Fernando Berrojalbiz

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas

Neyra Alvarado

El Colegio de San Luis Potosí

The Landscape in Tepiman Village Tradition

This work presents a comparison over time of the concept of space between two traditional Tepiman communities: Papagos and Tepehuanes. From the identification of the domain of different ecosystems, of the mobility that fills the life of these peoples, as well as of the rituals and of the importance of hills, caves, and burial places, we have put in relief common aspects that indicate to us that they belong to the same tradition. This concept of space, owing to the landscape, is determined by mobility within an open and free space, but with references to sacred places, among which stand out the hill associated with the labyrinth. This permits us to understand how memory is tied with places of the desert and with time, uncovering a new form of appropriation of space.

Carlo Bonfiglioli & Sabina Aguilera

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas

Tarahumara Rasps and the Concept of Cosmic Stairway

Starting from data collected by Lumholtz at the end of the 19th century – the rasp of the jíkuri shaman is the path of tata Dios - of which consciousness seems to actually have been lost, distinct elements within and outside the ritual context will be analyzed, including the textile and ceramic iconography, in order to sustain the standing and the importance of this concept for the Rarámuri cosmology.

Johanna Broda

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas

Mesoamerican Offerings in a Comparative Perspective

This paper establishes a classification of Mesoamerican offerings (mainly Aztec and modern Nahua) based on archaeological, ethnohistorical, iconographic and modern ethnographic evidence. It proposes some theoretical concepts in approaching this study and focuses on themes underlying the offerings related to cosmovision, the growth of corn crops and fertility in general, petition for rain, animals related to water and earth, etc. A comparative perspective is established with offerings of the Aymara of Bolivia on the one hand, and with historical descriptions of Hopi altars and dry paintings, on the other. The paper concludes that offerings and altars convey a deep cosmological meaning that is shared by the ancient tradition of Native American religions including the American Southwest, Mesoamerica and the Andean cultures.

Gordon Brotherston

Co-ordinates of the Epic Journey in Ancestral Pueblo and Mesoamerican Texts

A clear demonstration of cultural continuities between Mesoamerica and the greater northwest of Mexico can be found in the paradigm of the epic journey, at the end of which the traveler rises as it were astronomically in the eastern sky. Coincidences between the two regions, in detail and overall conception, are so precise and specific in this matter as to demand far more thorough investigation than has been undertaken hitherto. Moreover, interdisciplinary as it is, this project is well suited to promote such investigation.

Patricia Carot y Marie-Areti Hers

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas

Serpent Images along an Ancient Camino de Tierra Adentro

New archaeological studies in Michoacán and in the Sierra Madre Occidental document a very strong interaction between those parts of Mesoamerica and the Southwest from 600 to 1150 A.D. and allow for a review of the circumstances in which those relations occurred. The time period considered corresponds to that of the Mesoamerican expansion to the North and the creation of an ancient Tierra adentro road during the first millennium. Among the numerous iconographic and conceptual similarities between those distant regions, we choose to examine varied images of the serpent. Three themes related to these serpent figures have been recognized and are analyzed: the creation of the cosmic order, the  symbol of power and human sacrifice, and the water serpent, with examples from ancient Tarascan, Chalchihuites, Hohokam, and Mimbres art. The creation of the cosmic order is expressed by the violent action of two opposite serpents splitting a primordial deity, in some case Cipactli, the earth monster, in others the famous Coatlicue, the Earth Mother. The theme of power and sacrifice is evoked by the bird grasping the serpent and by the composite figure of a human-serpent being sacrificed or with the speech scroll as a symbol of the ruler. The theme of the horned plumed water serpent associated with fertility and well-being is even more widely expressed and is a good example of  cultural continuity as it is still the central deity of the modern Pueblo.

