museum were lost in the War, most of them, presumably, still hidden in Moscow and St. Petersberg.

　

　

24.

It would be nice to pinpoint exactly when No. IV B3252 was smashed. But internet searches haven’t yielded any information on that point. All that we know is that the bowl was broken during World War II. Half the ceramic was shattered, apparently comminuted, so that the figures painted on the bowl could not be reconstructed. Of the 13 sportive conga-dancers with their knobby erections, only six survive substantially complete. Two partial figures are at the head and tail of the curving procession and, since all dancers are identical, it’s easy enough to imagine the others completing the circuit around the concave interior of the bowl. I wonder whether there was a katsina figure on the opposite rim of the pot, flanked by kokopeli flute players – this seems plausible to me, but I don’t know.

I would like to tell you that a bolt of shrapnel smashed half the pot to pieces or that a Soviet looter, running through the fiery streets was shot and fell on the bowl or that American troops tried to cook K-rations in the pot over an open fire and broke it or that a 500 pound incendiary bomb plummeting to the earth didn’t detonate but that it’s huge blunt nose knocked the pot into pieces, pulverizing the little dancers with their hard-ons. But, of course, it’s equally likely that the pot was broken in shipment or that some butter-fingered museum attendant simply dropped it on the floor while trying to arrange ceramics on a shelf. No. IV B3252 survived the massacre at Awat’ovi but didn’t make it through the Fall of Berlin. It’s the nature of war to smash things up.

A photograph shows that the pot has been mended in sober, non-demonstrative manner. Where the pot has been restored, the ceramic is the color of the bowl’s background, that is vaguely cheese-colored, but without figures painted on the surface.

　

25.

Flashflooding still uncovers bones in the Tallahogan ("Singing House") wash. Most of the skeletons were retrieved from the massacre site in the thirties. Forearms were broken, so-called "parry" wounds, and skulls had been smashed apart during the killing. Many of the bones showed that they had been cut through with stone axes and obsidian blades. Bones still sometimes emerge occasionally from the sand and gravel of the wash. It’s a lonely place, off-limits, and people don’t go there.

　

26.

Ethnography begins in looting and ends in repatriation.

In the late 19^th century, a Norwegian Arctic explorer, Johan Adrian Jacobson, on expedition funded by the Prussian King in Berlin ripped open some Chugach graves hidden in caves near Prince William Sound. The graves contained heavy implacable masks, cut from spruce or hemlock, and the carved figure a of an ancestor, a yard-high post with a glowering face cut into it. (A cradle and carved cane were also looted.) The grave-goods reached Berlin and were indexed as part of the Ethnography Museum collection.

In 2018, the museum repatriated the masks and shaman figures to the Chugah tribe. Everyone seems to have regarded the return of the figures as public relations coup. Photographs show a representative of museum handing a large, crudely carved mask to someone from the tribe. Unless you read the caption, you can’t tell which man works for the German museum and which represents the Indian tribe – both seem equally European. The mask is forceful, with the nose and forehead carved like an archaic helmet, the sort of head-gear that you might imagine Beowulf wearing. One eye is open, the other is closed in death. Both men are wearing bluish plastic gloves of the type associated with TSA searches and rectal examinations. Although it’s not visible in the photograph, the mask was painted red with a pigment made from seal oil, human blood, and powdered hematite.

This is second time the masks and other grave goods have been repatriated. The items were lost in World War II. They resurfaced in the fifties in St. Petersberg, then, Leningrad. The Soviet authorities sent the masks to Leipzig in 1966 where they were displayed. The masks and other grave goods, then, went to Dahlem after the reunification of Germany. Upon the building of the Humboldt Forum in the Berlin Schloss, the museum contacted the Chugah corporation (Native American groups are incorporated in Alaska) and agreed to repatriate the items to Alaska.

There are more than 60 steel boxes in storage at the Peabody Museum at Harvard. These boxes contain skeletal remains excavated from the ruins of Awat’ovi. Some women survived the slaughter and, since the Hopi are matrilineal, there are clans that still trace their kin to Antelope Mesa and the ruined town. Of course, the Native American Graves Repatriation Act would entitle the Hopi to recover the bones at Harvard and return them to Indian Country. But the Hopi have pointedly not asked for repatriation. The people killed at Awat’ovi were powerful sorcerers and, if their bones were returned to Antelope Mesa, their ghosts would stalk the killing grounds seeking revenge. And, so, the dead from Awat’ovi are orphaned, an embarrassment to the Peabody Museum and not wanted by the Hopi.

In recent years, the Hopi have erected a tall chain-link fence around the ruins of Awat’ovi. The gate of that fence is always locked.

　

　

Note: some of the source material for this essay derives from an excellent book by James F. Brooks, Mesa of Sorrows: A history of the Awat’ovi Massacre (W.F. Norton & Co., 2016). A photograph of Berlin Ethnography Museum No. IV, B3252 may be found in Ekkehart Malotki’s fine book The Making of an Icon – Kokopelli, (University of Nebraska 2000), see Plate VII.