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>Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 12:10:17 -0800
>To: Recipient List Suppressed:;
>From: Native Americas Journal <bfw2@cornell.edu>
>Subject: Hopi-Haudenosaunee: Sharing Prophetic Traditions
>
>The following article is provided from Native Americas' special-issue
>on "Global Warming, Climate Change and Native Lands." Published by
>the Akwe:kon Press at Cornell University's American Indian Program,
>Native Americas Journal keeps you informed of issues and events that
>impact indigenous communities throughout the hemisphere. You can find
>more information on this topic, as well as how to subscribe to Native
>Americas on our website at http://nativeamericas.aip.cornell.edu.
>
>[Please excuse any crosspostings]
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Hopi-Haudenosaunee: Sharing Prophetic Traditions
>By John Mohawk/Native Americas Journal
>© Copyright 2000
>
>Harry Watt, Longhouse leader from the Allegany Indian Reservation in
>western New York, told a story about a visit from a carload of Hopi
>in 1948. The Hopi said they had prophecies of working with some
>Indian people in the East, but that they had been told all the
>Indians east of the Mississippi had been killed. Then, during World
>War II, some of their young men encountered Indians from New York
>State.
>
>The Hopi produced a piece of paper with a drawing depicting five men
>holding hands and said these were the people they were looking for.
>They were directed to Onondaga, capital of the Haudenosaunee
>Confederacy, because the symbol was one of the images that appears on
>a wampum belt depicting the unity of the five founding nations of the
>Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy.
>
>Today, hanging from the ceiling of the Onondaga longhouse is a small
>feather. It is evidence, to those who know the story, of the visits
>paid by the Hopi and of the treaty of friendship the Hopi and
>Haudenosaunee entered into during the 1970s. The Hopi came with a
>request, and introduced one of their people, Thomas Banyacya, as
>their spokesman to the outside world. They were on a mission, they
>explained, to warn the world about an impending danger and they
>wanted assistance because their prophecy foretold of a house of mica
>on the East coast and that the representatives of the people of the
>world gathered in this place. The Hopi wanted to deliver their
>message to this house and the Confederacy agreed to help.
>
>Banyacya was a tireless messenger. He traveled all over the world,
>addressing large groups and small, always with the same message.
>
>He carried with him a fabric banner with a facsimile of a pictograph
>he said was on an ancient rock not far from Oraybi, Ariz. Oraybi is
>said to be the oldest continuously inhabited town in the lower 48
>states, and Hopi mythology and prophecy have been the subject of
>numerous books, articles and documentaries. For the most part, people
>have been curious and respectful of the Hopi prophecies, but little
>serious attention was paid to Banyacya or the Hopi message. The
>general public tends toward things deemed entertaining or
>inspirational, and the Hopi ancient wisdom was lengthy, complex and
>out of step with the industrial world's religion of progress.
>
>The Oraybi rock pictograph was comprised of two symbols, which appear
>on ancient Hopi pottery-a circle representing the sun and a reversed
>swastika, which is said to represent the winds. Beneath these were
>drawings of two parallel lines connected at right angles by two
>shorter lines. The bottom line was straight and had representations
>of people and corn, the top line curved downward in a zigzag pattern
>and appeared to go nowhere.
>
>Banyacya used these illustrations to tell his story. This was an
>ancient prophecy, he said, and the two lines represent the way of
>life of distinct peoples. On the bottom line is the way of life of
>those who live in harmony with nature. They are seen as living a
>permanent existence. On the top line are people who do not live in
>harmony with nature-such as industrial civilizations.
>
>In ancient times, he said, there existed previous worlds. In each of
>these, the people were not satisfied with their lives. They wanted
>more and more material goods and they came up with all kinds of
>inventions that allowed them to do marvelous things like fly. But in
>order to do these things they gave up their relationship with nature
>and the sacred. In time the spirits of nature were revolted by this
>behavior and they caused a great purification-fire, floods-and swept
>all away. Survivors went on to build again and another thing
>happened. Greed and materialism prevailed, the spirits of nature
>became angry, and again the world was destroyed. And again there was
>purification. Three times this happened, three times the world was
>destroyed, and today, we exist in this, the Fourth World.
>
>The pictograph illustrates peoples on two roads and the lines
>connecting them represent two times the Earth would shake and the
>second time the two symbols would appear and things would go on for
>another generation or two. (The two symbols are thought to represent
>the rising sun of Japan and the Nazi swastika, and the second event,
>of course, is World War II.) Then the upper road, the path with the
>zigzag lines, would no longer be sustainable and those people are
>destined to suffer greatly and their way of life will end. But the
>people on the bottom line, those, who maintain the way of life in
>harmony with the creation, will go on as before and they will not
>feel the destruction.