Linda Cordell

University of Colorado Museum

An Overview of Pre-Columbian Maize Agriculture in La Gran Chichimeca: Questions and Avenues of Research

Maize, the most important domesticate for all indigenous peoples of La Gran Chichimeca, originated as a tropical grass. At various times scholars have thought the plant came from the U. S. SW, from Northern Mexico and from Mesoamerica. Archaeological information provides the data for understanding how the crop was developed and some ideas about how it diversified and spread out of its original humid, tropical habitat. Archaeological and botanical information encourage us to think about the contexts within which this transmission and diversification occurred. New data from archaeology, indigenous knowledge and practice, botany, experimental farming, and cultural anthropology provide exciting new directions for research.

Philip E. (Ted) Coyle

Western Carolina University

The Symbolic Construction of Náyari (Cora) Cosmology Through Pilgrimage and Ritual

Náyari people of Nayarit, Mexico undertake seasonal pilgrimages to sacred springs in order to “join the waters” from the four corners of their world and carry those waters back to the center. This symbolic act is said to bring about the return of the rains, who Náyari people refer to as their own deceased paternal ancestors.  In undertaking these pilgrimages, Náyari people also carry forward a symbolic representation of the universe. This representation depicts the heavens as fundamentally male and the earth as female. Their own bodies are depicted as corn, an axis mundi growing out of the earth and towards the heavens. These representations are particularly notable during the mid-winter Festival of the Wheel, which provides a clear image of Náyari cosmology.

Alejandro Fujigaki, Isabel Martínez y Coral Montero

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

The Road of the Dead: Relationships between Ethnographic and Archaeological Evidence in Northwestern Mexico

The main objective of this paper is to set a dialogue between Archaeology and Ethnology, focusing on the analysis of human burials in the Northwest of Mexico.  How these ritual processes vary through time, but related to similar ideas, set the burial as a unit that can be considered into a larger logic that includes the annual ritual cycle, the agricultural cycle, and finally the life cycle.  In this paper we consider the Northwest of Mexico as an area of study where a wider tradition is generated in space and time thus, having a continuity.  Nonetheless, there is possible that through time, transformations of the system can ocurre.  The Northwest of Mexico is not an isolated area, but one that has many dinamic relationships with other areas like Mesoamerica and the Southwest of United States.  Comparisons between global contexts and systemic contets will allow the  understanding of  the area both, in its own terms, and in the cultural continuity that exists throughout the region.  In this paper, we have used the tarahumara casa as an example, comparing it with other groups from the same region, as well as contrasting it with some archaeological data.

Arturo Gutiérrez

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas

Solar Calendars and Ceremonial Centers: A System of Transformations between Huicholes, Coras and Hopis.

In recent works I have proposed that the ceremonial centers called by the Huicholes tukipa, operate as true solar calendars tied to the basic principles of: a) the knowledge the people have about the solar and sidereal cycles; b) the link between these cycles with ceremonial organization; c) the previous points expressed by way of a cosmovision.

This presentation is an attempt to observe how these principles, when displaced to a neighboring culture like the Cora, operate with distinct expressions but under the same systemic principle.  Once the basic principles are profiled it is necessary to carry out a comparison with more removed groups, in this case with the Hopi kivas, which are also important solar calendars that express a cosmovision by means of the kachina cargo system.

Jane Hill

University of Arizona, Department of Anthropology

Linguistic Prehistory of the Uto-Aztecan Peoples

Maize cultivators arrived on the Colorado Plateau early in the 2nd Millennium B.C.  They encountered there a distinctive array of flora and fauna and a set of environmental challenges different from what cultivators had faced previously in the spread of maize cultivation (and probably cultivators) out of the Mexican highlands.  The linguistic evidence suggests that one of their strategies in accommodating to the new environment was to form social ties with, and to solicit knowledge from, local populations of hunter-gatherers.  The evidence takes the form of a set of words for economically important plants that are found only in Northern Uto-Aztecan languages, including pinyon pine, acorn-bearing oaks, Apocynum, Chrysothamnus, Carum gairdneri, and Calochortus among the plants.  The Northern Uto-Aztecan word for a prototypical large game animal, variously meaning deer or pronghorn, may be a similar loan. I argue that this set of words was borrowed by speakers of Proto-Northern Uto-Aztecan from speakers of a language ancestral to the modern Kiowa-Tanoan languages. In turn, the ancestral Kiowa-Tanoan community appears to have borrowed some maize cultivation vocabulary from Proto-Northern Uto-Aztecan.

