The Hopi Tribe

The Exciting History of The Hopi Tribe

Hopi society is matrilineal rather than matriarchal: clan membership and inheritance pass through the mother’s line, and a person’s clan establishes their place and responsibilities within the community. Clan relationships carry weight that outsiders often underestimate, and they matter more in daily life than many blood relationships do.

The Hopi live in twelve villages spread across three mesas in northeastern Arizona. On First Mesa are Tewa, Sichomovi, Walpi and Polacca; on Second Mesa, Shungopavi, Sipaulovi and Mishongnovi; and on Third Mesa, Kykotsmovi, Old Oraibi, Bacavi, Hotevilla and Moenkopi. Each village governs its own affairs and keeps its own ceremonies, so what is true of one is not automatically true of another.

The Hopi Reservation covers approximately 1,542,306 acres, or around 2,400 square miles, in Navajo and Coconino counties. The 2010 Census recorded about 12,580 Hopi people living on Hopi land, with several thousand more living elsewhere.

The Hopi Tribal Council makes law for the tribe and sets policy for tribal business, while the individual villages retain a great deal of autonomy over their own affairs. That balance between central council and village independence is a defining feature of how the Hopi govern themselves.

Notable Hopi Artists

Hopi artists are widely collected. Fred Kabotie, a painter, and Paul Saufkie, a silversmith, worked with the Museum of Northern Arizona in the 1930s and 40s to develop a distinctly Hopi jewelry style, and Saufkie taught the first Hopi silversmithing classes for returning World War II veterans in the 1940s. Together with those veterans they went on to found the Hopi Silvercraft Cooperative Guild in 1958. Nampeyo, the First Mesa potter, and the jeweler Charles Loloma are among the best known Hopi artists of the last century.

The Hopi Reservation was established by executive order in 1882. Much of the century that followed was shaped by boundary disputes with the neighboring Navajo Nation, whose land surrounds the Hopi Reservation entirely, and by federal boarding-school policies that removed Hopi children from their families. The Hopi Tribe is a federally recognized sovereign nation today.

Hopi Housing: There exists one general type of building among the Hopi. They are built using adobe bricks, but some can also be built using wood. Many buildings have two stories, while others may have as many as five. Houses range from 10 by 12 feet to 20 by 50 feet. Apartments usually contain one room and kitchenette, whereas larger houses contain multiple rooms. When there are available resources, homes are often connected to form townhouses, apartment complexes, or even entire suburban developments.

In addition to individual housing, the Hopi are responsible for the upkeep of at least 80 community centers. Some are simple structures, such as the “hobble” house, while others are elaborate multi-storied affairs with air conditioning, flush toilets, and running water. Most of these are used for dances and rituals. Other uses include meeting halls, classrooms, libraries, and auditoriums.

That building tradition connects the Hopi closely to the Pueblo people, whose architecture follows the same logic. If you own a Hopi piece and want to know its worth, our jewelry evaluation archive is the place to start.

Hopi & Their Religion

Religion: Hopi ceremonial life follows an annual cycle tied closely to farming and the seasons, and it remains central to the villages. Much of it involves the katsinam, spirit beings who are honored in ceremony and represented in the carved figures often called kachina dolls. A great deal of Hopi religious practice is private, and visitors should not assume that ceremonies are open or that photography is welcome. Some Hopi people are also Christian; the two are not always treated as mutually exclusive.

Hopi accounts describe the people emerging into this world and being given instructions for how to live in it, and clans carry their own histories of migration before settling on the mesas. We are deliberately brief here. These are living religious traditions belonging to the Hopi themselves, they are not uniform from village to village, and a jewelry site is not the right place to summarise them for you. If you want to understand them, seek out Hopi voices rather than ours.

Language: Hopi belongs to the Uto-Aztecan language family. It is very much a written language as well as a spoken one – the Hopi Dictionary / Hopìikwa Lavàytutuveni was published by the University of Arizona Press in 1998 – and language teaching is an active concern in the villages today.

Hopi Jewelry: Hopi silverwork is best known for overlay, and it is the technique that makes a Hopi piece recognisable across a room. Two sheets of silver are used: the top sheet is cut away in a design, then soldered over a lower sheet that has been oxidised dark, so the pattern reads as shadow against bright metal. The designs draw on Hopi pottery and basketry motifs. Overlay was developed deliberately in the 1930s and 40s, when Fred Kabotie and Paul Saufkie worked with the Museum of Northern Arizona to establish a jewelry style that was distinctly Hopi rather than an imitation of Navajo or Zuni work. Because the interest lies in the silver itself, Hopi pieces often carry few stones or none at all – which is worth remembering when you are judging one.

Older Hopi work sometimes carries a four-armed pinwheel motif that gives an unusually precise date. We explain the whirling log and dating older pieces separately.