>
>It will be difficult for the Hopi voice to be heard in 1999 because
>there are a number of prophets of doom competing for attention. There
>have been stories similar to this in other cultures; the most famous
>among them is the story of the Floods and Noah's Ark. The Hopi have
>explained that they have been trying to warn the world since the end
>of World War II. The sincerity of their message is clear to anyone
>who has heard their story and, in these times, reinforced by the fact
>they did not establish an 800 number or tell people where they can
>send money to avert disaster. The most cynical among us cannot point
>to a profit motive but might think this is simply an indigenous
>superstition or revitalization movement; that the events described
>either never happened or, in the case of two world wars, were either
>invented after the fact or were simply coincidences.
>
>What if the Hopi prophecy is none of these things? What if this story
>is what remains, in the form it had to take, of a philosophy of
>history? What does this story say if we view it from this perspective?
>
>There have not been very many philosophies of history even in Western
>culture. One of the most famous and long-lived appear in the writings
>of Augustine of Hippo (a.k.a. St. Augustine) who taught that history
>was the unfolding of God's plan for humankind on the road to the
>establishment of the Kingdom of God and the Second Coming and
>Judgment Day. This was a way of viewing the world as progressing (and
>progressive) toward a day when all the believers were to become
>immortal and the world would be perfected. It is, upon reflection,
>profoundly anthropocentric and without much consciousness about
>nature.
>
>Machiavelli, the author of The Prince, thought that politics was at
>the center of the historical process and that people ambitious for
>power would endlessly compete with one another for dominance.
>Immanuel Kant had an interesting view of history because he thought
>it was both moral and progressive and that it moved toward the idea
>of humanity, in which humankind progresses toward freedom from the
>"shackles" of an ultimately mysterious and unknowable nature. But he
>was unable to reconcile the idea of progress because it came at a
>cost. The happiness of one generation ultimately comes at the
>sacrifice of the happiness of previous generations, and this price
>was immoral.
>
>Francis Fukuyama thought history was the story of conflicts among
>opposing principles and that the collapse of the Soviet Union and its
>system of Communist rule signaled the end of these conflicts and the
>triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy. He designated this
>moment of a perceived absence of opposing principles "the end of
>history," an idea that some think sounds absurd but also follows the
>general discourse that is the philosophy of history in the West.
>
>The Hopi prophecy truly comes from a different world than these
>thinkers. The popular Western versions of the philosophy of history
>are anthropocentric. The Hopi may find human beings as the critical
>players, but humankind is far from the only player. The Indians of
>the Americas represent hundreds of different cultures, stretching
>from the mountains and forests of South America to the woodlands of
>North America, and a number of these are agricultural. Some of these
>peoples developed agriculture in the most difficult environments,
>including high deserts, mountains, lowlands, rainforests and so
>forth. The record of civilization in the Americas is one of triumph
>of human ingenuity. Some of the irrigation projects abandoned by
>Indians hundreds of years ago in places like Colombia and Bolivia are
>today being revitalized because, essentially, no one can improve upon
>the original designs.
>
>Ultimately, the most important thing to know about these cultures is
>that they were extremely successful. American Indian farmers
>developed an extraordinarily diverse list of edible crops, ranging
>from potatoes and tomatoes to grains and tubers most people in North
>America know nothing about. The result of all this effort was unique.
>The history of Western civilization is littered with accounts of
>famines and plagues and long periods of time when food supplies,
>while not at famine levels, were in short supply. When the Spanish
>arrived in Mexico they found a culture in which people had enough
>food to eat.
>
>Despite this, the archaeology of the Americas provides plenty of
>evidence of civilizations that rose, flourished and then disappeared
>or at least dramatically declined. Such cultures can be found on the
>Pacific coasts in South America, in Mexico, Central America and in
>the American Southwest. Some of these cultures declined for reasons
>unknown. Some may have declined because of internecine violence, and
>some appear to have declined because of climate change. The Anasazi
>culture, antecedent to the modern Pueblo, including the Hopi, may
>have declined because of climate change. According to the Hopi story,
>it happened more than once.
>
>Western civilization had similar experiences in the ancient world.