Phyllis Hogan and Theodora Homewytewa

Arizona Ethnobotanical Research Association

The Little Colorado River Corridor Ethnobotanical Project

Located in north-central Arizona an ecoregion of dazzling diversity, the Little Colorado River (LCR) is a cultural crossroads of immense importance to both Hopi and Navajo.  Along the LCR corridor there are more than 4,000 archeological sites and a network of Pre-Columbian trails that link the modern day town of Zuni in southeast New Mexico with the 12 Hopi villages of Black Mesa. In this power point presentation you will be introduced to some culturally significant medicinal and edible plants utilized by the respected Hopi Medicine Woman Theodora Homeytewa.

Hopi Footprints Project Team

Dawa Taylor, George Gumerman, and Marvin Lalo

Hopi Cultural Preservation Office and Northern Arizona University - Anthropology

Hopi Footprints: Building a Culture Curriculum for Hopi Schools

Archaeology, Anthropology, and Hopi elder oral history are used to build a standards-based cultural curriculum for K-6 Hopi schools. Archaeological sites provide a stimulating arena for cultivating an understanding of past cultural traditions that are linked to today’s Hopi people. Hopi oral history discusses these archaeological sites telling the story of Hopi migrations across much of the southwest. Our culturally appropriate professional development and cultural curriculum enables Hopi youth to connect to their cultural history and thereby facilitate student learning.

Steve Lekson

University of Colorado at Boulder

The “Post Classic” of North America

“Postclassic” refers to the period in Mesoamerica from the end of Teotihuacan and the Classic Maya to the arrival of the Spanish, or (roughly) A.D. 850 to 1520.  Michael Smith and Francis Berdan in The Postclassic Mesoamerican World (University of Utah Press, 2003) list its salient characteristics: (1) explosive population growth;  (2) proliferation of small polities; (3) increased quantity and diversity of long distance exchange; (4) commercialization of the economy; and (5) new iconographies and  stylistic interaction; to which, many would add (6) heightened militarism. 

This was the world in which Chaco (in northwestern New Mexico), Cahokia (near modern St Louis) and Paquimé (in northern Chihuahua) emerged as capitals of secondary states.  Archaeology has not thought hard (or even thought much) about secondary states.  “How do third- and fourth-generation states differ from first- and second-generation states? … and what to call the polities on the periphery of states when they acquire some of the trappings of that state but are never really incorporated into it?” asked contributors to a recent volume on  Archaic States (Gary Feinman and Joyce Marcus, SAR Press, 1998).  America north of Mexico is a good place, I think, to address those questions.  Chaco, Cahokia and Paquimé were sufficiently state-like: kings, capitals, monuments, regional economies, perhaps even armies (all much smaller and much less successful than, say, Tula), with a degree of permanence (a century or two).  And they were surely secondary, historically, to Mesoamerica.

We are accustomed to think of Chaco, Cahokia, and even Paquimé as isolates, cultures evolving in separate Petrie dishes.  Atomistic isolation is our default state.  We demand hard, solid proof – a bag of exotic sherds, tell-tale trace elements, exact copies of motifs – to demonstrate that Indians on one side of the river knew about Indians on the other side of the river.  This seems like a cruel, almost insulting assumption about the people we study.   Even the poorest peasant, mired in the mud of mediaeval Europe, had heard of Jerusalem and knew it lay somewhere to the east.  How much more might the lords of Cahokia or the rulers of Chaco know about their world? 
Let’s assume, instead of atomistic isolation, that everybody knew everything.  Not in detail nor with great accuracy, but perhaps Native peoples of North America knew quite a bit more about the continent they had inhabited (for over ten millennia!) than we customarily give them credit for.  If we treat Native North America like other continents (including Australia), we would not have to prove that Chaco or Cahokia knew something of the great cities to the South.  We can assume that this was so.  
When we speak of the “evolution of political complexity at Chaco” or “at Cahokia,” we should pause and reflect that “political complexity” in the form of kings, cities, and state-like entities had “evolved” almost two millennia earlier to the south.  Whatever political solutions were offered by leaders of Chaco and Cahokia, those solutions were not made de novo or in a historical vacuum – or in a Petrie dish.  There were almost two thousand years of political history and traditions which formed the background for northern political and social experiments.  And two thousand years of political history upon which rulers of northern secondary states could draw (à la Mary Helms). 

Many characteristics of Postclassic Mesoamerica were mirrored in contemporary societies of the North.  In the Southwest, (1) population exploded in the 11th and 12th centuries; (2) a series of small polities rose and fell – Chaco, Aztec, Paquimé, Classic Hohokam; (3) long distance exchange increased markedly in Pueblo IV; (4) market economies flourished in the Hohokam Sedentary and Classic periods; and (5) the remarkable new iconographies and stylistic interaction of Pueblo IV are analogues to the Mixteca-Puebla style (and other “international” styles), far to the south; and without question, (6) violence approaching militarism came after the 11th century.  Much the same could be said for the Mississippi Valley and the Southeast.  A few examples/observations:  Population increased at remarkable rates through the middle Mississippian periods.  Small and not-so-small polities rose and fell at Cahokia, Moundville, and scores of subsequent Mississippian “chiefdoms.”  The Southeastern Ceremonial Complex was Pueblo IV’s artistic equivalent in the East – if very different in form and content!  And militarism rose to levels unheard of in emergent Mississippian, Hopewell or earlier periods.  The trends and developments which characterized the Postclassic in Mesoamerica were paralleled in the North.

Danna A. Levin Rojo

Universidad Autónoma Metropolitano-Azcapotzalco

The Matachines Dance in the Hispano-mestizo Community of Alcalde, New Mexico: Possible Origins and Contemporary Developments

The matachines dance is one of the few dances performed both by Pueblo and Hispanic people in New Mexico. Its origins and original meanings are obscure but it is commonly believed that it derives fom the “Danzas de Conquista,” introduced in Mexico by missionary priests as a theatrical resource to reinforce evaluation. Attending to the characters involved in the performance –which is a purely choreogaphic representation with no dialogue but has one dancer playing Malinche and another playing Monarca/Montezuma– it has been suggested that initially it was a representation of the triumph of Christians over Moctezuma thanks to the efforts of Doña Marina, la Malinche who is considered the first convert in New Spain. The dance is also performed in Arizona among the Yaqui and in many places within Mexico, especially among the Tarahumara, Tepehuano, Yaqui, Mayo, Cora, and Huichol Indians, as well as among mestizo communities in Zacatecas. In nineteenth century New Mexico many Pueblo villages and almost every Hispanic village had their own matachines group that would dance on the town’s annual feast day or during Christmas. Today the number has shrunk to less than two dozen villages, among them Alcalde, a small, 89% Hispanic village in Rio Arriba County located in the vicinity of San Juan Pueblo, the Tewa village where the conqueror Juan de Oñate first established his headquarters in 1598.

After discussing the possible European origins (Italian and Iberian-Arabic) of the matachines dance and the way it may have been introduced in New Mexico, this paper focuses on the Alcalde matachines performance, highlighting the aspects it shares with other Hispanic versions and the differences between these and the Pueblo Indian versions. Apart from recent developments that reflect current transformations in local gender relations brought about by modernization, it reflects upon the role that this ancient tradition plays today in the community as a social space for cultural resistance and identity reinforcement as well as the ideological and political meanings it has come to embody vis à vis the land struggles of the pre-USA Hispanic community all over the state territory.

Janelli F. Miller

Washington University in St. Louis

Medicinal Plant Use among Rarámuri Women during the Childbearing Years.