>Ancient civilizations destroyed their forests, which speeded soil
>erosion, and they suffered from salinized and exhausted soils and
>sometimes became unable to feed their populations. Many explanations
>have been put forward to explain the fall of the most powerful of the
>civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean-Rome. Among these several
>are interesting: greed (the owners of the great estates learned to
>escape taxes, which eroded the ability of Rome to defend herself)
>declining soils, the disappearance of firewood and an economic crisis
>initiated by a Roman version of globalization, which worked to Rome's
>disadvantage.
>
>Western versions of the philosophy of history usually project that
>things are moving forward to some kind of utopian future where all
>the experiments have been tried and the best selected. This is the
>point Fukuyama has made about the triumph of representative liberal
>democracy. The Hopi version is proposing that civilizations are not
>permanent and that a primary reason for their decline is the tendency
>of people to prefer a material prosperity of the present over
>responsibility to "ecological imperatives" and the future. The people
>of the Hopi First, Second and Third Worlds did not heed warnings
>about the consequences of their excesses.
>
>The parallel is compelling. Contemporary industrial society has
>produced quantities of "greenhouse gases" and the subsequent global
>warming is producing weather patterns never seen before in some parts
>of the world. We experience more intense storms, unprecedented
>hurricanes, longer droughts, and the prospect of melting ice caps
>producing rising ocean levels that are already threatening some
>islands with destruction. Scientists can be offered monetary rewards
>to discover that the evidence of global warming is
>"controversial"-evidence of the greed mentioned in the Hopi story-and
>politicians are aware that the steps needed to reverse the trend are
>going to be unpopular and that the public is not clamoring for such
>measures.
>
>Could it be that similar kinds of things happened to civilizations of
>the Southwest long ago? When the first frosts came in June, or the
>drought went into its third year, did people go about business as
>usual? Did a small number of them take steps to prepare? What kinds
>of steps did they take? What do the Hopi mean when they urge people
>to become more in tune with creation? Most curiously, why are they
>trying to warn a mostly uncaring world about impending disaster?
>
>From everything we know about the history of agriculture in the
>Southwest, although various cultures declined, the people of those
>cultures persevered. In some stories they are said to have retreated
>into the Earth until the disaster passed, but in every case they
>re-emerged. The Indians of this area adapted agriculture to the
>desert and developed a culture that enabled them to live in what is,
>by any account, a hostile environment. Modern desert cities are
>colonial outposts that depend on the outside world for many of the
>things that support life. Unless there are dramatic changes in
>lifestyle, modern desert cities will disappear if the wider system of
>support declines. Civilization is always in danger of extinction,
>even civilizations that have lasted thousands of years.
>
>This seems to be one of the messages of the Hopi philosophy of
>history. Modern civilization is no exception. The idea of
>purification may be archaic, but it has its appeal. If global warming
>continues, the Arctic and Antarctic ice will melt, ocean levels will
>rise and the waters will inundate the cities that dot the coasts on
>every continent except Antarctica. That sounds like purification.
>
>For more than 40 years, Thomas Banyacya and other Hopi elders sought
>to address the United Nations at New York City in the "House of
>Mica." For about 20 years, they were joined by delegations from the
>Six Nations Confederacy. In 1992, a decade of indigenous peoples was
>declared and on a December afternoon Banyacya was, at last, invited
>to address the United Nations. He told a version of the story that is
>recounted here. As he spoke, one of the worst storms in memory
>swirled out of the Atlantic and battered New York, causing flooding
>in the streets and high winds in a demonstration of nature's fury.
>The storm may have been a coincidence. Global warming may be a
>coincidence. The Hopi philosophy of history, as presented here,
>counters the Western notion that changes occur over time in desirable
>and therefore progressive ways, and urges that nature reacts in
>unpredictable ways and that humans have a moral obligation to pay
>attention. The patterns of the Hopi message that bring us to this
>kind of conclusion may also be a coincidence. But then again, maybe
>not.
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>John Mohawk, Seneca, is a professor of American Studies at the State
>University of New York at Buffalo.
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>"Nowhere else will you be able to find such powerful-knowledge filled
writing."
>     -Wilma Mankiller, Editorial Board Member of Native Americas Journal
>
>Native Americas Journal
>Akwe:kon Press
>American Indian Program
>Cornell University
>450 Caldwell Hall
>Ithaca, NY 14853-2602
>
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>
>Native Americas Journal
>       http://nativeamericas.aip.cornell.edu
>
>American Indian Program
>       http://www.aip.cornell.edu
>
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>
 

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