Knowledge and utilization of plant remedies for pregnancy and birth is widespread among the Rarámuri of N. Mexico, yet there is little mention of plant use by women for childbirth in the literature. Previous ethnobotanical studies among the Rarámuri were undertaken primarily by male researchers and focus on plants used ceremonially or by men, including male ritual curers.  Information about plants discussed in this paper was elicited from Rarámuri women and Mestiza midwives between 1999 and 2003 in the Northern Sierra Madre.  Plants used by Rarámuri women also used by the Hopi and Navajo are noted, with an eye towards similarities and differences in usage.  How does knowledge about plant use in women’s reproductive cycle vary between the groups and what cultural, ecological, and sociopolitical factors need to be taken into consideration of these differences? 

Gary Nabhan and Shawn Kelley

Northern Arizona University, Center for Sustainable Environments

Changes in Crop Diversity and the Flower World among Uto-Aztecan Farmers, from Hopi through the O'odham

Some of the richest early documentation on agrobiodiversity and diet in the New World comes from Uto-Aztecan cultures, allowing longitudinal or "time-lapse" comparisons to assess changes in crop varieties and diet through time. This discussion will focus on a new assessment of agrobiodiversity among Hopi farmers, from prehistoric through historic to contemporary times, and compare their agrigenetic erosion and crop loss with that of the O'odham in Arizona, Sonora and Chihuahua. It will also discuss the largest seed repatriation in the Americas, which occurred in Hopiland in 2003, and efforts to restore crop diversity to Hopi fields and orchards.

María Eugenia Olavarría, Cristina Aguilar y Erica Merino

Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, México

Hitebi: Flower and Temple

Among the Yaqui (yoemem) of Sonora, México, a person receives from God the gift that will help him/her meet his/her ritual commitment: air or spirit is essential, as are the fluids that possess a transcendent sense: blood, tears, milk.  The yoemem destined to be healers receive the flower of the earth, a dark stone that is found in the entrails of the deer, and their own body – the temple – is conceived of as an altar, as a center in which the cosmological directions come together.  The hitebi or curandero – as the yoemem translate it into Spanish- is the person that cures, the one who has received from God and the other protector entities such as virgins and saints the gift of healing. This gift can be manifested through dreams or experiences in which the said entities or relatives of the hitebi comunicate their talent for healing..

The present work is an exercise in ethnographic writing in which, by means of the stories and testimonies of a group of yoemem women recognized as healers, the universe of traditional yoeme healers is presented with respect to recognition and initiation, notions of the person and the body, as well as the set of symbolic representations to which they refer in their practice.

Ethnographic research was carried out in the communities of Cócorit, Tajimaroa, Vícam Estación and Loma de Guamúchil, Sonora, México, between April 2001 and February 2002 as part of a wider study of kinship, notions of the body, and their relationship to cosmology.

* This presentation was produced  with support from the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT project U40611-S) and the Programa de Apoyo a Proyectos de Investigación e Innovación Tecnológica de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (PAPIIT project IN308602).

Guilhem Olivier

The Symbolism of the Deer among the Mexica and in the Northwest México

Cynthia Radding

University of New Mexico

Landscapes and the Creation of Regional Identities in Northwestern New Mexico

This contribution to the Third Congress on Vías del Noroeste joins together the meanings of landscapes as constructed environments with the historical development of regional and ethnic identities as these emerge and change over time. Focal points include physical landscapes and claims to resources, land tenure and use, and the spiritual landscapes that are an integral part of the regional identities of historical peoples. The paper will explore the differences and overlaps among cultivated landscapes and cultigens, appropriation of uncultivated sources, and the reciprocally creative tensions between nature and culture in the historical formation of “el noroeste,” situated primarily in the provinces of Sonora, Sinaloa and Ostimuri.

John Roney

Bureau of Land Management

Robert Hard

University of Texas at San Antonio

Ancient Corn: A Timeline

Genetic evidence suggests that corn (Zea mayes) originated in the Rio Balsas area of western Mexico, at perhaps 7200 BC.  A series of recent studies indicate rapid initial dispersal through tropical settings, with evidence of maize cultivation in Panama at 5800 BC, on the Gulf coast of Mexico near Tabasco by 5100 BC, and in coastal Equador as early as 5000 BC.  By 4300 BC maize was being grown in highland settings in Oaxaca, Mexico, and by 3500 BC it appears in the Tehuacan Valley of Puebla.  Along the southern Pacific coast of Mexico corn is found in association with large shell midden sites as early as 2500 BC, but it does not appear in coastal sequences near Acapulco until after 1800 BC.  It was present in Tamaulipas by 2400 BC, and reached the southwestern United States by about 2100 BC.

Ferrell Secakuku

Northern Arizona University, Anthropology and Applied Indigenous Studies

Miguel Vasquez

Northern Arizona University - Anthropology

Hopi & Quetzalcoatl: What Is The Connection?

For more than a century, anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, and historians have studied almost every aspect of Hopi culture.   This presentation will provide an visual overview of the diverse evidence for the Hopi-Mesoamerican connection as seen from the perspectives of a Hopi religious leader/anthropologist and a Mexican-American anthropologist.  Examining Hopi oral tradition, anthropological and linguistic evidence, and personal experiences spanning the U.S., Mexico, and Guatemala, and focusing specifically on the Snake Clan, we look at the question “Hopi and Quetzalcoatl: What Is the Connection?”

Emory Sekaquaptewa

University of Arizona, Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology

Gary Nabhan

Northern Arizona University, Center for Sustainable Enviroments

Kelley Hays-Gilpin

Northern Arizona University, Anthropology and the Museum of Northern Arizona

The Art and Soul of Hopi Farming

Three scholars collaborate to present the key beliefs, practices, and metaphors that have supported millennia of successful Hopi farming in the high dry desert of northern Arizona. Ancient artifacts, contemporary visual arts, and linguistic metaphors in song and prayer express concepts of sustainability, reciprocity, biodiversity, hard work, and humility. We will show how images of the flowery world of abundance, corn, and human effort pervade the iconography of pottery and mural painting for over a thousand years.

David Shaul

Venito Garcia Library and Archives

Comparative Tepiman Mythology and Beyond

I examine comparative Tepiman mythology (creation and preceding events VS. post-creation) across five Tepiman-speaking groups (Akimel O'odham, Tohono O'odham, Mountain Pima/O:b No'ok, Northern Tepehuan, and Souheaster Tepehuan).  There are differences (probably due to culture area effect), and similarities.  Some of the similarities have significance in Uto-Aztecan cultures outside the Tepiman group.

Thomas E. Sheridan

The Southwest Center and Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona

The Betrayal of the O'odham: From Landscapes of Community to Landscapes of Fraud in the Upper Santa Cruz River Valley

Drawing upon the work of critical geographers like Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, this presentation explores how the O'odham world of the Upper Santa Cruz River Valley in southern Arizona was circumscribed along axes of both space and time by Spanish missionaries and settlers and then destroyed by Mexican and Anglo speculators who trafficked in paper titles.  In the process, "land"-- a culturally constructed category as well as a biophysical reality -- was transformed from an extension of community to a factor of production to fictitious capital bought and sold for its future value as speculative capitalism strove to produce its own commodified spaces by burying the landscapes, and communities, of the O'odham of Mission Tumacacori in the
mid-19th century and Mexican and Anglo homesteaders in the early 20th century.

Karl Taube

University of California at Riverside

On the Road of Flowers: Supernatural Pathways in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest

Following the pioneering Flower World study by Jane Hill, this paper examines the relation of flowers to the soul and the afterlife in Mesoamerican and Puebloan thought. I will note that this religious complex is of great antiquity in Mesoamerica, and can be traced back to the Early Formative (ca. 900 b.c.). In ancient Mesoamerica, flowers were closely related to the breath spirit, which departs the body at death. One of the recurring themes appearing in ancient Mesoamerican art is the Rain of Flowers, in which falling or floating flowers and jewels appear in scenes of paradise and contact with the spirit word. Another basic concept is that of Flower Mountain, the paradise realm of gods and ancestors. Among the ancient Maya, Flower Mountain was the means by which the sun and maize gods were resurrected. Still another important theme is the Road of Flowers, the supernatural path taken by the sun and other supernatural beings. Quite frequently, this floral path takes the form of the plumed serpent, the embodiment of the breath and wind. In ancient Mesoamerican art, gods are commonly portrayed standing atop the plumed serpent, much as if it were their path or vehicle. Plumed serpent balustrades are simply architectonic versions of this concept. It will be noted that many of the themes and concepts of the Mesoamerican Flower World appear among the Hopi and other Puebloan peoples of the American Southwest. I will suggest that these shared traditions partly derived from the introduction of maize farming into the American Southwest. Along with the crops and technology of food production, the arrival of maize also included an elaborate system of ritual and belief concerning corn and agricultural abundance, with Flower World being part of this complex.

Miguel Vasquez

Northern Arizona University

Changing the Terms of Engagement: NAU - Hopi Collaboration

For the past 15 years, faculty and student anthropologists and archaeologists from the Anthropology Department at Northern Arizona University have worked in collaboration with communities on the Hopi Reservation and the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office on a variety of grass-roots projects aimed at the revitalization of traditional indigenous knowledge and valued tribal practices.   Using gardens, orchards, as well as conventional classrooms, in conjunction with tribal elders, parents, and teachers, these projects provide participants with practical experience in cultural sustainability and “raising children the Hopi way”.   This presentation will provide an overview of the diverse nature of this university-tribal cooperation, its background,  and challenges, as well as guidelines for further work in “changing the terms of engagement” between anthropologists and indigenous communities.

Peter Whiteley

American Museum of Natural History

Losing Water, Losing Culture

Threats to the Hopi water supply - from global warming, increased domestic use, competing uses by corporate entities and municipalities - threaten Hopi people's survivability in their traditional homeland, and the persistence of Hopi culture itself. This paper addresses the correlation of key Hopi ideas with water, and the implications of the threats for Hopi identity and the Hopi future.

David R. Wilcox

Museum of Northern Arizona

Tepimans and Hohokam Migration:  Is There a Connection?

The recent construction of the Coalescent Community Database of all known sites with 13 or more rooms for the whole North American Southwest during the period A.D. 1200 to 1700 opens up many new avenues for understanding the dynamic processes of migration by Southwestern peoples. These data show that the largest concentration of population in the whole Southwest from A. D. 1200 to 1380 was in the Phoenix Basin where Hohokam populations lived in large villages and farmed using large irrigation systems.  Massive flooding along the Salt River in the 1380s after which it is thought they were not able to reconnect the canal heads may have necessitated long-distance migration of these Tepiman speakers into central Sonora where they joined or initiated the large irrigation villages of Pima Bajo groups reported by the Spaniards in the middle 1500s.  No archaeological signatures for these putative Pima Bajo villages, or those of their Opata neighbors, are known, posing a highly significant archaeological problem that cries out for new research.

Felice Wyndham

University of British Columbia

Plant Knowledge Networks in the Sierra Tarahumara and Beyond

Rarámuri relations to the plant and animal worlds of the Sierra Tarahumara are extensive, varied, and, as all ecological knowledge, rooted in histories of interaction, mobility and negotiation, as well as profoundly influenced by life experience. In this paper I explore plant knowledge networks in a Rarámuri community, focusing on children’s shared knowledge as related to their social ties. Overall, Rarámuri children in this community maintain closer social networks than the adults, and are less segregated by gender. They share knowledge of a core subset of useful wild plants, while older children and adults incorporate other plants into their repertoire in a regular way. I discuss the personal and plant networks in relation to Rarámuri concepts of connectedness such as teke (rimugá) and speculate about how local knowledge networks relate to larger regional and continental patterns of knowledge transmission over time.